Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  “My grandfather built for eternity,” Boylan said, “and I’m living through it.” He laughed. “Forgive me if I talk too much. There’re so few opportunities of talking to anybody who has the faintest notion of what you’re saying around here.”

  “Why do you live here, then?” Rudolph asked, youthfully logical.

  “I am doomed,” said Boylan, with mock melodrama. “I am tied to the rock and the bird is eating my liver. Do you know that, too?”

  “Prometheus.”

  “Imagine. Is that school, too?”

  “Yes.” I know a lot of things, mister, Rudolph wanted to say.

  “Beware families,” Boylan said. He had finished his drink fast and he left the mantelpiece to pour another for himself. “You pay for their hopes. Are you family-ridden, Rudolph? Are there ancestors you must not disappoint?”

  “I have no ancestors,” Rudolph said.

  “A true American,” said Boylan. “Ah, the waders.”

  Perkins was in the room, carrying a hip-length pair of rubber boots and a towel, and a pair of light-blue wool socks. “Just put everything down, please, Perkins,” Boylan said.

  “Very good, sir.” Perkins put the waders within Rudolph’s reach and draped the towel over the edge of the armchair. He put the socks on the end table next to the chair.

  Rudolph stripped off his socks. Perkins took them from him, although Rudolph had intended to put them in his pocket. He had no idea what Perkins could do with a pair of soggy patched cotton socks in that house. He dried his feet with the towel. The towel smelled of lavender. Then he drew on the socks. They were of soft wool. He stood up and pulled on the waders. There was a triangular tear at the knee of one of them. Rudolph didn’t think it was polite to mention it. “They fit fine,” he said. Fifty dollars. At least fifty dollars, he thought. He felt like D’Artagnan in them.

  “I think I bought them before the war,” Boylan said. “When my wife left me, I thought I’d take up fishing.”

  Rudolph looked over quickly to see if Boylan was joking, but there was no glint of humor in the man’s eyes. “I tried a dog for company. A huge Irish wolfhound. Brutus. A lovely animal. I had him for five years. We were inordinately attached to each other. Then someone poisoned him. My surrogate.” Boylan laughed briefly. “Do you know what surrogate means, Rudolph?”

  The school-teacherly questions were annoying. “Yes,” he said.

  “Of course,” said Boylan. He didn’t ask Rudolph to define it. “Yes, I must have enemies. Or perhaps he was just chasing somebody’s chickens.”

  Rudolph took off the boots and held them uncertainly. “Just leave them anywhere,” Boylan said. “Perkins will put them in the car when I take you home. Oh, dear.” He had seen the rip in the boot. “I’m afraid they’re torn.”

  “It’s nothing. I’ll have it vulcanized,” Rudolph said.

  “No. I’ll have Perkins attend to it. He loves mending things.” Boylan made it sound as though Rudolph would be depriving Perkins of one of his dearest pleasures if he insisted upon mending the boot himself. Boylan was back at the bar table. The drink wasn’t strong enough for him and he added whiskey to his glass. “Would you like to see the house, Rudolph?” He kept using the name.

  “Yes,” Rudolph said. He was curious to find out what an armory was. The only armory he had ever seen was the one in Brooklyn where he had gone for a track meet.

  “Good,” Boylan said. “It may help you when you become an ancestor yourself. You will have an idea of what to inflict upon your descendants. Take your drink along with you.”

  In the hall there was a large bronze statue of a tigress clawing the back of a water buffalo. “Art,” Boylan said. “If I had been a patriot I would have had it melted down for cannon.” He opened two enormous doors, carved with cupids and garlands. “The ballroom,” he said. He pushed at a switch on the wall.

  The room was almost as big as the high school gymnasium. A huge crystal chandelier, draped in sheets, hung from the two-story-high ceiling. Only a few of the bulbs in the chandelier were working and the light through the muffling sheets was dusty and feeble. There were dozens of sheet-draped chairs around the painted wooden walls. “My father said his mother once had seven hundred people here. The orchestra played waltzes. Twenty-five pieces. Quite a club date, eh, Rudolph? You still play at the Jack and Jill?”

  “No,” Rudolph said, “our three weeks are finished.”

  “Charming girl, that little … what’s her name?”

  “Julie.”

  “Oh, yes, Julie. She doesn’t like me, does she?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Tell her I think she’s charming, will you? For what it’s worth.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “Seven hundred people,” Boylan said. He put his arms up as though he were holding a partner and made a surprising little swooping waltz step. The whiskey sloshed over from his glass onto his hand. “I was in great demand at debutantes’ parties.” He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at his hand. “Perhaps I’ll give a ball myself. On the eve of Waterloo. You know about that, too?”

  “Yes,” Rudolph said. “Wellington’s officers. I saw Becky Sharp.” He had read Byron, too, but he refused to show off for Boylan.

  “Have you read The Charterhouse of Parma?”

  “No.”

  “Try it, when you’re a little older,” Boylan said, with a last look around the dim ballroom. “Poor Stendhal, rotting in Civitavecchia, then dying unsung, with his mortgage on posterity.”

  All right, Rudolph thought, so you’ve read a book. But he was flattered at the same time. It was a literary conversation.

  “Port Philip is my Civitavecchia,” Boylan said. They were in the hall again and Boylan switched off the chandelier. He peered into the sheeted darkness. “The haunt of owls,” he said. He left the doors open and walked toward the rear of the house. “That’s the library,” he said. He opened a door briefly. It was an enormous room, lined with books. There was a smell of leather and dust; Boylan closed the door. “Bound sets. All of Voltaire. That sort of thing. Kipling.”

  He opened another door. “The armory,” Boylan said, switching on the lights. “Everybody else would call it a gun room, but my grandfather was a large man.”

  The room was in polished mahogany, with racks of shotguns and hunting rifles locked in behind glass. Trophies lined the walls, antlers, stuffed pheasants with long brilliant tails. The guns shone with oil. Everything was meticulously dusted. Mahogany cabinets with polished brass knobs made it look like a cabin on a ship.

  “Do you shoot, Rudolph?” Boylan asked, sitting astride a leather chair, shaped like a saddle.

  “No.” Rudolph’s hands itched to touch those beautiful guns.

  “I’ll teach you, if you want,” Boylan said. “There’s an old skeet trap somewhere on the property. There’s nothing much left here, a rabbit or so, and once in a while a deer. During the season I hear the guns popping around the house. Poachers, but there’s nothing much to be done about it.” He gazed around the room. “Convenient for suicide,” he said. “Yes, this was game country. Quail, partridge, doves, deer. I haven’t fired a gun in years. Perhaps teaching you will reawaken my interest. A virile sport. Man, the hunter.” His tone showed what he thought of this description of himself. “When you’re making your way in the world it may help you one day to be known as a good gun. A boy I knew in college married into one of the biggest fortunes in North Carolina because of his keenness of eye and steadiness of hand. Cotton mills. The money, I mean. Reeves, his name was. A poor boy, but he had beautiful manners, and that helped. Would you like to be rich, Rudolph?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you plan to do after college?”

  “I don’t know,” Rudolph said. “It depends upon what comes along.”

  “Let me suggest law,” Boylan said. “This is a lawyer’s country. And it’s becoming more so each year. Didn’t your sister tell me that you were the captain
of the debating team at school?”

  “I’m on the debating team.” The mention of his sister made him wary.

  “Perhaps you and I will drive down to New York some afternoon and visit her,” Boylan said.

  As they left the gun room, Boylan said, “I’ll have Perkins set up the skeet trap this week, and order some pigeons. I’ll give you a ring when it’s ready.”

  “We don’t have a phone.”

  “Oh, yes,” Boylan said. “I believe I once tried looking it up in the directory. I’ll drop you a line. I think I remember the address.” He looked vaguely up the marble staircase. “Nothing much up there to interest you,” he said. “Bedrooms. Mostly closed off. My mother’s upstairs sitting room. Nobody sits there anymore. If you’ll excuse me a moment, I’ll go up and change for dinner. Make yourself at home. Give yourself another drink.” He looked frail going up the sweeping staircase to the other floors, which would be of no interest to his young guest, except, of course, if his young guest were interested in seeing the bed upon which his sister had lost her virginity.

  III

  Rudolph went back into the living room and watched Perkins laying a table for dinner in front of the fire. Priestly hands on chalices and goblets. Westminster Abbey. Graves of the poets. A bottle of wine poked out of a silver ice bucket. A bottle of red wine, uncorked, was on a sideboard.

  “I have made a telephone call, sir,” Perkins said. “The boots will be ready by Wednesday next.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Perkins,” Rudolph said.

  “Happy to be of service, sir.”

  Two sirs in twenty seconds. Perkins returned to his sacraments.

  Rudolph would have liked to pee, but he couldn’t mention anything like that to a man of Perkins’ stature. Perkins whispered out of the room, a Rolls-Royce of a man. Rudolph went to the window and parted the curtains a little and looked out. A fog swirled up from the valley in the darkness. He thought of his brother, Tom, at the window, peering in at a naked man with two glasses in his hands.

  Rudolph sipped at his drink. Scotch got a grip on you. Maybe one day he would come back and buy this place, Perkins and all. This was America.

  Boylan came back into the room. He had merely changed from the suede jacket to a corduroy one. He still was wearing the checked wool shirt and paisley scarf. “I didn’t take the time for a bath,” Boylan said. “I hope you don’t mind.” He went over to the bar. He had put some sort of cologne on himself. It gave a tang to the air around him.

  “The dining room is chilling,” Boylan said, glancing at the table in front of the fire. He poured himself a fresh drink. “President Taft once ate there. A dinner for sixty notables.” Boylan walked over to the piano and sat down on the bench, putting his glass beside him. He played some random chords. “Do you play the violin, by any chance, Rudolph?”

  “No.”

  “Any other instrument besides the trumpet?”

  “Not really. I can fake a tune on the piano.”

  “Pity. We could have tried some duets. I don’t think I know of any duets for piano and trumpet.” Boylan began to play. Rudolph had to admit he played well. “Sometimes one gets tired of canned music,” he said. “Do you recognize this, Rudolph?” He continued playing.

  “No.”

  “Chopin, Nocturne in D-flat. Do you know how Schumann described Chopin’s music?”

  “No.” Rudolph wished Boylan would just play and stop talking. He enjoyed the music.

  “A cannon smothered in flowers,” Boylan said. “Something like that. I think it was Schumann. If you have to describe music, I suppose that’s as good a way as any.”

  Perkins came in and said, “Dinner is served, sir.”

  Boylan stopped playing and stood up. “Rudolph, do you went to pee or wash your hands or something?”

  Finally. “Thank you, yes.”

  “Perkins,” Boylan said, “show Mr. Jordache where it is.”

  “This way, sir,” Perkins said.

  As Perkins led him out of the room, Boylan sat down at the piano again and started playing from where he left off.

  The bathroom near the front entrance was a large room with a stained-glass window, which gave the place a religious air. The toilet was like a throne. The faucets on the basin looked like gold. The strains of Chopin drifted in as Rudolph peed. He was sorry he had agreed to stay for dinner. He had the feeling that Boylan was trapping him. He was a complicated man, with his piano-playing, his waders and whiskey, his poetry and guns and his burning cross and poisoned dog. Rudolph didn’t feel equipped to handle him. He could understand now why Gretchen had felt she had to get away from him.

  When he went out into the hall again, he had to fight down the impulse to sneak out through the front door. If he could have gotten his boots without anyone’s seeing him, he might have done it. But he couldn’t see himself walking down to the bus stop and getting on it in stockinged feet. Boylan’s socks.

  He went back into the living room, enjoying Chopin. Boylan stopped playing and stood up and touched Rudolph’s elbow formally as he led him to the table, where Perkins was pouring the white wine. The trout lay in a deep copper dish, in a kind of broth. Rudolph was disappointed. He liked trout fried.

  They sat down facing each other. There were three glasses in front of each place, and a lot of cutlery. Perkins transferred the trout to a silver platter, with small boiled potatoes on it. Perkins stood over Rudolph and Rudolph served himself cautiously, uneasy with all the implements and determined to seem at ease.

  “Truit au bleu,” Boylan said. Rudolph was pleased to note that he had a bad accent, or at least different from Miss Lenaut’s. “Cook does it quite well.”

  “Blue trout,” Rudolph said. “That’s the way they cook it in France.” He couldn’t help showing off on this one subject, after Boylan’s phoney accent.

  “How do you know?” Boylan looked at him questioningly. “Have you ever been in France?”

  “No. In school. We get a little French newspaper for students every week and there was an article about cooking.”

  Boylan helped himself generously. He had a good appetite. “Tu parles français?”

  Rudolph made a note of the tu. In an old French grammar he had once looked through, the student was instructed that the second-person singular was to be used for servants, children, non-commissioned soldiers, and social inferiors.

  “Un petit peu.”

  “Moi, j’étais en France quand j’étais jeune,” Boylan said, the accept rasping. “Avec mes parents. J’ai veçu mon premier amour à Paris. Quand c’était? Mille neuf cent vingt-huit, vingt-neuf. Comment s’appelait-elle? Anne? Annette? Elle était délicieuse.”

  She might have been delicious, Boylan’s first love, Rudolph thought, tasting the profound joys of snobbery, but she sure didn’t work on his accent.

  “Tu as l’envie d’y aller? En France?” Boylan asked, testing him. He had said he could speak a little French and Boylan wasn’t going to let him get away with it unchallenged.

  “J’irai, je suis sûr,” Rudolph said, remembering just how Miss Lenaut would have said it. He was a good mimic. “Peut-être après l’Université. Quad le pays sera rétabli.”

  “Good God,” Boylan said, “you speak like a Frenchman.”

  “I had a good teacher.” Last bouquet for poor Miss Lenaut, French cunt.

  “Maybe you ought to try for the Foreign Service,” Boylan said. “We could use some bright young men. But be careful to marry a rich wife first. The pay is dreadful.” He sipped at the wine. “I thought I wanted to live there. In Paris. My family thought differently. Is my accent rusty?”

  “Awful,” Rudolph said.

  Boylan laughed. “The honesty of youth.” He grew more serious. “Or maybe it’s a family characteristic. Your sister matches you.”

  They ate in silence for awhile, Rudolph carefully watching how Boylan used his knife and fork. A good gun, with beautiful manners.

  Perkins took away the fish dishes and served s
ome chops and baked potatoes and green peas. Rudolph wished he could send his mother up for some lessons in the kitchen here. Perkins presided over the red wine, rather than poured it. Rudolph wondered what Perkins knew about Gretchen. Everything, probably. Who made the bed in the room upstairs?

  “Has she found a job yet?” Boylan asked, as though there had been no interruption in the conversation. “She told me she intended to be an actress.”

  “I don’t know,” Rudolph said, keeping all information to himself. “I haven’t heard from her recently.”

  “Do you think she’ll be successful?” Boylan asked. “Have you ever seen her act?”

  “Once. Only in a school play.” Shakespeare battered and reeling, in homemade costumes. The seven ages of man. The boy who played Jacques nervously pushing at his beard, to make sure it was still pasted on. Gretchen looking strange and beautiful and not at all like a young man in her tights, but saying the words clearly.

  “Does she have talent?” Boylan asked.

  “I think so. She has something. Whenever she came onto the stage everybody stopped coughing.”

  Boylan laughed. Rudolph realized that he had sounded like a kid. “What I mean …” He tried to regain lost ground. “Is, well, you could feel the audience focusing on her, being for her, in a way that they weren’t for any of the other actors. I guess that’s talent.”

  “It certainly is.” Boylan nodded. “She’s an extraordinarily beautiful girl. I don’t suppose a brother would notice that.”

  “Oh, I noticed it,” Rudolph said.

  “Did you?” Boylan said absently. He no longer seemed interested. He waved for Perkins to take the dishes away and got up and went over to a big phonograph and put on the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, very loud, so that they didn’t talk for the rest of the meal. Five kinds of cheese on a wooden platter. Salad. A plum tart. No wonder Boylan had a paunch.

  Rudolph looked surreptitiously at his watch. If he could get out of there early enough maybe he could catch Julie. It would be too late for the movies, but maybe he could make up to her, anyway, for standing her up.

  After dinner, Boylan had a brandy with the demitasse, and put on a symphony. Rudolph was tired from the long afternoon’s fishing. The two glasses of wine he had drunk made him feel blurred and sleepy. The loud music was crushing him. Boylan was polite, but distant. Rudolph had the feeling the man was disappointed in him because he hadn’t opened up about Gretchen.