Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Then he got his coat and hurried out of the restaurant after his wife.

H e had the dream only once—in December. He thought about it for a few moments the next morning, and forgot about it until one evening in April, ten minutes before his plane was scheduled to take off. Then, suddenly, it returned to him. Always, when he was about to board a plane, there was a slight tremor; an awareness of risk, however small and controlled; a slight, subconscious realization that each flight might end with death; a hidden knowledge that there was a small, lurking fatality in winds and cloud and valves and wings, and that no amount of airline skill and care and advertising could ever absolutely dispel it. It was that usual minute, buried twinge of disaster that made him remember the dream as he stood at the gate with his wife and sister, looking out at the dark field and the huge, substantial plane and the flickering lights that marked the runways.

The dream had been a simple one. In it, somehow, his sister Elizabeth had died, and he had, in a resigned and hopeless way, followed the coffin to the cemetery and watched with dry eyes as it was lowered into the ground, and then he had returned home. And somehow, in the dream, it had all happened on May 14th. The date had been absolutely clear and definite and had given the dream a real, tragic sense that it might not otherwise have had. When he woke, he tried to figure out why May 14th, an obscure day five months in the future, had been chosen so relentlessly and specifically by his dreaming mind, but it was no use. There were no birthdays in his family in May, no anniversaries, and nothing in particular had ever happened to him or anyone he knew on that day. He had laughed a little, sleepily, to himself, gently touched Alice’s bare shoulder in the bed beside him, and had risen and gone to work, in the sensible, everyday atmosphere of drafting boards and blueprints, without saying a word then or later to her or anyone else about the dream.

And then—laughing at the way his five-year-old daughter had sleepily and carelessly said good-bye when he had left the apartment, standing there with the noise of engines filling the fresh April evening air, kissing his sister Elizabeth good-bye—the dream came back. Elizabeth was as rosy and sturdy as ever, a cheerful, pretty girl who looked as though she had just come triumphantly off a tennis court or from a swimming meet, and if there was any touch of doom hanging over her, it was very well hidden.

“Bring me back Cary Grant,” Elizabeth said as she brushed his cheek.

“Of course,” Roy said.

“I now leave you two to say a fond farewell,” Elizabeth said. “Alice, give him his last-minute instructions. Tell him to behave himself.”

“I’ve already briefed him for this mission,” Alice said. “No girls. No more than three Martinis before dinner. Telephone me and report twice weekly. Get on the plane and get home the minute the job is done.”

“Two weeks,” Roy said. “I swear I’ll be back in two weeks.”

“Don’t have too good a time.” Alice was smiling but on the verge of tears, as she always was every time he went anyplace without her, even overnight to Washington.

“I won’t,” Roy said. “I promise to be miserable.”

“Good enough.” Alice laughed.

“No old telephone numbers secreted on your person?” Elizabeth asked.

“No.” There had been a period in Roy’s life, just before he married Alice, when he had been quite lively, and during the war some of his friends had come back from Europe with lurid and highly fictionized tales of wild times in Paris and London, and to the women of his family he seemed more dashing and unstable than was the fact.

“God,” he said, “it’ll be a relief getting away from this female board of directors for a few days.”

He and Alice went up to the gate.

“Take care of yourself, darling,” Alice said softly.

“Don’t worry.” He kissed her.

“I hate this,” Alice said, holding onto him. “We’re always saying good-bye. This is the last time. From now on, no matter where you go, I’m going with you.”

“All right.” Roy smiled down at her.

“Even if you only go to Yankee Stadium.”

“Couldn’t be more pleased.” He held her tightly for a moment, dear and familiar and forlorn, left behind this way. Then he walked out to the plane. He turned as he started to climb into it, and waved. Alice and Elizabeth waved back, and he noticed again how much alike they looked, standing together, like two sisters in a pretty family, both of them blond and fair, trim, with little tricks of movement and holding themselves that were almost identical.

He turned and went into the plane, and a moment later the door was shut behind him and the plane started rolling toward the end of the runway.

Ten days later, over the phone between Los Angeles and New York, Roy told Alice she would have to come West. “Munson says it’s going to take six months,” Roy said, “and he’s promised me a place to live, and you are hereby invited.”

“Thanks,” Alice said. “Tell Munson I would like to kick him in the teeth.”

“Can’t be helped, baby,” Roy said. “Commerce above all. You know.”

“Why couldn’t he have told you before you went out? Then you could’ve helped me close up the apartment and we could’ve gone out together.”

“He didn’t know before I came out,” Roy said patiently. “The world is very confused these days.”

“I would like to kick him in the teeth.”

“O.K.” Roy grinned. “You come out and tell him yourself. When do you arrive? Tomorrow?”

“There’s one thing you’ve got to learn, Roy,” Alice said. “I am not a troop movement. You can’t say, ‘Civilian Alice Gaynor will report three thousand miles from here at 4 P.M. tomorrow,’ and expect it to happen.”

“O.K., you’re not a troop movement. When?”

Alice chuckled. “You sound nice and anxious.”

“I am nice and anxious.”

“That’s good.”

“When?”

“Well”—Alice hesitated thoughtfully—“I have to get Sally out of school, I have to send some things to storage, I have to rent the apartment, I have to get plane reservations—”

“When?”

“Two weeks,” Alice said, “if I can get the reservations all right. Can you wait?”

“No,” Roy said.

“Neither can I.” They both laughed. “Have you been very gay out there?”

Roy recognized the tentative, inquiring tone and sighed to himself. “Dull as mud,” he said. “I stay in in the evenings and read. I’ve read six books and I’m halfway through General Marshall’s report on the conduct of the war.”

“There was one evening you didn’t read.” Alice’s voice was careful and purposely light.

“All right,” Roy said flatly. “Let’s hear it.”

“Monica came in from the Coast Tuesday and she called me. She said she saw you with a beautiful girl at a fancy restaurant.”

“If there was any justice,” Roy said, “they would drop Monica on Bikini Atoll.”

“She had long black hair, Monica said.”

“She was absolutely right,” Roy said. “The girl had long black hair.”

“Don’t shout. I can hear perfectly well.”

“What Monica neglected to say was that it was Charlie Lewis’s wife—”

“She said you were alone.”

“—and Charlie Lewis was twenty feet away, in the men’s room.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. Maybe he was in the ladies’ room.”