Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  He thought of Johnson and his other friends with displeasure. Either they were insensitively militant like Johnson, in their untouchable civilian occupations, or, under a thin veneer of patriotism, they were cynical and resigned. And this was no time for resignation, Michael felt. This was no time for saying no or perhaps. This was a time for a great yea-saying. That was a good thing about getting into the Army. He would get away from the over-sensitive resigners, the poetic despairers, the polite suicides. He had come of age at a time of critics, in a country of critics. Everyone criticized books and poetry and plays and government and the policies of England, France, and Russia. America for the last twenty years had been a perpetual drama-critics circle, saying over and over again, “Yes, I know 3000 died at Barcelona, but how clumsy the second act …” Age of critics, country of critics. He had begun to feel it was a sour age and a barren country because of it. This was a time for roaring rhetoric, savage vengeance, melodramatic shouting of boasts and assurance down the corridors of night. This was a time for roistering and wild-eyed soldiers, crazy with faith, oblivious of death. Michael could see no faith-madness around him. Civilians saw too much of the cheapness of war for faith … the chicanery and treachery of the lovers of six percent, of the farm bloc and business bloc and labor bloc. He had gone into the good restaurants and seen the great boom of heavy eaters, the electric excitement and pleasure of the men and women who were making good money and spending it before the Government claimed it. Stay out of the Army and you had to turn critic. He wanted to be a critic only of the enemy.

  He felt silly sitting in the paneled room across the desk from his lawyer, reading through his will. Outside the window, high up in the tall building, the city shone in the everyday sunlight, the brick towers rearing into the soft blue haze, the streams of smoke from the boats on the river, the same city, looking exactly as it had always looked, and here he was, with his glasses on, reading “… one-third of the aforementioned estate to my former wife, Miss Laura Roberts. In the event of her marriage, this bequest is voided and the amount reserved in her interest will be joined to the residual amount left in the name of the executor and divided in this manner …”

  He felt so healthy and whole and the language was so portentous and ugly. He looked across at Piper, his lawyer. Piper was growing bald and had a pudgy, pale complexion like the inside of a classroom in torts and grievances. Piper was signing a batch of papers, his pudgy mouth pursed, happily making money, happily confident that with his three children and his recurrent arthritis he was never going to war. Michael regretted that he had not written out the will himself, in his own hand, in his own language. It was somehow shameful to be represented to the future in the dry and money-sly words of a bald lawyer who would never hear a gun fired any place. A will should be a short, eloquent, personal document that reflected the life of the man who signed it and whose last possessions and last wishes were being memorialized in it. “To my mother, for the love I bear her, and for the agony she has endured and will later endure in my name and the name of my brothers …

  “To my ex-wife, whom I humbly forgive and who will, I hope, forgive me in the same spirit of remembrance of our good days together …

  “To my father, who has lived a hard and tragic life, and who has behaved so bravely in his daily war, and whom, I hope, I shall see once more before he dies …”

  But Piper had covered eleven typewritten pages, full of whereases, and in the events of, and now if Michael died, he would be known to the future as a long list of many-syllabled modifying clauses, and cautious businessman’s devices.

  Perhaps later, Michael thought, if I really think I am going to be killed, I shall write another one, better than this. He signed the four copies.

  Piper pressed the buzzer on his desk and two secretaries came in. One was a notary and carried her seal with her. She stamped the papers methodically, and they both signed as witnesses. Again Michael had the feeling it was all wrong, that this should be done by good friends who had known him a long time and who would feel bereaved if he died.

  Michael looked at the date on the calendar. The thirteenth. He grinned a little sourly. He was not a superstitious man, but perhaps this was carrying it too far.

  The secretaries went out, and Piper stood up. They shook hands and Piper said, “I will keep an eye on things and I will mail you a monthly report on what you have earned, and what I have spent.”

  Sleeper’s play, in which Cahoon had given him a five percent interest, was doing very well, and it would undoubtedly sell to the movies, and there would be money coming in from it for two years. “I will be the richest private,” Michael said, “in the American Army.”

  “I still think,” Piper said, “that you ought to let me invest it for you.”

  “No, thank you,” said Michael. He had gone over that again and again with Piper, and Piper still couldn’t understand. Piper had some very good steel stocks himself and wanted Michael to buy some, too. But Michael had a stubborn, although vague and slightly shamefaced opposition to making money out of money, of profiting by the labor of other men. He had tried once to explain it to Piper, but the lawyer was too sensible for talk like that, and now Michael merely smiled and shook his head. Piper shrugged and put out his hand. “Good luck,” he said. “I’m sure the war will be over very soon.”

  “Of course,” said Michael. “Thanks.”

  He left quickly, glad to get out of the lawyer’s office. He always felt trapped and restless when talking to lawyers or doing any business with them, and the feeling was even worse today.

  He rang for the elevator. It was full of secretaries on the way to lunch, and there was a smell of powder, and the eager, released bubble of voices. As the elevator swooped down the forty stories, he wondered, again, how these young, bright, lively people could endure being locked in among the typewriters, the books, the Pipers, the notaries’ seals and the legal language all their lives.

  As he walked north along Fifth Avenue, toward the restaurant where he was to meet Peggy, he felt relieved. Now he was through with all his official business. For this afternoon, and all the night, until six-thirty the next morning when he had to report to his draft board, life was quit of all claims on him. The civil authorities had relinquished him and the military authorities had not yet taken him up. It was one o’clock now. Seventeen and a half hours, unanchored, between one life and the next.

  He felt lightfooted and free and he looked fondly about him at the sunny wide street and the hurrying people, like a plantation owner with a good breakfast under his belt strolling over the wide lawns of his estate and looking out over the stretching rich acres of his property. Fifth Avenue was his lawn, the city his estate, the shopwindows were his granaries, the Park his greenhouse, the theatres his workshop, all well taken care of, busy, in their proper order …

  He thought of a bomb falling in the bright space between the Cathedral and Rockefeller Center and peered a little thoughtfully at the people beside him on the crowded avenue to see if there was any hint or premonition in their faces of that possible disaster. But the faces were as they always had been, preoccupied, all confident that bombs might fall on Saville Street, on the Place Vendôme, on Unter den Linden, on Plaza Victor Emmanuel, on Red Square, but the world would never depart so far from its reasonable and appointed routine as to break one window in Saks’.

  Michael walked along the gray cathedral sides to Madison Avenue. Nobody on Madison Avenue looked as though the possibility that a bomb might fall there had ever entered their heads. Two Air Force Lieutenants in summer uniforms were walking with new-found military stiffness in front of the Columbia Broadcasting Building, and Michael imagined that in their faces he saw the realization that no place was invulnerable, not even the stone and flower courtyard of the Rockefeller’s, or the tall castle of the broadcasters. But the Lieutenants passed him quickly, and perhaps all that he saw in their faces was anxiety that the girls they were going to meet might order the most expensive dishes o
n the menu for lunch.

  Michael stopped in front of a hat store. It was a good store and the hats cost fifteen and twenty-five dollars, soft rich browns and gray felts with quiet bands. No helmets there, no ugly little limp overseas caps, at whatever price, no headgear, garrison, no braid for the Air Force or the Infantry or the Medical Corps. That was going to be a problem in the Army. You had to wear a hat in the Army, and Michael had never worn a hat, even in the rain and the snow. Hats gave him a headache. If the war lasted five years could he expect to have a headache that lasted five years?

  He moved on more briskly toward the restaurant in which Margaret was probably already waiting. The various unexpected problems of a war. Like the business of the hats. And then the other things. He was a light and uneasy sleeper. The slightest noise kept him awake, and it was very difficult to sleep in the same room with anyone else. In the Army there were always at least fifty men sleeping in the same room with you … Could he expect to postpone his sleep until the war was over? And the silly problem of the bathroom. Like most well-brought-up persons of twentieth-century America, the ritual of the private bathroom with the locked door was one of the pillars of existence. Were all those important bodily functions supposed to cease until Hitler surrendered, while he, Michael, stared in loathing and revulsion at the long row of soldiers squatting over the open toilets in serried, grotesque ranks? He sighed, saddened a little on the sunny Avenue. It would be easier, he thought, to stand and die in a blood-sodden trench, knowing no help would ever come, than to walk into an enlisted man’s latrine and … The modern world, he thought resentfully, prepares you very poorly for the tests it puts you to.

  And then, the question of sex. Perhaps it was a matter of habit, as so many authorities insisted, but it was a deep habit and firmly ingrained. Married or single, in the pleasant freedom of the 1930s and ’40’s, ever since he was seventeen years old, he had constant and agreeable relations with women. The two or three periods of a week or more when he had for one reason or another to do without women had been restless and unhappy times, with the riotous juices of his youth clouding in insistent thunder in his loins, making him irritable and nervous, preventing him from working, preventing him finally from thinking about anything else. In the manhordes of the Army, in the strict barracks, on the long marches and drill fields, in the foreign bivouacs ahead, there were hardly likely to be women convenient to the whims of a private soldier under the anonymous helmet and the anonymous title. Gene Tunney, the ex-heavyweight champion, had come out for celibacy for the soldiers of the Republic, solemnly announcing that medical authorities now agreed that it did no damage to the health. What would Freud have said to the conqueror of Dempsey? Michael grinned. He could grin now, but he knew that later in the year, as he lay awake and furious on his narrow bed, in the masculine, snoring night of the barracks, the humor of the situation would not appeal to him so strongly.

  Sweet and fitting, Democracy, in thy name, it may be to die but the other sacrifices, he thought, may be more difficult to manage.

  He turned down the two steps to the entrance of the little French restaurant. Through the window, he could see Peggy already sitting at the bar.

  The restaurant was crowded and they sat at the bar next to a slightly drunken sailor with bright red hair. Always, when he met Peggy like this, Michael spent the first two or three minutes silently looking at her, enjoying the quiet eagerness of her face, with its broad brow and arched eyes, admiring the simple, straight way she did her hair and the pleasant way she wore her clothes. All the best things about the city somehow seemed to have an echo and reflection in the tall, straight, dependable girl … And, now, when Michael thought about the city, it was inextricably mixed in his mind with the streets he had walked down with her, the houses they had entered, the plays they had seen together, the galleries they had gone to, the bars they had sat at late in the winter afternoons, when the cold had made the windows tinkle and the first drink had sunk in cool glory down their throats. Looking at her, her cheeks flushed with her walk, her eyes bright with pleasure at seeing him, her long competent hands reaching out to touch his sleeve, it was impossible to believe that that eagerness or pleasure would ever wane, that there ever would be a time when he would return here and not find her, unchanged, unchanging …

  He looked at her and all the sad, grotesque thoughts that had dogged him uptown from the notarized will in his lawyer’s office left him. He smiled gravely at her and touched her hand and slid onto the stool beside her.

  “What are you doing this afternoon?” he said.

  “Waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “Waiting to be asked.”

  “All right,” Michael said. “You’re asked. An old-fashioned,” he said to the bartender. He turned back to Peggy. “Man I know,” he said, “hasn’t a thing to do until six-thirty tomorrow morning.”

  “What will I tell the people at my office?”

  “Tell them,” he said gravely, “you are involved in a troop movement.”

  “I don’t know,” Peggy said. “My boss is against the war.”

  “Tell him the troops are against the war, too.”

  “Maybe I won’t tell him anything,” said Peggy.

  “I will call him,” Michael said, “and tell him that when you were last seen you were floating toward Washington Square in a bourbon old-fashioned.”

  “He doesn’t drink.”

  “Your boss,” said Michael, “is a dangerous alien.”

  They clicked glasses gently. Then Michael noticed that the red-headed sailor was leaning against him, peering at Peggy.

  “Exactly,” said the sailor.

  “If you please,” Michael said, feeling free to speak harshly to men in uniform now, “this lady and I are having a private party.”

  “Exactly,” said the sailor. He patted Michael’s shoulder and Michael remembered the hungry Sergeant staring at Laura at lunchtime in Hollywood the day after the beginning of the war. “Exactly,” the sailor repeated. “I admire you. You have the right idea. Don’t kiss the girls in the town square and go off to fight the war. Stay home and lay them. Exactly.”

  “Now, see here,” said Michael.

  “Excuse me,” said the sailor. He put some money down on the bar and put on his cap, very straight and white on top of his red hair. “It just slipped out. Exactly. I am on my way to Erie, Pennsylvania.” He walked out of the bar, very erect.

  Michael watched him walk out. He couldn’t help smiling, and when he turned back to Peggy he was still smiling. “The Armed Services,” he began, “makes confidants of every …” Then he saw she was crying. She sat straight on the high stool in her pretty brown dress and the tears were welling slowly and gravely down her cheeks. She didn’t put up her hands to touch them or wipe them off.

  “Peggy,” Michael said quietly, gratefully noticing that the bartender was ostentatiously working with his head ducked at the other end of the bar. Probably, Michael thought, as he put out his hand to touch Peggy, bartenders get used to seeing a great many tears these days and develop a technique to handle them.

  “I’m sorry,” Peggy said. “I started to laugh but this is the way it came out.”

  Then the headwaiter came over in a little Italian flurry, and said, “Your table now, Mr. Whitacre.”

  Michael carried the drinks and followed Peggy and the waiter to a table against the wall. By the time they sat down Peggy had stopped crying, but all the eagerness was gone out of her face and Michael had never seen her face looking like that.

  They ate the first part of their meal in silence. Michael waited for Peggy to recover. This was not like her at all. He had never seen her cry before. He had always thought of her as a girl who faced whatever happened to her with quiet stoicism. She had never complained about anything or fallen into the irrational emotional fevers he had more or less come to expect from the female sex, and he had developed no technique with her for soothing her or rescuing her from depression. He loo
ked at her from time to time as they ate, but her face was bent stubbornly over her food.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally, as they were drinking their coffee, and her voice was surprisingly harsh, “I’m sorry for the way I behaved. I know I should be gay and offhand and kiss the brave young soldier off. ‘Go get your goddamn head shot off, darling, I’ll be waiting with a martini in my hand.’”

  “Peggy,” Michael said, “shut up.”

  “Wear my glove on your arm,” Peggy said, “as you do KP.”

  “What’s the matter, Peggy?” Michael asked foolishly, because he knew what the matter was.

  “It’s just that I’m so fond of wars,” said Peggy flatly. “Crazy about wars.” She laughed. “It would be awful if people were having a war and someone I knew wasn’t being shot in it.”

  Michael sighed. He felt weary now, and helpless, but he couldn’t help realizing that he wouldn’t have liked it if Peggy was one of those patriotic women who jumped happily into the idea of the war, as into the arrangements for a wedding.

  “What do you want, Peggy?” he said, thinking of the Army waiting implacably for him at six-thirty the next morning, thinking of the other armies on both sides of the world waiting to kill him. “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing,” said Peggy. “You’ve given me two precious years of your time. What more could a girl want? Now go off and let them blow you up. I’ll hang a gold star outside the ladies’ room of the Stork Club.”

  The waiter was standing over them. “Anything else?” he asked, smiling with an Italian fondness for prosperous lovers who ate expensive lunches.

  “Brandy for me,” said Michael. “Peggy?”

  “Nothing, thanks,” Peggy said. “I’m perfectly happy.”

  The waiter backed off. If he hadn’t caught the boat at Naples, in 1920, Michael thought, he’d probably be in Libya today, rather than on 56th Street.

  “Do you want to know what I want to do this afternoon?” Peggy asked harshly.