Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

The church was almost empty, as Bryant had made no friends since they moved West, and there was just a scattering of people from the paper, who came as a matter of courtesy to the widow, so Victoria saw Borden almost immediately. It was a dark, rainy day, and he was sitting alone, in the rear of the church, near the door, but his blond head was unmistakable. Irrelevantly, while paying only half-attention to what the minister was saying, Victoria remembered the secret nickname by which, among the three of them, Borden had been called—Goldilocks.

There were only two cars in the cortege to the cemetery, but Borden found room in the second car and stood bareheaded in the rain during the ceremony at the grave. Victoria observed that he was now dyeing his hair and that, although at a distance there was still an appearance of boyish good looks about him, up close his face was lined by fine wrinkles and seemed dusted over by uncertainty and fatigue.

As she walked away from the grave, an erect, veiled, middle-aged, slender woman, tearless behind the black cloth, Borden asked her if he could drive back with her. Since she had come out to the cemetery with only the minister and there was plenty of room, she said yes. Borden’s voice had changed, too. Like his dyed hair, it pretended to a youthfulness and energy that she remembered and that was no longer there.

The minister was silent most of the way back to town. Victoria had only met him for the first time the day before, when she was making the arrangements for the funeral. Neither she nor her husband had been members of the congregation and the minister had that slightly aggrieved expression that one remarks on the faces of the representatives of religion when they know they are only being used out of necessity and not out of faith.

Among the three of them they spoke no more than thirty words on the way back into town. The minister got off at the church and after his embarrassed little handshake, Borden asked Victoria if he could accompany her home. She was in perfect control of herself—all her tears had been shed years before—and she told him she didn’t need any help. In fact, she had planned to sit down directly at her desk when she got home and start working on the full page for the Sunday issue, both because it needed doing and as a remedy against melancholy. But Borden persisted, with the same light good manners and concern for the welfare of others that had made him so popular in the years of their friendship.

With the minister gone, Victoria asked for a cigarette. She threw back her veil as Borden offered her a cigarette from a flat gold case and lighted both hers and his own with a flat gold lighter. There was something a little displeasing to Victoria in the action of his hands. She would have been hard put to explain why. They seemed, for lack of a better word, exaggerated .

They drove in silence for a minute or two. “Was he happy,” Borden asked, “those last few years?”

“No,” she said.

“What a waste,” Borden sighed. The sigh, she was sure, was not only for her husband. “He was an able man, an able man.” The tone was pompous. For that moment he might have been a politician making a speech at the dedication of a statue, much delayed, to the dead of a half-forgotten war.

“What did he do after he retired?” Borden asked.

“He read,” she said.

“Read?” Borden sounded puzzled. “Is that all?”

“Yes. My job on the paper supported us well enough.”

“I didn’t know you were any kind of writer,” Borden said.

“Necessity,” she said. “I used to get A’s in English courses in college.” They both smiled.

“Is Clare here with you?” Victoria asked.

Borden looked at Victoria strangely, as though he suspected her of sarcasm. “Didn’t you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“We were divorced six years ago. She married an Italian. He owns race horses. She won’t come to America.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He shrugged. “It wasn’t much of a marriage.” His voice was flat and careless. “We put on a good show for a few years, while it still did any good. After that— Adieu, Chérie .…”

“What are you doing out here?” Victoria asked.

“Well,” he said, “after the debacle, Clare and I wandered around Europe for awhile, but it never was the same. The jobs I might have had I didn’t want and we had enough money so that I didn’t have to work—and there was always that little whispering when we came into a room. Maybe we only imagined it, but …”

“You didn’t imagine it,” Victoria said.

They drove in silence for awhile. Then he asked her for her telephone number and wrote it down, with exaggeratedly neat little strokes of a small gold pencil in a handsome leather notebook.

“When you feel like,” he said, “please call me and we can have dinner.” He gave her his card. “Borden Staines,” it read. “Bottega del Mezzogiorno—Styles for Men.”

“I’m there every day,” he said, “after eleven o’clock.”

She had passed the shop many times. The name on the window had always struck her as pretentious and foolish. After all, in English, it only meant “The South Shop.” The place was elegant, expensive, and displayed gaudy shirts and ties and Italian sweaters and things like that, all a little too showy for her taste. She had never gone in.

“I bought it five years ago,” Borden said. “I decided I had to do something .” He smiled a little apologetically. “It’s amazing how well it’s done. I must say it never occurred to me that I would wind up as a Beverly Hills haberdasher. Anyway, it keeps me busy.”

The car stopped in front of the apartment house in which Victoria lived. It was still raining, but Borden hurried out to open the door for her and sent the driver on his way, saying that he preferred to walk a bit. “You’re sure you don’t mind being alone?” he said. “You know, I’d be delighted to come up and …”

“Thank you, no,” she said.

“Well …” he said, uncertainly, “I felt I just had to come. After all, we had so many good times together, all of us …” His voice trailed off.

“It was very good of you to come, Borden,” she said.

“I have a confession to make,” Borden said. He looked uneasily around him, as though fearful of being overheard. “I did see you that afternoon, Vicky. When you smiled and I turned away. I’ve always felt foolish about it and guilty and I …”

“What afternoon?” Victoria said. She turned and opened the lobby door.

“You don’t remember …?” He stared at her, his eyes suspicious and searching.

“What afternoon, Borden?” she repeated, standing with her hand on the doorknob.

“I guess I was mistaken,” he said. “It isn’t important.” He smiled at her, with his almost-perfect imitation of boyishness, and kissed her lightly on the cheek, good-bye now, probably good-bye forever, and walked off, very trim and young-looking in his smart raincoat, with his blond hair glistening with rain.

She went upstairs and unlocked the door. She threw off her hat and veil and walked aimlessly around the empty apartment. The apartment was nondescript. Nobody ever comes here, the apartment said, this is merely a place where two people once took shelter. Temporarily. Reduced now. To one.

Without emotion, Victoria looked at a photograph of her husband in a silver frame. It had been taken more than ten years ago. It was a sober portrait, posed carefully in a studio, and her husband looked serious and responsible, the sort of man who gets elected, young, to the board of trustees of the university from which he was graduated. You could not imagine his ever wearing any of the clothes displayed in the window of a California shop called “Bottega del Mezzogiorno.”