Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Enders nodded sympathetically.

“It’s my private curse,” Miss Zelinka said, tears looming in her eyes like mist over the ocean. She jumped up, shaking her head, walked lightly and dramatically around the room. “I have no complaints,” she said. “I’ve done very well. I live in a two-room suite on the twentieth floor of a hotel on Seventy-fifth Street. Overlooking the park. All my trunks and bags are up there. I just took a few things with me, until the rehearsals are over. Seventy-fifth Street, on the East Side, is too far away; when you’re rehearsing a musical comedy, you’ve got to be on tap twenty-four hours a day for the Shuberts. A very luxurious two-room suite in the Hotel Chalmers. It’s very exclusive, but it’s too far from Fifty-second Street.” She poured some more whisky for herself, and Enders noticed that the bottle was almost empty. “Oh, yes,” she said, crooning to the glass in her hand, “I’ve done very well. I’ve danced all over the country. In the most exclusive nightspots, I was the featured entertainment. I’m very greatly in demand.” She sat down, close to him, her body moving gently and rhythmically as she spoke. “Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit.” She gulped her whisky and her eyes clouded with a final, deep, vague mist and her voice suddenly got very throaty and hoarse. “Miami, Florida.” She sat absolutely still and the cloud dissolved into tears and the tears coursed slowly down her face.

“What’s the matter?” Enders asked anxiously. “Did I do something?”

Miss Zelinka threw the empty tumbler against the opposite wall. It broke heavily and sullenly, scattered over the carpet. She threw herself back on the bed, wept. “Miami, Florida,” she sobbed. “Miami, Florida …”

Enders patted her shoulder consolingly.

“I danced in The Golden Horn in Miami, Florida,” she cried. “It was a Turkish night club. Very exclusive.”

“Why’re you crying, darling?” Enders asked, feeling sorry for her, but elated, too, because he had said “darling.”

“Every time I think of Miami, Florida,” Miss Zelinka said, “I cry.”

“Can I do anything to help?” Enders held her hand softly.

“It was January, 1936.” Miss Zelinka’s voice throbbed with old, hopeless, broken tragedy, forlorn as the story of a siege of a lost and ruined village. “I was dressed in Turkish garments: a brassiere, and veils around my legs and nothing around the middle. At the end of the dance I had to do a back-bend. I leaned back and touched the floor with my hands, with my hair falling down to the floor. There was a bald man. There was a convention of the Metal-Trades Union in Miami, Florida. He had on a badge. The whole night club was full of them.” The tears and the anguish pulled at her face. “I’ll remember that bald son of a bitch until the day I die. There was no music at that part of the dance. Drums and tambourines. He leaned over and put an olive in my navel and sprinkled it with salt.” Miss Zelinka rolled suddenly over on her face and, clutching the bedspread, her shoulders heaving, burrowed into the grayish cotton. “It was a cartoon. He saw it in a cartoon in a magazine. It’s funny in a magazine, but wait until it happens to you! The humiliation,” she wept. “Every time I think of the humiliation I want to die. Miami, Florida.”

Enders watched the bedspread stain with tears, mascara and rouge. With genuine sympathy, he put his arm around her. “I want to be treated with respect,” Miss Zelinka wailed. “I was brought up in a good family, why shouldn’t I be treated with respect? That fat, bald man, with the badge from the Metal-Trades Union Convention. He leaned over and put the olive in my navel like an egg in an egg cup and sprinkled salt like he was starting breakfast and everybody laughed and laughed, including the orchestra.…” Her voice went wailing up the air well, lost, despairing, full of an ancient and irreparable sorrow.

She sat up and threw her arms around Enders, digging her grief-torn head into his shoulder, clutching him with strong hands, both of them rocking back and forth like Jews praying, on the enameled bed that squeaked and wailed in the little room.

“Hold me tight,” she wept, “hold me tight. I haven’t got a two-room suite on East Seventy-fifth Street. I got no trunks in the Hotel Chalmers, hold me tight.” Her hands dug into him and her tears and rouge and mascara stained his coat. “The Shuberts aren’t giving me a job. Why do I lie, why do I always lie?” She lifted her head, kissed his throat fiercely. He shook at the soft, violent pressure, at the wetness of her lips and the tragic and exhilarating trickle of her tears under his chin, knowing that he was going to have this woman, this Bertha Zelinka. Lonely, far from home, on a rainy night, the city was pulling him in, making a place in its wild and ludicrous life for him. As he kissed her, this woman who looked like Greta Garbo, the century’s dream of passion and tragedy and beauty, this woman whom he had met in a rat-tenanted lobby off Columbus Circle, among whores thinking of death and a Pole in an orange tie checking in each night’s transients, age and sin, at reasonable rates, Enders felt suddenly at home, accounted for. The city had produced for him a great beauty, supple as a cat, full of lies and whisky and ancient, shadowy victories, a woman with magnificent, proud legs and deep, stormy eyes who wept bitterly behind the frail, warped door because once, in 1936, a bald man from a Metal-Trades Union had put an olive in her navel. Enders held Bertha Zelinka’s head in his two hands, looked intently at the bony, drunken, beautiful, tear-stained face. Bertha Zelinka peered longingly and sadly at him through half-closed classic lids, her mouth hanging softly open in passion and promise, her poor jagged teeth showing behind the long, heart-breaking lips. He kissed her, feeling deep within him, that in its own way, on this rainy night, the city had put out its hand in greeting, had called, in its own voice, wry and ironic, “Welcome, Citizen.”

Gratefully, near tears, hating himself, his hands shaking exultantly, Enders bent to his knees and took the scraped, year-worn shoes, swollen with the streets’ rain, from the long and handsome feet of Bertha Zelinka.

F ifth Avenue was shining in the sun when they left the Brevoort and started walking toward Washington Square. The sun was warm, even though it was November and everything looked like Sunday morning—the buses, and the well-dressed people walking slowly in couples and the quiet buildings with the windows closed.

Michael held Frances’ arm tightly as they walked downtown in the sunlight. They walked lightly, almost smiling, because they had slept late and had a good breakfast and it was Sunday. Michael unbuttoned his coat and let it flap around him in the mild wind. They walked, without saying anything, among the young and pleasant-looking people who somehow seem to make up most of the population of that section of New York City.

“Look out,” Frances said, as they crossed Eighth Street. “You’ll break your neck.”

Michael laughed and Frances laughed with him.

“She’s not so pretty, anyway,” Frances said. “Anyway, not pretty enough to take a chance breaking your neck looking at her.”

Michael laughed again. He laughed louder this time, but not as solidly. “She wasn’t a bad-looking girl. She had a nice complexion. Country-girl complexion. How did you know I was looking at her?”

Frances cocked her head to one side and smiled at her husband under the tip-tilted brim of her hat. “Mike, darling …” she said.