Irwin Shaw - Nightwork

I remembered, painfully, the sense of deprivation, jealousy, loss that I had felt when I had called Jeremy Hale’s home and his daughter had answered the phone and the pure young voice had called, “Daddy, it’s for you.”

“Reasonable enough,” I admitted.

“All I’m suggesting is that you shouldn’t leave it to blind chance, as most idiots do. Control it.”

“How do you do that? Will you go out and arrange a match for me and sign a marriage contract? Is that the way it’s done in the Principality of Lowell these days?”

“Make your jokes if you want to,” Fabian said placidly. “I know they come out of a sense of embarrassment and I forgive them.”

“Don’t be so goddamn superior. Miles,” I warned him.

“The key word, I repeat, is control.” He ignored my little outburst.

“You married for money, if I remember correctly,” I said, “and it didn’t turn out to be so god-awful wonderful.”

“I was young and greedy,” he said, “and I didn’t have a wiser, older man to guide me. I married a shrew and a fool because she was rich and available. I would do everything in my power to prevent you from making the same mistake. The world is full of lovely, lovable girls with rich, indulgent fathers, who want nothing better in life than to marry a handsome, well-mannered, and well-educated young man who is obviously wealthy enough not to be after their money. In a word, you. Good grief, Douglas, you know the old saw – it’s just as easy to love a rich girl as a poor one.”

“If I’m going to be as rich as you say,” I insisted, “what do I have to bother with the whole thing for?”

“Insurance,” Fabian said. “I am not infallible. True, we have what seems to you like a substantial sum to dabble with at the moment. But in the eyes of men of real wealth, we’re paupers. Paupers, Douglas, playing in a penny-ante poker game.”

“I have faith in you,” I said, with just a little irony. “You’ll keep us both out of the poorhouse.”

“Devoutly to be wished,” he said. “But there are no guarantees. Fortunes come and go. We live in an age of upheaval. Just in my own lifetime…” Contemplating his lifetime in the speeding car, he shook his head sorrowfully. “We are caught in cycles of catastrophe. Perhaps right now we are in the lull before the storm. It is best to take what small precautions we can. And without wishing to harp on ugly matters, you’re more vulnerable than most. There’s no way of being sure that you’ll be able to go on forever unrecognized. At any moment, some extremely unpleasant chap may present you with a bill for one hundred thousand dollars. It would be cozier if you could pay it promptly, wouldn’t it?” “Cozier,” I said.

“A wealthy, pretty wife from a good family would be an excellent disguise. It would take a leap of imagination on anyone’s part to guess that the well-mannered young man, moving easily in the cream of international society and married to solid old English money got his start by swiping a packet of hundred-dollar bills from a dead man in a sleazy hotel in New York. Do I make sense?”

“You make sense,” I said reluctantly. “Still – you were talking about mutual interests. What’d be in it for you? You wouldn’t expect me to pay an agent’s commission on my imaginary wife’s dowry, would you?”

“Nothing as crass as that, old man,” Fabian said. “All I’d expect would be that our partnership wouldn’t be allowed to lapse. The most natural thing in the world would be that your wife would be pleased if you would relieve her of the burden of handling her money. And if I know women, and I believe I do, she’d much prefer to have you do it than the usual gaggle of brokers and trustees and hard-eyed bankers women usually have to depend on.”

“Is that where you come in?”

“Exactly.” He beamed, as though he had just presented me with a gift of great value. “Our partnership would continue as before. Whatever new capital you brought in would of course still be reserved to you. The profits would be shared. As simple and as equitable as that. I hope I’ve proved to your satisfaction that I am of some use in the field of investments.” “I won’t even comment on that,” I said. “The workman is worthy of his hire,” he said sententiously. “I don’t think you’d have any trouble explaining that to your wife.”

“That would depend on the wife.”

“It would depend on you, Douglas. I would expect you to choose a wise girl who trusted you and loved you and was anxious to give substantial proof of her devotion to you.”

I thought back over my history with women. “Miles,” I said, “I think you have an exaggerated notion of my charms.”

“As I told you once before, old man,” he said, “you’re much too modest. Dangerously modest.”

“I once took out a pretty waitress in Columbus, Ohio, for three months,” I said, “and all she ever let me do was hold her hand in the movies.”

“You’re moving up in class now, Douglas,” Fabian said. “The women you’re going to meet from now on are attracted by the rich, so inevitably they are surrounded by older men, men who are engaged almost twenty-four hours a day in great affairs, who have very little time for women. Along with them there are the men who do have time for women but whose masculinity very often is ambiguous, to say the least. Or whose interests are transparently pecuniary. Your waitress in Columbus wouldn’t even enter a movie house with any of them. In the circles in which you’re going to move now, any man under forty with an obvious income of his own and who shows the slightest evidence of virility and who has the leisure to have a three-hour lunch with a lady is greeted with piteous gratitude. Believe me, old man, just by being your normal, boyish self, you will be a smashing success. Not the least of the benefits I mean to shower on you is a new conception of your worth. I trust you will ask me to be the best man at your wedding.”

“You’re a calculating bastard, aren’t you?” I said.

“I calculate,” he said calmly, “and I intend to teach you to calculate, too. It’s absurd that the perfectly good verb, to calculate, should have a bad reputation in the modern world. Let schoolgirls and soldiers wallow in romance, Douglas. You calculate.”

“It all seems so – so immoral,” I said.

“I had hoped you would never use that word,” he said. “Was it moral to abscond with all that money from the St Augustine Hotel?”

“No.”

“Was it moral for me to hold onto your suitcase when I saw what was in it?”

“I should say not.”

“Morality is indivisible, my boy. You can’t select certain chunks of it, as though it were a pie waiting on a table to be cut up and served. Let’s face it, Douglas, you and I are no longer permitted the luxury of morality. Let’s understand each other, Douglas; it wasn’t morality that made you run from Herr Steubel – it was a huge reluctance to share a cell with him.”

“You’ve got a fucking argument for everything,” I said. “I’m happy you think that,” he said, smiling. “Let me present some further arguments. Forgive me if I repeat myself in assuring you that whatever I suggest is in your best interests. I haven’t hidden from you that your best interests are my best interests. I am thinking of the quality of life that you and I are eventually going to lead. You agree, I imagine, that, no matter what we do, we will have to do it together – that we will always have to be close together. Just like partners in any enterprise, we will have to be in constant communication. Practically on a day-to-day basis. You do agree, don’t you?” “Yes.”

“For the moment, except for the little disagreement in Lugano, it has been quite pleasant to wander about as we’ve been doing.”