Free Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw Page B

to come back here. Again and again and again. Until I’m an old lady with a big wide sun hat and a cane. When you were here during the war, did you ever think you’d come back?”
    “When I was here during the war,” he said, “all I thought about was getting home alive.”
    “Did you know then that you were going into the theatre and the movies?”
    “I don’t really remember.” He tried to recall exactly that September afternoon long ago, the jeep moving toward the sound of the guns, the four helmeted soldiers with their cameras and carbines bumping along the lovely wild coast none of them had ever seen before, past the blown pillboxes and the camouflaged villas facing the sea. What were the names of the other three men in the jeep? The driver’s name was Harte. He remembered that. Malcolm Harte. He had been killed in Luxembourg a few months later. He couldn’t remember the names of the other two men. They had not been killed.
    “I guess,” he said, “I must have thought it was possible I’d have something to do with the movies after the war. After all, I had a movie camera in my hands. The army had taught me how to be a cameraman, and the Signal Corps was full of men who had worked in Hollywood. But I wasn’t much of a cameraman. Just manufactured for the war. I knew I couldn’t do that once the war was over.” There was a melancholy pleasure in having an occasion to remember that distant time when he was a young man in the uniform of his country, in no danger, for that afternoon at least, of being shot at. “Actually,” he went on, “my going into the theatre was an accident. On the troopship going back to the States from Le Havre I met Edward Brenner in a poker game. We became friendly, and he told me he’d written a play while he had been waiting in the redeployment depot at Reims to be shipped home. I knew a little about the theatre, of course, because of my father—he’d been taking me to see plays since I was nine years old—and I asked Brenner if I could read it.”
    “That was a lucky poker game,” the girl said.
    “I suppose so,” Craig said.
    Actually, it had not been during the poker game that they had come together but on deck, on a sunny day when Craig had been able to find a corner out of the wind and was reading a collection of the ten best American plays of 1944 that his father had sent him. (What was the APO number? It was an address he had thought he would never forget.) Brenner had passed him twice, had eyed the book in his hand, had finally crouched down, farmer-style, on his heels beside him, and had said, “How are they? The plays, I mean.”
    “Medium,” Craig said.
    They had begun to talk then. It turned out that Brenner was from Pittsburgh and had gone to Carnegie Tech and had taken the drama course there before he was drafted—he was older than he looked—and was interested in the theatre. The next day he had shown Craig his play.
    Brenner was unprepossessing to look at—a gaunt, sallow boy with sad, dark eyes and a hesitant and guarded way of talking. Among the horde of jubilant, loud men sailing home from the war, he had been uncomfortable and unsoldierly in his ill-fitting uniform, his manner tentative, as though a little surprised that he had survived three campaigns and knew he could never survive a fourth. Craig had agreed to read his play with misgivings, trying in advance to compose anodyne comments that would not hurt Brenner’s feelings. He was unprepared for the fierceness of the emotion, the harsh unsentimentality, the rigor of the construction of the infantry private’s first dramatic work. While he himself had never done anything in the theatre, he had seen enough plays to be convinced, with youthful egotism, of the accuracy of his own taste. He had not measured his enthusiasm when he had discussed Brenner’s play with him, and by the time they had passed the Statue of Liberty, the two men were firm friends and Craig had promised Brenner that