Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  French cunt, he thought, and finished the “Marseillaise” with a mocking sour note. He took the trumpet from his lips. The girl who had come out of the house next door was standing next to him. She put her arm around his neck and kissed him. The boys and girls around him cheered and the cannon went off. He grinned. The kiss was delicious. He knew the girl’s address, too, now. He put the trumpet to his lips and began playing “Tiger Rag,” as he marched, swinging, down the street. The boys and girls danced behind him in a gigantic swirling mass as they headed toward Main Street.

  Victory was everywhere.

  IV

  She lit another cigarette. Alone in an empty house, she thought. She had closed all the windows, to mute the sounds from the town, the cheering and the noise of the fireworks and the blares of music. What did she have to celebrate? It was a night on which husbands turned to wives, children to parents, friends to friends, when even strangers embraced on street corners. Nobody had turned to her, she had been taken in no embrace.

  She went into her daughter’s room and turned on the light. The room was spotlessly clean, with the bedspread freshly ironed, a polished brass reading lamp, a brightly painted dressing table with jars and instruments of beauty. The tricks of the trade, Mary Jordache thought bitterly.

  She went over to the small mahogany bookcase. The books were all neatly in place, carefully arranged. She took out the thick book of the works of Shakespeare. She opened it to where the envelope parted the pages of Macbeth. She peered into the envelope. The money was still there. Her daughter didn’t even have the grace to try to hide it somewhere else, even knowing now that her mother knew. She took the envelope out of the Shakespeare and stuffed the book back carelessly on the shelf. She took out another book at random, an anthology of English poetry Gretchen had used in her last year of high school. The fine food of her fine daughter’s mind. She opened the book and put the envelope between the pages. Let her daughter worry about her money. If her father ever discovered there was eight hundred dollars in the house, she wouldn’t find it just by going through her bookshelves.

  She read a few lines.

  Break, break, break,

  On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

  And I would that my tongue could utter

  The thoughts that arise in me.

  Oh, fine, fine …

  She put the book back in its place on the shelf. She didn’t bother to turn out the light when she went out of the room.

  She went into the kitchen. The pots and dishes that she had used for the dinner she had eaten alone that night lay unwashed in the sink. She doused her cigarette in a frying pan, half-filled with greasy water. She had had a pork chop for her dinner. Coarse food. She looked at the stove, turned on the gas in the oven. She dragged a chair over to the oven and opened the oven door and sat down and put her head in. The smell was unpleasant. She sat like that for a little while. Sounds of cheering in the town filtered in through the closed kitchen window. She had read somewhere that there were more suicides on holidays than at any other time, Christmas, New Year’s. What better holiday would she ever find?

  The smell of the gas grew stronger. She began to feel giddy. She took her head out of the oven and turned the gas off. There was no rush.

  She went into the living room, mistress of the house. There was a faint smell of gas in the small room, with the four wooden chairs arranged geometrically around the square oak table in the center of the worn, reddish carpet. She sat down at the table, took a pencil out of her pocket and looked around for some paper, but there was only the student’s exercise book in which she kept her daily accounts in the bakery. She never wrote letters and never received any. She tore several sheets of paper out of the back of the book and began to write on the ruled paper.

  “Dear Gretchen,” she wrote. “I have decided to kill myself. It is a mortal sin and I know it, but I can’t go on any more. I am writing from one sinner to another. There is no need for me to say more. You know what I mean.

  “There is a curse on this family. On me, on you, on your father and your brother Tom. Only your brother Rudolph may have escaped it and perhaps in the end he too will feel it. I am happy that I will not live to see that day. It is the curse of sex. I will tell you now something I have hidden from you all your life. I was an illegitimate child. I never knew my father or my mother. I cannot bear to think what sort of life my mother must have led and the degradation she must have wallowed in. That you should be following in her footsteps and have gone to the gutter should not surprise me. Your father is an animal. You sleep in the room next to ours, so you must know what I mean. He has crucified me on his lust for twenty years. He is a raging beast and there have been times when I was sure he was going to kill me. I have seen him nearly beat a man to death with his fists over an eight-dollar bakery bill. Your brother Thomas inherits from his father and it would not surprise me if he winds up in jail or worse. I am living in a cage of tigers.

  “I am guilty, I suppose. I have been weak and I have permitted your father to drive me from the Church and to make heathens of my children. I was too worn out and beaten down to love you and protect you from your father and his influence. And you always seemed so neat and clean and well-behaved that my fears were put to sleep. With the results that you know better than I do.”

  She stopped writing and read what she had written with satisfaction. Finding her mother dead and this address from the grave on her pillow would poison the whore’s guilty pleasures. Each time she allowed a man to put a hand on her, Gretchen would remember her mother’s last words to her.

  “Your blood is tainted,” she wrote, “and it is now plain to me that your character is tainted too. Your room is clean and dainty but your soul is a stable. Your father should have married someone like you. You would have been fitting partners for each other. My last wish is for you to leave the house and go far away so that your influence cannot corrupt your brother Rudolph. If only one decent human being comes out of this terrible family, perhaps it will make a balance in God’s eyes.”

  There was a confused sound of music and cheering growing stronger outside. Then she heard the trumpet, and recognized it. Rudolph was playing beneath the window. She got up from the table and opened the window and looked out. There he was, at the head of what looked like a thousand boys and girls, playing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” up to her.

  She waved down at him, feeling the tears start. Rudolph ordered the boys with the cannon to fire a salute for her and the boom echoed along the street. She was crying frankly now and had to take out her handkerchief. With a last wave, Rudolph led his army down the street, his trumpet playing them on.

  She went in and sat down at the table, sobbing. He has saved my life, she thought, my beautiful son has saved my life.

  She tore up the letter and went into the kitchen and burned the scripts in the soup pot.

  V

  A good many of the soldiers were drunk. Everybody who could walk and get into a uniform had fled the hospital without waiting for passes as soon as the news had come over the radio, but some of them had come back with bottles and the common room smelled like a saloon as men in wheel chairs and on crutches reeled around the room, shouting and singing. The celebration had degenerated into destruction after supper and men were breaking windows with canes, tearing posters down from the walls, ripping books and magazines into handfuls of confetti, with which they conducted Mardi-gras battles amid drunken whoops of laughter.

  “I am General George S. Patton,” shouted a boy to no one in particular. He had a steel contraption around his shoulders that kept his shattered arm sticking out above his head. “Where’s your necktie, soldier? Thirty years KP.” Then he seized Gretchen with his good arm and insisted on dancing with her in the middle of the room to the tune of “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” which the other soldiers obligingly sang for him. Gretchen had to hold the boy tight to keep him from falling. “I’m the greatest, highest-class, one-armed, 105-millimeter bal
lroom dancer in the world and I’m going to Hollywood tomorrow to waltz with Ginger Rogers. Marry me, baby, we’ll live like kings on my total disability pension. We won the war, baby. We made the world safe for total disability.” Then he had to sit down, because his knees wouldn’t support him anymore. He sat on the floor and put his head between his knees and sang a verse of “Lili Marlene.”

  There was nothing Gretchen could do for any of them tonight. She kept a fixed smile on her face, trying to intervene when the confetti battles became too rough and looked as though they would become real fights. A nurse came to the door of the room and beckoned to Gretchen. Gretchen went over to her. “I think you’d better get out of here,” the nurse said in a low, worried voice. “It’s going to be wild in a little while.”

  “I don’t really blame them,” Gretchen said. “Do you?”

  “I don’t blame them,” the nurse said, “but I’m staying out of their way.”

  There was a crash of glass from the room. A soldier had thrown an empty whiskey bottle through a window. “Fire for effect,” the soldier said. He picked up a metal waste basket and hurled it through another window. “Put the mortars on the bastards, Lieutenant. Take the high ground.”

  “It’s a lucky thing they took their guns away from them before they came here,” said the nurse. “This is worse than Normandy.”

  “Bring on the Japs,” someone shouted. “I’ll beat ’em to death with my first-aid kit. Banzai!”

  The nurse tugged at Gretchen’s sleeve. “Go on home,” she said. “This is no place for a girl tonight. Come early tomorrow and help pick up the pieces.”

  Gretchen nodded and started toward the locker room to change, as the nurse disappeared. Then she stopped and turned back and went down the corridor from which the wards angled off. She went into the ward where the bad head and chest wounds were cared for. It was dimly lit here, and quiet. Most of the beds were empty, but here and there she could see a figure lying still under blankets. She went to the last bed in the corner, where Talbot Hughes lay, with the glucose dripping into his arm from the bottle rigged on its stand next to the bed. He was lying there with his eyes open, enormous and feverishly clear in the emaciated head. He recognized her and smiled. The shouting and singing from the distant common room sounded like the confused roar from a football stadium. She smiled down at him and sat on the edge of his bed. Although she had seen him only the night before he seemed to have grown ominously thinner in the last twenty-four hours. The bandages around his throat were the only solid thing about him. The doctor in the ward had told her Talbot was going to die within the week. There really was no reason for him to die, the wound was healing the doctor said, although he would never be able to speak again, of course. But by this time, by any normal calculation, he should have been taking nourishment and even walking around a little. Instead, he was fading quietly away day by day, politely and irresistibly insisting upon dying, making no fuss, a trouble to no one.

  “Would you like me to read to you tonight?” Gretchen asked.

  He shook his head on the pillow. Then he put out his hand toward hers. He grasped her hand. She could feel all the fragile birdlike bones. He smiled again and closed his eyes. She sat there, motionless, holding his hand. She sat like that for more than fifteen minutes, not saying anything. Then she saw that he was sleeping. She disengaged her hand gently, stood up, and walked softly out of the room. Tomorrow she would ask the doctor to tell her when he thought Talbot Hughes, victorious, was about to go. She would come and hold his hand, representative of his country’s sorrow, so that he would not be alone when he died, twenty years old, everything unspoken.

  She changed into her street clothes quickly and hurried out of the building.

  As she went out the front door, she saw Arnold Simms leaning against the wall next to the door, smoking. This was the first time she had seen him since the night in the common room. She hesitated for a moment, then started toward the bus stop.

  “Evenin’, Miss Jordache.” The remembered voice, polite, countrified.

  Gretchen made herself stop. “Good evening, Arnold,” she said. His face was bland, memoryless.

  “The boys finally got themselves something to yell about, didn’t they?” Arnold gestured with a little movement of his head toward the wing which contained the common room.

  “They certainly did,” she said. She wanted to get away, but didn’t want to appear as if she were afraid of him.

  “These little old Yoonited States went and did it,” Arnold said. “’Twas a mighty fine effort, wouldn’t you say?”

  Now he was making fun of her. “We all should be very happy,” she said. He had the trick of making her pompous.

  “I’m very happy,” he said. “Yes, indeed. Mighty happy. I got good news today, too. Special good news. That’s why I waited on you out here. I wanted to tell you.”

  “What is it, Arnold?”

  “I’m being discharged tomorrow,” he said.

  “That is good news,” she said. “Congratulations.”

  “Yup,” he said. “Officially, according to the Yoonited States Medical Corps, I can walk. Transportation orders to installation nearest point of induction and immediate processing of discharge from the service. This time next week I’ll be back in St. Louis. Arnold Simms, the immediate civilian.”

  “I hope you’ll be …” She stopped. She had nearly said happy, but that would have been foolish. “Lucky,” she said. Even worse.

  “Oh, I’m a lucky fella,” he said. “No one has to worry about l’il ole Arnold. Got some more good news this week. It was a big week for me, a giant of a week. I got a letter from Cornwall.”

  “Oh, isn’t that nice.” Prissy. “That girl you told me about wrote you.” Palm trees. Adam and Eve in the Garden.

  “Yep.” He flicked away his cigarette. “She just found out her husband got killed in Italy and she thought I’d like to know.”

  There was nothing to say to this, so she kept quiet.

  “Well, I won’t be seeing you any more, Miss Jordache,” he said, “unless you happen to be passin’ through St. Louis. You can find me in the telephone book. I’ll be in an exclusive residential district. I won’t keep you no longer. I’m sure you got a victory ball or a country club dance to go to. I just wanted to thank you for everything you done for the troops, Miss Jordache.”

  “Good luck, Arnold,” she said coldly.

  “Too bad you didn’t find the time to come on down to the Landing that Saturday,” he said, drawling it out flatly. “We got ourselves two fine chickens and roasted them and had ourselves quite a picnic. We missed you.”

  “I’d hoped you weren’t going to talk about that, Arnold,” she said. Hypocrite, hypocrite.

  “Oh, God,” he said, “you so beautiful I just want to sit down and cry.”

  He turned and opened the door to the hospital and limped in.

  She walked slowly toward the bus stop, feeling battered. Victory solved nothing.

  She stood under the light, looking at her watch, wondering if the bus drivers were also celebrating tonight. There was a car parked down the street in the shadow of a tree. The motor started up and it drove slowly toward her. It was Boylan’s Buick. For a moment she thought of running back into the hospital.

  Boylan stopped the car in front of her and opened the door. “Can I give you a lift, ma’am?”

  “Thank you very much, no.” She hadn’t seen him for more than a month, not since the night they had driven to New York.

  “I thought we might get together to offer fitting thanks to God for blessing our arms with victory,” he said.

  “I’ll wait for the bus, thank you,” she said.

  “You got my letters, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes.” There had been two letters, on her desk at the office, asking her to meet him in front of Bernstein’s Department Store. She hadn’t met him and she hadn’t answered the letters.

  “Your reply must have been lost in the mail,” he s
aid. “The service these days is very hit and miss, isn’t it?”

  She walked away from the car. He got out and came up to her and held her arm.

  “Come up to the house with me,” he said harshly. “This minute.”

  His touch unnerved her. She hated him but she knew she wanted to be in his bed. “Let go of me,” she said, and pulled her arm savagely out of his grasp. She walked back to the bus stop, with him following her.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll say what I came to say. I want to marry you.”

  She laughed. She didn’t know why she laughed. Surprise.

  “I said I want to marry you,” he repeated.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said, “you go on down to Jamaica, as you planned, and I’ll write you there. Leave your address with my secretary. Excuse me, here’s my bus.”

  The bus rolled to a stop and she jumped up through the door as soon as it opened. She gave the driver her ticket and went and sat in the back by herself. She was trembling. If the bus hadn’t come along, she would have said yes, she would marry him.

  When the bus neared Port Philip she heard the fire engines and looked up the hill. There was a fire on the hill. She hoped it was the main building, burning to the ground.