Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  Munnie turned and looked at his sleeping friend. Bert slept tranquilly, extended and composed under his blankets, his sunburned long thin nose geometrically straight in the air. This would change, too, Munnie thought. After the boat docked they would never be as close again. Never as close as on the rocks over the sea in Sicily or climbing through the sunny ruins at Paestum or chasing the two English girls through the Roman nightclubs. Never as close as the rainy afternoon in Florence when they talked, together, for the first time, to Martha. Never as close as on the long, winding journey, the three of them packed into the small open car, up the Ligurian coast toward the border, stopping whenever they felt like it for white wine or a swim at the little beach pavilions with all the small, brightly colored pennants whipping out in the hot Mediterranean afternoon. Never as close as the conspiratorial moment over the beers with the paratrooper in the bar of the casino at Juan-les-Pins, learning about the unbeatable system. Never as close as in the lavender, hilarious dawns, driving back to their hotel gloating over their winnings, with Martha dozing between them. Never as close as on the blazing afternoon at Barcelona, sitting high up on the sunny side, sweating and cheering and shading their eyes as the matador walked around the ring holding up the two bull’s ears, with the flowers and the wineskins sailing down around him. Never as close at Salamanca and Madrid and on the road through the straw-colored, hot, bare country up to France, drinking sweet, raw Spanish brandy and trying to remember how the music went that the gypsies danced to in the caves. Never so close, again, finally, as here in this small whitewashed Basque hotel room, with Bert still asleep, and Munnie standing at the window watching the old man disappear with his dog and his shotgun, and upstairs in the room above them, Martha, sleeping, as she always did, curled like a child, until they came in, as they always did, together, as though they didn’t trust themselves or each other to do it alone, to wake her and tell her what they planned to do for the day.

  Munnie threw the curtains wide open and let the sun stream in. If there’s one boat that I have a right to miss in my life, he thought, it’s the one that’s sailing from Le Havre the day after tomorrow.

  Munnie went over to Bert’s bed, stepping carefully over the clothes that were crumpled on the floor. He poked Bert’s bare shoulder with his finger. “Master,” he said, “rise and shine.” The rule was that whoever lost in tennis between them had to call the other Master for twenty-four hours. Bert had won the day before 6–3, 2–6, 7–5.

  “It’s after ten.” Munnie poked him again.

  Bert opened both eyes and stared coldly at the ceiling. “Do I have a hangover?” he asked.

  “We only had one bottle of wine amongst us for dinner,” said Munnie, “and two beers after.”

  “I do not have a hangover,” Bert said, as if the news depressed him. “But it’s raining outside.”

  “It’s a bright, hot sunny morning,” Munnie said.

  “Everybody always told me it rained all the time on the Basque coast,” said Bert, lying still, complaining.

  “Everybody is a liar,” Munnie said. “Get the hell out of bed.”

  Bert swung his legs slowly over the side of the bed and sat there, thin, bony and bare from the waist up, in his pajama pants that were too short for him and from which his big feet dangled loosely. “Do you know why American women live longer than American men, Fat Man?” he asked, squinting at Munnie in the sunlight.

  “No.”

  “Because they sleep in the morning. My ambition,” Bert said, lying back on the bed again, but with his legs still over the side, “is to live as long as the American Woman.”

  Munnie lit a cigarette and tossed one to Bert, who managed to light it without lifting his head from the blanket. “I had an idea,” Munnie said, “while you were wasting the precious hours of your childhood sleeping.”

  “Put it in the suggestion box.” Bert yawned and closed his eyes. “The management will give a buffalo-hide saddle to every employee who presents us with an idea that is put into practice by the …”

  “Listen,” Munnie said eagerly. “I think we ought to miss that damned boat.”

  Bert smoked in silence for a moment, narrowing his eyes and pointing his nose at the ceiling. “Some people,” he said, “are born boat-missers and train-missers and plane-missers. My mother, for example. She once saved herself from getting killed by ordering a second dessert at lunch. The plane left just as she got to the field and came down in flames thirty-five minutes later. Not a single survivor. It was ice cream, with crushed fresh strawberries …”

  “Come on, Bert.” Sometimes Munnie got very impatient with Bert’s habit of going off on tangents while he was making up his mind. “I know all about your mother.”

  “In the springtime,” Bert said, “she goes mad for strawberries. Tell me, Munnie, have you ever missed anything in your life?”

  “No,” Munnie said.

  “Do you think it’s wise,” Bert asked, “at this late stage, to fiddle with the patterns of a lifetime?”

  Munnie went into the bathroom and filled a glass with water. When he came back into the bedroom, Bert was still lying on the bed, his legs dangling over the side, smoking. Munnie stood over him, then slowly tipped the glass over Bert’s bare brown chest. The water splashed a little and ran in thin trickles over Bert’s ribs onto the sheets.

  “Ah,” Bert said, still smoking. “Refreshing.”

  They both laughed and Bert sat up.

  “All right, Fat Man,” Bert said. “I didn’t know you were serious.”

  “My idea,” said Munnie, “is to stay here until the weather changes. It’s too sunny to go home.”

  “What’ll we do about the tickets?”

  “We’ll send a telegram to the boat people and tell them we’ll take passage later. They’ve got a waiting list a mile long. They’ll be delighted.”

  Bert nodded judiciously. “What about Martha?” he asked. “Maybe she has to get to Paris today.”

  “Martha doesn’t have to go anyplace. Anytime,” Munnie said. “You know that.”

  Bert nodded again. “The luckiest girl in the world,” he said.

  Outside the window there was the sound of the shotgun again. Bert turned his head, listening. There was a second report. “My,” Bert said, running his tongue over his teeth, “that was wonderful partridge last night.” He stood up, looking, in his flapping pajama pants, like a boy who would be a good prospect for the college crew if he could be induced to eat heavily for a year. He had been chubby until he went into the Army, but by the time he got out in May, he was long and stringy and his ribs showed. When she wanted to make fun of him, Martha told him he looked like an English poet in his bathing trunks. He went to the window and Munnie crossed over and stood beside him, looking out over the mountains and the sea and the sunlight.

  “You’re right,” Bert said. “Only an idiot would dream of starting home on a day like this. Let’s go tell Martha the party’s still on.”

  They dressed quickly, in espadrilles and cotton trousers and tennis shirts and went upstairs together and into Martha’s room, without knocking. The wind was making one of the shutters rap against the window, but Martha was still asleep, curled around herself, only the top of her head showing above the blanket, the hair dark and tangled and short. The pillow was on the floor.

  Munnie and Bert stood in silence for a moment, looking down at the curled, blanketed figure and the dark head, each of them convinced that the other did not know what he was thinking.

  “Awake,” Bert said softly. “Awake to glory.” He went over to the bed and touched the top of Martha’s head. Watching him, Munnie could feel the tips of his own fingers twitching electrically.

  “Please,” Martha said, her eyes still closed. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “It’s nearly noon,” Munnie said, lying by nearly two hours, “and we have to tell you something.”

  “Tell it to me,” said Martha, “and get out of here.”

  “The
Fat Man here,” said Bert, standing at her head, “has come up with an idea. He wants us to stay here until it begins to rain. How do you feel about it?”

  “Of course,” Martha said.

  Bert and Munnie smiled at each other, because they felt they understood her so well. “Martha,” said Bert, “you’re the only perfect girl alive.”

  Then they went out of the room to give her a chance to get dressed.

  They had met Martha Holm in Florence. They seemed to have the same ideas about which museums and which churches to go to and they kept bumping into her and she was alone and obviously American and as Bert said, they didn’t come prettier, and finally they started talking to each other. Maybe it was because they had first seen her in the Uffizi Gallery among the Botticellis that gave Munnie the idea, but he thought, privately, that, aside from the fact that her hair was short and dark and irregularly cut, she looked like the Primavera, tall, slender, and girlish, with a long narrow nose and deep, brooding, dangerous eyes. He felt extravagant and embarrassed to be thinking things like this about a twenty-one-year-old American girl who wore slacks and had gone for a year to Smith, but he couldn’t help himself. He never told Martha about it and, of course, he never said a word on the subject to Bert.

  Martha knew a lot of people in and around Florence (later on, it turned out that she knew a lot of people in and around everyplace) and she got them invited to a tea in Fiesole at a villa where there was a swimming pool and to a party at which Munnie found himself dancing with a Contessa. Martha had been in Europe for nearly two years and she was wonderful at telling you what places to go to and what places were traps, and she spoke Italian and French, and she was ready when you told her to be ready, and she didn’t scream for pity when she had to walk a few blocks on her own two feet, and she laughed at Bert’s and Munnie’s jokes and made some of her own, and she didn’t giggle, weep or sulk, which put her several notches above every other girl Munnie had ever known. After they had been together for three days in Florence and were due to start for Portofino and France, it seemed unbearable just to leave her behind. As far as Munnie and Bert could tell, she had no plans of her own. “I tell my mother,” Martha explained, “that I’m taking courses at the Sorbonne, and it’s almost true, at least in the wintertime.”

  Martha’s mother lived in Philadelphia, after three divorces, and every once in awhile, Martha said, she sent back a photograph, so that when she finally did arrive back home, there wouldn’t be an embarrassing moment on the dock when her mother wouldn’t recognize her.

  So Munnie and Bert talked it over very seriously and sat at a café table with Martha in the Piazza del Signoria and ordered coffee and put it up to her.

  “What we’ve decided,” Bert said, with Munnie sitting beside him, silently agreeing, “is that the Brooks-Carboy unguided tour of Europe could use you, as interpreter, hotel-finder, and chief taster of foreign foods. Aside from supplying a welcome feminine touch. Are you interested?”

  “Yes,” Martha said.

  “We’d like to know if we could mesh schedules, more or less,” Munnie said.

  Martha smiled. “I’m on a schedule of drift,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

  “Does that mean,” Munnie asked, because he liked to have everything absolutely clear, “that you want to come along?”

  “It means that I want to come along very much,” said Martha, “and I was hoping you’d ask me.” She looked at each of them for exactly the same number of seconds, cheerful, grateful, ready for anything.

  “Now,” said Bert, “Munnie and I have talked it over and we’re going to lay it on the line. Something like this has to be planned out in advance or there comes a dark and hideous night of disaster. We’ve thought up a good, workable set of rules and if you agree, off we go tomorrow. If not—no harm done—and we hope you spend a pleasant summer.”

  “Get to it, Bert,” Munnie said, impatiently. “Don’t recite the preamble to the Constitution.”

  “Rule Number One,” Bert said, with Martha sitting still, nodding, gravely listening, “rule number one is basic. No entanglements. Munnie and I’re old friends and we’ve planned this summer for years and we’ve been having a wonderful time and we don’t want to wind up fighting duels with each other or anything like that. Now, I know women …” He paused, daring either of them to smile. They didn’t smile.

  “He wouldn’t have said that,” Munnie explained, “before the Army.”

  “What do you know about women?” Martha asked, being serious.

  “What I know is that women’re always busy choosing,” Bert went on. “They come into a room and if there’re five men present, their minds get to work like a business machine, punching holes. First Choice, Second Choice, Acceptable, Perhaps, Impossible.”

  “Oh, my.” Martha began to laugh. She covered her mouth with her hand apologetically and tried to straighten her face. “Forgive me. Munnie … do you believe this?”

  “I don’t know,” he said embarrassedly. “I haven’t had Bert’s advantages. I wasn’t in the Army.”

  “I’ll even tell you how you’d choose,” Bert said, “between Munnie and me, so you won’t have to wonder or waste your time.”

  “Tell me,” Martha said. “Do tell me.”

  “In the beginning,” said Bert, “the tendency is to choose me. I’ll go into the reasons some other time. Then, after awhile, the switch sets in, and Munnie gets the final decision.”

  “Poor Bert,” Martha said, chuckling. “How awful for you! Only winning the opening game of the season all the time. Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because you’ve got to promise not to choose anybody,” Bert said. “And if you do choose, you have to go to the grave with your secret.”

  “To the grave,” Martha repeated, trying to be solemn.

  “Until the boat sails,” Bert said, “we treat each other like brothers and sister, and that’s all. D’accord?”

  “D’accord,” Martha said.

  “Good.” Bert and Munnie nodded at each other, pleased with how reasonable everybody was.

  “Rule Number Two,” Bert said, “if after awhile we get to feel you’re a nuisance—we say farewell and you leave. No tears. No recriminations. No scenes. Just a friendly shake of the hand and off to the nearest railroad station. D’accord?”

  “D’accord two times,” Martha said.

  “Rule Number Three—everybody pays exactly one-third of the expenses.”

  “Of course,” said Martha.

  “Rule Number Four,” Bert went on, like the director of a company explaining a plan of operations to his board, “everybody is free to go wherever he or she wants to, and with anyone else whoever, and no questions asked. We are not an inseparable unit, because inseparable units are boring. O.K.?”

  “A free, loose confederation of sovereign states,” Martha said. “I got it. Whomever.”

  They all shook hands on it, surrounded by the looming oversized statues, and started out together early the next morning, after figuring out a way to squeeze Martha into the car and strap her baggage onto the back, and it all couldn’t have worked out better. There hadn’t been a single argument all summer, although they had discussed, among other things, sex, religion, politics, marriage, the choice of careers, the position of women in modern society, the theatre in New York and Paris, and the proper size of bathing costumes for young girls on the beaches of Italy, France and Spain. And when Bert had taken up with a plump little blonde American girl in St. Tropez for a week or so, it hadn’t seemed to disturb Martha for a minute, even when the girl moved into the hotel they were staying at and frankly installed herself in the room next to Munnie’s and Bert’s.

  The truth was, nothing seemed to disturb Martha very much. She greeted the events of each day with a strange and almost dreamlike placidity. She seemed to make no decisions herself and whatever decisions the others made, regardless of how they turned out, she accepted with exactly the same good-natured, smiling, rather vague ap
proval. Linked in Munnie’s mind with this pleasant will-lessness was Martha’s extraordinary talent for sleeping. If nobody went in to awaken her in the morning, she would sleep on till noon, till two o’clock in the afternoon, even if she had gone to bed early the evening before. It wasn’t anything physical, either, because she didn’t need the sleep and never suggested, herself, that it was time to go to bed, no matter how late they stayed up at night or at what hour she had arisen in the morning. She never wrote any letters and rarely received any, since she hardly ever remembered to leave a forwarding address when they moved. When she needed money she would wire the bank in Paris that handled her allowance, and when it came she spent it carelessly. She took almost no interest in clothes and the reason she cut her hair short the way she did, she told Bert and Munnie, was that she didn’t want to be bothered having to comb it all the time.

  When the three of them talked about what they would like to do with their lives, she was vaguer than ever. “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging, smiling, seeming to be mildly and indulgently puzzled about herself. “I suppose I’ll just hang around. Wait and see. For the moment, I’m on a policy of float. I don’t see anybody else our age doing anything so damned attractive. I’m waiting for a revelation to send me in a permanent direction. I’m in no hurry to commit myself, no hurry at all …”

  In a curious way, Martha’s lack of direction made her much more interesting to Munnie than all the other girls he had ever known, the positive but limited girls who knew they wanted to be married and have babies and join a country club, the girls who wanted to go on the stage and be famous, the girls who wanted to become editors or deans of women’s colleges. Martha hadn’t settled for anything yet, Munnie felt, because nothing good enough had come up. And there was always the chance, he believed, that when she finally did commit herself it would be for something huge, original and glorious.