Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  I’m not going to be good for much in the morning, he thought, and then was ashamed of his selfishness. His first class was in American history and he tried to remember what he had intended to say about the Federalist papers because he didn’t want to think about what Leslie’s appearance, hysterical and at that hour of the night, might mean.

  When Leslie came into the kitchen she was in a nightgown with a robe over it and her hair was in order and her face almost composed.

  “Here,” he said. “Here’s your drink.”

  “Thank you,” she said in a low voice. She tried to smile at him. It was like a flickering signal seen from thousands of yards away.

  “Darling,” he said, “what is it? Did you have an accident?”

  “No,” she said. “Only about a dozen near-misses. It’s the first time I’ve driven in snow. The car takes on a life of its own.”

  “Did anything happen back in New York?”

  “Nothing special.” She sat down suddenly and took her glass in both hands, like an infant, and brought it up to her mouth and sipped at it thirstily. For a moment, in a flicker of memory, like a superimposed picture, he saw Judith Quinlan, in the steamy coffee shop, holding her cup to her lips with the same gesture. “By the time I’m eighty,” Leslie said, “I suppose I’ll develop a taste for Scotch. Still, from what I’ve read, they give it to the survivors of shipwrecks, so it must have a life-supporting value. No, nothing special happened. I had a nice dinner with the dean and we played some Chopin duets and she told me about what a wonderful man her husband had been and how she has missed him since he died and what a credit to the school Caroline was and apologized for the fact that the school had no regular athletic program, because if it had, Caroline might have had chances for scholarships at colleges all over the country and how she looked forward to other evenings like this when I would stay over because it was so dreary sitting alone reading and sleeping alone in an empty apartment. No, nothing special—except that I had a vision. The vision was of my being like her, sitting alone reading at night and hating to go to bed alone…”

  “Your husband isn’t dead, darling,” Strand said gently. “Although I must say he tried.” The wry little joke did not make her smile.

  “No, you’re not dead,” Leslie said. Her voice was flat, exhausted, without timbre. “And I don’t think you’re going to die. What I’m afraid of is that we’re floating apart. We’re like two people in the water, in different currents, slowly being pulled away from each other. Finally, you’re gone and there I am like the dean, waiting for one of Jimmy’s duty telephone calls or Eleanor’s telegram on my birthday or a clipping from an Arizona newspaper saying that Caroline has tied the school record for the hundred yard dash. Suddenly, I couldn’t bear lying there alone in the middle of the night in a strange bed with you more than a hundred miles away. I had to make sure I could find you, touch you…”

  “Darling,” Strand said, “I’m here. I’ll always be here.”

  “I know it’s irrational,” she went on in the same dead tone, “but we’re both so distracted these days, I have the feeling we’re leading somebody else’s lives. We don’t sleep together, we don’t even eat our meals together, we’re drowning in a sea of boys, I have the most awful sexual dreams, other men, leering boys…And then on the road home a drunken man passed me, he was angry because I hadn’t pulled to the side quickly enough for him, and he shouted insults at me, then dropped behind me and kept right after me, with his high lights on and blowing his horn and I went off the highway at the first exit because I was frightened of him and I got lost and I wandered around all over Connecticut on dark little winding roads and there wasn’t a light showing in any of the houses I passed and the car skidded on the snow and I just missed hitting a tree…I had the crazy feeling that the car was trying to kill me, that it was my enemy and I was going to stop it and get out and sit by the side of the road and freeze to death, but then I saw a sign and I was just off the highway and here I am. For the rest of the night, at least, I feel safe again.” She smiled wanly at him and sipped her drink. “Don’t look so troubled, dear. I’m sure I’ll come back to my senses in the morning. Go to bed now. You have to get up in a couple of hours.” She leaned over and kissed him. “Go. Please. You look exhausted. I’m home and I’m safe and things will look different in the light of day.”

  He was too tired to argue with her and he put down his glass, which he had hardly touched, and dragged himself into his room and, shivering again, got under the covers without taking off his robe.

  Later, he heard, or thought he heard, the sound of a piano being played softly, far away.

  2

  CLASSES WERE CANCELLED FOR the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving and Leslie and Allen were packed and ready at noon when Conroy drove up in the Mercedes. They had been invited to spend the weekend in Hazen’s house on the beach and while Strand would have preferred merely lazying around the quiet campus, with all the boys away for the holiday, a conversation he had had with Babcock, the headmaster, about Leslie the week before had made the invitation come at a fortunate moment.

  Babcock had asked Strand to drop into his office and had fussed uneasily at his desk, lighting and relighting his pipe, pushing his glasses up and down from his forehead and rearranging papers while talking, with many false starts and embarrassed clearings of the throat, about the system of grading Strand was considering for his students and about the kind of schedule he preferred for the next term, which was still two months off. Finally, he had gotten around to the reason for his asking to see Strand. Apologetically, he said, “Allen, I don’t want to worry you unnecessarily—and I don’t want to seem to be prying into something that’s no business of mine—but Leslie…” He sighed. “You know we all admire her immensely and we were delighted when she offered to take the class in music appreciation and I don’t know where we could hope to find anyone as well qualified as she is to take her place….”

  “Please,” Strand said, “just what are you trying to tell me?”

  Babcock sighed again. The work of the term had made his face even wearier and grayer than it had been and Strand couldn’t help but be sorry for the man as he nervously fussed with his pipe and avoided looking directly across the desk. “It seems that her behavior in recent weeks…well, there’s nothing extreme about it, I hasten to say…but, I mean, she…she doesn’t seem to be quite herself, if you understand what I mean…. Something…I couldn’t say what it is and maybe you could help…Her behavior is a little…bizarre is much too strong a word, of course, but it comes to mind…. She has stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence in the classroom…. Of course it’s the boys who report this and one must take their gossip with a grain of salt…and just walked out of the room, without saying when or if she expected to return. And she has been seen by members of the faculty walking across the campus crying. It might be that she’s overworked, although her schedule is minimal, as it were…. I just wondered if I might suggest a little holiday for her…a few weeks off…. Miss Collins, who is something of a musician herself, has offered to fill in temporarily…. Naturally, it is the policy of the school to continue salaries during—ah—sick leave. Oh, dear, I find it so difficult to strike the right tone…”

  Strand felt sorry for the gentle, overburdened, slight man, and at the same time helpless about Leslie. Around the house, since the night she had arrived and awakened him she had merely been subdued, a quiet, receding presence moving listlessly, without complaint, from one room to another.

  “It’s not overwork,” Strand said. “It’s a combination of things, I would say…. I don’t think you should blame the school in any way.”

  “Thank you, Allen. I wasn’t sure how much you’ve noticed. Sometimes, those who are closest…” Babcock left the sentence unfinished. “The atmosphere of a school, when the term has been going on so long, when the season wanes, as it were…November can be trying to the strongest souls—the sense of confinement for a sensitive woman…�
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  “We’ve been invited to Russell Hazen’s house in the Hamptons for the Thanksgiving weekend,” Strand said. “Our son may join us, there will be people there who interest her…. Perhaps that will be all she needs.” Strand was anxious to get away from the sight of the weary, anxious face behind the desk. “It may help. If it doesn’t—we’ll see. Actually, a good friend of hers has asked her to go to Europe with her. So far, she’s refused—but if I let her know that you suggested a little vacation might do her good—I’ll be as tactful as possible…. You don’t mind if I wait until the weekend is over before I talk to her about it, do you?” As he said it, he knew he was postponing. Out of cowardice? Fear of bruising Leslie even more?

  “Anything that you feel is the wise course to pursue. You’re in the best position to judge,” Babcock said. There was relief in his voice that the matter, at least for a few days, would be out of his hands. “And you know, I’m sure,” he added delicately, “that if between you and your wife you feel that some psychiatric help would be useful, there’s a very good man who comes up from New Haven when we need him, who might…. You’d be surprised how many times we have felt it necessary to talk to him. For teachers and students alike. Sometimes I think that we are all too close, we sit in each other’s laps, so to speak, day in and day out, egos are rubbed raw, tempers flare, melancholy sets in, the approach of winter…so many things to consider, so many stresses….” One last sigh and he turned back to shuffling papers on his desk.

  When Strand left the office, he walked slowly across the campus. As he passed students, other teachers, who said hello to him, he weighed their greetings, wondering who had spoken to Babcock about Leslie, what they felt about her, who snickered secretly at her behavior, who pitied her, who said poor woman, the husband’s fault…

  Perhaps a psychiatrist, Babcock had said, out of the goodness of his heart and the modern totemic belief that words could cure ills that words had not caused and were beyond the reach of the remedies of language. What could Leslie tell the man from New Haven? I have been uprooted, my dear man, suddenly and without warning, from the city in which I was born and in which I have lived all my life; overnight my children, to whom I have devoted the greatest part of my emotion, have gone their own way; I am deafened by the clamor of that constantly renewed tribe of barbarians—boys in their teens—whose values are as strange to me, and as hostile, as that of the savages of the forest of the Amazon. And, since you are paid to hear the darkest truths of the troubled soul, I shall not hide from you that now, I, as a woman in her forties, at a time when, I am assured by the authorities of your profession, I am at the height of my sexual desires and capacity for satisfaction, am forced to sleep alone. I shall not bore you with my dreams. I am sure you can easily guess their nature.

  As he crossed the campus, Strand shook his head, tortured. What was the approved procedure for a psychiatrist at this juncture? What was he likely to suggest? Divorce? Violent exercise? Drugs? Other men? Masturbation?

  He decided that if he finally had to cope openly with Leslie’s problem—and, he realized, his own—whatever else he might say, he would not bring up the subject of psychiatry.

  In the days before Thanksgiving he said nothing to Leslie about what Babcock had told him, acted as normally as he could, as though he sensed nothing was wrong, the outburst in the kitchen had never occurred.

  Now, in the cold November noon, as he and Leslie greeted Conroy, in the holiday atmosphere of boys racing off jubilantly to four days of freedom, he felt reassured. Leslie looked lovely, he thought, smart and young in her heavy beige wool coat with the collar turned up around her face, alive and eager and flushed with color from the wind.

  He held her hand in the back seat as Conroy started the car and they wound around the campus to the stone gates which marked the limits of the school grounds and out onto the open road. As they left the school behind them he felt as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

  The weekend, they all agreed, was a great success. The Solomons, whose beach house was closed for the winter, were there and Linda Roberts, all of them pleased at seeing each other again and feeling lucky that the sun was shining and the weather warm enough to have cocktails on the terrace with the salt autumnal wind off the calm sea. Jimmy had brought along his guitar and entertained them, especially Herbert Solomon, with imitations of some of the more obstreperous performers among Solomon’s clients. Hazen had been a relaxed host and if he was worried about his wife or the investigation in Washington he hadn’t shown it. Leslie had brought along her painting kit and portable easel and with Linda accompanying her had gone down the dunes and started a landscape that Linda assured her would wind up hanging on the walls of a museum. Linda was more exuberant than usual. The gallery in Paris with which her New York gallery was associated had asked her to bring over a representative show of twentieth-century American paintings for an exhibition and Linda had gotten the last two of fifty canvases for which she had been negotiating for three months and would be leaving for France within a week. She repeated her invitation to Leslie. “They’re paying the way for me and an assistant. You’d make a marvelous assistant. When it comes to hanging the show, I’ll need an American to back me up against all those impossible Frenchmen. And we’ll take along your dune painting and in the program notes we’ll write that you’re our new, marvelous one hundred percent American discovery. All the other paintings are signed by people whose names end in ski.”

  Leslie had laughed and said, “Pipe dreams, Linda. I’ve had my Paris trip this year.”

  “Allen”—Linda had appealed to Strand—“make her say yes, she’ll go.”

  “If she won’t,” Strand said, “I’ll go.”

  “You don’t look like an assistant anything,” Linda said. “It’d be such fun, Leslie.”

  But Leslie shook her head, still smiling. “I’m a working woman. There are four hundred boys in Connecticut waiting for me to explain to them on Monday what A flat minor means.”

  But Strand could see that Leslie was tempted. Before the weekend is up, he decided, he would tell her about Babcock’s suggestion.

  Hazen, who had been down on the beach with Mr. Ketley inspecting the damage a storm had done to a jetty the week before, came up to the terrace where they were standing, wrapped in sweaters and coats, watching the sunset. Hazen was dressed in heavy corduroys and a ski cap and mackinaw, his face whipped to a high color by the wind. He looked as though he had never been in an office in his life. He smiled benignly at his guests. “It’d be perfect,” he said, “if your kids were here, too, Leslie. The other kids, Jimmy. No offense meant by calling the brood kids. You know what would be nice—telephoning them and saying ‘Happy Holiday.’”

  “There’s no need going to all that expense,” Strand said. “They’re okay.”

  “Nonsense,” Hazen said. “I insist.”

  So they trooped into the house and telephoned Caroline in Arizona and Eleanor and Giuseppe in Georgia and there was a general hubbub as they took turns at the two linked phones in the downstairs living room and the small library.

  Leslie had sounded lighthearted as first Caroline and then Eleanor gossiped with her over the phone. Taking turns, they all said hello. The only wrong note came when Leslie and Strand were talking to Caroline and Leslie said how much they missed her and Caroline said, “East Hampton isn’t for me. I don’t like the boys there.”

  “Now, what in the world does that mean?” Leslie said testily. Strand knew what it meant. Caroline had not forgotten the night in the parked car when George had torn at her clothes and broken her nose. Would never forget.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Caroline said. “I’m happy as a lark out here. Arizona is divine.”

  After that they all went upstairs to get ready for dinner. Solomon and Strand were the first ones down and while Strand stood in front of the driftwood fire, blazing high and spitting blue and green sparks, Solomon fixed himself a drink. With a sigh of satisfact
ion, Solomon sank into an easy chair and spoke about Jimmy. He told Strand that Jimmy was a great favorite around the office and with a wry smile intimated that Jimmy was having an affair with one of his stars, a woman by the name of Joan Dyer, who until Jimmy came into the business had been the most difficult of all his singers. “She’s been a different woman since she clapped eyes on the boy,” Solomon said. “I’m doubling his salary for devotion to the cause of Solomon and Company above and beyond the call of duty. She’s been a man-eater with everybody else in the office, including me. A tigress. Her tantrums are a legend in the business. I’d been seriously thinking of letting her go even though she sells more records than anybody else I’ve got.”

  “How old is she?” Strand asked.

  “Thirty-five, thirty-six.”

  “Isn’t he a little young for her?” Strand was not pleased with the news, although if he had been asked why, he couldn’t have explained his reasons.

  “Apparently not,” Solomon said. “Don’t worry about Jimmy, though. He’s amazingly level-headed for a boy his age. Hasn’t he said anything to you about her?”

  Strand shook his head. “Jimmy doesn’t boast about his conquests. If he has any. For all I know he’s still a virgin.”

  Solomon grinned. “Don’t bet on it.”

  Strand didn’t smile. “I was still a virgin at his age,” he said.

  “Different professions,” Solomon said, “different moralities.” He shrugged.

  “Thirty-five,” Strand said. “Is she married?”

  “There’s a husband around somewhere, the second or third, I think. Don’t look so shocked, Allen. Show business…”

  “Do me a favor,” Strand said. “Don’t say anything about this to Leslie. I’m afraid it might disturb her. She still thinks of him as her little innocent child.”