by Irwin Shaw
“And at last,” she said, flooding on, not giving Tony a chance to interrupt her, intent, like someone adding a long column of figures, in toting up the account and getting the sum right before turning to other things, “when the moment came to make the big decision, the salvaging decision, when perhaps I could have saved your father and myself with one word, the word I said was the wrong one. Naturally. You have to prepare yourself carefully, for years, you have to understand yourself, to say the right word in a crisis. And I didn’t understand anything and I wasn’t prepared for anything. He was waiting for me in the dark before he sailed for England. It was after three o’clock in the morning and he’d just come from seeing you and he must have heard something of what the lieutenant was saying to me at the door, but not much. And he asked me if I’d let the boy make love to me and I said yes. And he asked me if there had been others and I said yes. And he asked me if there would be others and I said yes. I was proud of myself because I thought I had become strong enough to be honest. But it wasn’t honesty, it was revenge and self-approval. In any case, it wasn’t the ‘yes’ of honesty that was needed between your father and me, it was the intelligent ‘no’ of charity. Only I’d run out of charity by that time, and your father beat me for it, as he should, and went off and got killed.”
She stopped and for a few seconds the only sound in the arbor was the buzz of a bee dipping erratically over a basket of plums on the table. She licked her lips and picked up her wine glass and drained it. “Well,” she said, “there’s your mother, who got off free. I’ve had a long time to think about all this and I never said it to anyone and you might as well be the first to hear it. And if you’re interested, I’ve never touched another man from that morning to this. It wasn’t hard and I don’t claim much credit for it, because I was only tempted once, and then not really seriously.”
She flicked with her napkin at the bee and it left the plums and darted up a beam of sunlight toward the leaves above their heads. “When I got the news that your father was dead and you wired that you wouldn’t come to the funeral services, I went through it myself. And after it, I sat alone in that damned house in New Jersey where your father and I had ground ourselves down into hatred and despair, and I decided that I had to rehabilitate myself. I had to be able, finally, to forgive myself. And I felt that the only way was through being useful and loving. And I was sure that I wasn’t going to be able to love another man, because I’d tried all that, and I fixed on children. Maybe you came into that, too. I’d botched you so badly, maybe I wanted to prove to myself that if I had another chance, I could do better. I applied to adopt two children, a boy and a girl, and while I was waiting I roamed the streets and the parks, staring at children, playing with them when their mothers and nurses would let me, making great plans about how for the next twenty years I would devote myself completely to turning out glorious, sunny young people, who would behave faultlessly, with gentleness and courage and intelligence, in every situation of their adult lives. Only the people who had charge of putting children out for adoption had other ideas. They weren’t so pleased with the notion of a single lady well over forty taking on two babies, and they investigated me quietly and they heard a few things. Not all. But enough. And they turned me down. The day they said no, I went walking in the meadows at Central Park, staring at little boys running across the grass and little girls playing with balloons and I knew what those poor women must feel who steal babies out of carriages. I wasn’t bitter at the people from the society. The actions of ten years must have their consequences. You can’t expect people to believe you if you go to them and say, ‘I’m changed. I’m a different woman. From today on I plan to become a saint.’ They have other things on their minds besides making it easy for a widow with a bad reputation to forgive herself.”
She reached over and took the bottle of wine and poured what was left into her glass. There wasn’t much and she didn’t drink it immediately, but sat looking at the glass between her fingers on the checkered tablecloth, not wanting or expecting any word from Tony, using him merely for the bitter and salutary pleasure of having a listener to involve in her self-denunciation.
“Still,” she said reflectively, turning the stem of the glass, “that was when I began to have some hope for myself. Do you remember Sam Patterson?” she asked abruptly.
“Yes,” Tony said. “Of course.”
“I hadn’t seen him for years, but he’d come to the funeral, and after that, from time to time, he’d visit me or ask me to meet him for dinner when he came to New York. His wife had divorced him just before the war, fifteen years too late for both of them, and he was easy to be with because he knew all about me and I didn’t have to pretend about anything with him. Once, long ago, when he was drunk at a dance, he’d put his arms around me and almost said he loved me.” She chuckled sadly. “Saturday night at a country club. Only it turned out he meant it, and when I went to him and told him that I couldn’t have the children, he asked me to marry him. That way, he said, married, we’d be sure to be able to adopt all the children we wanted. And he said he’d loved me from the beginning, even though it had only slipped out that one drunken time … And I nearly said yes. He was a good friend, maybe the only friend I had, and I’d liked him and admired him from the first time I met him. And it wasn’t only the children. It was a promise of pardon from loneliness. You have no idea what the loneliness of an aging woman, husbandless and without a family, can be like in a city like New York. Maybe it’s the real loneliness, the ultimate, naked meaning of the word in the twentieth century. But I said no. And I said no because he loved me and wanted me and all I felt I could love was a child and all I wanted was not to be alone, and I’d disappointed enough men in my life. When I’d said it and he’d gone away, I began to feel that, finally, I was going to be able to forgive myself. Don’t think I didn’t regret it later, and don’t think that I didn’t nearly call him up ten times in the next few months to tell him I’d changed my mind—but I didn’t. For once, I calculated correctly, and I stuck to my calculation. And even so, it was Sam Patterson in the long run who saved me. He’d heard about this committee that was being formed in connection with the United Nations, to do what they could for all the children who were left starving and homeless by the war, and he got me an interview and he got me hired and he made me stay with it when it all seemed pointless to me. Because, it isn’t the same thing, you know, caring for a million children you’ll never see, and worrying about tons of wheat and cases of penicillin and powdered milk. It’s not like watching a child grow in your own hands, and whatever victories you may win are terribly cold and abstract. And I’m not an abstract woman. But I worked twelve hours a day and I put as much money of my own into it as I could, and if I wasn’t satisfied and if I’m still hungry and lonely, well, what could I expect? And there’re other rewards. I’m not satisfied—but I’m necessary. That will have to be enough for this year. I’m thankful to those million unknown children whom I don’t love and who will never love me.”
She picked the wine bottle up and looked at it critically. “I suppose it’s too late to order another,” she said.
Tony looked at his watch. “Yes,” he said. He felt stunned and suddenly incapable of judging the woman who had exposed herself so painfully to him for the last hour. Later on, he knew, he would have to judge her, because now all the facts were in. But for the moment it was impossible. All he could do was look at his watch and say, “We’ll never get back to Paris tonight if we don’t leave here now.”
She nodded and tied the scarf around her head, to hold her hair in place against the wind, and in the soft warm shade of the arbor, the lines of her face were soft and calm, and she reminded Tony of girls he had seen driving in the summertime in open cars on the way to the beach. He took out his wallet and reached for the check, which was lying on a plate next to him, but Lucy bent over and picked up the slip of paper and squinting, a little nearsightedly, to see how much it was, said, “This lunch is on me.
The pleasure’s been mine.”
21
THEY DROVE IN SILENCE through the lengthening shadows of the afternoon. They went very fast, sweeping around the turns of the humped, narrow road, the tires squealing. Tony was tight over the wheel, and he seemed to Lucy to be driving fast and dangerously for a purpose, to keep himself so intent and concentrated on passing cars and managing curves that there was no chance of thinking about anything else.
She did not try to talk to him. I am expended, she thought dully. There’s nothing further I have to say.
They were approaching a village. It was still a quarter of a mile off, in a little declivity, a huddle of bluish slate roofs over gray stone, clustered around a church steeple.
“There it is,” Tony said.
Lucy stared through the windshield. The town lay quietly in the sunshine, surrounded by its green fields, with the road running straight into the middle of it, looking like a dozen other villages they had gone through.
“Well,” Tony asked, “what do you want to do?”
“It happened at a crossroads,” Lucy said. “I got a letter from a man who was with him and he said they were coming in from the north and there was a crossroads just outside the town.”
“North is on the other side,” Tony said.
They were silent as they drove through the village. The street was narrow and winding and the buildings were right along the edge, with boxes of geraniums in bloom under the windows. The shutters were closed on all the windows and Lucy had a sudden picture of all the inhabitants lurking within, balefully spying on the strangers rushing through their town in their noisy machines, breaking the centuries-old peace of the place, reminding them of their poverty and their bitter roots in this peasant soil, and of the hard lives they led.
Lucy remembered the Sergeant’s letter, and thought, distractedly, He crossed an ocean to take this empty place. And he never even reached it.
They were almost through the town by now and they still hadn’t seen a single person. The cracked shutters on the windows absorbed the glare of the sun and the single gas pump on the edge of the town was locked and unattended. It was almost as though, for her benefit, the town had remained exactly as it was, asleep and dangerous, on the day eleven years before when her husband had walked up the road toward it with a white towel on a stripped branch.
Tony was scowling a little as he drove through the town, as though he disapproved of the place. But it might only have been the effect of the sun, reflecting off the flaking stone walls. They pulled slowly out the other side of the village and Lucy saw the crossroads. Looking at it, the two narrow country roads, thick with white dust, intersecting each other in a meaningless small widening of their surfaces, Lucy had a sense of recognition that was almost pleasurable. It was like searching for something that you have lost, that has nagged you with its loss for many years, and suddenly coming upon it.
“Here,” she said. “Stop here.”
Tony pulled the car a little to one side, just before they reached the crossroads, although he couldn’t get all the way off the road because of the ditch that ran alongside it. The ditch was almost three feet deep and was overgrown with grass, powdered with the dust of the road. There were no trees, although there was a row of hedge a few yards back from the road.
Tony leaned back in his seat, stretching and working his shoulders.
“This is the place,” Lucy said. She got out of the car. Her legs were stiff and cramped and the sun beat down, very hot on the unshaded, bright road, now that they were no longer moving. She took off her scarf and pushed her hand through her hair and walked to the crossroads, the dust rising in little chalky puffs around her heels. The countryside slumbered all around them, empty and stretching and anonymous, without emotion, sending up a grassy, thin aroma.
In the distance there were several clusters of roofs and church steeples, other towns lost under the open sun. Only to the north, on the side away from the town, was the landscape broken. There was a rise about a hundred feet away and trees along the edges of the road which came down toward them in a gentle, direct slope, and Lucy could imagine, from the Sergeant’s letter, the jeeps parked facing in the other direction, just under the rise, and the four men in helmets lying there, rifles ready, their eyes just over the crest of the ridge, watching the town, watching the three figures walking through the hot naked sunlight in the white dust, coming up to the crossroads, outlined there for a moment in the blank and meaningless swelling, then starting on the other side toward the silent walls …
She paced slowly down the center of the road, thinking, I am treading on the spot. This is the place he was looking for, this is the place he was traveling to. Why did I come here? It is just a place, like any other. A back-country road, marked by cartwheels, in a part of Europe that looks as though it might be anywhere, Maryland, Maine, Delaware, with no sign any place within the horizon that a war ever passed this way, that armed men ever died here.
She shook her head. She felt empty and at a loss. There was no possible ceremony at this nondescript, vacant crossroads with which to dignify the moment or bring it to a climax. There were no symbols or monuments, just meaningless roads without history. She was conscious of Tony behind her, brooding and implacable, and suddenly resented his presence there. If she had been alone, or with someone else, anyone else, she thought, she would have been able to find significance in the moment, give way to sorrow or relief. I’m here with the wrong man, she thought.
Despite herself, she found herself wondering, How long should I stay here? Will it be decent to leave in ten minutes? Fifteen? Should I drop a flower, weep a tear, scratch a name on a stone?
She looked back at Tony. He was still sitting at the wheel of the car, his hat pulled down in front, so that the sun was kept from his eyes. He wasn’t watching her, but was staring incuriously across the empty fields. It occurred to Lucy that he had the air of a chauffeur waiting for his employer to come out of a shop, not caring what she was buying, how long she would stay, where the next stop would be, waiting with a remote, hired, unconnected patience, earning his salary, thinking of six o’clock, when he would be free to go his own way.
She walked over to the car. He turned his head toward her. “What a place to get killed,” he said.
Lucy didn’t answer him. She went around to the other side of the car, being careful not to slip into the ditch, and opened her bag, which was on the seat. She took out the Sergeant’s letter, and carefully removed it from its envelope. The paper was cracked and flaking with age at the edges and when she opened it she could see little holes along the creases.
“Here,” she said. “You might want to read this.”
Tony glanced at her suspiciously, the chauffeur wary of being involved unwillingly in the secrets of his employer. Then he took the letter, spreading it against the wheel, and began to read.
Lucy went around to the back of the car and leaned against the baggage rack. She didn’t want to watch Tony reading the letter. She didn’t want him to feel that it was necessary to put any kind of expression on his face for her, pity or amusement at the Sergeant’s grammar or sorrow for the event of the distant afternoon. She became conscious of the silence, so different from the crowded music of the American countryside, and she realized that she missed the sound of birds. That’s right, she remembered, the French shoot everything, the birds are dead or they have learned to keep quiet.
She heard Tony rustling the letter, putting it back in the envelope, and she turned around. He was being very careful with the frail paper and tucking the edges in neatly. He tapped the envelope reflectively against the steering wheel several times, then sat still, staring out at the road. Then he climbed out of the car, putting the letter in his pocket. He went out into the middle of the road and stopped, scuffing the dust with his shoe.
“Making mistakes right up to the last minute, wasn’t he?” Tony said, pushing the dust, smoothing it out with the sole of his shoe. “Always so sure people were go
ing to surrender.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
Tony shrugged. “What do you want me to say? Should I make a speech about our heroic dead? He was just taking a walk.” He came back toward her. “He should have stayed back at Corps, as the Sergeant said.”
“The Sergeant didn’t say that.”
Tony shrugged again, impatiently. “He intimated as much. All the others—the sensible ones—stayed there. They weren’t fearless and cheerful and democratic …” Tony grinned harshly. “And they’re back home today.”
He swung around and looked at the crossroads. Then he bent into the back of the car, under the lowered canvas top, and felt around for a moment and came up with a thin, jointed jack handle. He straightened it out and locked the joint. It had a curved end and now it looked like a cane in his hands. He leaned over again and he came up this time with a bottle in a straw jacket. He took the jacket off and Lucy saw that it was a bottle of brandy, still sealed.
“For cold nights and thirsty travelers,” Tony said, tossing the straw jacket into the ditch, and holding up the bottle. “Do you happen to have a corkscrew on you?”
“No.” Lucy watched him, puzzled and suspicious.
“That’s a mistake,” he said. “One should not be caught out in France without a corkscrew.” He went to the middle of the road and stared down at the surface. Then, with the jack handle, he began to write in the dust, slowly and carefully. Curiously, Lucy came up behind him to see what he was doing.