Lucy Crown (39 page)

She held him to her consolingly, patting his arm, oblivious of the people who passed them curiously on the dark, foreign street.

“Mother,” he said, “do you remember—when I went off at the end of that summer and I asked you what we would say if we happened to see each other—do you remember what you said?”

Lucy nodded, remembering the quiet afternoon and the dark autumn blue of the mountain lake and the boy in the suit that had grown too small for him in the summer. “I said, I guess we say hello.”

Tony pulled gently back from his mother’s embrace and stared into her eyes. “Hello,” he said gravely, “Hello, hello.”

Then they smiled at each other and they were like any other mother and grown son placidly parting after a day in the country.

Lucy looked down at her torn and rumpled dress, at her ripped stockings and scarred knees. “My,” she said, “what a sight! God only knows what the people in the hotel will think I’ve been up to today.” She laughed. Then she leaned over and kissed him matter-of-factly on the cheek, as though she had been kissing him good night every night for twenty years. “Sleep well,” she said, and turned and went into the hotel.

He watched her for a moment, going through the lobby toward the desk, a tall, heavy woman, lonely and showing her age, solid and reconciled and without illusions about herself. Then he got into the car and drove home.

The apartment was dark when he let himself in and he went into the child’s room and stood over his bed, listening to the steady breathing. After a moment or two, the boy awoke and sat up.

“Daddy,” he said.

“I just came in to say good night,” Tony said. “I just left your grandmother and she’s coming here tomorrow to see you after your nap.”

“After my nap,” the boy said drowsily, fixing it against the forgetfulness of sleep.

“She’s going to bring you a toy,” Tony said, whispering in the dark room.

“I want a tractor,” the boy said. “No, a boat.”

“I’ll call her in the morning,” Tony said, “and she’ll bring you a boat.”

“A big boat,” the boy said, lying back on his pillow. “For long voyages.”

Tony nodded over the bed. “A big boat for many long voyages,” he said.

But the boy was already asleep.

Tony went into the bedroom he shared with his wife. Dora was sleeping, too, on her back, breathing steadily, her head thrown back and her two hands up in front of her face, as though she were defending herself. Tony undressed quietly in the darkness and slipped into bed. He lay still for a few moments, thinking, Another day in my life.

Then he turned on his side and gently drew his wife’s hands down from her face and took her in his arms and slept.

A Biography of Irwin Shaw

Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an award-winning American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. His novel
The Young Lions
(1948) is considered a classic of World War II fiction. From the early pages of the
New Yorker
to the bestseller lists, Shaw earned a reputation as a leading literary voice of his generation.

Shaw was born Irwin Shamforoff in the Bronx, New York, on February 27, 1913. His parents, Will and Rose, were Russian Jewish immigrants and his father struggled as a haberdasher. The family moved to Brooklyn and barely survived the Depression. After graduating from high school at the age of sixteen, Shaw worked his way through Brooklyn College, where he started as quarterback on the school’s scrappy football team.

“Discovered” by a college teacher (who later got him his first assignment, writing for the
Dick Tracy
radio serials), Shaw became a household name at the age of twenty-two thanks to his first produced play,
Bury the Dead
. This 1935 Broadway hit—still regularly produced around the world—is a bugle call against profit-driven barbarity. Offered a job as a Hollywood staff scriptwriter, Shaw then contributed to numerous Golden Era films such as
The Big Game
(1936) and
The Talk of the Town
(1942). While continuing to write memorable stories for the
New Yorker
, he also penned
The Gentle People
(1939), a play that was adapted for film four different times.

World War II altered the course of Shaw’s career. Refusing a commission, he enlisted in the army, and was shipped off to North Africa as a private in a photography unit in 1943. After the North African campaign, he served in London during the preparations for the invasion of Normandy. After D-Day, Shaw and his unit followed the front lines and documented many of the most important moments of the war, including the liberations of Paris and the Dachau concentration camp.

The Young Lions
(1948), his epic novel, follows three soldiers—two Americans and one German—across North Africa, Europe, and into Germany. Along with James Jones’s
From Here to Eternity
, Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
, Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
, and
The Caine Mutiny
by Herman Wouk,
The Young Lions
stands as one of the great American novels of World War II. In 1958, it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.

In 1951, wrongly suspected of Communist sympathies, Shaw moved to Europe with his wife and six-month-old son. In Paris, he was neighbors with journalist Art Buchwald and friends with the great French writers, photographers, actors, and moviemakers of his generation, including Joseph Kessel, Robert Capa, Simone Signoret, and Louis Malle. In Rome, Shaw gave author William Styron his wedding lunch, doctored screenplays, walked with director Federico Fellini on the Via Veneto, and got the idea for his novel
Two Weeks in Another Town
(1960).

Finally, he settled in the small Swiss village of Klosters and continued writing screenplays, stage plays, and novels.
Rich Man, Poor Man
(1970) and
Beggerman, Thief
(1977) were made into the first famous television miniseries.
Nightwork
(1975) will soon be a major motion picture. Shaw died in the shadow of the Swiss peaks that had inspired Thomas Mann’s great novel
The Magic Mountain
.

Shaw as a young soldier crossing North Africa from Algiers to Cairo in 1943.

Shaw’s US Army record.

Shaw just after D-Day in Normandy, France, in 1944.

A few weeks after D-Day, Shaw and his Signal Corps film crew liberate Mont Saint-Michel.

A 1944 letter from Shaw to his wife, Marian, describing the “taking” of Mont Saint Michel, as well as a nerve-wracking night under a cathedral when he almost shot a group of monks, believing them to be Germans.

Shaw as a warrant-officer in Austria in 1945, with Signal Corps Captain Josh Logan (left) and Colonel Anatole Litvak (center), who became his lifelong friends.

Shaw, Marian, and their son, Adam, on the terrace of the newly built Chalet Mia in Klosters, Switzerland, in 1957.