Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  “Don’t you ever do anything like that again to anybody, my dear,” he said evenly. “And certainly not to me. I will not be tolerated. I will not be condescended to. I will not be part of anybody’s program of racial integration.”

  She stood with her head lowered, unable to speak.

  “When you get your degree,” he went on in the same flat, malevolent tone, “you can play Lady Bountiful with the poor bastards in the charity clinics, the beautiful, rich white lady proving to all the niggers and all the little greasers how democratic and generous this wonderful country is and how loving and Christian educated beautiful white ladies who don’t happen to have husbands can be. I won’t be here to see it. I’ll be back in Africa, praying that the grateful little niggers and the grateful little greasers are getting ready to slit your throat.”

  He went out silently. There was only the smallest sound as the front door closed.

  After a while, she cleared the desk they had been working on. She put the cups and saucers and the coffee pot in the sink in the kitchen and piled the books on one side of the desk. I’m too old for school books, she thought. I can’t cope. Then, walking painfully, she went around and locked up. Arnold Simms, in your maroon bathrobe, she thought as she switched off the lights, rest easy. I have paid for you.

  In the morning, she didn’t attend her two Saturday classes, but called Sam Corey at the studio and asked if she could come over and talk to him.

  Chapter 2

  1964

  Even pregnant as she was, Jean insisted upon coming down and having breakfast with him every day. “At the end of the day,” she said, “I want to be as tired as you. I don’t want to be one of those American women who lie around all day and then when their husbands come home, drag the poor beasts out every evening, because they’re bursting with unused vigor. The energy gap has ruined more marriages by half than adultery.”

  She was nearly at term and even under the loosely flowing nightgown and robe she was wearing, the bulge was huge and clumsy. Rudolph had a pang of guilt when he watched her. She had had such a neat delicate way of walking and now she was forced to balance herself painfully, belly protruding, pace careful, as she went from room to room. Nature has provided women with a kind of necessary lunacy, he thought, for them to desire to bring children into the world.

  They sat in the dining room, with the pale April sun streaming through the windows, while Martha brought them fresh coffee. Martha had changed miraculously since his mother’s death. Although she ate no more than before, she had filled out and was now matronly and comfortable. The sharp lines of her face had disappeared and the everlasting downward twitch of her mouth had been replaced by something that might even have been a smile. Death has its uses, Rudolph thought, watching her gently place the coffee pot in front of Jean. In the old days she would have banged it down on the table, her daily accusation against Fate.

  Pregnancy had rounded Jean’s face and she no longer looked like a schoolgirl fiercely determined to get the best marks in the class. Placid and womanly, her face glowed softly in the sunlight.

  “This morning,” Rudolph said, “you look saintly.”

  “You’d look saintly, too,” Jean said, “if you hadn’t had any sex for two months.”

  “I hope the kid turns out to be worth all this,” Rudolph said.

  “He’d better.”

  “How is it this morning?”

  “Okay. He’s marching up and down wearing paratroop boots, but otherwise okay.”

  “What if it’s a girl?” Rudolph asked.

  “I’ll teach her not to overlap,” Jean said. They both laughed.

  “What have you got to do this morning?” he asked.

  “There’s a nurse coming to be interviewed, and the furniture’s coming for the nursery and Martha and I have to put it in place and I have to take my vitamins and I have to weigh myself,” Jean said. “A big morning. How about you?”

  “I have to go to the university,” Rudolph said. “There’s a board of trustees’ meeting. Then I ought to look in at the office …”

  “You’re not going to let that old monster Calderwood nag at you again, are you?”

  Ever since Rudolph had told Calderwood he intended to retire from the business in June, Calderwood had argued with him almost every time he saw him. “Who retires at the age of thirty-six, for the Lord’s sake?” Calderwood kept repeating.

  “I do,” Rudolph had once replied, but Calderwood had refused to believe him. Suspicious, as always, Calderwood felt that Rudolph was really maneuvering for more control and had hinted that if Rudolph would stay he would give it to him. Calderwood had even offered to move the main office down to New York, but Rudolph said he no longer wanted to live in New York. Jean now shared his attachment to the old farmhouse in Whitby and was pouring over plans with an architect to enlarge it.

  “Don’t worry about Calderwood,” Rudolph said, standing. “I’ll be home for lunch.”

  “That’s what I like,” Jean said. “A husband who comes home for lunch. I’ll make love to you after lunch.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind.” He leaned over to kiss the dear, smiling face.

  It was early and he drove slowly, enjoying the town. Small children in bright-colored parkas were riding tricycles on the sidewalks or played on the drying lawns, burgeoning with the first frail green of spring. A young woman in slacks pushed a baby carriage in the sunshine. An old dog dozed on the warm steps of a big gingerbread house, painted white. Hawkins, the mailman, waved at him and he waved back. Slattery, standing beside his prowl car and talking to somebody’s gardener, saluted him with a smile; two professors from the biology department, walking toward the university deep in conversation, looked up long enough to indicate a mild hello. This part of town, with its trees and large wooden houses and quiet streets, had an innocent nineteenth-century neighborly air, before the wars, before booms and depressions. Rudolph wondered how he ever had been anxious to get away from the town, where he was known and greeted at every turn, for the anonymous uncertainties and stony hostility of New York.

  He had to pass the athletic field on the way to the Administration Building and he saw Quentin McGovern in a gray suit, jogging along the track. He stopped the car and got out and Quentin came over to him, a tall, serious young man, his skin gleaming with the sweat of his exercise. They shook hands. “I don’t have my first class till eleven,” Quentin said. “And it was a nice day for running, after being indoors on the boards all winter.”

  They didn’t run in the morning anymore. Since his marriage, Rudolph had taken up tennis, for Jean’s sake. Anyway, it was too Spartan a deed to make himself get up every morning at seven o’clock in all weathers from the bed of his bride to pound around a track for three-quarters of an hour, trying to keep pace with a young athlete at the top pitch of his form. Besides, it made him feel old. There was time enough for that bit.

  “How’s it going, Quentin?” Rudolph asked.

  “Not bad. I’m twenty-two eight for the two twenty and the Coach says he’s going to run me in the four forty and the relay as well.”

  “What does your mother say now?”

  Quentin smiled, remembering the cold winter mornings. “She says for me not to get too swell-headed. Mothers don’t change.”

  “How about your work in school?”

  “They must have made a mistake at the office,” Quentin said. “They put me on the Dean’s List.”

  “What does your mother say about that?”

  “She says it’s because I’m colored and they want to show how liberal they are.” Quentin smiled faintly.

  “If you have any further trouble with your mother,” Rudolph said, “tell her to call me.”

  “I’ll do that, Mr. Jordache.”

  “Well, I’ve got to be going. Give my regards to your father.”

  “My father’s dead, Mr. Jordache,” Quentin said quietly.

  “I’m sorry.” Rudolph got back into his car. Christ, he th
ought. Quentin’s father must have worked at least twenty-five years at Calderwood’s. You’d think somebody would have had the sense to pass the word around.

  The morning was no longer as pure and pleasurable as it had been before his conversation with Quentin.

  All the parking places were taken in front of the. Administration Building and Rudolph had to leave his car almost five hundred yards away. Everything is turning into a parking lot, he thought irritably, as he locked the car. The radio had been stolen out of it some time before, in New York, and Rudolph now locked the car wherever he left it, even if he was only going to be five minutes. He had had a mild argument with Jean on the subject, because she refused to lock the car at any time and even left the front door of the house open when she was home alone. You could love your neighbor, he had told her, but it was foolish to ignore the larceny in his heart.

  As he was testing the door, he heard his name called. “Hey, Jordache!” It was Leon Harrison, who was also on the board of trustees and was on his way to the meeting. Harrison was a tall, portly man of about sixty, with senatorial white hair and a misleading heartiness of manner. He was the publisher of the local newspaper, which he had inherited from his father, along with a great deal of real estate in and around Whitby. The newspaper was not doing very well, Rudolph knew. He wasn’t sorry about it. It was badly run by a small, underpaid, drunken, broken-down staff of men who had been thrown off other papers all across the country. Rudolph made a point in not believing anything he read in Harrison’s paper, even reports on the weather.

  “How are you, boy,” Harrison said, putting his arm around Rudolph’s shoulder as they walked toward the Administration Building. “All prepared to put a fire under us old fogies again this morning?” He laughed loudly, to show his lack of malice. Rudolph had had many dealings with Harrison, not all of them agreeable, about the Calderwood advertising in his paper. Harrison had started out calling him, boy, then Rudy, then Jordache, and by now was back to boy, Rudolph noted.

  “Just the same routine suggestions,” Rudolph said. “Like burning down the Science Building to get rid of Professor Fredericks.” Fredericks was the head of the department and Rudolph was sure that it was safe to say that the science courses were the worst in any university the size of Whitby north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Fredericks and Harrison were cronies and Fredericks often wrote scientific articles for Harrison’s paper, articles that made Rudolph blush with shame for the university. At least three times a year Fredericks would write an article acclaiming a new cure for cancer that would appear on the editorial page of the Whitby Sentinel.

  “You businessmen,” Harrison said largely, “you never can appreciate the role of pure science. You want to see a return on your investment every six months. You expect to see the simoleons come pouring out of every test tube.”

  When it suited his convenience, Harrison, with his acres of choice downtown property and his interest in a bank, was very much the hard-headed businessman. At other times, publisher that he was, immersed in printer’s ink, he was a literary figure, decrying the elimination of Latin as a required subject for graduation or inveighing against a new English syllabus because it did not include enough of the works of Charles Dickens.

  He tipped his hat grandly to a woman instructor in the psychology department who crossed their path. He had old-fashioned manners and up-to-date hatreds, Harrison. “I hear there’re some interesting things going on down at Dee Cee,” he.said.

  “There are always interesting things going on at Dee Cee,” Rudolph said.

  “More interesting than usual,” said Harrison. “There’s a rumor that you’re going to step down.”

  “I never step down,” Rudolph said and then was sorry he said it. The man brought out the worst in him.

  “If you do happen to step down,” Harrison persisted, “who’s the next in line? Knight?”

  “The matter hasn’t come up,” Rudolph said. Actually, the matter had come up, between him and Calderwood, but no decision had been reached. He didn’t like to lie, but if you didn’t lie to a man like Harrison you would deserve canonization.

  “Dee Cee means a lot to this town,” Harrison said, “largely thanks to you, and you know I’m not a man who indulges in flattery, and my readers have a right to know what’s going on behind the scenes.” The words were banal and innocuous, but there was a threat there, and both Harrison and Rudolph understood it.

  “If anything happens,” Rudolph said, “your readers will be the first to know.”

  As he went up the steps of the Administration Building, with Harrison at his side, Rudolph couldn’t help but feel that the morning was deteriorating rapidly.

  The President of the university was a new, youngish, brisk man from Harvard, by the name of Dorlacker, who stood for no nonsense from his board. He and Rudolph were friendly and he came over to the house quite often with his wife and talked freely, mostly about getting rid of the majority of the board of trustees. He detested Harrison.

  The meeting ran along familiar lines. The finance committee chairman reported that although endowments were going up, costs were going up even faster and advised raising the price of tuition and putting a freeze on the number of scholarships. The motion was tabled for further study.

  The board was reminded that the new wing for the library would be ready for the fall term and had not yet been given a name. It was recalled from the last meeting that Mr. Jordache had suggested that it be called the Kennedy Wing, or even better, have the whole building, now merely called the Memorial Library, be renamed the Kennedy Library.

  Harrison protested that the late President had been a controversial figure, and had represented only half the country and that a university campus was no place to introduce divisive politics. On a vote, it was decided to call the new wing the Kennedy Wing, leaving the entire building under its old title, the Memorial Library. The President drily appointed Mr. Harrison to find out for the board what or whom the library was in memory of.

  Another member of the board, who also had had to park at some distance from the Administration Building, said that he thought there ought to be a strict rule that no students be allowed to own automobiles. Impossible to enforce, Dorlacker said, therefore unwise. Perhaps a new parking lot could be built.

  Harrison was disturbed by an editorial in the student newspaper, calling for a ban-the-bomb demonstration. The editor should be disciplined for introducing politics to the campus and for disrespect for the government of the United States. Dorlacker explained that it was his opinion that a university was not the place to put down freedom of speech in America. On a vote, it was decided not to discipline the editor.

  “This board,” Harrison growled, “is running away from its responsibilities.”

  Rudolph was the youngest member of the board and he spoke softly and deferentially. But because of his alliance with Dorlacker and his ability to dig up endowments from alumni and foundations (he had even got Calderwood to donate fifty thousand dollars toward the new library wing) and his close knowledge of the town and its inter-relation with the university, he was the most influential member of the board and he knew it. What had started as almost a hobby and a mild boost to his ego had become a ruling interest in his life. It was with pleasure that he dominated the board and pushed one project after another down the throats of the die-hards like Harrison on the board. The new wing on the library, the expanded courses in sociology and foreign affairs, the introduction of a resident artist and the expansion of the Art School, the donation for two weeks a year of the theater at the Shopping Center to the Drama Department had all been his ideas. Remembering Boylan’s sneer, Rudolph was resolved that before he got through, nobody, not even a man like Boylan, could call Whitby an agricultural school.

  As an added satisfaction, he could at the end of each year deduct a good part of his travel expenses, both in the United States and abroad, from his income tax, as he made it a point to visit schools and universities wherever he went, as part o
f his duties as a trustee of the university. The training he had received at the hands of Johnny Heath had made this almost automatic. “The amusements of the rich,” Johnny called the game with the Internal Revenue Service.

  “As you know,” Dorlacker was saying, “at this meeting we are to consider new appointments to the faculty for the next school year. There is one department post that will be open—the head of the department of economics. We have inspected the field and conferred with the members of the department and we would like to offer for your approval the name of an ex-head of what used to be the combined departments of history and economics here, a man who has been gaining valuable experience in Europe for the past few years, Professor Lawrence Denton.” As he spoke the name, Dorlacker casually turned toward Rudolph. There was the barest hint of a wink. Rudolph had exchanged letters with his old teacher and knew that Denton wanted to come back to America. He was not made to be a man without a country, Denton had written, and his wife had never gotten over being homesick. Rudolph had told Dorlacker all about Denton and Dorlacker had been sympathetic. Denton had helped his own case by using the time in Europe to write a book about the rebirth of the German economy, which had gotten respectful reviews.

  Denton’s resurrection was only poetic justice, Rudolph thought. He had not testified in his old friend’s behalf at a time when it might have helped. But if he had testified the chances were that he never would have been elected to the board of trustees and been able to politick for Denton’s reinstatement. There was something pleasingly ironic about the situation that made Rudolph smile to himself as Dorlacker spoke. He knew that between them Dorlacker and he had canvassed enough votes to put Denton across. He sat back comfortably, in silence, allowing Dorlacker to make the necessary moves.