Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  “You sure are an early bird,” the night watchman said. “When I was your age you couldn’t drag me out of bed on a morning like this.”

  That’s why you’re a night watchman at your age, Sam, Rudolph thought, but he merely smiled and went on up to his office, through the dimly lit and sleeping store.

  His office was neat and bare, with two desks, one for himself and one for Miss Giles, his secretary, a middle-aged, efficient spinster. There were piles of magazines geometrically stacked on wide shelves, Vogue, French Vogue, Seventeen, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, House and Garden, which he combed for ideas for various departments of the store. The quality of the town was changing rapidly; the new people coming up from the city had money and spent it freely. The natives of the town were more prosperous than they had ever been and were beginning to imitate the tastes of the more sophisticated newer arrivals. Calderwood fought a stubborn rear guard action against the transformation of his store from a solid lower-middle-class establishment to what he called a grab bag of fads and fancy gewgaws, but the balance sheet could not be gainsaid as Rudolph pushed through one innovation after another, and each month it was becoming easier for Rudolph to put his ideas into practice. Calderwood had even agreed, after nearly a year of opposition, to wall off part of what had been an unnecessarily capacious delivery room and turn it into a liquor store, with a line of fine French wines that Rudolph, remembering what Boylan had taught him on the subject through the years, took pleasure in selecting himself.

  He hadn’t seen Boylan since the day of the Commencement exercises. He had called twice that summer to ask if Boylan was free for dinner and Boylan had said, “No,” curtly, each time. Every month, Rudolph sent a hundred-dollar check to Boylan, toward repaying the four-thousand-dollar loan. Boylan never cashed the checks, but Rudolph made sure that if at any time Boylan decided to cash them all at once there would be enough money in the account to honor them. Rudolph didn’t think about Boylan often, but when he did, he realized that there was contempt mixed with gratitude he felt for the older man. With all that money, Rudolph thought, all that freedom, Boylan had no right to be as unhappy as he was. It was a symptom of Boylan’s fundamental weakness, and Rudolph, fighting any signs of weakness in himself, had no tolerance for it in anybody else. Willie Abbott and Teddy Boylan, Rudolph thought, there’s a good team.

  Rudolph spread the newspapers on his desk. There was the Whitby Record, and the edition of the New York Times that came up on the first train of the morning. The front page of the Times reported heavy fighting along the 38th parallel and new accusations of treason and infiltration by Senator McCarthy in Washington. The Record’s front page reported on a vote for new taxes for the school board (not passed) and on the number of skiers who had made use of the new ski area nearby since the season began. Every city to its own interests.

  Rudolph turned to the inside pages of the Record. The half-page two-color advertisement for a new line of wool dresses and sweaters was sloppily done, with the colors bleeding out of register, and Rudolph made a note on his desk pad to call the paper that morning about it.

  Then he opened to the Stock Exchange figures in the Times and studied them for fifteen minutes. When he had saved a thousand dollars he had gone to Johnny Heath and asked him, as a favor, to invest it for him. Johnny, who handled some accounts in the millions of dollars, had gravely consented, and worried over Rudolph’s transactions as though Rudolph were one of the most important of his firm’s customers. Rudolph’s holdings were still small, but they were growing steadily. Looking over the Stock Exchange page, he was pleased to see that he was almost three hundred dollars richer this morning, on paper, than he had been the morning before. He breathed a quiet prayer of thanks to his friend Johnny Heath, and turned to the crossword puzzle and got out his pen and started on it. It was one of the pleasantest moments of the day. If he managed to finish the puzzle before nine o’clock, when the store opened, he started the day’s work with a faint sense of triumph.

  14 across. Heep. Uriah, he printed neatly.

  He was almost finished with the puzzle, when the phone rang. He looked at his watch. The switchboard was at work early, he noted approvingly. He picked up the phone with his left hand. “Yes?” he said, printing ubiquitous in one of the vertical columns.

  “Jordache? That you?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “Denton, Professor Denton.”

  “Oh, how are you, sir?” Rudolph said. He puzzled over Sober in five letters, a the third letter.

  “I hate to bother you,” Denton said. His voice sounded peculiar, as though he were whispering and was afraid of being overheard. “But can I see you sometime today?”

  “Of course,” Rudolph said. He printed staid along the lowest line of the puzzle. He saw Denton quite often, when he wanted to borrow books on business management and economics at the college. “I’m in the store all day.”

  Denton’s voice made a funny, sliding sound in the phone. “I’d prefer it if we could meet somewhere besides the store. Are you free for lunch?”

  “I just take forty-five minutes …”

  “That’s all right. We’ll make it someplace near you.” Denton sounded gaspy and hurried. In class he was slow and sonorous. “How about Ripley’s? That’s just around the corner from you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Rudolph said, surprised at Denton’s choice of a restaurant. Ripley’s was more of a saloon than a restaurant and was frequented by workmen with a thirst rather than anybody who was looking for a decent meal. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place you’d think an aging professor of history and economics would seek out. “Is twelve-fifteen all right?”

  “I’ll be there, Jordache. Thank you, thank you. It’s most kind of you. Until twelve-fifteen, then,” Denton said, speaking very quickly. “I can’t tell you how I appreciate …” He seemed to hang up in the middle of his last sentence.

  Rudolph frowned, wondering what was bothering Denton, then put the phone down. He looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. The doors were open. His secretary came into the office and said, “Good morning, Mr. Jordache.”

  “Good morning, Miss Giles,” he said and tossed the Times into the wastebasket, annoyed. Because of Denton he hadn’t finished the puzzle before nine o’clock.

  He made his first round of the store for the day, walking slowly, smiling at the clerks, not stopping or seeming to notice when his eye caught something amiss. Later in the morning, back in his office, he would dictate polite memos to the appropriate department head that the neck-ties piled on the counter for a sale were not arranged neatly enough, that Miss Kale, in cosmetics, had on too much eye make-up, that the ventilation in the fountain and tea shop was not sufficient.

  He looked with special interest at the departments that had not been there until he had induced Calderwood to put them in—the little boutique, which sold junk jewelry, Italian sweaters, French scarves, and fur hats and did a surprising amount of business; the fountain and tea shop (it was amazing how women never stopped eating all day), which not only showed a solid profit on its own but had become a meeting place for lunch for many of the housewives of the town who then rarely got out of the store without buying something; the ski shop, in a corner of the old sporting goods department, presided over by an athletically built young man named Larsen who dazzled the local girls on the nearby slopes on winter Sundays and who was being criminally underpaid considering how much trade he lured into the shop merely by sliding down a hill once a week. The young man had offered to teach Rudolph how to ski, but Rudolph had declined, with a smile. He couldn’t afford to break a leg, he explained.

  The record counter was his idea, too, and that brought in the young trade with their weirdly lavish allowances. Calderwood, who hated noise, and who couldn’t stand the way most young people behaved (his own three daughters, two of them now young ladies and the third a pallid teen-ager, behaved with cowed Victorian decorum), had fought bitterly against the record counter. “I do
n’t want to run a goddamn honky-tonk,” he had said. “Deprave the youth of America with those barbaric noises that passes for music these days. Leave me in peace, Jordache, leave a poor old-fashioned merchant in peace.”

  But Rudolph had produced statistics on how much teen-agers in America spent on records every year and had promised to have soundproof booths put in and Calderwood as usual had capitulated. He often seemed to be irritated with Rudolph, but Rudolph was unfailingly polite and patient with the old man and in most things had learned how to manage him. Privately, Calderwood boasted about his pipsqueak of an assistant manager and how clever he himself had been in picking the boy out of the herd. He had also doubled his salary, with no urging from Rudolph, and had given him a bonus at Christmas of three thousand dollars. “He is not only modernizing the store,” Calderwood had been heard to say, although not in Rudolph’s presence, “the sonofabitch is modernizing me. Well, when it comes down to it, that’s what I hired a young man for.”

  Once a month, Rudolph was invited to dinner at the Calderwoods’ house, grim Puritanical affairs, at which the daughters spoke only when spoken to and nothing stronger than apple juice was served. The oldest daughter, Prudence, who was also the prettiest, had asked Rudolph to escort her to several of the country club dances, and Rudolph had done so. Once away from her father, Prudence did not behave with Victorian decorum, but Rudolph carefully kept his hands off her. He was not going to do anything as banal or as dangerous as marrying the boss’s daughter.

  He was not marrying anybody. That could come later. Three months ago, he had received an invitation to Julie’s wedding. She was marrying a man called Fitzgerald in New York. He had not gone to the wedding and he had felt the tears come to his eyes when he had composed the telegram of congratulations. He had despised himself for the weakness and had thrown himself more completely into his work and almost managed to forget Julie.

  He was wary of all other girls. He could tell as he walked through the store that there were girls who looked at him flirtatiously, who would be delighted to go out with him, Miss Sullivan, raven haired, in the Boutique; Miss Brandywine, tall and lithe, in the Youth Shop; Miss Soames, in the Record Shop, small, blonde, and bosomy, jiggling to the music, smiling demurely as he passed; maybe six or seven others. He was tempted, of course, but he fought the temptation down, and behaved with perfect, impersonal courtesy to everybody. There were no parties at Calderwood’s, so there was no occasion on which, with the excuse of liquor and celebration, any real approach could be made.

  The night with Mary Jane in New York and the forlorn telephone call in the deserted lobby of the St. Moritz Hotel had steeled him against the pull of his own desire.

  Of one thing he was certain—the next time he asked a girl to marry him, he was going to be damn sure she would say yes.

  As he repassed the record counter, he made a mental note to try to get some older woman in the store tactfully to suggest to Miss Soames that perhaps she ought to wear a brassiere under her sweater.

  He was going over the drawings for the March window with Bergson, the young man who prepared the displays, when the phone rang.

  “Rudy,” it was Calderwood, “can you come down to my office for a minute?” The voice was flat, giving nothing away.

  “I’ll be right there, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said. He hung up. “I’m afraid these’ll have to wait a little while,” he said to Bergson. Bergson was a find. He had done the sets for the summer theater in Whitby. Rudolph liked them and had approached him about a job as window designer for Calderwood’s during the winter. Until Bergson had come on the scene the windows had been done haphazardly, with the different departments fighting for space and then doing their own displays without any reference to what was being shown in any window besides their own. Bergson had changed all that. He was a small, sad young man who couldn’t get into the scene designers’ union in New York. He was grateful for the winter’s work and put all his considerable talent into it. Used to working on the cheap for summer-theater productions, he made use of all sorts of unlikely inexpensive materials and did the art work himself.

  The plans laid out on Rudolph’s desk were on the theme of spring in the country and Rudolph had already told Bergson that he thought they were going to be the best set of windows Calderwood’s had ever had. Glum as Bergson was, Rudolph enjoyed the hours he spent working with him, as compared with the hours he spent with the heads of departments and the head of Costs and Accounting. In an ideal scheme of things, he thought, he would never have to look at a balance sheet or go through a monthly inventory.

  Calderwood’s door was open and Calderwood saw him immediately and said, “Come in, Rudy, and close the door behind you.” The papers that had been in the Manila envelope were spread over Calderwood’s desk.

  Rudolph sat down across from the old man and waited.

  “Rudy,” Calderwood said mildly, “you’re the most astonishing young man I’ve ever come across.”

  Rudolph said nothing.

  “Who else has seen all this?” Calderwood waved a hand over the papers on his desk.

  “Nobody.”

  “Who typed them up? Miss Giles?”

  “I did. At home.”

  “You think of everything, don’t you?” It was not a reproach, but it wasn’t a compliment, either.

  Rudolph kept quiet.

  “Who told you I owned thirty acres of land out near the lake?” Calderwood asked flatly.

  The land was owned by a corporation with a New York address. It had taken all of Johnny Heath’s cleverness to find out that the real owner of the corporation was Duncan Calderwood. “I’m afraid I can’t say, sir,” Rudolph said.

  “Can’t say, can’t say.” Calderwood accepted it, with a touch of impatience. “The feller can’t say. The Silent Generation, like they say in Time magazine. Rudy, I haven’t caught you in a lie since the first day I set eyes on you and I don’t expect you to lie to me now.”

  “I won’t lie to you, sir,” Rudolph said.

  Calderwood pushed at the papers on his desk. “Is this some sort of a trick to take me over?”

  “No, sir,” Rudolph said. “It’s a suggestion as to how you can take advantage of your position and your various assets. To expand with the community and diversify your interests. To profit from the tax laws and at the same time protect your estate for your wife and children when you die.”

  “How many pages are there in this?” Calderwood said. “Fifty, sixty?”

  “Fifty-three.”

  “Some suggestion.” Calderwood snorted. “Did you think this up all by yourself?”

  “Yes.” Rudolph didn’t feel he had to tell Calderwood that for months he had been methodically picking Johnny Heath’s brain and that Johnny was responsible for the more involved sections of the overall plan.

  “All right, all right,” Calderwood grumbled. “I’ll look into it.”

  “If I may make the suggestion, sir,” Rudolph said, “I think you should talk this over with your lawyers in New York and your bankers.”

  “What do you know about my lawyers in New York?” Calderwood asked suspiciously.

  “Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said, “I’ve been working for you for a long time.”

  “Okay. Supposing, after studying this some more, I say Yes and do the whole goddamn thing the way you outline it—go public, float a stock issue, borrow from the banks, build the goddamn shopping center near the lake, with a theater, too, like an idiot, supposing I do all that, what’s in it for you?”

  “I would expect to be made chairman of the board, with you as president of the company, at an appropriate salary,” Rudolph said, “and an option to buy a certain amount of stock in the next five years.” Good old Johnny Heath. Don’t niggle. Think big. “I would bring in an assistant to help take over here when I’m otherwise occupied.” He had already written Brad Knight in Oklahoma about the job.

  “You’ve got everything figured out, haven’t you, Rudy?” Now Calderwood wa
s frankly hostile.

  “I’ve been working on this plan for more than a year,” Rudolph said mildly. “I’ve tried to face all the problems.”

  “And if I just say no,” Calderwood said, if I just put all this pile of papers in a file and forget it, then what would you do?”

  “I’m afraid I’d have to tell you I’m leaving at the end of the year, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said. “I’m afraid I’d have to look for something with more of a future for me.”

  “I got along without you for a long time,” Calderwood said. “I could get along without you now.”

  “Of course you could,” Rudolph said.

  Calderwood looked down morosely at his desk, flicked out a sheet of paper from a pile, glared at it with especial distaste.

  “A theater,” he said angrily. “We already have a theater in town.”

  “They’re tearing it down next year,” Rudolph said.

  “You sure do your homework, don’t you?” Calderwood said. “They’re not going to announce it until July.”

  “Somebody always talks,” Rudolph said.

  “So it seems. And somebody always listens, don’t they, Rudy?”

  “Yes, sir.” Rudolph smiled.

  Finally, Calderwood smiled, too. “What makes Rudy run, eh?” he said.

  “That’s not my style, at all,” Rudolph said evenly. “You know that.”

  “Yes, I do,” Calderwood admitted. “I’m sorry I said it. All right. Get back to work. You’ll be hearing from me.”

  He was staring down at the papers on his desk as Rudolph left his office. Rudolph walked slowly among the counters, looking youthful and smiling benevolently as usual.

  The plan that he had submitted to Calderwood was a complicated one and he had argued every point closely. The community was growing in the direction of the lake. What was more, the neighboring town of Cedarton, about ten miles away, was linked with Whitby by a new highway and was also growing in the direction of the lake. Suburban shopping centers were springing up all over America and people were becoming accustomed to doing the greater part of their shopping, for all sorts of things, in them. Calderwood’s thirty acres were strategically placed for a market to siphon off trade from both towns and from the upper-middle-class homes that dotted the borders of the lake. If Calderwood didn’t make the move himself, somebody or some corporation would undoubtedly seize the opportunity in the next year or two and besides profiting from the new trade would cut drastically into Calderwood’s volume of business in the Whitby store. Rather than allow a competitor to undermine him, it was to Calderwood’s advantage to compete, even partially, with himself.