Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

During the morning, Mr. Gorsline came into Hugh’s room twice. The first time, he stood behind Hugh’s chair without saying a word for five minutes, then said, “Still on Sodium?” and left. The next time, he stood silently for eight minutes, then said, “Forester, you’re putting on weight. White bread,” and left. Each time, Hugh had the familiar feeling in the groin.

Just before lunch, Hugh’s daughter came into his office. She kissed him and said, “Many happy returns of the day, Daddy,” and gave him a small oblong package with a bow of colored ribbon on top of it. Clare was twenty-two and had been married four years but she refused to stop saying “Daddy.” Hugh opened the package, feeling confused. There was a gold-topped fountain pen in it. It was the fourth fountain pen Clare had given him in the last six years, two on birthdays and the third on Christmas. She had not inherited her father’s memory.

“What’s this for?” Hugh asked.

“Daddy!” Clare said. “You’re kidding.”

Hugh stared at the pen. He knew it wasn’t his birthday (June 12th). And it certainly wasn’t Christmas (December 25th).

“It can’t be,” Clare said incredulously. “You didn’t forget! ”

Hugh remembered Narcisse’s face at breakfast, and the twitching of her nose. “Oh, my,” he said.

“You better load yourself with flowers before you set foot in the house tonight,” Clare said. She peered anxiously at her father. “Daddy, are you all right?” she asked.

“Of course I’m all right,” Hugh said, annoyed. “Everybody forgets an anniversary once in a while.”

“Not you, Daddy.”

“Me, too. I’m human, too,” he said, but he felt shaken. He unscrewed the top of the pen and wrote TWENTY-FOUR YEARS, in capitals, on a pad, keeping his head down. He now owned eight fountain pens. “It’s just what I needed, Clare,” he said, and put it in his pocket. “Thank you very much.”

“You haven’t forgotten that you promised to take me to lunch, have you?” Clare had phoned the day before to make the appointment for lunch, because, she told Hugh, she had some serious problems to discuss.

“Of course not,” Hugh said briskly. He put on his overcoat, and they went out together. Hugh ordered sole, then changed to a lamb chop, because he remembered that Narcisse had said at breakfast they were to have fish for dinner. Clare ordered roast chicken and Waldorf salad, and a bottle of wine, because, she said, the afternoons became less sad after a bottle of wine. Hugh didn’t understand why a pretty twenty-two-year-old girl needed wine to keep her from being sad in the afternoons, but he didn’t interfere.

While Clare was going over the wine card, Hugh took Morton’s letter out of his pocket and read it. Morton was asking for two hundred and fifty dollars. It seemed that he had borrowed a fraternity brother’s Plymouth and gone into a ditch with it after a dance and the repairs had come to a hundred and twenty-five dollars. There had been a girl with him, too, and her nose had been broken and the doctor had charged a hundred dollars for the nose and Morton had promised to pay. Then, there was ten dollars for two books in a course on ethics and fifteen dollars just, as Morton phrased it, to make it a round number. Hugh put the letter back in his pocket without saying anything about it to Clare. At least, Hugh thought, it wasn’t as bad as last year, when it looked as though Morton was going to be kicked out of school for cheating on a calculus examination.

As Clare ate her chicken and drank her wine, she told her father what was troubling her. Mostly, it was Freddie, her husband. She was undecided, she said as she ate away steadily at her chicken, whether to leave him or have a baby. She was sure Freddie was seeing another woman, on East Seventy-eighth Street, in the afternoons, and before she took a step in either direction she wanted Hugh to confront Freddie man to man and get a statement of intentions from him. Freddie wouldn’t talk to her. Whenever she brought the subject up, he left the house and went to a hotel for the night. If it was to be a divorce, she would need at least a thousand dollars from Hugh for the six weeks in Reno, because Freddie had already told her he wouldn’t advance a cent for any damn thing like that. Besides, Freddie was having a little financial trouble at the moment. He had overdrawn against his account at the automobile agency for which he worked, and they had clamped down on him two weeks ago. If they had the baby, the doctor Clare wanted would cost eight hundred dollars, and there would be at least another five hundred for the hospital and nurses, and she knew she could depend on Daddy for that.

She drank her wine and talked on as Hugh ate silently. Freddie, she said, was also five months behind in his dues and greens fees at the golf club, and they were going to post his name if he didn’t pay by Sunday, and that was really urgent, because of the disgrace, and Freddie had behaved like an absolute savage around the house ever since he received the letter from the club secretary.

“I told him,” Clare said, with tears in her eyes and eating steadily, “I told him I would gladly go out and work, but he said he’d be damned if he’d let people say he couldn’t support his own wife, and, of course, you have to respect a feeling like that. And he told me he wouldn’t come to you for another cent, either, and you can’t help admiring him for that, can you?”

“No,” Hugh said, remembering that his son-in-law had borrowed from him, over a period of four years, three thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars and had not paid back a cent. “No, you can’t. Did he know you were going to come and talk to me today?”

“Vaguely,” Clare said, and poured herself another glass of wine. As she carefully harvested the last bits of apple and walnut from her salad, Clare said she didn’t really like to burden him with her problems but he was the only one in the whole world whose judgment she really trusted. He was so solid and sensible and smart, she said, and she didn’t know any more whether she really loved Freddie or not and she was so confused and she hated to see Freddie so unhappy all the time about money and she wanted to know whether Hugh honestly felt she was ready for motherhood at the age of twenty-two. By the time they finished their coffee, Hugh had promised to talk to Freddie very soon about the woman on Seventy-eighth Street and to underwrite either the trip to Reno or the obstetrician, as the case might be, and he had made a half promise about the back dues and the greens fees.

On the way to the office, Hugh bought an alligator handbag for Narcisse for sixty dollars and worried sharply, for a moment, about inflation as he wrote out the check and handed it to the salesgirl.

It was a little difficult to work after lunch, because he kept thinking about Clare and what she had been like as a little girl (measles at four, mumps the year after, braces from eleven to fifteen, acne between fourteen and seventeen). He worked very slowly on Sorrento. Mr. Gorsline came in twice during the afternoon. The first time he said, “Still on Sorrento?” and the second time he said, “Who the hell cares if that Communist Russian wrote a book there?”

In addition to the usual sensation in the groin, Hugh noticed a quickening of his breath, which was almost a gasp, when Mr. Gorsline stood behind him during the afternoon.

After work, he went into the little bar on Lexington Avenue where he met Jean three times a week. She was sitting there, finishing her first whisky, and he sat down beside her and squeezed her hand in greeting. They had been in love for eleven years now, but he had kissed her only once (V-E Day), because she had been a classmate of Narcisse’s at Bryn Mawr and they had decided early in the game to be honorable. She was a tall, majestic woman who, because she had led a troubled life, still looked comparatively young. They sat sadly and secretly in sad little bars late in the afternoon and talked in low, nostalgic tones about how different everything could have been. In the beginning, their conversation had been more animated, and for a half hour at a time Hugh had recovered some of the optimism and confidence that he had had as a young man who had taken all the honors at college, before it had become apparent that a retentive memory and talent and intelligence and luck were not all the same thing.