Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  “So,” he said. “Tomorrow we go up to the top of the mountain.”

  She was grateful to him for realizing that she didn’t want to talk about herself any more and switching the conversation without saying anything about it.

  “How will you do it—with your ankle?” she asked.

  “I’ll get the doctor to put a shot of Novocain in it,” he said. “And for a few hours my ankle will feel immortal.”

  “All right,” she said, watching him pour his own tea, watching his hand shake. “In the morning?”

  “I don’t ski in the morning,” he said. He added the rum to his tea and sniffed it appreciatively.

  “What do you do in the morning?”

  “I recover, and write poetry.”

  “Oh.” She looked at him doubtfully. “Should I know your name?”

  “No,” he said. “I always tear it up the next morning.”

  She laughed, a little uncertainly, because the only other people she had ever known who wrote poetry had been fifteen-year-old boys in prep school. “My,” she said, “you’re a queer man.”

  “Queer?” He raised his eyebrows. “Doesn’t that mean something a little obscene in America? Boys with boys, I mean.”

  “Only sometimes,” Constance said, embarrassed. “Not now. What sort of poetry do you write?”

  “Lyric, elegiac, and athletic,” he said. “In praise of youth, death, and anarchy. Very good for tearing. Shall we have dinner together tonight?”

  “Why?” she asked, unsettled by the way he jumped from one subject to another.

  “That’s a question that no European woman would ever ask,” he said.

  “I told the hotel that I was going to have dinner up in my room.”

  “I have great influence at the hotel,” he said. “I think I may be able to prevent them from taking the tray up.”

  “Besides,” Constance said, “what about the lady you’ve been having dinner with all week—the French lady?”

  “Good.” He smiled. “You’ve been watching me, too.”

  “There’re only fifteen tables in the whole dining room,” Constance said uncomfortably. “You can’t help …” The French lady was at least thirty, with a short, fluffed haircut and a senselessly narrow waist. She wore black slacks and sweaters and very tight, shiny belts, and she and Pritchard always seemed to be laughing a great deal together over private jokes in the corner in which they sat every night. Whenever Constance was in the room with the French lady, she felt young and clumsy.

  “The French lady is a good friend,” Pritchard said, “but Anglo-Saxons are not nuancé enough for her, she says. The French are patriots down to the last bedsheet. Besides, her husband is arriving tomorrow.”

  “I think I’d really rather stick to my plan,” Constance said formally. She stood up. “Are we ready to go?”

  He looked at her quietly for a moment. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Sometimes it’s impossible to keep from saying that.”

  “Please,” she said. “Please, I do have to go now.”

  “Of course,” he said. He stood up and left some money on the table. “Whatever you say.”

  They walked the hundred yards to their hotel in silence. It was completely dark now, and very cold, and their breath crystallized in little clouds before their mouths as they walked.

  “I’ll put your skis away,” he said, at the door of the hotel.

  “Thank you,” she said in a low voice.

  “Good night. And write a nice letter,” he said.

  “I’ll try,” she said. She turned and went into the hotel.

  In her room, she took off her boots but didn’t bother changing her clothes. She lay down on her bed, without putting on the lights, and stared at the dark ceiling, thinking, Nobody ever told me the English were like that.

  * * *

  “Dearest,” she wrote. “Forgive me for not writing, but the weather has been glorious and for a little while I’ve just devoted myself to making turns and handling deep snow.… There’s a young man here, an Englishman,” she wrote conscientiously, “who’s been very nice, who has been good enough to act as an instructor, and even if I say it myself, I’m really getting pretty good. He was in the R.A.F. and his father went down with the Hood and his mother was killed in a bombing—”

  She stopped. No, she thought, it sounds tricky. As though I’m hiding something, and putting in the poor, dead, patriotic family as artful window dressing. She crumpled the letter and threw it in the wastebasket. She took out another sheet of paper. “Dearest,” she wrote.

  There was a knock on the door, and she called “Ja.”

  The door opened and Pritchard came in. She looked up in surprise. In all the three weeks, he’d never come to her room. She stood up, embarrassed. She was in her stocking feet, and the room was littered with the debris of the afternoon’s skiing—boots standing near the window, sweaters thrown over a chair, gloves drying on the radiator, and her parka hanging near the bathroom door, with a little trickle of melting snow running down from the collar. The radio was on, and an American band was playing “Bali Ha’i” from an Armed Forces station in Germany.

  Pritchard, standing in front of the open door, smiled at her. “Ah,” he said, “some corner of a foreign room that is forever Vassar.”

  Constance turned the radio off. “I’m sorry,” she said, waving vaguely and conscious that her hair was not combed. “Everything’s such a mess.”

  Pritchard went over to the bureau and peered at Mark’s picture, which was standing there in a leather frame. “The receiver of letters?” he asked.

  “The receiver of letters.” There was an open box of Kleenex on the bureau, and an eyelash curler, and a half-eaten bar of chocolate, and Constance felt guilty to be presenting Mark so frivolously.

  “He’s very handsome.” Pritchard squinted at the photograph.

  “Yes,” Constance said. She found her moccasins and put them on, and felt a little less embarrassed.

  “He looks serious.” Pritchard moved the Kleenex to get a better view.

  “He is serious,” said Constance. In all the three weeks that she had been skiing with Pritchard, she had said hardly anything about Mark. They had talked about almost everything else, but somehow, by a tacit agreement, they had avoided Mark. They had skied together every afternoon and had talked a great deal about the necessity of leaning forward at all times, and about falling relaxed, and about Pritchard’s time in public school in England, and about his father, and about the London theatre and American novelists, and they had talked gravely about what it was like to be twenty and what it was like to be thirty, and they had talked about Christmastime in New York and what football weekends were like at Princeton, and they had even had a rather sharp discussion on the nature of courage when Constance lost her nerve in the middle of a steep trail late one afternoon, with the sun going down and the mountain deserted. But they had never talked about Mark.

  Pritchard turned away from the picture. “You didn’t have to shoe yourself for me,” he said, indicating her moccasins. “One of the nicest things about skiing is taking those damned heavy boots off and walking around on a warm floor in wool socks.”

  “I’m engaged in a constant struggle not to be sloppy,” Constance said.

  They stood there, facing each other in silence for a moment. “Oh,” Constance said. “Sit down.”

  “Thank you,” Pritchard said formally. He seated himself in the one easy chair. “I just came by for a minute. To say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” Constance repeated stupidly. “Where’re you going?”

  “Home. Or at least to England. I thought I’d like to leave you my address,” Pritchard said.

  “Of course.”

  He reached over and picked up a piece of paper and her pen and wrote for a moment. “It’s just a hotel,” he said. “Until I find a place of my own.” He put the paper down on the desk but kept the pen in his hand, playing with it. “Give you somebody else to write to,”
he said. “The English receiver of letters.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You can tell me what the snow’s like,” he said, “and how many times you came down the mountain in one day and who got drunk at the bar the night before.”

  “Isn’t this sudden?” Constance asked. Somehow, after the first few days, it had never occurred to her that Pritchard might leave. He had been there when she arrived and he seemed to belong there so thoroughly, to be so much a part of the furniture of the place, that it was hard to conceive of being there without him.

  “Not so sudden,” Pritchard said. He stood up. “I wanted to say goodbye in private,” he said. She wondered if he was going to kiss her. In all the three weeks, he hadn’t as much as held her hand, and the only times he had touched her had been when he was helping her up after a particularly bad fall. But he made no move. He stood there, smiling curiously, playing with the pen, unusually untalka-tive, as though waiting for her to say something. “Well,” he said, “will I see you later?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “We’ll have a farewell dinner. They have veal on the menu, but I’ll see if we can’t get something better, in honor of the occasion.” He put the pen down carefully on the desk. “Until later,” he said, and went out, closing the door behind him.

  Constance stared at the closed door. Everybody goes away, she thought. Unreasonably, she felt angry. She knew it was foolish, like a child protesting the end of a birthday party, but she couldn’t help feeling that way. She looked around the room. It seemed cluttered and untidy to her, like the room of a silly and careless schoolgirl. She shook her head impatiently and began to put things in place. She put the boots out in the hall and hung the parka in the closet and carried the box of Kleenex into the bathroom and gave the half bar of chocolate to the chambermaid. She straightened the coverlet of the bed and cleaned the ashtray and, on a sudden impulse, dropped the eyelash curler into the wastebasket. It’s too piddling, she thought, to worry about curling your eyelashes.

  Pritchard ordered a bottle of Burgundy with dinner, because Swiss wine, he said, was too thin to say farewell on. They didn’t talk much during dinner. It was as though he had already departed a little. Once or twice, Constance almost started to tell him how grateful she was for his patience with her on the hills, but somehow it never came out, and the dinner became more and more uncomfortable for both of them. Pritchard ordered brandy with the coffee, and she drank it, although it gave her heartburn. The three-piece band began to play for the evening’s dancing while they were drinking their brandy, and then it was too noisy to talk.

  “Do you want to dance?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “I despise dancing.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Constance said. “Let’s take a walk.”

  They went to their rooms to get some warm clothes, and Pritchard was waiting for her outside the hotel door when she came down in her snow boots and the beaver coat her father had given her the year before. Pritchard was leaning against a pillar on the front porch and she stared at him for a moment before he turned around, and she was surprised to see how tired and suddenly old he seemed when he was unaware that he was being watched.

  They walked down the main street, with the sounds of the band diminishing behind them. It was a clear night, and the stars shone above the mountains, electrically blue. At the top of the highest hill, at the end of the téléphérique, a single light glittered from the hut there, where you could warm yourself before the descent, and buy spiced hot wine and biscuits.

  They walked down to the bottom of the street and crossed over onto the path alongside the dark skating rink. The ice reflected the stars dimly and there was the noise of water from the brook that ran along one side of the rink and scarcely ever froze.

  They stopped at a small, snow-covered bridge, and Pritchard lit a cigarette. The lights of the town were distant now and the trees stood around them in black silence. Pritchard put his head back, with the smoke escaping slowly from between his lips, and gestured up toward the light on top of the mountain.

  “What a life,” he said. “Those two people up there. Night after winter night alone on top of the hills, waiting for the world to arrive each morning.” He took another puff of the cigarette. “They’re not married, you know,” he said. “Only the Swiss would think of putting two people who weren’t married on top of a hill like that. He’s an old man and she’s a religious fanatic and they hate each other, but neither of them will give the other the satisfaction of taking another job.” He chuckled as they both looked at the bright pinpoint above them. “Last year there was a blizzard and the téléphérique didn’t run for a week and the power lines were down and they had to stay up there for six days and nights, breaking up chairs for firewood, living off chocolate and tins of soup, and not talking to each other.” He stared reflectively at the faraway high light. “It will do as a symbol this year for this pretty continent,” he said softly.

  Suddenly Constance knew what she had to say. “Alan”—she moved squarely in front of him—“I don’t want you to go.”

  Pritchard flicked at his cigarette. “Six days and six nights,” he said. “For their hardness of heart.”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I’ve been here for a long time,” he said. “I’ve had the best of the snow.”

  “I want you to marry me,” Constance said.

  Pritchard looked at her. She could see he was trying to smile. “That’s the wonderful thing about being twenty years old,” he said. “You can say things like that.”

  “I said I want you to marry me.”

  He tossed away his cigarette. It glowed on the snow. He took a step toward her and kissed her. She could taste the fumed grape of the brandy faint on his lips. He held her for a moment, then stepped back and buttoned her coat, like a nurse being careful with a little girl. “The things that can happen to a man,” he said. He shook his head slowly.

  “Alan,” Constance said.

  “I take it all back,” Pritchard said. “You’re not at all like the girls who advertise soap and beer.”

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t make it hard.”

  “What do you know about me?” He knocked the snow off the bridge railing and leaned against it, brushing the snow off his hands with a dry sound. “Haven’t you ever been warned about the young men you’re liable to meet in Europe?”

  “Don’t confuse me,” she said. “Please.”

  “What about the chap in the leather frame?”

  Constance took a deep breath. She could feel the cold tingling in her lungs. “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s not here.”

  Pritchard chuckled, but it sounded sad. “Lost,” he said. “Lost by an ocean.”

  “It’s not only the ocean,” she said.

  They walked in silence again, listening to the sound of their boots on the frozen path. The moon was coming up between the peaks and reflecting milkily off the snow.

  “You ought to know one bit of information,” Pritchard said in a low voice, looking down at the long shadow the moon cast on the path ahead of him. “I’ve been married.”

  “Oh,” Constance said. She was very careful to walk in the footprints of the others who had tamped the path down before her.

  “Not gravely married,” Pritchard said, looking up. “We were divorced two years ago. Does that make a difference to you?”

  “Your business,” Constance said.

  “I must visit America someday,” Pritchard said, chuckling. “They are breeding a new type.”

  “What else?” Constance asked.

  “The next thing is unattractive,” Pritchard said. “I don’t have a pound. I haven’t worked since the war. I’ve been living off what was left of my mother’s jewelry. There wasn’t much and I sold the last brooch in Zurich last week. That’s why I have to go back, even if there were no other reasons. You can see,” he said, grinning painfully, “you’ve picke
d the prize of the litter.”

  “What else?” Constance asked.

  “Do you still want to hear more?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would never live in America,” Pritchard said. “I’m a weary, poverty-stricken, grounded old R.A.F. type, and I’m committed to another place. Come on.” He took her elbow brusquely, as though he didn’t want to talk any more. “It’s late. We’d better get to the hotel.”

  Constance hung back. “You’re not telling me everything,” she said.

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “No.”

  “All right,” he said. “I couldn’t go with you to America if I wanted to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they wouldn’t let me in.”

  “Why not?” Constance asked, puzzled.

  “Because I am host to the worm,” Pritchard said.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Swiss for delicate,” he said harshly. “They kicked D. H. Lawrence out of New Mexico and made him die along the Riviera for it. You can’t blame them. They have enough diseases of their own. Now let’s go back to the hotel.”

  “But you seem so healthy. You ski—”

  “Everybody dies here in the best of health,” Pritchard said. “It goes up and down with me. I almost get cured, then the next year”—he shrugged and chuckled soundlessly—“the next year I get almost uncured. The doctors hold their heads when they see me going up in the lift. Go home,” he said. “I’m not for you. I’m oppressed. And you’re not oppressed. It is the final miscegenation. Now shall we go back to the hotel?”

  Constance nodded. They walked slowly. The town on the hill ahead of them was almost completely dark now, but they could hear the music of the dance band, thin and distant in the clear night air.

  “I don’t care,” Constance said as they came to the first buildings. “I don’t care about anything.”

  “When I was twenty—” Pritchard said. “When I was twenty I once said the same thing.”

  “First, we’ll be practical,” Constance said. “You’ll need money to stay here. I’ll give it to you tomorrow.”

  “I can’t take your money.”