Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  Michael, himself, had been playing tennis in the blazing desert sun with two soldiers who were stationed at March Field. When the woman had come out of the clubhouse, saying, “You’d better come in and listen to the radio. There’s an awful lot of static, but I think I heard that the Japanese have attacked us,” the two soldiers had looked at each other and had put their racquets away and had gone in and packed their bags and had started right back for March Field. The ball before the battle of Waterloo. The gallant young officers waltzing, kissing the bare-shouldered ladies good-bye, then off to the guns on the foaming horses, with a rattle of hoofs and scabbards and a swirling of capes in the Flanders night more than a century ago. An old chestnut, then, probably, but Byron had done it big just the same. How would Byron have handled the morning in Honolulu and this next morning at Beverly Hills?

  Michael had meant to stay in Palm Springs another three days, but after the tennis game he had paid his bill and rushed back to town. No capes, no horses, just a rented Ford with a convertible top that went down when you pushed a button. And no battle waiting, just the hired-by-the-week ground-floor apartment overlooking the swimming pool.

  The noise of the mower came right up to the French windows that opened on the small lawn. Michael turned and looked at the machine and the gardener. The gardener was a small fifty-year-old Japanese, bent and thin with his years of tending other people’s grass and flower beds. He plodded after the machine mechanically, his thin, wiry arms straining against the handle.

  Michael couldn’t help grinning. A hell of a thing to wake up to the day after the Japanese Navy dropped the bombs on the American fleet … a fifty-year-old Jap advancing on you with a lawnmower. Michael looked more closely and stopped smiling. The gardener had a set, gloomy expression on his face, as though he were bearing a chronic illness. Michael remembered him from the week before, when he had gone about his chores with a cheery, agreeable smile, and had even hummed from time to time, tunelessly, as he had pruned the oleander bush outside the window.

  Michael got out of bed and went to the window, buttoning his pajama top. It was a clear, golden morning, with the tiny crispness that is Southern California’s luxurious substitute for winter. The green of the lawn looked very green and the small red and yellow dahlias along the border shone like gleaming bright buttons against it. The gardener kept everything in sharp definite lines out of some precise sense of Oriental design, and made the garden look like colored cups laid out on a billiard table.

  “Good morning,” Michael said. He didn’t know the man’s name. He didn’t know any Japanese names. Yes—one. Sessue Hayakawa, the old movie star. What was good old Sessue Hayakawa doing this morning?

  The gardener stopped the lawnmower and came slowly up from his somber dream to stare at Michael.

  “Yes, Sir,” he said. His voice was flat and high, and there was no welcome in it. His little dark eyes, set among the brown wrinkles, looked, Michael thought, lost and pleading. Michael wanted to say something comforting and civilized to this aging, laboring exile who had overnight found himself in a land of enemies, charged with the guilt of a vile attack three thousand miles away.

  “It’s too bad,” Michael said, “isn’t it?”

  The gardener looked blankly at him, as though he had not understood at all.

  “I mean,” said Michael, “about the war.”

  The man shrugged. “Not too bad,” he said. “Everybody say, ‘naughty Japan, goddamn Japan.’ But not too bad. Before, England wants, she take. America wants, she take. Now Japan wants.” He stared coldly at Michael, direct and challenging. “She take.”

  He turned and turned the mower with him and started across the lawn slowly, with the cut grass flying in a fragrant green spray around his ankles. Michael watched him for a moment, the bent humble back, the surprisingly powerful legs, bare up to the knee in torn denim pants, the creased, sun-worn neck rising out of the colorless sweaty shirt.

  Michael shrugged. Perhaps a good citizen, in time of war, should report utterances like this to the proper authorities. Perhaps this aged gardener in his ragged clothes was really a full commander in the Japanese Navy, cleverly awaiting the arrival of the Imperial Fleet outside San Pedro Harbor before showing his hand. Michael grinned. The movies, he thought, there is no escape for the modern mind from their onslaught.

  He closed the French windows and went in and shaved. While he was shaving, he tried to plan what he would do from now on. He had come to California with Thomas Cahoon, who was trying to cast a play. They were conferring about revisions with the author, too, Milton Sleeper, who could only work at night on the play, because he worked during the day for Warner Brothers as a scenario writer. “Art,” Cahoon had said, acidly, “is in great shape in the twentieth century. Goethe worked all day on a play, and Chekhov and Ibsen, but Milton Sleeper can only give it his evenings.”

  Somehow, Michael thought, as he scraped at his face, when your country goes to war, you should be galvanized into some vast and furious action. You should pick up a gun, board a naval vessel, climb into a bomber for a five-thousand-mile flight, parachute into the enemy’s capital …

  But Cahoon needed him to put the play on. And, there was no escaping this fact, Michael needed the money. If he went into the Army now, his mother and father would probably starve, and there was Laura’s alimony … Cahoon was giving him a percentage of the play this time, too. It was a small percentage, but if it was a hit it would mean that money would be coming in for a year or two. Perhaps the war would be short and the money would last it out. And if it was a tremendous smash, say, like Abie’s Irish Rose or Tobacco Road, the war could stretch on indefinitely. It was a dreadful thing to think of, though—a war that ran as long as Tobacco Road.

  Too bad he didn’t have the money now, though. It would have been so satisfactory to go to the nearest Army post after hearing the news on the radio and enlist. It would have been a solid, unequivocal gesture which you could look back at with pride all your life. But there were only six hundred dollars in the bank, and the income-tax people were bothering him about his return for 1939, and Laura had been unpredictably greedy about the divorce settlement. He had to give her eighty dollars a week for her whole life, unless she got married, and she had taken all the cash he had in his account in New York. He wondered what happened to alimony when you joined the Army. Probably an MP taps you on the shoulder as you lie crouched in a trench on the mainland of Asia, and says, “Come on, Soldier, we’ve been looking for you.” He remembered the story a British friend of his told him about the last war. The friend had been at the Somme, and on the third day of the battle, with nearly no one left in his company, and no sign anywhere of any respite of relief, he had received a letter from home. With trembling hands, near tears, he had opened it. It was from the British equivalent of the Internal Revenue Department, saying, “We have written you again and again with regard to your non-payment of thirteen pounds seven in tax for the year 1914. We regret to tell you that this is absolutely the last warning. If we do not hear from you we shall have to institute legal steps.” The friend, muddy, hollow-eyed, ragged, survivor of the death of all the men around him, deafened with the continuing roar of the guns, had gravely written on the face of the letter, “Come and get it. The War Office will be pleased to give you my address.” He had given it to the Company Clerk to mail and had turned to the Germans in front of him.

  As Michael dressed he tried to think about other things. There was something inglorious about sitting, a little hung-over from last night’s nervous drinking, in this over-fancy, pink-chiffon, rented bedroom, done in Hollywood whorehouse style, uneasily going over your finances on this morning of decision, like a bookkeeper who has lifted fifty dollars from the till and is worrying about how to get it back before the auditors arrive. The men at the guns in Honolulu were probably in even more severe financial shape, but he was sure they weren’t worrying about it this morning. Still, it was impractical to go down and enlist immediately. It was ridi
culous, but patriotism, like almost every other generous activity, was easier for the rich, too.

  While he was dressing he heard the colored man who did the cleaning come in and rattle the bottles in the small cabinet in the dining alcove. War hasn’t changed him, Michael thought, he’s stealing the gin just the same.

  Michael put on his tie and went out into the living room. The colored man was running a carpet sweeper. He was standing in the middle of the floor, staring up at the ceiling, and pushing the carpet sweeper about in long, vague gestures, in all directions. There was a powerful smell of gin in the air and the colored man wavered in a benign, pendulum-like movement as he worked.

  “Good morning, Bruce,” Michael said pleasantly. “How do you feel?”

  “Morning, Mr. Whitacre,” Bruce said dreamily. “Feel the same. Feel exactly the same.”

  “They going to get you in the Army?” Michael asked.

  “Me, Mr. Whitacre?” Bruce stopped sweeping and shook his head. “Not old Bruce. The man says, ‘Join up, Brother,’ but old Bruce don’t join. Too old, too full of clap and rheumatism. And even if I was as young as the leaping colt and strong as the roaring lion, you wouldn’t catch me enlisting for this war. Mebbe the next, but not this one. No, Sir.”

  Michael pulled back a little because in his vehemence Bruce had swayed, close and gin-smelling, toward him. Michael looked at him puzzledly. He always felt a little embarrassed with Negroes, and guilty. He never seemed to strike a candid, everyday, honest conversational tone with them.

  “No, Sir,” Bruce went on, swaying, “not this one at all. Not if they gave me a solid silver gun and spurs of shining gold. This is the war of the Unrighteous, as it is predicted in the Books of Prophecy, and I would not lift my hand in it to wound my fellowman.”

  “But,” Michael said, trying to put it in simple terms to get through the gin cloud, somehow feeling that on a day like this a man should debate this question with his neighbor, “they’re killing Americans, Bruce.”

  “Maybe they are. Haven’t seen for myself yet. Don’t know for certain. Only what I read in the white papers. Maybe they are killing Americans: Likely, they was provoked. Maybe they tried to get into a hotel and the white men said, no yellow men here, and the yellow men finally got mad and they schemed awhile and they said, ‘White men don’t let us in the hotel, let’s take the hotel.’ No, man …” He ran the carpet sweeper briskly twice over the carpet, then stopped and leaned on it again. “This ain’t the war for me. The next one is the one I’m waiting for.”

  “When will that be?” Michael asked.

  “1956,” Bruce said promptly. “Armageddon. The war of the races. The colored against the white.” He looked drunkenly and religiously up at the ceiling. “First day of that war, I present myself at the recruiting office and I say to the colored general, ‘General, make use of my strong right arm.’”

  California, Michael thought crazily. You only meet people like this in California.

  He left Bruce, who had fallen into a somber, reflective silence, leaning on the handle of the carpet sweeper in the middle of the room.

  Outside, across the street, on a vacant lot that rose quite steeply above the rest of the ground around it, there were two Army trucks and an anti-aircraft gun and soldiers in helmets were digging in. The gun, poking its long, covered muzzle up at the sky, and the busy soldiers scraping out an emplacement as though they were already under fire, struck Michael as incongruous and comic. This, too, must be a local phenomenon. It was impossible to believe that any place else in the country, the Army was going to these melodramatic lengths. And, somehow, soldiers and guns had always seemed to Michael, as they did to most Americans, like instruments for a kind of boring, grown-up game, not like anything real. And this particular gun was stuck between a woman’s Monday washline, brassieres and silk stockings and pantie girdles, and the back door of a Spanish bungalow, with the morning’s milk still on the steps.

  Michael walked toward Wilshire Boulevard, toward the drugstore where he usually had his breakfast. There was a bank building on the corner, with a line of people outside the door, waiting for the bank to open. A young policeman was keeping them in order, saying over and over again, “Ladies and Gentlemen. Ladies and Gentlemen. Keep your places. Don’t worry. You’ll all get your money.”

  Michael went up to the policeman, curiously. “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  The policeman looked sourly at him. “The end of the line, Mister,” he said pointing.

  “I don’t want to get inside,” said Michael. “I haven’t any money in this bank. Or,” and he grinned, “in any other bank.”

  The policeman smiled back at him, as though this expression of poverty had made sudden friends of them. “They’re gettin’ it out,” he gestured with his head to the line of people, “before the bombs fall on the vaults.”

  Michael stared at the people in the line. They stared back with hostility, as though they suspected anyone who talked to the policeman of being in conspiracy to defraud them of their money. They were well dressed, and there were many women among them.

  “Back east,” the policeman said in a loud, contemptuous stage whisper. “They’re all heading back east as soon as they get it out. I understand,” he said very loudly, so that everyone in the line could hear him, “that ten Japanese divisions have landed at Santa Barbara. The Bank of America is going to be used as headquarters for the Japanese General Staff, starting tomorrow.”

  “I’m going to report you,” a severe middle-aged woman in a pink dress and a wide blue straw hat said to the policeman. “See if I don’t.”

  “The name, Lady, is McCarty,” said the policeman.

  Michael smiled as he moved on toward his breakfast, but he walked reflectively past the plateglass windows of the shops, some of which already had strips of plaster across them to protect from concussion the silver tea sets and evening gowns displayed in them. The rich, he thought, are more sensitive to disaster than others. They have more to lose and they are quicker to run. It would never occur to a poor man to leave the West Coast because there was a war on somewhere in the Pacific. Not out of patriotism, perhaps, or fortitude, but merely because he couldn’t afford it. Also, the rich were accustomed to pay other people to do their manual work for them, and their dirty jobs, and a war was the hardest labor and the dirtiest job of all. He thought of the gardener, who had lived in this country for forty years, and Bruce, drunk on gin and prophecy, whose grandfather had been freed in South Carolina in 1863, and he remembered the grasping, tight, hostile expressions on the women in the line before the bank and he thought of himself sitting on the edge of the pink bed worrying about tax and alimony. Are these the people, created in greatness by the work of Jefferson and Franklin, he thought, are these the bitter farmers and hunters and craftsmen who came out of the wilderness, furious for liberty and justice, is this the new world of giants sung by Whitman?

  He went into the drugstore and ordered orange juice, toast and coffee.

  He met Cahoon at one o’clock at the famous restaurant in Beverly Hills. It was a large dark room, done in the curving, startling style affected by movie-set designers. It looks, Michael thought, standing at the bar, surveying the crowded civilian room, in which one uniform, on a tall infantry sergeant, stood out strangely, it looks like a bathroom decorated by a Wool-worth salesgirl for a Balkan queen. The image pleased him and he gazed with more favor on the tanned fat men in the tweed jackets and the smooth, powdered, beautiful women with startling hats who sat about the room, their eyes pecking at each new arrival. There was an air of celebration and generosity hanging over the room, and people clapped each other on the back and talked jovially and louder than usual and bought each other drinks. It reminded Michael, more than anything else, of the cocktail hour in fashionable bars in New York on the afternoon before New Year’s Eve, when everyone was stoking up for the night of hope and merrymaking ahead.

  There were rumors and anecdotes about the war already. A f
amous director walked through the room with a set face, whispering here and there that of course he didn’t want it spread around, but we hadn’t a ship in the Pacific, and a fleet had been spotted 300 miles off the Oregon coast. And a writer had heard a producer in the MGM barbershop sputter, through the lather on his face, “I’m so mad at those little yellow bastards, I feel like throwing up my job here and going—going—” The producer had hesitated, groping for the most violent symbol of his feeling of outrage and duty. Finally, he had found it, “—going right to Washington.” The writer was having a great success with the story. He was going to table after table with it, cleverly leaving on the burst of laughter it provoked, to move on to new listeners.

  Cahoon was quiet and abstracted and Michael could tell that he was in pain from his ulcer, although he insisted upon drinking an old-fashioned at the bar before going to their table. Michael had never seen Cahoon take a drink before.

  They sat down at one of the booths to wait for Milton Sleeper, the author of the play Cahoon was working on, and for Kirby Hoyt, a movie actor whom Cahoon hoped to induce to play in it. “One of the most irritating things about this town,” Cahoon growled. “Everybody insists on doing business over lunch. You can’t sign a barber without stuffing his face first.”

  Pharney came ambling down the room, smiling, and shaking hands in a royal passage across the booths. He was an agent for a hundred and fifty of the highest-priced actors and writers and directors in Hollywood, and this restaurant was his regal domain and lunchtime his solemn hour of audience. He knew Michael well, and again and again had tried to persuade him to come out and learn the business, promising him fame and fortune as a director.