Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  “Why,” he whispered, “don’t we …”

  “Sssh.” She put her hand over his lips. “You’ve drunk too much champagne.”

  They made their good-byes and started off under the tall trees, between the lawns on which water sprinklers were whirling, the flashing fountains of water, brilliant and rainbow-like in the sun, making the green smell of the lawns rise into the waning afternoon. They walked slowly, hand in hand.

  “Where are they going?” Noah asked.

  “California,” Hope said. “For a month. Monterey. He has a cousin there with a house.”

  They walked side by side among the fountains of Flatbush, thinking of the beaches of Monterey on the Pacific Ocean, thinking of the pale Mexican house’s in the southern light, thinking of the two young people getting into their compartment on the train at Grand Central and locking the door behind them.

  “Oh, God,” Noah said. Then he grinned sourly. “I pity them,” he said.

  “What?”

  “On a night like this. The first time. One of the hottest nights of the year.”

  Hope pulled her hand away. “You’re impossible,” she said sharply. “What a mean, vulgar thing to say …”

  “Hope …” he protested. “It was just a little joke.”

  “I hate that attitude,” Hope said loudly. “Everything’s funny!” With surprise, he saw that she was crying.

  “Please, darling.” He put his arms around her, although two small boys and a large collie dog were watching him interestedly from one of the lawns.

  She shrugged away. “Keep your hands off me,” she said. She started swiftly away.

  “Please.” He followed her anxiously. “Please, let me talk to you.”

  “Write me a letter,” she said, through her tears. “You seem to save all your romance for the typewriter.”

  He caught up with her and walked in troubled silence at her side. He was baffled and lost, adrift on the irrational, endless female sea, and he did not try to save himself, but merely let himself drift with the wind and tide, hoping they would not wreck him.

  But Hope would not relent, and all the long way home on the trolley car she sat stubborn and silent, her mouth set in bitter rejection. Oh, God, Noah thought, peering at her timidly as the car rattled on. Oh, God, she is going to quit me.

  But she let him follow her into the house when she opened the two doors with her key.

  The house was empty. Hope’s aunt and uncle had taken their two small children on a three-day holiday to the country, and an almost exotic air of peace hung over the dark rooms.

  “You hungry?” Hope asked dourly. She was standing in the middle of the living room and Noah had thought he would kiss her until he saw the expression on her face.

  “I think I’d better go home,” he said.

  “You might as well eat,” she. said. “I left some stuff in the icebox for supper.”

  He followed her meekly into the kitchen and helped as unobtrusively as possible. She got out some cold chicken and made a salad and poured a pitcherful of milk. She put everything on a tray and said, curtly, “Outside,” like a Sergeant commanding a platoon.

  He took the tray out to the back garden, a twilit oblong now, that was bounded on two sides by a high board fence, and on the far end by the blank brick wall of a garage that had Virginia creeper growing all over it. There was a graceful acacia tree growing out of the garden, Hope’s uncle had a small rock garden at one end and beds of common flowers, and there was a wood table with shielded candles and a long, sofa-like swing with a canopy. In the hazy blue light of evening, Brooklyn vanished like mist and rumor, and they were in a walled garden in England or France or the mountains of India.

  Hope lit the candles and they sat gravely across from each other, eating hungrily. They hardly spoke while they ate, just polite requests for the salt and the milk pitcher. They folded their napkins and stood up on opposite sides of the table.

  “We don’t need the candles,” Hope said. “Will you please blow out the one on your side?”

  “Certainly,” Noah said. He leaned over the small glass chimney that guarded the candle and Hope bent over the one on her side of the table. Their heads touched as they blew, together, and in the sudden darkness, Hope said, “Forgive me. I am the meanest female in the whole world.”

  Then it was all right. They sat side by side, in the swing, looking up at the darkening sky with the summer stars beginning to bloom above them one by one through, the single tree. Far off the trolley, far off the trucks, far off the aunt, the uncle and the two children of the house, far off the newsboys crying beyond the garage, far off the world as they sat there in the walled garden in the evening.

  Hope said, “No, we shouldn’t” and “I’m afraid, afraid …” and “Darling, darling” and Noah was shy and triumphant and dazzled and humble and after it was over they lay there crushed and subdued by the wilderness of feeling through which they had blundered, and Noah was afraid that now that it was done she would hate him for it, and every moment of her silence seemed more and more foreboding and then she said, “See …” and she chuckled. “It wasn’t too hot. Not too hot at all.”

  Much later, when it was time for him to go home, they went inside. They blinked in the light, and didn’t quite look at each other. Noah bent over to turn the radio on because it gave him something to do.

  They were playing Tchaikovsky on the radio, the piano concerto, and the music sounded rich and mournful, as though it had been especially composed and played for them, two people barely out of childhood, who had just loved each other for the first time. Hope came over and kissed the back of his neck as he stood above the radio. He turned to kiss her, when the music stopped, and a matter-of-fact voice said, “Special Bulletin from the Associated Press. The German advance is continuing along the Russian border at all points. Many new armored divisions have struck on a line extending from Finland to the Black Sea.”

  “What?” Hope said.

  “The Germans,” Noah said, thinking how often you say that word, how well known they’ve made themselves. “They’ve gone into Russia. That must have been what the newsboys were yelling …”

  “Turn it off.” Hope reached over and turned the radio off herself. “Tonight.”

  He held her, feeling her heart beating with sudden fierceness against him. All this afternoon, he thought, while we were at the wedding and walking down that street, and all this evening, in the garden, it was happening, the guns going, the men dying. From Finland to the Black Sea. His mind made no comment on it. It merely recorded the thought, like a poster on the side of the road which you read automatically as you speed by in a car.

  They sat down on the worn couch in the quiet room. Outside it was very dark and the newsboys crying on the distant streets were remote and inconsequential. “What’s the day?” Hope asked.

  “Sunday.” He smiled. “The day of rest.”

  “I don’t mean that,” she said. “I know that. The date.”

  “June,” he said, “the twenty-second of June.”

  “June twenty-second,” the girl whispered. “I’m going to remember that date. The first time you made love to me.”

  Roger was still up when Noah got home. Standing outside the doorway, in the dark house, trying to compose his face so that it would show nothing of what had gone on that night, Noah heard the piano being softly played within. It was a sad jazz tune, hesitant and blue, and Roger was improvising on it so that it was difficult to recognize the melody. Noah listened for two or three minutes in the little hallway before he opened the door and went in. Roger waved to him with one hand, without looking around, and continued playing. There was only one lamp lit, in the corner, and the room looked large and mysterious as Noah sank slowly into the battered leather chair near the window. Outside, the city was sleeping along the dark streets. The curtains moved at the open window in the soft wind. Noah closed his eyes, listening to the running, somber chords. He had a strange impression that he could feel
every bone and muscle and pore of his body, alive and weary, in trembling balance under his clothes, reacting to the music.

  In the middle of a passage Roger stopped. He sat at the piano with his long hands resting on the keyboard; staring at the scratched and polished old wood. Then he swung around.

  “The house is yours,” he said.

  “What?” Noah opened his eyes.

  “I’m going in tomorrow,” Roger said. He spoke as though he were continuing a conversation with himself he had been conducting for hours.

  “What?” Noah looked closely at his friend to see if he had been drinking.

  “The Army. The party’s over. Now they begin to collect the civilians.”

  Noah felt dazed, as though he couldn’t quite understand the words Roger was using. Another night, he felt, and I could understand. But too much has happened tonight.

  “I suppose,” Roger said, “the news has reached Brooklyn.”

  “You mean about the Russians?”

  “I mean about the Russians.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am going to spring to the aid of the Russians,” Roger said.

  “What?” Noah asked, puzzledly. “Are you going to join the Russian Army?”

  Roger laughed and walked over to the window. He stood there, holding onto the curtain, staring out. “Not exactly,” he said. “The Army of the United States.”

  “I’ll go in with you,” Noah said suddenly.

  “Thanks,” said Roger. “Don’t be silly. Wait until they call you.”

  “They haven’t called you,” said Noah.

  “Not yet. But I’m in a hurry.” Roger tied a knot reflectively in the curtain, then untied it. “I’m older than you. Wait until they come for you. It’ll be soon enough.”

  “Don’t sound,” Noah said, “as though you’re eighty years old.”

  Roger laughed and turned around. “Forgive me, Son,” he said. Then he grew more serious. “I ignored it just about as long as it could be ignored,” he said. “Today, when I heard it over the radio, I knew I couldn’t ignore it any more. From now on, the only way I can make any sense to myself is with a rifle in my hand. From Finland to the Black Sea,” he said, and Noah remembered the voice on the radio. “From Finland to the Black Sea to the Hudson River to Roger Cannon. We’re going to be in soon, anyway. I want to rush to it. I’ve waited around for things all my life. This thing I want to take a running broad jump at. What the hell, I come from an Army family, anyway.” He grinned. “My grandfather deserted at Antietam, and my old man left three illegitimate children at Soissons.”

  “Do you think it’ll do any good?” Noah said.

  Roger grinned. “Don’t ask me that, Son,” he said. “Never ask me that.” Then he spoke more soberly. “It may be the making of me. Right now, as you may have noticed, I have no goal in life. That’s a disease. In the beginning it’s no worse than a pimple and you hardly notice it. Three years later the patient is paralyzed. Maybe the Army will give me a goal in life …” He grinned. “Like staying alive or making sergeant or winning some war. Do you mind if I play the piano some more?”

  “Of course not,” Noah said dully. He’s going to die, a voice kept saying inside Noah’s head, Roger is going to die, they’re going to kill him.

  Roger sat down at the piano once more and placed his hands reflectively on the keys. He played something Noah had never heard before.

  “Anyway,” said Roger above the music, “I’m glad to see you and the girl finally went and did it …”

  “What?” Noah asked, hazily trying to remember if he had said anything. “What’re you talking about?”

  “It was sticking out all over your face,” Roger said, grinning. “Like an electric sign.” He played a long passage in the bass.

  Roger disappeared into the Army the next day. He wouldn’t let Noah go down to the recruiting station with him, and he left him all his belongings, all the furniture, all the books, and even all his clothes, although they were much too large for Noah. “I won’t need any of this stuff,” Roger said, looking around critically at the accumulation of the baggage of his twenty-six years. “It’s just junk anyway.” He stuffed a copy of the New Republic into his pocket to read on the subway ride down to Whitehall Street, smiling and saying, “Oh, what a frail weapon I have here,” and waved at Noah and jammed his hat at his own private angle on the lean, close-cropped head, and once and for all left the room in which he had lived for five years. Noah watched him go, with a choked feeling in his throat, and a premonition that he would never have a friend again and that the best days of his life were past.

  Occasionally Noah would get a dry, sardonic note from some camp in the South, and once a mimeographed company order announcing that Private Roger Cannon had been promoted to Private First Class, and then there was a long lapse until a two-page letter came from the Philippines, describing the red-light section of Manila and a half-Burmese, half-Dutch girl who had the SS Texas tattooed on her belly. There was a postscript, in Roger’s sprawling handwriting. “P.S. Stay out of the Army. It is not for human beings.”

  There was, of course, one advantage, and Noah felt guiltily how much he was enjoying it. Now he and Hope had a place of their own. They were no longer night-prowlers, famished for each other, waiting sadly in cold vestibules for Bible-reading uncles to go to bed, lovers lacking a couch to bed their love in, sad-eyed children comically frustrated on the public concrete of the city.

  In the months after Roger’s departure, Noah felt that he had finally, after all these years, made the discovery of his body. It was stronger than he had known and capable of more feeling than he had ever expected. He even took to looking at it in the long mirror behind the door, and with the blessing of Hope’s approval on it, it appeared infinitely more graceful and useful than it had seemed to him before. Oh, he thought gratefully, looking at his bare chest, oh, how lucky it is I have no hair on it.

  Hope, with a private place that was so securely their own, was unexpectedly wanton. In the warm familiar darkness of the city summer the cold hills of her Vermont puritanism vanished in riotous smoke, and they matched hunger for hunger, claim for claim on the other’s flesh. In the dizzying ebb and flow of love, in the shabby room which had become the dearest and most profound secret of their lives, the noise of the streets below, the shouting on the corners, the calls in the Senate, the gunfire on other continents, dwindled to a remote murmur of background music, drums and bugles in the camp of another army far away in another war.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHRISTIAN FOUND it hard to keep his mind on the moving picture. It was a fairly good picture, too, about a detachment of troops in Berlin for one day in 1918 en route from the Russian Front to the Western Front. The Lieutenant in the picture was under strict orders to keep his men together at the station, but he understood how much they wanted to see their wives and sweethearts, after the ferocious battles in the East and the fatal battles-to-come in the West. At the risk of court-martial and death, he permitted them to go to their homes. If any one of them failed to get back to the station on time, the Lieutenant’s life would be forfeit. The picture followed the various men. Some got drunk, some were tempted by Jews and defeatists to remain in Berlin, some were nearly persuaded by their wives, and for awhile it was touch-and-go whether the Lieutenant would survive the gamble. But finally, in the nick of time, the last soldier made the station just as the train was pulling out, and it was a solid band of comrades who started toward France, having vindicated their Lieutenant’s faith in them. The picture was done very well. It cleverly demonstrated that the war had not been lost by the Army, but by the faint-hearts and the traitors at home, and it was full of touches of humor and pathos.

  Even the soldiers who were sitting in the troop theatre all around Christian were moved by the actors playing soldiers in another wan The Lieutenant was a little too good to be true, of course, and Christian had never come across one quite like him. Lieutenant Hardenburg, Christian thought dryly,
could profit by seeing this picture a few times. Since the one day of relaxation in the brothel in Paris, Hardenburg had grown more and more rigid with the lengthening of the war. Their regiment had had its armor taken from it and had been moved to Rennes. They had been stationed there, as policemen, more than anything else, while the war with Russia had started and all of Hardenburg’s contemporaries were winning honors in the East.

  One morning Hardenburg had read that a boy he had gone to officers’ school with, whom they had called the Ox because he was so backward, had been made a Lieutenant Colonel in the Ukraine, and Hardenburg had nearly exploded with fury. He was still a Lieutenant, and even though he was living well, in a two-room apartment in one of the best hotels in town, and he had an arrangement with two women who lived on the same floor, and was making considerable money blackmailing illegal operators in meat and dairy products, Hardenburg was inconsolable. And an inconsolable Lieutenant, Christian thought grimly, made for an unhappy Sergeant.

  It was a good thing Christian’s leave was beginning tomorrow. Another unrelieved week of Hardenburg’s snapping sarcasm might have driven Christian to some dangerous act of insubordination. Even now, Christian thought resentfully, when he knows I’m leaving on the seven-o’clock train for Germany in the morning he’s put me on duty. There was a patrol scheduled for midnight to round up some French boys who were dodging labor service in Germany, and Hardenburg hadn’t picked Himmler or Stein or any of the others for it. That nasty, thin grin, and, “I know you won’t mind, Diestl. Keep you from being bored your last night in Rennes. You don’t have to report till midnight.”

  The picture faded out on a closeup of the handsome young Lieutenant smiling tenderly and thoughtfully at his collected men as the train sped west, and there was real applause from the soldiers in the hall.

  The newsreel came on. There were pictures of Hitler talking and the Luftwaffe dropping bombs on London and Goering pinning a medal on a pilot who had downed a hundred planes, and infantry advancing against a burning farm building on the road to Leningrad.