Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  “Go ahead, Billy.”

  He went upstairs happily, pretending to be unhappy.

  Gretchen got out three glasses. “What’s the occasion?” she asked Rudolph, who was working on opening the bottle of champagne.

  “We did it,” Rudolph said. “Today we had the final signing. We can drink champagne morning, noon, and night for the rest of our lives.” He got the cork out and let the foam splash over his hand as he poured.

  “That’s wonderful,” Gretchen said mechanically. It was difficult for her to understand Rudolph’s single-minded immersion in business.

  They touched glasses.

  “To Dee Cee Enterprises and the Chairman of the Board,” Johnny said. “The Newest Tycoon of them all.”

  Both men laughed, nerves still taut. They gave Gretchen the curious impression of being survivors of an accident, almost hysterically congratulating themselves on their escape. What goes on in those offices downtown, Gretchen wondered.

  Rudolph couldn’t sit still. He prowled around the room, glass in hand, opening books, glancing at the confusion of her desk, ruffling the pages of a newspaper. He looked trained down and nervy, with very bright eyes and hollows showing in his cheeks.

  By contrast, Johnny looked chubby, soft, smooth, unedged, and now that he had a glass in his hand, composed, almost sleepy. He was more familiar with money and its uses than Rudolph and was prepared for sudden strokes of fortune and misfortune.

  Rudolph turned on the radio and the middle of the first movement of the Emperor Concerto blared out. Rudolph grinned. “They’re playing Our Song,” he said to Johnny. “Music to million by.”

  “Cut it out,” Gretchen said. “You fellows are making me feel like a pauper.”

  “If Willie has any sense,” Johnny said, “he’ll beg, borrow, or steal to scrape up some dough and come in on the ground floor of Dee Cee Enterprises. I mean it. There’s no limit to how high this stuff can go.”

  “Willie,” Gretchen said, “is too proud to beg, too well known to borrow, and too cowardly to steal.”

  “You’re talking about my friend,” Johnny said, pretending to be shocked.

  “He was once a friend of mine, too,” Gretchen said.

  “Have some more champagne,” Johnny said, and poured.

  Rudolph picked up a sheet of paper from her desk. “‘The Age of Midgets,’” he read. “What sort of title is that?”

  “It started out to be an article about the new television programs this season,” Gretchen said, “and somehow I branched out. Last year’s plays, this year’s plays, a bunch of novels, Eisenhower’s cabinet, architecture, public morality, education … I’m aghast at how Billy’s being educated and maybe that really started me off.”

  Rudolph read the first paragraph. “You’re pretty rough,” he said.

  “I’m paid to be a common scold,” Gretchen said. “That’s my racket.”

  “Do you really feel as black as you sound?” Rudolph asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She held out her glass toward Johnny.

  The telephone rang. “Probably Willie saying he can’t come home for dinner,” Gretchen said. She got up and went to the telephone on the desk. “Hello,” she said, her voice aggrieved in advance. She listened, puzzled. “One moment, please,” she said, and handed the phone to Rudolph. “It’s for you,” she said.

  “Me?” Rudolph shrugged. “Nobody knows I’m here.”

  “The man said Mr. Jordache.”

  “Yes?” Rudolph said into the phone.

  “Jordache?” The voice was husky, secretive.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Al. I put down five hundred for you for tonight. A good price. Seven to five.”

  “Wait a minute,” Rudolph said, but the phone went dead. Rudolph stared at the instrument in his hand. “That was the queerest thing. It was a man called Al. He said he put down five hundred for me for tonight at seven to five. Gretchen, do you gamble secretly?”

  “I don’t know any Al,” she said, “and I don’t have five hundred dollars and besides, he asked for Mr. Jordache, not Miss Jordache.” She wrote under her maiden name and was listed as G. Jordache in the Manhattan directory.

  “That’s the damnedest thing,” Rudolph said. “Did I tell anyone I’d be at this number?” he asked Johnny.

  “Not to my knowledge,” Johnny said.

  “He must have gotten the numbers mixed up,” Gretchen said.

  “That doesn’t sound reasonable,” Rudolph said. “How many Jordaches can there be in New York? Did you ever come across any others?”

  Gretchen shook her head.

  “Where’s the Manhattan book?”

  Gretchen pointed and Rudolph picked it up and opened it to the J’s. “T. Jordache,” he read, “West Ninety-third Street.” He closed the book slowly and put it down. “T. Jordache,” he said to Gretchen. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  “I hope not,” Gretchen said.

  “What’s all this about?” Johnny asked.

  “We have a brother named Thomas,” Rudolph said.

  “The baby of the family,” Gretchen said. “Some baby.”

  “We haven’t seen him or heard of him in ten years,” Rudolph said.

  “The Jordaches are an extraordinarily close-knit family,” Gretchen said. After the work of the day, the champagne was beginning to take effect, and she lolled back on the couch. She remembered that she hadn’t eaten any lunch.

  “What does he do?” Johnny said. “Your brother?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Rudolph said.

  “If he’s living up to his early promise,” Gretchen said, “he is dodging the police.”

  “I’m going to find out.” Rudolph opened the book again and looked up the number of T. Jordache on West Ninety-third Street. He dialled. The phone was answered by a woman, young from the sound of her voice.

  “Good evening, madam,” Rudolph said, impersonal, institutional. “May I speak to Mr. Thomas Jordache, please?”

  “No, you can’t,” the woman said. She had a high, thin soprano voice. “Who’s this?” Now she sounded suspicious.

  “A friend of his,” Rudolph said. “Is Mr. Jordache there?”

  “He’s sleeping,” the woman said angrily. “He’s got to fight tonight. He hasn’t got time to talk to anybody.”

  There was the sound of the receiver slamming down.

  Rudolph had been holding the receiver away from his ear and the woman had talked loudly, so both Gretchen and Johnny had heard every word of the conversation.

  “Fighting tonight on the old camp grounds,” Gretchen said. “Sounds like our Tommy.”

  Rudolph picked up the copy of the New York Times that was lying on a chair beside the desk and turned to the sports section. “Here it is,” he said. “Main bout. Tommy Jordache versus Virgil Walters, middleweights, ten rounds. At the Sunnyside Gardens.”

  “It sounds bucolic,” Gretchen said.

  “I’m going,” Rudolph said.

  “Why?” Gretchen asked.

  “He’s my brother, after all.”

  “I’ve gotten along for ten years without him,” Gretchen said. “I’m going to try for twenty.”

  “Johnny?” Rudolph turned to Heath.

  “Sorry,” Johnny said. “I’m invited to a dinner. Tell me how it works out.”

  The telephone rang again. Rudolph picked it up eagerly, but it was only Willie. “Hi, Rudy,” Willie said. There were barroom noises behind him. “No, I don’t have to speak to her,” Willie said. “Just tell her I’m sorry, but I’ve got a business dinner tonight and I can’t make it home until late. Tell her not to wait up.”

  Gretchen smiled, lying on the couch. “Don’t tell me what he said.”

  “He’s not coming home to dinner.”

  “And I’m not to wait up.”

  “Something along those lines.”

  “Johnny,” Gretchen said, “don’t you think it’s time to open the second bottle?”

  By the
time they had finished the second bottle, Gretchen had called for a baby sitter and they had found out where Sunnyside Gardens was. She went in and took a shower, did her hair, and put on a dark-wool dress, wondering if it was comme il faut for prizefights. She had grown thinner and the dress was a little loose on her, but she caught the quick glances of approval of the two men at her appearance and was gratified by it. I must not let myself fall into slobhood, she thought. Ever.

  When the baby sitter came, Gretchen gave her instructions and left the apartment with Rudolph and Johnny. They went to a nearby steak house. Johnny had a drink with them at the bar and was saying, “Thanks for the drink,” and was preparing to leave when Rudolph said, “I only have five dollars.” He laughed. “Johnny, be my banker for tonight, will you?”

  Johnny took out his wallet and put down five ten-dollar bills. “Enough?” he said.

  “Thanks.” Rudolph put the bills carelessly in his pocket. He laughed again.

  “What’s so funny?” Gretchen asked.

  “I never thought I’d like to see the day,” Rudolph said, “when I didn’t know exactly how much money I had in my pocket.”

  “You have taken on the wholesome and mind-freeing habits of the rich,” Johnny said gravely. “Congratulations. I’ll see you tomorrow at the office, Rudy. And I hope your brother wins.”

  “I hope he gets his head knocked off,” Gretchen said.

  A preliminary bout was under way as an usher led them to their seats three rows from ringside. Gretchen noted that there were few women present and that none of them was wearing a black-wool dress. She had never been to a prizefight before and she tuned out the television set whenever one was being shown. The idea of men beating each other senseless for pay seemed brutish to her and the faces of the men around her were just the sort of faces that one would expect at such an entertainment. She was sure she had never seen so many ugly people collected in one place.

  The men in the ring did not appear to be doing much harm to each other and she watched with passive disgust as they clinched, wrestled, and ducked away from blows. The crowd, in its fog of tobacco smoke, was apathetic and only once in awhile, when there was the thud of a heavy punch, a sort of sharp, grunting, animal noise filled the arena.

  Rudolph, she knew, went to prizefights from time to time and she had heard him discussing particular boxers like Ray Robinson enthusiastically with Willie. She looked surreptitiously over at her brother. He seemed interested by the spectacle in the ring. Now that she was actually seeing a fight, with the smell of sweat in her nostrils and the red blotches on pale skin where blows had landed, Rudolph’s whole character, the subtle, deprecating air of educated superiority, the well-mannered lack of aggressiveness, seemed suddenly suspect to her. He was linked with the brutes in the ring, with the brutes in the rows around her.

  In the next fight, one man was cut over the eye and the wound spurted blood all over him and his opponent. The roar of the crowd when they saw the blood sickened her and she wondered if she could sit there and wait for a brother to climb through the ropes to face similar butchery.

  By the time the main bout came on, she was pale and sick and it was through a haze of tears and smoke that she saw a large man in a red bathrobe climb agilely through the ropes and recognized Thomas.

  When Thomas’s handlers took off his robe and threw it over his shoulders to put the gloves on over the bandaged hands, the first thing Rudolph noticed, with a touch of jealousy, was that Thomas had almost no hair on his body. Rudolph was getting quite hairy, with thick, tight, black curls on his chest and sprouting on his shoulders. His legs, too, were covered with dark hair, and it did not fit with the image he had of himself. When he went swimming in the summer, his hairiness embarrassed him and he felt that people were snickering at him. For that reason he rarely sunbathed and put on a shirt as soon as he got out of the water.

  Thomas, except for the ferocious, muscular, overtrained body, looked surprisingly the same. His face was unmarked and the expression was still boyish and ingratiating. Thomas kept smiling during the formalities before the beginning of the bout, but Rudolph could see him flicking the corner of his mouth nervously with his tongue. A muscle in his leg twitched under his shiny silk, purple trunks while the referee was giving the final instructions to the two men in the center of the ring. Except for the moment when he had been introduced (In this corner, Tommy Jordache, weight one fifty-nine and a half), and had raised his gloved hand and looked quickly up at the crowd, Thomas had kept his eyes down. If he had seen Rudolph and Gretchen, he made no sign.

  His opponent was a rangy Negro, considerably taller than Tommy, and with much longer arms, shuffling dangerously in his corner in a little dance, nodding as he listened to the advice being whispered into his ear by his handler.

  Gretchen watched with a rigid, painful grimace on her face, squinting through the smoke at her brother’s powerful, destructive, bare figure. She did not like the hairless male body—Willie was covered with a comfortable reddish fuzz—and the ridged professional muscles made her shudder in primitive distaste. Siblings, out of the same womb. The thought dismayed her. Behind Thomas’s boyish smile she recognized the sly malevolence, the desire to hurt, the pleasure in dealing pain, that had alienated her when they lived in the same house. The thought that it was her own flesh and blood exposed there under the bright lights in this dreadful ceremony was almost unbearable to her. Of course, she thought, I should have known; this is where he had to end. Fighting for his life.

  The men were evenly matched, equally fast, the Negro less aggressive, but better able to defend himself with his long arms. Thomas kept burrowing in, taking two punches to get in one, slugging away at the Negro’s body, making the Negro give ground and occasionally punishing him terribly when he got him in a corner against the ropes.

  “Kill the nigger,” a voice from the back of the arena cried out each time Thomas threw a volley of punches. Gretchen winced, ashamed to be there, ashamed for every man and woman in the place. Oh, Arnold Simms, limping, in the maroon bathrobe, saying, “You got pretty feet, Miss Jordache,” dreaming of Cornwall, oh, Arnold Simms, forgive me for tonight.

  It lasted eight of the ten rounds. Thomas was bleeding from the nose and from a cut above the eye, but never retreating, always shuffling in, with a kind of hideous, heedless, mechanical energy, slowly wearing his man down. In the eighth round, the Negro could hardly lift his hands and Thomas sent him to the canvas with a long, looping right hand that caught the Negro high on the forehead. The Negro got up at the count of eight, staggering, barely able to get his guard up, and Thomas, his face a bloody smear, but smiling, leapt after him mercilessly and hit him what seemed to Gretchen at least fifty times in the space of seconds. The Negro collapsed onto his face as the crowd yelled ear-splittingly around her. The Negro tried to get up, almost reached one knee. In a neutral corner, Thomas crouched alertly, bloody, tireless. He seemed to want his man to get up, to continue the fight, and Gretchen was sure there was a swift look of disappointment that flitted across his battered face as the Negro sank helplessly to the canvas and was counted out.

  She wanted to vomit, but she merely retched drily, holding her handkerchief to her face, surprised at the smell of the perfume on it, among the rank odors of the arena. She sat huddled over in her seat, looking down, unable to watch any more, afraid she was going to faint and by that act announce to all the world her fatal connection to the victorious animal in the ring.

  Rudolph had sat through the whole bout without uttering a sound, his lips twisted a little in disapproval at the clumsy bloodthirstiness, without style or grace, of the fight.

  The fighters left the ring, the Negro, swathed in towels and robe, was helped through the ropes by his handlers, Thomas grinning, waving triumphantly, as people clapped him on the back. He left the ring on the far side, so that there was no chance of seeing his brother and sister as he made his way to the locker room.

  The crowd began to drift out, but Gretchen and Ru
dolph sat side by side, without saying a word to each other, fearful of communicating after what they had seen. Finally Gretchen said, thickly, her eyes still lowered, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “We have to go back,” Rudolph said.

  “What do you mean?” Gretchen looked up in surprise at her brother.

  “We came,” Rudolph said. “We watched. We have to see him.”

  “He’s got nothing to do with us.” As she said this, she knew she was lying.

  “Come on.” Rudolph stood up and took her elbow, making her stand. He met all challenges, Rudolph, the cold, veray parfit gentil knight at Sunnyside Gardens.

  “I won’t, I won’t …” Even as she was babbling this, she knew Rudolph would lead her inexorably to face Thomas, bloody, victorious, brutal, rancorous.

  There were some men standing at the door of the dressing room, but nobody stopped Rudolph as he pushed the door open. Gretchen hung back. “I’d better wait outside,” she said. “He may not be dressed.”

  Rudolph paid no attention to what she had said, but held her wrist and pulled her into the room after him. Thomas was sitting on a stained rubbing table with a towel around his middle and a doctor was sewing up the cut over his eye.

  “It’s nothing,” the doctor was saying. “One more stitch and it’s done.”

  Thomas had his eyes closed, to make it easier for the doctor to work. There was an orange stain of antiseptic above the eyebrow that gave him a clownish, lopsided air. He had obviously already taken his shower, as his hair was dark with water and plastered to his head, making him look like a print of an old-time bare-knuckle pugilist. Grouped around the table were several men, whom Rudolph recognized as having been in or near Thomas’s corner during the fight. A curvy young woman in a tight dress kept making little sighing sounds each time the doctor’s needle went into flesh. She had startling black hair and wore black nylon stockings over outlandishly shapely legs. Her eyebrows, plucked into a thin pencil line, high up, gave her a look of doll-like surprise. The room stank of old sweat, liniment, cigar smoke, and urine from the toilet visible through an open door leading off the dressing room. A bloodstained towel lay on the greasy floor, in a heap with the sweat-soaked purple tights and supporter and socks and shoes that Thomas had worn during the fight. It was sickeningly hot in the room.