Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  “Leslie, darling,” Strand said, smiling, “that’s what you say about just about anyplace that isn’t New York.”

  “I don’t say it about Boston or San Francisco or even Atlanta,” Leslie defended herself.

  “Anyplace under a population of a million. I didn’t ask about the town. I asked about Eleanor and Giuseppe.”

  “Well, they seem to be delighted with their work,” Leslie said grudgingly. “They feel they’ve improved the paper a hundred percent and they seem to devote sixteen hours a day to it. They have a big old house which looks as though it’s falling down. It’s like a cross between Tobacco Road, cleaned up for the movies, and an antebellum plantation. Eleanor says it’s perfect for newlyweds. When they have an argument they can sleep in bedrooms so far apart they have to communicate with each other by shortwave. I only got to talk to them in fits and starts. Whenever we sat down to a meal, the telephone rang and one or the other of them would have to charge out and do something. It would drive me crazy, but they both seem to be thriving on it. When I tried to find out if they were making or losing money they immediately changed the subject. They seemed to be crazy about each other and I suppose that’s the main thing.” She wriggled out of his encircling arm and said, “Goodness, it must be past midnight. Is there any hot water? I must take a bath, I’ve been traveling all day.”

  “There’s hot water. At least I think so. Don’t you want a drink first, to celebrate being home?”

  “Maybe after the bath. I’ll signal when ready.” She bent over and kissed him. “Did you miss me?”

  “What do you think?”

  She laughed and went in and in a moment he heard the water running.

  When he went in a few minutes later, she was already in bed, her hair brushed and shining. He undressed and got into the bed and snuggled up to her. He began to caress her, but she pulled away gently. “I’m afraid, darling,” she said. He didn’t have to ask what she was afraid of. Dr. Prinz had warned him. Even obeying Dr. Prinz’s orders, pampering and denying himself at the same time, he was still subject to sudden fits of fatigue when he could hardly make himself walk across the campus or face a class.

  “Of course,” he said, and moved to the other side of the bed. This is impossible, he thought. Tomorrow night I’ll sleep in the other room.

  From then on, without discussion, Jimmy’s narrow old bed in the other bedroom was made up for him each night.

  Well, he thought, as he sat at his desk, remembering in front of the fire, that was a good night in our marriage, considering everything.

  He sighed, stood up, stretched, put a log on the dwindling fire because he was not yet ready for sleep and went into the kitchen and poured himself a drink of whiskey and water.

  He went back into the living room, carrying his drink. Above him he heard the sound of footsteps. The old wooden house creaked and groaned and all movements were betrayed through its beams; He was sure that there was a certain amount of prohibited visiting after hours among the boys. He did not wish to learn what the nocturnal traffic meant. An illegal cigarette perhaps, the passing of a marijuana joint from one hand to another, homosexual experiments, the sharing of smuggled liquor, a more or less innocent rap session. A dedicated and conscientious teacher, he thought, would steal upstairs as quietly as possible and catch the culprits at their teenage crimes and bring down upon their heads appropriate punishment. What appropriate punishment was for any crime in this day and age would be difficult to figure out. At least in the public school system he hadn’t had to worry about what his students did once they left his classes. As always, you had to live in consideration of a balance between profits and losses. As long as his charges didn’t burn the house down, a benevolent blind eye was a useful piece of equipment. He hadn’t asked the other teachers what their systems for maintaining order were and nobody had volunteered any advice to him. He wondered what a teacher from Eton or Harrow, schools where caning, as far as he knew, was still practiced, would think of his conduct. Would such a pedagogue march boldly up the stairs, uphold the law, grimly mete out so many strokes of the cane for smoking, so many for drinking, so many for talking after hours? How many for buggery? None, from what he had read. Go, and do thou likewise. Strand grinned at the thought. His own son was no older than some of the boys in the house and Strand had never punished him except by a sharp word, rarely spoken. If Jimmy had gone to Dunberry or Eton or Harrow instead of to a public high school, would he now be immersed in the world of bearded guitarists and orgiastic millionaire rock stars doomed to die before the age of thirty from overdoses of heroin or uppers and downers?

  He put his drink down on the desk, seated himself, hesitated, then picked up his pen and began to write.

  I have been musing upon the differences between the old-time system of education in the English language and the permissive order we have now in which students are awarded degrees for some of the most inconsequential dabbling the tutorial mind can imagine. When one thinks of the poets, philosophers, statesmen, and soldiers turned out by the old British system and by the church-oriented colleges of the United States that have endured since colonial times, it is difficult to believe that we are doing as well for our children as our ancestors did for theirs. We live in the most curious of times, where at the same moment liberalism has gone amok in our educational systems while discipline and repression have gone amok in most of the world’s political systems. The two things must be somehow linked, although it is too late in the night for me to find those links. The English schools found place for eccentrics: do we find place for scholars? Gentlemen? Poets? It is a nice subject to bring up with Romero. Or should I merely go to the headmaster and tell him that the boy is dangerous and a threat to us all and have him dropped from the school immediately? But I know I won’t do it. I am affected as we all are here, as Russell Hazen is, too, by the liberal superstition which, with all that has happened, still impels us decently or guiltily to spend our treasure and our goodwill in educating and even arming our own Arabs, our own fellahin, our invited Iranians. I will not discuss this in the faculty common room over tea. I am the odd man out among them, as it is, and when they ask me about my career in the public schools they sound as though they were asking questions of a man who has spent the best years of his life in a combat zone.

  On the whole, though, they are good people, lacking in that quality, ambition, which so often makes people repugnant.

  The word ambition itself leads to endless speculation. Just last week Hazen telephoned me, ostensibly to apologize for not being able to come and visit us and to find out how I was doing. I told him, not completely candidly, that everything was going along splendidly. Then he said he had a little problem to talk to me about. It was not about his divorce problems or the pretty lady lawyer from Paris, as I half-guessed it would be, but about Eleanor and Gianelli. I told him that when Leslie had visited them she thought they were doing very well. Hazen was of a different opinion. He had talked with his friend the publisher, who had warned him that the two young people were too ambitious by far, changing routines that had made the paper prosper for almost a half century, firing old hands, bringing in know-it-all kids from eastern schools of journalism, antagonizing the townspeople by their high-handedness. Eleanor, it seems, was being blamed even more than her husband. “They say she’s leading her husband around with a ring in his nose,” Hazen said the publisher told him. “And he complains that they treat him as though he’s a fragile relic from another century. He may be exaggerating,” Hazen said, “but it wouldn’t be amiss if you could advise them to show a little patience.”

  I promised to do what I could. I didn’t tell him that I didn’t have much hope of influencing Eleanor and felt that I would have to get Gianelli off to one side in a private conversation if I wanted to try to do anything with him. Besides, they have no plans that I know of to visit here and a trip to Georgia would only be a useless expense.

  When I put the phone down, I sighed involuntarily. Wh
en one is poor in one’s youth, even if later on one is quite comfortably fixed, thinking about money is an activity which can send one into a state that borders on anything from a slight uneasiness to terror.

  I had never had any illusions about being rich and I hadn’t longed for the toys and choices of wealth. I was never a gambler and knew that the windfalls of luck would never be mine. I had chosen a profession for love of teaching, for the opportunities of scholarly leisure, for the assurance it had seemed then to offer of a decent if modest style of living. As I rose in the school system my salary increased proportionately and met all our reasonable needs, with the prospect that when I was forced to retire the blows of old age would be softened by an adequate pension. Like most Americans I was not prepared for the spiraling realities of inflation. The disasters it had caused for the middle classes of the countries of Europe could not descend, we thought, upon America. As a historian I knew we were not immune to change, but I shared the common belief that if America was no longer a fortress in military terms, our monetary system, at least, would resist invasion in our lifetimes. On a more personal level I had never imagined that at the age of fifty a nearly mortal illness would make me alter my entire mode of life and force me to earn my bread in a different place and under radically different rules.

  If I had continued working until retirement age in the public school system, my pension would have been fair enough. Under ordinary circumstances, although we would have had to move to a smaller apartment, I could suppose that we could survive comfortably, even a little better than comfortably, with enough left over to be able to visit a child who lived a thousand miles away from us, when the necessity arose. My salary here is much less than I was earning in the city and even though we get the house rent-free, if I had to buy a new suit or Leslie needed a new coat, it would mean some close and anxious planning on our part. Leslie of course doesn’t complain, but I would be fooling myself if I thought that some of the tension reflected in her face is not…

  The phone rang. He stared at the instrument stupidly. Calls that late at night were frightening, especially since Leslie was not in the house with him. He let the phone ring two more times before he picked it up, trying to control the shaking in his hands.

  But it was only Russell Hazen. His voice was reassuringly normal. “I hope I’m not waking you, Allen,” he said.

  “Actually,” Strand said, “I was sitting at my desk catching up on my work.”

  “Don’t overdo it,” Hazen said. “One heart attack is enough.”

  “I agree with you there,” Strand said, relieved that there were no accidents to report, no crises to be attended to.

  “It’s just that I’ve been so busy,” Hazen said. “I’ve just gotten in from a conference. And I wanted to catch you as soon as I could.”

  “What is it, Russell?” Strand asked. “Have you been talking to your friend in Georgia again?”

  “No. I haven’t heard from him, so I guess things have been going better down there. Actually…” He hesitated for a moment. “Actually, it’s about me. It’s nothing very important, but it just possibly might involve you, too.” He laughed a little oddly. He sounded embarrassed, Strand thought. “You remember that oil man—at least that lobbyist I met at lunch when I was up at the school…?”

  “Yes,” Strand said.

  “Something a little unpleasant has come up. He’s been called before a Senate committee down in Washington that’s investigating the use of improper influence on legislators…”

  “I haven’t read anything about it in the papers.”

  “It hasn’t reached the papers yet. But a friend who’s in a position to know has given me some private information.”

  Strand couldn’t help thinking that once more, as always, Russell had a friend who was in a position to know or do something useful for him.

  “The man’s in hot water,” Hazen went on, “and he’s trying to shift blame. They haven’t anything definite to load on him, but some drunk at one of those goddamn Washington parties was overheard babbling that he’d heard the oil man boasting that he’d persuaded a certain senator to switch his vote on a big offshore exploratory drilling proposal and that a company my firm happens to represent had promised to put up an important sum of money to make sure the senator saw the light. And he mentioned my name. According to my information he told the committee that we had met by design at the school—his kid is in one of your classes, I think—Hitz is his name…”

  “C scholar, verging on D. Actually, he’s in my house. Not likable. A big fat oaf of a boy, given to bullying the younger ones.”

  “Anyway, aside from saying—or at least he was reported as saying—that we had planned the meeting at Dunberry, Hitz said I had taken him aside and discussed the deal with him, the lying sonofabitch.”

  “I’m sorry to hear this,” Strand said, “but why’re you telling it to me?”

  “Because, Allen,” Hazen said, “if anybody comes around to ask you questions or if you have to testify, I’d like you to swear under oath, if necessary, that I was with you or someone in your family at all times when I was at the school and nobody ever heard anything at all about votes or deals or law firms…”

  “Russell,” Strand said, as quietly as he could manage, “I wasn’t with you every minute and neither was Leslie or Caroline.”

  “You don’t think I’d be capable of anything like that, do you?” Hazen’s voice on the telephone was getting loud, with a hint of anger in it.

  “No, I don’t,” Strand said honestly.

  “It’s a vendetta,” Hazen said. “Against me. You don’t know what the infighting is like in Washington. In my work, there’s no avoiding rubbing some people—powerful people—the wrong way and if they see even the smallest, most ridiculous chance of getting me discredited, they’ll jump at it.”

  “What can they possibly do to you? There’s no proof of any kind, is there?”

  “Of course not.” There was no questioning the sincerity in his reply. “But you have no idea of how it can look in the newspapers and how delighted some of my colleagues in the Bar Association would be to have my scalp. Probably nothing will come of it, Allen, but if you do by some chance come up for questioning I’d be most grateful. Well, I’ve said enough. You do what you think fit.”

  “Russell…” Strand began.

  “I’d rather we didn’t talk about it any longer.” His tone was decisive. There was a short silence which Strand was not tempted to break. When Hazen spoke again the usual friendliness was in his voice. “Oh, by the way, I saw Leslie last week. I called the school in New York and invited her out to lunch. There’s a young boy, the son of a friend of mine, who shows some talent and I wanted to talk to her about the chances of her taking him on. She looked splendid. Has she said anything to you about the boy?”

  “No,” Strand said. The truth was that she hadn’t told him about seeing Hazen at all.

  “Ask her about him. The father is waiting for an answer. Well, it’s been great talking to you. And please don’t worry about me. Probably the whole thing will dry up and blow away in the next week or so. Take care of yourself, friend. And I promise, I’ll come out and pay you a visit, probably on Thanksgiving, if not before. I miss you, old friend, I miss you a lot.”

  When Strand hung up, he sat staring at the telephone. Slowly, he finished his drink and turned off the lamp and went to the back of the apartment, where the bedrooms were. He looked into Leslie’s room, where the wide old-fashioned bed he had shared with Leslie since the early days of their marriage looked comfortable and comforting. Jimmy’s bed was narrow and his sleep there was haunted by dreams in which he felt tied down, imprisoned. He nearly decided to sleep in the big bed this one night, then thought better of it and went into his own room and slowly undressed and got in between the cold, shroudlike sheets.

  He was awakened by a sound in the next room. He rubbed at his eyes wearily, automatically looking at the fluorescent dial of the clock on the bedside ta
ble. It was after four. The sound in the next room was steady and for a moment he just lay there, puzzled, wondering what it was. Then he realized it was a woman sobbing. He threw back the blankets and jumped out of bed and ran into Leslie’s room. She was sitting in the dark, bent over on the big bed.

  “Leslie,” he said, “Leslie, for the love of God…” He switched on a lamp. He couldn’t see her face.

  “No lights,” she cried, “please, no lights.” Suddenly she seemed small to him, shrunken. He turned off the lamp and kneeled in front of her and put his arms around her waist. “Leslie,” he said, “what is it?” Then, worriedly, “What are you doing here? I thought you were staying overnight in New York. What happened? Did you just get in? It’s past four o’clock…”

  “Don’t scold me,” she said. “I can’t stand being scolded tonight. I’m home. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Darling,” he said soothingly, “I’m not scolding. I’m worried. I want to help…”

  “Hold on to me. Just like that. And don’t say anything for a while.” She laughed hysterically. “Can’t a lady cry once in a while without calling out the police? Forgive me.” She stroked his hair. Her hand was trembling. “I’m calming down. Believe me, it’s nothing. Nerves. Idiocy. Now, you do something for me. Leave me alone for a minute or two. Go into the kitchen and make us a nice drink. Then I’ll put on the light and fix my face and comb my hair and I’ll come into the kitchen and we’ll have a sneaky nightcap and a cozy little fireside chat and you’ll see that there’s nothing to get upset about. I’m a little foolish, but you’ve known that all along and there’s no drastic change. Really. And put on a robe and slippers. You’re shivering. Go ahead. Please go ahead.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, he stood up and went into his room. He put on a robe and slippers and walked down the dark hall toward the kitchen, switching on lights as he went. He poured two whiskeys, put a lot of water in his and a few drops in Leslie’s and sat at the table and waited, looking out the window, seeing his reflection blurred against the dark glass and the snow drifting slowly down, white deliberate dust threatening winter in the beam of light from the old-fashioned kerosene lamp, now wired for electricity, that hung over the kitchen table.