Short Stories: Five Decades (54 page)

There was only one customer in the restaurant, sitting at the small bar near the entrance. The waiters had already gone home and Giovanni was changing glasses for the man at the bar and pouring him a bourbon. Weatherby sat at the end of the bar, but there were still only two stools between him and the other customer. Giovanni came over to Weatherby and said, “Good evening, Mr. Weatherby,” and put out a glass and poured him a big whiskey, without measuring, and opened a soda bottle and allowed Weatherby to fill the glass himself.

Giovanni was a large, non-Italian-looking man, with an unsmiling, square, severe face and a gray, Prussian-cut head of hair. “How’s Mrs. Weatherby tonight?” he asked.

“Fine,” Weatherby said. “At least she was fine when I talked to her this afternoon. I’ve just come from the office.”

“You work too hard, Mr. Weatherby,” Giovanni said.

“That’s right.” Weatherby took a good long swallow of the whiskey. There is nothing like Scotch, he thought gratefully, and touched the glass with the palm of his hand and rubbed it pleasurably. “You’re open late tonight,” he said.

“That’s all right,” Giovanni said. “I’m in no hurry. Drink as much as you want.” Although he was talking to Weatherby, Weatherby somehow had the feeling that the words were addressed to the other man at the bar, who was sitting with his elbows on the mahogany, holding his glass in his two hands in front of his face and peering with a small smile into it, like a clairvoyant who sees something undefined and cloudy, but still agreeable, in the crystal ball. The man was slender and graying, with a polite, educated face. His clothes were narrow and modish, in dark gray, and he wore a gay striped bow tie and a button-down oxford white shirt. Weatherby noted a wedding ring on his left hand. He didn’t look like the sort of man who sat around alone in bars drinking late at night. The light in the bar was subdued and Weatherby had the impression that in a brighter light he would recognize the man and that he would turn out to be someone he had met briefly once or twice long ago. But New York was like that. After you lived in New York long enough, a great many of the faces seemed tantalizingly familiar to you.

“I suppose,” Giovanni said, standing in front of Weatherby, “after it happens, we’ll be losing you.”

“Oh,” Weatherby said, “we’ll be dropping in here to eat again and again.”

“You know what I mean,” Giovanni said. “You plan on moving to the country?”

“Eventually,” Weatherby said, “I imagine so. If we find a nice place, not too far out.”

“Kids need fresh air,” Giovanni said. “It isn’t fair to them, growing up in the city.”

“No,” Weatherby said. Dorothy, his wife, was seven-months pregnant. They had been married five years and this was their first child, and it gave him an absurd primitive pleasure to talk about the country air that his child would breathe as he grew up. “And then, of course, the schools.” What joy there was in platitudes about children, once you knew you could have them.

“Mr. Weatherby …” It was the other man at the bar. “May I say good evening to you, sir?”

Weatherby turned toward the man, a little reluctantly. He was in no mood for random conversation with strangers. Also, he had had a fleeting impression that Giovanni regretted the man’s advance toward him.

“You don’t remember me,” the man said, smiling nervously. “I met you eight or ten years ago. In my … ah … in my shop.” He made a slight sibilant sound that might have been the beginning of an embarrassed laugh. “In fact, I think you came there two or three times.… There was some question of our perhaps doing some work together, if I remember correctly. Then, when I heard Giovanni call you by name. I couldn’t help overhearing. I’m … ah … Sidney Gosden.” He let his voice drop as he spoke his name, as people who are celebrated sometimes do when they don’t wish to sound immodest. Weatherby glanced across the bar at Giovanni for help, but Giovanni was polishing a glass with a towel, his eyes lowered, consciously keeping aloof from the conversation.

“Oh … uh … yes,” Weatherby said vaguely.

“I had—have—the shop on Third Avenue,” Gosden said. “Antiques, interior decoration.” Again the soft, hissing, self-deprecating half-laugh. “It was when I was supposed to do over that row of houses off Beekman Place and you had spoken to a friend of mine …”

“Of course,” Weatherby said heartily. He still didn’t remember the man’s name, really, but he remembered the incident. It was when he was just starting in, when he still thought he could make a go of it by himself as an architect, and he had heard that four old buildings on the East Side were going to be thrown together and cut up into small studio apartments. Somebody in one of the big firms, which had turned the job down, had suggested it might be worth looking into and had given him Gosden’s name. His memory of his conversation with Gosden was shadowy, fifteen or twenty minutes of rather distracted talk in a dark shop with unlit brass lamps and early-American tables piled one on top of another, a sense of time being wasted, a sense of going up one more dead-end street. “Whatever happened?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Gosden said. “You know how those things are. In the end, they merely pulled the whole block down and put up one of those monstrous apartment houses nineteen-stories high. It was too bad. I was terribly impressed with your ideas. I do remember, to this day.” He sounded like a woman at a cocktail party, talking swiftly to a man in a corner to hold him there, saying anything that came to mind, to try to keep him from escaping to the bar and leaving her there stranded, with no one to talk to for the rest of the evening, for the rest of her life. “I meant to follow your career,” Gosden went on hurriedly. “I was sure you were meant for splendid achievements, but a person is so kept so frantically busy in this city—with nothing important, of course—the best intentions—” He waved his hand helplessly and let the complicated sentence lapse. “I’m sure I pass buildings you’ve put up every day, monuments to your talent, without knowing …”

“Not really,” Weatherby said. “I went in with a big firm.” He told the man the name of the firm and Gosden nodded gravely, to show his respect for their works. “I do bits and pieces for them.”

“Everything in due time,” Gosden said gaily. “So you’re one of those young men who are putting us poor New Yorkers into our cold, bright glass cages.”

“I’m not so young,” Weatherby said, thinking, grimly,
That’s
the truth. And, at the most, Gosden could only have been ten years older than he. He drained his drink. Gosden’s manner, gushy, importunate, with its hint of effeminacy, made him uncomfortable. “Well,” he said, taking out his wallet, “I think I’d better …”

“Oh, no, please …” Gosden said. There was a surprising note of anguish in his voice. “Giovanni will just lock up the bottles and put me out if you go. Another round, please, Giovanni. Please. And please serve yourself, too. Late at night like this …”

“I really must …” Weatherby began. Then he saw Giovanni looking at him in a strange, imperative way, as though there were an urgent message he wanted to deliver. Giovanni quickly poured a second Scotch for Weatherby, a bourbon for Gosden and a neat slug of bourbon for himself.

“There,” Gosden said, beaming. “
That’s
better. And don’t think, Mr. Weatherby, that I go around town just offering rounds of drink to
every
body. In fact, I’m parsimonious, unpleasantly parsimonious, my wife used to say, it was the one thing she constantly held against me.” He held up his glass ceremoniously. His long narrow hand was shaking minutely, Weatherby noticed, and he wondered if Gosden was a drunkard. “To the cold, beautiful, lonesome glass buildings,” Gosden said, “of the city of New York.”

They all drank. Giovanni knocked his tot down in one gulp and washed the glass and dried it without changing his expression.

“I do love this place,” Gosden said, looking around him fondly at the dim lamps and the gluey paintings of the Ligurian coast that dotted the walls. “It has especial memories for me. I proposed marriage here on a winter night. To my wife,” he added hastily, as if afraid that Weatherby would suspect he had proposed marriage to somebody else’s wife here. “We never came here often enough after that.” He shook his head a little sadly. “I don’t know why. Perhaps because we lived on the other side of town.” He sipped at his drink and squinted at a painting of sea and mountains at the other end of the bar. “I always intended to take my wife to Nervi. To see the Temple,” he said obscurely. “The Golden Bough. As the French would say, Hélas, we did not make the voyage. Foolishly, I thought there would always be time, some other year. And, of course, being parsimonious, the expense always seemed out of proportion …” He shrugged and once more took up his clairvoyant position, holding the glass up with his two hands and peering into it. “Tell me, Mr. Weatherby,” he said in a flat, ordinary tone of voice, “have you ever killed a man?”

“What?” Weatherby asked, not believing that he had heard correctly.

“Have you ever killed a man?” Gosden for the third time made his little hissing near-laugh. “Actually, it’s a question that one might well ask quite frequently, on many different occasions. After all, there must be quite a few people loose in the city who at one time or another have killed a man—policemen on their rounds, rash automobilists, prizefighters, doctors and nurses, with the best will in the world, children with air rifles, bank robbers, thugs, soldiers of the great war …”

Weatherby looked doubtfully at Giovanni. Giovanni didn’t say anything, but there was something in his face that showed Weatherby the barman wanted him to humor the other man.

“Well,” Weatherby said, “I was in the war.…”

“In the infantry, with a bayonet, perhaps,” Gosden said, in the new, curious, flat, noneffeminate voice.

“I was in the artillery,” Weatherby said. “In a battery of 105s. I suppose you could say that …”

“A dashing captain,” Gosden said, smiling, “peering through binoculars, calling down the fire of the great guns on the enemy headquarters.”

“It wasn’t exactly like that,” Weatherby said. “I was nineteen years old and I was a private and I was one of the loaders. Most of the time I spent digging.”

“Still,” Gosden persisted, “you could say that you contributed, that by your efforts men had been killed.”

“Well,” Weatherby said, “we fired off a lot of rounds. Somewhere along the line we probably hit something.”

“I used to be a passionate hunter,” Gosden said. “When I was a boy. I was brought up in the South. Alabama, to be exact, although I’m proud to say one would never know it from my accent. I once shot a lynx.” He sipped thoughtfully at his drink. “It finally became distasteful to me to take the lives of animals. Although I had no feeling about birds. There is something inimical,
prehuman
about birds, don’t you think, Mr. Weatherby?”

“I haven’t really given it much thought,” Weatherby said, sure now the man was drunk and wondering how soon, with decency, he could get out of there and whether he could go without buying Gosden a round.

“There must be a moment of the utmost exaltation when you take a human life,” Gosden said, “followed by a wave of the most abject, ineradicable shame. For example, during the war, among your soldier friends, the question must have arisen.…”

“I’m afraid,” Weatherby said, “that in most cases they didn’t feel as much as you would like them to have felt.”

“How about you?” Gosden said. “Even in your humble position as loader, as you put it, as a cog in the machinery—how did you feel, how do you feel now?”

Weatherby hesitated, on the verge of being angry with the man. “Now,” he said, “I regret it. While it was happening, I merely wanted to survive.”

“Have you given any thought to the institution of capital punishment, Mr. Weatherby?” Gosden spoke without looking in Weatherby’s direction, but staring at his own dim reflection above the bottles in the mirror above the bar. “Are you pro or con the taking of life by the State? Have you ever made an effort to have it abolished?”

“I signed a petition once, in college, I think.”

“When we are young,” Gosden said, speaking to his wavery reflection in the mirror, “we are more conscious of the value of life. I, myself, once walked in a procession protesting the hanging of several young colored boys. I was not in the South, then. I had already moved up North. Still, I walked in the procession. In France, under the guillotine, the theory is that death is instantaneous, although an instant is a variable quantity, as it were. And there is some speculation that the severed head as it rolls into the basket is still capable of feeling and thinking some moments after the act is completed.”

“Now, Mr. Gosden,” Giovanni said soothingly, “I don’t think it helps to talk like this, does it, now?”

“I’m sorry, Giovanni,” Gosden said, smiling brightly. “I should be ashamed of myself. In a charming bar like this, with a man of sensibility and talent like Mr. Weatherby. Please forgive me. And now, if you’ll pardon me, there’s a telephone call I have to make.” He got off his stool and walked jauntily, his shoulders thrown back in his narrow dark suit, toward the other end of the deserted restaurant and went through the little door that led to the washrooms and the telephone booth.

“My Lord,” Weatherby said. “What’s
that
all about?”

“Don’t you know who he is?” Giovanni said, in a low voice, keeping his eyes on the rear of the restaurant.

“Only what he just told me,” Weatherby said. “Why? Are people supposed to know who he is?”

“His name was in all the papers, two, three years ago,” Giovanni said. “His wife was raped and murdered. Somewhere on the East Side. He came home for dinner and found the body.”

“Good God,” said Weatherby softly, with pity.

“They picked up the guy who did it the next day,” Giovanni said. “It was a carpenter or a plumber or something like that. A foreigner from Europe, with a wife and three kids in Queens somewhere. No criminal sheet, no complaints on him previous. He had a job to do in the building and he rang the wrong doorbell and there she was in her bathrobe or something.”

“What did they do to him?” Weatherby asked.