Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

They were both walking swiftly now, Harriet holding her hands stiffly down at her sides.

“There is a particular wonderful way you are joined together …”

“Paul, stop it.” Harriet’s voice was flat but loud.

“Two years. In two years the edge should be dulled off things like that. Instead …” How can you make a mistake as big as that? Paul thought, how can you deliberately be as wrong as that? And no remedy. So long as you live, no remedy. He looked harshly at Harriet. Her face was set, as though she weren’t listening to him and only intent on getting across the street as quickly as possible. “How about you?” he asked. “Don’t you remember …?”

“I don’t remember anything,” she said. And then, suddenly, the tears sprang up in her eyes and streamed down the tight, distorted cheeks. “I don’t remember a goddamn thing!” she wept. “I’m not going to Wanamaker’s. I’m going home! Good-bye!” She ran over to a cab that was parked at the corner and opened the door and sprang in. The cab spurted past Paul and he had a glimpse of Harriet sitting stiffly upright, the tears bitter and unheeded in her eyes.

He watched the cab go down Fifth Avenue until it turned. Then he turned the other way and started walking, thinking, I must move away from this neighborhood. I’ve lived here long enough.

“ I do not want any of his private stock,” McMahon said firmly. He blew on a glass and wiped it carefully. “I have my own opinion of his private stock.”

Mr. Grimmet looked sad, sitting across the bar on a high stool, and Thesing shrugged like a salesman, not giving up the fight, but moving to a new position to continue the attack. McMahon picked up another glass in his clean, soft bartender’s hands. He wiped it, his face serious and determined and flushed right up to the bald spot that his plastered-down hair couldn’t cover. There was nobody else in the bar at the front part of the restaurant.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. In the rear three waiters stood arguing. Every day at three o’clock the three waiters gathered in the back and argued.

“Fascism,” one waiter said, “is a rehearsal for the cemetery.”

“You read that some place,” another waiter said.

“All right,” said the first waiter, “I read it some place.”

“An Italian,” the third waiter said to the first waiter. “You are one lousy Italian.”

Mr. Grimmet turned around and called to the waiters, “Please reserve discussions of that character for when you go home. This is a restaurant, not Madison Square Garden.”

He turned back to watching McMahon wiping the glasses. The three waiters looked at him with equal hate.

“Many of the best bars in the city,” Thesing said in his musical salesman’s voice, “use our private stock.”

“Many of the best bars in the city,” McMahon said, using the towel very hard, “ought to be turned into riding academies.”

“That’s funny,” Thesing said, laughing almost naturally. “He’s very funny, isn’t he, Mr. Grimmet?”

“Listen, Billy,” Mr. Grimmet said, leaning forward, disregarding Thesing, “listen to reason. In a mixed drink nobody can tell how much you paid for the rye that goes into it. That is the supreme beauty of cocktails.”

McMahon didn’t say anything. The red got a little deeper on his cheeks and on his bald spot and he put the clean glasses down with a sharp tinkle and the tinkle went through the shining lines of the other glasses on the shelves and sounded thinly through the empty restaurant. He was a little fat man, very compact. He moved with great precision and style behind a bar and you could tell by watching him whether he was merry or sad or perturbed, just from the way he mixed a drink or put down a glass. Just now he was angry and Mr. Grimmet knew it. Mr. Grimmet didn’t want a fight, but there was money to be saved. He put out his hand appealingly to Thesing.

“Tell me the truth, Thesing,” he said. “Is your private stock bad?”

“Well,” Thesing said slowly, “a lot of people like it. It is very superior for a blended product.”

“Blended varnish,” McMahon said, facing the shelves. “Carefully matched developing fluid.”

Thesing laughed, the laugh he used from nine to six. “Witty,” he said, “the sparkling bartender.” McMahon wheeled and looked at him, head down a little on his chest. “I meant it,” Thesing protested. “I sincerely meant it.”

“I want to tell you,” Mr. Grimmet said to McMahon, fixing him with his eye, “that we can save seven dollars a case on the private stock.”

McMahon started whistling the tenor aria from Pagliacci . He looked up at the ceiling and wiped a glass and whistled. Mr. Grimmet felt like firing him and remembered that at least twice a month he felt like firing McMahon.

“Please stop whistling,” he said politely. “We have a matter to discuss.”

McMahon stopped whistling and Mr. Grimmet still felt like firing him.

“Times’re not so good,” Mr. Grimmet said in a cajoling tone of voice, hating himself for descending to such tactics before an employee of his. “Remember, McMahon, Coolidge is no longer in the White House. I am the last one in the world to compromise with quality, but we must remember, we are in business and it is 1938.”

“Thesing’s private stock,” McMahon said, “would destroy the stomach of a healthy horse.”

“Mussolini!” the first waiter’s voice came out from the back of the restaurant. “Every day on Broadway I pass forty-five actors who could do his act better.”

“I am going to tell you one thing,” Mr. Grimmet said with obvious calmness to McMahon. “I am the owner of this restaurant.”

McMahon whistled some more from Pagliacci . Thesing moved wisely down the bar a bit.

“I am interested in making money,” Mr. Grimmet said. “What would you say, Mr. McMahon, if I ordered you to use the private stock?”

“I would say, ‘I’m through, Mr. Grimmet.’ Once and for all.”

Mr. Grimmet rubbed his face unhappily and stared coldly at the waiters in the back of the restaurant. The waiters remained silent and stared coldly back at him. “What’s it to you?” Mr. Grimmet asked McMahon angrily. “What do you care if we use another whisky. Do you have to drink it?”

“In my bar, Mr. Grimmet,” McMahon said, putting down his towel and the glasses and facing his employer squarely, “in my bar, good drinks are served.”

“Nobody will know the difference!” Mr. Grimmet got off his stool and jumped up and down gently. “What do Americans know about liquor? Nothing! Read any book on the subject!”

“True,” Thesing said judiciously. “The general consensus of opinion is that Americans do not know the difference between red wine and a chocolate malted milk.”

“In my bar,” McMahon repeated, his face very red, his wide hands spread on the bar, “I serve the best drinks I know how to serve.”

“Stubborn!” Mr. Grimmet yelled. “You are a stubborn Irishman! You do this out of malice! You are anxious to see me lose seven dollars on every case of liquor because you dislike me. Let us get down to the bedrock of truth!”

“Keep your voice down,” McMahon said, speaking with great control. “I want to remind you of one or two things. I have worked for you since Repeal, Mr. Grimmet. In that time, how many times did we have to enlarge the bar?”

“I am not in the mood for history, McMahon!” Mr. Grimmet shouted. “What good is a bar as long as the Normandie if it is not run on a businesslike basis?”