Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Crane cocked his head and listened with pleasure to the chorus of Downtown , and he had to speak loudly to be heard over the jukebox. “You know why my brother wasn’t elected captain of the football team? He was all set for it, he was the logical choice, everybody expected it. I’ll tell you why he wasn’t, though. He wouldn’t shake the hand of last year’s captain, at the end of the season, and last year’s captain had a lot of votes he could influence any way he wanted. And do you know why my brother wouldn’t shake his hand? Because he thought the man was a coward. He saw him tackle high when a low tackle would’ve been punishing, and he saw him not go all the way on blocks when they looked too rough. Maybe nobody else saw what my brother saw or maybe they gave the man the benefit of the doubt. Not my brother. So he didn’t shake his hand, because he didn’t shake cowards’ hands, see, and somebody else was elected captain. That’s what I mean by purity,” Crane said, sipping at his beer and looking out at the deserted beach and the ocean. For the first time, it occurred to Steve that it was perhaps just as well that he had never known Crane’s brother, never been measured against that Cromwellian certitude of conduct.

“As for girls,” Crane said. “The homeland of compromise, the womb of the second best—” Crane shook his head emphatically. “Not for my brother. Do you know what he did with his first girl? And he thought he was in love with her, too, at the time, but it still didn’t make any difference. They only made love in the dark. The girl insisted. That’s the way some girls are, you know, darkness excuses all. Well, my brother was crazy about her, and he didn’t mind the darkness if it pleased her. But one night he saw her sitting up in bed and the curtains on the window moved in the wind and her silhouette was outlined against the moonlight, and he saw that when she sat like that she had a fat, loose belly. The silhouette, my brother said, was slack and self-indulgent. Of course, when she was lying down it sank in, and when she was dressed she wore a girdle that would’ve tucked in a beer barrel. And when he saw her silhouette against the curtain, he said to himself, This is the last time, this is not for me. Because it wasn’t perfect, and he wouldn’t settle for less. Love or no love, desire or not. He, himself, had a body like Michelangelo’s David and he knew it and he was proud of it and he kept it that way, why should he settle for imperfection? Are you laughing, Dennicott?”

“Well,” Steve said, trying to control his mouth, “the truth is, I’m smiling a little.” He was amused, but he couldn’t help thinking that it was possible that Crane had loved his brother for all the wrong reasons. And he couldn’t help feeling sorry for the unknown girl, deserted, without knowing it, in the dark room, by the implacable athlete who had just made love to her.

“Don’t you think I ought to talk about my brother this way?” Crane said.

“Of course,” Steve said. “If I were dead, I hope my brother could talk like this about me the day after the funeral.”

“It’s just those goddamned speeches everybody makes,” Crane whispered. “If you’re not careful, they can take the whole idea of your brother away from you.”

He wiped his glasses. His hands were shaking. “My goddamned hands,” he said. He put his glasses back on his head and pressed his hands hard on the table, so they wouldn’t shake.

“How about you, Dennicott?” Crane said. “Have you ever done anything in your whole life that was unprofitable, damaging, maybe even ruinous, because it was the pure thing to do, the uncompromising thing, because if you acted otherwise, for the rest of your life you would remember it and feel shame?”

Steve hesitated. He did not have the habit of self-examination and had the feeling that it was vanity that made people speak about their virtues. And their faults. But there was Crane, waiting, himself open, naked. “Well, yes …” Steve said.

“What?”

“Well, it was never anything very grandiose …” Steve said, embarrassed, but feeling that Crane needed it, that in some way this exchange of intimacies helped relieve the boy’s burden of sorrow. And he was intrigued by Crane, by the violence of his views, by the almost comic flood of his reminiscence about his brother, by the importance that Crane assigned to the slightest gesture, by his searching for meaning in trivialities, which gave the dignity of examination to every breath of life. “There was the time on the beach at Santa Monica,” Steve said, “I got myself beaten up and I knew I was going to be beaten up …”

“That’s good,” Crane nodded approvingly. “That’s always a good beginning.”

“Oh, hell,” Steve said, “it’s too picayune.”

“Nothing is picayune,” said Crane. “Come on.”

“Well, there was a huge guy there who always hung around and made a pest of himself,” Steve said. “A physical-culture idiot, with muscles like basketballs. I made fun of him in front of some girls and he said I’d insulted him, and I had, and he said if I didn’t apologize, I would have to fight him. And I was wrong, I’d been snotty and superior, and I realized it, and I knew that if I apologized, he’d be disappointed and the girls’d still be laughing at him—so I said I wouldn’t apologize and I fought him there on the beach and he must have knocked me down a dozen times and he nearly killed me.”

“Right.” Crane nodded again, delivering a favorable judgment. “Excellent.”

“Then there was this girl I wanted …” Steve stopped.

“Well?” Crane said.

“Nothing,” Steve said. “I haven’t figured it out yet.” Until now he had thought that the episode with the girl reflected honorably on him. He had behaved, as his mother would have put it, in a gentlemanly manner. He wasn’t sure now that Crane and his mother would see eye to eye. Crane confused him. “Some other time,” he said.

“You promise?” Crane said.

“I promise.”

“You won’t disappoint me, now?”

“No.”

“OK.” Crane said. “Let’s get out of here.”

They split the check.

“Come back again sometime, boys,” the blond waitress said. “I’ll play that record for you.” She laughed, her breasts shaking. She had liked having them there. One of them was very good-looking, and the other one, the queer one with the glasses, she had decided, after thinking about it, was a great joker. It helped pass the long afternoon.

On the way home, Crane no longer drove like a nervous old maid on her third driving lesson. He drove very fast, with one hand, humming Downtown , as though he didn’t care whether he lived or died.

Then, abruptly, Crane stopped humming and began to drive carefully, timidly, again. “Dennicott,” he said, “what are you going to do with your life?”

“Who knows?” Steve said, taken aback by the way Crane’s conversation jumped from one enormous question to another. “Go to sea, maybe, build electronic equipment, teach, marry a rich wife …”

“What’s that about electronics?” Crane asked.

“My father’s factory,” Steve said. “The ancestral business. No sophisticated missile is complete without a Dennicott supersecret what-do-you-call-it.”

“Nah,” Crane said, shaking his head, “you won’t do that. And you won’t teach school, either. You don’t have the soul of a didact. I have the feeling something adventurous is going to happen to you.”

“Do you?” Steve said. “Thanks. What’re you going to do with your life?”

“I have it all planned out,” Crane said, “I’m going to join the forestry service. I’m going to live in a hut on the top of a mountain and watch out for fires and fight to preserve the wilderness of America.”