by Irwin Shaw
But they were out of the door and somehow they managed to keep walking and a taxi was passing by and Thomas hailed it. Jean struggled to push him in and then tumbled in after him and the taxi was on its way to Antibes by the time the man who had called out to them came out on the sidewalk looking for them.
In the cab, Thomas leaned back, exhausted, against the seat. Jean huddled in her white coat in a corner, away from him. He couldn’t stand his own smell, mingled with the smell of Danovic and blood and the dank cellar, and he didn’t blame Jean for keeping as far away from him as possible. He passed out, or fell asleep, he couldn’t tell which. When he opened his eyes again they were going down the street toward the harbor of Antibes. Jean was weeping uncontrollably in her corner, but he couldn’t worry any more about her tonight.
He chuckled as they came up to where the Clothilde was tied up.
The chuckle must have startled Jean. She stopped crying abruptly. “What’re you laughing about, Tom?” she asked.
“I’m laughing about the doctor in New York,” he said. “He told me to avoid any sudden movements or strenuous exertion for a long time. I’d have loved to see his face if he’d been there tonight.”
He forced himself to get out of the cab unaided and paid the driver off and limped up the gangplank after Jean. He had a dizzy spell again and nearly fell sideways off the gangplank into the water.
“Should I help you to your cabin?” Jean asked, when he finally made it to the deck.
He waved her away. “You go down and tell your husband you’re home,” he said. “And tell him any story you want about tonight.”
She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. “I swear I’ll never touch another drop of liquor again as long as I live,” she said.
“Well, then,” he said, “we’ve had a successful evening, after all, haven’t we?” But he patted her smooth, childish cheek, to take the sting out of his words. He watched as she went down through the saloon and to the main cabin. Then he painfully went below and opened the door to his own cabin. Kate was awake and the light was on. She made a hushed, choked sound when she saw what he looked like.
“Sssh,” he said.
“What happened?” she whispered.
“Something great,” he said. “I just avoided killing a man.” He dropped onto the bunk. “Now get dressed and go get a doctor.”
He closed his eyes, but he heard her dressing swiftly. By the time she was out of the room he was asleep.
He was up early, awakened by the sound of hissing water, as Dwyer and Wesley hosed off the deck. They had come into port too late the night before to do it then. He had a big bandage around his knee and every time he moved his right shoulder he winced with pain. But it could have been worse. The doctor said there were no broken bones, but that the knee had been badly mauled and perhaps some cartilage had been torn away. Kate was already in the galley preparing breakfast and he lay alone in the bunk, his body remembering all the other times in his life he had awakened bruised and aching. His memory bank.
He pushed himself out of the bunk with his good arm and stood in front of the little cabinet mirror on his good leg. His face was a mess. He hadn’t felt it at the time, but when he had toppled Danovic his face had crashed against the rough concrete floor and his nose was swollen and his lip puffed out and there were gashes on his forehead and cheekbones. The doctor had cleaned out the cuts with alcohol and compared to the rest of him his face felt in good shape, but he hoped Enid wouldn’t go screaming to her mother when she got a glimpse of him.
He was naked and there were black-and-blue welts blooming all over his chest and arms. Schultzy should see me now, he thought, as he pulled on a pair of pants. It took him five minutes to get the pants on and he couldn’t manage a shirt at all. He took the shirt with him and clumped, hopping mostly, into the galley. The coffee was on and Kate was squeezing oranges. Once the doctor had assured her that nothing serious was wrong, she had become calm and businesslike. Before he had gone to sleep, after the doctor had left, he had told her the whole story.
“You want to kiss the bridegroom’s beautiful face?” he said.
She kissed him gently, smiling, and helped him on with his shirt. He didn’t tell her how much it hurt when he moved his shoulder.
“Does anybody know anything yet?” he asked.
“I haven’t told Wesley or Bunny,” she said. “And none of the others have come up yet.”
“As far as anybody is concerned, I was in a fight with a drunk outside Le Cameo,” Thomas said. “That will be an object lesson to anybody who goes out drinking on his wedding night.”
Kate nodded. “Wesley’s been down with the mask already,” she said. “There’s a big chunk out of the port screw and as far as he can tell the shaft is twisted, too.”
“If we get out of here in a week,” Thomas said, “we’ll be lucky. Well, I might as well go up on deck and start lying.”
He followed Kate as she went up the ladder carrying the orange juice and the coffee pot on a tray. When Wesley and Dwyer saw him, Dwyer said, “For Christ’s sake what did you do to yourself?” and Wesley said, “Pa!”
“I’ll tell everybody about it when we’re all together,” Thomas said. “I’m only going to tell the story once.”
Rudolph came up with Enid and Thomas could tell from the look on his face that Jean had probably told him the true story or most of the true story. All Enid said was, “Uncle Thomas, you look funny this morning.”
“I bet I do, darling,” Thomas said.
Rudolph didn’t say anything, except that Jean had a headache and was staying in bed and that he’d take her some orange juice after they’d all had their breakfast. They had just sat down around the table when Gretchen came up. “Good God, Tom,” she said, “what in the world happened to you?”
“I was waiting for someone to ask just that question,” Thomas said. Then he told the story about the fight with the drunk in front of Le Cameo. Only, he said, laughing, the drunk hadn’t been as drunk as he had been.
“Oh, Tom,” Gretchen said, distractedly, “I thought you’d given up fighting.”
“I thought so, too,” Thomas said. “Only that drunk didn’t.”
“Were you there, Kate?” Gretchen asked accusingly.
“I was in bed asleep,” Kate said placidly. “He sneaked out. You know how men are.”
“I think it’s disgraceful,” Gretchen said. “Big, grown men fighting.”
“So do I,” Thomas said. “Especially when you lose. Now let’s eat breakfast.”
V
Later that morning Thomas and Rudolph were up in the bow alone. Kate and Gretchen had gone to do the marketing, taking Enid along with them, and Wesley and Dwyer were down looking at the screws again with the masks.
“Jean told me the whole story,” Rudolph said. “I don’t know how to thank you, Tom.”
“Forget it. It wasn’t all that much. It probably looked a lot worse than it was to a nicely brought up girl like Jean.”
“All that drinking going on all day,” Rudolph said bitterly, “and then the final straw—Gretchen and me drinking here on board before dinner. She just couldn’t stand it. And alcoholics can be so sly. How she could have gotten out of bed and dressed and off the ship without my waking up …” He shook his head. “She’s behaved so well, I guess I thought there was nothing to worry about. And when she has a couple, she’s not responsible. She’s not the same girl at all. You don’t think that when she’s sober she goes around picking men up in bars in the middle of the night?”
“Of course not, Rudy.”
“She told me, she told me,” Rudolph said. “This polite-looking, well-spoken young man came up to her and said he had a car outside and he knew a very nice bar in Cannes that stayed open until dawn and would she like to come with him, he’d bring her back whenever she wanted …”
“Polite-looking, well-spoken young man,” Thomas said, thinking of Danovic lying on the floor of the cellar with the handle of the ba
ll-peen hammer sticking up from his broken teeth. He chuckled. “He’s not so polite looking or well spoken this morning, I can tell you that.”
“And then when they got to that bar, a strip-tease joint—God, I can’t even imagine Jean in a place like that—he said it was too noisy for him at the bar, there was a little cosy club downstairs …” Rudolph shook his head despairingly. “Well, you know the rest.”
“Don’t think about it, Rudy, please,” Thomas said.
“Why didn’t you wake me up and take me along with you?” Rudolph’s voice was harsh.
“You’re not the sort of man for a trip like that, Rudy.”
“I’m her husband, for Christ’s sake.”
“That was another reason for not waking you up,” said Thomas.
“He could have killed you.”
“For a little while there,” Thomas admitted, “the chances looked pretty good.”
“And you could have killed him.”
“That’s the one good thing about the night,” Thomas said. “I found out I couldn’t. Now, let’s go back and see what the divers’re up to.” He hobbled down the deck from the bow, leaving his brother and his brother’s guilts and gratitudes behind him.
VI
He was sitting alone on the deck, enjoying the calm late evening air. Kate was down below and the others had all gone on a two-day automobile trip to the hill towns and into Italy. It had been five days since the Clothilde had come back into the harbor and they were still waiting for the new propeller and shaft to be delivered from Holland. Rudolph had said that a little sightseeing was in order. Jean had been dangerously quiet since her night of drunkenness and Rudolph kept doing his best to distract her. He had asked Kate and Thomas to come along with them, but Thomas had said the newlyweds wanted to be alone. He had even privately told Rudolph to invite Dwyer along with the party. Dwyer had been pestering him to point out the drunk who had beaten him up outside Le Cameo and he was sure Dwyer was thinking of cooking up some crazy scheme of retaliation with Wesley. Also, Jean kept following him around without saying anything, but with a peculiar, haunted look in her eyes. Lying for five days had been something of a strain and it was a relief to have the ship to himself and Kate for a little while.
The harbor was silent, the lights out in most of the ships. He yawned, stretched, stood up. His body had gotten over feeling bruised and while he still limped, his leg had stopped feeling as though it was broken in half somewhere along the middle when he walked. He hadn’t made love to his wife since the fight and he was thinking that this might be a good night to start in again, when he saw the car without lights driving swiftly along the quay. The car stopped. It was a black DS 19. The two doors on his side opened and two men got out, then two more. The last man was Danovic, one arm in a sling.
If Kate hadn’t been aboard, he would have dived over the side and let them try to get him. But there was nothing for him to do but stand there. There was nobody on the boats on either side of him. Danovic remained on the quay, as the other three men came aboard.
“Well, gentlemen,” Thomas said, “what can I do for you?”
Then something hit him.
He came out of the coma only once. Wesley and Kate were in the hospital room with him. “No more …” he said, and then slipped back into the coma again.
Rudolph had called a brain specialist in New York and the specialist was on his way to Nice when Thomas died. The skull had been fractured, the surgeon had explained to Rudolph and there had been catastrophic bleeding.
Rudolph had moved Gretchen and Jean and Enid to a hotel. Gretchen had strict orders not to leave Jean alone for a minute.
Rudolph had told the police what he knew and they had talked to Jean, who had broken down hysterically after a half hour’s questioning. She had told them about La Porte Rose and they had picked up Danovic, but there had been no witnesses to the beating and Danovic had an alibi for the entire night that couldn’t be shaken.
VII
The morning after the cremation Rudolph and Gretchen went by taxi to the place and got the metal box with their brother’s ashes. Then they drove toward Antibes harbor, where Kate and Wesley and Dwyer were expecting them. Jean was at the hotel with Enid. It would have been too much for Kate to bear, Rudolph thought, to have to stand by Jean’s side today. And if Jean got drunk, Rudolph thought, she would finally have good reason to do so.
Gretchen now knew the true story of the wedding night, as did the others.
“Tom,” Gretchen said in the taxi, as they drove through the bustle of holiday traffic, “the one of us who finally made a life.”
“Dead for one of us who didn’t,” Rudolph said.
“The only thing you did wrong,” Gretchen said, “was not waking up one night.”
“The only thing,” Rudolph said.
After that they didn’t speak until they reached the Clothilde. Kate and Wesley and Dwyer, dressed in their working clothes, were waiting for them on the deck. Dwyer and Wesley were red eyed from crying, but Kate, although grave faced, showed no signs of tears. Rudolph came on board carrying the box and Gretchen followed him. Rudolph put the box in the pilot house and Dwyer took the wheel and started the one engine. Wesley pulled up the gangplank and then jumped ashore to throw off the two stern lines, which Kate reeled in. Wesley leaped across open water, landed catlike on the stern, and swung himself aboard, then ran forward to help Kate with the anchor.
It was all so routine, so much like every other time they had set out from a port, that Rudolph, on the after deck, had the feeling that at any moment Tom would come rolling out of the shadow of the pilot house, smoking his pipe.
The immaculate white-and-blue little ship chugged past the harbor mouth in the morning sunlight, only the two figures standing in incongruous black on the open deck making it seem any different from any other pleasure craft sailing out for a day’s sport.
Nobody spoke. They had decided what they were to do the day before. They sailed for an hour, due south, away from the mainland. Because they were only on one engine they did not go far and the coast line was clear behind them.
After exactly one hour, Dwyer turned the boat around and cut the engine. There were no other craft within sight and the sea was calm, so there wasn’t even the small sound of waves. Rudolph went into the pilot house, took out the box and opened it. Kate came up from below with a large bunch of white and red gladioli. They all stood in a line on the stern, facing the open, empty sea. Wesley took the box from Rudolph’s hands and, after a moment’s hesitation, his eyes dry now, started to strew his father’s ashes into the sea. It only took a minute. The ashes floated away, a faint sprinkling of dust on the blue glint of the Mediterranean.
The body of their father, Rudolph thought, also rolled in deep waters.
Kate threw the flowers in with a slow, housewifely gesture of her round, tanned arms.
Wesley tossed the metal box and its cover over the side, both face down. They sank immediately. Then Wesley went to the pilot house and started the engine. They were pointed toward the coast now and he held a straight course for the mouth of the harbor.
Kate went below and Dwyer went forward to stand in the prow, leaving Gretchen and Rudolph, death colored, together on the after deck.
Up in the bow, Dwyer stood in the little breeze of their passage, watching the coast line, white mansions, old walls, green pines, grow nearer in the brilliant light of the morning sun.
Rich man’s weather, Dwyer remembered.
Turn the page to start reading the follow-up to Rich Man, Poor Man
CHAPTER 1
FROM BILLY ABBOTT’S NOTEBOOK—
I AM WORTHLESS, MONIKA SAYS. SHE SAYS IT ONLY HALF-SERIOUSLY. MONIKA, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS NOT DEMONSTRABLY WORTHLESS. BEING IN LOVE WITH HER UNDOUBTEDLY CLOUDS MY VISION OF HER. MORE ABOUT THAT LATER.
SHE ASKED ME ONCE WHAT I WRITE IN THIS NOTEBOOK. I TOLD HER THAT THE COLONEL KEEPS SAYING WE HERE IN NATO ARE ON THE FIRING LINE OF CIVILIZATION. IT IS IMPORTAN
T FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS, I TOLD HER, TO KNOW WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO BE ON THE FIRING LINE OF CIVILIZATION IN BRUSSELS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. MAYBE SOME DUSTY, IRRADIATED SCHOLAR WILL DIG AROUND IN THE RUINS OF THE CITY AND COME UPON THIS NOTEBOOK, CHARRED A LITTLE AROUND THE EDGES AND PERHAPS STIFF WITH THE RUSTY STAINS OF MY BLOOD, AND BE GRATEFUL TO WM. ABBOTT, JUNIOR, FOR HIS FORETHOUGHT IN JOTTING DOWN HIS OBSERVATIONS OF HOW THE SIMPLE AMERICAN SOLDIER LIVED WHILE DEFENDING CIVILIZATION ON THE EDGE OF EUROPE. WHAT THE PRICE OF OYSTERS WAS, THE SHAPE AND DIMENSIONS OF HIS BELOVED’S BREASTS, HIS SIMPLE PLEASURES, LIKE FUCKING AND STEALING GASOLINE FROM THE ARMY, THINGS LIKE THAT.
MONIKA SAID, DID I ALWAYS HAVE TO BE FRIVOLOUS? AND I SAID, WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO BE?
DON’T YOU BELIEVE IN ANYTHING? SHE ASKED ME.
I BELIEVE IN NOT BUCKING THE TIDE, I TOLD HER. IF THERE’S A PARADE GOING DOWN THE STREET I FALL IN LINE AND KEEP STEP, WAVING TO THE POPULACE, FRIEND AND FOE ALIKE.
GO BACK TO YOUR SCRIBBLING, SHE SAID. WRITE DOWN THAT YOU’RE NOT A TRUE REPRESENTATIVE OF YOUR GENERATION.
SCRIBBLING PERHAPS IS THE WORD FOR WHAT I’M DOING. I COME FROM A LITERARY FAMILY. BOTH MY MOTHER AND FATHER ARE—OR WERE—WRITERS. OF A SORT. MY FATHER WAS A PUBLIC RELATIONS MAN, A MEMBER OF A PROFESSION NOT HELD IN PARTICULARLY HIGH ESTEEM IN THE HALLS OF ACADEME OR IN PUBLISHERS’ OFFICES. STILL, WHATEVER THE MERITS OR FAILURES THAT CAN BE PUT TO HIS ACCOUNT, HE ACHIEVED THEM AT A TYPEWRITER. HE LIVES IN CHICAGO NOW AND WRITES ME OFTEN, ESPECIALLY WHEN HE IS DRUNK. I REPLY DUTIFULLY. WE ARE GREAT FRIENDS WHEN WE ARE FOUR THOUSAND MILES APART.