Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  “I believe it,” Enders said sincerely, noting that half the bottle was already gone.

  “That’s why I’m here now,” she said. She walked beautifully around the small, flaky-walled room, her hands running sorrowfully over the warped bureau, the painted bedstead. “That’s why I’m here now.” Her voice was faraway and echoing, hoarse with whisky and regret. “I’m very much in demand, you know. I’ve stopped shows for ten minutes at a time. They wouldn’t let me get off the stage. Musicals that cost one hundred and fifty thousand to ring the curtain up. That’s why I’m here now,” she said mysteriously, and drained her glass. She threw herself on the bed next to Enders, stared moodily through almost closed eyes, at the stained and beaten ceiling. “The Shuberts’re putting on a musical. They want me for it. Rehearsals are on Fifty-second Street, so I thought I’d move close by for the time being.” She sat up, silently reached for the bottle, poured with the fixed expression, brooding and infatuate, which she reserved for the distillers’ product. Enders, too full for words, sitting on the same bed with a woman who looked like Greta Garbo, who had stopped musical shows with specialty dancing from coast to coast, who got drunk with the assured yet ferocious grace of a young society matron, watched her every move, with hope, admiration, growing passion.

  “You might ask,” Miss Zelinka said, “what is a person like myself doing in a rat-hole like this.” She waited, but Enders merely gulped silently at his whisky. She chuckled and patted his hand. “You’re a nice boy. Iowa, you said? You come from Iowa?”

  “Iowa.”

  “Corn,” Miss Zelinka said. “That’s what they grow in Iowa.” She nodded, having placed Iowa and Enders firmly in her mind. “I passed through Iowa on my way to Hollywood.” Half the whisky in her glass disappeared.

  “Have you acted in pictures?” Enders asked, impressed, sitting on the same bed with a woman who had been in Hollywood.

  Miss Zelinka laughed moodily. “Hollywood!” She finished her drink. “Don’t look for my footprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese.” She reached fluently for the bottle.

  “It seems to me,” Enders said seriously, breathing deeply because Miss Zelinka was leaning across him for the moment. “It seems to me you’d do very well. You’re beautiful and you’ve got a wonderful voice.”

  Miss Zelinka laughed again. “Look at me,” she said.

  Enders looked at her.

  “Do I remind you of anybody?” Miss Zelinka asked.

  Enders nodded.

  Miss Zelinka drank moodily. “I look like Greta Garbo,” she said. “Nobody could deny that. I’m not being vain when I tell you when I photograph you couldn’t tell me apart from the Swede.” She sipped her whisky, ran it lovingly around in her mouth, swallowed slowly. “A woman who looks like Greta Garbo in Hollywood is like the fifth leg on a race horse. Do you understand what I mean?”

  Enders nodded sympathetically.

  “It’s my private curse,” Miss Zelinka said, tears looming in her eyes like mist over the ocean. She jumped up, shaking her head, walked lightly and dramatically around the room. “I have no complaints,” she said. “I’ve done very well. I live in a two-room suite on the twentieth floor of a hotel on Seventy-fifth Street. Overlooking the park. All my trunks and bags are up there. I just took a few things with me, until the rehearsals are over. Seventy-fifth Street, on the East Side, is too far away; when you’re rehearsing a musical comedy, you’ve got to be on tap twenty-four hours a day for the Shuberts. A very luxurious two-room suite in the Hotel Chalmers. It’s very exclusive, but it’s too far from Fifty-second Street.” She poured some more whisky for herself, and Enders noticed that the bottle was almost empty. “Oh, yes,” she said, crooning to the glass in her hand, “I’ve done very well. I’ve danced all over the country. In the most exclusive nightspots, I was the featured entertainment. I’m very greatly in demand.” She sat down, close to him, her body moving gently and rhythmically as she spoke. “Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit.” She gulped her whisky and her eyes clouded with a final, deep, vague mist and her voice suddenly got very throaty and hoarse. “Miami, Florida.” She sat absolutely still and the cloud dissolved into tears and the tears coursed slowly down her face.

  “What’s the matter?” Enders asked anxiously. “Did I do something?”

  Miss Zelinka threw the empty tumbler against the opposite wall. It broke heavily and sullenly, scattered over the carpet. She threw herself back on the bed, wept. “Miami, Florida,” she sobbed. “Miami, Florida …”

  Enders patted her shoulder consolingly.

  “I danced in The Golden Horn in Miami, Florida,” she cried. “It was a Turkish night club. Very exclusive.”

  “Why’re you crying, darling?” Enders asked, feeling sorry for her, but elated, too, because he had said “darling.”

  “Every time I think of Miami, Florida,” Miss Zelinka said, “I cry.”

  “Can I do anything to help?” Enders held her hand softly.

  “It was January, 1936.” Miss Zelinka’s voice throbbed with old, hopeless, broken tragedy, forlorn as the story of a siege of a lost and ruined village. “I was dressed in Turkish garments: a brassiere, and veils around my legs and nothing around the middle. At the end of the dance I had to do a back-bend. I leaned back and touched the floor with my hands, with my hair falling down to the floor. There was a bald man. There was a convention of the Metal-Trades Union in Miami, Florida. He had on a badge. The whole night club was full of them.” The tears and the anguish pulled at her face. “I’ll remember that bald son of a bitch until the day I die. There was no music at that part of the dance. Drums and tambourines. He leaned over and put an olive in my navel and sprinkled it with salt.” Miss Zelinka rolled suddenly over on her face and, clutching the bedspread, her shoulders heaving, burrowed into the grayish cotton. “It was a cartoon. He saw it in a cartoon in a magazine. It’s funny in a magazine, but wait until it happens to you! The humiliation,” she wept. “Every time I think of the humiliation I want to die. Miami, Florida.”

  Enders watched the bedspread stain with tears, mascara and rouge. With genuine sympathy, he put his arm around her. “I want to be treated with respect,” Miss Zelinka wailed. “I was brought up in a good family, why shouldn’t I be treated with respect? That fat, bald man, with the badge from the Metal-Trades Union Convention. He leaned over and put the olive in my navel like an egg in an egg cup and sprinkled salt like he was starting breakfast and everybody laughed and laughed, including the orchestra.…” Her voice went wailing up the air well, lost, despairing, full of an ancient and irreparable sorrow.

  She sat up and threw her arms around Enders, digging her grief-torn head into his shoulder, clutching him with strong hands, both of them rocking back and forth like Jews praying, on the enameled bed that squeaked and wailed in the little room.

  “Hold me tight,” she wept, “hold me tight. I haven’t got a two-room suite on East Seventy-fifth Street. I got no trunks in the Hotel Chalmers, hold me tight.” Her hands dug into him and her tears and rouge and mascara stained his coat. “The Shuberts aren’t giving me a job. Why do I lie, why do I always lie?” She lifted her head, kissed his throat fiercely. He shook at the soft, violent pressure, at the wetness of her lips and the tragic and exhilarating trickle of her tears under his chin, knowing that he was going to have this woman, this Bertha Zelinka. Lonely, far from home, on a rainy night, the city was pulling him in, making a place in its wild and ludicrous life for him. As he kissed her, this woman who looked like Greta Garbo, the century’s dream of passion and tragedy and beauty, this woman whom he had met in a rat-tenanted lobby off Columbus Circle, among whores thinking of death and a Pole in an orange tie checking in each night’s transients, age and sin, at reasonable rates, Enders felt suddenly at home, accounted for. The city had produced for him a great beauty, supple as a cat, full of lies and whisky and ancient, shadowy victories, a woman with magnificent, proud legs and deep, stormy eyes who wept bitterly behind the frail, warped door because o
nce, in 1936, a bald man from a Metal-Trades Union had put an olive in her navel. Enders held Bertha Zelinka’s head in his two hands, looked intently at the bony, drunken, beautiful, tear-stained face. Bertha Zelinka peered longingly and sadly at him through half-closed classic lids, her mouth hanging softly open in passion and promise, her poor jagged teeth showing behind the long, heart-breaking lips. He kissed her, feeling deep within him, that in its own way, on this rainy night, the city had put out its hand in greeting, had called, in its own voice, wry and ironic, “Welcome, Citizen.”

  Gratefully, near tears, hating himself, his hands shaking exultantly, Enders bent to his knees and took the scraped, year-worn shoes, swollen with the streets’ rain, from the long and handsome feet of Bertha Zelinka.

  The Girls in Their

  Summer Dresses

  Fifth Avenue was shining in the sun when they left the Brevoort and started walking toward Washington Square. The sun was warm, even though it was November and everything looked like Sunday morning—the buses, and the well-dressed people walking slowly in couples and the quiet buildings with the windows closed.

  Michael held Frances’ arm tightly as they walked downtown in the sunlight. They walked lightly, almost smiling, because they had slept late and had a good breakfast and it was Sunday. Michael unbuttoned his coat and let it flap around him in the mild wind. They walked, without saying anything, among the young and pleasant-looking people who somehow seem to make up most of the population of that section of New York City.

  “Look out,” Frances said, as they crossed Eighth Street. “You’ll break your neck.”

  Michael laughed and Frances laughed with him.

  “She’s not so pretty, anyway,” Frances said. “Anyway, not pretty enough to take a chance breaking your neck looking at her.”

  Michael laughed again. He laughed louder this time, but not as solidly. “She wasn’t a bad-looking girl. She had a nice complexion. Country-girl complexion. How did you know I was looking at her?”

  Frances cocked her head to one side and smiled at her husband under the tip-tilted brim of her hat. “Mike, darling …” she said.

  Michael laughed, just a little laugh this time. “O.K.,” he said. “The evidence is in. Excuse me. It was the complexion. It’s not the sort of complexion you see much in New York. Excuse me.”

  Frances patted his arm lightly and pulled him along a little faster toward Washington Square.

  “This is a nice morning,” she said. “This is a wonderful morning. When I have breakfast with you it makes me feel good all day.”

  “Tonic,” Michael said. “Morning pick-up. Rolls and coffee with Mike and you’re on the alkali side, guaranteed.”

  “That’s the story. Also, I slept all night, wound around you like a rope.”

  “Saturday night,” he said. “I permit such liberties only when the week’s work is done.”

  “You’re getting fat,” she said.

  “Isn’t it the truth? The lean man from Ohio.”

  “I love it,” she said, “an extra five pounds of husband.”

  “I love it, too,” Michael said gravely.

  “I have an idea,” Frances said.

  “My wife has an idea. That pretty girl.”

  “Let’s not see anybody all day,” Frances said. “Let’s just hang around with each other. You and me. We’re always up to our neck in people, drinking their Scotch, or drinking our Scotch, we only see each other in bed …”

  “The Great Meeting Place,” Michael said. “Stay in bed long enough and everybody you ever knew will show up there.”

  “Wise guy,” Frances said. “I’m talking serious.”

  “O.K., I’m listening serious.”

  “I want to go out with my husband all day long. I want him to talk only to me and listen only to me.”

  “What’s to stop us?” Michael asked. “What party intends to prevent me from seeing my wife alone on Sunday? What party?”

  “The Stevensons. They want us to drop by around one o’clock and they’ll drive us into the country.”

  “The lousy Stevensons,” Mike said. “Transparent. They can whistle. They can go driving in the country by themselves. My wife and I have to stay in New York and bore each other tête-à-tête.”

  “Is it a date?”

  “It’s a date.”

  Frances leaned over and kissed him on the tip of the ear.

  “Darling,” Michael said. “This is Fifth Avenue.”

  “Let me arrange a program,” Frances said. “A planned Sunday in New York for a young couple with money to throw away.”

  “Go easy.”

  “First let’s go see a football game. A professional football game,” Frances said, because she knew Michael loved to watch them. “The Giants are playing. And it’ll be nice to be outside all day today and get hungry and later we’ll go down to Cavanagh’s and get a steak as big as a blacksmith’s apron, with a bottle of wine, and after that, there’s a new French picture at the Filmarte that everybody says … Say, are you listening to me?”

  “Sure,” he said. He took his eyes off the hatless girl with the dark hair, cut dancer-style, like a helmet, who was walking past him with the self-conscious strength and grace dancers have. She was walking without a coat and she looked very solid and strong and her belly was flat, like a boy’s, under her skirt, and her hips swung boldly because she was a dancer and also because she knew Michael was looking at her. She smiled a little to herself as she went past and Michael noticed all these things before he looked back at his wife. “Sure,” he said, “we’re going to watch the Giants and we’re going to eat steak and we’re going to see a French picture. How do you like that?”

  “That’s it,” Frances said flatly. “That’s the program for the day. Or maybe you’d just rather walk up and down Fifth Avenue.”

  “No,” Michael said carefully. “Not at all.”

  “You always look at other women,” Frances said. “At every damn woman in the City of New York.”

  “Oh, come now,” Michael said, pretending to joke. “Only pretty ones. And, after all, how many pretty women are there in New York? Seventeen?”

  “More. At least you seem to think so. Wherever you go.”

  “Not the truth. Occasionally, maybe, I look at a woman as she passes. In the street. I admit, perhaps in the street I look at a woman once in a while …”

  “Everywhere,” Frances said. “Every damned place we go. Restaurants, subways, theaters, lectures, concerts.”

  “Now, darling,” Michael said, “I look at everything. God gave me eyes and I look at women and men and subway excavations and moving pictures and the little flowers of the field. I casually inspect the universe.”

  “You ought to see the look in your eye,” Frances said, “as you casually inspect the universe on Fifth Avenue.”

  “I’m a happily married man.” Michael pressed her elbow tenderly, knowing what he was doing. “Example for the whole twentieth century, Mr. and Mrs. Mike Loomis.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Frances, baby …”

  “Are you really happily married?”

  “Sure,” Michael said, feeling the whole Sunday morning sinking like lead inside him. “Now what the hell is the sense in talking like that?”

  “I would like to know.” Frances walked faster now, looking straight ahead, her face showing nothing, which was the way she always managed it when she was arguing or feeling bad.

  “I’m wonderfully happily married,” Michael said patiently. “I am the envy of all men between the ages of fifteen and sixty in the State of New York.”

  “Stop kidding,” Frances said.

  “I have a fine home,” Michael said. “I got nice books and a phonograph and nice friends. I live in a town I like the way I like and I do the work I like and I live with the woman I like. Whenever something good happens, don’t I run to you? When something bad happens, don’t I cry on your shoulder?”

  “Yes,” Frances said. “You loo
k at every woman that passes.”

  “That’s an exaggeration.”

  “Every woman.” Frances took her hand off Michael’s arm. “If she’s not pretty you turn away fairly quickly. If she’s halfway pretty you watch her for about seven steps …”

  “My lord, Frances!”

  “If she’s pretty you practically break your neck …”

  “Hey, let’s have a drink,” Michael said, stopping.

  “We just had breakfast.”

  “Now, listen, darling,” Mike said, choosing his words with care, “it’s a nice day and we both feel good and there’s no reason why we have to break it up. Let’s have a nice Sunday.”

  “I could have a fine Sunday if you didn’t look as though you were dying to run after every skirt on Fifth Avenue.”

  “Let’s have a drink,” Michael said.

  “I don’t want a drink.”

  “What do you want, a fight?”

  “No,” Frances said so unhappily that Michael felt terribly sorry for her. “I don’t want a fight. I don’t know why I started this. All right, let’s drop it. Let’s have a good time.”

  They joined hands consciously and walked without talking among the baby carriages and the old Italian men in their Sunday clothes and the young women with Scotties in Washington Square Park.

  “I hope it’s a good game today,” Frances said after a while, her tone a good imitation of the tone she had used at breakfast and at the beginning of their walk. “I like professional football games. They hit each other as though they’re made out of concrete. When they tackle each other,” she said, trying to make Michael laugh, “they make divots. It’s very exciting.”

  “I want to tell you something,” Michael said very seriously. “I have not touched another woman. Not once. In all the five years.”

  “All right,” Frances said.

  “You believe that, don’t you?”

  “All right.”

  They walked between the crowded benches, under the scrubby city park trees.

  “I try not to notice it,” Frances said, as though she were talking to herself. “I try to make believe it doesn’t mean anything. Some men’re like that, I tell myself, they have to see what they’re missing.”