Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  The father, who might have been expected to be disturbed by the spectacle of his pregnant daughter locked in hand-to-hand combat with her faithless lover at this odd hour of the morning, never made a move to stop the action. He merely moved along the street with the struggle, circling it warily, keeping a keen eye on the principals, like a referee who is loath to interfere in a good fight so long as the clinching is not too obvious and the low blows unintentional.

  The noise, however, had awakened sleepers, and here and there along the street, shutters opened a crack on dark windows and heads appeared briefly, with that French combination of impartiality, curiosity and caution which would lock the shutters fast on the scene of violence with the approach of the first gendarme.

  By this time, Moumou had stamped and hammered Raoul some fifteen yards away from the point of the original attack and they were swaying and panting in front of the lovers who had been tranquilly kissing all this time in the shadow of the doorway on the other side of the street. But now, with the noise of battle on their very doorstep, as it were, and the contestants threatening invasion at any moment, the lovers separated, and the man stepped out protectively in front of the figure of the girl he had been crushing so cosily and for so long against the stone doorway. Tibbell saw that the man was short and burly and dressed in a sports jacket and an open-necked shirt. “Here, here,” the man in the sports jacket said authoritatively, seizing Raoul by the shoulders and pulling at him, “that’s enough of that. Go home and go to sleep.”

  His appearance distracted Moumou for an instant. “Go back to your doorway fornication, Monsieur!” she said. “We don’t need your advice.” At that moment, Raoul slid away from her and pounded up the street. “Coward,” Moumou shouted, and took off after him, swinging her bag menacingly, running with surprising speed and agility in her high-heeled, pointed shoes. She seemed actually to be gaining on Raoul when he came to the corner and ducked around it, closely followed by Moumou.

  The street seemed strangely quiet now and Tibbell could hear the discreet clicking of shutters being closed, now that the principals had departed the scene.

  But the father was still there, staring with melancholy, weary eyes at the corner around which he had last seen his daughter disappear, brandishing the patent-leather handbag. He turned his glance on the young man in the sports jacket, who was saying to his girl, “Well, there’s a pair for you. Barbarians.”

  “Monsieur,” the father said gravely, “Who asked you to meddle in other peoples’ affairs? It is the same all over this poor country. Nobody minds his own business any more. Privacy is a thing of the past. No wonder we are on the edge of anarchy. They were on the point of agreement when you destroyed everything.”

  “Listen, Monsieur,” the man in the sports jacket said belligerently, “I am by nature a simple, honorable man. I do not stand by idly while a man and a woman beat each other in my presence. It was my duty to separate them and, if you were not old enough to be my grandfather, I would say that you should be ashamed of yourself for not having separated them sooner.”

  M. Banary-Cointal examined the simple, honorable man with scientific detachment, as though he were weighing the last statement judiciously, without prejudice. But instead of answering, he turned to the girl, still discreetly in shadow and arranging her ruffled hair with little pats of her hand. “Young woman,” the old man said loudly, “you see what’s ahead of you? The same thing will happen to you as happened to my daughter. Mark my words, you’ll find yourself pregnant and that one”—the old man pointed like a prosecuting attorney at the sports coat—“that one will disappear like a hare in a cornfield.”

  “Simone,” the man in the sports coat said, before the girl had a chance to reply, “we have better ways of spending our time than listening to this old windbag.” He pushed a button on the wall next to him and the door against which he and the girl had been leaning opened with an electric buzzing. With dignity, he took the girl’s arm and escorted her into the deeper shadow of the inner court. The old man shrugged, his duty done, his warning to a careless generation delivered, as the huge wooden door clicked shut behind the interrupted lovers. Now the old man seemed to be looking around for another audience for his views on life, but the street was deserted, and Tibbell pulled back a bit from the window, fearful of being harangued.

  Deprived of further targets for his wisdom, M. Banary-Cointal sighed, then walked slowly toward the corner around which his daughter had vanished in pursuit of Raoul. Tibbell could see him standing there, caught in the dark stone geometry of the city crossroads, a solitary and baffled figure, peering off in the distance, searching the lonely street for survivors.

  Now there was the click of shutters again below Tibbell and old women’s voices, seeming to rise from some underground of the night, made themselves heard, from window to window.

  “Ah,” one voice said, “this city is becoming unbearable. People will do anything on the street at any hour. Did you hear what I heard, Madame Harrahs?”

  “Every word,” a second old voice spoke in a loud, hoarse, accusing, concierge’s whisper. “He was a thief. He tried to snatch her purse. Since de Gaulle a woman isn’t safe after dark any more in Paris. And the police have the nerve to demand a rise in pay.”

  “Not at all, Madame,” the first voice said irritably. “I saw with my own eyes. She hit him. With her bag. Thirty or forty of the best. He was bleeding like a pig. He’s lucky to be alive. Though he only got what’s coming to him. She’s pregnant.”

  “Ah,” said Madame Harrahs, “the salaud.”

  “Though to tell the truth,” said the first voice, “she didn’t seem any better than she should be. Never at home, flitting around, only thinking about marriage when it was too late, after the rabbit test.”

  “Young girls these days,” said Madame Harrahs. “They deserve what they get.”

  “You can say that again,” said the first concierge. “If I told you some of the things that go on in this very house.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” said Madame Harrahs. “It’s the same on both sides of the street. When I think of some of the people I have to open the door to and say Monsieur Blanchard lives on the third, to the right, it’s a wonder I still have the courage to go to Mass at Easter.”

  “The one I feel sorry for is the old man,” said the first concierge. “The father.”

  “Don’t waste your pity,” said Madame Harrahs. “It’s probably all his fault. He is obviously lacking in authority. And if a man hasn’t authority, he has to expect the worst from his children. Besides, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he didn’t have a little thing on the side himself, a little poupette in the Sixteenth, like that disgusting lawyer in Geneva. I got a good look at him. I know the type.”

  “Ah, the dirty old man,” the first voice said.

  Now Tibbell heard footsteps approaching from the corner and he turned to see the dirty old man approaching. The shutters clicked tight again and the old ladies subsided after their choric irruption, leaving the street to the weary sound of the old man’s shoes on the uneven concrete and the asthmatic sighs he emitted with every other step. He stopped below Tibbell’s window, looking sorrowfully at the Vespa, shaking his head, then sat down uncomfortably on the curb, his feet in the gutter, his hands dangling loose and helpless between his knees. Tibbell would have liked to go down and comfort him, but was uncertain whether M. Banary-Cointal was in any condition that night to be consoled by foreigners.

  Tibbell was on the verge of closing his own shutters, like the two concierges, and leaving the old man to his problems on the street below, when he saw Moumou appear at the corner, sobbing exhaustedly, walking unsteadily on her high heels, the bag with which she had so vigorously attacked Raoul now hanging like a dead weight from her hand. The father saw her too and stood up, with a rheumatic effort, to greet her. When she saw the old man, Moumou sobbed more loudly. The old man opened his arms and she plunged onto his shoulder, weeping and clutching him, while
he patted her back clumsily.

  “He got away,” Moumou wept. “I’ll never see him again.”

  “Perhaps it is for the best,” the old man said. “He is far from dependable, that fellow.”

  “I love him, I love him,” the girl said wetly. “I’m going to kill him.”

  “Now, now, Moumou …” The father looked around him uneasily, conscious of witnesses behind the shuttered windows.

  “I’ll show him,” the girl said wildly. She broke away from her father and stood accusingly in front of the parked Vespa, glaring at it. “He took me out to the Marne on this the first time we went out together,” she said in a throbbing voice, meant to carry the memory of ancient tenderness, betrayed promises, to unseen and guilty ears. “I’ll show him.” With a swift movement, before her father could do anything to stop her, she took off her right shoe. Violently, holding the shoe by the pointed toe, she smashed the sharp heel into the headlight of the scooter. There was the crash of breaking glass and a tinkling on the pavement, closely followed by a shriek of pain from Moumou.

  “What is it? What is it?” The old man asked anxiously.

  “I cut myself. I opened a vein.” Moumou held out her hands, like Lady Macbeth. Tibbell could see blood spurting from several cuts on her hand and wrist.

  “Oh, my poor child,” the old man said distractedly. “Hold your hand still. Let me see.…”

  But Moumou pulled her hand away and danced unevenly on her one shoe around the Vespa, waving her arm over the machine, spattering the wheels, the handle bars, the saddle, the black pillion, with the blood that sprayed from her wounds. “There!” she shouted. “You wanted my blood, take it! I hope it brings you good luck!”

  “Moumou, don’t be so impetuous,” the old man implored her. “You will do yourself a permanent harm.” Finally he managed to grab his daughter’s arm and inspect the cuts. “Oh, oh,” he said. “This is dolorous. Stand still.” He took out a handkerchief and bound her wrist tight. “Now,” he said, “I will take you home and you will get a good night’s sleep and you will forget about that serpent.”

  “No,” Moumou said. She backed against the wall of the building on the opposite side of the street and stood there stubbornly. “He will come back for his Vespa. Then I will kill him. And after that I will kill myself.”

  “Moumou …” the old man wailed.

  “Go home, Papa.”

  “How can I go home and leave you like this?”

  “I will wait for him if I have to stand here in this place all night.” Moumou said her words awash with tears. She gripped the wall behind her with her hands, as if to keep her father from taking her away by force. “He has to come here sometime before the church. He won’t get married without his scooter. You go home. I will handle him myself.”

  “I can’t leave you here alone in this condition,” the old man said, sighing. Beaten, he sat down again on the curb to rest.

  “I want to die,” Moumou said.

  The street was quiet again, but not for long. The door behind which the two lovers had taken refuge opened and the man in the sports jacket came out, his arm around his girl. They passed slowly beneath Tibbell’s window, ostentatiously ignoring Moumou and her father. The old man looked balefully up at the linked couple. “Young lady,” he said, “remember my warning. Profit by the events you have witnessed tonight. If it is not too late already. Reenter into your home, I speak as a friend.”

  “See here, old man,” the man in the sports jacket pulled away from his companion and stood threateningly in front of Moumou’s father, “that’s enough out of you. I do not permit anybody to speak like that in front of …”

  “Come on, Edouard,” the girl said, pulling the man in the sports jacket away. “It is too late at night to become enraged.”

  “I ignore you, Monsieur,” Edouard said, then let the girl lead him away.

  “Permit, permit.…” M. Banary-Cointal said loudly, getting in the last word, as the couple rounded the corner and disappeared.

  Tibbell watched the old man and his daughter for another moment, wishing that the two of them would move away from their stations of affliction on his doorstep. It would be difficult to sleep, Tibbell felt, knowing that those two grieving, dissatisfied, vengeful figures were still outside his window, waiting for some horrid, violent last act of their drama.

  He was just about to turn away when he heard a car door slam far down the street. He looked and saw a woman in a green dress striding swiftly toward him, away from the car that he had earlier noticed being parked near the far corner. Now the car lights switched on, very bright, and the car followed the woman as she half-walked, half-ran, in the direction of Moumou and her father. She was obviously in flight. Her dress shone a violent, electric lime color in the headlights of the pursuing car. The car, which was a bright red, new Alfa Romeo Giulietta, stopped abruptly just before it reached the old man, who was still sitting on the curb, but with his head turned suspiciously in the direction of the woman bearing swiftly down on him, as though he feared that she was bringing with her, stranger though she was, a new burden of trouble to load onto his bowed and tortured shoulders. The woman darted toward a doorway, but before she could press the button for entry, a man in a black suit leaped out of the car and seized her wrist.

  Tibbell watched without surprise. By now he felt that the street below him was a preordained scene of conflict, like Agincourt or the pass of Thermopylae, and that clash would follow clash there continually, like the performances in a twentyfour-hour-a-day movie house.

  “No, you don’t!” the man in the black suit was saying, pulling the woman away from the door. “You don’t get away that easily.”

  “Let me go,” the woman said, trying to escape. She was breathless and she sounded frightened and Tibbell wondered if now, finally, was the time for him to run down the stairs and enter into the night life of the street in front of his window, a tardy Spartan, a belated recruit for Henry’s army.

  “I’ll let you go when you give me my three hundred francs,” the man in the black suit said loudly. He was young and slender and Tibbell could see, by the light of the automobile headlights, that he had a small mustache and long, carefully brushed hair that fell over the back of his high, white collar. He reminded Tibbell of certain young men he had seen lounging in various bars in the neighborhood of Pigalle, and he had the kind of face which looks fitting in newspaper photographs that accompany the stories of the arrest of suspects after particularly well-planned jewel robberies and pay-roll thefts.

  “I don’t owe you any three hundred francs,” the woman said. Now Tibbell heard that she had an accent in French, probably Spanish. She looked Spanish, too, with luxuriant black hair swooping down over her exposed shoulders, and a wide, shiny black leather belt around a very narrow waist. Her skirt was short and showed her knees every time she moved.

  “Don’t lie to me,” the man in the dark suit said, still holding the woman’s wrist and shaking her arm angrily. “It was never my intention to buy them.”

  “And it was never my intention to let you follow me to my home,” the woman snapped back at him, trying to pull away. “Let me go, you’ve annoyed me enough tonight!”

  “Not until I get my three hundred francs,” the man said, gripping her more firmly.

  “Unless you let me go,” the woman said, “I’ll call for the police.”

  The man glared at her and dropped her wrist. Then he slapped her hard across the face.

  “Here, here!” said Moumou’s father, who had been watching the affair with mournful interest. He stood up. Moumou, lost in the egotism of her own unhappiness, took no notice of what was happening.

  The man in the dark suit and the Spanish woman stood close to each other, breathing heavily, looking curiously undecided, as though the slap had brought some new and unexpected problem into their relationship which for the moment confused them and made them uncertain about further action. Then the young man, his white teeth gleaming under his mustache,
slowly raised his hand again.

  “Once is enough,” the woman said and ran over to Moumou’s father for protection. “Monsieur,” she said, “you have seen him strike me.”

  “The light is bad,” the old man said, even in his sorrow instinctively extricating himself from possible formal involvement with the police. “And at the moment, I happened to be looking the other way. Still,” he said to the young man, who was advancing menacingly on the Spanish woman, “let me remind you that striking a woman is considered in certain quarters to be a most serious offense.”

  “I throw myself on your protection, Monsieur,” the woman said, stepping behind M. Banary-Cointal.

  “Don’t worry,” the man with the mustache said contemptuously. “I won’t hit her again. She is not worth the emotion. All I want is my three hundred francs.”

  “What do you think of a man,” the woman said, from the shelter of the old man’s bulk, “who buys a lady flowers and then demands to be reimbursed?”

  “To keep the record clear,” the man with the mustache said, “let me say once and for all that I never bought her any flowers. When I went to the toilet she took the violets from the basket and when I came back the woman asked me for three hundred francs and rather than make a scene I …”

  “Please,” the old man said, interested now despite himself, “this is all very confusing. If you would be good enough to start from the beginning, perhaps I can be of service.”