Rich Man, Poor Man (17 page)

Rudolph had the gift of being liked. He knew that and knew that was why he had been elected president of his class three times in a row. But he felt it wasn’t a real gift. He had to plan to be liked, to be agreeable to people, and seem interested in them, and cheerfully take on thankless jobs like running school dances and heading the advertising board of the magazine and working hard at them to get people to appreciate him. His gift of being liked wasn’t a true gift, he thought, because he had no close friends and he didn’t really like people himself very much. Even his habit of kissing his mother morning and evening and taking her for walks on Sundays was planned for her gratitude, to maintain the notion he knew she had of him as a thoughtful and loving son. The Sunday walks bored him and he really couldn’t stand her pawing him when he kissed her, though, of course, he never showed it.

He felt that he was built in two layers, one that only he knew about and the other which was displayed to the world. He wanted to be what he seemed but he was doubtful that he could ever manage it. Although he knew that his mother and his sister and even some of his teachers thought he was handsome, he was uncertain about his looks. He felt he was too dark, that his nose was too long, his jaw too flat and hard, his pale eyes too light and too small for his olive skin, and his hair

too lower-class dull black. He studied the photographs in the newspapers and the magazines to see how boys at good schools like Exeter and St Paul’s dressed and what college men at places like Harvard and Princeton were wearing, and tried to copy their styles in his own clothes and on his own budget.

He had scuffed white buckskin shoes with rubber soles and now he had a blazer but he had the uneasy feeling that if he were ever invited to a party with a group of preppies he would stand out immediately for what he was, a small-town hick, pretending to be something he wasn’t.

He was shy with girls and had never been in love, unless you could call that stupid thing for Miss Lenaut love. He made himself seem uninterested in girls, too busy with more important matters to bother with kid stuff like dating and flirting and necking. But in reality he avoided the company of girls because he was afraid that if he ever got really close to one, she would find out that behind his lofty manner he was inexperienced and clownish.

In a way he envied his brother. Thomas wasn’t living up to anyone’s estimate of him. His gift was ferocity. He was feared and even hated and certainly no one truly liked him, but he didn’t agonise over which tie to wear or what to say in an English class. He was all of one piece and when he did something he didn’t have to make a painful and hesitant selection of attitudes within himself before he did it.

As for his sister, she was beautiful, a lot more beautiful than most of the movie stars he saw on the screen, and that gift was enough for anybody.

‘This goose is great, Pop,’ Rudolph said, because he knew his father expected him to comment on the meal. ‘It really is something.’ He had already eaten more than he wanted, but he held out his plate for a second portion. He tried not to wince when he saw the size of the piece that his father put on the plate.

Gretchen ate quietly. When am I going to tell them, what’s the best moment? On Friday she had been given two weeks’ notice at the Works. Mr Hutchens had called her into his office and after a little distracted preliminary speech about how efficient she was and conscientious and how her work was always excellent and how agreeable it was to have her in the office, he had come out with it. He had received orders that morning to give her notice, along with another girl in the office. He had gone to the manager to remonstrate, Mr Hutchens said, his dry voice clicking with real distress, but the manager had said he was sorry, there was nothing he could do about it. With the end of the war in Europe there were going to be cutbacks on government contracts. A falling-off in business was expected and they had to economise on staff. Gretchen and the other girl were the last two clerks to be hired in Mr Hutchens’ department and so they had to be the first to go. Mr Hutchens had been so disturbed that he had taken out his handkerchief several times while talking to her and blown his nose aridly, to prove to her that it was none of his doing. Three decades of working with paper had left Mr Hutchens rather papery himself, like a paid bill that has been tucked away for many years and is brittle and yellowed and flaking at the edges, when it is brought out to be examined. The emotion in his voice as he spoke to her was incongruous, like tears from a filing cabinet.

Gretchen had to console Mr Hutchens. She had no intention of spending the rest of her life working for the Boylan Brick and Tile Works, she told him, and she understood why the last to be hired had to be the first to go. She did not tell Mr Hutchens the real reason why she was being fired and she felt guilty about the other girl, who was being sacrificed as camouflage to Teddy Boylan’s act of vengeance.

She had not yet figured out what she was going to do and she hoped to be able to wait until her plans were set before telling her father about her dismissal. There was bound to be an ugly scene and she wanted to have her defences ready. Today, though, her father was behaving like a human being for once, and perhaps at the end of the meal, ripened by wine and basking in his pleasure in the one child, he might prove to be lenient with another. With the dessert, she decided.

Jordache had baked a birthday cake and he came in from the kitchen carrying it, eighteen candles alight on the icing, seventeen and one to grow on, and they all actually were singing ‘Happy birthday to you, dear Rudolph’, when the doorbell rang. The sound stopped the song in mid-verse. The doorbell almost never rang in the Jordache house. No one ever came to visit them and the mailman dropped the letters through a slot. ‘Who the hell is that?’ Jordache asked. He reacted pugnaciously to all surprises, as though anything new could only be an attack of one kind or another.

‘I’ll go,’ Gretchen said. She had the instantaneous certainty that it must be Boylan downstairs at the door, with the Buick parked in front of the shop. It was just the sort of demented thing he was liable to do. She was running down the stairs as Rudolph blew out the candles. She was glad that she was all dressed up and had done her hair that morning for Rudolph’s party. Let Teddy Boylan mourn over what he was never going to get anymore.

When she opened the door, there were two men standing there. She knew them both, Mr Tinker and his brother, the priest. She knew Mr Tinker from the Works and everybody knew Father Tinker, a burly, red-faced man, who looked like a longshoreman who had made a mistake in his profession.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Jordache,’ Mr Tinker said, taking off his hat. His voice was sober, and his long, flabby face looked as though he had just discovered a terrible error in the books.

“Hello, Mr Tinker. Father,’ Gretchen said.

‘I hope we’re not interrupting anything,’ Mr, Tinker said, his voice more ceremoniously churchly than that of his ordained brother. ‘But we have to speak to your father. Is he in?’

‘Yes,’ Gretchen said. ‘If you’ll come up … We’re just at dinner, but..;’

‘I wonder if you’d be good enough to ask him to come down, child,’ said the priest. He had the round, assured voice of a man who inspired confidence in women. ‘We have a most important matter to discuss with him in private.’

‘I’ll go get him,’ Gretchen said. The men came into the dark little hallway and shut the door behind them, as though unwilling to be observed from the street. Gretchen put the light on. She felt peculiar about leaving the two men standing crowded together in the dark. She hurried up the steps, knowing that the Tinker brothers were looking at her legs as she mounted.

Rudolph was cutting the cake as she went into the livingroom. Everybody looked at her inquiringly.

“What the hell was that about?’ Jordache asked.

‘Mr Tinker’s down there,’ Gretchen said. ‘With his brother, the priest. They want to speak to you, Pa.’

“Well, why didn’t you ask them to come up?’ Jordache accepted a slice of cake on a plate from Rudolph and took a huge bite.

They didn’t want to. They said they had a most important

matter to discuss with you in private.’

Thomas made a little sucking sound, pulling his tongue over his teeth, as though he had a morsel of food caught between one tooth and other.

Jordache pushed back his chair. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘a priest. You’d think the bastards would at least leave a man in peace on a Sunday afternoon.’ But he stood up and went out of the room. They could hear his heavy limping tread as he descended the staircase.

Jordache didn’t greet the two men standing in the feeble light of the forty-watt bulb in the hallway. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘what the hell is so important that you’ve got to take a working man away from his Sunday dinner to talk about?’

‘Mr Jordache,’ Tinker said, ‘could we talk to you in private?’

‘What’s wrong with right here?’ Jordache asked, standing above them on the last step, still chewing on his cake. The hallway smelled of the goose.

Tinker looked up the stairway. ‘I wouldn’t like to be overheard,’ he said.

‘As far as I can tell,’ Jordache said, *we got nothing to say to each other that the whole goddamn town can’t hear. I don’t owe you any money and you don’t owe me none.’ Still, he took the step down into the hallway and opened the door to the street and unlocked the front door of the bakery with the key he always carried in his pocket.

The three men went into the bakery, its big window covered from within by a canvas blind for Sunday.

Upstairs, Mary Jordache was waiting for the coffee to boil. Rudolph kept looking at his watch, worried that he’d be late for his date with Julie. Thomas sat slumped in his chair, humming tunelessly and tapping an annoying rhythm on his glass with his fork.

‘Stop that, please,’ the mother said. ‘You’re giving me a headache.’

‘Sorry,’ Thomas said. ‘I’ll take up the trumpet for my next concert.’

Never a courteous moment, Mary Jordache thought. ‘What’s keeping them down there?’ she asked querulously. The one day we’re having a normal family meal.’ She turned accusingly on Gretchen. ‘You work with Mr Tinker,’ she said. ‘Have

you done something disgraceful downtown?’

‘Maybe they discovered I stole a brick,’ Gretchen said.

‘Even one day,’ her mother said, ‘is too much for this family to be polite.’ She went into the kitchen to get the coffee, her back a drama of martyrdom.

There was the sound of Jordache coming up the staircase. He came into the livingroom, his face expressionless. ‘Tom,’ he said flatly, ‘come on downstairs.’

‘I got nothing to say to the Tinker family,’ Thomas said.

They got something to say to you.’ Jordache turned and went out of the room and down the stairs again. Thomas shrugged. He pulled at his fingers, tugging with one hand against the other, the way he did before a fight, and followed his father.

Gretchen frowned. ‘Do you know what it’s all about?’ she asked Rudolph.

Trouble,’ Rudolph said gloomily. He knew he was going to be late for Julie.

In the bakery the two Tinkers, one in a navy-blue suit and the other in his shiny, black, priest’s suit, looked like two ravens against the bare shelves and the grey marble counter. Thomas came in and Jordache closed the door behind him.

I’m going to have to kill him, Thomas thought. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Tinker,’ he said, smiling boyishly. ‘Good afternoon, Father.’

‘My son,’ the priest said portentiously.

Tell him what you told me,’ Jordache said.

‘We know all about it, son,’ the priest said. ‘Claude confessed everything to his uncle, as was only right and natural. From confession flows repentance and from repentance forgiveness.’

‘Save that crap for Sunday school,’ Jordache said. He was leaning with his back against the door, as though to make sure nobody was going to escape.

Thomas didn’t say anything. He was wearing his little pre-fight smile.

The shameful burning of the cross,’ the priest said. ‘On a day consecrated to the memory of the brave young men who have fallen in the struggle. On a day when I celebrated holy mass for the repose of their souls at the altar of my own church. And with all the trials and intolerance we Catholics have undergone

in this country and our bitter efforts to be accepted by our bigoted countrymen. And to have the deed perpetrated by two Catholic boys.’ He shook his head sorrowfully,

‘He’s no Catholic,’ Jordache said.

‘His mother and father were born in the Church,’ the priest said. ‘I have made inquiries.’

‘Did you do it or didn’t you do it?’ Jordache asked. . ‘I did it,’ Thomas said. That yellow, gutless son of a bitch Claude.

‘Can you imagine, my son,’ the priest went on, what would happen to your family and Claude’s family if it ever became known who raised that flaming cross?’

‘We’d be driven out of town,’ Mr Tinker said excitedly. That’s what would happen. Your father wouldn’t be able to give away a loaf of bread in this town. The people of this town remember you’re foreigners, Germans, even if you’d like to forget it.’

‘Oh, Christ, now,’ Jordache said. The red, white and blue.’

‘Facts are facts,’ Mr Tinker said. ‘You might as well face it. I’ll give you another fact. If Boylan ever finds out who it was that set fire to his greenhouse hell sue us for our lives. He’ll get a smart lawyer that’ll make that old greenhouse seem like the most valuable property between here and New York.’ He shook his fist at Thomas. ‘Your father won’t have two pennies to rub against each other in his pocket. You’re minors. We’re responsible, your father and me. The savings of a lifetime … ‘

Thomas could see his father’s hands working, as though he would like to put them around Thomas’s neck and strangle him.

‘Keep calm, John,’ the priest said to Tinker. There’s no sense in getting the boy too upset. We have to depend upon his good sense to save us all.’ He turned to Thomas. ‘I will not ask you what devilish impulse moved you to incite our Claude to do this awful deed…’