Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Enders!” His name was spoken gaily, warmly. He turned from looking at Bertha Zelinka, wrenching his soul. “Mr. Enders, I was waiting for your appearance.” It was Bishop, the owner of the hotel, a little fat, gray-faced man with wet mustaches. He was rubbing his hands jovially now. “You were just the person I wanted to see tonight,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Enders.

“Wait!” Bishop’s voice trilled. “Don’t move an inch from the spot! I have a treat in store for you.”

He darted back of the desk through the door into his office. Enders turned and looked at Bertha Zelinka, sitting there as calmly, as remotely, as Garbo herself.

“Observe!” Bishop darted out again from his office. “Look!” He held his hand high above his head. From it dangled a dead, wet chicken. “See what I’ve saved for you. I am willing to give you this chicken for sixty cents, Mr. Enders.”

Enders looked politely at the chicken, hanging sadly in death from Bishop’s proud hand.

“Thanks, Mr. Bishop,” Enders said. “But I have no place to cook a chicken.”

“Take it to your home.” Bishop whirled the chicken lovingly, giving it a spruce and electric appearance of life, the wings spreading, the feathers ruffling. “Your mother would be delighted with this bird.”

“My mother’s in Davenport, Iowa,” Enders said.

“You must have some relatives in the city.” Bishop pushed it lovingly under his nose, spreading the limp wings for inspection. “They’ll receive you with open arms with this chicken. This is a guaranteed Plymouth Rock chicken. Birds like this are exhibited in poultry shows from coast to coast. Sixty cents, Mr. Enders,” Bishop said winningly. “Can you go wrong for sixty cents?”

Enders shook his head. “I have no relatives in the city,” he said. “Thanks a lot, but I can’t use it.”

Bishop looked at him coldly. He shrugged. “I could’ve sold this chicken five times already,” he said, “but I was saving it for you because you looked so pale. You gained my sympathy.” He shrugged again, and holding the Plymouth Rock by the neck, he went into his office.

“Well,” said Enders loudly, looking squarely at Bertha Zelinka, “I guess I’ll turn in for the night.”

“Want some company, Baby?” Josephine asked, in her voice the first note of hope she had allowed to sound there all evening.

“No, thank you,” Enders said, embarrassedly, glad that Miss Zelinka wasn’t looking at him at the moment.

“You certainly are a great ladies’ man,” Josephine said, her voice rasping through the lobby. “Don’t you know you’ll go crazy, you go so long without a woman? You been here two weeks, you haven’t had a woman all that time. They face that problem in Sing Sing, the convicts climb on the walls.”

Enders looked uneasily at Miss Zelinka. He didn’t want a girl who looked like Greta Garbo to hear him mixed up in that kind of a conversation. “Good night,” he said, and walked past Miss Zelinka, down the hallway to his own room, which was on the ground floor, at the bottom of an airwell, three dollars a week. He looked back regretfully. Miss Zelinka’s legs were visible, jutting out, like a promise of poetry and flowers, past the grime and gloom of the hallway. Sadly he opened the door and went into his room, took off his hat and coat and fell on the bed. He could hear Josephine talking, as though the walls, the vermin, the old and wailing plumbing, the very rats hurrying on their gloomy errands between the floors, had at last found a voice.

“The papers are full of boys like him” Josephine was saying. “Turning the gas on and stuffing their heads into the oven. What a night! What a stinking whore of a night! They’ll find plenty of bodies in the river tomorrow morning.”

“Josephine,” Wysocki’s voice floated down the hallway. “You ought to learn to talk with more cheerfulness. You’re ruining your business, Josephine. The wholesale butchers from Tenth Avenue, the slaughterhouse workers, your whole regular clientele, they’re all avoiding you. Should I tell you why?”

“Tell me why,” Josephine said.

“Because you’re gloomy!” Wysocki said. “Because you depress them with your talk. People like a woman to be cheerful. You can’t expect to succeed in your line if you walk around like the last day of the world is beginning in two and three-quarter hours, Bulova watch time.”

“The butchers from Tenth Avenue!” Josephine snarled. “Who wants them? I give them to you as a gift.”

Enders lay on the bed, regretting that a proud and beautiful woman like Bertha Zelinka had to sit in one of the three chairs of the lobby of the Circus Hotel on a rainy night and listen to a conversation like that. He put on the light and picked up the book he was reading.

I was neither at the hot gates

Nor fought in the warm rain

Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass ,

Bitten by flies, fought …

“What a night!” Josephine’s voice scraped down the hallway. “The river will be stuffed with bodies in the morning.”

Enders put down T. S. Eliot. It was hard to read T. S. Eliot in the Circus Hotel without a deep feeling of irony. Enders got up and looked around the doorpost, down the hall. The proud, poetic legs were still there, lean, muscular, beautifully shaped, aristocratic, stemming down into slim ankles and narrow feet. Enders leaned dreamily against the doorpost, regarding Miss Zelinka’s legs. Music played from a well-known orchestra in a night club lit by orange lamps, where no dish cost less than a dollar seventy-five, even tomato juice, and he danced with Bertha Zelinka, both of them dressed beautifully, shiningly, and he made those deep, long eyes, charged with Northern melancholy, crinkle with laughter, and later grow sober and reflective as he talked swiftly of culture, of art, of poetry. “‘Nor fought in the warm rain,’ in the phrase of T. S. Eliot, a favorite of mine, ‘nor knee deep in the salt marsh …’”

He walked quickly down the hallway, looking neither to right nor left until he stopped at the desk. “Have there been any telephone calls for me today?” he asked Wysocki, carefully avoiding looking at Miss Zelinka.

“No,” said Wysocki. “Not a thing.”

Enders turned and stared full at Miss Zelinka, trying, with the deep intensity of his glance, to get her to look at him, smile at him …

“Heads like yours, my friend,” Josephine said, “they find in ovens.”

Miss Zelinka sat passionless, expressionless, heedless, looking at a point twenty-five feet over Wysocki’s shoulder, patiently, but coolly, in the attitude of a woman who is expecting a Lincoln to drive up at any moment and a uniformed chauffeur to spring from it and lead her fastidiously to the heavy, upholstered door, rich with heavy hardware.

Enders walked slowly back to his room. He tried to read some more. “April is the cruellest month …” He thumbed through the book. “Here, said she, is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor …” Enders put the book down. He couldn’t read tonight. He went to the door and looked out. The legs, silk and skin and firm muscle, were still there. Enders took a deep breath and walked back toward the desk.

“Look,” said Josephine, “the shuttle’s back.”

“I forgot to ask.” He looked straight at Wysocki. “Is there any mail for me?”

“No mail,” said Wysocki.

“I’ll tell you frankly, friend,” Josephine said. “You should’ve stayed in Davenport, Iowa. That’s my honest opinion. New York City will break you like a peanut shell.”

“Nobody asked for your opinion,” Wysocki said, noticing Enders peering uneasily at Miss Zelinka to see what impression Josephine’s advice had made on her. “He’s a nice boy, he’s educated, he’s going to go a long way. Leave him alone.”