Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  “You can’t call, Pop,” Eddie yelled, “because there’s nothing to talk to. See?”

  “Oh,” his father said, with searing irony, “the school has disappeared. Poof! and off it goes. The Arabian Nights. In Connecticut.”

  “That’s why I’m here, Pop,” Eddie pleaded rapidly. “There ain’t no more school. It burned. It burned right down to the ground. This afternoon. Look, even my overcoat. Look, I don’t have an overcoat.”

  His father stood silent, regarding him soberly through the deepset cold gray eyes under the famous gray brows. One of the famous long thick fingers beat slowly, like the pendulum of doom, on the dressing table, as he listened to his son, standing there, chapped by exposure, in his tight uniform, talking fast, shifting from one foot to another.

  “See, Pop, it burned down, I swear to God, you can ask anyone, I was lying in my bed writing a letter and the firemen got me, you can ask them, and there wasn’t no place for them to put me and they gave me money for the train and … I’ll stay here with you, Pop, eh, Pop, for Christmas, what do you say, Pop?” Pleading, pleading … His voice broke off under his father’s steady, unrelenting stare. He stood silent, pleading with his face, his eyes, the twist of his mouth, with his cold, chapped hands. His father moved majestically over to him, raised his hand, and slapped him across the face.

  Eddie stood there, his face quivering, but no tears. “Pop,” he said, controlling his voice as best he could. “Pop, what’re you hitting me for? It ain’t my fault. The school burned down, Pop.”

  “If the school burned down,” his father said in measured tones, “and you were there, it was your fault. Frederick,” he said to his dresser, who was standing in the doorway, “put Eddie on the next train to his aunt in Duluth.” And he turned, immutable as Fate, back to his dressing table and once more carefully started applying false hair to the famous face.

  In the train to Duluth an hour later, Eddie sat watching the Hudson River fly past, crying at last.

  The House of Pain

  “Tell her Mr. Bloomer wants to see her,” Philip said, holding his hat, standing straight before the elegant, white-handed hotel clerk.

  “It’s a Mr. Bloomer, Miss Gerry,” the hotel clerk said elegantly, looking through Philip’s plain, clean face, far across the rich lobby.

  Philip heard the famous voice rise and fall in the receiver. “Who the hell is Mr. Bloomer?” the famous, sweet voice said.

  Philip moved his shoulders uncomfortably in his overcoat. His country-boy ears, sticking out from his rough hair, reddened.

  “I heard that,” he said. “Tell her my name is Philip Bloomer and I wrote a play called The House of Pain.”

  “It’s a Mr. Philip Bloomer,” the clerk said languidly, “and he says he wrote a play called A House of Pain.”

  “Did he come all the way up here to tell me that?” the deep rich voice boomed in the receiver. “Tell him that’s dandy.”

  “Let me talk to her, please.” Philip grabbed the receiver from the clerk’s pale hand. “Hello,” he said, his voice shaking in embarrassment. “This is Philip Bloomer.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Bloomer?” the voice said with charm.

  “The thing is, Miss Gerry, this play I wrote,” Philip tried to find the subject, the object, the predicate before she hung up, “The House of Pain.”

  “The clerk said A House of Pain, Mr. Bloomer.”

  “He’s wrong,” Philip said.

  “He’s a very stupid man, that clerk,” the voice said. “I’ve told him so many times.”

  “I went to Mr. Wilkes’ office,” Philip said desperately, “and they said you still had the script.”

  “What script?” Miss Gerry asked.

  “The House of Pain,” Philip cried, sweating. “When I brought it into Mr. Wilkes’ office I suggested that you play the leading part and they sent it to you. Now, you see, somebody at the Theatre Guild wants to see the script, and you’ve had it for two months already, so I thought you mightn’t mind letting me have it.”

  There was a pause, an intake of breath at the other end of the wire. “Won’t you come up, Mr. Bloomer?” Miss Gerry said, her voice chaste but inviting.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Philip said.

  “1205, sir,” the clerk said, delicately taking the phone from Philip’s hands and placing it softly on its pedestal.

  In the elevator Philip looked anxiously at his reflection in the mirror, arranged his tie, tried to smooth down his hair. The truth was he looked like a farm boy, a dairy-hand who had perhaps gone to agricultural school for two years. As far as possible he tried to avoid meeting theater people because he knew nobody would believe that anybody who looked like him could write plays.

  He got out of the elevator and went down the softly carpeted hall to 1205. There was a sheet of paper stuck in a clip on the metal door. He braced himself and rang the bell.

  Miss Adele Gerry opened the door herself. She stood there, tall, dark-haired, perfumed, womanly, in an afternoon dress that showed a square yard of bosom. Her eyes held the same dark fire that had commanded admiring attention on many stages from Brooks Atkinson, from Mantle, from John Mason Brown. She stood there, her hand lightly on the doorknob, her hair swept up simply, her head a little to one side, looking speculatively at Philip Bloomer in the hallway.

  “I’m Mr. Bloomer,” Philip said.

  “Won’t you come in?” Her voice was sweet, simple, direct, fitted exactly to the task of allaying the nervousness of farm boys and dairy-hands.

  “There’s a note for you on the door,” Philip said, glad of one sentence, at least, with which to get inside.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said, taking it.

  “Probably a letter from some secret admirer,” Philip said, with a smile, suddenly resolved to be gallant, to fight the farm boy, destroy the dairy-hand.

  Miss Gerry took the sheet of paper over to the window, scanned it, her eyes close to it near-sightedly, her whole body beautifully intent on the written word.

  “It’s a menu,” she said, tossing it on a table. “They have lamb stew tonight.”

  Philip closed his eyes for a moment, hoping that when he opened them, Miss Gerry, the room, the hotel would have disappeared.

  “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Bloomer?” Miss Gerry said.

  He opened his eyes and marched across the room and sat upright on a little gilt chair. Miss Gerry arranged herself beautifully on a sofa, her hand outstretched along the back, the fingers dangling, the legs girlishly tucked in.

  “You know, Mr. Bloomer,” Miss Gerry said, her voice charmingly playful, “you don’t look like a playwright at all.”

  “I know,” Philip said, gloomily.

  “You look so healthy.” She laughed.

  “I know.”

  “But you are a playwright?” She leaned forward intimately, and Philip religiously kept his eyes away from her bosom. This, he suddenly realized, had become the great problem of the interview.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, looking steadfastly over her shoulder. “Yes, indeed. As I told you over the phone, I came up for my play.”

  “The House of Pain.” She shook her head musingly. “A lovely title. Such a strange title for such a healthy-looking boy.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Philip said, rigorously holding his head steady, his gaze up.

  “It was so good of you to think of me for it,” Miss Gerry said, leaning forward even farther, her eyes liquid and grateful enough to project to the third row, balcony. “I’ve practically been in retirement for three years. I thought nobody even remembered Adele Gerry any more.”

  “Oh, no,” Philip said, gallantly. “I remembered you.” He saw that this was bad, but was sure that anything else he might add would be worse.

  “The Theatre Guild is going to do your play, Mr. Bloomer?” Miss Gerry asked fondly.

  “Oh, no. I didn’t say that. I said somebody I knew up there thought it might not be a bad idea to send it around, and since you’d had the play for two months �
��”

  Some of the interest fled from Miss Gerry’s deep eyes. “I haven’t a copy of your play, Mr. Bloomer. My director, Mr. Lawrence Wilkes, has it.” She smiled beautifully at him, although the wrinkles showed clearly then. “I was interested in seeing you. I like to keep an eye on the new blood of the theater.”

  “Thank you,” Philip mumbled, feeling somehow exalted. Miss Gerry beamed at him and he felt his eyes, unable to withstand the full glory of her glance, sinking to her bosom. “Mr. Wilkes,” he said loudly. “I’ve seen many of his plays. You were wonderful in his plays. He’s a wonderful director.”

  “He has his points,” Miss Gerry said coldly. “But he has limitations. Grave limitations. It is the tragedy of the American theater that there is no man operating in it today who does not suffer from grave limitations.”

  “Yes,” Philip said.

  “Tell me about your play, Mr. Bloomer. Tell me about the part you had in mind for me.” She recrossed her legs comfortably, as though preparing for a long session on the sofa.

  “Well,” Philip said, “it’s about a boarding house. A low, dreary, miserable boarding house with bad plumbing and poor devils who can’t pay the rent. That sort of thing.”

  Miss Gerry said nothing.

  “The presiding genius of this boarding house,” Philip went on, “is a slatternly, tyrannical, scheming, harsh woman. I modeled her on my aunt, who keeps a boarding house.”

  “How old is she?” Miss Gerry asked, her voice small and flat.

  “Who? My aunt?”

  “The woman in the play.”

  “Forty-five.” Philip got up and started to stride up and down the room as he talked of his play. “She’s continually snooping around, listening at keyholes, piecing together the tragedies of her boarders from overheard snatches, fighting with her family, fighting with …” He stopped. “Why, Miss Gerry,” he said. “Miss Gerry …”

  She was bent over on the couch and the tears were dropping slowly and bitterly from her eyes.

  “That man,” she wept, “that man …” She jumped up and swept across to the phone, dialed a number. Unheeded, the tears streamed down through the mascara, eye-shadow, rouge, powder, in dark channels. “That man,” she wept, “that man …”

  Philip backed instinctively against a wall between a table and a chest, his hands spread coldly out behind him. Silently he stood there, like a man awaiting an attack.

  “Lawrence!” she cried into the phone. “I’m glad you were home. There’s a young man up here and he’s offered me a part in his play.” The tears coursed bitterly down the dark channels on her cheeks. “Do you know what part it is? I’m going to tell you and then I’m going to throw the young man right the hell out of this hotel!”

  Philip cowered against the wall.

  “Keep quiet, Lawrence!” Miss Gerry was shouting. “I’ve listened to your smooth excuses long enough. A woman of forty-five,” she wept, her mouth close to the phone, “a bitter, slatternly, ugly, hateful boarding-house keeper who listens at keyholes and fights with her family.” Miss Gerry was half bent over in grief now, and she gripped the telephone desperately and clumsily in her two hands. Because her tears were too much for her, she listened and Philip heard a man’s voice talking quickly, but soothingly, over the phone.

  Finally, disregarding the urgent voice in the receiver, Miss Gerry stood straight. “Mr. Bloomer,” she said, her teeth closing savagely over the name, “please tell me why you thought of me for this rich and glamorous role.”

  Philip braced himself weakly against the wall between the chest and the table. “You see,” he said, his voice high and boyish and forlorn, “I saw you in two plays.”

  “Shut up, for the love of God!” Miss Gerry called into the phone. Then she looked up and with a cold smile, spoke to Philip. “What plays, Mr. Bloomer?”

  “Sun in the East,” Philip croaked, “and Take the Hindmost.”

  A new and deeper flood of tears formed in her dark eyes. “Lawrence,” she sobbed into the phone. “Do you know why he’s offering me this part? He saw me in two plays. Your two great successes. He saw me playing a hag of sixty in Sun in the East and he saw me playing the mother of a goddamned brood of Irish hoodlums in Take the Hindmost. You’ve ruined me, Lawrence, you’ve ruined me.”

  Philip slipped out of his niche against the wall and walked quickly over to the window and looked out. Twelve stories, his mind registered automatically.

  “Everybody’s seen me in those parts. Everybody! Now, whenever there’s a play with a mother, a crone in it, they say, ‘Call up Adele Gerry.’ I’m a woman in the full flush of my powers. I should be playing Candida, Hedda, Joan, and I’m everybody’s candidate for the hero’s old mother! Boarding-house keepers in children’s first efforts!”

  Philip winced, looking down at Madison Avenue.

  “Who did this to me?” Miss Gerry’s tones were full, round, tragic. “Who did it? Who cajoled, pleaded, begged, drove me into those two miserable plays? Lawrence Wilkes! Lawrence Wilkes can claim the credit for ruining the magnificent career of a great actress. The famous Lawrence Wilkes, who fooled me into playing a mother at the age of thirty-three!”

  Philip hunched his shoulders as the deep, famous voice crowded the room with sound.

  “And now you wonder,” even at the phone, her wide gesture of shoulder and arm was sharp with irony, “now you wonder why I won’t marry you. Send me flowers, send me books, send me tickets to the theater, write me letters telling me you don’t care if I go out with other men. From now on I’m going out with the entire garrison of Governor’s Island! I’ll eat dinner next to you with a different man every night! I hate you, I hate you, Larry, I hate you …”

  Her sobs finally conquered her. She let the phone drop heedlessly, walked slowly and with pain over to a deep chair and sank into it, damp, bedraggled, undone, like a sorrowing child.

  Philip breathed deeply and turned around. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely.

  Miss Gerry waved her hand wearily. “It’s not your fault. I’ve been getting this for three years. You’re the agent of events, that’s all.”

  “Thank you,” Philip said gratefully.

  “A young woman like me,” Miss Gerry moaned, looking like a little girl, miserable in the deep chair. “I’ll never get a decent part. Never. Never. Mothers! That man has done me in. Don’t ever get mixed up with that man. He’s an egotistic maniac. He would crucify his grandmother for a second-act curtain.” She wiped her eyes in a general smear of cosmetics. “He wants me to marry him.” She laughed horribly.

  “I’m so sorry,” Philip said, feeling finally, because that was all he could say, like a farm boy, a dairy-hand. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “He says go up and get your script,” Miss Gerry said. “He lives across the street in the Chatham. Just call up from the desk and he’ll bring it down.”

  “Thank you, Miss Gerry,” Philip said.

  “Come here,” she said, the tears departing. He walked slowly over to her and she pulled his head down to her bosom and kissed his forehead and held his ears with her two hands. “You’re a nice, clean, stupid boy,” she said. “I’m glad to see there’s a new crop springing up. Go.”

  Philip limped to the door, turned there, meaning to say something, saw Adele Gerry sitting in her chair, looking blankly at the floor, with her face a ruin of sorrow and mascara and age. Philip softly opened the door and softly closed it behind him.

  He went across to the street, breathing the cold air deeply, and called Lawrence Wilkes on the phone. Philip recognized Wilkes when he got out of the elevator with a copy of The House of Pain under his arm. Wilkes was neatly and beautifully dressed and had a hit running and had just been to a barber, but his face was worn and tortured and weary, like the faces of the people in the newsreels who have just escaped an air-raid, but who do not hope to escape the next.

  “Mr. Wilkes,” Philip said softly.

  Wilkes look at Philip and smiled and put his head forgivingly a
nd humorously to one side. “Young man,” he said, “in the theater you must learn one thing. Never tell an actress what type of part you think she can play.” And he gave Philip The House of Pain and turned and went back into the elevator. Philip watched the door close on his well-tailored, tortured back, then sprang out into the street and fled across town to the Theatre Guild.

  A Year to Learn

  the Language

  “La barbe,” Louise said, “how can you stand the stink?” She was sitting on the floor cross-legged, her bare feet sticking out of her blue jeans, her back against the bookcase. She had on the heavy black tortoise-shell glasses that she used for reading and she was eating miniature éclairs out of a little carton on the floor next to her as she turned the pages of her book. Louise was studying French literature at the Sorbonne for a year, but at the moment was reading Huckleberry Finn, in a French translation. French literature was depressing her, she said, and she yearned for a whiff of the Mississippi. She came from St. Louis and at parties she had been heard to say that the Mississippi was the Mother-Water of her life. Roberta wasn’t quite sure what this meant, but was secretly impressed by the statement, with its hint of mid-continent mysticism and the liquid boldness of its self-knowledge. Roberta, as far as she knew, had no Mother-Water in her life.

  Roberta was at the easel in the middle of the big, dark, cluttered room which she and Louise had shared since they had come to Paris eight months before. Roberta was working on a long thin canvas of Parisian shop windows, trying to overcome the influences of Chagall, Picasso, and Joan Miró, influences that overtook her in disconcerting waves at different periods of the month. She was only nineteen and she worried over her susceptibility to other styles and other people and tried to look at as few paintings as possible.

  Louise stood up with a long, swanlike movement, sucking éclair goo off her fingers, shaking her shiny black hair. She went over to the window and threw it open and took several loud, ostentatious breaths of the dank winter afternoon Paris air. “I fear for your health,” she said. “I’ll bet that if they took a survey, they’d discover that half the painters of history died from silicosis.”