Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Hugo growled.

“What did you say?” the doctor asked.

Hugo growled again and went over to the window. The doctor followed him, worried now, and looked out the window. Fifty yards away, on the soft, leaf-covered lawn, a five-year-old boy in sneakers was crossing over toward the garage-way of the next house.

The two men stood in silence for a moment.

The doctor sighed. “If you’ll come into my operating room,” he said.

When he left the doctor’s house an hour later, Hugo had a small bandage behind his left ear, but he was happy. The left side of his head felt like a corked-up cider bottle.

Hugo didn’t intercept another pass all the rest of the season. He was fooled by the simplest hand-offs and dashed to the left when the play went to the right, and he couldn’t hear Johnny Smathers’ shouts of warning as the other teams lined up. Johnny Smathers stopped talking to him after two games and moved in with another roommate on road trips. At the end of the season, Hugo’s contract was not renewed. The official reason the coach gave to the newspapers was that Hugo’s head injury had turned out to be so severe that he would be risking permanent disablement if he ever got hit again.

Dr. Sebastian charged him $500 for the operation and, what with the fine and making up the bribes to the magistrate and the newspapers, that took care of the $1000 raise the coach had promised him. But Hugo was glad to pay for it.

By January tenth, he was contentedly and monogamously selling insurance for his father-in-law, although he had to make sure to sit on the left side of prospects to be able to hear what they were saying.

H e woke up feeling good. There was no reason for him to wake up feeling anything else.

He was an only child. He was twenty years old. He was over six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds and had never been sick in his whole life. He was number two on the tennis team and back home in his father’s study there was a whole shelf of cups he had won in tournaments since he was eleven years old. He had a lean, sharply cut face, straight black hair that he wore just a little long, which prevented him from looking merely like an athlete. A girl had once said he looked like Shelley. Another, like Laurence Olivier. He had smiled noncommittally at both girls.

He had a retentive memory and classes were easy for him. He had just been put on the dean’s list. His father, who was doing well up North in an electronics business, had sent him a check for $100 as a reward. The check had been in his box the night before.

He had a gift for mathematics and probably could get a job teaching in the department if he wanted it upon graduation, but he planned to go into his father’s business.

He was not one of the single-minded educational wizards who roamed the science departments. He got A’s in English and history and had memorized most of Shakespeare’s sonnets and read Roethke and Eliot and Ginsberg. He had tried marijuana. He was invited to all the parties. When he went home, mothers made obvious efforts to throw their daughters at him.

His own mother was beautiful and young and funny. There were no unbroken silver cords in the family. He was having an affair with one of the prettiest girls on the campus and she said she loved him. From time to time he said he loved her. When he said it he meant it. At that moment, anyway.

Nobody he had ever cared for had as yet died and everybody in his family had come home safe from all the wars.

The world saluted him.

He maintained his cool.

No wonder he woke up feeling good.

It was nearly December, but the California sun made a summer morning of the season and the girls and boys in corduroys and T-shirts and bright-colored sweaters on their way to their ten-o’clock classes walked over green lawns and in and out of the shadows of trees that had not yet lost their leaves.

He passed the sorority house where Adele lived and waved as she came out. His first class every Tuesday was at ten o’clock and the sorority house was on his route to the arts buildings in which the classroom was situated.

Adele was a tall girl, her dark, combed head coming well above his shoulder. She had a triangular, blooming, still-childish face. Her walk, even with the books she was carrying in her arms, wasn’t childish, though, and he was amused at the envious looks directed at him by some of the other students as Adele paced at his side down the graveled path.

“‘She walks in beauty,’” Steve said, “‘like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies;/And all that’s best of dark and bright/Meet in her aspect and her eyes.’”

“What a nice thing to hear at ten o’clock in the morning,” Adele said. “Did you bone up on that for me?”

“No,” he said. “We’re having a test on Byron today.”

“Animal,” she said.

He laughed.

“Are you taking me to the dance Saturday night?” she asked.

He grimaced. He didn’t like to dance. He didn’t like the kind of music that was played and he thought the way people danced these days was devoid of grace. “I’ll tell you later,” he said.

“I have to know today,” Adele said. “Two other boys’ve asked me.”

“I’ll tell you at lunch,” he said.

“What time?”

“One. Can the other aspirants hold back their frenzy to dance until then?”

“Barely,” she said. He knew that with or without him, Adele would be at the dance on Saturday night. She loved to dance and he had to admit that a girl had every right to expect the boy she was seeing almost every night in the week to take her dancing at least once on the weekend. He felt very mature, almost fatherly, as he resigned himself to four hours of heat and noise on Saturday night. But he didn’t tell Adele that he’d take her. It wouldn’t do her any harm to wait until lunch.

He squeezed her hand as they parted and watched for a moment as she swung down the path, conscious of the provocative way she was walking, conscious of the eyes on her. He smiled and continued on his way, waving at people who greeted him.

It was early and Mollison, the English professor, had not yet put in an appearance. The room was only half full as Steve entered it, but there wasn’t the usual soprano-tenor turning-up sound of conversation from the students who were already there. They sat in their chairs quietly, not talking, most of them ostentatiously arranging their books or going through their notes. Occasionally, almost furtively, one or another of them would look up toward the front of the room and the blackboard, where a thin boy with wispy reddish hair was writing swiftly and neatly behind the teacher’s desk.

“Oh, weep for Adonais—he is dead!” the red-haired boy had written. “Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!”

Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed

Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep

Like his a mute and uncomplaining sleep;

For he is gone where all things wise and fair

Descend. Oh, dream not that the amorous Deep

Will yet restore him to the vital air;

Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair .

Then, on a second blackboard, where the boy was finishing the last lines of another stanza, was written:

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;

Envy and calumny and hate and pain ,

And that unrest which men miscall delight;

Can touch him not and torture not again;