Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Shut up, Bert,” Martha said. “They’re going to hit you with a beermug.”

“Now, boys,” Bert went on, lifting his glass, “I’d like you to join me in a toast to the greatest little old Swiss of them all, that kindly, sweet old lovable fellow, Adolf Hitler, and after that we’ll all join in singing Switzerland Über Alles. I’m sure you know the words …”

Munnie had edged around by now and when the first German swung, he grabbed the man’s arm and clubbed him twice with his right hand. The Germans were slow, but strong, and very angry, and by the time Munnie dragged Bert to the door, he had a bloody nose and Bert’s coat collar was half torn off and all the waiters were screaming for the police.

The three of them ran through the back streets of Nice, hearing confused shouting dying down behind them. Bert was chuckling as he ran, and shaking his right hand, which was numb from a German skull, and he kept saying to Munnie, “What part of Switzerland you from, Bud? Leipzig? Nuremberg?”

A half hour later, when they were sitting safely in a bar along the Promenade des Anglais, it had begun to seem funny to Martha and Munnie, too, and for the rest of the summer, whenever any one of them did something that seemed objectionable or foolish, the others would ask, incredulously, “What part of Switzerland are you from?”

Now Bert was sitting, waving the wine bottle gently, beaming out at the bay. “I think I am going to start a new kind of travel service. Out-of-season tours to slightly rundown resorts. I’ll write a brochure, entitled ‘Know Bliss! Be Unfashionable! Get Away from Your Fellow Man on Your Next Vacation!’ Do you think your father would be inclined to put up the dough to get us started, Munnie?”

Bert had an unshakable belief that Munnie’s father was enormously wealthy and avid for unusual business opportunities, which Bert was happy to find for him. The opportunities had included the planting of an avocado grove near Grasse, and the building of a 4000-foot téléphérique for skiing in a village of twenty-two houses in the Spanish Pyrenees. All of Bert’s projects, aside from involving great outlays of capital on the part of Munnie’s father, also included the necessity of Bert’s remaining permanently in Europe as manager.

“Munnie,” Bert said, “don’t you think we ought to send your father a cable?”

“No,” said Munnie.

“The chance of a lifetime,” Bert said. “What does he want to hold onto all that money for? The inheritance people’ll just take it from him in the hideous end. Well, I’ll find something. That’s not the only way to turn a dollar.” He peered speculatively at Martha, who was eating the grapes by now. “Martha,” he said, “do you know that you represent a source of vast potential income?”

“I’m going to donate my body to science,” Martha said, “at the age of eighty-five.”

“The essential thing,” said Bert, “is not to marry an American.”

“Report that man to a committee,” Martha said.

“America is not the place for a pretty woman,” Bert went on. “The houses’re getting too small, the help too expensive, a beauty suddenly finds herself in a cosy little nest in Scarsdale surrounded by television sets and labor-saving devices and invitations to join the Parent-Teachers Association. A beautiful woman does better in a country which is decaying a little, and rather uneconomically run—like France. You could marry a nice forty-five-year-old man with a clean mustache and large, rolling feudal estates on the banks of the Loire . Wonderful shooting in the autumn and good, light wines grown on the property and dozens of servants taking off their caps and bowing when the station wagon went by. Your husband would adore you and invite all your friends down to keep you happy and he’d leave you alone a good deal of the time when he went up to Paris to attend to his affairs and have his doctor probe his liver.”

“Where do you fit into this picture?” Martha asked.

“He’d be one of the friends invited to keep you happy,” Munnie said. He wasn’t enjoying the conversation. Even though Bert was joking, Munnie knew that actually Bert would approve if Martha did go out and marry an old man with a lot of money. Just the other day, when they had been talking about the careers that might lie ahead of them, Bert had said, “The important thing is to recognize your gift and then use it. And the best way to use it is to keep you from the insufferable boredom of work. Now your gift—” he had grinned at Martha “—your gift is beauty. That’s easy. You use it on a man and the sky’s the limit. My gift is a double one, but in the long run less hopeful. I have charm …” He grinned more widely, making fun of himself, “and I don’t give a damn. Still, if I’m clever enough and don’t rise to the wrong bait, I may go a long way on it. As for Munnie …” He shook his head doubtfully. “His gift is virtue. Poor sod. What can he do with that?”

Now, sitting on the corner of the towel, picking the grapes appreciatively off their stems, one by one, Bert was shaking his head. “No,” he said, “I won’t be one of the invited friends. I’m a permanent fixture. I’m the overseer of the estates, the curious American with no ambition who likes to live in France on the banks of the pretty river. I walk around in an old tweed jacket smelling a little from horses and new wine barrels, loved by one and all, making wry comments on the state of the world, playing backgammon in front of the fire with the mistress of the house when her husband is away, and going up the stairs later, with the last glass of Armagnac in my hand, to entertain her in my wry, American way in the ancestral bed …”

“Ah,” Martha said, “how idyllic!”

“Every age,” Bert said gravely, “to its own particular idyll. This is this year, among the wars.”

Munnie felt very uncomfortable and when he looked over at Martha he felt even more uncomfortable, because she was laughing. They had laughed together at a lot of things since Florence, and they had covered all the subjects, but Munnie didn’t want to hear Martha laughing now at this.

He stood up. “I think I’m going down the wall a way,” he said, “and take a siesta. Wake me when you want to go.”

He walked about thirty yards, carrying a sweater to use as a pillow, and as he stretched out on the smooth sun-warmed stone, he heard Martha and Bert laughing together, the laughter private and small in the wide, bright emptiness.

Closing his eyes against the glare of the sun, listening to the distant laughter, Munnie realized that he was in pain. The pain was not localized and it had a curious, evasive quality. Just when Munnie felt, There, I’ve got it, it’s in my throat , it slipped away, not to disappear, but to put vague, sharp, almost detectable fingers somewhere else. Then, lying there, with the curtain of heat on his eyelids, Munnie understood that what he was feeling was not pain, but sorrow.

The sorrow was deep and complex, and was composed of many elements—a sense of deprivation, a shadow of impending departure, a nostalgia for memories that were moving irrevocably away from innocence, a confusion of emotion more profound than anything he had ever experienced before in his life. Engulfed and shaken as he was, Munnie also knew that if, telepathically affected, Martha would stop laughing with Bert and get up and walk the thirty yards along the wall to where he lay, and if she were to sit down beside him and touch his hand, all would instantaneously be well.

But she didn’t move, and he heard her laugh more loudly at something that Bert had said and which Munnie couldn’t hear.

Suddenly, Munnie knew what he was going to do. As soon as he was on the boat, and all bargains were over, all rules no longer in effect, he was going to write Martha and ask her to marry him. Clumsily, he began to compose the letter in his mind. This will come as a surprise to you, I suppose, because all summer long I never said a word, but I didn’t realize for a long time what had been happening to me, and besides there was the arrangement you and Bert and I made in Florence to keep everything on a purely friendly basis, which I am happy we did. But now I’m on the boat and I feel free to tell you how I feel about you. I love you and I want to marry you. I don’t know how you feel about me, but maybe the arrangement kept you from saying anything, just the way it did me. Anyway, I hope so. I am going to get a job and get settled just as soon as I get home, and then you could come back and meet my family and all that …