by Irwin Shaw
“Lady and gentleman,” the man said briefly, “down in the lobby.” He turned and sauntered off.
Noah looked anxiously at his face in the mirror, combed his short hair back in three jerky movements, straightened his tie, and left the room. Why, he asked himself as he went uneasily down the creaking stairs that smelled of wax and bacon fat, why would a man in his right mind say yes to me? Three dollars to my name, with an alien religion, and a body that had been discarded as worthless by the government of the republic, and no profession, no real ambition except to live with and love his daughter. No family, no accomplishments, no friends, with a face that must seem harsh and foreign to this man, and a voice that nearly stuttered and was stained with the common accents of bad schools and low company from one end of America to the other. Noah had been in towns like this before and he knew what sort of men grew from them. Proud, private to themselves and their own kind, hard, with family histories that went back as far as the stones and planks of the towns themselves, looking with fear and scorn at the rootless foreign hordes which filled the cities. Noah had never felt more of a stranger anywhere on the long face of the continent than he did at the moment when he stepped down into the hotel lobby from the stairway and saw the man and the girl sitting on the wooden rockers, looking out through the small plateglass window at the frozen street.
The two people stood up when they heard Noah come into the lobby. She’s pale, Noah’s mind registered, with a sense of catastrophe, very pale. He walked slowly toward the father and daughter. Mr. Plowman was a tall, stooped man, who looked as though he had worked with stone and iron all his life and had risen no later than five in the morning for the last sixty years. He had an angular, reserved face, and weary eyes behind silver-rimmed glasses, and he gave no sign either of welcome or hostility, as Hope said, “Father, this is Noah.”
He put his hand out, though. Noah shook it. The hand was tough and horny. I’m not going to beg. Noah thought, no matter what. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to pretend I’m anything much. If he says yes, fine. If he says no … Noah refused to think about that.
“Very glad,” her father said, “to make your acquaintance.”
They stood in an uneasy group, with the old man who served as clerk watching them with undisguised interest.
“Seems to me,” Mr. Plowman said, “might not be a bad idea for myself and Mr. Ackerman to have a little talk.”
“Yes,” Hope whispered, and the tense, uncertain timbre of her voice made Noah feel that all was lost.
Mr. Plowman looked around the lobby consideringly. “This might not be the best place for it,” he said, staring at the clerk, who stared back curiously. “Might take a little walk around town. Mr. Ackerman might like to see the town, anyway.”
“Yes, Sir,” Noah said.
“I’ll wait here,” said Hope. She sat down suddenly in the rocker. It creaked alarmingly in the still lobby. The clerk made a severe, disapproving grimace at the sound and Noah was sure that he was going to hear the complaining wooden noise in his bad moments for many years.
“We’ll be back in a half hour or so, Daughter,” Mr. Plowman said.
Noah winced a little at the “Daughter.” It was like a bad play about life on the farm in 1900, and he had an unreal sense of melodrama and heavy contrivance as he held the door open and he and Mr. Plowman went out into the snowy street. He caught a glimpse of Hope sitting behind the window, staring anxiously at them, and then they were walking slowly and deliberately past the closed shop-fronts on the cleared sidewalks, in the harsh, windy cold.
They walked without speaking for almost two minutes, their shoes making a dry crunching on the scraps of snow that the shovels had left on the pavements. Then Mr. Plowman spoke. “How much,” he asked, “do they charge you in the hotel?”
“Two-fifty,” Noah said.
“For one day?” Mr. Plowman asked.
“Yes.”
“Highway robbers,” Mr. Plowman said. “All hotelkeepers.”
Then he fell back into silence and they walked quietly once more. They walked past Marshall’s Feed and Grain store, past the drugstore of F. Kinne, past J. Gifford’s Men’s Clothing shop, past the law offices of Virgil Swift, past John Harding’s butcher shop and Mrs. Walton’s Bakery, past the furniture and undertaking establishment of Oliver Robinson, and N. West’s grocery store.
Mr. Plowman’s face was set and rigid, and as Noah looked from his sharp, quiet features, noncommittally arranged under the oldfashioned Sunday hat, to the storefronts, the names went into his brain like so many spikes driven into a plank by a methodical, impartial carpenter. Each name was an attack. Each name was a wall, an announcement, an arrow, a reproof. Subtly, Noah felt, in an ingenious quiet way, the old man was showing Noah the close-knit, homogeneous world of plain English names from which his daughter sprang. Deviously, Noah felt, the old man was demanding, how will an Ackerman fit here, a name imported from the broil of Europe, a name lonely, careless, un-owned and dispossessed, a name without a father or a home, a name rootless and accidental.
It would have been better to have the brother here, Noah thought, talking, fulminating, with all the old, familiar, ugly, spoken arguments, rather than this shrewd, silent Yankee attack.
They passed the business section, still in silence. A weathered red brick school building reared up across a lawn, covered with dead ivy.
“Went to school there,” Mr. Plowman said, with a stiff gesture of his head. “Hope.”
A new enemy, Noah thought, looking at the plain old building, crouched behind its oak trees, another antagonist lying in wait for twenty-five years. There was some motto carved into the weathered stone above the portal and Noah squinted to read it. “Ye shall know the truth,” the faded letters proclaimed to the generations of Plowmans who had walked under it to learn how to read and write and how their forefathers had set foot on the rock of Plymouth in the blustery weather of the seventeenth century. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Noah could almost hear his own father reading the words, the dead voice ringing out of the tomb with rhetorical, flaring relish.
“Cost twenty-three thousand dollars,” Mr. Plowman said, “back in 1904. WPA wanted to tear it down and put up a new one in 1935. We stopped that. Waste of the taxpayers’ money. Perfectly good school.”
They continued walking. There was a church a hundred yards down the road, its steeple rising slender and austere into the morning sky. That’s where it’s going to happen, Noah thought despairingly. This is the shrewdest weapon coming up. There are probably six dozen Plowmans buried in that yard, and I’m going to be told in their presence.
The church was made of white wood and lay delicately and solidly on its sloping snowy lawns. It was balanced and reserved and did not cry out wildly to God, like the soaring cathedrals of the French and the Italians, but rather addressed Him in measured, plain terms, brief, dryly musical, and to the point.
“Well,” said Mr. Plowman while the church was still fifty yards away, “we’ve probably gone far enough.” He turned. “Like to go back?”
“Yes,” Noah said. He was dazed and puzzled, and walked automatically, almost unseeingly, as they started back toward the hotel. The blow had not fallen yet, and there was no indication when it would fall. He glanced at the old man’s face. There was a look of concentration and puzzlement there, among the granite lines, and Noah felt that he was searching painfully in his mind for the proper, cold, thoughtful words with which to dismiss his daughter’s lover, words that would be fair but decisive, reasonable but final.
“You’re doing an awful thing, young fellow,” Mr. Plowman said, and Noah felt his jaw grow rigid as he prepared to fight. “You’re putting an old man to the test of his principles. I won’t deny it. I wish to God you would turn around and get on the train and go back to New York and never see Hope again. You won’t do that, will you?” He peered shrewdly at Noah.
“No,” said Noah. “I won’t.”
“Didn’t t
hink you would. Wouldn’t’ve been up here in the first place if you would.” The old man took a deep breath, stared at the cleared pavements before his feet, as he walked slowly at Noah’s side. “Excuse me if I’ve given you a pretty glum walk through town,” he said. “A man goes a good deal of his life living more or less automatically. But every once in a while, he has to make a real decision. He has to say to himself, now, what do I really believe, and is it good or is it bad? The last forty-five minutes you’ve had me doing that, and I’m not fond of you for it Don’t know any Jews, never had any dealings with them. I had to look at you and try to decide whether I thought Jews were wild, howling heathen, or congenital felons, or whatever … Hope thinks you’re not too bad, but young girls’ve made plenty of mistakes before. All my life I thought I believed one man was born as good as another, but thank God I never had to act on it till this day. Anybody else show up in town asking to marry Hope, I’d say, ‘Come out to the house. Virginia’s got turkey for dinner …’”
They were in front of the hotel now. Noah hadn’t noticed it, listening to the old man’s earnest voice, but the door of the hotel opened and Hope came quickly out. The old man stopped and wiped his mouth reflectively as his daughter stood there staring at him, her face worried and set-looking.
Noah felt as though he had been confined to a sickbed for weeks, and the list of names on the storefronts, the Kinnes and Wests and Swifts marshalled behind him, and the name on the tombstones in the churchyard, and the cold unrelenting church itself, and the deliberate voice of the. old man, suddenly, all together, with the pale, harrowed sight of Hope herself, became intolerable. He had a vision of his warm, tumbled room near the river, with the books and the old piano, and he longed for it with an aching intensity.
“Well?” Hope said.
“Well,” her father said slowly. “I just been telling Mr. Ackerman, there’s turkey for dinner.”
Slowly, Hope’s face broke into a smile. She leaned over and kissed her father. “What in Heaven took so long?” she asked, and, dazedly, Noah knew it was going to be all right, although at the moment he was too spent and weary to feel anything about it.
“Might as well take your things, young man,” Mr. Plowman said. “No sense giving those robbers all your money.”
“Yes,” Noah said. “Yes, of course.” He moved slowly and dreamily up the steps into the hotel. He opened the door and looked back. Hope was holding her father’s arm. The old man was grinning. It was a little forced and a little painful, but it was a grin.
“Oh,” said Noah, “I forgot. Merry Christmas.”
Then he went in to get his bag.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE DRAFT BOARD was in a large bare loft over a Greek restaurant. The smell of frying oil and misused fish swept up in waves. The floor was dirty. There were only two bare lights glaring down on the rickety wooden camp chairs and the cluttered desks with the two plain secretaries boredly typing forms. A composition wall divided the waiting room from the section where the board was meeting, and a hum of voices filtered through. There were about a dozen people sitting on the camp chairs, grave, almost middle-aged men in good business suits, an Italian boy in a leather jacket with his mother, several young couples, holding hands defensively. They all look, Michael thought, as though they are at bay, resentful, bitter, staring at the frayed paper American flag and the mimeographed and printed announcements on the walls.
They all sit, Michael thought, like people with dependents or deferable physical ailments. And their women, the wives and mothers, glared accusingly at all the other men, as though they were on the verge of saying, “I can see through you. You’re in perfect health and you have plenty of money hidden away in the vault, and you want my son or my husband to go instead of you. Well, you’re not going to get away with it.”
The door from the board room opened, and a small dark-eyed boy came out with his mother. The mother was crying and the boy was red-faced, half-angry, half-frightened. Everyone in the room looked at him, coldly and measuringly, already seeing the still form on the battlefield, the white wood cross, the Western Union messenger ringing the doorbell with the telegram in his hand. There was no pity in their glances, only a harsh satisfaction that seemed to say, “Well, there’s one son of a bitch that didn’t fool them.”
There was a buzz from the machine on the desk of one of the secretaries. She stood up and looked bleakly out across the room., “Michael Whitacre,” she called. Her voice was rasping and bored. She was an ugly girl with a large nose and a great deal of lipstick. Michael noticed, as he stood up, that her legs were bowed and her stockings were crooked and wrinkled.
“Whitacre,” she called again, her voice bristling and impatient. He waved to her and smiled. “Control yourself, darling,” he said. “I’m on my way.”
She stared at him with cold superiority. Michael couldn’t blame her. Added to the automatic insolence of a government employee was the heady sense of power that she was sending men out to die for her, who obviously had never had a man look kindly at her in her life. Each oppressed minority, Negroes, Mormons, Nudists, loveless women, Michael thought as he approached the door, to its own peculiar compensations. It would take a saint to behave well on a draft board.
As he opened the door, Michael noticed with surprise that he was trembling a little. Ridiculous, he thought, annoyed with himself, as he faced the seven men sitting at the long table. They swung around and looked at him. Their faces were the other side of the draftee’s coin. To match the fear and resentment and argument waiting in the outside room, here were unrelenting suspicion, shrewd, constantly reinforced hardness. There isn’t one of them, Michael thought, staring unsmilingly at their unwelcoming faces, that I would ever talk to under any other circumstances. My neighbors. Who picked them? Where did they come from? What made them so eager to send their fellow-citizens off to war?
“Sit down, please, Mr. Whitacre,” said the chairman. He motioned glumly to the vacant chair at the head of the table. He was an old man, fat, with a face that had heavy, cold dewlaps, and angry, peering eyes. Even when he said “Please,” there was a peremptory challenge in his voice. What war, Michael thought, as he walked to his chair, did you fight in?
The other faces swung around at him, like the guns of a cruiser preparing for a bombardment Amazing, Michael thought, as. he sat down, I’ve lived in this neighborhood for ten years and I’ve never seen a single one of these faces before. They must have been lying in wait, lurking secretly in the cellars, for this moment.
There was an American flag on the long wall behind the board, real cloth this time, a garish spot of color in the drab room, behind the gray and blue business suits of the board and their yellow complexions. Michael had a sudden vision of thousands of such rooms all over the country, thousands of such graying, cold-faced, suspicious men with the flag behind their balding heads, facing thousands of resentful, captured boys. It was probably the key scene of the moment, 1942’s most common symbol, the lines of terror and violence and guile brought to this single point, shabby, loveless, with only the promise of wounds and death to add any stature or nobility to the proceedings.
“Now, Mr. Whitacre,” the chairman said, fumbling nearsightedly with a dossier, “you claim a 3A exemption here because of dependency.” He peered at Michael angrily, as though he had just said “Where is the gun with which you shot the deceased?”
“Yes,” Michael said.
“We have found out,” the chairman said loudly, “that you are not living with your wife.” He looked triumphantly around him, and several of the other members of the board nodded eagerly.
“We are divorced,” Michael said.
“Divorced!” the chairman said. “Why did you. hide that fact?”
“Look,” Michael said, “I’m going to save you a lot of time. I’m going to enlist.”
“When?”
“As soon as the play I’m working on is put on.”
“When will that be?” a little fat man at
the other end of the table asked in a sour voice.
“Two months,” said Michael. “I don’t know what you have down on that paper, but I have to provide for my mother and father, and I have to pay alimony …”
“Your wife,” the chairman said bitterly, looking down at the papers before him, “makes five hundred and fifty dollars a week …”
“When she works,” Michael said.
“She worked thirty weeks last year,” the chairman said.
“That’s right,” Michael said wearily. “And not a week this year.”
“Well,” said the chairman, with a wave, “we have to consider the probable earnings. She’s worked for the last five years and there’s no reason to suppose she won’t continue. Also,” he glared down once more at the papers in front of him, “you claim your mother and father as dependents.”
“Yes,” said Michael, sighing.
“Your father, we have discovered, has a pension of sixty-eight dollars a month.”
“That’s right,” said Michael. “Have you ever tried to support two people on sixty-eight dollars a month?”
“Everybody,” said the chairman with dignity, “has to expect to make some sacrifices at a time like this.”
“I’m not going to argue with you,” said Michael. “I told you I’m going to enlist in two months.”
“Why?” said a man down at the other end. He peered glitteringly through pince-nez glasses at Michael, as though ready to ferret out this last subterfuge.
Michael looked around him at the seven glowering faces. He grinned. “I don’t know why,” he said. “Do you?”
“That will be all, Mr. Whitacre,” the chairman said.
Michael got up and walked out of the room. He felt the eyes of all seven men on him, angry, resentful. They feel cheated, he realized suddenly, they would have much preferred to trap me into it. They were all prepared.
The people waiting in the outside room looked up at him, surprised, because he had come out so quickly. He grinned at them. He wanted to make a joke, but it would be too cruel to the taut, harried boys waiting so painfully.
