by Irwin Shaw
“In a while,” Jack said. “Don’t wait for me to start. I still haven’t cleaned up.”
“What the hell have you been doing all this time?”
“Nothing,” Jack said, thinking, He never did catch us together. “Arranging things. Saying good-bye to a friend.”
“Are you all right?” Bresach said. “You sound awful queer.”
“I’m fine,” Jack said. “I’ll be over right away.”
He hung up. He waited at the phone, waited for it to ring again, or for the door to open. But the phone didn’t ring and the door didn’t open and after a few minutes he went into the bathroom with the two basins and the mirror on which the loving, coquettish V had been scrawled in lipstick. Methodically he shaved and bathed, before putting on fresh linen and a newly pressed dark suit. Then he went out, looking like any other polite American tourist, on the town for a night in Rome.
26
HE HAD THE THREE martinis. Then three more. Then champagne with dinner. And more champagne when they went upstairs to the night club. It was a way of making the night bearable, after the unbearable scene with Veronica. The liquor didn’t make him drunk. It gave everything around him a crystalline clarity. He sat with a fixed, small smile on his face, in his dark, American suit, regarding the people at the table with him and the dancers on the floor, their edges sharp, their movements unambiguous.
Everybody at the table was happy, for various reasons, and many toasts were drunk and many bottles emptied. Bertha Holt was happy because she had found a woman from Naples with six children who was going to give birth in two weeks to a seventh, which she was willing to give up for adoption to the Holts because even six mouths were more than enough for her and her husband to feed.
Sam Holt was happy because his wife was happy and because Delaney had called him from the hospital and had told him about the agreement he had come to with Jack, and new continents of legal tax evasion were opening before him.
Tucino was happy because he had read Bresach’s script and because Holt had said they could go ahead with forming the company and now it looked as though Tucino would certainly avoid bankruptcy for at least another three years. Tucino, although shrewd, was an optimist, so he liked the beginnings of things better than the middles or ends of things, and he was beaming behind his glasses all night and calling Bresach, “Our young genius” and raising his glass to the fortunes they all would make in their new and perfect association.
Tasseti wasn’t there, but Jack was sure that he must be happy that night because for once he didn’t have to listen to Tucino.
Barzelli was happy because she had had a day’s vacation and had used it to sleep, so that she looked rested and beautiful and she was sure that every man in the room wanted her. Give or take a man or two, this was probably true. She sat next to Bresach and talked earnestly to him, between toasts.
Max was happy because Bresach was there and they both had had enough to eat.
Bresach was happy because he was drunk, and he hadn’t overheard what Veronica had told Jack earlier in the evening. If he hadn’t been drunk, there would have been many other reasons, all perfectly valid, for his being happy that night.
Jack looked at them all, in the new, crystalline light which the martinis and the champagne were shedding on them, and was glad that they were happy, and pitied them for the short duration of their joy, because on this night everybody’s past was known to him, and all futures were revealed. He was neither happy nor unhappy. He was coldly and accurately balanced, like the machines that are made to trace the orbits of protons in the unimaginable distances of the atom. The martinis and the champagne spread their winter starlight on his soul, too, and he looked with electronic detachment on what was revealed there. Frozen and static in that cold, bodiless glare, he saw himself in Veronica’s arms, caught between saying Stay and Go, forced to say one or the other and knowing that sorrow waited whichever word was spoken. Too sane and responsible to seize the pleasure whose denial was crippling him, too sensual to be able to congratulate himself on escaping from the web of lies and betrayals that was the corollary of claiming that pleasure, he was that interesting example of modern life, a man who lived in a permanent condition of being torn asunder.
As a result of many careful observations, conducted under a good light, with the most precise equipment, we are now happy to be able to present the whole picture of John Andrus, briefly notorious as James Royal. He is responsible, honorable, useful to his friends, and when forced to betray anyone, makes certain that the betrayed party is himself. Further details in our next bulletin.
Thinking these thoughts, sitting politely at the night-club table, Jack chuckled, the pleased chuckle of a scientist whose experiments have checked against theory. Now, he thought, looking around him, I can focus on the others.
The essential thing here, he thought, as his eye roamed the table, is a man called Delaney. For this last brief time, he is still the element in which we move, the force that binds us together. The champagne, for the last time, is for him. Without him, we would not be here, in these positions, but the next time we are assembled, it will no longer be because of him. Youth will be served, whole hearts will be served, money will be served, love will be served. Bresach will have taken his step toward the center of the system.
It is like a wake, Jack thought. Delaney’s friends are gathered to drink to his disappearance, in a place where he was known and respected and where the absent man spent his happiest hours. A man who would seem to be Delaney would reappear, of course, but so different in quality and power that it would only be out of politeness and convenience that he would be called by the same name. Remembering Delaney and Barzelli together on that other night, Jack looked to see if Barzelli’s hand was under the table, on Bresach’s thigh. But it wasn’t. The replacement was not yet total.
Thirty years from now, Jack thought, regarding Bresach and remembering Delaney at the same table, with success and failure behind him, how will Bresach look at these midnight ceremonies, what women will he be whispering to, and what will thirty years of money and work and disappointment make him say to them?
“Remember the man in the hospital, my dear young friend,” Jack said, speaking slowly and distinctly. Bresach looked at him, puzzled, across the delicious Catanian vista of Barzelli’s bosom, tastefully displayed that night under pink lace. Jack raised his hand gravely, in warning, greeting, and friendship, in love and farewell, as fathers raise their hands to the captains who are their sons and who are parting, with the music playing, for distant wars.
“What the hell has come over you tonight, Jack?” Bresach asked. Jack noted that his voice was thicker than usual, and shook his head, remembering how many of his friends and lovers had been lost in alcohol, that glittering, deceptive sea.
“Wine, nerves, ambition, women and overwork,” Jack said cryptically. He turned his small, night-club-clear smile on Mrs. Holt, because Mrs. Holt, floating above the table in tulle like something Marc Chagall would have painted if he had been born in Oklahoma and lived in Rome, was saying, “I do so want you to meet Mrs. Lusaldi, Jack. She is the lady who has been kind enough to promise us her son. She knows it’s going to be a son this time. She has four boys and two girls, and she’s never guessed wrong. She was up at our house this evening and I wish you could have seen her. She is as wide as a piano, with beautiful dark skin, and she sat there with a shawl over her head, and I declare, all that I could think was that a fertility goddess had descended upon our palazzo.”
Careful, Bertha Holt, Jack wanted to say, careful. What would the ladies in Oklahoma City think if they heard you use language like that? Would they let their daughters come to Rome?
“What I’ve always liked about Italians,” Mrs. Holt said dreamily, floating wispily above the rumbas and the church domes of the Roman night, “is they always have such beautiful teeth. Teeth are so important. Don’t you agree, Jack?”
Jack agreed that teeth were important and then Tucino gallantly
asked her to dance, because of the occasion, and she said, “Oh, that is too kind,” and stood up and drifted into his arms and followed him with a demure, drunken smile on her face, like a kitten whose cream has been mischievously laced with brandy.
Light-footed, frail, and unfertile, she went through the figures of the dance in those robust Italian arms, and Jack watched her with pity because she was committed to the belief that a son, anybody’s son, would bring her happiness.
To pity Tucino required a godlike act of compassion, because you could only pity him generically, as a representative of an attractive but doomed species, the race of gamblers, those optimists who cannot hold themselves back from doubling their bets, going from one dizzying win to another, until the final loss. Sometime before you are sixty, Jack thought, watching Tucino as he maneuvered Bertha Holt among the dancers, there will come an evening when you will not be able to buy a dinner in this place.
Max was perhaps the most to be pitied, because he was at the climax of one exile and was at the beginning of another. He would never be as close to Bresach again. Bresach had shared his bed, because there had only been the one bed; he had shared his hunger, because he had been living on crusts; and in that Spartan sharing he had restored Max’s shaken faith in man’s goodness and love. Now there would be many beds, and daily feasting would quickly become routine and unnoticed. Brotherhood would become charity, and charity is just one condition of exile, as persecution is another. Exulting in Bresach’s triumph tonight, Max, because he was wise, knew that each new triumph would move Bresach further from him.
Pitying Barzelli was an aesthetic exercise, impersonal and pure, because all that was pitiable about her was that she would grow older and her beauty would be destroyed by time. If it could be said that one could pity a lovely, uninhabited building that the years would inevitably bring down into dust, then it could be said that Barzelli could be pitied.
Sam Holt was a different matter. As he watched his wife dance, his eyes fond, pleased at the sight of her pleasure, his destiny was painfully clear. His happiness was moored in his wife and that anchorage was hazardous and exposed.
As if he were conscious of. Jack considering him, Holt turned his head and smiled at him. “It’s quite a night,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“Quite a night.”
“I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re coming in with us,” Holt said. “It gives me a great feeling of confidence. We needed a man like you. Solid, responsible, tactful.”
For my tombstone, Jack thought. Here lies, in desperation, A Responsible Man.
“I’ve been thinking,” Holt said. “Remember I talked to you about my brother-in-law, Bertha’s kid brother—I told you I wanted to put him on the payroll as an assistant producer, for tax reasons…?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “I remember.”
“Well,” Holt said, “I’ve reconsidered. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to burden you with him. Not that you wouldn’t like him,” Holt said with hurried loyalty. “He’s a good boy. But, after all, this isn’t his line of thing…” He smiled wryly. “I’ll take care of him some other way. The same old way. The Bureau of Internal Revenue way. Help pay for some of those rockets going to the moon.” Holt sighed resignedly, as, for the hundredth time, involuntarily, and feeling a little ashamed of himself for the calculation, he computed what that good boy, Bertha’s brother, aged forty-five, was going to cost him for the rest of his life. Then his face brightened. “This is a nice celebration, isn’t it?” He looked benignly across the table at Bresach, who was chuckling at something that Barzelli was whispering into his ear. “I bet that boy is going to remember this night for a long time. Ah—it’s a shame Maurice can’t be here with us tonight.”
The wake, Jack thought. He’s here, all right. The spirit moves among the champagne glasses. Only the corpse is absent.
“It’s been quite a day all around,” Holt said. “I suppose Mother told you about the Italian lady who has kindly offered to allow us to adopt her child when it…” He cast around for a modest description of the event. “When it…uh…arrives.”
“Yes,” Jack said, “she told me. Congratulations.”
“We can have it immediately,” Holt said. “That way Mother can really feel that it is all hers. She’s going to go out shopping tomorrow morning for baby clothes and a baby carriage. It will make a great change in her life, don’t you think?” There was a note of pleading in his voice.
“Without a doubt,” Jack said.
“For the better,” Holt said, hastily, fearful of leaving the suggestion of an alternative in Jack’s mind.
“Of course,” Jack said.
“I am going to write to various educators in the United States about the boy,” Holt said. “Taking a chance that it will be a boy…” He laughed slyly. “I would like him to go to the best schools. Groton or Andover, or one of those. I understand you can’t apply too early. I want him to feel that he has all the advantages…”
Then, past Holt’s shoulder, Jack saw Veronica. She was making her way around the edge of the floor, behind the headwaiter, who was leading her to a table on the other side of the room. There was a tall blond young man bulking beside her, holding her by the elbow.
Of course, Jack thought agonizedly, I should have expected it. Where else would honeymooners go if they had only one night in Rome? Sit in a dark corner, Jack prayed. Sit where no one can recognize you. He looked down the table at Bresach. Bresach was turned toward Barzelli now, speaking intently.
Veronica and the blond man sat down at a small table. It was just around the corner of the room. Jack sighed with relief. But then he saw Veronica’s profile appear out from the edge of the wall, softly lit by one of the projectors. He realized that she had leaned forward, just enough to be seen from Jack’s side of the room. Then the dancers swept across his line of vision and he couldn’t see her for the moment.
“In the years to come,” Holt was saying, still on the subject of the education of his son, who had not yet been born to the dark Neapolitan lady, “whether we Americans like it or not, we’re going to be called upon to lead the world—or our half or quarter of the world.” He was very earnest and he put his hand on Jack’s wrist in emphasis, the big, rough, capable hand formed by years of labor and not yet softened by wealth. “What we have to do is to try to keep the world—recognizable. It’s going to change, sure, but it’s up to us to make the changes recognizable in the terms of what we’ve had and liked up to now. And we’ll never do it by fighting for it. One more war and this world won’t be recognizable to our dear God Who created it. We’ll have to do it by work and example and persuasion. It’s a funny thing,” he said, shaking his head, “we’re a nation of lawyers and yet we can’t persuade a single foreigner to piss downwind unless we bribe him or threaten him with the hydrogen bomb. But that doesn’t mean we should stop persuading. No, sir,” he said with emphasis. “All it means is we have to learn to persuade a damn sight better. And if a man is well educated and he behaves like a gentleman, he can be much more persuasive, more useful. I am no gentleman myself, I grew like a weed, as the saying goes, so I can say these things without offense…And if the boy happens to come from this…uh…robust common stock, and he is European by blood, and if, as we intend, he does not break his ties with his own country…Well,” he said diffidently, “maybe Mother and me, well have contributed something valuable…”
“Excuse me,” Jack said. He had seen the man who was with Veronica come out from behind the wall, on his way past the bar toward the men’s room. “I’ve just seen a friend,” Jack said, standing up. He knew that Holt must be hurt by what must have seemed to him Jack’s rudeness, but there was no time to lose. “Excuse me for a minute, please. I must say hello.”
As unobtrusively as possible, Jack went along the edge of the dance floor, in the direction of the bar. Bresach didn’t even look up as Jack passed him. Then Jack, with the dancers between him and the Holt table, made his way back to wh
ere Veronica was sitting, alone, with a glass of champagne before her, and the bottle in a bucket of ice on a stand within reach. She was wearing a dress of cream brocade that left her shoulders bare and she had pulled her hair into a knot to one side. The whole effect was of sophistication and cool beauty that made her seem almost a stranger to Jack. Whatever anguish she had suffered earlier in the evening had been carefully erased from the cool, lovely face she was presenting to the world and her husband now.
“Veronica,” Jack said in a low voice, as he came up to the table, “what the hell are you doing here?”
She looked up, startled. “Oh, Jack,” she said. She glanced worriedly past him at the doorway through which her husband had gone. “Please. My husband will be back in a minute. I can’t talk to you now.”
“You’ve got to get out of here,” Jack said. “Right now.”
“Now, Jack,” she said, “please don’t start anything. You’ve hurt me enough tonight. I don’t want to have to introduce you to my husband. We’ve been with some of his friends until now, and it’s been bad enough, trying to answer their questions about people I know in Rome…”
“Listen to me,” Jack said harshly, grasping her hand. “Bresach’s over there. On the other side of the room.”
“I don’t believe you,” Veronica said, nervously eyeing the doorway. “Robert never came to a place like this in his life.”
“Well, he came tonight,” Jack said. “I’m telling you this for your own good.” Now he regretted the martinis and the champagne. He was not saying what he wanted to say. He didn’t want to talk to her about Bresach. He wanted to talk to her about himself. He would have liked to be able to say, “Now let us go back to the moment this evening in the hotel when you kissed me and I counted to six and you said, ‘Like human beings. With generosity!’” He had a sudden distasteful vision of himself as an onlooker and intermediary, the observer of others’ passions, the agent of their hatreds and desires, the recipient of their confessions, the channel of their communications, but never the actor, never the giver, never wholly involved, always ready to break off. Involved, he remembered from the night with the Morrisons, involved, he remembered from the accusation of his wife.
