Short Stories: Five Decades Read online

  Short Stories

  Five Decades

  Irwin Shaw

  Many thanks to my editor, Kathy Anderson, for her invaluable assistance and advice

  To Arthur Stanton

  Contents

  Introduction by Irwin Shaw

  The Eighty-Yard Run

  Borough of Cemeteries

  Main Currents of American Thought

  Second Mortgage

  Sailor off the Bremen

  Strawberry Ice Cream Soda

  Welcome to the City

  The Girls in Their Summer Dresses

  Search Through the Streets of the City

  The Monument

  I Stand by Dempsey

  God on Friday Night

  Return to Kansas City

  Triumph of Justice

  No Jury Would Convict

  The Lament of Madame Rechevsky

  The Deputy Sheriff

  Stop Pushing, Rocky

  “March, March on Down the Field”

  Free Conscience, Void of Offence

  Weep in Years to Come

  The City Was in Total Darkness

  Night, Birth and Opinion

  Preach on the Dusty Roads

  Hamlets of the World

  Medal from Jerusalem

  Walking Wounded

  Night in Algiers

  Gunners’ Passage

  Retreat

  Act of Faith

  The Man with One Arm

  The Passion of Lance Corporal Hawkins

  The Dry Rock

  Noises in the City

  The Indian in Depth of Night

  Material Witness

  Little Henry Irving

  The House of Pain

  A Year to Learn the Language

  The Greek General

  The Green Nude

  The Climate of Insomnia

  Goldilocks at Graveside

  Mixed Doubles

  A Wicked Story

  Age of Reason

  Peter Two

  The Sunny Banks of the River Lethe

  The Man Who Married a French Wife

  Voyage Out, Voyage Home

  Tip on a Dead Jockey

  The Inhabitants of Venus

  In the French Style

  Then We Were Three

  God Was Here But He Left Early

  Love on a Dark Street

  Small Saturday

  Pattern of Love

  Whispers in Bedlam

  Where All Things Wise and Fair Descend

  Full Many a Flower

  Circle of Light

  A Biography of Irwin Shaw

  Introduction by Irwin Shaw

  I am a product of my times. I remember the end of World War I, the bells and whistles and cheering, and as an adolescent I profited briefly from the boom years. I suffered the Depression; exulted at the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt; drank my first glass of legal 3.2 beer the day Prohibition ended; mourned over Spain; listened to the Communist sirens; sensed the coming of World War II; went to that war; was shamed by the McCarthy era; saw the rebirth of Europe; marveled at the new generations of students; admired Kennedy; mourned over Vietnam. I have been both praised and blamed, all the while living my private life the best way I could.

  I have written stories in Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, on Fifth Avenue, in the New Yorker office on 43rd Street, in Connecticut, Cairo, Algiers, London, Paris, Rome, the Basque country, on ships, in the Alps, in the Mojave Desert, and bits and pieces on transcontinental trains.

  All these things, in one way or another, are reflected in my stories, which I now see as a record of the events of almost sixty years, all coming together in the imagination of one American. Of course there are gaps. Other writers have filled many of these but some remain and will never be filled.

  Why does a man spend fifty years of his life in an occupation that is often painful? I once told a class I was teaching that writing is an intellectual contact sport, similar in some respects to football. The effort required can be exhausting, the goal unreached, and you are hurt on almost every play; but that doesn’t deprive a man or a boy from getting peculiar pleasures from the game.

  In a preface to an earlier collection I described some of those pleasures. Among them, I wrote, there is the reward of the storyteller, sitting cross-legged in the bazaar, filling the need of humanity in the humdrum course of the ordinary day for magic and distant wonders, for disguised moralizing that will set everyday transactions into larger perspectives, for the compression of great matters into digestible portions, for the shaping of mysteries into sharply edged and comprehensible symbols.

  Then there is the private and exquisite reward of escaping from the laws of consistency. Today you are sad and you tell a sad story. Tomorrow you are happy and your tale is a joyful one. You remember a woman whom you loved wholeheartedly and you celebrate her memory. You suffer from the wound of a woman who treated you badly and you denigrate womanhood. A saint has touched you and you are a priest. God has neglected you and you preach atheism.

  In a novel or a play you must be a whole man. In a collection of stories you can be all the men or fragments of men, worthy and unworthy, who in different seasons abound in you. It is a luxury not to be scorned.

  Originally this book was intended to contain all of my stories, but when the count was made the total came to eighty-four, and to include them all would have meant a formidably bulky and outrageously expensive book. Since my publishers and I agreed that we did not wish to produce a volume that the reader could neither carry nor afford, we fixed on sixty-three stories as a reasonable number and began the sad process of winnowing out the ones we would leave behind. It was a little like being the commander of a besieged town who knows he cannot evacuate all his troops and is forced to decide who shall go and who shall stay to be overrun by the enemy. And the enemy in this case might be oblivion.

  The experience of going through the stories was also something like what is supposed to happen when a man is drowning, as scene after scene of his life passes before his eyes. If the drowning man is devout, it can be imagined that in those final moments he examines the scenes to determine the balance between his sins and his virtues with a view toward eventual salvation. Since I am not particularly devout, my chances for salvation lie in a place sometime in the future on a library shelf. These stories were selected, often with doubts and misgivings, with the hope that a spot on that distant shelf is waiting for them.

  —Irwin Shaw

  1978

  The Eighty-Yard Run

  The pass was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling it slap flatly against his hands, as he shook his hips to throw off the halfback who was diving at him. The center floated by, his hands desperately brushing Darling’s knee as Darling picked his feet up high and delicately ran over a blocker and an opposing linesman in a jumble on the ground near the scrimmage line. He had ten yards in the clear and picked up speed, breathing easily, feeling his thigh pads rising and falling against his legs, listening to the sound of cleats behind him, pulling away from them, watching the other backs heading him off toward the sideline, the whole picture, the men closing in on him, the blockers fighting for position, the ground he had to cross, all suddenly clear in his head, for the first time in his life not a meaningless confusion of men, sounds, speed. He smiled a little to himself as he ran, holding the ball lightly in front of him with his two hands, his knees pumping high, his hips twisting in the almost girlish run of a back in a broken field. The first halfback came at him and he fed him his leg, then swung at the last moment, took the shock of the man’s shoulder without breaking stride, ran right through him, his cleats biting securely into the turf. There was only the safety man n
ow, coming warily at him, his arms crooked, hands spread. Darling tucked the ball in, spurted at him, driving hard, hurling himself along, his legs pounding, knees high, all two hundred pounds bunched into controlled attack. He was sure he was going to get past the safety man. Without thought, his arms and legs working beautifully together, he headed right for the safety man, stiff-armed him, feeling blood spurt instantaneously from the man’s nose onto his hand, seeing his face go awry, head turned, mouth pulled to one side. He pivoted away, keeping the arm locked, dropping the safety man as he ran easily toward the goal line, with the drumming of cleats diminishing behind him.

  How long ago? It was autumn then, and the ground was getting hard because the nights were cold and leaves from the maples around the stadium blew across the practice fields in gusts of wind, and the girls were beginning to put polo coats over their sweaters when they came to watch practice in the afternoons.… Fifteen years. Darling walked slowly over the same ground in the spring twilight, in his neat shoes, a man of thirty-five dressed in a double-breasted suit, ten pounds heavier in the fifteen years, but not fat, with the years between 1925 and 1940 showing in his face.

  The coach was smiling quietly to himself and the assistant coaches were looking at each other with pleasure the way they always did when one of the second stringers suddenly did something fine, bringing credit to them, making their $2,000 a year a tiny bit more secure.

  Darling trotted back, smiling, breathing deeply but easily, feeling wonderful, not tired, though this was the tail end of practice and he’d run eighty yards. The sweat poured off his face and soaked his jersey and he liked the feeling, the warm moistness lubricating his skin like oil. Off in a corner of the field some players were punting and the smack of leather against the ball came pleasantly through the afternoon air. The freshmen were running signals on the next field and the quarterback’s sharp voice, the pound of the eleven pairs of cleats, the “Dig, now dig!” of the coaches, the laughter of the players all somehow made him feel happy as he trotted back to midfield, listening to the applause and shouts of the students along the sidelines, knowing that after that run the coach would have to start him Saturday against Illinois.

  Fifteen years, Darling thought, remembering the shower after the workout, the hot water steaming off his skin and the deep soapsuds and all the young voices singing with the water streaming down and towels going and managers running in and out and the sharp sweet smell of oil of wintergreen and everybody clapping him on the back as he dressed and Packard, the captain, who took being captain very seriously, coming over to him and shaking his hand and saying, “Darling, you’re going to go places in the next two years.”

  The assistant manager fussed over him, wiping a cut on his leg with alcohol and iodine, the little sting making him realize suddenly how fresh and whole and solid his body felt. The manager slapped a piece of adhesive tape over the cut, and Darling noticed the sharp clean white of the tape against the ruddiness of the skin, fresh from the shower.

  He dressed slowly, the softness of his shirt and the soft warmth of his wool socks and his flannel trousers a reward against his skin after the harsh pressure of the shoulder harness and thigh and hip pads. He drank three glasses of cold water, the liquid reaching down coldly inside of him, soothing the harsh dry places in his throat and belly left by the sweat and running and shouting of practice.

  Fifteen years.

  The sun had gone down and the sky was green behind the stadium and he laughed quietly to himself as he looked at the stadium, rearing above the trees, and knew that on Saturday when the 70,000 voices roared as the team came running out onto the field, part of that enormous salute would be for him. He walked slowly, listening to the gravel crunch satisfactorily under his shoes in the still twilight, feeling his clothes swing lightly against his skin, breathing the thin evening air, feeling the wind move softly in his damp hair, wonderfully cool behind his ears and at the nape of his neck.

  Louise was waiting for him at the road, in her car. The top was down and he noticed all over again, as he always did when he saw her, how pretty she was, the rough blonde hair and the large, inquiring eyes and the bright mouth, smiling now.

  She threw the door open. “Were you good today?” she asked.

  “Pretty good,” he said. He climbed in, sank luxuriously into the soft leather, stretched his legs far out. He smiled, thinking of the eighty yards. “Pretty damn good.”

  She looked at him seriously for a moment, then scrambled around, like a little girl, kneeling on the seat next to him, grabbed him, her hands along his ears, and kissed him as he sprawled, head back, on the seat cushion. She let go of him, but kept her head close to his, over his. Darling reached up slowly and rubbed the back of his hand against her cheek, lit softly by a street lamp a hundred feet away. They looked at each other, smiling.

  Louise drove down to the lake and they sat there silently, watching the moon rise behind the hills on the other side. Finally he reached over, pulled her gently to him, kissed her. Her lips grew soft, her body sank into his, tears formed slowly in her eyes. He knew, for the first time, that he could do whatever he wanted with her.

  “Tonight,” he said. “I’ll call for you at seven-thirty. Can you get out?”

  She looked at him. She was smiling, but the tears were still full in her eyes. “All right,” she said. “I’ll get out. How about you? Won’t the coach raise hell?”

  Darling grinned. “I got the coach in the palm of my hand,” he said. “Can you wait till seven-thirty?”

  She grinned back at him. “No,” she said.

  They kissed and she started the car and they went back to town for dinner. He sang on the way home.

  Christian Darling, thirty-five years old, sat on the frail spring grass, greener now than it ever would be again on the practice field, looked thoughtfully up at the stadium, a deserted ruin in the twilight. He had started on the first team that Saturday and every Saturday after that for the next two years, but it had never been as satisfactory as it should have been. He never had broken away, the longest run he’d ever made was thirty-five yards, and that in a game that was already won, and then that kid had come up from the third team, Diederich, a blank-faced German kid from Wisconsin, who ran like a bull, ripping lines to pieces Saturday after Saturday, plowing through, never getting hurt, never changing his expression, scoring more points, gaining more ground than all the rest of the team put together, making everybody’s All-American, carrying the ball three times out of four, keeping everybody else out of the headlines. Darling was a good blocker and he spent his Saturday afternoons working on the big Swedes and Polacks who played tackle and end for Michigan, Illinois, Purdue, hurling into huge pile-ups, bobbing his head wildly to elude the great raw hands swinging like meat-cleavers at him as he went charging in to open up holes for Diederich coming through like a locomotive behind him. Still, it wasn’t so bad. Everybody liked him and he did his job and he was pointed out on the campus and boys always felt important when they introduced their girls to him at their proms, and Louise loved him and watched him faithfully in the games, even in the mud, when your own mother wouldn’t know you, and drove him around in her car keeping the top down because she was proud of him and wanted to show everybody that she was Christian Darling’s girl. She bought him crazy presents because her father was rich, watches, pipes, humidors, an icebox for beer for his room, curtains, wallets, a fifty-dollar dictionary.

  “You’ll spend every cent your old man owns,” Darling protested once when she showed up at his rooms with seven different packages in her arms and tossed them onto the couch.

  “Kiss me,” Louise said, “and shut up.”

  “Do you want to break your poor old man?”

  “I don’t mind. I want to buy you presents.”

  “Why?”

  “It makes me feel good. Kiss me. I don’t know why. Did you know that you’re an important figure?”

  “Yes,” Darling said gravely.

  “When I was wai
ting for you at the library yesterday two girls saw you coming and one of them said to the other, ‘That’s Christian Darling. He’s an important figure.’”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “I’m in love with an important figure.”

  “Still, why the hell did you have to give me a forty-pound dictionary?”

  “I wanted to make sure,” Louise said, “that you had a token of my esteem. I want to smother you in tokens of my esteem.”

  Fifteen years ago.

  They’d married when they got out of college. There’d been other women for him, but all casual and secret, more for curiosity’s sake, and vanity, women who’d thrown themselves at him and flattered him, a pretty mother at a summer camp for boys, an old girl from his home town who’d suddenly blossomed into a coquette, a friend of Louise’s who had dogged him grimly for six months and had taken advantage of the two weeks that Louise went home when her mother died. Perhaps Louise had known, but she’d kept quiet, loving him completely, filling his rooms with presents, religiously watching him battling with the big Swedes and Polacks on the line of scrimmage on Saturday afternoons, making plans for marrying him and living with him in New York and going with him there to the night clubs, the theaters, the good restaurants, being proud of him in advance, tall, white-teethed, smiling, large, yet moving lightly, with an athlete’s grace, dressed in evening clothes, approvingly eyed by magnificently dressed and famous women in theater lobbies, with Louise adoringly at his side.

  Her father, who manufactured inks, set up a New York office for Darling to manage and presented him with three hundred accounts, and they lived on Beekman Place with a view of the river with fifteen thousand dollars a year between them, because everybody was buying everything in those days, including ink. They saw all the shows and went to all the speakeasies and spent their fifteen thousand dollars a year and in the afternoons Louise went to the art galleries and the matinees of the more serious plays that Darling didn’t like to sit through and Darling slept with a girl who danced in the chorus of Rosalie and with the wife of a man who owned three copper mines. Darling played squash three times a week and remained as solid as a stone barn and Louise never took her eyes off him when they were in the same room together, watching him with a secret, miser’s smile, with a trick of coming over to him in the middle of a crowded room and saying gravely, in a low voice, “You’re the handsomest man I’ve ever seen in my whole life. Want a drink?”