Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Oh, I love it!” Mrs. Taylor gasped.

Margaret turned her back on them and looked at her father. He was laughing, too.

Margaret looked carefully at him, as though he were a man whom she had just met. Her father’s face was not fat, Margaret noticed, but almost so. His gray suit was double-breasted and his collar was sharp, starched white. The heavy silk necktie flowed like a spring from his lined though ruddy throat, and his shoes looked as though they had been brought from England for carefully custom-built feet. She looked at his face, like the faces of the fathers of her friends, the men who had been graduated from the good colleges around 1910 and had gone on to stand at the head of businesses, committees, charity organizations, lodges, lobbies, political parties, who got brick red when they thought of the income tax, who said, “That lunatic in the White House.” Her father was sitting across the table with that face, laughing.

“What’re you laughing at?” Margaret asked. “What the hell are you laughing at?”

Mr. Clay stopped laughing, but a look of surprise seemed to hang over as a kind of transition expression on his face. Margaret stood up as the man in tweeds and his friends left to go to Poughkeepsie.

“Where’re you going?” Mr. Clay asked.

“I don’t feel like eating here,” Margaret said, putting on her coat.

Mr. Clay left some bills for the check, and put his coat on. “I thought you wanted me to tell you what I thought,” he said. “I thought you wanted me to advise …”

Margaret said nothing as they started out.

“I don’t believe he was a Columbia man at all,” Mrs. Taylor was saying as Margaret passed her. “He couldn’t sing ‘Stand, Columbia.’”

“That’s right,” said Mr. Taylor. “Too tweedy, too much sweater.”

“To Neville Chamberlain!” Mrs. Taylor said, her thin, white fingers holding her cocktail glass high. “I’m going to get drunk tonight. I don’t have to go to church tomorrow.”

Margaret closed the door behind her and walked with her father toward their car, past the sign on the lawn, lit and shaking in the wind, with the dry leaves blowing against it.

This was in the autumn of 1938, the year Columbia beat Yale 27-14 in the first game of the season.

T hey came out of the movie house and started slowly eastward in the direction of Fifth Avenue. “Hitler!” a newsboy called. “Hitler!”

“That Fletcher,” Dora said, “the one that played her father. Remember him?”

“Uh huh,” Paul said, holding her hand as they walked slowly up the dark street.

“He’s got stones in his kidney.”

“That’s the way he acts,” Paul said. “Now I know how to describe the way that man acts—he acts like a man who has stones in his kidney.”

Dora laughed. “I X-rayed him last winter. He’s one of Dr. Thayer’s best patients. He’s always got something wrong with him. He’s going to try to pass the stones out of his kidney this summer.”

“Good luck, Fletcher, old man,” Paul said.

“I used to massage his shoulder. He had neuritis. He makes fifteen hundred dollars a week.”

“No wonder he has neuritis.”

“He asked me to come to his house for dinner.” Dora pulled her hand out of Paul’s and slipped it up to his elbow and held on, hard. “He likes me.”

“I bet he does.”

“What about you?”

“What about me what?” Paul asked.

“Do you like me?”

They stopped at Rockefeller Plaza and leaned over the marble wall and looked down at the fountain and the statue and the people sitting out at the tables, drinking, and the waiters standing around, listening to the sound of the fountain.

“I can’t stand you,” Paul said. He kissed her hair.

“That’s what I thought,” Dora said. They both laughed.

They looked down at the Plaza, at the thin trees with the light-green leaves rustling in the wind that came down between the buildings. There were pansies, yellow and tight, along the borders of the small pools with the bronze sea statues, and hydrangeas, and little full trees, all shaking in the wind and the diffuse, clear light of the flood lamps above. Couples strolled slowly down from Fifth Avenue, talking amiably in low, calm, week-end voices, appreciating the Rockefeller frivolity and extravagance which had carved a place for hydrangeas and water and saplings and spring and sea-gods riding bronze dolphins out of these austere buildings, out of the bleak side of Business.

Paul and Dora walked up the promenade, looking in the windows. They stopped at a window filled with men’s sports clothes—gabardine slacks and bright-colored shirts with short sleeves and brilliant handkerchiefs to tie around the throat.

“I have visions,” Paul said, “of sitting in my garden, with two Great Danes, dressed like that, like a Hollywood actor in the country.”

“Have you got a garden?” Dora asked.

“No.”

“Those’re nice pants,” Dora said.

They went on to the next window. “On the other hand,” Paul said, “there are days when I want to look like that. A derby hat and a stiff blue shirt with a pleated bosom and a little starched white collar and a five-dollar neat little necktie and a Burberry overcoat. Leave the office at five o’clock every day to go to a cocktail party.”

“You go to a cocktail party almost every afternoon anyway,” Dora said. “Without a derby hat.”

“A different kind of cocktail party,” Paul said. He started her across Fifth Avenue. “The kind attended by men with starched blue pleated bosoms. Some day.”

“Oh, Lord,” Dora said as they ran to escape a bus, “look at those dresses.”

They stood in front of Saks.

“Fifth Avenue,” Paul said. “Street of dreams.”

“It’s nice to know things like that exist,” Dora murmured, looking into the stage-lit window at the yellow dress and the sign that said “Tropical Nights in Manhattan” and the little carved-stone fish that for some reason was in the same window. “Even if you can’t have them.”

“Uptown?” Paul asked. “Or to my house?”

“I feel like walking.” Dora looked up at Paul and grinned. “For the moment.” She squeezed his arm. “Only for the moment. Uptown.”

They started uptown.

“I love those models,” Paul said. “Each and every one of them. They’re superior, yet warm; inviting, yet polite. Their breasts are always tipped at the correct angle for the season.”

“Sure,” Dora said, “papier-mâché. It’s easy with papier-mâché. Look. Aluminum suitcases. Travel by air.”

“They look like my mother’s kitchen pots.”

“Wouldn’t you like to own a few of them?”

“Yes.” Paul peered at them. “Fly away. Buy luggage and depart. Leave for the ends of the earth.”

“They got a little case just for books. A whole separate little traveling bookcase.”

“That’s just what I need,” Paul said, “for my trips on the Fifth Avenue bus every morning.”

They passed St. Patrick’s, dark and huge, with the moon sailing over it.

“Do you think God walks up Fifth Avenue?” Paul asked.

“Sure,” said Dora. “Why not?”

“We are princes of the earth,” Paul said. “All over the world men slave to bring riches to these few blocks for us to look at and say ‘Yes, very nice’ or ‘Take it away, it stinks.’ I feel very important when I walk up Fifth Avenue.”

They stopped at the window of the Hamburg-American Line. Little dolls in native costumes danced endlessly around a pole while other dolls in native costume looked on. All the dolls had wide smiles on their faces. “Harvest Festival in Buckeburg, Germany,” a small sign said.