Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  “What’re you waiting for, sweets?” he heard her think as her glance swept over him. “The night’s not getting any younger.”

  He drank the second bourbon even more quickly than the first. “Oh, God,” he thought, “I’m becoming a drunkard.” The bourbon didn’t seem to do anything for his nerves this time.

  “It’s time to go home,” he said, standing up. His voice didn’t sound like his. “I’m not feeling so well.”

  “Get a good night’s sleep,” Krkanius said.

  “Yeah.” If Krkanius knew that he’d had $30 stolen from him that evening, he wouldn’t have been so solicitous.

  Hugo walked quickly past the bar, making sure not to look at the girl. It was raining outside now and all the taxis were taken. He was just about to start walking when he heard the door open behind him. He couldn’t help but turn. The girl was standing there, alone, with her coat on. She was scanning the street for a taxi, too. Then she looked at him. “Your move, baby,” he heard, in a voice that was surprisingly harsh for a girl so young.

  Hugo felt himself blush. Just then, a taxi drove up. Both he and the girl started for it.

  “Can I give you a lift?” Hugo heard himself saying.

  “How kind of you,” the girl said, demurely.

  On the way home, in the dawn, many hours later, Hugo wished for the first time in his life that he had been born a Catholic. Then he could have gone directly to a priest, confessed, accepted penance and been absolved of sin.

  Sibyl called in the morning to tell him that her parents, who had come East for the wedding, were taking a trip to New York and wanted her to go along with them. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have been able to keep the disappointment at news like that out of his voice. He loved Sibyl dearly and usually felt lost without her. But now a wave of relief swept over him. The moment of confrontation, the moment when he would have to tell his innocent and trusting young wife about his appalling lapse from grace or, even worse, lie to her, was postponed.

  “That’s all right, honey,” he said, “you just go along with your mother and dad and have a good time. You deserve a holiday. Stay as long as you like.”

  “Hugo,” Sibyl said, “I just could break down and cry, you’re so good to me.”

  There was the sound of a kiss over the telephone and Hugo kissed back. When he hung up, he leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes in pain. One thing he was sure of, he wasn’t going to see that girl, that Sylvia, again. Sylvia. Almost the same name as Sibyl. How rotten could a man be?

  Passion spent for the moment, he lay in the largest double bed he had ever seen, next to the dazzling body that had opened undreamed-of utopias of pleasure for him. Ashamed of himself even for thinking about it, he was sure that if Sibyl lived to the age of ninety, she wouldn’t know one tenth as much as Sylvia must have known the day she was born.

  In the soft glow of a distant lamp, he looked at the bedside clock. It was past four o’clock. He had to report for practice, dressed, at ten o’clock. After a losing game, the coach gave them wind sprints for forty-five minutes every day for a week. He groaned inwardly as he thought of what he was going to feel like at 10:45 that morning. Still, for some reason, he was loath to go.

  An hour later, he was finally dressed. He leaned over Sylvia to kiss her good-bye. She lay there, fresh as the morning, smiling, breathing placidly. He wished he were in as good condition as she was. “G’night, sweets,” she said, an arm around his neck. “Don’t let those rough boys hurt you today. And bring Baby a little giftie tonight. Try Myer’s, on Sanford Street. They’re full of goodies.”

  Walking home along the dark streets, Hugo thought, “Of course. Girls like little tokens of affection. Flowers, candy. Sentimental creatures.” He didn’t remember any store called Myer’s on Sanford Street, but he supposed it was a confectionery shop that had some specialties that Sylvia had a taste for. He resolved to get her the best five-pound box of candy money could buy.

  That afternoon, feeling a little light-headed from lack of sleep and the wind sprints, he walked along Sanford Street, searching for a shop called Myer’s. He stopped short. MYER, the thin lettering read on the window. But instead of boxes of candy displayed behind the glass, there was a blaze of gold and diamonds. Myer’s sold jewelry. Expensive jewelry.

  Hugo did not go in. Thrift was another of the virtues his excellent family had instilled in him as a boy. He walked along Sanford Street until he found a candyshop and bought a five-pound box of chocolates. It cost $15 and Hugo felt a twinge at his extravagance as the clerk wrapped the box in festive paper.

  That night, he didn’t stay more than ten minutes in Sylvia’s apartment. She had a headache, she said. She didn’t bother to unwrap the candy.

  The next night, he stayed longer. He had visited Myer’s during the afternoon and bought a gold bracelet for $300. “I like a generous man,” Sylvia said.

  The pain Hugo had felt in handing over the $300 to the clerk in Myer’s was considerably mitigated by the fact that the night before, when he had left Sylvia with her headache, he had remembered that every Tuesday there was a poker game at Krkanius’ apartment. Hugo had sat in for three hours and won $416, the record for a single night’s winnings since the inception of the game. During the course of the evening, by twisting his head a little now and then to get a fix with his left ear, he had been warned of lurking straights, one flush and several full houses. He had discarded a nine-high full house himself because Croker, of the taxi squad, was sitting in the hole with a jack-high full house; and Hugo had won with a pair of sevens after Krkanius had bluffed wildly through a hand with a pair of fives. Somehow, he told himself piously, as he stuffed bills and checks into his wallet when the game broke up, he would make it up to his teammates. But not just now. Just now, he couldn’t bear the thought of Sylvia having any more headaches.

  Luckily, Sibyl didn’t return until Friday. On Friday nights during the season, Hugo slept on the living-room couch, so as not to be tempted to impair his energies for Sunday’s games, so that problem was postponed. He was afraid that Sibyl’s woman’s intuition would lead her to discover a fateful change in her husband, but Sibyl was so grateful for her holiday that her intuition lay dormant. She merely tucked him in and kissed him chastely on the forehead and said, “Get a good night’s sleep, honey.”

  When she appeared with his breakfast on a tray the next morning, his conscience stirred uneasily; and after the light Saturday-morning practice, he went into Myer’s and bought Sibyl a string of cultured pearls for $85.

  Sunday was triumphal. Before the game, suiting up, Hugo decided that the best way he could make up to his teammates for taking $416 away from them was by doing everything he could to win the game for them. His conscience clear, obeying the voices within his head, he was in on half the tackles. When he intercepted a pass in the last quarter and ran for a touchdown, the first of his life, to put the game on ice, the entire stadium stood and cheered him. The coach even shook his hand when he came off the field. He felt dainty footed and powerful and as though he could play forever without fatigue. The blood coursing through his veins felt like a new and exhilarating liquid, full of dancing bubbles.

  After the game, he was dragged off to a television interview in a little makeshift studio under the stands. He had never been on television before, but he got through it all right and later that night, somebody told him he was photogenic.

  His life entered a new phase. It was as definite as opening and going through a door and closing it behind him, like leaving a small, shabby corridor and with one step emerging into a brilliantly lit ballroom.

  His photograph was in the papers every week, with laudatory articles. Newspapermen sought him out and quoted him faithfully when he said, “The trick is to study your opponents. The National Football League is no place for guesswork.”

  He posed for advertising stills, his hair combed with greaseless products. He modeled sweaters and flowered bathing trunks and was amazed at how simple it was
to earn large sums of money in America merely by smiling.

  His picture was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and small boys waited for him at the players’ entrance after practice. He autographed footballs, and taxi drivers recognized him and sometimes refused to take payment for their fares. He took to eating out in restaurants with Sibyl, because the managers more often than not tore up the check when he asked for it. He learned to eat caviar and developed a taste for champagne.

  He was invited to parties at the home of Bruce Fallon, the quarterback, who had been paid $200,000 to sign and who was called a superstar by the sportswriters. Until then, Fallon, who only went around with the famous old-timers and the upper-bracket players on the club, had never even said hello to him when they passed on the street. “Do you play bridge, Hugo?” Fallon asked.

  They played bridge, Fallon and Fallon’s wife, Nora, and Hugo and Sibyl, in the huge living room of the Fallons’ apartment, which had been decorated by an imported Norwegian. “Isn’t this cozy?” Nora Fallon said, as the four of them sat around the pale wood table before the fire, playing for ten cents a point. Hugo’s left ear worked for bridge as well as poker and Hugo wound up the first evening with an $800 profit, and Fallon said, “I’ve heard about your poker from the boys, Hugo. I’ve never met anybody with a card sense like yours.”

  Fallon discussed the coach with him. “If Bert would really let me call my own game.” Fallon said, pouring whiskeys for himself and Hugo, “we’d be twenty points better a Sunday.”

  “He’s a little primitive, Bert, that’s true,” Hugo said, “but he’s not a bad guy at heart.” He had never heard anybody criticize the coach before and had never even thought of him by his first name. Even now, with the coach a good seven miles away across town and safely in bed, Hugo felt a curious little tickling in the small of his back as he realized that he had actually said, “Bert.”

  When they left that night, with Fallon’s check for $800 in his pocket, Nora Fallon put up her cheek to be kissed. She had gone to school in Lausanne. She said, “We have to make this a weekly affair,” as Hugo kissed her, and he knew she was thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a little quiet tête-à-tête, you and I, sometime soon?”

  That night, when Hugo got home, he wrote the Fallon telephone number in his little pocket address book. He wondered what it could be like, making love to a woman who thought in French.

  The trainer took a fussy interest in him now and, when he came up with a small bruise on his knee, insisted on giving him whirlpool baths for six days. The coach let him off a half hour early one day to make a speech at a local high school. Brenatskis, the publicity man, rewrote his biography for the programs and said that he had made Phi Beta Kappa in college. When Hugo protested, mildly, Brenatskis said, “Who’ll know?” and, “It’s good for your image.” He also arranged for a national magazine to have Hugo photographed at home for a feature, article. Sibyl insisted on buying a pair of gold-lamé pajamas if she was going to be photographed for a national magazine, and on having new curtains in the living room and new slipcovers made. When the article came out, there was only one picture accompanying it—Hugo in an apron, cooking in the kitchen. He was supposed to be making a complicated French dish. He never actually even made coffee for himself.

  He bought three loud checked sports jackets for himself and a $400 brooch for Sylvia, who was still subject to headaches. He couldn’t tear himself away from Sylvia, although he was beginning to find her rather common, especially compared with Nora Fallon. He bought a $100 pair of earrings for Sibyl.

  On Sundays, he raged over all the fields in the league, and at the end of home games, he had to get to the locker room fast to keep from being mobbed by fans. He began to receive love letters from girls, who sometimes included photographs taken in surprising positions. He knew that these letters disturbed Sibyl, but the mails were free, after all. By now, everybody agreed that he was photogenic.

  Sibyl one day announced that she was pregnant. Until then, although Hugo had wanted children from the beginning of their marriage, she had insisted that she was too young. Now, for some reason, she had decided that she was no longer too young. Hugo was very happy, but he was so occupied with other things that he didn’t have quite the time to show it completely. Still, he bought her a turquoise necklace.

  Fallon, who was a born gambler, said that it was a shame to waste Hugo’s card sense on penny-ante poker games and ten-cent-a point family bridge. There was a big poker game in town that Fallon played in once a week. In the game, there was a stockbroker, a newspaper publisher, the president of an agricultural-machinery firm, an automobile distributor and a man who owned, among other things, a string of race horses. When Fallon brought Hugo into the hotel suite where the game was held, there was a haze of money in the room as palpable as the cigar smoke that eddied over the green table and against the drawn curtains. Hugo and Fallon had made a private deal that they would split their winnings and their losses. Hugo wasn’t sure about the morality of this, since they weren’t letting the others know that they were up against a partnership, but Fallon said, “What the hell, Huge, they’re only civilians.” Anybody who wasn’t in some way involved in professional football was a civilian in Fallon’s eyes. “Huge” was Fallon’s friendly corruption of Hugo’s name and it had caught on with the other men on the team and with the newspapermen who followed the club. When the offensive team trotted off the field, passing the defensive team coming in, Fallon had taken to calling out, “Get the ball back for me, Huge.” A sportswriter had picked it up and had written a piece on Hugo using that as the title, and now, whenever the defensive team went in, the home crowd chanted “Get the ball back for me, Huge.” Sometimes, listening to all that love and faith come roaring through the autumn air at him, Hugo felt like crying for joy out there.

  The men around the green table all stood up when Fallon and Hugo came into the room. The game hadn’t started yet and they were still making up the piles of chips. They were all big men, with hearty, authoritative faces. They shook hands with the two football players as Fallon introduced Hugo. One of them said, “It’s an honor,” and another man said, “Get the ball back for me, Huge,” as he shook Hugo’s hand and they all roared with kindly laughter. Hugo smiled boyishly. Because of the five-tooth bridge in the front of his mouth, Hugo for years had smiled as little as possible: but in the past few weeks, since he had become photogenic, he smiled readily. He practiced grinning boyishly from time to time in front of the mirror at home. People, he knew, were pleased to be able to say about him, “Huge? He looks rough, but when he smiles, he’s just a nice big kid.” Civilians.

  They played until two o’clock in the morning. Hugo had won $6020 and Fallon had won $1175. “You two fellers are just as tough off the field as on,” said the automobile distributor admiringly as he signed a check, and the other men laughed jovially. Losing money seemed to please them.

  “Beginner’s luck,” Hugo said. Later on, the automobile distributor would tell his wife that Huge didn’t look it, but he was witty.

  They hailed a taxi outside the hotel. Fallon hadn’t brought his Lincoln Continental, because there was no sense in taking a chance that somebody would spot it parked outside the hotel and tell the coach his quarterback stayed out till two o’clock in the morning. In the taxi, Fallon asked, “You got a safe-deposit box, Huge?”

  “No,” Hugo said.

  “Get one tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Income tax,” Fallon said. In the light of a street lamp, he saw that Hugo looked puzzled. “What Uncle Sam doesn’t know,” Fallon said lightly, “won’t hurt him. We’ll cash these checks tomorrow, divvy up and stash the loot away in nice dark little boxes. Don’t use your regular bank, either.”

  “I see,” Hugo said. There was no doubt about it; Fallon was a brainy man. For a moment, he felt a pang of regret that he had taken Nora Fallon to a motel the week before. He hadn’t regretted it at the time, though. Quite the contrary. He
had just thought that if the child Sibyl was carrying turned out to be a girl, he wouldn’t send her to school in Lausanne.

  Sibyl awoke when he came into the bedroom. “You win, honey?” she asked sleepily.

  “A couple of bucks,” Hugo said.

  “That’s nice,” she said.

  ***

  By now, Hugo was free of doubt. If God gave you a special gift, He obviously meant you to use it. A man who could run the hundred in nine flat would be a fool to allow himself to be beaten by a man who could do only nine, five. If it was God’s will that Hugo should have the good things of life—fame, success, wealth, beautiful women—well, that was God’s will. Hugo was a devout man, even though, in the season, he was busy on Sunday and couldn’t go to church.

  During next week’s poker game, Hugo saw to it that he didn’t win too much. He let himself get caught bluffing several times and deliberately bet into hands that he knew were stronger than his. There was no sense in being greedy and killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. Even so, he came out almost $2000 ahead. Fallon lost nearly $500, so nobody had reason for complaint.

  When the game broke up, Connors, the automobile distributor, told Hugo he’d like to talk to him for a minute. They went downstairs and sat in a deserted corner of the lobby. Connors was opening a sports-car agency and he wanted Hugo to lend his name to it. “There’s nothing to it,” Connors said. “Hang around the showroom a couple of afternoons a week and have your picture taken sitting in a Porsche once in a while. I’ll give you ten thousand a year for it.”

  Hugo scratched his head boyishly, turning his left ear slightly toward Connors. The figure $25,000 came through loud and clear. “I’ll take twenty-five thousand dollars and ten percent of the profits,” Hugo said.

  Connors laughed, delighted with his new employee’s astuteness. “You must have read my mind,” he said. They shook on the deal. Hugo was to go on the payroll the next day.

  “He’s got a head on his shoulders, old Huge,” Connors told his wife. “He’ll sell cars.”