Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  Caroline’s face grew very sober and she ran her hand through her hair. Strand hoped she would say she didn’t want to go, but she said, “I’ll go.”

  “You’re sure now?”

  “Positive. Those boys shouldn’t be on the street. I can’t forget what they were like—a pack of wild animals, grunting, stabbing, hitting, grabbing. I just hope they found the right one.”

  “All right.” Strand sighed. “Your mother and I’ll go along with you.”

  “There’s no need. I’m not a baby.”

  “I said we’d go with you,” Strand said.

  Caroline sighed and started out of the kitchen, but Strand stopped her. “Sit down for a minute, Caroline. There’s something I have to talk about with you.”

  Caroline looked at him suspiciously but seated herself in one of the chairs at the kitchen table. Strand sat facing her. “I understand from Mr. Hazen,” he said, “that you talked about going out west to college.”

  “Oh,” Caroline said, sounding on the thin edge of guilt, “he told you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t say I was going,” she said. “I just said that if I had my druthers that’s where I’d like to go. I also told him I had no druthers.”

  “He told me that there was a chance you could have what you call your druthers.”

  “He did?” Caroline looked surprised. “He didn’t tell me.”

  “He wanted to talk to me first.”

  “What else did he tell you?” Now she was wary.

  “That you wanted to go to an agricultural college to prepare for a veterinary’s degree.”

  “Is that a crime?” Her voice was hostile.

  “Of course not,” Strand said soothingly. “But your mother and I would like to know why you want to do it and why you didn’t tell us long ago.”

  “I wasn’t sure long ago. I didn’t want to say anything while I was undecided. Besides, I was afraid you’d laugh at me and tell me I was a sentimental little girl. Well, now it’s out. Laugh if you want,” she said.

  “Nobody’s laughing, Caroline,” Strand said gently.

  “Anyway, it’s pointless even talking about it.” She made a gesture of dismissal with her hand. “Fairy tales for the young. It’d take money, a lot of money. We’re rich in affection around here,” she said ironically, “but when it comes to worldly goods…” She shrugged. “I’m not blind. When was the last time you bought a new suit?”

  “Let’s come to that later,” Strand said. “Right now I’m interested in your reasons. What do you know about animals?”

  “Nothing, yet. Well, I do know something. That they suffer and suffer horribly and deserve to find relief. Is it so weird to want to use your life to make this awful world just a little more human?” Her voice rose in anger, as though she felt she was being attacked.

  “I don’t think it’s weird,” Strand said. “In fact, I find it admirable. But people suffer, too. Yet you don’t want to be a doctor.”

  “I don’t want to be a doctor or a politician or a general or a social worker, because I’d be no good at any of those things. Eleanor could be anything she wanted but I can’t. I may be stupid, but there’s one thing I know and that’s me. I don’t get along easily with people and they’d scare me and I’d be clumsy and say all the wrong things and feel they were always laughing at me behind my back.”

  Oh, my poor dear daughter, Strand thought sorrowfully.

  “Animals’re better.” Caroline went rushing on. “They don’t talk. Or at least not so we can understand them. They wouldn’t embarrass me.” Now she was on the brink of tears.

  Strand leaned over the table and patted her hand. “All right,” he said. “Now I know how you feel, although I think maybe you’re too hard on yourself. As you grow older, I think you’ll have a higher opinion of your value.”

  “If I have to stay in this city, fighting day and night to try to keep up with all the smart kids around me, I’ll just be wiped out for good.” She was wailing now.

  “What if I were to tell you,” Strand said, “that you’ve convinced me and that I think it would be better all around if you went away to school?” He paused. “And there may be a way we can swing it, worldly goods or no worldly goods.”

  Caroline looked at him disbelievingly. “What’re you and Mummy going to do—get jobs at night to send me to Arizona?”

  “Nothing as drastic as that.” Strand laughed. “No, Mr. Hazen has come up with an idea.”

  “You’re not thinking of asking him to lend you the money, are you? I wouldn’t go if…”

  “Not that, either,” Strand interrupted her. Then he told her about Hazen’s plan for an athletic scholarship. She listened, wide-eyed. “He’s already talked to his friend at the school,” Strand went on, “and they can arrange for an alumnus who ran on the team and who lives in New York to talk to you and time you. If you’re really serious about the whole thing, I advise you to do a little practicing.”

  “I’m serious all right,” she said. “Boy, am I serious.”

  “I’ll talk to the head of the physical education department at your school and maybe they can give you a little coaching.”

  “It sounds bananas,” Caroline said, shaking her head wonderingly. “I run one race in my whole life against girls who would take all week just to get around the block and for that some dopey school is going to pay my way for four years? I think Mr. Hazen was kidding you, Daddy.”

  “He’s not the sort of man who goes in for kidding,” Strand said. “Whom you were running against doesn’t matter—it’s the time that counts.” Strand stood up. “By the way, the name of the school is Truscott. And Mr. Hazen said it has a strong agricultural department. If you’re positive you want to give it a try, your mother and I will do all we can to help you. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll look for something else.”

  Caroline looked pensive, rubbing her nose. “Arizona,” she said. “It sounds yummy. Positive! Hell, I’ll run for my life.”

  “You can talk to Mr. Hazen about it,” Strand said as he started out of the kitchen, “after you get through with the police tomorrow morning.”

  But Caroline didn’t get a chance to talk to Hazen the next morning, because after she had pointed at the young boy with the livid scar fresh across his forehead and the bridge of his nose, and said, very calmly, “Yes, I am sure, that was the one with the knife,” she began to scream, putting the heels of her hands into her eyes and bending over, weaving from side to side. She was still screaming when Strand carried her in his arms out of the station house with Leslie and Hazen hurrying beside him. Conroy was there with the Mercedes and they took her directly to Dr. Prinz’s office and he gave her a shot and after a while she lay on the couch, silently, her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.

  She stayed home from school for two more days, not going out of the apartment, quiet and subdued, her room gaudy with the flowers and littered with huge boxes of chocolates that Hazen sent her. Hazen called twice a day to find out how she was. During one of his calls he mentioned that his friend at Truscott was arranging to have someone in New York take a look at Caroline when she felt she was ready to perform. Hazen too wanted to see her but was understanding when Leslie told him that for the time being it was better if she were left alone.

  Then, on Thursday morning, Caroline came into the kitchen, dressed to go out, as Strand was having breakfast. She was humming and the color had returned to her cheeks and she told Strand she was going to school. “Are you sure it’s the right thing to do?” Strand said. “After all, it’s only a couple of days. You can wait till Monday.”

  Caroline shook her head. “I don’t want to hang around the house anymore. Don’t worry, Daddy, I’m over the glooms. I don’t know what came over me back there—in the police station—seeing that awful scar on that boy’s head and knowing I did it. And he was so young, like a scared baby. And looking at me with a funny, puzzled look on his face, as though he couldn’t understand why I was doing th
at to him. And the way that detective gripped his arm, like a handcuff, and he was going to be put behind bars just because a silly little white girl pointed at him…. I was so mixed up, Daddy,” she said, trying to keep back tears, “all I could do was scream.”

  “Don’t think about it. You did what you had to do. Now forget it.”

  Caroline nodded slowly. “I’ll try. But I’m not going into the park anymore, I’ll tell you that.” While she was drinking her juice and boiling some eggs for herself, he went into the bedroom and awoke Leslie to ask her what she thought about allowing Caroline to leave the house. “She’s digested it,” Leslie said, after a moment’s thought. “Or she’s pretending she’s digested it. Anyway, the best thing we can do is let her act normally, or what she thinks is normally.” Still, Leslie dressed hurriedly and, making an excuse that she had some early shopping to do, walked to school with Caroline. Before she left, she told Strand that she was going to invite Hazen to dinner. She was sure, she said, that he would accept. Which he did. Immediately and with pleasure. “I get the impression he eats dinner alone every night of the week,” Leslie said to Strand when he came home in the afternoon.

  “Funny,” Strand said. “I had the same feeling that first night.”

  “I also told him,” Leslie said, “that we would be grateful if he could manage to get Caroline into that school.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “He said he wished all young people knew what sort of education they wanted and were as eager to get it as Caroline.”

  “He should have been a headmaster.”

  “I guess law pays better,” Leslie said.

  When Hazen came into the apartment that evening he was carrying a sports bag with a warmup suit in it and a pair of track shoes. Caroline blushed, somewhere between gratitude and embarrassment, at the gift. “I’ll fly with these,” she said.

  “You just give me a week’s notice,” Hazen said, “as to when you think you’ll be ready and I’ll make sure everything is arranged correctly. There’s a track on Randall’s Island. I suggest you get some starting blocks and try out the shoes a few times.”

  During dinner they all carefully avoided talking about the scene in the police station. Hazen did most of the talking, telling them what the summers had been like in East Hampton when he was a boy and of the great tennis tournaments that had been held there on grass before the game became professionalized—when the best players were glad to come merely for the pleasure of playing and going to the parties and being put up for the week at the houses of the club members. For the first time he spoke of his family and Strand learned that he had a younger brother who taught philosophy at Stanford and a sister who was married to an oil man in Dallas and had her own private plane. He did not mention his own children or his wife. But he seemed relaxed and happy to talk, like a man who had spent too many silent evenings in his lifetime. He even told a joke on himself, with his father as the hero of it. “When my father died,” he said, “I inherited his old secretary, among other things. A forbidding lady by the name of Miss Goodson. One day she was in my office while I was lighting a pipe, a habit, among others, I had picked up from him, as well as the practice of law. She looked at me sternly. ‘If I may say so, Mr. Hazen,’ she said, ‘you remind me of your father.’ Naturally, still a young man at the time, I was gratified at the remark. My father had been one of the most distinguished attorneys in the country and had served brilliantly on several important government committees and as president of the New York Bar Association. ‘Just exactly how do I remind you of my father, Miss Goodson?’ I said, preening a little. ‘You drop your lighted matches into the wastebasket and start fires just like him,’ she said.” Hazen laughed with the rest of them. They were having dessert by then and Hazen sighed contentedly as he put down his spoon. “My, what a delicious meal. I’m afraid,” he said to Caroline, “you won’t be able to eat like this when you get to Arizona.”

  “If I get to Arizona.”

  “If whoever is using the stopwatch is honest, I have every confidence you’ll get there,” Hazen said, making it sound like a judgment at the bar. “You won’t have to give up your tennis. There’ll be time for both. But I don’t imagine you want to play in the park anymore.”

  “Never,” Caroline said.

  “In that case, we’ll have to arrange something else, won’t we?” he said, as he sipped at his coffee. “I’m a member of the Town and Country Tennis Club on East 58th Street. Would you like to play some doubles with me on Saturday morning?”

  “That would be super,” Caroline said.

  “I’ll introduce you around,” Hazen said. “There are quite a few players there worthy of you and you can go whenever you want as my guest.”

  “Aren’t you going out to the Island this weekend?” Strand asked. He didn’t like the idea of Hazen piling up debts of gratitude.

  “Not this weekend,” Hazen said. “I have an appointment in town Saturday evening.”

  “I’m afraid you work too hard, Mr. Hazen,” Leslie said.

  “Russell, please,” Hazen said. “I think it’s about time we moved on to a first name basis. Leslie?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you. Work.” He paused reflectively. “It’s my pleasure. I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I didn’t work. If possible, I plan to die before I have to retire.” He chuckled, to take the sting out of his words. “Anyway, I’m the senior member of the firm so they can’t push me out to pasture, no matter how gaga I get. Well,” Hazen said, standing, “I must be getting on. I have some dull reading to do before I get to bed. Thank you for a most agreeable evening. Good night, Caroline, Leslie.” He hesitated, then said, “Good night, Allen.”

  “I’ll see you to the door,” Strand said. He cleared his throat. “Russell.” At the door, where they could hear the faint clink of dishes from the kitchen, where Leslie and Caroline were cleaning up, Strand said, “By the way, that Romero boy came into my office the other day. He said he was interested. I told him to write you a letter. To spare you his presence as long as possible.”

  Hazen laughed. “Is he as bad as that?”

  “Worse.”

  “I’ll look for the letter.” Hazen stared gravely at his host. “You’re not regretting it, your decision about Caroline, I mean, are you?”

  “Not yet,” Strand said.

  “You won’t,” Hazen said. “I guarantee. Oh, by the way, the Yankees are playing Boston this Saturday. If the weather’s fair, can you get away?”

  “I’m sure I can.”

  “Good. I’ll call you Saturday morning after I introduce Caroline at the club.”

  The two men shook hands and Hazen went out the door.

  Later, in bed, Leslie said, “We have a very happy little girl in the house tonight.”

  “Yes,” Strand said.

  “You’re not so happy, though, are you?”

  “I’ll get over it,” Strand said. Then, bitterly, “Why the hell is she so anxious to get as far away from us as possible?”

  7

  HE WAS FLOATING THROUGH blurred whiteness. He moved. There were tubes attached to him. There were voices in the far distance, unrecognizable. Sleep, insensibility, were infinitely precious.

  Saturday was a great success. The weather was warm and sunny, the Yankees won, the manager and the first base coach came over to the owner’s box where they were sitting to shake Hazen’s hand, which made Strand smile and say, “Come on, Russell, they all know you. What’s that stuff about only taking in an occasional game?”

  “Well, Allen,” Hazen said, “I have to admit I do sneak out of the office when I can and it’s a nice day. I never played hooky when I was a kid and I try to make up for it now and then.” Dressed for sport in a loud checked jacket and wearing a tweed hat tilted down over his eyes to shut out the glare of the sun, he meticulously made entries on his scorecard of hits, runs, errors, strikeouts and substitutions. He ate three frankfurters during the course of the ga
me and drank two beers, saying “I’m not going to weigh myself for a week.”

  When Jackson hit a home run he stood up and roared with the rest of the crowd and he groaned aloud when the Yankee shortstop made an error. He caught a foul ball with a one-handed lunge as the ball curved into the box and stood up and tipped his hat in mock gravity as the crowd applauded him.

  There was a young boy wearing a Yankee cap sitting in the next box with his father. He had on a fielder’s glove for just such eventualities as foul balls and had leaped to catch the ball that Hazen had caught and then had sunk back into his seat embarrassedly. Hazen leaned over and gave the ball to the boy. “Here you are, lad,” he said. “This is for you.” He smiled as the boy stared with wonder and disbelief at the treasure in his hand.

  “You’ve made his week, sir,” the boy’s father said.

  “May he have many more like it,” Hazen said, with a little pull at the visor of the boy’s cap. Watching him, Strand remembered Hazen’s uncondescending and comradely relationship with the Ketleys’ grandson while they were playing catch. The man had a gentle, affectionate way with children and Strand wondered how he could have gone so wrong with his own son and daughters.

  The entire afternoon had shown a playful and youthfully attractive streak in Hazen for which his usual composed and judicial manner of speaking and behaving had not prepared Strand and for the first time he felt a warmth for the man that broke through the watchful reserve with which he had up to then regarded the lawyer. After this day, Strand thought, it will be easier to be his friend.

  Conroy was waiting with the car at the gate when they left the stadium, a benevolent policeman disregarding the fact that the car was in a no-standing zone and touching the visor of his cap as Hazen and Strand approached. Strand felt a touch of what he knew was unworthy, elitist superiority as he got into the car, leaving the thousands of other spectators to herd their way toward the steps leading to the platform of the elevated tracks.