Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

My husband recounted the entire story to me on the first afternoon after my arrival. I listened and told him I would say no more about it and we have not mentioned the matter again to this day. I think I can honestly say that I have not permitted the incident to change, in the smallest particular, our relations with each other.

It is at this point in my story that I begin to perceive some of the problems that a writer faces. To make understandable what has happened it has been necessary to explain, as fully as I have, the background and personality of my husband, the kind of marriage we enjoy, and the stages and accidents of his career. But none of these things has its proper meaning unless it is viewed in relationship to the climate in which he worked and in which we lived and the pressures to which he was subjected. A more skillful writer would no doubt manage to include as much information of this nature as was necessary in a well-contrived series of dramatic scenes, so that the reader, while being held in suspense and amused by the brisk conflict of personalities, would be brought, almost without his realizing it, adequately prepared, to the climax of the story. There are two reasons why I have not attempted to do this. In the first place, I find it beyond my still undeveloped powers. And secondly, in my reading, I have found, for my own tastes, that the writers who did this particular thing most deftly were the ones I finally could not stomach.

There are crucial days in the lives of men and women, as in the lives of governments and armies; days which may begin like all other days, ordinary and routine, with no warning of the crises ahead and which end with cabinets fallen, battles lost, careers brought to a sudden and catastrophic halt.

The crucial day for my husband was clear and warm, in late spring, when the waters of the harbor of the port in which he was serving as vice-consul were blue and calm. At breakfast we decided the season was well enough advanced so that we could dine thereafter on the terrace of our apartment and I told my husband that I would search in the shops that day for a pair of hurricane lamps to shield the candles on our table in the evening. Two friends were coming in after dinner for bridge, and I asked my husband to bring home with him a bottle of whiskey. He left the apartment, as usual, neat, brushed, deliberate, unmistakably American, despite his many years abroad, among the lively pedestrian traffic of our quarter.

My husband is a methodical man, with a trained memory, and when I asked him, later on, for my own purposes, exactly what took place that morning he was able to tell me, almost word for word. The consul had gone north for several days and my husband was serving temporarily as chief of the office. When he reached the office he read the mail and despatches, none of which was of immediate importance.

Just as he had finished reading, Michael Laborde came into the office. (Remember, please, that all names used here are fictitious.) Michael had the office next to my husband’s and he wandered in and out through a connecting door, almost at will. He was no more than thirty years old and held a junior post in the commercial side of the consulate. He was personable, though weak, and my husband considered him intelligent. He was lonely in the city and we had him to dinner at least once a week. He had a quick, jumpy mind and he was always full of gossip and my husband has confessed that he enjoyed the five-minute breaks in the day’s routine which Laborde’s visits afforded. This morning, Michael came into the office, smoking a cigarette, looking disturbed.

“Holy God,” he said, “that Washington.”

“What is it now?” my husband asked.

“I got a letter last night,” Michael said. “Friend of mine works in the Latin-American section. They’re howling in anguish. People’re getting dumped by the dozen, every day.”

“A certain amount of deadwood …” my husband began. He is always very correct in questions like this, even with good friends.

“Deadwood, hell!” Michael said. “They’re cutting the living flesh. And they’re going crazy on the pansy hunt. My friend says he heard they have microphones in half the hotels and bars in Washington and they’ve caught twenty of them already, right out of their own mouths. And no nonsense about it. No looking at the record for commendations, no fooling around about length of service or anything. A five-minute interview and then out—as of close of business that day.”

“Well,” my husband said, smiling, “I don’t imagine you have to worry about that too much.” Michael had something of a reputation locally as a ladies’ man, being a bachelor, and, as I have said, quite personable.

“I’m not worried about myself—not about that, anyway,” Michael said. “But I’m not so sure about the principle. Official purity. Once people declare for purity they’re not satisfied until they nail you to the wood. And my friend wrote me to be careful what I say in my letters. My last letter had scotch tape on it. And I never use scotch tape.”

“Your friend is too nervous,” my husband said.

“He says Il Blanko has ninety paid spies in Europe,” said Michael. Il Blanko was Michael’s epithet for the senator who was freezing the Foreign Service into a permanent attitude of terror. “My friend says the damndest people are reporting back all the time. He says they sit next to you in restaurants and write down the jokes when you’re not looking.”

“Eat at home,” my husband said. “Like me.”

“And he says he’s heard of a new wrinkle,” Michael went on. “Some crank you never heard of decides he doesn’t like you and he sends an anonymous letter to the FBI saying he saw you flying the flag upside down on the Fourth of July or that you’re living with two eleven-year-old Arab boys and then he sends a copy to some hot-eyed congressman and a couple of days later the congressman gets up waving the letter and saying, ‘I have here a copy of information that is at this moment resting in the files of the FBI,’ and the next thing you know you’re in the soup.”

“Do you believe that?” my husband asked.

“How the hell do I know what to believe? I’m waiting for the rumor that they’ve discovered a sane man on F Street,” Michael said. “Then I’m going to apply for home leave to see for myself.” He doused his cigarette and went back into his own office.

My husband sat at his desk, feeling, as he told me later, annoyed with Michael for having brought up matters which, to tell the truth, had been lying close to the surface of John’s consciousness for some time. John had been passed over for promotion twice and his present appointment, even when the most optimistic face had been put upon it, could only be regarded as a sign that, at the very least, he was out of favor in certain influential quarters in the Service. For more than a year he had had moments of uneasiness about his own mail and had, without specifically admitting it to himself, taken to keeping the tone and contents of his letters, even to intimate friends, mildly noncommittal. As he sat there, he remembered, disquietingly, that several personal letters among those he had received in the last few months had had scotch tape on the flaps of the envelopes. And in the course of his duties in the visa and passport sections he had received information through intelligence channels on various applicants, of a surprisingly intimate nature, information which must have been gathered, he realized, in the most unorthodox manner. And in recent months he had been visited, with annoying frequency, by investigators, persistent and humorless young men, who had questioned him closely for derogatory information about colleagues of his, going back in time as far as 1933. Since all this, as the investigators always pointed out, was merely routine, my husband was conscious of the fact that the very same young men must certainly be making the same inquiries about himself.