Free Acceptable Losses by Irwin Shaw

friends who had been to Europe advised them of places they couldn’t afford to miss, and the friends who had not been to Europe told them how much they envied the travelers and Mr. Gray, in a ceremonious speech, presented Damon with a leather-bound diary in which to put down his impressions of the trip and gave Sheila a slide rule in a suede leather case with which you could figure out how to change meters and centimeters into yards and inches and foreign currencies into the value in American dollars.
    The party ended late, but Damon could see that Mr. Gray was loath to leave and poured him his third brandy of the night and whispered, “Stay a while,” before saying good-bye to his other guests. Sheila went into the bedroom to do some last-minute packing, and Damon fixed himself a drink and sat down in the chair near the end of the couch on which Mr. Gray was sitting.
    “I have to apologize, Roger,” Mr. Gray said, “for what I did to Crewes. After all, he was one of your guests.”
    “Nonsense,” Damon said. “Anybody who comes to a party in New York dressed like that deserves what he gets.”
    “I just couldn’t hold myself back,” Mr. Gray said. “You know, I have nothing against the movies, per se. In fact, I love them. And I have nothing against the people who make them. But when I see a man who had the talent Crewes had let himself go like that and never write a decent word in ten years, I mourn. The waste, man, the waste. There’re writers who’ve gone through our office I’ve counseled to go out there and stay there because I knew they’d be happier adapting other people’s materials and relieved of the heavy burden of creation. They’d be paid besides and I don’t underestimate the love for money some men have, and anyway the language wouldn’t be a phrase the loser by their spending their lives writing to order. And there are other men I’ve counseled to go and do one picture, for the experience, for the money, because I knew they’d come back and do the work they were born to do.” He sipped sadly at his brandy. “And in Crewes’s case it was a personal disappointment. I thought I was molding him. I saw a one-act play of his in one of those Equity Library presentations, and I sought him out and told him he was a novelist, not a playwright, and I financed him for a full year while he was working on his first book and he was one of the most promising young men ever to come into the office. Now, what is he? A suntanned cockerel, crowing in the barnyard.” His mouth twisted in distaste. “Ah, why go on about it? In our profession disappointment is the one commodity we can be sure will arrive with every morning’s mail.” He sipped his drink in silence for a few moments, staring thoughtfully into the embers of the dying fire. “Not only in our profession,” he said bitterly. “My son, for example.”
    “What?” Damon said, surprised. He knew that Mr. Gray had been married and had been a widower when they had first met, but the son had never been mentioned before.
    “My son,” Mr. Gray repeated. “He’s a grain merchant, dealing in futures, things like that. He made a fortune during the war. And after. Waiting till the market went up before selling wheat to the starving millions of Europe and Asia. He was a brilliant boy, he was close to being a genius. His field was mathematics, physics. He could have been the shining star of any faculty at any university in the country. He was the one golden gift of an otherwise dreadful marriage. He used his talent all right—to wheel, to deal, to take advantage of every trick and turn of the law and the marketplace. I read not long ago that he was the youngest multimillionaire in the United States who had made all his money by his own efforts. With the cold heart of a guard in a concentration camp. It was in Time magazine.”
    “I never happened to read it,” Damon said.
    “I didn’t carry it in my pocket to show to my friends.” Mr. Gray