Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Margaret!” Mr. Clay said, honestly shocked.

“The French novel, Elizabethan poetry, exclusive of the drama—remote, remote, the world’s racing by. Mr. Trent,” Margaret called, “we want two more.”

“A good college affords protection.” Mr. Clay felt uneasy saying it, but felt he had to say it or something like it, play the father decently and in good form, although he had never played the father with Margaret, had always been friendly and easy with her until the past year, when she had suddenly changed. “It affords protection to a young girl at a time when she’s unstable, easily swayed …”

“I don’t want to be afforded protection,” Margaret said. “I want to be easily swayed.” She looked out at the sign, standing, lit, on the lawn. “‘Free conscience, void of offence, 1840.’ That’s the nicest thing about this whole place.”

Trent came over with the drinks. Neatly and ceremoniously, he cleared away the old glasses, the wet paper napkins, flicked ashes, put down the fresh glasses, smiling admiringly at Mr. Clay, because his suit, shoes, wrist watch, the complexion of his skin were all handsome, expensive, rigorously correct.

Margaret watched the people at the bar while Trent fussed over the table. The men all had on dark-gray or blue double-breasted suits and starched white collars, as sharp and neat as knives, and ties, small, precise, of heavy silk, fitted into the collars so snugly that they seemed to spring from the throat itself. Cuff links, neat but expensive, gleamed at all their wrists, and their shoes, deeply shining and brought from England, made them look as though they were all equipped with exactly the same feet. Their faces, Margaret thought, were familiar, the faces of her friends’ fathers, well barbered, controlled, with not too much fat on them; the lines not deep now but soon to be deep; the eyes, the mouths, assured, arrogant, superior, because the men had never found a place in the last forty years of their lives where they hadn’t made themselves at home, felt themselves superior. They were the faces of businessmen ready to assume responsibility, give orders, watch machines run for them, money be counted for them. They had come from the same colleges, married the same girls, listened to the same sermons, were marked similarly, the way bullets fired from the same gun are similarly marked, can be identified when dug out of walls, picture frames, car moldings, victims.

“I’m going to get drunk tonight,” Mrs. Taylor was saying. “I’m not going to church tomorrow. I prayed all week and I don’t have to go to church tomorrow. I’m going to get drunk.”

“Mrs. Chamberlain prayed every morning,” one of the suburban mothers, a bright blonde, said. “She went in and prayed in Westminster Abbey while her husband was flying day after day to Germany.”

“That’s the sort of wife to have,” Mr. Taylor said.

“It was the old man’s first trip,” the fattest man said. “He’d never been up in an airplane before. Sixty-nine years old. That’s a hell of a first trip!”

“‘Out of this nettle, danger,’” the blonde said, “‘we pluck this flower, safety,’ he said when he came back. It’s from Shakespeare. He’s a well-educated man.”

“All those Englishmen are well educated,” Mr. Taylor said. “The ruling class. They know how to run a country. Not like what we have here.”

“The contacts you make at college,” Mr. Clay said, “are the most important …”

“Sh-h-h.” Margaret waved impatiently at him. “I’m listening.”

“I’m going to get drunk tonight,” Mrs. Taylor said. “I prayed for peace so my son wouldn’t have to go to war, and I got peace. What do I have to go to church for any more? Let’s have another round.”

“‘Peace in our time,’” the blonde said. “That’s what he said when he got off the plane. That old man with the umbrella.”

“Do you want my advice?” Mr. Clay asked.

Margaret looked at him, at the face she remembered as the first thing in her life, deep down at the bottom of memory, the handsome, easy, cheerful face, now troubled, puzzled, in a funny way helpless, loaded tonight with this problem of a twenty-year-old daughter. “Sure,” Margaret said softly, feeling suddenly sorry for her father. “I want your advice. That’s why I asked you to come. You’re dependable,” she said, smiling. “After all, you were the one who advised me to cut my hair the first time.”

Mr. Clay smiled happily. He sipped his drink, spread his beautiful, well-kept hands lightly on the table, talked gently to his daughter. She watched the people at the bar as he talked about the friends you made at college, the people you could live with for the rest of your life, the memories you stored up, the important contacts.

A new party had come in, two men and two women, all of them with cold, red faces, as though they had been riding in an open car. One of the men was just like the other men at the bar—neat, double-breasted in blue, with English feet—and the women, though younger, lived on the same streets as the women already at the bar. The second man was a huge, fat man in a light tweed suit with a black slip-on sweater under it, and a white shirt, very white now under the heavy-hanging, deep-red jowls.

“Roar, Lion, Roar,” the man in tweeds was singing. “Twenty-seven–fourteen.”

“Who won?” asked Mr. Taylor.

“Columbia,” the man in tweeds said. “Twenty-seven–fourteen. Hail Columbia! I’m a Columbia man.”

“Who’d’ve thought that a team from New York City would ever beat Yale?” Mr. Taylor said.

“I don’t believe it,” Oliver said.

“Twenty-seven–fourteen,” the man in tweeds said. “Luckman ran over them.”

“We’re from Yale,” Mr. Taylor said. “All of us. Yale, 1912.”

“Have a drink on a Columbia man,” the man in tweeds said. “Everybody.” He ordered the drinks and they sang “Roar, Lion, Roar,” the two parties melting happily and naturally together.

Margaret heard her father going on seriously about your needing solid friends to depend on later on, and, by God, the place where you developed them, people of your own kind that you could cleave to through thick and thin.… She watched the huge man in tweeds as he drank, sang out “Roar, Lion, Roar,” his behind quivering deeply under the expanse of heavy cloth.

“Can you sing ‘Stand, Columbia’?” Mrs. Taylor asked. “That’s a Columbia song. You ought to be able to sing it.”

“I would,” said the fat man, “only my throat’s too hoarse for a song like that.”

They sang “Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, It’s Off to Work We Go,” their voices hearty, full of whisky and pleasure and loud good-fellowship.

“I would like to hear ‘Stand, Columbia,’” Mrs. Taylor said.

“Did you hear this one?” the fat man said. And he sang, “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, I joined the C.I.O., I pay my dues to a bunch of Jews, heigh-ho, heigh-ho!”

Oliver, who had been slapping Mrs. Taylor on the back, slapped the fat man on the back in appreciation, and all the others laughed and beat on the bar approvingly, and Trent, who was standing behind the bar, looked out nervously across the room, scanning it for a Jewish face. Seeing none, he permitted himself to smile.

“Once again,” the fat man said, beaming, standing up to lead with large gestures of his arms, “before we leave for Poughkeepsie.”

All the voices, middle-aged, hoarse, joined happily in the chorus, the song more spontaneous, full of more joy and celebration and real pleasure, than any before that evening. “Heigh-ho,” they sang joyously, “heigh-ho, we’ve joined the C.I.O., We’ve paid our dues to a bunch of Jews, heigh-ho, heigh-ho!”

They laughed and clapped each other on the back, the room echoing and re-echoing as they banged the bar and roared.