by Irwin Shaw
Boylan sat sunk in a deep chair, his eyes almost closed, concentrating on the music, occasionally taking a sip of the brandy. He might just as well have been alone, Rudolph thought resentfully, or with his Irish wolfhound. They probably had some lively evenings here together, before the neighbors put out the poison. Maybe he’s getting ready to offer me a position as his dog.
There was a scratch on the record now and Boylan made an irritated gesture as the clicking recurred. He stood up and turned off the machine. “I’m sorry about that,” he said to Rudolph. “The revenge of the machine age on Schumann. Shall I take you on down to town now?”
“Thank you.” Rudolph stood up, gratefully.
Boylan looked down at Rudolph’s feet. “Oh,” he said. “You can’t go like that, can you?”
“If you’ll give me my boots …”
“I’m sure they’re still soaking wet inside,” Boylan said. “Wait here a minute. I’ll find something for you.” He went out of the room and up the stairway.
Rudolph took a long look around the room. How good it was to be rich. He wondered if he ever was going to see the room again. Thomas had seen it once, although he had not been invited in. He came down into the living-room bare-assed, with his thing hanging down to his knees, he’s a regular horse, and made two whiskies and called up the stairs, “Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?”
Now that he had had a chance to listen to Boylan, Rudolph recognized that Tom’s caricature of the man’s voice had been an accurate one. He had caught the educated flattening out on the “there,” and the curious way he had of making questions not sound like questions.
Rudolph shook his head. What could Gretchen have been thinking of? “I liked it.” He heard her voice again in the Port Philip House bar. “I liked it better than anything that had ever happened to me.”
He walked restlessly around the room. He looked at the album of the symphony that Boylan had cut off. Schumann’s Third, the Rhenish Symphony. Well, at least he had learned something today. He would recognize it when he heard it again. He picked up a silver cigarette lighter a foot long and examined it. There was a monogram on it. T.B. Purposely expensive gadgets for doing things that cost nothing to the poor. He flicked it open. It spouted flame. The burning cross. Enemies. He heard Boylan’s footsteps on the marble floor in the hall and hurriedly doused the flame and put the lighter down.
Boylan came into the room. He was carrying a little overnight bag and a pair of mahogany-colored moccasins. “Try these on, Rudolph,” he said.
The moccasins were old but beautifully polished, with thick soles and leather tassels. They fit Rudolph perfectly. “Ah,” Boylan said, “you have narrow feet, too.” One aristocrat to another.
“I’ll bring them back in a day or two,” Rudolph said, as they started out.
“Don’t bother,” Boylan said. “They’re old as the hills. I never wear them.”
Rudolph’s rod, neatly folded, and the creel and net were on the back seat of the Buick. The fireman’s boots, still damp inside, were on the floor behind the front seat. Boylan swung the overnight bag onto the back seat and they got into the car. Rudolph had retrieved the old felt hat from the table in the hallway, but didn’t have the courage to put it on with Perkins watching him. Boylan turned on the radio in the car, jazz from New York, so they didn’t talk all the way to Vanderhoff Street. When Boylan stopped the Buick in front of the bakery, he turned the radio off.
“Here we are,” he said.
“Thank you very much,” Rudolph said. “For everything.”
“Thank you, Rudolph,” Boylan said. “It’s been a refreshing day.” As Rudolph put his hand on the handle of the car door, Boylan reached out and held his arm lightly.
“Ah, I wonder if you’d do me a favor.”
“Of course.”
“In that bag back there …” Boylan twisted a little, holding onto the wheel to indicate the presence of the leather overnight bag behind him. “… there’s something I’d particularly like your sister to have. Do you think you could get it to her?”
“Well,” Rudolph said, “I don’t know when I’ll be seeing her.”
“There’s no hurry,” Boylan said. “It’s something I know she wants, but it’s not pressing.”
“Okay,” Rudolph said. It wasn’t like giving away Gretchen’s address, or anything like that. “Sure. When I happen to see her.”
“That’s very good of you, Rudolph.” He looked at his watch. “It’s not very late. Would you like to come and have a drink with me someplace? I don’t fancy going back to that dreary house alone for the moment.”
“I have to get up awfully early in the morning,” Rudolph said. He wanted to be by himself now, to sort out his impressions of Boylan, to assess the dangers and the possible advantages in knowing the man. He didn’t want to be loaded with any new impressions, Boylan drunk, Boylan with strangers at a bar, Boylan perhaps flirting with a woman, or making a pass at a sailor. The idea was sudden. Boylan, the fairy? Making a pass at him. The delicate hands on the piano, the gifts, the clothes that were like costumes, the unobtrusive touching.
“What’s early?” Boylan asked.
“Five,” Rudolph said.
“Good God!” Boylan said. “What in the world does anyone do up at five o’clock in the morning?”
“I deliver rolls on a bicycle for my father,” Rudolph said.
“I see,” Boylan said. “I suppose somebody has to deliver rolls.” He laughed. “You just don’t seem like a roll-deliverer.”
“It’s not my main function in life,” Rudolph said.
“What is your main function in life, Rudolph?” Absently, Boylan switched off the headlights. It was dark in the car because they were directly under a lamppost. There was no light from the cellar. His father hadn’t begun his night’s work. If his father were asked, would he say that his main function in life was baking rolls?
“I don’t know yet,” Rudolph said. Then aggressively, “What’s yours?”
“I don’t know,” Boylan said. “Yet. Have you any idea?”
“No.” The man was split into a million different parts. Rudolph felt that if he were older he might be able to assemble Boylan into one coherent pattern.
“A pity,” Boylan said. “I thought perhaps the clear eyes of youth would see things in me I am incapable of seeing in myself.”
“How old are you, anyway?” Rudolph asked. Boylan spoke so much of the past that he seemed to stretch far, far back, to the Indians, to President Taft, to a greener geography. It occurred to Rudolph that Boylan was not old so much as old-fashioned.
“What would you guess, Rudolph?” Boylan asked, his tone light.
“I don’t know.” Rudolph hesitated. Everybody over thirty-five seemed almost the same age to Rudolph, except for real tottering graybeards, hunching along on canes. He was never surprised when he read in the papers that somebody thirty-five had died. “Fifty?”
Boylan laughed. “Your sister was kinder,” he said. “Much kinder.”
Everything comes back to Gretchen, Rudolph thought. He just can’t stop talking about her. “Well,” Rudolph said, “how old are you?”
“Forty,” Boylan said. “Just turned forty. With all my life still ahead of me, alas,” he said ironically.
You have to be damn sure of yourself, Rudolph thought, to use a word like “alas.”
“What do you think you’ll be like when you’re forty, Rudolph?” Boylan asked lightly. “Like me?”
“No,” Rudolph said.
“Wise young man. You wouldn’t want to be like me, I take it?”
“No.” He’d asked for it and he was going to get it.
“Why not? Do you disapprove of me?”
“A little,” Rudolph said. “But that’s not why.”
“What’s the reason you don’t want to be like me?”
“I’d like to have a room like yours,” Rudolph said. “I’d like to have money like you and
books like you and a car like you. I’d like to be able to talk like you—some of the time, anyway—and know as much as you and go to Europe like you …”
“But …”
“You’re lonesome,” Rudolph said. “You’re sad.”
“And when you’re forty you do not intend to be lonesome and sad?”
“No.”
“You will have a loving, beautiful wife,” Boylan said, sounding like someone reciting a fairy story for children, “waiting at the station each evening to drive you home after your day’s work in the city, and handsome, bright children who will love you and whom you will see off to the next war, and …”
“I don’t expect to marry,” Rudolph said.
“Ah,” Boylan said. “You have studied the institution. I was different. I expected to marry. And I married. I expected to fill that echoing castle on the hill with the laughter of little children. As you may have noticed, I am not married and there is very little laughter of any kind in that house. Still, it isn’t too late …” He took out a cigarette from his gold case and used his lighter. In its light his hair looked gray, his face deeply lined with shadows. “Did your sister tell you I asked her to marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Did she tell you why she wouldn’t?”
“No.”
“Did she tell you she was my mistress?”
The word seemed dirty to Rudolph. If Boylan had said, “Did she tell you that I fucked her?” it would have made him resent Boylan less. It would have made her seem less like another of Theodore Boylan’s possessions. “Yes,” he said. “She told me.”
“Do you disapprove?” Boylan’s tone was harsh.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You’re too old for her.”
“That’s my loss,” Boylan said. “Not hers. When you see her, will you tell her the offer still holds?”
“No.”
Boylan seemed not to have noticed the no. “Tell her,” he said, “that I cannot bear to lie in my bed without her. I’ll tell you a secret, Rudolph. I wasn’t at Jack and Jill’s that night by accident. I never go to places like that, as you can well imagine. I made it a point to find out where you were playing. I followed you out to my car. I was looking for Gretchen. Maybe I had some foolish notion I could find something of the sister in the brother.”
“I’d better go to sleep,” Rudolph said cruelly. He opened the car door and got out. He reached into the back for his rod and creel and net and the fireman’s boots. He put on the ridiculous felt hat. Boylan sat smoking, squinting through the smoke at the straight line of lights of Vanderhoff Street, like a lesson in drawing class in perspective. Parallel to infinity, where lines meet or do not meet, as the case may be.
“Don’t forget the bag, please,” Boylan said.
Rudolph took the bag. It was very light, as though there were nothing in it. Some new scientific infernal machine.
“Thank you for your delightful visit,” Boylan said. “I’m afraid I got all the best of it. Just for the price of an old pair of torn waders that I was never going to use anymore anyway. I’ll let you know when the skeet trap is up. Roll on, young unmarried roll-deliverer. I’ll think of you at five A.M.” He started the motor of the car and drove off abruptly.
Rudolph watched the red tail lights speeding off toward infinity, twin signals saying Stop! then unlocked the door next to the bakery and lugged all the stuff into the hall. He turned on the light and looked at the bag. The lock was open. The key, on a leather thong, hung from the handle. He opened the bag, hoping that his mother hadn’t heard him come in.
There was a bright-red dress lying in a careless heap in the bag. Rudolph picked it up and studied it. It was lacy and cut low in front, he could tell that. He tried to imagine his sister wearing it, showing practically everything.
“Rudolph?” It was his mother’s voice, from above, querulous.
“Yes, Ma.” He turned the light out hurriedly. “I’ll be right back. I forgot to get the evening papers.” He picked up the bag and got out of the hallway before his mother could come down. He didn’t know whom he was protecting, himself or Gretchen or his mother.
He hurried over to Buddy Westerman’s, on the next block. Luckily, there were still lights on. The Westerman house was big and old. Buddy’s mother let the River Five practice in the basement. Rudolph whistled. Buddy’s mother was a jolly, easy-going woman who liked boys and served them all milk and cake after the practice sessions, but he didn’t want to have to talk to her tonight. He took the key of the bag off the handle and locked the bag and put the key in his pocket.
After awhile, Buddy came out. “Hey,” he said, “what’s up? This time of night?”
“Listen, Buddy,” Rudolph said, “will you hold onto this for me for a couple of days?” He thrust the bag at Buddy. “It’s a present for Julie and I don’t want my old lady to see it.” Inspired lie. Everybody knew what misers the Jordaches were. Buddy also knew that Mrs. Jordache didn’t like the idea of Rudolph going around with girls.
“Okay,” Buddy said carelessly. He took the bag.
“I’ll do as much for you some day,” Rudolph said.
“Just don’t play flat on ‘Stardust.’” Buddy was the best musician in the band and that gave him the right to say things like that. “Any other little thing?”
“No.”
“By the way,” Buddy said, “I saw Julie tonight. I was passing the movie. She was going in. With a guy I didn’t know. An old guy. Twenty-two, at least. I asked her where you were and she said she didn’t know and didn’t care.”
“Pal,” Rudolph said.
“No use living your life in total ignorance,” Buddy said. “See you tomorrow.” He went in, carrying the bag.
Rudolph went down to the Ace Diner to buy the evening paper. He sat at the counter reading the sports page while drinking a glass of milk and eating two doughnuts. The Giants had won that afternoon. Other than that, Rudolph couldn’t decide whether it had been a good day or a bad day.
IV
Thomas kissed Clothilde good night. She was lying under the covers, with her hair spread on the pillow. She had turned on the lamp so that he could find his way out without bumping into anything. There was the soft glow of a smile as she touched his cheek. He opened the door without a sound and closed it behind him. The crack of light under the door disappeared as Clothilde switched off the lamp.
He went through the kitchen and out into the hallway and mounted the dark steps carefully, carrying his sweater. There was no sound from Uncle Harold’s and Tante Elsa’s bedroom. Usually, there was snoring that shook the house. Uncle Harold must be sleeping on his side tonight. Nobody had died in Saratoga. Uncle Harold had lost three pounds, drinking the waters.
Thomas climbed the narrow steps to the attic and opened the door to his room and put on the light. Uncle Harold was sitting there in striped pajamas, on the bed.
Uncle Harold smiled at him peculiarly, blinking in the light. Four of his front upper teeth were missing. He had a bridge that he took out at night.
“Good evening, Tommy,” Uncle Harold said. His speech was gappy, without the bridge.
“Hi, Uncle Harold,” Thomas said. He was conscious that his hair was mussed and that he smelled of Clothilde. He didn’t know what Uncle Harold was doing there. It was the first time he had come to the room. Thomas knew he had to be careful about what he said and how he said it.
“It is quite late, isn’t it, Tommy?” Uncle Harold said. He was keeping his voice down.
“Is it?” Thomas said. “I haven’t looked at a clock.” He stood near the door, away from Uncle Harold. The room was bare. He had few possessions. A book from the library lay on the dresser. Riders of the Purple Sage. The lady at the library had said he would like it. Uncle Harold filled the little room in his striped pajamas, making the bed sag in the middle, where he sat on it.
“It is nearly one o’clock,” Uncle Harold said. He sprayed because of the missing teeth. “Fo
r a growing boy who has to get up early and do a day’s work. A growing boy needs his sleep, Tommy.”
“I didn’t realize how late it was,” Thomas said.
“What amusements have you found to keep a young boy out till one o’clock in the morning, Tommy?”
“I was just wandering around town.”
“The bright lights,” Uncle Harold said. “The bright lights of Elysium, Ohio.”
Thomas faked a yawn and stretched. He threw his sweater over the one chair of the room. “I’m sleepy now,” he said. “I better get to bed fast.”
“Tommy,” Uncle Harold said, in that wet whisper, “you have a good home here, hey?”
“Sure.”
“You eat good here, just like the family, hey?”
“I eat all right.”
“You have a good home, a good roof over your head.” The “roof” came out “woof,” through the gap.
“I’m not complaining.” Thomas kept his voice low. No sense in waking Tante Elsa and getting her in on the conference.
“You live in a nice clean house,” Uncle Harold persisted. “Everybody treats you like a member of the family. You have your own personal bicycle.”
“I’m not complaining.”
“You have a good job. You are paid a man’s wages. You are learning a trade. There will be unemployment now, millions of men coming home, but for the mechanic, there is always a job. Am I mistaken?”
“I can take care of myself,” Thomas said.
“You can take care of yourself,” Uncle Harold said. “I hope so. You are my flesh and blood. I took you in without a question, didn’t I, when your father called? You were in trouble, Tommy, in Port Philip, weren’t you, and Uncle Harold asked no questions, he and Tante Elsa took you in.”
“There was a little fuss back home,” Thomas said. “Nothing serious.”
“I ask no questions.” Magnanimously, Uncle Harold waved away all thought of interrogation. His pajamas opened. There was a view of plump, pink rolls of beer-and-sausage belly over the drawstrings of the pajama pants. “In return for this, what do I ask? Impossibilities? Gratitude? No. A little thing. That a young boy should behave himself properly, that he should be in bed at a reasonable hour. His own bed, Tommy.”