Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“That’s just too bad,” Raoul said, his voice high with exasperation. “Because I can’t live with her.”

“I warn you,” the father said, speaking loudly, to be heard above the thunder of his daughter’s sobs, “I hold you personally responsible if she throws herself in the river. I, her father, am saying this. Solemnly.”

“The river!” Raoul laughed in harsh disbelief. “Call me when it happens. I will personally accompany her. Anyway, she swims like a fish. I’m surprised that a man your age can be innocent enough to be taken in by female guff like that.”

Somehow, this last statement enraged Moumou more than anything else Raoul had said. With a sound that was a kind of mixture of growl and air-raid siren, Moumou leapt from the shelter of her father’s arms and flung herself on Raoul, hurling him out into the middle of the street, whacking him ferociously with the huge leather bag, holding it by the handle, swinging it again and again like an Olympic hammer-thrower. From the noise it made as it smashed against Raoul’s head and shoulders Tibbell calculated that it weighed about ten pounds and was filled with glass and metalware. Raoul raised his arms to protect himself, shouting, dancing backwards, “Moumou, Moumou, you’re losing control of yourself!”

To halt the brutal, arching blows of the bag, which were coming in at all angles, he lunged forward and grappled with Moumou, but she continued her attack with her sharply pointed shoes, kicking him pitilessly in the shins and grinding her high, needle-sharp heels into the soft suede of his moccasins. To Tibbell, watching bemused from his window, the couple seemed to be performing some eccentric tribal dance, with their shadows, thrown by the nearby lamppost, whirling around them and up and down the face of the buildings opposite in an elongated African pattern.

“Moumou, Moumou,” Raoul shouted hoarsely, as he clutched her and at the same time kept up his painful, jigging dance, to try to avoid the cruel pert heels that dug into his toes. “What good does this do? It solves none of our problems. Moumou, stop it!”

But Moumou, now that she had started, had no mind to stop it. All the indignities, deceptions, and false hopes of her life were welling up in her, finding ecstatic expression in the blows and kicks with which she was belaboring her defaulting partner. The grunts and muffled growls that accompanied her efforts had a note of triumph and wild, orgiastic release in them, hardly fitting, Tibbell thought, for a public performance on a public street. Foreign and American as he was, he was uneasy at the thought of intervention. In New York City, if he had been the witness of a fight between a man and a woman, he would have rushed to part the combatants. But here, in the strange land of France, where the code of behavior between the sexes was at best a titillating mystery to him, he could only wait and hope for the best. Besides, by any system of scoring, the woman was clearly winning by a large margin, delivering all the blows, gaining many points for what is approvingly called aggressiveness in the prize ring and only suffering such incidental damage as came her way when Raoul’s head bumped her forehead as she tried to bite him.

The father, who might have been expected to be disturbed by the spectacle of his pregnant daughter locked in hand-to-hand combat with her faithless lover at this odd hour of the morning, never made a move to stop the action. He merely moved along the street with the struggle, circling it warily, keeping a keen eye on the principals, like a referee who is loath to interfere in a good fight so long as the clinching is not too obvious and the low blows unintentional.

The noise, however, had awakened sleepers, and here and there along the street, shutters opened a crack on dark windows and heads appeared briefly, with that French combination of impartiality, curiosity and caution which would lock the shutters fast on the scene of violence with the approach of the first gendarme.

By this time, Moumou had stamped and hammered Raoul some fifteen yards away from the point of the original attack and they were swaying and panting in front of the lovers who had been tranquilly kissing all this time in the shadow of the doorway on the other side of the street. But now, with the noise of battle on their very doorstep, as it were, and the contestants threatening invasion at any moment, the lovers separated, and the man stepped out protectively in front of the figure of the girl he had been crushing so cosily and for so long against the stone doorway. Tibbell saw that the man was short and burly and dressed in a sports jacket and an open-necked shirt. “Here, here,” the man in the sports jacket said authoritatively, seizing Raoul by the shoulders and pulling at him, “that’s enough of that. Go home and go to sleep.”

His appearance distracted Moumou for an instant. “Go back to your doorway fornication, Monsieur!” she said. “We don’t need your advice.” At that moment, Raoul slid away from her and pounded up the street. “Coward,” Moumou shouted, and took off after him, swinging her bag menacingly, running with surprising speed and agility in her high-heeled, pointed shoes. She seemed actually to be gaining on Raoul when he came to the corner and ducked around it, closely followed by Moumou.

The street seemed strangely quiet now and Tibbell could hear the discreet clicking of shutters being closed, now that the principals had departed the scene.

But the father was still there, staring with melancholy, weary eyes at the corner around which he had last seen his daughter disappear, brandishing the patent-leather handbag. He turned his glance on the young man in the sports jacket, who was saying to his girl, “Well, there’s a pair for you. Barbarians.”

“Monsieur,” the father said gravely, “Who asked you to meddle in other peoples’ affairs? It is the same all over this poor country. Nobody minds his own business any more. Privacy is a thing of the past. No wonder we are on the edge of anarchy. They were on the point of agreement when you destroyed everything.”

“Listen, Monsieur,” the man in the sports jacket said belligerently, “I am by nature a simple, honorable man. I do not stand by idly while a man and a woman beat each other in my presence. It was my duty to separate them and, if you were not old enough to be my grandfather, I would say that you should be ashamed of yourself for not having separated them sooner.”

M. Banary-Cointal examined the simple, honorable man with scientific detachment, as though he were weighing the last statement judiciously, without prejudice. But instead of answering, he turned to the girl, still discreetly in shadow and arranging her ruffled hair with little pats of her hand. “Young woman,” the old man said loudly, “you see what’s ahead of you? The same thing will happen to you as happened to my daughter. Mark my words, you’ll find yourself pregnant and that one”—the old man pointed like a prosecuting attorney at the sports coat—“that one will disappear like a hare in a cornfield.”

“Simone,” the man in the sports coat said, before the girl had a chance to reply, “we have better ways of spending our time than listening to this old windbag.” He pushed a button on the wall next to him and the door against which he and the girl had been leaning opened with an electric buzzing. With dignity, he took the girl’s arm and escorted her into the deeper shadow of the inner court. The old man shrugged, his duty done, his warning to a careless generation delivered, as the huge wooden door clicked shut behind the interrupted lovers. Now the old man seemed to be looking around for another audience for his views on life, but the street was deserted, and Tibbell pulled back a bit from the window, fearful of being harangued.