Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Yes, it does,” Weatherby said.

“People usually prefer off-color stories, I notice,” Gosden said, “but as I said, I don’t seem to be able to remember them.” He drank delicately from his glass. “I suppose Giovanni told you something about me while I was telephoning,” he said. Once more his voice had taken on its other tone, flat, almost dead, not effeminate.

Weatherby glanced at Giovanni and Giovanni nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Yes,” Weatherby said. “A little.”

“My wife was a virgin when I married her,” Gosden said. “But we had the most passionate and complete relationship right from the beginning. She was one of those rare women who are made simply for marriage, for wifehood, and nothing else. No one could suspect the glory of her beauty or the depths of her feeling merely from looking at her or talking to her. On the surface, she seemed the shyest and least assertive of women, didn’t she, Giovanni?”

“Yes, Mr. Gosden,” Giovanni said.

“In all the world there were only two men who could have known. Myself and …” He stopped. His face twitched. “At eleven-o-eight,” he said, “they pulled the switch. The man is dead. I was constantly telling her to leave the chain on the door, but she was thoughtless and she trusted all the world. The city is full of wild beasts, it is ridiculous to say that we are civilized. She screamed. Various people in the building heard her scream, but in the city one pays little attention to the noises that emanate from a neighbor’s apartment. Later on, a lady downstairs said that she thought perhaps my wife and I were having an argument, although we never fought in all the years we were married, and another neighbor thought it was a program on a television set, and she was thinking of complaining to the management of the building because she had a headache that morning and was trying to sleep.” Gosden tucked his feet under the barstool rung in an almost girlish position and held his glass up again before his eyes with his two hands. “It is good of you to listen to me like this, Mr. Weatherby,” he said. “People have been avoiding me in the last three years, old customers hurry past my shop without looking in, old friends are out when I call. I depend upon strangers for trade and conversation these days. At Christmas, I sent a hundred-dollar bill anonymously, in a plain envelope, through the mails to the woman in Queens. It was on impulse, I didn’t reason it out, the holiday season perhaps.… I contemplated asking for an invitation to the … the ceremony at Ossining tonight, I thought quite seriously about it, I suppose it could have been arranged. Then, finally, I thought it wouldn’t really do any good, would it. And I came here, instead, to drink with Giovanni.” He smiled across the bar at Giovanni. “Italians,” he said, “are likely to have gentle and understanding souls. And now, I really must go home. I sleep poorly and on principle I’m opposed to drugs.” He got out his wallet and put down some bills.

“Wait a few minutes,” Giovanni said, “until I lock up and I’ll walk you home and open your door for you.”

“Ah,” Gosden said, “that would be kind of you, Giovanni. It is the most difficult moment. Opening the door. I am terribly alone. After that, I’m sure I’ll be absolutely all right.”

Weatherby got off the stool and said to Giovanni, “Put it on the bill, please.” He was released now. “Good night,” he said to Giovanni. “Good night, Mr. Gosden.” He wanted to say more, to proffer some word of consolation or hope, but he knew nothing he could say would be of any help.

“Good night,” Gosden said, in his bright, breathy voice now. “It’s been a pleasure renewing our acquaintanceship, even so briefly. And please present my respects to your wife.”

Weatherby went out of the door onto the street, leaving Giovanni locking the liquor bottles away and Gosden silently and slowly drinking, perched neat and straight-backed on the barstool.

The street was dark and Weatherby hurried up it toward his doorway, making himself keep from running. He used the stairway, because the elevator was too slow. He opened the metal door of his apartment and saw that there was a light on in the bedroom.

“Is that you, darling?” He heard his wife’s drowsy voice from the bedroom.

“I’ll be right in,” Weatherby said. “I’m locking up.” He pushed the extra bolt that most of the time they neglected to use and carefully walked, without haste, as on any night, across the carpet of the darkened living room.

Dorothy was in bed, with the lamp beside her lit and a magazine that she had been reading fallen to the floor beside her. She smiled up at him sleepily. “You have a lazy wife,” she said, as he began to undress.

“I thought you were going to the movies,” he said.

“I went. But I kept falling asleep,” she said. “So I came home.”

“Do you want anything? A glass of milk. Some crackers?”

“Sleep,” she said. She rolled over on her back, the covers up to her throat, her hair loose on the pillow. He put on his pyjamas, turned off the light, and got into bed beside her and she lifted her head to put it on his shoulder.

“Whiskey,” she said drowsily. “Why do people have such a prejudice against it? Smells delicious. Did you work hard, darling?”

“Not too bad,” he said, with the freshness of her hair against his face.

“Yum,” she said, and went to sleep.

He lay awake for a while, holding her gently, listening to the muffled sounds from the street below. God deliver us from accident, he thought, and make us understand the true nature of the noises arising from the city around us.

T he city lay around Central Park in a deep hush, the four-o’clock-in-the-morning sky mild with stars and a frail, softly rising mist. Now and then a car went secretly by, with a sigh of tires and wind and a sudden small flare of headlights. The birds were still, and the trolley cars and buses; the taxicabs waited silently at scattered corners; the drunks were lying by this time in the doorways; the bums bedded for the night, the lights of the tall choked buildings out, save for a window here and there lit in lust or illness. There was no wind, and the smell of earth, heavy and surprising in the concrete city, rose with the mist.

O’Malley walked slowly from east to west on the rolling footpaths of the park, free now of nurses and children and policemen and scholars and old men retired heartbrokenly from business. The paths were free now of everything but the soft night and the mist and the country smell of spring earth and the endless and complex memory of all the feet that had trod and worn the paths in the green park in the palm of the city’s hand.

O’Malley walked slowly, carrying his head with the exaggerated and conscious care of a man who feels he has drunk one whisky past absolute clarity. He breathed deeply of that rare and fragrant early morning air which seemed to O’Malley to have been made especially by God, in assurance of His mercy and benign tolerance, to follow whisky.

O’Malley looked around him at the city slumbering magnificently past the trees of the park and was glad to know his home was there, his work, his future. He walked slowly from eat to west, breathing in the quiet air, holding his head carefully, but comfortably.

“Pardon me.” A man slipped out in front of him. “Have you got a light?”

O’Malley stopped and struck a match. He held the match to the man’s cigarette, noticing the touch of rouge on the cheeks, the long, carefully waved hair, the white trembling hands cupping the match, the slight smear of rouge on the man’s lips.