Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  Hugo sat at the rear of the church, feeling chastened. It was a good feeling. That was what he had come to church for, and he almost said “Amen” aloud after one or two of the more spiritedly presented items on the minister’s list.

  Then, gradually, he became aware of a curious cooing voice in his left ear. “Ah, you, fourth seat to the left in the third row,” he heard, “you with that little pink cleft just peeping out, why don’t you come around late one weekday afternoon for a little spiritual consolation, ha-ha.” Aghast, Hugo realized it was the minister’s voice he was hearing.

  Aloud, the minister was moving on to a rather unconvincing endorsement of the advantages of celibacy. “And you, the plump one in the fifth row, with the tight brassiere, Mrs. What’s-your-name, looking down at your hymnbook as though you were planning to go into a nunnery,” Hugo heard, mixed with loud advice on holy thoughts and vigorous, innocent exercise, “I can guess what you’re up to when your husband goes out of town. I wouldn’t mind if you had my private telephone number in your little black book, ha-ha.”

  Hugo sat rigid in his pew. This was going just a little bit too far.

  The minister had swung into chastity. He wanted to end on a note of uplift. His head was tilted back, heavenward, but through slitted eyes, he scanned his Sunday-best parishioners. The minister had a vested interest in chastity and his voice took on a special solemn intonation as he described how particularly pleasing this virtue was in the eyes of God and His angels. “And little Miss Crewes, with your white gloves and white socks,” Hugo heard, “ripening away like a tasty little Georgia persimmon, trembling on the luscious brink of womanhood, nobody has to tell me what you do behind the stands on the way home from school. The rectory is only two blocks from school, baby, and it’s on your way home. Just one timid knock on the door will suffice, ha-ha. There’s always tea and little cakes for little girls like you at the rectory, ha-ha.”

  If Hugo hadn’t been afraid of making a scene, he would have got up and run out of the church. Instead, he rapped himself sharply across the left ear. The consequent ringing kept him from hearing anything else. Several people turned around at the sound of the blow and stared disapprovingly at Hugo, but he didn’t care. By the time the ringing stopped, the sermon was over and the minister was announcing the number of the hymn.

  It was Rock of Ages. Hugo wasn’t sure of the words, but he hummed, so as not to draw any more attention to himself.

  The organ swelled, the sopranos, altos, tenors and bassos joined in, musical and faithful.

  “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in Thee.

  Let the water and the blood,

  From Thy side, a healing flood,

  Be of sin the double cure …”

  Hugo was swept along on the tide of sound. He didn’t have much of an ear for music and the only things he played on the phonograph at home were some old 78-rpm Wayne King records that his mother had collected when she was a girl and had given him as a wedding present. But now the diapason of the organ, the pure flutelike tones of the women and young girls addressing God, the deep cello support of the men, combined to give him a feeling of lightness, of floating on spring airs, of being lost in endless fragrant gardens. Virgins caressed his forehead with petaled fingers, waters sang in mountain streams, strong men embraced him in everlasting brotherhood. By the time the congregation reached “Thou must save, and Thou alone,” Hugo was out of his pew and writhing in ecstasy on the floor.

  It was lucky he was in the last row, and on the aisle.

  The hymn was never finished. It started to falter at “While I draw this fleeting breath,” as people turned around to see what was happening and came to a final stop on “When I rise to worlds unknown.” By that time, everybody in the church was standing up and looking at Hugo, trembling, sprawled on his back, in the middle of the aisle.

  The last notes of the organ came to a halt discordantly, at a signal from the minister. Hugo lay still for an instant, conscious of 300 pairs of eyes on him. Then he leaped up and fled.

  He rang the bell a long time, but it was only when he roared, “I know you’re in there. Open up or I’ll break it down,” and began to buck at the door with his shoulder that it opened.

  “What’s going on here?” Miss Cattavi asked, blocking his way. “There are no visiting hours on Sunday.”

  “There will be this Sunday,” Hugo said hoarsely. He pushed roughly past Miss Cattavi. She was all muscle. It was the first time he had ever been rude to a lady.

  “He’s in Romania,” Miss Cattavi said, trying to hold on to him.

  “I’ll show him Romania,” Hugo cried, throwing open doors and dragging Miss Cattavi after him like a junior high school guard.

  Dr. Sebastian was behind the fourth door, in a room like a library, practicing dry-fly casting. He was wearing hip-length rubber boots.

  “Oh, Mr. Pleiss,” Dr. Sebastian said merrily, “you came back.”

  “I sure did come back,” Hugo said. He had difficulty talking.

  “You want your other ear done, I wager,” said Dr. Sebastian, reeling in delicately.

  Hugo grabbed Dr. Sebastian by the lapels and lifted him off the floor so that they were eye to eye. Dr. Sebastian weighed only 140 pounds, although he was quite fat. “I don’t want the other ear done,” Hugo said loudly.

  “Should I call the police?” Miss Cattavi had her hand on the phone.

  Hugo dropped Dr. Sebastian, who went down on one knee but made a creditable recovery. Hugo ripped the phone out of the wall. He had always been very careful of other people’s property. It was something his father had taught him as a boy.

  “Don’t tell me,” Dr. Sebastian said solicitously, “that the ear has filled up again. It’s unusual, but not unheard of. Don’t worry about it. The treatment is simple. A little twirl of an instrument and—”

  Hugo grabbed the doctor’s throat with one hand and kept Miss. Cattavi off with the other. “Now, listen to this,” Hugo said, “listen to what you did to me.”

  “Cawlsnhnd on my goddamn windpipe,” the doctor said.

  Hugo let him go.

  “Now, my dear young man,” Dr. Sebastian said, “if you’ll only tell me what little thing is bothering you.…”

  “Get her out of the room.” Hugo gestured toward Miss Cattavi. The things he had to tell Dr. Sebastian could not be said in front of a woman.

  “Miss Cattavi, please …” Dr. Sebastian said.

  “Animal,” Miss Cattavi said, but she went out of the room and closed the door behind her.

  Moving out of range, Dr. Sebastian went behind a desk. He remained standing. “I could have sworn that your ear was in superb condition,” he said.

  “Superb!” Hugo was sorry he had taken his hand off the doctor’s throat.

  “Well, you can hear your team’s signals now, can’t you?” Dr. Sebastian said.

  “If that’s all I could hear,” Hugo moaned.

  “Ah.” Dr. Sebastian brightened. “Your hearing is better than normal. I told you you had an extraordinary aural arrangement. It only took a little cutting, a bold clearing away of certain extraneous matter.… You must be having a very good season.”

  “I am having a season in hell,” Hugo said, unconscious that he was now paying tribute to a French poet.

  “I’m terribly confused,” the doctor said petulantly. “I do better for you than you ever hoped for and what is my reward—you come in here and try to strangle me. I do think you owe me an explanation, Mr. Pleiss.”

  “I owe you a lot more than that,” Hugo said. “Where did you learn your medicine—in the Congo?”

  Dr. Sebastian drew himself to his full height. “Cornell Medical School,” he said with quiet pride. “Now, if you’ll only tell me—”

  “I’ll tell you, all right,” Hugo said. He paced up and down the room. It was an old house and the timbers creaked. The sound was like a thousand sea gulls in Hugo’s ear.

  “First,” said Dr. Sebastian
, “just what is it that you want me to do for you?”

  “I want you to put my ear back the way it was when I came to you,” Hugo said.

  “You want to be deaf again?” the doctor asked incredulously.

  “Exactly.”

  Dr. Sebastian shook his head. “My dear fellow,” he said, “I can’t do that. It’s against all medical ethics. If it ever got out, I’d be barred forever from practicing medicine anyplace in the United States. A graduate of Cornell—”

  “I don’t care where you graduated from. You’re going to do it.”

  “You’re overwrought, Mr. Pleiss,” the doctor said. He sat down at his desk and drew a piece of paper to him and took out a pen. “Now, if you’ll only attempt, in a calm and orderly way, to describe the symptoms.…”

  Hugo paced up and down some more, trying to be calm and orderly. Deep down, he still had a great respect for doctors. “It started,” he began, “with hearing the other team’s signals.”

  Dr. Sebastian nodded approvingly and jotted something down.

  “In the huddle,” Hugo said.

  “What’s a huddle?”

  Hugo explained, as best he could, what a huddle was. “And it’s fifteen yards away and they whisper and sixty thousand people are yelling at the top of their lungs all around you.”

  “I knew it was a successful operation,” Dr. Sebastian said, beaming in self-appreciation, “but I had no idea it was that successful. It must be very helpful in your profession. Congratulations. It will make a most interesting paper for the next congress of—”

  “Shut up,” Hugo said. He then went on to describe how he began understanding what the signals meant. Dr. Sebastian’s face got a little graver as he asked Hugo to kindly repeat what he had just said and to explain exactly what was the significance of “Brown right! Draw fifty-five.… on two!” When he finally got it straight and noted that it was a secret code, different for each team, and that the codes were as jealously guarded from opposing teams as the crown jewels, he stopped jotting anything down. And when Hugo went on to the moment when he knew that the opposing quarterback was thinking, “No.… It won’t work, they’re overshifting on us,” in just those words, Dr. Sebastian put his pen down altogether and a look of concern came into his eyes.

  The description of the poker game only made the doctor shrug. “These days,” he said, “we are just beginning to catch a glimmer of the powers of extrasensory perception, my dear fellow. Why, down at Duke University—”

  “Keep quiet,” Hugo said, and described, with a reminiscent thrill of terror, the radio breakdown in the cockpit of the airplane and hearing the conversation between the pilots.

  “I’m sure that could be explained,” the doctor said. “A freak electronic phenomenon that—”

  Hugo cut in. “I want you to hear what happened to me with a girl,” Hugo said. “There was nothing electronic about that.”

  Dr. Sebastian listened with interest as Hugo relived the experience with Sylvia. Dr. Sebastian licked his lips from time to time but said nothing. He clucked sympathetically, though, when Hugo described the laughter four stories up and Croker’s replay in the shower.

  Hugo didn’t say anything about his conversations with the coach. There were certain things too painfull to recall.

  In a rush, Hugo let all the rest of it out—Vietnam, the clubbing by the policeman, the interior sneer of the magistrate, Mrs. Fitzgerald’s dangerous radical leanings, the President’s speech, the television repairman’s chicanery, his mother’s judgment of his wife.

  Dr. Sebastian sat there without saying a word, shaking his head pityingly from time to time.

  Hugo went on, without mercy for himself, about the green dress and mink cuffs at a time when you’d bet for sure a woman would be thinking about other things. “Well,” he demanded, “what’ve you got to say about that?”

  “Unfortunately,” Dr. Sebastian said, “I’ve never been married. A man my size.” He shrugged regretfully. “But there are well-documented cases on record of loving couples who have spent long years together, who are very close together, who have a telepathic sympathy with each other’s thoughts.…”

  “Let me tell you what happened in church this morning,” Hugo said desperately. The doctor’s scientific ammunition was beginning to take its toll. The fearful thought occured to him that he wasn’t going to shake the doctor and that he was going to walk out of that door no different from the way he had entered.

  “It is nice to hear that a big, famous, attractive young man like you still goes to church on Sunday morning,” the doctor murmured.

  “I’ve gone to my last church,” Hugo said and gave him the gist of what he had heard the minister think while he was delivering his sermon on sex and violence.

  The doctor smiled tolerantly. “The men of the cloth are just like us other poor mortals,” he said. “It’s very probable that it was merely the transference of your own desires and—”

  “Then the last thing,” Hugo said, knowing he had to convince the doctor somehow. He told him about writhing on the floor of the church, the spring breezes, the smell of flowers, the unutterable ecstasy during Rock of Ages.

  The doctor made an amused little moue. “A common experience,” he said, “for simple and susceptible religious natures. It does no harm.”

  “Three hundred people watching a two-hundred-and-thirty-five-pound man jerking around on the floor like a hooked tuna!” Hugo shouted. “That does no harm? And you yourself told me that if people could really hear, they’d writhe on the floor in ecstasy when they listened to Beethoven.”

  “Beethoven, yes,” the doctor said. “But Rock of Ages?” He was a musical snob, Dr. Sebastian. “Tum-tum-tah-dee, tum-tum-dah,” he sang contemptuously. Then he became professional. He leaned across the desk and patted Hugo’s hand and spoke quietly. “My dear young man, I believe every word you say. You undoubtedly think you have gone through these experiences. The incidents on the playing field can easily be explained. You are highly trained in the intricacies of a certain game, you are coming into your full powers, your understanding of your profession leads you into certain instantaneous practical insights. Be grateful for them. I’ve already explained the cards, the minister, your wife. The passage with the lady you call Sylvia is a concretization of your sense of guilt, combined with a certain natural young man’s sexual appetite. Everything else, I’m afraid, is hallucination. I suggest you see a psychiatrist. I have the name of a good man and I’ll give him a call and—”

  Hugo growled.

  “What did you say?” the doctor asked.

  Hugo growled again and went over to the window. The doctor followed him, worried now, and looked out the window. Fifty yards away, on the soft, leaf-covered lawn, a five-year-old boy in sneakers was crossing over toward the garage-way of the next house.

  The two men stood in silence for a moment.

  The doctor sighed. “If you’ll come into my operating room,” he said.

  When he left the doctor’s house an hour later, Hugo had a small bandage behind his left ear, but he was happy. The left side of his head felt like a corked-up cider bottle.

  Hugo didn’t intercept another pass all the rest of the season. He was fooled by the simplest hand-offs and dashed to the left when the play went to the right, and he couldn’t hear Johnny Smathers’ shouts of warning as the other teams lined up. Johnny Smathers stopped talking to him after two games and moved in with another roommate on road trips. At the end of the season, Hugo’s contract was not renewed. The official reason the coach gave to the newspapers was that Hugo’s head injury had turned out to be so severe that he would be risking permanent disablement if he ever got hit again.

  Dr. Sebastian charged him $500 for the operation and, what with the fine and making up the bribes to the magistrate and the newspapers, that took care of the $1000 raise the coach had promised him. But Hugo was glad to pay for it.

  By January tenth, he was contentedly and monogamously selling insurance for h
is father-in-law, although he had to make sure to sit on the left side of prospects to be able to hear what they were saying.

  Where All Things Wise

  and Fair Descend

  He woke up feeling good. There was no reason for him to wake up feeling anything else.

  He was an only child. He was twenty years old. He was over six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds and had never been sick in his whole life. He was number two on the tennis team and back home in his father’s study there was a whole shelf of cups he had won in tournaments since he was eleven years old. He had a lean, sharply cut face, straight black hair that he wore just a little long, which prevented him from looking merely like an athlete. A girl had once said he looked like Shelley. Another, like Laurence Olivier. He had smiled noncommittally at both girls.

  He had a retentive memory and classes were easy for him. He had just been put on the dean’s list. His father, who was doing well up North in an electronics business, had sent him a check for $100 as a reward. The check had been in his box the night before.

  He had a gift for mathematics and probably could get a job teaching in the department if he wanted it upon graduation, but he planned to go into his father’s business.

  He was not one of the single-minded educational wizards who roamed the science departments. He got A’s in English and history and had memorized most of Shakespeare’s sonnets and read Roethke and Eliot and Ginsberg. He had tried marijuana. He was invited to all the parties. When he went home, mothers made obvious efforts to throw their daughters at him.

  His own mother was beautiful and young and funny. There were no unbroken silver cords in the family. He was having an affair with one of the prettiest girls on the campus and she said she loved him. From time to time he said he loved her. When he said it he meant it. At that moment, anyway.