Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

“Too many,” Jack said, annoyed with the man for the smug offer of Italians, like a hunter who invites you to his house to dine off the pheasant he has just shot.

  “I imagine you’re joking,” Kern said.

  “Yes.”

  “I always make a point of centering as much of my social life as possible around the people of the country I’m stationed in,” Kern said, making it sound like a rebuke to Jack and others like him, who, Kern implied, frivolously wasted their time on mere Americans. “Even in the Middle East, where it was considerably more difficult, I kept to it. Would you like to come?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tonight,” Jack said.

  “In any event…” Kern reached into his pocket, took out his wallet, and produced a card. “Here’s my address. Try and make it if you can. Well be there until quite late.”

  “Thanks,” Jack said, pocketing the card. “I’ll try. Well, so long. I…”

  “I found out a curious thing about your friend,” Kern said. “I wonder if you knew.”

  “What’s that?” Jack asked impatiently.

  “He was a felon,” Kern said. “He served time in prison. Did you know that?”

  Jack hesitated, uncomfortable under the saffron, sardonic stare. The hell with it, he thought, he’s not going to make me lie. “Yes,” he said. “I knew it.”

  Kern nodded with a kind of mournful pleasure. “And yet you didn’t think it necessary to tell me?” he said. “You were prepared to allow me to vouch for him to my Italian friends in this extremely delicate affair?”

  “Oh, hell, Kern,” Jack said impatiently, “he was in prison when he was twenty years old. It’s all ancient history. He’s a pillar of respectability now. How important is it?”

  “You have a peculiar notion of what’s important and what isn’t important, Andrus,” said Kern.

  “Did Holt tell you himself?”

  “No.” Kern smiled with gloomy satisfaction. “I found out myself. In the course of my inquiries.” He peered mistrustfully at Jack. “I wonder if there’s any other pertinent information in your possession, Andrus, that I ought to have, before I go any deeper into this.”

  His wife’s a dipsomaniac, Jack thought. That’s pertinent. But I’ll be godamned if I’ll tell you. Find it out for yourself in the course of your inquiries, brother. “He’s got a kind and generous heart,” Jack said. “Is that pertinent?”

  Kern sniffed. “Hardly,” he said. He extended his hand. “Try and make it tonight, if you can. The view from my apartment is the best in Rome.” He went gravely, ambassadorially, into the Embassy.

  Jack hurried off, anxious to avoid meeting anyone else who might waste his time. He kept calling his hotel, asking if there were any messages for him, but there never were any messages, and finally the telephone operators, recognizing him, turned sullen when they heard his voice. He drank innumerable cups of coffee, sitting outside Doney’s on the Via Veneto, although it was chilly and raw, because he hoped that Miss Henken, whom he had met there at the same time with Veronica, might appear and give him the information he was looking for. But Miss Henken didn’t appear.

  It was while he was sitting there, at the little table, sipping his tenth coffee of the afternoon, and feeling almost drunk from all the concentrated caffeine he had imbibed that he thought of Dr. Gildermeister.

  “At five o’clock every afternoon,” he remembered Veronica’s saying, “he goes to his analyst.” And, at another time, on the beach at Fregene—“Dr. Gildermeister. An Austrian from Innsbruck. ‘I must warn you, young lady, Robert is a very finely balanced mechanism.’ That was news. Hot from Innsbruck.”

  Jack jumped up and put a five-hundred-lire note for his coffees under a saucer on the table to keep it from blowing away. He went inside to the telephone booth and waited impatiently while a young man in a leather wind-jacket ruffled through the pages of the directory there, making notes of names and addresses in a greasy little black notebook. Uncharitably, Jack thought that he looked like a professional housebreaker making up a list of victims for his next year’s haul. Finally the man in the windbreaker was through and Jack turned to the G’s. It was true that in Europe you almost never could find anybody in the telephone directory of any city, but a doctor, even a psychoanalyst, must have his name and number and address available for the public. Jack was surprised to feel his hands shaking, and when he finally found the name, the print seemed to blur before his eyes in the bad light, and he had to lean way over, close to the page, to read Gildermeister, Dr. J. C, and an address on Via Monte Parioli, and the telephone number.

  He started to dial the doctor’s number, then stopped. He looked at his watch. It was three fifteen. Five o’clock, every afternoon, Veronica had said. He hesitated, then decided to wait till five o’clock, so that he could talk to Bresach himself.

  On his way back to his hotel, he was nearly run over by a man on a Vespa, who smiled gently and forgivingly at him as Jack leaped back onto the sidewalk. In Paris, the man almost certainly would have snarled, “Sal con,” at him, after a similar incident. There were advantages to being in Italy after all.

  There was an air-mail letter waiting for him at the desk, from his son. He opened the letter as soon as he entered his rooms, and read it, standing next to the open window, with the sunlight streaming in on the typewritten pages.

  “Father,” the letter began, “I’ve just read the letter you wrote me from the airplane, and there’s no sense in dissembling what I feel about it or trying to be polite about it.

  “I detest it.

  “What’s more, I detest the whole way of life that makes it possible for a father to write a letter like that to his son.”

  Oh, Christ, Jack thought, not today! For a moment he contemplated crumpling the letter and throwing it away. Then he made himself read on.

  “First of all—about Miss McCarthy. I assure you that if we marry, we will make it stick. I do not need the advice of a cynical sensualist who has led a blatantly promiscuous life to guide me in matters of love. Don’t think that because you’ve hardly ever bothered to see me that I am completely uninformed about you.”

  Jack grinned painfully as he read this. His mother has told him the facts of life, he thought. My life. If he only knew what it’s really been like. Maybe I’ll write him the truth—that it is not the promiscuousness I regret, but the occasions, all too many, of abstinence. See what the Puritan has to say about that.

  “As for my so-called political activities,” the letter went on, “you’ve obviously been coached on that subject by my mother, who is a hysterically nervous woman, a condition which I have no doubt you did your best to aggravate. She is married to a timid, third-rate man, whose mumblings would not be taken seriously by an intelligent ten-year-old child. As far as you’re concerned, the position you hold, and which you seem so proud of, makes everything you say suspect. Your whole job, your salary, the soft life you lead in Paris with your frivolous wife, all depend upon your being a willing stooge for the system. Do the generals call for bigger bombs and bigger tests? You’ve got to say yes to them. Is the level of radioactivity rising dangerously throughout the world? You’ve got to pretend it is the propaganda of Communists and professional alarmists. Do most sane people think that giving atomic weapons to the Germans is like putting a loaded pistol in a criminal lunatic’s hands? You’ve got to make believe you think the Germans are kindly, gentle folk whose reputation has been somehow blackened by a conspiracy of villains. I left Paris so abruptly last summer, because I didn’t want to have to tell you these things. But now your letter has forced me to write what I feel.

  “You advise me to be reticent. Like you, I suppose. Your reticence has been bought, and in your letter you suggest what price I might expect for mine. I tell you, if we all came as cheap as you, our reticence would bring us, very quickly, to a world of freaks and ruins.

  “You write that the government is perfectly prepared and willing to hand out punishments to the men who oppose its policies. In saying that
, I know you meant to get me to stop opposing those policies, even though I believe they are inhuman and suicidal. In reply, I’d use exactly the same argument to you to try to make you get out of the system, where every move you make, however insignificant and harmless it may be in itself, is a tacit vote of support and approval. You are not highly placed enough to oppose policy from within. All you can do is obey. If you think you are obeying sane and reasonable orders which will lead to a peaceful, healthy world, you are a fool, and I will have nothing to do with you. If you obey out of timidity and love of comfort, you are a coward, and I will have nothing to do with you. If you decide at any time to get out and come back to America, where it counts, and speak your mind, I will be most happy to treat you as my father.

  Steven.”

  The sheets of air-mail paper were shaking in Jack’s hands as he finished. He felt bruised and battered. This is what I started, he thought, the night I looked down into the crib on Twelfth Street and was sorry he had been born.

  That is the end of my son, he thought, and crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it into the wastebasket and sat down on the edge of the desk, with his hands trembling.

  There was no answer possible. The wall of arrogance, of hatred, finally revealed, was impossible to breach. The calm and reasonable arguments which could, with so much justice, be used to attack his son’s position, would have no effect.

  He remembered, with annoyance, his son’s description of Hélène. Your frivolous wife. The idiot, he thought, she is gay, not frivolous. Even at twenty-two, a man should be able to tell the difference.

  I should feel worse, Jack thought, looking down at the crumpled ball of paper in the wastebasket. A normal father would be in despair. He was angry and regretful, but no more. This afternoon it was more important to him to find a young girl whom he had met by chance on a street in Rome and who had disappeared than to come to grips with his estranged son. Maybe some other afternoon all this would change. Maybe some other afternoon he would feel he had to search out his son and give him his answer. But not this afternoon.

  He went into the bedroom, picked up the script of Delaney’s picture, and lay down on the bed to study the scenes he had to do the next day. At five o’clock, sharp, he called the number of Dr. Gildermeister.

  A man’s voice answered, after three rings. “Pronto,” the man said.

  “Signor Bresach, per favore,” Jack said.

  The man talked for thirty seconds in Italian that even Jack could tell was marked by a heavy German accent.

  “Do you speak English?” Jack asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I would like to speak to Mr. Bresach, please.”

  “Not here,” the man said impatiently.

  “Is this Dr. Gildermeister?”

  “This is Dr. Gildermeister. Who are you? What do you want?”

  “This is a friend of Mr. Bresach’s, Doctor,” Jack said. He spoke quickly, because he had the impression that the man was on the verge of hanging up. “I understood that Mr. Bresach came to see you every day at five o’clock.”

  “Well, he is not here now,” the man said testily. “He has not come for the last three days.”

  A small shrill of alarm rang somewhere in Jack’s brain at this news. “Oh, I see,” he said, trying to sound offhand. “That’s too bad. It’s about a job that’s come up that I’m sure Mr. Bresach would be interested in.”

  “A job? What sort of a job?”

  “A movie company is…” Jack began.

  “I see, I see,” the man said. “Well, he is not here.”

  “I wonder if you can tell me his telephone number,” Jack said.

  “He has no telephone.”

  “Could you let me have his address?” There was silence on the other end and Jack waited, tensely.

  “Ah, why not?” the man said. He shouted the address, and Jack wrote it down. “And while you’re at it,” the man said furiously, “you might tell him it is absurd to skip three days. Absurd. That is no way for a sick man to behave. Tell him I am waiting for him, I am worried about him, and I expect to see him here tomorrow.”

  “I’ll tell him. Thank you,” Jack said, and hung up.

  16

  THE ADDRESS THAT DR. Gildermeister had given Jack was that of a building on a narrow cobbled street without sidewalks not far from the Palazzo Farnese. The building was dark with age, a cracked fountain leaked in the courtyard, the windows along the worn marble staircase were broken and there was a dank smell of winter, like a cold river passing over stone, in the hallway. Chipped plaster angels, darkened with soot, gave evidence that in the distant past the inhabitants of the building had combined piety and wealth. The heavy black wood doors on the landings looked like prison entrances. Mingled with the smell of cats and winter there was the peculiar sour cheese smell of Italian poverty.

  Bresach lived on the fourth floor. Jack stood in front of the heavy door, taking a little longer than was necessary to catch his breath after the climb. Then he knocked on the door. While he waited he heard children playing on the floor below and a radio screeching out, “‘Volare, oh, oh!…Cantare…oh, oh, oh, oh!’” loudly.

  It was hard to imagine Veronica, with her shining long hair and her bright clothes, climbing these stairs and using her own key to enter the apartment behind the grimy door.

  Jack knocked again. The door swung open, as though whoever was behind it had been waiting there silently, hoping that the knock would not be repeated and the door need not be opened. There was a man standing in the mouth of what seemed to be a dark tunnel, holding the door half-open. But it was not Bresach. The man was tall and a little stooped and he wore glasses and he was wearing a sweater and had a scholarly, gentle face and inquisitive, weak eyes.

  “Yes?” the man said.

  From behind him, at the other end of the tunnel, which Jack now saw was an entrance hall that led, at right angles, into a room, there came the sound of typing, rapid and nervous.

  “I’m looking for Robert Bresach,” Jack said. “Is he in?” He moved a little closer, prepared to thrust his foot in the door if the man tried to close it.

  But the man merely called back down the tunnel. “Robert, it’s somebody looking for you.” The man had an accent, not too strong, that was difficult to place at the moment.

  The typing stopped. “Tell him to come in,” Bresach’s voice called out.

  The man in the sweater smiled in a friendly manner and made a little, almost courtly bow as he opened the door wide and indicated to Jack that he should enter. The typing started up again as Jack went down the hall, which was hung with clothes, among them the khaki duffel coat. Jack turned into the room. It was small and irregular, but there were two long windows leading out onto a small balcony with an iron railing, and there was a jumbled view of terraces, vines with their roots three stories in the air, washing, roof-tops, and the evening sky, filled by soft gray clouds, with patches of deepening blue, over the city of Rome. In front of one window there was a small table and Bresach was sitting at it, his back to the room, typing intently, by touch, bent over, peering at a pile of manuscript which he seemed to be copying or translating. He didn’t turn around. He was smoking, and he had obviously been smoking a good deal, because the air of the room, with its closed windows, was hazy. There was one big bed, covered with an old piece of brocade, and a table in one corner on which stood a hot plate and a coffee pot. There were two or three wooden chairs, one of them broken, and a washbasin, and more clothes hung, neatly enough, on hooks along one wall. There were books on the floor. A large painting, done mostly in yellow and black, of a not quite recognizable animal, either in ecstasy or in terror, hung over the bed, and there was a cracked and gilded wooden crucifix about two feet high, leaning casually in a corner. The gilt was almost all flaked off the body of Christ and the limbs had a disconcerting uneven texture that realistically suggested flesh. There was no sign in the room that a woman had ever lived there.

  There was only the one do
orway, and the single room constituted the entire apartment. If a girl like Veronica were to come to live with you in a place like this, Jack thought, naturally you’d believe she loved you.

  “Robert,” said the soft, accented voice of the man in the sweater. He had followed Jack into the room.

  Bresach finished a page, dragged it from the typewriter and put it down on top of a pile on the floor. Then he swung around. He looked gravely at Jack, squinting through his glasses. He needed a shave and there was a light, uneven stubble on his jaws and chin and he seemed tiled and young and in trouble.

  “Look who’s here,” he said flatly. “What’s the matter—didn’t you like my message?” He didn’t stand up.

  “I want to talk to you,” Jack said.

  “All right,” Bresach said. “Talk.” He took a cigarette from a crumpled pack and tossed the pack to the man in the sweater. He did not offer a cigarette to Jack.

  “I think we’d better do it alone,” Jack said, looking over at the man in the sweater, who was lighting his cigarette with extreme care, cupping his hands around the little wax match as though he were standing in a high wind.

  “Max can hear anything you have to say,” Bresach said. On his own ground he seemed sure of himself, offhand, sardonic. “I have nothing to hide from Max. Max, this is Mr. Andrus. I told you about him.”

  “Delighted,” Max said. He made a half bow. “Robert has told me enormously about you.” There was no irony or reproach in the man’s voice.

  “Max lives here,” Bresach said. “He moved in when half a bed fell unexpectedly vacant. You wouldn’t want to chase a man out of his own house, would you, Andrus?”

  “Robert,” Max said, “I could easily go stand in the hall and smoke my cigarette while…”

  “Stay where you are,” Bresach said loudly. “Well”—he peered malevolently at Jack through his glasses—“how’s flaming middle-age these days?”

  Jack walked over to a chair near Bresach and sat down. “When you stop joking,” he said, “I’ll talk to you.”