Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  “I’ll remember,” said Wesley.

  “You’re dear and vulnerable, Old Toughie,” Gretchen said. She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Defend yourself. You’re in a much rougher racket than you know.”

  That night he had made love to Frances almost the whole night long, brutally, until he had had to smother her face in a pillow so that the entire hotel wouldn’t be awakened by her screams. She was a girl who made no secret about whether she was enjoying herself.

  As they both lay side by side, exhausted, he had thought, triumphantly, She’s not going back to anyone after tonight.

  At dinner he and the other actors ate together as usual in the hotel dining room. Gretchen and Ida Cohen and Ida Cohen’s uncle, along with the scene designer and Uncle Rudolph, ate upstairs in the living room of Gretchen’s suite. After dinner, Wesley and Frances decided to go for a walk. It was a cool autumn night with a moon that was almost full and they walked arm in arm, like any young couple out on a date.

  The main street was almost empty, neon-lit from forlorn store windows. Port Philip watched television and went to bed early. Frances looked idly at the displays in the windows as they passed. “There’s nothing here I’d ever buy,” she said. “Imagine living in a place like this. Ugh.”

  “My family comes from here,” Wesley said.

  “Oh, my God,” Frances said. “You poor boy.”

  “I never lived here. My father, my grandfather …” He stopped himself before he said, my Aunt Gretchen. He hadn’t told Frances or any of the company that Gretchen was his aunt, and Gretchen was careful to treat him like any other novice actor in the company.

  “Do you see any of them—” Frances asked. “I mean, your family, while you’re here?”

  “There’re none left. They all moved away.”

  “I can understand why,” Frances said. “This town must have gone downhill from the first day they put up the post office.”

  “My grandmother told my father that when she first came here as a young girl, it was a beautiful place,” Wesley said. He was walking the streets of the town in which his father was born and which had formed him and he didn’t like the idea of its being thought of as a dreary backwater by a girl from California. Somewhere in the town, he thought, his father must have left a mark, a sign that he had been and gone. He had burned a cross here. Theodore Boylan, at least, remembered. He wondered what his father would have thought of his son walking the old same streets arm in arm with a beautiful, almost famous movie actress. And, more than that, making three thousand dollars for four weeks’ work, which was more play than any work his father had ever known. “There were trees everywhere, my grandmother told my father,” Wesley said, “and all those big houses were painted and clean and had big gardens. My father used to swim in the Hudson River—it was clean then—and the riverboats used to stop by and there was great fishing …” He stopped before telling the girl that aside from the boats and the fishing, his grandfather had used the river in which to drown himself.

  “Things get worse, don’t they?” Frances said. “I’ll bet there was a lot of screwing in those big gardens then. Nothing else to do in the evening and no motels.”

  “I suppose everybody got his share.”

  “And her share,” Frances said, laughing. “Like now. It’s too bad you’re on this picture.”

  “Why?” Wesley asked, hurt.

  “If you weren’t,” she said, “I’d have gone through War and Peace by now, these long nights.”

  “Sorry?”

  “War and Peace can wait,” she said. She hugged his arm. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you—what drama school did you go to?”

  “Me?” He hesitated. “None.”

  “You act as though you’ve had years,” she said. “Incidentally, how old are you?”

  “Twenty-one,” he said, without hesitation. He had made the mistake of telling Alice how old he was and she treated him as a child. He wasn’t about to make that mistake again.

  “How is it you’re not in the army?”

  “Football knee,” he said promptly. Since he had come back to America he had learned how to lie at a moment’s notice.

  “I see.” She sounded suspicious. “Where’ve you acted before?”

  “Me?” he said again, foolishly. “Well … noplace.” Frances was too knowing about things like that to take a chance on lying.

  “Not even summer stock?”

  “Not even summer stock.”

  “How’d you get this job then?”

  “Mrs. Burke …” It sounded funny in his ears to talk about his aunt as Mrs. Burke. “She saw me at a friend’s house and asked me if I wanted to test. What’re you asking all these questions for?”

  “It’s natural for a girl to want to know a few facts about the man she’s having an affair with, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.” He was pleased with the word “affair.” It gave him a new sense of maturity. Teenagers had dates or girlfriends, not affairs.

  “There’s one thing about me,” Frances said, very definitely. “I can’t go to bed with a man whom I don’t respect.” It embarrassed Wesley when Frances spoke in that offhand, plural way about other men she had known. But, he told himself, she had been an actress since she was fourteen, what could he expect? Still, some day soon, he promised himself, he would tell her to keep her reflections on that particular subject to herself.

  “You came as a surprise, I must admit,” she said cheerfully. “I took one look at the list of the cast and said this is going to be chastity-belt time for me.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “You.” She laughed. “I knew just about all the others, but Wesley Jordan was a new name for me. I didn’t know you’d be the prize of the litter. By the way, is that your real name?”

  “No,” Wesley said, after a pause.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s long and complicated,” he said evasively. “It would never look good over the title.”

  She laughed again. “This is your first picture, but you’re learning fast.”

  He grinned. “I’m a quick study.” He was enjoying being in the movies more and more and his vocabulary reflected it.

  “What’re you going to do after this picture?”

  “Don’t know.” He shrugged. “Go to Europe if I can.”

  “You’re awfully good,” she said. “That isn’t only my opinion. Freddie Kahn, the cameraman, has seen all the rushes and he’s raving about you. You going to try Hollywood?”

  “Maybe,” he said cautiously.

  “Come on out,” she said. “I promise you a warm welcome.”

  Wesley took in a big gulp of air. “I understand you’re married,” he said.

  “Who told you that?” she asked sharply.

  “I don’t remember. Someone. It just came up in the conversation.”

  “I wish people would keep their goddamn mouths shut. That’s my business. Does that make any difference to you?”

  “What would you say if I said it did?”

  “I’d say you’re a fool.”

  “Then I won’t say it.”

  “That’s better,” she said. “Are you in love with me?”

  “Why do you ask that question?”

  “Because I like it more when people are in love with me,” she said. “That’s why I’m an actress.”

  “All right,” he said, “I’m in love with you.”

  “Let’s drink to that,” she said. “There’s a bar on the next block.”

  “I’m on the wagon,” he said. He didn’t want to be asked in front of Frances for proof of his age by the bartender.

  “I like to drink,” she said, “and I like men who don’t drink. Come on, I’ll buy you a Coke.”

  When they went into the bar they saw Rudolph and the set designer, a red-bearded young man by the name of Donnelly, sitting at a booth, absorbed in conversation.

  “What ho,” Frances whispered, “the brass.”

/>   Everybody in the cast knew that Rudolph was on the financial end of the undertaking and had been instrumental with the authorities in Port Philip when difficulties had arisen about permits, shooting at night and the use of the town police to block off streets. The cast didn’t know, however, that he was Wesley’s uncle; on the few occasions that Wesley had spoken to Rudolph in public he had addressed him as Mr. Jor-dache, and Rudolph had replied, gravely and courteously, by addressing his nephew as Mr. Jordan.

  Frances and Wesley had to pass the booth in which the two men sat. Rudolph looked up and smiled at them and stood up and said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Wesley mumbled a greeting, but Frances smiled her most winsome smile and said, “What new plot are you two gentlemen concocting against us poor actors in this noisome den now?”

  Wesley winced at the false, girlish smile, the fancy language. Suddenly he realized that Frances had too many different ways of addressing different people.

  “We were sitting here praising the performance of you two young people,” Rudolph said.

  Frances giggled. “Aren’t you the polite man,” she said. “What a delightful lie.”

  Donnelly grunted.

  “Do sit down,” Frances said. “In Hollywood nobody ever stands up for the help.”

  Again Wesley winced. At certain moments, aside from using her abundant charm, Frances managed to remind people whom she considered important of the bright career she had already put behind her.

  The two men sat down, Donnelly staring morosely at the glass in front of him. No one had as yet seen him smile during the course of the shooting.

  “Mr. Donnelly,” Frances said, her voice still girlish, “I haven’t dared to tell you this before, but now that the picture’s almost over, I’d like to say that it’s just wonderful what you’ve been doing with the sets. I haven’t seen any of the film yet—” she made a small grimace—“us poor actors aren’t let in on the decisions on who lives and who dies in the projection room, so I don’t know how they look on film, but I do have to tell you that as far as I’m concerned I’ve never been as comfortable moving around in front of the camera as I have in the acting space you’ve designed for us to work in.” She laughed, as though she were a little embarrassed at speaking so boldly.

  Donnelly grunted again.

  Wesley could see Frances’ jaw set then. “I won’t disturb you any longer while you two gentlemen arrange our fates,” she said. “Young Wesley and I—” Now she made it sound as though Wesley were ten years old—“have some problems in our scene tomorrow that we thought we’d do a little homework on.”

  Wesley tugged at her arm, and with a last dazzling smile, she moved off with him. She made a move to sit in the next booth, but Wesley guided her firmly to the last booth in the rear of the bar, well out of earshot of Donnelly and his uncle.

  “What a goddamn performance,” he said as they sat down.

  “Honey catches more flies than vinegar, darling,” Frances said sweetly. “Who knows when those two nice men will do another picture and have the final say about who’s going to be in it and who’s going to be out on his or her ass?”

  “You put on so many acts,” Wesley said, “I bet sometimes you have to call up your mother to find out who you really are.”

  “That’s the art, dear,” Frances said coolly. “You’d better learn it if you want to get anyplace.”

  “I don’t want to get anyplace at that price,” Wesley said.

  “That’s what I used to say,” she said. “When I was fourteen years old. By the time I was fifteen, I changed my mind. You’re just a little retarded, dear.”

  “Thank God for that,” Wesley said.

  The waiter was standing over them now and Frances ordered for both of them, a gin and tonic for her and a Coke for him.

  When the waiter had gone over to the bar Wesley said, “I wish you wouldn’t drink gin.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t like the way your breath smells when you drink gin.”

  “There’s no need to worry tonight, dear,” Frances said coldly. “I’m due for an early call with the hairdresser tomorrow and I’m not up to any gymnastics tonight.”

  Wesley sat in glum silence until the waiter brought the drinks.

  “Anyway, even if you’re so horrendously critical of a few little harmless, girlish tricks,” Frances said, sipping at her gin and tonic, “there are others who find them entrancing. That cute Mr. Jordache, with all that money, for example. His eyes light up like a billboard sign whenever he sees me.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Wesley said, honestly shocked that anyone could call his uncle that cute Mr. Jordache.

  “I have,” Frances said firmly. “I bet he’d be something. That icy Yankee exterior with a volcano underneath. I know the type.”

  “He’s old enough to be your father, for God’s sake.”

  “Not unless he started awfully young,” Frances said. “And I bet he did.”

  Wesley stood up. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to crap like that. I’m going home. See how you get on with that cute Mr. Jordache with all that money.”

  “Dear, dear,” Frances said, without moving, “aren’t we the touchy young man this evening.”

  “Good night,” Wesley said.

  “Good night,” Frances said calmly. “Don’t bother with the check.”

  Wesley strode past the booth where his uncle was sitting. Neither of the two men looked up as he passed. He went out into the street, feeling childish, hurt and foolishly emotional.

  Five minutes later Frances got up and walked toward the door. She stopped and spoke for a moment to the two men, but they didn’t ask her to join them. When she went back to the hotel she didn’t go down the corridor and open Wesley’s door as she did on all other nights, but continued on to her own room and stared at herself in the mirror over the dressing table for a long time.

  Back in the bar, the two men were not talking about making movies. Donnelly was an architect who had drifted into scene designing when he discovered that he was offered only unprofitable commissions for mediocre small buildings which he considered beneath his talent. In the course of the preparations for Restoration Comedy he and Rudolph had become friendly, and at first timidly, then more enthusiastically, he had spoken about an ambitious project that he was involved in but so far had not been able to get financing for. Now he was giving Rudolph the details. “We live in the age of what the British call redundancy,” he was saying, “not only because of new machines or shifts in population, but redundancy because of age. Men retire from business because they’re bored and can afford it, or because they can’t stand the strain or because younger men are called in to fill their jobs. Their children have grown up and moved away. Their houses are suddenly too big for them, the city in which they live frightens them or has exhausted its attraction for them. Their pensions or savings don’t permit them to keep the servants they once had, the neighborhoods where they can afford to find small apartments are crowded with young couples with small children who treat them as invaders from another century, they are separated from friends of their own age who have similar problems but have looked for other solutions in other places—They want to keep their independence but they’re frightened of loneliness. What they need is a new habitat, a new atmosphere that fits their condition—where they’re surrounded by people approximately their own age, with approximately the same problems and needs, people who can be depended upon in an emergency, just as it gives them a sense of their own humanity to know that they’re ready to come to a neighbor’s aid when he needs help.” Donnelly spoke with great urgency, as though he were a general, outlining plans for the relief of a besieged garrison. “It has to be a real community,” he continued, gesturing eloquently with his large hands, as if already he was molding brick, mortar and cement into livable, populated shapes, “shops, movies, a small hotel where they can entertain visitors, a golf course, swimming pools, tennis courts
, lecture rooms.… I’m not talking about the poor. I don’t know how they can be taken care of except by the state and I’m not vain enough to think I can rearrange American society. I’m talking about the middle-income group, the ones whose way of life is most drastically affected when the breadwinner stops working.” His voice dropped to bitterness. “I know all about this in the case of my own mother and father. They have a little money and I help some, myself, but from being a hearty, outgoing couple, they’re now a depressed, fretful pair of people, fiddling the last years of their lives away in useless boredom. My idea isn’t so new. It’s been tried and found successful all over the country, but so far I haven’t been able to get any money men interested in it, because there isn’t much profit to be made, if any. What it needs to begin with is to buy a huge piece of land in some pleasant country spot—not too isolated—so that when people want a little city life it’s easily available to them—and build a small, but complete village of modest, well-designed, but cheaply built attached homes, say in groups of four or five, scattered in a parklike landscape, houses that can be handled easily by two aging people. With bus service, doctors and nurses on hand, a congenial but unobtrusive management. It wouldn’t be an old folks’ home, with all the despair that entails—there’d be a constant flow of young people—sons and daughters and grandchildren, hopeful and lively, a view on the future. Your sister has told me that you’re a public-spirited man and that you have access to money and you’re looking for something to occupy your time. From what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think getting mixed up in movies is exactly your idea of public service.…”

  Rudolph laughed. “No,” he said, “not exactly.”

  “She also said that you’re a born builder,” Donnelly went on, “that when you were young you bulled through the idea of a shopping center in what was then practically a wilderness and made almost a whole small town of it. I went out to look at it the other day, the Calderwood complex near here, and I was deeply impressed—it was way ahead of its time and it showed real imagination—”

  “When I was young,” Rudolph said reflectively. He hadn’t shown anything of what he thought as he listened to Donnelly’s speech, but he felt an excitement that was both new and old to him as Donnelly spoke. He had been waiting for something, he hadn’t known what. Perhaps this was what he was waiting for.