Irwin Shaw: Nightwork

“Think it over,” Wales said. “You’d have the time of your life.”

“S … stop tempting a working man,” I said.

“What the hell,” Wales said. “Everybody needs a vacation.”

“I… I’ll think it o … over,” I said.

He went back to his seat, leaving the smell of whiskey in the cockpit. I kept my eyes on the horizon, sharp against the bright blue of the winter sky, trying not to be jealous of a man who was as untalented on the slopes as Wales, but who could take three weeks off from work to spend thousands of dollars to ski in the Alps.

After I checked into the office and confirmed that there was nothing for me that weekend, I drove into town in my Volkswagen for the biannual ritual of the physical examination. Dr Ryan was an eye-specialist, but kept up a limited general practice on the side. He was a slow-moving, gentle old man who had been listening to my heart, taking my blood pressure, and testing my eyes and reflexes for five years. Except for one occasion when I bad come down with a mild case of grippe, he had never prescribed as much as an aspirin for me. “In shape for the Derby”, he would say each time when he finished with me. “Ready to run for the roses.” He shared my interest in the horses and was an impressive student of form. Every once in a while he would call me at my home when he would discover a horse that was outrageously underpriced or carrying, in his opinion, much too little weight.

The examination followed its usual routine, with the doctor nodding comfortably after each stage. It was only when he came to my eyes that his expression changed. I read the charts all right, but when he used his instruments to look into my eyes, his face became professionally sober. His nurse came into the office twice to tell him that there were patients in the waiting room with appointments, but he brusquely waved her aside. He gave me a whole series of tests that he had never used before, making me stare straight ahead while he kept his hands in his lap, then slowly lifting his hands and asking me to tell him when they came into my field of vision. Finally, he put away his instruments, sat down heavily behind his desk, sighed, and passed his hand wearily across his face.

“Mr. Grimes,” he said finally, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”

The news old Dr Ryan had for me on that sunny morning in his big, old-fashioned office changed my whole life.

“Technically,” he said, “the name of the disease is retinoschisis [1]. It is a splitting of the ten layers of the retina into two portions, giving rise to the development of a retinal cyst. It is a well-known condition. Most often it does not progress, but as far as it goes it’s irreversible. Sometimes we can arrest it by operating by laser beam. One of its manifestations is a blocking out of peripheral vision. In your case downward peripheral vision. For a pilot who has to be alert to a whole array of dials in front of him, below him, around him on all sides, as well as the horizon toward which he is speeding, it is essentially disabling… Still, for all general purposes, such as reading, sports, et cetera, you can consider yourself normal.”

“Normal,” I said. “Boy, oh boy, normal. You know the only thing that’s normal for me, Doc. Flying. That’s all I ever wanted to do, all I ever prepared myself to do…”

“I’m sending the report over today, Mr. Grimes,” Ryan said. “With the greatest regret. Of course, you can go to another doctor. Other doctors. I don’t believe they can do anything to help you, but that’s only my opinion. As far as I’m concerned, you’re grounded. As of this minute. For good. I’m sorry.”

I fought to hold back the surge of hatred I felt for the neat old man, seated among his shining instruments, signing papers of condemnation with his scrawly [2]doctor’s handwriting. I knew I was being unreasonable, but it was not a moment for reason. I lurched out of the office, not shaking Ryan’s hand, saying, “Goddamnit, goddamnit,” aloud over and over to myself, paying no attention to the people in the waiting room and on the street who stared curiously at me as I headed for the nearest bar. I knew I couldn’t face going back to the airfield and saying what I would have to say without fortification. Considerable fortification.

The bar was decorated like an English pub, dark wood and pewter tankards on the walls. I ordered a whiskey. There was a thin old man in a khaki mackinaw and a hunter’s red cap leaning against the bar with a glass of beer in front of him. “They’re polluting the whole lake,” the old man was saying in a dry Vermont accent. “The paper mill. In five years it’ll be as dead as Lake Erie. And they keep putting salt on the roads so those idiots from New York can go eighty miles an hour up to Stowe and Mad River and Sugarbush, and, when the snow melts off the salt goes into all the ponds and rivers. By the time I die there won’t be a fish left anywhere in the whole state. And nobody does a goddamn thing about it. I tell you, I’m glad I won’t be around to see it.”

I ordered another whiskey. The first one hadn’t seemed to do anything for me. Nor did the second. I paid and went out to my car. The thought that Lake Champlain, in which I had swum every summer and on which I had spent so many great days sailing and fishing, was going to die, somehow seemed sadder than anything that had happened to me for a long time.

When I got to the office I could tell by the look on Cunningham’s rough old face that Dr Ryan had already called him. Cunningham was the president and sole owner of the little airline and was a World War II vintage fighter pilot, and I guess he knew how I felt that afternoon.

“I’m ch… checking out, Freddy,” I said. “You know wh… why.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He fiddled uncomfortably with a pencil on his desk. “You know, we can always find something for you here. In the office, maybe … maintenance…” His voice trailed off. He stared at the pencil in his big hand.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s nice of you, but forget it.” If there was one thing I knew it was that I couldn’t hang around like a crippled bird, watching all my friends take off into the sky. And I didn’t want to get used to the look of pity I saw on Freddy Cunningham’s honest face, or on any other face.

“Well, anyway Doug, think it over,” Cunningham said.

“No n … need,” I said.

“What do you plan to do?”

“First,” I said, “leave town.”

“For where?”

“Anywhere,” I said.

“Then what?”

Then try to figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I stuttered twice on the word life.

He nodded, avoiding looking at me, deeply interested in the pencil. “How’re you fixed for dough?”

“Sufficient,” I said. “For the time being.”

“Well,” he said, “if you ever … I mean you know where to come, don’t you?”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” I looked at my watch. “I have a date.”

“Shit,” he said loudly. Then stood up and shook my hand. I didn’t say good-bye to anyone else.

I parked the car and got out and waited. There was a peculiar muted hum coming from the big, red-brick building with the Latin inscription on the facade and the flag flying above it. The hum of learning, I thought, a small, decent music that made me remember my childhood.

Pat would be in her classroom, lecturing the boys and girls on the origins of the Civil War or the succession of the kings of England. She took her history seriously. “It is the most relevant of subjects,” she had told me once, using the word that cropped up in every conversation about education in those days. “Every move we make today is the result of what men and women have been doing with each other and to each other since before recorded time.” As I remembered this, I grinned sourly. Had I been born to stutter or lived to be a discarded airman because Meade had repulsed Lee at Gettysburg, or because Cromwell had had Charles beheaded? It would be an interesting point to discuss when we had an idle moment to spare.