Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Seeger was a large, lanky boy, with a big nose, who had been wounded at Saint Lô, but had come back to his outfit in the Siegfried Line, quite unchanged. He was cheerful and dependable, and he knew his business and had broken in five or six second lieutenants who had been killed or wounded and the CO had tried to get him commissioned in the field, but the war had ended while the paperwork was being fumbled over at headquarters.

“They reached the door of the orderly tent and stopped. “Be brave, Sergeant,” Olson said. “Welch and I are depending on you.”

“O.K.,” Seeger said, and went in.

The tent had the dank, army-canvas smell that had been so much a part of Seeger’s life in the past three years. The company clerk was reading a July, 1945, issue of the Buffalo Courier-Express , which had just reached him, and Captain Taney, the company CO, was seated at a sawbuck table he used as a desk, writing a letter to his wife, his lips pursed with effort. He was a small, fussy man, with sandy hair that was falling out. While the fighting had been going on, he had been lean and tense and his small voice had been cold and full of authority. But now he had relaxed, and a little pot belly was creeping up under his belt and he kept the top button of his trousers open when he could do it without too public loss of dignity. During the war Seeger had thought of him as a natural soldier, tireless, fanatic about detail, aggressive, severely anxious to kill Germans. But in the past few months Seeger had seen him relapsing gradually and pleasantly into a small-town wholesale hardware merchant, which he had been before the war, sedentary and a little shy, and, as he had once told Seeger, worried, here in the bleak champagne fields of France, about his daughter, who had just turned twelve and had a tendency to go after the boys and had been caught by her mother kissing a fifteen-year-old neighbor in the hammock after school.

“Hello, Seeger,” he said, returning the salute in a mild, offhand gesture. “What’s on your mind?”

“Am I disturbing you, sir?”

“Oh, no. Just writing a letter to my wife. You married, Seeger?” He peered at the tall boy standing before him.

“No, sir.”

“It’s very difficult,” Taney sighed, pushing dissatisfiedly at the letter before him. “My wife complains I don’t tell her I love her often enough. Been married fifteen years. You’d think she’d know by now.” He smiled at Seeger. “I thought you were going to Paris,” he said. “I signed the passes yesterday.”

“That’s what I came to see you about, sir.”

“I suppose something’s wrong with the passes.” Taney spoke resignedly, like a man who has never quite got the hang of army regulations and has had requisitions, furloughs, requests for court-martial returned for correction in a baffling flood.

“No, sir,” Seeger said. “The passes’re fine. They start tomorrow. Well, it’s just …” He looked around at the company clerk, who was on the sports page.

“This confidential?” Taney asked.

“If you don’t mind, sir.”

“Johnny,” Taney said to the clerk, “go stand in the rain some place.”

“Yes, sir,” the clerk said, and slowly got up and walked out.

Taney looked shrewdly at Seeger, spoke in a secret whisper. “You pick up anything?” he asked.

Seeger grinned. “No, sir, haven’t had my hands on a girl since Strasbourg.”

“Ah, that’s good.” Taney leaned back, relieved, happy he didn’t have to cope with the disapproval of the Medical Corps.

“It’s—well,” said Seeger, embarrassed, “it’s hard to say—but it’s money.”

Taney shook his head sadly. “I know.”

“We haven’t been paid for three months, sir, and …”

“Damn it!” Taney stood up and shouted furiously. “I would like to take every bloody chair-warming old lady in the Finance Department and wring their necks.”

The clerk stuck his head into the tent. “Anything wrong? You call for me, sir?”

“No,” Taney shouted. “Get out of here.”

The clerk ducked out.

Taney sat down again. “I suppose,” he said, in a more normal voice, “they have their problems. Outfits being broken up, being moved all over the place. But it is rugged.”

“It wouldn’t be so bad,” Seeger said. “But we’re going to Paris tomorrow. Olson, Welch and myself. And you need money in Paris.”

“Don’t I know it.” Taney wagged his head. “Do you know what I paid for a bottle of champagne on the Place Pigalle in September …?” He paused significantly. “I won’t tell you. You won’t have any respect for me the rest of your life.”

Seeger laughed. “Hanging,” he said, “is too good for the guy who thought up the rate of exchange.”

“I don’t care if I never see another franc as long as I live.” Taney waved his letter in the air, although it had been dry for a long time.

There was silence in the tent and Seeger swallowed a little embarrassedly, watching the CO wave the flimsy sheet of paper in regular sweeping movements. “Sir,” he said, “the truth is, I’ve come to borrow some money for Welch, Olson and myself. We’ll pay it back out of the first pay we get, and that can’t be too long from now. If you don’t want to give it to us, just tell me and I’ll understand and get the hell out of here. We don’t like to ask, but you might just as well be dead as be in Paris broke.”

Taney stopped waving his letter and put it down thoughtfully. He peered at it, wrinkling his brow, looking like an aged bookkeeper in the single gloomy light that hung in the middle of the tent.

“Just say the word, Captain,” Seeger said, “and I’ll blow …”

“Stay where you are, son,” said Taney. He dug in his shirt pocket and took out a worn, sweat-stained wallet. He looked at it for a moment. “Alligator,” he said, with automatic, absent pride. “My wife sent it to me when we were in England. Pounds don’t fit in it. However …” He opened it and took out all the contents. There was a small pile of francs on the table in front of him. He counted them. “Four hundred francs,” he said. “Eight bucks.”

“Excuse me,” Seeger said humbly. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Delighted,” Taney said vigorously. “Absolutely delighted.” He started dividing the francs into two piles. “Truth is, Seeger, most of my money goes home in allotments. And the truth is, I lost eleven hundred francs in a poker game three nights ago, and I ought to be ashamed of myself. Here …” He shoved one pile toward Seeger. “Two hundred francs.”

Seeger looked down at the frayed, meretricious paper, which always seemed to him like stage money, anyway. “No, sir,” he said, “I can’t take it.”

“Take it,” Taney said. “That’s a direct order.”

Seeger slowly picked up the money, not looking at Taney. “Some time, sir,” he said, “after we get out, you have to come over to my house and you and my father and my brother and I’ll go on a real drunk.”

“I regard that,” Taney said, gravely, “as a solemn commitment.”

They smiled at each other and Seeger started out.

“Have a drink for me,” said Taney, “at the Café de la Paix. A small drink.” He was sitting down to write his wife he loved her when Seeger went out of the tent.

Olson fell into step with Seeger and they walked silently through the mud between the tents.

“Well, mon vieux? ” Olson said finally.

“Two hundred francs,” said Seeger.

Olson groaned. “Two hundred francs! We won’t be able to pinch a whore’s behind on the Boulevard des Capucines for two hundred francs. That miserable, penny-loving Yankee!”

“He only had four hundred,” Seeger said.