Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  “It was very good of you to come, Borden,” she said.

  “I have a confession to make,” Borden said. He looked uneasily around him, as though fearful of being overheard. “I did see you that afternoon, Vicky. When you smiled and I turned away. I’ve always felt foolish about it and guilty and I …”

  “What afternoon?” Victoria said. She turned and opened the lobby door.

  “You don’t remember …?” He stared at her, his eyes suspicious and searching.

  “What afternoon, Borden?” she repeated, standing with her hand on the doorknob.

  “I guess I was mistaken,” he said. “It isn’t important.” He smiled at her, with his almost-perfect imitation of boyishness, and kissed her lightly on the cheek, good-bye now, probably good-bye forever, and walked off, very trim and young-looking in his smart raincoat, with his blond hair glistening with rain.

  She went upstairs and unlocked the door. She threw off her hat and veil and walked aimlessly around the empty apartment. The apartment was nondescript. Nobody ever comes here, the apartment said, this is merely a place where two people once took shelter. Temporarily. Reduced now. To one.

  Without emotion, Victoria looked at a photograph of her husband in a silver frame. It had been taken more than ten years ago. It was a sober portrait, posed carefully in a studio, and her husband looked serious and responsible, the sort of man who gets elected, young, to the board of trustees of the university from which he was graduated. You could not imagine his ever wearing any of the clothes displayed in the window of a California shop called “Bottega del Mezzogiorno.”

  There was work laid out all over the desk, but she couldn’t get herself to sit down and finish it. The meeting with Borden had started too many memories. It was so unexpected that it had unsettled her in a way that her husband’s death, long awaited, had not.

  She went to the closet where she kept her files and pulled down a carton. The carton had “1953” written in large numerals on its label. She leafed through the pages until she came upon what she was looking for. It was a folder, neatly held together by clasps, with about twenty-five typewritten pages in it.

  She sat down in a chair near the window, which was still streaming with rain, and put on her glasses and started to read. It was the first time in at least ten years that she had even glanced at the folder.

  “From the Desert,” she read. “A short story by V. Simmons.”

  She made a little grimace and reached over and picked up a pencil and blacked out the V. Simmons. Then she settled back and started to read.

  Naturally, she read, I am not going to sign my real name to this. If the reader persists to the end, the reason will be plain to him.

  If I am ever successful in the attempt to become a writer, it will be quite easy for me to keep my identity hidden. I have never written anything before and in all the years since I have been married, I have put down in answer to all questionnaires and official requests, Occupation: Housewife. I am still making beds and cooking three meals a day and going into town twice a week to do the shopping and we have no neighbors and we have made no friends who might see the typewriter on my desk or the ream of cheap paper which I was sensible enough to buy in C—, the large city which is fifty miles away from where we live. I have taken the precaution, also, of renting a postal box in the same city under the pseudonym which I intend to use and all communications from publishers and editors will be delivered to me there. When I have to send any of the things I plan to write through the mails, I shall make the trip to the city and mail the manuscripts in an ordinary envelope at a time when the traffic in the post office is at its peak and a rather plain, modestly dressed, middle-aged woman standing momentarily before the outgoing slot in the wall can most probably pass unnoticed.

  All these measures must seem rather excessive to the reader, but until recently my husband and I have been leading our lives in an atmosphere of surveillance, of rumors of hidden microphones, intercepted mail and confidential reports of private conversations with friends. While I am sure the rumors were more lurid than the facts, there was never any means of discovering just how lurid they were and I have become accustomed to a permanent quiver of uneasiness. Even living as we do now, on the bare face of the desert, with no servants and not another house in sight, and no telephone for the curious, the malicious, or the inquiring to listen in on, I cannot rid myself of the posture of suspicion.

  Our habit of isolation has been accepted on strange terms in the town in which I do our shopping. My husband never goes into town and the people of the town know, of course, that we receive no visitors. Somehow, the shopkeepers, and the postmistress, who are my only points of contact with the town, have decided that my husband is suffering from consumption and has come here to take advantage of the dryness of the climate and the tranquillity of the desert. Naturally, we have said nothing to disabuse them. John, my husband (that is not his real name, of course), was never well known enough to have his name in the newspapers, and the events leading to his retirement were handled, largely by luck, with circumspection.

  My decision to try to write came slowly and from a variety of reasons. I found myself with a great deal of time on my hands, as the work of the house, which is a small and simple one, can be done in three or four hours a day. Since his arrival here, my husband has become less and less communicative and spends the greater part of his time reading in a corner of the patio, protected by the wall from the wind, or staring, for hours on end, at the mountains which rim our desert to the north and east. The question of money will begin to be of importance within the next year and I have reached the conclusion that my husband, at the age of forty-five, will never work again.

  When we first came here, I supposed that our retreat was only to be temporary, while my husband came to terms with his defeat and gathered his forces for an effort in a new direction. In the beginning he sent out several letters a week to old friends and acquaintances with the suggestion that, after a prolonged vacation of perhaps six months, he would be ready to work again. He understood that in the field of public service his usefulness was probably at an end, at least in the foreseeable future, but he felt that a man of his education and experience, especially abroad, could be of considerable value in a variety of private enterprises. The tone and quality of the responses to his letters, especially from men who had been his friends since his college days, proved disillusioning, although in this instance, as always, he showed nothing, on the surface, of his disappointment. For three months now he has not written a letter to anyone.

  My husband has never told me that he has given up hope but I know him too well to require direct statements from him. I spy on him. I read his letters. I covertly watch his expression every moment I am with him. When we eat a new dish I scan his face minutely for signs of approval. When we still had friends I could tell, almost to the second, when a friendship was beginning to bore him, and I would take steps immediately to bring the relationship painlessly to an end. In matters that are secret between a man and wife and which, as a writer, despite the present style, I do not intend to discuss, I have made myself a connoisseur of his pleasure. When he reads a book, I read it immediately after. I am a dossier of his likes and dislikes, his moods, his satisfactions. I do not do all this out of jealousy or a sick, female love of possession. I do it so that at all times I can amuse and interest him and I do it for him and not for myself and I do it out of gratitude.

  My husband is an extraordinary man, with an appearance that is studiedly ordinary. He wears the correct, unobtrusive clothes of his caste and he has his hair cut short and brushed straight back, although he has a long, bony face and a bold nose and the shortness of hair above it makes the proportions somehow unpleasing. Once, when he and I spent a vacation alone on an island in the Caribbean, he permitted his hair to grow and he developed a full, thick black moustache. Suddenly, his face assumed its proper proportions and character. With the deep tan that he acquired on the beach and on a small sailing v
essel that we rented, he looked like the photographs of the young men, dedicated and spirited, who go on expeditions to climb the Himalayas. But when the time came to return to his post, he shaved the moustache and clipped his hair, so that his face assumed once more the unremarkable expression and not quite harmonious proportions behind which he protects himself.

  His manner, like his appearance, is designed, too, for disguise rather than display. He is a snob who is unfailingly polite to his inferiors and carefully disinterested in the presence of people whom he admires. He is subject to fierce and sudden tempers which he controls, with an exhausting expense of will, by forcing himself, at the moment when he is under the greatest stress, to speak slightly more slowly and with a hesitant and lowered voice. He is perfectly confident of his intelligence and has a deep contempt for the powers of most of the men with whom he has had to work, but he has spent endless hours listening to their ramblings and pretending to take their proposals into consideration. He is a man tortured by ambition without limit and he has unfailingly refrained from using all the hundred expedients by which his less gifted colleagues have won advancement. Racked, as I know, by passion, he has hardly even reached for my hand in public or allowed himself even the most casual expression of interest in the presence of the beautiful women who frequented the society in which we moved for so long a time. Avid for the touch of destiny, he has not moved a step in its direction.

  This is the man who sits now day after day, reading in the silent desert sunlight, wearing, even here, the neat collar and tie and gray jacket of his working days, protected by the patio wall from the constant wind.

  If he wishes to remain here, alone with me, for the rest of his life, I am content. Since, situated as we are, there is no other way to earn money, and both our families having long since succumbed into the economic morass so that there is no help to be hoped for from them, I have taken to the typewriter. We do not need much to keep us going in this remote place and while I have had no experience in the field of letters I am encouraged by the dismal quality of the writing which is published daily in this country. Certainly, a person of education, and one who has been close to the center of important affairs, as I have for nearly twenty years, should, with such pitiful standards to meet, be able to sustain a modest existence on almost the barest level of literacy.

  I admit that I look forward to the experience with pleasure. I am a plain and vindictive woman who has had to remain silent in the company of fools and self-seekers for a long time and in the process of paying them off, I feel there should be profit both for me and whatever readers I may attract who have not been irremediably numbed by the floods of sentimentality, violence and hypocrisy which pour forth from our presses.

  Writers of the first class, I have read somewhere, are invariably men or women with an obsession. While I do not deceive myself about my merits or the grandeur of the heights I might ultimately reach, I share that one thing with them. I have an obsession. That obsession is my husband and it is of him that I shall write.

  My husband came of a family that, in another country or other times, might fairly be called aristocratic. The family fortune held out long enough so that he went to the proper schools and was graduated from the proper college, in the same class with a surprising number of men who have since done extremely well in business and in the government. Unsympathetic to commerce and springing from a family which has a long tradition of public office, my husband applied for the Foreign Service. This was at a time when the other departments of the government were being thrown open to hordes of noisy and unpleasant careerists, of doubtful origin, painful manners, and the most imperfect education. The Service, because of its rigid system of selection and its frank prejudice in favor of intellectual and conservative young men of good family, was the one enclave in a welter of shallow egalitarianism in which a gentleman might serve his country without compromise.

  My husband, who never spared himself when there was a question of work, was given one good post after another. He was never popular, but he was always respected and at the time he married me, four years after his first appointment, we both could reasonably suppose that in time he would rise to the most important positions in the Service. During the war he was given a mission of the utmost danger and delicacy, and performed it so well that he was told, personally, by the Secretary, that he was responsible for saving the lives of a considerable number of Americans.

  Just after the war, he was appointed to the Embassy at X—. (Forgive me for these old-fashioned symbols. At this moment in our country’s history candor is foolhardy, reprisals devastating.) I did not accompany my husband to X—. It was at that time that I found it necessary to undergo an operation which turned out to be not so simple as my doctor had hoped. A second operation was considered advisable, complications developed, and it was six months before I could join my husband. In those six months of living alone in a turbulent city, my husband became involved with the two people who, it turned out, were to destroy him. The first was Munder (the name, like all others I shall use, is an invention, of course), who at that time was making a brilliant record for himself as first secretary of the embassy. John and he had been friendly at college and the friendship was renewed and strengthened in the embassy, helped in great part by their recognition in each other of similar ambitions, equal devotion to their jobs, and complementary temperaments. The ambassador at that time was an amiable and lazy man who was pleased to turn over the real work of the embassy to his subordinates, and between them, Munder and my husband were, in an appreciable degree, responsible for the carrying-out of directives from Washington and the formulation of local policy. It was at that period that the Communists were profiting most, throughout Europe, from the post-armistice confusions, and the success of the Embassy at X—in tactfully shoring up a government favorable to the interests of the United States was in no small measure due to the efforts of Munder and my husband. In fact, it was because of this that some time later Munder was recalled to Washington, where he played, for several years, a leading part in the formulation of policy. His prominence, as it so often does, finally resulted in his downfall. When the time came to offer up a sacrifice to the exasperation and disappointments of the electorate, Munder, because of his earlier distinction, was treated in such a manner that he decided to resign. While they did not understand it at the time, his friends and aides in the Service were also marked for eventual degradation, or, what is almost as bad, stagnation in humiliatingly unimportant posts.

  The other person my husband became involved with was a woman. She was the wife of a diplomat from another country, a distinguished idiot who foolishly permitted himself to be sent off on distant missions for months at a time. She was that most dangerous of combinations—beautiful, talkative, and sentimental; and it was only a question of time before she blundered into a scandal. It was my husband’s misfortune that her luck ran out during his tenure as her lover. As it later turned out, it might just as well have been any one of three or four other gentlemen, all within the diplomatic community, which the lady favored exclusively for her activities.

  I knew, of course, almost from the beginning, although I was four thousand miles away, of what was going on. Friends, as they always do, saw to that. I will not pretend that I was either happy with the news or surprised by it. In marriages like mine, in which the partners are separated for months on end and the woman is, like me, rather drab and no longer young, it would take a fool to expect perfect fidelity from a passionate and attractive man. I do not know of a single marriage within the circle of my friends and acquaintances which has not required, at one point or another, a painful act of forgiveness on the part of one or both of the partners, to ensure the survival of the marriage. I had no intention of allowing the central foundations of my life to be laid in ruins for the fleeting pleasure of recrimination or to satisfy the busy hypocrisy of my friends. I did not hurry my convalescence, confident that when I appeared on the scene a workable modus vivendi would gradual
ly be achieved.

  Unhappily, when my husband told the lady of my impending arrival and announced to her that that would mean the end of their relationship, she made one of those half-hearted attempts at suicide with which silly and frivolous women try to prove to themselves and their lovers that they are not silly and frivolous. The lady telephoned my husband just after she took the pills, and was unconscious, in negligee, in her apartment, when he arrived. He did what was necessary and stayed with her at the hospital until he was assured by the doctors that she was out of danger. Luckily, the people at the hospital were civilized and sympathetic, and my husband managed, with a minimum of bribery, to keep the entire matter out of the newspapers. There was a wave of rumor, of course, in certain circles of the city, and there was no doubt a quite accurate estimate of the situation current for a week or two; but in Europe present scandal blends easily into centuries of anecdote, and when the lady appeared two weeks later, looking as pretty as ever, on her husband’s arm at a diplomatic reception, the event seemed safely in the past.

  My husband recounted the entire story to me on the first afternoon after my arrival. I listened and told him I would say no more about it and we have not mentioned the matter again to this day. I think I can honestly say that I have not permitted the incident to change, in the smallest particular, our relations with each other.

  It is at this point in my story that I begin to perceive some of the problems that a writer faces. To make understandable what has happened it has been necessary to explain, as fully as I have, the background and personality of my husband, the kind of marriage we enjoy, and the stages and accidents of his career. But none of these things has its proper meaning unless it is viewed in relationship to the climate in which he worked and in which we lived and the pressures to which he was subjected. A more skillful writer would no doubt manage to include as much information of this nature as was necessary in a well-contrived series of dramatic scenes, so that the reader, while being held in suspense and amused by the brisk conflict of personalities, would be brought, almost without his realizing it, adequately prepared, to the climax of the story. There are two reasons why I have not attempted to do this. In the first place, I find it beyond my still undeveloped powers. And secondly, in my reading, I have found, for my own tastes, that the writers who did this particular thing most deftly were the ones I finally could not stomach.