by Irwin Shaw
“Ah, what a mess,” Gretchen said. “All of us. Yes, you, too. Do you enjoy anything, Rudy?”
“I don’t think of things in those terms,” he said.
“The commercial monk,” Gretchen said harshly. “Except that instead of the vow of poverty, you’ve taken the vow of wealth. Which is better in the long run?”
“Don’t talk like a fool, Gretchen.” Now he was sorry he had come upstairs with her.
“And the two others,” she continued. “Chastity and obedience. Chaste for our Virgin Mother’s sake—is that it? Obedience to Duncan Calderwood, the Pope of Whit-by’s Chamber of Commerce?”
“That’s all going to change now,” Rudolph said, but he was unwilling to defend himself further.
“You’re going to go over the wall, Father Rudolph? You’re going to marry, you’re going to wallow in the fleshpots, you’re going to tell Duncan Calderwood to go fuck himself?”
Rudolph stood up and went over and poured some more soda into his glass, biting back his anger. “It’s silly, Gretchen,” he said, as calmly as possible, “to take tonight out on me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, but her voice was still hard. “Ah—I’m the worst of the lot. I live with a man I despise, I do work that’s mean-spirited and piddling and useless, I’m New York’s easiest lay … Do I shock you, brother?” she said mockingly.
“I think you’re giving yourself a title you haven’t earned,” Rudolph said.
“Joke,” Gretchen said. “Do you want a list? Beginning with Johnny Heath? Do you think he’s been so good to you because of your shining bright eyes?”
“What does Willie think about all this?” Rudolph asked, ignoring the jibe. No matter how it had started and for whatever reasons, Johnny Heath was now his friend.
“Willie doesn’t think about anything but infesting bars and occasionally screwing some drunken broad and getting by in this world with as little work and as little honor as possible. If he somehow was given the original stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, his first thought would be which sponsor he could sell it to at the highest price to advertise vacation tours to Mount Sinai.”
Rudolph laughed and despite herself Gretchen had to laugh, too. “There’s nothing like a failing marriage,” she said, “to bring out flights of rhetoric.”
Rudolph’s laughter was part relief. Gretchen had switched targets and he no longer was under attack.
“Does Willie know what your opinion is of him?” he asked.
“Yes,” Gretchen said. “He agrees with it. That’s the worst thing about him. He says there’s not a man or a woman or a thing in this world that he admires, especially himself. He’d be deeply dissatisfied with himself, he told me, if he was anything but a failure. Beware romantic men.”
“Why do you live with him?” Rudolph asked bluntly.
“Do you remember the note I sent you saying I was in a mess and I wanted to see you?”
“Yes.” Rudolph remembered it very well, remembered that whole day very well. When he had come down to New York the next week and asked Gretchen what the trouble was she had said, “Nothing. It’s blown over.”
“I’d more or less decided I wanted to ask Willie for a divorce,” Gretchen said, “and I wanted your advice.”
“What changed your mind?”
Gretchen shrugged. “Billy got sick. Nothing. For a day the doctor thought it was appendicitis, but it wasn’t. But Willie and I stayed up with him all night and as I looked at him lying all white faced and in pain on the bed and Willie hovering over him, so obviously loving him, I couldn’t bear the thought of making him another one of those poor forlorn statistics—child of a broken marriage, permanently homesick, preparing for the psychiatrist’s couch. Well …” her voice hardened, “that charming fit of maternal sentimentality has passed on. If our parents had divorced when I was nine, I’d be a better woman than I am today.”
“You mean you want a divorce now?”
“If I get custody of Billy,” she said. “And that’s one thing he won’t give me.”
Rudolph hesitated, took a long drink of his whiskey. “Do you want me to see what I can do with him?” He wouldn’t have offered to interfere if it hadn’t been for the tears in the taxicab.
“If it’ll do any good,” Gretchen said. “I want to sleep with one man, not ten, I want to be honest, do something useful, finally. God, I should like The Three Sisters. Divorce is my Moscow. Give me one more drink, please.” She held out her glass.
Rudolph went over to the bar and filled both their glasses. “You’re running low on Scotch,” he said.
“I wish that were true,” she said.
There was the sound of an ambulance siren again, wailing, diminishing, a warning as it approached, a lament as it departed. The Doppler phenomenon. Was it the same accident, completing the round trip? Or one of an endless series, limitless blood on the avenues of the city?
Rudolph handed her her drink and she sat curled up on the couch, staring at it.
A clock chimed somewhere. One o’clock.
“Well,” Gretchen said, “I guess they’re finished eating Chinese by now, Tommy and that lady. Is it possible that he has the only happy marriage in the history of the Jordaches? Do they love, honor and cherish each other as they eat Chinese and warm the bosomy marriage bed?”
There was the sound of a key in the front door lock. “Ah,” Gretchen said, “the veteran is returning home, wearing his medals.”
Willie came into the room, walking straight. “Hi, darling,” he said, and went over and kissed Gretchen’s cheek. As always, when he hadn’t seen Willie for some time, Rudolph was surprised at how short he was. Perhaps that was his real flaw—his size. He waved at Rudolph. “How’s the merchant prince tonight?” he said.
“Congratulate him,” Gretchen said. “He signed that deal today.”
“Congratulations,” Willie said. He squinted around the room. “God, it’s dark in here. What’ve you two been talking about—death, tombs, foul deeds done by night?” He went over to the bar and poured the last of the whiskey. “Darling,” he said, “we need a fresh bottle.”
Automatically, Gretchen stood up and went into the kitchen.
Willie looked after her anxiously. “Rudy,” he whispered, “is she sore at me for not coming home to dinner?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Willie said. “Otherwise, I’d be getting Lecture Number 725. Thanks, darling,” he said as Gretchen came into the room carrying a bottle. He took the bottle from her, opened it, and strengthened his drink. “What’d you kids do tonight?” he asked.
“We had a family reunion,” Gretchen said, from her place on the couch. “We went to a prize fight.”
“What?” Willie said puzzledly. “What is she talking about, Rudy?”
“She can tell you about it later.” Rudolph stood up, leaving most of his last whiskey undrunk. “I’ve got to be moving along. I have to get up at the crack of dawn.” He felt uncomfortable sitting there with Willie, pretending that this night was no different from others, pretending he had not heard what Gretchen had said about him and about herself. He bent over and kissed Gretchen and Willie accompanied him to the door.
“Thanks for coming by and keeping the old girl company,” Willie said. “It makes me feel like less of a shit, leaving her alone. But it was unavoidable.”
It wasn’t a butt, Tommy, Rudolph remembered, I swear it wasn’t a butt. “You don’t have to make any excuses to me, Willie,” he said.
“Say,” Willie said, “she was joking, wasn’t she? That stuff about the prize fight? What is it—a kind of riddle, or something?”
“No. We went to a fight.”
“I’ll never understand that woman,” Willie said. “When I want to watch a fight on television, I have to go to somebody else’s house. Ah, well, I suppose she’ll tell me about it.” He pressed Rudolph’s hand warmly and Rudolph went out the door. He heard Willie locking it securely behind h
im and fixing the anti-burglar chain. The danger is inside, Willie, Rudolph wanted to say. You are locking it in with you. He went down the stairs slowly. He wondered where he would be tonight, what evasions he would be offering, what cuckoldry and dissatisfaction would have been in the air, if that night in 1950, room 923 in the St. Moritz Hotel had answered?
If I were a religious man, he thought, going out into the night, I would believe that God was watching over me.
He remembered his promise to try to do what he could to get Gretchen a divorce, on her terms. There was the logical first step to be taken and he was a logical man. He wondered where he could find a reliable private detective. Johnny Heath would know. Johnny Heath was made for New York City. Rudolph sighed, hating the moment ahead of him when he would enter the detective’s office, hating the detective himself, still unknown to him, preparing, all in the week’s work, to spy on the breakdown and end of love.
Rudolph turned and took a last look at the building he had just left and against which he was sworn to conspire. He knew he’d never be able to mount those steps again, shake that small, desperate man’s hand again. Duplicity, too, must have its limits.
Chapter 6
I
He had pissed blood in the morning, but not very much and he wasn’t hurting. The reflection of his face in the train window when they went through a tunnel was a little sinister, because of the slash of bandage over his eye, but otherwise, he told himself, he looked like anybody else on the way to the bank. The Hudson was cold blue in the October sun and as the train passed Sing Sing he thought of the prisoners peering out at the broad river running free to the sea, and he said, “Poor bastards,” aloud.
He patted the bulge of his wallet under his jacket. He had collected the seven hundred dollars from the bookie on the way downtown. Maybe he could get away with giving Teresa just two hundred of it, two fifty if she made a stink.
He pulled the wallet out. He had been paid off in hundreds. He took out a bill and studied it. Founding father, Benjamin Franklin, stared out at him, looking like somebody’s old mother. Lightning on a kite, he remembered dimly; at night all cats are gray. He must have been a tougher man than he looked to get his picture on a bill that size. Did he once say, Gentlemen we must hang together or we will hang separately? I should have at least finished high school, Thomas thought, vague in the presence of one hundred dollars’ worth of history. This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private and is redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve Bank. If this wasn’t lawful money, what the hell was? It was signed in fancy script by somebody called Ivy Baker Priest, Treasurer of the United States. It took a someone with a name like that to give out with double talk about debts and money and get away with it.
Thomas folded the bill neatly and slipped it by itself in a side pocket, to be put with the other hundred-dollar bills, reposing in the dark vault for just such a day as this.
The man on the seat in front of him was reading a newspaper, turned to the sports page. Thomas could see that he was reading about last night’s fight. He wondered what the man would say if he tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Mister, I was there, how would you like an account of the battle right from the middle of the ring?” Actually, the reports of the fight in the papers had been pretty good and there had been a picture on the back page of the News of Virgil trying to get up the last time and himself in a neutral corner. One newspaperman had even said the fight had raised him into the ranks of the contenders for the title and Schultzy had called him all excited, right before he left the house, to say that a promoter over from England had seen the fight and was offering them a bout in London in six weeks. “We’re going international,” Schultzy had said excitedly. “We can fight all over the Continent. And you’ll knock ’em dead. They ain’t got anybody half as good even as Virgil Walters in England at your weight. And the guy said he’d give us some of the purse under the table and we won’t have to declare it to the goddamn income tax.”
So, all in all, he should have been feeling pretty good, sitting there in the train, with the prison falling away behind him, full of a lot of guys who probably were a damn sight smarter than he was and maybe less guilty of one thing and another, too. But he wasn’t feeling good. Teresa had given him a load of grief about not telling her about the bet and about his la-di-da family, as she called them. She was sore because he’d never said anything about them, as though he was hiding some fucking treasure or something.
“That sister of yours looked at me like I was dirt,” Teresa had said. “And your fancy brother opened the window as though I smelled like horseshit and he pulled away to his side of the cab like if he happened to touch me for a second he’d catch the clap. And after not seeing their brother for ten years they were just too fine even to come and have a cup of coffee with him, for God’s sake. And you, the big fighter, you never said a word, you just took it all.”
This had been in bed, after the restaurant, where she had eaten in sullen silence. He had wanted to make love to her, as he always did after a fight, because he didn’t touch her for weeks before a fight and his thing was so hard you could knock out fungoes to the outfield with it, but she had closed down like a stone and wouldn’t let him near her. For Christ’s sake, he thought, I didn’t marry her for her conversation. And it wasn’t as though even in her best moments Teresa was so marvelous in bed. If you mussed her hair while you were going at it hammer and tongs, she’d complain bloody murder, and she was always finding excuses to put it off till tomorrow or next week or next year and when she finally opened her legs it was like a tollgate being fed a counterfeit coin. She came from a religious family, she said, as though the Angel Michael with his sword was standing guard over all Catholic cunts. He’d bet his next purse his sister Gretchen, with her straight hair and her no make-up and her black dress and that ladylike don’t-you-dare-touch-the-hem-of-my-garment look would give a man a better time in one bang than Teresa in twenty ten-minute rounds.
So he’d slept badly, his wife’s words ringing in his ears. The worst of it was that what she said was true. Here he was a big grown man, and all his brother and sister had to do was come into the room and he felt just the way they had made him feel when he was a kid—slimy, stupid, useless, suspect.
Go win fights, have your picture in the papers, piss blood, go have people cheer you and clap you on the back and ask you to appear in London; two snots you thought you’d never see or hear from again show up and say hello, just hello, and everything you are is nothing. Well, his goddamn brother, momma’s pet, poppa’s pet, blowing his golden horn, opening taxi windows, was going to be in for a shock from his nothing pug brother today.
For a crazy moment he thought maybe he wouldn’t get off the train, he’d go on to Albany and make the change and arrive in Elysium, Ohio, and go to the one person in the whole world who had touched him with love, who had made him feel like a whole man, when he was just a kid of sixteen. Clothilde, servant to his uncle’s bed. St. Sebastian, in the bathtub.
But when the train pulled into Port Philip, he got off and went to the bank, just as he had planned.
II
She tried not to show her impatience as Billy played with his lunch. Superstitiously (children sensed things that transcended the years) she had not dressed yet for the afternoon ahead of her, but was sitting with him in her work clothes, slacks and a sweater. She picked at her food, without appetite, trying not to scold the boy as he pushed bits of lamb chop and lettuce around his plate.
“Why do I have to go to the Museum of Natural History?” Billy demanded.
“It’s a treat,” she said, “a special treat.”
“Not for me. Why do I have to go?”
“The whole class is going.”
“They’re dopes. Except for Conrad Franklin they’re all dopes.” Billy had had the same morsel of lamb chop in his mouth for what seemed like five minutes. Occasionally, he would move it symbolically from one side o
f his mouth to the other. Gretchen wondered if, finally, she should hit him. The clock in the kitchen suddenly ticked louder and louder and she tried not to look at it, but couldn’t resist. Twenty to one. She was due uptown at a quarter to two. And she had to take Billy to school, hurry back, bathe and dress, carefully, carefully, and then make sure not to arrive panting as though she had just run a marathon.
“Finish your lunch,” Gretchen said, marveling at the motherly calmness of her voice, on this afternoon when she felt anything but motherly. “There’s Jello for dessert.”
“I don’t like Jello.”
“Since when?”
“Since today. And what’s the sense in going to see a lot of old stuffed animals? At least if they want us to look at animals we could go see some live ones.”
“On Sunday,” Gretchen said, “I’ll take you to the zoo.”
“I told Conrad Franklin I’d go over to his house on Sunday,” Billy said. He reached into his mouth and took out the piece of lamb chop and put it on his plate.
“That’s not a polite thing to do,” Gretchen said, as the clock ticked.
“It’s tough.”
“All right,” Gretchen said, reaching for his plate. “If you’re through, you’re through.”
Billy held onto the plate. “I haven’t finished my salad.” Deliberately, he cut a lettuce leaf into geometric forms with his fork.
He is asserting his personality, Gretchen made herself think, to keep from hitting him. It bodes well for his future.
Unable to bear watching his measured game with the lettuce, she got up and took a cup of Jello out of the refrigerator.
“Why’re you so nervous today?” Billy asked. “Jumping around.”
Children and their goddamn intuition, Gretchen thought. Not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of radar do we come. She put the Jello down on the table. “Eat your dessert,” she said, “it’s getting late.”
Billy folded his arms and leaned back. “I told you I don’t like Jello.”