Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  “I’ve got to get a divorce, Rudy,” Thomas said. “And I thought maybe you could help me.”

  “That lawyer I sent you to said there wouldn’t be any problem. You should’ve done it then.”

  “I didn’t have the time,” Thomas said. “I wanted to get Wesley out of the country as quick as possible. And in New York, I’d have to come out with the reason. I don’t want Wesley to find out I got a divorce from his mother because she’s a whore. And even if I did get the divorce in New York, it would take too long. I’d have to hang around here and I’d miss a good part of my season and I can’t afford that. And I have to be divorced by October at the latest.”

  “Why?”

  “Well … I’m living with a woman. An English girl. A wonderful girl. And she’s going to have a baby in October.”

  “I see,” Rudolph said. “Congratulations. The increasing tribe of Jordaches. Maybe the line can stand some English blood. What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t want to have to talk to Teresa,” Thomas said. “If I see her, I’m afraid of what I’ll do to her. Even now. If you or somebody could talk to her and get her to go out to Reno or a place like that …”

  Rudolph put his glass down neatly. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll be glad to help.” There was a noise at the door. “Ah, here’s Enid.” He called, “Come here, baby.” Enid came bouncing in, dressed in a red coat. She stopped short when she saw the strange man in the room with her father. Rudolph picked her up, kissed her. “Say hello to your Uncle Thomas,” he said. “He lives on a boat.”

  Three mornings later, Rudolph called Thomas and made a date for lunch with him at P. J. Moriarty’s, on Third Avenue. The atmosphere there was male and plain and not likely to make Thomas feel ill at ease or give him the idea that Rudolph was showing off.

  Thomas was waiting for him at the bar when he came in, a drink in front of him. “Well,” Rudolph said, as he sat down on the stool next to his brother’s, “the lady’s on her way to Nevada.”

  “You’re kidding,” Thomas said.

  “I drove her to the airport myself,” Rudolph said, “and watched the plane take off.”

  “Christ, Rudy,” Thomas said, “you’re a miracle worker.”

  “Actually, it wasn’t so hard,” Rudolph said. He ordered a martini, to get over the effects of a whole morning with Teresa Jordache. “She’s thinking of remarrying, too, she says.” This was a lie, but Rudolph said it convincingly. “And she saw the wisdom of not dragging her good name, as she calls it, through the courts in New York.”

  “Did she hit you for dough?” Thomas asked. He knew his wife.

  “No,” Rudolph lied again. “She says she makes good money and she can afford the trip.”

  “It doesn’t sound like her,” Thomas said doubtfully.

  “Maybe life has mellowed her.” The martini was sustaining. He had argued with the woman for two whole days and had finally agreed to pay for her round-trip fare, first class, her hotel bill in Reno for six weeks, plus five hundred dollars a week, for what Teresa had described as loss of trade. He had paid her half in advance and would pay her the rest when she came back and gave him the papers that formally ended her marriage.

  They had a good, solid lunch, with two bottles of wine, and Thomas became a little maudlin and kept telling Rudy how grateful he was and how stupid he had been all these years not to realize what a great guy he had for a brother. Over cognacs, he said, “Look, the other day you said you were going to do some traveling when your wife got out of the clinic. The first two weeks in July I haven’t got a charter. I’ll keep it open and you and your wife can come on board, as my guests, and we’ll do a little cruising. And if Gretchen can come, bring her along, too. You’ve got to meet Kate. Christ, the divorce’ll be final by then and you can come to my wedding. Come on, Rudy, I won’t take no for an answer.”

  “It depends upon Jean,” Rudolph said. “How she feels …”

  “It’ll be the best thing in the world for her,” Thomas said. “There won’t be a bottle of liquor on board. Rudy, you just got to do it.”

  “Okay,” Rudy said. “The first of July. Maybe it’ll do us both good to get out of this country for awhile.”

  Thomas insisted upon paying for the lunch. “It’s the least I can do,” he said. “I got a lot to celebrate. I got back an eye and got rid of a wife all in the same month.”

  II

  The Mayor was wearing a sash, the bride was dressed in cornflower blue and did not look pregnant. Enid was wearing white gloves and was holding her mother’s hand and was frowning a little at the mysterious games the grown-ups were playing in a language she did not understand. Thomas was brown and healthy again. He had put back the weight he had lost and his muscular neck bulged at the collar of the white shirt he was wearing. Wesley stood just behind his father, a tall, graceful boy of fifteen in a suit whose sleeves were too short for him, his face deeply tanned, and his blond hair bleached by the Mediterranean sun. They were all tanned because they had been cruising for a week and had only come back to Antibes for the ceremony. Gretchen, Rudolph thought, looked superb, her dark hair with just a little animal sheen of gray in it, severely drawn around the bony, wide-eyed, magnificent face. Queenlike, Rudolph thought, nobly tragic. Rhetoric went with weddings. Rudolph knew that the single week on the sea had made him look years younger than when he had stepped off the plane at Nice. He listened, amused, to the Mayor, who was describing, in a rich Midi accent, full of rolling hard g’s, the duties expected of the bride. Jean understood French, too, and they exchanged little smiles as the Mayor went on. Jean hadn’t had a drink since she had come down from the clinic and she looked dear and beautifully fragile in the room full of Thomas’s friends from the harbor, with their weather-worn, strong, dark faces, above unaccustomed neckties and jackets. There was an aura of voyages in the sunny, flower-bedecked Mayor’s office, Rudolph thought, a tang of salt, the flavors of a thousand ports.

  Only Dwyer seemed sad, touching the white carnation in his button-hole. Thomas had told Rudolph Dwyer’s story and Rudolph thought perhaps the sight of his friend’s happiness made Dwyer regret the girl in Boston he had foresworn for the Clothilde.

  The Mayor was robust and obviously liked this part of his job. He was as sun-darkened as the seamen around him. When I was the mayor of another town, Rudolph thought, I didn’t spend much time in the sun. He wondered if the Mayor was worried about kids smoking pot in dormitories and whether or not to order the police to use tear gas. Whitby, too, at certain seasons, looked idyllic.

  When he had first met Kate, Rudolph had been disappointed in his brother’s choice. He was partial to pretty women and Kate, with her flat, dark, humble face, and her stubby body, was certainly not pretty in any conventional terms. She reminded him of some of the native women in Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, he thought, have much to answer for. With all those long, slender beauties, they have tuned us out from simpler and more primitive appeals.

  Kate’s speech, shy, uneducated, and Liverpudlian, had jarred on his ears in the beginning, too. It was curious, Rudolph thought, how Americans, with their ideas of the English formed by visiting actors and lecturers, were more snobbish about British accents than those of their own countrymen.

  But after a day or two of watching Kate with Tom and Wesley, uncomplainingly doing all sorts of chores on board the ship, handling the man and the boy with the most transparent, undemonstrative love and trust, he had felt ashamed of his first reactions to the woman. Tom was a lucky man, and he told him so and Tom had soberly agreed.

  The Mayor came to the end of his speech, rings were exchanged, bride and groom kissed each other. The Mayor kissed the bride, beaming, as though he had brilliantly performed some extraordinarily delicate bureaucratic function.

  The last wedding Rudolph had attended had been that of Brad Knight and Virginia Calderwood. He preferred this one.

  Rudolph and Gretchen signed the register, after the newlyweds. R
udolph hesitantly kissed the bride. There were finger-mangling handshakes all around, and the entire party trooped out into the sunlight of the town that had been founded more than two thousand years ago by men who must have looked very much like the men who accompanied his brother in the wedding procession.

  There was champagne waiting for them at Chez Felix au Port and melon and bouillabaisse for lunch. An accordionist played, the Mayor toasted the bride, Pinky Kimball toasted the bridegroom in Southampton French, Rudolph toasted the couple in French that made the guests gaze at him with wonder and got him a great round of applause when he finished. Jean had brought along a camera and took roll after roll of photographs to commemorate the occasion. It was the first time since the night she had broken her cameras that she had taken any pictures. And Rudolph hadn’t suggested it. She had suggested it herself.

  The lunch broke up at four o’clock and all the guests, some of them weaving now, paraded the bridal couple back to where the Clothilde lay at the quay. On the after deck there was a big crate tied up in red ribbon. It was Rudolph’s wedding gift and he had arranged for it to be put aboard during the festivities. He had had it shipped over from New York to Thomas’s agent, with instructions to hold it until the wedding day.

  Thomas read the card. “What the hell is this?” he asked Rudolph.

  “Open it and find out.”

  Dwyer went to get a hammer and chisel and the bridegroom stripped down to the waist and with all the guests crowding around, broke open the crate. Inside it was a beautiful Bendix radar set and scanner. Before leaving New York, Rudolph had spoken to Mr. Goodhart and asked him what Thomas would like best for the Clothilde and Mr. Goodhart had suggested the radar.

  Thomas held the set up triumphantly, and the guests applauded Rudolph again, as though he personally had invented and manufactured the machine with his own hands.

  There were tears in Thomas’s eyes, a little drunken, to be sure, as he thanked Rudolph. “Radar,” he said. “I’ve been wanting this for years.”

  “I thought it made a fitting wedding present,” Rudolph said. “Mark the horizon, recognize obstacles, avoid wrecks.”

  Kate, sea-going wife, kept touching the machine as though it were a delightful young puppy.

  “I tell you,” Thomas said, “this is the greatest goddamn wedding anybody ever had.”

  The plan was to set sail that afternoon for Portofino. They would stay along the coast past Monte Carlo, Menton, and San Remo, then cross the Gulf of Genoa during the night and make a landfall on the Italian mainland some time the next morning. The météo was good and the entire voyage, according to Thomas, shouldn’t take more than fifteen hours.

  Dwyer and Wesley wouldn’t allow Thomas or Kate to touch a line, but made them sit enthroned on the afterdeck while they got the Clothilde under way. As the anchor finally came up and the ship turned its nose seaward, from various boats in the harbor there came the sound of horns, in salute, and a fishing boat full of flowers accompanied them to the buoy, with two men strewing the flowers in their wake.

  As they hit the gentle swell of open water they could see the white towers of Nice far off across the Baie des Anges.

  “What a place to live,” Rudolph said. “France.”

  “Especially,” Thomas said, “if you’re not a Frenchman.”

  III

  Gretchen and Rudolph sat in deck chairs near the stern of the Clothilde, watching the sun begin to set behind them. They were just opposite the Nice airport and could watch the jets swoop in, one every few minutes. Coming in, their wings gleamed in the level sunlight and nearly touched the silvery sea as they landed. Taking off, they climbed above the escarpment of Monaco, still brightly sunlit to the east. How pleasant it was to be moving at ten knots, Rudolph thought, and watch everybody else going at five hundred.

  Jean was below putting Enid to bed. When she was on deck Enid wore a small orange life-jacket and she was attached by a line around her waist to a metal loop on the pilot house to make sure she wasn’t lost overboard. The bridegroom was forward sleeping off his champagne. Dwyer was with Kate in the galley preparing dinner. Rudolph had protested about this and had invited them all to dinner in Nice or Monte Carlo, but Kate had insisted. “I couldn’t think of a better thing to do on my wedding night,” Kate had said. Wesley, in a blue turtle-neck sweater, because it was getting cool, was at the wheel. He moved around the boat, barefooted and sure handed, as though he had been born at sea.

  Gretchen and Rudolph were wearing sweaters, too. “What a luxury it is,” Rudolph said, “to be cold in July.”

  “You’re glad you came, aren’t you?” Gretchen asked.

  “Very glad,” Rudolph said.

  “The family restored,” Gretchen said. “No, not even that. Assembled, for the first time. And by Tom, of all people.”

  “He’s learned something we never quite learned,” Rudolph said.

  “He certainly has. Have you noticed—wherever he goes, he moves in an atmosphere of love. His wife, Dwyer, all those friends at the wedding. Even his own son.” She laughed shortly.

  She had talked to Rudolph about her visit with Billy in Brussels before she had come down to Antibes to join them, so Rudolph knew what was behind the laugh. Billy, safe in an Army office as a typist and clerk, was, she had told Rudolph, cynical, ambitionless, sweating out his time, mocking of everything and everybody, including his mother, incurious about the wealth of the Old World around him, shacking up with silly girls in Brussels and Paris, one after the other, smoking marijuana, if he wasn’t going in for stronger stuff, risking jail with the same lack of interest that he had risked getting kicked out of college, unwavering in his icy attitude toward his mother. At their last dinner in Brussels, Gretchen had reported, when the subject of Evans Kinsella had finally come up, Billy had been savage. “I know all about people your age,” he had said. “Big phoney ideals, going into raptures about books and plays and politicians that just make people my age horse laugh, out saving the world and going from one crap-talking artist to another to pretend you’re still young and the Nazis have just been licked and the brave new world is just around the corner or at the next bar or in the next bed.”

  “In a way,” Gretchen had told Rudolph, “maybe he’s right. Hateful but right. When he says the word phoney. You know better than anyone about me. When the time came I didn’t tell him, ‘Go to prison,’ or ‘Desert.’ I just called my influential brother and saved my son’s miserable skin and let other mothers persuade their sons to go to prison or desert or march on the Pentagon, or go die in the jungle someplace. Anyway, I’ve signed my last petition.”

  There was nothing much Rudolph could say to that. He had been the necessary accomplice. They were both guilty as charged.

  But the week on the sea had been so healing, the wedding so gay and optimistic, that he had consciously put it all from his mind. He was sorry that the sight of Wesley at the wheel, brown and agile, had made them both, inevitably, think about Billy.

  “Look at him,” Gretchen was saying, staring at Wesley. “Brought up by a whore. With a father who never got past the second year in high school, who hasn’t opened a book since then and who’s been beaten and hunted and knocked down and lived ever since he was sixteen with the scum of the earth. And no questions asked. When Tom decided the time was right he got his kid and took him to another country and made him learn another language and threw him in with a whole group of ruffians who can barely read and write. And he’s made him go to work at an age when Billy was still asking for two dollars on Saturday night to go to the movies. As for the amenities of family life.” She laughed. “That boy sure has his share of elegant privacy, living in the next room to a little English peasant girl who’s his father’s mistress, with his father’s illegitimate child in her belly. And what’s the result? He’s healthy and useful and polite. And he’s so devoted to his father Tom doesn’t ever have to raise his voice to him. All he has to do is indicate what he wants the boy to do and the boy does it.
Christ,” she said, “we’d better start rewriting all those books on child care. And one thing that boy is sure of. No draft board is going to send him to Viet Nam. His father will see to that. I’ll tell you something—if I were you, as soon as Enid is big enough to walk around this boat without falling overboard, I’d send her over here to let Tom bring her up for you. Lord, I could use a drink. Tom must have one bottle of something stashed away on this Woman’s Christian Temperance Union vessel.”

  “I imagine he has,” Rudolph said. “I’ll ask.” He got up from his chair and went forward. It was getting dark and Wesley was putting the running lights on. Wesley smiled at him as he passed him. “I guess the excitement was too much for the old man,” he said. “He hasn’t even been up to check whether I’m heading into the Alps or not.”

  “Weddings don’t happen every day,” Rudolph said.

  “They sure don’t,” Wesley said. “It’s a lucky thing for Pa they don’t. His constitution couldn’t stand it.”

  Rudolph went through the saloon to the galley. Dwyer was washing lettuce in the sink and Kate, no longer dressed for celebration, was basting a roast in the oven. “Kate,” Rudolph said, “has Tom got a bottle hidden away down here somewhere?”

  Kate closed the oven door and stood up and looked troubledly at Dwyer. “I thought he promised you we’d be bone dry all the time you were on board,” she said.

  “That’s all right, Kate,” Rudolph said. “Jean’s in the cabin with the kid. It’s for Gretchen and me. We’re up on deck and it’s getting nippy.”

  “Bunny,” Kate said to Dwyer, “go get it.”

  Dwyer went up forward to his cabin and came back with a bottle of gin. Rudolph poured the gin into two glasses and put some tonic in with it.