Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  Behind him he heard the child prattling happily. He heard Elaine whispering into her ear, making Enid laugh. To look at her, one would think that Elaine would dread embracing a child, fear that her handsome tweed suit would be wrinkled or dirtied. When Rudolph turned around he saw that Enid was mussing Elaine’s perfectly set hair and that Elaine was smiling happily. You never could tell about anybody, Rudolph thought as he turned back and watched the road. They were crossing the Triborough Bridge and New York stretched alongside the river, towers, glass, smoke, the old, enormous, impossible engine glittering in the morning springtime sun. Only at certain moments, moments like this one, when he saw the city as a great, challenging entity, its harsh, imperial beauty falling into a cohesive pattern, did he feel any of the thrill, the satisfaction of belonging, that had moved him daily when he was younger.

  Down below, on the swiftly moving river, a small yacht chugged bravely against the current. Perhaps, he thought, this summer I will board the Clothilde and set sail for Italy. Might as well get some use out of the boat. They had been on course once for Portofino but had never reached it. Dispel ghosts. Get Jeanne somehow to escape her husband and children for two weeks and make love at twelve knots and in a softer climate, drink cold local wine out of a carafe at cafés along the Ligurian shore. I must not allow myself just to become a used-up old man. Fantasia Italiana.

  He shook himself out of his reverie. “Johnny,” he said, “you told me over the phone that you wanted to talk to me. What about?”

  “I have a client,” Johnny said; “actually it’s a dead client, whose estate has to be settled.” Johnny, Rudolph thought maliciously, makes more money out of the dead than a cityful of undertakers. Lawyers. “The heirs are squabbling,” Johnny said, “as heirs will. You know all about that.”

  “It has become my specialty,” Rudolph said.

  “To avoid litigation,” Johnny went on, “there’s a part of the estate that’s up for sale at a very decent, low price. It’s a big ranch out in Nevada. The usual income tax benefits. I don’t have to tell you about that.”

  “No,” Rudolph said.

  “You’re not doing anything in New York,” Johnny said. “You don’t look good, you certainly don’t seem happy, I don’t know what the hell you do with yourself day after day.”

  “I play the piano,” Rudolph said.

  “I haven’t seen your name recently on the posters outside Carnegie Hall.”

  “Keep looking,” Rudolph said.

  “You’re just sinking into decay here,” Johnny said. “You’re not in action anymore. Christ, nobody even sees you at any of the parties these days.”

  “How’re the parties in Nevada?”

  “Jamborees,” Johnny said defensively. “It’s one of the fastest-growing states in the union. People’re becoming millionaires by the dozen. Just to show you I’m not kidding, if you say yes, I’ll go in for half with you—arrange the mortgages, help you find people to run it. I’m not just being altruistic, old buddy, I could use a place to hide from time to time myself. And I could also use a little tax shelter in the golden West. I haven’t seen the place myself, but I’ve seen the books. It’s viable. With some smart additional investment, a lot more than viable. There’s a great big house there that with a little fixing up would be a dream. And there’s no better place to bring up kids—no pollution, no drugs, a hundred miles away from the nearest city. And politics are nicely controlled there; it’s a sweet, tight operation—you could move into it like a fish in water. And they never heard of Whitby, New York. Anyway, that’s all forgotten by now, even in Whitby, even with that goddamn article in Time. In ten years you could wind up being senator. Are you listening to me, Rudy?”

  “Of course.” Actually, he hadn’t been listening too closely for the last few seconds. What Johnny had said about its being a place to bring up kids had intrigued him. He had Enid to think of, of course, but there were also Wesley and Billy. Flesh and blood. He worried for them. Billy was a drifter—even as a boy in school he had been cynical, without ambition, a sardonic dropout from society. Wesley, as far as Rudolph could tell, had no particular talents, and whatever education he might receive was unlikely to improve his chances for an honorable life. On a modern ranch, with its eternal problems of drought, flood and fertility and the newer necessity for shrewd handling of machinery, employees, the marketplace, there would be plenty of work for the two of them to keep them out of trouble. And eventually they’d have families of their own. And there was always the possibility that he’d marry again—why not?—and have more children. “The dream of the patriarch,” he said aloud.

  “What was that?” Johnny asked, puzzled.

  “Nothing, I was talking to myself. Seeing myself surrounded by my flocks and my progeny.”

  “It isn’t as though you’d be stuck in the wilderness,” Johnny said, mistaking the intention of what Rudolph had said, believing it to be ironic. “There’s a landing strip on the property. You could have your own plane.”

  “The American dream,” Rudolph said. “A landing strip on the property.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with the American dream?” Johnny demanded. “Mobility isn’t a venal sin. You could be in Reno or San Francisco in an hour whenever you wanted. What do you think? It’s not like retiring, though it has a lot of its advantages. It’s getting into action again—a new kind of action.…”

  “I’ll think about it,” Rudolph said.

  “Why don’t you plan—why don’t we both plan—to fly out there next week and take a look?” Johnny said. “That can’t do any harm, can it? And it’d give me a good excuse to get away from the damned office. Hell, even if it turned out to be worthless, it’d be a vacation. You can bring your piano along.”

  Heavy irony, Rudolph thought. He knew that Johnny considered his having retired a kind of whimsical aberration, a vastly premature symptom of the male menopause. When Johnny retired it would be to the cemetery. They had come up together, they had made a great deal of money together, they had never cheated each other, they understood each other, and Rudolph knew that Johnny felt that as an act and seal of their friendship he had to get Rudolph moving again.

  “Well,” Rudolph said, “I’ve always dreamed of riding across the desert on a horse.”

  “It’s not desert,” Johnny said testily. “It’s ranchland. And it’s at the foot of the mountains. There’s a trout stream on the property.”

  “I can take a couple of days off this week,” Rudolph said, “while Enid’s with Jean. Can you get away?”

  “I’ll buy the tickets,” Johnny said.

  While they drove swiftly past the endless graveyards of Long Island, where the generations of New Yorkers had hidden their dead, Rudolph closed his eyes and dreamed of the mesas and mountains of the silver state of Nevada.

  Usually, Gretchen liked to work on Saturdays, just she and her assistant, Ida Cohen, alone in the cutting room in the deserted, silent building. But today Ida could tell Gretchen wasn’t enjoying herself at all as she shuttled the moviola back and forth, running the film irritably through her white-gloved hands, pushing the slicing lever down with sharp little snaps and whistling mournfully, when she wasn’t sighing in despair. Ida knew why Gretchen was in a bad mood this morning. The director, Evans Kinsella, was up to his old tricks, shooting lazily, incoherently, fighting a hangover, letting the actors get away with murder, trusting that somehow Gretchen would make sense out of the wasteful miles of film he was throwing at her. And Ida had been in the room the day before when Kinsella had phoned to say that he couldn’t take Gretchen to dinner as he had promised.

  By now, Ida, whose loyalty to the woman she worked with was absolute, loathed Kinsella with an intensity of feeling that she otherwise reserved for the cause of Women’s Liberation, a movement whose meetings she attended religiously and at which she made passionate and somewhat demented speeches. Fat and short, she had even gone so far as to renounce wearing a brassiere, until Gretchen had scowled at her and s
aid, “Christ, Ida, with udders like yours, you’re putting the movement back a century.”

  Ida, forty-five years old and plain, with no man in her private life to bully her, believed that Gretchen, beautiful and talented, allowed herself to be taken advantage of by men. She had persuaded Gretchen to accompany her to two of the meetings, but Gretchen had been bored and annoyed by the shrillness of some of the orators and had left early, saying, “When you go to the barricades you can count on me. Not before.”

  “But we need women just like you,” Ida had pleaded.

  “Maybe,” Gretchen had said, “but I don’t need them.”

  Ida had sighed hopelessly at what she told Gretchen was sinful political abdication.

  Gretchen had more to bother her that morning than the quality of the film she was working on. During the week, Kinsella had tossed a screenplay at her and asked her to read it. It was by a young writer, unknown to either of them, but whose agent had been insistent that Kinsella look at it.

  Gretchen had read it and thought it was brilliant, and when Kinsella had called the afternoon before to break their date for dinner had told him so. “Brilliant?” he had said over the phone. “I think it’s a load of shit. Give it to my secretary and tell her to send it back.” He had hung up before she could argue with him. Instead, she had stayed up until two in the morning re-reading it. Although it was written by a young man, the central role was that of a strong-minded, young, working-class woman, sunk in the drabness and hopelessness of the people around her, a girl who, of all her generation in the small, dreary town in which she lived, had the wit and courage to break out, live up to her dream of herself.

  It could be a bracing corrective, Gretchen believed, to the recent spate of films which, overcorrecting for the happy-ending fairy tales that Hollywood had been sending out for so long, now had all their characters aimlessly drifting, reacting with a poor little flicker of revolt against their fates, and then sinking hopelessly back into apathy, leaving the viewer with a taste of mud in his mouth. If the old Hollywood pictures, with their manufactured sugar-candy optimism, were false, Gretchen thought, these new listless dirges were equally false. Heroes emerged daily. If it was true that they did not rise with their class, it wasn’t true that they all sank with their class.

  When she had finished reading, she was more convinced than ever that her first impression had been correct and that if Kinsella could be pulled up again to the level of his earlier work, he would finish with a dazzling movie. She had even called his hotel at two-thirty in the morning to tell him so, but his phone hadn’t answered. All this was going through her mind, like a looped piece of film in which the action of a scene is repeated over and over again, as she worked on the shoddy results of Kinsella’s last week of shooting.

  Suddenly, she turned the machine off. “Ida,” she said, “I have something I want you to do for me.”

  “Yes?” Ida looked up from her filing and registration of film clips.

  Gretchen had the script with her in the big shoulder bag she always wore to work. She went over to where it was hanging and took it out. “I’m going to a museum for an hour or so,” she said. “Meanwhile I want you to drop that trash you’re fiddling with and read this for me.” She handed the script to Ida. “When I get back, we’ll go out to a girly lunch, just you and me, and I’d like to discuss it with you.”

  Ida looked at her doubtfully as she took the script. It wasn’t like Gretchen to break off in the middle of work for anything more than a container of coffee. “Of course,” she said. She adjusted her glasses and looked down at the script in her hands as though afraid it might contain an explosive device.

  Gretchen put on her coat and went downstairs and into the bustle of Seventh Avenue, where the building was located. She walked swiftly crosstown and went into the Museum of Modern Art, to soothe her nerves, she told herself, wrongly, with honest works of art. When she came out, she was no more soothed than when she went in. She couldn’t bear the thought of going back to the moviola after more than an hour of Picasso and Renoir and Henry Moore, so she telephoned the cutting room and asked Ida to meet her at a restaurant nearby. “And put some makeup on and straighten your stockings,” she told Ida cruelly. “The restaurant is French and fancy, but fancy-fancy. I’m treating—because I’m in trouble.”

  Waiting for Ida in the restaurant, she had a Scotch at the bar. She never drank during the day, but, she told herself defiantly, there’s no law against it. It’s Saturday.

  When Ida came in and saw Gretchen at the bar, she asked, suspiciously, “What’re you drinking?”

  “Scotch.”

  “You are in trouble.” Philosophically in the vanguard of modern thought, as she believed she was, in her daily life Ida was grimly puritanical.

  “Two Scotches, please,” Gretchen said to the bartender.

  “I can’t work after I’ve had anything to drink,” Ida said plaintively. “You know that.”

  “You’re not going to work this afternoon,” Gretchen said. “Nobody’s going to work this afternoon. I thought you were against sweated female labor. Especially on Saturdays. Aren’t you always telling me that what this country needs is the twenty-hour week?”

  “That’s just the theory,” Ida said defensively, eyeing the glass that the bartender set down in front of her with repugnance. “Personally I choose to work.”

  “Not today,” Gretchen said firmly. She waved to the maitre d’hôtel. “A table for two, please. And send over the drinks.” She left two dollars, grandly, as a tip for the bartender.

  “That’s an awful big tip for just three drinks,” Ida whispered as they followed the maitre d’hôtel toward the rear of the restaurant.

  “One of the things that will make us women equal to men,” Gretchen said, “is the size of our tips.”

  The maitre d’hôtel pulled out the two chairs at one of the tables just next to the kitchen.

  “You see”—Ida glared around her. “The restaurant’s almost empty and he puts us next to the kitchen. Just because there isn’t a man along.”

  “Drink your whiskey,” Gretchen said. “We’ll get our revenge in heaven.”

  Ida sipped at her drink and made a face. “While you were at it,” she said, “you might have ordered something sweet.”

  “On to the barricades, where there are no sweet drinks,” Gretchen said. “And now tell me what you think of the script.”

  Ida’s face lit up. A well-done scene in a movie, a passage she admired in a book, could make her euphoric. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “God, what a picture it’s going to make.”

  “Except it looks as though no one is going to make it,” Gretchen said. “I think it’s been around and our beloved Evans Kinsella was the agent’s last gasp.”

  “Has he read it yet—Evans?”

  “Yes,” Gretchen said. “He thinks it’s a load of shit. His words. He told me to give the script to his secretary to send back.”

  “Vulgarian,” Ida said hotly. “And to think what a big shot he is. How much is the picture we’re on going to cost?”

  “Three and a half million.”

  “There’s something goddamn wrong with the business, with the world, for that matter,” Ida said, “if they give a fool like that three and a half million dollars to play around with.”

  “He’s had two big hits in the last three years,” Gretchen said.

  “Luck,” Ida said, “that’s all—luck.”

  “I’m not so sure it’s only that,” Gretchen said. “He has his moments.”

  “Not three and a half million dollars’ worth,” Ida said stubbornly. “And I don’t know why you stick up for him. The way he treats you. And I’m not talking about only in the office, either.”

  “Oh,” Gretchen said with a lightness that she didn’t feel, “a little touch of masochism never hurt a girl.”

  “Sometimes, Gretchen,” Ida said primly, “you drive me crazy, you really do.”

  The waiter was standing over
them now, his pad and pencil ready.

  “Time to order,” Gretchen said. She looked at the menu. “They have roast duck with olives. That’s for two. Do you want to share it with me?”

  “All right,” Ida said. “I don’t like olives. You can have them all.”

  Gretchen ordered the duck and a bottle of Pouilly Fumeé.

  “Not a whole bottle,” Ida said. “Please. I won’t drink more than half a glass.”

  “A whole bottle,” Gretchen said to the waiter, ignoring her.

  “You’ll be drunk,” Ida warned her.

  “Good,” said Gretchen, “I have some big decisions to make and maybe I won’t make them dead sober.”

  “You have a funny look in your eye today,” Ida said.

  “You bet your liberated brassiere I have,” said Gretchen. She finished her second whiskey in one long gulp.

  “What are you planning on doing?” Ida said. “Now don’t be reckless. You’re angry and you’ve got all that alcohol in you …”

  “I’m angry,” Gretchen said, “and I have a wee bit of whiskey in me and part of what I’m planning to do is drink most of the bottle of wine all by my little self, if you won’t help me. And after that …” She stopped.

  “After that, what?”

  “After that,” Gretchen said, “I’m not quite sure.” She laughed. The laughter sounded so strange that Ida was convinced that Gretchen was in the first stages of descending alcoholism. “After that I’m going to have a little talk with Evans Kinsella. If I can find him, which I doubt.”