Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  “I don’t want to overlook the language,” Di Calco said hotly.

  “Let him talk.” Sweeney waved his hand majestically. “Let’s hear everybody’s point of view. Let the Dutchman talk.”

  “Well …” Lubbock started.

  “Don’t be insulting,” the bartender said. “It’s late and I’m ready to close up the bar anyway, so don’t insult the patrons.”

  Lubbock rinsed his mouth with beer, let it slide slowly down his throat. “Don’t yuh ever clean the pipes?” he asked the bartender. “Yuh know, that’s the most important thing about beer—the pipes.”

  “He’s got a comment on everything!” Di Calco said angrily. “This country’s full of them!”

  “They are dividing up the world,” Lubbock said. “I got eighty-five cents to my name. No matter which way they finish dividing, I’ll be lucky to still have eighty-five cents when it’s all over.”

  “That’s not the way to approach the problem,” said Sweeney. “Your eighty-five cents.”

  “Will I get Greece?” Lubbock pointed his huge finger threateningly at Sweeney. “Will Di Calco get China?”

  “Who wants China?” Di Calco asked triumphantly.

  “We get one thing,” Lubbock said soberly. “You and me and Sweeney and Buffalo Bill …”

  “Please,” said the bartender.

  “We get trouble. The workingman gets trouble.” Lubbock sighed and looked sadly up at the ceiling, and the other men silently drank their beer. “Military strategists agree,” Lubbock said, his tongue going proudly over the phrase, “that it takes four men to attack a position defended by one man.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Sweeney demanded.

  “This war is going to be fought in Europe, in Africa, in Asia,” Lubbock chanted. “It is not going to be fought in William Cody’s Bar.”

  “Sorry I can’t oblige you,” the bartender said sarcastically.

  “I’ve studied the situation,” Lubbock said, “and I’ve decided that there’s going to be four times as many Americans killed as anybody else. It stands to reason. They’re not going to attack us here, are they? We’re going to take the offensive. Four to one!” He banged the bar with savage certainty. “Us four poor dumb yokels’ll get it just to put one lousy Dutchman out of the way. Military strategy guarantees!”

  “Don’t yell so loud,” the bartender said nervously. “The people upstairs don’t like me.”

  “The worst thing is,” Lubbock shouted, glaring wildly around him, “the worst thing is I look around and I see the world full of poor dumb stupid bastards like Sweeney and Di Calco and William Cody!”

  “The language,” Di Calco snarled. “Watch the language.”

  “Hitler has to be beaten!” Sweeney yelled. “That’s a fundamental fact.”

  “Hitler has to be beaten!” Lubbock’s voice sank to a significant, harsh whisper. “Why does Hitler have to be beaten? Because poor ignorant bastards like you put him there in the first place and left him there in the second place and went out to shoot him down in the third place and in the meantime just drank yer beer and argued in bars!”

  “Don’t accuse me,” said Sweeney. “I didn’t put Hitler any place.”

  “Sweeneys all over the world!” Lubbock shouted. “And now I got to get shot for it. I got to sit in tents in the wintertime!” Suddenly he grabbed Sweeney by the collar with one hand. “Say …” Sweeney gasped. Lubbock’s other hand shot out, grasped Di Calco by his collar. Lubbock drew the two men close to his face and stared with terrible loathing at them. “I would like to mash yer stupid thick heads,” he whispered.

  “Now, lissen,” Di Calco gasped.

  “Boys,” said the bartender, reaching for the sawed-off baseball bat he kept under the counter.

  “If I get shot it’s your fault!” Lubbock shook the two men fiercely. “I oughta kill yuh. I feel like killin’ every dumb slob walkin’ the streets …”

  Di Calco reached back for a beer bottle and Sweeney grabbed the big hand at his throat and the bartender lifted the sawed-off baseball bat. The door swung open and a girl stepped through it and looked blankly at them.

  “Go right ahead,” she said, the expression on her face not surprised or worried or amused. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

  “Boys …” the bartender said and put the baseball bat away. Lubbock gave Sweeney and Di Calco a last little push and released them and turned back to his beer.

  “People like you,” Sweeney murmured, outraged, “people like you they ought to commit to asylums.”

  Di Calco straightened his tie and tried to smile gallantly through his rage at the girl, who was still standing by the open door, hatless, her dirty blonde hair falling straight down to her shoulders. She was a thin girl, with the bones showing plainly in her face, and her hands skinny and rough coming out of the sleeves of the light old gray coat she was wearing. Her face was very tired, as though she had been working too long, too many nights.

  “Would you like to close the door, Miss?” the bartender asked. “It’s getting awfully cold.”

  The girl wearily closed the door and stood against it for a moment, wearily surveying the four men.

  “I need some help,” she said.

  “Now, Miss …” the bartender started.

  “Oh, shut up!” she snapped at him. Her voice was flat and worn. “I’m not bumming anything. My sister’s just had a kid and she’s laying in a stinking little hospital and she was bleeding all day and they gave her two transfusions and that’s all they got and they just told me maybe she’s dyin’. I been walkin’ past this saloon for the last half hour watchin’ you four guys talkin’, gettin’ up nerve to come in. She needs blood. Any you guys got some blood you don’t need?” The girl smiled a little.

  The men carefully avoided looking at each other.

  “We’re busted,” the girl said, her tone as flat as ever. “The kid came out seven months and her husband’s a sailor; he’s on his way to Portugal and there’s nobody in this whole goddamned, freezin’ town I can turn to.” She shrugged. “My blood’s the wrong type.” She took a step nearer the bar. “She’s only nineteen years old, my sister. She had to go marry a sailor …” Lubbock turned and looked at her.

  “All right,” Lubbock said. “I’ll go with yuh.”

  “Me, too,” said Di Calco.

  Sweeney opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “I hate hospitals,” he said. “But I’ll come along.”

  Lubbock turned and looked slowly at the bartender.

  “It’s late anyway,” the bartender said, nervously drying the bar with a towel. “I might as well come along, just in case.… My type blood might … Yes.” He nodded vigorously, and started taking off his apron.

  Lubbock reached over the bar and brought up a bottle of rye and a glass and silently poured it and pushed it in front of the girl. The girl took it without smiling and drained it in one gulp.

  They all sat in the dreary hospital clinic room with the old dead light of the hospital on them and all the weary sorrowful smells of the hospital swelling around them. They sat without talking, waiting for the interne to come and tell them which one of them had the right type of blood for the transfusion. Lubbock sat with his hands between his knees, occasionally glancing sharply at Sweeney and Di Calco and Cody, all of them nervously squirming on their benches. Only the girl walked slowly back and forth down the middle of the room, smoking a cigarette, the smoke curling slowly over her lank, blonde hair.

  The door opened and the interne came in and touched Lubbock on the arm. “You’re elected,” he said.

  Lubbock took a deep breath and stood up. He looked around him, at Di Calco, at Sweeney, at Cody, triumphantly, smiled at the girl, and followed the interne out of the room.

  When he was through, when the blood had poured out of his veins, slowly and delicately, into the veins of the pale, quiet girl on the table next to him, Lubbock got up and bent over her and whispered, “You’re going to be all right,” and
she smiled weakly at him.

  Then he put on his coat and went back into the clinic room. The others were still there. They stood there, scowling at him in the blue hospital light. He smiled widely at them.

  “Everything all right?” Di Calco asked solemnly.

  “Everything’s fine,” Lubbock said cheerfully. “My blood is singing in her system like whisky.”

  Di Calco looked at Sweeney, Sweeney at Cody, each with doubt and hesitancy in his eye.

  “Say, Dutchman,” Sweeney said loudly, “we’ll buy you a drink. What d’yuh say?”

  They waited, tense, almost ready for attack.

  Lubbock looked consideringly at them. Cody put up the collar of his coat.

  “Sure,” Lubbock said, putting his arm around the girl. “It’ll be an honor.”

  They walked out through the hospital doors together.

  Preach on the Dusty Roads

  Nelson Weaver sat at his desk and wrote, “Labor … Bridgeport plant … $1,435,639.77.” Then he put his sharply pointed hard pencil down among the nine other sharply pointed hard pencils arrayed in severe line on the right side of the shining desk, below the silver-framed photograph of his dead wife.

  He looked at the leather clock on the back edge of his desk. 10:35. Robert wouldn’t be along for ten minutes yet.

  Nelson Weaver picked up his pencil and looked at the long sheets of paper, closely covered with typewritten figures, to his right. “Depreciation … $3,100,456.25,” he wrote.

  The tax sheets for Marshall and Co., Valves and Turbines, were nearly done. He had sat at this desk for thirty-five days, working slowly and carefully, from time to time deliberately putting down a number on the page, like Cézanne with his six strokes a day on a water color, until the huge elaborate structure of Marshall and Co.’s finances, which reached from bank to bank and country to country, from Wilmington, Delaware, where it was incorporated, to Chungking, China, where it sold electrical equipment to Chiang Kai-shek; until all this sprawling, complex history of money paid and money gained and credit offered and rejected and profit and loss, palpable and impalpable, was laid bare and comprehensible on five short pages of his clean accountant’s figures.

  Nelson looked at the leather clock. 10:40. The train was leaving at 11:15. Robert had better hurry.

  Nelson looked at the $3,100,456.25 he had written. For the thousandth time he admired the delicate, tilted, bookkeeper’s 2 he had early in his career learned to make. Somehow that 2 was to him a badge of his profession, a sign of his talents, an advertisement of the difficult rare world of figures in which he moved skillfully and at ease, turning sweat and clamor, heat and smoke, bonanza and disaster, into clear, rigid, immutable tables.

  10:43. Where was Robert? Nelson got up and went to the window and looked out. He looked down the steel and granite fifty stories to the street. He laughed a little to himself when he realized he was trying to pick his son out of the hurry and confusion of Forty-ninth Street, five hundred feet below.

  He went back to his desk and sat down and picked up the sheet of paper on which he had been working. Tax sheets represented a formal and intricate game in which the players solemnly and conventionally juggled abstractions, like Spinoza proving God, to bring about very real and tangible results, like the great man who, in 1932, proved that J. P. Morgan had no taxable income. Once, in 1936, Nelson, in a rare burst of capriciousness, had made up two tax sheets. One, that Marshall and Co. had actually submitted to the government. And the other, with a change here and there to conform more to the actual realities of iron and sweat rather than the formal accountant’s symbolism of numbers and deductible percentages. There had been a difference of $700,962.12. Nelson had carried the second sheet around with him for his private amusement for a week and then burned it, wisely.

  This year, with the blossoming expansion of Marshall and Co. for war orders and the jump in the surplus profits tax, the difference between the real and the formal would be immense, over a million dollars, Nelson figured. Marshall and Co. paid him $40,000 a year. He was quite a bargain, he told himself grimly.

  10:47. No Robert yet. Nelson put down the paper because the figures were beginning to jump before his eyes. More and more frequently he found that happening to him. Well, along with the waistline that grew an inch a year and the tendency to wake at five in the morning and his lack of shock at overhearing people calling him a middle-aged gentleman, that had to be expected of a man who had led a quiet, rather unhealthy life at a desk and was now over fifty.…

  The door opened and Robert came in in his new lieutenant’s uniform, with the rawhide suitcase Nelson had given him in his hand.

  “On our way, Pop,” Robert said. “The U.S. Army is waiting on tiptoe.”

  They smiled at each other and Nelson took his beautiful gray Homburg out of the closet and put it carefully on before the mirror.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t make it,” he said, delicately fingering the brim of the hat.

  Robert was over at the window, staring out at New York, shining all around in the early summer sun, with the Hudson a flat blue highway against the cliffs of New Jersey and the buildings piled against each other like stiff confectionery in the light morning air. “Lord, Lord …” Robert murmured. “What a place to work! You ought to be sitting here writing the Ninth Symphony, Pop.”

  Nelson smiled at him and took his arm. “I’m not writing the Ninth Symphony.” He would have liked to carry Robert’s bag for him to the elevator and even made a move for it, but Robert detected it and switched the bag without a word to the other hand.

  There was a pretty, dark-haired woman in a fine, severe black dress that looked on her as black dresses are supposed to look on smart women who work in fashionable businesses, and rarely do. She had her hair swept up for the summer morning and she looked pert and sharp and pretty and grownup all at once, and she looked coolly and approvingly, Nelson noticed, at his tall son, standing beside him, very slender and straight and self-consciously handsome in his new dark-green lieutenant’s blouse with the proud gold bar shining on each shoulder.

  Robert smiled a little to himself, conscious of the cool approving stare, helplessly and a little ashamedly pleased with himself for provoking it.

  “Sometimes,” he said, as he and Nelson got out of the elevator and walked toward Fifth Avenue, with the woman lost behind them, “sometimes, Pop, they ought to be allowed to arrest a man for the thoughts that pass through his head.”

  They grinned at each other and Robert took a deep full breath, looking around him, the smile still on his lips, before he got into the taxicab and said, “Grand Central, please.”

  They sat quietly as the cab dodged through the streets. Nelson looked steadfastly at the shining rawhide bag. You saw bags like that, he thought, on Friday afternoons in the summertime, on station platforms where people in summer clothes gaily waited for trains going to New England, to the Adirondacks, to Cape Cod … Somehow, he felt, to make the picture complete, there should be a tennis racket lying beside it, in its bright rubber case, and a girl’s voice, light and excited, dominating the scene, saying swiftly, laughing, “Olive oil and vinegar in equal parts and a few drops of glycerin and just smear yourself, darling, every hour. There was this lifeguard at Hobe Sound and he was out in the sun twelve hours a day and that was all he used and he was as brown as the outside of an old piece of roast beef.…”

  But instead it was Robert’s voice saying, “Five medium tanks …”

  “What was that?” Nelson looked at his son, apologetically. “I’m sorry. I didn’t quite …”

  “When I get back,” Robert said, “I’m put in command of five medium tanks. Twelve tons apiece, with a crew of four men. They represent an investment of about three hundred thousand bucks. And I’ve got to tell them, start, stop, go here, go there, kindly demolish that hot dog stand to the left, would you be so good as to put six shells into that corset and lingerie shop five blocks down the street.” He grinned widely. “Me. I never even
ran a set of electric trains before in my life. The faith that the U.S. Government has in me! I’m going to develop a beautiful case of stage fright when the time comes for me to look those five medium tanks in the eye.”

  “You’ll do all right,” Nelson said soberly.

  Robert stared at him seriously for a moment, the smile gone. “I suppose so,” he said.

  The cab wheeled into Grand Central and they got out.

  “We have fifteen minutes,” Robert said, looking up at the clock. “How about one quick one, to oil the wheels?”

  “Is anyone else seeing you off?” Nelson asked, as they walked through the dim, shuffling, echoing vault, toward the bar of the Commodore Hotel. “No girls?”

  “Nope,” said Robert, smiling. “Can’t start that. If you invite one you’ve got to invite them all. It’d look like a reunion of Vassar graduates, classes of ’38 to ’41, inclusive.” He laughed aloud. “I wouldn’t like to make such a showy exit.”

  Nelson smiled at the joke, but was aware that the joke covered the fact that Robert had saved his final private good-bye before he went to war for his father. He wished there was some way to tell Robert he understood and was grateful, but whatever words he could think of would be clumsy and tragic, so he said nothing. They went into the Commodore and stood at the long bar, quiet now and cool and dim in the eleven o’clock pause before the day’s drinking began.

  “Two martinis,” Robert said to the bartender.

  “I haven’t had a drink in the morning,” Nelson said, “since Arthur Parker’s wedding. 1936.”

  “What the hell,” Robert said. “There’s a war on.”

  There was the pleasant sound of the ice clinking in the mixer and the faint strange smell of the gin rising in the empty bar and the pungent tiny smell of the lemon peel that the bartender twisted delicately over the full cold glasses.

  They lifted their drinks and Nelson looked past his son’s lean, well-loved head, capped and young and martial, with the gold and leather of the United States Army shining on it. Nelson looked along the bar into the dim recesses of the low-ceilinged, long room, as neat and orderly and expectant with its empty and regular tables and chairs as only a bar or restaurant prepared for the day’s eating and drinking can be. How many farewells had been said in this room, this drinking place next to the trains that spread out across the whole huge continent. How many final good-byes. How many last kisses between husband and wife. How many gulped and tasteless drinks, how much shock of alcohol to take the first terrible edge off the pain of loss and distance. How many farewelling ghosts sat at those regular tables, their endless irrevocable good-byes echoing among the frivolous glasses. How full the company of grieving leavetakers, each of them tasting death in this snatched last moment over whisky, before the train rolled out.…