Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  Although it wasn’t warm in the headmaster’s office, Strand was drenched with sweat.

  The door opened and Babcock came in. He looked like an aged worried monkey. Academics, Strand thought irrelevantly, were not by and large a handsome race.

  “What was that all about?” Babcock asked.

  “I’ll tell you just about as much as they said,” Strand said, for Hazen’s sake not quite telling the truth. “They said to read The New York Times tomorrow and you’ll know.”

  “The FBI was up here once before,” Babcock said worriedly. “Way back, during the Vietnam War. They were checking to see if a young instructor we had on the staff who’d signed some sort of petition was a Communist. They were very unpleasant.”

  “These gentlemen were most pleasant,” Strand said. “The next time they come they may not be. Thanks for the use of the office.”

  As he hurried across the campus he pulled up the collar of his coat against the cold. A harsh wind was sweeping in from the northeast, with flakes of snow mixed with sleet, and the bare limbs of the campus trees were shivering in the polar blasts. The six o’clock bells pealed from the chapel tower. At that moment Leslie was in the car approaching the airport to board the plane for France. He stopped and whispered a small prayer for the safety of all planes aloft that night in the winter storm.

  Then he walked quickly toward the Malson house to shower away the dust of the school day and dress and get ready for dinner.

  5

  ROLLINS USUALLY ATE AT Strand’s table, but this evening he did not appear for dinner. Even though he had the day off, the school rule was that the boy had to be back by seven o’clock. But Strand wasn’t going to put him on report as he was supposed to do. Rollins had enough on his mind without being called into the headmaster’s office to explain his absence.

  Strand didn’t like to speculate on what Rollins might be doing in Waterbury in his attempt to get Romero out of jail. The manner in which he had spoken of the people he might see who knew how to handle matters like that had made it plain that Rollins was not intending to apply for a loan at a bank or sell stock to make up the amount of the bail. Strand had a confused notion that Rollins was speaking of people who were not quite within the law or were frankly outside it, people who in return for a favor given to Rollins would certainly demand a greater favor in return. Scenarios of bribery, numbers running, arson, all the categories of ghetto crime with which readers of newspapers and watchers of television had become sadly familiar, ran through Strand’s mind as he sat decorously at the dinner table with the scrubbed and politely dressed boys who, at least at table, remembered the manners their nurses and mothers had drummed into them. The black boys who had been in his classes in high school had not been conducive to making him believe in the absolute probity of what the newspapers called ethnic teenagers, when they didn’t call them hoodlums. Rollins was, he knew, absolutely honest ordinarily, but in a situation like this, with his friend abandoned as he was now by the authorities, with his fate, as Rollins believed, in his, Rollins’s, own hands, Strand had the uneasy feeling that he had made a mistake in allowing Rollins to leave the campus. The boy’s absence fed his fears and after dinner he nearly went over to speak to Babcock and tell him that he thought that it might be a good idea to telephone Rollins’s parents and warn them to keep a watchful eye on their son.

  But the thought that Rollins, who trusted him, would lump him in with all the other adults in the Establishment who were leagued against people like Romero and himself made Strand hesitate and then decide against saying anything. He had been touched by what Rollins had said to him and valued Rollins’s opinion of him and he told himself, One more night won’t kill anybody.

  He stayed up late, trying to read, and made two trips to the top of the house to look into Rollins’s room to see if perhaps he had come back without checking in. But both beds were empty. He kept looking at his watch. With the time difference between New York and Paris, it would be six in the morning Paris time, midnight Eastern Standard Time, before Leslie’s plane landed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep until he could call Air France at Kennedy and find out that the plane had arrived safely.

  He had another call to make before the night was over, but kept postponing it. To Russell Hazen. Hazen had been abrasive in their last conversation and Strand found it hard to forgive the accusations shouted at him over the phone, but the man after all was his friend and the debt he owed him, Strand admitted to himself, far outweighed the small and really justifiable outburst of bad temper. He knew Hazen would not welcome what he had to tell him about the interview with the FBI agents. But Hazen deserved to be warned and sooner or later the call would have to be made. I’ll wait till he gets in from dinner, Strand thought, easing his conscience, it’ll be time enough. As long as I tell him before he reads the paper in the morning.

  He waited until ten thirty, then dialed Hazen’s home number. There was no answer. He let the phone ring ten times, then hung up.

  He was relieved for the moment but still jittery. He picked up his book and read the same paragraph over and over again without making any sense of the words on the page. He closed the book and went into the kitchen and got out the bottle of Scotch that had been standing in the cupboard since he had bought it at the beginning of the term. He poured a generous slug into a glass, added ice and water, and was sitting in front of the fire in the living room, with the glass in his hand, listening to the wind snapping at the windows, when he heard a knock on the apartment door. He hurried over to the door and opened it. Rollins was standing there swathed in a football hood, his face rimed with frost, looking as though he had suddenly grown old and was sprouting a white beard. He was blowing on his hands, but smiling.

  “Come in, come in,” Strand said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Rollins said.

  Strand closed the door behind him. Rollins went and stood in front of the fire, warming his hands. “I had to walk from the bus station,” he said, “and I nearly froze my bones. This fire sure is a cheerful sight.” He looked sidelong at the glass still in Strand’s hand. “There just wouldn’t happen to be any more of that stuff from where it came from, would there?”

  “Well,” Strand said, “it’s a cold night…”

  “You ain’t exaggerating, Mr. Strand. Any college wants me to play ball for them better be below the Mason-Dixon Line. Or in Hawaii.”

  “It’s against the rules, of course. If anybody finds out…”

  “I will go to my grave first,” Rollins said, with suitable solemnity.

  “You stay there and warm up,” Strand said and went into the kitchen. He poured a generous dose of whiskey and added only a little water to the glass and brought it back to Rollins. Rollins held it, the glass looking tiny in his huge hand, and rolled the liquid around, gently admiring it. He lifted his glass. “To the gentleman who invented it.” He drank a great gulp, sighed contentedly. “That takes the nip out of winter, doesn’t it?” Then he became serious. “Any developments since last night, Mr. Strand?”

  “No. Except that Hitz went to Washington to see a doctor.”

  “Eighteen years too late,” Rollins said grimly. Then his face brightened. “I got some developments, though. Hot developments.”

  The phrase was worrisome. “Just how hot?” Strand asked.

  “I didn’t hold up no bank, if that’s what you’re afraid of. Legitimate. Strictly legitimate.” Rollins took out his wallet. It was bulging. “Here it is,” he said. “Ten thousand dollars. In legal tender. Tomorrow morning I’m going to go down to the jail and get Romero out of there quick as a greased pig and there’s enough left over so I’ll be able to give him the best damn lunch that poor skinny sonofabitch ever sat down in front of.”

  From the slurred way Rollins was speaking, Strand guessed the whiskey in his hand was not the first drink of the boy’s evening. “Going to the jail won’t do much good,” Strand said. “I’m sure there are all sorts of legal formalities. His lawyer has t
o be warned to expect you. With the money. If, as you say, it’s not hot.”

  “On the head of my mother.”

  “He’ll do it the way it has to be done,” Strand said, pretending to a knowledge of the law that he didn’t have, but guessing that if a black boy in a football hood showed up with ten thousand dollars, the process would be slow, to say the least. “I’ll have Mr. Babcock call him. I don’t know where his office is. In fact,” he said, “I don’t even know where Romero is at the moment. They’ve probably moved him somewhere. To a proper prison.”

  “There ain’t no proper prisons, Mr. Strand,” Rollins said.

  “Will you answer a question?”

  “Yes.” Rollins sounded reluctant.

  “Where did you get the money?”

  “Do you really have to know?”

  “I don’t. But the authorities might be curious.”

  Rollins took another big gulp of his whiskey.

  “I raised it,” he said. “From friends.”

  “What friends?”

  “Don’t you trust me?” Rollins said plaintively.

  “I trust you. But there are other people involved.”

  “Well, I laid out the case—” Rollins hesitated. “To my family, if you want to know. My mother, my father, my brothers. We ain’t on the edge of poverty, exactly, Mr. Strand, we’re not starving, even though I look scrawny…” He grinned. “My father’s chief engineer at the waterworks. One of my brothers owns a garage. My mother is chief nurse at the Intensive Care Unit in the hospital. Another of my brothers is in real estate. And my oldest brother is an assistant vice president in a bank in New York and plays the market like a xylophone. The family ain’t exactly sharecroppers, Mr. Strand.”

  “You amaze me, Rollins,” Strand said. “You never told me a word of all this—or anybody else in the school.”

  “I didn’t want it to be held against me,” Rollins said, laughing. “I didn’t want people to be expecting me to be smarter than I am and holding my record in school up against my family’s. It’s tough enough when we all get together for dinner and they begin to get on my back for being a shiftless, no-good black jock. My biggest brother, he was offered a tryout with the New York Knicks, that’s a basketball team, and he turned it down, he said he didn’t want to earn his living running and sweating in public like a slave of the pharaohs and having his knees operated on every summer. If my family thought I was aiming at trying to play pro football, they’d kick me out like a leper. They’re bookish, Mr. Strand, fanatical bookish, and they’re so set on improving themselves—and me—it near drives me crazy.” He finished his drink. “You got any more in that bottle in the kitchen by any chance, Mr. Strand?”

  “Do you mean to say that your family gave you the money?”

  “Loaned, Mr. Strand,” Rollins said earnestly. “Loaned is the word.”

  “And if, after you get Romero out of jail, he runs off?”

  “They’d stuff me and hang me up as a trophy on the wall for ten years,” Rollins said. “But he’s not going to run away.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “He’s my friend.” It was said with the utmost quiet simplicity. “Anyway, I can’t see Romero being allowed to hang around here when he gets out on bail.”

  “No,” Strand admitted. “He’s already been expelled.”

  “They don’t waste no time on little things like being innocent until proven guilty around here, do they?”

  “Do you blame them?”

  “Sure I blame them,” Rollins said soberly. “I blame everybody, But he won’t run away. Not if he knows it’s my money. Besides, where’s he going to run to? His family? He doesn’t even know where they are. His brother wrote he was splitting, going out west, and they didn’t know where the sisters’ve gone to and his mother had to move, but he didn’t say where. Makes no difference—he doesn’t want to go near any of them. Anyway, I’m telling him he’s coming to live in my family’s house until the trial and nobody, not even Romero, could get away from my brothers if they had a mind to keep him in place. Now, can I have that drink?”

  “I’ll get it for you.” As he took Rollins’s glass and went back to the kitchen, Strand was surprised to feel the tears in his eyes. He made Rollins’s drink stronger this time. His own glass was still half full. Before tonight, the last time he had had the bottle in his hand was the night Leslie had been lost on the road back from New York and had been near hysteria when she stumbled into the house to awaken him. “A certain medicinal value,” he remembered she had said. One could say that tonight, too, medicine had its uses.

  If he had been asked why he had tears in his eyes, he would have been hard put to find an answer. Rollins’s unwavering adherence to the bonds of friendship? His family’s blind generosity of spirit? Their silent defiance of the capricious indifference of the white man’s world? Their quick acceptance of the needs of their youngest member, hardly more than a boy, and his estimate of what it was right and just to do? Strand remembered the phrase Rollins had quoted his brother using—“running and sweating for the pharaohs.” Strand didn’t know how often the Rollins family went to church, but their act was a Christian rebuke to the men and women sleeping in the pretty, ivied houses that night, people who went to chapel each evening to celebrate charity and the brotherhood of man. And a rebuke, too, to the vengeful, powerful man in the great duplex apartment on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by his glorious paintings.

  As he went back into the living room carrying Rollins’s refilled glass, he made a decision. “Rollins,” he said, handing the boy the whiskey, “I don’t like the idea of nobody else chipping in to help. Maybe, if we had the time, we might collect a few dollars on the campus, although I doubt it. But we don’t have the time. In the morning, you come down to the bank with me and I’ll give you two thousand dollars of my own toward the ten. It’s only a token, but sometimes tokens are necessary.” He knew he had three thousand dollars in his account. His total wealth. It would have to do him for more than a month. There would be no Christmas presents this year. No matter.

  Rollins looked studiously at his glass. “Amen,” he said, surprisingly. “What time you figure to be free in the morning to go to the bank?”

  “After breakfast.”

  “What about your classes?”

  “Force majeure,” Strand said. “I’ll explain to the headmaster.”

  “Force—what’s that?”

  “An act of God,” Strand said. “Freely translated.”

  “I wouldn’t want Romero to stay in that jail one minute longer than he has to.”

  “He won’t. One condition, though. Nobody’s to know about my contribution. Especially not Romero.”

  Rollins looked quizzically at Strand. “I understand your reasons,” he said.

  Strand doubted that he did. He himself was not sure of his reasons. “On second thought,” he said, “I think it’d be better if we didn’t bring Mr. Babcock in on this for the time being. He might think it’s unwise, or he might insist on talking to your parents—”

  “You mean you think he wouldn’t believe me,” Rollins said.

  “The possibility exists. And he may be under pressure to leave Romero where he is. I think you’d better do this on your own. The lawyer’s name is Hollingsbee. He’s in the Hartford book. I’ll call him first thing in the morning to be ready for you. If you have any trouble, call me.”

  “I don’t expect any trouble.” Rollins finished his drink quickly. “I’d better be getting to bed.” He started to leave.

  “One more thing, please,” Strand said. His throat felt constricted and he coughed. “About those letters that Romero said were stolen. Do you know anything about them?”

  “He didn’t read them to me, Mr. Strand,” Rollins said, “and I didn’t ask. He kept them locked up. Every once in a while he would take them out and read them to himself with a sort of sappy expression on his face. Then he’d put them away and lock them up again.”

  “Y
ou don’t know whom they were from?”

  “From the way he looked I would guess they were from a girl.” Rollins laughed. “It’s a cinch they weren’t from bill collectors. Anyway, I could tell he prized them. Do you want me to ask him who they were from?”

  “No. It’s of no importance. Well, good luck. And thank your family for me.”

  “That might help. They ain’t all that crazy about my getting them to fork over all that dough. And my mother and father were against my coming here on football scholarship in the first place. But they’re on Romero’s side, and that’s the main thing.” He patted the bulge in his hip pocket. “Got to make sure it’s still there,” he said, a little embarrassedly. “I’m sorry I made such a dent in your booze. See you in the morning, sir.”

  He was weaving a little as he went out of the apartment.

  It had been a long day. He had started out tired. He had dozed a little during the night, but had awakened at six to call Air France. Air France had told him that Paris was fogged in and no planes were landing there as yet and that the New York flight had had to put down in Geneva and was waiting there for conditions to improve. He had called after that at twenty-minute intervals, but the message was always the same. Then, just before breakfast they had told him that Leslie’s plane had been diverted to Nice. Her trip was not beginning on a fortunate note.

  At breakfast, he had told Babcock that he would have to skip his first classes. He didn’t give any reason and Babcock had looked at him oddly and had been markedly cool when he said “I do hope that we can settle back into a sensible routine soon again,” and had turned away abruptly.

  The long walk into town with Rollins to the bank in a biting wind had left him gasping and twice he had had to ask Rollins to stop while he regained his breath. Rollins had watched him anxiously, as though he was afraid that he would drop where he stood. “My father has heart trouble, too,” Rollins said. “My mother’s after him all the time to slow down.”