Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  “But you were with him before that,” Wesley said, “there were other things …”

  “Destroyed by his cock,” the fat man said, with the clacking of dentures, as he stared straight ahead of him. “I said my say. Get the fuck out of here, I’m a busy man.”

  Wesley started to say something else, then realized it was hopeless. He shrugged and went out, leaving the fat man in his overcoat and derby hat staring at the wall across from him.

  « »

  Dutifully, not knowing whether to laugh or cry as he spoke, Wesley made his report of the visit with Schultz to Alice. When he finished, he said, “I don’t know whether I want to talk to anyone else who knew him, at least on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe there are some things a son shouldn’t hear about his father. A lot of things, maybe. What’s the sense in my listening to people smear him all over the country? He must have been a different man while he was in America. There’s no connection between the man I knew and the man these people’re talking about. If I hear one more person tell me how rotten my father was and how glad they are he’s dead, maybe I’ll go back to Indianapolis and let my mother cut my hair and take me to church and forget about my father once and for all.…” He stopped when he saw the disapproval on Alice’s face.

  “That’s quitting,” she said.

  “Maybe that’s the name of the game,” Wesley said. “At least my game.”

  “Clothilde didn’t talk like that about your father,” Alice said, her eyes angry behind her glasses.

  “A fat lady in a Laundromat,” Wesley said cruelly.

  “Say you’re sorry you said that,” Alice said, sounding school-teacherly.

  “All right,” he said listlessly. “I’m sorry. But, I have a feeling I’m just wasting time and money. My time,” he said, with a wry smile, “and your money.”

  “Don’t you worry about my money,” she said.

  “I suppose,” Wesley said, “the character in your book is a fine, upstanding young man who never gets down in the dumps and he finds out that his father was one of nature’s noblemen, who went around while he was alive doing good deeds and helping the poor and being nice to old ladies and never screwing a friend’s wife.…”

  “Shut up, Wesley,” Alice said. “That’s enough of that. Don’t you tell me what I’m writing. When the book comes out, if it ever comes out, you can buy it and then tell me what the characters are like. Not before.”

  They were in the living room, Alice seated in an easy chair and Wesley standing at the window looking out at the dark street. Alice was dressed to go out because she had a date to go to a party and was waiting for the man who was going to escort her.

  “I hate this goddamn city,” Wesley said, staring down at the empty street, “I wish I was a thousand miles out to sea. Oh, hell!” He moved away from the window and threw himself full length on the sofa. “Christ, if I could only be back in France, just one night, with people I love and who I know love me …”

  “Take your shoes off the sofa,” Alice said sharply. “You’re not in a stable.”

  “Sorry,” he said, moving his legs so that his feet were on the floor. “I was brought up uncouth, or so people keep telling me.”

  Then he heard her sobbing. He lay still for a moment, closing his eyes, wishing the dry, uneven sound would go away. But it didn’t go away and he jumped up and went over to the chair in which she was sitting with her head in her hands, her shoulders moving convulsively. He knelt in front of her and put his arms around her. She felt small and fragile and soft in her pretty black party dress.

  “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “Honest, I didn’t mean what I said, honest. I’m just sore at myself and that’s how it came out. Don’t think I don’t appreciate everything you’ve done for me. I don’t want to let you down, only sometimes, like tonight …”

  She raised her head, her face tearstained. “Forgive me for crying,” she said. “I hate women who cry. I had an awful day, too, people were yelling at me all day. You can put your shoes on the sofa anytime you want.” She laughed, through her tears.

  “Never again,” he said, still holding her, glad that she had laughed, wanting to protect her against disappointment and people yelling at her all day and the city and his own black character.

  They looked at each other in silence, her clear wet eyes magnified by her glasses. She smiled tremulously at him. He pulled her gently toward him and kissed her. She put her arm around him and held him. Her lips were as soft as anything he had ever imagined, the very essence of softness. Finally, she pulled away from him. All tears were gone. “So, that’s what a girl has to do to get a kiss around here,” she said, laughing.

  The doorbell rang from downstairs. She jumped out of the chair and he stood up. “There’s my date,” she said. “Entertain him while I fix my face. His field is archaeology.”

  She fled into the bathroom.

  There was a knock on the door and Wesley opened it. A tall, skinny young man with a domed forehead and steel-rimmed glasses was standing there. “Hello,” the man said. “Is Alice in?”

  “She’ll be out in a minute,” Wesley said, closing the door as the man came in. “I’m to entertain you until she’s ready. My name is Jordache. I’m her cousin.”

  “Robinson,” the man said. They shook hands.

  Wesley wondered how he was expected to entertain him. “You want to listen to the radio?” he asked.

  “Not especially,” the man said. “May I sit down?”

  “Of course.”

  Robinson sat down in the easy chair and crossed his long legs and took out a package of cigarettes. “Smoke?” he said, offering the package to Wesley.

  “No, thanks.” He watched Robinson light his cigarette. How did you talk to a man whose field is archaeology? “I saw some ruins in France when I was there,” he offered hopefully. “The arena in Nîmes, Arles, stuff like that,” he said lamely.

  “Is that so?” Robinson said, blowing smoke. “Interesting.”

  Wesley wondered if Robinson would be so offhand if he was told that just before he rang the bell, Wesley had kissed Alice Larkin, Robinson’s date for the night, in the very chair he was sitting in and that before that he had made her cry. He felt condescendingly superior to the lanky man in his baggy slacks and five-colored, nubbly tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, although maybe that was the way all archaeologists dressed, maybe it was a uniform that commanded respect in those circles. “Where did you dig?” he said abruptly.

  “What’s that?” Robinson stopped his cigarette in midair, on the way to his mouth.

  “I said, where did you dig?” Wesley said. “Alice told me you were in the field. Isn’t that what archaeologists do—dig?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. Syria mostly. A little bit in Turkey.”

  “What did you find?” Alice had asked him to entertain the man and he was doing his best.

  “Shards, mostly.”

  “I see,” Wesley said, resolving to look up the word. “Shards.”

  “You interested in archaeology?”

  “Moderately,” Wesley said.

  There was a silence and Wesley had the impression Robinson wasn’t being entertained. “What’s Syria like?” he asked.

  “Grim,” Robinson said. “Grim and beautiful. You ought to go there some day.”

  “I plan to,” Wesley said.

  “What college you go to?” Robinson asked.

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet,” Wesley said.

  “I would go to Stanford,” said Robinson. “If you could get in. Marvelous people out there.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  Robinson peered at him nearsightedly through the steel-rimmed glasses. “You said you were Alice’s cousin?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know she had a cousin,” Robinson said. “Where you from?”

  “Indianapolis,” Wesley said promptly.

  “Dreadful place. What’re you doing in New York?”

/>   “Visiting Alice.”

  “Oh, I see. Where do you stay in New York?”

  “Here,” Wesley said, feeling as though the man were excavating him.

  “Oh.” Robinson looked around at the small room gloomily. “A little cramped, I’d say.”

  “We make do.”

  “It’s a convenient location. Near Lincoln Center and all …” Robinson seemed depressed. “Where do you sleep?”

  “On the sofa.”

  Robinson stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “Well,” he said, sounding more depressed than ever, “I suppose … cousins …”

  Alice came in, bright as a rosebud, with her party contacts in place, so she wouldn’t look like a secretarial mouse, as she had explained to Wesley other times she had gone out on dates.

  “Well,” she said gaily, “have you two gentlemen had a nice chat?”

  “Fascinating,” Robinson said gloomily as he heaved himself to his feet. “We’d better be going. It’s late.” Alice must be pretty hard up, Wesley thought, if Robinson was the best she could do, a man who spent his life digging up shards. He wished, despairingly, that he was twenty-seven years old. He was glad he wasn’t going to be around when Alice had to explain to the archaeologist just what sort of cousins they were.

  “Wesley,” Alice said, “there’re two roast beef sandwiches and some beer in the icebox if you get hungry. Oh—I nearly forgot—I found the address and telephone number of the man you were looking for—Mr. Renway, who was a shipmate of your father’s. I called him today and he said he’s looking forward to seeing you. I got his address through the National Maritime Union. It’s right near here, in the West Nineties. He lives with his brother when he’s not at sea. He sounded awfully nice on the telephone. You going to see him? He said he’d be in all day tomorrow.”

  “I’ll see how I feel tomorrow,” Wesley said ungraciously and Alice gave him a reproachful look.

  Robinson helped Alice on with her coat, and said as they went out the door, “Remember Stanford.”

  “I will,” Wesley said, thinking, the reason he’s so keen on Stanford is it’s three thousand miles away from Alice Larkin.

  He had no idea what time it was when he was awakened, as he slept under the blanket on the sofa, by the sound of murmured conversation on the other side of the front door. Then there was the click of the key in the lock and he heard Alice come in, softly, alone. She came over silently to the sofa and he felt her staring down at him, but he kept his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. He heard her sigh, then move away. A moment later he heard her door shut and then the sound of her typewriter.

  I wonder what she expected me to do? he thought, just before he fell back to sleep.

  « »

  Calvin Renway reminded Wesley of Bunny Dwyer. His skin was coffee-colored, almost the same as Bunny’s when Bunny had been out in the sun all summer, and he was small and delicate-boned and the muscles of his arms showed sharply in his short-sleeved flowered shirt and his voice was gentle, with an underlying permanent tone of politeness, as he welcomed Wesley at the door of his brother’s home, saying, “Well, this is a nice day, the son of Tom Jordache come to visit. Come in, boy, come in. The nice lady on the phone said you’d be coming up, come in.”

  He led Wesley into the living room and pushed the biggest chair a couple of inches toward him and said, “Make yourself comfortable, boy. Can I get you a beer? It’s past noon, time for a beer.”

  “No, thank you, Mr. Renway,” Wesley said.

  “The name’s Calvin, Wesley,” Renway said. “I sure was surprised when that nice lady called and said you’d be looking for me—I haven’t seen your father for all these years—you ship out with a man and he means something special to you that you carry with you all your days, and then he goes his way and you go yours—ships that pass in the night, as you might say—and then a big young man rings your doorbell—by God the time does pass, doesn’t it?—I never got married, never had any son, to my sorrow, a seaman’s life, one port after another, no time to court a woman and the ones who want to enter into wedlock”—he laughed heartily, gleaming white teeth in the wide, kindly mouth “—not the sort you’d want as the mother of your kids, if you ever could be sure, if you know what I mean. But there’s no mistaking about you, boy, the moment you appeared at the door, there was no mistake, there was Tom Jordache’s kid, yes, sir, I bet he’s proud of you, a big strong boy, with Tom Jordache printed all over your face.…”

  “Mr. Renway—Calvin, I mean—” Wesley said uneasily, “didn’t the lady tell you over the phone?”

  Renway looked puzzled. “Tell me what?” he said. “All the lady said to me was, ‘Are you the Mr. Renway was once on the same cargo vessel with Tom Jordache?’ and when I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, the same,’ she said, ‘Tom Jordache’s boy is in town and he’d like to talk to you for a few minutes,’ that’s all she said and asked if my address was the same she got from the Maritime Union.”

  “Calvin,” Wesley said, “my father’s dead. He got murdered in Antibes.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Renway whispered. He said nothing more, but turned his face away to the wall, silently, for a long minute, hiding pain, as though somehow it was a breach of manners to show unbearable sorrow publicly. His long dark hands clenched and unclenched in an unconscious spasm, as though his hands were the only part of him that hadn’t learned the lesson that it was useless to let the world know when he was hurting.

  Finally, he turned back to Wesley. “Murdered,” he said flatly. “They sure do away with the good ones, don’t they? Don’t tell me the story, boy. Some other time. It can wait, I’m in no hurry for any details. It’s kind of you to come and tell me what happened—I could’ve gone on for years without knowing and I might be in a bar in Marseilles or New Orleans or someplace, drinking a couple of beers and talking about the old days when we crewed together on the Elga Anderson, maybe the nastiest vessel on the Atlantic or any other ocean, when he saved my life, in a manner of speaking, and somebody would say, ‘Tom Jordache, why he died ages ago.’ It’s better this way and I thank you. I suppose you want to talk about him, boy—that’s why you’re here, I take it …?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Wesley said.

  “Times were different then,” Renway said. “On ships, anyway. They didn’t call us blacks those days or mister, we were niggers and never forget it. I’m not saying your father was a special friend or a preacher or anything like that, but when he passed me in the morning, it was always, ‘Hi, bud, how’re they treating you,’ nothing special, just a normal human greeting, which was like a band playing those days on that nasty ship, the way just about everybody else was treating me. Your pa ever mention the name Falconetti to you?”

  “I know something about him.”

  “The nastiest man I ever had the misfortune to come across, black or white,” Renway said. “Big bull of a man, terrorized the crew, he beat up on men just for the animal pleasure of it and out of meanness of spirit and he said he wouldn’t let no niggers sit down in the same messroom with him and I was the only black on board and that meant whenever he came into the room, even if I was in the middle of supper, I’d have to get up and go out. Then your pa took him on, the only one out of a crew of twenty-eight who had the guts to do it—he didn’t do it for me, Falconetti’d been bugging Bunny Dwyer too—and your pa gave him the licking of his life, maybe he went too far, like the other men said, he shamed him every day, whenever they happened to pass each other, your pa’d say, come over here, slob, and punch him hard in the stomach, so that that big bull of a man would be left standing there, with people watching, bent over, with tears in his eyes.

  “One night, it was dark and stormy, waves thirty feet high, in the messroom Falconetti quiet as a lamb, your pa came and got me and took me back to the messroom, the radio was on, and he said, ‘We’re just going to sit down like gentlemen next to this gentleman here and enjoy the music’ I sat myself down next to Falconetti—my heart was beating, I can
assure you, I was still scared—but nobody said as much as boo and finally, after a while, you pa said to the man, ‘You can go now, slob,’ and Falconetti got up and looked around at the men in the room, none of them looking at him, and he went out and up to the deck and jumped over the side.

  “It didn’t make your pa popular with the other men; they said it’s one thing to beat up on a man, but it’s another to send him to his death like that. I’m not a vengeful man, Wesley, but I didn’t go along with that talk—I kept remembering how I felt sitting down next to that nasty man, with the music playing, and him not saying a single word. I tell you it was one of the greatest, most satisfactory moments of my life and I remember it to this day with pleasure and I owe it to your pa and I’ll never forget it.”

  Renway had been talking in a kind of singsong chant, with his eyes almost closed, as though seeing the whole thing over again, as though he was not in the neat little living room in the West Nineties in New York City, but back in the hushed messroom among the silent, uncomfortable men, tasting once more the moment of exquisite pleasure, safe, protected by the courage of the father of the boy sitting across from him.

  He opened his eyes and looked thoughtfully at Wesley. “I tell you, boy,” he said, “if you turn out to be half the man your father was, you should bless God every day for your luck. Wait here a minute.” He stood up and went into a bedroom that gave oft the living room. Wesley could hear a drawer opening, then closing a few seconds later. Renway came back into the living room carrying something wrapped in tissue paper. He took off the tissue paper and Wesley saw that he was holding a small leather box, inlaid with gold. “I bought this box in Italy,” Renway said, “in the town of Florence, they make them there, it’s a specialty of the town. Here.” He thrust it toward Wesley. “Take it.”