Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  As the students and guests of the school passed the table, Strand heard Romero’s name mentioned several times with approval. Strand was not sure if it was the praise bestowed on a gladiator who had shone that afternoon in the arena or a token that the equestrian order was open from time to time to barbarians of merit.

  He shook his head impatiently, displeased with the way his thoughts had run, and stood up to greet Johnson, the football coach, who was approaching the table, a smile on his face. Strand introduced the coach to Hazen, who also stood. “Too bad you fellows couldn’t make that extra point,” Hazen said.

  The coach shrugged. “I tell you, sir, I was happy to settle for a tie today. That boy is something, isn’t he? I was ready to kick him off the squad right then and there when he started running back toward our own goal.” He laughed. “But nothing succeeds like success, does it? Two or three more runs like that and we’ll have to change the name of your house from the Malson Residence to Romero Gardens.”

  “Frankly, Mr. Johnson,” Hazen said, “Mr. Strand and I are more interested in the boy’s attitude toward his studies than his exploits on the football field. What do you hear about him from his teachers?”

  “Well,” Johnson said, “the coaching staff keeps a pretty close watch on how our boys are doing in their studies. We aren’t one of those schools that look the other way when an athlete falls behind in class. So far, I’m happy to say, the word on Romero is most satisfactory. He’s highly intelligent, they say, and is always thoroughly prepared in class. He’s somewhat argumentative, as you probably know”—Johnson smiled—“but always polite and clever in the way he states his positions. Of course his…uh…background is considerably different from the usual run of Dunberry students, so his teachers realize that there must be a certain give and take in the way he has to be handled, but I’d say that if he continues as he’s begun there’s nothing to worry about. Except that he doesn’t seem to be interested in being liked by his fellow students or the boys on the squad and except for his relationship with Rollins he doesn’t seem to want any friends.”

  “I’ll have a little talk with him,” Hazen said. “Allen, let’s take him to dinner with us tonight. The restaurant at the inn where I’m staying in town is quite good and maybe in a different atmosphere he’ll unbend a bit. And I’d like to get Caroline’s opinion about him. I haven’t the faintest notion of how he reacts to girls who have been—ah—more gently reared than the girls he’s been used to.”

  Strand wondered what Hazen would say if he told him about the striptease artist on the train and the afternoon in New Haven. “Well,” he said, “I haven’t seen him with any girls, either here or back in the city, but Mrs. Schiller, our housekeeper, says he’s her favorite. He treats her like a lady, she says, which is more than she can say about most of the other boys. And he’s the neatest boy she’s ever had anything to do with in all her years at the school.”

  “I’d say that’s a good sign,” Hazen said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, I would,” Strand said. “A very good sign.”

  By this time the members of the two squads had come into the field house, fresh and rosy from their showers and swarming hungrily around the buffet table. “Do you see him?” Hazen asked. “If he’s here, I’ll invite him myself.”

  “I don’t think he’s here,” Johnson said. “He was the first one out of the locker room and I heard him say to Rollins that he’d meet him later back at the house. Tea parties obviously are not his favorite form of entertainment.”

  Strand saw Rollins carrying a plate piled with sandwiches away from the buffet table and waved to him to come over. As Rollins approached, he looked a little embarrassed to be caught with the evidence of gluttony on his plate, but grinned and covered the sandwiches with his hand jokingly. “Caught red-handed, sir, I’m afraid. All that open air sure gives a man an appetite.”

  “Rollins,” Strand said, “this is Mr. Hazen. He was instrumental in getting your friend Romero to come to Dunberry.”

  “Glad to meet you, sir.” He put his plate down on the table and shook Hazen’s hand. “This afternoon, at least, you’re the most popular visitor on the campus.”

  “Congratulations on your game,” Hazen said.

  “Thank you, sir. We didn’t win, but we didn’t lose either. We’ll do better later.”

  “That was a nice block you threw on Romero’s run,” Johnson said. “He’d have been nailed if you hadn’t made it.”

  “Well, coach,” Rollins said, grinning again, “us players have to show the gentlemen we know how to help each other.”

  “Rollins,” Johnson said sharply, “I think you and Romero could drop that private joke of yours from now on. We’ve all had enough of it.”

  “Sorry, coach,” Rollins said quietly. “I’ll pass the word along.” Carrying the plate piled with sandwiches, he walked off toward a group of his teammates. Rollins, Strand thought, deadly blocker, nighttime devourer of chocolate cookies, another candidate for the equestrian order.

  PART THREE

  1

  FOR THE FIRST TIME since Leslie got back from Arizona, she is not here with me in the evening. She is in New York, where she goes every Wednesday to teach her pupils in Caroline’s old school. Until now she has driven back after her lessons, getting in as late as eleven o’clock, after the long trip from the city. This time she has arranged to sleep over in the apartment of the dean of the school and get up early enough tomorrow to be here for her scheduled ten o’clock class. The railroad connections are inadequate and she has to drive the old station wagon Hazen has loaned us to and from the city. She is still a nervous driver and the two trips crowded into one day have turned out to be too much for her and she invariably has arrived back here with nerves frayed by the glaring lights of the nighttime traffic and suffering from a violent headache. The traveling isn’t the only thing that disturbs her. The clatter of the boys around us, the wild bursts of adolescent laughter, the shouts in front of the television set in the common room, the thuds of playful scuffling, the wailing of canned music, are painfully reflected in the tautness around her eyes and the lines at the corners of her mouth and she is resorting to aspirin frequently and taking daily doses of the Librium the school doctor has prescribed for her.

  I am of two minds whether her keeping up with her pupils in the city is good or bad for her. I know she is stimulated by them and she says that one of her girls, aged twelve, gives promise of developing into a concert pianist. When she speaks of this girl a tone of elation, rare these days, comes into her voice. She is pessimistic about the value of her classes in Dunberry. There isn’t a boy, she says, who’s interested in anything musical beyond rock or disco.

  Even at moments like this one, when the late evening quiet has fallen on the house, she moves restlessly around, moving bits of furniture, clipping dead flowers out of the vases, thumbing through books and magazines and throwing them down impatiently. She plays the piano only during school hours when the boys are out of the house and she has no classes. When she has any time free she goes out to paint, but returns home with canvases smeared savagely in disgust with what she has done.

  Our apartment still looks bare and temporary. Leslie has not as yet put up any of her paintings. She says she is shy about having any of the boys or faculty think that she considers herself an artist, although I don’t believe that is the reason. To me she seems poised for flight, although I’m sure she does not think so, and her paintings on the walls would be symbols of unwanted permanence.

  On one of her visits to New York she had lunch with Linda Roberts, who told Leslie she might be going to France for a week or ten days and invited Leslie to accompany her. I told Leslie I was sure the school would allow her the leave and that the trip would do her good, but she said it was out of the question. When I tried to persuade her, she became impatient and asked me if I was trying to get rid of her. I denied this as nonsense, but, and I hate to admit it, her brief absence now is soothing. It prese
nts an opportunity, which I am taking, to reflect at leisure for once, to sit at my desk here in the room and reflect upon the small events of the autumn.

  The evening after the game in which Romero made his first appearance on the field for Dunberry we all went to dinner at the inn at which Hazen and Conroy were staying. Romero, neatly dressed and wearing a tie, sat next to Caroline at the table. They seemed interested in each other and Hazen, while regarding them intently at certain moments, left them to their own conversation. The next morning, before he left for New York with Leslie and Caroline, he told me he was favorably impressed with Romero’s manners and asked me to sound out Caroline about what she thought of the boy. I had no chance to talk to her before they left, but told Leslie to speak to Caroline and find out what she could.

  We had our furniture from New York by that time, and so Leslie and I could sleep in the same bed, but after what had happened in Tours we slept stiffly as far away from each other as possible. We said nothing about it, although we both knew we would have to come to some final decision on the subject of our sexual appetites and the impossibility of pretending that abstinence had not changed the character of our marriage. With all that, we woke in the morning lying in each other’s arms.

  He put down his pen. He had been writing for more than an hour at the old desk in the light of the student lamp. Weary, but knowing he would not be able to sleep, he sat, slumped in his chair, staring out the window.

  The first snow of the season was beginning to drift down in the November darkness. The lights were out in the rest of the house and the noise of the radios and cassettes and the thunder of the boys’ feet above the Strands’ quarters finally was stilled. When Leslie was home she could not wait for the blessed moment when riot turned into silence. Usually during those hours Strand merely sat in a big easy chair reading or staring into the fire that took the bite off the autumn nights, as the house cooled down with the fire in the furnace banked for the hours of sleep.

  He heard what he thought was the sound of a car arriving outside the house. It sounded like the engine of the old Volkswagen Leslie drove. He jumped up and went to the window and looked out, thinking that perhaps Leslie had changed her mind about staying overnight in New York. But there was no car, just the snow and the dark windswept campus. With a sigh, he went back to his desk.

  He had heard that sound the evening that Leslie had returned from Arizona and had almost run to the door to greet her. They had thrown themselves into each other’s arms, he remembered, not caring if there were boys watching them or not. She was glowing with pleasure at seeing him again and he could tell by her expression that all had gone well on her trip.

  They had sat on the couch, his arm around her, until well past midnight as she told him what it had been like in Arizona.

  “Caroline is sure she’ll love it there. She likes the college—it’s very pretty and certainly not anything like City College—and the other girls on her dormitory floor were nice and friendly. We talked and talked—endlessly. Just being alone together for a few days, with no one else in the family to get my attention, seemed to have opened some sort of dam. Maybe we should have done more of that, both of us, with all three of the children.”

  “What did she have to say?”

  “Well, for one thing, she was very impressed with your Mr. Romero.”

  “Russell will be pleased to hear that.” Strand was not so sure that he was equally pleased. “What impressed her? That crazy run he made in the football game?”

  “She didn’t even mention that. She said he seemed gentler and shyer than most boys.”

  “That will come as news to Romero,” Strand said dryly.

  “She said that she sensed that he had no desire to be like the other boys in his classes.”

  “There’s hardly any danger of that.”

  “It was impossible for him, anyway, he told her. He was going to amount to something, he said. He didn’t know just what it was going to be, but it was going to be something. Just about every other boy in the school was on rails, he told her…Caroline said his tone was scornful…they had everything all mapped out—go to Harvard or Yale, then to business school and into their daddy’s firm, be a lawyer, be a bank president, get into the big bucks and retire at the age of fifty-five and play golf. They’re all in for big surprises, though, he said. He had one big advantage over all of them—nothing was going to surprise him. They were going to teach him all the tricks…”

  “Who’re they?” Strand asked.

  “He didn’t tell Caroline that. He just said that he was going to beat them at their own game and his own game and any game that was going. Caroline said he was very intense about it all, as though he’d been thinking about it for a long time and she guessed it was the first time he’d had a chance to talk to anyone about it.”

  “She guessed wrong,” Strand said. “I got a little dose of it, too. Not exactly the same, but close enough.” He remembered the conversation about the Goths.

  “And he thanked them for it, he said. They were educating him. Just like the fellahin in Algeria who got educated at the Sorbonne and then kicked the French out of the country and the smart Arab kids who got educated at Harvard and Oxford and turned around and made the British and Americans bleed for oil like stuck pigs when they took off their business suits and put on their desert robes.”

  “And what did Caroline think about that pleasant piece of information?”

  “She told him she thought he was just trying to put on a show for her benefit—that he’d read it all someplace and he was just sounding off to be a big shot.”

  “That must have flattered him,” Strand said.

  “Caroline said he glowered at her and she thought he was just going to get up and leave. But he didn’t. He said, sure he read it someplace, he’d written it himself after he’d been at the school for a week and asked himself what the hell he was doing there. He sure wasn’t there to run back kicks.”

  “He probably wasn’t lying,” Strand said. “About writing it himself. It sounds like him.”

  “Then he asked her where she was going to school and when she told him about her athletic scholarship, he laughed. Two accidental jocks, is what he said. He knew what he was running away from. What was she running from? Then he said, even after the touchdown that after noon, he would have quit the team, but was only staying on for his friend Rollins’s sake. Games were for kids, he said.”

  “Johnson will not weep into his beer if he quits,” Strand said.

  “Who’s Johnson?”

  “The football coach. Romero kept telling people he didn’t have any imagination and the word got back to him.”

  “I know you think he’s a difficult young man,” Leslie said, “but I never heard Caroline go on like that about anybody. She said it was the most fascinating evening she’d ever had in her life and when she got back home here after dinner she sat down and wrote out everything she remembered about it.”

  Another keeper of journals in the family, Strand thought. Perhaps it was a hereditary disease. “She seems to have remembered every word,” he said.

  “There’s more to come,” Leslie said. “When Caroline told him she wanted to be a veterinarian, he said that she was trying to save the wrong species. He knew where she should practice when she got her degree—in his old neighborhood in Manhattan. It was teeming with animals, he said, herds of them, on two legs, all of them sick. He said she’d be a lot more useful there than giving pills to de-worm Pekingeses. Caroline thought that he was making fun of her, but then he asked her, very seriously, if it would be all right if he wrote her. Caroline asked what he would want to write her about, and he said politics, murders, graft, poverty, the color of peoples’ skin, the lies of history, napalm and the hydrogen bomb, running back punts…. When you were his age, did you ever hear talk like that from anybody that young?”

  “No,” Strand said. “Times were different then.”

  “He said that he’d also practice writing
a love letter or two.”

  “The bastard,” Strand said.

  “Oh, Allen, it’s just a boy trying to show an attractive girl that he’s more sophisticated than he is. And by the time they ever see each other again they won’t even remember each other’s names.”

  “What did Caroline say—about the love letters, I mean?”

  “She told me she said she didn’t think it would do any harm.” Leslie smiled as she said this, as though reassured that her shy daughter had finally caught on to the rules of the female game. “The boy wasn’t kidding,” Leslie said. “When we got to the college there was a letter from him, waiting for Caroline. She read it and gave it to me. It didn’t have a date or start with Dear Caroline or Dear Anything. It was just word for word the speech he’d made to her about the Algerians during dinner. It wasn’t even signed. Caroline said it was the first love letter she’d ever received. Of course she laughed at it, but she said she was going to keep it and show it to the other boys to improve the level of their conversation if they ever said any of the usual stupid thing to her.” Leslie scowled a little then. “I do hope she isn’t turning into a coquette. Just about every male on the campus stared at her every place we went.”

  “You were the one who said she should have the nose job,” Strand said.

  “Those are the risks you run,” Leslie said, but not lightly. She shook her head, as though to get rid of fears about her daughter. “She’ll probably change ten times before we see her again. With or without us.”

  “You haven’t said a word about how Eleanor is doing,” Strand said. Leslie had flown to Georgia for a few days after Arizona to visit the young married couple. “Is she happy?”

  “Very,” Leslie said, “as far as I could tell. Although the town is stultifying.”