Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  “Of course, I could set myself up as a philanthropist and dole out sums to the deserving poor or deserving artists or deserving scientists and scholars, but although I give, I hope generously, to many causes, I can’t see putting myself into the position of arbiter in such matters. It certainly is not a full-time vocation, at least not for me.

  “It must seem funny to you, as it does to me, for anyone in the Jordache family to be worrying so because he has money, but the swings and turns of American life are so weird that here I am doing just that.

  “Another complication. I love the house in Whitby and I love Whitby itself. I do not, really, want to live anywhere else. Jean, too, sometime ago, confessed that she liked it there, and said that if we ever had children she would prefer bringing them up there than in the city. Well, I shall see to it that she’ll have children, or at least a child, to bring up. We can always keep a small apartment in New York for when we want a bit of worldly excitement or when she has work to do in the city. But there is nobody in Whitby who just does nothing. I would be immediately branded as a freak by my neighbors, which wouldn’t make the town as attractive to me as it now is. I don’t want to turn into a Teddy Boylan.

  “Maybe when I get back to America, I’ll buy a copy of the Times and look through the want-ads.

  “Jean has just come in, soaked and happy and a little drunk. The rain drove her into a cafe and two Venetian gentlemen plied her with wine. She sends her love.

  “This has been a long egotistical letter. I expect one of equal length, equally egotistical, from you. Send it to the American Express in Paris. I don’t know just when we’ll be in Paris, but we’ll be there sometime in the next couple of weeks and they’ll hold the letter for me. Love to you and Billy, Rudolph. P.S. Have you heard from Tom? I haven’t had a word from him since the day of Mom’s funeral.”

  Gretchen put down the flimsy sheets of air-mail stationery, covered densely with her brother’s firm, clearly formed handwriting. She finished her drink and decided against another one. She got up and went to the window and looked out. The rain was pouring down. The city below her was erased by water.

  She mused over Rudolph’s letter. They were friendlier through the mails than when they saw each other. In writing, Rudolph showed a hesitant side, a lack of pride and confidence, that was endearing and that he somehow hid at other times. When they were together, at one moment or another, the urge to wound him swept over her. His letters showed a largeness of spirit, a willingness to forgive that was the sweeter because it was tacit and he never showed any signs that he knew that there was anything that needed forgiving. Billy had told her about his assault on Rudolph at the school and Rudolph had never even mentioned it to her and had been warm and thoughtful with the boy every time he saw him. And the letters were always signed “Love to you and Billy.”

  I must learn generosity, she thought, staring out at the rain.

  She didn’t know what to do about Tom. Tom didn’t write her often, but he kept her abreast of what he was doing. But as he had done with his mother, he made her promise to say nothing of his whereabouts to Rudolph.

  Right now, right this day, Tom was in Italy, too. On the other side of the peninsula, it was true, and farther south, but in Italy. She had received a letter from him just a few days before, from a place called Porto Santo Stefano, on the Mediterranean, above Rome. Tom and a friend of his called Dwyer had finally found the boat they were looking for at a price they could manage and had been working on it in a shipyard there all autumn and winter, to get it ready for service by June first. “We do everything ourselves,”—Tom had written in his large, boyish handwriting, on ruled paper.—“We took the Diesels apart piece by piece and we put them together again, piece by piece and they’re as good as new. We’ve rewired the entire boat, calked and scraped the hull, trued the propellers, repaired the generator, put in a new galley, painted the hull, painted the cabins, bought a lot of second hand furniture and painted that. Dwyer turns out to be quite an interior decorator and I’d love you to see what he’s done with the saloon and the cabins. We’ve been putting in a fourteen-hour day seven days a week, but it’s worth it. We live on board, even though the boat is up on blocks on dry land, and save our money. Neither Dwyer or me can cook worth a damn, but we don’t starve. When we go out on charter we’ll have to find somebody who can cook to crew with us. I figure we can make do with three in crew. If Billy would like to come over for the summer we have room for him on board and plenty of work. When I saw him he looked as though a summer’s hard work out in the open might do him a lot of good.

  “We plan to put the boat in the water in ten days. We haven’t decided on a name yet. When we bought it it was called the Penelope II, but that’s a little too fancy for an ex-pug like me. Talking about that—nobody hits anybody here. They argue a lot, or at least they talk loud, but everybody keeps his hands to himself. It’s restful to go into a bar and be sure you won’t have to fight your way out. They tell me it’s different south of Naples, but I wouldn’t know.

  “The man who runs the shipyard here is a good guy and from what I gather, asking around, he is giving us a very good deal on everything. He even found us two charters already. One in June and one in July and he says more will be coming up. I had some run-ins with certain Italians in the U.S., but these Italians are altogether different. Nice people. I am learning a few words in Italian, but don’t ask me to make a speech.

  “When we get into the water, my friend Dwyer will be the skipper, even though it was my money that bought the boat. He’s got third mate’s papers and he knows how to handle a boat. But he’s teaching me. The day I can get into a harbor on my own without busting into anything, I am going to be the skipper. After expenses, we’re splitting on everything, because he’s a pal and I couldn’t have done it without him.

  “Again, I got to remind you of your promise not to tell Rudy anything. If he hears I did something crazy like buying a leaky old boat on the Mediterranean with the money he made for me, he’ll split a gut. His idea of money is something you hide in the bank. Well, everybody to his own pleasure. When I have the business on a good, solid, paying basis, I’ll write and tell him and invite him to come on a cruise with us, with his wife. Free. Then he can see for himself just how dumb his brother is.

  “You don’t write much, but in your letters I get the impression things aren’t so hot with you. I’m sorry. Maybe you ought to change whatever it is you’re doing and do something else. If my friend Dwyer wasn’t so close to being a fag as to make no difference, I’d ask you to marry him, so you could be the cook. Joke.

  “If you have any rich friends who like the idea of a Mediterranean cruise this coming summer, mention my name. No joke.

  “Maybe it seems gaga to you and Rudy, your brother’s being a yacht captain but I figure it must be in the blood. After all Pa sailed the Hudson in his own boat. One time too many. Not such a joke.

  “The boat is painted white, with blue trim. It looks like a million dollars. The shipyard owner says we could sell it like it is right now and make 10,000 dollars profit. But we’re not selling.

  “If you happen to go East you could do me a favor. See if you can find out where my wife is and what she’s doing and how the kid is. I don’t miss the flag and I don’t miss the bright lights, but I sure miss him.

  “I am writing such a long letter because it is raining like crazy here and we can’t finish the second coat of the deck house (blue). Don’t believe anybody who tells you it doesn’t rain on the Mediterranean.

  “Dwyer is cooking and he is calling me to come eat. You have no idea how awful it smells. Love and kisses, Tom.”

  Rain in Porto Santo Stefano, rain in Venice, rain in California. The Jordaches weren’t having much luck with the weather. But two of them, at least, were having luck with everything else, if only for one season. “Five o’clock in the afternoon is a lousy time of day,” Gretchen said aloud. To stave off self-pity, she drew the curtains and made herself anoth
er drink.

  It was still raining at seven o’clock, when she got into the car and went down to Wilshire Boulevard to pick up Kosi Krumah. She drove slowly and carefully down the hill, with the water, six inches deep, racing ahead of her, gurgling at the tires. Beverly Hills, city of a thousand rivers.

  Kosi was taking his master’s in sociology and was in two of her courses and they sometimes studied together, before examinations. He had been at Oxford and was older than the other students and more intelligent, she thought. He was from Ghana and had a scholarship. The scholarship, she knew, was not a lavish one, so when they worked together, she tried to arrange to give him dinner first at the house. She was sure he wasn’t getting quite enough to eat, although he never talked about it. She never dared to go into restaurants too far off campus with him, as you never knew how headwaiters would behave if a white woman came in with a black man, no matter how properly dressed he was and regardless of the fact that he spoke English with a pure Oxford accent. In class there never was any trouble and two or three of the professors seemed even unduly to defer to him when he spoke. With her, he was polite but invariably distant, almost like a teacher with a student. He had never seen any of Colin’s movies. He didn’t have the time to go to movies, he said. Gretchen suspected he didn’t have the money. She never saw him with girls and he didn’t seem to have made any friends except for herself. If she was his friend.

  Her practice was to pick him up at the corner of Rodeo and Wilshire in Beverly Hills. He didn’t have a car, but he could take the bus along Wilshire from Westwood, where he lived, hear the university campus. As she came along Wilshire, peering through the spattered windshield, the rain so dense that the wipers couldn’t work fast enough to clear the glass, she saw him standing on the corner, with no raincoat, with not even the collar of his jacket turned up for protection. His head was up and he was looking out at the stream of traffic through his blurred glasses as though he were watching a parade.

  She stopped and opened the door for him and he got in leisurely, water dripping from his clothes and forming an immediate pool on the floor around his shoes.

  “Kosi!” Gretchen said. “You’re drowning. Why didn’t you wait in a doorway, at least?”

  “In my tribe, my dear,” he said, “the men do not run from a little water.”

  She was furious with him. “In my tribe,” she mimicked him, “in my tribe of white weaklings, the men have sense enough to come in out of the rain. You … you …” She racked’ her brain for an epithet. “You Israeli!”

  There was a moment of stunned silence. Then he laughed, uproariously. She had to laugh with him. “And while you’re at it,” she said, “you might as well wipe your glasses, tribesman.”

  Obediently, he dried off his glasses.

  When they got home, she made him take off his shirt and jacket and gave him one of Colin’s sweaters to wear. He was a small man, just about Colin’s size, and the sweater fit him. She hadn’t known what to do with Colin’s things, so they just lay in the drawers and hung in the closets, where he had left them. Every once in a while she told herself that she should give them to the Red Cross or some other organization, but she never got around to it.

  They ate in the kitchen, fried chicken, peas, salad, cheese, ice cream, and coffee. She opened a bottle of wine. Kosi had once told her he had gotten used to drinking wine with his meals at Oxford.

  He always protested that he wasn’t hungry and that she needn’t have bothered, but she noticed that he ate every morsel she put before him, even though she wasn’t much of a cook and the food was just passable. The only difference in their eating habits was that he used his fork with the left hand. Another thing he had learned in Oxford. He had gone through Oxford on a scholarship, too. His father kept a small cotton-goods shop in Accra, and without the scholarship there never would have been enough money to educate the brilliant son. He hadn’t been home in six years, but planned to go back and settle in Accra and work for the government as soon as he had written his thesis.

  He asked where Billy was. Usually, they all ate together. When Gretchen said that Billy was away for the weekend, he said, “Too bad. I miss the little man.”

  Actually, Billy was taller than he, but Gretchen had become accustomed to Kosi’s speech, with its “my dears” and its “little men.”

  The rain drummed on the flagstones of the patio outside the window. They dawdled over dinner and Gretchen opened another bottle of wine.

  “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I don’t feel like working tonight.”

  “None of that, now,” he said reprovingly. “I didn’t make that fearful journey in a flood just to eat.”

  They finished the wine as they did the dishes, Gretchen washing and Kosi wiping. The dishwasher had been broken for six months, but there wasn’t much need for it, as there were never more than three people for any one meal and fiddling with the machine was more trouble than it was worth for so few dishes.

  She carried the pot of coffee into the living room with her and they each had two cups as they went over the week’s work. He had a quick, agile mind, by now severely trained, and he was impatient with her slowness.

  “My dear,” he said, “you’re just not concentrating. Stop being a dilettante.”

  She slammed the book shut. It was the third or fourth time he had reprimanded her since they had sat down at the desk together. Like a—like a governess, she thought, a big black mammy governess. They were working on a course on statistics and statistics bored her to stupefaction. “Not everyone can be as goddamn clever as you,” she said. “I was never the brightest student in Accra, I never won a scholarship to …”

  “My dear Gretchen,” he said quietly, but obviously hurt, “I never claimed to be the brightest student anywhere …”

  “Never claimed, never claimed,” she said, thinking, hopelessly, I’m being shrill. “You don’t have to claim. You just sit there being superior. Or stand out in the rain like some idiotic tribal god, looking down on the poor, cowardly white folk slinking past in their decadent Cadillacs.”

  Kosi stood up, stepped back. He took off his glasses and put them in his pocket “I’m sorry,” he said “This relationship doesn’t seem to be working out …”

  “This relationship,” she taunted him. “Where did you learn to talk like that?”

  “Good night, Gretchen,” he said. He stood there, his mouth tight, his body taut. “If you’ll just give me the time to change back into my shirt and jacket … I won’t be a minute.”

  He went into the bathroom. She heard him moving around in there. She drank what was left in her cup. The coffee was cold and the sugar at the bottom of the cup made it too sweet. She put her head in her hands, her elbows on the desk, above the scattered books, ashamed of herself. I did it because of Rudolph’s letter this afternoon, she thought. I did it because of Colin’s sweater. Because of nothing to do with that poor young man with his Oxford accent.

  When he came back, wearing his shirt and jacket, still shapeless and damp, she was standing, waiting for him. Without his glasses his close-cropped head was beautiful, the forehead wide, the eyelids heavy, the nose sharply cut, the lips rounded, the ears small and flat against the head. All done in flawless, dark stone, and all somehow pitiful and defeated.

  “I shall be leaving you now, my dear,” he said.

  “I’ll take you in the car,” she said, in a small voice.

  “I’ll walk, thank you.”

  “It’s still pouring,” she said.

  “We Israelis,” he said somberly, “do not pay attention to the rain.”

  She essayed a laugh, but there was no answering glint of humor.

  He turned toward the door. She reached out and seized his sleeve. “Kosi,” she said. “Please don’t go like that.”

  He stopped and turned back toward her. “Please,” she said. She put her arms loosely around him, kissed his cheek. His hands came up slowly and held her head between them. He kissed her gently. Then not
so gently. She felt his hands sliding over her body. Why not? she thought, why not, and pressed him to her. He tried to pull away and move her toward the bedroom, but she dropped onto the couch. Not in the bed in which she and Colin had lain together.

  He stood over her. “Undress,” he said.

  “Put out the lights.”

  He went over to the switch on the wall and the room was in darkness. She heard him undressing as she took off her clothes. She was shivering when he came to her. She wanted to say, “I have made a mistake, please go home,” but she was ashamed to say it.

  She was dry and unready but he plunged into her at once, hurting her. She moaned, but the moan was not one of pleasure. She felt as though she were being torn apart. He was rough and powerful and she lay absolutely still, absorbing the pain.

  It was over quickly, without a word. He got up and she heard him feeling his way across the room toward the light switch. She jumped up and ran into the bathroom and locked the door. She washed her face repeatedly in cold water and stared at her reflection in the mirror above the basin. She wiped off what was left of her lipstick which had smeared around her mouth. She would have liked to take a hot shower, but she didn’t want him to hear her doing it. She put on a robe and waited as long as she dared, hoping he would be gone when she went out. But he was still there, standing in the middle of the living room, dressed, impassive. She tried to smile. She had no idea of how it came out.