Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  As for Gretchen, just walking across a stage three times a night for sixty dollars a week …

  In the last three nights Rudolph had figured out approximately how much the Jordache Bakery earned. About sixty dollars a week, on the average, after rent and expenses, and the thirty dollars for salary for the widow who took care of the shop now that his mother was sick.

  He remembered the bill for more than twelve dollars that Boylan had paid in the restaurant in New York, and all the money for drinks that one night.

  Boylan had gone down to Hobe Sound, in Florida, for two months. Now that the war was over, life was returning to normal.

  He put another tray of rolls into the oven.

  He was awakened by the sound of voices. He groaned. Five o’clock so soon? He got out of bed mechanically. He noticed that he was dressed. He shook his head stupidly. How could he be dressed? He looked blearily at his watch. A quarter to six. Then he remembered. It wasn’t morning. He had come home from school and thrown himself on the bed to get some rest before the night’s work. He heard his father’s voice. His father must have come home while he was asleep. His first thought was selfish. I don’t have to work tonight.

  He lay down again.

  The two voices, the one high and excited, the other low and explaining, came up from downstairs. His father and mother were fighting. He was too tired to care. But he couldn’t go to sleep, with all that noise downstairs, so he listened.

  Mary Pease Jordache was moving out. She wasn’t moving far. Just to Gretchen’s room across the hall. She stumbled back and forth, her legs hurting from the phlebitis, carrying dresses, underwear, sweaters, shoes, combs, photographs of the children when they were young, Rudolph’s scrapbook, a sewing kit, Gone With the Wind, a rumpled package of Camels, old handbags. Everything she owned, getting it out of the room she had hated for twenty years and piling everything on Gretchen’s unmade bed, raising a small cloud of dust every time she came in with a new load in her arms.

  She kept up a surging monologue as she went back and forth. “I’m through with this room. Twenty years too late, but I’m finally through. No one shows any consideration for me, I’m going to go my own way from now on. I am not going to be at the disposal of a fool. A man who travels halfway across the country to give away five thousand dollars to a perfect stranger. The savings of a lifetime. My lifetime. I slaved, day in and day out, I denied myself everything, I became an old woman, to save that money. My son was going to go to college, my son was going to be a gentleman. But now he’s not going anywhere, he’s not going to be anything, my brilliant husband had to show what a great man he was—handing out thousand dollar bills to millionaires in Ohio, so that his precious brother and his fat wife wouldn’t be embarrassed when they went to the opera in their Lincoln Continental.”

  “It wasn’t for my brother or his fat wife,” Axel Jordache said. He was sitting on the bed, his hands dangling between his knees. “I explained to you. It was for Rudy. What good would it do going to college if one day all of a sudden people found out he had a brother in jail?”

  “He belongs in jail,” Mary Pease Jordache said. “Thomas. It’s the natural place for him. If you’re going to hand out five thousand dollars each time they want to put him in jail, you’d better get out of the bakery right away and go into the oil business or become a banker. I bet you felt good giving that man the money. You felt proud. Your son. A chip off the old block. Full of sex. Potent. Right on the target. It isn’t enough for him to get one girl pregnant at a time. Oh, no, not Axel Jordache’s son. Two at a time, that’s the kind of family he comes from. Well, if Axel Jordache wants to show what a great big he-man he is in bed from now on he’d better start looking for a couple of twins on his own. It’s all finished here. My Calvary is over.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Jordache said. “Calvary.”

  “Filth, filth!” Mary Jordache screamed. “From one generation to another. Your daughter’s a whore, too, I saw the money she took from men for her services, right in this house, eight hundred dollars, I saw it with my own eyes, she hid it in a book. Eight hundred dollars. Your children command a good price. Well, I’m going to have a price, too. You want anything from me, you want me to go down into that store, you want to come to my bed, you pay. We give that woman downstairs thirty dollars a week, and she only does half the job, she goes home at night. Thirty dollars a week is my price. I’m giving you a bargain rate. Only I want my back pay first. Thirty dollars a week for twenty years. I figured it out. Thirty thousand dollars on the table. You put thirty thousand dollars on the table and I’ll talk to you. Not before.”

  She had the last bundle of clothes in her arms now and she rushed out of the room. The door to Gretchen’s room slammed behind her.

  Jordache shook his head, then got up and limped up the stairs to Rudolph’s room.

  Rudolph was lying on the bed, his eyes open.

  “You heard, I suppose,” Jordache said.

  “Yeah,” Rudolph said.

  “I’m sorry,” Jordache said.

  “Yeah,” said Rudolph.

  “Well, I’m going down to the shop, see how things are.” Jordache turned away.

  “I’ll come down and give you a hand tonight,” Rudolph said.

  “You sleep,” Jordache said. “I don’t want to see you down there.”

  He went out of the room.

  Chapter 11

  1946

  I

  The lights were down low in the Westerman basement. They had it fixed up as a sort of den and they gave parties there. There was a party on tonight, about twenty boys and girls, some of them dancing, some of them necking a little in the dark corners of the room, some of them just listening to Benny Goodman playing “Paper Doll” on a record.

  The River Five didn’t practice much anymore there because some guys back from the Army had started a band, too, and were getting most of the dates. Rudolph didn’t blame people for hiring the other band. The guys were older and they played a lot better than the River Five.

  Alex Dailey was dancing closely with Lila Belkamp in the middle of the room. They told everybody they were going to get married when they got out of school in June. Alex was nineteen and a little slow in school. Lila was all right, a little gushy and silly, but all right. Rudolph wondered if his mother had looked anything like Lila when she was nineteen. Rudolph wished he had a recording of his mother’s speech the night his father came home from Elysium, to play to Alex. It should be required listening for all prospective bridegrooms. Maybe there wouldn’t be such a rush to the church.

  Julie was sitting on Rudolph’s lap in a broken-down old easy chair in a corner of the den. There were other girls sitting on boys’ laps around the room, but Rudolph wished she wouldn’t do it. He didn’t like the idea of people seeing him like that and guessing how he was feeling. There were some things that ought to be kept private. He couldn’t imagine Teddy Boylan letting any girl sit in his lap in public, at any age. But if he even hinted about it to Julie, she’d blow up.

  Julie nuzzled her head around and kissed him. He kissed her back, of course, and enjoyed it, but wished she’d quit.

  She had applied to Barnard for the fall and was pretty sure of getting in. She was smart in school. She wanted Rudolph to try to get into Columbia, so they would be right next to each other in New York. Rudolph pretended he was considering Harvard or Yale. He never could get himself to tell Julie that he wasn’t going to college.

  Julie snuggled closer, her head under his chin. She made a purring sound that at other times made him chuckle. He looked over her head at the other people at the party. He was probably the only virgin among the boys in the room. He was sure about Buddy Westerman and Dailey and Kessler and most of the others, although maybe there were one or two who probably lied when the question came up. That wasn’t the only way he was different from the others. He wondered if they’d have invited him if they knew that his father had killed two men, that his brother had been in jail for rape, tha
t his sister was pregnant (she had written him to tell him, so that it wouldn’t come as a horrid surprise, she said) and living with a married man, that his mother had demanded thirty thousand dollars from his father if he wanted to go to bed with her.

  The Jordaches were special, there was no doubt about that.

  Buddy Westerman came over and said, “Listen, kids, there’s punch upstairs and sandwiches and cake.”

  “Thanks, Buddy,” Rudolph said. He wished Julie would get the hell off his lap.

  Buddy went around passing the word along to the other couples. There was nothing wrong with Buddy. He was going to Cornell, and then to law school, because his father had a solid law practice in town. Buddy had been approached by the new group to play bass for them, but out of loyalty to the River Five had said no. Rudolph gave Buddy’s loyalty just about three weeks to wear out. Buddy was a born musician and as he said, “Those guys really make music,” and you couldn’t expect Buddy to hold out forever, especially as they didn’t get more than one date a month any more.

  As he looked at the boys in the room, Rudolph realized that almost every one of them knew where he was going. Kessler’s father had a pharmacy and Kessler was going to go to pharmaceutical school after college and take over the old man’s business. Starrett’s father dealt in real estate and Starrett was going to Harvard and to the school of business there, to make sure he could tell his father how to use his money. Lawson’s family had an engineering concern and Lawson was going to study engineering. Even Dailey, who probably was too slow to get into college, was going into his father’s plumbing supply business.

  There was a great opening for Rudolph in the ancestral oven. “I am going into grains.” Or perhaps, “I intend to join the German army. My father is an alumnus.”

  Rudolph felt a sick surge of envy for all his friends. Benny Goodman was playing the clarinet like silver lace on the phonograph and Rudolph envied him. Maybe most of all.

  On a night like this you could understand why people robbed banks.

  He wasn’t going to come to any more parties. He didn’t belong there, even if he was the only one who knew it.

  He wanted to go home. He was tired. He was always tired these days, somehow. Aside from the bicycle route in the morning, he had to tend the store every day from four to seven, after school closed. The widow had decided she couldn’t work the whole day, she had children at home to take care of. It had meant giving up the track and the debating teams and his marks were slipping, too, as he never seemed to find the energy to study. He’d been sick, too, with a cold that started after Christmas and seemed to be hanging on all winter.

  “Julie,” he said, “let’s go home.”

  She sat up straight on his lap, surprised.

  “It’s early,” she said, “it’s a nice party.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, sounding more impatient than he intended. “I just want to get out of here.”

  “We can’t do anything in my house,” she said. “My folks have people over for bridge. It’s Friday.”

  “I just want to go home,” he said.

  “You go.” She got off his lap and stood over him angrily. “I’ll find somebody else to take me home.”

  He was tempted to spill out everything he had been thinking. Maybe she’d understand then.

  “Boy, oh boy,” Julie said. There were tears in her eyes. “This is the first party we’ve been to in months and you want to go home practically before we get here.”

  “I just feel lousy,” he said. He stood up.

  “It’s peculiar,” she said. “Just the nights you’re with me you feel lousy. I bet you feel just fine the nights you go out with Teddy Boylan.”

  “Oh, lay off Boylan, will you, Julie?” Rudolph said, “I haven’t seen him for weeks.”

  “What’s the matter—he run out of peroxide?”

  “Joke,” Rudolph said wearily.

  She turned on her heel, her pony tail swinging, and went over to the group around the phonograph. She was the prettiest girl in the room, snub-nosed, scrubbed, smart, slender, dear, and Rudolph wished she would go away someplace for six months, a year, and then come back, after he had gotten over being tired, and had a chance to figure everything out in peace and they could start all over again.

  He went upstairs and put on his coat and left the house without saying good night to anyone. Judy Garland was on the phonograph now, singing “The Trolley Song.”

  It was raining outside, a cold, drifting, February misty river rain, blowing at him in the wind. He coughed inside his coat, with the wet trickling down inside his turned-up collar. He walked slowly toward home, feeling like crying. He hated these spats with Julie, and they were becoming more and more frequent. If they made love to each other, really made love, not that frustrating, foolish necking that made them both ashamed after it, he was sure they wouldn’t be scratching at each other all the time. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It would have to be hidden, they’d have to lie, they’d have to sneak off somewhere like criminals. He had long ago made up his mind. It was going to be perfect or it wasn’t going to happen.

  The hotel manager threw open the door of the suite. There was a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. There was a smell of jasmine and thyme in the air. The two bronzed young people looked around the room coolly, glanced at the Mediterranean. Uniformed bellboys brought in many pieces of leather luggage and distributed them around the rooms.

  “Ça vous plaît, Monsieur?” the manager asked.

  “Çava,” the bronzed young man said.

  “Merci, Monsieur.” The hotel manager backed out of the room.

  The two bronzed young people went out onto the balcony and looked at the sea. They kissed against the blueness. The smell of jasmine and thyme became stronger.

  Or …

  It was only a small log cabin, with the snow piled high against its sides. The mountains reared behind it. The two bronzed young people came in shaking the snow from their clothes, laughing. There was a fire roaring in the fireplace. The snow was so high it covered the windows. They were all alone in the high world. The two bronzed young people sank down to the floor in front of the fire.

  Or …

  The two bronzed young people walked along the red carpet on the platform. The Twentieth Century to Chicago stood on the tracks, gleaming. The two young people went past the porter in his white coat, into the car. The stateroom was full of flowers. There was the smell of roses. The two bronzed young people smiled at each other and strolled through the train to the club car for a drink.

  Or …

  Rudolph coughed miserably in the rain as he turned into Vanderhoff Street. I’ve seen too goddamn many movies, he thought.

  The light from the cellar was coming up through the grating in front of the bakery. The Eternal Flame. Axel Jordache, the Unknown Soldier. If his father died, Rudolph thought, would anyone remember to put out the light?

  Rudolph hesitated, the keys to the house in his hand. Ever since the night his mother had made that crazy speech about thirty thousand dollars, he had felt sorry for his father. His father walked around the house slowly and quietly, like a man who has just come out of a hospital after a major operation, a man who had felt the warning tap of death on his shoulder. Axel Jordache had always seemed strong, terrifyingly strong, to Rudolph. His voice had been loud, his movements abrupt and careless. Now his long silences, his hesitant gestures, his slow, apologetic way of spreading a newspaper or fixing himself a pot of coffee, careful not to make any unnecessary noise, was somehow frightening. Suddenly, it seemed to Rudolph that his father was preparing himself for his grave. Standing in the dark hallway with his hand on the banister, for the first time since he was a little boy he asked himself whether he loved his father or not.

  He went over to the door leading to the bakery, unlocked it and passed through it to the back room and descended into the cellar.

  His father wasn’t doing anything, just sitting on his bench, staring ahea
d of him at the oven, the bottle of whiskey on the floor beside him. The cat lay crouched in the corner.

  “Hello, Pa,” Rudolph said.

  His father turned his head slowly toward him and nodded.

  “I just came down to see if there was something I could do.”

  “No,” his father said. He reached down and picked up the bottle and took a small swig. He offered the bottle to Rudolph. “Want some?”

  “Thanks.” Rudolph didn’t want any whiskey, but he felt his father would like it if he took some. The bottle was slippery from his father’s sweat. He took a swig. It burned his mouth and throat.

  “You’re soaking wet,” his father said.

  “It’s raining out.”

  “Take off your coat. You don’t want to sit there in a wet coat.”

  Rudolph took off his coat and hung it on a hook on the wall. “How’re things, Pa?” he asked. It was a question he had never asked his father before.

  His father chuckled quietly, but didn’t answer. He took another swig of the whiskey.

  “What’d you do tonight?” Axel asked.

  “I went to a party.”

  “A party.” Axel nodded. “Did you play your horn?”

  “No.”

  “What do people do at a party these days?”

  “I don’t know. Dance. Listen to music. Kid around.”

  “Did I ever tell you I went to dancing school when I was a boy?” Axel said. “In Cologne. In white gloves. They taught me how to bow. Cologne was nice in the summertime. Maybe I ought to go back there. They’ll be starting everything up from scratch there now, maybe that’s the place for me. A ruin for the ruins.”

  “Come on, Pa,” Rudolph said. “Don’t talk like that.”

  Axel took another drink. “I had a visitor today,” he said. “Mr. Harrison.”

  Mr. Harrison was the owner of the building. He came on the third of each month for the rent. He was at least eighty years old, but he never missed collecting. In person. It wasn’t the third of the month, so Rudolph knew that the visit must have been an important one. “What’d he want?” Rudolph said.