Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

By the time his mother and father had been notified and had reached the hospital, the doctor had given him a shot of morphine and was in the middle of setting the leg. So it wasn’t until the next morning, as he lay in the gray hospital room, sweating with pain, with his leg in traction, that he could get out any kind of coherent story and tell his parents what had happened.

“Then I saw this man skiing very fast, all alone,” Robert said, trying to speak normally, without showing how much the effort was costing him, trying to take the look of shock and agony from his parent’s set faces by pretending that his leg hardly hurt him at all, and that the whole incident was of small importance. “He heard me and came over and took off my skis and made me comfortable on a tree stump and he asked me what my name was and where my parents were staying and he said he’d go to the ski school and tell them where I was and to send a sled for me and then he’d call you at the Chalet and tell you they were bringing me down to the hospital. Then, after more than an hour, it was pitch dark already, nobody came and I decided I’d better not wait any more and I started down and I was lucky and I saw this farmer with a sled and …”

“You were very lucky,” Robert’s mother said flatly. She was a small, neat, plump woman, with bad nerves, who was only at home in cities. She detested the cold, detested the mountains, detested the idea of her loved ones running what seemed to her the senseless risk of injury that skiing involved, and only came on these holidays because Robert and his father and sister were so passionate about the sport. Now she was white with fatigue and worry, and if Robert had not been immobilized in traction she would have had him out of the accursed mountains that morning on the train to Paris.

“Now, Robert,” his father said, “is it possible that when you hurt yourself, the pain did things to you, and that you just imagined you saw a man, and just imagined he told you he was going to call us and get you a sled from the ski school?”

“I didn’t imagine it, Papa,” Robert said. The morphine had made him feel hazy and heavy-brained and he was puzzled that his father was talking to him that way. “Why do you think I might have imagined it?”

“Because,” said his father, “nobody called us last night until ten o’clock, when the doctor telephoned from the hospital. And nobody called the ski school, either.”

“I didn’t imagine him,” Robert repeated. He was hurt that his father perhaps thought he was lying. “If he came into this room I’d know him right off. He was wearing a white cap, he was a big man with a black anarac, and he had blue eyes, they looked a little funny, because his eyelashes were almost white and from a little way off it looked as though he didn’t have any eyelashes at all.…”

“How old was he, do you think?” Robert’s father asked. “As old as I am?” Robert’s father was nearly fifty.

“No,” Robert said. “I don’t think so.”

“Was he as old as your Uncle Jules?” Robert’s father asked.

“Yes,” Robert said. “Just about.” He wished his father and mother would leave him alone. He was all right now. His leg was in plaster and he wasn’t dead and in three months, the doctor said, he’d be walking again, and he wanted to forget everything that had happened last night in the forest.

“So,” Robert’s mother said, “he was a man of about twenty-five, with a white cap and blue eyes.” She picked up the phone and asked for the ski school.

Robert’s father lit a cigarette and went over to the window and looked out. It was snowing. It had been snowing since midnight, heavily, and the lifts weren’t running today because a driving wind had sprung up with the snow and there was danger of avalanches up on top.

“Did you talk to the farmer who picked me up?” Robert asked.

“Yes,” said his father. “He said you were a very brave little boy. He also said that if he hadn’t found you, you couldn’t have gone on more than another fifty meters. I gave him two hundred francs. Swiss.”

“Sssh,” Robert’s mother said. She had the connection with the ski school now. “This is Mrs. Rosenthal again. Yes, thank you, he’s doing as well as can be expected,” she said, in her precise, melodious French. “We’ve been talking to him and there’s one aspect of his story that’s a little strange. He says a man stopped and helped him take off his skis last night after he’d broken his leg, and promised to go to the ski school and leave the skis there and ask for a sled to be sent to bring him down. We’d like to know if, in fact, the man did come into the office and report the accident. It would have been somewhere around six o’clock.” She listened for a moment, her face tense. “I see,” she said. She listened again. “No,” she said, “we don’t know his name. My son says he was about twenty-five years old, with blue eyes and a white cap. Wait a minute. I’ll ask.” She turned to Robert. “Robert,” she said, “what kind of skis did you have? They’re going to look and see if they’re out front in the rack.”

“Attenhoffer’s,” Robert said. “One meter seventy. And they have my initials in red up on the tips.”

“Attenhoffer’s,” his mother repeated over the phone. “And they have his initials on them. R.R., in red. Thank you. I’ll wait.”

Robert’s father came back from the window, dousing his cigarette in an ashtray. Underneath the holiday tan of his skin, his face looked weary and sick. “Robert,” he said, with a rueful smile, “you must learn to be a little more careful. You are my only male heir and there is very little chance that I shall produce another.”

“Yes, Papa,” Robert said. “I’ll be careful.”

His mother waved impatiently at them to be quiet and listened again at the telephone. “Thank you,” she said. “Please call me if you hear anything.” She hung up. “No,” she said to Robert’s father, “the skis aren’t there.”

“It can’t be possible,” Robert’s father said, “that a man would leave a little boy to freeze to death just to steal a pair of skis.”

“I’d like to get my hands on him,” Robert’s mother said. “Just for ten minutes. Robert, darling, think hard. Did he seem … well … did he seem normal? ”

“He seemed all right,” Robert said. “I suppose.”

“Was there any other thing about him that you noticed? Think hard. Anything that would help us find him. It’s not only for us, Robert. If there’s a man in this town who would do something like that to you, it’s important that people know about him, before he does something even worse to other boys …”

“Mama,” Robert said, feeling close to tears under the insistence of his mother’s questioning, “I told you just the way it was. Everything. I’m not lying, Mama.”

“What did he sound like, Robert?” his mother said. “Did he have a low voice, a high voice, did he sound like us, as though he lived in Paris, did he sound like any of your teachers, did he sound like the other people from around here, did he …?”

“Oh …” Robert said, remembering.

“What is it? What do you want to say?” his mother said sharply.

“I had to speak German to him,” Robert said. Until now, with the pain and the morphine, it hadn’t occurred to him to mention that.

“What do you mean you had to speak German to him?”

“I started to speak to him in French and he didn’t understand. We spoke in German.”

His father and mother exchanged glances. Then his mother said, gently, “Was it real German? Or was it Swiss-German? You know the difference, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Robert said. One of his father’s parlor tricks was giving imitations of Swiss friends in Paris speaking in French and then in Swiss-German. Robert had a good ear for languages, and aside from having heard his Alsatian grandparents speaking German since he was an infant, he was studying German literature in school and knew long passages of Goethe and Schiller and Heine by heart. “It was German, all right,” he said.