Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  “I think we ought to stay here for awhile,” Mrs. Goodhart said, trying to keep her balance on the wet cord surface of the heaving raft. “Until it calms down a little.”

  “It’s going to get worse, Mrs. Goodhart,” Thomas said. “In a few minutes you won’t have a chance of getting in.”

  Dwyer, worried about being too close to shore, had gone out another five hundred yards and was circling there. Anyway, there was no chance of getting Mrs. Goodhart up on the rolling boat in that sea without hurting her badly.

  “You’ll just have to come in with us right now,” Thomas said to Mrs. Goodhart.

  Mr. Goodhart didn’t say anything. He was sober now.

  “Nathaniel,” Mrs. Goodhart said to her husband, “will you tell him I’m going to stay here until the sea calms a bit.”

  “You heard what he said,” Mr. Goodhart said. “You wanted to swim in. Swim in.” He toppled into the water.

  By now there were at least twenty people clustered on the rocks, safely out of reach of the spume, watching the group on the raft.

  Thomas took Mrs. Goodhart’s hand and said, “In we go. Together.” He stood up shakily and brought her to her feet and they jumped in, holding hands. Once in the sea, Mrs. Goodhart was less frightened and they swam side by side toward the ladder. As they came closer to the rocks, they felt themselves being swept forward by a wave, then sucked back as it broke against the rocks and receded. Thomas trod water and shouted, to be heard above the noise of the sea. “I’ll go in first. Then Mrs. Goodhart. Watch how I do it. I’ll go in on a wave and catch onto the railing and hold on. Then, I’ll give you the signal when to start. Swim as hard as you can. I’ll grab you when you get to the ladder. Just hold onto me. You’ll be all right.” He wasn’t sure that anybody would be all right, but he had to say something.

  He waited, looking over his shoulder at the oncoming

  waves. He saw a big one, thrashed hard with his arms, rode it in, smashed against the steel of the ladder, grabbed the railing, hung on against the pull away. Then he stood up, faced seaward. “Now!” he shouted at Mrs. Goodhart, and she came in fast, high above him for an instant, then breaking down. He grabbed her, held her tight, just managing to keep her from sliding back. Hurriedly, he pushed her up the ladder. She stumbled, but got to the safety of the rock platform before the next wave crashed in.

  Mr. Goodhart, when he came in, was so heavy that, for a moment, Thomas lost his grip and he thought they were both going to be washed back. But the old man was strong. He swung in the water and grabbed the other pipe, holding onto Thomas at the same time. He didn’t need any help up the ladder, but climbed it decorously, looking coldly at the silent group of spectators above him, as though he had caught them prying into some intensely private affair of his own.

  Kate came in lightly and she and Thomas climbed the ladder together.

  They got towels from the locker room attendant and dried themselves off, although there was nothing to do about their wet suits.

  Mr. Goodhart called the hotel for his car and chauffeur and merely said, “That was very well done, Captain,” when the car came down for Thomas and Kate. He had borrowed terrycloth robes for himself and Mrs. Goodhart and had ordered them all drinks at the bar while Kate and Thomas were drying themselves off. As he stood there, in the long robe, like a toga, you’d never think that he had been drinking all afternoon and had nearly got them all drowned just fifteen minutes before.

  He held the door of the car open for Kate and Thomas. As Thomas got in, Mr. Goodhart said, “We have to settle up, Captain. Will you be in the harbor after dinner?”

  Thomas had planned to set out for St. Tropez before sunset, but he said, “Yes, sir. We’ll be there all evening.”

  “Very good, Captain. We’ll have a farewell drink aboard.” Mr. Goodhart closed the car door and they drove up the driveway, with the pines along its borders thrashing their branches about in the increasing wind.

  When Thomas and Kate got out of the car on the quay they left two wet spots on the upholstery where they had been sitting in their bathing suits. The Clothilde hadn’t come into the harbor yet and they sat with towels wrapped around their shoulders on an overturned dinghy on the quay and shivered.

  Fifteen minutes later the Clothilde came into port. They grabbed the lines from Dwyer, made her fast, jumped on board, and rushed to put on dry clothes. Kate made a pot of coffee and as they drank it in the pilot house, with the wind whistling through the rigging, Dwyer said, “The rich. They always find a way of making you pay.” Then he got out the hose, attached it to a water line on the quay and they all three of them began to scrub down the ship. There was salt crusted everywhere.

  After dinner, which Kate prepared from the food left over from the Goodharts’ lunch, she and Dwyer went into Antibes with the week’s sheets, pillowcases, and towels. Kate did all the personal laundry, but the heavy items had to be done ashore. The wind had died down as suddenly as it had risen, and while the sea was still thundering at the harbor walls outside, the port itself was calm and the Clothilde’s buffers were merely nudging gently at the boats on either side from time to time.

  It was a clear, warm night, and Thomas sat on the afterdeck, smoking a pipe, admiring the stars, waiting for Mr. Goodhart. He had made up the bill and it was in an envelope in the pilot house. It didn’t amount to very much—just fuel, laundry, a few bottles of whiskey and vodka, ice and the twelve hundred francs a day for food for himself and the two others. Mr. Goodhart had given him a check for the charter itself the first day he had come aboard. Before going ashore, Kate had packed the Goodharts’ belongings, extra bathing suits, clothes, shoes, and books, in two of the hotel baskets. The baskets were on deck, near the after rail.

  Thomas saw the lights of Mr. Goodhart’s car coming up to the quay. He stood up as the car stopped and Mr. Goodhart got out and came up the gangplank. He was dressed for the evening, in a gray suit and white shirt and dark silk tie. Somehow he looked older and frailer in his city clothes.

  “May I offer you something to drink?” Thomas asked.

  “A whiskey would be nice, Captain,” Mr. Goodhart said. He was absolutely sober now. “If you’ll join me.” He sat down in one of the folding canvas-and-wood chairs while Thomas went to the saloon for the drinks. On his way up, he went into the pilot house and got the envelope with the bill.

  “Mrs. Goodhart has a slight chill,” Mr. Goodhart said, as Thomas gave him the glass. “She’s gone to bed for the night. She especially commanded me to tell you how much she enjoyed these two weeks.”

  “That’s very kind of her,” Thomas said. “It was a pleasure having her with us.” If Mr. Goodhart wasn’t going to mention the afternoon’s adventure, he wasn’t going to say a word about it, either. “I made up the bill, sir,” he said. He gave the envelope to Mr. Goodhart. “If you want to go over it and …”

  Mr. Goodhart waved the envelope negligently. “I’m sure it’s in order,” he said. He took the bill out, squinted at it briefly in the light of the quay lamp post. He had a checkbook with him and he wrote out a check and handed it to Thomas. “There’s a little something extra there for you and the crew, Captain,” he said.

  Thomas glanced at the check. Five-hundred-dollar bonus. Like last year. “It’s most generous of you, sir.” Oh, for summers of Goodharts!

  Mr. Goodhart waved off gratitude. “Next year,” he said, “perhaps we can make it a full month. There’s no law that says that we have to spend the whole summer in the house in Newport, is there?” He had explained that ever since he was a boy he had spent July and August in the family house in Newport and now his married son and two daughters and their children spent their holidays there with Mrs. Goodhart and himself. “We could give the house over to the younger generation,” Mr. Goodhart went on, as though trying to convince himself. “They could have orgies or whatever the younger generation has these days when we’re not around. Maybe we could steal a grandchild or two and go on a real cruise with you.” He sett
led comfortably back in his chair, sipping at his drink, playing with this new idea. “If we had a month, where could we go?”

  “Well,” Thomas said, “the party we’re picking up tomorrow at St. Tropez, two French couples, are only taking the boat for three weeks and with any break in the weather, we can go down the coast of Spain, the Costa Brava, Cadaques, Rosas, Barcelona, then across to the Balearics. And after them, we come back here and there’s an English family who want to go south—that’s another three week cruise—the Ligurian coast, Portofino, Porto Venere, Elba, Porto Ercole, Corsica, Sardinia, Ischia, Capri …”

  Mr. Goodhart chuckled. “You’re making Newport sound like Coney Island, Captain. Have you been to all those places?”

  “Uhuh.”

  “And people pay you for it?”

  “A lot of them make you earn your money, and more,” Thomas said. “Not everybody’s like you and Mrs. Goodhart.”

  “Old age has sweetened us, perhaps,” Mr. Goodhart said slowly. “In some ways. Do you think I might have another drink, Captain?”

  “If you don’t plan to do any more swimming tonight,” Thomas said, rising and taking Mr. Goodhart’s glass.

  Mr. Goodhart chuckled. “That was a horse’s ass thing to do today, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir, it was.” Thomas was surprised at Mr. Good-hart’s using an expression like that. He went below and mixed two more drinks. When he came back on deck, Mr. Goodhart was stretched out in his chair, his long legs crossed at the ankles, his head back, looking up at the stars. He took the glass from Thomas’s hand without changing his position.

  “Captain,” he said, “I’ve decided to pamper myself. And my wife. I’ll make a firm commitment with you right now. Starting June first next year we’ll take the Clothilde for six weeks and go south to all those pretty names you were reeling off. I’ll give you a deposit tonight. And when you say no swimming, nobody will swim. How does that strike you?”

  “It would be fine for me, but …” Thomas hesitated.

  “But what?”

  “The Clothilde’s all right for you using it during the day the way you do, going to the islands … but for six weeks, living aboard … I don’t know. For some people it’s fine, but for others, who are used to luxury …”

  “You mean for spoiled old crocks like my wife and myself,” Mr. Goodhart said, “it’s not grand enough, is that it?”

  “Well,” Thomas said uncomfortably, “I wouldn’t like you not to enjoy yourselves. The Clothilde rolls quite a bit in rough weather and it’s pretty stuffy down below when we’re under way, because we have to close all the portholes, and there’s no proper bath, just showers, and …”

  “It’ll do us good. We’ve had it too easy all our lives. Oh, it’s ridiculous, Captain.” Mr. Goodhart sat up. “You make me ashamed of myself. To have you feel as though going around the Mediterranean on a boat as nice as this one is roughing it for me and my wife. God, it sends cold shivers down my spine to think of the opinion people must have of us.”

  “People get used to living in different ways,” Thomas said.

  “You’ve lived yours the hard way, haven’t you?” Mr. Goodhart said.

  “No worse than a lot of others.”

  “You don’t seem any the worse for it,” Mr. Goodhart said. “In fact, if I may say so, if my son had turned out like you, I’d be more pleased with him than I am now. Considerably more pleased.”

  “It’s hard to know,” Thomas said neutrally. If he knew about Port Philip, he thought, burning the cross on VE day, and hitting my father, and taking money for screwing married ladies in Elysium, Ohio, if he knew about blackmailing Sinclair in Boston, and throwing fights, and about Quayles and Quayles’s wife in Las Vegas, and about Pappy and Teresa and Falconetti, maybe he wouldn’t be sitting there being friendly, with a glass in his hand, wishing his son was more like me. “There’s a lot of things I’ve done I’m not so goddamn proud of,” he said.

  “That doesn’t make you any different from the rest of us, Captain,” Goodhart said quietly. “And while we’re on the subject—forgive me for this afternoon. I was drunk and I had had two weeks of watching three splendid young people happily working together, moving around like graceful animals, and I felt old and I didn’t want to feel old and I wanted to prove that I wasn’t all that old and I risked all our lives. Knowingly, Captain, knowingly. Because I was sure you weren’t going to let us make that swim alone.”

  “It’s better not to talk about it, sir,” Thomas said. “Anyway, no harm was done.”

  “Old age is an aberration, Tom,” Mr. Goodhart said bitterly. “A terrible, perverted aberration.” He stood up and put his glass down carefully. “I’d better be getting back to the hotel and see how my wife is doing,” he said. He extended his hand and Thomas shook it. “Until next June first,” he said and strode off the ship, carrying the two baskets with him.

  When Kate and Dwyer came back, with the freshly laundered linen, all Thomas said was that Mr. Goodhart had been and gone and that they had their first charter, six weeks, for the following year.

  Dwyer had a letter from his girl. She had been down to the Aegean Hotel, but she had no information for Tom, she said, because Pappy was dead. He had been found, knifed and with a gag in his mouth, in his room, the new man at the desk had told her. Three months ago.

  Thomas listened to the news without surprise. That was the kind of business Pappy had run and he had finally paid his dues.

  There was something else in the letter that was obviously bothering Dwyer, but he didn’t tell the others what it was, although Thomas could guess. Dwyer’s girl didn’t want to wait any more and she wouldn’t leave Boston and if Dwyer wanted to marry her he’d have to go back to America. He hadn’t asked Thomas’s advice yet, but if he had, Thomas would have told him that no dame was worth it.

  They went to bed early, because they were going to set out for St. Tropez at four in the morning, before the wind sprang up.

  Kate had made up the big bed in the master cabin for herself and Thomas for the night, because there were no clients on board. It was the first time they had a chance to make love in comfort and Kate said she wasn’t going to miss it. In the cabin they shared forward, they had two narrow bunks, one above the other.

  Kate’s stocky, solid, full-breasted body was not made for showing off clothes, but her skin was wonderfully soft and she made love with gentle avidity and as Thomas lay later, with her in his arms in the big bed, he was grateful that he was not old, that his girl was not in Boston, that he had allowed himself to be persuaded by Pinky to have a woman on board.

  Before she went to sleep, Kate said, “Dwyer told me tonight that when you bought the boat you changed the name. Who was Clothilde?”

  “She was a queen of France,” Thomas said. He pulled her closer to him. “She was somebody I knew as a boy. And she smelled like you.”

  The cruise to Spain wasn’t bad, although they hit some weather off Cap Cruz and had to stay in port for five days at a stretch. The French couples consisted of two paunchy Parisian businessmen and two young women who were definitely not their wives. There was some trading going on between the couples in the after cabins, but Thomas hadn’t come to the Mediterranean to teach French businessmen how to behave. As long as they paid their bills and kept the two ladies from walking around in high heels and poking holes in the deck, he wasn’t going to interfere with their fun. The ladies also lay on deck with the tops of their bikinis off. Kate took a poor view of that, but one of the ladies had really sensational tits and it didn’t interfere with the navigation too much, although if there had been any reefs on the course while Dwyer was at the wheel, Dwyer would have most likely run them aground. That particular lady also made it clear to Thomas that she wouldn’t mind sneaking up on deck in the middle of the night to have a go with him while her Jules was snoring away below. But Thomas told her he didn’t come with the charter. You got into enough complications with clients without any of that.

&nb
sp; Because of the delay caused by the storm, the two French couples got off at Marseilles, to catch the train up to Paris. The two businessmen had to meet their wives in Paris to go to Deauville for the rest of the summer. When they paid Thomas off at the dock in front of the Maine in the Vieux Port, the two Frenchmen gave Thomas fifty thousand francs as a tip, which wasn’t bad, considering they were Frenchmen. After they had gone, Thomas took Kate and Dwyer to the same restaurant that Dwyer and Thomas had eaten at when they first came to Marseilles on the Elga Andersen. It was too bad that the Elga Andersen wasn’t in port. It would have been satisfying to sail across her rusty bows in the shining white-and-blue Clothilde and dip the flag in salute to the old Nazi captain.

  They had three days before picking up the next charter in Antibes, and again Kate made up the big bed in the master cabin for herself and Thomas. She had had the portholes and the doors wide open all evening to get out the smell of perfume.

  “That poule,” Kate said as they lay in the darkness. “Parading around naked. You had a hard on for three weeks running.”

  Thomas laughed. There were times when Kate talked like any sailor.

  “I don’t like the way you laugh,” Kate said. “Let me warn you—if I ever catch you grabbing any of that stuff, I’m going to go out and jump into the kip with the first man I see as I walk off the boat.”

  “There’s one sure way,” Thomas said, “that you can keep me honest.”

  Kate then made sure that he was going to be honest. That night, anyway. As she lay in his arms he whispered, “Kate, every time I make love to you I forget one more bad thing in my life.” A moment later he could feel her tears on his shoulders.