Fling and Other Stories

by John Hersey

  Miss Alderhoff, in tune with all pains and sorrows, both at this table and elsewhere, said, “Mr. Eisenhower shouldn’t have gone out shooting in the rain, poor man. He has bursitis, you know.”

  Gordon could see his mother sagging somewhat in her chair. This, he knew, meant that she was groping with her foot under the table for the bulge of the bell button under the rug down there. Then she must have found it; he heard the buzzer in the kitchen, and Flo burst in. “We’ll need another bottle of red wine up here, Flo,” his mother said. “How’s the supply down at that end, Beth?”

  “We could use another bottle,” Aunt Beth said.

  “White or red, Beth?”

  “It’s all the same to me,” Aunt Beth said. She laughed her tinkling laugh.

  “I think red here, too, Mother,” Gordon said.

  “Two red,” Flo said, giving the swinging door a little whack with the flat of her hand as she left the room.

  “You were playing Sibelius before,” Beverly said to Gordon’s mother. “Do you specially like his music?”

  “Oh, yes. Do you know ‘The Swan of Tuonela’?”

  “Then you must also like Brahms,” Beverly said. “And probably Rachmaninoff. I was th-thinking, why is it that really good pianists and conductors seem to live forever? When I was a little girl, my mother took me to hear Rachmaninoff, he was an old, old man, playing two of his concertos with the Philharmonic. Two concertos in one evening. I think I fell asleep, but I’ve never forgotten—that old man’s f-frightening…p-power.”

  “Ah, Beverly,” Gordon’s mother said, her face winy and soft, “I can’t wait to be really old. That regime! You wake up at five-thirty or so, and they give you a cup of hot milk. You snooze a bit until breakfast. Then you sit for a while under the dogwood tree and doze off. Later, you walk over to look at the strawberries, and then you go back to your chair and they bring you some hot consommé, but you’re bored with consommé, so you don’t take it, you just sit there: the spots of sun filtering through the tiny white saucers of the dogwood blossoms are so dazzling. Good heavens, you must have dropped off, it’s lunchtime! After lunch you lie down on the sofa with a knitted throw over you. Then you get up and play some solitaire. A bath. A highball. Supper. You fall asleep listening to the radio—only that’s not your night-sleep—you’ll need a toddy to insure your night-sleep. And then they put you to bed, and they actually tuck you in like a child. Think of it!”

  Gordon felt a rush of gratitude. Beverly was so fine. Her face, like his mother’s, was rosy and melted and a tiny bit swollen by the warmed blood of friendliness. Her scarf had slid down off to the left, and he stared at the curve of her bare pink neck down onto her pale bare shoulder. Suddenly, putting his fork down, he was overcome by a wish that he could get up and go around there and take Bev by the hand, and lead her upstairs to his old room, and receive her in his boyhood bed, and celebrate with her what there was to be most thankful for on this earth.

  But Miss Rankin, who was perhaps not looking forward quite so eagerly as Gordon’s mother to being “really old,” broke his spell. She said in a cranky voice, “Did anyone see David Susskind interviewing Khrushchev in New York the other night?”

  “Sure did,” Uncle Solbert said, his orange hat askew. “He gave the old bugger what for, didn’t he?”

  “Did you notice,” Miss Alderhoff said, “that Khrushchev drank mineral water instead of coffee during the program? He must have indigestion.”

  Little Freddie spoke up for the first time. “Susskind sucks,” he said.

  “I hope the big K does have a bad stomach,” Peter said, speaking again straight to Bev. “God damn peasant.”

  “That’s just it, Peter!” Beverly said. “Every clever Russian wants you to think he’s a peasant. Did you ever read Gorky’s reminiscence of…T-Tolstoy?” Gordon smiled at the thought of Peter reading even the morning paper. “Gorky read a story of his out loud to Tolstoy, and Tolstoy said he’d got his p-peasants all wrong. The old man said a Russian peasant will come up to you and talk in a silly and incoherent way. He does this on…p-purpose, so you’ll think he’s…st-stupid. He knows that people are open and direct with stupid people, and that’s just what he wants, because you blurt out everything, you show all your c-cards, and right away he knows your…w-weaknesses.”

  “I think Beverly has a point there, Peter,” Gordon’s mother said, tapping Peter on the shoulder.

  Peter colored violently. He started to say something, but Beverly had turned to Mr. Cannahan, who had finished his mashed bananas, and she was saying, “I like people with weak stomachs. It means that they…th-think about things. Maybe they think too m-much sometimes. But at least they think.” As she said that last sentence she swerved her gaze back toward Peter.

  Gordon saw that his mother was charmed by Beverly’s kindness to Mr. Cannahan, and Mr. Cannahan looked as if he might faint from pleasure. But Peter was still very red, and as he chewed, his lower jaw seemed to push out like a bulldozer blade. Gordon knew he must break in somehow, to change the drift of things.

  He urgently pinged the back of his knife against his wineglass and then raised the glass and said, “Here’s to the two women I love most in this world.”

  * * *

  —

  He knew on the instant that he had made a terrible mistake. He saw his mother, faced with the appalling idea of equivalence, suddenly looking at him as if she had no idea who he was. Bev, stricken pale, reached for her wineglass, presumably to raise it to his mother, or perhaps, Gordon thought in sudden panic, to throw it down the whole length of the table at him, but instead she clumsily knocked it over, and a flood of red, like guilty blood, soaked into one of the priceless lace doilies.

  A dead silence followed, a pause in which a creaking of dry timbers could be heard, as if the whole house around them were heaving a deep sigh. Then came such a rush of exclamations that Gordon had a sensation of watching a speeded-up footage of film.

  Peter cried out, “Ha!”

  “Salt! Salt!” Aunt Beth shouted. “Put a lot of salt on it. I tell you, it’s the only way to prevent a stain.”

  Beverly said, all too distinctly, “Sh-shit!” and then quickly added, “I’m s-so s-sorry, Mrs. Bronson.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Peter said.

  Uncle Solbert, absurd in his orange paper hat, said in a shocked voice, “Peter!”

  Gordon’s mother said to Peter, “Watch your tongue, Son. Have you forgotten what day this is?”—as if she herself had forgotten what day it actually was.

  Old Miss Alderhoff pushed her chair back and stood up. “Well!” she said, “I am going to get a box of salt,” and she marched around the table to the kitchen door.

  Peter’s wife, Molly, at Gordon’s left, chose this moment to shout, “Mother Bronson, you’ve always favored Gordon over Petie. Always. You’re not fair!”

  Gordon’s mother snapped out, “You stay out of this, Molly.”

  Little Caroline stood up, knocked her chair over backward, and ran sobbing into the living room. Awful Freddie’s eyes were popping out with his first signs of pleasure all day. Miss Alderhoff appeared, with Flo right behind her holding high a blue cylindrical box as if it were the Statue of Liberty’s torch, and they strode around the table in tandem. “Where is it? Where is it?” Flo kept asking. Uncle Solbert pointed; Flo leaned over his shoulder and poured a heap of salt on Beverly Zimmer’s taint.

  Gordon’s first thought, scanning his mother’s face for what might happen next, was that she suddenly looked a hundred. It was as if she’d got, all at once, her wish to be “really old.” The caverns under her eyes had gone dark, her cheeks were bloodless, and the left side of her mouth sagged as if she’d had a stroke. He thought, Oh, God, I’ve ruined her Thanksgiving. And then, suddenly, with a forkful of maple-flavored turnip on his tongue and with his eyes abruptly peeled to truths for which there was no way of givi
ng thanks, he saw the appalling emptiness, the bleakness, of his mother’s life. Here she sat in a dark house with her best friends: two gossipy old maids and a man whose stomach burned year after year with the acidity of his enigmatic needs—three companions of her days and nights in empty prattle during endless bridge games. On top of that, she’d had to cope with her alcoholic brother Solbert and alcoholic sister-in-law Beth, who lived nearby. And then her raging son Peter; and his Molly, with a voice like the one you heard as a child on a tin-can telephone with a string stretched to the speaker’s can; and their rotten children, her only grandchildren, affording her, too sadly, a hollow pride in her legacy. And then: what of the other son, at that moment swallowing turnip—what of him?

  Gordon’s mother turned to Beverly and asked in a kindly voice, “What do you like about my son?”

  Gordon wondered what sort of trap his mother was setting.

  “G-Gordon? Gordon?” Beverly asked twice, perhaps to stall for time. “What I like about G-Gordon is that he doesn’t…sm-smoke cigars.”

  Mrs. Bronson laughed. “Good for you!” she said with generous admiration, as if Beverly had managed to drive a passing shot over the net that was stretched between them.

  “Do you have any idea why he likes you?”

  It was Beverly’s turn to laugh. “He likes my being…di-di-di-disorderly. In my…th-thinking. You see, your son is very neat—very careful which dr-drawers he p-puts things in.”

  Gordon saw that the color was coming back into his mother’s face. By God, she was a strong one, she had recovered, she was enjoying herself. He was tempted to ask his mother what it was in Beverly that she was beginning to like, but he was afraid to.

  “How ’bout your drawers?” Peter said to Beverly. “Is he, like you say, c-careful?”

  Little Freddie snickered.

  “Shut up, Peter!” Uncle Solbert shouted.

  “My heavens,” Mr. Cannahan said.

  “Molly,” Gordon’s mother said, projecting a hushed voice the length of the table, “sometimes your husband can be very annoying. But I’m sure you know that of your own knowledge.” She turned back to Beverly and said, “Tell me more about my Gordon.”

  “Well,” Bev said, “he’s sort of muh-muh…m-my Gordon right now.”

  “Ah,” Mrs. Bronson said. “You stake a claim. Do you believe his intentions are honorable, as they used to say?”

  “Better ask him,” Beverly said without a trace of a stammer.

  “Gordon,” his mother said, “serve some more turkey to whoever wants it, please.”

  Gordon felt a stab of anger. Having said that he and Peter reverted to being eight and ten years old at her table, his mother was now, for her purposes, treating him like a child. Staking her claim, he guessed. Careful to control his voice, he said, “Beverly and I are going to be married.”

  Uncle Solbert tore his paper hat off and waved it in circles over his head and shouted, “Hurray!”

  “Congratulations,” Mr. Cannahan said to Beverly, looking heartbroken.

  “My God,” Peter said.

  “And you chose to tell me this at Thanksgiving dinner?” Gordon’s mother said.

  “I thought you’d be happy for me, Mother.”

  “Oh, but I am,” she said, her voice trembling. “You have picked a winner. You’ve shown very good sense, Son.” She turned to Beverly and said, her eyes brimming, “I have liked you, Miss Zimmer, from the moment you walked in the front door. My Gordon, if you will permit me to call him that once more, is a very lucky boy.”

  After a long pause Beverly said, “Your p-peach ch-chutney is the b-best I ever tasted.”

  “Thank you, my dear.” Gordon saw his mother’s face relax into a terrible smile of surrender, and he felt a rush of contrition and pity. She was amazing. She had caught her balance. “Marriage,” she was saying to Bev, “isn’t an easy estate. You’d better have a little chat with Molly down there about it. I was fairly lucky myself, but it wasn’t easy, you know. My husband was an indecisive man, and—”

  But Miss Alderhoff had raised her glass, and was calling out in a shrill voice, “Let’s drink to the engagement. To Gordon and Miss Zimmer!”

  “Yes! Yes!” cried Miss Rankin. “To the engagement!”

  Uncle Solbert and Aunt Beth both cheered, but others at the table were quiet as they lifted their glasses and drank. Peter hesitated.

  “Drink up, darling,” Gordon’s mother said to Peter. She seemed to be herself again. She caressed his arm. “Wish your brother luck, darling.”

  “Here’s mud in your eye,” Peter said to Gordon, before he gulped at his glass. He did not look at Beverly.

  Why Were You Sent Out Here?

  With abrupt acceleration, the heavy revolving front door of the Wagons-Lits Hotel started to swing around. After the door flaps had thudded twice, Colonel Potter Watson emerged on the outer side. He was about thirty-five years old, florid and strong-looking. He had on his lapels the brass vial and flame of Chemical Warfare, and he displayed, above his left breast pocket, only one overseas ribbon—a brand-new Asian Theater stripe. When he had stepped clear, the door slowed down a lot and let out Colonel William de Angelis, who wore the insignia of an infantryman and several decorations from the First World War. The second officer’s face, that of a man about sixty, was a pattern of meaningless lines on contours that had apparently been interesting once, like an action map in a rear-echelon headquarters after the fighting is over. Everything about the older man looked slightly dilapidated, except for a beautiful, flexible, braided swagger stick tucked under his left arm.

  Colonel Watson stepped out to the front of the marble platform of the entranceway and greeted the heavy Chinese doorman by name: “Good morning, Sung.”

  The doorman tipped his visored khaki hat and said, “Good morning, master,” and bowed slightly.

  The older colonel, coming along behind, said dully, “Good day.”

  “Good morning, sir,” Sung replied, and did not bow to the older man. He told the officers that the eight-o’clock shuttle bus to Peking Union Medical College, their headquarters, had just left.

  Colonel Watson, the younger officer, said, “Nice spring morning like this, why don’t we take a ricksha?” Colonel de Angelis acquiesced. Sung lifted a fat hand as a signal to the coolies lounging on the footboards of a row of fancy Legation Quarter rickshas across the street. Several grabbed up the shafts of their vehicles and ran, pulling the rickshas, across to the entranceway and shouted competitively for the Americans’ favor. Colonel Watson, recognizing a puller he had engaged once before, said, “I’ll take Number Thirty-four here.” Colonel de Angelis, who did not know one coolie from another, accepted the most insistent puller. This man had run up the steps and was actually trying to push the elderly colonel toward his own ricksha. “All right,” Colonel de Angelis said, “take your hands off me.”

  Instead of giving instructions in English to Sung for translation, Colonel Watson spoke directly to his coolie in fairly well pronounced Chinese: “To Executive Headquarters. How are you today?”

  The coolie mumbled a reply and pulled out ahead. The older colonel’s puller followed.

  Colonel Watson turned and said over his shoulder to his companion in the other ricksha, “No dust today. Look at that sky.”

  The two rickshas turned in to Legation Street. Along the sidewalks, the horse chestnuts and acacias, whose leaves had suddenly fanned out from buds after a rain the week before, were still and fragrant. Policemen in black uniforms argued noisily in front of a large building on the left, which they were apparently appropriating as a station; their hubbub seemed to be all about how to unload some furniture they were moving. A couple of Chinese college girls rode up the street on bicycles, careless of the way their slit dresses exposed their thighs; Colonel Watson watched them, but the older man did not. He was looking, as he had been bid to do, at t
he sky. How sharply the roof tiles of the buildings they passed were edged against the blue! And what blue! Pure, a color one could see only over Peking, with the sheen of old porcelain, he thought. He saw Colonel Watson turn again and heard him shout cheerfully, “Spring moves along a lot faster here than it does in Hartford!”

  Colonel de Angelis found the younger man’s exuberance annoying. He realized all at once that he had nothing specific and absolute with which to compare the North China weather, for he had nothing to remember as home—just the series of camps that a regular Army man passes through. Was there ever spring at Fort Bragg or Camp Mills or Fort Sam Houston? How fast did all those seasons move along? Colonel Watson’s remarks, whether he intended them to be or not, were irritating. He remembered, in sudden focus—as, for some reason, he had quite a few times in recent days while he had been rooming with Colonel Watson—several scenes at Fort Sam Houston: a parade there, the barbershop on the post, his desk at C Company headquarters.

  As the rickshas swung into Rue Marco Polo and passed a couple of curio shops, Colonel Watson leaned around again and called out, “Don’t get sucked into those places. Terrible gyp joints. Have you been down to Embroidery Street?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll take you down there someday. Chinese city. Same stuff as up here, only you can bargain. I’ll take you down.”

  Colonel de Angelis decided at once that he did not want to go to Embroidery Street with Colonel Watson, who surely would bully the merchants and boast later of his triumphs. Colonel de Angelis was rather surprised at the vehemence of his feeling about the younger officer. Ever since they had been put in the same room at the hotel, he had been annoyed by little things Watson did—his long throat-clearing sessions in the bathroom in the mornings, his frequent and positive contradictions of what people said, his excellent appetite, his constant good spirits, his knowing everything and wanting to be so helpful—but Colonel de Angelis had not realized so clearly before how much he really disliked his roommate. Colonel de Angelis thought again of Fort Sam Houston; something about that place had been trying to crowd into his memory ever since he had spent his first day with Watson. Maybe, he decided, it was because he had been about Watson’s age when he was there. That was in 1921 and 1922; twenty-four and -five years ago. Yes, he thought, that must be it.