Short Stories: Five Decades (80 page)

“I certainly do. Because it’s an exact statement of fact.”

“I saw that smile,” Virginia said. “Don’t think I didn’t.”

“What smile?” Robert asked, honestly puzzled.

“Why, Mr. Harvey,” Virginia said, cooing, “isn’t it nice seeing you again? And then the teeth and the girlish crinkling of the nose and the long, direct stare …”

“Finally,” Robert said to the waiter, who was leaning over the table, putting the check down. “Don’t go away.” Robert counted out some bills, feeling his hands shaking minutely with rage. He watched the waiter going toward the cashier’s desk, near the kitchen, for change. Then, he spoke, trying to keep his voice under control. “Now,” he said, turning back to Virginia, “what, exactly, did you mean by that?”

“I may not be very smart,” Virginia said, “but if there’s one thing I have, it’s intuition. Especially where you’re concerned. And anyway that smile was unmistakable.”

“Now, wait a minute.” Robert felt his fists opening and closing spasmodically. “It’s charming of you to think, even after being married to me for five years, that women just drop at my feet after speaking to me for five minutes, but I have to disillusion you. It has never happened to me. Never,” he said slowly and distinctly and with some disappointment.

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s fake modesty,” Virginia said. “I’ve seen you looking at yourself in the mirror, approving of yourself by the hour, pretending you were shaving or looking for gray hairs. And,” she added bitterly, “I’ve talked to your mother. I know how she brought you up. Drilling it into your head that the whole panting female sex was after you because you were a Harvey and you were so dazzling—”

“Good God,” Robert said. “Now we have my mother, too.”

“She has a lot to answer for,” Virginia said, “your mother. Don’t think she hasn’t.”

“All right,” Robert said. “My mother is a low, terrible woman and everybody agrees on that. But what has that got to do with the fact that a woman I met at a party happened to smile at me?”

“Happened,” Virginia said.

“I still don’t see how it could be my fault,” Robert said, trying to sound patient. “I can’t control the way people smile in restaurants.”

“It’s always your fault,” Virginia said. “Even if you don’t say a word. It’s just the way you come into the room and stand there and decide to look … male.”

Robert jumped up, pushing the table back. “I can’t stand it,” he said. “I can’t stand it any more. The hell with the change.”

Virginia stood up, too, her face rigid. “I have an idea,” Robert said as he helped her on with her coat. “Let’s you and I not talk to each other for a week.”

“Fine,” said Virginia crazily. “That’s perfectly fine with me.” She walked swiftly toward the door, through the middle of the restaurant, without looking back.

Robert watched her striding down the narrow aisle between the tables, her black coat floating behind her. He wished that he had a worse temper. He wished that he had a temper so bad that he could stay out all night and get drunk.

The waiter came with the change, and Robert fumbled with the tip. Over the waiter’s shoulder he saw Miss Byrne swing her head slowly toward him. Everybody else at her table was talking animatedly. For the first time, Robert looked at her carefully. It
is
true, he thought numbly. Most women these days
are
too damn thin.

Then Miss Byrne smiled at him. Her nose crinkled and her teeth showed and she seemed to be looking at him for a long time. He felt flattered and considerably younger and very curious. And as he dropped his eyes and left a large tip for the waiter, he knew, helplessly, that he was going to call her next day and he knew what her voice was going to sound like on the telephone.

Then he got his coat and hurried out of the restaurant after his wife.

Age of Reason

H
e had the dream only once—in December. He thought about it for a few moments the next morning, and forgot about it until one evening in April, ten minutes before his plane was scheduled to take off. Then, suddenly, it returned to him. Always, when he was about to board a plane, there was a slight tremor; an awareness of risk, however small and controlled; a slight, subconscious realization that each flight might end with death; a hidden knowledge that there was a small, lurking fatality in winds and cloud and valves and wings, and that no amount of airline skill and care and advertising could ever absolutely dispel it. It was that usual minute, buried twinge of disaster that made him remember the dream as he stood at the gate with his wife and sister, looking out at the dark field and the huge, substantial plane and the flickering lights that marked the runways.

The dream had been a simple one. In it, somehow, his sister Elizabeth had died, and he had, in a resigned and hopeless way, followed the coffin to the cemetery and watched with dry eyes as it was lowered into the ground, and then he had returned home. And somehow, in the dream, it had all happened on May 14th. The date had been absolutely clear and definite and had given the dream a real, tragic sense that it might not otherwise have had. When he woke, he tried to figure out why May 14th, an obscure day five months in the future, had been chosen so relentlessly and specifically by his dreaming mind, but it was no use. There were no birthdays in his family in May, no anniversaries, and nothing in particular had ever happened to him or anyone he knew on that day. He had laughed a little, sleepily, to himself, gently touched Alice’s bare shoulder in the bed beside him, and had risen and gone to work, in the sensible, everyday atmosphere of drafting boards and blueprints, without saying a word then or later to her or anyone else about the dream.

And then—laughing at the way his five-year-old daughter had sleepily and carelessly said good-bye when he had left the apartment, standing there with the noise of engines filling the fresh April evening air, kissing his sister Elizabeth good-bye—the dream came back. Elizabeth was as rosy and sturdy as ever, a cheerful, pretty girl who looked as though she had just come triumphantly off a tennis court or from a swimming meet, and if there was any touch of doom hanging over her, it was very well hidden.

“Bring me back Cary Grant,” Elizabeth said as she brushed his cheek.

“Of course,” Roy said.

“I now leave you two to say a fond farewell,” Elizabeth said. “Alice, give him his last-minute instructions. Tell him to behave himself.”

“I’ve already briefed him for this mission,” Alice said. “No girls. No more than three Martinis before dinner. Telephone me and report twice weekly. Get on the plane and get home the minute the job is done.”

“Two weeks,” Roy said. “I swear I’ll be back in two weeks.”

“Don’t have too good a time.” Alice was smiling but on the verge of tears, as she always was every time he went anyplace without her, even overnight to Washington.

“I won’t,” Roy said. “I promise to be miserable.”

“Good enough.” Alice laughed.

“No old telephone numbers secreted on your person?” Elizabeth asked.

“No.” There had been a period in Roy’s life, just before he married Alice, when he had been quite lively, and during the war some of his friends had come back from Europe with lurid and highly fictionized tales of wild times in Paris and London, and to the women of his family he seemed more dashing and unstable than was the fact.

“God,” he said, “it’ll be a relief getting away from this female board of directors for a few days.”

He and Alice went up to the gate.

“Take care of yourself, darling,” Alice said softly.

“Don’t worry.” He kissed her.

“I hate this,” Alice said, holding onto him. “We’re always saying good-bye. This is the last time. From now on, no matter where you go, I’m going with you.”

“All right.” Roy smiled down at her.

“Even if you only go to Yankee Stadium.”

“Couldn’t be more pleased.” He held her tightly for a moment, dear and familiar and forlorn, left behind this way. Then he walked out to the plane. He turned as he started to climb into it, and waved. Alice and Elizabeth waved back, and he noticed again how much alike they looked, standing together, like two sisters in a pretty family, both of them blond and fair, trim, with little tricks of movement and holding themselves that were almost identical.

He turned and went into the plane, and a moment later the door was shut behind him and the plane started rolling toward the end of the runway.

Ten days later, over the phone between Los Angeles and New York, Roy told Alice she would have to come West. “Munson says it’s going to take six months,” Roy said, “and he’s promised me a place to live, and you are hereby invited.”

“Thanks,” Alice said. “Tell Munson I would like to kick him in the teeth.”

“Can’t be helped, baby,” Roy said. “Commerce above all. You know.”

“Why couldn’t he have told you before you went out? Then you could’ve helped me close up the apartment and we could’ve gone out together.”

“He didn’t know before I came out,” Roy said patiently. “The world is very confused these days.”

“I would like to kick him in the teeth.”

“O.K.” Roy grinned. “You come out and tell him yourself. When do you arrive? Tomorrow?”

“There’s one thing you’ve got to learn, Roy,” Alice said. “I am not a troop movement. You can’t say, ‘Civilian Alice Gaynor will report three thousand miles from here at 4
P.M.
tomorrow,’ and expect it to happen.”

“O.K., you’re not a troop movement. When?”

Alice chuckled. “You sound nice and anxious.”

“I
am
nice and anxious.”

“That’s good.”

“When?”

“Well”—Alice hesitated thoughtfully—“I have to get Sally out of school, I have to send some things to storage, I have to rent the apartment, I have to get plane reservations—”

“When?”

“Two weeks,” Alice said, “if I can get the reservations all right. Can you wait?”

“No,” Roy said.

“Neither can I.” They both laughed. “Have you been very gay out there?”

Roy recognized the tentative, inquiring tone and sighed to himself. “Dull as mud,” he said. “I stay in in the evenings and read. I’ve read six books and I’m halfway through General Marshall’s report on the conduct of the war.”

“There was one evening you didn’t read.” Alice’s voice was careful and purposely light.

“All right,” Roy said flatly. “Let’s hear it.”

“Monica came in from the Coast Tuesday and she called me. She said she saw you with a beautiful girl at a fancy restaurant.”

“If there was any justice,” Roy said, “they would drop Monica on Bikini Atoll.”

“She had long black hair, Monica said.”

“She was absolutely right,” Roy said. “The girl had long black hair.”

“Don’t shout. I can hear perfectly well.”

“What Monica neglected to say was that it was Charlie Lewis’s wife—”

“She said you were alone.”

“—and Charlie Lewis was twenty feet away, in the men’s room.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. Maybe he was in the ladies’ room.”

“It may be funny to you, but with your history—”

“I will match my history with any husband’s,” Roy said.

“I hate your sense of humor on this subject.” Alice’s voice began to tremble a little, and Roy relented.

“Listen, baby,” he said softly. “Get out here quick. Quick as you can. Then we can stop this nonsense.”

“I’m sorry.” Alice’s voice was soft and repentant. “It’s just that we’ve been away from each other for so long in these last few years. I’m foolish and jittery. Who’s paying for this call?”

“The company.”

“That’s good.” Alice chuckled. “I’d hate to fight on our own money. Do you love me?”

“Get out here quick.”

“Do you consider that an answer to my question?”

“Yes.”

“O.K.,” Alice said. “So do I. Good-bye, darling. See you soon.”

“Kiss Sally for me,” said Roy.

“I will. Good-bye.”

Roy hung up. First he shook his head a little wearily, remembering the argument; then he smiled, remembering the end of the conversation. He got up from his chair and went over to the calendar on the desk, to try to figure what day he could expect his wife and child.

The telegram came three days later:
“RESERVATIONS ON
2
O’CLOCK FLIGHT MAY
14.
WILL ARRIVE BURBANK AT 10 P.M. YOUR TIME. PLEASE SHAVE. LOVE, ALICE
.”

Roy grinned as he reread the telegram, then became conscious of a sensation of uneasiness that refused to be crystallized or pinned down. He walked around all that day with that undefined sense of trouble, and it wasn’t until he was dozing off to sleep that night that it suddenly became clear to him. He woke and got out of bed and read the telegram again. May 14th. He kept the lamp on and lit a cigarette and sat up in the narrow bed in the impersonal hotel room and slowly allowed the thing to take control.

He had never been a superstitious man, or even a religious man, and he had always laughed at his mother, who had a fund of dreams and predictions and omens of good and evil at her command. Alice had one or two superstitious habits—like not talking about anything that she wanted to have happen, because she was sure it wouldn’t happen if it were mentioned or hoped for too much—but he had always scorned them, too. During the war, when every magazine assured the world that there were no atheists in foxholes, he had never prayed, even in the most gloomy and dangerous times. He had never, in all his adult life, done anything as a result of superstition or premonition. He looked around him at his efficiently furnished, bright, twentieth-century room and felt foolish to be awake now in the heel of the night, chasing phantoms and echoing warnings and scraps of old dreams through the sensible channels of his engineer’s mind.