Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  “That leaves approximately one-third to …” He stopped. “Wesley, are you listening?”

  “Sure,” the boy said. A waiter had gone by with a huge porterhouse steak crackling on a platter and Wesley had followed its passage across the room hungrily with his eyes. Whatever you could say about him, Rudolph thought, you could never fault him for being spoiled about money.

  “As I was saying,” Rudolph continued, “There’s about thirty-three thousand dollars that will be put in a trust fund for you. That should bring in roughly about nineteen hundred dollars a year, which your mother is supposed to use for your support. At the age of eighteen you get the whole thing to use as you see fit. I advise you to leave it in the trust fund. The income won’t be very much but it could help you pay for college if that’s what you want. Are you following me, Wesley?”

  Again he had lost the boy’s attention. Wesley was gazing with open admiration at a flashy blond lady in a mink coat who had come in with two paunchy men with gray hair and white ties. The restaurant, Rudolph knew, was a favorite of the more successful members of the Mafia and the girls who came in on their arms made for stern competition with the food.

  “Wesley,” Rudolph said plaintively. “I’m talking about money.”

  “I know,” Wesley said apologetically. “But, holy man, that is something, isn’t it?”

  “It comes with money, Wesley,” Rudolph said. As an uncle he felt he had to instill a true sense of value in the boy. “Nineteen hundred dollars a year may not mean much to you,” he said, “but when I was your age …” Now he knew he would sound pompous if he finished the sentence. “The hell with it. I’ll write it all down in my letter.”

  Just then he saw Gretchen come in and he waved to her. Both of the men stood up as she approached the table. She kissed Rudolph on the cheek, then threw her arms around Wesley and kissed him, hard. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you,” she said. Her voice, to Rudolph’s surprise, was trembling. He felt a twinge of pity for her as he watched the two of them, Gretchen staring hard into the boy’s face, fighting with an emotion he could not identify. Perhaps she was thinking of her own son, lost to her, rejecting her, making excuses to her as to why she should not come to Brussels whenever she wrote him that she would like to visit him. “You look wonderful,” Gretchen said, still holding onto the boy. “Although you could use a new suit.”

  They both laughed.

  “If you’ll stay over until Monday,” Gretchen said, finally releasing Wesley and sitting down, “I’ll take you to Saks and see if they have anything there to fit you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wesley said as he and Rudolph seated themselves. “I’ve got to be on my way tomorrow.”

  “You just came here for one day?” Gretchen said incredulously.

  “He’s a busy man,” Rudolph said. He didn’t want to listen to Gretchen’s predictable explosion of wrath if she heard about Mr. and Mrs. Kraler’s Christian concept of money for the young. “Now, let’s order. I’m starved.”

  Over the meal, Wesley began to ask the questions about his father. “I told Uncle Rudy, back in his house,” Wesley said as he wolfed down his steak, “why I want to know—why I have to know, what my old man was like. Really like, I mean. He told me a lot before he died, and Bunny told me even more—but so far it hasn’t added up. I mean, my father’s just bits and pieces for me. There’s all those stories about what a terror he was as a kid and as a young man, how much trouble he got into … how people hated him. How he hated people. You and Uncle Rudy, too.…” He looked gravely first at Gretchen and then at Rudolph. “But then when I saw him with you, he didn’t hate you. He—well—I suppose I got to say it—he loved you. He was unhappy most of his life, he told me—and then—well, he said it himself—he learned to lose enemies—to be happy. Well, I want to learn to be happy, myself.” Now the boy was frankly crying, while at the same time eating large chunks of the rare steak, as though he hadn’t eaten in weeks.

  “The crux of the matter,” Gretchen said, putting down her knife and fork and speaking slowly, “is Rudy. Do you mind if I say that, Rudy?”

  “Say whatever you want. If I think you’re wrong, I’ll correct you.” Some other time he might tell the boy how and when his father had learned to be happy. The day he found out that Rudolph, unknown to him, had invested the five thousand dollars Tom had laid his hands on by blackmailing a kleptomaniac lawyer in Boston. The return of the blood money, Tom had called it, the same amount their father had to pay to get Tom out of the jail where he was facing a charge of rape. Tom had thrown the hundred-dollar bills on the hotel bed, saying, “I want to pay off our fucking family and this does it. Piss on it. Blow it on dames. Give it to your favorite charity. I’m not walking out of this room with it.” Five thousand dollars which by careful babying along had grown to sixty thousand through the years when Rudolph hadn’t known where Tom was, whether he was alive or dead, and which had finally enabled Tom to buy a ship and rename it the Clothilde. “Your father,” he might say at that future date, “became happy through crime, luck and money, and was smart enough to use all three things for the one act that could save him.” He didn’t believe that saying it would help Wesley much. Wesley did not seem inclined to crime, his luck so far had been all bad and his devotion to money nonexistent.

  “Rudy,” Gretchen was saying, “was the white-haired boy of the family. If there was any love my parents had to spare, it was for him. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it—he was the one who helped out in the store, he was the one who got the highest marks in school, he was the one who was the star of the track team, he was the one who was expected to go to college. He was the one who got presents, birthday celebrations, he was the only one who had a freshly ironed shirt to go out in, an expensive trumpet, so he could play in a band. All the hope in the family was invested in him. As for me and Tom …” She shrugged. “We were outcasts. No college for me—when I finished high school I was sent out to work and had to pay almost all of my salary into the family kitty. When Rudolph went out with a girl, my mother would make sure he had pocket money to entertain her. When I had an affair, she called me a whore. As for Tom—I’ve heard our parents predict a hundred times that he’d wind up in jail. When they talked to him, which was as little as possible, they snarled at him. I think he said to himself, Well if that’s the way you think I am, that’s what I’m going to be. Frankly, I was terrified of him. He had a streak of violence in him that was frightening. I avoided him. When I was walking down the street with any of my friends I’d pretend I didn’t see him, so I wouldn’t have to introduce him. When he left town and dropped out of sight, I was glad. For years I didn’t even think about him. Now I realize I was wrong. At least we two should have made some sort of combination, a common front against the rest of the family. I was too young then to realize it, but I was afraid he’d drag me down to his level. I was a snob, although never as much a snob as Rudy, and I thought of Tom as a dangerous peasant. When I went to New York and for a while became an actress, then started writing for magazines, I cringed in fear that he’d look me up and make me lose all my friends. When I finally did see him—Rudy took me to see him fight once—I was horrified, both by him and your mother. They seemed to come from another world. An awful world. I snubbed them and fled. I was ashamed that I was connected to them in any way. All this may be too painful for you, Wesley …”

  Wesley nodded. “It’s painful,” he said, “but I asked you. I don’t want any fairy tales.”

  Gretchen turned to Rudolph. “I hope I haven’t been too rough on you, Rudy, with my little history of the happy childhood we spent together.”

  “No,” Rudolph said. “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—you know the rest. I was a prig, Wesley,” he said, tearing at old scars, “and I imagine you guessed that. In fact, I wouldn’t hold it against you if you thought so now. I don’t suppose your father would have used that word. What he would have said, if he had thought it out, was that everything I did was fake—not for mysel
f, but for its effect on other people, mostly older people, people in authority. The way I look back on it now, I use the word prig. But back then the way I acted was an escape hatch from the world my mother and father were caught in.” He laughed ruefully. “The injustice of it is in that it worked. I did escape.”

  “You ride yourself too hard, Uncle Rudy,” Wesley said quietly. “Why don’t you give yourself a break once in a while? My father said that you saved his life.”

  “Did he?” Rudolph said, surprised. “He never told me that.”

  “He didn’t hold with praising people to their face,” Wesley said. “He didn’t praise me much, I can tell you that.…” He grinned. He had even white teeth and a sweet smile that changed the entire look of his sharp, brooding face, made it seem boyish and open. Rudolph wished he would smile more. “And he didn’t go overboard praising Bunny or even Kate, except for her cooking, and that was more of a joke than anything else, because she was English. Even when I first got to know him, when he was off by himself and didn’t think anybody was watching him, there was something sad about him, as though there were a lot of bad things that had happened to him that he couldn’t forget. But he did say you saved his life.”

  “I only gave him some money that was coming to him,” Rudolph said. “I guess you realize by now that Gretchen was trying to show you how and why your father became what he was as a young man.… That the family made him that way.”

  “Yeah,” Wesley said, “I see that.”

  “It’s true,” Rudolph said, “and again, it’s not true. There are some excuses, as there always are. It’s not my fault that I was the oldest son, that my father was an ignorant and violent man with a hideous past that had been no fault of his own. It wasn’t my fault that my mother was a frigid, hysterical woman with idiotically genteel pretensions. It wasn’t my fault that Gretchen was a sentimental and selfish little fool.… Forgive me,” he said to Gretchen. “I’m not going through all this for your sake or mine. It’s for Wesley.”

  “I understand,” Gretchen said, bent over her food, half hiding her face.

  “After all,” Rudolph said, “the three of us had the same genes, the same influences. Maybe that’s why Gretchen said just now that your father was frightening. What she was afraid of was that what she saw in him she saw in herself, and recoiled from it. What I saw in him was a reflection of our father, a ferocious man chained to an impossible job, pathologically afraid of ending his life a pauper—so much so that he finally committed suicide rather than face up to the prospect. I recoiled in my own way. Toward money, respectability …”

  Wesley nodded soberly. “Maybe it’s lucky Kraler’s kid is in Vietnam. Who knows what he’d do for me if I had to eat dinner every night with him?”

  “There have been second sons before your father,” Rudolph said, “in worse families, and they didn’t go around trying to destroy everything they touched. I don’t like to say this, Wesley, but until the day of our mother’s funeral, I believed that your father was born with an affinity for destruction, an affinity that gave him great pleasure. Destruction of all kinds. Including self-destruction.”

  “It sure turned out that way,” Wesley said bitterly, “didn’t it?”

  “What he did that night in Cannes,” Rudolph said, “was admirable. By his lights. And to tell the truth, by my lights, too. You mustn’t forget that.”

  “I’ll try not to forget it,” Wesley said. “But it’s not easy. Waste, that’s what I think it really was. Crazy macho waste.”

  Rudolph sighed. “I think we’ve told you everything we could for now, as honestly as we could. We’ll save the anecdotes for another time. You must be tired. I’ll send you a list of names of people you might want to talk to who’ll perhaps be more helpful than we’ve been. Finish your dinner and then I’ll ride you over to the YMCA.”

  “No need,” Wesley said shortly. “I can walk through the park.”

  “Nobody walks through the park in New York at night alone,” Gretchen said.

  Wesley stared at her coldly. “I do,” he said.

  Christ, Rudolph thought, as he watched the boy finish the last bit of his steak, he looks and sounds just like his father. God help him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Rudolph stood on the sidewalk in the morning sunlight with Enid and her nurse, waiting for Johnny Heath and his wife to come by in their Lincoln Continental and pick Enid and himself up for the trip to Mon-tauk. The nurse had a suitcase with her. She was off for her family in New Jersey for the week. Somehow, Rudolph thought idly, children’s nurses never seemed to have families who lived in the same state in which they worked. Enid was carrying some schoolbooks and her homework to do over the holiday. The nurse had packed a bag for her. He had a small overnight bag with his shaving kit, pajamas and a clean shirt.

  The night before, after they had said good-bye to Wesley, Rudolph had walked Gretchen to her apartment. He had invited her to come with him and the Heaths to Montauk. She had looked at him strangely and he remembered that she had once had an affair with Heath. “You want a lot of witnesses present when you see your ex-wife, don’t you?” she had said.

  He hadn’t really thought about this, but as she said it, he recognized the truth of what she had said. Jean had visited him once, with the burly masseuse she had hired as her companion in Reno, and the meeting had been an uncomfortable one, although Jean had been sober, reasonable, subdued, even when she had played with Enid. She was leading the quiet life, she said, in a small house she had bought for herself at Mon-tauk. Mexico had not worked out. It was a drinking man’s climate, she had decided, too raw for her nerves. She was completely dried out, she had said, with a tiny smile, and had even begun to take photographs again. She hadn’t tried to place them in any magazines. She was just doing it for herself, proud of the fact that her hands were steady again. Once more, except for the heavy presence of the masseuse, she was so much the woman he had married and loved for so long—shining of hair, her delicate, pink-tinted complexion healthy and youthful—that he started wondering uncomfortably all over again if he had done the right thing in consenting to the divorce. Pity was mixed in his feeling, but pity for himself, too. When she had called a few days ago to ask if she could have Enid for a week, he could not say no.

  He had no fears for Enid, but feared for himself, if he and Jean had to spend any time alone in what she described as a cosy small house filled with the sound of an uncosy large ocean. She had invited him to stay in the guest room, but he had made a reservation at a nearby motel. As an afterthought, he had invited the Heaths. He didn’t want to be tempted by an evening in front of a blazing fire in a silent house, lulled by the sound of the sea, to go back to domesticity. Let the past belong to the past. Hence the Heaths. Hence Gretchen’s sharp question.

  “I don’t need any witnesses,” he said. “Johnny and I have a lot of things to talk about and I hate to have to go to his office.”

  “I see,” Gretchen had said, unconvincingly, and had changed the subject. “What’s your opinion about the boy. Wesley?”

  “He’s a thoughtful young man,” Rudolph said. “Maybe too—well—interior. How he turns out all depends on if he can survive his mother and her husband until he’s eighteen.”

  “He’s a beautiful young man,” Gretchen said. “Don’t you think so?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “It’s a marvelous face for the movies,” Gretchen said. “The tough bones, the sweet smile, the moral weight, to be fancy about it, the tenderness in the eyes.”

  “Maybe you’re more perceptive than I am,” was all that Rudolph had answered.

  “Or more vulnerable.” She smiled.

  “You sounded on the phone as though there was something you wanted to talk to me about,” he said. “Are you in trouble?”

  “No more than usual.” She smiled again. “I’ll tell you about it when you get back to town.”

  He had kissed her good night in front of her apartment house and watch
ed her go into the lighted lobby, guarded by a doorman. She looked trim, capable, desirable, able to take care of herself. Occasionally, he thought. Only occasionally.

  The Lincoln Continental drove up, Johnny Heath at the wheel, his wife Elaine beside him. The nurse kissed Enid good-bye. “You’re going to be a good little girl, aren’t you, miss?” the nurse said.

  “No,” said Enid, “I’m going to be a horrid little girl.” She chortled.

  Rudolph laughed and the nurse looked at him reprovingly. “Sorry, Anna,” he said, straightening his face.

  Elaine Heath got out of the front of the car and helped establish Enid in the rear with her. She was a tall, exquisitely groomed woman, with hard, intelligent eyes, fitting wife to a man who was a partner in one of the most successful firms on Wall Street. The Heaths had no children.

  He got in beside Johnny. Enid waved at the nurse standing with her bag on the sidewalk and they drove off. “Hi, ho,” Johnny said, at the wheel, “on to the orgies of Montauk, to the lobsters and the nude clambakes on the white beaches.” His face was soft and round, his eyes deceptively mild, his hands on the wheel pale, with only the smallest suggestion of fat, his paunch just a tiny hint of things to come under his checked sports jacket. He drove aggressively and well. Other drivers were forced to respect Johnny Heath’s right of way, as other lawyers had to respect his tenacity and purpose in a boardroom or before the bench. Rudolph did not see Johnny often; after the Heaths’ marriage they had drifted apart somewhat, and each time Rudolph saw his old friend after a lapse of months, he thought, with no regret, I might have looked like that, too.