Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  “I’ve got whole sets of drawings,” Donnelly said, “models of the sort of houses I want to put up, schedules of approximate costs … everything.…”

  “I’d like to take a look at them,” Rudolph said.

  “Can you be in New York tomorrow?”

  “No reason why not.”

  “Good. I’ll show them to you.”

  “Of course,” Rudolph said, “the whole thing would depend on just what piece of land you could get, what its suitability was, what the cost would be—all that.”

  Donnelly looked around him at the empty bar, as though searching out spies. “I’ve even picked out the spot,” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s a beauty. It’s abandoned, overgrown farmland now and cheap. It’s in Connecticut, rolling hill country, and it’s no more than an hour from New Haven, maybe two from New York. It’s made for something like this.”

  “Could you show it to me?”

  Donnelly glared at him, as though suddenly suspecting him of some dark purpose. “Are you really interested?”

  “I’m really interested.”

  “Good,” Donnelly said. “You know something—” His voice was solemn now. “I think it was fate that made me say yes to your sister when she asked me to work on this movie. I’ll drive you out there and you can see for yourself.”

  Rudolph left a bill on the table to pay for the drinks. “It’s getting late,” he said as he stood up. “Shall we go back to the hotel?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Donnelly said, “I’d rather stay here and get drunk.”

  “Take two aspirin before going to bed,” Rudolph said. Donnelly was ordering another whiskey as he went out of the bar, offering a libation to fate, which had brought him and Rudolph Jordache together.

  Rudolph walked slowly, alone, down the familiar streets. They had aged since he had pedaled along them, delivering rolls for the family bakery at dawn every morning, but he had the incongruous feeling this night that he was a young man again, with grandiose plans in his head, achievement in his future. Once again, as he had felt on the gravelly strand in Nice, he was tempted to sprint in the darkness, renewing the elation of his youth when he was the best 220 high hurdler in the high school. He even took a few tentative, loping steps, but saw a car’s headlights approaching and relapsed into his usual dignified walk.

  He passed the big building which housed the Calderwood Department Store and looked into the windows and remembered the nights he had put in arranging the displays. If his fortune had started at any one place, it had started there. The windows were shabby now, he thought, an old lady putting makeup carelessly on her face, the lipstick awry, the eye shadow sloppy, the simulation of youth weary and unconvincing. Old man Calderwood would have bellowed. A dead man’s life’s work. Useful? Useless?

  He remembered, too, marching, playing the trumpet at the head of a column of students on the evening of the day the war had ended, the future a triumphant panorama ahead of him. Yesterday, he had read in the town newspaper, there had been another parade of students, this time to protest the war in Vietnam, the youths chanting obscene slogans, defacing the flag, taunting the police. Eleven students had wound up in jail. Truman then, Nixon now. Decay. He sighed. Better not to remember anything.

  When he had suggested to Gretchen that Port Philip would be a good place to shoot her movie—a neglected town, withdrawn from its prosperous and honorable past on the banks of the great river—he had resolved not to have anything to do with the actual machinery of the production or even visit the town. But problems had arisen and Gretchen had called for help and he had reluctantly made the trip, talked to the officials, fearing that they would recall his downfall when the students had turned against him and driven him away.

  How beautiful Jean had been in those days.

  But the officials had been respectful, eager to accommodate him. Scandals passed. New men arrived. Memories faded.

  Donnelly reminded him of himself when he was young—passionate, hopeful, driving, self-centered, sure of his purposes. He wondered what Donnelly would feel ten years from now, many accomplishments behind him, the streets of his native town, wherever it was, changed, everything changed. He liked Donnelly. He knew Gretchen liked him, too. He wondered if there was anything between them. He wondered, too, if Donnelly’s idea was practical, workable. Was Donnelly too young, too ambitious? He cautioned himself to move slowly, check everything, as he thought he himself had checked everything when he was that age.

  He would talk it over with Helen Morison. She was a hardheaded woman. She could be depended on. But she was in Washington now. She had been offered a job there on the staff of a congressman whom she admired and she had moved on. He would have to catch up with her somehow.

  He thought of Jeanne. There had been a few letters, with less and less to say in each succeeding one, the emotion of the week on the Côte fading. Perhaps when Wesley finally went to France, he would take it as an excuse to visit her. The lawyer in Antibes had finally written that it had been arranged that Wesley could come back, but he hadn’t told Wesley that. He was waiting until the movie was finished. He didn’t want Wesley suddenly to take it into his head to quit the picture and fly across the ocean. Wesley was not a flighty boy, but he was driven, driven by his own ghosts, unpredictable.

  He himself had been driven by the ghost of his own father, despairing, a failure, a suicide, drunk on poverty and destroyed hopes, so he could half understand his nephew. Weird, that that subterranean, hidden boy could turn out to be such a touching actor.

  There had never been anybody with that kind of talent in the family before, although Gretchen had been briefly on the stage, without success. You never could tell where it comes from, Gretchen had told him after a session in the projection room in which they had watched and marveled at what the boy could do. And it wasn’t only that particular talent. It was every kind of talent. In America especially, no maps to tell where anybody had set out from or what ports they would sail to. No dependable genealogical trees anywhere.

  He went into the sleeping hotel and up to his room and undressed and got into the cold bed. He found it difficult to sleep, thought of the pretty, coquettish girl in the bar, her jeans tight across her hips, her professionally inviting smile. What would it be like, he wondered, that perfect young body, open to invitation? Ask my nephew, he thought enviously, he’s probably in bed with her now. A different generation. He had been a virgin, himself, at Wesley’s age. He was ashamed of his envy, although he was sure the boy would suffer later. Was suffering now—he’d left the bar alone. Not used to the tricks. Well, neither was he. You suffered according to your capacity to suffer and there was something about the boy that made you feel his capacity was dangerously great.

  He hovered between sleeping and waking, missing the body in the bed beside him. Whose body? Jean’s, Helen’s, Jeanne’s, someone he had never met but who would finally lie beside him? He had not found any answer by the time he fell into a deep slumber.

  He was awakened by the sound of drunken singing in the street. He recognized Donnelly’s voice, harsh and tuneless, singing “Boola, Boola.” Donnelly had gone to Yale. Not a typical graduate, Rudolph thought dreamily. The singing stopped. He turned over and went back to sleep.

  « »

  In her room, Gretchen was alone, going over the setups she wanted for the next day’s shooting. When she was on the set she made herself seem calm and certain of herself, even at times she wanted to scream in anger or anguish. But when she was alone like this, working by herself, she could sometimes feel her hands shaking in fear and indecision. So many people depended on her and every decision was so final. She had seen the same division of conduct in Colin Burke when he was directing a movie or a play and had wondered how he could manage it. Now she wondered how any human being could survive a whole month at a time, or longer, being cut in half like that. Private faces in public places, in Auden’s phrase, had no part in the business of making movies.

  Then she
heard Donnelly singing “Boola, Boola” outside the hotel. Sadly, she shook her head at the relation between talent and liquor in the arts in America. There again she thought of Colin Burke, whom she had never seen drunk and who rarely even took a drink. An exception. An exception in many ways. She thought of him often these days, while she worked, trying to imagine how he would set up the camera, what he would say to a balky actor, how direct a complicated scene. If you couldn’t plagiarize a dead husband, she thought defensively, whom could you plagiarize?

  The singing outside stopped and she hoped that Donnelly wouldn’t feel too shaken in the morning. For his sake, not for hers—she didn’t need him for the next day’s shooting—but he always looked so shamefaced when he came onto the set after the night before.

  She smiled, thinking of the artful, dour, complicated man, who, she thought, looked like a young Confederate cavalry colonel, with his jutting beard and fierce, unsatisfied eyes. She liked him and she could tell he was attracted to her and, despite her vow never to let a younger man touch her again, if she wasn’t so obsessed with the picture, she might …

  There was a knock on her door.

  “Come in,” she said. She never locked her door.

  The door opened and Donnelly came in, walking almost straight.

  “Good evening,” she said.

  “I have just spent a momentous hour,” he said solemnly, “with your brother. I love your brother. I thought you had to be told.”

  She smiled. “I love my brother, too.”

  “We are going to engage in grand—grandiloquent undertakings together,” Donnelly said. “We are of the same tribe.”

  “Possibly,” Gretchen said good-naturedly; “our mother possibly was Irish, or at least that was what she claimed. Our father was German, though.”

  “I respect both the Irish and the Germans,” Donnelly said, leaning against the doorpost for support, “but that is not what I meant. I am talking of the tribe of the spirit. Do I interrupt you?”

  “I’d just about finished,” Gretchen said. “If you want to talk don’t you think it would be a good idea to shut the door?”

  Slowly, with dignity, Donnelly closed the door behind him and leaned against it.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Gretchen indicated the thermos pitcher on her desk. She drank twenty cups a day to keep going.

  “People are always offering me coffee,” Donnelly said petishly. “I find it degrading. I despise coffee.”

  “I’m afraid I have nothing harder to drink,” Gretchen said, although there was a bottle of Scotch, she knew, in the cupboard.

  “I have no need of the drink, madam,” Donnelly said. “I come merely as a messenger.”

  “From whom?”

  “From David P. Donnelly,” Donnelly said, “himself.”

  Gretchen laughed.

  “Deliver the message,” she said, “and then I advise bed.”

  “I have delivered half the message,” Donnelly said. “I love your brother. The other half is more difficult. I love his sister.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Correct,” he said. “Drunk I love his sister and sober I love his sister.”

  “Thank you for the message,” Gretchen said, still seated, although she wanted to stand up and kiss the man.

  “You will remember what I have said?” He glowered at her over his beard.

  “I’ll remember.”

  “In that case,” he said oratorically, “I shall retire for the night. Good night, madam.”

  “Good night,” she said. “Sleep well.”

  “I promise to toss and turn. Ah, me.”

  Gretchen chuckled. “Ah, you.”

  If he had stayed another ten seconds she would have sprung from her chair and embraced him. But he waved his arm grandly in salute and went out, almost straight.

  She heard him singing “Boola, Boola” as he went down the hallway.

  She sat staring at the door, thinking, Why not, why the hell not? She shook her head. Later, later, when the work is over. Perhaps.

  She went back to marking her script in the quiet room, which now smelled from whiskey.

  « »

  On the floor below, Wesley tried to sleep. He had kept listening for the soft turning of the door handle and the rustle of cloth as Frances came into the darkened room. But the door handle didn’t turn, there was no sound except the complaint of the bedsprings as he turned restlessly under the covers.

  He had said he loved her. True, she had more or less forced it out of him, but when he had said it he had meant it. When you loved someone, though, did you notice when she was faking, putting on an act, did you let her know that she was behaving foolishly? People talked about love as though it was all one piece, as though once you said you were in love nothing else mattered. In the movie he was doing the young politician who fell in love with Frances never criticized her for her behavior, which he adored, but only for some of the wilder schemes she concocted to sway the other characters in the script to see things her way. Love is blind, the saying went. Well, he certainly hadn’t been blind that evening. He had felt that the performance Frances had put on in the bar was phony and disgusting and he had told her so. Maybe he had better learn to keep his opinions to himself. If he had, he wouldn’t be in bed alone at two o’clock in the morning.

  He ached for the touch of her hand, the softness of her breast as he kissed it. If that wasn’t love, what was it? When she was in bed with him he couldn’t believe she would go back to her husband, be attracted to another man, despite what his aunt had told him. He had enjoyed the women on the Clothilde, while their husbands had slept below or been off at the casino, he had liked what he did with Mrs. Wertham, but he had known, with certainty, that what he was feeling then wasn’t love. You didn’t have to be an experienced man of the world to know the difference between what he had felt then and what he felt with Frances.

  He remembered the times when Frances was in his arms in the narrow bed, their bodies entwined in the dark, and Frances had whispered, “I love you.” What had she meant those times? He groaned softly.

  He had told Frances to call her mother to find out who she really was. Whom could he call to find out who he really was? His own mother? She would probably say that like his father he was a defiler of decent Christian homes. His uncle? To his uncle he most likely seemed like an inherited nuisance, with no sense of gratitude, who only showed up when he needed something. His Aunt Gretchen? A freak, who by some mysterious trick of nature was gifted with a talent he was too stupid or unambitious to want to use. Alice? A clumsy, unsophisticated boy who needed pity and mothering. Bunny? A good deckhand who would never be anywhere near the man his father was. Kate? Half brother to her son, a painful, living memory of her dead husband. How put all this together and make one whole person out of the parts?

  Was it only because he was so young that he felt so split up, so uncertain of himself? Retarded, Frances had said that evening. But other people around his age didn’t seem to suffer, they put themselves together all right. Jimmy, the other delivery boy at the supermarket, with his music and the firm knowledge that his sisters and his mother had a single, uncomplicated opinion of him, and that opinion based on love. His own mother said she loved him but that kind of love was a whole lot worse than hate.

  He thought of Healey, the wounded soldier who had come back with Kraler’s son’s body. Healey lived on one certainty, that he was a man who always got a raw deal from the world and that nothing would ever change for him and that the world could go fuck itself.

  There was only one thing he was certain of, Wesley thought, he was going to change. Only he had no inkling, as he lay there alone in the dark room, in what direction. He wondered, if by some miracle he could get a glimpse of himself at the age of twenty-one, twenty-five, thirty, what he would think of himself.

  Maybe, after he was finished with Frances, he would finally do what his aunt wanted him to do and become an actor. Learn to live with all the diff
erent parts of himself and make full use of them, act not only in front of a camera, but like Frances, every minute of the day. Maybe she had it figured out—that’s what the world wanted and that’s what she gave it.

  In the morning, he knew, on the set, he would be expected to seem like a savage, irresponsible ruffian. It was an easy role for him to play. Maybe he would try it for a year or two. It was as good a starting point as anyplace else.

  When he finally slept he dreamed that he was in Alice’s living room eating a roast beef sandwich and drinking a beer, only it wasn’t Alice across the table from him, but Frances Miller.

  CHAPTER 7

  FROM BILLY ABBOTT’S NOTEBOOK—

  BACK AT THE TYPEWRITER AGAIN. BAD HABITS DIE HARD. BESIDES, EVERYONE TAKES A SIESTA HERE AFTER LUNCH AND I’VE NEVER GOTTEN INTO THE HABIT OF SLEEPING DURING THE DAY AND SINCE THERE’S NOBODY ELSE TO TALK TO, I MIGHT AS WELL TALK TO MYSELF. ANYWAY, THERE’S NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT FRANCO’S POLICE WOULD BE INTERESTED IN THE RAMBLINGS OF AN AMERICAN TENNIS PRO IN THIS ENCLAVE OF THE RICH ON THE EDGE OF THE BLUE SEA. IT WAS DIFFERENT IN BELGIUM. IS IT POSSIBLE THAT PRIVACY IS EASIER TO ACHIEVE UNDER FASCISM THAN UNDER DEMOCRACY? MUST STUDY THE QUESTION.

  AFTER BRUSSELS, THE CLIMATE OF SOUTHERN SPAIN IS THE WEATHER OF HEAVEN AND IT MAKES YOU WONDER, HOW, IF PEOPLE HAD ANY CHOICE IN THE MATTER, THEY WOULD CONTINUE TO LIVE NORTH OF THE LOIRE.

  DROVE DOWN IN THE NEAT LITTLE SECONDHAND OPEN PEUGEOT WITH FRENCH TRANSIT TTX PLATES THAT I GOT AT A GOOD PRICE IN PARIS. AS SOON AS I CROSSED THE PYRENEES, BETWEEN THE GREEN MOUNTAINS AND THE OCEAN, I FELT A PECULIAR PLEASURE, AS THOUGH I RECOGNIZED THE VILLAGES AND THE FIELDS AND RIVERS FROM ANOTHER LIFE, AS THOUGH I WERE RETURNING HOME FROM A LONG JOURNEY, AND THIS WAS THE COUNTRY FOR ME.

  UNTIL I OPEN MY MOUTH I CAN PASS AS A SPANIARD. IS IT POSSIBLE THAT THE COLORING OF THE ABBOTT FAMILY IS THE RESULT OF A SLIPUP AT THE TIME OF THE SPANISH ARMADA? SHIPWRECKED, POTENT ANDALUSIANS ON THE COAST OF ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND?