Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

This is the man who sits now day after day, reading in the silent desert sunlight, wearing, even here, the neat collar and tie and gray jacket of his working days, protected by the patio wall from the constant wind.

If he wishes to remain here, alone with me, for the rest of his life, I am content. Since, situated as we are, there is no other way to earn money, and both our families having long since succumbed into the economic morass so that there is no help to be hoped for from them, I have taken to the typewriter. We do not need much to keep us going in this remote place and while I have had no experience in the field of letters I am encouraged by the dismal quality of the writing which is published daily in this country. Certainly, a person of education, and one who has been close to the center of important affairs, as I have for nearly twenty years, should, with such pitiful standards to meet, be able to sustain a modest existence on almost the barest level of literacy.

I admit that I look forward to the experience with pleasure. I am a plain and vindictive woman who has had to remain silent in the company of fools and self-seekers for a long time and in the process of paying them off, I feel there should be profit both for me and whatever readers I may attract who have not been irremediably numbed by the floods of sentimentality, violence and hypocrisy which pour forth from our presses.

Writers of the first class, I have read somewhere, are invariably men or women with an obsession. While I do not deceive myself about my merits or the grandeur of the heights I might ultimately reach, I share that one thing with them. I have an obsession. That obsession is my husband and it is of him that I shall write.

My husband came of a family that, in another country or other times, might fairly be called aristocratic. The family fortune held out long enough so that he went to the proper schools and was graduated from the proper college, in the same class with a surprising number of men who have since done extremely well in business and in the government. Unsympathetic to commerce and springing from a family which has a long tradition of public office, my husband applied for the Foreign Service. This was at a time when the other departments of the government were being thrown open to hordes of noisy and unpleasant careerists, of doubtful origin, painful manners, and the most imperfect education. The Service, because of its rigid system of selection and its frank prejudice in favor of intellectual and conservative young men of good family, was the one enclave in a welter of shallow egalitarianism in which a gentleman might serve his country without compromise.

My husband, who never spared himself when there was a question of work, was given one good post after another. He was never popular, but he was always respected and at the time he married me, four years after his first appointment, we both could reasonably suppose that in time he would rise to the most important positions in the Service. During the war he was given a mission of the utmost danger and delicacy, and performed it so well that he was told, personally, by the Secretary, that he was responsible for saving the lives of a considerable number of Americans.

Just after the war, he was appointed to the Embassy at X—. (Forgive me for these old-fashioned symbols. At this moment in our country’s history candor is foolhardy, reprisals devastating.) I did not accompany my husband to X—. It was at that time that I found it necessary to undergo an operation which turned out to be not so simple as my doctor had hoped. A second operation was considered advisable, complications developed, and it was six months before I could join my husband. In those six months of living alone in a turbulent city, my husband became involved with the two people who, it turned out, were to destroy him. The first was Munder (the name, like all others I shall use, is an invention, of course), who at that time was making a brilliant record for himself as first secretary of the embassy. John and he had been friendly at college and the friendship was renewed and strengthened in the embassy, helped in great part by their recognition in each other of similar ambitions, equal devotion to their jobs, and complementary temperaments. The ambassador at that time was an amiable and lazy man who was pleased to turn over the real work of the embassy to his subordinates, and between them, Munder and my husband were, in an appreciable degree, responsible for the carrying-out of directives from Washington and the formulation of local policy. It was at that period that the Communists were profiting most, throughout Europe, from the post-armistice confusions, and the success of the Embassy at X—in tactfully shoring up a government favorable to the interests of the United States was in no small measure due to the efforts of Munder and my husband. In fact, it was because of this that some time later Munder was recalled to Washington, where he played, for several years, a leading part in the formulation of policy. His prominence, as it so often does, finally resulted in his downfall. When the time came to offer up a sacrifice to the exasperation and disappointments of the electorate, Munder, because of his earlier distinction, was treated in such a manner that he decided to resign. While they did not understand it at the time, his friends and aides in the Service were also marked for eventual degradation, or, what is almost as bad, stagnation in humiliatingly unimportant posts.

The other person my husband became involved with was a woman. She was the wife of a diplomat from another country, a distinguished idiot who foolishly permitted himself to be sent off on distant missions for months at a time. She was that most dangerous of combinations—beautiful, talkative, and sentimental; and it was only a question of time before she blundered into a scandal. It was my husband’s misfortune that her luck ran out during his tenure as her lover. As it later turned out, it might just as well have been any one of three or four other gentlemen, all within the diplomatic community, which the lady favored exclusively for her activities.

I knew, of course, almost from the beginning, although I was four thousand miles away, of what was going on. Friends, as they always do, saw to that. I will not pretend that I was either happy with the news or surprised by it. In marriages like mine, in which the partners are separated for months on end and the woman is, like me, rather drab and no longer young, it would take a fool to expect perfect fidelity from a passionate and attractive man. I do not know of a single marriage within the circle of my friends and acquaintances which has not required, at one point or another, a painful act of forgiveness on the part of one or both of the partners, to ensure the survival of the marriage. I had no intention of allowing the central foundations of my life to be laid in ruins for the fleeting pleasure of recrimination or to satisfy the busy hypocrisy of my friends. I did not hurry my convalescence, confident that when I appeared on the scene a workable modus vivendi would gradually be achieved.

Unhappily, when my husband told the lady of my impending arrival and announced to her that that would mean the end of their relationship, she made one of those half-hearted attempts at suicide with which silly and frivolous women try to prove to themselves and their lovers that they are not silly and frivolous. The lady telephoned my husband just after she took the pills, and was unconscious, in negligee, in her apartment, when he arrived. He did what was necessary and stayed with her at the hospital until he was assured by the doctors that she was out of danger. Luckily, the people at the hospital were civilized and sympathetic, and my husband managed, with a minimum of bribery, to keep the entire matter out of the newspapers. There was a wave of rumor, of course, in certain circles of the city, and there was no doubt a quite accurate estimate of the situation current for a week or two; but in Europe present scandal blends easily into centuries of anecdote, and when the lady appeared two weeks later, looking as pretty as ever, on her husband’s arm at a diplomatic reception, the event seemed safely in the past.