Short Stories: Five Decades

by Irwin Shaw

  Rebecca had broken with her boyfriend the week before. He worked in Wall Street and even with the way things were going down there, he had an income that was designed to please any young girl with marriage on her mind. Her boyfriend’s family had a seat on the stock exchange, a big seat, and unless Wall Street vanished completely, which was a possibility, of course, he had nothing to worry about. And, from all indications, he was approaching marriage, like a squirrel approaching a peanut, apprehensive but hungry. But the week before, he had tried to take Rebecca to an orgy on East 63rd Street. That is, he had taken Rebecca to an orgy without telling her that was what it was going to be. It had seemed like a superior party to Rebecca, with well-dressed guests and champagne and pot, until people began to take off their clothes.

  Then Rebecca had said, “George, you have brought me to an orgy.”

  And George had said, “That’s what it looks like, honey.”

  And Rebecca had said, “Take me home. This is no place for a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn.”

  And George had said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, when are you going to stop being a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn?” He was taking off his Countess Mara tie as she went out the front door. So she had nobody this Saturday to look good for and she was putting in some extra time on Beulah’s nails, because Beulah had somebody to look good for, at precisely 3:15 that afternoon, to be exact, if the goddamn air-traffic controllers didn’t keep the plane from Zurich in a holding pattern between Nantucket and Allentown, Pennsylvania, for five hours, as they sometimes did.

  The picture of the man who was arriving at Kennedy that afternoon was in a silver frame on an end table in the living room and another picture of him, in a leather frame, was on the dresser in Beulah’s bedroom. In both pictures he was in ski clothes, because he was a ski instructor by the name of Jirg in St. Anton, where Beulah had spent a month the previous winter. In the picture in the living room he was in motion, skis beautifully clamped together, giving it that old Austrian reverse shoulder, a spray of snow pluming behind him. He was at rest in the bedroom, brown, smiling, long hair blowing boyishly in the wind, like Jean-Claude Killy, all strong white teeth and Tyrolean charm. Even Rebecca had to admit he was luscious, Beulah’s word for Jirg, although Rebecca had said when Beulah had first reported on him, “John Osborne says in some play or other that having an affair with a ski instructor is vulgar.”

  “Englishmen,” Beulah had said, hurt, “’re jealous of everybody. They’ll say anything that comes into their heads, because they zilched the Empire.” It hadn’t been vulgar at all. On the contrary. It hadn’t been like getting involved with a man in the city, worrying about finding a taxi in the rain to get there on time and waking up at seven o’clock in the morning to go to work and eating lunch alone in Hamburger Heaven and worrying if the man’s stuffy friends would think your clothes were extreme and listening to him complain about the other men in the office. In the mountains everybody lived in ski pants and it was all snow like diamonds and frosty starlight and huge country feather beds and rosy complexions and being together day and night and incredibly graceful young men doing dangerous, beautiful things to show off for you and eating in cute mountain huts with hot wine and people singing jolly Austrian songs at the next table and all the other girls trying to get your ski teacher away from you both on the slopes and off, and not managing it, because, as he said in his darling Austrian accent, wrinkling that dear tanned face in an effort to speak English correctly. “It is neffer come my way before, a girl so much like you.”

  Beulah hadn’t seen him since St. Anton, but his influence had lingered on. She hadn’t been pleased with any man she’d gone out with since she’d come back to America and she’d been saving her money so that she could spend three months at least this winter in the Tirol. Then the letter had come from Jirg, telling her that he’d been offered a job at Stowe starting in December and would she be glad to see him? Beulah had written back the same day. December was too far off, she wrote, and why didn’t he come to New York immediately? As her guest. (The poor boys were paid a pitiful pittance in Austria, despite their great skills, and you always had to show practically inhuman delicacy about paying when you went anywhere with them, so as not to embarrass them. In the month in St. Anton she had become one of the most unobtrusive bill payers the Alps had ever seen.) She could afford it, she told herself, because this winter she wasn’t going on an expensive jaunt to Europe but would be skiing at Stowe.

  “You’re crazy,” Rebecca had said when she learned about the invitation. “I wouldn’t pay for a man to lead me out of a burning building.” Sometimes Rebecca’s mother showed through a little in her daughter’s attitudes.

  “I’m giving myself a birthday gift, luv,” Beulah had said. Her birthday was in November. “One beautiful brown, energetic young Austrian who doesn’t know what’s hit him. It’s my money, luv, and I couldn’t spend it better.”

  Jirg had written that he liked the idea and as soon as he was finished with his summer job, he would be happy to accept his old pupil’s invitation. He had underlined pupil roguishly. He had some clean outdoor job on a farm in the summer. He had sent another picture, to keep his memory green. It was of himself, winning a ski teachers’ race at the end of the season. He was wearing goggles and a helmet and was going so fast that the picture was a little blurred, but Beulah was certain she would have recognized him anyway. She had pasted the picture in a big scrapbook that contained photographs of all the men she had had affairs with.

  There was one thing really worrying Beulah as she sat in her robe in the living room, watching Rebecca buff her nails. She hadn’t yet decided where to put Jirg. Ideally, the best place would be the apartment. She and Rebecca had separate rooms and the bed in her room was a double one and it wasn’t as though she and Rebecca were shy about bringing men home with them. And stashing Jirg away in a hotel would cost money and he wouldn’t always be on hand when she wanted him. But Rebecca had had an unsettling effect on some of her boyfriends, with her red hair and white skin and that brazen (that was the only word for it, Beulah thought), that brazen Brooklyn camaraderie with men. And let’s face it, Beulah thought, she’s a wonderful girl and I’d trust her with my life, but when it comes to men, there isn’t a loyal bone in her body. And a poor gullible ski teacher who’d never been off the mountain in his life and used to avid girls coming and going in rapacious batches all winter long.… And sometimes Beulah had to work nights or go out of town for several days at a time on a job.…

  She had been puzzling over the problem ever since she got the letter from Jirg and she still hadn’t made up her mind. Play it by ear, she decided. See what the odds are on the morning line.

  “There you are,” Rebecca said, pushing her hand away. “The anointed bride.”

  “Thanks, luv,” Beulah said, admiring her nails. “I’ll buy you lunch at P.J.’s” There were always a lot of extra men who ate lunch at P.J.’s on Saturday, with nothing to do for the weekend and an eye out for companionship or whatever, and maybe she could make a connection for Rebecca and get her out of the apartment at least for the afternoon and evening. With luck, for the whole night.

  “Naah,” Rebecca said, standing and yawning. “I don’t feel like going out. I’m going to stay home and watch the game of the week on the tube.”

  Shit, Beulah said to herself.

  Then the phone rang.

  “Miss Stickney’s residence,” Beulah said into the phone. She always answered that way, as though she were a maid or the answering service, so that if it was some pest, she could say, “Miss Stickney’s not at home. Can I take a message?”

  “May I speak to Miss Stickney, please?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Mr. Bagshot.”

  “Who?”

  “From the Browsing—”

  “Hi, luv,” Beulah said. “My book on Sicily come in yet, you know the one?”

  “It’s on order,” Christopher said. He was disappointed with this co
mmercial prelude, even though she called him luv. “What I’m phoning for, beautiful,” he said daringly, suddenly deciding to be racy and familiar, put himself right up there on her level, so to speak, “what I’m phoning for is what do you say you and me hit the town tonight?”

  “Hit what?” Beulah asked, puzzled.

  “Well, I thought I just happen to be free and maybe you’re hanging loose yourself and we could go to some joint for dinner and then split off downtown to the Electric—”

  “Oh, shit, luv,” Beulah said, “I’m prostrate with grief. This is Drearsville Day for me. I’ve got an aunt coming into Kennedy from Denver this P.M. and God knows when I can get rid of her.” It was standard policy on her part never to admit that she even knew another man when asked for a date.

  “Oh, that’s all right.…”

  “Wait a minute, luv,” she said. “There’s a buzz at the door. Hold fast, like a dear.” She put her hand over the phone. “Hey, Becky,” she said to Rebecca, who was screwing the top on the nail-polish bottle, “how’d you like to hit the town with a divine—”

  “Hit what?”

  “That beautiful boy from the bookstore is on the phone. He’s invited me to dinner. But—”

  “That dwarf?” Rebecca said.

  “He’s not so small, actually,” Beulah said. “He’s very well proportioned.”

  “I don’t go in for comedy acts,” Rebecca said. “He’d have to use his ladder even to get into scoring territory.”

  “There’s no need to be vulgar about my friends,” Beulah said frigidly, realizing finally that the whole Sixth Fleet wouldn’t be able to get her roommate out of the house today. “And I do think it shows a surprisingly ugly side to your character. Prejudice is the word, luv. It’s a kind of anti-Semitism, if you want to know what I think.”

  “Tell him to pick on somebody his own size,” Rebecca said, taking the nail polish into the bathroom.

  Beulah lifted her hand from the phone. “It was the super with the mail, luv,” she said. “Bills and more bills.”

  “Yeah,” said Christopher dispiritedly, “I know how it is.” He remembered that Beulah Stickney owed him $47 since July, but of course this was not the time to bring it up. “Well, have a nice time.…” He prepared to hang up.

  “Hold on, Chris.…” That was his name, Christopher. “Maybe something can be salvaged from Be Kind to Aunts Day, after all. Maybe I can get her drunk at the airport or she’ll turn out to be suffering from some dreadful female disease and will have to plunge into bed.…” The plane was due at 3:15, but you never could tell, it might be held up for engine trouble or darling Jirg, who had never been out of the hills before, might be confused by the wild traffic of the city of Zurich and miss the connection or go to the wrong gate and wind up in Tehran. Or even, the way things were going with airlines these days, the plane could be hijacked or bombed by Arabs or just fall down into a lake in Labrador. One thing she couldn’t bear and that was having dinner alone. “I’ll tell you what, you just sit there among all those lovely books like a good boy and I’ll get on the horn this afternoon and tell you if Auntie looks like conking out or not. What time do you stay open to?”

  “Seven o’clock,” Christopher said.

  “You poor overworked boy,” Beulah said. “Stay near the phone, luv.”

  “Yeah,” Christopher said.

  “It was dear of you to call,” Beulah said and hung up. She always concluded on the telephone with “It was dear of you to call” and without saying goodbye. It was original and it spread good will.

  She looked at the clock and then went into the bathroom to experiment with her hair.

  ***

  Christopher put the phone down slowly, the palms of his hands damp. The store felt very warm and he went to the front door and opened it. He stared out at Madison Avenue. People were passing by in the sunlight. Perhaps it was his imagination, but it looked to him as though the tall people on the avenue were strolling and the short ones were, well burrowing. He closed the door and went back into the shop, reflecting on his conversation with Stickney, Beulah**. If luck had been with him, if he’d had a premonition or extrasensory perception or something, he’d have asked to speak to Rebecca Fleischer, instead of Beulah Stickney. The chances were that no aunt of Rebecca Fleischer’s was coming in from Denver that afternoon. Now, after having tried to make it with Beulah, he could not call back and ask Rebecca. There were limits. The girl would be mortally offended, being tapped to go into the game as a substitute, as it were, and he wouldn’t blame her.

  He didn’t trust Beulah’s ability to get rid of her aunt before seven o’clock. He had aunts of his own and once they got hold of you, they stuck.

  Back to the address book. It was nearly twelve o’clock and people would be going out to lunch and then matinees or linen showers or whatever it was girls went to on Saturday afternoons.

  Caroline Trowbridge was in bed with Scotty Powalter. At one time, Caroline Trowbridge had been Caroline Powalter, but Scotty Powalter had found her in bed with his ex-roommate from Yale, Giuliano Ascione, and had divorced her for adultery. It hadn’t been a completely friendly divorce. It had been all over the New York Daily News and Caroline had been dropped from the social register the next year, but she and Scotty had what they both agreed was a Big Physical Thing for each other and every once in a while they spent a night or a week together until something happened to remind Scotty of his ex-roommate at Yale.

  The truth was that Caroline had a Big Physical Thing with almost every man she met. She was a tall, sturdy, inbred, healthy social-register kind of girl who was crazy about boats and horses and Italians and if she had had to swear to it under oath, she wouldn’t have been able to say what was more fun—leaping a ditch on an Irish hunter or crewing a Dragon in a force-six gale or going on a weekend to a sinful little inn in the country with one of her husband’s best friends.

  Despite her catholic approval of the entire male sex, she oftened regretted not being married to Scotty anymore. He was six feet, four inches tall and built accordingly and the way he behaved in bed, you’d never suspect he came from one of the oldest families along the Main Line in Philadelphia. His family had a place up in Maine with horses and he had a sixty-foot ketch at Center Island and he didn’t have to bother with anything boring like working. As she sometimes said to her lovers, if he hadn’t been so insanely and irrationally possessive, it would have been the marriage of the century.

  He had called her the evening before from the Racquet Club, where he had been playing backgammon. When she recognized his voice on the telephone and he said he was calling from the Racquet Club, she knew he had been losing, because he always got horny when he lost at backgammon, especially on weekends. She’d canceled the man she was supposed to go to Southampton with—after all, husbands, even ex-husbands, came first—and Scotty had come over and she’d opened two cans of turtle soup and they’d been in bed ever since 9:30 the night before. It had been such a complete night that sometime around dawn, he’d even mentioned something about getting remarried. It was almost noon now and they were hungry and she got out of bed and put on a pink terry-cloth robe and went into the kitchen to make some bloody marys, for nourishment. She was always strict with herself about no drinks before 11 o’clock, because she had seen too many of her friends go that route. She was dashing in the Worcestershire sauce when the phone rang.

  What Christopher liked about her, he thought, as his hand hovered over the phone, preparing to dial, was that she was wholesome. In the polluted city, she was a breath of fresh country air. If you didn’t know about her and her family’s steel mills and her divorce and her expulsion from the social register, you’d think she was a girl just in from the farm, milking cows. She came into the shop often, breezing in with a big childish smile, hanging onto a man’s arm, a different one each time, and buying large, expensive, color-plate books about boats or horses. She had an account at the shop, but usually the man with her would pay for the books and t
hen she would throw her strong firm arms around her escort and kiss him enthusiastically in gratitude, no matter who was looking.

  She had kissed Christopher once, too. Although not in the shop. He had gone to the opening of a one-man show at an art gallery four doors down on Madison Avenue and she was there, too, squinting over the heads of the other connoisseurs at the geometric forms in clashing colors that represented the painter’s reaction to being alive in America. Extraordinarily, she was unaccompanied, and when she spotted Christopher, she bulled her way through the crowd, smiling sexily, and said, “My deliverer,” and put her arm through his and stroked his forearm. There was something unnatural about her being alone, like a free-floating abalone. Her predestined form was the couple. Knowing this, Christopher was not particularly flattered by her attention, since it was no more personal than a swan’s being attracted to a pond or a wildcat to a pine tree. Still, the touch of her capable ex-social-register fingers on his arm was cordial.

  “I suppose,” she said, “clever man that you are, that you know what all this is about.”

  “Well.…” Christopher began.

  “They remind me of my trigonometry class at Chatham Hall. That distressing pi sign. Don’t they make you thirsty, Mr.—uh?”

  “Bagshot.”

  “Of course. Why don’t you and I just sidle out of here like true art lovers and go out into the night and snap on one or two martinis?”

  They were nearly at the door by now, anyway, so Christopher said, as brightly as he could, “Right on.” The owner of the gallery, who was a business friend of his, was near the door, too, looking at him with a betrayed expression for leaving so quickly. Christopher tried to show, by a grimace and a twitch of his shoulders, that he was under the sway of powers stronger than he and that he would come back soon, but he doubted that he communicated.