Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

I left the Waldorf before the celebration reached its peak and later, without hesitation, paid the quite impressive bill for damage done to the premises.

On my next visit to my poor demented friend, the geologist, in the clinic in Connecticut, I explained to him over a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, his one remaining interest in the world outside the walls, something of what had happened. As he drank, he nodded politely, but I could see his mind, such as it was, was on other things. “There’s a fellow here,” he said, “I believe he’s something of a chemist, worked for Dupont, the rumor goes, who claims he’s discovered a new process—I think it’s a cheap way of producing hydrogen for fuel. Dupont laughed at him. I told him about you and Vermont and he said he’d like to meet you. Should I call him in?”

“By all means,” I said.

Since then, I have visited the clinic 20 times in two months.

T here was mist lying low along the ground and the headlights made a milky thin soup in every dip of the road. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning and they didn’t pass any other cars as they wound along the narrow road up the hill toward the house. There were only four other houses between the main highway and the Willards’ house, and they were all dark.

They were sitting in the front seat, Martin and his sister and her husband. Linda had the radio on and was singing softly, accompanying the orchestra, singing, “It’s the wrong time, and the wrong place …”

John Willard sat comfortably at the wheel, driving fast, smiling when Linda leaned over and sang into his ear, burlesquing passion in the style of a nightclub singer, “Though it’s such a pretty fa-aaace …”

“Be careful,” Willard said. “You’re tickling the ear of the driver.”

“There were more fatalities on the roads last year,” Martin said, “from tickling the ear of the driver than from drunkenness, national holidays, and faulty brakes.”

“Who said that?” Linda asked aggressively.

“It’s a well-known statistic,” Martin said.

“I don’t care,” Linda said. “I’m crazy about the ear of the driver.”

Willard chuckled.

“Wipe that complacent grin off your face, soldier,” Linda said.

Willard chuckled again and Linda went back to finishing the song, her head leaning against Martin’s arm, her face lit dimly by the dashboard glow, looking gay and young, framed by her loose dark hair.

Ten years after I get married, Martin thought, glancing sideways at his sister, I hope my wife and I feel like that on the way home after a night in the city.

Martin had arrived from California late that afternoon, after sending a telegram that he was giving up his job and was on his way to Europe and could he count on a bed and meal enroute. Linda had met him at the airport, looking the same, he thought, after the two years of separation, and they had picked up Willard at his office and had had a couple of drinks and a good dinner and an extravagant bottle of wine to celebrate Martin’s arrival. It was Friday and Willard didn’t have to work the next day, so they had gone to a nightclub and listened to a girl in a white dress singing French songs. Martin and Willard had taken turns dancing with Linda, and Linda had said, “Isn’t this nice? If you had given me more warning I’d have felt I’d have had to find a girl for you for the evening and there would’ve been four of us and the whole thing would’ve been ruined. Don’t you hate the number four?”

Martin was seven years younger than Linda, and her favorite brother. When he was still in college he had spent his summers with Linda and Willard, acting as spare man at parties, playing tennis with Willard, and endangering the lives of their two small sons, as Linda put it, teaching them how to swim and dive and ride bicycles and catch a baseball and fall out of trees.

“Oh, God,” Linda said as the car swung through an overgrown stone gate, “two years are too long, Martin. What’re we going to do without you when you’re in Europe?”

“Come and visit me,” Martin said.

“Listen to that,” Linda said.

“It’s only overnight by plane.”

“You know anybody wants to give us a free ride?” She waved her hand at the dark woods outside the car window. “It’ll take ten years before we get through paying off Gruesome Acres.”

“It looks very nice.” Martin peered through the misted window at the dripping black woods. “Very rural.”

“It’s rural all right,” Linda said. “Seventeen acres of impenetrable underbrush.”

“Can’t you clear part of it,” Martin asked, “and grow something on it?”

“Taxes,” Willard said briefly, swinging out of the woods and into the circular driveway in front of a large brick house with white pillars, rising dimly out of the mist.

There were no lights showing downstairs, only a pale glimmer coming from a curtained window on the upper storey, and the house bulked impressively in the darkness.

“There ought to be at least one light left on at the entrance, Linda,” Willard said.

“It’s the new maid,” Linda said. “I tell her all the time, but she’s a demon for economy.”

Willard stopped the car and they all got out, Martin taking his bag off the back seat.

“Notice the exquisite architecture,” Linda said, as they climbed the steps and went between the pillars to the front door. “Spectral Greek.”

“Wait till you see the inside, though,” Willard said, opening the door and turning on the light. “It makes up for the whole thing. And the land around it is great for the kids.”

“It has one other glorious advantage,” Linda said, taking off her coat and throwing it across a chair in the wall-papered front hall. “The television reception is horrible.”

They went into the living room and Linda switched on the lamps and Willard poured them some whiskeys for Martin to admire the house on. The living room was big and airy and pleasant, with a clutter of paintings on the walls and a lot of books and magazines and small semiuseful objects not quite in place. Martin smiled, looking at it and recognizing his sister’s undisciplined, cheerful touch in the bright choice of colors, the profusion of vases, flowers, antique odds and ends, and in the air of comfortable disorder that the room presented now, at one o’clock in the morning, after it had been empty and unused all evening.

Linda took her shoes off and sat with her legs up in the corner of the big couch, holding her whiskey glass in two hands and the two men sat facing her, sleepy, but reluctant to end the night of reunion. “Now, really, Martin,” Linda said, “you can’t possibly mean it when you say you’re not going to stay at least a week.”

“I have to go up to Boston on Monday,” Martin said. “And I’m taking the plane for Paris from there on Wednesday.”

“The boys’re going to be black with disappointment,” Linda said. “Maybe you’ll meet somebody over the weekend here and you’ll change your mind. We’re invited to three parties.”

Martin laughed. “It’s a lucky thing I have to go to Boston,” he said. “I can recover in Boston.”

Linda swished the whiskey around in her glass. “John,” she said, “don’t you think this is as good a time as any to give him the lecture?”

“It’s awfully late, you know, Linda,” Willard said, a little uncomfortably.

“What lecture?” Martin asked suspiciously, beginning to feel, in advance, like a younger brother.