by Irwin Shaw
“Good night, darling,” he said to the ugly girl behind the desk. He couldn’t resist that. She looked at him with the unbreakable superiority of the person who will not be called upon to die over the man who may.
Michael was still smiling as he started down the steps through the thick fumes of the Greek cuisine, but he felt depressed. The first day, he thought, I should have gone in the first day. I shouldn’t’ve exposed myself to a scene like that. He felt soiled and suspect as he walked slowly through the mild late winter night, among the strolling couples oblivious to the tattered, shabby war being fought between one soul and another, in their name, in the dirty loft over the Greek restaurant half a block away.
Two mornings later, when he went down for his mail, there was a card from his draft board. “As per your request,” it read, “you will be reclassified as 1A on May 15.” He laughed as he read it. They have salvaged victory out of the ruins of their campaign, he thought. But he felt relieved as he went upstairs again in the elevator. There were no more decisions to be made.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NOAH OPENED HIS EYES in the soft dawn light and looked at his wife. She sleeps, he thought, as though she were keeping a secret. Hope, he thought, Hope, Hope. She must have been one of those grave little girls, walking through that white clapboard town, always looking as though she was hurrying to some private destination. She probably had little caches of things stuffed away in the odd corners of her room, too. Feathers, dried flowers, old fashion plates from Harper’s Bazaar, drawings of women with bustles, that sort of thing. You didn’t know anything about little girls. Would be different if you had sisters. Your wife came to you out of a locked vault of experience. Might just as well have come from the mountains of Tibet or a French nunnery. While he was smoking cigarettes under the roof at Colonel Drury’s Military Academy for Boys, We Take the Boy and Return the Man, what was she doing, walking gravely past the churchyard with all the Plowmans tucked in under the old grass? If there was a plan to anything, she was preparing for him then, preparing for this moment of sleeping beside him in the dawn light. And he had been preparing for her. If there was a plan. Impossible to believe. If Roger hadn’t somehow met her (how did he meet her? Must ask). If Roger hadn’t half-ironically decided to have a party to get him a girl. If Roger had brought one of the dozen other girls he knew, they wouldn’t be lying here together this morning. Accident, the only law of life. Roger. “You make time and you make love dandy. You make swell molasses candy. But honey, are you makin’ any money. That’s all I want to know.” Caught in the Philippines, Bataan, if he had lived that long. And here they were in Roger’s room, in Roger’s bed, because it was more comfortable. Noah’s old bed slanted to the right. It all started when he reached up to the copy of, Yeats’ The Herne’s Egg and Other Plays on the library shelf. If he had reached for another book, he wouldn’t’ve bumped into Roger and he wouldn’t have lived here and he wouldn’t’ve met Hope and she probably would be lying in another bed now, with another man watching her, thinking, I love her, I love her. If you thought about it you stared into the shouting pit of madness. No plan to anything. No plan to loving or dying or fighting or anything. The equation: Man plus his intentions equals Accident. Impossible to believe. The plan must be there, but cleverly camouflaged, the way a good playwright disguises his plot. At the moment you die perhaps everything is clear to you, you say, oh, now I see, that’s why that character was introduced in the first act.
Bataan. Hard to think of Roger saying “Yes, Sir” to anybody. Hard to think of Roger in a helmet. Always thought of him with that tipped, broken, brown felt hat across his head. Hard to think of Roger in a muddy hole. Hard to think of a man who could play Beethoven on the piano being shelled in the jungle. Hard to think of Roger losing, even in a war. Roger was a born victor, because victory in anything never seemed very important to him, it amused him. Hard to think of Roger being torn apart by a mortar shell, screaming, or falling with machine-gun bullets in his chest. Hard to think of Roger surrendering. “Oh, my God,” you could imagine him saying, grinning crookedly at the Jap who made the request, “are you kidding?” Hard to think of Roger’s grave under the palm trees, Roger’s skull laid bare by time in the jungle mold. Had Roger ever kissed Hope? Probably. How many other men? The secret face on the pillow. The locked vault. How many men had she wanted, and what visions had she manufactured as she lay waiting in her single bed in Vermont and Brooklyn? And how many of the other men lay dead in the Pacific? And how many of the others, boys and men had she touched, longed for, had unspeakable dreams about, were walking alive now and would be dead this year or next somewhere in the world?
What time was it? Six-fifteen. Another five minutes in bed. This was going to be a kind of holiday today. No nervous thunder of the riveters, no wind on the scaffolds, none of the hiss and flare of the welders in the shipyard in Passaic. He had to go to his draft board today, and once more to Governor’s Island to be examined. The system kept repeating itself, like a bank teller with a bad memory, adding the same line of figures over and over again. Once more the Wassermann, once more the careless finger pressing the testicles, “Cough,” no hernia, once more the bored psychiatrist. “Have you ever bad relations with men?” What a degrading way to phrase that question. The Army’s belief that relations with your fellowman could only be unnatural. What about his relations with Roger, and Vincent Moriarity, the foreman on his shift at the shipyard, who bought him beers and boasted that he pulled down the British flag over the post office in Dublin, Easter week, 1916? What about his relations with his wife’s father, who had sent him his own edition of the collected works of Emerson as a wedding gift? What of his relations with his own father, who had wandered half across the world from Odessa, full of lust and lies and prophecy, and who now was a small box of ashes neglected on a mausoleum shelf in California? What of his relations with Hitler and Roosevelt, with Thomas Jefferson and Shakespeare, with Colonel Drury in the crumbling gray buildings outside Detroit, who drank a quart of bourbon every afternoon, who had once told the graduating class, “There is only one virtue. Courage. I am not interested in a man who is not quick to take offense.” What of his relations to his own son, not yet conceived, but latent and attendant here in this dawn bed between Hope and himself? Would his son be quick to take offense? Offense at what? Who would give him offense and what the cause and how decided? Was there a grave waiting for him somewhere, too, on some far island? Was there a bullet, not yet made, that would bring down his son, not yet born? Was there an unconceived soul somewhere on another continent, who later in the century would peer out across rifle sights at the heart of his son? And what God would the minister address at the funeral service? Christ, Jehovah, Who? Maybe an uneasy double address, like a careful gambler’s hedged bet. “To Whatever God It May Concern—kindly accept this dead boy into Whatever Hereafter You happen to run.” Ridiculous to lie here next to a girl you have just scarcely married, worrying about how your child, who has not yet announced his coming, is going to be buried. Other problems, though, before that. Would he be christened? Would he be circumcised? “You circumcised dog!” in Ivanhoe, in the first term in high school. In Budapest, in the pogroms, when the Revolutionary Government was overthrown in 1920, the crowds tore down the trousers of suspected Jews and murdered every male who had been circumcised. The poor Christians who had had it done for sanitary reasons. Probably hated the Jews as heartily as any of their executioners, and yet there they were, dying in that approximate hatred. Must stop thinking about the Jews. If you let yourself fall into a reverie, on no matter what subject, it finally came around to that. Wonder if there was ever a time when a Jew could avoid that? What century? The fifth century before Christ, perhaps.
Six-twenty. Time to get up. The doctors were waiting on the green island, the ferry with the General’s name, the x-ray technicians, the rubber stamp with Rejected on it. What did they do in older wars? Before x-ray. How many men fought at Shiloh with scars on their lungs, all
unknowing? How many men came to Borodino with stomach ulcers? How many at Thermopylae who would be turned back by their draft boards today for curvature of the spine? How many 4F’s perished outside Troy? Time to get up.
Hope stirred beside him. She turned to him and put her arm across his chest. She came slowly out from the backstage of sleep and ran her hand lightly, in half-slumbering possession, down his ribs and his stomach.
“Bed,” she murmured, still in the grip of the last dream, and he grinned at her and gathered her close to him.
“What time is it?” she whispered, her lips close to his ear. “Is it morning? Do you have to go?”
“It’s morning,” he said. “And I have to go. But,” and he smiled as he said it, and pressed the familiar, slender body, “but I think the government can wait another fifteen minutes.”
Hope was washing her hair when she heard the key in the lock. She had come home from work and seen that Noah hadn’t returned yet from Government’s Island, and she had puttered around the house, without switching on a lamp, in the summer twilight, waiting for him to get back.
With her head bent over the basin, and the soapy water dripping onto her closed eyelids, she heard Noah come into the big room.
“Noah,” she called, “I’m in here,” and she wrapped a towel around her head and turned to him, naked except for that. His face was sober and controlled. He held her loosely, gently touching the base of her neck, still wet from the rinsing.
“It happened,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“The x-ray?”
“Didn’t show anything, I guess.” His voice was remote and calm.
“Did you tell them?” she asked. “About the last time?”
“No.”
She wanted to ask why not, but she stopped herself, because in a confused, intuitive way, she knew.
“You didn’t tell them that you had a defense job, either, did you?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell them,” she said loudly. “I’ll go down myself. A man with scars on his lungs can’t be …”
“Sssh,” he said. “Sssh.”
“It’s silly,” she said, trying to talk reasonably, like a debater. “What good will a sick man do in the Army? You’ll only crack up. It’ll just be another burden for them. They can’t make you a soldier …”
“They can try.” Noah smiled slowly. “They sure can try. The least I can do is give them a chance. Anyway,” and he kissed her behind the ear, “anyway, they’ve already done it. I was sworn in at eight o’clock tonight.”
She pulled back. “What’re you doing here then?”
“Two weeks,” he said. “They give you two weeks to settle your affairs.”
“Will it do any good,” Hope asked, “for me to argue with you?”
“No,” he said very softly.
“Goddamn them!” Hope said. “Why don’t they get things straight the first time? Why,” she cried, addressing the draft boards and the Army doctors and the regiments in the field and the politicians in all the capitals of the world, addressing the war and the time and all the agony ahead of her, “why can’t they behave like sensible human beings?”
“Sssh,” Noah said. “We only have two weeks. Let’s not waste them. Have you eaten yet?”
“No,” she said. “I’m washing my hair.”
He sat down on the edge of the tub, smiling wearily at her. “Finish your hair,” he said, “and we’ll go out to dinner. There’s a place I heard about on Second Avenue where they have the best steaks in the world. Three dollars apiece, but they’re …”
She threw herself down at his knees and held him tightly. “Oh, darling,” she said, “oh, darling …”
He stroked her bare shoulder as though he were trying to memorize it. “For the next two weeks,” he said, his voice almost not trembling, “we will go on a holiday. That’s how we’ll settle my affairs.” He grinned at her. “We’ll go up to Cape Cod and swim and we’ll hire bicycles and we’ll eat only three-dollar steaks at every meal. Please, please, darling, stop crying.”
Hope stood up. She blinked twice. “All right,” she said. “It’s stopped. I won’t cry again. It’ll take me fifteen minutes to get ready. Can you wait?”
“Yes,” he said. “But hurry. I’m starved.”
She took the towel off her head and finished washing her hair. Noah sat on the edge of the tub and watched her. From time to time Hope got glimpses of his drawn, thin face in the mirror. She knew that she was going to remember the way his face looked then, lost and loving as he sat perched on the porcelain rim, in the cluttered, garishly lit room, remember for a long, long time.
They had their two weeks on Cape Cod. They stayed at an aggressively clean tourist house with an American flag on a pole on the lawn in front of it. They ate clam chowder and broiled lobster for dinner. They lay on the pale sand and swam in the dancing, cold water and went to the movies religiously at night, without commenting on the newsreels to each other, without saying anything about the charging, tremulous voices describing death and defeat and victory on the flickering screen. They rented bicycles and rode slowly along the seaside roads and laughed when a truckload of soldiers passed and whistled at Hope’s pretty legs, and called to Noah, “Pretty soft, Bud. What’s your draft number, Bud? We’ll see you soon!”
Their noses peeled and their hair got sticky with salt, and their skin, when they went to bed at night, smelled ocean fragrant and sunny in the immaculate sheets of the shingled cottage in which they lived. They hardly spoke to anyone else, and the two weeks seemed to stretch through the summer, through the year, through every summer they had ever known, and all time seemed to go in a gentle spiral on sandy roads, between scrub firs, in a gleam of summer light on brisk waves and under the stars of cool summer evenings stirred by a holiday wind that came off the Vineyard and off Nantucket and off a sunny ocean disturbed only by gulls and the sails of small boats and the splash of flying fish playing in the water.
Then the two weeks were up and they went back to the city. The people there seemed pallid and wilted, defeated by the summer, and they felt healthy and powerful in comparison.
The final morning, Hope made coffee for them at six o’clock. They sat across from each other, sipping the hot, bitter liquid out of the huge cups that were their first joint domestic investment. Hope walked with Noah down the quiet, shining streets, still cool with the memory of night, to the drab unpainted store that had been taken over by the draft board.
They kissed, thoughtfully, already remote from each other, and Noah went in to join the quiet group of boys and men who were gathered around the desk of the middle-aged man who was serving his country in its hour of need by waking early twice a month to give the last civilian instructions and the tickets for the free subway ride to the groups of men departing from the draft board for the war.
Noah went out in the shuffling, self-conscious line, with the fifty others, and walked with them the three blocks to the subway station. The people on the street, going about their morning business, on their way to their shops and offices, on their way to the day’s marketing and the day’s cooking and money-making, looked at them with curiosity and a little awe, as the natives of a town might look at a group of pilgrims from another country who happen to pass through their streets, on their journey to an obscure and fascinating religious festival.
Noah saw Hope across the street from the entrance to the subway station. She was standing in front of a florist’s shop. The florist was an old man slowly putting out pots of geraniums and large blue vases of gladioli in the windows behind her. She had on a blue dress dotted with white flowers. The morning wind brushed it softly against her body in front of the blossoms shining through the glass behind her. Because of the sun reflecting from the glass, Noah could not tell what her face was like. He started to cross the street to her, but the leader that the man at the draft board had assigned to the group called anxiously, “Please, boys, stick together, please,” and N
oah thought, what could I tell her, what could she tell me? He waved to her. She waved back, a single, lifting gesture of the bare brown arm. In the shadow she created with the movement, Noah could see she wasn’t crying.
What do you know, he said to himself, she isn’t crying. And he went down into the subway, between a boy named Tempesta and a thirty-five-year-old Spaniard whose name was Nuncio Aguilar.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE RED-HEADED WOMAN he hadn’t kissed four years ago leaned over, smiling, in Michael’s last dream and kissed him. He awoke, warmly remembering the dream and the red-headed woman.
The morning sun angled past the sides of the closed Venetian blinds, framing the windows in a golden dust. Michael stretched.
Outside the room he heard the murmur of the seven million people walking through the streets and corridors of the city. Michael got up. He padded over on the carpeted floor to the window and pulled up the blinds.
The sun filled the back gardens with an early summer wealth, soft and buttery on the faded brick of the old buildings, on the dusty ivy, on the bleached striped awnings of the small terraces filled with rattan furniture and potted plants. A little round woman, in a wide orange hat and old fat slacks that clung cheerfully to her round behind, was standing over a potted geranium on the terrace directly across from Michael. She reached thoughtfully down and snipped off a blossom. Her hat shook sorrowfully as she looked at the mortal flower in her hand. Then she turned and walked through curtained French windows into her house, her cheerful behind shaking, middle-aged and healthy, in her city garden.
Michael grinned, pleased that it was sunny, and that the redheaded woman had finally kissed him, and that there was a fat little woman with an absurd sweet behind mourning over faded geraniums on the other side of the sunny back gardens.
He washed, dousing himself with cold water, then walked barefoot, in his pajamas, across the carpeted floor through the living room, to the front door. He opened it and picked up the Times.