Two Weeks in Another Town by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online Page B

next day, Jack was James Royal. He hadn’t liked the name then and he had never grown to like it, but it had seemed innocuous enough, and the head of the studio had kept his promise and had put the name up in lights in all the major cities, as he had phrased it, and on enormous billboards along all the major arteries of travel. The head of the studio had also kept his promise about the money, and for a few years Jack had been richer than he had ever thought he could possibly be. He had never changed his name legally and when he went into the Army, he enlisted, with a sense of relief and homecoming, as John Andrus.
    The other names on the list of credits and in the cast of characters swam up out of the past, names he hadn’t thought of for many years. Walter Bushell, Otis Carrington, Genevieve Carr, Harry Davies, Charles McKnight, Lawrence Myers, Frederick Swift, Boris Ilenski (not very American, that, but he was a musician and a musician did not have to have his name in lights or strike the native ear), Carlotta Lee, a dozen others, the names of people who had died or who had failed or who had become famous or disappeared from sight, and the name of the woman he had married and divorced. Sitting there in the darkness, he had an almost irrepressible desire to flee. If he had been alone, he knew he would have gotten up and run out of the theatre, but he looked over at Delaney, slumped in the seat beside him, loudly chewing his gum, squinting coldly through his glasses at the screen, and he thought, If he can take it, so can I.
    Then the picture started and he didn’t look over at Delaney again.
    The story was about a young boy in a small town who fell in love with an older woman who ran a bookshop. In the third reel, after the stolen midnight which gave the movie its title, and the discreet fade-out for the censors in the dark backroom of the bookshop, their sin was discovered and the scandal started, and the woman was attacked and there was some foolish melodrama about a crime that the boy committed to get money to help her stay in town and there was a kindly and philosophic judge who set the boy to rights and showed him where his duty lay, and a sorrowful parting between the boy and the older woman, and a standard ending in which the boy returned to the wholesome girl who had remained true to him through all his troubles. But the foolishness of the story and the familiarity of the ingredients didn’t make any difference. Jack was swept up in it, not because it was himself as a boy of twenty-two that he was watching (the boy seemed as strange to him and as remote as any of the other people on the screen), and not because he saw again, in the slightly comic clothes of another period, the beautiful woman who had been his wife and whom he had once loved and later hated, but because of the swiftness, the assurance, the sense of vigor and reality that Delaney had brought to every scene, the silly ones as well as the good ones, the quiet, true scenes between the boy and the older woman and the scenes of melodrama and sentimentality that the industry had imposed on them all. The picture had a clipped, tumbling style that carried everything along with it, and even now Jack could see why it had been so successful, could see how Delaney had made a star of him, even if that hadn’t lasted very long, could see why the picture had survived and had been played again and again, all over the world, for so many years.
    Watching himself, he was surprised that he had been so good. He was a little old for the part (he was supposed to be a boy of nineteen in the picture, just out of high school), but somehow he had caught the slippery movements of a complicated adolescent emerging, in fits and starts, into maturity. He was funny when he had to be and pitiable when he had to be and he seemed to be looking within himself at all times and dragging out of himself, with pain and with laughter, the accurate report on himself.
    He hadn’t remembered