Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Nothing like it.”

The farmer puffed reflectively. “Some day I’m goin’ to live in the city. No sense in livin’ in the country these days.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Eddie said. “The country’s very nice. There’s a lot to be said for the country.”

The farmer nodded, weighing the matter in his own mind. He put out his cigarette. “Another cigarette?” he asked Eddie.

“No, thanks,” Eddie said, “I’m still working on this.”

“Say,” said the farmer, “do you think your brother’ll damage my kid?”

“It’s possible,” Eddie said. “He’s very tough, my brother. He has dozens a’ fights, every month. Every kid back home’s scared stiff a’ him. Why,” said Eddie, sailing full into fancy, “I remember one day, Larry fought three kids all in a row. In a half a hour. He busted all their noses. In a half-hour! He’s got a terrific left jab—one, two, bang! like this—and it gets ’em in the nose.”

“Well, he can’t do Nathan’s nose any harm.” The farmer laughed. “No matter what you did to a nose like that it’d be a improvement.”

“He’s got a lot of talent, my brother,” Eddie said, proud of the warrior in the woods. “He plays the piano. He’s a very good pianoplayer. You ought to hear him.”

“A little kid like that,” the farmer marveled. “Nathan can’t do nothing.”

Off in the distance, in the gloom under the trees, two figures appeared, close together, walked slowly out into the sunlight of the field. Eddie and the farmer stood up. Wearily the two fighters approached, together, their arms dangling at their sides.

Eddie looked first at Nathan. Nathan’s mouth had been bleeding and there was a lump on his forehead and his ear was red. Eddie smiled with satisfaction. Nathan had been in a fight. Eddie walked slowly toward Lawrence. Lawrence approached with head high. But it was a sadly battered head. The hair was tangled, an eye was closed, the nose was bruised and still bled. Lawrence sucked in the blood from his nose from time to time with his tongue. His collar was torn, his pants covered with forest loam, with his bare knees skinned and raw. But in the one eye that still could be seen shone a clear light, honorable, indomitable.

“Ready to go home now, Eddie?” Lawrence asked.

“Sure.” Eddie started to pat Lawrence on the back, pulled his hand back. He turned and waved at the farmer. “So long.”

“So long,” the farmer called. “Any time you want to use the boat, just step into it.”

“Thanks.” Eddie waited while Lawrence shook hands gravely with Nathan.

“Good night,” Lawrence said. “It was a good fight.”

“Yeah,” Nathan said.

The two brothers walked away, close together, across the field of clover, fragrant in the long shadows. Half the way they walked in silence, the silence of equals, strong men communicating in a language more eloquent than words, the only sound the thin jingle of the thirty-five cents in Eddie’s pocket.

Suddenly Eddie stopped Lawrence. “Let’s go this way,” he said, pointing off to the right.

“But home’s this way, Eddie.”

“I know. Let’s go into town. Let’s get ice cream sodas,” Eddie said; “let’s get strawberry ice cream sodas.”

A s he drew nearer to it, Enders looked up at his hotel through the black drizzle of the city that filled the streets with rain and soot and despair. A small red neon sign bloomed over the hotel entrance, spelling out CIRCUS HOTEL, REASONABLE, turning the drizzle falling profoundly around it into blood.

Enders sighed, shivered inside his raincoat, and walked slowly up the five steps to the entrance and went in. His nostrils curled, as they did each time he opened the door of the hotel, and his nose was hit by the ancient odor of ammonia and lysol and old linoleum and old beds and people who must depend on two bathrooms to the floor, and over the other odors the odor of age and sin, all at reasonable rates.

Wysocki was at the desk, in his gray suit with the markings of all the cafeteria soup in the city on it, and the pale face shaven down to a point where at any moment you half-expected to see the bone exposed, gleaming and green. Wysocki stood against the desk with the thirty-watt bulb shining down on his thinning hair and his navy-blue shirt and the solid orange tie, bright as hope in the dark hotel lobby, gravely reading the next morning’s Mirror , his pale, hairy hands spread importantly, with delicate possessiveness, on the desk in front of him.

Josephine was sitting in one of the three lobby chairs, facing Wysocki. She wore a purple tailored suit with a ruffled waist, and open-toed red shoes, even though the streets outside were as damp and penetratingly cold as any marsh, and Enders could see the high red polish under her stockings, on her toenails. She sat there, not reading, not talking, her face carved out of powder and rouge under the blonde hair whose last surge of life had been strangled from it a dozen years before by peroxide and small-town hairdressers and curling irons that could have been used to primp the hair of General Sherman’s granite horse.

“The English,” Wysocki was saying, without looking up from his paper. “I wouldn’t let them conduct a war for me for one million dollars in gilt-edged securities. Debaters and herring-fishermen,” he said. “That’s what they are.”

“I thought Jews ate herring,” Josephine said. Her voice scraped in the lobby, as though the Circus Hotel itself had suddenly broken into speech in its own voice, lysol and ammonia and rotting ancient wood finally put into sound.

“Jews eat herring,” Wysocki said. “And the English eat herring.”

Enders sighed again and walked up to the desk. In the chair near the stairway, he noticed, a girl was sitting, a pretty girl in a handsome green coat trimmed with lynx. He watched her obliquely as he talked to Wysocki, noticed that her legs were good and the expression cool, dignified, somehow hauntingly familiar.

“Hello, Wysocki,” Enders said.

“Mr. Enders,” Wysocki looked up pleasantly from the newspaper. “So you decided to come in out of the rain to your cozy little nest.”

“Yes,” said Enders, watching the girl.

“Did you know,” Josephine asked, “that the English eat herring?”

“Yes,” Enders said, digging into his mind for the face the girl reminded him of.

“That’s what Wysocki said.” Josephine shrugged. “I was living in happy ignorance.”

Enders leaned over so that he could whisper into Wysocki’s ear. “Who is she?” Enders asked.

Wysocki peered at the girl in the green coat, his eyes sly and guilty, as a thief might peer at a window at Tiffany’s through which he intended to heave a brick later in the evening. “Zelinka,” Wysocki whispered. “Her name’s Bertha Zelinka. She checked in this afternoon. You could do worse, couldn’t you?” He chuckled soundlessly, his bone-shaven face creasing without mirth, green and gleaming under the thirty-watt bulb.

“I’ve seen her some place,” Enders whispered, looking at the girl over his shoulder. She sat remote, cold, her legs crossed beautifully under the green coat, looking under heavy lids at the scarred and battered clock over Wysocki’s head. “I know that face,” Enders said. “But from where?”

“She looks like Greta Garbo,” Wysocki said. “That’s where you know her from.”

Enders stared at the girl in the green coat. She did look like Greta Garbo, the long pale face, the long eyes, the wide, firm mouth, the whole thing a mirror of passion and pain and deep Northern melancholy and bony, stubborn beauty. Suddenly Enders realized that he was a stranger in a strange city, a thousand miles from home, that it was raining out, that he had no girl, and that no one in this huge and wrangling seven-million town had ever said anything more tender to him than, “Pass the mustard.” And here, before him, solid as his hand, in a green coat with a lynx collar, sat a tall, melancholy girl who looked enough like Greta Garbo, pain and passion and beauty and understanding all mixed on the bony, pale face, to be her twin sister. His voice charged at his throat, leaping to say the first tender word in this rat-eaten, roach-claimed hotel lobby.