Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  Read a newspaper, listen to a news broadcast, wake for a quarter hour in your own bed some time before dawn, and death came familiarly to hand. When he’d come home in 1945, he’d thought all that was behind him. My limit, he always said—not seriously, but meaning it, too—is one war. But other people, of more influence, seemed to have other limits. It was one thing, at the age of thirty-three, bravely to don the uniform and sail off to a relatively old-fashioned war, in which comprehensible weapons like machine guns and bombs were being used. It was quite another, seven years later, a sedentary forty, to contemplate exposing yourself to the atom and the microbe, feeling, too, all the while, that your well-run home, enclosing your wife and children, might at any moment dissolve in radioactive dust or become the harbor for the germs of plague. He looked over at his wife, comfortably at rest. How, he wondered, does anyone sleep this year?

  The dim light of dawn was washing through the curtains now. God, Cahill thought, his hot eyes resentfully taking it in, I am going to be a wreck today. Masochistically, he continued with his list. Politics. There we have a subject, he reflected, to keep a man’s eyes open a night or two. According to Lloyd again, after Reeves had visited the president’s office that afternoon, he had been called into a secret session of the committee of state senators who were down from the capital investigating Communist influence on the campus. Lloyd, who had been active in several questionable organizations for years, and who didn’t trust Reeves, had been none too happy about that. “A company man,” Lloyd had said resentfully, in Cahill’s presence. “He’d sell his best friend for a smile from the stockholders.” Lloyd had peered meaningfully at Cahill when he said it, too, and Cahill was sure that the phrase “his best friend” had not been a random choice of words. Cahill thought of various things that Reeves might have told the committee and twitched uneasily. Back in the years before the war, when Communism was an almost respectable doctrine, Cahill had been on various committees with people he was sure belonged to the Party, and had let his name be used again and again on a flood of well-meaning petitions and statements that, if not promulgated by the Communists, certainly had their endorsement. Once, he and Reeves had even gone to a kind of polite, open Party meeting, at which several people he knew had made amorphous speeches about Communism’s being twentieth-century Americanism, and stuff like that. He had even been invited to join, he remembered, although he couldn’t remember who had actually come up to him and spoken the fateful words. He hadn’t joined, and he’d never gone to another meeting, but what if the committee, armed with informers’ information, demanded of him whether he had ever attended a meeting and if he had ever been asked to join. What would he do? Perjure himself, and say he had never gone, or tell the truth, and leave himself open to the next question. Was Professor Kane there? Did Mr. Ryan, instructor in chemistry, make a speech about the working of the Communist Party? Will you kindly look over this list of names and check off the ones you can swear were present? What do you do in a situation like that? Professor Kane had been there and had made a speech, but Cahill knew that he had quietly resigned from the Party at the time of the Pact and had had no more to do with it. Still, who knew what Kane had told the committee? Kane was a friend of his, and needed the job. And if Cahill told the truth, Kane would be out of his job, disgraced, in a month. And poor Ryan. He’d been suspended on suspicion already, and his wife was sick, and he’d had to pay a lawyer to defend him. And, Communist or no, he’d always seemed to Cahill to be a very decent, shy, undangerous man. Cahill had given Ryan fifty dollars toward his defense, secretly, in cash. It was hard to understand just why. He was opposed to Ryan’s politics, but he liked Ryan and felt sorry for him, and fifty dollars was not much, one way or another. Cahill had told Reeves about the fifty dollars and had even asked Reeves to help, too. Reeves, coldly, saying Ryan had it coming to him, had refused. What if Reeves had been trapped into saying something about the fifty dollars to the committee? What could Cahill tell them when he was questioned? How would he act? Would he be brave, considered, honorable? Just what was honorable in a situation like this? Was there honor in perjury? Or did honor lie in destroying your friends? Or destroying yourself? Did he actually believe that Ryan, for example, was an innocent, idealistic fellow, or did he believe that Ryan, the soft-voiced, scholarly, shyly smiling family man Ryan, was a potential traitor, a patient murderer, a dangerous conspirator against all the values that he, Cahill, held dear? I am too weary, Cahill thought pettishly, to decide this this morning. What if they asked about the meeting? What day was it? What year? Who invited you? The mists of memory shifted thickly around the fact. Whatever you answered was bound to be wrong. And if you said honestly, “I don’t remember,” how would that look on the record and in the newspapers? Like evasion, guilt, worthy only of disbelief and disdain.

  So much for the crisp, neat two minutes of Politics. It was simpler in a magazine, where another issue was coming out in seven days, with another capsule of highly polished, anonymous, streamlined facts. A new man, Cahill thought, should be published every week, under a different title, anonymously. Each issue built around a different fact. The honorable man. The perjured man. The sensual man. The devout man. The economic man. Fifty-two times a year, something new and interesting in each copy. No irreconcilable facts to be found in any single volume. For Christmas, we plan to give you the friendly man, to be followed shortly by the betraying man, all in fine, unlimited editions. And, as a dividend to our subscribers, bound in blood, stitched with nerve ends, and illustrated by the leading artists of the age, with copious notes, the doubtful man, on which our editors have been working continuously for three hundred years at great personal expense.

  There was a soft, sighing sound at the window, and Cahill saw that the wind had grown stronger and that it had begun to snow. A thin shower of snow sifted in through the open window, making a pale pattern on the floor. Fair and warmer, Cahill thought angrily, that’s what the forecasters said. The liars of science, portentously surrounded by inaccurate instruments, confidently deluding you with false visions of the future. Like Dr. Manners, armed with stethoscope and X-ray, patting him heartily on the back last Tuesday, telling him of course he occasionally must expect to feel a twinge here, a pain there; he was not as young as he used to be. How many men died on Sunday who had been told during the week by their doctors that they were not as young as they used to be? The breezy assumption on the part of the medical profession that agony was the ordinary condition of life. Manners, he thought resentfully, would be considerably less breezy with himself if it were his chest that trembled to the tone of pain, secret and until now distant, but there, warning, definite. Experimentally, Cahill lifted his left arm and stretched it. Again, as always in the last few months, there was the small answering pressure, dull, lurking, cross his chest, across his heart. “A slight irregularity,” Manners had said. “Just nerves. Nothing to worry about.” Nothing for Manners to worry about, perhaps. And the constriction across the stomach; that, too, according to Manners, was nerves. Nerves, the modern equivalent for Fate, the substitute for the medieval Devil, which attacked mankind in the form of obscure, and often mortal, ills. Nerves, the perfect formula for the lazy diagnostician. Or—and Cahill could feel his breath catching in his throat at the thought—perhaps Manners, out of kindness, was hiding the true information from him. A hearty clap on the back, an innocuous prescription for sugar water and belladonna, and, after the door had closed, a thoughtful, sorrowful shrug, and the fateful entry in the case history of Philip Cahill “Prognosis negative.”

  Cahill put the palm of his hand under his pajama jacket, on the warm skin of his abdomen, as though by the touch of flesh on flesh he might discover the dreadful secret that lay there. Within him, under his hand, he could feel a faint, erratic quivering. Not good, he thought, not good at all. His mind touched regretfully on the edge of the word he was afraid to say. The papers were so damned full of it, the posters on the buses, even the radio. And if it occurred in the stomac
h, it was fatal at least eighty per cent of the time, and you almost never found out about it before it was too late. Maybe that was what Reeves had called about. Maybe Manners had gone to Reeves and explained to him and asked what Reeves thought should be done. The services that friends had to do for each other. You start out as gay children, playing tennis with each other, racing each other across the lakes of summer, roaring jubilantly together on your first drunks, and twenty years later, all that far in the past, you have to go in and announce to your friend that his death is at hand.

  Ridiculous, Cahill thought. I’m not going to lie here any longer. He got out of bed and stood up. His legs felt weary and uncertain, and there was the tense, stretched sensation in his stomach as he put on his robe and slippers. He looked over at Edith. She still slept, the rhythm of her breathing unchanged. Walking slowly, his slippers shuffling across the rug, he went silently out of the bedroom. He descended the stairs, holding the banister, shivering a little in the night-frozen house. In the hall below, he went over to the telephone, on the table under the mirror. He hesitated, staring at the phone. The clock in the living room said ten minutes to seven. He picked up the phone and dialed Joe Reeves’ number. While he listened to the long succession of buzzes in the receiver, he stared at himself in the mirror. His face was haggard, his eyes thick and glazed and encircled completely by muddy blue shadows. His rumpled hair looked slack and lustreless, his face exhausted and—hunted. He looked for a moment, then turned his back on the mirror.

  Finally, there was the sound of someone picking up the receiver at the other end. Whoever it was fumbled a long time with the instrument, and Cahill said impatiently, “Hello! Hello!” Then he heard a sleepy, dark voice mumbling irritatedly, “Mr. Reeves’ residence. Who that calling?”

  “Hello,” Cahill said eagerly. “Violet?”

  “Yes. This Violet. Who calling?”

  “Violet,” Cahill said, making his voice even and clear, because he remembered with what suspicion Violet regarded the telephone, “this is Mr. Cahill.”

  “Who?”

  “Cahill. Mr. Cahill.”

  “It’s an awful early hour of the mawnin’, Mr. Cahill,” Violet said aggrievedly.

  “I know,” Cahill said, “but Mr. Reeves has a message for me. He especially asked me to call him as soon as I could. Is he up yet?”

  “I dunno, Mr. Cahill,” said Violet. He could hear her yawn enormously at the other end of the wire. “He’s not here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s gone. Went last night. He and Mis’ Reeves. They gone for the weekend. I’m the only livin’ soul in the house. And”—her voice took on a tone of impatient complaint—“I’m freezin’ here in my night shirt in this drafty old hall.”

  Cahill could sense that Violet was on the verge of hurling the receiver down on the hook—an amusing trick of hers, with which she concluded telephone conversations in mid-message. It was not amusing now. “Violet,” he said urgently, “don’t hang up. Where did they go?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Violet said. “They didn’t tell me. You know Mr. Reeves. He was sittin’ around the house last night, real restless, like he is, and all of a sudden he jumped up and said to Mis’ Reeves, ‘Let’s get into the car and get away from here for a couple of days.’ They just packed one little bag. Mis’ Reeves was wearing slacks and she didn’t even bother to change ’em. They just gone for a ride, I guess. They’ll be back by Monday, never you worry.”

  Slowly, Cahill put the receiver down. He looked up and saw that Elizabeth was standing at the foot of the stairs, in an almost transparent nightgown, her bathrobe carelessly open and hanging loose from her shoulders. Her dark hair was down, flowing thickly around her throat. Her face was creamy with sleep and her eyes were half closed in an amused, almost condescending smile. “Daddy,” she said, “who on earth are you calling at this fantastic hour? One of your other girls?”

  Cahill stared dully at her. Through the frail rayon of her nightdress, he could see, very plainly, the swell of her breasts, rising generously from the exposed, rich skin of her bare bosom. “None of your business,” he said harshly. “Now go upstairs. And when you come down again, make sure you’re decently covered! This is your home. It is not a burlesque house! Is that clear?”

  He could see the incredulous, hurt grimace gripping her features, and then the blush, rising from her bosom, flaming on her cheeks. “Yes,” she said faintly. “Yes, Daddy.” She turned, hugging her robe around her ashamedly. Cahill watched her walk slowly and painfully up the stairs. He wanted to say something, call her back, but by now he knew there was nothing to say and that the child would not come back.

  He went into the living room and sank into a chair, feeling cold. Wildly, he contemplated the thought of living until Monday.

  Goldilocks at Graveside

  She was surprised to see him in the church. She hadn’t known he was in Los Angeles. And there had only been the one notice in the one newspaper—“Ex-State Dept. Officer Dies. William MacPherson Bryant died last night at the Santa Monica Hospital, after a long illness. Entering the foreign service in 1935, he held posts in Washington, Geneva, Italy, Brazil and Spain, before resigning for reasons of health in 1952. The couple were childless and he is survived only by his widow, who, under her maiden name, Victoria Simmons, is the editress of the Women’s Page of this newspaper.”

  The church was almost empty, as Bryant had made no friends since they moved West, and there was just a scattering of people from the paper, who came as a matter of courtesy to the widow, so Victoria saw Borden almost immediately. It was a dark, rainy day, and he was sitting alone, in the rear of the church, near the door, but his blond head was unmistakable. Irrelevantly, while paying only half-attention to what the minister was saying, Victoria remembered the secret nickname by which, among the three of them, Borden had been called—Goldilocks.

  There were only two cars in the cortege to the cemetery, but Borden found room in the second car and stood bareheaded in the rain during the ceremony at the grave. Victoria observed that he was now dyeing his hair and that, although at a distance there was still an appearance of boyish good looks about him, up close his face was lined by fine wrinkles and seemed dusted over by uncertainty and fatigue.

  As she walked away from the grave, an erect, veiled, middle-aged, slender woman, tearless behind the black cloth, Borden asked her if he could drive back with her. Since she had come out to the cemetery with only the minister and there was plenty of room, she said yes. Borden’s voice had changed, too. Like his dyed hair, it pretended to a youthfulness and energy that she remembered and that was no longer there.

  The minister was silent most of the way back to town. Victoria had only met him for the first time the day before, when she was making the arrangements for the funeral. Neither she nor her husband had been members of the congregation and the minister had that slightly aggrieved expression that one remarks on the faces of the representatives of religion when they know they are only being used out of necessity and not out of faith.

  Among the three of them they spoke no more than thirty words on the way back into town. The minister got off at the church and after his embarrassed little handshake, Borden asked Victoria if he could accompany her home. She was in perfect control of herself—all her tears had been shed years before—and she told him she didn’t need any help. In fact, she had planned to sit down directly at her desk when she got home and start working on the full page for the Sunday issue, both because it needed doing and as a remedy against melancholy. But Borden persisted, with the same light good manners and concern for the welfare of others that had made him so popular in the years of their friendship.

  With the minister gone, Victoria asked for a cigarette. She threw back her veil as Borden offered her a cigarette from a flat gold case and lighted both hers and his own with a flat gold lighter. There was something a little displeasing to Victoria in the action of his hands. She would have been hard put to explain why. They
seemed, for lack of a better word, exaggerated.

  They drove in silence for a minute or two. “Was he happy,” Borden asked, “those last few years?”

  “No,” she said.

  “What a waste,” Borden sighed. The sigh, she was sure, was not only for her husband. “He was an able man, an able man.” The tone was pompous. For that moment he might have been a politician making a speech at the dedication of a statue, much delayed, to the dead of a half-forgotten war.

  “What did he do after he retired?” Borden asked.

  “He read,” she said.