Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  Axel Jordache was a huge, silent young man with a limp, who had emigrated from Germany in the early 1920s and who worked as a deckhand on the Lake. steamers. In the winter, when the Lakes were frozen over, he sometimes helped Mr. Mueller in the kitchen as a cook and baker. He hardly spoke English then and he frequented the Muellers’ restaurant so that he could have someone to talk to in his native tongue. When he had been wounded in the German army and couldn’t fight any more they had made him into a cook at the hospital in Frankfurt.

  Because, during another war, a young man had come out of a hospital alienated and looking for exile, she was standing tonight in a shabby room, over a shop in a slum, where every day, twelve hours a day, she had given up her youth, her beauty, her hopes. And no end in sight.

  He had been most polite. He never as much as tried to hold her hand and when he was in Buffalo between voyages he would walk her to night school and wait to accompany her home. He had asked her to correct his English. Her English was a source of pride to her. People told her they thought she came from Boston when they heard her talk and she took it as a great compliment. Sister Catherine, whom she admired above all the teachers in the orphanage, came from Boston, and spoke crisply and with great precision and had the vocabulary of an educated woman. “To speak slovenly English,” Sister Catherine had said, “is to live the life of a cripple. There are no aspirations denied a girl who speaks like a lady.” She had modeled herself on Sister Catherine and Sister Catherine had given her a book, a history of Irish heroes, when she had left the orphanage. “To Mary Pease, my most hopeful student,” was written in a bold, upright hand on the flyleaf. Mary had modeled her handwriting on Sister Catherine’s, too. Somehow, Sister Catherine’s teaching had made her believe that her father, whoever he was, must have been a gentleman.

  With Mary Pease coaching him in the silvery Back Bay accents of Sister Catherine, Axel Jordache had learned how to speak proper English very quickly. Even before they were married, he spoke so well that people were surprised when he told them that he had been born in Germany. There was no denying it, he was an intelligent man. But he used his intelligence to torment her, torment himself, torment everyone around him.

  He hadn’t even kissed her before he proposed to her. She was nineteen at the time, her daughter Gretchen’s age, and a virgin. He was unfailingly attentive, always cleanly bathed and shaved and he always brought her small gifts of candy and flowers when he returned from his trips.

  He had known her for two years before he proposed.

  He hadn’t dared to speak earlier, he said, because he was afraid she would reject him because he was a foreigner and because he limped. How he must have laughed to himself as he saw the tears come to her eyes at his modesty and his lack of confidence in himself. He was a diabolical man, weaving lifetime plots.

  She said yes, conditionally. Perhaps she thought she loved him. He was a good-looking man, with that Indian head of black hair and a sober, industrious, thin face and clear, brown eyes that seemed soft and considerate when they looked at her. When he touched her it was with the utmost deceptive gentleness, as though she were made of china. When she told him she had been born out of wedlock (her phrase) he said he already knew it, from the Muellers, and that it didn’t make any difference, in fact, it was a good thing, there wouldn’t be any in-laws to disapprove of him. He himself was cut off from what remained of his family. His father had been killed on the Russian front in 1915 and his mother had remarried a year later and moved to Berlin from Cologne. There was a younger brother he had never liked, who had married a rich German-American girl who had come to Berlin after the war to visit relatives. The brother now lived in Ohio, but Axel never saw him. His loneliness was apparent and it matched her own.

  Her conditions were stringent. He was to give up his job on the Lakes. She didn’t want a husband who was away most of the time and who had a job that was no better than a common laborer’s. And they were not to live in Buffalo, where everyone knew about her birth and the orphanage and where at every turn she would meet people who had seen her working as a waitress. And they were to be married in church.

  He had agreed to everything. Oh, diabolical, diabolical. He had some money saved up and through Mr. Mueller he got in touch with a man who had a bakery in Port Philip whose lease was for sale. She made him buy a straw hat for the trip to Port Philip to conclude the deal. He was not to go wearing his usual cloth cap, that hangover from Europe. He was to look like a respectable American businessman.

  Two weeks before the wedding, he took her to see the shop in which she was going to spend her life and the apartment above it in which she was going to conceive three children. It was a sunny day in May and the shop was freshly painted, with a large, green awning to protect the plate-glass window, with its array of cakes and cookies, from the sun. The street was a clean, bright one, with other little shops, a hardware store, a dry-goods store, a pharmacy on the corner. There was even a milliner’s shop, with hats wreathed in artificial flowers on stands in the window. It was the shopping street for a quiet residential section that lay between it and the river. Large, comfortable houses behind green lawns. There were sails on the river and a white excursion boat, up from New York, passed as they sat on a bench under a tree looking across the broad stretch of summer-blue water. They could hear the band on board playing waltzes. Of course, with his limp, they never danced.

  Oh, the plans she had that sunny May waltzing rivery day. Once they were established, she would put in tables, redecorate the shop, put up curtains, set out candles, serve chocolate and tea, then, later, buy the shop next door (it was empty that first day she saw it) and start a little restaurant, not one like the Muellers’, for working men, but for traveling salesmen and the better class of people of the town. She saw her husband in a dark suit and bow tie showing diners to their table, saw waitresses in crisp muslin aprons hurrying with loaded platters out of the kitchen, saw herself seated behind the cash register, smiling as she rang up the checks, saying, “I hope you enjoyed your dinner,” sitting down with friends over coffee and cake when the day’s work was over.

  How was she to know that the neighborhood was going to deteriorate, that the people she would have liked to befriend would consider her beneath them, that the people who would have liked to befriend her she would consider beneath her, that the building next door was to be torn down and a large, clanging garage put up beside the bakery, that the millinery shop was to vanish, that the houses facing the river would be turned into squalid apartments or demolished to make place for junkyards and metal-working shops?

  There were never any little tables for chocolate and cakes, never any candles and curtains, never any waitresses, just herself, standing on her feet twelve hours a day summer and winter, selling coarse loaves of bread to grease-stained mechanics and slatternly housewives and filthy children whose parents fought drunkenly with each other in the street on Saturday nights.

  Her torment began on her wedding night. In the second-class hotel in Niagara Falls (convenient to Buffalo). All the fragile hopes of the timid, rosy, frail young girl who had been photographed smiling in bridal white beside her unsmiling, handsome groom just eight hours before disappeared in the blood-stained, creaking Niagara bed. Speared helplessly under the huge, scarred, demonically tireless, dark, male body, she knew that she had entered upon her sentence of life imprisonment.

  At the end of her week of honeymoon she wrote a suicide note. Then she tore it up. It was an act she was to repeat again and again through the years.

  During the day, they were like other honeymooning couples. He was unfailingly considerate, he held her elbow when they crossed the street, he bought her trinkets and took her to the theater (the last week in which he ever showed any generosity to her. Very soon she discovered she had married a fanatical miser). He took her into ice cream parlors and ordered huge whipped cream sundaes (she had a child’s sweet tooth) and smiled indulgently at her like a favorite uncle as she spooned down the heap
ed confections. He took her for a ride on the river under the Falls and held her hand lovingly when they walked in the sunlight of the northern summer. They never discussed the nights. When he closed the door behind them after dinner it was as though two different and unconnected souls swooped down to inhabit their bodies. They had no vocabulary with which to discuss the grotesque combat in which they were engaged. The severe upbringing of the Sisters had left her inhibited and full of impossible illusions of gentility. Whores had educated him and perhaps he believed all women who were worthy of marriage lay still and terrified in the marriage bed. Or perhaps he thought all American women.

  In the end, of course, after months had passed, he recognized that fatalistic, lifeless rejection for what it was, and it enraged him. It spurred him on, made his attacks wilder. He never went with other women. He never looked at another woman. His obsession slept in his bed. It was her misfortune that the one body he craved was hers and was at his disposal. For twenty years he besieged her, hopelessly, hating her, like the commander of a great army incredibly being held at bay before the walls of a flimsy little suburban cottage.

  She wept when she discovered that she was pregnant.

  When they fought it was not about this. They fought about money. She learned that she had a sharp and hurtful tongue. She became a shrew for small change. To get ten dollars for a new pair of shoes and, later on, for a decent dress for Gretchen to wear to school, took months of bitter campaigning. He begrudged her the bread she ate. She was never to know how much money he had in the bank. He saved like a lunatic squirrel for a new ice age. He had been in Germany when a whole population had been ruined and he knew it could happen in America, too. He had been shaped by defeat and understood that no continent was immune.

  The paint was flaking off the walls of the shop for years before he bought five cans of whitewash and repainted. When his prosperous, garage-owning brother came from Ohio to visit him and offered him a share in a new automobile agency he was acquiring, for a few thousand dollars which he could borrow from his brother’s bank, Axel threw his brother out of the house as a thief and schemer. The brother was chubby and cheerful. He took a two-week holiday in Saratoga every summer and went to the theater in New York several times a year with his fat, garrulous wife. He was dressed in a good wool suit and smelled nicely of bay rum. If Axel had been willing to borrow money like his brother, they would have lived in comfort all their lives, could have been freed from the slavery of the bakery, escaped from the slum into which the neighborhood was sinking. But her husband would not draw a penny from the bank or put his name on a note. The paupers of his native country, with their tons of worthless money, watched with gaunt eyes over every dollar that passed through his hands.

  When Gretchen graduated from high school, although, like her brother Rudolph, she was always at the head of her class, there was no question of her going to college. She had to go to work immediately and hand half her salary over to her father every Friday. College ruined women, turned them into whores. The Father has spoken. Gretchen would marry young, the mother knew, would marry the first man who asked her, to escape her father. Another life destroyed, in the endless chain.

  Only with Rudolph was her husband generous. Rudolph was the hope of the family. He was handsome, well-mannered, well-spoken, admired by his teachers, affectionate. He was the only member of the family who kissed her when he left in the morning and returned in the evening. Both she and her husband saw the redemption of their separate failures in their older son. Rudolph had a talent for music and played the trumpet in the school band. At the end of the last school year Axel had bought a trumpet for him, a gleaming, golden instrument. It was the one gift to any of them that Axel had ever made. Everything else he had given to them had come as a result of ferocious bargaining. It was strange to hear the soaring, triumphant horn notes resounding through the gray, undusted apartment when Rudolph was practicing. Rudolph played club dates at dances and Axel had advanced him the money for a tuxedo, thirty-five dollars, an unheard-of outpouring. And he permitted Rudolph to hold onto the money he earned. “Save it,” he said. “You’ll be able to use it when you get to college.” It was understood from the beginning that Rudolph was going to go to college. Somehow.

  She feels guilty about Rudolph. All her love is for him. She is too exhausted to love anybody but her chosen son. She touches him when she can, she goes into his room when he is sleeping and kisses his forehead, she washes and irons his clothes when she is dizzy from fatigue so that his splendor will be clear to all eyes at every moment. She cuts out items from the school newspaper when he wins a race and pastes his report cards neatly in a scrapbook that she keeps on her dresser next to her copy of Gone With the Wind.

  Her younger son, Thomas, and her daughter are inhabitants of her house. Rudolph is her blood. When she looks at him she sees the image of her ghostly father.

  She has no hopes for Thomas. With his blond, sly, derisive face. He is a ruffian, always brawling, always in trouble at school, insolent, mocking, going his own way, without standards, sliding in and out of the house on his own secret schedule, impervious to punishment. On some calendar, somewhere, disgrace is printed in blood red, like a dreadful holiday, for her son Thomas. There is nothing to be done about it. She does not love him and she cannot hold out a hand to him.

  So, the mother, standing on swollen legs at the window, surrounded by her family in the sleeping house. Insomniac, unfastidious, overworked, ailing, shapeless, avoiding mirrors, a writer of suicide notes, graying at the age of forty-two, her bathrobe dusted with ash from her cigarette.

  A train hoots far away, troops piled into the rattling coaches, on their way to distant ports, on their way to the sound of the guns. Thank God Rudolph is not yet seventeen. She would die if they took him for a soldier.

  She lights a last cigarette, takes off her robe, the cigarette hanging carelessly from her lower lip, and gets into bed. She lies there smoking. She will sleep a few hours. But she knows she will wake when she hears her husband coming heavily up the steps, rank with the sweat of his night’s work and the whiskey he has drunk.

  Chapter 2

  The office clock stood at five to twelve. Gretchen kept typing. Since it was Saturday, the other girls had already stopped working and were making up, ready to depart. Two of them, Luella Devlin and Pat Hauser, had invited her to go out and have a pizza with them, but she was in no mood for their brainless gabble this afternoon. When she was in high school she had had three good friends, Bertha Sorel, Sue Jackson, Felicity Turner. They were the brightest girls in the school and they had made a small, superior, isolated clique. She wished all three of them or any one of them were in town today. But they all came from well-off families and had gone to college and she had found no one else to take their place in her life.

  Gretchen wished that there were enough work to give her an excuse to remain at her desk the whole afternoon, but she was typing out the final items of the last bill of lading Mr. Hutchens had put on her desk and there was no way of dragging it out.

  She hadn’t gone to the hospital the last two nights. She had phoned in and said she was sick and had gone home directly after work and stayed there. She had been too restless to read and had fussed over her entire wardrobe, washing blouses that were already spotlessly clean, pressing dresses that didn’t have a crease in them, washing her hair and setting it, manicuring her nails, insisting on giving Rudy a manicure, although she had given him one just the week before.

  Late on Friday night, unable to sleep, she had gone down into the cellar where her father was working. He looked up at her in surprise as she came down the steps, but didn’t say anything, even when she sat down on a chair and said, “Here, pussy, pussy,” to the cat. The cat backed away. The human race, the cat knew, was the enemy.

  “Pa,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  Jordache didn’t say anything.

  “I’m not getting anywhere in this job I have,” Gretchen said.
“There’s no chance of more money and no place to go. And once the war is over, they’ll be cutting down and I’ll be lucky if I can hang on.”

  “The war’s not over yet,” Jordache said. “There’s still a lot of idiots waiting that have to be killed.”

  “I thought I ought to go down to New York and look for a real job there. I’m a good secretary now and I see ads for all sorts of jobs with twice the pay I’m getting now.”

  “You talk to your mother about this?” Jordache began to shape the dough into rolls, with quick little flips of his hand, like a magician.

  “No,” Gretchen said. “She’s not feeling so well and I didn’t want to disturb her.”

  “Everyone’s so damn thoughtful in this family,” Jordache said. “Warms the cockles.”

  “Pa,” Gretchen said, “be serious.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I said so. Be careful, you’re going to get flour all over that fancy gown.”

  “Pa, I’ll be able to send back a lot more money …”

  “No,” Jordache said. “When you’re twenty-one, you can fly off anyplace you want. But you’re not twenty-one. You’re nineteen. You have to bear up under the hospitality of the ancestral home for two years. Grin and bear it.” He took the cork out of the bottle and took a long swig of whiskey. With deliberate coarseness, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a smudge of flour across his face.

  “I’ve got to get out of this town,” Gretchen said.

  “There are worse towns,” Jordache said. “I’ll see you in two years.”

  Five minutes past twelve, the clock read. She put the neatly typed papers in the drawer of her desk. All the other clerks were gone. She put the cover on her typewriter and went into the washroom and stared at herself in the mirror. She looked feverish. She dabbed some cold water on her forehead, then took out a vial of perfume from her bag and put a little on under each ear.