Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  “I thought a long time before I bought this hat,” Lenore said, flushing because he’d noticed it.

  “Har-riet!” The governess next door screamed in the alley to the next-door neighbor’s little girl. “Harriet, get away from there this minute!”

  Andrew turned over on his stomach on the couch and put a pillow over his head. “Have you got any ideas for Ronnie Cook and His Friends for tomorrow?” he asked Lenore.

  “No. Have you?”

  “No.” He pulled the pillow tight around his head.

  “You’ll get them by tomorrow,” Lenore said. “You always do.”

  “Yeah,” said Andrew.

  “You need a vacation,” Lenore said.

  “Get out of here.”

  “Good-bye,” Lenore started out. “Get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Anything you say.”

  Andrew watched her with one eye as she went off the porch on which he worked and through the living room and dining room, toward the stairs. She had nice legs. You were always surprised when a girl with a face like that had nice legs. But she had hair on her legs. She was not a lucky girl. “Oh, no,” Andrew said as the door closed behind her, “you are not a lucky girl.”

  He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The sun came in through the open windows and the curtains blew softly over his head and the sun was warm and comforting on his closed eyes. Across the street, on the public athletic field, four boys were shagging flies. There would be the neat pleasant crack of the bat and a long time later the smack of the ball in the fielder’s glove. The tall trees outside, as old as Brooklyn, rustled a little from time to time as little spurts of wind swept across the baseball field.

  “Harriet!” the governess called. “Stop that or I will make you stand by yourself in the corner all afternoon! Harriet! I demand you to stop it!” The governess was French. She had the only unpleasant French accent Andrew had ever heard.

  The little girl started to cry, “Mamma! Mamma! Mamma, she’s going to hit me!” The little girl hated the governess and the governess hated the little girl, and they continually reported each other to the little girl’s mother. “Mamma!”

  “You are a little liar,” the governess screamed. “You will grow up, and you will be a liar all your life. There will be no hope for you.”

  “Mamma!” wailed the little girl.

  They went inside the house and it was quiet again.

  “Charlie,” one of the boys on the baseball field yelled, “hit it to me, Charlie!”

  The telephone rang, four times, and then Andrew heard his mother talking into it. She came onto the porch.

  “It’s a man from the bank,” she said. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “You should’ve told him I wasn’t home,” Andrew said.

  “But you are home,” his mother said. “How was I to know that …?”

  “You’re right.” Andrew swung his legs over and sat up. “You’re perfectly right.”

  He went into the dining room, to the telephone, and talked to the man at the bank.

  “You’re a hundred and eleven dollars overdrawn,” said the man at the bank.

  Andrew squinted at his mother, sitting across the room, on a straight chair, with her arms folded in her lap, her head turned just a little, so as not to miss anything.

  “I thought I had about four hundred dollars in the bank,” Andrew said into the phone.

  “You are a hundred and eleven dollars overdrawn,” said the man at the bank.

  Andrew sighed. “I’ll check it.” He put the phone down.

  “What’s the matter?” his mother asked.

  “I’m a hundred and eleven dollars overdrawn,” he said.

  “That’s shameful,” his mother said. “You ought to be more methodical.”

  “Yes.” Andrew started back to the porch.

  “You’re awfully careless.” His mother followed him. “You really ought to keep track of your money.”

  “Yes.” Andrew sat down on the couch.

  “Give me a kiss,” his mother said.

  “Why?”

  “No particular reason.” She laughed.

  “O.K.” He kissed her and she held him for a moment. He dropped down on the couch. She ran her finger under his eye.

  “You’ve got rings under your eyes,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  She kissed him again and went to the rear of the house. He closed his eyes. From the rear of the house came the sound of the vacuum cleaner. Andrew felt his muscles getting stiff in protest against the vacuum cleaner. He got up and went to her bedroom, where she was running the machine back and forth under the bed. She was down on one knee and was bent over, looking under the bed.

  “Hey!” Andrew yelled. “Hey, Mom!”

  She turned off the machine and looked up at him. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m trying to sleep,” he said.

  “Well, why don’t you sleep?”

  “The vacuum cleaner. It’s shaking the house.”

  His mother stood up, her face setting into stern lines. “I’ve got to clean the house, don’t I?”

  “Why do you have to clean the house while I’m trying to sleep?”

  His mother bent down again. “I can’t use it while you’re working. I can’t use it while you’re reading. I can’t use it until ten o’clock in the morning because you’re sleeping.” She started the machine. “When am I supposed to clean the house?” she called over the noise of the cleaner. “Why don’t you sleep at night like everybody else?” And she put her head down low and vigorously ran the machine back and forth.

  Andrew watched her for a moment. No arguments came to him. The sound of the cleaner so close to him made his nerves jump. He went out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  The telephone was ringing and he picked it up and said, “Hello.”

  “Ahndrew?” his agent’s voice asked. His agent was from Brooklyn, too, but he had a very broad A, with which he impressed actors and sponsors.

  “Yes, this is Ahndrew.” Andrew always made this straight-faced joke with his agent, but the agent never seemed to catch on. “You didn’t have to call. The Dusty Blades scripts are all through. You’ll get them tomorrow.”

  “I called about something else, Ahndrew,” his agent said, his voice very smooth and influential on the phone. “The complaints’re piling up on the Blades scripts. They’re as slow as gum. Nothing ever happens. Ahndrew, you’re not writing for the Atlantic Monthly.”

  “I know I’m not writing for the Atlantic Monthly.”

  “I think you’ve rather run out of material,” his agent said lightly, soothingly. “I think perhaps you ought to take a little vacation from the Blades scripts.”

  “Go to hell, Herman,” Andrew said, knowing that Herman had found somebody to do the scripts more cheaply for him.

  “That’s hardly the way to talk, Ahndrew,” Herman said, his voice still smooth, but hurt. “After all, I have to stand in the studio and listen to the complaints.”

  “Sad, Herman,” Andrew said. “That’s a sad picture,” and hung up.

  He rubbed the back of his neck reflectively, feeling again the little lump behind his ear.

  He went into his own room and sat at his desk looking blankly at the notes for his play that lay, neatly piled, growing older, on one side. He took out his checkbook and his last month’s vouchers and arranged them in front of him.

  “One hundred and eleven dollars,” he murmured, as he checked back and added and subtracted, his eyes smarting from the strain, his hands shaking a little because the vacuum cleaner was still going in his mother’s room. Out on the athletic field more boys had arrived and formed an infield and were throwing the ball around the bases and yelling at each other.

  Dr. Chalmers, seventy-five dollars. That was for his mother and her stomach.

  Eighty dollars rent. The roof over his head equaled two Ronnie Cook’s and His Friends. Five thousand words for rent.

&nbs
p; Buddy was in the hands of Flacker. Flacker could torture him for six pages. Then you could have Dusty Blades speeding to the rescue with Sam, by boat, and the boat could spring a leak because the driver was in Flacker’s pay, and there could be a fight for the next six pages. The driver could have a gun. You could use it, but it wouldn’t be liked, because you’d done at least four like it already.

  Furniture, and a hundred and thirty-seven dollars. His mother had always wanted a good dining-room table. She didn’t have a maid, she said, so he ought to get her a dining-room table. How many words for a dining-room table?

  “Come on, Baby, make it two,” the second baseman out on the field was yelling. “Double ’em up!”

  Andrew felt like picking up his old glove and going out there and joining them. When he was still in college he used to go out on a Saturday at ten o’clock in the morning and shag flies and jump around the infield and run and run all day, playing in pickup games until it got too dark to see. He was always tired now and even when he played tennis he didn’t move his feet right, because he was tired, and hit flat-footed and wild.

  Spain, one hundred dollars. Oh, Lord.

  A hundred and fifty to his father, to meet his father’s payroll. His father had nine people on his payroll, making little tin gadgets that his father tried to sell to the dime stores, and at the end of every month Andrew had to meet the payroll. His father always gravely made out a note to him.

  Flacker is about to kill Buddy out of anger and desperation. In bursts Dusty, alone. Sam is hurt. On the way to the hospital. Buddy is spirited away a moment before Dusty arrives. Flacker, very smooth and oily. Confrontation. “Where is Buddy, Flacker?” “You mean the little lad?” “I mean the little lad, Flacker!”

  Fifty dollars to Dorothy’s piano teacher. His sister. Another plain girl. She might as well learn how to play the piano. Then one day they’d come to him and say, “Dorothy is ready for her debut. All we’re asking you to do is rent Town Hall for a Wednesday evening. Just advance the money.” She’d never get married. She was too smart for the men who would want her and too plain for the men she’d want herself. She bought her dresses in Saks. He would have to support, for life, a sister who would only buy her dresses in Saks and pay her piano teacher fifty dollars a month every month. She was only twenty-four, she would have a normal life expectancy of at least forty years, twelve times forty, plus dresses at Saks and Town Hall from time to time …

  His father’s teeth—ninety dollars. The money it cost to keep a man going in his losing fight against age.

  The automobile. Nine hundred dollars. A nine-hundred-dollar check looked very austere and impressive, like a penal institution. He was going to go off in the automobile, find a place in the mountains, write a play. Only he could never get himself far enough ahead on Dusty Blades and Ronnie Cook and His Friends. Twenty thousand words a week, each week, recurring like Sunday on the calendar. How many words was Hamlet? Thirty, thirty-five thousand?

  Twenty-three dollars to Best’s. That was Martha’s sweater for her birthday. “Either you say yes or no,” Martha said Saturday night. “I want to get married and I’ve waited long enough.” If you married you paid rent in two places, light, gas, telephone twice, and you bought stockings, dresses, toothpaste, medical attention, for your wife.

  Flacker plays with something in his pocket. Dusty’s hand shoots out, grabs his wrist, pulls his hand out. Buddy’s little penknife, which Dusty had given him for a birthday present, is in Flacker’s hand. “Flacker, tell me where Buddy Jones is, or I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” A gong rings. Flacker has stepped on an alarm. Doors open and the room fills with his henchmen.

  Twenty dollars to Macy’s for books. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought. How does Dusty Blades fit into the Main Currents of American Thought?

  Ten dollars to Dr. Farber. “I don’t sleep at night. Can you help me?”

  “Do you drink coffee?”

  “I drink one cup of coffee in the morning. That’s all.”

  Pills, to be taken before retiring. Ten dollars. We ransom our lives from doctors’ hands.

  If you marry, you take an apartment downtown because it’s silly to live in Brooklyn this way; and you buy furniture, four rooms full of furniture, beds, chairs, dishrags, relatives. Martha’s family was poor and getting no younger and finally there would be three families, with rent and clothes and doctors and funerals.

  Andrew got up and opened the closet door. In it, stacked in files, were the scripts he had written in the last four years. They stretched from one end of a wide closet across to another, bridge from one wall to another of a million words. Four years’ work.

  Next script. The henchmen close in on Dusty. He hears the sounds of Buddy screaming in the next room …

  How many years more?

  The vacuum cleaner roared.

  Martha was Jewish. That meant you’d have to lie your way into some hotels, if you went at all, and you never could escape from one particular meanness of the world around you; and when the bad time came there you’d be, adrift on that dangerous sea.

  He sat down at his desk. One hundred dollars again to Spain. Barcelona had fallen and the long dusty lines were beating their way to the French border with the planes over them, and out of a sense of guilt at not being on a dusty road, yourself, bloody-footed and in fear of death, you gave a hundred dollars, feeling at the same time that it was too much and nothing you ever gave could be enough. Three-and-a-third The Adventures of Dusty Blades to the dead and dying of Spain.

  The world loads you day by day with new burdens that increase on your shoulders. Lift a pound and you find you’re carrying a ton. “Marry me,” she says, “marry me.” Then what does Dusty do? What the hell can he do that he hasn’t done before? For five afternoons a week now, for a year, Dusty has been in Flacker’s hands, or the hands of somebody else who is Flacker but has another name, and each time he has escaped. How now?

  The vacuum roared in the hallway outside his room.

  “Mom!” he yelled. “Please turn that thing off!”

  “What did you say?” his mother called.

  “Nothing.”

  He added up the bank balances. His figures showed that he was four hundred and twelve dollars overdrawn instead of one hundred and eleven dollars, as the bank said. He didn’t feel like adding the figures over. He put the vouchers and the bank’s sheet into an envelope for his income-tax returns.

  “Hit it out, Charlie!” a boy called on the field. “Make it a fast one!”

  Andrew felt like going out and playing with them. He changed his clothes and put on a pair of old spikes that were lying in the back of the closet. His old pants were tight on him. Fat. If he ever let go, if anything happened and he couldn’t exercise, he’d blow up like a house, if he got sick and had to lie in bed and convalesce … Maybe Dusty has a knife in a holster up his sleeve … How to plant that? The rent, the food, the piano teacher, the people at Saks who sold his sister dresses, the nimble girls who painted the tin gadgets in his father’s shop, the teeth in his father’s mouth, the doctors, the doctors, all living on the words that would have to come out of his head. See here, Flacker, I know what you’re up to. Business: Sound of a shot. A groan. Hurry, before the train gets to the crossing! Look! He’s gaining on us! Hurry! will he make it? Will Dusty Blades head off the desperate gang of counterfeiters and murderers in the race for the yacht? Will I be able to keep it up? The years, the years ahead … You grow fat and the lines become permanent under your eyes and you drink too much and you pay more to the doctors because death is nearer and there is no stop, no vacation from life, in no year can you say, “I want to sit this one out, kindly excuse me.”

  His mother opened the door. “Martha’s on the phone.”

  Andrew clattered out in his spiked shoes, holding the old, torn fielder’s glove. He closed the door to the dining room to show his mother this was going to be a private conversation.

  “Hello,” he said. “Yes.”
He listened gravely. “No,” he said. “I guess not. Good-bye. Good luck, Martha.”

  He stood looking at the phone. His mother came in and he raised his head and started down the steps.

  “Andrew,” she said, “I want to ask you something.”

  “What?”

  “Could you spare fifty dollars, Andrew?”

  “Oh, God!”

  “It’s important. You know I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important. It’s for Dorothy.”

  “What does she need it for?”

  “She’s going to a party, a very important party, a lot of very big people’re going to be there and she’s sure they’ll ask her to play.…”

  “Do the invitations cost fifty dollars apiece?” Andrew kicked the top step and a little piece of dried mud fell off the spiked shoes.

  “No, Andrew.” His mother was talking in her asking-for-money voice. “It’s for a dress. She can’t go without a new dress, she says. There’s a man there she’s after.”

  “She won’t get him, dress or no dress,” Andrew said. “Your daughter’s a very plain girl.”

  “I know,” his mother’s hands waved a little, helpless and sad. “But it’s better if she at least does the best she can. I feel sorry for her, Andrew …”

  “Everybody comes to me!” Andrew yelled, his voice suddenly high. “Nobody leaves me alone! Not for a minute!”

  He was crying now and he turned to hide it from his mother. She looked at him, surprised, shaking her head. She put her arms around him. “Just do what you want to, Andrew, that’s all. Don’t do anything you don’t want to do.”

  “Yeah,” Andrew said. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I’ll give you the money. I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  “Don’t give it to me if you don’t want to, Andrew.” His mother was saying this honestly, believing it.