Irwin Shaw: Nightwork

Inside the building a bell clanged. The hum of education swelled to a roar of freedom, and a few minutes later the students began to pour out of the doors in a confused sea of brightly colored parkas and brilliant wool hats.

As usual. Pat was late. She was the most conscientious of teachers, and there were always two or three students who clustered around her desk after class, asking her questions that she patiently answered. When I finally saw her, the lawn was deserted, the hundreds of children vanished as if melted away by the pale Vermont sun.

She didn’t see me at first. She was nearsighted, but out of vanity didn’t wear her glasses except when she was working or reading or going to the movies. It had been a little joke of mine that she wouldn’t find a grand piano in a ballroom.

I stood, leaning against a tree, without moving or saying anything, watching her walk down the cleared walk toward me, carrying a leather envelope that I knew contained test papers, cradled against her bosom, schoolgirl-fashion. She was wearing a skirt and red wool stockings and brown suede after-ski boots and a short, blue cloth overcoat. Her way of walking was concentrated, straight, uncoquettish [3], always brisk. Her small head with its dark hair pulled back was almost half obscured by the big, upraised collar of her coat.

When she saw me, she smiled, a non-desultory smile. It was going to be even more difficult than I had feared. We didn’t kiss. You never knew who was looking out of a window. “Right on time,” she said. “My stuff’s in the car.” She waved toward the parking lot. She had a battered old Chevy. A good part of her salary went for Biafra refugees, starving Indian children, political prisoners in various parts of the world. I don’t think she owned more than three dresses. “I hear the skiing’s great,” she said, as she started toward the parking lot. “This ought to be a weekend to remember.”

I put my hand out and held her arm. “W … wait a min … minute, Pat,” I said, trying not to notice the slight strained look that invariably crossed her face when I stuttered. “I have some … something to tell you. I … I’m not going up there th … this weekend.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice small. “I thought you were free this weekend.”

“I am f … free,” I said. “But I’m not going skiing. I’m leaving town.”

“For the weekend?”

“For good,” I said.

She squinted at me, as though I had suddenly gone out of focus. “Has it got something to do with me?”

“N … nothing.”

“Oh,” she said harshly, “nothing. Can you tell me where you’re going?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know wh … where I’m g… going.”

“Do you want to tell me why you’re going?”

“You’ll hear s … soon enough.”

“If you’re in trouble,” she said, her voice soft now, “and I could help…”

“I’m in t… trouble,” I said. “And you can’t help.”

“Will you write me?”

“I’ll try.”

She kissed me then, not worrying who might be at a window. But there were no tears. And she didn’t tell me that she loved me. It might have been different if she had, but she didn’t. “I have a lot of work to catch up on over the weekend anyway,” she said, as she stepped back a pace. “The snow’ll last.” She smiled a little crookedly at me. “Good luck,” she said. “Wherever.”

I watched her walk toward the old Chevy in the parking lot, small and neat and familiar. Then I got into the Volkswagen and drove off.

I was out of my small furnished apartment by six o’clock that evening. I had left my skis and boots and the rest of my skiing equipment except a padded parka, which I liked, in a duffel bag to be delivered to Pat’s brother, who was just about my size, and had told my landlady that she could have all my books and whatever else I left behind me. Traveling light, I headed south, leaving the town where, I realized now, I bad been happy for more than five years.

I had no destination. I had told Freddy Cunningham that I was going to try to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life and one place was as good as another for that.

Figure out my life. I had plenty of time to do it. As I drove south, down the entire East Coast of America, I was alone, unfettered, free of claims, with no distractions, plunged in that solitude that is supposed to be the essential condition of philosophic speculation. There was Pat Minot’s cause and effect to be considered; also not to be overlooked was the maxim I had been taught in English lit courses that your character was your fate, that your rewards and failures were the result of your faults and virtues. In Lord Jim, a book I must have read at least five times since I was a boy, the hero is killed eventually because of a flaw in himself that permitted him to leave a shipload of poor beggars to die. He pays for his cowardice in the end by being killed himself. I had always thought it just, fair, inevitable. At the wheel of the little Volkswagen, speeding down the great highways past Washington and Richmond and Savannah, I remembered Lord Jim. But it no longer convinced me. I certainly was not flawless, but, at least in my opinion, I had been a decent son, an honorable friend, conscientious in my profession, law-abiding, careful to avoid cruelty or spite, inciting no man to be my enemy, indifferent to power, abhorring violence. I had never seduced a woman – or cheated a shopkeeper, had not struck a fellow human being since a fight in the schoolyard at the age of ten. I had definitely never left anyone to die. Yet … Yet there had been that morning in Dr Ryan’s office.

If character was fate. Was it the character of thirty million Europeans to die in World War II, was it the character of the inhabitants of Calcutta to drop in the streets of starvation, was it the character of thousands of citizens of Pompeii to be mummified in a flood of lava?

The ruling law was simple – accident. The throw of dice, the turning of a card. From now on I would gamble and trust to luck. Maybe, I thought, it was in my character to be a gambler and fate had neatly arranged it so that I could play out my destined role. Maybe my short career as a man who traveled the Northern skies was an aberration, a detour and only now, back to earth, was I on the right path.

When I got to Florida, I spent my days at the tracks. In the beginning, all went well. I won often enough to live comfortably and not have to worry about taking a job. There was no job that anyone could offer me that I could imagine accepting. I kept by myself, making no friends, approaching no women. I found, mildly surprised, that all desire had left me. Whether this was temporary or would turn out to be permanent did not bother me. I wanted no attachments.

I turned with bitter pleasure into myself, content with the long sunny afternoons at the track and the solitary meals and the evenings spent studying the performances of thoroughbreds and the habits of trainers and jockeys. I also had time now for reading, and I indiscriminately devoured libraries of paperbacks. As Dr Ryan had assured me, the condition of my eyes did not interfere with my ability to read. Still, I found nothing in any of the books I read that either helped or harmed me.

I lived in small hotels, moving on from one to another when other guests, to whom I had become a familiar presence, attempted to approach me.

I was ahead of the game by several thousand dollars when the season ended and I drifted up to New York. I no longer went to the track. The actual running of a race now bored me. I continued betting, but with bookies. For a while I went often to the theater, to the movies, losing myself for a few hours at a time in their fantasies. New York is a good city for a man who prefers to be alone. It is the easiest city in the world to enjoy solitude.