Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  “Last year,” Alice said suddenly, “it might have something to do with what happened last winter.”

  “What’s that?” Archer asked, puzzled.

  “I got a terrible letter. Printed. In pencil. All misspelled.”

  “What letter?” Archer tried to sound patient. “Try to remember everything you can, Alice.”

  “It was anonymous. I only read half of it and I threw it away,” Alice said. “I couldn’t bear to read it. It called me the most filthy names. You’d be surprised what people can send through the mails. It said why didn’t I go back to where I came from if I didn’t like it here.” Alice essayed a laugh. “I don’t know quite what they meant by that. My family’s lived in New York for over a hundred years. They threatened me.” She looked up at the ceiling, remembering, the sagging skin of her throat pulled tight. “ ‘We’re going to take care of you and your kind,’ it said, ‘soon. We are forming,’ it said, ‘and it won’t take long now. In Europe they shaved the heads of women like you, but you won’t get off just with a haircut.’ ”

  Archer closed his eyes, ashamed for the people he passed every day, unrecognizingly, on the street. “Why didn’t you show it to me?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t,” Alice said. “Some of the names they called me you just couldn’t show to anyone. I bought a new lock for the door and I had a chain put on.” She laughed nervously. “It was really nothing. Nothing happened. I even managed to forget about it until today.”

  “Have you any idea why that letter was sent to you?” Archer asked, thinking, Now we are entering another field, the field of the anonymous threat to impoverished widows. Live in the big city and expose yourself to all its cultural advantages.

  “Yes,” Alice said, surprisingly definite. “It was after that big meeting last winter, that peace meeting at the Waldorf. The one that had those Russian writers and composers …”

  “Were you there?” Archer asked incredulously.

  “Yes, I was.” Alice sounded defiant.

  “What the hell were you doing there?”

  “I was on the radio panel. I was supposed to make a speech, but I was too nervous and I got out of it. I was going to speak on the bad effects of the crime shows on children.”

  Hopeless, Archer thought, listening to the soft, defensive voice, absolutely hopeless.

  “You have no idea how evil they are,” Alice said earnestly. “Full of people being tortured and killed and hitting each other over the head. It’s the only thing I fight about with Ralph. He sits there, listening, getting jumpy and over-stimulated, when he should be out in the open air or doing his homework. I feel quite strongly about it,” she said primly, as though she were a little surprised at herself for permitting herself the luxury of feeling quite strongly about anything. “But then, when the time approached, I knew I could never manage to stand up in front of all those important people …” She laughed embarrassedly. “I said I had a headache.”

  “There were thousands of pickets around the hotel all the time,” Archer said, wonderingly. “Didn’t you realize you were liable to get into trouble?”

  “I saw those pickets. They looked like very low types. Very coarse and unreasonable,” Alice said, invincibly ladylike. “Just the kind to send a woman an unprintable anonymous letter.”

  “Was your name on the program?” Archer asked wearily.

  “Yes.” Alice started to get up. “I think I have it in the desk if you’d like to …”

  “Never mind. Never mind. Sit down.” He stared consideringly at Alice, as she subsided. At least he knew now why the magazine had included her in its list. It didn’t take much, he realized grimly. One undelivered speech on the effects of afternoon serials on the minds of growing boys … He shook his head, half in pity, half in exasperation. “How did you get mixed up in it, Alice?” he asked.

  “Frances Motherwell told me about it,” Alice said, “and asked me to appear in the radio section. She said it would focus the attention of the world on the necessity of avoiding a third world war.”

  Frances Motherwell, Archer thought bitterly, herself almost invulnerable, energetically supplying slogans and disaster to bereft ladies with low bank accounts.

  “You mustn’t be angry with me, Clement,” Alice said unhappily. “I knew a lot of people thought that there was something wrong with the Conference, and the papers kept saying it was a Communist trick. And, really, they didn’t seem to accomplish very much. But even if they accomplished just a tiny bit, even if it made people in Washington and Moscow just a fraction more unwilling to go to war, I had to go … I suppose a mother, especially if she only has one son, is kind of crazy on the subject of war. Ralph is fourteen. In four or five more years, he’ll be just the age … My sister, she’s older than I am, she lives in Chicago, she sent a son to the last one. He came back—but he was hit in the face, his chin was all shot away. They’ve operated on him ten times, but he still …” Alice stopped. “He refuses to go out. He refuses to see anyone. He sits in his room at the top of the house, all day long. You read the papers and every day they talk about being firm, about delivering ultimatums, about sending soldiers all over the world … They keep building new submarines, faster airplanes, rockets, bombs. You look at your son, fourteen years old, sitting in the front room, practicing the cello, and you think they’re preparing it for him, all those old men in Washington, all those generals, all those people on the newspapers. They’re preparing to have Ralph shot. Blown up. That’s what I think every time I read a general’s speech in the papers, every time I see new planes in the newsreels. When I get home from the movies I go into Ralph’s room and I look at him sleeping there and I think, ‘They want to kill him. They want to kill him.’ I’ll tell you something, Clement,” Alice said loudly, “if there was any place to go and I could scrape together the money, I’d take Ralph tomorrow. To the smallest island, the most backward country—and hide him there and stay there with him. Of course there’s no place to go. They’ve made sure of that.” There was a profound note of bitterness in Alice’s voice that Archer had never heard before. “So I did what I could. I was very brave and I went to a meeting, one afternoon, at the Waldorf Astoria, on Park Avenue,” she said with harsh sarcasm. “And I put a chain on my door.”

  “Alice, darling,” Archer said gently, “did it ever occur to you that you were being used?”

  “Good,” Alice said. “They can use me all they want if it means there’s not going to be a war.”

  “The Communists are for peace today,” Archer said. “Tomorrow they’re just as likely to be for war.”

  “All right,” Alice said, stonily. “Tomorrow I won’t let them use me. Today I will.”

  Archer shrugged. “OK,” he said. “I know how you feel.” He took his pipe from his pocket and filled it from his pouch.

  “You think I’m wrong, don’t you, Clement?” Alice asked, her voice pleading and hesitant again.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Archer said, feeling that the question was too complex to answer in one afternoon. He stood up, holding the pipe in his hand. “I have to go now,” he said.

  Alice stood too. “Clement,” she said, “what will I do if they won’t let me work? How will I live? How will Ralph live?” She looked haggard and old, standing close to him, peering wildly into his eyes, her curls silly and out of place over her drawn face.

  “Don’t worry,” Archer said, because he had to say something, but knowing as he said it that it was foolish.

  “Are you going to let them fire me, Clement?” Her hands clutched fiercely at his shoulders. Her hands were large and very strong and he could feel the nails biting in through the cloth.

  Archer took a deep breath. “I’m on your side, Alice,” he said. “I want you to know that.”

  “Are you going to let them fire me?” Alice asked, ignoring his answer.

  Archer put his arms around her. She was shivering, and he could feel the small, sweeping spasms going through her body. She wasn’t crying.
Her body was thick and corseted and the material of the dress felt sleazy under his hands.

  “Clement,” she whispered despairingly, “are you going to let them fire me?”

  Archer kissed her cheek, holding her close. Her skin felt harsh against his lips. “No,” he said. “I promise you.”

  She clutched him convulsively for a second. Then she pulled away. She still wasn’t crying. Her lips were quivering, but there were no tears.

  “Some day,” she said, “I’m going to tell you how grateful I am, Clement.” She touched the pipe in his hand. “I’m so glad,” she said, “you still like this pipe.”

  “What?” Archer began, looking down at the pipe. It was an old one that he had picked off his desk that morning because it had no ashes in it from the night before. Then he remembered, Alice had given it to him as a gift after he had given her a job on his first program, back in the years of the war. It was a straight-grain briar and he knew it must have been very expensive. It was a handsome pipe, but for some reason it never drew well and he rarely smoked it. “Yes,” he said, “it’s one of my favorites.”

  11

  A PLUMP, FIFTY-YEAR-OLD WOMAN IN SHORTS WAS STANDING ON HER head on a mat in a corner, her reversed face very red, but her ankles neatly together and her toes expertly pointed. Mr. Morris, the bank-teller, was sitting in the Buddha position, his thin legs wound around each other. He had an intent expression on his face and he was trying to make his stomach touch his backbone. Archer was lying on his back, working on his breathing, looking up at Mrs. Creighton, who was standing above him, shaking her head.

  “Your thoughts are congested, Mr. Archer,” Mrs. Creighton said. “Your lungs are tense. You are denying yourself the full beauty of oxygen. You are not thinking with your whole soul about breathing.”

  Mrs. Creighton was an English lady who had lived in India a long time ago. Now she conducted classes in Yogi exercises on Fifty-seventh Street. She was over sixty and she had the face of an exhausted athlete, but her body was as slender and supple as a girl’s. Gliding energetically around the city in smart dresses that she bought in the debutante sections of the department stores, she was a glowing advertisement for her system of physical discipline, and her classes were full of ladies who thought they were being conquered by age and by men who had been told by their doctors to give up smoking. There were rumors that she practiced strange religious rites in the room back of her studio and that she intended to retire to the Himalayas at the age of seventy, to achieve oneness with the infinite, but in her day-to-day career she behaved more like a gymnasium instructor than a priestess, and, in fact, reminded Archer of Horace Samson, the football coach at his old college, although Samson rarely used the word “soul” when complaining about the failure of an off-tackle play. Archer had heard about her at a party several years before. It had been during the trying period in his life, when he was suffering badly from insomnia and was ready to try any remedy to defeat the looming threat of Seconal. He had met a man whom he knew slightly, and who had been unhealthily fat, with a bad complexion and a stertorous, shallow, way of breathing. But in the period of three months, the man had lost at least twenty pounds, had achieved a smooth, rosy complexion, and had learned to breathe quietly and deeply.

  “It was a question of my bowels,” the man had said earnestly, drinking celery juice, staring disapprovingly at a trayful of canapés. “The center of feeling. Without knowing it, I was being shaken constantly by secret spasms. My body was controlling me, rather than the other way around. Then I went to Mrs. Creighton. I stand on my head fifteen minutes a day now, aside from the other exercises. Now look at me. I’ve had to get an entire new wardrobe of suits,” he said with mournful pride. “My bowels,” he said profoundly, “are now my servant.”

  Feeling a little silly, Archer had gone to Mrs. Creighton’s studio. He had never approached the holy reverence of the man with the bowels, and he did not drink celery juice, but he found, after going two or three times a week for a month, that he was beginning to sleep better. Occasionally, when he was feeling ambitious, he did some of the simpler exercises on a rug at home.

  Today, after the session with Alice, he had felt that a workout would help him. It took a great deal of concentration even to breathe to Mrs. Creighton’s satisfaction, and there was no time to reflect on other matters. “Breathing,” as Mrs. Creighton often put it, “is the first function in living. While you’re here you must learn to devote all your attention to it.”

  So Archer lay on the mat in a sweatsuit, devoting all his attention to breathing.

  “No,” Mrs. Creighton said, critically, peering down at him like a horse-trainer. “Not good. Be fluid. Feel like a wave. Feel limitless …”

  Maybe they can feel limitless in India, Archer thought, trying not to smile, but a man has his work cut out for him feeling like a wave on Fifty-seventh Street.

  “Mr. Archer, you are retrogressing,” Mrs. Creighton said in her high, English voice, that sounded like teacups being washed in the pantry. “Your concentration has become faulty. You are divided, and division is the parent of tension and tension is the father of disease.”

  Mrs. Creighton glided frostily over to the chubby woman who was standing on her head and began to show her how to bend backwards in one sinuous, easy movement, so that she could touch the mat with the back of her head. Archer lay on his own mat, doggedly trying to be undivided, trying to forget everything but breathing. In the studio upstairs, which was used by a voice teacher, a contralto was working on scales, the notes liquid and diminishing. The tone of the voice reminded Archer of Alice Weller’s way of speaking and it became harder to combat division as he listened.

  Later, as he was dressing after his shower, sitting on a stool next to Mr. Morris, who was methodically putting on long woolen underwear, Archer felt better. The exercise and the cold water had made his skin glow, and he felt younger and more robust as he stood in front of the mirror buttoning his collar and adjusting his necktie. In the mirror, he saw Mr. Morris watching him soberly, shoe in hand. Mr. Morris was a small, sandy man who kept his rimless glasses on even when he was standing on his head. At first glance, he seemed completely innocuous, the sort of man whose name you never remember, although you see him once a week for years behind the gilded grating neatly entering items in your bankbook. But when you looked at Mr. Morris closely, you saw that a wild, harsh fanaticism lurked behind the shine of his glasses. His eyes were dark and full of judgment. Just the sort of man, Archer thought as he pushed the knot of the tie up against his collar, who surprises everybody one day by walking off with fifty thousand dollars of the bank’s money and somebody else’s wife.

  “Mr. Archer,” Morris said, “may I take a liberty?”

  “Of course.” Archer turned and nodded pleasantly to the man in the long underwear.

  “I’ve been watching you,” Morris said, “and you ought to lose twenty pounds.”

  “Yes?” Archer said, displeased with the remark, since he did not feel particularly obese. “You think I’m fat?”

  “You are carrying excess weight,” Morris said. He bent down and put on his shoe. It was made of dark canvas and had a gum sole, like the shoes that are sold to yachtsmen. “You are over-fleshed.”

  “Perhaps,” Archer said resentfully, putting on his coat and not feeling over-fleshed.

  “You eat too much,” Mr. Morris said accusingly. “You have too much energy.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Very bad. Excess energy turns the spirit away from contemplation, from the spiritual to the practical, from reflection toward action. I myself eat one meal a day. I allow myself to grow hungry and weak in the flesh to reach satisfaction and strength in the spirit.” Mr. Morris nodded soberly as he stood up and put on his shirt. “I used to eat heavily, five of six times a day. I weighed twenty-eight pounds more than I do now. I behaved like all the other barbarians in the streets.”

  “Everyone to his taste,” Archer said with false good humor, think
ing, Maybe I just ought to join the YMCA and get my exercise there, without lectures.

  “And I don’t eat meat,” Mr. Morris said accusingly. “I eat fruits, nuts and raw vegetables. I do not eat eggs or drink milk, either. I do not live off the flesh of my fellow creatures.”

  I wonder if the people at the bank know about this fellow, Archer thought, as he smiled fixedly at Mr. Morris.

  “Meat eating,” Mr. Morris said, putting on his trousers, buttoning them with meticulous, small movements of his fingers, “is at the root of the terror of civilization. It is only to be expected. If we kill daily the harmless and innocent, creatures of the field and waters, in person or by proxy, if we get our pleasure from death, if we satisfy our appetites with living agony, what can that do to our moral natures?”

  “I suppose,” Archer said agreeably, “a case could be made for that argument.”

  “We become the enemy of all living things,” Mr. Morris went on. “The birds dart away at our approach, the deer leaps into the thicket when he sniffs us on the wind. We are the villains in the system of nature, the upsetting element in all of the Infinite’s calculation, the unstable and bloody x in God’s arithmetic. We represent tragedy and disorder on the stage of life.”

  “You certainly have a lot of arguments on your side there,” Archer said placatingly, putting on his coat and showing as plainly as he could without being rude that he was on the verge of leaving.

  “It is the inevitable next step,” Mr. Morris said, in his mournful piercing voice, “to go from killing cattle and fowl and swimming things to killing human beings. The moral restraint is blunted by the act, and the step from the smaller game to the largest game is taken without hesitation, almost without notice. If daily we wage war against the dumb flesh of billions of animals, for the transitory pleasure of our palates, how easy it is to turn our ferocity against our fellows-men and kill them for even more powerful pleasures. The ruins of Berlin and London, Mr. Archer,” Mr. Morris said, his eyes glittering madly behind his glasses, “are the only natural result of our stockyards and slaughterhouses. The full cemeteries of the war dead are the final testimony to our shameful indulgence in table delicacies.”