Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  Briefly, Rudolph had considered putting Billy in a hotel, but had discarded the idea as too cold-blooded. This was no night for the boy to spend alone in a hotel. Also, it would have been cowardly. He would have to face the old lady down.

  Still, when he awakened the boy as he stopped the car in front of the house, and led him through the door, he was relieved to see that his mother was not in the living room. He looked down the hallway and saw that her door was closed. That meant she had probably had a fight with Martha and was sulking. He could confront her alone and prepare her for her first meeting with her grandson.

  He went into the kitchen with Billy. Martha was sitting at the table reading a newspaper and there was a smell of something cooking coming from the oven. Martha was not fat, as his mother spitefully described her, but in fact was an angular, virginal, gaunt woman of fifty, sure of the world’s displeasure, anxious to give back as good as she got.

  “Martha,” he said, “this is my nephew, Billy. He’s going to stay with us for a few days. He’s tired and he needs a bath and some hot food. Do you think you can give him a hand? He’ll sleep in the guest room, next to mine.”

  Martha smoothed out the newspaper on the kitchen table. “Your mother said you weren’t going to be in for dinner.”

  “I’m not. I’m going out again.”

  “Then there’ll be enough for him,” Martha said. “She—” with a savage gesture of the head toward the part of the house inhabited by his mother—“she didn’t say nothing about no nephews.”

  “She doesn’t know yet,” Rudolph said, trying to make his voice sound cheery, for Billy’s sake.

  “That’ll make her day,” Martha said. “Finding out about nephews.”

  Billy stood quietly to one side, testing the atmosphere, not liking it.

  Martha stood up, her face no more disapproving, really, than usual, but how could Billy know that? “Come on, young man,” Martha said. “I guess we can make room for a skinny little thing like you.”

  Rudolph was surprised at what was, in Martha’s vocabulary, practically a tender invitation.

  “Go ahead, Billy,” he said. “I’ll be up to see you in a little while.”

  Billy followed Martha out of the kitchen, hesitantly. Attached now to his uncle, any separation was full of risk.

  Rudolph heard their footsteps going up the stairs. His mother would be alerted that someone strange was in the house. She recognized his tread and invariably called out to him when he was on his way to his room.

  He got some ice out of the refrigerator. He needed a drink after the almost teetotaling day and before the meeting with his mother. He carried the ice out into the living room and was pleased to find that the living room was warm. Brad must have sent over an engineer yesterday for the furnace. His mother’s tongue would at least not be honed by cold.

  He made himself a bourbon and water, with plenty of ice, sank into a chair, put his feet up, and sipped at his drink, enjoying it. He was pleased with the room, not too heavily furnished, with modern, leather chairs, globular glass lamps, Danish wood tables and simple, neutral-colored curtains, all of it making a carefully thought-out contrast with the low-beamed ceiling and the small eighteenth-century, square-paned windows. His mother complained that it looked like a dentist’s waiting room.

  He finished his drink slowly, in no hurry for the scene ahead of him. Finally, he pushed himself up out of the chair, went down the hallway, and knocked on the door. His mother’s bedroom was on the ground floor so that she wouldn’t have to manage the stairs. Although, now, since the two operations, one for phlebitis, the second for cataracts, she got around fairly well. Complainingly, but well.

  “Who is it?” The voice was sharp behind the closed door.

  “It’s me, Mom,” Rudolph said. “You asleep?”

  “Not any more,” she said.

  He pushed the door open.

  “Not with people tramping up and down like elephants all over the house,” she said from the bed. She was propped up against lacy pillows, wearing a pink bed jacket that was trimmed with what seemed to be some kind of pinkish fur. She was wearing the thick glasses that the doctor had prescribed for her after the operation. They permitted her to read, watch television, and go to the movies, but they gave a wild, blank, soulless stare to her hugely magnified eyes.

  Doctors had done wonders for her since they had moved to the new house. Before that, when they were still living over the store, although Rudolph had pleaded with his mother to undergo the various operations he was sure she needed, she had adamantly refused. “I will be nobody’s charity patient,” she had said, “being experimented on by interns who shouldn’t be allowed to put a knife to a dog.” Rudolph’s protestations had fallen then on deaf ears. While they lived in the poor apartment nothing could convince her that she was not poor and doomed to suffer the fate of the poor once confided to the cold care of an institution. But once they made the move and Martha read the write-ups in the newspapers about Rudy’s successes to her and she had ridden in the new car that Rudy had bought, she went boldly into surgery, after ascertaining that the men who treated her were the best and most expensive available.

  She had been literally rejuvenated, resuscitated, brought back from the lip of the grave, by her belief in money. Rudy had thought that decent medical care would make his mother’s last years a little more comfortable. Instead, they had almost made her young. With Martha glooming at the wheel, she now went out in Rudy’s car whenever it was free; she frequented beauty parlors (her hair was almost blue and waved); patronized the town’s movie houses; called for taxis; attended Mass; played bridge with newly found church acquaintances twice a week; fed priests on nights when Rudy was not at home; had bought a new copy of Gone With the Wind, as well as all the novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes.

  A wide variety of clothes and hats for all occasions were stored in the wardrobe in her room, which was as full of furniture as a small antique shop, gilt desks, a chaise longue, a dressing table with ten different flasks of French perfume on it. For the first time in her life her lips were heavily rouged. She looked ghastly, Rudolph thought, with her painted face and gaudy dresses, but she was infinitely more alive than before. If this was the way she was making up for the dreadful years of her childhood and the long agony of her marriage, it was not up to him to deprive her of her toys.

  He had played with the idea of moving her to an apartment of her own in town, with Martha to tend her, but he could not bear the thought of the expression on her face at the moment when he would take her through the door of the house for the last time, stricken by the ingratitude of a son whom she had loved above all things in her life, a son whose shirts she had ironed at midnight after twelve hours on her feet in the store, a son for whom she had sacrificed youth, husband, friends, her other two children.

  So she stayed on. Rudolph was not one to miss payment on his debts.

  “Who is it upstairs? You’ve brought a woman into the house,” she said accusingly.

  “I’ve never brought a woman into the house, as you put it, Mom,” Rudolph said, “although if I wanted to, I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”

  “Your father’s blood,” his mother said. Dreadful charge.

  “It’s your grandson. I brought him home from school.”

  “That was no six-year-old boy going up the staircase,” she said. “I have ears.”

  “It isn’t Thomas’s son,” Rudolph said. “It’s Gretchen’s son.”

  “I will not hear that name,” she said. She put her hands to her ears. Television-watching had left its mark on her gestures.

  Rudolph sat on the edge of his mother’s bed and gently took her hands down, holding them. I have been lax, he thought. This conversation should have been held years ago.

  “Now listen to me, Mom,” he said. “He’s a very good boy and he’s in trouble and …”

  “I won’t have that whore’s brat in my house,” she said.

  “Gretchen is not a whore
,” Rudolph said. “Her son is not a brat. And this is not your house.”

  “I was waiting for the day you would finally say those words,” she said.

  Rudolph ignored the invitation to melodrama. “He’s going to stay only a few days,” he said, “and he needs kindness and attention and I’m going to give it to him and Martha’s going to give it to him and you’re going to give it to him.”

  “What will I ever tell Father McDonnell?” His mother looked, eyes magnified and blank, up toward Heaven, before whose gates stood, theoretically, Father McDonnell.

  “You’re going to tell Father McDonnell that you have finally learned the virtue of Christian charity,” Rudolph said.

  “Ah,” she said, “you’re a fine one to talk about Christian charity. Have you ever seen the inside of a church?”

  “I haven’t got time to argue,” Rudolph said. “Calderwood is expecting me any minute now. I’m telling you how you’re going to behave with the boy.”

  “I will not allow him in my presence,” she said, quoting from some portion of her favorite reading. “I will close my door and Martha will serve my meals on a tray.”

  “You can do that if you want, Mom,” Rudolph said quietly. “But if you do, I’m cutting you off. No more car, no more bridge parties, no more charge accounts, no more beauty parlors, no more dinners for Father McDonnell. Think about it.” He stood up. “I’ve got to go now. Martha’s prepared to give Billy dinner. I suggest you join them.”

  Tears as he closed his mother’s bedroom door. What a cheap way to threaten an old lady, he thought. Why didn’t she just die? Gracefully, unwaved, unrinsed, unrouged.

  There was a grandfather’s clock in the hallway and he saw that he had time to phone Gretchen if he made an immediate connection to California. He put in the call and made himself another drink while waiting for the call to come through. Calderwood might smell the liquor on his breath and disapprove, but he was past that, too. As he sipped his drink he thought of what he had been doing the day before at just this hour. Entwined in twilit warmth in the soft bed, the red-wool stockings strewn on the floor, the sweet warm breath mingled with his, rum and lemon. Had his mother once lain sweetly in a lover’s arms on a cold December afternoon, clothes carelessly discarded in lover’s haste? The image refused to materialize. Would Jean, old, one day lie in a fussed-up bed, eyes staring behind thick glasses, old lips rouged in scorn and avarice? Better not to think about it.

  The phone rang and it was Gretchen. He explained the afternoon as quickly as he could and said that Billy was safely with him and that if she thought best he would put Billy on a plane to Los Angeles in two or three days, unless, of course, she wanted to come East.

  “No,” she said. “Put him on a plane.”

  A tricky little sense of pleasure. An excuse to get to New York on Tuesday or Wednesday. Jean.

  “I don’t have to tell you how grateful I am, Rudy,” Gretchen said.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “When I have a son I will expect you to take cafe of him. I’ll let you know what plane he’s on. And maybe one day soon, I’ll come out and visit you.”

  The lives of others.

  Calderwood himself answered the door when Rudolph rang. He was dressed for Sunday, even though his Sabbath duties were behind him, dark suit with vest, white shirt, somber tie, his high, black shoes. There never was enough light in the frugal Calderwood house and it was too dark for Rudolph to see what sort of expression Calderwood had on his face as he said, neutrally, “Come in, Rudy. You’re a little late.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said. He followed the old man, who walked heavily now, a certain measured number of steps between him and the grave, to be economized, doled out.

  Calderwood led him into the somber oak-paneled room he called his study, with a big mahogany desk and cracked oak and leather easy chairs. The glassed bookcases were filled with files, records of bills paid, twenty-year-old transactions that Calderwood still didn’t trust putting in the modest basement vaults where the ordinary business files were kept, open to any clerk’s prying eye.

  “Sit down.” Calderwood gestured toward one of the leather and oak easy chairs. “You’ve been drinking, Rudy,” he said mournfully. “My sons-in-law, I regret to say, are also drinkers.” Calderwood’s two older daughers had married some time before, one a man from Chicago, another a man from. Arizona. Rudolph had the feeling that the girls had picked their mates not out of love, but geography, to get away from their father.

  “That isn’t what I brought you here to talk about though,” Calderwood said. “I wanted to speak to you man-to-man, when Mrs. Calderwood and Virginia were not on the premises. They have gone to the movie show and we can speak freely.” It was not like the old man to indulge in elaborate preliminaries. He seemed ill at ease, which also was not like him.

  Rudolph waited, conscious that Calderwood was fiddling with objects on his desk, a paper opener, an old-fashioned inkstand.

  “Rudolph …” Calderwood cleared his throat portentously. “I’m surprised at your behavior.”

  “My behavior?” For a wild instant Rudolph thought that Calderwood had somehow found out about himself and Jean.

  “Yes. It’s not like you at all, Rudy.” The tone was sorrowful now. “You’ve been like a son to me. Better than a son. Truthful. Open. Trustworthy.”

  The old Eagle Scout, covered with merit badges, Rudolph thought, waiting, wary.

  “Suddenly something has come over you, Rudy,” Calderwood continued. “You have been operating behind my back. With no apparent reason. You know you could have come to the door of my house and rung my bell and I would have been glad to welcome you.”

  “Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said, thinking, old age here, too. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I am talking about the affections of my daughter Virginia, Rudy. Don’t deny.”

  “Mr. Calderwood …”

  “You have been tampering with her affections. Gratuitously. You have stolen where you could have demanded.” There was anger in the voice now.

  “I assure you, Mr. Calderwood, that I haven’t …”

  “It’s not like you to lie, Rudy.”

  “I’m not lying. I don’t know …”

  “What if I told you the girl has confessed everything?” Calderwood boomed.

  “There’s nothing to confess.” Rudolph felt helpless, and at the same time like laughing.

  “Your story differs from my daughter’s. She has told her mother that she is in love with you and that she intends to go to New York City to learn to be a secretary to be free to see you.”

  “Holy God!” Rudolph said.

  “We do not use the name of God in vain in this house, Rudy.”

  “Mr. Calderwood, the most I’ve ever done with Virginia,” Rudolph said, “is buy her a lunch or an ice cream soda when I’ve bumped into her at the store.”

  “You’ve bewitched her,” Calderwood said. “She’s in tears five times a week about you. A pure young girl doesn’t indulge in antics like that unless she’s been led on artfully by a man.”

  The Puritan inheritance has finally exploded, Rudolph thought. Land on Plymouth Rock, hang around for a couple of centuries in the bracing air of New England, prosper, and go crackers. It was all too much for one day—Billy, the school, his mother, now this.

  “I want to know what you intend to do about it, young man.” When Calderwood said young man, he was apt to be dangerous. Instantaneously, Rudolph’s mind flashed over the possibilities—he was well entrenched, but the final power in the business lay with Calderwood. There could be a fight, but in the long run Calderwood could get him out. That silly bitch Virginia.

  “I don’t know what you want me to do, sir.” He was stalling for time.

  “It’s very simple,” Calderwood said. Obviously he had been thinking about the problem ever since Mrs. Calderwood had come to him with the happy news about their daughter’s shame. “Marry Virginia. But you must pro
mise not to move down to New York.” He was demented about New York City, Rudolph decided. Haunt of evil. “I will make you a full partner with me. Upon my death, after I make adequate provisions for my daughters and Mrs. Calderwood, you will get the bulk of my shares. You will have voting control. I shall never bring up this conversation again and there will be no reproaches. In fact, I shall put it out of my mind forever. Rudy, I couldn’t be happier than to have a boy like you in the family. It has been my fondest wish for years and both Mrs. Calderwood and I were disappointed when we invited you to partake of the hospitality of our home that you seemed to take no interest in any of our daughters, although they are all pretty, in their way, and well brought up, and if I may say so, independently wealthy. I have no idea why you thought you couldn’t approach me directly when you had made your choice.”

  “I haven’t made any choice,” Rudolph said distractedly. “Virginia’s a charming girl, and she’ll make the best of wives, I’m sure. I had no inkling she had any interest in me whatever …”

  “Rudy,” Calderwood said sternly. “I’ve known you a long time. You’re one of the smartest men I’ve ever met. And you have the nerve to sit there and tell me …”

  “Yes, I do.” The hell with the business. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll sit right here with you and wait until Mrs. Calderwood and Virginia come home and I’ll ask her point-blank in front of both of you whether I’ve ever made any advances to her, if I’ve ever as much as tried to kiss her.” It was all pure farce but he had to go on with it. “If she says yes, she’s lying, but I don’t care. I’ll walk out right now and you can do whatever you want with your goddamn business and your goddamn stocks and your goddamn daughter.”

  “Rudy!” Calderwood’s voice was shocked, but Rudolph could see that he had suddenly become uncertain of his ground.

  “If she’d had the sense to tell me long ago that she loved me,” Rudolph went on swiftly pressing his advantage, reckless now, “maybe something would have come of it. I do like her. But it’s too late now. Yesterday evening, if you must know, in New York City, I asked another girl to marry me.”