Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  “Help me with these, kid,” Dominic said, extending his gloves. Thomas tied the laces. Dominic had already done Greening’s gloves.

  Dominic looked up at the big clock over the mat room door to make sure that he wouldn’t inadvertently box more than two minutes without resting and put up his gloves and shuffled toward Greening, saying, “Whenever you’re ready, sir.”

  Greening came at him fast. He was a straight-up, conventional, schooled kind of fighter who made use of his longer reach to jab at Dominic’s head. His cold and his hangover made Dominic begin to breathe hard immediately. He tried to get inside the jab and put his head out of harm’s way under Greening’s chin while he punched away without much enthusiasm or power at Greening’s stomach. Suddenly, Greening stepped back and brought up his right in an all-out uppercut that caught Dominic flush on the mouth.

  The shit, Thomas thought. But he said nothing and the expression on his face didn’t change.

  Dominic sat on the mat pushing reflectively at his bleeding mouth with the big glove. Greening didn’t bother to help him up, but stepped back and looked thoughtfully at him, his hands dangling. Still sitting, Dominic held out his gloves toward Thomas.

  “Take ’em off me, kid,” Dominic said. His voice was thick. “I’ve had enough exercise for today.”

  Nobody said anything as Thomas bent and unlaced the gloves and pulled them off Dominic’s hands. He knew the old fighter didn’t want to be helped up, so he didn’t try. Dominic stood up wearily, wiping his mouth with the wrist band of his sweatsuit. “Sorry, sir,” he said to Greening. “I guess I’m under the weather today.”

  “That wasn’t much of a workout,” Greening said. “You should have told me you weren’t feeling well. I wouldn’t have bothered getting undressed. How about you, Jordache?” he asked. “I’ve seen you in here a couple of times. You want to go a few minutes?”

  Jordache, Thomas thought. He knows my name. He looked inquiringly over at Dominic. Greening was another story entirely from the pot-bellied, earnest, physical culture enthusiasts Dominic assigned him usually.

  A flame of Sicilian hatred glowed momentarily in Dominic’s hooded dark eyes. The time had come to burn down the landlord’s mansion. “If Mr. Greening wants to, Tom,” Dominic said mildly, spitting blood, “I think you might oblige him.”

  Thomas put on the gloves and Dominic laced them for him, his head bent, his eyes guarded, saying nothing. Thomas felt the old feeling, fear, pleasure, eagerness, an electric tingling in his arms and legs, his gut pulling in. He made himself smile boyishly over Dominic’s bent head at Greening, who was watching him stonily.

  Dominic stepped away. “Okay,” he said.

  Greening came right to Thomas, his long left out, his right hand under his chin. College man, Thomas thought contemptuously, as he picked off the jab and circled away from the right. Greening was taller than he but had only eight or nine pounds on him. But he was faster than Thomas realized and the right caught him, hard, high up on the temple. Thomas hadn’t been in a real fight since the time with the foreman at the garage in Brookline and the polite exercises with the pacific gentlemen of the club membership had not prepared him for Greening. Greening feinted, unorthodoxically, with his right, and crashed a left hook to Thomas’s head. The sonofabitch isn’t fooling, Thomas thought, and went in low, looping a left to Greening’s side and following quickly with a right to the man’s head. Greening held him and battered at his ribs with his right hand. He was strong, there was no doubt about it, very strong.

  Thomas got a glimpse of Dominic and wondered if Dominic was going to give him some sort of signal. Dominic was standing to one side, placidly, giving no signals.

  Okay, Thomas thought, deliciously, here it goes. The hell with what happens later.

  They fought without stopping for the usual two-minute break. Greening fought controlledly, brutally, using his height and weight, Thomas with the swift malevolence that he had carefully subdued within himself all these months. Here you are, Captain, he was saying to himself as he burrowed in, using everything he knew, stinging, hurting, ducking, here you are Rich-boy, here you are, Policeman, are you getting your ten dollars’ worth?

  They were both bleeding from the nose and mouth, when Thomas finally got in the one he knew was the beginning of the end. Greening stepped back, smiling foolishly, his hands still up, but feebly pawing the air. Thomas circled him, going for the last big one, when Dominic stepped between them.

  “I think that’s enough for the time being, gentlemen,” Dominic said. “That was a very nice little workout.”

  Greening recovered quickly. The blank look went out of his eyes and he stared coldly at Thomas. “Take these off me, Dominic,” was all he said. He made no move to wipe the blood off his face. Dominic unlaced the gloves and Greening walked, very straight, out of the mat room.

  “There goes my job,” Thomas said.

  “Probably,” Dominic said, unlacing the gloves. “It was worth it. For me.” He grinned.

  For three days, nothing happened. Nobody but Dominic, Greening, and Thomas had been in the mat room and neither Thomas nor Dominic mentioned the fight to any of the members. There was the possibility that Greening was too embarrassed about being beaten by a twenty-year-old kid a lot smaller than he to make a fuss with the committee.

  Each night, when they closed up, Dominic would say, “Nothing yet,” and knock on wood.

  Then, on the fourth day, Charley, the locker-room man, came looking for him. “Dominic wants to see you in his office,” Charley said. “Right away.”

  Thomas went directly to Dominic’s office. Dominic was sitting behind his desk, counting out ninety dollars in ten-dollar bills. He looked up sadly as Thomas came into the office. “Here’s your two weeks’ pay, kid,” he said. “You’re through as of now. There was a committee meeting this afternoon.”

  Thomas put the money in his pocket. And I hoped it was going to last at least a year, he thought.

  “You should’ve let me get that last punch in, Dom,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Dominic, “I should’ve.”

  “Are you going to get into trouble, too?”

  “Probably. Take care of yourself,” Dominic said. “Just remember one thing—never trust the rich.”

  They shook hands. Thomas went out of the office to get his things out of the locker and went out of the building without saying good-bye to anyone.

  Chapter 4

  1954

  He woke exactly at a quarter to seven. He never set the alarm. There was no need to.

  The usual erection. Forget it. He lay quietly in bed for a minute or two. His mother was snoring in the next room. The curtains at the open window were blowing a little and it was cold in the room. A pale winter light came through the curtains, making a long, dark blur of the books on the shelves across from the bed.

  This was not going to be an ordinary day. At closing the night before he had gone into Calderwood’s office and laid the thick Manila envelope on Calderwood’s desk. “I’d like you to read this,” he said to the old man, “when you find the time.”

  Calderwood eyed the envelope suspiciously. “What’s in there?” he asked, pushing gingerly at the envelope with one blunt finger.

  “It’s complicated,” Rudolph said. “I’d rather we didn’t discuss it until you’ve read it.”

  “This another of your crazy ideas?” Calderwood asked. The bulk of the envelope seemed to anger him. “Are you pushing me again?”

  “Uhuh,” Rudolph said, and smiled.

  “Do you know, young man,” Calderwood said, “my cholesterol count has gone up appreciably since I hired you? Way up.”

  “Mrs. Calderwood keeps asking me to try to make you take a vacation.”

  “Does she, now?” Calderwood snorted. “What she doesn’t know is that I wouldn’t leave you alone in this store for ten consecutive minutes. Tell her that the next time she tells you to try to make me take a vacation.” But he had carried the thick envelope, u
nopened, home with him, when he left the store the night before. Once he started reading what was in it, Rudolph was sure he wouldn’t stop until he had finished.

  He lay still under the covers in the cold room, almost deciding not to get up promptly this morning, but lie there and figure out what to say to the old man when he came into his office. Then he thought, the hell with it, play it cool, pretend it’s just another morning.

  He threw back the covers, crossed the room quickly and closed the window. He tried not to shiver as he took off his pajamas and pulled on his heavy track suit. He put on a pair of woolen socks and thick, gum-soled tennis shoes. He put a plaid mackinaw on over the track suit and went out of the apartment, closing the door softly so as not to wake his mother.

  Downstairs, in front of the house, Quentin McGovern was waiting for him. Quentin was also wearing a track suit. Over it he had a bulky sweater. A wool stocking hat was pulled down over his ears. Quentin was fourteen, the oldest son of the Negro family across the street. They ran together every morning.

  “Hi, Quent,” Rudolph said.

  “Hi, Rudy,” said Quentin. “Sure is cold. Mornings like this, my mother thinks we’re out of our minds.”

  “She’ll sing a different tune when you bring home a gold medal from the Olympics.”

  “I bet,” Quentin said. “I can just hear her now.”

  They walked quickly around the corner. Rudolph unlocked the door of the garage where he rented space, and went to the motorcycle. Dimly, at the back of his mind, a memory lurked. Another door, another dark space, another machine. The shell in the warehouse, the smell of the river, his father’s ropy arms.

  Then he was back in Whitby again, with the boy in the track suit, in another place, with no river. He rolled out the motorcycle. He pulled on a pair of old wool-lined gloves and swung onto the machine and started the motor. Quentin got on the pillion and put his arms around him and they sped down the street, the cold wind making their eyes tear.

  It was only a few minutes to the university ahtletic field. Whitby College was Whitby University now. The field was not enclosed but had a group of wooden stands along one side. Rudolph set up the motorcycle beside the stands and threw his mackinaw over the saddle of the machine. “Better take off your sweater,” he said. “For later. You don’t want to catch cold on the way back.”

  Quentin looked over the field. A thin, icy mist was ghosting up from the turf. He shivered. “Maybe my mother is right,” he said. But he took off his sweater and they began jogging slowly around the cinder track.

  While he was going to college, Rudolph had never had time to go out for the track team. It amused him that now, as a busy young executive, he had time to run half an hour a day, six days a week. He did it for the exercise and to keep himself hard, but he also enjoyed the early morning quiet, the smell of turf, the sense of changing seasons, the pounding of his feet on the hard track. He had started doing it alone, but one morning Quentin had been standing outside the house in his track suit and had said, “Mr. Jordache, I see you going off to work out every day. Do you mind if I tag along?” Rudolph had nearly said no to the boy. He liked being alone that early in the morning, surrounded as he was all day by people at the store. But Quentin had said, “I’m on the high-school squad. The four-forty. If I know I got to run seriously every morning, it’s just got to help my time. You don’t have to tell me anything, Mr. Jordache, just let me run along with you.” He spoke shyly, softly, not asking for secrets, and Rudolph could see that he had had to screw up his courage to make a request like that of a grown-up white man who had only said hello to him once or twice in his life. Also, Quentin’s father worked on a delivery truck at the store. Labor relations, Rudolph thought. Keep the working man happy. All democrats together. “Okay,” he said. “Come on.”

  The boy had smiled nervously and swung along down the street beside Rudolph to the garage.

  They jogged around the track twice, warming up, then broke into a sprint for a hundred yards, then jogged once more, then went fast for the two twenty, then jogged twice around the track and went the four-forty at almost full speed. Quentin was a lanky boy with long, skinny legs and a nice, smooth motion. It was good to have him along, since he pushed Rudolph to run harder than he would have alone. They finished by jogging twice more around the track, and finally, sweating, threw on their overclothes and drove back through the awakening town to their street.

  “See you in the morning, Quent,” Rudolph said as he parked the motorcycle along the curb.

  “Thanks,” Quentin said. “Tomorrow.”

  Rudolph waved and went into the house, liking the boy. They had conquered normal human sloth together on a cold winter’s morning, had tested themselves together against weather, speed, and time. When the summer holidays came, he would find some sort of job for the boy at the store. He was sure Quentin’s family could use the money.

  His mother was awake when he came into the apartment. “How is it out?” she called.

  “Cold,” he said. “You won’t miss anything if you stay home today.” They continued with the fiction that his mother normally went out every day, just like other women.

  He went into the bathroom, took a steaming-hot shower, then stood under an ice-cold stream for a minute and came out tingling. He heard his mother squeezing orange juice and making coffee in the kitchen as he toweled himself off, the sound of her movements like somebody dragging a heavy sack across the kitchen floor. He remembered the long-paced sprinting on the frozen track and thought, if I’m ever like that, I’ll ask somebody to knock me off.

  He weighed himself on the bathroom scale. One-sixty. Satisfactory. He despised fat people. At the store, without telling Calderwood his real reasons, he had tried to get rid of clerks who were overweight.

  He rubbed some deodorant under his armpits before dressing. It was a long day and the store was always too hot in winter. He dressed in gray-flannel slacks, a soft blue shirt with a dark red tie, and put on a brown-tweed sports jacket, with no padding at the shoulders. For the first year as assistant manager he had dressed in sober, dark business suits, but as he became more important in the company’s hierarchy he had switched to more informal clothes. He was young for his responsibilities and he had to make sure that he didn’t appear pompous. For the same reason he had bought himself a motorcycle. Nobody could say as the assistant manager came roaring up to work, bareheaded, on a motorcycle, in all weathers, that the young man was taking himself too seriously. You had to be careful to keep the envy quotient down as low as possible. He could easily afford a car, but he preferred the motorcycle anyway. It kept his complexion fresh and made him look as though he spent a good deal of his time outdoors. To be tanned, especially in winter, made him feel subtly superior to all the pale, sickly looking people around him. He understood now why Boylan had always used a sun lamp. He himself would never descend to a sun lamp. It was deceitful and cheap, he decided, a form of masculine cosmetics and made you vulnerable to people who knew about sun lamps and saw through the artifice.

  He went into the kitchen and kissed his mother good morning. She smiled girlishly. If he forgot to kiss her, there would be a long monologue over the breakfast table about how badly she had slept and how the medicines the doctor prescribed for her were a waste of money. He did not tell his mother how much money he earned or that he could very well afford to move them to a much better apartment. He didn’t plan any entertainment at home and he had other uses for his money.

  He sat down at the kitchen table and drank his orange juice and coffee and munched some toast. His mother just drank coffee. Her hair was lank and there were shocking, huge rings of purple sag under her eyes. But with all that, she didn’t seem any worse to him than she had been for the last three years. She would probably live to the age of ninety. He did not begrudge her her longevity. She kept him out of the draft. Sole support of an invalid mother. Last and dearest maternal gift—she had spared him an icebound foxhole in Korea.

  “I had a
dream last night,” she said. “About your brother, Thomas. He looked the way he looked when he was eight years old. Like a choirboy at Easter. He came into my room and said, Forgive me, forgive me …” She drank her coffee moodily. “I haven’t dreamt about him in forever. Do you ever hear from him?”

  “No,” Rudolph said.

  “You’re not hiding anything from me, are you?” she asked.

  “No. Why would I do that?”

  “I would like to see him once more before I die,” she said. “After all he is my own flesh and blood.”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “I have a feeling when spring comes, I’m going to feel much better. We can go for walks again.”

  “That’s good news,” Rudolph said, finishing his coffee and standing. He kissed her good-bye. “I’ll fix dinner tonight,” he said. “I’ll shop on the way home.”

  “Don’t tell me what it’s going to be,” she said co-quettishly, “surprise me.”

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll surprise you.”

  The night watchman was still on duty at the employees’ entrance when Rudolph got to the store, carrying the morning papers, which he had bought on the way over.

  “Good morning, Sam,” Rudolph said.

  “Hi, Rudy,” the night watchman said. Rudolph made a point of having all the old employees, who knew him from his first days at the store, call him by his Christian name.