Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Madam Rechevsky approached her husband’s grave. Her face was composed, the lips set, the chin high, out of the smart seal collar. She knelt gracefully, placed the chrysanthemums in a compact spray of yellow on the cold earth against the granite. She patted the flowers lightly with one hand to make a pattern more pleasing to the eye, and stood up. She stood without speaking, looking at the even, dead, winter-brown grass that spread across the grave.

Slowly, still looking at the faded grass, she took off first one glove, then the other, and absently stuffed them into a pocket, leaving her white and brilliantly manicured hands bare.

Then she spoke.

“Abraham!” she cried, her voice ringing and imperious and fiercely intimate. “Abraham!” the proud, useful voice echoed and re-echoed among the marble on the small rolling hills of the cemetery. “Abraham, listen to me!”

She took a deep breath, and disregarding the formal stone, spoke directly to the earth beneath her. “You’ve got to help me, Abraham. Trouble, trouble … I’m old and I’m poor and you’ve left me alone for fifteen years.” The resonance and volume had gone from her voice, and she spoke quietly, with the little touch of impatience that comes to women’s voices when they are complaining to their husbands. “Money. All your life you never made less than fifteen hundred dollars a week and now they bother me for rent.” Her lips curled contemptuously as she thought of the miserable men who came to her door on the first of each month. “You rode in carriages, Abraham. You always owned at least four horses. Wherever you went everybody always said, ‘There goes Abraham Rechevsky!’ When you sat down to eat, fifty people always sat down with you. You drank wine with breakfast, dinner and supper, and fifty people always drank it with you. You had five daughters by me and God knows how many by other women and every one of them was dressed from Paris from the day she could walk. You had six sons and each one of them had a private tutor from Harvard College. You ate in the best restaurants in New York, London, Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Rio de Janeiro. You ate more good food than any other man that ever lived. You had two overcoats at one time lined with mink. You gave diamonds and rubies and strings of pearls to enough women to make up three ballet companies! Sometimes you were paying railroad fare for five women at one time crossing the country after you, on tour. You ate and you drank and you always had a baby daughter in your lap till the day you died, and you lived like a king of the earth, in all respects.” Madam Rechevsky shook her head at the grave. “And I? Your wife? Where is the rent?”

Madam Rechevsky paced deliberately to the foot of the grave and addressed herself even more directly to her husband. “A king, to the day you died, with a specialist from Vienna and three trained nurses and four consulting doctors for an old man, seventy-seven, who had exhausted himself completely with eating and drinking and making love. Buried … buried like a king. Three blocks long. The line behind your coffin was three blocks long on Second Avenue at the funeral, thousands of grown men and women crying into their handkerchiefs in broad daylight. And I? Your wife? Forgotten! Money spent, theater gone, husband dead, no insurance … Only one thing left—children.”

Madam Rechevsky smiled coldly at her husband. “And the children—like their father. Selfish. Thinking of themselves. Silly. Doing crazy things. Getting mixed up with ridiculous people. Disastrous. The whole world is disastrous, and your children have led disastrous lives. Alimony, movies, trouble with girls, never any money, never … Relatives are dying in Germany. Five hundred dollars would have saved them. No five hundred dollars. And I am getting older day by day and the ones that can help won’t, and the ones that want to help, can’t. Three times a week the dressmaker calls me with old bills. Disastrous! Why should it happen to me?”

Once more, for a moment, Madam Rechevsky’s voice went high and clear and echoed among the small graveyard hills. “Why should it happen to me? I worked for you like a slave. I got up at five o’clock in the morning. I sewed the costumes. I rented the theaters. I fought with the authors about the plays. I picked the parts for you. I taught you how to act, Abraham. The Great Actor, they said, the Hamlet of the Yiddish Theater, people knew your name from South Africa to San Francisco, the women tore off their gowns in your dressing room. You were an amateur before I taught you; on every line you tried to blow down the back of the theater. I worked on you like a sculptor on a statue. I made you an artist. And in between …” Madam Rechevsky shrugged ironically. “In between I took care of the books, I hired the ushers, I played opposite you better than any leading lady you ever had, I gave you a child every two years and fed all the others other women gave you the rest of the time. With my own hands I polished the apples they sold during intermission!”

Madam Rechevsky slumped a little inside her fashionable seal coat, her voice sank to a whisper. “I loved you better than you deserved and you left me alone for fifteen years and I’m getting older and now they bother me for rent.…” She sat down on the cold earth, on the dead winter grass covering the grave. “Abraham,” she whispered, “you’ve got to help me. Please help me. One thing … One thing I can say for you—whenever I was in trouble, I could turn to you. Always. Help me, Abraham.”

She was silent a moment, her bare hands outspread on the grass. Then she shrugged, stood up, her face more relaxed, confident, at peace, than it had been in months. She turned away from the grave and called.

“Helen, darling,” she called. “You can come here now.”

Helen left the marble bench on the plot of the man named Axelrod and walked slowly toward her father’s grave.

M acomber sat in the sheriff’s swivel chair, his feet in the waste-basket because he was too fat to lift them to the desk. He sat there looking across at the poster on the opposite wall that said, “Wanted, for Murder, Walter Cooper, Reward Four Hundred Dollars.” He sometimes sat for seven days on end looking at the spot that said “Four Hundred Dollars,” going out only for meals and ten hours’ sleep a night.

Macomber was the third deputy sheriff and he took care of the office because he didn’t like to go home to his wife. In the afternoon the second deputy sheriff came in, too, and sat tilted against the wall, also looking at the spot that said, “Four Hundred Dollars.”

“I read in the newspapers,” Macomber said, feeling the sweat roll deliberately down his neck into his shirt, “that New Mexico has the healthiest climate in the world. Look at me sweat. Do you call that healthy?”

“You’re too goddamn fat,” the second deputy sheriff said, never taking his eyes off the “Four Hundred Dollars.” “What do you expect?”

“You could fry eggs,” Macomber said, looking for an instant at the street blazing outside his window. “I need a vacation. You need a vacation. Everybody needs a vacation.” He shifted his gun wearily, where it dug into the fat. “Why can’t Walter Cooper walk in here this minute? Why can’t he?” he asked.

The telephone rang. Macomber picked it up. He listened, said, “Yes, no, the sheriff’s taking a nap. I’ll tell him, good-bye.”

He put the telephone down slowly, thought in his eyes. “That was Los Angeles,” he said. “They caught Brisbane. They got him in the jail there.”