Short Stories: Five Decades (140 page)

“I don’t want to hear,” Martin said. He had liked Mrs. Winters.

“That’s all right,” Bowman said mockingly. “It won’t offend your pristine sense of modesty. They never say a word. She goes upstairs and takes a handful of pills and greases her face and puts a mask over her face to sleep and he sits downstairs by himself, with one light on, drinking whiskey straight. And after he’s knocked off half a bottle he lies down on the couch with his shoes on and sleeps. I’ve been there four times and it’s been the same each time. Pills, whiskey, silence. The public lovebirds. God, it makes me laugh. And the others … even when they’re alone. You don’t know our minister, do you, the Right Reverend Fenwick?”

“No,” Martin said.

“No, of course not. We played tennis today instead of worshipping.” Bowman chuckled. “I made a call on the man of God a few Sundays ago. His bedroom is on the ground floor. He’s a marvelous-looking gray-haired gentleman. If you were casting somebody to play the Pope in a movie, he’d get the job in five minutes. Always with a soft humble smile on his face, and divine forgiveness radiating out from him all over the state of Connecticut. And what do you think he was doing when I looked in on him? He was standing in front of a full-length mirror with only his shorts on, pulling his gut in, looking at himself critically and approvingly in profile. You’d’ve been surprised what good condition he’s in, he must do fifty pushups a day. Standing there, pushing his hair forward in little dabs, like a woman making up, to get that effect of other-worldly carelessness he’s famous for. He always looks as though he’s too busy communicating with God to pay attention to mundane things like combing his hair. And he was making faces at himself and raising his hands in holy benediction, practicing for next Sunday’s performance, just about naked in his shorts, with legs like an old fullback. The old faker. I don’t know what I hoped for. Maybe to find him on his knees, praying, in communion with God, with some secret happiness showing on his face that never is quite there in church. For the joys of the flesh,” Bowman said, switching abruptly, speaking in a confidential whisper, leaning toward Martin in the darkness, “I tried our African cousins.…”

“What’re you talking about?” Martin asked, puzzled.

“Our colored population,” Bowman said. “Closer to the primeval push. Simpler, I thought, less inhibited. The Slocums have a colored couple. You saw them passing drinks last night. About thirty-five years old, both of them. The man’s huge, he looks as though he could move walls with his bare hands. And the woman’s beautiful. Oversized, black, with great big breasts and a fantastic behind. I’ve sat behind them in the movies and when they laugh it’s like cannon going off in a twenty-one-gun salute. You’d think that if you saw them in bed together you’d shrivel with shame at your own white, niggling, sin-haunted, worn-out, puritanical gropings. Well, I saw them once. They have a room back of the kitchen at the Slocums and you can get up real close. I saw them, and they were in bed together all right, only all they were doing was reading. And do you know what she was reading?” Bowman laughed breathlessly. “She was reading
The Second Sex
. That’s that French book about how badly women have been treated since the Pleistocene Age. And he was reading the Bible. The first page. Genesis. In the beginning, there was the Word.” Bowman laughed again, sounding delighted with his story. “I went back a couple of times, but they had the curtains drawn, so I don’t know what they’re reading these days.…”

“Harry! Harry!” It was Mrs. Bowman’s voice, calling. She was standing, a white blur in the moonlight, about thirty yards from them. “What’re you doing out there? People’re going home.”

“Yes, dear,” Bowman called. “We’re coming right away. I’m just coming to the tag line of a joke with young Martin, here. I’ll be right along.”

“Well, hurry. It’s late.” Mrs. Bowman turned and walked through the moonlight back toward the house. Bowman watched his wife silently, his eyes brooding and puzzled.

“What did you want from my sister and Willard?” Martin asked, shaken by everything he had heard, no more certain now about what he should do than when he had arrived that evening.

“They were my last hope,” Bowman said in a low voice. “We’d better get back to the party.” He started across the lawn, Martin walking at his side.

“If ever two people seemed”—Bowman hesitated—
“connected
—dear to each other,
pleasurable
to each other … I’ve come home on the same train with Willard in the evening and the wives’re waiting, and your sister always seems to be a little apart, preparing herself, almost, and something happens to her face when she sees him.… They’re not all over each other, of course, like the Winters, but once in a while they touch each other with their fingertips. And with their boys … They know something, they’ve found something, that I don’t know and I haven’t found. When I see them, I have the feeling that I’m on the verge. It’s almost there, I almost have it. That’s why you nearly caught me the other night. God, I’ve been doing this for years and nobody’s ever come close. I’m careful as a cat. But that night, watching all three of you in the living room, late at night, I forgot where I was. When you came to the window, I … I wanted to smile, to say … to say, yes, good for you … Ah, maybe I’m wrong about them, too.”

“No,” Martin said, thoughtfully, “you’re not wrong.”

They were close to the candlelit tables by now and somebody had turned on the radio inside the house and from a loudspeaker on the terrace music was playing and several couples were dancing. Willard and Linda were dancing together, lightly, not close to each other, barely holding each other. Martin stopped and put his hand on Bowman’s arm to halt him. Bowman was trembling and Martin could feel the little shudders, as though the man were freezing, through the cloth of his sleeve.

“Listen,” Martin said, watching his sister and her husband dance, “I ought to tell them. And I ought to tell the police. Even if nobody could prove anything, you know what that would mean to you around here, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Bowman said, his eyes on the Willards, longing, baffled, despairing. “Ah, do whatever you want,” he said flatly. “It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

“I’m not going to say anything now,” Martin said, sounding harsher than he felt, trying, for Bowman’s sake, to keep the pity out of his voice. “But my sister writes me every week. If I hear that anybody has seen a man outside a window—once—just once …”

Bowman shrugged, still watching the dancers. “You won’t hear anything,” he said. “I’ll stay home at night. I’m never going to learn anything. Why’m I kidding myself?”

He walked away from Martin, robust and demented, a spy lost in a dark country, his pocket crammed with confused intelligence, impossible to decipher. He walked slowly among the dancers, and a moment later, Martin heard his laughter, loud, genial, from the table that was being used as a bar and around which three or four of the guests were standing, including Mr. and Mrs. Winters, who had their arms around each other’s waists.

Martin turned from the group at the bar and looked at his sister and her husband, dancing together on the flagstone terrace to the soft, late-at-night music, that sounded faraway and uninsistent in the open garden. Looking at them with new understanding, he had the feeling that Willard did not feel the need of leading, or Linda of following, that they moved gently and irresistibly together, mysteriously enclosed, beyond danger.

Poor Harry, he thought. But even so, he thought, starting over to Linda to tell her he was ready to go home, even so, tomorrow I’m buying them a dog.

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.