Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  Hutt chuckled. “I’ll tell her that,” he said. “I’m having lunch with her this afternoon to celebrate. I expect it to be a very merry lunch. Because we really accomplished something last night. We really hurt you, all you soft-headed orators with your shady friends skulking behind you. All your wild-eyed, filthy immigrant friends whose families haven’t been here long enough to learn to speak the language without degrading it, all you misfits and spies and conspirators trying to drag their betters down to their own stinking level.” Hutt stood up. His face was very red now and his eyes were almost colorless and raging as he gave up all control over himself. “And don’t think I’m stopping here,” he whispered. “I’m going to drive everyone of you out of the industry, out of the city, out of the country, if I can. I’m going to tell you something. Three men put up the money to start Blueprint and I was one of the three, and I never made a better investment in my whole life. We’ll starve you out and we’ll raise the country against you, and we’ll hound you and defame you and we won’t stop until you’re all behind bars or swinging from trees, as you ought to be.”

  Archer sprang across the room and hit him. He only hit him once, because O’Neill grabbed him and held him.

  “Stop it, Clem!” O’Neill whispered. “Don’t be a God-damn fool.”

  Hutt didn’t do anything. He didn’t fall back. He didn’t even put his hand up to his face, which had grown pale, except for the mark high on the cheek where Archer’s clumsy blow had landed. It was the first time Archer had hit anybody since he was fifteen years old. He was ashamed of himself for the outburst and dissatisfied that it had been so ineffectual. “Let go,” he said thickly to O’Neill. “It’s OK.”

  Cautiously O’Neill released him. Hutt was staring at him, breathing heavily, his eyelids narrowed, as though his mind was racing over the possibility of doing further harm.

  “I’ll take you out of here,” O’Neill said. “Come on.”

  Archer walked slowly across the room toward the door, stepping on the newspapers that were strewn over the carpet. O’Neill held onto his elbow as they went past the desks, with the pretty, busy girls, the sound of typewriters, the fragrance of perfumes. In O’Neill’s office, Archer put on his coat in silence. It was still wet. He and O’Neill refused to look squarely at each other.

  “Everything,” O’Neill said after a moment, looking down at his shoes, “everything turns out to be a lot dirtier than anybody ever expected, doesn’t it?”

  Archer didn’t answer. There was a mirror on one wall and he went over and looked at his face. It was just his face. There was no sign of what he had gone through. Curiously, he was a little disappointed. He didn’t know what he had expected to find, but he felt that something should be different. He shrugged under the wet cloth of his coat.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve got to be going.”

  “I’ll give you a call,” O’Neill said. “We’ll go out for a drink.”

  “Sure.”

  The phone rang and O’Neill picked it up. “O’Neill speaking,” he said. He looked at Archer. “It’s for you,” he said. He handed Archer the phone.

  “Hello,” Archer said.

  “Daddy.” It was Jane’s voice, and she sounded frightened and hurried. “Is that you, Daddy?”

  “Yes, Jane,” Archer said. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m calling from the corner,” Jane said. “The phone in the house doesn’t work any more.”

  “Yes, Jane,” Archer said impatiently. “What do you want?”

  “You’d better come right home, Daddy,” said Jane. “Mother’s not feeling very well and she asked me to call you.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know exactly. She won’t tell me. She just said to call you. I think …” Jane’s voice broke a little and she hesitated. “I think it’s started. I think it’s labor … Gloria’s been in there and she says there’s some bleeding …”

  Archer tried to speak, but his mouth was dry and he couldn’t seem to get anything out.

  “Daddy,” Jane said, “are you still there?”

  “Listen, Jane,” Archer said, wetting his lips with his tongue. “When you hang up there, call the phone company and tell them we want the service connected immediately. Tell them it’s an emergency and they have to do it right away. Have you got that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then call the doctor and tell him to come right down.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “When you speak to the doctor ask him if there’s anything that you can do before he gets down,” Archer said. “Then go home and see if you can help your mother …”

  “Daddy …” Jane’s voice was hesitant and strange. “Something funny’s happening. Mother doesn’t want me in the house.”

  “What?” Archer asked incredulously.

  “She’s not angry at me or anything,” Jane said swiftly. “She just says she doesn’t want me around now. For this. She says this is private. Between you and her, she says. It’s awfully queer …” Archer could tell that Jane was struggling to keep from crying in the telephone booth. “Cathy Rooks invited me up to her place for the weekend and Mother made me promise I’d go. I didn’t know what to do. Mother was so—so determined. She said she wanted me out of the house before you came home. Everything’s so upset. What should I do, Daddy?”

  Archer sighed. “Darling,” he said wearily, “I guess you’d better do whatever your mother wants just now.”

  “Will you call me?” Jane asked. “Will you let me know when she wants to see me again?”

  “Of course.”

  Jane was frankly crying now, the anguish remote and mechanized over the wire. “Is it my fault, Daddy?” she sobbed. “Is this happening account of me?”

  “No,” Archer said. “Never think that. Now, listen, baby.” He was conscious of O’Neill staring at him, puzzled and apprehensive. “You go home,” Archer said into the phone, “and tell Mother I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. And tell her …” He hesitated. He wanted to give Jane a message that would tide Kitty over the next quarter hour, a word, two words, a sentence that would carry reassurance, love, confidence. Jane waited at the other end of the line, but no words came. “Just tell her,” Archer said lamely, “not to worry. I’ll be right home.”

  He hung up. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said. He started out of the office toward the elevators. O’Neill trailed beside him.

  “What’s the matter, Clem?” O’Neill asked.

  “Kitty. It looks as though labor may have begun already.” Archer rang for the elevator.

  “Oh, Christ,” O’Neill said. “Wait a second. I’ll get my coat and go down with you.”

  “Thanks,” Archer said. “It’s not necessary. I’ll be able to handle it.”

  O’Neill hesitated. “Will you call me if you need anything?” he asked.

  Archer looked gravely at him. Then he said something he was going to regret for a long time. “Just what do you mean by anything?” he asked.

  O’Neill took a step back. Then the elevator came and Archer got in and the door slid shut, blotting out O’Neill’s baffled, shamed, rejected face.

  26

  HE SAT IN THE AMBULANCE, GOING UPTOWN. IT WAS DARK BY NOW. Kitty had said she was feeling better when Archer got home from O’Neill’s office, and the bleeding hadn’t been bad until about six o’clock. The doctor, who hadn’t been able to come in person, had told Archer over the phone that it probably was only false labor and merely to keep Kitty quiet and give her a couple of sleeping pills. But then the bleeding had begun again, and regular pains, although not too severe and not too closely spaced, and Archer had called for the ambulance and phoned the doctor’s office (he was still out) and left word, rather roughly, that they were going to the hospital immediately and that he wanted the doctor to put in an appearance in the next half-hour.

  The interior of the ambulance was dim, and Kitty was almost buried under the blankets: The two large, gentle att
endants had wrapped her head in a wool scarf, so that only the pale small glimmer of her face, occasionally reflecting the lights of a shop window, could be seen. Archer remembered a black puppy he had had when he was ten years old. His mother, who was a fanatic on the subject of cleanliness, whether for small boys or small dogs, used to wash the puppy in the tub, then wrap him in towels and old blankets, leaving only his mournful, soap-betrayed muzzle sticking out, and put him on a chair to dry. The puppy, Archer remembered, had had distemper later in the summer and had to be killed.

  “Really, Clement,” Kitty said, her voice dreamy from the sleeping pills, “we didn’t have to go to the hospital. I feel fine. Really I do. And we didn’t have to take an ambulance. It’s so expensive and here’re so many nicer ways of spending the money.”

  “How do you feel, Kitty?”

  “Fine. Honest. A little sleepy, that’s all, only I don’t want to sleep. “Clement …”

  “Yes?”

  “Are we passing red lights?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s nice. I know how you always yearn to pass red lights. You’re so impatient.” She chuckled. “You always cheat a little, when you’re driving. You never quite wait for them to change. Did you lave dinner?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You can have dinner at the hospital. You can even have a drink. It’s a very fancy hospital. I inquired especially. They’ll even send up a Martini. Do you feel like a Martini?”

  “I think it’d be tempting fate to ask a hospital bartender to make a Martini,” Archer said.

  Kitty moved under the blankets and she closed her eyes and the lines of pain bit around her mouth. It took nearly a minute; then she was all right again.

  “You feel so important riding in an ambulance,” she said. “What’re the initials they used for big shots in the war?”

  “VIP,” Archer said. “Very Important Personage.”

  “VIP Kitty Archer,” she murmured. “Passing all the red lights.” She was silent for a moment and he thought she was falling asleep again. “Clement,” she said. “Yes?”

  “Is it still raining out?”

  “No. It’s turning cold.”

  “Did you ever ride in an ambulance before?”

  “No.”

  “VIP. You’re not worrying, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “There’s really no reason to worry. A lot of women go through this in the sixth month. A little bleeding, a few pains. Just a warning to take things easy. You mustn’t worry.”

  “I’m not at all worried.”

  “I’m going to hold on, you know,” Kitty said. “I’m absolutely sure.”

  “Of course.”

  “And it’s going to be a boy. I’ve told you that, haven’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve always wanted a son. You never said it, but I knew. We’ll start a whole new life with a son. Would you like to move to the country? Some place where there are a lot of fields and he can run around and not worry about traffic or about having his mother watch him all the time? I think it’s about time we moved to the country, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Archer said.

  “New York …” Kitty’s voice almost trailed away. “New York’s nice, but it’s sort of all used-up, isn’t it?”

  “Kitty, darling, why don’t you try to sleep? Then when you wake up you’ll …”

  “What street are we on, Clement?”

  Archer looked out the wide, clean window over Kitty’s head. “Sixty-seventh street.”

  “We’re going so slow. It’s taking so long.” There was the grimace of pain again, and the twitching under the blankets. She sighed once, then opened her eyes again. “Look away, Clement,” Kitty said. “Please. When that happens.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Archer said.

  They rode in silence for awhile. The driver wasn’t using the siren now and there was only the muted, careful hum of the tires in the ambulance, and the slight creaking of the jump seat on which Archer was sitting, near Kitty’s head.

  “You know what would be nice, Clement?”

  “What?”

  “If Jane would get married and come and live near us. In a house in the country. A nice man that we all could like,” Kitty murmured. “And we would have time to get to be friends again. There are so many things I never had time to tell her …”

  Archer closed his eyes momentarily. Jane had been gone when he got home that morning, and they hadn’t mentioned her name all day.

  “You don’t mind that I sent her away, do you, Clement?” Kitty asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “You understand, don’t you?” Kitty pleaded. “This is just between you and me. I—I didn’t want us to be—divided—at a time like this. It’s—it’s more like when we were young, this way, when you took me to the hospital when I had Jane—what kind of car was it we had then?”

  “An Essex,” Archer said. “A 1928 Essex.”

  “It worked out so well, then,” Kitty said, ramblingly. “It was so easy … And there was no family, nobody else, just you and me. For luck. Am I superstitious, darling?”

  Archer made himself smile at her. “Yes, dear,” he said.

  “Just you and me,” Kitty said. “The Essex had plaid seat covers. It smelled of apples, because we’d brought home a basket of apples from my mother’s place the week before.” She looked around her vaguely, her head moving uncertainly in its swathing of wool. “A 1950 ambulance,” she said, “going uptown. Oh, I give you so much trouble,” she whispered. “So damn much trouble.”

  “Sssh. Sssh.” Archer put out his hand and touched her forehead. It was hot and dry. They rode that way until they reached the hospital.

  “The chances are three to one that she’ll abort,” Dr. Graves was saying judiciously, making Kitty sound like a bomber turning home before reaching the target because of engine failure. Graves and Archer were walking slowly down the corridor after the doctor had examined Kitty. Graves hadn’t been able to come for almost two hours, but he had left word to have Kitty given morphine to quiet her. Unfortunately, the morphine had made Kitty vomit again and again, and the pains were coming more and more regularly now and with greater severity. “These things happen, Mr. Archer,” Graves said, professionally resigned. “There is always a certain irreducible percentage of cases.”

  “Why?” Archer asked. He didn’t like the plump, self-satisfied man and his complacence about making Kitty an irreducible percentage. “Why does it: happen?”

  Graves spread his soft, clean, delivery-room hands in an almost religious gesture of wonderment. “The way of Nature,” he said devoutly. “The mysterious; intention of God.”

  “If it’s all the same to you,” Archer said sharply, “I don’t like to hear about the mysterious intention of God from doctors. I prefer hearing about the certain remedies of science.”

  Graves looked at him obliquely, and Archer could almost sense the doctor pigeonholing him in, the category of nervous and irascible relatives of the patient who are likely to blame the physician, and who have to be treated delicately but with firmness. “Technically,” Graves said, his little mustache moving deliberately over the words, “there is no reason why labor should have been premature. Mrs. Archer is fundamentally healthy and normally formed. Of course, she is no longer young. … His glance was almost accusing, or as accusing as Dr. Graves; who had a polite and expensive practice and a large office on Park Avenue, would permit it to be. Somehow he made Archer feel as though wanting another child was a bestial and depraved desire for a man his age.

  “But one never knows,” Graves said. They were standing at the elevator now, and there was just the slightest rumor of polite impatience in Graves’s stance, as though there were many children who were delaying being born because he had to stand here and talk to Archer. “The emotional state has a great deal to do with it. Has Mrs. Archer been emotionally disturbed recently?”

  Now, what does he expec
t me to say to that? Archer thought. “Yes,” he said.

  Graves nodded. “The way I prefer, to look at it,” he said, well-rehearsed, “is, if it happens, it is probably all for the best. There is an imperfection perhaps, an improper development, an indication of future malfunction, that Nature, in her wisdom, tries to reject. That is not to say,” he added hastily, “that we will not do everything in our power to prolong the pregnancy. But if it happens …” He shrugged with plump resignation. “Perhaps in the long run it is something to be thankful for.”

  You be thankful, you scientific, pious old lady, Archer thought. It’s not your child, it’s not your wife, you don’t have to go home with her to the empty house.

  “What are the chances,” Archer asked, noticing that Graves was inching imperceptibly up to the elevator button, “what are the chances of the child’s surviving?”

  “If it is born tonight?”

  “If it’s born tonight.”

  Graves shook his head. “I don’t want to raise your hopes, Mr. Archer. It is my policy to be as candid as possible at all times. This is only the beginning of the sixth month, and it is really little more than an embryo at this stage, and most likely terribly small. Of course, there have been instances, but I would say the chances are a thousand to one. It will not really be viable, Mr. Archer.”

  The elevator door opened and a tall, blonde girl, whose time was obviously imminent, got out of the elevator with her husband. They were a handsome couple, both of them well dressed, and they were holding hands and smiling. They walked slowly down the corridor, the girl’s head proudly thrown back. She walked gracefully on long legs, even though she was very large, and the expression on her face was serene and confident.

  That’s the way it should be, Archer thought jealously. You should be young and beautiful and be absolutely certain that everything would go neatly, by the calendar, without terror or loss.

  “I have to go now,” Graves said. “I expect a delivery upstairs very soon. I’ll be in the hospital all night.” He moved plumply into the elevator, which had been waiting for him, and went off behind the silently closing door, to his place of business on the upper floor.