Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  Nobody he had ever cared for had as yet died and everybody in his family had come home safe from all the wars.

  The world saluted him.

  He maintained his cool.

  No wonder he woke up feeling good.

  It was nearly December, but the California sun made a summer morning of the season and the girls and boys in corduroys and T-shirts and bright-colored sweaters on their way to their ten-o’clock classes walked over green lawns and in and out of the shadows of trees that had not yet lost their leaves.

  He passed the sorority house where Adele lived and waved as she came out. His first class every Tuesday was at ten o’clock and the sorority house was on his route to the arts buildings in which the classroom was situated.

  Adele was a tall girl, her dark, combed head coming well above his shoulder. She had a triangular, blooming, still-childish face. Her walk, even with the books she was carrying in her arms, wasn’t childish, though, and he was amused at the envious looks directed at him by some of the other students as Adele paced at his side down the graveled path.

  “‘She walks in beauty,’” Steve said, “‘like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies;/And all that’s best of dark and bright/Meet in her aspect and her eyes.’”

  “What a nice thing to hear at ten o’clock in the morning,” Adele said. “Did you bone up on that for me?”

  “No,” he said. “We’re having a test on Byron today.”

  “Animal,” she said.

  He laughed.

  “Are you taking me to the dance Saturday night?” she asked.

  He grimaced. He didn’t like to dance. He didn’t like the kind of music that was played and he thought the way people danced these days was devoid of grace. “I’ll tell you later,” he said.

  “I have to know today,” Adele said. “Two other boys’ve asked me.”

  “I’ll tell you at lunch,” he said.

  “What time?”

  “One. Can the other aspirants hold back their frenzy to dance until then?”

  “Barely,” she said. He knew that with or without him, Adele would be at the dance on Saturday night. She loved to dance and he had to admit that a girl had every right to expect the boy she was seeing almost every night in the week to take her dancing at least once on the weekend. He felt very mature, almost fatherly, as he resigned himself to four hours of heat and noise on Saturday night. But he didn’t tell Adele that he’d take her. It wouldn’t do her any harm to wait until lunch.

  He squeezed her hand as they parted and watched for a moment as she swung down the path, conscious of the provocative way she was walking, conscious of the eyes on her. He smiled and continued on his way, waving at people who greeted him.

  It was early and Mollison, the English professor, had not yet put in an appearance. The room was only half full as Steve entered it, but there wasn’t the usual soprano-tenor turning-up sound of conversation from the students who were already there. They sat in their chairs quietly, not talking, most of them ostentatiously arranging their books or going through their notes. Occasionally, almost furtively, one or another of them would look up toward the front of the room and the blackboard, where a thin boy with wispy reddish hair was writing swiftly and neatly behind the teacher’s desk.

  “Oh, weep for Adonais—he is dead!” the red-haired boy had written. “Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!”

  Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed

  Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep

  Like his a mute and uncomplaining sleep;

  For he is gone where all things wise and fair

  Descend. Oh, dream not that the amorous Deep

  Will yet restore him to the vital air;

  Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair.

  Then, on a second blackboard, where the boy was finishing the last lines of another stanza, was written:

  He has outsoared the shadow of our night;

  Envy and calumny and hate and pain,

  And that unrest which men miscall delight;

  Can touch him not and torture not again;

  From the contagion of the world’s slow stain

  He is secure, and now can never mourn

  A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain;

  Professor Mollison came bustling in with the half-apologetic smile of an absent-minded man who is afraid he is always late. He stopped at the door, sensing by the quiet that this was no ordinary Tuesday morning in his classroom. He peered nearsightedly at Crane writing swiftly in rounded chalk letters on the blackboard.

  Mollison took out his glasses and read for a moment, then went over to the window without a word and stood there looking out, a graying, soft-faced, rosy-cheeked old man, the soberness of his expression intensified by the bright sunlight at the window.

  “Nor,” Crane was writing, the chalk making a dry sound in the silence,

  when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,

  With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

  When Crane had finished, he put the chalk down neatly and stepped back to look at what he had written. A girl’s laugh came in on the fragrance of cut grass through the open window and there was a curious hushing little intake of breath all through the room.

  The bell rang, abrasively, for the beginning of classes. When the bell stopped, Crane turned around and faced the students seated in rows before him. He was a lanky, skinny boy, only nineteen, and he was already going bald. He hardly ever spoke in class and when he spoke, it was in a low, harsh whisper.

  He didn’t seem to have any friends and he never was seen with girls and the time he didn’t spend in class he seemed to spend in the library. Crane’s brother had played fullback on the football team, but the brothers had rarely been seen together, and the fact that the huge, graceful athlete and the scarecrow bookworm were members of the same family seemed like a freak of eugenics to the students who knew them both.

  Steve knew why Crane had come early to write the two verses of Shelley’s lament on the clean morning blackboard. The Saturday night before, Crane’s brother had been killed in an automobile accident on the way back from the game, which had been played in San Francisco. The funeral had taken place yesterday, Monday. Now it was Tuesday morning and Crane’s first class since the death of his brother.

  Crane stood there, narrow shoulders hunched in a bright tweed jacket that was too large for him, surveying the class without emotion. He glanced once more at what he had written, as though to make sure the problem he had placed on the board had been correctly solved, then turned again to the group of gigantic, blossoming, rosy California boys and girls, unnaturally serious and a little embarrassed by this unexpected prologue to their class, and began to recite.

  He recited flatly, without any emotion in his voice, moving casually back and forth in front of the blackboards, occasionally turning to the text to flick off a little chalk dust, to touch the end of a word with his thumb, to hesitate at a line, as though he had suddenly perceived a new meaning in it.

  Mollison, who had long ago given up any hope of making any impression on the sun-washed young California brain with the fragile hammer of nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, stood at the window, looking out over the campus, nodding in rhythm from time to time and occasionally whispering a line, almost silently, in unison with Crane.

  “‘… an unlamented urn,’” Crane said, still as flat and unemphatic as ever, as though he had merely gone through the two verses as a feat of memory. The last echo of his voice quiet now in the still room, he looked out at the class through his thick glasses, demanding nothing. Then he went to the back of the room and sat down in his chair and began putting his books together.

  Mollison, finally awakened from his absorption with the sunny lawn, the whirling sprinklers, the shadows of the trees speckling in the heat and the wind, turned away from the window and walked slowly to his desk. He peered nearsightedly for a moment at the script crammed on the black
boards, then said, absently, “On the death of Keats. The class is excused.”

  For once, the students filed out silently, making a point, with youthful good manners, of not looking at Crane, bent over at his chair, pulling books together.

  Steve was nearly the last one to leave the room and he waited outside the door for Crane. Somebody had to say something, do something, whisper “I’m sorry,” shake the boy’s hand. Steve didn’t want to be the one, but there was nobody else left. When Crane came out, Steve fell into place beside him and they went out of the building together.

  “My name is Dennicott,” Steve said.

  “I know,” said Crane.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.” There was no trace of grief in Crane’s voice or manner. He blinked through his glasses at the sunshine, but that was all.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Did you object?” The question was sharp but the tone was mild, offhand, careless.

  “Hell, no,” Steve said. “I just want to know why you did it.”

  “My brother was killed Saturday night,” Crane said.

  “I know.”

  “‘The death of Keats. The class is excused.’” Crane chuckled softly but without malice. “He’s a nice old man, Mollison. Did you ever read the book he wrote about Marvell?”

  “No,” Steve said.

  “Terrible book,” Crane said. “You really want to know?” He peered with sudden sharpness at Steve.

  “Yes,” Steve said.

  “Yes,” Crane said absently, brushing at his forehead, “you would be the one who would ask. Out of the whole class. Did you know my brother?”

  “Just barely,” Steve said. He thought about Crane’s brother, the fullback. A gold helmet far below on a green field, a number (what number?), a doll brought out every Saturday to do skillful and violent maneuvers in a great wash of sound, a photograph in a program, a young, brutal face looking out a little scornfully from the page. Scornful of what? Of whom? The inept photographer? The idea that anyone would really be interested in knowing what face was on that numbered doll? The notion that what he was doing was important enough to warrant this attempt to memorialize him, so that somewhere, in somebody’s attic fifty years from now, that young face would still be there, in the debris, part of some old man’s false memory of his youth?

  “He didn’t seem much like John Keats to you, did he?” Crane stopped under a tree, in the shade, to rearrange the books under his arm. He seemed oppressed by sunshine and he held his books clumsily and they were always on the verge of falling to the ground.

  “To be honest,” Steve said, “no, he didn’t seem much like John Keats to me.”

  Crane nodded gently. “But I knew him,” he said. “I knew him. And nobody who made those goddamned speeches at the funeral yesterday knew him. And he didn’t believe in God or in funerals or those goddamned speeches. He needed a proper ceremony of farewell,” Crane said, “and I tried to give it to him. All it took was a little chalk, and a poet, and none of those liars in black suits. Do you want to take a ride today?”

  “Yes,” Steve said without hesitation.

  “I’ll meet you at the library at eleven,” Crane said. He waved stiffly and hunched off, gangling, awkward, ill-nourished, thin-haired, laden with books, a discredit to the golden Coastal legend.

  They drove north in silence. Crane had an old Ford without a top and it rattled so much and the wind made so much noise as they bumped along that conversation would have been almost impossible, even if they had wished to talk. Crane bent over the wheel, driving nervously, with an excess of care, his long pale hands gripping the wheel tightly. Steve hadn’t asked where they were going and Crane hadn’t told him. Steve hadn’t been able to get hold of Adele to tell her he probably wouldn’t be back in time to have lunch with her, but there was nothing to be done about that now. He sat back, enjoying the sun and the yellow, burnt-out hills and the long, grayish-blue swells of the Pacific beating lazily into the beaches and against the cliffs of the coast. Without being told, he knew that this ride somehow was a continuation of the ceremony in honor of Crane’s brother.

  They passed several restaurants alongside the road. Steve was hungry, but he didn’t suggest stopping. This was Crane’s expedition and Steve had no intention of interfering with whatever ritual Crane was following.

  They rocked along between groves of lemon and orange and the air was heavy with the perfume of the fruit, mingled with the smell of salt from the sea.

  They went through the flecked shade of avenues of eucalyptus that the Spanish monks had planted in another century to make their journeys from mission to mission bearable in the California summers. Rattling along in the noisy car, squinting a little when the car spurted out into bare sunlight, Steve thought of what the road must have looked like with an old man in a cassock nodding along it on a sleepy mule, to the sound of distant Spanish bells, welcoming travelers. There were no bells ringing today. California, Steve thought, sniffing the diesel oil of a truck in front of them, has not improved.

  The car swerved around a turn, Crane put on the brakes and they stopped. Then Steve saw what they had stopped for.

  There was a huge tree leaning over a bend of the highway and all the bark at road level on one side of the tree had been ripped off. The wood beneath, whitish, splintered, showed in a raw wound.

  “This is the place,” Crane said, in his harsh whisper. He stopped the engine and got out of the car. Steve followed him and stood to one side as Crane peered nearsightedly through his glasses at the tree. Crane touched the tree, just at the edge of the wound.

  “Eucalyptus,” he said. “From the Greek, meaning well covered; the flower, before it opens having a sort of cap. A genus of plants of the N. O. Myrtaceae. If I had been a true brother,” he said, “I would have come here Saturday morning and cut this tree down. My brother would be alive today.” He ran his hand casually over the torn and splintered wood, and Steve remembered how he had touched the blackboard and flicked chalk dust off the ends of words that morning, unemphatically, in contrast with the feel of things, the slate, the chalk mark at the end of the last “s” in Adonais, the gummy, drying wood. “You’d think,” Crane said, “that if you loved a brother enough you’d have sense enough to come and cut a tree down, wouldn’t you? The Egyptians, I read somewhere,” he said, “were believed to have used the oil of the eucalyptus leaf in the embalming process.” His long hand flicked once more at the torn bark. “Well, I didn’t cut the tree down. Let’s go.”

  He strode back to the car, without looking back at the tree. He got into the car behind the wheel and sat slumped there, squinting through his glasses at the road ahead of him, waiting for Steve to settle himself beside him. “It’s terrible for my mother and father,” Crane said, after Steve had closed the door behind him. A truck filled with oranges passed them in a thunderous whoosh and a swirl of dust, leaving a fragrance of a hundred weddings on the air. “We live at home, you know. My brother and I were the only children they had, and they look at me and they can’t help feeling, If it had to be one of them, why couldn’t it have been him? and it shows in their eyes and they know it shows in their eyes and they know I agree with them and they feel guilty and I can’t help them.” He started the engine with a succession of nervous, uncertain gestures, like a man who was just learning how to drive. He turned the car around in the direction of Los Angeles and they started south. Steve looked once more at the tree, but Crane kept his eyes on the road ahead of him.

  “I’m hungry,” he said. “I know a place where we can get abalone about ten miles from here.”

  They were sitting in the weather-beaten shack with the windows open on the ocean, eating their abalone and drinking beer. The jukebox was playing Downtown. It was the third time they were listening to Downtown. Crane kept putting dimes into the machine and choosing the same song over and over again.

  “I’m crazy about that song,” he said. “Saturday night in America. Bud
weiser Bacchanalia.”

  “Everything all right, boys?” The waitress, a fat little dyed blonde of about thirty, smiled down at them from the end of the table.

  “Everything is perfectly splendid,” Crane said in a clear, ringing voice.

  The waitress giggled. “Why, that sure is nice to hear,” she said.

  Crane examined her closely. “What do you do when it storms?” he asked.

  “What’s that?” She frowned uncertainly at him.

  “When it storms,” Crane said. “When the winds blow. When the sea heaves. Then the young sailors drown in the bottomless deeps.”

  “My,” the waitress said, “and I thought you boys only had one beer.”

  “I advise anchors,” Crane said. “You are badly placed. A turn of the wind, a twist of the tide, and you will be afloat, past the reef, on the way to Japan.”

  “I’ll tell the boss,” the waitress said, grinning. “You advise anchors.”

  “You are in peril, lady,” Crane said seriously. “Don’t think you’re not. Nobody speaks candidly. Nobody tells you the one-hundred-percent honest-to-God truth.” He pushed a dime from a pile at his elbow, across the table to the waitress. “Would you be good enough to put this in the box, my dear?” he said formally.

  “What do you want to hear?” the waitress asked.

  “Downtown,” Crane said.

  “Again?” The waitress grimaced. “It’s coming out of my ears.”

  “I understand it’s all the rage,” Crane said.

  The waitress took the dime and put it in the box and Downtown started over again.

  “She’ll remember me,” Crane said, eating fried potatoes covered with ketchup. “Everytime it blows and the sea comes up. You must not go through life unremembered.”

  “You’re a queer duck, all right,” Steve said, smiling a little, to take the sting out of it, but surprised into saying it.

  “Ah, I’m not so queer,” Crane said, wiping ketchup off his chin. “I don’t behave like this ordinarily. This is the first time I ever flirted with a waitress in my life.”

  Steve laughed. “Do you call that flirting?”