Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  Then he saw a big man in a workman’s cap and a mackinaw limping slowly toward him on the platform. What a way to dress. Harold was glad it was dark and there were so few people around. He must have been crazy that time in Port Philip when he’d invited Axel to come in with him.

  “All right, I’m here,” Axel said. He didn’t shake hands.

  “Hello, Axel,” Harold said. “I was beginning to worry you wouldn’t come. How much money you bring with you?”

  “Five thousand dollars,” Axel said.

  “I hope it’s enough,” Harold said.

  “It better be enough,” Axel said flatly. “There isn’t any more.” He looked old, Harold thought, and sick. His limp was worse than Harold remembered.

  They walked together through the station toward Harold’s car.

  “If you want to see Tommy,” Harold said, “you’ll have to wait till tomorrow. They don’t let anybody in after six o’clock.”

  “I don’t want to see the sonofabitch,” Axel said.

  Harold couldn’t help feeling that it was wrong to call your own child a sonofabitch, even under the circumstances, but he didn’t say anything.

  “You have your dinner, Axel?” he asked. “Elsa can find something in the icebox.”

  “Let’s not waste time,” Axel said. “Who do I have to pay off?”

  “The father, Abraham Chase. He’s one of the biggest men in town. Your son had to pick somebody like that,” Harold said aggrievedly. “A girl in a factory wasn’t good enough for him.”

  “Is he Jewish?” Axel asked, as they got into the car.

  “What?” Harold asked, irritatedly. That would be great, that would help a lot, if Axel turned out to be a Nazi, along with everything else.

  “Why should he be Jewish?”

  “Abraham,” Axel said.

  “No. It’s one of the oldest families in town. They own practically everything. You’ll be lucky if he takes your money.”

  “Yeah,” Axel said. “Lucky.”

  Harold backed out of the parking lot and started toward the Chase house. It was in the good section of town, near the Jordache house. “I talked to him on the phone,” Harold said. “I told him you were coming. He sounded out of his mind. I don’t blame him. It’s bad enough to come home and find one daughter pregnant. But both of them! And they’re twins, besides.”

  “They can get a wholesale rate on baby clothes.” Axel laughed. The laughter sounded like a tin pitcher rattling against a sink. “Twins. He had a busy season, didn’t he, Thomas?”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Harold said. “He’s beat up a dozen people since he came here, besides.” The stories that had reached Harold’s ears had been exaggerated as they passed along the town’s chain of gossip. “It’s a wonder he hasn’t been in jail before this. Everybody’s scared of him. It’s the most natural thing in the world that something like this comes up, they pin it on him. But who suffers? Me. And Elsa.”

  Axel ignored his brother’s suffering and the suffering of his brother’s wife. “How do they know it was my kid?”

  “The twins told their father.” Harold slowed the car down. He was in no hurry to confront Abraham Chase. “They’ve done it with every boy in town, the twins, and plenty of the men too, everybody knows that, but when it comes to naming names, naturally the first name anybody’d pick would be your Tommy. They’re not going to say it was the nice boy next door or Joe Kuntz, the policeman, or the boy from Harvard whose parents play bridge with the Chases twice a week. They pick the black sheep. Those two little bitohes’re smart. And your son had to tell them he was nineteen years old. Big shot. Under eighteen, my lawyer says, you can’t be held for statutory rape.”

  “So what’s the fuss?” Axel said. “I have his birth certificate.”

  “Don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” Harold said. “Mr. Chase swears he can have him locked up until he’s twenty-one as a juvenile delinquent. And he can. That’s four years. And don’t think Tommy is making it any easier for himself telling the cops he knows twenty fellows personally who’ve been in there with those girls and giving a list of names. It just makes everybody sorer, that’s all. It gives the whole town a bad name and they’ll make him pay for it. And me and Elsa. That’s my shop,” he said automatically. They were passing the showroom. “I’ll be lucky if they don’t put a brick through the window.”

  “You friendly with Abraham?”

  “I do some business with Mr. Chase,” Harold said. “I sold him a Lincoln. I can’t say we move in the same circles. He’s on the waiting list for a new Mercury. I could sell a hundred cars tomorrow if I could get delivery. The goddamn war. You don’t know what I’ve been going through for four years, just to keep my head above water. And now, just when I begin to see a little daylight, this has to come along.”

  “You don’t seem to be doing so bad,” Axel said.

  “You have to keep up appearances.” One thing was sure. If Axel thought for a minute that he was going to borrow any money, he was barking up the wrong tree.

  “How do I know Abraham won’t take my money and the kid’ll go to jail just the same?”

  “Mr. Chase is a man of his word,” Harold said. He had a sudden horrible fear that Axel was going to call Mr. Chase Abraham in his own house. “He’s got this town in his pocket. The cops, the judge, the mayor, the party organization. If he tells you the case’ll be dropped, it’ll be dropped.”

  “It better be,” Axel said. There was a threat in his voice and Harold remembered what a rough boy his brother had been when they had both been young back home in Germany. Axel had gone off to war and had killed people. He was not a civilized man, with that harsh, sick face and that hatred of everybody and everything, including his own flesh and blood. Harold wondered if maybe he hadn’t made a mistake calling his brother and telling him to come to Elysium. Maybe it would have been better if he had just tried to handle it himself. But he had known it was going to cost money and he’d panicked. The heartburn gripped him again as they drove up to the white house, with big pillars, where the Chase family lived.

  The two men went up the walk to the front door and Harold rang the bell. He took off his hat and held it across his chest, almost as if he were saluting the flag. Axel kept his cap on.

  The door opened and a maid stood there. Mr. Chase was expecting them, she said.

  V

  “They take millions of clean-limbed young boys.” The poacher was chewing on a wad of tobacco and spitting into a tin can on the floor beside him, as he talked. “Clean-limbed boys, and send them off to kill and maim each other with inhuman instruments of destruction and they congratulate themselves and hang their chests with medals and parade down the main thoroughfares of the city and they put me in jail and mark me as an enemy of society because every once in awhile I drift out into the woodlands of America and shoot myself a choice buck with an old 1910 Winchester 22.” The poacher originally had come from the Ozarks and he spoke like a country preacher.

  There were four bunks in the cell, two on one side and two on the other. The poacher, whose name was Dave, was lying in his bunk and Thomas was lying in the lower bunk on the other side of the cell. Dave smelled rather ripe and Thomas preferred to keep some space between them. It was two days now that they had been in the cell together and Thomas knew quite a bit about Dave, who lived alone in a shack near the lake and appreciated a permanent audience. Dave had come down from the Ozarks to work in the automobile industry in Detroit and after fifteen years of it had had enough. “I was in there in the paint department,” Dave said, “in the stink of chemicals and the heat of a furnace, devoting my numbered days on this earth to spraying paint on cars for people who didn’t mean a fart in hell to me to ride around in and the spring came and the leaves burgeoned and the summer came and the crops were taken in and the autumn came and city folk in funny caps with hunting licenses and fancy guns were out in the woods shooting the deer and I might just as well have been down in the blackest pit,
chained to a post, for all the difference the seasons meant to me. I’m a mountain man and I pined away and one day I saw where my path laid straight before me and I took to the woods. A man has to be careful with his numbered days on this earth, son. There is a conspiracy to chain every living child of man to an iron post in a black pit, and you mustn’t be fooled because they paint it all the bright colors of the rainbow and pull all sorts of devilish tricks to make you think that it isn’t a pit, it isn’t an iron post, it isn’t a chain. The president of General Motors, up high in his glorious office, was just as much chained, just as deep down in the pit as me coughing up violet in the paint shop.”

  Dave spat tobacco juice into the tin can on the floor next to his bunk. The gob of juice made a musical sound against the side of the can.

  “I don’t ask for much,” Dave said, “just an occasional buck and the smell of woodsy air in my nostrils. I don’t blame nobody for putting me in jail from time to time, that’s their profession just like hunting is my profession, and I don’t begrudge ’em the coupla months here and there I spend behind bars. Somehow, they always seem to catch me just as the winter months’re drawing on, so it’s really no hardship. But nothing they say can make me feel like a criminal, no sir. I’m an American out in the American forest livin’ off American deer. They want to make all sorts of rules and regulations for those city folk in the gun clubs, that’s all right by me. They don’t apply, they just don’t apply.”

  He spat again. “There’s just one thing that makes me a mite forlorn—and that’s the hypocrisy. Why, once the very judge that condemned me had eaten venison I shot just the week before and ate it right at the dining-room table in his own house and it was bought with his own money by his own cook. The hypocrisy is the canker in the soul of the American people. Why, just look at your case, son. What did you do? You did what everybody knows he’d do if he got the chance—you were offered a nice bit of juicy tail and you took it. At your age, son, the loins’re raging, and all the rules in the book don’t make a never-no-mind. I bet that the very judge who is going to put you away for years of your young life, if he got the offer from those two little plump-assed young girls you told me about, if that same judge got the offer and he was certain sure nobody was around to see him, he’d go cavorting with those plump-assed young girls like a crazy goat. Like the judge who ate my venison. Statutory rape.” Dave spat in disgust. “Old man’s rules. What does a little twitching young tail know about statutory? It’s the hypocrisy, son, the hypocrisy, son, the hypocrisy everywhere.”

  Joe Kuntz appeared at the cell door and opened it. “Come on out, Jordache,” Kuntz said. Ever since Thomas had told the lawyer Uncle Harold had got for him that Joe Kuntz had been in there with the twins, too, and Kuntz had heard the news, the policeman had not been markedly friendly. He was married, with three kids.

  Axel Jordache was waiting in Horvath’s office with Uncle Harold and the lawyer. The lawyer was a worried-looking young man with a bad complexion and thick glasses. Thomas had never seen his father looking so bad, not even the day he hit him.

  He waited for his father to say hello, but Axel kept quiet, so he kept quiet, too.

  “Thomas,” the lawyer said, “I am happy to say that everything has been arranged to everybody’s satisfaction.”

  “Yeah,” Horvath said behind the desk. He didn’t sound terribly satisfied.

  “You’re a free man, Thomas,” the lawyer said.

  Thomas looked doubtfully at the five men in the room. There were no signs of celebration on any of the faces. “You mean I can just walk out of this joint?” Thomas asked.

  “Exactly,” the lawyer said.

  “Let’s go,” Axel Jordache said. “I wasted enough time in this goddamn town as it is.” He turned abruptly and limped out.

  Thomas had to make himself walk slowly after his father. He wanted to cut and run for it, before anybody changed his mind.

  Outside it was sunny late afternoon. There were no windows in the cell and you couldn’t tell what the weather was from in there. Uncle Harold walked on one side of Thomas and his father on the other. It was another kind of arrest.

  They got into Uncle Harold’s car. Axel sat up in front and Thomas had the back seat all to himself. He didn’t ask any questions.

  “I bought your way out, in case you’re curious,” his father said. His father didn’t turn in the seat, but talked straight ahead, at the windshield. “Five thousand dollars to that Shylock for his pound of flesh. I guess you got the highest-priced lay in history. I hope it was worth it.”

  Thomas wanted to say he was sorry, that somehow, some day, he’d make it up to his father. But the words wouldn’t come out.

  “Don’t think I did it for you,” his father said, “or for Harold here …”

  “Now, Axel,” Harold began.

  “You could both die tonight and it wouldn’t spoil my appetite,” his father said. “I did it for the only member of the family that’s worth a damn—your brother Rudolph. I’m not going to have him start out in life with a convict brother hanging around his neck. But this is the last time I ever want to see you or hear from you. I’m taking the train home now and that’s the end of you and me. Do you get that?”

  “I get it,” Thomas said flatly.

  “You’re getting out of town, too,” Uncle Harold said to Thomas. His voice was quivering. “That’s the condition Mr. Chase made and I couldn’t agree with him more. I’ll take you home and you pack your things and you don’t sleep another night in my house. Do you get that too?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Thomas said. They could have the town. Who needed it?

  There was no more talking. When Uncle Harold stopped the car at the station, his father got out without a word and limped away, leaving the door of the car open. Uncle Harold had to reach over and slam it shut.

  In the bare room under the roof, there was a small, battered valise on his bed. Thomas recognized it. It belonged to Clothilde. The bed was stripped down and the mattress was rolled up, as though Tante Elsa were afraid that he might sneak in a few minutes’ sleep on it. Tante Elsa and the girls were not in the house. To avoid contamination, Tante Elsa had taken the girls to the movies for the afternoon.

  Thomas threw his things into the bag quickly. There wasn’t much. A few shirts and underwear and socks, an extra pair of shoes and a sweater. He took off the garage uniform that he had been arrested in and put on the new gray suit Tante Elsa had bought for him on his birthday.

  He looked around the room. The book from the library, the Riders of the Purple Sage, was lying on a table. They kept sending postcards saying he was overdue and they were charging him two cents a day. He must owe them a good ten bucks by now. He threw the book into the valise. Remember Elysium, Ohio.

  He closed the valise and went downstairs and into the kitchen. He wanted to thank Clothilde for the valise. But she wasn’t in the kitchen.

  He went out through the hallway. Uncle Harold was eating a big piece of apple pie in the dining room, standing up. His hands were trembling as he picked up the pie. Uncle Harold always ate when he was nervous. “If you’re looking for Clothilde,” Uncle Harold said, “save your energy. I sent her to the movies with Tante Elsa and the girls.”

  Well, Thomas thought, at least she got a movie out of me. One good thing.

  “You got any money?” Uncle Harold asked. “I don’t want you to be picked up for vagrancy and go through the whole thing again.” He wolfed at his apple pie.

  “I have money,” Thomas said. He had twenty-one dollars and change.

  “Good. Give me your key.”

  Thomas took the key out of his pocket and put it on the table. He had an impulse to push the rest of the pie in Uncle Harold’s face, but what good would that do?

  They stared at each other. A piece of pie dribbled down Uncle Harold’s chin.

  “Kiss Clothilde for me,” Thomas said, and went out the door, carrying Clothilde’s valise.

  He walked to the station and
bought twenty dollars’ worth of transportation away from Elysium, Ohio.

  Chapter 10

  The cat stared at him from its corner, malevolent and unblinking. Its enemies were interchangeable. Whoever came down in the cellar each night, to work in the hammering heat, was regarded by the cat with the same hatred, the same topaz lust for death in his yellow eyes. The cat’s night-long cold stare disconcerted Rudolph as he put the rolls in the oven. It made him uneasy when he was not liked, even by an animal. He had tried to win the cat over with an extra bowl of milk, with caresses, with a “Nice, kitty,” here and there, but the cat knew it wasn’t a nice kitty and lay there, it’s tail twisting, contemplating murder.

  Axel had been gone for three days now. There had been no word from Elysium and there was no telling how many more nights Rudolph would have to come down into the cellar and face the heat, the flour dust, the arm-numbing lifting and shoving and hauling. He didn’t know how his father could stand it. Year in and year out. After only three nights, Rudolph was almost completely worn out, with purplish bruises of fatigue under his eyes and his face haggard. And he still had to take the bicycle and deliver the rolls in the morning. And school after that. There was an important exam in math the next day and he hadn’t been able to prepare for it and he never was all that good in math anyway.

  Sweating, fighting the greasy, huge trays, the flour smearing chalkily over his bare arms and face, after three nights he was his father’s ghost, staggering under the punishment his father had endured six thousand nights. Good son, faithful son. Shit on that. Bitterly, he regretted the fact that he had come down to help his father on holidays, when there was a rush on, and had learned, approximately, his father’s profession. Thomas had been wiser. Let the family go to hell. Whatever trouble Thomas was in now (Axel had not told Rudolph what it was when he got the telegram from Elysium), Thomas just had to be better off than the dutiful son in the blazing cellar.