Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“You’re right,” Bert said. “Only an idiot would dream of starting home on a day like this. Let’s go tell Martha the party’s still on.”

They dressed quickly, in espadrilles and cotton trousers and tennis shirts and went upstairs together and into Martha’s room, without knocking. The wind was making one of the shutters rap against the window, but Martha was still asleep, curled around herself, only the top of her head showing above the blanket, the hair dark and tangled and short. The pillow was on the floor.

Munnie and Bert stood in silence for a moment, looking down at the curled, blanketed figure and the dark head, each of them convinced that the other did not know what he was thinking.

“Awake,” Bert said softly. “Awake to glory.” He went over to the bed and touched the top of Martha’s head. Watching him, Munnie could feel the tips of his own fingers twitching electrically.

“Please,” Martha said, her eyes still closed. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“It’s nearly noon,” Munnie said, lying by nearly two hours, “and we have to tell you something.”

“Tell it to me,” said Martha, “and get out of here.”

“The Fat Man here,” said Bert, standing at her head, “has come up with an idea. He wants us to stay here until it begins to rain. How do you feel about it?”

“Of course,” Martha said.

Bert and Munnie smiled at each other, because they felt they understood her so well. “Martha,” said Bert, “you’re the only perfect girl alive.”

Then they went out of the room to give her a chance to get dressed.

They had met Martha Holm in Florence. They seemed to have the same ideas about which museums and which churches to go to and they kept bumping into her and she was alone and obviously American and as Bert said, they didn’t come prettier, and finally they started talking to each other. Maybe it was because they had first seen her in the Uffizi Gallery among the Botticellis that gave Munnie the idea, but he thought, privately, that, aside from the fact that her hair was short and dark and irregularly cut, she looked like the Primavera, tall, slender, and girlish, with a long narrow nose and deep, brooding, dangerous eyes. He felt extravagant and embarrassed to be thinking things like this about a twenty-one-year-old American girl who wore slacks and had gone for a year to Smith, but he couldn’t help himself. He never told Martha about it and, of course, he never said a word on the subject to Bert.

Martha knew a lot of people in and around Florence (later on, it turned out that she knew a lot of people in and around everyplace) and she got them invited to a tea in Fiesole at a villa where there was a swimming pool and to a party at which Munnie found himself dancing with a Contessa. Martha had been in Europe for nearly two years and she was wonderful at telling you what places to go to and what places were traps, and she spoke Italian and French, and she was ready when you told her to be ready, and she didn’t scream for pity when she had to walk a few blocks on her own two feet, and she laughed at Bert’s and Munnie’s jokes and made some of her own, and she didn’t giggle, weep or sulk, which put her several notches above every other girl Munnie had ever known. After they had been together for three days in Florence and were due to start for Portofino and France, it seemed unbearable just to leave her behind. As far as Munnie and Bert could tell, she had no plans of her own. “I tell my mother,” Martha explained, “that I’m taking courses at the Sorbonne, and it’s almost true, at least in the wintertime.”

Martha’s mother lived in Philadelphia, after three divorces, and every once in awhile, Martha said, she sent back a photograph, so that when she finally did arrive back home, there wouldn’t be an embarrassing moment on the dock when her mother wouldn’t recognize her.

So Munnie and Bert talked it over very seriously and sat at a café table with Martha in the Piazza del Signoria and ordered coffee and put it up to her.

“What we’ve decided,” Bert said, with Munnie sitting beside him, silently agreeing, “is that the Brooks-Carboy unguided tour of Europe could use you, as interpreter, hotel-finder, and chief taster of foreign foods. Aside from supplying a welcome feminine touch. Are you interested?”

“Yes,” Martha said.

“We’d like to know if we could mesh schedules, more or less,” Munnie said.

Martha smiled. “I’m on a schedule of drift,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Does that mean,” Munnie asked, because he liked to have everything absolutely clear, “that you want to come along?”

“It means that I want to come along very much,” said Martha, “and I was hoping you’d ask me.” She looked at each of them for exactly the same number of seconds, cheerful, grateful, ready for anything.

“Now,” said Bert, “Munnie and I have talked it over and we’re going to lay it on the line. Something like this has to be planned out in advance or there comes a dark and hideous night of disaster. We’ve thought up a good, workable set of rules and if you agree, off we go tomorrow. If not—no harm done—and we hope you spend a pleasant summer.”

“Get to it, Bert,” Munnie said, impatiently. “Don’t recite the preamble to the Constitution.”

“Rule Number One,” Bert said, with Martha sitting still, nodding, gravely listening, “rule number one is basic. No entanglements. Munnie and I’re old friends and we’ve planned this summer for years and we’ve been having a wonderful time and we don’t want to wind up fighting duels with each other or anything like that. Now, I know women …” He paused, daring either of them to smile. They didn’t smile.

“He wouldn’t have said that,” Munnie explained, “before the Army.”

“What do you know about women?” Martha asked, being serious.

“What I know is that women’re always busy choosing,” Bert went on. “They come into a room and if there’re five men present, their minds get to work like a business machine, punching holes. First Choice, Second Choice, Acceptable, Perhaps, Impossible.”

“Oh, my.” Martha began to laugh. She covered her mouth with her hand apologetically and tried to straighten her face. “Forgive me. Munnie … do you believe this?”

“I don’t know,” he said embarrassedly. “I haven’t had Bert’s advantages. I wasn’t in the Army.”

“I’ll even tell you how you’d choose,” Bert said, “between Munnie and me, so you won’t have to wonder or waste your time.”

“Tell me,” Martha said. “Do tell me.”

“In the beginning,” said Bert, “the tendency is to choose me. I’ll go into the reasons some other time. Then, after awhile, the switch sets in, and Munnie gets the final decision.”

“Poor Bert,” Martha said, chuckling. “How awful for you! Only winning the opening game of the season all the time. Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because you’ve got to promise not to choose anybody,” Bert said. “And if you do choose, you have to go to the grave with your secret.”

“To the grave,” Martha repeated, trying to be solemn.

“Until the boat sails,” Bert said, “we treat each other like brothers and sister, and that’s all. D’accord? ”

“ D’accord ,” Martha said.

“Good.” Bert and Munnie nodded at each other, pleased with how reasonable everybody was.

“Rule Number Two,” Bert said, “if after awhile we get to feel you’re a nuisance—we say farewell and you leave. No tears. No recriminations. No scenes. Just a friendly shake of the hand and off to the nearest railroad station. D’accord? ”

“ D’accord two times,” Martha said.