Rich Man, Poor Man (16 page)

‘I’d hoped you weren’t going to talk about that, Arnold,’ she said. Hypocrite, hypocrite.

‘Oh, God,’ he said, “you’re so beautiful I just want to sit down and cry,’

He turned and opened the door to the hospital and limped in.

She walked slowly towards the bus stop, feeling battered. Victory solved nothing.

She stood under the light, looking at her watch, wondering if the bus drivers were also celebrating tonight. There was a car parked down the street in the shadow of a tree. The motor started up and it drove slowly towards her. It was Boylan’s Buick. For a moment she thought of running back into the hospital.

Boylan stopped the car in front of her and opened the door. ‘Can I give you a lift, ma’am?’

Thank you very much, no.’ She hadn’t seen him for more than a month, not since the night they had driven to New York.

‘I thought we might get together to offer fitting thanks to God for blessing our arms with victory,’ he said.

‘Ill wait for a bus, thank you?’ she said.

‘You got my letters, didn’t you?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ There had been two letters, on her desk at the office, asking her to meet him in front of Bernstein’s Department Store. She hadn’t met him and she hadn’t answered the letters.

‘Your reply must have been lost in the mail,’ she said. The service these days is very hit and miss, isn’t it?’

She walked away from the car. He got out and came up to her and held her arm.

‘Come up to the house with me,’ he said harshly. This minute.’

His touch unnerved her. She hated him but she knew she wanted to be in his bed. ‘Let go of me,’ she said, and pulled her arm savagely out of his grasp. She walked back to the bus stop, with him following her.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll say what I came to say. I want to marry you.’

She laughed. She didn’t know why she laughed. Surprise.

‘I said I want to marry you,’ he repeated.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said, ‘you go on down to Jamaica, as you planned, and I’ll write you there. Leave your address with my secretary. Excuse me, here’s my bus.’

The bus rolled to a stop and she jumped up through the door as soon as it opened. She gave the driver her ticket and went and sat in the back by herself. She was trembling. If the bus hadn’t come along, she would have said yes, she would marry him. When the bus neared Port Philip she heard the fire engines

and looked up the hill. There was a fire on the hill. She hoped it was the main building, burning to the ground.

Claude hung on to him with his good arm, as Tom drove the bike down the narrow back road behind the Boylan estate. He hadn’t had much practice and he had to go slowly and Claude moaned in his ear every time they skidded or hit a bump. Tom didn’t know how bad the arm was, but he knew something had to be done about it. But if he took Claude to the hospital, they’d ask how he happened to get burned and it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out the connection between the boy with the burned arm and the cross flaming on the Boylan hill. And Claude sure as hell wouldn’t take the blame alone. Claude was no hero. He’d never die under torture with his secret forever clamped between his lips, that was for sure.

‘Listen,’ Tom said, slowing the bike down so that they were hardly moving, ‘you got a family doctor?’

‘Yeah,’ Claude said. ‘My uncle.’

That was the kind of family to have. Priests, doctors, there probably was a lawyer uncle, too, who would come in handy later on, after they were arrested.

“What’s the address?’ Tom asked.

Claude mumbled the address. He was so frightened he found it almost impossible to speak. Tom speeded up and keeping on back roads, found his way to the big house on the outskirts of the town, with a sign on the lawn that said, ‘Dr Robert Tinker, MD’.

Tom stopped the bike and helped Claude off. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’re going in there alone, you understand, and no matter what you tell your uncle, you don’t mention my name. And you better get your father to send you out of town tonight. There’s going to be an awful mess in this town tomorrow and if anybody sees you walking around with a burned hand it’ll take them just about ten seconds to come down on you like a load of bricks.’

For answer, Claude moaned, and hung on to Tom’s shoulder. Tom pushed him away. ‘Stand on your own two feet, man.’ Tom said. ‘Now get in there and make sure you see your uncle and nobody else. And if I ever find out that you gave me away I’ll kill you.’

Tom,’ Claude whimpered.

‘You heard me,’ Tom said. ‘I’ll kill you. And you know I mean it.’ He pushed him towards the door of the house.

Claude staggered towards the door. He reached up his good hand and rang the bell. Tom didn’t wait to see him go in. He hurried off down the street. Above the town the fire was still blazing, lighting up the sky.

He went down to the river near the warehouse in which his father kept his shell. It was dark along the bank and there was the acid odour of rusting metal. He took off his sweater. It had the sick smell of burnt wool, like vomit He found a stone and tied it into the sweater and heaved the bundle out into the river. There was a dull splash and he could see the little fountain of white water against the black of the current, as the sweater sank. He hated to lose the sweater. It was his lucky sweater. He had won a lot of fights while wearing it. But there were times when you had to get rid of things and this was one of them.

He walked away from the river towards home, feeling the chill of the night through his shirt. He wondered if he really was going to have to kill Claude Tinker.

With his German food, Mary Jordache thought, as Jordache came in from the kitchen, carrying the roast goose on a platter with red cabbage and dumplings. Immigrant.

She didn’t remember when she had seen her husband in such a high mood. The surrender of the Third Reich that week had made him jovial and expansive. He had devoured the newspapers, chuckling over the photographs of the German generals signing the papers at Rheims. Now, on Sunday, it was Rudolph’s seventeenth birthday, and Jordache had decreed a holiday. No other birthday in the family was celebrated by more than a grunt He had bought Rudolph a fancy fishing rod. God knew how much it cost, and had told Gretchen that she could keep half her salary from now on instead of the usual quarter. He had even given Thomas the money for a new sweater to replace the one he said he lost. If the German army could be brought to surrender every week, life might be tolerable in the home of Axel Jordache.

‘From now on,’ Jordache had said, ‘we eat Sunday dinner together.’ The bloody defeat of his race, it seemed, had given him a sentimental interest in the ties of blood.

So they were all seated at the table, Rudolph self-consciously the focus of the occasion, wearing a collar and tie, and sitting very erect, like a cadet at table at West Point; Gretchen in a lacy, white shirtwaist looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, the whore; and Thomas, with Ms gambler’s dodgy smile, all neatly washed and combed. Thomas had changed unaccountably since VE day, too, coming right home from school, studying all evening in his room, and even helping out in the shop for the first time in his life. The mother permitted herself the first glimmerings of timid hope. Perhaps by some unknown magic, the falling silent of the guns in Europe would make them a normal family.

Mary Jordache’s idea of a normal American family was largely formed by the lectures of the nuns in the orphanage and later on by glances at the advertisements in popular magazines. Normal American families were always well-washed and fragrant and smiled at each other constantly. They showered each other with gifts for Christmas, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and Mother’s Day. They had hale old parents who lived on farms in the country and at least one automobile. The sons called the father sir and the daughters played the piano and told their mothers about their dates and everybody used Listerine. They had breakfast, dinner, and Sunday lunch together and attended the church of their choice, and took holidays at the seashore en masse. The father commuted to business every day in a dark suit and had a great deal of life insurance. None of this was completely formulated in her mind, but it was the misty standard of reference against which she compared her own circumstances. Both too shy and too snobbish to mix with her own neighbours, the reality of the life of the other families who lived in the town was unknown to her. The rich were out of her reach and the poor were beneath her contempt. By her reckoning, hazy and unsystematic as it was, she, her husband, Thomas, and Gretchen, were not a family in any way that she could accept or that might give her pleasure. Rather they were an abrasive group

collected almost at random for a voyage which none of them had chosen and during which the best that could be hoped for was that hostilities could be kept to a minimum. Rudolph, of course, was excepted.

Axel Jordache put the goose down on the table with satisfaction. He had spent all morning preparing the meal, keeping his wife out of the kitchen, but without the usual insults about her cooking. He carved the bird roughly, but competently, and set out huge portions for all, serving the mother first, to her surprise. He had bought two bottles of California Riesling and he filled all their glasses ceremoniously. He raised his glass in a toast. ‘To my son Rudolph, on his birthday,’ he said huskily. ‘May he justify our hopes and rise to the top and not forget us when he gets there.’

They all drank seriously, although the mother saw Thomas make a little grimace. Perhaps he thought the wine was sour.

Jordache did not specify just which top he expected his son to rise to. Specifications were unnecessary. The top existed, a place with boundaries, densities, privileges. When you got there you recognised it and your arrival was greeted with hosannahs and Cadillacs by earlier arrivals.

Rudolph ate the goose delicately. It was a little fatty to his taste and he knew that fat caused pimples. And he ate sparingly of the cabbage. He had a date later in the afternoon with the girl with the blonde pigtail who had kissed him outside Miss Lenaut’s house and he didn’t want to be smelling of cabbage when he met her. He only sipped at his wine. He had decided that he was never going to get drunk in his whole life. He was always going to be in full control of his mind and his body. He had also decided because of the example of his mother and father, that he was never going to get married.

He had gone back to the house next to Miss Lenaut’s the following day and loitered obviously across the street from it. Sure enough, after about ten minutes the girl had come out Wearing blue jeans and a sweater and waved to him. She was just about his age, with bright-blue eyes and the open friendly

smile of someone who has never had anything bad happen to her. They had walked down the street together and in half an hour Rudolph felt that he had known her for years. She’d just moved into the neighbourhood from Connecticut. Her name was Julie and her father had something to do with the Power Company. She had an older brother who was in the Army in France and that was the reason she’d kissed him that night, to celebrate her brother’s being alive in France with the war over for him. Whatever the reason, Rudolph was glad that she had kissed him, although the memory of that first brush of the lips between strangers made him diffident and awkward for a while.

Julie was crazy about music and liked to sing and thought he played a marvellous trumpet and he had half promised her that he would get his band to take her along with them to sing with them on their next club date.

She liked serious boys, Julie said, and there was no doubt about it, Rudolph was serious. He had already told Gretchen about Julie. He liked to keep saying her name. ‘Julie, Julie …’ Gretchen had merely smiled, being a little bit too patronisingly grownup for his taste. She had given him a blue-flannel blazer for his birthday.

He knew his mother would be disappointed that he wasn’t going to take her for a walk this afternoon, but the way his father was behaving all of a sudden, the miracle might happen and his father might actually take her for a walk himself.

He wished he was as confident about getting to the top as his father and mother were. He was intelligent, but intelligent enough to know that intelligence by itself carried no guarantee along with it. For the kind of success his mother and father expected of him you had to have something special - luck, birth, a gift. He did not know yet if he was lucky. He certainly could not count upon his birth to launch him on a career and he was doubtful of his gifts. He was a connoisseur of others’ gifts and an explorer of his own. Ralph Stevens, a boy in his class, could hardly make a B average overall, but he was a genius in mathematics and was doing problems in calculus and physics for fun while his class mates were labouring with elementary algebra. Ralph Stevens had a gift which directed his life like a magnet. He knew where he was going because it was the only way he could go.

Rudolph had many small talents and no definite direction. He wasn’t bad on the horn, but he didn’t fool himself that he was any Benny Goodman or Louis Armstrong. Of the four other boys who played in the band with him, two were better

than he and the other two were just about as good. He listened to the music he made with a cool appreciation of what it was worth and he knew it wasn’t worth much. And wouldn’t be worth much more, no matter how hard he worked on it. As an athlete, he was top man in one event, the two-twenty hurdles, but in a big city high school, he doubted if he could even make the team, as compared with Stan O’Brien, who played fullback for the football team, and had to depend upon the tolerance of his teachers to get marks just good enough to keep him eligible to play. But on a football field O’Brien was one of the smartest players anybody had ever seen in the state. He could feint and find split-second holes and make the right move every time, with that special sense of a great athlete that no mere intelligence could ever compete with. Stan O’Brien had offers of scholarships from colleges as far away as California and if he didn’t get hurt would probably make All-American and be set for life. In class, Rudolph did better on the English Literature tests than little Sandy Hoperwood, who edited the school paper and who flunked all his science courses regularly, but all you had to do was read one article of his and you knew that nothing was going to stop Sandy from being a writer.