Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  “The World Series,” Rudolph said.

  “I know. I get the Paris Herald Tribune.”

  “Tom,” Rudolph said, “don’t you ever miss America?”

  “What’s America done for me?” Thomas said. “I don’t care if I never see it again after this time.”

  “I hate to hear you talk like that.”

  “One patriot in the family is enough,” Thomas said.

  “What about your son?”

  “What about him?”

  “How long are you figuring you’ll keep him in Europe?”

  “Forever,” Thomas said. “Maybe when you get elected President and straighten out the whole country and put all the crooks and generals and policemen and judges and congressmen and high-priced lawyers in jail and if they don’t shoot you maybe I’ll send him over on a visit.”

  “What about his education?” Rudolph persisted.

  “There’re schools in Antibes. Better than a crappy military academy.”

  “But he’s an American.”

  “Why?” Thomas asked.

  “Well, he’s not a Frenchman.”

  “He won’t be a Frenchman either,” Thomas said. “He’ll be Wesley Jordache.”

  “He won’t know where he belongs.”

  “Where do you think I belong? Here?” Thomas laughed. “My son’ll belong on a boat in the Mediterranean, sailing from one country where they make wine and olive oil to another country where they make wine and olive oil.”

  Rudolph quit then. They drove the rest of the way in silence to the building on Park Avenue where Rudolph had an apartment. The doorman double-parked the car for him when he said he’d only be a few minutes. The doorman gave a queer look at Thomas, with his collar open and his tie loose and his blue, wide-trousered suit and green fedora hat with the brown band that he had bought in Genoa.

  “Your doorman doesn’t approve of my clothes,” Thomas said as they went up in the elevator. “Tell him I buy my clothes in Marseilles and everybody knows Marseilles is the greatest center of haute couture for men in Europe.”

  “Don’t worry about the doorman,” Rudolph said as he led Thomas into the apartment.

  “Not a bad little place you have here,” Thomas said, standing in the middle of the large living room, with its fireplace and long, straw-colored corduroy couch, with two winged easy chairs on each side of it. There were fresh flowers in vases on the tables, a pale-beige wall-to-wall carpet, and bright, non-objective paintings on the dark-green walls. The room faced west and the afternoon sun streamed in through the curtained windows. The air-conditioning was on, humming softly, and the room was comfortably cool.

  “We don’t get down to the city as much as we’d like,” Rudolph said. “Jean’s pregnant again and she’s having a bad couple of months just now.” He opened a cupboard. “Here’s the bar,” he said. “There’s ice in the refrigerator. If you want to eat here, just tell the maid when she gets in in the morning. She’s a pretty good cook.” He led Thomas into the spare room, which Jean had made over to look exactly like the guest room in the farmhouse in Whitby, countrified and delicate. Rudolph couldn’t help but notice how out of place his brother looked in the neat, feminine room, with its four-poster twin beds and patchwork quilts.

  Thomas threw his battered valise and his jacket and hat on one of the beds and Rudolph tried not to wince. On his boat, Johnny Heath had written, Tom was a stickler for neatness. Obviously, he did not carry his seagoing habits with him when he went ashore.

  Back in the living room Rudolph poured a whiskey and soda for Thomas and himself and while they drank, got out the papers he had collected from the Police Department and the report from the private detective and gave them to Thomas. He called the lawyer’s office and made an appointment for Thomas for the next morning at ten.

  “Now,” he said, as they finished their drinks, “is there anything else you need? Do you want me to go with you when you go up to the school?”

  “I’ll handle the school on my own,” Thomas said. “Don’t worry.”

  “How are you fixed for money?”

  “I’m rolling,” Thomas said. “Thanks.”

  “If anything comes up,” Rudolph said, “call me.”

  “Okay, mayor,” Thomas said.

  They shook hands and Rudolph left his brother standing next to the table on which lay the reports from the Police Department and the detective. Thomas was picking them up to read as Rudolph went out the front door.

  Teresa Jordache, Thomas read from the police file, alias Theresa Laval. Thomas grinned. He was tempted to call her up and ask her to come over. He’d disguise his voice. “Apartment 14B, Miss Laval. It’s on Park Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth street.” Even the most suspicious whore wouldn’t think there’d by any trouble at an address like that. He would love to see her face when she rang the bell and he opened the door. He nearly went to the phone to dial the last number the detective had ferreted out, then stopped. It would be almost impossible not. to give her the beating she deserved and that wasn’t what he had come to America for.

  He shaved and showered, using the perfumed soap in the bathroom, and had another drink and put on a clean shirt and the blue Marseilles suit, then went down in the elevator and walked over to Fifth Avenue in the dusk. On a side street he saw a steak place and went in and had a steak with half a bottle of wine and apple pie à la mode, to salute his native country. Then he strolled over to Broadway. Broadway was worse than ever, with noise coming out of the music shops and bigger and uglier signs than he remembered and the people pushing and sick looking, but he enjoyed it. He could walk anywhere, go to any bar, any movie.

  Everybody was dead or in jail. Music.

  The Hilltop Military Academy was on top of a hill and it was military. A high, gray, stone wall enclosed it, like a prison, and when Thomas drove through the front gate in the car he had rented, he could see boys in blue-gray uniforms doing close-order drill on a dusty field: The weather had turned cooler and some of the trees on the grounds had begun to change color. The driveway passed close to the parade grounds and Thomas stopped the car and watched. There were four separate groups wheeling and marching on different parts of the field. The group of boys nearest to him, perhaps thirty of them, were between twelve and fourteen, just about Wesley’s age. Thomas stared at them as they passed him, but if Wesley was among them he didn’t recognize him.

  He started the car again and went up the driveway to a stone building that looked like a small castle. The grounds were well kept, with flower beds and closely mown lawns and the other buildings were large and solidly built, of the same stone as the little castle.

  Teresa must get a fancy price for her services, Thomas thought, to afford a place like this for the kid.

  He got out of the car and went into the building. The granite hallway was dark and chilly. It was lined with flags, sabers, crossed rifles, and marble lists of the names of graduates who had been killed in the Spanish-American War, the Mexican Expedition, the First World War, the Second World War, and the war in Korea. It was like the head office of a company, with a display advertising their product. A boy with close-cropped hair and a lot of fancy chevrons on his arm was coming down the steps, and Thomas asked him, “Son, where’s the main office here?”

  The boy came to attention, as though Thomas were General MacArthur, and said, “This way, sir.” They obviously taught respect to the older generation at Hilltop Military Academy. Maybe that was why Teresa had sent the kid here. She could use all the respect going.

  The boy opened the door to a big office. Two women were working at desks behind a small fence. “Here you are, sir,” the boy said, and clicked his heels before turning smartly back into the hallway. Thomas went over toward the nearest desk behind the fence. The woman there looked up from papers she was making checks on and said, “May I help you, sir?” She was not in uniform and she didn’t click her heels.

  “I have a son in the school,” Thomas said. “My name
is Jordache. I’d like to speak to whoever is in charge here.”

  The woman gave him a peculiar look, as though the name meant something not particularly pleasant to her. She stood up and said, “I’ll tell Colonel Bainbridge you’re here, sir. Won’t you please take a seat.” She indicated a bench along the wall and waddled off to a door on the other side of the office. She was fat and about fifty and her stockings were crooked. They were not tempting the young soldiers with much sex at the Hilltop Military Academy.

  After a little while she came out of the door and opened a gate in the little fence and said, “Colonel Bainbridge will see you now, sir. Thank you for waiting.” She led Thomas to the rear of the room and closed the door after him as he went into Colonel Bainbridge’s office. There were more flags there and photographs of General Patton and General Eisenhower and of Colonel Bainbridge looking fierce in a combat jacket and pistol and helmet, with binoculars hanging around his neck, taken during World War Two. Colonel Bainbridge himself, in a regular U.S. Army uniform, was standing behind his desk to greet Thomas. He was thinner than in the photograph, with almost no hair, and he was wearing silver-rimmed glasses and no weapons or binoculars and he looked like an actor in a war play.

  “Welcome to Hilltop, Mr. Jordache,” Colonel Bainbridge said. He was not standing at attention but he gave the impression that he was. “Won’t you sit down?” His expression was peculiar, too, a little like the doorman’s at Rudolph’s building.

  If I stay in America much longer, Thomas thought as he sat down, I guess I’ll have to change my tailor.

  “I don’t want to take up much of your time, Colonel,” Thomas said. “I just came up here to see my son, Wesley.”

  “Yes, of course, I understand,” Bainbridge said. He was stumbling a little over his words. “There’s a games period shortly and we’ll have him sent for.” He cleared his throat embarrassedly. “It’s a pleasure to have a member of the young man’s family finally visit the school. I am correct in assuming that you are his father, am I not?”

  “That’s what I told the lady outside,” Thomas said.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me for the question, Mr. … Mr. Jordache,” Bainbridge said, looking distractedly at General Eisenhower on the wall, “but in Wesley’s application it was clearly stated that his father was dead.”

  The bitch, Thomas thought, oh, the stinking, miserable bitch. “Well,” he said, “I’m not dead.”

  “I can see that,” Bainbridge said nervously. “Of course I can see that. It must be a clerical error of some kind, although it’s hard to understand how …”

  “I’ve been away a few years,” Thomas said. “My wife and I are not on friendly terms.”

  “Even so.” Bainbridge’s hand fluttered over a small model brass cannon on his desk. “Of course, one doesn’t meddle in intimate family matters … I’ve never had the honor of meeting Mrs. Jordache. Our communication was entirely by mail. It is the same Mrs. Jordache, isn’t it?” Bainbridge said desperately. “In the antique business in New York?”

  “She may handle some antiques,” Thomas said. “I wouldn’t know. Now, I want to see my son.”

  “They’ll be finished with drill in five minutes,” Bainbridge said. “I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you. Very happy. Seeing his father may just be what he needs at this particular moment …”

  “Why? What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s a difficult boy, Mr. Jordache, very difficult. We have our problems with him.”

  “What problems?”

  “He’s extraordinarily … uh … pugnacious.” Bainbridge seemed happy to have found the word. “He’s constantly getting into fights. With everyone. No matter what age or size. On one occasion last term he even hit one of the instructors. General science. The instructor missed a whole week of classes. He’s very … adept … shall we say, with his fists, young Wesley. Of course, we like a boy to show a normal amount of aggressiveness in a school of this nature, but Wesley …” Bainbridge sighed. “His disagreements are not ordinary schoolboy fights. We’ve had to hospitalize boys, upperclassmen … To be absolutely frank with you, there’s a kind of, well, the only word is adult, adult viciousness about the boy that we on the staff consider very dangerous.”

  Jordache blood, Thomas thought bitterly, fucking Jordache blood.

  “I’m afraid I have to tell you, Mr. Jordache, that Wesley is on probation this term, with no privileges,” Bainbridge said.

  “Well, Colonel,” Thomas said, “I have some good news for you. I’m going to do something about Wesley and his problems.”

  “I’m glad to hear that you propose to take the matter in hand, Mr. Jordache,” Bainbridge said. “We’ve written innumerable letters to his mother but she seems to be too busy even to reply.”

  “I propose to take him out of school this afternoon,” Thomas said. “You can stop worrying.”

  Bainbridge’s hand trembled on the brass cannon on his desk. “I wasn’t suggesting anything as drastic as that, sir,” he said. His voice quavered a little. The battlefields of Normandy and the Rhine basin were far behind him and he was an old man, dressed up like a soldier.

  “Well, I’m suggesting it, Colonel.”

  Bainbridge stood up too, behind his desk. “I’m afraid it’s most … most irregular,” he said. “We would have to have his mother’s written permission. After all, all our dealings have been with her. She has paid the tuition for the entire school year. We would have to authenticate your relationship with the boy.”

  Thomas took out his wallet and drew his passport from it and put it on the desk in front of Bainbridge. “Who does this look like?” he asked.

  Bainbridge opened the little green book. “Of course,” he said, “your name is Jordache. But otherwise … Really, sir, I must get in touch with the boy’s mother …”

  “I don’t want to waste any more of your time, Colonel,” Thomas said. He dug into his inside pocket once more and brought out the Police Department report on Teresa Jordache, alias Theresa Laval. “Read this, please,” he said, handing the paper to the Colonel.

  Bainbridge glanced at the report, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes wearily. “Oh, dear,” he said. He handed the paper back to Thomas, as though he were afraid that if it lay around his office one moment more it would go permanently into the files of the school.

  “Do you still want to keep the kid?” Thomas asked brutally.

  “Of course, this alters things,” Bainbridge said. “Considerably.”

  A half hour later, they drove out the gate of the Hilltop Military Academy. Wesley’s footlocker was on the back seat and Wesley, still in uniform, was up front beside Thomas. He was big for his age, sallow skinned and pimpled, and around his sullen eyes and wide, set mouth, he resembled, as a son does his father, Axel Jordache. He had not been effusive when he was brought in to see Thomas and had seemed neither glad nor sorry when he was told he was being taken from the school and he hadn’t asked where Thomas was taking him.

  “Tomorrow,” Thomas said, as the school disappeared behind them, “you’re going to get some decent clothes. And you’ve had your last fight.”

  The boy was silent.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir. I’m your father,” Thomas said.

  Chapter 5

  1966

  For a few minutes at a time, while she was working, Gretchen forgot that it was her fortieth birthday. She sat on the high steel stool in front of the moviola, pushing the levers, gazing intently into the glass screen. She ran film and sound track together, her hands in dirty white-cotton gloves, emulsion stained. The spoor of film. She made swift marks in soft red pencil, giving the strips to her assistant to splice and file. From adjacent cutting rooms on the floor in the building on Broadway, where other companies rented rooms, came scraps of voices, screeches, explosions, orchestral passages, and the shrill gabble as track was run backward at high speed. Engrossed in her own lab
or she hardly noticed the noise. It was part of the furniture of a cutting room, with the clacking machines, the distorted sounds, the round tins of film stacked on the shelves.

  This was her third picture as a head cutter. Sam Corey had taught her well as his assistant and then, after praising her highly to directors and producers, had sent her off on her own, to get her first independent job. Skilled and imaginative, with no ambition to become a director herself that would arouse jealousy, she was in great demand and could pick and choose among the jobs offered her.

  The picture she was working on now was being shot in New York and she found the city’s impersonal variety exhilarating after the inbred, ambiguously jovial, big-family atmosphere of Hollywood, where everybody lived in everyone else’s pocket. In her free hours she tried to continue with the political activities that had taken up a great deal of her time in Los Angeles since Colin’s death. With her assistant, Ida Cohen, she went to meetings where people made speeches about the war in Viet Nam and school busing. She signed dozens of petitions and tried to get the important people in the movie business to sign them, too. All this helped her assuage her sense of guilt about having given up her studies in California. Also, Billy was now of a draftable age, and the thought of her one son being killed in Viet Nam was intolerable to her. Ida had no sons but was even more intense about the meetings, demonstrations, and petitions than Gretchen. They both wore Ban the Bomb buttons on their blouses and on their coats.

  When she wasn’t going to meetings in the evenings, Gretchen went as often as she could to the theater, with a renewed appetite for it, after the years of being away. Sometimes she went with Ida, a small, dowdy, shrewd woman of about her own age, with whom she had developed a steady friendship, sometimes she went with Evans Kinsella, the director of the picture, with whom she was having an affair, sometimes with Rudolph and Jean, when they were in town, or with one or another of the actors she met when she visited the locations on which they were shooting.