by Irwin Shaw
“What kind of things?”
“Begin at the beginning,” he said. “Place of residence?”
“The Y.W.C.A. downtown,” she said.
“Oh, God.” He groaned. “If I dress in drag could I pass as a young Christian woman and rent a room next to yours? I’m petite and I have a light beard. I could borrow a wig. My father always wanted daughters.”
“I’m afraid not,” Gretchen said. “The old lady at the desk can tell a boy from a girl at a hundred yards.”
“Other facts. Fellas?”
“Not at the moment,” she said after a slight hesitation. “And you?”
“The Geneva Convention stipulates that when captured, a prisoner of war must only reveal his name, rank, and serial number.” He grinned at her and laid his hand on hers. “No,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything. I shall bare my soul. I shall tell you, in many installments, how I wished to murder my father when I was a babe in a crib and how I was not weaned from my mother’s breast until I was three and what us boys used to do behind the barn with the neighbor’s daughter in the good old summertime.” His face became serious, the forehead prominent, as he brushed back his hair with his hand. “You might as well know now as later,” he said. “I’m married.”
The champagne burned in her throat. “I liked you better when you were joking,” she said.
“Me, too,” he said soberly. “Still, there’s a brighter side to it. I’m working on a divorce. The lady found other divertissements while daddy was away playing soldier.”
“Where is she? Your wife?” The words came out leadenly. Absurd, she thought. I’ve only known him for a few hours.
“California,” he said. “Hollywood. I guess I have a thing for actresses.”
A continent away. Burning deserts, impassable peaks, the fruited-plain. Beautiful, wide America. “How long have you been married?”
“Five years.”
“How old are you anyway?” she asked.
“Will you promise not to discard me if I tell you the truth?”
“Don’t be silly. How old?”
“Twenty fucking nine,” he said. “Ah, God.”
“I’d have said twenty-three at the outside,” Gretchen shook her head wonderingly. “What’s the secret?”
“Drink and riotous living,” Willie said. “My face is my misfortune. I look like an ad for the boys’ clothing department of Saks. Women of twenty-two are ashamed to be seen with me in public places. When I made captain the Group Commander said, ‘Willie, here’s your gold star for being a good boy in school this month.’ Maybe I ought to grow a moustache.”
“Wee Willie Abbott,” Gretchen said. His false youthfulness was reassuring to her. She thought of the gross, dominating maturity of Teddy Boylan. “What did you do before the war?” she asked. She wanted to know everything about him. “How do you know Bayard Nichols?”
“I worked for him on a couple of shows. I’m a flak. I’m in the worst business in the world. I’m a publicity man. Do you want your picture in the paper, little girl?” The disgust was not put on. If he wanted to look older, there was no need to grow a moustache. All he had to do was talk about his profession. “When I went into the Army, I thought I’d finally get away from it. So they looked up my card and put me in public relations. I ought to be arrested for impersonating an officer. Have some more champagne.” He poured for them again, the bottle clinking an icy code of distress against the glasses, the nicotined fingers trembling minutely.
“But you were overseas. You did fly,” she said. During lunch, he had talked about England.
“A few missions. Just enough to get an Air Medal, so I wouldn’t feel naked in London. I was a passenger. I admired other men’s wars.”
“Still, you could’ve been killed.” His bitterness disturbed her and she would have liked to move him out of it.
“I’m too young to die, Colonel.” He grinned. “Finish your bubbly. They’re waiting for us all over town.”
“When do you get out of the Air Force?”
“I’m on terminal leave now,” he said. “I wear the uniform because I can get into shows free with it. I also have to go over to the hospital on Staten Island a couple of times a week for therapy for my back and nobody’d believe I was a Captain if I didn’t wear the suit.”
“Therapy? Were you wounded?”
“Not really. We made an aggressive landing and bounced. I had a little operation on my spine. Twenty years from now I’ll say the scar came from shrapnel. All drunk up, like a good little girl?”
“Yes,” Gretchen said. The wounded were everywhere. Arnold Simms, in the maroon bathrobe, sitting on the table and looking down at the foot that no longer was any good for running. Talbot Hughes, with everything torn out of his throat, dying silently in his corner. Her own father, limping from another war.
Willie paid for the drinks and they left the bar. Gretchen wondered how he could walk so erectly with a bad back.
Twilight made a lavender puzzle out of New York as they came out of the bar onto the street. The stone heat of the day had gentled down to a meadowed balminess and they walked against a soft breeze, hand in hand. The air was like a drift of pollen. A three-quarter moon, pale as china in the fading sky, sailed over the towered office buildings.
“You know what I like about you?” Willie said.
“What?”
“You didn’t say you wanted to go home and change your dress when I said we were going to a party.”
She didn’t feel she had to tell him she was wearing her best dress and had nothing to change to. It was cornflower-blue linen, buttoned all the way down the front, with short sleeves and a tight red cloth belt. She had changed into it when she had gone down to the Y.W.C.A. after lunch to get her bathing suit. Six ninety-five at Ohrbach’s. The only piece of clothing she had bought since she came to New York. “Will I shame you in front of your fine friends?” she said.
“A dozen of my fine friends will come up to you tonight and ask for your telephone number,” he said.
“Shall I give it to them?”
“Upon pain of death,” Willie said.
They went slowly up Fifth Avenue, looking in all the windows. Finchley’s was displaying tweed sports jackets. “I fancy myself in one of those,” Willie said. “Give me bulk. Abbott, the tweedy Squire.”
“You’re not tweedy,” Gretchen said. “I fancy you smooth.”
“Smooth I shall be,” Willie said.
They stopped a long time in front of Brentano’s and looked at the books. There was an arrangement of recent plays in the window. Odets, Hellman, Sherwood, Kaufman and Hart. “The literary life,” Willie said. “I have a confession to make. I’m writing a play. Like every other flak.”
“It will be in the window,” she said.
“Please God, it will be in the window,” he said. “Can you act?”
“I’m a one-part actress. The Mystery of Woman.”
“I am quoting,” he said. They laughed. They knew the laughter was foolish, but it was dear because it was for their own private joke.
When they reached Fifty-fifth Street, they turned off Fifth Avenue. Under the St. Regis canopy, a wedding party was disembarking from taxis. The bride was very young, very slender, a white tulip. The groom was a young infantry lieutenant, no hashmarks, no campaign ribbons, razor-nicked, peach-cheeked, untouched.
“Bless you, my children,” Willie said as they passed.
The bride smiled, a whitecap of joy, blew a kiss to them. “Thank you, sir,” said the lieutenant, restraining himself from throwing a salute, by the book.
“It’s a good night for a wedding,” Willie said as they walked on. “Temperature in the low eighties, visibility unlimited, no war on at the moment.”
The party was between Park and Lexington. As they crossed Park, at Fifty-fifth Street, a taxi swung around the corner and down toward Lexington. Mary Jane was sitting alone in the taxi. The taxi stopped midway down the street and Mary Jane got out and ran in
to a five-story building.
“Mary Jane,” Willie said. “See her?”
“Uhuh.” They were walking more slowly now.
Willie looked across at Gretchen, studying her face. “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s have our own party.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Gretchen said.
“Company, about face,” he barked out. He made a smart military turn, clicking his heels. They started walking back toward Fifth Avenue. “I don’t cotton to the idea of all those guys asking for your telephone number,” he said.
She squeezed his hand. She was almost sure now that Willie had slept with Mary Jane, but she squeezed his hand just the same.
They went to the Oak Room Bar of the Plaza and had mint julep in frosted pewter mugs. “For Kentucky’s sake,” Willie explained. He didn’t mind mixing his drinks. Scotch, champagne, bourbon. “I am an exploder of myths,” he said.
After the mint juleps they left the Plaza and got onto a Fifth Avenue bus heading downtown. They sat on the top deck, in the open air. Willie took off his overseas cap with the two silver bars and the officer’s braid. The wind of the bus’s passage tumbled his hair, making him look younger than ever. Gretchen wanted to take his head and put it down on her breast and kiss the top of his head, but there were people all around them so she took his cap and ran her fingers along the braid and the two bars instead.
They got off the bus at Eighth Street and found a table on the sidewalk at the Brevoort and Willie ordered a Martini. “To improve my appetite,” he said. “Give notice to the gastric juices. Red Alert.”
The Algonquin, the Plaza, the Brevoort, a job, a captain. All in one day. It was a cornucopia of firsts.
They had melon and a small roast chicken for dinner and a bottle of California red wine from the Napa Valley. “Patriotism,” Willie said. “And because we won the war.” He drank most of the bottle himself. Nothing of what he had drunk seemed to affect him. His eyes were clear, his speech the same.
They weren’t talking much any more, just looking at each other across the table. If she couldn’t kiss him soon, Gretchen thought, they would carry her off to Bellevue.
Willie ordered brandy for both of them after the coffee. What with paying for lunch and all the eating and drinking of the evening, Gretchen figured that it must have cost Willie at least fifty dollars since noon. “Are you a rich man?” she asked, as he was paying the bill.
“Rich in spirit only,” Willie said. He turned his wallet upside down and six bills floated down onto the table. Two were for a hundred apiece, the rest were fives. “The complete Abbott fortune,” he said. “Shall I mention you in my will?”
Two hundred and twenty dollars. She was shocked at how little it was. She still had more than that in the bank herself, from Boylan’s eight hundred, and she never paid more than ninety-five cents for a meal. Her father’s blood? The thought made her uneasy.
She watched Willie gather up the bills and stuff them carelessly into his pocket. “The war taught me the value of money,” he said.
“Did you grow up rich?” she asked.
“My father was a customs inspector, on the Canadian border,” he said. “And honest. And there were six children. We lived like kings. Meat three times a week.”
“I worry about money,” she confessed. “I saw what not having any did to my mother.”
“Drink hearty,” Willie said. “You will not be your mother’s daughter. I will turn to my golden typewriter in the very near future.”
They finished their brandies. Gretchen was beginning to feel a little lightheaded, but not drunk. Definitely not drunk.
“Is it the opinion of this meeting,” Willie said, as they stood up from the table and passed through the boxed hedges of the terrace onto the avenue, “that a drink is in order?”
“I’m not drinking any more tonight,” she said.
“Look to women for wisdom,” Willie said. “Earth mother. Priestesses of the oracle. Delphic pronouncements, truth cunningly hidden in enigmas. No more drink shall be drunk tonight. Taxi!” he called.
“We can walk to the Y.W.C.A. from here,” she said. “It’s only about fifteen minutes …”
The taxi braked to a halt and Willie opened the door and she got in.
“The Hotel Stanley,” Willie said to the driver as he got into the cab. “On Seventh Avenue.”
They kissed. Oasis of lips. Champagne, Scotch, Kentucky mint, red wine of Napa Valley in Spanish California, brandy, gift of France. She pushed his head down onto her breast and nuzzled into the thick silkiness of his hair. The hard bone of skull under it. “I’ve been wanting to do this all day,” she said. She held him against her, child soldier. He opened the top two buttons of her dress, his fingers swift, and kissed the cleft between her breasts. Over his cradled head, she could see the driver, his back toward her, busy with red lights, green lights, rash pedestrians, what the passengers do is the passengers’ business. His photograph stared at her from the lighted tag. A man of about forty with glaring, defiant eyes and kidney trouble, a man who had seen everything, who knew the whole city. Eli Lefkowitz, his name, prominently displayed by police order. She would remember his name forever. Eli Lefkowitz, unwatching charioteer of love.
There was little traffic at this hour and the cab swept uptown. Airman in the quick sky.
One last kiss for Eli Lefkowitz and she buttoned her dress, proper for the bridal suite.
The facade of the Hotel Stanley was imposing. The architect had been to Italy, or had seen a photograph. The Doges’ Palace, plus Walgreen’s. The Adriatic coast of Seventh Avenue.
She stood to one side of the lobby while Willie went to the desk for the key. Potted palms, Italianate dark wood chairs, glaring light. Traffic of women with the faces of police matrons and hair the frizzed blonde of cheap dolls. Horse-players in corners, G.I.’s on travel orders, two show girls, high-assed, long-lashed, an old lady in men’s work shoes, reading Seventeen, somebody’s mother, traveling salesmen after a bad day, detectives, alert for Vice.
She drifted toward the elevator shaft, as though she were alone, and did not look at Willie when he came up to her with the key. Deception easily learned. They didn’t speak in the elevator.
“Seventh floor,” Willie said to the operator.
There was no hint of Italy on the seventh floor. The architect’s inspiration had run out on the way up. Narrow corridors, peeling dark-brown metal doors, uncarpeted tile floors that must have once been white. Sorry, folks, we can’t kid you anymore, you might as well know the facts, you’re in America.
They walked down a narrow corridor, her heels making a noise like a pony trotting. Their shadows wavered on the dim walls, uncertain poltergeists left over from the 1925 boom. They stopped at a door like all the other doors. 777. On Seventh Avenue, on the seventh floor. The magic orderliness of numbers.
Willie worked the key and they went into Room 777 of the Stanley Hotel on Seventh Avenue. “You’ll be happier if I don’t put on a light,” Willie said. “It’s a hole. But it’s the only thing I could get. And even so, they’ll only let me stay five days. The town’s full up.”
But enough light filtered in from electric New York outside the chipped tin blinds, so that she could see what the room was like. A small cell, a slab of a single bed, one upright wooden chair, a basin, no bathroom, a shadowy pile of officer’s shirts on the bureau.
Deliberately, he began to undress her. The red cloth belt first, then the top button of her dress and then, going all the way, one button after another. She counted with his movements as he kneeled before her. “… seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven …” What conferences, what soul searching in the workrooms farther down on Seventh Avenue to come to that supreme decision—not ten buttons, not twelve buttons, ELEVEN!
“It’s a full day’s work,” Willie said. He took the dress from her shoulders and put it neatly over the back of the chair. Officer and gentleman. She turned around so that he could undo her brassiere. Boylan’s trainin
g. The light coming in through the blinds cut her into a tiger’s stripes. Willie fumbled at the hooks on her back. “They must finally invent something better,” he said.
She laughed and helped him. The brassiere fell away. She turned to him again and he gently pulled her innocent white cotton panties down to her ankles. She kicked off her shoes. She went over to the bed and with a single movement ripped off the cover and the blanket and top sheet. The linen wasn’t fresh. Had Mary Jane slept there? No matter.
She stretched out on the bed, her legs straight, her ankles touching, her hands at her sides. He stood over her. He put his hand between her thighs. Clever fingers. “The Vale of Delight,” he said.
“Get undressed,” she said.
She watched him rip off his tie and unbutton his shirt. When he took his shirt off, she saw that he was wearing a medical corset with hooks and laces. The corset went almost up to his shoulders and down past the web belt of his trousers. That’s why he stands so erectly, the young Captain. We made an aggressive landing and bounced. The punished flesh of soldiers.
“Did you ever make love to a man with a corset before?” Willie asked, as he started pulling at the laces.
“Not that I remember,” she said.
“It’s only temporary,” he said. He was embarrassed by it. “A couple of months more. Or so they tell me at the hospital.” He was struggling with the laces.
“Should I turn the light on?” she asked.
“I couldn’t bear it.”
The telephone rang.
They looked at each other. Neither of them moved. If they didn’t move, perhaps it wouldn’t ring again.
The telephone rang again.
“I guess I’d better answer it,” he said.
He picked up the phone from the bedtable next to her head. “Yes?”
“Captain Abbott?” Willie held the phone loosely and she could hear clearly. It was a man’s voice, aggrieved.
