Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  “I twisted my ankle yesterday,” Pritchard said. “Overrated myself. The February disease. Out of control and into a gully, with a great deal of style. So today I can only do slow, majestic turns. But tomorrow we attack that one once more—” He gestured up toward the peak, half closed in by fog, with the sun a wet, pale ball above it, making it look forbidding and dangerous. “Come along?” He looked at her inquiringly.

  “I haven’t been up there yet,” Constance said, regarding the mountain respectfully. “I’m afraid it’s a little too much for me so far.”

  “You must always do things that are a little too much for you,” he said. “On skis. Otherwise, where’s the fun?”

  They were silent for several moments, moving slowly up the hill, feeling the wind cut across their faces, noticing the quiet and the queer, fogged mountain light. Twenty yards ahead of them, on the preceding bar, a girl in a yellow parka moved evenly upward like a bright, patient doll.

  “Paris?” Pritchard said.

  “What’s that?” He jumps around entirely too much, Constance thought, feeling heavy.

  “You said you came from Paris. Are you one of those nice people who come here to give us your government’s money?”

  “No,” said Constance. “I just came over on a—well, on a vacation. I live in New York, really. And French food makes me break out.”

  He looked at her critically. “You look completely unbroken out now,” he said. “You look like the girls who advertise soap and beer in American magazines.” Then he added hastily. “If that’s considered insulting in your country, I take it back.”

  “And the men in Paris,” she said.

  “Oh. Are there men in Paris?”

  “Even in the museums. They follow you. With homburg hats. Looking at you as though they’re weighing you by the pound. In front of religious pictures and everything.”

  “Girl I knew, English girl,” Pritchard said, “was followed from Prestwick, Scotland, to the tip of Cornwall by an American gunner in 1944. Three months. No religious pictures, though, as far as I know.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s an impolite atmosphere,” she said primly, knowing he was making fun of her in that straight-faced English way but not knowing whether to be offended or not.

  “Were you brought up in a convent?”

  “No.”

  “It’s amazing how many American girls sound as though they were brought up in a convent. Then it turns out they drink gin and roar in bars. What do you do at night?”

  “Where? At home?”

  “No. I know what people do at night in America. They look at television,” he said. “I mean here.”

  “I—I wash my hair,” she said defensively, feeling foolish. “And I write letters.”

  “How long are you staying up here?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Six weeks.” He nodded, and swung his poles to his outside hand, because they were nearing the top. “Six weeks of shining hair and correspondence.”

  “I made a promise,” she said, thinking, I might as well let him know now, just in case he’s getting any ideas. “I promised someone I’d write him a letter a day while I was gone.”

  Pritchard nodded soberly, as though sympathizing with her. “Americans,” he said as they came to the top and slid out from the T bar onto the flat place. “Americans baffle me.”

  Then he waved his poles at her and went straight down the hill, his red sweater a swift, diminishing gay speck against the blue-shadowed snow.

  The sun slipped between the peaks, like a gold coin in a gigantic slot, and the light got flat and dangerous, making it almost impossible to see the bumps. Constance made her last descent, falling twice and feeling superstitious, because it was always when you said, “Well, this is the last one,” that you got hurt.

  Running out and coming to a stop on the packed snow between two farmhouses at the outskirts of the town, she kicked off her skis with a sense of accomplishment and relief. Her toes and fingers were frozen, but she was warm everywhere else and her cheeks were bright red and she breathed the thin, cold air with a mountain sense of tasting something delicious. She felt vigorous and friendly, and smiled at the other skiers clattering to a stop around her. She was brushing the snow of the last two falls off her clothes, so that she would look like a good skier as she walked through the town, when Pritchard came down over the last ridge and flicked to a stop beside her.

  “I see you,” he said, bending to unlock his bindings, “but I won’t tell a soul.”

  Constance gave a final, self-conscious pat to the icy crystals on her parka. “I only fell four times all afternoon,” she said.

  “Up there, tomorrow”—he made a gesture of his head toward the mountain—“you’ll crash all day.”

  “I didn’t say I was going up there.” Constance buckled her skis together and started to swing them up to her shoulder. Pritchard reached over and took them from her. “I can carry my own skis,” she said.

  “Don’t be sturdy. American girls are always being sturdy about inessential points.” He made a big V out of the two pairs of skis on his shoulders, and they started walking, their boots crunching on the stained, hard snow of the road. The lights came on in the town, pale in the fading light. The postman passed them, pulling his sled with his big dog yoked beside him. Six children in snowsuits on a linked whip of sleds came sliding down out of a steep side street and overturned in front of them in a fountain of laughter. A big brown horse with his belly clipped to keep the ice from forming there slowly pulled three huge logs toward the station. Old men in pale-blue parkas passed them and said “Grüezi,” and a maid from one of the houses up the hill shot out on a little sled, holding a milk can between her knees as she rocketed around the turns. They were playing a French waltz over at the skating rink, and the music mingled with the laughter of the children and the bells on the horse’s bridle and the distant, old-fashioned clanging of the gong at the railroad station, announcing a train’s departure.

  “Departure,” the station bell said, insistent among the other sounds.

  There was a booming noise far off in the hills, and Constance looked up, puzzled. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Mortars,” said Pritchard. “It snowed last night, and the patrols have been out all day firing at the overhangs. For the avalanches.”

  There was another shot, low and echoing, and they stopped and listened. “Like old times,” Pritchard said as they started walking again. “Like the good old war.”

  “Oh,” said Constance, feeling delicate, because she had never heard guns before. “The war. Were you in it?”

  “A little.” He grinned. “I had a little war.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Night fighter,” he said, shifting the yoke of skis a little on his shoulders. “I flew an ugly black plane across an ugly black sky. That’s the wonderful thing about the Swiss—the only thing they shoot is snow.”

  “Night fighter,” Constance said vaguely. She had been only twelve years old when the war ended, and it was all jumbled and remote in her memory. It was like hearing about the graduating class two generations before you in school. People were always referring to names and dates and events that they expected you to recognize, but which you could never quite get straight. “Night fighter. What was that?”

  “We flew interceptor missions over France,” Pritchard said. “We’d fly on the deck to avoid the radar and flak, and hang around airfields making the Hun miserable, waiting for planes to come in slow, with their wheels down.”

  “Oh, I remember now,” Constance said firmly. “You’re the ones who ate carrots. For night vision.”

  Pritchard laughed. “For publication we ate carrots,” he said. “Actually, we used radar. We’d locate them on the screen and fire when we saw the exhaust flares. Give me a radar screen over a carrot any day.”

  “Did you shoot down many planes?” Constance asked, wondering if she sounded morbid.

  “Grüezi,” Pritch
ard said to the owner of a pension who was standing in front of his door looking up at the sky to see if it was going to snow that night. “Twenty centimetres by morning. Powder.”

  “You think?” the man said, looking doubtfully at the evening sky.

  “I guarantee,” Pritchard said.

  “You’re very polite,” the man said, smiling. “You must come to Switzerland more often.” He went into his pension, closing the door behind him.

  “A couple,” Pritchard said carelessly. “We shot down a couple. Should I tell you how brave I was?”

  “You look so young,” Constance said.

  “I’m thirty,” said Pritchard. “How old do you have to be to shoot down a plane? Especially poor, lumbering transports, running out of gas, full of clerks and rear-echelon types, wiping their glasses and being sorry the airplane was never invented.”

  In the hills, there was the flat sound of the mortars again. Constance wished they’d stop. “You don’t look thirty,” she said to Pritchard.

  “I’ve led a simple and salutary life. Here,” he said. They were in front of one of the smaller hotels, and he put the skis in the rack and jammed the poles into the snow beside them. “Let’s go in here and get a simple and salutary cup of tea.”

  “Well,” said Constance, “I really—”

  “Make the letter two pages shorter tonight, and more intense.” He took her elbow gently, barely touching it, as he guided her toward the door. “And polish your hair some other night.”

  They went into the bar and sat down at a heavy, carefully carved wood table. There were no other skiers in the bar—just some village men sitting under the chamois antlers on the wall, quietly playing cards on felt cloths and drinking coffee out of small stemmed glasses.

  “I told you,” Pritchard said, taking off his scarf. “This country is being overrun by the Swiss.”

  The waitress came over, and Pritchard ordered, in German.

  “What did you ask for?” Constance asked, because she could tell it wasn’t only tea.

  “Tea and lemon and black rum,” said Pritchard.

  “Do you think I ought to have rum?” she asked doubtfully.

  “Everybody in the whole world should have rum,” he said. “It will keep you from committing suicide in the twilight.”

  “You speak German, don’t you?”

  “I speak all the dead languages of Europe,” he said. “German, French, Italian, and English. I was carefully educated for a world of interchangeable currency.” He sat back, rubbing the knuckles of one hand against the palm of the other, to warm them. His head was leaning against the wood-panelled wall and he was smiling at her and she couldn’t tell whether she was uncomfortable or not. “Let me hear you say ‘Hi-ho, Silver.’”

  “What?” she asked, puzzled.

  “Isn’t that what people say in America? I want to perfect my accent for the next invasion,” he said.

  “They stopped that,” she said, thinking, My, he’s a jumpy boy, I wonder what happened to him to make him that way. “They don’t say it any more. It’s out of date.”

  “All the best things go out of date so quickly in your country,” he said regretfully. “Observe the Swiss.” He gestured with his head toward where the men were playing. “That game has been going on since 1910,” he said. “Living among the Swiss is so placid. It’s like living alongside a lake. Many people can’t stand it, of course. You remember that joke about the Swiss in that film about Vienna?”

  “No,” Constance said. “What film?” This is the first time, she thought, I’ve ever called a movie a film. I must be careful.

  “One of the characters says, ‘The Swiss haven’t had a war in a hundred and fifty years and what have they produced? The cuckoo clock.’ I don’t know.” Pritchard shrugged. “Maybe it’s better to live in a country that invents the cuckoo clock than one that invents radar. Time is nothing serious to a cuckoo clock. A little toy that makes a silly, artificial sound every half hour. For people who invent radar, time is ominous, because it’s the difference between the altitude of a plane and the location of the battery that’s going to bring it down. It’s an invention for people who are suspicious and are thinking of ambush. Here’s your tea. As you see, I’m making a serious effort to amuse you, because I’ve been watching you for five days and you give the impression of a girl who cries herself to sleep several times a week.”

  “How much of this stuff do I put in?” Constance asked, confused by the flood of talk, holding up the glass of rum, and carefully making sure not to look at Pritchard.

  “Half,” he said. “You have to have something in reserve for the second cup.”

  “It smells good,” Constance said, sniffing the fragrance that rose from the cup after she had measured out half the glass of rum and squeezed the lemon into it.

  “Perhaps”—Pritchard prepared his own cup—“perhaps I’d better talk only on impersonal subjects.”

  “Perhaps that would be better,” Constance said.

  “The chap who receives all those letters,” Pritchard said. “Why isn’t he here?”

  Constance hesitated for a moment. “He works,” she said.

  “Oh. That vice.” He sipped his tea, then put down his cup and rubbed his nose with his handkerchief. “Hot tea does that to you, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to marry him?”

  “You said impersonal.”

  “So. The marriage is arranged.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No. But you would have said no if it wasn’t.”

  Constance chuckled. “All right,” she said. “Arranged. Anyway, approximately arranged.”

  “When?”

  “When the three months’re up,” she said, without thinking.

  “Is that a law in New York?” Pritchard asked. “That you have to wait three months? Or is it a private family taboo?”

  Constance hesitated. Suddenly, she felt that she hadn’t really talked to anyone in a long time. She had ordered meals and asked directions in railroad stations and said good morning to the people in shops, but everything else had been loneliness and silence, no less painful because she had imposed it on herself. Why not, she thought, selfishly and gratefully. Why not talk about it, for once?

  “It’s my father,” she said, twisting her cup. “It’s his idea. He’s against it. He said wait three months and see. He thinks I’ll forget Mark in three months in Europe.”

  “America,” Pritchard said. “The only place left where people can afford to act in an old-fashioned manner. What’s the matter with Mark? Is he a fright?”

  “He’s beautiful,” Constance said. “Melancholy and beautiful.”

  Pritchard nodded, as though noting all this down. “No money, though,” he said.

  “Enough,” said Constance. “At least, he has a good job.”

  “What’s the matter with him, then?”

  “My father thinks he’s too old for me,” Constance said. “He’s forty.”

  “A grave complaint,” Pritchard said. “Is that why he’s melancholy?”

  Constance smiled. “No. He was born that way. He’s a thoughtful man.”

  “Do you only like forty-year-old men?” Pritchard asked.

  “I only like Mark,” said Constance. “Although it’s true I never got along with the young men I knew. They—they’re cruel. They make me feel shy—and angry with myself. When I go out with one of them, I come home feeling crooked.”

  “Crooked?” Pritchard looked puzzled.

  “Yes. I feel I haven’t behaved like me. I’ve behaved the way I think the other girls they’ve gone out with have behaved. Coquettish, cynical, amorous. Is this too complicated?”

  “No.”

  “I hate the opinions other people have of me,” Constance said, almost forgetting the young man at the table with her, and talking bitterly, and for herself. “I hate being used just for celebrations, when people come into town from college or from the Army. Somebody f
or parties, somebody to maul on the way home in the taxi. And my father’s opinion of me.” She was getting it out for the first time. “I used to think we were good friends, that he thought I was a responsible, grown-up human being. Then when I told him I wanted to marry Mark, I found out it was all a fraud. What he really thinks of me is that I’m a child. And a child is a form of idiot. My mother left him when I was ten and we’ve been very close since then, but we weren’t as close as I thought we were. He was just playing a game with me. Flattering me. When the first real issue came up, the whole thing collapsed. He wouldn’t let me have my own opinion of me at all. That’s why I finally said all right to the three months. To prove it to him once and for all.” She looked suddenly, distrustfully, at Pritchard, to see whether he was smiling. “Are you being amused at me?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “I’m thinking of all the people I’ve known who’ve had different opinions of me than I’ve had of myself. What a frightening idea.” He looked at her speculatively, but it was hard for her to tell how serious he was. “And what’s your opinion of yourself?”

  “It’s not completely formed yet,” she said slowly. “I know what I want it to be. I want to be responsible and I don’t want to be a child and I don’t want to be cruel—and I want to move in a good direction.” She shrugged, embarrassed now. “That’s pretty lame, isn’t it?”

  “Lame,” Pritchard said, “but admirable.”

  “Oh, I’m not admirable yet,” she said. “Maybe in ten years. I haven’t sorted myself out completely yet.” She laughed nervously. “Isn’t it nice,” she said, “you’re going away in a few days and I’ll never see you again, so I can talk like this to you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Very nice.”

  “I haven’t talked to anyone for so long. Maybe it’s the rum.”

  Pritchard smiled. “Ready for your second cup?”

  “Yes, thank you.” She watched him pour the tea and was surprised to notice that his hand shook. Perhaps, she thought, he’s one of those young men who came out of the war drinking a bottle of whisky a day.