Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  “Linda is staying with us for the weekend, Allen,” Hazen said, as he went to get his own drink.

  “I’m the last-minute addition,” Linda Roberts said to Strand. “I didn’t think I could get away. I just got back from France to find out there was a mess at the gallery. A shipment of pictures arrived from our French branch and a half-dozen of them looked as though they had crossed the Atlantic in a canoe. I’ve been dreaming of this martini since the Triborough Bridge.”

  But Strand noticed that her drink was only half-finished before she started up to comb her hair. She halted at the doorway and frowned. “Good heavens,” she said, “what is that funereal wail?”

  Hazen laughed. “It’s Allen’s son, Jimmy. He’s a guitarist.”

  “Oh, my.” Mrs. Roberts put her hand up to her mouth in mock dismay. “You must forgive me, Mr. Strand. I’m absolutely stone-deaf. I was exposed to Wagner at an early age and have never gotten over it.”

  “That’s all right,” Strand said, amused. “At home we let him practice only behind locked doors. I’m afraid different generations have different notions of what constitutes music. I stop at Brahms myself.”

  “I like your friend, Russell,” Mrs. Roberts said and went briskly out of the room, carrying her martini.

  There was silence in the room for a few seconds as Hazen stirred the ice in his glass with his finger and Strand wondered if this was the reputed mistress. Offhand, he liked the woman, but he wouldn’t have chosen her as his mistress. If someone had seen him going up to Judith Quinlan’s apartment and then coming out with his hair mussed and a bemused expression on his face would Judith be known as his reputed mistress? Reputations are easily made.

  “She visits here from time to time,” Hazen said, as though he owed Strand an explanation. “Always on the spur of the moment. The house is so big…” He stopped. “She’s the widow of one of my best friends. Forty-seven years old. Went off like…” He snapped his fingers. “Playing golf. Heart.”

  “She seems to be bearing up bravely,” Strand said and Hazen gave him a peculiar sharp look.

  “She wisely keeps herself busy. She’s half-owner of an art gallery and is very clever at the business. It’s associated with a gallery in France and it gives her an excuse to visit Europe several times a year. She sounds foolish at times, but I assure you she’s no fool,” Hazen said stiffly. “And she devotes herself extensively to charities.”

  “I hope that when I’m gone my widow will be able to devote herself extensively to charities, too.”

  “He was in Wall Street. Very shrewd,” Hazen said, ignoring Strand’s remark, which Strand now realized had been facetiously rude. “Boy wonder. Overwork. Did you read that postmen live longer than the executives of large corporations?”

  “All that walking,” Strand said, wishing that the others would come down before the level of conversation sank any lower.

  “You can take off your tie, you know,” Hazen said. “Probably nobody else will be wearing one. East Hampton has become proletarianized. Not like the old days. My father insisted that we dress for dinner almost every night. Now almost anything goes. See-through dresses, jeans, red pants like the goddamn things I’m wearing. I’m sure it all has the most somber sociological implications.”

  Strand undid his tie and stuffed it into his pocket. His neck was so thin that it was almost impossible to get shirts that were long enough in the sleeve for his arms and still snug around the neck. Hazen looked at him curiously. “I’ve observed that you eat very well…”

  “Like a horse,” Strand said.

  “And yet you remain so thin.”

  “Meager.”

  “I wouldn’t complain. If I ate like you they’d have to wheel me around in a barrow.” He sipped at his whiskey. “But none of your family runs to fat.”

  “No. Eleanor sometimes goes on a crazy diet if she sees she’s gained a few ounces.”

  “Ridiculous,” Hazen snorted. “At her age, with her figure.”

  The doorbell rang. “My dinner guests,” Hazen said. “I hope they don’t bore you. Parties in the Hamptons can be stuffy.”

  At dinner, Hazen sat at the head of the table, with Leslie on his right, her hair swept up, and Caroline on his left. Next to Caroline was one of the young men she had played tennis with three weeks before. Strand noticed with some amusement that it wasn’t the good-looking one, Brad or Chad, whom Hazen had warned him about. Next to him was a lady named Caldwell, who had one of the houses down the dunes and who had come with her husband and daughter. The daughter sat next to Jimmy and looked about Jimmy’s age, although Strand was never sure about how old girls really were. In his classes he had girls he knew were sixteen who looked twenty-five. A big, jovial man by the name of Solomon, with long straight gray hair that made him look like George Washington, sat next to the girl. Then came Linda Roberts, on Strand’s right, who was not dressed in her traveling rags, as she had described them, but in a long, flouncy mauve-colored gown that left her rather bony shoulders bare. Mrs. Solomon, a sharp-faced but pretty woman with a boyish haircut and a deep tan, sat on Strand’s left and Caldwell, who had been introduced as Dr. Caldwell, a middle-aged man with the mournful diplomatic face of an ambassador who has just been ordered to deliver a nasty note to a volatile government, completed the table, sitting between Mrs. Solomon and Leslie. Conroy, Strand saw, although he lived on the grounds, was not on his employer’s social list.

  The conversation was lively and Strand was pleased to see that Leslie and Caroline were obviously enjoying themselves and that the Caldwell girl who had been invited for Jimmy seemed deeply interested in what Jimmy was telling her. But it was difficult for Strand to hear more than snatches of what people were saying because Linda Roberts kept talking to him in a high, piercing voice. “I’ll be terrible company tonight,” she had warned him as she sat down. “I’m exhausted. Jet lag.” She had just come back from France, where, she said, besides the work at the gallery in Paris, there had been a wedding that she just couldn’t avoid attending. “Four hundred guests,” she said. “Luckily it didn’t rain so the reception in the garden didn’t turn into a marine disaster. I’ve been flooded out of one June wedding after another and you always feel that when a marriage starts with everybody cowering for shelter, there’ll be a divorce in a year or two. Russell has told me all about you and your lovely family and how much you’ve done for him. You must be proud of your daughter. If it had been me I’d have just screamed and fallen into a dead faint. I don’t know what’s ever going to become of dear old New York. Nobody dares wear jewelry anymore. It’s all in vaults in banks. The insurance.” She sighed, heaving her bony shoulders. “Russell says you’re a history teacher. What fun that must be. It was one of my best subjects in the University of Michigan, but I don’t read the newspapers anymore—just the society page and the movie reviews—everything else is so pessimistic. You must forgive me. I can hardly speak, I’m so exhausted. Airports are hell, anyway. The worst is Fiumicino. I’ve almost stopped going to Rome because of it. Everybody travels so much these days, you see the strangest people in first class. My husband was on the verge of buying a Lear jet, but then he died. I always like to arrive at Nice. The airport’s just along the sea and it’s a little like the good old days when you could take one of those glorious plush ships to Europe, with bouillon served at eleven by those smart stewards going along the deck chairs. And now they’ve even taken those beautiful Italian boats out of service. Heavenly pasta. I don’t like to sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but there’s such a thing as carrying progress too far. They’ve ruined the Côte d’Azur, of course, it might just as well be Miami Beach, but I just rush from the airport to my little nest, it’s in the hills above Mougins and never put my foot out of it except to walk around my garden. You know Mougins, don’t you, Mr. Strand?”

  “Allen,” Strand said gallantly, wondering how fast and how long Mrs. Roberts could talk when she wasn’t suffering from jet lag.

  “Allen,” she said.
“I had a beau by that name. Lovely young man. Divine looking. People were always asking him if he wanted to go into the movies. But he was a serious horseman. He absolutely wilted when I married my husband and he immediately married a woman who’d been divorced four times. Stupendous alimony. He came with his wife to visit me and my husband, and Allen sulked for three days and we had to pretend we were packing to go to Ischia to get them out of the house. Vulgar little thing, the wife, I mean, she sunbathes with her breasts bare. She was inordinately proud of them, her breasts, I mean. She came up from being a cheerleader at the University of Texas and her first husband played football and beat her all the time. I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame him. You and your beautiful wife—my heavens, she is stunning—must come and visit me in Mougins. Do you get to France often?”

  “No,” Strand said, trying to pay attention to the delicious rare slice of lamb on his plate. “Not often.”

  “You’d love Mougins. It’s a haven of peace tucked away in the hills. My husband bought it for me as a wedding present. He was the most thoughtful of men. He dealt internationally. Companies everywhere. In a multitude of countries. You name it, the country I mean, and he had a company there. Of course it meant being away an awful lot of the time.”

  I can understand why he was away a lot of time, Strand thought, meanly.

  “That’s what turned me on to good works,” Linda Roberts said. “Being alone so much of the time. In those conditions other women take lovers.” She laughed again, breathily, hysterically. “But my husband was not a complaisant man, no, not at all, you couldn’t describe him as being complaisant. Charity fills a great gap in my life, Mr. Strand, I mean Allen. I mustn’t monopolize you anymore. Nellie Solomon is just dying to talk to you, I can tell, and I’ll just sit here and fall into a stupor.”

  Mrs. Solomon was seated on his left and he turned gratefully to her. Once or twice Leslie had looked down the table during Linda Roberts’s monologue and had given him an ironic, pitying smile.

  Mrs. Solomon was eating heartily and silently, her eyes on her plate. Dr. Caldwell, on her left, was talking in a low, confidential tone to Leslie, as Strand had noticed he’d been doing almost all through dinner. Later on Leslie told Strand that Caldwell had moved to the Hamptons to practice because, he said, he could never find a place to park his car when he made calls in the city. He was also deeply interested in music, and she said that he knew a great deal about it and didn’t talk nonsense. She said he didn’t look like a diplomat to her, but a doctor whose patients were always dying on him.

  “Are you here for the summer?” Strand said to Mrs. Solomon, because you had to start somewhere.

  “We rent,” Mrs. Solomon said. “This is the second summer.” She had a soft southern accent. Alabama, Strand thought. “Herb wants to buy a house here.”

  “It is a beautiful part of the world,” Strand said.

  “If you don’t play golf,” Mrs. Solomon said.

  “What?” Strand asked, puzzled.

  “If your name is Solomon,” she said, “the club is pretty clubby, if you know what I mean.”

  “I see,” Strand said, embarrassed.

  “Oh, it’s not too bad,” Mrs. Solomon said airily, smiling. She had perfect sharp little white teeth and the smile softened her face. “I haven’t noticed any pogroms yet. I guess we’ll buy the house. It’s only at the club that it makes any difference. Everyplace else you can be a Zulu and you’ll still be invited to all the parties. And I guess in fifty years the club’ll burn down or everybody will be dead or have a Jewish daughter-in-law.” Suddenly, she looked at him strangely. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

  “No.” He had been asked that question many times, almost always by Jews. His beak of a nose.

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Solomon said. “Neither am I. Née Ferguson. Nellie Ferguson. I don’t know why I thought you were.”

  “I do.”

  They grinned at each other.

  “I wouldn’t have given you my little speech if I thought you were a goy. As I said, in fifty years it probably won’t make a smidgen of difference. Fifty years ago, they wouldn’t let the Irish into the club. That’s why the rich Irish set themselves up in Southampton. Fifty years isn’t a long time to wait for a game of golf, is it?” She smiled again.

  Strand decided she was a very pretty woman. If Hazen had to have a mistress, he would have done a lot better with Nellie Solomon than with Linda Roberts.

  “Actually,” Mrs. Solomon said, “I love it here. The beach is glorious, Russell lets me use his court whenever I want to—I’m due to play with your daughter tomorrow, I hear she’s somethin’—and it’s near enough to New York so that Herb can dash in when the office calls him. He loves bein’ a Jew. And it helps in the business he’s in.”

  “What business is that?”

  “Didn’t Russell tell you?”

  “No, he merely said there were some nice people coming to dinner.”

  “He said he especially wanted us to come tonight and meet you. We broke another date to come.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “You are polite. Russell said as much.” She smiled again. “My Herbert books bands, arranges concerts, rock, country, jazz, spirituals, schmaltz, you name it, he does it. You ought to see some of the people who pour through our house.”

  “I see,” Strand said. He shook his head. Good old Hazen, something for everyone. He had asked Jimmy to bring his guitar with a purpose. Perhaps Hazen had thought that one of the family looked sick, anemic or in the first stages of some dreadful disease and had invited Dr. Caldwell to give him a secret diagnosis.

  “That’s how I met Herbert,” Mrs. Solomon said. “I thought I was a singer.”

  “How did it turn out?”

  She shrugged. “He disabused me. You can’t fool ole Herb when it comes to talent. ‘Poor girl,’ he said, after he’d heard me, ‘I will have to marry you.’” She chuckled and looked across at her husband fondly. Then she returned seriously to her food. “I do love to get invited to Russell’s parties here. They’re so—so un-East-Hamptonish. He collects oddities—like Herb and me…”

  “And us,” Strand said.

  Mrs. Solomon gave him a little childish, conspiratorial smile. “I wasn’t goin’ to say so.”

  Strand liked the pretty, frank young woman, with her round, appealing figure, which, if she always ate the way she was eating tonight, would not be so appealing in later years. “He’s a most thoughtful host,” Strand said, “Russell.”

  “Marvelous.” It came out mahhhvelous. “Have you ever been to his place in New York?”

  “No.”

  “It’s just campin’ out heah compared to that,” Mrs. Solomon said. “It’s funny, the feasts he puts out and he hardly takes an insignificant little bite of nourishment himself…. Have you noticed that?”

  “I have.”

  “And Herb says that if he had Russell’s wine cellar he wouldn’t draw a sober breath till the end of his days.”

  “Everything all right down at your end, Nellie?” Hazen called to Mrs. Solomon.

  “Delightful,” Mrs. Solomon said. “We were just praisin’ you.”

  “Continue,” Hazen said and raised his glass to her, then turned back to talk to Leslie.

  “These little green beans are somethin’, aren’t they?” Mrs. Solomon said, chewing delicately but definitely on a mouthful of food.

  “Flageolets, that’s what they’re called,” Mrs. Roberts said across Strand. She had not fallen into her promised stupor. “Traditionally,” Mrs. Roberts said, “they’re always served with gigot in France.”

  “Thank you, Linda,” Mrs. Solomon said. “In Alabama we traditionally serve yams with our gigot.” Under the table she pinched Strand’s leg, lightly.

  Strand tried not to smile too openly.

  After dinner, Strand smoked his second cigar. Jimmy, he saw, did not take one when Mr. Ketley passed the box around. They all went out on the terrace to look at the m
oon over the ocean. Leslie stood next to Strand and he put his arm around her waist. “Having a good time?” he asked.

  “Wonderful,” she said. “Will you ever be satisfied to eat my cooking again?”

  “I’m putting an ad in the Times on Monday for a Cordon Bleu cook.”

  Leslie laughed. “Russell’s a fascinating man. He seems to know everything. Politics, art, finance, whatever. It makes me feel as though my education has been sadly neglected. And he’s been everywhere.”

  “So have we,” Strand said. “The Museum of Modern Art, Chinatown, The Bronx…”

  “Oh, hush, Allen,” Leslie said, gently. “I wasn’t complaining. But seriously, I do think we ought to do some traveling. We could save on other things…”

  “On what?”

  “Oh…just other things,” Leslie said vaguely. “Russell said I ought to do more with my painting. It’s amazing, he’s only been in our house twice really and the first time doesn’t even count, and he remembers every detail of the two paintings of mine in the living room. He said they were bold and original. Imagine that. My little scratches. I told him I only painted when I was lonesome and he said I ought to arrange to be lonesome more of the time. Do you think he was just being polite and trying to flatter me?”

  “No,” Strand said. “He doesn’t flatter. I’ve always told you I liked your paintings.”

  “That’s different. You’re my husband, what could you say, poor man? Do I look all right tonight?” She sounded anxious.

  “The lady on my right said you were stunning.”

  “Stunning how? Stunning stunning or stunning horrendous?”

  “Stunning stunning.”

  “What a nice group of people,” Leslie said. “And Jimmy and Caroline are behaving so well.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  Leslie squeezed his arm. “No,” she said. “I’ve had enough of the moon. I’m getting a little cold. Let’s go inside.”

  The others followed them in and Hazen asked Jimmy if he would oblige them with a little music. Jimmy looked doubtfully at his parents. Strand didn’t say anything, but Leslie said, firmly, “By all means, Jimmy,” and Jimmy went upstairs to get his guitar. Caroline made a little grimace, but Leslie caught it and whispered, “None of that, young lady.”