Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

That’s a hell of an ambition, Steve thought, but he didn’t say it. “You’re going to be awfully lonesome,” he said.

“Good,” Crane said. “I expect to get a lot of reading done. I’m not so enthusiastic about my fellow man, anyway, I prefer trees.”

“What about women?” Steve asked. “A wife?”

“What sort of woman would choose me?” Crane said harshly. “I look like something left over after a New Year’s party on skid row. And I would only take the best, the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most loving. I’m not going to settle for some poor, drab Saturday-night castaway.”

“Well, now,” Steve said, “you’re not so awful.” Although, it was true, you’d be shocked if you saw Crane out with a pretty girl.

“Don’t lie to your friends,” Crane said. He began to drive recklessly again, as some new wave of feeling, some new conception of himself, took hold of him. Steve sat tight on his side of the car, holding onto the door, wondering if a whole generation of Cranes was going to meet death on the roads of California within a week.

They drove in silence until they reached the university library. Crane stopped the car and slouched back from the wheel as Steve got out. Steve saw Adele on the library steps, surrounded by three young men, none of whom he knew. Adele saw him as he got out of the car and started coming over to him. Even at that distance, Steve could tell she was angry. He wanted to get rid of Crane before Adele reached him. “Well, so long,” Steve said, watching Adele approach. Her walk was distasteful, self-conscious, teasing.

Crane sat there, playing with the keys to the ignition, like a man who is always uncertain that the last important word has been said when the time has come to make an exit.

“Dennicott,” he began, then stopped, because Adele was standing there, confronting Steve, her face set. She didn’t look at Crane.

“Thanks,” she said to Steve. “Thanks for the lunch.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Steve said. “I had to go someplace.”

“I’m not in the habit of being stood up,” Adele said.

“I’ll explain later,” Steve said, wanting her to get out of there, away from him, away from Crane, watching soberly from behind the wheel.

“You don’t have to explain anything,” Adele said. She walked away. Steve gave her the benefit of the doubt. Probably she didn’t know who Crane was and that it was Crane’s brother who had been killed Saturday night. Still …

“I’m sorry I made you miss your date,” Crane said.

“Forget it,” Steve said. “She’ll get over it.”

For a moment he saw Crane looking after Adele, his face cold, severe, judging. Then Crane shrugged, dismissed the girl.

“Thanks, Dennicott,” Crane said. “Thanks for coming to the tree. You did a good thing this afternoon. You did a friendly thing. You don’t know how much you helped me. I have no friends. My brother was the only friend. If you hadn’t come with me and let me talk, I don’t know how I could’ve lived through today. Forgive me if I talked too much.”

“You didn’t talk too much,” Steve said.

“Will I see you again?” Crane asked.

“Sure,” said Steve. “We have to go back to that restaurant to listen to Downtown real soon.”

Crane sat up straight, suddenly, smiling shyly, looking pleased, like a child who has just been given a present. If it had been possible, Steve would have put his arms around Crane and embraced him. And with all Crane’s anguish and all the loneliness that he knew so clearly was waiting for him, Steve envied him. Crane had the capacity for sorrow and now, after the day Steve had spent with the bereaved boy, he understood that the capacity for sorrow was also the capacity for living.

“ Downtown ,” Crane said. He started the motor and drove off, waving gaily, to go toward his parents’ house, where his mother and father were waiting, with the guilty look in their eyes, because they felt that if one of the sons had to die, they would have preferred it to be him.

Steve saw Adele coming back toward him from the library steps. He could see that her anger had cooled and that she probably would apologize for her outburst. Seeing Adele suddenly with Crane’s eyes, he made a move to turn away. He didn’t want to talk to her. He had to think about her. He had to think about everything. Then he remembered the twinge of pity he had felt when he had heard about the fat girl erased from her lover’s life by the movement of a curtain on a moonlit night. He turned back and smiled in greeting as Adele came up to him. Crane had taught him a good deal that afternoon, but perhaps not the things Crane had thought he was teaching.

“Hello,” Steve said, looking not quite candidly into the young blue eyes on a level with his own. “I was hoping you’d come back.”

But he wasn’t going to wake up, automatically feeling good, ever again.

Y ou have no doubt heard of me. My name is Carlos Romanovici. I am a gypsy, suffering from a deep psychic wound and unutterably rich.

Among my other credentials is the fact that I am the first and only gypsy to be admitted to the Maidstone Club in East Hampton, Long Island. I am married and have four children. All daughters and all Episcopalians. I believe I am the only gypsy to have played three full seasons as a defensive tackle for a major American university. I am a graduate of the Harvard School of Business, a teaching establishment that led me to ignore all accepted theories of economics, currency, finance and management; to fear experts in whatever field and to reject informed statistical advice. As a result of my skeptical years in Cambridge, I own, to all intents and purposes, the entire state of Vermont, am the president and controlling stockholder of a large chain of television and gasoline stations, among other holdings too numerous to mention, and am, as I repeat, unutterably rich.

About Vermont. By playing hunches and ignoring trends, I had already done remarkably well in the stock and commodities markets when a geologist friend of mine, who was no longer in a state of grace with his peers because he had to be put away in a mental clinic for years at a time, came to me with a map of North America that he had drawn himself on which he had traced lines that suggested to him that Vermont had been linked since paleolithic times by profound tropical forests and marshes with the newly discovered oil fields in Alaska. Vermont, known until recently as fit only for the habitation of inbred Puritans and exiled French Canadians, as a stony waste hostile to agriculture and inimical, because of its uncertain climate, even to skiers, concealed under its rock-strewn fields, said my geologist friend in his daft way, a vast pool of high-grade petroleum.

His insistence upon this so-called discovery of his was received by the officers of the oil companies to whom he divulged it in much the same manner as the account of Saint Joan’s visions was received by her judges in Rouen and contributed, I’m afraid, to the geologist’s later visits to the mental clinic. Unfortunately, although later events proved that he was saner than any of the vice-presidents he harangued at Shell or Exxon, the strain of the struggle against educated disbelief overcame him once and for all and he is at present weaving baskets under guard in Connecticut. At my expense.

Knowing nothing about the oil business and open to all seminal ideas as a bonus of my straightforward unorthodoxy, I listened carefully to the poor man and studied his map. Since no one had ever suggested that anybody could extract any wealth from the state of Vermont except by such marginally lucrative enterprises as tapping maple trees, quarrying for marble, building ski lifts or renting rooms to travelers on the way to Montreal, leases for the right to drill for oil cost no more, as my wife jokingly put it, than the price of a meal at La Grenouille, a French restaurant in New York that she favors.