Short Stories: Five Decades (104 page)

“Awake,” Bert said softly. “Awake to glory.” He went over to the bed and touched the top of Martha’s head. Watching him, Munnie could feel the tips of his own fingers twitching electrically.

“Please,” Martha said, her eyes still closed. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“It’s nearly noon,” Munnie said, lying by nearly two hours, “and we have to tell you something.”

“Tell it to me,” said Martha, “and get out of here.”

“The Fat Man here,” said Bert, standing at her head, “has come up with an idea. He wants us to stay here until it begins to rain. How do you feel about it?”

“Of course,” Martha said.

Bert and Munnie smiled at each other, because they felt they understood her so well. “Martha,” said Bert, “you’re the only perfect girl alive.”

Then they went out of the room to give her a chance to get dressed.

They had met Martha Holm in Florence. They seemed to have the same ideas about which museums and which churches to go to and they kept bumping into her and she was alone and obviously American and as Bert said, they didn’t come prettier, and finally they started talking to each other. Maybe it was because they had first seen her in the Uffizi Gallery among the Botticellis that gave Munnie the idea, but he thought, privately, that, aside from the fact that her hair was short and dark and irregularly cut, she looked like the Primavera, tall, slender, and girlish, with a long narrow nose and deep, brooding, dangerous eyes. He felt extravagant and embarrassed to be thinking things like this about a twenty-one-year-old American girl who wore slacks and had gone for a year to Smith, but he couldn’t help himself. He never told Martha about it and, of course, he never said a word on the subject to Bert.

Martha knew a lot of people in and around Florence (later on, it turned out that she knew a lot of people in and around everyplace) and she got them invited to a tea in Fiesole at a villa where there was a swimming pool and to a party at which Munnie found himself dancing with a Contessa. Martha had been in Europe for nearly two years and she was wonderful at telling you what places to go to and what places were traps, and she spoke Italian and French, and she was ready when you told her to be ready, and she didn’t scream for pity when she had to walk a few blocks on her own two feet, and she laughed at Bert’s and Munnie’s jokes and made some of her own, and she didn’t giggle, weep or sulk, which put her several notches above every other girl Munnie had ever known. After they had been together for three days in Florence and were due to start for Portofino and France, it seemed unbearable just to leave her behind. As far as Munnie and Bert could tell, she had no plans of her own. “I tell my mother,” Martha explained, “that I’m taking courses at the Sorbonne, and it’s almost true, at least in the wintertime.”

Martha’s mother lived in Philadelphia, after three divorces, and every once in awhile, Martha said, she sent back a photograph, so that when she finally did arrive back home, there wouldn’t be an embarrassing moment on the dock when her mother wouldn’t recognize her.

So Munnie and Bert talked it over very seriously and sat at a café table with Martha in the Piazza del Signoria and ordered coffee and put it up to her.

“What we’ve decided,” Bert said, with Munnie sitting beside him, silently agreeing, “is that the Brooks-Carboy unguided tour of Europe could use you, as interpreter, hotel-finder, and chief taster of foreign foods. Aside from supplying a welcome feminine touch. Are you interested?”

“Yes,” Martha said.

“We’d like to know if we could mesh schedules, more or less,” Munnie said.

Martha smiled. “I’m on a schedule of drift,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Does that mean,” Munnie asked, because he liked to have everything absolutely clear, “that you want to come along?”

“It means that I want to come along very much,” said Martha, “and I was hoping you’d ask me.” She looked at each of them for exactly the same number of seconds, cheerful, grateful, ready for anything.

“Now,” said Bert, “Munnie and I have talked it over and we’re going to lay it on the line. Something like this has to be planned out in advance or there comes a dark and hideous night of disaster. We’ve thought up a good, workable set of rules and if you agree, off we go tomorrow. If not—no harm done—and we hope you spend a pleasant summer.”

“Get to it, Bert,” Munnie said, impatiently. “Don’t recite the preamble to the Constitution.”

“Rule Number One,” Bert said, with Martha sitting still, nodding, gravely listening, “rule number one is basic. No entanglements. Munnie and I’re old friends and we’ve planned this summer for years and we’ve been having a wonderful time and we don’t want to wind up fighting duels with each other or anything like that. Now, I know women …” He paused, daring either of them to smile. They didn’t smile.

“He wouldn’t have said that,” Munnie explained, “before the Army.”

“What do you know about women?” Martha asked, being serious.

“What I know is that women’re always busy choosing,” Bert went on. “They come into a room and if there’re five men present, their minds get to work like a business machine, punching holes. First Choice, Second Choice, Acceptable, Perhaps, Impossible.”

“Oh, my.” Martha began to laugh. She covered her mouth with her hand apologetically and tried to straighten her face. “Forgive me. Munnie … do you believe this?”

“I don’t know,” he said embarrassedly. “I haven’t had Bert’s advantages. I wasn’t in the Army.”

“I’ll even tell you how you’d choose,” Bert said, “between Munnie and me, so you won’t have to wonder or waste your time.”

“Tell me,” Martha said. “Do tell me.”

“In the beginning,” said Bert, “the tendency is to choose me. I’ll go into the reasons some other time. Then, after awhile, the switch sets in, and Munnie gets the final decision.”

“Poor Bert,” Martha said, chuckling. “How awful for you! Only winning the opening game of the season all the time. Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because you’ve got to promise not to choose anybody,” Bert said. “And if you
do
choose, you have to go to the grave with your secret.”

“To the grave,” Martha repeated, trying to be solemn.

“Until the boat sails,” Bert said, “we treat each other like brothers and sister, and that’s all.
D’accord?
”

“
D’accord
,” Martha said.

“Good.” Bert and Munnie nodded at each other, pleased with how reasonable everybody was.

“Rule Number Two,” Bert said, “if after awhile we get to feel you’re a nuisance—we say farewell and you leave. No tears. No recriminations. No scenes. Just a friendly shake of the hand and off to the nearest railroad station.
D’accord?
”

“
D’accord
two times,” Martha said.

“Rule Number Three—everybody pays exactly one-third of the expenses.”

“Of course,” said Martha.

“Rule Number Four,” Bert went on, like the director of a company explaining a plan of operations to his board, “everybody is free to go wherever he or she wants to, and with anyone else whoever, and no questions asked. We are not an inseparable unit, because inseparable units are boring. O.K.?”

“A free, loose confederation of sovereign states,” Martha said. “I got it. Whomever.”

They all shook hands on it, surrounded by the looming oversized statues, and started out together early the next morning, after figuring out a way to squeeze Martha into the car and strap her baggage onto the back, and it all couldn’t have worked out better. There hadn’t been a single argument all summer, although they had discussed, among other things, sex, religion, politics, marriage, the choice of careers, the position of women in modern society, the theatre in New York and Paris, and the proper size of bathing costumes for young girls on the beaches of Italy, France and Spain. And when Bert had taken up with a plump little blonde American girl in St. Tropez for a week or so, it hadn’t seemed to disturb Martha for a minute, even when the girl moved into the hotel they were staying at and frankly installed herself in the room next to Munnie’s and Bert’s.

The truth was, nothing seemed to disturb Martha very much. She greeted the events of each day with a strange and almost dreamlike placidity. She seemed to make no decisions herself and whatever decisions the others made, regardless of how they turned out, she accepted with exactly the same good-natured, smiling, rather vague approval. Linked in Munnie’s mind with this pleasant will-lessness was Martha’s extraordinary talent for sleeping. If nobody went in to awaken her in the morning, she would sleep on till noon, till two o’clock in the afternoon, even if she had gone to bed early the evening before. It wasn’t anything physical, either, because she didn’t need the sleep and never suggested, herself, that it was time to go to bed, no matter how late they stayed up at night or at what hour she had arisen in the morning. She never wrote any letters and rarely received any, since she hardly ever remembered to leave a forwarding address when they moved. When she needed money she would wire the bank in Paris that handled her allowance, and when it came she spent it carelessly. She took almost no interest in clothes and the reason she cut her hair short the way she did, she told Bert and Munnie, was that she didn’t want to be bothered having to comb it all the time.

When the three of them talked about what they would like to do with their lives, she was vaguer than ever. “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging, smiling, seeming to be mildly and indulgently puzzled about herself. “I suppose I’ll just hang around. Wait and see. For the moment, I’m on a policy of float. I don’t see anybody else our age doing anything so damned attractive. I’m waiting for a revelation to send me in a permanent direction. I’m in no hurry to commit myself, no hurry at all …”

In a curious way, Martha’s lack of direction made her much more interesting to Munnie than all the other girls he had ever known, the positive but limited girls who knew they wanted to be married and have babies and join a country club, the girls who wanted to go on the stage and be famous, the girls who wanted to become editors or deans of women’s colleges. Martha hadn’t settled for anything yet, Munnie felt, because nothing good enough had come up. And there was always the chance, he believed, that when she finally did commit herself it would be for something huge, original and glorious.

The only way that the plans hadn’t worked out as outlined in Florence had been that, except for the week of the plump blonde in St. Tropez, they had been an inseparable unit, but that was only because all three of them enjoyed being with one another better than being with anyone else. It wouldn’t have worked if Martha had been a different kind of girl, if she had been a coquette or greedy or foolish, and it wouldn’t have worked if Munnie and Bert hadn’t been such good friends and hadn’t trusted each other so completely, and finally, it wouldn’t have worked if they had all been a little older. But it
had
worked, at least up until the first week of October, and with luck, it would continue to work, until they kissed Martha good-bye and got on the boat train, and started for home.

They lay on the deserted beach until nearly two o’clock and then took a swim. They had a race, because the water was cold, and it was the best way to keep warm. The race was a short one, only about fifty yards, and Munnie was completely out of breath by the time he finished, trying to keep up with Martha. Martha won easily and was floating serenely on her back when Munnie came up to her, blowing heavily and fighting to get air in his lungs.

“It would be a different story,” Munnie said, grinning, but a little ashamed, “if I didn’t have asthma.”

“Don’t be gloomy about it,” Martha said, kicking her legs gently. “Women’re more naturally buoyant.”

They both stood up and watched Bert plowing doggedly up toward them.

“Bert,” Martha said, as he reached them and stopped, “you’re the only man I know who looks like an old lady driving an electric automobile when he swims.”

“My talents,” said Bert, with dignity, “run in another direction.”

They went in then, shouting and pink from the cold water and waving their arms. They dressed on the beach, under the big towel, one after another, for modesty’s sake. Martha wore slacks that came down only to the middle of her calf and a fisherman’s jersey, striped blue and white. Watching her arrange her clothes with light, careless movements, Munnie felt that never in his life would he see again anything so gay and obscurely touching as Martha Holm, dressed in a sailor’s striped shirt, on a sunny beach, shaking the sea water out of her short, dark hair.

They decided to have a picnic rather than to go to a restaurant for lunch and they got into the little two-seater MG that Munnie’s brother had left for him, when he had had his summer in Europe the year before. With Martha sitting on the cushioned brake in the middle they went into town and bought a cold chicken and a long loaf of bread and a piece of Gruyère cheese. They borrowed a basket from the fruit dealer from whom they bought a huge bunch of blue grapes and picked up two bottles of pink wine and got back into the car and drove all around the harbor to the old fort, which had been besieged and which had fallen at other times but which was used now in the summertime as a school to teach young people how to sail. They parked the car and walked out along the broad, bleached top of the sea wall, carrying the basket and the wine and the big, slightly damp towel, to serve as a tablecloth.

From the wall they could see the wide stretch of the oval harbor, empty now except for a dory with a homemade sail heading toward the point of Sainte Barbe, and the deserted beach and the white and red buildings of Saint Jean de Luz. The boatyard near the fort was crammed with small blue Snipe-class boats, lashed down and on blocks for the winter, and from somewhere in the distance came the faint sound of hammering, lonely and out-of-season, where a single workman was putting new planks into the bow of a small fishing vessel. Out at sea, almost lost against the gray-blue wash of the horizon, the boats of the tuna fleet bobbed in the swell. The tide was out and the waves rolled in, white and spumy, but not ominous, over the slanting uncovered rocks on which the sea wall was built. Close to the wall, on the bay side, the ruined, circular bastions of the old wall, which the sea had broken in another century, loomed out of the quiet water, irregular, crumbling, useless, looking somehow Roman and reminding Munnie of aqueducts that had brought mountain water to cities that had long since vanished and dungeons in which the last prisoners had died five hundred years before.