Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  He enjoyed the ride. The whole day, in fact. He was glad his mother’s talk about church had driven him out of the house.

  At the outskirts of Whitby, as they were passing the university, he slowed down, to ask Miss Soames where she lived. It wasn’t far from the campus and he zoomed down the familiar streets. It was still fairly early in the afternoon, but the clouds overhead were black and there were lights to be seen in the windows of the houses they passed. He had to slow down at a stop sign and as he did so, he felt Miss Soames’s hand slide down from his waist, where she had been holding on, to his crotch. She stroked him there softly and he could hear her laughing in his ear.

  “No disturbing the driver,” he said. “State law.”

  But she only laughed and kept on doing what she had been doing.

  They passed an elderly man walking a dog and Rudolph was sure the old man looked startled. He gunned the machine and it had some effect. Miss Soames just held on to the place she had been caressing.

  He came to the address she had given him. It was an old, one-family clapboard house set on a yellowed lawn. There were no lights on in the house.

  “Home,” Miss Soames said. She jumped off the pillion. “That was a nice ride, Rudy. Especially the last two minutes.” She took off her goggles and hat and put her head to one side, letting her hair swing loose over her shoulders. “Want to come inside?” she asked. “There’s nobody home. My mother and father are out visiting and my brother’s at the movies. We can go on to the next chapter.”

  He hesitated, looked at the house, guessed what it was like inside. Papa and Mama off on a visit but likely to return early. Brother perhaps bored with the movie and coming rattling in an hour earlier than expected. Miss Soames stood before him, one hand on her hip, smiling, swinging her goggles and ski cap in the other.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Some other time, perhaps,” he said.

  “Scaredy-cat,” she said, and giggled. Then she ran up the front walk toward the house. At the door she turned and stuck out her tongue at him. The dark building engulfed her.

  Thoughtfully, he started the motorcycle and drove slowly toward the center of the town along the darkening streets. He didn’t want to go home, so he parked the machine and went into a movie. He hardly saw the movie and would not have been able to tell what it was about when he got out.

  He kept thinking about Miss Soames. Silly, cheap little girl, teasing, teasing, making fun of him. He didn’t like the idea of seeing her in the store next morning. If it were possible he would have had her fired. But she would go to the union and complain and he would have to explain the grounds on which he had had her fired. “She called me Mr. Frigidaire, then she called me Rudy and finally she held my cock on a public thoroughfare.”

  He gave up the idea of firing Miss Soames. One thing it all proved—he had been right all along in having nothing to do with anybody from the store.

  He had dinner alone in a restaurant and drank a whole bottle of wine by himself and nearly hit a lamp post on the way home.

  He slept badly and he groaned at a quarter to seven Monday morning, when he knew he had to get up and run with Quentin McGovern. But he got up and he ran.

  When he made his morning round of the store he was careful to avoid going near the record counter. He waved to Larsen in the ski shop and Larsen, red sweatered, said, “Good morning, Mr. Jordache,” as though they had not shared Sunday together.

  Calderwood called him into his office in the afternoon. “All right, Rudy,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about your ideas and I’ve talked them over with some people down in New York. We’re going down there tomorrow, we have a date at my lawyer’s office in Wall Street at two o’clock. They want to ask you some questions. We’ll take the 11:05 train down. I’m not promising anything, but the first time around, my people seem to think you got something there.” Calderwood peered at him. “You don’t seem particularly happy, Rudy,” he said accusingly.

  “Oh, I’m pleased, sir. Very pleased.” He managed to smile. Two o’clock Tuesday, he was thinking, I promised Denton I’d go before the board two o’clock Tuesday. “It’s very good news, sir.” He smiled again, trying to seem boyish and naive. “I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it—so soon, I mean.”

  “We’ll have lunch on the train,” Calderwood said, dismissing him.

  Lunch on the train with the old man. That means no drink, Rudolph thought, as he went out of the office. He preferred to be gloomy about that than gloomy about Professor Denton.

  Later in the afternoon, the phone rang in his office and Miss Giles answered. “I’ll see if he’s in,” she said. “Who’s calling please?” She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Professor Denton.”

  Rudolph hesitated, then stretched out his hand for the phone. “Hello, Professor,” he said heartily. “How’re things?”

  “Jordache,” Denton said, his voice hoarse, “I’m at Ripley’s. Can you come over for a few minutes? I’ve got to talk to you.”

  Just as well now as later. “Of course, Professor,” he said. “I’ll be right there.” He got up from his desk. “If anybody wants me,” he said to Miss Giles, “say I’ll be back in a half hour.”

  When he came into the bar, he had to search to find Denton. Denton was in the last booth again, with his hat and coat on, hunched over the table, his hands cupped around his glass. He needed a shave and his clothes were rumpled and his spectacles clouded and smeared. It occurred to Rudolph that he looked like an old wino, waiting blearily on a park bench in the winter weather for a cop to come and move him on. The self-confident, loud, ironic man of Rudolph’s classrooms, amused and amusing, had vanished.

  “Hello, Professor.” Rudolph slid into the booth opposite Denton. He hadn’t bothered to put on a coat for the short walk from the store, “I’m glad to see you.” He smiled, as though to reassure Denton that Denton was the same man he had always known, to be greeted in the usual manner.

  Denton looked up dully. He didn’t offer to shake hands. His face, ordinarily ruddy, was gray. Even his blood has surrendered, Rudolph thought.

  “Have a drink.” Denton’s voice was thick. He had obviously already had a drink. Or several. “Miss,” he called loudly to the lady in the orange uniform, who was leaning, like an old mare in harness, against the end of the bar. “What’ll you have?” he asked Rudolph.

  “Scotch, please.”

  “Scotch and soda for my friend, miss,” Denton said. “And another bourbon for me.”

  After that, he sat silently for awhile, staring down at the glass between his hands. On the way over from the store, Rudolph had decided what he had to do. He would have to tell Denton that it was impossible for him to appear before the board the next day, but that he would offer to do so any other day, if the board would postpone. Failing that, he would go to see the President that night and say what he had to say. Or if Denton disapproved of that, he would write out his defense of Denton that night for Denton to read before the board when they considered his case. He dreaded the moment when he would have to make these proposals to Denton, but there was no question of not going down to New York with Calderwood on the 11:05 tomorrow morning. He was grateful that Denton kept silent, even for a moment, and he made a big business of stirring his drink when it came, the noise a little musical barrier against conversation for a few seconds.

  “I hate to drag you away from your work like this, Jordache,” Denton said, not lifting his eyes, and mumbling now. “Trouble makes a man egotistic. I pass a movie theater and I see people lined up to go in, to laugh at a comedy, and I say, ‘Don’t they know what’s happening to me, how can they go to the movies?’” He laughed sourly. “Absurd,” he said. “Fifty million people were being killed in Europe alone between 1939 and 1945, and I went to the movies twice a week.” He took a thirsty gulp of his drink, bending low over the table and holding the glass with his two hands. The glass rattled as he put it down.

  “Tell me what’s happening,”
Rudolph said, soothingly.

  “Nothing,” Denton said. “Well, that’s not true, either. A lot. It’s over.”

  “What are you talking about?” Rudolph spoke calmly, but it was difficult to keep the excitement out of his voice. So, it was nothing, he thought. A storm in a teacup. People finally couldn’t be that idiotic. “You mean they’ve dropped the whole thing?”

  “I mean I’ve dropped the whole thing,” Denton said flatly, lifting his head and looking out from under the brim of his battered brown felt hat at Rudolph. “I resigned today.”

  “Oh, no,” Rudolph said.

  “Oh, yes,” Denton said. “After twelve years. They offered to accept my resignation and drop the proceedings. I couldn’t face tomorrow. After twelve years. I’m too old, too old. Maybe if I were younger. When you’re younger, you can face the irrational. Justice seems obtainable. My wife has been crying for a week. She says the disgrace would kill her. A figure of speech, of course, but a woman weeping seven days and seven nights erodes the will. So, it’s done. I just wanted to thank you and tell you you don’t have to be there tomorrow at two P.M.”

  Rudolph swallowed. Carefully, he tried to keep the relief out of his voice. “I would have been happy to speak up,” he said. He would not have been happy, but one way or another he had been prepared to do it, and a more exact description of his feelings would do no good at the moment. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

  “I have been thrown a lifeline,” Denton said dully. “A friend of mine is on the faculty of the International School at Geneva, I’ve been offered a place. Less money, but a place. They are not as maniacal, it seems, in Geneva. They tell me the city is pretty.”

  “But it’s just a high school,” Rudolph protested. “You’ve taught in colleges all your life.”

  “It’s in Geneva,” Denton said. “I want to get out of this goddamn country.”

  Rudolph had never heard anybody say this goddamn country about America and he was shocked at Denton’s bitterness. As a boy in school he had sung “God shed his Grace on Thee” about his native land, along with the forty other boys and girls in the classroom, and now, he realized that what he had sung as a child he still believed as a grown man. “It’s not as bad as you think,” he said.

  “Worse,” Denton said.

  “It’ll blow over. You’ll be asked back.”

  “Never,” Denton said. “I wouldn’t come back if they begged me on their knees.”

  “The Man Without a Country,” Rudolph remembered from grade school, the poor exile being transferred from ship to ship, never to see the shores of the land where he was born, never to see the flag without tears. Geneva, that flagless vessel. He looked at Denton, exiled already in the back booth of Ripley’s Bar, and felt a confused mixture of emotions, pity, contempt. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked. “Money?”

  Denton shook his head. “We’re all right. For the time being. We’re selling the house. Real estate values have gone up since I bought it. The country is booming.” He laughed drily. He stood up abruptly. “I have to go home now,” he said. “I’m giving my wife French lessons every afternoon.”

  He allowed Rudolph to pay for the drinks. Outside on the street, he put his collar up, looking more like an old wino than ever, and shook Rudolph’s hand slackly. “I’ll write you from Geneva,” he said. “Noncommittal letters. God knows who opens mail these days.”

  He shuffled off, a bent, scholarly figure among the citizens of his goddamn country, Rudolph watched him for a moment, then walked back to the store. He breathed deeply, feeling young, lucky, lucky.

  He was in the line waiting to laugh, while the sufferers shuffled past. Fifty million dead, but the movies were always open.

  He felt sorry for Denton, but overriding that, he felt joyous for himself. Everything from now on was going to be all right, everything was going to go his way. The sign had been made clear that afternoon, the omens were plain.

  He was on the 11:05 the next morning with Calderwood, composed and optimistic. When they went into the dining car for lunch, he didn’t mind not being able to order a drink.

  Chapter 5

  1955

  “Why do you have to come and wait, for me?” Billy was complaining, as they walked toward home. “As though I’m a baby.”

  “You’ll go around by yourself soon enough,” she said, automatically taking his hand as they crossed a street.

  “When?”

  “Soon enough.”

  “When?”

  “When you’re ten.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “You know you mustn’t say things like that.”

  “Daddy does.”

  “You’re not Daddy.”

  “So do you sometimes.”

  “You’re not me. And I shouldn’t say it, either.”

  “Then why do you say it?”

  “Because I get angry.”

  “I’m angry now. All the other kids don’t have their mothers waiting for them outside the gate like babies. They go home by themselves.”

  Gretchen knew this was true and that she was being a nervous parent, not faithful to Spock, and that she or Billy or both of them would have to pay for it later, but she couldn’t bear the thought of the child wandering by himself around in the doubtful traffic of Greenwich Village. Several times she had suggested to Willie that they move to the suburbs for their son’s sake, but Willie had vetoed the idea. “I’m not the Scarsdale type,” he said.

  She didn’t know what the Scarsdale type was. She knew a lot of people who lived in Scarsdale or in places very much like Scarsdale, and they seemed as various as people living anywhere else—drunks, wife-swappers, churchgoers, politicians, patriots, scholars, suicides, whatever.

  “When?” Billy asked again, stubbornly, pulling away from her hand.

  “When you’re ten,” she repeated.

  “That’s a whole year,” he wailed.

  “You’ll be surprised how fast it goes,” she said. “Now, button your coat. You’ll catch cold.” He had been playing basketball in the schoolyard and he was still sweating. The late-afternoon October air was nippy and there was a wind off the Hudson.

  “A whole year,” Billy said. “That’s inhuman.”

  She laughed and bent and kissed the top of his head, but he pulled away. “Don’t kiss me in public,” he said.

  A big dog came trotting toward them and she had to restrain herself from telling Billy not to pat him. “Old boy,” Billy said, “old boy,” and patted the dog’s head and pulled his ears, at home in the animal kingdom. He thinks nothing living wishes him harm, Gretchen thought. Except his mother.

  The dog wagged his tail, went on.

  They were on their own street now, and safe. Gretchen allowed Billy to dawdle behind her, balancing on cracks in the pavement. As she came up to the front door of the brownstone in which she lived, she saw Rudolph and Johnny Heath standing in front of the building, leaning against the stoop. They each were holding a paper bag with a bottle in it. She had just put on a scarf over her head and an old coat and she hadn’t bothered to change from the slacks she was wearing around the house when she had gone to fetch Billy. She felt dowdy as she approached Rudolph and Johnny, who were dressed like sober young businessmen and were even wearing hats.

  She was used to seeing Rudolph in New York often. For the past six months or so, he had come to the city two or three times a week, in his young businessman’s suits. There was some sort of deal being arranged, with Calderwood and Johnny Heath’s brokerage house, although when she asked Rudolph about it, and he tried to explain, she never could quite grasp the details. It had something to do with setting up an involved corporation called Dee Cee Enterprises, after Duncan Calderwood’s initials. Eventually, it was supposed to make Rudolph a wealthy man and get him out of the store, and for half the year, at least, out of Whitby. He had asked her to be on the lookout for a small furnished apartment for him.

  Both Rudolph and Johnny looked som
ehow high, as though they had already done some drinking. She could see by the gilt paper sticking out of the brown paper bags that the bottles they were carrying contained champagne. “Hi, boys,” she said. “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

  “We didn’t know we were coming,” Rudolph said. “This is an impromptu celebration.” He kissed her cheek. He had not been drinking.

  “Hi, Billy,” he said to the little boy.

  “Hi,” Billy said perfunctorily. The relationship between uncle and nephew was tenuous. Billy called his uncle Rudy. From time to time Gretchen tried to get the boy to be more polite and say Uncle Rudolph, but Willie backed up his son, saying, “Old forms, old forms. Don’t bring up the kid to be a hypocrite.”

  “Come on upstairs,” Gretchen said, “and we’ll open these bottles.”

  The living room was a mess. She worked there now, having surrendered the upstairs room completely to Billy, and there were bits and pieces of two articles she had promised for the first of the month. Books, notes, and scraps of paper were scattered all over the desk and tables. Not even the sofa was immune. She was not a methodical worker, and her occasional attempts at order soon foundered into even greater chaos than before. She had taken to chain-smoking when she worked and ash trays full of stubs were everywhere. Willie, who was far from neat himself, complained from time to time. “This isn’t a home,” he said, “it’s the goddamn city room of a small-time newspaper.”

  She noticed Rudolph’s quick glance of disapproval around the room. Was he judging her now against the fastidious girl she had been at nineteen? She had an unreasonable flash of anger against her impeccable, well-pressed brother. I’m running a family, I’m earning a living, don’t forget any of that, brother.

  “Billy,” she said, as she hung up her coat and scarf, with elaborate precision, to make up for the state of the room, “go upstairs and do your homework.”

  “Aah …” Billy said, more for form’s sake than out of any desire to remain below with the grownups.