Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  Until today he had thought he was kind of funny looking, a snotty kid with a flat face and a sassy expression. Saint Sebastian. The next time he saw those two beauties, Rudolph and Gretchen, he could look them straight in the eye. I have been compared by an older, experienced woman to Saint Sebastian, a young and beautiful soldier. For the first time since he had left home he was sorry he wasn’t going to see his brother and sister that night.

  He got up and put the book away. He was about to leave the reference room when it occurred to him that Clothilde was a Saint’s name, too. He searched through the volumes and took out CASTIR to COLE.

  Practiced now, he found what he was looking for quickly, although it wasn’t Clothilde, but “CLOTILDA, ST. (d. 544) daughter of the Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks.”

  Tom thought of Clothilde sweating over the stove in the Jordache kitchen and washing Uncle Harold’s underwear and was saddened. Daughter of the Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks. People didn’t think of the future when they named babies.

  He read the rest of the paragraph, but Clotilda didn’t seem to have done all that much, converting her husband and building churches and stuff like that, and getting into trouble with her family. The book didn’t say what entrance requirements she had met to be made a saint.

  Tom put the book away, eager to get home to Clothilde. But he stopped at the desk to say, “Thank you, ma’am,” to the lady. He was conscious of a sweet smell. There was a bowl of narcissus on the desk, spears of green, with white flowers, set in a bed of multi-colored pebbles. Then, speaking without thinking, he said, “Can I take out a card, please?”

  The lady looked at him, surprised. “Have you ever had a card anywhere before?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am. I never had the time to read before.”

  The lady gave him a queer look, but pulled out a blank card and asked him his name, age, and address. She printed the information in a funny backward way on the card, stamped the date, and handed the card to him.

  “Can I take out a book right away?” he asked.

  “If you want,” she said.

  He went back to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and took out SARS to SORC. He wanted to have a good look at that paragraph and try to memorize it. But when he stood at the desk to have it stamped, the lady shook her head impatiently. “Put that right back,” she said. “That’s not supposed to leave the Reference Room.”

  He returned to the Reference Room and put the volume back. They keep yapping at you to read, he thought resentfully, and then when you finally say okay, I’ll read, they throw a rule in your face.

  Still, walking out of the library, he patted his back pocket several times, to feel the nice stiffness of the card in there.

  There was fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and apple sauce for dinner and blueberry pie for dessert. He and Clothilde ate in the kitchen, not saying much.

  When they had finished and Clothilde was clearing off the dishes, he went over to her and held her in his arms and said “Clotilda, daughter of the Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks.”

  She looked at him, wide-eyed. “What’s that?”

  “I wanted to find out where your name came from,” he said. “I went to the library. You’re a king’s daughter and a king’s wife.”

  She looked at him a long time, her arms around his waist. Then she kissed him on the forehead, gratefully, as if he had brought home a present for her.

  II

  There were two fish in the straw creel already, speckled on the bed of wet fern. The stream was well stocked, as Boylan had said. There was a dam at one edge of the property where the stream entered the estate. From there the stream wound around the property to another dam with a wire fence to keep the fish in, at the other edge of the property. From there it fell in a series of cascades down toward the Hudson.

  Rudolph wore old corduroys and a pair of fireman’s rubber boots, bought secondhand and too big for him, to make his way along the banks, with the thorns and the interlaced branches tearing at him. It was a long walk up the hill from the last stop on the local bus line, but it was worth it. His own private trout stream. He hadn’t seen Boylan or anybody else on the property any of the times he had come up there. The stream was never closer at any point to the main house than five hundred yards.

  It had rained the night before and there was rain in the gray, late-afternoon air. The brook was a bit muddy and the trout were shy. But just slowly moving upstream, getting the fly lightly, lightly, where he wanted it, with nobody around, and the only sound the water tumbling over the rocks, was happiness enough. School began again in a week and he was making the most of the last days of the holiday.

  He was near one of the stream’s two ornamental bridges, working the water, when he heard footsteps on gravel. A little path, overgrown with weeds, led to the bridge. He reeled in and waited. Boylan, hatless, dressed in a suede jacket, a paisley scarf, and jodhpur boots, came down the path and stopped on the bridge. “Hello, Mr. Boylan,” Rudolph said. He was a little uneasy, seeing the man, worried that perhaps Boylan hadn’t remembered inviting him to fish the stream, or had merely said it for politeness’ sake, not really meaning it.

  “Any luck?” Boylan asked.

  “There’re two in the basket.”

  “Not bad for a day like this,” Boylan said, examining the muddied water. “With flies.”

  “Do you fish?” Rudolph moved nearer the bridge, so that they wouldn’t have to talk so loud.

  “I used to,” Boylan said. “Don’t let me interfere. I’m just taking a walk. I’ll be back this way. If you’re still here, perhaps you’ll do me the pleaseure of joining me in a drink up at the house.”

  “Thank you,” Rudolph said. He didn’t say whether he’d wait or not.

  With a wave, Boylan continued his walk.

  Rudolph changed the fly, taking the new one from where it was stuck in the band of the battered old brown felt hat he used when it rained or when he went fishing. He made the knots precisely, losing no time. Perhaps one day he would be a surgeon, suturing incisions. “I think the patient will live, nurse.” How many years? Three in premed, four in medical school, two more as an intern. Who had that much money? Forget it.

  On his third cast, the fly was taken. There was a thrash of water, dirty white against the brown current. It felt like a big one. He played it carefully, trying to keep the fish away from the rocks and brushwood anchored in the stream. He didn’t know how long it took him. Twice the fish was nearly his and twice it streaked away, taking line with it. The third time, he felt it tiring. He waded out with his net. The water rushed in over the top of his fireman’s boots, icy cold. It was only when he had the trout in the net that he was conscious that Boylan had come back and was on the bridge watching him.

  “Bravo,” Boylan said, as Rudolph stepped back on shore, water squelching up from the top of his boots. “Very well done.”

  Rudolph killed the trout and Boylan came around and watched him as he laid the fish with the two others in the creel. “I could never do that,” Boylan said. “Kill anything with my hands.” He was wearing gloves. “They look like miniature sharks,” he said, “don’t they?”

  They looked like trout to Rudolph. “I’ve never seen a shark,” he said. He plucked some more fern and stuffed it in the creel, around the fish. His father would have trout for breakfast. His father liked trout. A return on his investment in the birthday rod and reel.

  “Do you ever fish in the Hudson?” Boylan asked.

  “Once in awhile. Sometimes, in season, a shad gets up this far.”

  “When my father was a boy, he caught salmon in the Hudson,” Boylan said. “Can you imagine what the Hudson must have been like when the Indians were here? Before the Roosevelts. With bear and lynx on the shores and deer coming down to the banks.”

  “I see a deer once in awhile,” Rudolph said. It had never occurred to him to wonder what th
e Hudson must have looked like with Iroquois canoes furrowing it.

  “Bad for the crops, deer, bad for the crops,” Boylan said.

  Rudolph would have liked to sit down and take his boots off and get the water out, but he knew his socks were darned, and he didn’t cherish the idea of displaying the thick patches of his mother’s handiwork to Boylan.

  As though reading his mind, Boylan said, “I do believe you ought to empty the water out of those boots. That water must be cold.”

  “It is.” Rudolph pulled off one boot, then another. Boylan didn’t seem to notice. He was looking around him at the overgrown woods that had been in his family’s possession since just after the Civil War. “You used to be able to see the house from here. There was no underbrush. Ten gardeners used to work this land, winter and summer. Now the only ones who come are the state fisheries people once a year. You can’t get anybody anymore. No sense to it, really, anyway.” He studied the massed foliage of the shrub oak and blossomless dogwood and alder. “Trash trees,” he said. “The forest primeval. Where only Man in vile. Who said that?”

  “Longfellow,” Rudolph said. His socks were soaking wet, as he put his boots back on.

  “You read a lot?” Boylan said.

  “We had to learn it in school.” Rudolph refused to boast.

  “I’m happy to see that our educational system does not neglect our native birds and their native wood-notes wild,” Boylan said.

  Fancy talk again, Rudolph thought. Who’s he impressing? Rudolph didn’t much like Longfellow, himself, but who did Boylan think he was to be so superior? What poems have you written, brother?

  “By the way, I believe there’s an old pair of hip-length waders up at the house. God knows when I bought them. If they fit you, you can have them. Why don’t you come up and try them on?”

  Rudolph had planned to go right on home. It was a long walk to the bus and he had been invited for dinner at Julie’s house. After dinner they were to go to a movie. But waders … They cost over twenty dollars new. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  “Don’t call me sir,’” Boylan said. “I feel old enough as it is.”

  They started toward the house, on the overgrown path. “Let me carry the creel,” Boylan said.

  “It’s not heavy,” Rudolph said.

  “Please,” said Boylan. “It will make me feel as though I’ve done something useful today.”

  He’s sad, Rudolph thought with surprise. Why, he’s as sad as my mother. He handed the creel to Boylan, who slung it over his shoulder.

  The house sat on the hill, huge, a useless fortress in Gothic stone, with ivy running wild all over it, defensive against knights in armor and dips in the Market.

  “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” Boylan murmured.

  “Yes,” Rudolph said.

  “You have a nice turn of phrase, my boy.” Boylan laughed. “Come on in.” He opened the massive oak front doors.

  My sister has passed through here, Rudolph thought. I should turn back.

  But he didn’t.

  They went into a large, dark, marble-floored hall, with a big staircase winding up from it. An old man in a gray alpaca jacket and bow tie appeared immediately, as though merely by entering the house Boylan set up waves of pressure that drove servants into his presence.

  “Good evening, Perkins,” Boylan said. “This is Mr. Jordache, a young friend of the family.”

  Perkins nodded, the ghost of a bow. He looked English. He had a for King and Country face. He took Rudolph’s battered hat and laid it on a table along the wall, a wreath on a royal tomb.

  “I wonder if you could be kind enough, Perkins, to go into the Armory,” Boylan said, “and hunt around a bit for my old pair of waders. Mr. Jordache is a fisherman.” He opened the creel. “As you can see.”

  Perkins regarded the fish. “Very good size, sir.” Caterer to the Crown.

  “Aren’t they?” The two men played an elaborate game with each other, the rules of which were unknown to Rudolph. “Take them into Cook,” Boylan said to Perkins. “Ask her if she can’t do something with them for dinner. You are staying to dinner, aren’t you, Rudolph?”

  Rudolph hesitated. He’d miss his date with Julie. But he was fishing Boylan’s stream, and he was getting a pair of waders. “If I could make a telephone call,” he said.

  “Of course,” Boylan said. Then to Perkins. “Tell Cook we’ll be two.” Axel Jordache would not eat trout for breakfast. “And while you’re at it,” Boylan said, “bring down a pair of nice, warm socks and a towel for Mr. Jordache. His feet are soaked. He doesn’t feel it now, being young, but as he creaks to the fireside forty years from now, he will feel the rheumatism in his joints, even as you and I, and will remember this afternoon.”

  “Yes, sir,” Perkins said and went off to the kitchen or to the Armory, whatever that was.

  “I think you’ll be more comfortable if you take your boots off here,” Boylan said. It was a polite way of hinting to Rudolph that he didn’t want him to leave a trail of wet footprints all over the house. Rudolph pulled off the boots. Silent reproach of darned socks.

  “We’ll go in here,” Boylan pushed open two high carved wooden doors leading off the hallway. “I think Perkins has had the goodness to start a fire. This house is chilly on the best of days. At the very best it is always November in here. And on a day like this, when there’s rain in the air, one can ice-skate on one’s bones.”

  One. One, Rudolph thought, as, bootless, he went through the door which Boylan held open for him. One can take a flying hump for oneself.

  The room was the largest private room Rudolph had ever been in. It didn’t seem like November at all. Dark-red velvet curtains were drawn over the high windows, books were ranged on shelves on the walls, there were many paintings, portraits of highly colored ladies in nineteenth-century dresses and solid, oldish men with beards, and big cracked oils. Rudolph recognized the latter as views of the neighboring valley of the Hudson that must have been painted when it was all still farmland and forest. There was a grand piano with a lot of bound music albums strewn on it, and a table against a wall with bottles. There was a huge upholstered couch, some deep leather armchairs, and a library table heaped with magazines. An immense pale Persian carpet that looked hundreds of years old, was shabby and worn to Rudolph’s unknowing eye. Perkins had, indeed, started a fire in the wide fireplace. Three logs crackled on heavy andirons and six or seven lamps around the room gave forth a tempered evening light. Instantly, Rudolph decided that one day he would live in a room like this.

  “It’s a wonderful room,” he said sincerely.

  “Too big for a single man,” Boylan said. “One rattles around in it. I’m making us a whiskey.”

  “Thank you,” Rudolph said. His sister ordering whiskey in the bar in the Port Philip House. She was in New York now, because of this man. Good or bad? She had a job, she had written. Acting. She would let him know when the play opened. She had a new address. She had moved from the Y.W.C.A. Don’t tell Ma or Pa. She was being paid sixty dollars a week.

  “You wanted to phone,” Boylan said, pouring whiskey. “On the table near the window.”

  Rudolph picked up the phone and waited for the operator. A beautiful blonde woman with an out-of-style hairdo smiled at him from a silver frame on the piano. “Number, please,” the operator said.

  Rudolph gave her Julie’s number. He hoped that Julie wasn’t home, so that he could leave a message. Cowardice. Another mark against him in the Book of Himself.

  But it was Julie’s voice that answered, after two rings.

  “Julie …” he began.

  “Rudy!” Her pleasure at hearing his voice was a rebuke. He wished Boylan were not in the room. “Julie,” he said, “about tonight. Something’s come up …”

  “What’s come up?” Her voice was stony. It was amazing how a pretty young girl like that, who could sing like a lark, could also make her voice sound like a gate clanging, between one sentence and the next.
/>   “I can’t explain at the moment, but …”

  “Why can’t you explain at the moment?”

  He looked across at Boylan’s back. “I just can’t,” he said. “Anyway, why can’t we make it for tomorrow night? The same picture’s playing and …”

  “Go to hell.” She hung up.

  He waited for a moment, shaken. How could a girl be so … so decisive? “That’s fine, Julie,” he said into the dead phone. “See you tomorrow. ’Bye.” It was not a bad performance. He hung up.

  “Here’s your drink,” Boylan called to him across the room. He made no comment on the telephone call.

  Rudolph went over to him and took the glass. “Cheers,” Boylan said as he drank.

  Rudolph couldn’t bring himself to say Cheers, but the drink warmed him and even the taste wasn’t too bad.

  “First one of the day,” Boylan said, rattling the ice in his glass. “Thank you for joining me. I’m not a solitary drinker and I needed it. I had a boring afternoon. Please do sit down.” He indicated one of the big armchairs near the fire. Rudolph sat in it and Boylan stood to one side of the hearth, leaning against the mantelpiece. There was a Chinese clay horse on the mantelpiece, stocky and warlike-looking. “I had insurance people here all afternoon,” Boylan went on. “About that silly fire I had here on VE Day. Night, rather. Did you see the cross burn?”

  “I heard about it,” Rudolph said.

  “Curious that they should have picked my place,” Boylan said. “I’m not Catholic and I’m certainly not black or Jewish. The Ku Klux Klan up in these parts must be singularly misinformed. The insurance people keep asking me if I have any particular enemies. Perhaps you’ve heard something in town?”

  “No,” Rudolph said carefully.

  “I’m sure I have. Enemies, I mean. But they don’t advertise,” Boylan said. “Too bad the cross wasn’t nearer the house. It would be a blessing if this mausoleum burnt down. You’re not drinking your drink.”

  “I’m a slow drinker,” Rudolph said.