by Irwin Shaw
“You know me better than that. As far as I could tell, he’s fine. Now, please, let’s go to sleep.”
“Did you have a fight with Eleanor?” Leslie persisted. “Another one of your medieval attacks?”
For a moment, Strand was tempted to tell his wife what his talk with Eleanor had really been about. The preposterous idea that Caroline thought she was ugly. The ludicrous discussion of Caroline’s nose. And Hazen’s troubling suggestion about sending Caroline off to a distant college. But he wasn’t up to it yet. He felt bone-weary, badgered, uncertain. If he let it all out he’d be up the entire night struggling with Leslie. From the way her mouth was quivering he knew there would be tears. Her tears unmanned him at the best of times.
“I just have to go to sleep now,” he said.
“Go to sleep,” she said. She got off the bed and strode out of the bedroom. A moment later he heard her at the piano, all doors open, both things disastrous indications of storm at that hour of the night.
He sighed, put on his pajamas and went to bed.
He went to sleep almost immediately and when he woke in the middle of the night, Leslie was in bed, too, but on the other side, not touching him.
In the morning she pretended to be asleep when the alarm clock woke him and he left the apartment without going in and kissing her as he did on other mornings. She was a serene woman with a good temper and she did not like to fight, but when she was angry, the anger lasted for days, cold and distant and untouchable, making him feel he was an exile in his own house.
Strand looked across the table at Judith Quinlan, drinking her coffee with her two hands around the mug in that affecting, childish way she had, her soft pale eyes sympathetic and concerned. Suddenly he felt that he had to confide in this nice simple woman who was intelligent and understanding and not involved in his problems and who could be depended upon not to break into tears.
“Some things came up,” he said. “Family things. Nothing tragic. Decisions to be made. After you’ve brought up two children you think you’ve learned the trick and can handle the third. Not true. They’re all different. What went with one doesn’t necessarily go with the others, at all. Maybe I worry too much, maybe I ought to let things just happen…. The way I was brought up…” He shrugged. He had been an only child, he had been lonely, his father had been much older than his mother, a sickly, failing man who had no time for a scholarly son and who used what energy he had left when he came home from work to argue with his wife about money. “My own family life…” Strand said, “well, there was no overflow of love.” He chuckled dryly. “Maybe I developed a sentimental notion of what a family might be. Anyway, it made me feel that when I had children of my own I’d be responsible for them, protect them. And luckily, or maybe unluckily, my wife had always felt the same way. We’re involved, maybe too involved, selfishly involved, in their lives. I don’t know. As a man said to me over the weekend, I’m out of joint with the times…. It’s hard to unlearn.”
“Are they in trouble?” Judith asked, her eyes grave. He could see that in her mind she was running through all the possible troubles young people could get into in New York City these days and thinking how dire those troubles could be.
“Nothing gruesome.” Strand smiled. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite.” Then he told her about Hazen’s offer to send Caroline away to college and the reasons for it. He didn’t tell her about Eleanor’s reaction and what Eleanor’s reasons were for believing that Caroline should be kept at home. That would have been too painful…. Even as he spoke he felt again the resentment against his older daughter that had risen in him when she had spoken to him and he was afraid the resentment would show. “My immediate reaction was to say no,” he said. “I’m afraid my pride was hurt. That I was being left out of the decision-making process, that I wasn’t capable of taking care of my own child—somehow Hazen, the whole weekend—made me feel like a loser….”
“Nonsense,” Judith said sharply. She had sat quietly, playing with the coffee mug while he had talked, and now she impatiently pushed the mug away from her.
He patted her hand gently. “I’m touchier than I seem,” he said.
“What does your wife think?” Judith asked.
“That’s another thing. I haven’t told her yet.”
“Why not?” Judith looked surprised.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. We were surrounded by strangers. In someone else’s house. Then, at home, she sensed something and I…I didn’t know what I really felt myself and I dissembled. I’m awful at dissembling. And we had a little argument. Which,” he said, “I’m afraid will continue this evening. That’s neither here nor there,” he said, with false briskness. “It’ll blow over. What do you think?”
“Of course,” Judith said, “I don’t know your daughter, but if she were mine, I’d grab the chance for her. Charity or no charity. Of course, I’m probably warped—the job I have here, the kind of school we’re in—but to get her out of the city these years to a good college—I’d think it was a gift from heaven. Education in this city, why, it’s just a continuation of war by other means.”
Strand laughed. “Clausewitz couldn’t have said it better. I have to tell that to my friend Hazen. Maybe we ought to have it engraved above the portals of every school in the system.” He left a tip for the waitress. “I think we ought to go now.”
“What are you going to do?” Judith asked, gravely.
Strand hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ll decide between now and the time I get home.”
Outside, it was raining harder and it was impossible for the tall man and the tiny woman both to keep dry under her umbrella. “I’ll splurge today,” Strand said. “We’ll take a taxi. I’m beginning to like the habits of the rich.”
They were both quiet in the taxi for a long time.
“I hate to see you bothered like this,” Judith said. “With all the other things you have to cope with. Why don’t you just let Mr. Hazen talk to Caroline and let her make up her own mind?”
Strand nodded. “I suppose you’re right. My wife might suppose differently, though. Very differently. As for me…” He sighed. “I’m struggling between selfishness and wisdom. Only I don’t know which is which.”
As the taxi drew up before Judith’s building, which was only three blocks from Strand’s, she said, “If you’re not in a hurry, why don’t you come upstairs with me and have a drink? A little whiskey may make things look clearer.”
“That’s a fine idea,” Strand said, grateful for Judith’s feminine concern, her appreciation of the uses of postponement.
He had never been in her apartment before. It was high up in an old building and had been designed as an artist’s studio, with a big window facing north and a bedroom off it. The walls were lined with books, the furniture was brightly colored (he had expected dark brown) and everything was neat and crisply tidy. There were no signs that a man had ever been there before.
He sat in a corner of the big sofa watching her getting out ice from the refrigerator in the kitchenette that was separated from the main room by white-painted louver doors. She was so small that she had to stand on tiptoe to reach the whiskey bottle and two glasses from the cupboard on the side of the refrigerator. He noticed that the whiskey bottle was only half full and he wondered if Judith Quinlan sat alone at night and drank herself to sleep.
She poured the Scotch over the ice cubes, ran some water into the glasses from the tap and put them on a little tray with a saucer of salted almonds. She placed the tray on a low coffee table in front of the sofa and said, “There,” and sat down beside him.
They took their glasses and as she lifted hers, Judith said, “Welcome to my house.”
The whiskey tasted fine. “Imagine,” Strand said, “drinking on a Monday afternoon. The very path to ruin.”
They laughed comfortably together.
“What a nice place this is,” Strand said. “So quiet. And it seems to be so far away from…” He stopped. It was hard
to say what the room was far away from. “Well,” he said, “just far away.”
Judith put her glass down firmly. “Now,” she said, “I’m going to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.” With a quick movement, she knelt on the couch beside him, her arms around him, and she kissed him.
Amazed, he sat rigidly, conscious of the glass in his hand, afraid that the whiskey would spill. But after the first moment, with her lips soft but determined on his, he relaxed, leaned back, pulling her down with him, not caring about the whiskey anymore. He put his free arm around her and kissed her, hard. He felt her hand fumbling with the buttons on his shirt. She opened the shirt and her hand, soft and light, caressed the skin of his chest, then down to his belly. Astonishing Miss Quinlan. She kissed his cheek, many small, tender touches, whispered into his ear, “I need you, I need you.” He leaned back further, her hands like petals on his body, proving to him that the impotence of Saturday night had been merely temporary.
Suddenly she stopped, wriggled out of his encircling arm, jumped up and stood before him. Her hair was mussed, she was smiling, there was a look he had not seen before in her eyes, playful, mischievous. She looked beautiful, he thought, in the cold light of the big north window, and most desirable.
“Well,” she said, “shall we?”
He stood up, saw that the whiskey hadn’t spilled. “That was lovely,” he said. “Surprising and lovely.”
She laughed, lightly, gleefully. “I didn’t ask for a description,” she said. “I asked about an action.”
He shook his head sadly. “I would love to,” he said. “But I can’t. Anyway, not now.”
Her face grew grave. “You’re not offended, are you?”
“God, no,” he said. “I’m flattered. Delighted. But I can’t.”
“Will you think about it?” Her eyes were downcast now and it hurt him that he was hurting her.
“Of course I’ll think about it,” he said.
“You came up here to get away from your problems,” she said, with a low, sorrowful laugh, “and now I’ve given you a new problem. I was clumsy. I have no talent for such things.” She lifted her head, looked at him squarely. “Still, at least now you know. We both know.”
“Yes,” he said.
She came over to him and buttoned his shirt. He kissed the top of her head. “Now,” she said, “let’s finish our drinks.”
As he walked slowly in the wet dusk toward his home, his feelings were mixed. He was elated and dissatisfied with himself at the same time, but he didn’t feel like a loser this afternoon. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before and certainly not since his marriage. He had not considered himself attractive to any woman but his wife. And her attachment to him had been built, he was sure, on her appreciation of his intellectual and moral qualities rather than his physical attributes.
Hazen had asked him if he believed in the Ten Commandments and he had answered that he did. Believing in them and obeying them were not one and the same thing. Even if he had not committed adultery, from time to time he had coveted his neighbor’s wife, which was natural and inevitable although contrary to the fiat from Mount Sinai. The messenger of the God of Israel in the desert, announcing the Law to a wandering tribe, could not have known what it would be like millennia later on the highways and byways of the City of New York.
Then he remembered the tone of Judith’s voice when she said, “Now I’m going to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.” A long time, he thought. I’m fifty, he thought, there isn’t all that amount of time to think about anything. On the corner of his own block he nearly turned to go back. But then he saw Alexander leaning against the front of the building and knew that Alexander had seen him. He walked briskly down the block and said, “Good evening, Alexander. Miserable weather, isn’t it?”
“Miserable,” Alexander said, huddling into his combat jacket and chewing on his cigar.
When he opened the door to his apartment, he heard Leslie playing. He stopped and listened for a moment. It was a Schubert sonata, in a minor key, low and haunting, fitting for a dark, wet afternoon. He took off his raincoat and hat and hung them up neatly in the foyer. Then he went into the living room. “Good evening,” he said.
Abruptly Leslie broke off playing and stood up and faced him. “Good evening,” she said coldly. She did not move to kiss him. No better than last night, he thought, or this morning. Still, the ritual of the homecoming kiss was as old as their marriage. He went over to her where she was standing before the piano bench and leaned over and kissed her cheek.
“You’re late,” she said. She sniffed. “And you’ve been drinking.”
“I stopped in at a bar,” he said. Not quite the truth, but easy to say—shamefully easy. “I got wet and chilled. One whiskey.” He shrugged. “Is Caroline home?”
“No. She went to the library.”
“Anybody call?” The words were the usual words after the day’s absence, but the tone was not at all usual.
“No.”
“I don’t want to interrupt your playing. I’ll go into…”
“You’re not interrupting anything. I’ve played enough.”
The telephone began to ring. “I’ll get it,” Strand said, grateful for an excuse to leave the room.
It was Hazen, “Sorry to have left you in the lurch at my place the way I did,” Hazen said. “But the wires were burning in New York, I hope everything was all right.”
“Couldn’t be better,” Strand said with false heartiness.
“Something has come up,” Hazen said. “The police called my office this afternoon. They think they may have caught at least one of my attackers. At least, the boy was involved in the same sort of job they tried on me. They’d like Caroline and me to come to the twentieth precinct. It’s near you—”
“I know where it is.”
“At nine o’clock tomorrow morning to see whether we can identify him. Do you think Caroline would mind very much?” Hazen sounded anxious. “Of course, if she doesn’t want to do it, they can’t force her. But a single identification probably wouldn’t hold up as conclusive in court and…”
“Caroline’s not home yet,” Strand said. “I’ll ask her when she gets in.”
“Good,” Hazen said. “I’d like to see the rascal put away for a few months, although with the way the courts are these days, that’s probably too much to hope for. You can call me back at the office. I’ll be working late tonight. Oh, by the way, I’ve already talked to my friend at Truscott and he says he can arrange to have one of their alumni who does some scouting in New York for them take a look at Caroline.”
“Good God, don’t you have anything better to do with your Monday mornings?”
“It only took me five minutes.”
When Strand went back into the living room, Leslie was standing at the window, looking out at the rainy street.
“That was Hazen,” Strand said. “The police think they may have found one of the boys. They want Caroline and Hazen to come down tomorrow morning and identify him.”
“What did you tell him?” Leslie still kept looking out the window.
“That I’d ask Caroline and call him back. I don’t particularly relish the idea of Caroline getting mixed up in something like that.”
Leslie nodded. “Neither do I. Still, she may have strong feelings about it.”
“Leslie, darling, please sit down,” Strand said gently. “I have some things to tell you. The things I didn’t want to talk about last night.”
Slowly, she turned away from the window and sat down facing him. “It was after Caroline had played tennis with Hazen,” Strand said, “and he and I were walking back to the house…” Then he told her everything: Hazen’s offer and his arguments for sending Caroline off, the possibility of the athletic scholarship, and as completely as he could remember, about his conversation with Eleanor.
Leslie listened quietly, her face showing no emotion, her hands folded in her lap. When
Strand had finished, she said, “Eleanor is right, of course, about Caroline. She does think she’s unattractive. She does hate her nose. She is painfully shy. She hides it from us, she’s been hiding it from us since she was a child.”
“You knew?” Strand asked, incredulously. “You knew all along and you didn’t tell me?”
Leslie reached out and touched his hand. “What good would it have done?” Her tone was gentle now and loving. “Don’t you have enough to worry about?”
“I feel like an absolute fool,” Strand said.
“You’re not a fool. Sometimes you’re unobservant, that’s all,” she said. “Especially about your children. Now, the question is, what are we going to do about it?” She smiled. “Notice I said we.”
“Hazen wants us to let him talk to Caroline.”
“Tempt her with visions of perpetual western sunshine.” Leslie smiled again. “Well, why not? A little perpetual sunshine would be a welcome change for us all.”
“But to study to be a veterinary, for God’s sake! How do you think she got an idea like that?”
“Don’t know,” Leslie said. “Maybe she read the Englishman’s book—All Creatures Great and Small—and it seemed like an interesting profession—meeting different kinds of people, out in the open air and all that. If she’s really got her mind set on it, I wouldn’t stand in her way.”
“Why didn’t she ever say a word to either of us about it?” Strand knew he sounded aggrieved.
“Maybe she was just waiting for the right moment. Girls learn early not to blurt out everything to their parents.”
“You’d be for letting her go away?”
Leslie nodded.
“Well,” Strand said, “they’ll probably be seeing each other tomorrow morning at the police station. They can talk there. It’s an ideal place for temptation.”
Leslie stood up and moved toward him and leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. She touched his hair. “You need a haircut,” she said.
When Caroline came in a little before dinner time, Strand told her about Hazen’s call. Leslie was giving a lesson to her policeman pupil in the living room and they went into the kitchen to get away from the clanking chords that the representative of the law was clubbing out of the poor piano. “Mr. Hazen said he was going to go to the police station, but that if you didn’t want to go, they couldn’t force you.”
