Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Barber squinted at himself in the mirror above the bureau across from the bed. He wished he was better-looking. “Did she give her name?” he asked.

“No, Monsieur. Should I demand it?”

“Never mind,” Barber said. “I’ll be right down.”

He hung up the phone and put on his shoes. He always put the left one on first, for luck. He buttoned his collar and pulled his tie into place, noticing that it was frayed at the knot. He got into his jacket and patted his pockets to see if he had cigarettes. He had no cigarettes. He shrugged, and left the light on vindictively, because the manager was being unpleasant about the bill, and went downstairs.

Maureen Richardson was sitting in the little room off the lobby, in one of those age-colored plush chairs that fourth-rate Parisian hotels furnish their clientele to discourage excessive conviviality on the ground floor. None of the lamps was lit, and a dark, dead, greenish light filtered in through the dusty curtains from the rainy street outside. Maureen had been a young, pretty girl with bright, credulous blue eyes when Barber first met her, during the war, just before she married Jimmy Richardson. But she had had two children since then and Richardson hadn’t done so well, and now she was wearing a worn cloth coat that was soaked, and her complexion had gone, and in the greenish lobby light she seemed bone-colored and her eyes were pale.

“Hello, Beauty,” Barber said. Richardson always called her that, and while it had amused his friends in the squadron, he had loyally stuck to it, and finally everyone had picked it up.

Maureen turned around quickly, almost as though he had frightened her. “Lloyd,” she said. “I’m so glad I found you in.”

They shook hands, and Barber asked if she wanted to go someplace for a coffee.

“I’d rather not,” Maureen said. “I left the kids with a friend for lunch and I promised I’d collect them at two-thirty and I don’t have much time.”

“Sure,” Barber said. “How’s Jimmy?”

“Oh, Lloyd …” Maureen pulled at her fingers, and Barber noticed that they were reddened and the nails were uneven. “Have you seen him?”

“What?” Barber peered through the gloom at her, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Have you seen him?” Maureen persisted. Her voice was thin and frightened.

“Not for a month or so,” Barber said. “Why?” He asked it, but he almost knew why.

“He’s gone, Lloyd,” Maureen said. “He’s been gone thirty-two days. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Where did he go?” Barber asked.

“I don’t know.” Maureen took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. She was too distracted to offer the pack to Barber. “He didn’t tell me.” She smoked the cigarette avidly but absently. “I’m so worried. I thought maybe he’d said something to you—or that you’d bumped into him.”

“No,” Barber said carefully. “He didn’t say anything.”

“It’s the queerest thing. We’ve been married over ten years and he never did anything like this before,” Maureen said, trying to control her voice. “He just came to me one night and he said he’d got leave of absence from his job for a month and that he’d be back inside of thirty days and he’d tell me all about it when he got back, and he begged me not to ask any questions.”

“And you didn’t ask any questions?”

“He was acting so strangely,” Maureen said. “I’d never seen him like that before. All hopped up. Excited. You might even say happy, except that he kept going in all night to look at the kids. And he’s never given me anything to worry about in the—the girl department,” Maureen said primly. “Not like some of the other boys we know. And if there was one thing about Jimmy, it was that you could trust him. So I helped him pack.”

“What did he take?”

“Just one Valpak,” Maureen said. “With light clothes. As though he was going off on a summer vacation. He even took a tennis racket.”

“A tennis racket,” Barber nodded, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for husbands to take tennis rackets along when disappearing. “Did you hear from him at all?”

“No,” Maureen said. “He told me he wouldn’t write. Did you ever hear of anything like that?” Even in her anguish, she permitted herself a tone of wifely grievance. “I knew we shouldn’t have come to Europe. It’s different for you. You’re not married and you were always kind of wild anyway, not like Jimmy—”

“Did you call his office?” Barber asked, interrupting. He didn’t want to hear how wild people thought he was, or how unmarried.

“I had a friend call,” Maureen said. “It would look too fishy—his wife calling to ask where he was.”

“What did they say?”

“They said that they had expected him two days ago but he hadn’t come in yet.”

Barber took one of Maureen’s cigarettes and lit it. It was the first one in four hours and it tasted wonderful. He had a little selfish twinge of gratitude that Maureen had come to his hotel.

“Lloyd, do you know anything?” Maureen asked, worn and shabby in her damp, thin coat in the foggy green light.

Barber hesitated. “No,” he said. “But I’ll put in a couple of calls and I’ll telephone you tomorrow.”

They both stood up. Maureen pulled on gloves over her reddened hands. The gloves were worn and greenish black. Looking at them, Barber suddenly remembered how neat and shining Maureen had been when they first met, in Louisiana, so many years before, and how healthy and well-dressed he and Jimmy and the others had been in their lieutenants’ uniforms with the new wings on their breasts.

“Listen, Beauty,” Barber said. “How are you fixed for dough?”

“I didn’t come over for that,” Maureen said firmly.

Barber took out his wallet and peered judiciously into it. It wasn’t necessary. He knew exactly what was there. He took out a five-thousand-franc note. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “Try this on for size.”

Maureen made a motion as though to give it back to him. “I really don’t think I should …” she began.

“Sh-h-h, Beauty,” Barber said. “There isn’t an American girl in Paris who couldn’t use five mille on a day like this.”

Maureen sighed and put the bill in her pocketbook. “I feel terrible about taking your money, Lloyd.”

Barber kissed her forehead. “In memory of the wild blue yonder,” he said, pocketing the wallet, with its remaining fifteen thousand francs, which, as far as he knew, would have to last him for the rest of his life. “Jimmy’ll give it back to me.”

“Do you think he’s all right?” Maureen asked, standing close to him.

“Of course,” Lloyd said lightly and falsely. “There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll call you tomorrow. He’ll probably be there, answering the phone, getting sore at me for sucking around his wife when he’s out of town.”

“I bet.” Maureen smiled miserably. She went through the cavelike murk of the lobby, out into the rainy street, on her way to pick up the two children, who had been sent out to lunch at the home of a friend.

Barber went to his room and picked up the phone and waited for the old man downstairs to plug in. There were two suitcases standing open on the floor, with shirts piled in them, because there wasn’t enough drawer space in the tiny bureau supplied by the hotel. On top of the bureau there were: a bill, marked overdue, from a tailor; a letter from his ex-wife, in New York, saying she had found an Army pistol of his in the bottom of a trunk and asking him what he wanted her to do with it, because she was afraid of the Sullivan Law; a letter from his mother, telling him to stop being a damn fool and come home and get a regular job; a letter from a woman in whom he was not interested, inviting him to come and stay with her in her villa near Eze, where it was beautiful and warm, she said, and where she needed a man around the house; a letter from a boy who had flown as his waist-gunner during the war and who insisted that Barber had saved his life when he was hit in the stomach over Palermo, and who, surprisingly, had written a book since then. Now he sent long, rather literary letters at least once a month to Barber. He was an odd, intense boy, who had been an excitable gunner, and he was constantly examining himself to find out whether he and the people he loved, among whom he rather embarrassingly included Barber, mostly because of the eight minutes over Palermo, were living up to their promise. “Our generation is in danger,” the boy had typed in the letter on the bureau, “the danger of diminution. We have had our adventures too early. Our love has turned to affection, our hate to distaste, our despair to melancholy, our passion to preference. We have settled for the life of obedient dwarfs in a small but fatal sideshow.”