Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  “As you said, he’s a lonely man.”

  Solomon nodded somberly. “One night, when he had a little too much to drink, he told me he knew the moment he’d made the one great wrong turn of his life—when he said, for the first time, ‘Yes, Father.’” Solomon made a small grimace. “Old American families. Fortunately, I came from a new American family. Nellie says she thought you were Jewish.” Solomon chuckled. “By now she thinks practically everybody is Jewish. Have you been married before?”

  “No.”

  “It shows,” Solomon said. “Nellie’s my second—and last. I have two awful kids. Not by her,” he added hastily. “There’s a subject—children. To weep vinegar.” His face grew dark as he said it. “Talk to Russell sometime. You ought to write a manual, with your litter. ‘How to Bring Up Human Beings in the Twentieth Century.’ It would outsell the Bible. Hang in there, pal. You have a lot to be thankful for.”

  “I know,” Strand said, although he wasn’t sure that the reasons he had to be thankful were those that Solomon was thinking of.

  Solomon squinted thoughtfully at him, Washington reviewing his troops. Was it at Valley Forge or Yorktown?

  “You don’t look so bad, considering,” Solomon said. “A little thin, maybe. And you’re getting a nice tan.”

  “The doctors say I can live to be a hundred.”

  “Who wants to live to be a hundred?” Solomon said. “What a drag.”

  “Exactly my sentiments.” Both men laughed.

  “I had an interesting talk with your son,” Solomon said. “There’s a bright boy. Did he tell you he’s starting work for me on Monday?”

  “No.”

  “Oh?” Solomon sounded surprised.

  “I think he believes I disapprove of his getting mixed up in the music business,” Strand said.

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t want him to be disappointed. And it’s so chancy. And I haven’t the faintest idea of how good he is.”

  Solomon nodded soberly. “I explained all that to him. I listened to him again and had some of my people in to listen, too. I put it on the line for him. It isn’t Tin Pan Alley, it’s Heartache Alley, I told him. Old Chinese joke. For everyone who makes it there’re ten thousand who don’t. It’s a grim life, waiting around maybe years for your chance, and maybe the worst thing is to get your chance and then flop. I put it to him squarely. I told him he had a nice touch and a passable voice, but there was nothing original in the way he played and sang and that his own songs—the ones he wrote himself—were all derivative. I told him that I didn’t think he had that something special, that electricity, that makes a performer popular.”

  “How did he take that?”

  “Like a soldier,” Solomon said.

  “But you said he was going to work for you…”

  “In the office,” Solomon said. “Not as a performer. Oh, maybe in a couple of years, as he matures, he may find a style. A sound, as he says himself. And then, of course, I might be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.” He smiled sourly, remembering mistakes, opportunities missed. “But as I said, he’s got a true ear, and he knows just about everything about the current crop of artists, what they’re good at, where they fake, what they’ve done. He’ll be very useful, I think, to weed out the hopeless ones who flood into my office and latch on to just the one or two who might go all the way. It’s not creative in the way he wants, but it’s creative just the same. You understand what I’m talking about?”

  “I believe so. And he said he’d do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s very kind of you to give him the chance.”

  “Not kindness. Business. I feel I can trust his judgment. That doesn’t happen to me too often with people.”

  As Solomon spoke, Strand began to develop a new picture of the man. Not the jovial teller of jokes at dinner parties, with the sound of New York in his voice, not the pleasant neighbor delivering a gift of a loaf of bread, but a shrewd, hard-grained man, honest and implacable in his estimates of possibilities, characters, virtues and faults. “Jimmy will be lucky,” Strand said, “to have you as his boss.”

  “I hope he’ll think so. And I hope it’ll be true. There’re a million traps.” Solomon stood up. “I don’t want to tire you. I’ll be moseying along.”

  “You’re not tiring me at all. The doctor tells me I’m to get up tomorrow and start taking walks. A mile a day.”

  “The fact is,” Solomon said, “I have to drive into town. I have to be in the office by two o’clock. There’s a singer who just made a recording for us that she’s decided she doesn’t like or her fag of a husband tells her she doesn’t like and she wants to do the whole thing all over again. There will be tears.” He grinned, relishing the scene in his office that afternoon in advance. “There will be ultimatums. I will save some fifty thousand dollars. Nellie’s staying down here. She’d love to come over and say hello to you.”

  “By all means.”

  “I’ll tell her. Keep well, Allen. They didn’t fish you out of the waves to have you fade on us.” He started to leave.

  “Oh,” Strand said, “I’m afraid I’ve never thanked you for the recorder and the cassettes.”

  Solomon shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “I dispense music the way the men with the baskets on Fifth Avenue dispense pretzels. When you’re up and around you must come over and have dinner with Nellie and me. She says she grew fond of you in one evening.”

  “We shared secrets together,” Strand said and waved good-bye as Solomon left.

  Strand stared out to sea for a long moment, then absently reached over and broke off another piece of bread.

  “I haven’t noticed any pogroms yet,” Nellie Solomon had said at dinner. Jews, murdered and surviving, invited to everything.

  Strand took a bite of the bread, tasting the earthy stone-ground wheat.

  Baked with love.

  He dozed. Dozing, he thought, as the sound of the surf ebbed from his consciousness, dozing can become a full-time career

  He was awakened by the sound of voices. Leslie and Linda Roberts were coming up the steps to the terrace from the beach. Leslie was carrying the easel and the canvas she had been working on and Linda Roberts was carrying the big box with the paints and brushes in it and Leslie’s palette. Both women were barefooted, Linda in a flouncy pink bathing suit, which revealed that she had a good figure, long-limbed and narrow-waisted. The bony shoulders and insignificant breasts were fashionable, the feminine superstructure in vogue in the magazines in which tall, starved girls posed in the latest gowns. Once more Strand had doubts about Hazen and Linda Roberts. Men went in for that sort of thing these days. Maybe both of them—Mrs. Solomon and Mrs. Roberts. Perhaps Hazen wasn’t as lonely as Solomon had said. Not by half. He remembered Linda Roberts through the haze of foam, staggering as the waves buffeted her, her arm raised, the loop of rescuing rope ready to be thrown—then, as he dazedly came to, lying on the wet sand, the feel of her lips on his, breathing life back into his lungs. Yes, she was much better than fashionable. People were not to be judged by their talk at dinner tables. One day he would tell her all this. But they would have to be alone.

  Leslie had on a short cotton skirt and a loose, woven blouse that left her arms bare. She was getting tan, too, and it became her.

  “How did the morning go?” Leslie asked as she reached the terrace.

  “Fine,” Strand said. “How about yours?”

  “Happily smudging away,” Leslie said, putting the easel down and leaning the canvas against a chair. Strand saw that she had just blocked in the outlines of a scene of dunes, with a gray house in the distance, and put in splotches of different colors here and there as an indication of what she was going to fill in later.

  “I wouldn’t call it smudging,” Linda Roberts said. “I just marvel about how sure she is about what she’s doing. Even with me gabbing away in her ear all the morning.”

  “It isn’t gabbing,” Leslie said to her husband. “She’s
been to all those museums in Europe that I’ve never seen and I’m beginning to get an idea of what I’m missing. Linda, don’t be modest, you know a great deal about painting.”

  “Russell keeps after me,” Mrs. Roberts said. “He makes me buy pictures. Some of them very curious, indeed. He’s the one who made me buy into the galleries here and in Paris. He says I must become a patron of the arts. Patroness? Nobody knows about words like that anymore. Chairman, Madam Chairman, Chairperson, Chairlady. The world is getting just too complicated. Women in the Naval Academy. You’d be surprised how many letters I get from women’s organizations asking me to support abortion and God knows what all. Anyway, it’s a wonderful way to spend the morning, watching a pretty woman doing something and knowing what she’s doing.”

  “I put on a good act,” Leslie said.

  “And the piano besides,” Mrs. Roberts said. “It makes me feel absolutely stunted. Now I must go into the village and have my hair done. The beach and the sun and the sea are marvelous and I’m grateful Russell gives me the freedom of the house, but it’s sinful what it does to the hair. Leslie, I hope I didn’t disturb you about—well, what we talked about.”

  “No, not at all,” Leslie said shortly.

  “Well, see everybody at lunch,” Mrs. Roberts said, and went into the house.

  “What was that about?” Strand asked. “What did you talk about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Leslie,” Strand said. He could see that she was disturbed.

  “Nonsense,” Leslie said. “She just chatters. Off the top of her head.” She sighed. “It was about Caroline’s nose.”

  “Poor Caroline,” Strand said. “I have a lot to answer for. Has Linda been talking to Eleanor?”

  “No. She thought it up all by herself.”

  “Well, what in the world can anybody do about it?”

  “She thinks Caroline ought to have an operation. Now. Before she goes away to college. She’d be absolutely beautiful, Linda says, the boys’d fall over themselves chasing her…”

  “What’s so good about that?”

  Leslie shrugged. “It would change her whole way of looking at life, according to Linda. She quoted chapter and verse. Nieces of hers, classmates in school, timid little creatures now living like duchesses.”

  “Caroline seems to be doing all right down here, nose or no nose,” Strand said defensively. “There’s that boy, that sophomore from Wesleyan, George Anderson, who comes and picks her up almost every night.”

  “I don’t like him,” Leslie said.

  “That’s beside the point. It’s the first time a boy, any boy, has shown an interest in her.”

  “He’s a spoiled young man,” Leslie said, disregarding what Strand had said. “A boy that age with a fancy car like that.” The boy drove a Corvette. “And the way he rushes up the driveway and sweeps to a stop, as though he’s a movie star. I don’t like him at all. He’s barely civil to any of us and he snarls at Caroline if she’s a minute late and his lordship has to wait. I tell you, I sit up every night until she comes home and I never did that with Eleanor and any of her beaux.”

  “Eleanor was different. Noses had nothing to do with it.”

  “Who can tell?”

  “Anyway,” Strand said, “she comes home early and in one piece, doesn’t she?”

  “So far,” Leslie said gloomily.

  “I’d be grateful to Linda Roberts if she kept her opinions to herself.”

  “You’ve got the wrong lady for that,” Leslie said, laughing. “Now, let’s not talk about it anymore. A man who’s just recovering from a heart attack has more important things to worry about. Eleanor’s coming down for the weekend and I’ll have a chat with her.”

  “You mean you’re actually taking this seriously?” Strand asked incredulously.

  “Half,” Leslie said. “Oh, Jimmy called this morning. You were sleeping so I didn’t wake you. He’s got a job.”

  “I know,” Strand said. “Herb Solomon was here and he told me about it. He brought a loaf of bread his wife baked. We’re having it for lunch. Mr. Ketley took it into the kitchen.”

  “That was nice of the Solomons. What do you think about the job?”

  “It won’t kill him.”

  “He’s awfully young for that sort of work.”

  “He’ll age quickly in that business,” Strand said.

  Leslie sighed. “I think I’ll go to a fortune teller and find out what’s going to happen to us in the next five years. Linda has a gypsy in Greenwich Village she says is absolutely fantastic. Horoscopes. She predicted Mr. Roberts’s death.”

  “That’s just the sort of thing we need just now,” Strand said ironically. “Tell Linda Roberts to stick to being a patron or patroness or whatever of the arts.”

  “She means well. She’s not as foolish as she seems.”

  “Not by a long shot,” Strand said.

  “She’s unsure of herself and scared about the rest of her life and she still hasn’t gotten over the death of her husband and she’s uncomfortable with the image of the rich widow and she hides it all by pretending to be frivolous. She’d rather have people laugh at her than be sorry for her. Everybody to his own disguise.”

  “What’s yours?” Strand asked.

  “I pretend to be a big grown-up serious woman,” Leslie said, “when I really know that I’m only an eighteen-year-old girl who isn’t sure if the boys like me or not.” She laughed, stood and leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “The sun isn’t doing awful things to your hair,” she said. “I’m going in and getting ready for lunch.”

  But when she went into the house, he heard her playing the piano, something sad and complicated that he couldn’t recognize.

  Once, when he had come into their living room while she was playing Bach he had asked what she thought as she sat at the piano. “I hope,” she had said, “I am addressing God.”

  Now, sitting in the seaside sun, tanned to a simulacrum of health, frail and escaped from the tubes, machines and flickering dials of the hospital, he listened to the shadowed and unfamiliar music of his wife, who had been counseled to consult downtown gypsies who had warned Linda Roberts of her husband’s end. The stars in their courses, fate in the whirl of planets, death in the corridors…

  Christ, he thought, fragile in his comfortable, blanketed chair, what is going to happen to me, what is going to happen to us all?

  PART TWO

  1

  HE STOOD AT THE window of the Hotel Crillon and looked out at the obelisk, the rearing stone horses set in the noble expanse of the Place de la Concorde. In the milky sunlight with the Seine and the Chamber of Deputies in the distance it was almost empty, because, as Hazen had explained when they arrived, everybody left Paris in August. His being there seemed almost miraculous to Strand. When Hazen had told them that he had pressing business in Europe and that a company for which he worked was lending him their corporate Lear jet to cross the ocean and had proposed that since there was room and he detested traveling alone the Strands and Linda Roberts accompanying him, he had immediately said, “Impossible.” He had suggested to Leslie that she make the trip on her own, but Leslie had said she wouldn’t go without him. He had tried to plead illness, but he had been walking a mile a day on the beach and the truth was that he was fit as a man his age who had been at death’s door only six weeks before had a right to feel and Dr. Caldwell had said the trip would do him good. The munificence of Hazen’s offer had embarrassed him but Leslie was so painfully anxious to go that he had felt that it would be cruel to deprive her of the experience. Eleanor, too, had said that it was sinful to reject the gifts that a benevolent fate, in the form of Russell Hazen, was offering him. Women, he had thought, accept favors more naturally than men. He had said yes reluctantly, but now, after a week in Paris, strolling slowly along the streets whose names he had known from his reading since he was a young man and sitting in the sidewalk cafés and making his way slowly through Figaro and Le Mo
nde, pleased that he still half-remembered his college French, he was grateful that Leslie had insisted.

  Actually, there had been no urgent reason to keep him in America for the moment. Mr. Babcock had visited him and, as Hazen had promised, had been a likable, diffident, rather dusty small man. The interview had been tactfully brief, and after he had outlined the nature of Strand’s duties Strand was relieved to see that after all his years of teaching history there was no need to prepare his courses. Leslie had gone to Dunberry to inspect the house they were to live in and pronounced it livable. They needed a car to get to town but Hazen had volunteered the old station wagon and Mr. Ketley had given her lessons in driving it. She was a nervous driver, but she had passed the test at the first attempt and now had her license.

  Although from her gallery and her social life Linda knew, as she said, shoals of French, she had advised them that for their first short visit they’d have a better time just seeing what the French had produced and collected during the centuries rather than grappling with the race itself. Taking her advice as wise counsel, they had kept to themselves and escaped the rigors of not quite bilingual socializing. As Linda said, they had been spared the disappointment of comparing what the French had accomplished with what the French had become.

  His own sightseeing was limited, as Dr. Caldwell had warned him not to overdo things. His trying to keep up with Leslie and Linda Roberts in their tireless raids on museums, galleries and churches certainly wouldn’t have met with Dr. Caldwell’s approval. He had quickly fallen into a happy and comfortable routine, spending most of the days by himself. He slept late, waking in the beautifully appointed large room to breakfast with Leslie. When she went out to meet Linda Roberts he would go back to bed and sleep for an hour or so. Then, shaved and bathed, he would walk idly, looking at the windows on the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré or the Rue de la Paix, admiring the lush displays of the shops, but with no itch of acquisition. He would meet with the ladies for lunch at a bistro, listening with amused detachment to their descriptions of the treasures they had viewed that morning, then go back to the hotel for a siesta, unhurried, content to let Paris bustle on without him for a while, before going out again to sit on an open terrasse with the newspapers, lulled by the sound of a language he could not quite understand, half-reading, half-watching, with a small smile on his lips, the lively show of pedestrians, approving, without lust, of the pretty, well-turned-out women and girls who passed by, and intrigued by the Japanese tourists who like himself were in Paris for the moment.