Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  “Well, you’re not spastic now.”

  “Anyway,” Wesley said, “I don’t feel spastic. That’s something.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “Talking about kids—you think it would be all right if I went in and said hello to Enid?”

  “Of course,” Rudolph said, pleased.

  “She still talk a blue streak?”

  “Yes,” Rudolph said as he led the way into the kitchen, “more than ever.”

  For once, Enid was shy when they entered the kitchen and Wesley said, “Hello, Enid, I’m your cousin, Wesley. Remember?”

  Enid looked up at him soberly, then turned her head away. “It’s late,” the nurse said defensively. “She gets a little temperamental this time of day.”

  “I’ll come around in the morning sometime,” Wesley said. In the small kitchen, his deep, mature voice sounded brassy and harsh and Enid put her hands over her ears.

  “Manners, miss,” the nurse said.

  “I guess I talk too loud,” Wesley said apologetically, as he followed Rudolph out of the kitchen. “You get in the habit on a boat, with the wind and the noise of the water and all.”

  In the living room, Rudolph poured the martini out of the shaker into a glass and twisted a piece of lemon peel over the top of the drink. He raised his glass to Wesley, suddenly glad that the boy had come to see him, had asked to see Enid. Maybe, he thought, in some dim, distant future we will be something like a family again. He had little left, he thought, self-pityingly; a family was something to cling to. Even the letter he had received from Billy, with its rather timid, offhand request for money, had been cordial in tone. With no sons of his own, he knew that if the boys permitted it, he would be their friend, more than friend. Lonely, no longer married, Jeanne an almost forgotten incident in the past, with his own child in the hands of a highly competent woman and still at an age at which he thought of her as no more than a kind of charming toy, he knew that once he began communicating with his nephews he would soon need them more than they would ever need him. He hoped that day would come—and soon.

  “Whatever reason brought you to New York,” he said, moved, as he raised his glass, “I’m very happy to see you.”

  Wesley raised his glass, too, self-consciously. “Thanks.”

  “No more fights in bars, I hope,” Rudolph said.

  “Don’t worry,” Wesley said soberly. “My fighting days’re over. Though sometimes it’s pretty tough to hold back. There’re a lot of blacks in the school and the whites pick on them and they pick on the white boys. I guess I have the reputation of being chicken. But, what the hell, I can live with it. I learned my lesson. Anyway, I promised my father, the day he took me out of military school. I forgot only once. It wasn’t what you would call a normal occasion.” He stared down into his glass, grim, looking older than his years. “Just the once. Well, every dog is entitled to one bite, like they say. I guess I owe it to my father to keep my promise. It’s the least I …” He stopped. His mouth tightened. Rudolph was afraid the boy was going to cry.

  “I guess you do,” he said quickly. “Where’re you staying in New York?”

  “The YMCA. Not too bad.”

  “Look,” said Rudolph, “I’m taking Enid down to Montauk to her mother’s tomorrow morning for the week, but I’ll be coming back myself on Sunday. Why don’t you ride down with me, get a breath of sea air …?” He stopped as he saw Wesley eyeing him warily.

  “Thanks,” Wesley said. “That would be nice. But some other time. I have to be getting back to Indianapolis.”

  “You won’t have to hitchhike. I’ll give you the air fare back.” When will I ever stop offering people money, he thought despairingly, instead of what they’ve really come for?

  “I’d rather not,” Wesley said. “Actually, I like to hitch rides. You get to talk to a lot of different kinds of people.”

  “Whatever you say,” Rudolph said, rebuffed, but not blaming the boy for not wanting to run the risk of having to see Jean again, being reminded all over again. “Still,” he said, “if you’d rather stay here for the night, I can fix you up on the sofa.… I don’t have a guest room, but you’d be comfortable.” Hospitality, family solidarity, not dollar bills.

  “That’s nice of you,” Wesley said carefully, “but I’m fixed at the Y.”

  “The next time you come to New York let me know in advance. There’re some nice hotels in the neighborhood and it would be convenient. We could take in a couple of shows, things like that.…” He stopped short. He didn’t want the boy to think that he was attempting to bribe him.

  “Sure,” Wesley said unconvincingly. “Next time. This time, Uncle Rudy, I want to talk to you about my father.” He stared soberly at Rudolph. “I didn’t have the chance to know my father well enough. I was just a kid, maybe I’m still just a kid, but I want to know what he was like, what he was worth.… Do you understand what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “I keep making up lists, names of people who knew my father at different times in his life—and you and Aunt Gretchen are first on that list. That’s natural, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. Yes. That’s natural.” He was afraid of the questions he was going to be asked, the answers that he would be forced to give the tall, solemn, overgrown boy.

  “When I got to know him—” Wesley went on, “just the short time we had together—I thought he was some kind of hero, a saint, almost, the way he treated me and Kate and Dwyer, how he got everybody to do what he wanted without ever even raising his voice, how, no matter what came up, he could handle it. But I know he wasn’t always like that, I know my opinion of him was a kid’s opinion. I’ve got to get a real fix on my father. For my own sake. Because that’ll help me to get a fix on myself. On what kind of man I want to be, what I want to do with my life.… It sounds kind of mixed up, doesn’t it …?” He moved his bulky shoulders, as though he was irritated with himself.

  “It’s not so mixed up, Wesley,” Rudolph said gently. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, anything I can remember. But first, I think, we ought to go out and have dinner.” Postpone the past—the first rule of civilization.

  “I could use a good meal,” Wesley said, standing up. “I just ate junk food on the road. And the stuff I eat at home—” He made a face. “My mother is a health food nut. Fine for squirrels. Uncle Rudy,” he smiled, “everybody keeps telling me how rich you are. Can you afford a steak?”

  “I guess I’m rich enough for that,” Rudolph said. “Anyway, a few times a year. Just wait here for me while I go up and say good night to the baby and get a jacket.”

  He was taking the jacket out of the closet when the phone rang. “Hello,” he said, as he picked up the phone.

  “Rudy …” It was Gretchen’s voice. “What are you doing for dinner?” She was always most brusque and direct when she was slightly embarrassed. He hadn’t spoken to her in weeks and it was a strange time for her to call, at a quarter past seven on a Friday evening.

  “Well …” He hesitated. “I’ve had an unexpected visitor. Wesley. He hitchhiked in from Indianapolis. I’m taking him to dinner. Would you like to join us?”

  “Is there anything special he wants to talk to you about?” She sounded disappointed.

  “Not that I know of. Not anything he wouldn’t want to say in front of you, as far as I know.”

  “I wouldn’t like to interfere …”

  “Don’t be silly, Gretchen. Is there anything special you want to talk to me about?” The last time they had had a meal together she had seemed distracted and had let drop enough hints for him to guess that she was having trouble with the Hollywood director with whom she was working and having an on-again, off-again affair. What was his name? Kinsella. Evans Kinsella. Arrogant Hollywood sonofabitch. Gretchen had had luck once in her life with a man and that man had run a car into a tree. Rudolph supposed that Kinsella had something to do with her call, but she could bring that up if she wished after he had pac
ked Wesley off to the YMCA.

  “I just called,” Gretchen said, “because I’m at something of a loose end for the evening. My boyfriend stood me up. For a change.” She laughed mirthlessly. “So I thought about family. Weekends are a good time for loose ends and family.” But she still didn’t say whether she would come to dinner. Instead she said, “How’s Wesley?”

  “Getting along,” Rudolph said. “Bigger than ever. As serious as ever. More so.”

  “In trouble?” she asked.

  “No more than you and I,” he said lightly.

  “Do you think he’d object to seeing me?”

  “Absolutely not. In fact he said we were at the top of the list of people he wanted to see.”

  “What did he mean by that?” She sounded worried.

  “I’ll fill you in after dinner. He wants a steak.” He told her the name of the restaurant.

  He hung up and put on his jacket and went downstairs. Wesley was standing in the middle of the living room staring about him. “You know something,” Wesley said and grinned as he said it. “This is my idea of a real Christian home.”

  As they went down Third Avenue toward the restaurant, Rudolph noted how much like his brother Tom Wesley walked—the same almost-slouch, with a warning swinging of the shoulders. When he and Tom were young, Rudolph had thought it was a conscious pose, an advertisement that here was a predatory and dangerous male on the loose, to be avoided. Later as a grown man, Rudolph saw his brother’s manner of walking as a way of avoiding pain, a signal that he wanted the world to leave him alone.

  Rudolph’s own gliding, slow walk, with shoulders stiff, was a manufactured gait, which he had developed as a youth because he thought it was gentlemanly, Ivy League. He no longer cared about seeming gentlemanly and he had met enough Ivy Leaguers in business not to be anxious to be taken as one of them. But his way of walking was now a part of him. To change it now would be an affectation.

  When he had told Wesley that Gretchen was dining with them, Wesley’s face had brightened and he’d said, “That’s great. She’s swell, a real lady. What a difference between her and some of the dames we had to put up with on the boat.” He wagged his head humorously. “Money coming out of their ears, their tits showing day and night, and treating everybody like dirt.” The two beers had loosened his vocabulary. “You know, I sometimes wonder how it happens some women who never lifted a finger in their lives can act like they own the whole goddamn world.”

  “They practice in front of a mirror,” Rudolph said.

  “Practice in front of a mirror.” Wesley laughed. “I got to remember that. Aunt Gretchen works, doesn’t she?”

  “Very hard,” Rudolph said.

  “I guess that’s what does it. If you don’t work, you’re just shit. You don’t mind the way I talk, do you?” he asked anxiously.

  “Not at all.”

  “My father was kind of free talking,” Wesley said. “He said he didn’t like people who talked as though they had an anchor up their ass. He said there was a difference between talking dirty and talking ugly.”

  “Your father had a point there.” Rudolph, who had never gotten over his boyhood aversion to swearing and carefully censored his speech at all times, suddenly wondered if his brother had included him among the people who spoke as though they had an anchor up their ass.

  “You know,” Wesley went on, “Bunny thought your sister was something special, too. He told me you should have married somebody like her.”

  “That would have been a little awkward,” Rudolph said, “seeing that we were sister and brother and I wasn’t the pharaoh of Egypt.”

  “What’s that?” Wesley said.

  “I’m sorry,” Rudolph said. His embarrassment—jealousy?—at Wesley’s open admiration for his sister had made him pedantic in self-defense. “It was the custom in ancient Egypt in the families of the pharaohs.”

  “I get it,” Wesley said. “I guess I’m not what you might call well educated.”

  “You’re young yet.”

  “Yeah,” Wesley said, brooding over his youth.

  The boy had good stuff in him, Rudolph was sure, and it was criminal that by law the Kralers were given the right to warp or destroy it. He was going to see Johnny Heath in the morning when Johnny and his wife came to drive down to Montauk with him and Enid. He’d ask Johnny once more if there weren’t some legal way to get the boy out of his mother’s clutches.

  “What about education?” Rudolph said. “Are you going on to college?”

  The boy shrugged. “My mother says it’d be a waste of money on me. I read a lot, but not what they tell me to read in school. I’ve been studying up some on the Mormons. I guess I wanted to find out if Mr. Kraler and my mother were like they are because they’re Mormons or because they’re my mother and Mr. Kraler.” He grinned. “The way I figure it now, they started out as awful people, and their religion brought out the worst in them. But,” he said seriously, “it’s a queer religion. They sure were brave, the Mormons, fighting off the whole United States and all, and going in wagons halfway across America and settling in the desert and making it bloom, the way they say. But all those wives! I look at my mother and I swear, it makes you wonder why anybody would ever want to get married. You listen for ten minutes to my mother and one wife is one wife too many. Marriage in general …” He scowled. “Our family, for instance. You got divorced, Aunt Gretchen got divorced, my father got divorced … What’s it all about? I ask myself.”

  “You’re not the first man to ask himself that question,” Rudolph said. “Maybe it’s the times we live in. We’re adjusting to new stances in each other, as the sociologists would put it, and perhaps we’re not ready for it.”

  “There’s a girl in school,” Wesley said, scowling again, “pretty as a ripe red apple and older than me. I … well … I fooled around with her in the back of a car, in her own house, when her parents were out—a couple of times—and she started talking about marriage. I couldn’t get her off the subject. I just stopped seeing her. You going to get married again?” He peered fiercely at Rudolph, suspecting wedding bells.

  “It’s hard to say,” Rudolph said. “At the moment I have no plans.”

  “Religion is a funny thing,” Wesley said abruptly, as though the exchange about marriage had embarrassed him and he wanted to get away from it as quickly as possible. “I want to believe in God,” Wesley said earnestly. “After all, there had to be something that started the whole shebang going, wasn’t there? I mean how we got here, what we’re doing here, how everything works, like how we have air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat. I read the whole Bible through the last few months. There’re no answers there, I tell you—at least not for me.”

  Oh, dear nephew, Rudolph wanted to say, when your uncle was sixteen he was there before you. And found no answers.

  “What are you supposed to believe?” Wesley asked. “Do you believe in those copper plates the Mormons say Joseph Smith found in upstate New York and never showed to anybody? How do they expect people to believe stuff like that?”

  “Well, Moses came down off Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments carved in stone by God,” Rudolph said, relieved that Wesley had not asked him about his own beclouded lack of religion. “A lot of people have believed that story for thousands of years.”

  “Do you? I mean do you believe it?”

  “No.”

  “In school, too, they tell you a lot of things that just want to make you laugh out loud. They spend hours trying to tell you that black and white are the same thing and all you have to do is go out the door and walk one block and you see it just ain’t so. It was different in France. Or maybe I was different in France. I was doing fine in France, even with the language problem—but in Indianapolis …” He shrugged. “Most of the teachers seem full of shit to me. They spend most of the time trying to keep the kids from yelling in classroom and throwing spitballs, if they’re not knifing each other. If college is anything like that, I’d say, Fu
ck it.” He looked inquiringly at Rudolph. “What’s your opinion about college? I mean, for me?”

  “It’s all according to what you want to do with your life,” Rudolph said carefully. He was touched by the boy’s naive garrulousness, his trust that his uncle would not betray him to the adult world.

  “Who the hell knows?” Wesley said. “I have some notions. I’m not ready to tell anybody about them yet.” His tone was suddenly cold.

  “For example,” Rudolph said, ignoring the change in Wesley’s attitude, “you know something about the sea. You like it, don’t you?”

  “I did,” Wesley said bitterly.

  “You might want to go into the merchant marine.”

  “It’s a dog’s life, Bunny says.”

  “Not necessarily. It wasn’t a dog’s life for Bunny on the Clothilde, was it?”

  “No.”

  “It isn’t a dog’s life if you’re an officer on a decent ship, if you get to be a captain …”

  “I guess not.”

  “There’s a merchant marine academy right here in New York. When you get out of it you’re an officer right off.”

  “Ah,” Wesley said reflectively. “Maybe I ought to look into that.”

  “I’ll ask around,” Rudolph said, “and write you what I find out. Just remember to ask for your mail at General Delivery.”

  While they were waiting for Gretchen to arrive before ordering, Rudolph had a martini. It was as good a time as any to explain about the estate. “All told,” Rudolph said, “after taxes and expenses for lawyers there should be a little over a hundred thousand dollars to be divided.” He didn’t intend to let either Wesley or Kate ever know that it was the amount he had paid for the Clothilde so that the estate could be liquidated. “One-third to Kate,” he went on, “one-third in trust for her child, with Kate as the executrix—” He didn’t tell the boy about the endless hours spent in legal wrangling to reach that compromise. The Kralers had fought tenaciously to have Teresa, as Wesley’s mother, appointed as the administrator of the whole estate. They had some legal backing for their claim, as Kate was not an American citizen and was domiciled in England. Heath had had to threaten to bring up Teresa’s two convictions as a prostitute and start proceedings to have her declared unfit on moral grounds to be Wesley’s guardian, even though she was the boy’s natural mother. Rudolph knew that for Wesley’s sake he would never have allowed Johnny to go through with the action, but the threat had worked and the Kralers had finally given in and allowed Rudolph to be appointed administrator of the estate, which meant that he had to answer a long list of vengeful questions each month about the disposition of every penny that went through his hands. In addition, they were constantly threatening to sue him for faulty or criminal behavior in protecting Wesley’s interest. What evil angel, Rudolph thought again and again, had touched his brother Tom’s shoulder the day he asked the woman to marry him?