Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

I folded the letter and gave it back to my husband. He put it thoughtfully into his pocket. “Now,” he said, “what do you think of that?”

He did not expect an answer and I said nothing. He took a turn around the small patio, touching the sun-warmed adobe wall, and stopped in front of me once more. “Poor man,” he said, and the pity was real and revivifying. “He was doing so well.”

He took another turn around the patio and said, “What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose somebody sent a letter to somebody.”

“Somebody sent a letter to somebody,” he repeated, nodding gently. He looked at me for what seemed like a long time, searchingly. Then he touched my hand and smiled in a very strange manner.

“Do you know what I’ve been thinking?” he said. “I’ve been thinking it might be a nice idea if we both got into the car and drove into C—and bought a good bottle of wine for dinner.”

“Yes,” I said, “that would be a very nice idea.”

I went in and changed and then we drove down the long, straight fifty miles to C—. We bought a bottle of Bordeaux that my husband said was of a quality he hadn’t expected to find so deep in the heart of America. He seemed delighted with the crowds on the streets and the things in the windows and insisted upon buying me a very pretty little cotton dress, in a green plaid design, that he saw in a shop.

We drove home and I prepared the dinner and we sat out under the stars and ate it slowly. The Bordeaux, my husband said, was exceptionally good, and we became quite tipsy over the unaccustomed wine, and we laughed unreasonably as we sat across from each other at the table and if there had been anybody there to see us, he would have thought that we were very happy indeed, that night.

Victoria put the folder down.

The story had never been printed. There had been three rejection slips and she had given up. The editors during that period were cowardly, she told herself. She had started four or five more stories and never finished them. Wishing does not make a writer, nor education, nor injustice, nor suffering. The house was sold, at a profit, and they moved to Los Angeles.

She looked at the photograph of her husband, grave, soberly lighted, falsely calm, falsely honorable. She was not sorry he was dead.

She looked out the window. It was still raining. The rain on the window drowned the drowning world outside. It had turned out to be a good day for funerals. A good day for questions, too. Victoria. Victory. Victory over what?

What sort of love could it have been that demanded that price for its survival? In a time of sharks, must all be sharks? Who was the monster who had sat, in the pretty new dress—proud, wily, subservient, dining under the desert stars, and had smiled in pleasure and complicity at the man across the table, enjoying the wine?

The blond hair had been wet that day, too, although Borden was young then and had not yet begun to use dye .

A s Jane Collins walked out onto the court behind her husband, she felt once more the private, strong thrill of pride that had moved her again and again in the time she had known him. Jane and Stewart had been married six years, but even so, as she watched him stride before her in that curious upright, individual, half-proud, half-comic walk, like a Prussian drill sergeant on his Sunday off, Jane felt the same mixture of amusement and delight in him that had touched her so strongly when they first met. Stewart was tall and broad and his face was moody and good-humored and original, and Jane felt that even at a distance of five hundred yards and surrounded by a crowd of people, she could pick him out unerringly. Now, in well-cut white trousers and a long-sleeved Oxford shirt, he seemed elegant and a little old-fashioned among the other players, and he looked graceful and debonair as he hit the first few shots in the preliminary rallying.

Jane was sensibly dressed, in shorts and tennis shirt, and her hair was imprisoned in a bandanna, so that it wouldn’t get into her eyes. She knew that the shorts made her look a little dumpy and that the handkerchief around her head gave her a rather skinned and severe appearance, and she had a slight twinge of female regret when she looked across the net and saw Eleanor Burns soft and attractive in a prettily cut tennis dress and with a red ribbon in her hair, but she fought it down and concentrated on keeping her eye on the ball as Mr. Croker, Eleanor’s partner, sliced it back methodically at her.

Mr. Croker, a vague, round, serious little man, was a neighbor of the Collinses’ hosts. His shorts were too tight for him, and Jane knew, from having watched him on previous occasions, that his face would get more serious and more purple as the afternoon wore on, but he played a steady, dependable game and he was useful when other guests were too lazy or had drunk too much at lunch to play in the afternoon.

Two large oak trees shaded part of the court, and the balls flashed back and forth, in light and shadow, making guitarlike chords as they hit the rackets, and on the small terrace above the court, where the other guests were lounging, there was the watery music of ice in glasses and the bright flash of summer colors as people moved about.

How pleasant this was, Jane thought—to get away from the city on a week end, to this cool, tree-shaded spot, to slip all the stiff bonds of business and city living and run swiftly on the springy surface of the court, feeling the country wind against her bare skin, feeling youth in her legs, feeling, for this short Sunday hour at least, free of desks and doors and weekday concrete.

Stewart hit a tremendous overhead smash, whipping all the strength of his long body into it, and the ball struck the ground at Eleanor’s feet and slammed high in the air. He grinned. “I’m ready,” he said.

“You’re not going to do that to me in the game, are you?” Eleanor asked.

“I certainly am,” Stewart said. “No mercy for women. The ancient motto of the Collins family.”

They tossed for service, and Stewart won. He served and aced Eleanor with a twisting, ferocious shot that spun off at a sharp angle.

“Jane, darling,” he said, grinning, as he walked to the other side, “we’re going to be sensational today.”

They won the first set with no trouble. Stewart played very well. He moved around the court swiftly and easily, hitting the ball hard in loose, well-coached strokes, with an almost exaggerated grace. Again and again, the people watching applauded or called out after one of his shots, and he waved his racket, smiling at them, and said, “Oh, we’re murderous today.” He kept humming between shots—a tuneless, happy composition of his own—like a little boy who is completely satisfied with himself, and Jane couldn’t help smiling and adoring him as he light-heartedly dominated the game and the spectators and the afternoon, brown and dashing and handsome in his white clothes, with the sun flooding around him like a spotlight on an actor in the middle of the stage.

Occasionally, when Stewart missed a shot, he would stand, betrayed and tragic, and stare up at the sky and ask with mock despair, “Collins, why don’t you just go home?” And then he would turn to Jane and say, “Janie, darling, forgive me. Your husband’s just no good.”

And even as she smiled at him and said, “You’re so right,” she could sense the other women, up on the terrace, looking down at him, their eyes speculative and veiled and lit with invitation as they watched.