Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

They didn’t go all the way out to the end of the wall, which was separated from the middle section of the breakwater by a wide channel through which the shipping entered and left the harbor. Even on the calmest day, Munnie felt something wild and dangerous out there on the flat point of stone, where the full force of the unbroken ocean probed, however quietly, at the guarded waters of the bay and the land beyond. Munnie suffered a little from vertigo and when he looked down the sheer sides of the wall into the shifting green depths and the fringe of foam he had a helpless picture of himself caught there below, or plunging down to fight against the tides and the rocks and the waves coming and going and crossing each other with upcurling tips of spray. He didn’t say anything about it, of course, but he was grateful when Martha said, “This is good enough,” before they had gone very far, and he carefully helped weight the towel down as a tablecloth squarely in the middle of the wall.

There was a little wind, capricious and sporadically chilly, but Bert took off his shirt, to maintain his tan. Munnie, who had a soft, rather full growth of fuzzy reddish hair on his chest, and who was embarrassed by it, said that the wind was too cold for undressing. Bert glanced at him ironically, because he knew how Munnie felt about his chest, but he didn’t say anything.

As Martha cut up the chicken and arranged the cheese and bread and grapes on pieces of paper in the center of the towel, where they could all get at them neatly, Bert cocked his head, listening to the distant, slow, rhythmic hammering from the boatyard. “Whenever I hear that noise in a place like this,” he said, “it reminds me of the end of The Cherry Orchard . Everything melancholy and closed up and ready to die and the autumn setting in …”

“Whenever I hear it,” Martha said, arranging the grapes, “I think, ‘Divorce, divorce.’”

“That’s the difference,” said Bert, “between Russia and America.” He walked over to the edge of the wall and stood there, his toes dangerously over the brink, staring out at the horizon, a tall, spare, loose-limbed figure, reciting, his arms ritually upraised, “Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, Oh, sea, And I would that my heart could utter, The thoughts that arise in me …”

“Lunch is on,” Martha said, sitting cross-legged and pushing her sleeves above the elbows, her bare arms, under the bunched jersey, brown and surprisingly full and solid for such a slender girl. She took a piece of chicken and bit into it and said, “It’s the only kind of picnic that makes picnics worth while. And no ants.”

Munnie drank some of the wine from the bottle, because they had neglected to bring glasses, and broke a piece of bread off the long loaf and took some of the dark meat. Bert sat on the other side of Martha, folding his long legs down in slow motion. He reached for a piece of chicken, and said, as he munched at it, “Do you think a bright, sober young American would make a fortune setting up a factory in France to manufacture paper plates and paper cups?”

“It would spoil all the ineffable medieval charm,” Martha said.

“Oh, that old, lowdown, ineffable, medieval, greasy-paper charm,” Bert said. “Trust a woman to notice things like that, eh, Munnie?” He lifted his eyebrow in an exaggerated, theatrical leer. “God, isn’t it lucky we walked into that gallery in Florence and found Martha? Otherwise, you know what our summer would’ve been like? We’d have been delivered over to all the female riffraff of Europe—all those Italian movie starlets, bursting out of their shirtwaists, all those skinny French models, all those hungry-eyed, golden-brown American divorcees, smelling from Arpège. God, Munnie, doesn’t it make you feel as though Something was watching over you that day in the museum? Tell me the truth, Fat Man, doesn’t it make you feel supernaturally serene?”

“Where did you ever learn to talk like that?” Martha asked, sitting cross-legged, placidly lifting the wine bottle to her lips.

“My grandfather was a Baptist preacher in Memphis, Tennessee,” Bert said, “and he taught me to fear the Lord, read the Bible, relish corn, and speak in balanced sentences.” He stood up and waved the drumstick of the chicken at the Atlantic Ocean. “Repent, ye sinners, because ye have swum in the warm waters, and ogled the virgins …” He made a bow in Martha’s direction. “And ye have played at the tables and ye have neglected to send postcards home. Repent, because ye have found pleasure and ye have missed the boat.”

“Do you want some cheese?” Martha asked.

“With mustard.” Bert sat down again. He peered thoughtfully at Munnie. “What do you think, Munnie?” he asked. “Are we really as happy as we feel or do we only think we’re this happy? The philosopher’s everlasting cud—illusion or reality. Is this wall stone?” he demanded oratorically. “Is this ocean blue, this water wet? Is this girl beautiful? Is this money we have in our pockets or is it really coupons for prizes that were given away in Duluth in 1922 by a tobacco company that went bankrupt the first Thursday after the crash? Is this the good wine of France we’re drinking or is it vinegar spiked with blood and seawater? Rosé de Béarn,” he said, reading the label on the bottle. “It seems real, doesn’t it, but is it? Are we three over-privileged, white-toothed, splendid young American princes, visiting our greatest colony, or are we, without knowing it, pitiful refugees, in flight, with our backs to the sea?… Have you read a newspaper this morning, do you know the answer? Are we friends and brothers, or will we betray each other by sunset? Search the lady for daggers.”

“Holy man,” Martha said, “the self-starter got loose.”

Munnie smiled dreamily, in appreciation of Bert’s performance. He himself was literal and direct and always said exactly what he meant and no more. But he was entertained by Bert’s flights of rhetoric and appreciated Bert much the way a man with no talent, but a love for music, appreciates a friend who is a skillful pianist and who generously performs at just the right moments, without being asked. It went all the way back to the time when they were both sixteen and in school together and Bert used to make scandalous improvisations in blank verse about the assumed sexual habits of the middle-aged and slightly bald lady who taught them chemistry. It got Bert into trouble from time to time because he was recklessly brave and once he started he let himself be carried away and say outrageous things, no matter who was listening. Just this summer, they had had to fight four young Germans in a brasserie in Nice and run from the police because of one of his performances. Bert had struck up a conversation with the young men and asked them where they came from and they had said, after a little hesitation, that they were Swiss. “What part of Switzerland?” Bert had asked blandly. “Düsseldorf? Hamburg?”

The Germans, who were large, solid men, had looked uncomfortable and turned away from him toward the beers that were standing on the bar in front of them, but Bert wouldn’t leave it alone. “The part of Switzerland I find most charming,” Bert said loudly, “is Belsen. So rural, so cosy, so full of memories. What I always have said is that Switzerland would have won the war if it hadn’t been stabbed in the back by the watchmakers. And a good thing, too.”

“Cut it out,” Munnie had whispered, and Martha had shaken her head warningly too, and pulled at Bert’s arm. “There’re four of them. They’ll murder us.”

But Bert had gone right on. “I’m proud to tell you gentlemen,” he had said, smiling broadly, “that I have always been a believer in a Greater Switzerland and there are plenty of good, red-blooded Americans who go right along with me.” The Germans were muttering among themselves by now and Munnie took off his watch and slipped it into his pocket because he didn’t want it broken when the fight began.