Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Below him, outlined in the light of the street lamp stood three people, tensely together, arguing, their voices sometimes hushed, as though they were trying to keep their quarrel to themselves, and sometimes, in bursts of anger, carelessly loud and brutal. There was a man of about sixty, with gray hair and a bald spot, clearly visible from Tibbell’s post at the window, and a young woman who was sobbing into a handkerchief, and a young man in a windjacket. The young woman had on a gay, flowered-cotton dress and her hair was blond and piled high on her head in the inevitable Brigitte Bardot style of the season, the ensemble making her look like a stuffed, cleansed little piglet. The old man looked like a respectable engineer or government official, robust and vaguely intellectual at the same time. They were grouped around a Vespa that was parked in front of the building. During the most heated exchanges the young man kept stroking the machine, as though reassuring himself that in extremis a means of escape was still available to him.

“I repeat, Monsieur ,” the old man was saying loudly, “you are a salaud. ” His speech had a rotund, self-important ring to it, almost oratorical, as if he were accustomed to addressing large audiences.

“I repeat once more to you, Monsieur Banary-Cointal,” the young man said, equally loudly, “I am not a salaud .” His speech was street-Parisian, rasping, rough, formed by twenty-five years of constant argument with the fellow citizens of his city, but his overall air suggested the student or laboratory assistant or pharmacist’s clerk.

The young woman wept, her hands trembling on a large patent-leather purse she was carrying.

“But you are,” the old man said, his face close to the other man’s face. “The worst kind. Do you wish proof?” It was an oratorical question. “I will give you proof. My daughter is pregnant. Due to your attentions. And what do you do now that she is in this condition? You abandon her. Like a serpent. And to add to the injury, you propose to get married tomorrow. To another woman.”

Undoubtedly, the conversation would have had a different ring to it for a Frenchman who happened to overhear it, but to Tibbell’s Exeter-cum-Swarth-more ear all spoken French was translated automatically into English that was constructed like a schoolboy’s version of excerpts from Racine and Cicero. To Tibbell, all Frenchmen seemed to have a slightly archaic and elevated vocabulary and they always sounded to him as though they were making a speech to a group of senators in the forum or exhorting the Athenians to kill Socrates. Far from annoying Tibbell, it gave an added, mysterious charm to his contacts with the inhabitants of the country, and on the rare occasions when he understood accurately a few words of argot it supplied a piquancy to his relations with the language, as though he had discovered a phrase of Damon Runyon’s in Act Three of Le Cid .

“I will leave it to the opinion of the most neutral observer,” M. Banary-Cointal was saying, “if that is not the action of a man who deserves to be termed a salaud .”

The young woman, standing stiffly upright, not yet looking pregnant, wept more loudly.

In the shadow of their doorway, the lovers shifted a little; a bare arm moved, a kiss was planted on an ear rather than on lips, a muscular arm took a new hold—but whether that was due to the commotion around the Vespa or to the natural fatigue and need for variation of prolonged amour Tibbell could not tell.

Farther down the street a car approached, with bright lights and an Italian roar of motor, but it stopped near the corner, swinging in to park in front of a closed laundry shop, and the lights were extinguished. The street was left to the disputants.

“If I’m getting married tomorrow,” the young man said, “it’s her fault.” He pointed accusingly at the girl.

“I forbid you to go on,” said M. Banary-Cointal with dignity.

“I tried,” the young man shouted. “I did everything I could. I lived with her for a year, didn’t I?” He said this righteously, with pride and self-pity, as if he expected congratulations all around for his sacrifice. “At the end of the year it became clear to me—if I ever wanted a worthy home for any children I might have, I would never get it from your daughter. It is time to speak frankly, Monsieur. Your daughter conducts herself in an impossible manner. Impossible. In addition, her character is abominable.”

“Be careful in your choice of words, young man,” the father said.

“Abominable,” the young man repeated. He waved his arms in emphasis and his long black hair fell over his forehead into his eyes, adding to the effect of blind and uncontrollable rage. “As her father, I will spare you the details, but I will permit myself to say that never has a man had to bear such treatment from a woman who in theory shared his home for twelve months. Even the phrase makes me laugh,” he said, without laughing. “When you say ‘share a home,’ you imagine that it means that a woman is occasionally physically present in the foyer—for example, when a man comes home to lunch or when he returns for an evening of peace and relaxation after a hard day’s work. But if you imagine that in the case of your daughter, M. Banary-Cointal, you are sadly mistaken. In the last year, M. Banary-Cointal, I assure you I have seen more of my mother, of my maiden aunt in Toulouse, of the woman who sells newspapers opposite the Madeleine, than I have seen of your daughter. Ask for her at any hour of the day or night—winter or summer—and where was she? Absent!”

“Raoul,” the girl sobbed, “how can you talk like that? I was faithful from the first day to the last.”

“Faithful!” Raoul snorted contemptuously. “What difference does that make? A woman says she is faithful and believes that excuses everything from arson to matricide. What good did your fidelity do me? You were never home. At the hairdresser, at the cinema, at the Galéries Lafayette, at the Zoo, at the tennis matches, at the swimming pool, at the dressmaker, at the Deux Magots, on the Champs-Elysées, at the home of a girl friend in St.-Cloud—but never home. Monsieur”—Raoul turned to the father—“I do not know what it was in her childhood that formed your daughter’s character, but I speak only of the results. Your daughter is a woman who has only the most lively detestation of a home.”

“A home is one thing, Monsieur,” the old man said, his voice trembling with parental emotion, “and a clandestine and illicit ménage is another. It is the difference between a church and a … a …” The old man hesitated, searching for the proper crushing comparison. “The difference between a church and a racecourse.” He permitted himself a wild smile at the brilliance of his rhetoric.

“I swear to you, Raoul,” the girl said, “if you marry me I will not budge from the kitchen.”

“A woman will promise anything,” Raoul said, “on the night before a man is due to marry somebody else.” He turned brutally to the father. “I will give you my final judgment on your daughter. I pity the man who marries her, and if I were a good citizen and a good Christian, I would send such a man an anonymous letter of warning before he took the fatal step.”

The young woman cried out as though she had been struck and threw herself against her father heartbrokenly, to sob against his shoulder. Her father patted her distractedly, saying, “There, there, Moumou,” while the girl brokenly repeated, “I love him, I love him, I can’t live without him. If he leaves me I’m going to throw myself in the river.”

“You see,” the father said accusingly, over his daughter’s bent, tragic head, “you serpent of ingratitude, she can’t live without you.”