Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  Nineteen twenty-nine came to Darling and to his wife and father-in-law, the maker of inks, just as it came to everyone else. The father-in-law waited until 1933 and then blew his brains out and when Darling went to Chicago to see what the books of the firm looked like he found out all that was left were debts and three or four gallons of unbought ink.

  “Please, Christian,” Louise said, sitting in their neat Beekman Place apartment, with a view of the river and prints of paintings by Dufy and Braque and Picasso on the wall, “please, why do you want to start drinking at two o’clock in the afternoon?”

  “I have nothing else to do,” Darling said, putting down his glass, emptied of its fourth drink. “Please pass the whisky.”

  Louise filled his glass. “Come take a walk with me,” she said. “We’ll walk along the river.”

  “I don’t want to walk along the river,” Darling said, squinting intensely at the prints of paintings by Dufy, Braque and Picasso.

  “We’ll walk along Fifth Avenue.”

  “I don’t want to walk along Fifth Avenue.”

  “Maybe,” Louise said gently, “you’d like to come with me to some art galleries. There’s an exhibition by a man named Klee.…”

  “I don’t want to go to any art galleries. I want to sit here and drink Scotch whisky,” Darling said. “Who the hell hung those goddam pictures up on the wall?”

  “I did,” Louise said.

  “I hate them.”

  “I’ll take them down,” Louise said.

  “Leave them there. It gives me something to do in the afternoon. I can hate them.” Darling took a long swallow. “Is that the way people paint these days?”

  “Yes, Christian. Please don’t drink any more.”

  “Do you like painting like that?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Darling looked carefully at the prints once more. “Little Louise Tucker. The middle-western beauty. I like pictures with horses in them. Why should you like pictures like that?”

  “I just happen to have gone to a lot of galleries in the last few years …”

  “Is that what you do in the afternoon?”

  “That’s what I do in the afternoon,” Louise said.

  “I drink in the afternoon.”

  Louise kissed him lightly on the top of his head as he sat there squinting at the pictures on the wall, the glass of whisky held firmly in his hand. She put on her coat and went out without saying another word. When she came back in the early evening, she had a job on a woman’s fashion magazine.

  They moved downtown and Louise went out to work every morning and Darling sat home and drank and Louise paid the bills as they came up. She made believe she was going to quit work as soon as Darling found a job, even though she was taking over more responsibility day by day at the magazine, interviewing authors, picking painters for the illustrations and covers, getting actresses to pose for pictures, going out for drinks with the right people, making a thousand new friends whom she loyally introduced to Darling.

  “I don’t like your hat,” Darling said, once, when she came in in the evening and kissed him, her breath rich with Martinis.

  “What’s the matter with my hat, Baby?” she asked, running her fingers through his hair. “Everybody says it’s very smart.”

  “It’s too damned smart,” he said. “It’s not for you. It’s for a rich, sophisticated woman of thirty-five with admirers.”

  Louise laughed. “I’m practicing to be a rich, sophisticated woman of thirty-five with admirers,” she said. He stared soberly at her. “Now, don’t look so grim, Baby. It’s still the same simple little wife under the hat.” She took the hat off, threw it into a corner, sat on his lap. “See? Homebody Number One.”

  “Your breath could run a train,” Darling said, not wanting to be mean, but talking out of boredom, and sudden shock at seeing his wife curiously a stranger in a new hat, with a new expression in her eyes under the little brim, secret, confident, knowing.

  Louise tucked her head under his chin so he couldn’t smell her breath. “I had to take an author out for cocktails,” she said. “He’s a boy from the Ozark Mountains and he drinks like a fish. He’s a Communist.”

  “What the hell is a Communist from the Ozarks doing writing for a woman’s fashion magazine?”

  Louise chuckled. “The magazine business is getting all mixed up these days. The publishers want to have a foot in every camp. And anyway, you can’t find an author under seventy these days who isn’t a Communist.”

  “I don’t think I like you to associate with all those people, Louise,” Darling said. “Drinking with them.”

  “He’s a very nice, gentle boy,” Louise said. “He reads Ernest Dowson.”

  “Who’s Ernest Dowson?”

  Louise patted his arm, stood up, fixed her hair. “He’s an English poet.”

  Darling felt that somehow he had disappointed her. “Am I supposed to know who Ernest Dowson is?”

  “No, dear. I’d better go in and take a bath.”

  After she had gone, Darling went over to the corner where the hat was lying and picked it up. It was nothing, a scrap of straw, a red flower, a veil, meaningless on his big hand, but on his wife’s head a signal of something … big city, smart and knowing women drinking and dining with men other than their husbands, conversation about things a normal man wouldn’t know much about, Frenchmen who painted as though they used their elbows instead of brushes, composers who wrote whole symphonies without a single melody in them, writers who knew all about politics and women who knew all about writers, the movement of the proletariat, Marx, somehow mixed up with five-dollar dinners and the best-looking women in America and fairies who made them laugh and half-sentences immediately understood and secretly hilarious and wives who called their husbands “Baby.” He put the hat down, a scrap of straw and a red flower, and a little veil. He drank some whisky straight and went into the bathroom where his wife was lying deep in her bath, singing to herself and smiling from time to time like a little girl, paddling the water gently with her hands, sending up a slight spicy fragrance from the bath salts she used.

  He stood over her, looking down at her. She smiled up at him, her eyes half closed, her body pink and shimmering in the warm, scented water. All over again, with all the old suddenness, he was hit deep inside him with the knowledge of how beautiful she was, how much he needed her.

  “I came in here,” he said, “to tell you I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘Baby.’”

  She looked up at him from the bath, her eyes quickly full of sorrow, half-understanding what he meant. He knelt and put his arms around her, his sleeves plunged heedlessly in the water, his shirt and jacket soaking wet as he clutched her wordlessly, holding her crazily tight, crushing her breath from her, kissing her desperately, searchingly, regretfully.

  He got jobs after that, selling real estate and automobiles, but somehow, although he had a desk with his name on a wooden wedge on it, and he went to the office religiously at nine each morning, he never managed to sell anything and he never made any money.

  Louise was made assistant editor, and the house was always full of strange men and women who talked fast and got angry on abstract subjects like mural painting, novelists, labor unions. Negro short-story writers drank Louise’s liquor, and a lot of Jews, and big solemn men with scarred faces and knotted hands who talked slowly but clearly about picket lines and battles with guns and leadpipe at mine-shaft-heads and in front of factory gates. And Louise moved among them all, confidently, knowing what they were talking about, with opinions that they listened to and argued about just as though she were a man. She knew everybody, condescended to no one, devoured books that Darling had never heard of, walked along the streets of the city, excited, at home, soaking in all the million tides of New York without fear, with constant wonder.

  Her friends liked Darling and sometimes he found a man who wanted to get off in the corner and talk abo
ut the new boy who played fullback for Princeton, and the decline of the double wing-back, or even the state of the stock market, but for the most part he sat on the edge of things, solid and quiet in the high storm of words. “The dialectics of the situation … The theater has been given over to expert jugglers … Picasso? What man has a right to paint old bones and collect ten thousand dollars for them?… I stand firmly behind Trotsky … Poe was the last American critic. When he died they put lilies on the grave of American criticism. I don’t say this because they panned my last book, but …”

  Once in a while he caught Louise looking soberly and consideringly at him through the cigarette smoke and the noise and he avoided her eyes and found an excuse to get up and go into the kitchen for more ice or to open another bottle.

  “Come on,” Cathal Flaherty was saying, standing at the door with a girl, “you’ve got to come down and see this. It’s down on Fourteenth Street, in the old Civic Repertory, and you can only see it on Sunday nights and I guarantee you’ll come out of the theater singing.” Flaherty was a big young Irishman with a broken nose who was the lawyer for a longshoreman’s union, and he had been hanging around the house for six months on and off, roaring and shutting everybody else up when he got in an argument. “It’s a new play, Waiting for Lefty; it’s about taxi-drivers.”

  “Odets,” the girl with Flaherty said. “It’s by a guy named Odets.”

  “I never heard of him,” Darling said.

  “He’s a new one,” the girl said.

  “It’s like watching a bombardment,” Flaherty said. “I saw it last Sunday night. You’ve got to see it.”

  “Come on, Baby,” Louise said to Darling, excitement in her eyes already. “We’ve been sitting in the Sunday Times all day, this’ll be a great change.”

  “I see enough taxi-drivers every day,” Darling said, not because he meant that, but because he didn’t like to be around Flaherty, who said things that made Louise laugh a lot and whose judgment she accepted on almost every subject. “Let’s go to the movies.”

  “You’ve never seen anything like this before,” Flaherty said. “He wrote this play with a baseball bat.”

  “Come on,” Louise coaxed, “I bet it’s wonderful.”

  “He has long hair,” the girl with Flaherty said. “Odets. I met him at a party. He’s an actor. He didn’t say a goddam thing all night.”

  “I don’t feel like going down to Fourteenth Street,” Darling said, wishing Flaherty and his girl would get out. “It’s gloomy.”

  “Oh, hell!” Louise said loudly. She looked coolly at Darling, as though she’d just been introduced to him and was making up her mind about him, and not very favorably. He saw her looking at him, knowing there was something new and dangerous in her face and he wanted to say something, but Flaherty was there and his damned girl, and anyway, he didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m going,” Louise said, getting her coat. “I don’t think Fourteenth Street is gloomy.”

  “I’m telling you,” Flaherty was saying, helping her on with her coat, “it’s the Battle of Gettysburg, in Brooklynese.”

  “Nobody could get a word out of him,” Flaherty’s girl was saying as they went through the door. “He just sat there all night.”

  The door closed. Louise hadn’t said good night to him. Darling walked around the room four times, then sprawled out on the sofa, on top of the Sunday Times. He lay there for five minutes looking at the ceiling, thinking of Flaherty walking down the street talking in that booming voice, between the girls, holding their arms.

  Louise had looked wonderful. She’d washed her hair in the afternoon and it had been very soft and light and clung close to her head as she stood there angrily putting her coat on. Louise was getting prettier every year, partly because she knew by now how pretty she was, and made the most of it.

  “Nuts,” Darling said, standing up. “Oh, nuts.”

  He put on his coat and went down to the nearest bar and had five drinks off by himself in a corner before his money ran out.

  The years since then had been foggy and downhill. Louise had been nice to him, and in a way, loving and kind, and they’d fought only once, when he said he was going to vote for Landon. (“Oh, Christ,” she’d said, “doesn’t anything happen inside your head? Don’t you read the papers? The penniless Republican!”) She’d been sorry later and apologized for hurting him, but apologized as she might to a child. He’d tried hard, had gone grimly to the art galleries, the concert halls, the bookshops, trying to gain on the trail of his wife, but it was no use. He was bored, and none of what he saw or heard or dutifully read made much sense to him and finally he gave it up. He had thought, many nights as he ate dinner alone, knowing that Louise would come home late and drop silently into bed without explanation, of getting a divorce, but he knew the loneliness, the hopelessness, of not seeing her again would be too much to take. So he was good, completely devoted, ready at all times to go any place with her, do anything she wanted. He even got a small job, in a broker’s office and paid his own way, bought his own liquor.

  Then he’d been offered the job of going from college to college as a tailor’s representative. “We want a man,” Mr. Rosenberg had said, “who as soon as you look at him, you say, ‘There’s a university man.’” Rosenberg had looked approvingly at Darling’s broad shoulders and well-kept waist, at his carefully brushed hair and his honest, wrinkle-less face. “Frankly, Mr. Darling, I am willing to make you a proposition. I have inquired about you, you are favorably known on your old campus, I understand you were in the backfield with Alfred Diederich.”

  Darling nodded. “Whatever happened to him?”

  “He is walking around in a cast for seven years now. An iron brace. He played professional football and they broke his neck for him.”

  Darling smiled. That, at least, had turned out well.

  “Our suits are an easy product to sell, Mr. Darling,” Rosenberg said. “We have a handsome, custom-made garment. What has Brooks Brothers got that we haven’t got? A name. No more.”

  “I can make fifty, sixty dollars a week,” Darling said to Louise that night. “And expenses. I can save some money and then come back to New York and really get started here.”

  “Yes, Baby,” Louise said.

  “As it is,” Darling said carefully, “I can make it back here once a month, and holidays and the summer. We can see each other often.”

  “Yes, Baby.” He looked at her face, lovelier now at thirty-five than it had ever been before, but fogged over now as it had been for five years with a kind of patient, kindly, remote boredom.

  “What do you say?” he asked. “Should I take it?” Deep within him he hoped fiercely, longingly, for her to say, “No, Baby, you stay right here,” but she said, as he knew she’d say, “I think you’d better take it.”

  He nodded. He had to get up and stand with his back to her, looking out the window, because there were things plain on his face that she had never seen in the fifteen years she’d known him. “Fifty dollars is a lot of money,” he said. “I never thought I’d ever see fifty dollars again.” He laughed. Louise laughed, too.

  Christian Darling sat on the frail green grass of the practice field. The shadow of the stadium had reached out and covered him. In the distance the lights of the university shone a little mistily in the light haze of evening. Fifteen years. Flaherty even now was calling for his wife, buying her a drink, filling whatever bar they were in with that voice of his and that easy laugh. Darling half-closed his eyes, almost saw the boy fifteen years ago reach for the pass, slip the halfback, go skittering lightly down the field, his knees high and fast and graceful, smiling to himself because he knew he was going to get past the safety man. That was the high point, Darling thought, fifteen years ago, on an autumn afternoon, twenty years old and far from death, with the air coming easily into his lungs, and a deep feeling inside him that he could do anything, knock over anybody, outrun whatever had to be outrun. And the shower after and the three
glasses of water and the cool night air on his damp head and Louise sitting hatless in the open car with a smile and the first kiss she ever really meant. The high point, an eighty-yard run in the practice, and a girl’s kiss and everything after that a decline. Darling laughed. He had practiced the wrong thing, perhaps. He hadn’t practiced for 1929 and New York City and a girl who would turn into a woman. Somewhere, he thought, there must have been a point where she moved up to me, was even with me for a moment, when I could have held her hand, if I’d known, held tight, gone with her. Well, he’d never known. Here he was on a playing field that was fifteen years away and his wife was in another city having dinner with another and better man, speaking with him a different, new language, a language nobody had ever taught him.

  Darling stood up, smiled a little, because if he didn’t smile he knew the tears would come. He looked around him. This was the spot. O’Connor’s pass had come sliding out just to here … the high point. Darling put up his hands, felt all over again the flat slap of the ball. He shook his hips to throw off the halfback, cut back inside the center, picked his knees high as he ran gracefully over two men jumbled on the ground at the line of scrimmage, ran easily, gaining speed, for ten yards, holding the ball lightly in his two hands, swung away from the halfback diving at him, ran, swinging his hips in the almost girlish manner of a back in a broken field, tore into the safety man, his shoes drumming heavily on the turf, stiff-armed, elbow locked, pivoted, raced lightly and exultantly for the goal line.

  It was only after he had sped over the goal line and slowed to a trot that he saw the boy and girl sitting together on the turf, looking at him wonderingly.

  He stopped short, dropping his arms. “I …” he said, gasping a little, though his condition was fine and the run hadn’t winded him. “I—once I played here.”