by Irwin Shaw
“What am I going to do?” Veronica said. Her voice was low but almost hysterical. “I told my husband I wanted to go dancing. He didn’t even want to come. And we haven’t been here ten minutes. We have a whole bottle of champagne, and…”
She stopped. A little dry sound like a sob escaped from her. Her husband was coming through the door and making his way through the dancers. He came up to the table and stood there, smiling politely at Jack, waiting for Veronica to introduce him. Tucino and Bertha Holt danced by slowly.
“Yes?” Veronica’s husband said, a little uncertainly, because Veronica hadn’t said anything yet. He was a tall, wide-shouldered blond man, young and sharply handsome, with probing, careful blue eyes. “Veronica?” He looked steadily at Jack, the question mark at the end of his wife’s name very marked.
“Oh,” she said, breathily, “I’m sorry, Georg. I…This is Mr. Andrus. A…a friend of mine. He came over to congratulate me. My husband, Georg Strooker…”
“How do you?” Strooker said. He had a heavy voice and, for those three words, at least, no accent. He put out his hand. Jack shook it. The hand was hard and powerful.
“I…I hope you and Veronica will be very happy,” Jack said. He felt confused. He had drunk too much that night, and too much had happened.
“Thank you very much,” Strooker said formally. “I am sure we shall be.” Now the accent of Zurich was detectable, but not comically. There was nothing light or comic about this large, hard young man with the sharp blond face and the glacial blue eyes. Strength through Joy Department, Jack thought, Swiss Division. Strooker did not sit down, nor did he ask Jack to sit down.
“I…I sent Mr. Andrus an announcement,” Veronica said, too loudly. “From Zurich. He’s…” She stopped, and Jack saw her eyes widen and her mouth tighten as she looked past him.
“Well, now,” said Bresach’s voice at Jack’s shoulder. “Look who’s here. With a new hair-do. Welcome to the Eternal City.”
“Robert,” Veronica said. She was trying to look sprightly and matter-of-fact, but even in saying Robert’s name a note of desperation trembled in her voice. “I never expected to see you in a place like this.”
“Great changes have taken place,” Robert said, keeping his eyes fixed on Veronica, “since I saw you last…”
“Veronica,” Strooker said, “will you introduce me to the gentleman, please.”
“Yes, of course,” Veronica said hastily. “I’m so sorry. I haven’t come back to earth yet.” She laughed falsely. “This is my husband, Robert, Georg Strooker…”
“Enchanted Georg, old man,” Bresach said, without turning, still staring down at Veronica. “How was the wedding? Fun?”
Then Jack knew that Bresach was not going to let anyone off from anything. “Come on now,” he whispered and took Bresach’s arm. “Don’t be a fool.”
Bresach shook his arm loose, roughly. Strooker was watching him coldly, puzzled, suspicious, unpleasant.
“What I think,” Bresach said, still staring at Veronica, “is that we all ought to be invited to drink to the health of the bride and groom.” With a sudden movement, he reached past Jack and picked the champagne bottle out of the ice bucket. He stood with it in front of him, cradling it against his shirt front, not heeding the damp spot that was spreading on his shirt from the wet bottle. “I now dub thee Cuckold Premier,” he said loudly and slowly. He raised the bottle high in the air above him and solemnly tilted it and poured the wine onto his head. It foamed in his hair and ran down into his collar. All this time he kept staring unblinkingly, his face expressionless, at Veronica.
“Stop that,” Jack said sharply, getting ready to leap between Bresach and Strooker if Strooker made a move. But for the moment Strooker was too surprised to say or do anything. He just stood where he was, regarding Bresach doubtfully, trying to decide whether Bresach was a harmless drunk or somebody who would have to be dealt with harshly in a moment or two.
“Now, friend,” Bresach said, turning to Strooker, “we must not omit you from the ceremony.” Before Jack could make a move to stop him, he had raised the bottle once more and was pouring champagne over Strooker’s neatly brushed blond hair.
“Robert!” Veronica screamed.
“I hereby dub thee Cuckold the Second,” Bresach was saying. For a moment nobody moved. The music and the dancing had stopped, and the room had fallen into a deep hush. People all over the room sat still, expectant, watching Bresach and Strooker. Strooker himself appeared bemused, disbelieving, as he stood there looking mildly at Bresach, for a second or two seeming to be a willing participant in the ceremony. Then he moved so quickly that there was no time to save Bresach. Strooker’s hand snapped up, slashing at Bresach’s arm. The champagne bottle hurtled through the air and broke with an explosive noise on the dance floor. Then Strooker slapped Bresach twice, with a sharp, cracking noise, across the face. Bresach’s glasses splintered and blood appeared immediately around his eyes. He made no gesture to defend himself. He merely stood there, grave and immobile, as though the whole scene were rehearsed and inevitable. Jack grabbed him around the shoulders and started to pull him away, but Strooker came after Bresach, punching him in the face. As Jack struggled clumsily in the narrow space between the tables to get Bresach out of harm’s way and at the same time ward off Strooker’s blows, Max magically appeared between the two men, grabbing at Strooker’s arms. Strooker, who was by far the larger man, pulled one arm free and hit Max in the mouth. Max fell back against another table, which kept him from sinking to the floor. But the distraction had been enough. Waiters sprang upon Strooker and held him, making placating Italian noises. Holt and Tucino came up and led Max and Bresach away, while Jack stood in front of Strooker, prepared to fight him off if he broke away from the restraining arms and tried to go for Bresach again. The band had started to play loudly again and Veronica was weeping with her head down on the table.
Strooker suddenly stopped struggling. He said something in German, but the waiter didn’t understand him. “All right,” he said in English, “now let me go.”
Warily, the waiters stepped back. Strooker was pale and his hair was soaked with champagne, but he went around the table and sat next to Veronica, without looking at her. He stared coldly out at the roomful of people who were watching him. His hand was bleeding from Bresach’s broken glasses, but he paid no attention to the blood staining the wine-soaked tablecloth. “I believe we will need another bottle of champagne,” he said to the headwaiter, who was standing nervously over him. Jack couldn’t help but admire him at that moment.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Jack said to Strooker, “about my friend. I imagine he’s had a little too much to drink tonight.”
“Yes,” the man said flatly, “I imagine he had.” Then he turned to Veronica. “Sit up,” he said, without expression. “Do not be a child.”
Slowly, her eyes stained with tears, she sat erect. “Please…” she whispered.
“Sit up,” Strooker said evenly, staring out across the room, beginning her lifelong punishment.
There was nothing more to be said or done at that table, and Jack turned and went across the dance floor, conscious of all the eyes watching him.
Jack said he would take Bresach and Max home in a taxi. He had washed the blood off Bresach’s face in the men’s room of the night club and had made sure that no bits of glass had cut into his eyes. Bresach submitted to everything that was done to him with the tranced, passionless expression of a sleepwalker. He didn’t say a word to Jack and he didn’t say goodnight to the Holts and Tucino and Barzelli, who were waiting on the street in front of the club to see if Bresach was all right before going home.
“It’s too bad, it’s too bad,” Holt said worriedly. He was holding his wife’s arm protectively, as though the fight in the night club had reminded him all over again how violent the world was and how frail and vulnerable was his wife. “What a way to end an evening like this.” He shook his head sadly. “It’s hardly the sort of thin
g you’d expect in a place like this. In Rome—in the best place in Rome. In America, of course, you expect it, it doesn’t come as a surprise…”
“Oh, it’s not so terrible,” Barzelli said. She seemed ironically amused by the incident. “He’s a young man. Young men fight. He’ll be all right in the morning. All he needs is a new pair of glasses.”
As Jack was bundling Bresach and Max into the cab he heard Tucino complaining, “One night Tasseti doesn’t come, and this happens. Just when you need him. If Tasseti was here, I assure you nobody would have hit a guest of mine and got away with it.”
“Why do you say guest of yours?” Barzelli asked. “Mr. Holt paid the bill.”
“I was speaking in a wider sense,” Tucino said, with dignity, as he walked toward his car.
In the taxi, the only sound for a while was Max sucking on his lip, which had been cut. Then Max said, “I didn’t like that man’s face. He looked like a commissar. That girl has my complete pity, having to live with a man like that.”
He went back to sucking his cut lip.
All the way home, Bresach sat in the corner, his head against the window, weeping silently. There was nothing to be said, no comfort that he would accept, and the other two men held their peace and kept their heads averted as the taxi rattled through the narrow streets of the sleeping city.
When the taxi stopped, Max said to Jack, “You do not have to come up. I will take care of him. Come on, Robert,” he said to the boy, with infinite gentleness.
Jack watched the two of them disappear into the dark, vaulted doorway, then told the driver of the cab to take him to his hotel. On the way, it occurred to him that Veronica and her husband were probably still at the night club, finishing their champagne, the man with the face of the commissar, as Max had put it, stonily continuing the punishment he had begun when he had told Veronica, “Sit up. Do not be a child.”
Last chance, last chance, Jack thought. Tomorrow she will be in Athens and it will all be over.
For a moment, he hesitated. He even leaned forward to speak to the driver. He sat there, poised on the edge of the seat, uncomfortable, insecure, as the taxi took a corner fast. Then he sat back, thinking, No, let the poor girl rest in her insured Swiss bed.
Five minutes later he was at the door of his hotel.
27
THERE WERE TWO MESSAGES waiting for him at the hotel—both of them from Clara Delaney, both of them requesting Mr. Andrus to call Mrs. Delaney at the hospital, no matter what hour he got in.
On the way up to his room in the elevator, he kept staring at the messages, scrawled almost illegibly by the night operator of the hotel. At the hospital, at the hospital, he read over and over again. The wake, he thought guiltily. It amused me this night to pretend we were attending Delaney’s wake.
Jack hurried down the silent, carpeted corridor toward his door. He unlocked it, leaving the key in the lock, and went directly to the telephone on the desk in the salon. The maid had left a single lamp on, next to the telephone, and the instrument gleamed in the tight cone of light in the shadowy room.
It took a long time to reach Clara Delaney at the hospital. The nurse on duty at the desk at the switchboard at first refused to call Delaney’s room at that hour and only went to speak to Clara after a heated argument.
Jack looked at his watch. It was two thirty-five. While waiting, he thought of Sam Holt saying, “In Rome—in the best place in Rome,” and the blood around Robert Bresach’s eyes after Veronica’s husband had broken his glasses.
Finally, there was a series of clicks on the phone, and Clara’s voice, saying, “Hello.”
“Clara,” Jack said, “what is it? Has anything happened?”
“Who is this?” Clara asked. She sounded irritated and sleepy.
“Jack. You left a message for me to call. I just got in, and…”
“Oh,” Clara said flatly. “Jack.”
“Is Maurice all right?”
“About the same,” Clara said. There was a curious dull tone in her voice, a lack of resonance, that made whatever she said sound hostile.
“I’m glad you finally decided to go and see him, Clara,” Jack said, thinking, It’s just like Clara—when she finally condescends to visit her invalid husband, she makes sure to destroy his night’s sleep. “I’m sure it’s the right thing to do.” Now that he knew that Maurice hadn’t taken a turn for the worse, Jack was sorry he had called. Whatever Clara had to say to him could be better said and more easily endured in the morning. “Look, Clara,” he said, “it’s awfully late. I’ll be coming by the hospital tomorrow night as usual, and…”
“No you won’t.”
“What did you say, Clara?”
“I said you won’t be coming by the hospital tomorrow,” Clara said. “I won’t let you into Maurice’s room.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Maurice’s friends are permitted to come and visit him,” Clara said. “You’re no friend.”
Jack sighed. “Clara,” he said, “obviously, whatever you have to say is very unpleasant, and it’s too late now to be unpleasant. I’ll speak to you in the morning…”
“You’ll never speak to me again,” she said loudly. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been doing to poor Maurice, while he’s been lying helpless on his deathbed. He’s told me everything.”
“What have I been doing to poor Maurice?” Jack asked. He knew it would be better to hang up immediately and take his chances on reaching Delaney directly in the morning, but he couldn’t help being curious about this new attack of Clara’s.
“Betraying him,” Clara said harshly, her voice whistling in the telephone. “After everything he’s done for you…”
“Now, Clara,” Jack said evenly, “try to talk reasonably, like a woman in full possession of her senses. Just how am I betraying Maurice?”
“Don’t patronize me,” Clara said shrilly. “I’m through with all that. We had it all out tonight, Maurice and I, and we decided that from now on he’s going to listen to me, he’s going to let me take care of him. He realizes that all his life he’s been too wild and thoughtless and trusting, and he’s paying for it. Now,” she said triumphantly, “if anybody wants anything from Maurice Delaney, they have to come to me first.”
The born jailor, Jack thought, has finally reached the apex of her profession, she has been given the key to the jail. “I don’t want anything from Maurice,” Jack said, “and I don’t want anything from you. But I’ll come over right now and straighten this out.”
“Don’t bother,” Clara said. “You won’t get in. I’m at the door. From now on he’s not going to waste his time and affection on people who stab him in the back…”
“All right, Clara,” Jack said quietly, “I think that’s enough for tonight. I’ll try to figure this out in the morning. I’m going to bed now.” He prepared to hang up.
“I know everything,” she shouted, and Jack wondered how many patients the mad, dry voice was rousing into pain and anxiety in the sleeping hospital. “And now Maurice knows everything. Everything about his good friend, John Andrus, that he picked up out of the gutter when he was a dime-a-dozen actor in New York without a penny to his name. Don’t think I don’t know what’s been going on behind his back. Don’t think I don’t have my sources of information. Hilda calls me three times a day, and I spoke to Sam Holt myself just ten minutes ago. You can’t hide anything from me…”
Maybe, Jack thought, if Maurice is lucky, he will die before dawn and never have to listen to his wife’s voice again.
“I’m not trying to hide anything, Clara,” Jack said, keeping his voice low and calm in the hope that his example would have a soothing effect on her. He knew that she was in the same room as Maurice and he wondered what listening to that mad, wailing, nighttime voice, with its burden of misery and hatred, was doing to the sick man.
“Do you deny that you tried to put Maurice on the shelf for a year?” Clara shouted, as loud as ever.
“I tried to convince him to save his life,” Jack said. “I don’t deny that.”
“Save his life!” she screamed. “Don’t you worry about his life! He’ll outlive you and me.” There was no testimony, medical or otherwise, Jack realized, that would ever make Clara believe that the vital, energetic man she had married was not immortal. In a crazy way it was a tribute to Delaney and a tribute to the power of her love for him. “You tried to get him out of the way for a year,” she went on, “while you and that boy took over. You knew how much that boy’s script meant to Maurice. You knew how he loved it. You knew it would put him right back on top again if he did it, so you schemed to take it away from him. And you took advantage of him while he was lying helpless to get him to agree. And you even had the gall to tell Maurice to his face that you told the boy not to let Maurice do it. Because you thought he was too weak to fight back. Do you deny that?”
“I don’t want to talk to you any more, Clara,” Jack said. “I don’t think you’re sane enough to listen to reason.”
“Oh, I’m sane all right,” she said wildly. “And that’s just why you tried to hide all this from me. Because you didn’t want to get found out. And it’s not enough that you’re trying to ruin Maurice’s future—don’t think I don’t know how you and that crazy boy are plotting to change everything he’s done on the picture, all the beautiful, subtle things, to spoil everything. This is Maurice’s last chance, you sonofabitch, and you’re trying to kill it, deliberately kill it, and you have the courage to come to his sickroom and pretend to be worried about him, pretend you’re his friend, send him flowers.”
I’ve got to hear her out, Jack thought, holding the receiver away from his ear. Let her get it all out, and then talk to Maurice…
“And I know why you’re doing it, don’t think I don’t!” She ranted on. “You’re jealous of him. You’ve always been jealous. Because he’s successful and that’s iron in your soul, his success. And because he slept with that whore of a wife of yours and you’ve never forgiven him…”