Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  Gretchen and Mary Jane Hackett were sitting in the cramped, poster-lined anteroom of the Nichols office on West 46th Street, waiting with a collection of other girls and young men to see Bayard Nichols. There were only three chairs behind the railing which divided the aspirants from the desk of Nichols’s secretary, who was typing with spiky malice, her fingers stabbing at the keys, as though the English language were her personal enemy, to be dispatched as swiftly as possible.

  The third chair in the anteroom was occupied by a character actress who wore a fur stole, even though it was eighty-five degrees in the shade outside.

  Without losing a syllable on her machine, the secretary said, “Hello, dear,” each time the door opened for another actor or actress. The word was that Nichols was casting a new play, six characters, four men, two women.

  Mary Jane Hackett was a tall, slender, bosomless girl, who made her real money modeling. Gretchen was too curvy to model. Mary Jane Hackett had been in two flops on Broadway and had played a half-season of summer stock and already spoke like a veteran. She looked around her at the actors standing along the walls, lounging gracefully against the posters of Bayard Nichols’s past productions. “You’d think, with all those hits,” Mary Jane Hackett said, “going all the way back to the dark ages, 1935, for God’s sake, Nichols could afford something grander than this foul little rat trap. At least air conditioning, for heaven’s sake. He must have the first nickel he ever made. I don’t know what I’m doing here. He dies if he has to pay more than minimum and even then, he gives you a long lecture about how Franklin D. Roosevelt has ruined this country.”

  Gretchen looked uneasily over at the secretary. The office was so small, there was no possibility that she hadn’t heard Mary Jane. But the secretary typed on, stolidly disloyal, defeating English.

  “Look at the size of them.” Mary Jane gestured with a toss of her head at the young men. “They don’t come up to my shoulder. If they wrote women’s parts playing all three acts on their knees, I’d stand a chance of getting a job. The American theater, for God’s sake! The men’re midgets and if they’re over five feet tall they’re fairies.”

  “Naughty, naughty, Mary Jane,” a tall boy said.

  “When was the last time you kissed a girl?” Mary Jane demanded.

  “Nineteen-twenty-eight,” the boy said. “To celebrate the election of Herbert Hoover.”

  Everybody in the office laughed good-naturedly. Except the secretary. She kept on typing.

  Even though she still had to get her first job, Gretchen enjoyed this new world into which she had been thrown. Everybody talked to everybody else, everybody called everybody by his first name; Alfred Lunt was Alfred to anyone who had ever been in a play with him, even if it was only for two lines at the beginning of the first act; everybody helped everybody else. If a girl heard of a part that was up for casting, she told all her friends and might even lend a particular dress for the interview. It was like being a member of a generous club, whose entrance requirements were not birth or money, but youth and ambition and belief in one another’s talent.

  In the basement of Walgreen’s drugstore, where they all congregated over endless cups of coffee, to compare notes, to denigrate success, to mimic matinee idols and lament the death of the Group Theatre, Gretchen was now accepted, and talked as freely as anyone about how idiotic critics were, about how Trigorin should be played in The Sea Gull, about how nobody acted like Laurette Taylor any more, about how certain producers tried to lay every girl who came into their offices. In two months, in the flood of youthful voices, speaking with the accents of Georgia, Maine, Texas, and Oklahoma, the mean streets of Port Philip had almost disappeared, a dot on the curve of memory’s horizon.

  She slept till ten in the morning, without feeling guilty. She went to young men’s apartments and stayed there till all hours, rehearsing scenes, without worrying what people would think. A Lesbian at the Y.W.C.A., where she was staying until she found a job, had made a pass at her, but they were still good friends and sometimes had dinner and went to the movies together. She worked out in a ballet class three hours a week, to learn how to move gracefully on a stage, and she had changed the way she walked completely, keeping her head so still that she could have balanced a glass of water on it, even when going up and down stairs … Primitive serenity, the exballerina who taught the class, called it.

  She felt that when people looked at her they were sure she had been born in the city. She believed that she was no longer shy. She went out to dinners with some of the young actors and would-be directors whom she met at Walgreen’s and in producers’ offices and rehearsal classes and she paid for her own meals. She didn’t mind cigarette smoke any more. She had no lovers. She had decided she would wait for that until she had a job. One problem at a time.

  She had almost made up her mind to write Teddy Boylan and ask him to send down the red dress he had bought for her. There was no telling when she would be invited to that kind of party.

  The door to the inner office opened and Bayard Nichols came out with a short, thin man in the suntan uniform of a captain in the Air Force. “… if anything comes up, Willie,” Nichols was saying, “I’ll let you know.” He had a sad, resigned voice. He remembered only his failures. His eyes made a sweep of the people who were waiting to see him, like the beam of a lighthouse, sightless, casting shadows.

  “I’ll come by next week sometime and mooch a meal off you,” the Captain said. He had a voice in the low tenor range, unexpected in a man who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and thirty pounds and wasn’t more than five feet, six inches, tall. He held himself very erect, as though he were still in Air Cadets’ school. But his face was unmilitary, and his hair was chestnut, unruly, long for a soldier, making you disbelieve the uniform. His forehead was high, a little bulgy, an unsettling hint of Beethoven, massive and brooding, and his eyes were Wedgwood blue.

  “You’re still being paid by Uncle,” Nichols was saying to the Captain. “My taxes. I’ll mooch the meal off you.” He sounded like a man who would not cost much to feed. The theater was an Elizabethan tragedy being played nightly in his digestive tract. Murders stalked the duodenum. Ulcers lurked. He was always going on the wagon next Monday. A psychiatrist or a new wife might help.

  “Mr. Nichols …” The tall young man who had had the exchange with Mary Jane took a step away from the wall.

  “Next week, Bernie,” Mr. Nichols said. One more sweep of the beam. “Miss Saunders,” he said to the secretary, “can you come inside for a moment, please?” A languid, dyspeptic wave of the hand and he disappeared into his office. The secretary sprayed a last mortal burst out of the typewriter, enfilading the Dramatists’ Guild, then stood up and followed him, carrying a shorthand pad. The door closed behind her.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the Captain said to the room at large, “we are all in the wrong business. I suggest Army surplus. The demand for used bazookas will be overwhelming. Hello, Tiny.” This was for Mary Jane, who stood up, towering over him, and leaning over, kissed his cheek.

  “I’m glad to see you got home alive from that party, Willie,” Mary Jane said.

  “I confess, it was a little drunk out,” the Captain said. “We were washing the somber memories of combat from our souls.”

  “Drowning, I’d say,” Mary Jane said.

  “Don’t begrudge us our poor little entertainments,” the Captain said. “Remember, you were modeling girdles while we were walking on flak in the terrible skies over Berlin.”

  “Were you ever over Berlin, Willie?” Mary Jane asked.

  “Of course not.” He grinned at Gretchen, disclaiming valor. “I am standing here patiently, Tiny,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Gretchen Jordache, Willie Abbott.”

  “I am happy I walked down 46th Street this morning,” Abbott said.

  “Hello,” said Gretchen. She nearly stood up. After all, he was a captain.

  “I suppose you’re an actress,” he said.
<
br />   “Trying.”

  “Dreadful trade,” Abbott said. “To quote Shakespeare on samphire?”

  “Don’t show off, Willie,” Mary Jane said.

  “You will make some man a fine wife and mother, Miss Jordache,” Abbott said. “Mark my words. Why haven’t I seen you before?”

  “She just came to town,” Mary Jane said, before Gretchen could answer. It was a warning, a go slow sign. Jealousy?

  “Oh, the girls who have just come to town,” Abbott said. “May I sit in your lap?”

  “Willie!” Mary Jane said.

  Gretchen laughed and Abbott laughed with her. He had very white, even, small teeth. “I was not mothered sufficiently as a child.”

  The door to the inner office opened and Miss Saunders came out. “Miss Jordache,” she said, “Mr. Nichols can see you now.”

  Gretchen stood up, surprised that Miss Saunders remembered her name. This was only the third time she had been in the Nichols office. She hadn’t talked to Nichols at all, ever. She brushed out the wrinkles in her dress nervously, as Miss Saunders held open the little swinging gate in the partition.

  “Ask for a thousand dollars a week and ten percent of the gross,” Abbott said.

  Gretchen went through the gate and toward Nichols’s door. “Everybody else can go home,” Miss Saunders said. “Mr. Nichols has an appointment for lunch in fifteen minutes.”

  “Beast,” said the character woman with the stole.

  “I just work here,” Miss Saunders said.

  Confusion of feelings. Pleasure and fright at the prospect of being tested for a job. Guilt because the others had been dismissed and she chosen. Loss, because now Mary Jane would leave with Willie Abbott. Flak above Berlin.

  “See you later,” Mary Jane said. She didn’t say where. Abbott didn’t say anything.

  Nichols’s office was a little larger than the anteroom. The walls were bare and his desk was piled with play-scripts in leatherette covers. There were three yellowish wooden armchairs and the windows were coated with dust. It looked like the office of a man whose business was somehow shady and who had trouble meeting the rent on the first of the month.

  Nichols stood up as she came into the office and said, “It was good of you to wait, Miss Jordache.” He waved to a chair on one side of his desk and waited for her to sit down before he seated himself. He stared at her for a long time, without a word, studying her with the slightly sour expression of a man who is being offered a painting with a doubtful signature. She was so nervous that she was afraid her knees were shaking. “I suppose,” she said, “you want to know about my experience. I don’t have much to …”

  “No,” he said. “For the moment we can dispense with experience. Miss Jordache, the part I’m considering you for is frankly absurd.” He shook his head sorrowfully, pitying himself for the grotesque deeds his profession forced him to perform. “Tell me, do you have any objections to playing in a bathing suit? In three bathing suits to be exact.”

  “Well …” She laughed uncertainly. “I guess it all depends.” Idiot. Depends upon what? The size of the bathing suit? The size of the part? The size of her bosom? She thought of her mother. Her mother never went to the theater. Lucky.

  “I’m afraid it isn’t a speaking role,” Nichols said. “The girl just walks across the stage three times, once in each act, in a different suit each time. The whole play takes place at a beach club.”

  “I see,” Gretchen said. She was annoyed with Nichols. Because of him, she had let Mary Jane walk off with Willie Abbott, out into the city. Captain, Captain … Six million people. Get into an elevator and you are lost forever. For a walk-on. Practically naked.

  “The girl is a symbol. Or so the playwright tells me,” Nichols said, long hours of struggle with the casuistry of artists tolling like a shipwreck’s bell under the phrase. “Youth. Sensual beauty. The Mystery of Woman. The heartbreaking ephemeralness of the flesh. I am quoting the author. Every man must feel as she walks across the stage, ‘My God, why am I married?’ Do you have a bathing suit?”

  “I … I think so.” She shook her head, annoyed with herself now. “Of course.”

  “Could you come to the Belasco at five with your bathing suit? The author and the director will be there.”

  “At five.” She nodded. Farewell, Stanislavsky. She could feel the blush starting. Prig. A job was a job.

  “That’s most kind of you, Miss Jordache.” Nichols stood, mournfully. She stood with him. He escorted her to the door and opened it for her. The anteroom was empty, except for Miss Saunders, blazing away.

  “Forgive me,” Nichols murmured obscurely. He went back into his office.

  “So long,” Gretchen said as she passed Miss Saunders.

  “Good-bye, dear,” Miss Saunders said, without looking up. She smelled of sweat. Ephemeral flesh. I am quoting.

  Gretchen went out into the corridor. She didn’t ring for the elevator until the blush had subsided.

  When the elevator finally came, there was a young man in it carrying a Confederate officer’s uniform and a cavalry saber in a scabbard. He was wearing the hat that went with the uniform, a dashing wide-brimmed felt, plumed. Under it his beaked, hard-boiled 1945 New York face looked like a misprint. “Will the wars never end?” he said amiably to Gretchen as she got into the elevator.

  It was steamy in the little grilled car and she felt the sweat break out on her forehead. She dabbed at her forehead with a piece of Kleenex.

  She went out into the street, geometric blocks of hot, glassy light and concrete shadow. Abbott and Mary Jane were standing in front of the building, waiting for her. She smiled. Six million people in the city. Let there be six million people. They had waited for her.

  “What I thought,” Willie was saying, “was lunch.”

  “I’m starving,” Gretchen said.

  They walked off toward lunch on the shady side of the street, the two tall girls, with the slender, small soldier between them, jaunty, remembering that other warriors had also been short men, Napoleon, Trotsky, Caesar, probably Tamerlane.

  Naked, she regarded herself in the dressing-room mirror. She had gone out to Jones Beach with Mary Jane and two boys the Sunday before and the skin of her shoulders and arms and legs was a faint rosy tan. She didn’t wear a girdle any more and in the summer heat she dispensed with stockings, so there were no prosaic ridges from clinging elastic on the smooth arch of her hips. She stared at her breasts. I want to see how it tastes with whiskey on it. She had had two Bloody Marys at lunch, with Mary Jane and Willie, and they had shared a bottle of white wine. Willie liked to drink. She put on her one-piece, black bathing suit. There were grains of sand in the crotch, from Jones Beach. She walked away from the mirror, then toward it, studying herself critically. The Mystery of Woman. Her walk was too modest. Remember Primitive Serenity. Willie and Mary Jane were waiting for her at the bar of the Algonquin, to find out how it all came out. She walked less modestly. There was a knock on the door. “Miss Jordache,” the stage manager said, “we’re ready when you are.”

  She began to blush as she opened the door. Luckily, in the harsh work light of the stage, nobody could tell.

  She followed the stage manager. “Just walk across and back a couple of times,” he said. There were shadowy figures sitting toward the tenth row of the darkened auditorium. The stage floor was unswept and the bare bricks of the back wall looked like the ruins of Rome. She was sure her blush could be seen all the way out to the street. “Miss Gretchen Jordache,” the stage manager called out into the cavernous darkness. A message in a bottle over the night waves of seats. I am adrift. She wanted to run away.

  She walked across the stage. She felt as though she were stumbling up a mountain. A zombie in a bathing suit.

  There was no sound from the auditorium. She walked back. Still no sound. She walked back and forth twice more, worried about splinters in her bare feet.

  “Thank you very much, Miss Jordache.” Nichols’s dejected voice, thin
in the empty theater. “That’s fine. If you’ll stop in the office tomorrow we’ll arrange about the contract.”

  It was as simple as that. Abruptly, she stopped blushing.

  Willie was sitting alone at the small bar in the Algonquin, erect on a stool, nursing a whiskey in the greenish, submarine dusk that was the constant atmosphere of the room. He swiveled around to greet her as she came in carrying the little rubberized beach bag with her bathing suit in it. “The beautiful girl looks like a beautiful girl who has just landed herself a job as the Mystery of Woman at the Belasco Theatre,” he said. “I am quoting.” Over lunch, they had all laughed at Gretchen’s account of her interview with Nichols.

  She sat down on the stool next to his. “You’re right,” she said. “Sarah Bernhardt is on her way.”

  “She never could have handled it,” Willie said. “She had a wooden leg. Do we drink champagne?”

  “Where’s Mary Jane?”

  “Gone. She had a date.”

  “We drink champagne.” They both laughed.

  When the barman set their glasses in front of them, they drank to Mary Jane. Delicious absence. It was the second time in her life Gretchen had drunk champagne. The hushed, gaudy room in the four-story house on a side street, the one-way mirror, the magnificent whore with the baby face, stretched triumphantly on the wide bed.

  “We have many choices,” Willie said. “We can stay here and drink wine all night. We can have dinner. We can make love. We can go to a party on Fifty-sixth Street. Are you a party girl?”

  “I would like to be,” Gretchen said. She ignored the “make love.” Obviously it was a joke. Everything was a joke with Willie. She had the feeling that even in the war, at the worst times, he had made fun of the bursting shells, the planes diving in, the flaming wings. Images from news-reels, war movies. “Old Johnny bought it today, chaps. This is my round.” Was it like that? She would ask him later, when she knew him better.

  “The party it is,” he said. “There’s no hurry. It’ll go on all night. Now, before we fling ourselves into the mad whirl of pleasure, are there things I should know about you?” Willie poured himself another glass of champagne. His hand was not quite steady and the bottle made a little clinking music against the rim of the glass.