Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  “It’s a nice, quiet street,” Harriet said, looking up at the window on the fourth floor, too. She shook her head, took Paul’s arm again. “I’ve got to get to Wanamaker’s.”

  They started off.

  “What’re you buying at Wanamaker’s?” Paul asked.

  Harriet hesitated for a moment. “Nothing much. I’m looking at some baby clothes. I’m going to have a baby.” They crowded over to one side to let a little woman with four dachshunds pass them in a busy tangle. “Isn’t it funny—me with a baby?” Harriet smiled. “I lie around all day and try to imagine what it’s going to be like. In between, I sleep and drink beer to nourish us. I’ve never had such a good time in all my life.”

  “Well,” said Paul, “at least it’ll keep your husband out of the army.”

  “Maybe. He’s a raging patriot.”

  “Good. When he’s at Fort Dix I’ll meet you in Washington Square Park when you take the baby out for an airing in its perambulator. I’ll put on a policeman’s uniform to make it proper. I’m not such a raging patriot.”

  “They’ll get you anyway, won’t they?”

  “Sure. I’ll send you my picture in a lieutenant’s suit. From Bulgaria. I have a premonition I’m going to be called on to defend a strategic point in Bulgaria.”

  “How do you feel about it?” For the first time Harriet looked squarely and searchingly at him.

  Paul shrugged. “It’s going to happen. It’s all damned silly, but it isn’t as silly now as it was ten years ago.”

  Suddenly Harriet laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Paul demanded.

  “My asking you how you felt about something. I never used to have a chance … You’d let me know how you felt about everything. Roosevelt, James Joyce, Jesus Christ, Gypsy Rose Lee, Matisse, Yogi, liquor, sex, architecture …”

  “I was full of opinions in those days.” Paul smiled a little regretfully. “Lust and conversation. The firm foundations of civilized relations between the sexes.”

  He turned and looked back at the window on the fourth floor. “That was a nice apartment,” he said softly. “Lust and conversation …”

  “Come on, Paul,” Harriet said. “Wanamaker’s isn’t going to stay open all night.”

  Paul turned up his collar because the wind was getting stronger as they neared Fifth Avenue. “You were the only girl I ever knew I could sleep in the same bed with.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say to a girl.” Harriet laughed. “Is that your notion of a compliment?”

  Paul shrugged. “It’s an irrelevant fact. Or a relevant fact. Is it polite to talk to a married lady this way?”

  “No.”

  Paul walked along with her. “What do you think of when you look at me?” he asked.

  “Nothing much,” Harriet said carefully.

  “What’re you lying about?”

  “Nothing much,” Harriet said flatly.

  “Don’t you even think, ‘What in the name of God did I ever see in him?’”

  “No.” Harriet put her hands deep in her pockets and walked quickly along the railings.

  “Should I tell you what I think of when I look at you?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve been looking for you for two years,” Paul said.

  “My name’s been in the telephone book.” Harriet hurried even more, wrapping her coat tightly around her.

  “I didn’t realize I was looking for you until I saw you.”

  “Please, Paul …”

  “I would walk along the street and I’d pass a bar we’d been in together and I’d go in and sit there, even though I didn’t want a drink, not knowing why I was sitting there. Now I know. I was waiting for you to come in. I didn’t pass your house by accident.”

  “Look, Paul,” Harriet pleaded. “It was a long time ago and it was fine and it ended.…”

  “I was wrong,” Paul said. “Do you like hearing that? I was wrong. You know, I never did get married, after all.”

  “I know,” Harriet said. “Please shut up.”

  “I walk along Fifth Avenue and every time I pass St. Patrick’s I half look up to see if you’re passing, because I met you that day right after you’d had a tooth pulled, and it was cold; you were walking along with the tears streaming from your eyes and your eyes red and that was the only time I ever met you by accident any place.…”

  Harriet smiled. “That certainly sounds like a beautiful memory.”

  “Two years …” Paul said. “I’ve gone out with a lot of girls in the last two years.” He shrugged. “They’ve bored me and I’ve bored them. I keep looking at every woman who passes to see if it’s you. All the girls I go out with bawl the hell out of me for it. I’ve been walking around, following girls with dark hair to see if it’ll turn out to be you, and girls with a fur jacket like that old one you had and girls that walk in that silly, beautiful way you walk.… I’ve been searching the streets of the city for you for two years and this is the first time I’ve admitted it even to myself. That little Spanish joint we went the first time. Every time I pass it I remember everything—how many drinks we had and what the band played and what we said and the fat Cuban who kept winking at you from the bar and the very delicate way we landed up in my apartment.…”

  They were both walking swiftly now, Harriet holding her hands stiffly down at her sides.

  “There is a particular wonderful way you are joined together …”

  “Paul, stop it.” Harriet’s voice was flat but loud.

  “Two years. In two years the edge should be dulled off things like that. Instead …” How can you make a mistake as big as that? Paul thought, how can you deliberately be as wrong as that? And no remedy. So long as you live, no remedy. He looked harshly at Harriet. Her face was set, as though she weren’t listening to him and only intent on getting across the street as quickly as possible. “How about you?” he asked. “Don’t you remember …?”

  “I don’t remember anything,” she said. And then, suddenly, the tears sprang up in her eyes and streamed down the tight, distorted cheeks. “I don’t remember a goddamn thing!” she wept. “I’m not going to Wanamaker’s. I’m going home! Good-bye!” She ran over to a cab that was parked at the corner and opened the door and sprang in. The cab spurted past Paul and he had a glimpse of Harriet sitting stiffly upright, the tears bitter and unheeded in her eyes.

  He watched the cab go down Fifth Avenue until it turned. Then he turned the other way and started walking, thinking, I must move away from this neighborhood. I’ve lived here long enough.

  The Monument

  “I do not want any of his private stock,” McMahon said firmly. He blew on a glass and wiped it carefully. “I have my own opinion of his private stock.”

  Mr. Grimmet looked sad, sitting across the bar on a high stool, and Thesing shrugged like a salesman, not giving up the fight, but moving to a new position to continue the attack. McMahon picked up another glass in his clean, soft bartender’s hands. He wiped it, his face serious and determined and flushed right up to the bald spot that his plastered-down hair couldn’t cover. There was nobody else in the bar at the front part of the restaurant.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon. In the rear three waiters stood arguing. Every day at three o’clock the three waiters gathered in the back and argued.

  “Fascism,” one waiter said, “is a rehearsal for the cemetery.”

  “You read that some place,” another waiter said.

  “All right,” said the first waiter, “I read it some place.”

  “An Italian,” the third waiter said to the first waiter. “You are one lousy Italian.”

  Mr. Grimmet turned around and called to the waiters, “Please reserve discussions of that character for when you go home. This is a restaurant, not Madison Square Garden.”

  He turned back to watching McMahon wiping the glasses. The three waiters looked at him with equal hate.

  “Many of the best bars in the city,” Thesing s
aid in his musical salesman’s voice, “use our private stock.”

  “Many of the best bars in the city,” McMahon said, using the towel very hard, “ought to be turned into riding academies.”

  “That’s funny,” Thesing said, laughing almost naturally. “He’s very funny, isn’t he, Mr. Grimmet?”

  “Listen, Billy,” Mr. Grimmet said, leaning forward, disregarding Thesing, “listen to reason. In a mixed drink nobody can tell how much you paid for the rye that goes into it. That is the supreme beauty of cocktails.”

  McMahon didn’t say anything. The red got a little deeper on his cheeks and on his bald spot and he put the clean glasses down with a sharp tinkle and the tinkle went through the shining lines of the other glasses on the shelves and sounded thinly through the empty restaurant. He was a little fat man, very compact. He moved with great precision and style behind a bar and you could tell by watching him whether he was merry or sad or perturbed, just from the way he mixed a drink or put down a glass. Just now he was angry and Mr. Grimmet knew it. Mr. Grimmet didn’t want a fight, but there was money to be saved. He put out his hand appealingly to Thesing.

  “Tell me the truth, Thesing,” he said. “Is your private stock bad?”

  “Well,” Thesing said slowly, “a lot of people like it. It is very superior for a blended product.”

  “Blended varnish,” McMahon said, facing the shelves. “Carefully matched developing fluid.”

  Thesing laughed, the laugh he used from nine to six. “Witty,” he said, “the sparkling bartender.” McMahon wheeled and looked at him, head down a little on his chest. “I meant it,” Thesing protested. “I sincerely meant it.”

  “I want to tell you,” Mr. Grimmet said to McMahon, fixing him with his eye, “that we can save seven dollars a case on the private stock.”

  McMahon started whistling the tenor aria from Pagliacci. He looked up at the ceiling and wiped a glass and whistled. Mr. Grimmet felt like firing him and remembered that at least twice a month he felt like firing McMahon.

  “Please stop whistling,” he said politely. “We have a matter to discuss.”

  McMahon stopped whistling and Mr. Grimmet still felt like firing him.

  “Times’re not so good,” Mr. Grimmet said in a cajoling tone of voice, hating himself for descending to such tactics before an employee of his. “Remember, McMahon, Coolidge is no longer in the White House. I am the last one in the world to compromise with quality, but we must remember, we are in business and it is 1938.”

  “Thesing’s private stock,” McMahon said, “would destroy the stomach of a healthy horse.”

  “Mussolini!” the first waiter’s voice came out from the back of the restaurant. “Every day on Broadway I pass forty-five actors who could do his act better.”

  “I am going to tell you one thing,” Mr. Grimmet said with obvious calmness to McMahon. “I am the owner of this restaurant.”

  McMahon whistled some more from Pagliacci. Thesing moved wisely down the bar a bit.

  “I am interested in making money,” Mr. Grimmet said. “What would you say, Mr. McMahon, if I ordered you to use the private stock?”

  “I would say, ‘I’m through, Mr. Grimmet.’ Once and for all.”

  Mr. Grimmet rubbed his face unhappily and stared coldly at the waiters in the back of the restaurant. The waiters remained silent and stared coldly back at him. “What’s it to you?” Mr. Grimmet asked McMahon angrily. “What do you care if we use another whisky. Do you have to drink it?”

  “In my bar, Mr. Grimmet,” McMahon said, putting down his towel and the glasses and facing his employer squarely, “in my bar, good drinks are served.”

  “Nobody will know the difference!” Mr. Grimmet got off his stool and jumped up and down gently. “What do Americans know about liquor? Nothing! Read any book on the subject!”

  “True,” Thesing said judiciously. “The general consensus of opinion is that Americans do not know the difference between red wine and a chocolate malted milk.”

  “In my bar,” McMahon repeated, his face very red, his wide hands spread on the bar, “I serve the best drinks I know how to serve.”

  “Stubborn!” Mr. Grimmet yelled. “You are a stubborn Irishman! You do this out of malice! You are anxious to see me lose seven dollars on every case of liquor because you dislike me. Let us get down to the bedrock of truth!”

  “Keep your voice down,” McMahon said, speaking with great control. “I want to remind you of one or two things. I have worked for you since Repeal, Mr. Grimmet. In that time, how many times did we have to enlarge the bar?”

  “I am not in the mood for history, McMahon!” Mr. Grimmet shouted. “What good is a bar as long as the Normandie if it is not run on a businesslike basis?”

  “Answer my question,” McMahon said. “How many times?”

  “Three,” Mr. Grimmet said, “all right, three.”

  “We are three times as big now as we were six years ago,” McMahon said in a professor’s tone, explaining proposition one, going on to proposition two. “Why do you think that is?”

  “Accident!” Mr. Grimmet looked ironically up to the ceiling. “Fate! Roosevelt! The hand of God! How do I know?”

  “I will tell you,” McMahon said, continuing in the professorial vein. “People who come into this bar get the best Manhattans, the best Martinis, the best Daiquiris that are made on the face of the earth. They are made out of the finest ingredients, with great care, Mr. Grimmet.”

  “One cocktail tastes like another,” Mr. Grimmet said. “People make a big fuss and they don’t know anything.”

  “Mr. Grimmet,” McMahon said with open contempt, “it is easy to see that you are not a drinking man.”

  Mr. Grimmet’s face reflected his desperate search for a new line of defense. His eyebrows went up with pleasure as he found it. He sat down and spoke softly across the bar to McMahon. “Did it ever occur to you,” he asked, “that people come into this place because of the food that is served here?”

  “I will give you my final opinion of Greta Garbo,” the first waiter’s voice sounded out defiantly. “There is nobody like her.”

  For a moment McMahon looked straight into Mr. Grimmet’s eyes. A slight, bitter smile played at one corner of his mouth. He breathed deeply, like a man who has just decided to bet on a horse that has not won in fourteen races. “Shall I tell you what I think of the food that is served in your restaurant, Mr. Grim-met?” McMahon asked flatly.

  “The best chefs,” Mr. Grimmet said quickly, “the best chefs in the City of New York.”

  McMahon nodded slowly. “The best chefs,” he said, “and the worst food.”

  “Consider,” Mr. Grimmet called. “Consider what you’re saying.”

  “Anything a cook can disguise,” McMahon said, talking now to Thesing, disregarding Mr. Grimmet, “is wonderful here. Anything with a sauce. Once I ate a sirloin steak in this restaurant …”

  “Careful, McMahon,” Mr. Grimmet jumped off his stool and ran around to face McMahon.

  “What can be done to disguise a sirloin steak?” McMahon asked reasonably. “Nothing. You broil it. Simply that. If it was good when it was cut off the steer, it’s good on your plate. If it was bad …”

  “I pay good prices!” Mr. Grimmet yelled. “I’ll have no allusions …”

  “I would not bring a dog into this restaurant to eat sirloin steak,” McMahon said. “Not a young dog with the teeth of a lion.”

  “You’re fired!” Mr. Grimmet pounded on the bar. “This restaurant will now do without your services.”

  McMahon bowed. “That is satisfactory to me,” he said. “Perfectly satisfactory.”

  “Well, now, everybody. Boys!” Thesing said pacifically. “Over a little thing like private stock rye …”

  McMahon began taking off his apron. “This bar has a reputation. It is my reputation. I am proud of it. I am not interested in remaining at a place in which my reputation will be damaged.”

  McMahon threw his ap
ron, neatly folded, over a towel rack and picked up the little wooden wedge on which was printed, in gold letters, “William McMahon, In Charge.” Mr. Grimmet watched him with trouble in his eyes as McMahon lifted the hinged piece of the bar that permitted the bartenders to get out into the restaurant proper.

  “What is the sense,” Mr. Grimmet asked as the hinges creaked, “of taking a rash step, Billy?” Once more Mr. Grimmet hated himself for his dulcet tone of voice, but William McMahon was one of the five finest bartenders in the City of New York.

  McMahon stood there, pushing the hinged piece of the bar a little, back and forth. “Once and for all,” he said. He let the hinged piece fall behind him.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Billy,” Mr. Grimmet went on swiftly, hating himself more and more, “I’ll make a compromise. I will give you five dollars more per week.” He sighed to himself and then looked brightly at McMahon.

  McMahon knocked his shingle thoughtfully against the bar. “I will try to make you understand something, Mr. Grimmet,” he said, gently. “I am not as fundamentally interested in money as I am fundamentally interested in other things.”

  “You are not so different from the test of the world,” Mr. Grimmet said with dignity.

  “I have been working for twenty-five years,” McMahon said, knocking the shingle that said, “William McMahon, In Charge,” “and I have constantly been able to make a living. I do not work only to make a living. I am more interested in making something else. For the last six years I have worked here night and day. A lot of nice people come in here and drink like ladies and gentlemen. They all like this place. They all like me.”

  “Nobody is saying anything about anybody not liking you,” Mr. Grimmet said impatiently. “I am discussing a matter of business principle.”

  “I like this place.” McMahon looked down at the shingle in his hand. “I think this is a very nice bar. I planned it. Right?” He looked up at Mr. Grimmet.

  “You planned it. I will sign an affidavit to the effect that you planned it,” Mr. Grimmet said ironically. “What has that got to do with Thesing’s private stock?”