by Irwin Shaw
Oliver Crown, he was printing in the dust in wide, evenly spaced letters. Husband. Father. He hesitated, the jack handle poised. Then he added one more word. Negotiator, he wrote. When he had finished that, he stepped back a little, cocking his head to one side, like an artist criticizing his own work. Then he stepped up again and drew a box around the inscription. “That’s better,” he said. He went over to the side of the road and bent down and knocked off the head of the brandy bottle against a stone and came back and carefully poured brandy, in a series of little spurts, along the lines of the letters.
“To make it stand out,” Tony said, “for all the world to see.”
The brandy smelled strong and sweetish in the heat and when Tony had finished with the letters he had enough left over for the frame. For a moment, the memorial looked permanent and sensible, darkly outlined in the glittering dust.
When he finished, Tony straightened up. He looked at Lucy, his face strange, sad, pulled into a tortured grimace. “Something had to be done,” he said, standing there with the jagged-throated bottle in his hand.
Then Lucy heard the sound of footsteps, many footsteps, shuffling in a rough irregular rhythm, growing stronger and stronger. She looked up. Over the edge of the rise a banner was showing, small and triangular, carried on a staff. A second later, uniformed men appeared over the rise, marching in a column of twos, coming out of the shade of the trees, moving swiftly. Lucy blinked. I’m imagining things, she thought, they stopped marching a long time ago.
The columns came closer and then she began to laugh. The uniformed men coming sweatily over the rise, with their banner before them, were boy scouts, in khaki shirts and shorts and packs, led by a scout master in a beret. Lucy went over and leaned against the car and laughed uncontrollably.
“What’s the matter?” Tony followed her and peered at her closely. “What’re you laughing about?”
She stopped. She stared at the approaching columns. “I don’t know,” she said.
She and Tony stood against the car, off to one side, as the boys came up. They were between thirteen and sixteen, red-faced and thin, long-haired and knobby-kneed and serious under their packs. They looked like the sons of barbers and musicians. Without paying any attention to what was under their feet, they marched over the inscription in the dust, on which the brandy had already dried. They raised a small cloud as they passed and their boots and stockings were powdery gray. They stared admiringly from their sweating, unformed faces at the pretty little car and smiled gravely at the foreigners. The scout master saluted solemnly and said “Bonjour” and looked curiously at the bottle in Tony’s hand.
Tony said “Bonjour,” and all the boys answered him in chorus, their voices high and choirlike over the scuffling sound of their boots on the road.
They marched purposefully against the walls of the town and after they had gone a little distance down the straight white road, they were no longer children, but soldiers again, weary and lonely in the hot sun, but determined and potent under their packs, with their banner in the van. Tony and Lucy stood silently watching them until they disappeared into the town, which received them in silence.
Then Tony tossed the bottle away, into the hedge.
“Well,” he said, “I guess we’re through here.”
“Yes,” said Lucy. In utter weariness, her feet shuffling through the dust, she started back toward the passenger’s side of the car. There were some loose rocks on the edge of the ditch and her high heel turned on one of them and she stumbled and fell, heavily, on her hands and knees, into the dust of the road. Stunned, feeling the pain begin in her knees and the palms of her hands, and the shock spreading dully up her spine and in her brain, she stayed that way, her hair hanging down over her eyes, panting, like an overburdened and exhausted animal.
For a moment, Tony looked down incredulously at his mother, awkward and in pain, fallen at his feet. Then he bent forward and put his hand on her shoulder to pick her up.
“Let go of me,” she said harshly, not looking at him, her head still down.
He stepped back, listening to the dry, tearless sobbing of her breath. After a while she put out her hand to the car bumper and slowly and heavily pulled herself up. Her palms were bleeding and she rubbed them on her dress, leaving dusty red smears on it. Her stockings were torn and a little blood was seeping from the broken skin of her knees. She pushed at herself with blind, clumsy movements of her hands, and suddenly she seemed old, bereaved, pitiable, struggling to hold on to the last remnants of her courage and endurance.
He made no move to help her, but kept staring at her, his face set, as the new image of his mother, bloody, vulnerable, stained with dust, took possession of him. Watching her straightening her dress with ungainly, sexless, un-womanish movements, and bending over heavily to scrape the blood off her knees, he had a vision of her old age and her death, and remembered, in a wave of pity for them both, the night he had slept out under the stars on the glider on the porch and had listened to the owl and had decided to become a doctor and invent a serum against mortality. His eyes blurring with tears, he heard again the owl’s call, and remembered the deathless monkey, and his selection of candidates for everlasting life, his mother, his father, Jeff, himself. And somehow, in the confusion of memory and the final overrunning of long-held defenses, it was not only himself in the glider, but his son, too, magically thirteen, and his twin, dispensing immortality in accordance with the stern rules of love and watching his mother, light-footed, soft-voiced, cherished, coming across the misty lawn from her lover’s bed to kiss him good night.
He went slowly over to her and took her hands, one after the other, and carefully brushed the dirt from the wounds. Then he pushed her hair back from her forehead and with his handkerchief wiped the sweat from her drawn and aging face. Then he led her to the car door and helped her in. He stood over her briefly, as she looked up at him, the pain draining out of her eyes.
He touched her cheek lightly with his fingertips, as she had touched him so often when he was a boy, and said, “There’s no need to go to the grave any more, is there?”
He could feel her skin tremble minutely under his fingers. She shook her head gratefully. “No,” she said.
It was nearly midnight when they got back to Paris, and Tony drove directly to his mother’s hotel. He helped her out of the car and walked with her to the hotel entrance. They stopped there, oppressed by the difficulty of saying good-bye.
“Tony,” Lucy said, “I’m only going to be here another day. I wonder if I might come by your apartment tomorrow some time. I’d like to give your son something. A toy.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Don’t think you have to be there, Tony,” she said anxiously. “It’s not necessary.”
“I know,” he said.
“Good,” she said quickly. “I’ll come in the afternoon. What time does he get up from his nap?”
“Three o’clock, I think.”
“I’ll be there at three o’clock,” she said.
Then he knew he couldn’t leave her like that. With a smothered, childish cry, he threw his arms around her and held her tight, feeling the years, with their weight of memory and error, lift convulsively from his shoulders as he clung to her, forgiving her, mutely asking for forgiveness for himself, clutching at her, clutching at whatever might be left to them in the waste of love they had made around them.
She held him to her consolingly, patting his arm, oblivious of the people who passed them curiously on the dark, foreign street.
“Mother,” he said, “do you remember—when I went off at the end of that summer and I asked you what we would say if we happened to see each other—do you remember what you said?”
Lucy nodded, remembering the quiet afternoon and the dark autumn blue of the mountain lake and the boy in the suit that had grown too small for him in the summer. “I said, I guess we say hello.”
Tony pulled gently back from his mother’s embrace and stared into
her eyes. “Hello,” he said gravely, “Hello, hello.”
Then they smiled at each other and they were like any other mother and grown son placidly parting after a day in the country.
Lucy looked down at her torn and rumpled dress, at her ripped stockings and scarred knees. “My,” she said, “what a sight! God only knows what the people in the hotel will think I’ve been up to today.” She laughed. Then she leaned over and kissed him matter-of-factly on the cheek, as though she had been kissing him good night every night for twenty years. “Sleep well,” she said, and turned and went into the hotel.
He watched her for a moment, going through the lobby toward the desk, a tall, heavy woman, lonely and showing her age, solid and reconciled and without illusions about herself. Then he got into the car and drove home.
The apartment was dark when he let himself in and he went into the child’s room and stood over his bed, listening to the steady breathing. After a moment or two, the boy awoke and sat up.
“Daddy,” he said.
“I just came in to say good night,” Tony said. “I just left your grandmother and she’s coming here tomorrow to see you after your nap.”
“After my nap,” the boy said drowsily, fixing it against the forgetfulness of sleep.
“She’s going to bring you a toy,” Tony said, whispering in the dark room.
“I want a tractor,” the boy said. “No, a boat.”
“I’ll call her in the morning,” Tony said, “and she’ll bring you a boat.”
“A big boat,” the boy said, lying back on his pillow. “For long voyages.”
Tony nodded over the bed. “A big boat for many long voyages,” he said.
But the boy was already asleep.
Tony went into the bedroom he shared with his wife. Dora was sleeping, too, on her back, breathing steadily, her head thrown back and her two hands up in front of her face, as though she were defending herself. Tony undressed quietly in the darkness and slipped into bed. He lay still for a few moments, thinking, Another day in my life.
Then he turned on his side and gently drew his wife’s hands down from her face and took her in his arms and slept.
A Biography of Irwin Shaw
Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an award-winning American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. His novel The Young Lions (1948) is considered a classic of World War II fiction. From the early pages of the New Yorker to the bestseller lists, Shaw earned a reputation as a leading literary voice of his generation.
Shaw was born Irwin Shamforoff in the Bronx, New York, on February 27, 1913. His parents, Will and Rose, were Russian Jewish immigrants and his father struggled as a haberdasher. The family moved to Brooklyn and barely survived the Depression. After graduating from high school at the age of sixteen, Shaw worked his way through Brooklyn College, where he started as quarterback on the school’s scrappy football team.
“Discovered” by a college teacher (who later got him his first assignment, writing for the Dick Tracy radio serials), Shaw became a household name at the age of twenty-two thanks to his first produced play, Bury the Dead. This 1935 Broadway hit—still regularly produced around the world—is a bugle call against profit-driven barbarity. Offered a job as a Hollywood staff scriptwriter, Shaw then contributed to numerous Golden Era films such as The Big Game (1936) and The Talk of the Town (1942). While continuing to write memorable stories for the New Yorker, he also penned The Gentle People (1939), a play that was adapted for film four different times.
World War II altered the course of Shaw’s career. Refusing a commission, he enlisted in the army, and was shipped off to North Africa as a private in a photography unit in 1943. After the North African campaign, he served in London during the preparations for the invasion of Normandy. After D-Day, Shaw and his unit followed the front lines and documented many of the most important moments of the war, including the liberations of Paris and the Dachau concentration camp.
The Young Lions (1948), his epic novel, follows three soldiers—two Americans and one German—across North Africa, Europe, and into Germany. Along with James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, The Young Lions stands as one of the great American novels of World War II. In 1958, it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.
In 1951, wrongly suspected of Communist sympathies, Shaw moved to Europe with his wife and six-month-old son. In Paris, he was neighbors with journalist Art Buchwald and friends with the great French writers, photographers, actors, and moviemakers of his generation, including Joseph Kessel, Robert Capa, Simone Signoret, and Louis Malle. In Rome, Shaw gave author William Styron his wedding lunch, doctored screenplays, walked with director Federico Fellini on the Via Veneto, and got the idea for his novel Two Weeks in Another Town (1960).
Finally, he settled in the small Swiss village of Klosters and continued writing screenplays, stage plays, and novels. Rich Man, Poor Man (1970) and Beggerman, Thief (1977) were made into the first famous television miniseries. Nightwork (1975) will soon be a major motion picture. Shaw died in the shadow of the Swiss peaks that had inspired Thomas Mann’s great novel The Magic Mountain.
Shaw as a young soldier crossing North Africa from Algiers to Cairo in 1943.
Shaw’s US Army record.
Shaw just after D-Day in Normandy, France, in 1944.
A few weeks after D-Day, Shaw and his Signal Corps film crew liberate Mont Saint-Michel.
A 1944 letter from Shaw to his wife, Marian, describing the “taking” of Mont Saint Michel, as well as a nerve-wracking night under a cathedral when he almost shot a group of monks, believing them to be Germans.
Shaw as a warrant-officer in Austria in 1945, with Signal Corps Captain Josh Logan (left) and Colonel Anatole Litvak (center), who became his lifelong friends.
Shaw, Marian, and their son, Adam, on the terrace of the newly built Chalet Mia in Klosters, Switzerland, in 1957.
Shaw at home with Marian at Chalet Mia, Klosters, in 1958.
Shaw (center) skiing in Klosters in 1960 with (left to right) Noel Howard (an actor), an unidentified Hollywood producer, Marian Shaw, Jacques Charmoz (a French World War II pilot, cartoonist, and painter), and Jacqueline Tesseron.
Shaw in Klosters in 1960 with (from left to right) Kathy Parrish, her husband Robert Parrish (an Academy Award–winning film editor and director), and Peter Viertel (a screenwriter, novelist, and Shaw’s coauthor for the play The Survivors). Shaw’s friendship with Viertel started before the war, when they both lived in Malibu.
Shaw with Irving P. “Swifty” Lazar, the legendary talent agent who represented him, in Evian, France, in 1963.
Shaw playing tennis in Klosters in 1964.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1965 by Irwin Shaw
Cover design by Andrea C. Uva
978-1-4804-1241-5
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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