Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Harry thought patiently about the absence of money. “Cash a check,” he said.

“It’s Saturday afternoon,” she said, “the bank is closed. Anyway, I’m overdrawn this month.”

Harry thought patiently again. “Cash a check in the bookstore. Is he good for a hundred, do you think?”

“I can try.”

“Do the best you can,” Harry said. “Now go get dressed.” He was stuffing the extra newspapers from the tennis bag into the fireplace and once again Sue had to admire him for his foresight. If anything went wrong and the tennis bag were found, with the Newark newspapers in it, there would be nothing in her apartment that even by the wildest chance could connect her with the event. As she was pulling on a soft brown wool dress with a midiskirt, she could hear the crackling from the fireplace in the living room as the papers went up in flames.

She went back into the living room and put on a tweed coat over the brown dress and picked up the tennis bag. How invariably clever Harry was, she thought. Who would suspect that a well-dressed, aristocratic-looking girl carrying a tennis bag had destruction at her finger tips; saw, in her mind’s eye, Park Avenue in ruins, Madison Avenue smoldering in the cleansing fire of revolution? She wanted to ask Harry when she was going to see him again. But she knew better and all she said was goodbye.

One hundred dollars, Christopher thought as he watched the door close behind Miss Marsh. I wonder if I wasn’t a little excessive. He took the check out of the cash-register drawer and examined it once more, interested in the handwriting. It was bold but controlled, generous but intellectual. He put the check back into the cash-register drawer and picked up the blue tennis bag and carried it into the back office for safekeeping. He tried to keep his excitement down. The bag was a hostage, a guarantee that she would return. And she had said that she was almost one hundred percent sure that she would be free to have dinner with him tonight. And she hadn’t been political at all during her brief visit, but sort of twinkly and almost coquettish, especially when he had been enterprising enough to say that it was a shame a girl like her, with legs like that, thought she had to wear a midiskirt, to be in fashion.

It was the most hopeful thing that had happened to him all day, he thought.

When Sue opened the door to her apartment with her key, she didn’t have the time to be surprised that Harry and Fred were still there. There were four other men in the living room and they immediately turned out to be detectives.

Harry had handcuffs on his beautiful slender wrists, and he spoke to her quickly in a loud clear voice, “Don’t say anything until we get a lawyer.”

At exactly the moment that Sue Marsh was arrested, Beulah Stickney was in the glassed-in visitors’ gallery at Kennedy peering down at the floor where the passengers from Zurich were waiting for their baggage before going through Customs. Quite a few miles away to the west, in a one-room apartment on East 87th Street that Omar Gadsden used, he said, when he was kept in town too late to go to his home in Mount Kisco, Paulette Anderson was fighting weakly to keep the silvery-haired commentator from tearing off her cashmere sweater.

“Please,” she said plaintively, struggling to sit up on the day bed on which she somehow had been trapped. “Please.…” He had gotten one hook of her brassiere undone. It was like wrestling with a man with ten arms. It was obscene for a man with that much gray hair to be so strong. “You mustn’t, Mr. Gadsden,” Paulette said, half smothered by a shoulder that butted into her mouth. “Really, you mustn’t.”

“Come on, treasure,” Mr. Gadsden said hoarsely, all his ten arms working at once.

It was nice being called Treasure, even nicer than Angel of Hygeia, but she would have preferred it at a distance.

His behavior had come as a complete surprise. He had been fatherly and wise at lunch, suggesting delicious dishes and talking authoritatively about campus disorders and the ABM and Nixon’s Southern strategy and integration and the relation of the G.N.P. to ecological decay in America. She didn’t remember ever having a more informative lunch. He hadn’t even tried to touch her hand in the restaurant. It had been so friendly and he seemed to be enjoying her company so much that she had ventured to say that she was invited down to a party in the Village that evening where he would meet some young people who would be wildly interested to hear his views. And he had said yes, he’d like to go, he knew a nice little place on Ninth Street where they could have dinner first. She had hoped that he would take her to a movie to fill in the time between lunch and dinner, but he said he was exhausted from the morning session with Dr. Levinson, as well he might be, poor man, and why didn’t they go to this place of his that he kept for emergencies and play some music on the hi-fi and just relax until it was time to go downtown. Although she was disappointed about the movie, she told herself that she could go to a movie any time and when would she ever get the chance again to have Omar Gadsden for an entire afternoon, with the knowledge that when the evening came, she was going to give her friends something to talk about for months to come.

But in the meantime, Mr. Gadsden was working powerfully on her stockings. There was a fiendish ingenuity to his attack. When she defended one place, the assault shifted, with demonic energy, to another. If this was the way he was when exhausted, he must be perfectly shocking when fresh. If his public were to see him now, she thought, they might take his pronouncements on public morality with a grain of salt.

Suddenly, he stopped. He didn’t move away, but he stopped. He looked at her, wrinkling his lovely gray eyebrows inquiringly. His hair was tousled and he looked sad and disturbed. As long as he didn’t move, she liked him very much. If you had to do it with an old man, she thought, he wouldn’t be a bad one to start with. She lay on the couch, disheveled, skin showing here and there.

“What is it?” he asked. “Are you a Lesbian?”

She began to cry. Nothing as bad as that had ever been said to her before, she said. What she didn’t tell him was that she was something even stranger. She was a virgin. She felt that she would die of shame if Mr. Gadsden found out that she was a virgin.

She sobbed bitterly, not knowing whether it was because Mr. Gadsden had asked her if she was a Lesbian or because she was a virgin. He took her in his arms and stroked her hair and kissed her tears away and said. “There, there, treasure,” and in eight minutes she was lying naked on top of the day bed and Mr. Gadsden was taking off his shirt. She kept her eyes averted from him and looked at the photographs on the walls, of Mr. Gadsden with President Kennedy and Mr. Gadsden with Mayor Lindsay and Mr. Gadsden with John Kenneth Galbraith. When the moment comes, she thought, I’ll close my eyes. I can’t bear the thought of doing it in front of all those important people.

Mr. Gadsden seemed to be taking a long time and she looked over at him out of the corner of her eye. He was putting his shirt on.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’d better get dressed. I can’t go through with it.”

She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of Mr. Gadsden, President Kennedy, Mayor Lindsay, John Kenneth Galbraith.

But she couldn’t shut her ears. “I looked down at you, lying there, so young and perfect,” Mr. Gadsden was saying, “and I thought of you in your white uniform performing those humble necessary tasks in Dr. Levinson’s office, peering in at my bleeding jaws with all those weird little stumps of teeth, the ugly maw of age, and I thought, Omar Gadsden, you are trading on innocence and pity, you despicable old lecher; it is unbecoming and disgusting.”