Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  It was too late to turn back or avoid them, and Peter just stood still, five feet from the entrance.

  “Good morning,” Mr. Chalmers said as he took his wife’s arm and they started walking past Peter.

  “Good morning, Peter,” said Mrs. Chalmers in her soft voice, smiling at him. “Isn’t it a nice day today?”

  “Good morning,” Peter said, and he was surprised that it came out and sounded like good morning.

  The Chalmers walked down the street toward Madison Avenue, two married people, arm in arm, going to church or to a big hotel for Sunday breakfast. Peter watched them, ashamed. He was ashamed of Mrs. Chalmers for looking the way she did the night before, down on her knees, and yelling like that and being so afraid. He was ashamed of Mr. Chalmers for making the noise that was not like the noise of a human being, and for threatening to shoot Mrs. Chalmers and not doing it. And he was ashamed of himself because he had been fearless when he opened the door, but had not been fearless ten seconds later, with Mr. Chalmers five feet away with the gun. He was ashamed of himself for not taking Mrs. Chalmers into the apartment, ashamed because he was not lying now with a bullet in his heart. But most of all he was ashamed because they had all said good morning to each other and the Chalmers were walking quietly together, arm in arm, in the windy sunlight, toward Madison Avenue.

  It was nearly eleven o’clock when Peter got back to the apartment, but his parents had gone back to sleep. There was a pretty good program on at eleven, about counterspies in Asia, and he turned it on automatically, while eating an orange. It was pretty exciting, but then there was a part in which an Oriental held a ticking bomb in his hand in a roomful of Americans, and Peter could tell what was coming. The hero, who was fearless and who came from California, was beginning to feint with his eyes, and Peter reached over and turned the set off. It closed down with a shivering, collapsing pattern. Blinking a little, Peter watched the blind screen for a moment.

  Ah, he thought in sudden, permanent disbelief, after the night in which he had faced the incomprehensible, shameless, weaponed grownup world and had failed to disarm it, ah, they can have that, that’s for kids.

  The Sunny Banks of the

  River Lethe

  Hugh Forester always remembered everything. He remembered the dates of the Battle of New Cold Harbor (May 31–June 12, 1864); he remembered the name of his teacher in the first grade (Webel; red-haired; weight, one-forty-five; no eyelashes); he remembered the record number of strikeouts in one game in the National League (Dizzy Dean, St. Louis Cards, July 30, 1933, seventeen men, against the Cubs); he remembered the fifth line of “To a Skylark” (Shelley: “In profuse strains of unpremeditated art”); he remembered the address of the first girl he ever kissed (Prudence Collingwood, 248 East South Temple Street, Salt Lake City, Utah; March 14, 1918); he remembered the dates of the three partitions of Poland and the destruction of the Temple (1772, 1793, 1795, and 70 A.D.); he remembered the number of ships taken by Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar (twenty), and the profession of the hero of Frank Norris’s novel McTeague (dentist); he remembered the name of the man who won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1925 (Frederic L. Paxson), the name of the Derby winner at Epsom in 1923 (Papyrus), and the number he drew in the draft in 1940 (4726); he remembered the figures for his blood pressure (a hundred and sixty-five over ninety; too high), his blood type (O), and his vision (forty over twenty for the right eye and thirty over twenty for the left); he remembered what his boss told him when he was fired from his first job (“I’m getting a machine to do the job”), and what his wife said when he proposed to her (“I want to live in New York”); he remembered the correct name of Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), and what caused the death of Louis XIV (gangrene of the leg). He also remembered the species of birds, the mean depths of the navigable rivers of America; the names, given and assumed, of all the Popes, including the ones at Avignon; the batting averages of Harry Heilmann and Heinie Groh; the dates of the total eclipses of the sun since the reign of Charlemagne; the speed of sound; the location of the tomb of D. H. Lawrence; all of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; the population of the lost settlement of Roanoke; the rate of fire of the Browning automatic rifle; the campaigns of Caesar in Gaul and Britain; the name of the shepherdess in As You Like It and the amount of money he had in the Chemical Bank & Trust on the morning of December 7, 1941 ($2,367.58).

  Then he forgot his twenty-fourth wedding anniversary (January 25th). His wife, Narcisse, looked at him strangely over breakfast that morning, but he was reading the previous night’s newspaper and thinking, They will never get it straight in Washington, and he didn’t pay much attention. There was a letter from their son, who was at the University of Alabama, but he put it in his pocket without opening it. It was addressed only to him, so he knew it was a request for money. When Morton wrote his dutiful, familial notes they were addressed to both his parents. Morton was at Alabama because his marks had not been high enough to get him into Yale, Dartmouth, Williams, Antioch, the College of the City of New York, or the University of Colorado.

  Narcisse asked if Hugh wanted fish for dinner and he said yes, and Narcisse said that fish was criminally expensive, too, and he said yes, and she asked if anything was the matter and he said no and kissed her and walked out of the apartment to the 242nd Street subway station and stood all the way down to the office, reading the morning newspaper. Narcisse’s parents had lived in France for some time and that was where the name came from; by now he was used to it. As he read his newspaper in the crowded car he wished, mildly, that most of the people whom people wrote about in the newspapers would vanish.

  Hugh was the first one in the office, and he went to his cubbyhole and sat at his desk, leaving the door open, enjoying the empty desks and the sound of silence. He remembered that Narcisse’s nose had twitched at the breakfast table and that she had seemed about to cry. He wondered briefly why, but knew that he would be told in good time, and dismissed it. Narcisse cried between five and eight times a month.

  The company for which he worked was putting out a one-volume encyclopedia, absolutely complete, on Indian paper, with seven hundred and fifty illustrations. There was some talk of its being called the Giant Pocket Encyclopedia, but no final decision had as yet been reached. Hugh was working on the “S”s. Today he had Soap, Sodium, Sophocles, and Sorrento before him. He remembered that Maxim Gorki had lived in Sorrento, and that of the hundred and twenty-three plays that Sophocles wrote, only seven had been discovered. Hugh was not actually unhappy at his work except when Mr. Gorsline appeared. Mr. Gorsline was the owner and editor-in-chief of the house, and believed in standing behind the backs of his employees, silently watching them at their labors. Whenever Mr. Gorsline came into the room, Hugh had the curious feeling that blood was running slowly over his groin.

  Mr. Gorsline was gray-haired, wore tweed suits, had the face and figure of a picador, and had started with calendars. The house still put out a great variety of calendars—pornographic, religious and occasional. Hugh was very useful on calendars because he remembered things like the death of Oliver Cromwell (September 3, 1658) and the date on which Marconi sent the first wireless message across the Atlantic (December 12, 1901) and the date of the first steamboat run from New York to Albany (August 17, 1807).

  Mr. Gorsline appreciated Hugh’s peculiar talents and was relentlessly paternal about his welfare. Mr. Gorsline was a believer in homeopathic medicines and the health-giving properties of raw vegetables, particularly eggplant. He was also opposed to glasses, having thrown his away in 1944 after reading a book about a series of exercises for the muscles of the eyes. He had persuaded Hugh to discard his glasses for a period of seven months in 1948, during which time Hugh had suffered from continual headaches, for which Mr. Gorsline had prescribed minute doses of a medicine from a homeopathic pharmacy which made Hugh feel as though he had been hit in the skull with bird shot. Now whenever Mr. Gorsline stood behind Hugh, he stared at Hugh’s glasses with the stubborn, Irredenti
st expression of an Italian general surveying Trieste. Hugh’s health, while not actively bad, was shabby. He had frequent, moist colds, and his eyes had a tendency to become bloodshot after lunch. There was no hiding these lapses or the fact that in cold weather he had to make several trips an hour to the men’s room. At such times, Mr. Gorsline would break his customary silence to outline diets designed to improve the tone of the nasal passages, the eyes and the kidneys.

  During the morning, Mr. Gorsline came into Hugh’s room twice. The first time, he stood behind Hugh’s chair without saying a word for five minutes, then said, “Still on Sodium?” and left. The next time, he stood silently for eight minutes, then said, “Forester, you’re putting on weight. White bread,” and left. Each time, Hugh had the familiar feeling in the groin.

  Just before lunch, Hugh’s daughter came into his office. She kissed him and said, “Many happy returns of the day, Daddy,” and gave him a small oblong package with a bow of colored ribbon on top of it. Clare was twenty-two and had been married four years but she refused to stop saying “Daddy.” Hugh opened the package, feeling confused. There was a gold-topped fountain pen in it. It was the fourth fountain pen Clare had given him in the last six years, two on birthdays and the third on Christmas. She had not inherited her father’s memory.

  “What’s this for?” Hugh asked.

  “Daddy!” Clare said. “You’re kidding.”

  Hugh stared at the pen. He knew it wasn’t his birthday (June 12th). And it certainly wasn’t Christmas (December 25th).

  “It can’t be,” Clare said incredulously. “You didn’t forget!”

  Hugh remembered Narcisse’s face at breakfast, and the twitching of her nose. “Oh, my,” he said.

  “You better load yourself with flowers before you set foot in the house tonight,” Clare said. She peered anxiously at her father. “Daddy, are you all right?” she asked.

  “Of course I’m all right,” Hugh said, annoyed. “Everybody forgets an anniversary once in a while.”

  “Not you, Daddy.”

  “Me, too. I’m human, too,” he said, but he felt shaken. He unscrewed the top of the pen and wrote TWENTY-FOUR YEARS, in capitals, on a pad, keeping his head down. He now owned eight fountain pens. “It’s just what I needed, Clare,” he said, and put it in his pocket. “Thank you very much.”

  “You haven’t forgotten that you promised to take me to lunch, have you?” Clare had phoned the day before to make the appointment for lunch, because, she told Hugh, she had some serious problems to discuss.

  “Of course not,” Hugh said briskly. He put on his overcoat, and they went out together. Hugh ordered sole, then changed to a lamb chop, because he remembered that Narcisse had said at breakfast they were to have fish for dinner. Clare ordered roast chicken and Waldorf salad, and a bottle of wine, because, she said, the afternoons became less sad after a bottle of wine. Hugh didn’t understand why a pretty twenty-two-year-old girl needed wine to keep her from being sad in the afternoons, but he didn’t interfere.

  While Clare was going over the wine card, Hugh took Morton’s letter out of his pocket and read it. Morton was asking for two hundred and fifty dollars. It seemed that he had borrowed a fraternity brother’s Plymouth and gone into a ditch with it after a dance and the repairs had come to a hundred and twenty-five dollars. There had been a girl with him, too, and her nose had been broken and the doctor had charged a hundred dollars for the nose and Morton had promised to pay. Then, there was ten dollars for two books in a course on ethics and fifteen dollars just, as Morton phrased it, to make it a round number. Hugh put the letter back in his pocket without saying anything about it to Clare. At least, Hugh thought, it wasn’t as bad as last year, when it looked as though Morton was going to be kicked out of school for cheating on a calculus examination.

  As Clare ate her chicken and drank her wine, she told her father what was troubling her. Mostly, it was Freddie, her husband. She was undecided, she said as she ate away steadily at her chicken, whether to leave him or have a baby. She was sure Freddie was seeing another woman, on East Seventy-eighth Street, in the afternoons, and before she took a step in either direction she wanted Hugh to confront Freddie man to man and get a statement of intentions from him. Freddie wouldn’t talk to her. Whenever she brought the subject up, he left the house and went to a hotel for the night. If it was to be a divorce, she would need at least a thousand dollars from Hugh for the six weeks in Reno, because Freddie had already told her he wouldn’t advance a cent for any damn thing like that. Besides, Freddie was having a little financial trouble at the moment. He had overdrawn against his account at the automobile agency for which he worked, and they had clamped down on him two weeks ago. If they had the baby, the doctor Clare wanted would cost eight hundred dollars, and there would be at least another five hundred for the hospital and nurses, and she knew she could depend on Daddy for that.

  She drank her wine and talked on as Hugh ate silently. Freddie, she said, was also five months behind in his dues and greens fees at the golf club, and they were going to post his name if he didn’t pay by Sunday, and that was really urgent, because of the disgrace, and Freddie had behaved like an absolute savage around the house ever since he received the letter from the club secretary.

  “I told him,” Clare said, with tears in her eyes and eating steadily, “I told him I would gladly go out and work, but he said he’d be damned if he’d let people say he couldn’t support his own wife, and, of course, you have to respect a feeling like that. And he told me he wouldn’t come to you for another cent, either, and you can’t help admiring him for that, can you?”

  “No,” Hugh said, remembering that his son-in-law had borrowed from him, over a period of four years, three thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars and had not paid back a cent. “No, you can’t. Did he know you were going to come and talk to me today?”

  “Vaguely,” Clare said, and poured herself another glass of wine. As she carefully harvested the last bits of apple and walnut from her salad, Clare said she didn’t really like to burden him with her problems but he was the only one in the whole world whose judgment she really trusted. He was so solid and sensible and smart, she said, and she didn’t know any more whether she really loved Freddie or not and she was so confused and she hated to see Freddie so unhappy all the time about money and she wanted to know whether Hugh honestly felt she was ready for motherhood at the age of twenty-two. By the time they finished their coffee, Hugh had promised to talk to Freddie very soon about the woman on Seventy-eighth Street and to underwrite either the trip to Reno or the obstetrician, as the case might be, and he had made a half promise about the back dues and the greens fees.

  On the way to the office, Hugh bought an alligator handbag for Narcisse for sixty dollars and worried sharply, for a moment, about inflation as he wrote out the check and handed it to the salesgirl.

  It was a little difficult to work after lunch, because he kept thinking about Clare and what she had been like as a little girl (measles at four, mumps the year after, braces from eleven to fifteen, acne between fourteen and seventeen). He worked very slowly on Sorrento. Mr. Gorsline came in twice during the afternoon. The first time he said, “Still on Sorrento?” and the second time he said, “Who the hell cares if that Communist Russian wrote a book there?”

  In addition to the usual sensation in the groin, Hugh noticed a quickening of his breath, which was almost a gasp, when Mr. Gorsline stood behind him during the afternoon.

  After work, he went into the little bar on Lexington Avenue where he met Jean three times a week. She was sitting there, finishing her first whisky, and he sat down beside her and squeezed her hand in greeting. They had been in love for eleven years now, but he had kissed her only once (V-E Day), because she had been a classmate of Narcisse’s at Bryn Mawr and they had decided early in the game to be honorable. She was a tall, majestic woman who, because she had led a troubled life, still looked comparatively young. They sat sadly and secretly in sad little bar
s late in the afternoon and talked in low, nostalgic tones about how different everything could have been. In the beginning, their conversation had been more animated, and for a half hour at a time Hugh had recovered some of the optimism and confidence that he had had as a young man who had taken all the honors at college, before it had become apparent that a retentive memory and talent and intelligence and luck were not all the same thing.

  “I think, very soon,” Jean said while he was sipping his drink, “we’ll have to give this up. It isn’t going anywhere, really, is it, and I just don’t feel right about it. I feel guilty. Don’t you?”

  Until then, it hadn’t occurred to Hugh that he had done anything to feel guilty about, with the possible exception of the kiss on V-E Day. But now that Jean had said it, he realized that he probably would feel guilty from now on, every time he entered the bar and saw her sitting there.

  “Yes,” he said sadly. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I’m going away for the summer,” Jean said. “In June. When I come back I’m not going to see you any more.”

  Hugh nodded miserably. The summer was still five months away, but behind him he had a sense of something slipping, with a rustling noise, like a curtain coming down.

  He had to stand in the subway all the way home, and the car was so crowded that he couldn’t turn the pages of his newspaper. He read and reread the front page, thinking, I certainly am glad I wasn’t elected President.

  It was hot in the train, and he felt fat and uncomfortable jammed among the travellers, and he had a new, uneasy feeling that his flesh was overburdening him. Then, just before he came to Two hundred and forty-second Street, he realized that he had left the alligator bag on his desk in the office. He felt a little tickle of terror in his throat and knees. It was not so much that, empty-handed, he faced an evening of domestic sighs, half-spoken reproaches, and almost certain tears. It was not even so much the fact that he mistrusted the cleaning woman who did his office every night and who had once (November 3, 1950), he was sure, taken a dollar and thirty cents’ worth of airmail stamps from the upper right-hand drawer. But, standing there in the now uncrowded car, he had to face the fact that twice in one day he had forgotten something. He couldn’t remember when anything like that had ever happened to him before. He touched his head with his fingertips, as though there might be some obscure explanation to be found that way. He decided to give up drinking. He drank only five or six whiskies a week, but the induction of partial amnesia by alcohol was a well-established medical principle, and perhaps his level of tolerance was abnormally low.