Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Oh … uh … yes,” Weatherby said vaguely.

“I had—have—the shop on Third Avenue,” Gosden said. “Antiques, interior decoration.” Again the soft, hissing, self-deprecating half-laugh. “It was when I was supposed to do over that row of houses off Beekman Place and you had spoken to a friend of mine …”

“Of course,” Weatherby said heartily. He still didn’t remember the man’s name, really, but he remembered the incident. It was when he was just starting in, when he still thought he could make a go of it by himself as an architect, and he had heard that four old buildings on the East Side were going to be thrown together and cut up into small studio apartments. Somebody in one of the big firms, which had turned the job down, had suggested it might be worth looking into and had given him Gosden’s name. His memory of his conversation with Gosden was shadowy, fifteen or twenty minutes of rather distracted talk in a dark shop with unlit brass lamps and early-American tables piled one on top of another, a sense of time being wasted, a sense of going up one more dead-end street. “Whatever happened?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Gosden said. “You know how those things are. In the end, they merely pulled the whole block down and put up one of those monstrous apartment houses nineteen-stories high. It was too bad. I was terribly impressed with your ideas. I do remember, to this day.” He sounded like a woman at a cocktail party, talking swiftly to a man in a corner to hold him there, saying anything that came to mind, to try to keep him from escaping to the bar and leaving her there stranded, with no one to talk to for the rest of the evening, for the rest of her life. “I meant to follow your career,” Gosden went on hurriedly. “I was sure you were meant for splendid achievements, but a person is so kept so frantically busy in this city—with nothing important, of course—the best intentions—” He waved his hand helplessly and let the complicated sentence lapse. “I’m sure I pass buildings you’ve put up every day, monuments to your talent, without knowing …”

“Not really,” Weatherby said. “I went in with a big firm.” He told the man the name of the firm and Gosden nodded gravely, to show his respect for their works. “I do bits and pieces for them.”

“Everything in due time,” Gosden said gaily. “So you’re one of those young men who are putting us poor New Yorkers into our cold, bright glass cages.”

“I’m not so young,” Weatherby said, thinking, grimly, That’s the truth. And, at the most, Gosden could only have been ten years older than he. He drained his drink. Gosden’s manner, gushy, importunate, with its hint of effeminacy, made him uncomfortable. “Well,” he said, taking out his wallet, “I think I’d better …”

“Oh, no, please …” Gosden said. There was a surprising note of anguish in his voice. “Giovanni will just lock up the bottles and put me out if you go. Another round, please, Giovanni. Please. And please serve yourself, too. Late at night like this …”

“I really must …” Weatherby began. Then he saw Giovanni looking at him in a strange, imperative way, as though there were an urgent message he wanted to deliver. Giovanni quickly poured a second Scotch for Weatherby, a bourbon for Gosden and a neat slug of bourbon for himself.

“There,” Gosden said, beaming. “ That’s better. And don’t think, Mr. Weatherby, that I go around town just offering rounds of drink to every body. In fact, I’m parsimonious, unpleasantly parsimonious, my wife used to say, it was the one thing she constantly held against me.” He held up his glass ceremoniously. His long narrow hand was shaking minutely, Weatherby noticed, and he wondered if Gosden was a drunkard. “To the cold, beautiful, lonesome glass buildings,” Gosden said, “of the city of New York.”

They all drank. Giovanni knocked his tot down in one gulp and washed the glass and dried it without changing his expression.

“I do love this place,” Gosden said, looking around him fondly at the dim lamps and the gluey paintings of the Ligurian coast that dotted the walls. “It has especial memories for me. I proposed marriage here on a winter night. To my wife,” he added hastily, as if afraid that Weatherby would suspect he had proposed marriage to somebody else’s wife here. “We never came here often enough after that.” He shook his head a little sadly. “I don’t know why. Perhaps because we lived on the other side of town.” He sipped at his drink and squinted at a painting of sea and mountains at the other end of the bar. “I always intended to take my wife to Nervi. To see the Temple,” he said obscurely. “The Golden Bough. As the French would say, Hélas, we did not make the voyage. Foolishly, I thought there would always be time, some other year. And, of course, being parsimonious, the expense always seemed out of proportion …” He shrugged and once more took up his clairvoyant position, holding the glass up with his two hands and peering into it. “Tell me, Mr. Weatherby,” he said in a flat, ordinary tone of voice, “have you ever killed a man?”

“What?” Weatherby asked, not believing that he had heard correctly.

“Have you ever killed a man?” Gosden for the third time made his little hissing near-laugh. “Actually, it’s a question that one might well ask quite frequently, on many different occasions. After all, there must be quite a few people loose in the city who at one time or another have killed a man—policemen on their rounds, rash automobilists, prizefighters, doctors and nurses, with the best will in the world, children with air rifles, bank robbers, thugs, soldiers of the great war …”

Weatherby looked doubtfully at Giovanni. Giovanni didn’t say anything, but there was something in his face that showed Weatherby the barman wanted him to humor the other man.

“Well,” Weatherby said, “I was in the war.…”

“In the infantry, with a bayonet, perhaps,” Gosden said, in the new, curious, flat, noneffeminate voice.

“I was in the artillery,” Weatherby said. “In a battery of 105s. I suppose you could say that …”

“A dashing captain,” Gosden said, smiling, “peering through binoculars, calling down the fire of the great guns on the enemy headquarters.”

“It wasn’t exactly like that,” Weatherby said. “I was nineteen years old and I was a private and I was one of the loaders. Most of the time I spent digging.”

“Still,” Gosden persisted, “you could say that you contributed, that by your efforts men had been killed.”

“Well,” Weatherby said, “we fired off a lot of rounds. Somewhere along the line we probably hit something.”

“I used to be a passionate hunter,” Gosden said. “When I was a boy. I was brought up in the South. Alabama, to be exact, although I’m proud to say one would never know it from my accent. I once shot a lynx.” He sipped thoughtfully at his drink. “It finally became distasteful to me to take the lives of animals. Although I had no feeling about birds. There is something inimical, prehuman about birds, don’t you think, Mr. Weatherby?”

“I haven’t really given it much thought,” Weatherby said, sure now the man was drunk and wondering how soon, with decency, he could get out of there and whether he could go without buying Gosden a round.

“There must be a moment of the utmost exaltation when you take a human life,” Gosden said, “followed by a wave of the most abject, ineradicable shame. For example, during the war, among your soldier friends, the question must have arisen.…”

“I’m afraid,” Weatherby said, “that in most cases they didn’t feel as much as you would like them to have felt.”