Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  They laughed and clapped each other on the back, the room echoing and re-echoing as they banged the bar and roared.

  “Oh, I love it!” Mrs. Taylor gasped.

  Margaret turned her back on them and looked at her father. He was laughing, too.

  Margaret looked carefully at him, as though he were a man whom she had just met. Her father’s face was not fat, Margaret noticed, but almost so. His gray suit was double-breasted and his collar was sharp, starched white. The heavy silk necktie flowed like a spring from his lined though ruddy throat, and his shoes looked as though they had been brought from England for carefully custom-built feet. She looked at his face, like the faces of the fathers of her friends, the men who had been graduated from the good colleges around 1910 and had gone on to stand at the head of businesses, committees, charity organizations, lodges, lobbies, political parties, who got brick red when they thought of the income tax, who said, “That lunatic in the White House.” Her father was sitting across the table with that face, laughing.

  “What’re you laughing at?” Margaret asked. “What the hell are you laughing at?”

  Mr. Clay stopped laughing, but a look of surprise seemed to hang over as a kind of transition expression on his face. Margaret stood up as the man in tweeds and his friends left to go to Poughkeepsie.

  “Where’re you going?” Mr. Clay asked.

  “I don’t feel like eating here,” Margaret said, putting on her coat.

  Mr. Clay left some bills for the check, and put his coat on. “I thought you wanted me to tell you what I thought,” he said. “I thought you wanted me to advise …”

  Margaret said nothing as they started out.

  “I don’t believe he was a Columbia man at all,” Mrs. Taylor was saying as Margaret passed her. “He couldn’t sing ‘Stand, Columbia.’”

  “That’s right,” said Mr. Taylor. “Too tweedy, too much sweater.”

  “To Neville Chamberlain!” Mrs. Taylor said, her thin, white fingers holding her cocktail glass high. “I’m going to get drunk tonight. I don’t have to go to church tomorrow.”

  Margaret closed the door behind her and walked with her father toward their car, past the sign on the lawn, lit and shaking in the wind, with the dry leaves blowing against it.

  This was in the autumn of 1938, the year Columbia beat Yale 27-14 in the first game of the season.

  Weep in Years to Come

  They came out of the movie house and started slowly eastward in the direction of Fifth Avenue. “Hitler!” a newsboy called. “Hitler!”

  “That Fletcher,” Dora said, “the one that played her father. Remember him?”

  “Uh huh,” Paul said, holding her hand as they walked slowly up the dark street.

  “He’s got stones in his kidney.”

  “That’s the way he acts,” Paul said. “Now I know how to describe the way that man acts—he acts like a man who has stones in his kidney.”

  Dora laughed. “I X-rayed him last winter. He’s one of Dr. Thayer’s best patients. He’s always got something wrong with him. He’s going to try to pass the stones out of his kidney this summer.”

  “Good luck, Fletcher, old man,” Paul said.

  “I used to massage his shoulder. He had neuritis. He makes fifteen hundred dollars a week.”

  “No wonder he has neuritis.”

  “He asked me to come to his house for dinner.” Dora pulled her hand out of Paul’s and slipped it up to his elbow and held on, hard. “He likes me.”

  “I bet he does.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me what?” Paul asked.

  “Do you like me?”

  They stopped at Rockefeller Plaza and leaned over the marble wall and looked down at the fountain and the statue and the people sitting out at the tables, drinking, and the waiters standing around, listening to the sound of the fountain.

  “I can’t stand you,” Paul said. He kissed her hair.

  “That’s what I thought,” Dora said. They both laughed.

  They looked down at the Plaza, at the thin trees with the light-green leaves rustling in the wind that came down between the buildings. There were pansies, yellow and tight, along the borders of the small pools with the bronze sea statues, and hydrangeas, and little full trees, all shaking in the wind and the diffuse, clear light of the flood lamps above. Couples strolled slowly down from Fifth Avenue, talking amiably in low, calm, week-end voices, appreciating the Rockefeller frivolity and extravagance which had carved a place for hydrangeas and water and saplings and spring and sea-gods riding bronze dolphins out of these austere buildings, out of the bleak side of Business.

  Paul and Dora walked up the promenade, looking in the windows. They stopped at a window filled with men’s sports clothes—gabardine slacks and bright-colored shirts with short sleeves and brilliant handkerchiefs to tie around the throat.

  “I have visions,” Paul said, “of sitting in my garden, with two Great Danes, dressed like that, like a Hollywood actor in the country.”

  “Have you got a garden?” Dora asked.

  “No.”

  “Those’re nice pants,” Dora said.

  They went on to the next window. “On the other hand,” Paul said, “there are days when I want to look like that. A derby hat and a stiff blue shirt with a pleated bosom and a little starched white collar and a five-dollar neat little necktie and a Burberry overcoat. Leave the office at five o’clock every day to go to a cocktail party.”

  “You go to a cocktail party almost every afternoon anyway,” Dora said. “Without a derby hat.”

  “A different kind of cocktail party,” Paul said. He started her across Fifth Avenue. “The kind attended by men with starched blue pleated bosoms. Some day.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Dora said as they ran to escape a bus, “look at those dresses.”

  They stood in front of Saks.

  “Fifth Avenue,” Paul said. “Street of dreams.”

  “It’s nice to know things like that exist,” Dora murmured, looking into the stage-lit window at the yellow dress and the sign that said “Tropical Nights in Manhattan” and the little carved-stone fish that for some reason was in the same window. “Even if you can’t have them.”

  “Uptown?” Paul asked. “Or to my house?”

  “I feel like walking.” Dora looked up at Paul and grinned. “For the moment.” She squeezed his arm. “Only for the moment. Uptown.”

  They started uptown.

  “I love those models,” Paul said. “Each and every one of them. They’re superior, yet warm; inviting, yet polite. Their breasts are always tipped at the correct angle for the season.”

  “Sure,” Dora said, “papier-mâché. It’s easy with papier-mâché. Look. Aluminum suitcases. Travel by air.”

  “They look like my mother’s kitchen pots.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to own a few of them?”

  “Yes.” Paul peered at them. “Fly away. Buy luggage and depart. Leave for the ends of the earth.”

  “They got a little case just for books. A whole separate little traveling bookcase.”

  “That’s just what I need,” Paul said, “for my trips on the Fifth Avenue bus every morning.”

  They passed St. Patrick’s, dark and huge, with the moon sailing over it.

  “Do you think God walks up Fifth Avenue?” Paul asked.

  “Sure,” said Dora. “Why not?”

  “We are princes of the earth,” Paul said. “All over the world men slave to bring riches to these few blocks for us to look at and say ‘Yes, very nice’ or ‘Take it away, it stinks.’ I feel very important when I walk up Fifth Avenue.”

  They stopped at the window of the Hamburg-American Line. Little dolls in native costumes danced endlessly around a pole while other dolls in native costume looked on. All the dolls had wide smiles on their faces. “Harvest Festival in Buckeburg, Germany,” a small sign said.

  A private policeman turned the corner and stood and watched them. They mov
ed to the next window.

  “‘A suggestion to passengers to promote carefree travel,’” Paul read off a booklet. “Also, Hapag-Lloyd announces a twenty-per-cent reduction for all educators on sabbatical leave. They are ‘Masters in the Art of Travel,’ they say.”

  “I used to want to go to see Germany,” Dora said. “I know a lot of Germans and they’re nice.”

  “I’ll be there soon,” Paul said as they passed the private policeman.

  “You’re going to visit it?”

  “Uh huh. At the expense of the government. In a well-tailored khaki uniform. I’m going to see glamorous Europe, seat of culture, at last. From a bombing plane. To our left we have the Stork Club, seat of culture for East Fifty-third Street. Look at the pretty girls. A lot of them have breasts at the correct angle, too. See how nature mimics art. New York is a wonderful city.”

  Dora didn’t say anything. She hung onto him tightly as they went down the street. They turned at the corner and walked down Madison Avenue. After a while they stopped at a shop that had phonographs and radios in the window. “That’s what I want.” Paul pointed at a machine. “A Capehart. It plays two symphonies at a time. You just lie on your back and out come Brahms and Beethoven and Prokofieff. That’s the way life should be. Lie on your back and be surrounded by great music, automatically.”

  Dora looked at the phonograph, all mahogany and doors and machinery. “Do you really think there’s going to be a war?” she said.

  “Sure. They’re warming up the pitchers now. They’re waiting to see if the other side has right-handed or left-handed batters before they nominate their starting pitchers.”

  They continued walking downtown.

  “But it’s in Europe,” Dora said. “Do you think we’ll get into it?”

  “Sure. Read the papers.” He glanced at the window they were passing. “Look at those nice tables. Informal luncheons on your terrace. Metal and glass for outdoor feeding. That would be nice, eating out on a terrace off those wonderful colored plates, rich food with green salads. With a view of mountains and a lake, and inside, the phonograph.”

  “That sounds good,” Dora said quietly.

  “I could get an extra speaker,” Paul said, “and wire it out to the terrace, so we could listen as we ate. I like Mozart with dinner.” He laughed and drew her to a bookstore window.

  “I always get sad,” Dora said, “when I look in a bookshop window and see all the books I’m never going to have time to read.”

  Paul kissed her. “What did you think the first time you saw me?” he asked.

  “What did you think?”

  “I thought, ‘I must get that girl!’”

  Dora laughed, close to him.

  “What did you think?” Paul asked.

  “I thought”—she giggled—“I thought, ‘I must get that man!’”

  “Isn’t New York marvelous?” Paul said. “Where did you say you come from?”

  “Seattle,” Dora said. “Seattle, Washington.”

  “Here we are on Madison Avenue, holding hands, shopping for the future.…”

  “Even if there was a war,” Dora said after a while, “why would you have to get mixed up in it? Why would the United States have to get mixed up in it?”

  “They got into the last one, didn’t they?” Paul said. “They’ll get into this one.”

  “They were gypped the last time,” Dora said. “The guys who were killed were gypped.”

  “That’s right,” said Paul. “They were killed for six-per-cent interest on bonds, for oil wells, for spheres of influence. I wish I had a sphere of influence.”

  “Still,” said Dora, “you’d enlist this time?”

  “Yop. The first day. I’d walk right up to the recruiting office and say, ‘Paul Triplett, twenty-six years old, hard as nails, good eyes, good teeth, good feet; give me a gun. Put me in a plane, so I can do a lot of damage.”

  They walked a whole block in silence.

  “Don’t you think you’d be gypped this time, too?” Dora said. “Don’t you think they’d have you fighting for bonds and oil wells all over again?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And even so, you’d sign up?”

  “The first day.”

  Dora pulled her hand away from him. “Do you like the idea of killing people?”

  “I hate the idea,” Paul said slowly. “I don’t want to hurt anybody. I think the idea of war is ridiculous. I want to live in a world in which everybody sits on a terrace and eats off a metal-and-glass table off colored plates and the phonograph inside turns Mozart over automatically and the music is piped out to an extra loud-speaker on the terrace. Only Hitler isn’t interested in that kind of world. He’s interested in another kind of world. I couldn’t stand to live in his kind of world, German or homemade.”

  “You wouldn’t kill Hitler,” Dora said. “You’d just kill young boys like yourself.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you like that?”

  “I’m really not interested in killing Hitler, either,” Paul said. “I want to kill the idea he represents for so many people. In years to come I’ll cry over the young boys I’ve killed and maybe if they kill me, they’ll cry over me.”

  “They’re probably just like you.” They were walking fast now.

  “Sure,” Paul said. “I’m sure they’d love to go to bed with you tonight. I bet they’d love to walk along the fountains with the bronze statues in Rockefeller Plaza, holding hands with you on a spring Saturday evening and looking at the sports clothes in the windows. I bet a lot of them like Mozart, too, but still I’ll kill them. Gladly.”

  “Gladly?”

  “Yes, gladly.” Paul wiped his eyes with his hands, suddenly tired. “Gladly today. I’ll weep for them in years to come. Today they’re guns aimed at me and the world I want. Their bodies protect an idea I have to kill to live. Hey!” He stretched out his hands and caught hers. “What’s the sense talking about things like this tonight?”

  “But it’s all a big fraud,” Dora cried. “You’re being used and you know it.”

  “That’s right,” Paul said. “It’s all a big fraud, the whole business. Even so, I got to fight. I’ll be gypped, but by a little bit I’ll do something for my side, for Mozart on a terrace at dinner. What the hell, it’s not even heroism. I’ll be dragged in, whatever I say.”

  “That’s too bad,” Dora said softly, walking by herself. “It’s too bad.”

  “Sure,” Paul said. “Some day maybe it’ll be better. Maybe some day the world’ll be run for people who like Mozart. Not today.”

  They stopped. They were in front of a little art store. There was a reproduction of the Renoir painting of a boating party on the river. There was the woman kissing the Pekinese, and the man in his underwear with a straw hat and his red beard, solid as earth, and the wit with his cocked derby hat whispering to the woman with her hands to her ears, and there was the great still life in the foreground, of wine and bottles and glasses and grapes and food.

  “I saw it in Washington,” Paul said. “They had it in Washington. You can’t tell why it’s a great picture from the print. There’s an air of pink immortality hanging over it. They got it in New York now and I go look at it three times a week. It’s settled, happy, solid. It’s a picture of a summertime that vanished a long time ago.” Paul kissed her hand. “It’s getting late, darling, the hours’re dwindling. Let’s go home.”

  They got into a cab and went downtown to his apartment.

  The City Was in

  Total Darkness

  Dutcher stood at the bar, feeling clean after his shower and still thirsty, looking at the girls, glad that he was alone, listening with one ear to the conversation around him. “The British and French,” a man in a hound’s-tooth-check jacket was saying, “will shuttle back and forth over Germany from Paris to Warsaw. And besides, he has no oil. Everybody knows Hitler has no oil.”

  “‘Darling,’ she says to me,” a large blonde woman said lou
dly to another large blonde woman, “‘darling, I haven’t seen you in forever. Where’ve you been—in the summer theater?’ She knows goddamn well I just finished two pictures for Fox!”

  “It’s a bluff,” the man in the hound’s-tooth-check said. “He’s going to back down, Russia or no Russia. He has no oil. Where are you today without oil?”

  “Mr. Dutcher.” The barman brought over a phone and plugged it in. “For you.”

  It was Machamer on the phone. “What’re you doing tonight, Ralph?” Machamer asked, his voice, as always, grating and noisy.

  “I’m drinking tonight,” Dutcher said. “I’m drinking and waiting for something good to happen to me.”

  “We’re going to Mexico,” Machamer said. “Want to come along?”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Dolly and me. Want to come along?”

  “What part of Mexico?” Dutcher asked. “What distant part of that verdant land? Vera Cruz, Mexico City …?”

  Machamer laughed. “Tia Juana. I got to be back on Tuesday to look for a job. Just overnight. For the races. Want to go?”

  “Without oil,” the man in the check was saying, “a war is absolutely impractical.” Dutcher looked gravely at him, considering whether or not he wanted to go to Mexico. He had avoided people after playing tennis in the afternoon, because he’d wanted to be alone, by himself, with the decks clear for something special and significant to happen to him on this special and significant week end.

  “Have they got bullfights in Tia Juana?” he asked Machamer.

  “Maybe,” Machamer said. “They have them sometimes. Come on, this is Labor Day, there’s nobody in Hollywood.”

  “I’m tired,” Dutcher said. “I’ve been listening to the radio for seven nights and I played tennis and I’m thirsty.”

  “You can lie down in the back of the car, with a bottle,” Machamer said. Machamer was a young writer and very impressed with Dutcher’s two novels and constantly was after him. “I’ll drive.”

  “I never saw a bullfight,” Dutcher said. “Did you ever see one there?”