Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“That is the business I am in,” Eddie tried to explain gently. “That is the nature of my profession.”

“Don’t tell me that!” Arline said. “I have gone out with other fighters. They don’t sleep all the time.”

“I am not interested,” Eddie said. “I do not want to hear anything about your life before our marriage.”

“They go to night clubs,” Arline went on irresistibly, “and they dance and they take a drink once in a while and they take a girl to see a musical show!”

Eddie nodded. “They are after something,” he said. “That is the whole story.”

“I wish to God you were after something!”

“I meet the type of fighter you mention, too,” Eddie said. “The night-club boys. They knock my head off for three rounds and then they start breathing through the mouth. By the time they reach the eighth round they wish they never saw a naked lady on a dance floor. And by the time I get through with them they are storing up energy, flat on their backs. With five thousand people watching them. You want me to be that kind of a fighter?”

“You’re wonderful,” Arline said, wrinkling her nose, sneering. “My Joe Louis. Big-Purse Eddie Megaffin. I don’t notice you bringing back the million-dollar gate.”

“I am progressing slowly,” Eddie said, looking at the picture of Mary and Jesus over his bed. “I am planning for the future.”

“I am linked for life to a goddamn health-enthusiast,” Arline said despairingly.

“Why do you talk like that, Arline?”

“Because I want to be in Kansas City,” she wailed.

“Explain to me,” Eddie said, “why in the name of God you are so crazy for Kansas City?”

“I’m lonesome,” Arline wept with true bitterness. “I’m awful lonesome. I’m only twenty-one years old, Eddie.”

Eddie patted her gently on the shoulder. “Look, Arline.” He tried to make his voice very warm and at the same time logical. “If you would only go easy. If you would go by coach and not buy presents for everybody, maybe I can borrow a coupla bucks and swing it.”

“I would rather die,” Arline said. “I would rather never see Kansas City again for the rest of my life than let them know my husband has to watch pennies like a streetcar conductor. A man with his name in the papers every week. It would be shameful!”

“But, Arline, darling”—Eddie’s face was tortured—“you go four times a year, you spread presents like the WPA and you always buy new clothes …”

“I can’t appear in Kansas City in rags!” Arline pulled at a stocking, righting it on her well-curved leg. “I would rather …”

“Some day, darling,” Eddie interrupted. “We’re working up. Right now I can’t.”

“You can!” Arline said. “You’re lying to me, Eddie Megaffin. Jake Blucher called up this morning and he told me he offered you a thousand dollars to fight Joe Principe.”

Eddie sat down in a chair. He looked down at the floor, understanding why Arline had picked this particular afternoon.

“You would come out of that fight with seven hundred and fifty dollars.” Arline’s voice was soft and inviting. “I could go to Kansas …”

“Joe Principe will knock my ears off.”

Arline sighed. “I am so anxious to see my mother. She is an old woman and soon she will die.”

“At this stage,” Eddie said slowly, “I am not ready for Joe Principe. He is too strong and too smart for me.”

“Jake Blucher told me he thought you had a wonderful chance.”

“I have a wonderful chance to land in the hospital,” Eddie said. “That Joe Principe is made out of springs and cement. If you gave him a pair of horns it would be legal to kill him with a sword.”

“He is only a man with two fists just like you,” Arline said.

“Yeah.”

“You’re always telling me how good you are.”

“In two years,” Eddie said, “taking it very easy and careful, making sure I don’t get knocked apart …”

“You could make the money easy!” Arline pointed her finger dramatically at him. “You just don’t want to. You don’t want me to be happy. I see through you, Eddie Megaffin!”

“I just don’t want to get beaten up,” Eddie said, shaking his head.

“A fine fighter!” Arline laughed. “What kind of fighter are you, anyhow? A fighter is supposed to get beaten up, isn’t he? That’s his business, isn’t it? You don’t care for me. All you wanted was somebody to give you a kid and cook your goddamn steaks and lamb chops. In Brooklyn! I got to stay in a lousy little house day in and …”

“I’ll take you to the movies tonight,” Eddie promised.

“I don’t want to go to the movies. I want to go to Kansas City.” Arline threw herself face down on the bed and sobbed. “I’m caught. I’m caught! You don’t love me! You won’t let me go to people who love me! Mama! Mama!”

Eddie closed his eyes in pain. “I love you,” he said, meaning it. “I swear to God.”

“You say it.” Her voice was smothered in the pillow. “But you don’t prove it! Prove it! I never knew a young man could be so stingy. Prove it …” The words trailed off in sorrow.

Eddie went over an bent down to kiss her. She shook her shoulders to send him away and cried like a heartbroken child. From the next room, where the baby had been sleeping, came the sound of his wailing.

Eddie walked over to the window and looked out at the peaceful Brooklyn Street, at the trees and the little boys and girls skating.

“O.K.,” he said, “I’ll call Blucher.”

Arline stopped crying. The baby still wailed in the next room.

“I’ll try to raise him to twelve hundred,” Eddie said. “You can go to Kansas City. You happy?”

Arline sat up and nodded. “I’ll write Mama right away,” she said.

“Take the kid out for a walk, will you?” Eddie said, as Arline started repairing her face before the mirror. “I want to take a little nap.”

“Sure,” Arline said, “sure, Eddie.”

Eddie took off his shoes and lay down on the bed to start storing up his energy.

M ike Pilato purposefully threw open the door of Victor’s shack. Above him the sign that said, “Lunch, Truckmen Welcome,” shook a little, and the pale shadows its red bulbs threw in the twilight waved over the State Road.

“Victor,” Mike said, in Italian.

Victor was leaning on the counter, reading Walter Winchell in a spread-out newspaper. He smiled amiably. “Mike,” he said, “I am so glad to see you.”

Mike slammed the door. “Three hundred dollars, Victor,” he said, standing five feet tall, round and solid as a pumpkin against the door. “You owe me three hundred dollars, Victor, and I am here tonight to collect.”

Victor shrugged slightly and closed the paper on Walter Winchell.

“As I’ve been telling you for the past six months,” he said, “business is bad. Business is terrible. I work and I work and at the end …” He shrugged again. “Barely enough to feed myself.”

Mike’s cheeks, farmer-brown, and wrinkled deeply by wind and sun, grew dark with blood. “Victor, you are lying in my face,” he said slowly, his voice desperately even. “For six months, each time it comes time to collect the rent you tell me, ‘Business is bad.’ What do I say? I say ‘All right, Victor, don’t worry, I know how it is.’”

“Frankly, Mike,” Victor said sadly, “there has been no improvement this month.”

Mike’s face grew darker than ever. He pulled harshly at the ends of his iron-gray mustache, his great hands tense and swollen with anger, repressed but terrible. “For six months, Victor,” Mike said, “I believed you. Now I no longer believe you.”