Short Stories: Five Decades by Irwin Shaw

dollars a week. He looked back regretfully. Miss Zelinka’s legs were visible, jutting out, like a promise of poetry and flowers, past the grime and gloom of the hallway. Sadly he opened the door and went into his room, took off his hat and coat and fell on the bed. He could hear Josephine talking, as though the walls, the vermin, the old and wailing plumbing, the very rats hurrying on their gloomy errands between the floors, had at last found a voice.
    “The papers are full of boys like him” Josephine was saying. “Turning the gas on and stuffing their heads into the oven. What a night! What a stinking whore of a night! They’ll find plenty of bodies in the river tomorrow morning.”
    “Josephine,” Wysocki’s voice floated down the hallway. “You ought to learn to talk with more cheerfulness. You’re ruining your business, Josephine. The wholesale butchers from Tenth Avenue, the slaughterhouse workers, your whole regular clientele, they’re all avoiding you. Should I tell you why?”
    “Tell me why,” Josephine said.
    “Because you’re gloomy!” Wysocki said. “Because you depress them with your talk. People like a woman to be cheerful. You can’t expect to succeed in your line if you walk around like the last day of the world is beginning in two and three-quarter hours, Bulova watch time.”
    “The butchers from Tenth Avenue!” Josephine snarled. “Who wants them? I give them to you as a gift.”
    Enders lay on the bed, regretting that a proud and beautiful woman like Bertha Zelinka had to sit in one of the three chairs of the lobby of the Circus Hotel on a rainy night and listen to a conversation like that. He put on the light and picked up the book he was reading.
    I was neither at the hot gates
    Nor fought in the warm rain
    Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass ,
    Bitten by flies, fought …
    “What a night!” Josephine’s voice scraped down the hallway. “The river will be stuffed with bodies in the morning.”
    Enders put down T. S. Eliot. It was hard to read T. S. Eliot in the Circus Hotel without a deep feeling of irony. Enders got up and looked around the doorpost, down the hall. The proud, poetic legs were still there, lean, muscular, beautifully shaped, aristocratic, stemming down into slim ankles and narrow feet. Enders leaned dreamily against the doorpost, regarding Miss Zelinka’s legs. Music played from a well-known orchestra in a night club lit by orange lamps, where no dish cost less than a dollar seventy-five, even tomato juice, and he danced with Bertha Zelinka, both of them dressed beautifully, shiningly, and he made those deep, long eyes, charged with Northern melancholy, crinkle with laughter, and later grow sober and reflective as he talked swiftly of culture, of art, of poetry. “‘Nor fought in the warm rain,’ in the phrase of T. S. Eliot, a favorite of mine, ‘nor knee deep in the salt marsh …’”
    He walked quickly down the hallway, looking neither to right nor left until he stopped at the desk. “Have there been any telephone calls for me today?” he asked Wysocki, carefully avoiding looking at Miss Zelinka.
    “No,” said Wysocki. “Not a thing.”
    Enders turned and stared full at Miss Zelinka, trying, with the deep intensity of his glance, to get her to look at him, smile at him …
    “Heads like yours, my friend,” Josephine said, “they find in ovens.”
    Miss Zelinka sat passionless, expressionless, heedless, looking at a point twenty-five feet over Wysocki’s shoulder, patiently, but coolly, in the attitude of a woman who is expecting a Lincoln to drive up at any moment and a uniformed chauffeur to spring from it and lead her fastidiously to the heavy, upholstered door, rich with heavy hardware.
    Enders walked slowly back to his room. He tried to read some more. “April is the cruellest month …” He thumbed through the book. “Here, said she, is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor …” Enders put the book down. He