Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  The only way that the plans hadn’t worked out as outlined in Florence had been that, except for the week of the plump blonde in St. Tropez, they had been an inseparable unit, but that was only because all three of them enjoyed being with one another better than being with anyone else. It wouldn’t have worked if Martha had been a different kind of girl, if she had been a coquette or greedy or foolish, and it wouldn’t have worked if Munnie and Bert hadn’t been such good friends and hadn’t trusted each other so completely, and finally, it wouldn’t have worked if they had all been a little older. But it had worked, at least up until the first week of October, and with luck, it would continue to work, until they kissed Martha good-bye and got on the boat train, and started for home.

  They lay on the deserted beach until nearly two o’clock and then took a swim. They had a race, because the water was cold, and it was the best way to keep warm. The race was a short one, only about fifty yards, and Munnie was completely out of breath by the time he finished, trying to keep up with Martha. Martha won easily and was floating serenely on her back when Munnie came up to her, blowing heavily and fighting to get air in his lungs.

  “It would be a different story,” Munnie said, grinning, but a little ashamed, “if I didn’t have asthma.”

  “Don’t be gloomy about it,” Martha said, kicking her legs gently. “Women’re more naturally buoyant.”

  They both stood up and watched Bert plowing doggedly up toward them.

  “Bert,” Martha said, as he reached them and stopped, “you’re the only man I know who looks like an old lady driving an electric automobile when he swims.”

  “My talents,” said Bert, with dignity, “run in another direction.”

  They went in then, shouting and pink from the cold water and waving their arms. They dressed on the beach, under the big towel, one after another, for modesty’s sake. Martha wore slacks that came down only to the middle of her calf and a fisherman’s jersey, striped blue and white. Watching her arrange her clothes with light, careless movements, Munnie felt that never in his life would he see again anything so gay and obscurely touching as Martha Holm, dressed in a sailor’s striped shirt, on a sunny beach, shaking the sea water out of her short, dark hair.

  They decided to have a picnic rather than to go to a restaurant for lunch and they got into the little two-seater MG that Munnie’s brother had left for him, when he had had his summer in Europe the year before. With Martha sitting on the cushioned brake in the middle they went into town and bought a cold chicken and a long loaf of bread and a piece of Gruyère cheese. They borrowed a basket from the fruit dealer from whom they bought a huge bunch of blue grapes and picked up two bottles of pink wine and got back into the car and drove all around the harbor to the old fort, which had been besieged and which had fallen at other times but which was used now in the summertime as a school to teach young people how to sail. They parked the car and walked out along the broad, bleached top of the sea wall, carrying the basket and the wine and the big, slightly damp towel, to serve as a tablecloth.

  From the wall they could see the wide stretch of the oval harbor, empty now except for a dory with a homemade sail heading toward the point of Sainte Barbe, and the deserted beach and the white and red buildings of Saint Jean de Luz. The boatyard near the fort was crammed with small blue Snipe-class boats, lashed down and on blocks for the winter, and from somewhere in the distance came the faint sound of hammering, lonely and out-of-season, where a single workman was putting new planks into the bow of a small fishing vessel. Out at sea, almost lost against the gray-blue wash of the horizon, the boats of the tuna fleet bobbed in the swell. The tide was out and the waves rolled in, white and spumy, but not ominous, over the slanting uncovered rocks on which the sea wall was built. Close to the wall, on the bay side, the ruined, circular bastions of the old wall, which the sea had broken in another century, loomed out of the quiet water, irregular, crumbling, useless, looking somehow Roman and reminding Munnie of aqueducts that had brought mountain water to cities that had long since vanished and dungeons in which the last prisoners had died five hundred years before.

  They didn’t go all the way out to the end of the wall, which was separated from the middle section of the breakwater by a wide channel through which the shipping entered and left the harbor. Even on the calmest day, Munnie felt something wild and dangerous out there on the flat point of stone, where the full force of the unbroken ocean probed, however quietly, at the guarded waters of the bay and the land beyond. Munnie suffered a little from vertigo and when he looked down the sheer sides of the wall into the shifting green depths and the fringe of foam he had a helpless picture of himself caught there below, or plunging down to fight against the tides and the rocks and the waves coming and going and crossing each other with upcurling tips of spray. He didn’t say anything about it, of course, but he was grateful when Martha said, “This is good enough,” before they had gone very far, and he carefully helped weight the towel down as a tablecloth squarely in the middle of the wall.

  There was a little wind, capricious and sporadically chilly, but Bert took off his shirt, to maintain his tan. Munnie, who had a soft, rather full growth of fuzzy reddish hair on his chest, and who was embarrassed by it, said that the wind was too cold for undressing. Bert glanced at him ironically, because he knew how Munnie felt about his chest, but he didn’t say anything.

  As Martha cut up the chicken and arranged the cheese and bread and grapes on pieces of paper in the center of the towel, where they could all get at them neatly, Bert cocked his head, listening to the distant, slow, rhythmic hammering from the boatyard. “Whenever I hear that noise in a place like this,” he said, “it reminds me of the end of The Cherry Orchard. Everything melancholy and closed up and ready to die and the autumn setting in …”

  “Whenever I hear it,” Martha said, arranging the grapes, “I think, ‘Divorce, divorce.’”

  “That’s the difference,” said Bert, “between Russia and America.” He walked over to the edge of the wall and stood there, his toes dangerously over the brink, staring out at the horizon, a tall, spare, loose-limbed figure, reciting, his arms ritually upraised, “Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, Oh, sea, And I would that my heart could utter, The thoughts that arise in me …”

  “Lunch is on,” Martha said, sitting cross-legged and pushing her sleeves above the elbows, her bare arms, under the bunched jersey, brown and surprisingly full and solid for such a slender girl. She took a piece of chicken and bit into it and said, “It’s the only kind of picnic that makes picnics worth while. And no ants.”

  Munnie drank some of the wine from the bottle, because they had neglected to bring glasses, and broke a piece of bread off the long loaf and took some of the dark meat. Bert sat on the other side of Martha, folding his long legs down in slow motion. He reached for a piece of chicken, and said, as he munched at it, “Do you think a bright, sober young American would make a fortune setting up a factory in France to manufacture paper plates and paper cups?”

  “It would spoil all the ineffable medieval charm,” Martha said.

  “Oh, that old, lowdown, ineffable, medieval, greasy-paper charm,” Bert said. “Trust a woman to notice things like that, eh, Munnie?” He lifted his eyebrow in an exaggerated, theatrical leer. “God, isn’t it lucky we walked into that gallery in Florence and found Martha? Otherwise, you know what our summer would’ve been like? We’d have been delivered over to all the female riffraff of Europe—all those Italian movie starlets, bursting out of their shirtwaists, all those skinny French models, all those hungry-eyed, golden-brown American divorcees, smelling from Arpège. God, Munnie, doesn’t it make you feel as though Something was watching over you that day in the museum? Tell me the truth, Fat Man, doesn’t it make you feel supernaturally serene?”

  “Where did you ever learn to talk like that?” Martha asked, sitting cross-legged, placidly lifting the wine bottle to her lips.

  “My grandfather was a Baptist preache
r in Memphis, Tennessee,” Bert said, “and he taught me to fear the Lord, read the Bible, relish corn, and speak in balanced sentences.” He stood up and waved the drumstick of the chicken at the Atlantic Ocean. “Repent, ye sinners, because ye have swum in the warm waters, and ogled the virgins …” He made a bow in Martha’s direction. “And ye have played at the tables and ye have neglected to send postcards home. Repent, because ye have found pleasure and ye have missed the boat.”

  “Do you want some cheese?” Martha asked.

  “With mustard.” Bert sat down again. He peered thoughtfully at Munnie. “What do you think, Munnie?” he asked. “Are we really as happy as we feel or do we only think we’re this happy? The philosopher’s everlasting cud—illusion or reality. Is this wall stone?” he demanded oratorically. “Is this ocean blue, this water wet? Is this girl beautiful? Is this money we have in our pockets or is it really coupons for prizes that were given away in Duluth in 1922 by a tobacco company that went bankrupt the first Thursday after the crash? Is this the good wine of France we’re drinking or is it vinegar spiked with blood and seawater? Rosé de Béarn,” he said, reading the label on the bottle. “It seems real, doesn’t it, but is it? Are we three over-privileged, white-toothed, splendid young American princes, visiting our greatest colony, or are we, without knowing it, pitiful refugees, in flight, with our backs to the sea?… Have you read a newspaper this morning, do you know the answer? Are we friends and brothers, or will we betray each other by sunset? Search the lady for daggers.”

  “Holy man,” Martha said, “the self-starter got loose.”

  Munnie smiled dreamily, in appreciation of Bert’s performance. He himself was literal and direct and always said exactly what he meant and no more. But he was entertained by Bert’s flights of rhetoric and appreciated Bert much the way a man with no talent, but a love for music, appreciates a friend who is a skillful pianist and who generously performs at just the right moments, without being asked. It went all the way back to the time when they were both sixteen and in school together and Bert used to make scandalous improvisations in blank verse about the assumed sexual habits of the middle-aged and slightly bald lady who taught them chemistry. It got Bert into trouble from time to time because he was recklessly brave and once he started he let himself be carried away and say outrageous things, no matter who was listening. Just this summer, they had had to fight four young Germans in a brasserie in Nice and run from the police because of one of his performances. Bert had struck up a conversation with the young men and asked them where they came from and they had said, after a little hesitation, that they were Swiss. “What part of Switzerland?” Bert had asked blandly. “Düsseldorf? Hamburg?”

  The Germans, who were large, solid men, had looked uncomfortable and turned away from him toward the beers that were standing on the bar in front of them, but Bert wouldn’t leave it alone. “The part of Switzerland I find most charming,” Bert said loudly, “is Belsen. So rural, so cosy, so full of memories. What I always have said is that Switzerland would have won the war if it hadn’t been stabbed in the back by the watchmakers. And a good thing, too.”

  “Cut it out,” Munnie had whispered, and Martha had shaken her head warningly too, and pulled at Bert’s arm. “There’re four of them. They’ll murder us.”

  But Bert had gone right on. “I’m proud to tell you gentlemen,” he had said, smiling broadly, “that I have always been a believer in a Greater Switzerland and there are plenty of good, red-blooded Americans who go right along with me.” The Germans were muttering among themselves by now and Munnie took off his watch and slipped it into his pocket because he didn’t want it broken when the fight began.

  “Shut up, Bert,” Martha said. “They’re going to hit you with a beermug.”

  “Now, boys,” Bert went on, lifting his glass, “I’d like you to join me in a toast to the greatest little old Swiss of them all, that kindly, sweet old lovable fellow, Adolf Hitler, and after that we’ll all join in singing Switzerland Über Alles. I’m sure you know the words …”

  Munnie had edged around by now and when the first German swung, he grabbed the man’s arm and clubbed him twice with his right hand. The Germans were slow, but strong, and very angry, and by the time Munnie dragged Bert to the door, he had a bloody nose and Bert’s coat collar was half torn off and all the waiters were screaming for the police.

  The three of them ran through the back streets of Nice, hearing confused shouting dying down behind them. Bert was chuckling as he ran, and shaking his right hand, which was numb from a German skull, and he kept saying to Munnie, “What part of Switzerland you from, Bud? Leipzig? Nuremberg?”

  A half hour later, when they were sitting safely in a bar along the Promenade des Anglais, it had begun to seem funny to Martha and Munnie, too, and for the rest of the summer, whenever any one of them did something that seemed objectionable or foolish, the others would ask, incredulously, “What part of Switzerland are you from?”

  Now Bert was sitting, waving the wine bottle gently, beaming out at the bay. “I think I am going to start a new kind of travel service. Out-of-season tours to slightly rundown resorts. I’ll write a brochure, entitled ‘Know Bliss! Be Unfashionable! Get Away from Your Fellow Man on Your Next Vacation!’ Do you think your father would be inclined to put up the dough to get us started, Munnie?”

  Bert had an unshakable belief that Munnie’s father was enormously wealthy and avid for unusual business opportunities, which Bert was happy to find for him. The opportunities had included the planting of an avocado grove near Grasse, and the building of a 4000-foot téléphérique for skiing in a village of twenty-two houses in the Spanish Pyrenees. All of Bert’s projects, aside from involving great outlays of capital on the part of Munnie’s father, also included the necessity of Bert’s remaining permanently in Europe as manager.

  “Munnie,” Bert said, “don’t you think we ought to send your father a cable?”

  “No,” said Munnie.

  “The chance of a lifetime,” Bert said. “What does he want to hold onto all that money for? The inheritance people’ll just take it from him in the hideous end. Well, I’ll find something. That’s not the only way to turn a dollar.” He peered speculatively at Martha, who was eating the grapes by now. “Martha,” he said, “do you know that you represent a source of vast potential income?”

  “I’m going to donate my body to science,” Martha said, “at the age of eighty-five.”

  “The essential thing,” said Bert, “is not to marry an American.”

  “Report that man to a committee,” Martha said.

  “America is not the place for a pretty woman,” Bert went on. “The houses’re getting too small, the help too expensive, a beauty suddenly finds herself in a cosy little nest in Scarsdale surrounded by television sets and labor-saving devices and invitations to join the Parent-Teachers Association. A beautiful woman does better in a country which is decaying a little, and rather uneconomically run—like France. You could marry a nice forty-five-year-old man with a clean mustache and large, rolling feudal estates on the banks of the Loire. Wonderful shooting in the autumn and good, light wines grown on the property and dozens of servants taking off their caps and bowing when the station wagon went by. Your husband would adore you and invite all your friends down to keep you happy and he’d leave you alone a good deal of the time when he went up to Paris to attend to his affairs and have his doctor probe his liver.”

  “Where do you fit into this picture?” Martha asked.

  “He’d be one of the friends invited to keep you happy,” Munnie said. He wasn’t enjoying the conversation. Even though Bert was joking, Munnie knew that actually Bert would approve if Martha did go out and marry an old man with a lot of money. Just the other day, when they had been talking about the careers that might lie ahead of them, Bert had said, “The important thing is to recognize your gift and then use it. And the best way to use it is to keep you from the insufferable boredom of work. Now your gift—” he
had grinned at Martha “—your gift is beauty. That’s easy. You use it on a man and the sky’s the limit. My gift is a double one, but in the long run less hopeful. I have charm …” He grinned more widely, making fun of himself, “and I don’t give a damn. Still, if I’m clever enough and don’t rise to the wrong bait, I may go a long way on it. As for Munnie …” He shook his head doubtfully. “His gift is virtue. Poor sod. What can he do with that?”

  Now, sitting on the corner of the towel, picking the grapes appreciatively off their stems, one by one, Bert was shaking his head. “No,” he said, “I won’t be one of the invited friends. I’m a permanent fixture. I’m the overseer of the estates, the curious American with no ambition who likes to live in France on the banks of the pretty river. I walk around in an old tweed jacket smelling a little from horses and new wine barrels, loved by one and all, making wry comments on the state of the world, playing backgammon in front of the fire with the mistress of the house when her husband is away, and going up the stairs later, with the last glass of Armagnac in my hand, to entertain her in my wry, American way in the ancestral bed …”

  “Ah,” Martha said, “how idyllic!”

  “Every age,” Bert said gravely, “to its own particular idyll. This is this year, among the wars.”

  Munnie felt very uncomfortable and when he looked over at Martha he felt even more uncomfortable, because she was laughing. They had laughed together at a lot of things since Florence, and they had covered all the subjects, but Munnie didn’t want to hear Martha laughing now at this.