Rich Man, Poor Man (4 page)

Gretchen opened the door and went in. Tom waited until he was sure that she was safely upstairs in her room, then crossed the street and stood in front of the weathered grey frame building. Home. He had been born in that house. He had come unexpectedly, early, and there had been no time to get his mother to hospital. How many times he had heard that story. Big deal, being born at home. The Queen did not leave the Palace. The Prince first saw the light of day in the royal bedchamber. The house looked desolate, ready to be torn down. Tom spat again. He stared at the building, all exhilaration gone. There was the usual light from the basement window, where his father was working. The boy’s face hardened. A whole life in a cellar. What do they know? he thought. Nothing.

He let himself in quietly with the key and climbed to the room he shared with Rudolph on the third floor. He was careful on the creaky stairs. Moving soundlessly was a point of honour with him. His exits and entrances were his own business. Especially on a night like this. There was some blood on the sleeve of his sweater and he didn’t want anybddy coming in and howling about it.

He could hear Rudolph breathing steadily, asleep, as he closed the door quietly behind him. Nice, proper Rudolph, the perfect gentleman, smelling of toothpaste, right at the head of his class, everybody’s pet, never coming home with Wood on him, getting a good night’s sleep, so he wouldn’t miss a good morning, Ma’am, or a trigonometry problem the next day. Tom undressed in the dark, throwing his clothes carelessly over a chair. He didn’t want to answer anv Questions from

Rudolph, either. Rudolph was no ally. He was on the other side. Let him be on the other side. Who cared?

But when he got into the double bed, Rudolph awoke. ‘Where you been?’ Rudolph asked sleepily.

‘Just to the show.’

‘How was it?’

‘Lousy.’

The two brothers lay still in the darkness. Rudolph moved a bit towards the other side of the bed. He thought it was degrading to have to sleep in the same bed with his brother. It Was cold in the room, with the window open and the wind coming off the river. Rudolph always opened the window wide at night. If there was a rule, you could bet Rudolph would obey it. He slept in pyjamas. Tom just stripped to his shorts for sleeping. They had arguments about that twice a week.

Rudolph sniffed. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said, ‘you smell like a wild animal. What’ve you been doing?’

‘Nothing,’ Tom said. ‘ I can’t help the way I smell.’ If he wasn’t my brother, he thought, Fd beat the shit out of him.

He wished he’d had the money to go to Alice’s behind the railroad station. He’d lost his virginity there for five dollars and he’d gone back several times after that. That was in the summer. He had had a job on a dredge in the river and he told his father he made ten dollars a week less than he actually did. That big dark woman, that Florence girl, up from Virginia, who had let him come twice for the same five dollars because he was only fourteen and he was cherry, that would have really finished the night off. He hadn’t told Rudolph about Alice’s either. Rudolph was still a virgin, that was for sure. He was above sex or he was waiting for a movie star or he was a fairy or something. One day, he, Tom, was going to tell Rudolph everything and then watch the expression on his face. Wild animal. Well, if mat’s what they thought of him, that’s what he was going to be - a wild animal.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember what the soldier looked like, down on one knee on the pavement with the blood leaking all over his face. The image was clear, but

here was no pleasure in it any more.

He started to tremble. The room was cold, but that wasn’t vhy he was trembling.

vGretchen sat in front of the little mirror which was propped up on the dressing table against the wall of her room: It was an old kitchen table she had bought at a junk sale for two dollars and painted pink. There were some cosmetic jars on it and a silver backed brush she had got as a present on her eighteenth birthday and three small bottles of perfume and a manicure set all neatly laid out on a clean towel. She had on an old bathrobe. The worn flannel was warm against her skin and gave her some of the same feeling of coziness she used to have when she came in out of the cold and put it on before bedtime as a young girl. She needed what comfort she could find tonight.

She scrubbed the cold cream off her face with a piece of Kleenex. Her skin was very white, a heritage from her mother, like her blue shading-to-violet eyes. Her straight, black hair was like her father’s. Gretchen was beautiful, her mother said, just as she had been when she was Gretchen’s age. Her mother was constantly imploring her not to allow herself to decay, as she had done. Decay was the word her mother used. With marriage, her mother intimated, decay set in immediately. Corruption lay in the touch of a man. Her mother did not lecture her about men; she was sure of what she called Gre’t-chen’s virtue (that was another word she used freely), but she [wed her influence to get Gretchen to wear loose clothes that did not show off her figure. There’s no sense in seeking out trouble,’ her mother said. ‘It comes finding you out soon enough. You have an old-fashioned figure, but your troubles will be I strictly up-to-date.’

Her mother once confided to Gretcheh that she had wanted to be a nun. There was a bluntness of sensiblity there that disturbed Gretchen when she thought about it. Nuns had no daughters. She existed, aged nineteen, seated in front of the mirror on a March night in the middle of the century because her mother had failed to live up to her destiny.

After what had happened to her tonight, Gretchen thought litterly, she herself would be tempted to enter a nunnery. If only she believed in God.

She had gone to the hospital as usual after work. The hospital was a military one on the outskirst of town, full of soldiers convalescing from wounds received in Europe. Gretchen was a volunteer worker five nights a week, distributing books and

wounds and writing letters for soldiers with hand and arm injuries. She wasn’t paid anything, but she felt it was the least she could do. Actually, she enjoyed the work. The soldiers were grateful and docile, made almost childlike by their wounds, and there was none of the tense sexual parading and reconnoitring that she had to endure in the office all day. Of course, many of the nurses and some of the other volunteers slipped off with the doctors and the more active officer-wounded, but Gretchen had quickly shown that she wasn’t having any of that. So many girls were available and willing, that very few of the men persisted. To make it all easier, she had arranged to be assigned to the crowded enlisted men’s wards, where it was almost impossible for a soldier to be alone with her for more than a few seconds at a time. She was friendly and easy with men conversationally, but she couldn’t bear the thought of any man touching her. She had been kissed by boys from time to time, of course, at parties and in cars after dances, but their clumsy gropings had seemed meaningless to her, unsanitary and vaguely comic.

She was never interested in any of the boys who surrounded her in school and she scorned the girls who had crushes on football heroes or boys with cars. It all seemed so pointless. The only man she had ever speculated about in that way was Mr Pollack, the English teacher, who was an old man, maybe fifty, with tousled grey hair, and who spoke in a low, gentlemanly voice and read Shakespeare aloud in class.’ ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day … ”’ She could imagine herself in his arms, and his poetic and mournful caresses, but he was married and had daughters her age and never remembered anyone’s name. As for her dreams … She forgot her dreams.

Something enormous was going to happen to her, she was sure, but it wasn’t going to be this year or in this town.

As she went on her rounds in the loose, grey smock provided by the hospital, Gretchen felt motherly and useful, making up in a small way for what these courteous, uncomplaining young men had suffered for their country. The lights were low in the wards and all the men were supposed to be in bed. Gretchen had made her usual special visit to the bedside of a soldier named Talbot Hughes, who had been wounded in the throat and couldn’t speak. He was the youngest soldier in the ward and the most pitiful and Gretchen liked to believe that the touch of her hand and her goodnight smile made the long hours before dawn more bearable

for the boy. She was tidying the common-room, where the men read and wrote letters, played cards and checkers, and listened to the phonograph. She stacked the magazines neatly on the centre table, cleared off a chessboard and put the pieces in their box, dropped two empty Coca-Cola bottles into a wastebasket.

She liked the little housewifely end of the night, conscious of the hundreds of young men sleeping around this central, warm core of the hospital block, young men saved from death, acquitted of war, young men healing and forgetting fear and agony, young men one day nearer to peace and home.

She had lived in small, cramped quarters all her life and the spaciousness of the common-room, with its pleasant light-green walls and deep upholstered chairs, made her feel almost like a hostess in her own elegant home, after a successful party. She was humming as she finished her work and was just about to turn out the light and start for the locker-room to change her clothes when a tall young Negro in pyjamas and the Medical Corps’ maroon bathrobe limped in.

“Evening, Miss Jordache,’ the Negro said. His name was Arnold. He had been in the hospital a long time and she knew him fairly well. There were only two Negroes in the block and this was the first time Gretchen had seen one without the other. She always made a particular point of being agreeable to them. Arnold had had his leg smashed when a shell hit the truck be was driving in France. He came from St Louis, he had told her, and had eleven brothers and sisters, and had finished high school.

He had spent many hours reading and wore glasses while doing so. Although he seemed to read at random, comic books, magazines, the plays of Shakespeare, anything that happened to be lying around, Gfetchen had decided that he was ripe for literature. He did look bookish, like a brilliant, lonely student from an African country, with his Army-issue glasses. From time to time Gretchen brought him books, either her own or her brother Rudolph’s, or sometimes from the public library in town. Arnold read them promptly and returned them conscientiously, in good condition without ever offering any comment on them, Gretchen felt that he was silent out of embarrassment, not wanting to pretend to be an intellectual in front of the other men. She read a great deal herself, but omnivorously, her taste guided in the last two years by Mr Polack’s catholic enthusiasms. So she had through the months offered Arnold such disparate works as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and the poems

of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Rupert Brooke, and This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

She smiled as the boy came into the room. ‘Good evening, Arnold,’ she said. ‘Looking for something?’

‘Naw. Just wanderin’. Couldn’t get to sleep, somehow. Then I saw the light in here and I say to myself, “I’ll go in and visit with that pretty lil Miss Jordache, pass the time of day.”’ He smiled at her, his teeth white and perfect: Unlike the other men, who called her Gretchen, he always used her last name. His speech was somehow countrified, as though his family had carried the burden of their Alabama farm with them when they migrated north. He was quite black, gaunt in the loose bathrobe. It had taken two or three operations to save his leg, Gretchen knew, and she was sure she could see the lines of suffering around his mouth.

‘I was just going to put the light out,’ Gretchen said. The next bus passed the hospital in about fifteen minutes and she didn’t want to miss it.

Pushing off his good leg, Arnold bounced up on the table. He sat there swinging his legs. ‘You don’t know the pleasure a man can get,’ Arnold said, ‘just looking down and seeing his own two feet. Just go on home, Miss Jordache, I imagine you got some fine young man waiting for you and I wouldn’t like him to be upset your not coming on time.’

‘Nobody’s waiting for me,’ Gretchen said. Now she felt guilty that she had wanted to hustle the boy out of the room just to catch a bus. There’d be another bus along. ‘I’m in no

hurry.’

He took a package of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered her one. She shook her head. ‘No, thank you. I don’t smoke.’ He lit his cigarette, his hands very steady, his eyes narrowed against the smoke. His movements were all deliberate and slow. He had been a football player in high school in St Louis before he was drafted, he had told her, and the athlete remained in the wounded soldier. He patted the table next to him. ‘Why don’t you set awhile, Miss Jordache?’ he said. You must be weary, on your feet all night, running around the way you do for us.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Gretchen said. ‘I sit most of the day in the office.’ But she hoisted herself up to the table beside him, to

show that she was not anxious to leave. They sat side by side, their legs hanging over the side of the table.

‘You got pretty feet,’ Arnold said.

Gretchen looked down at her sensible, low-heeled, brown

shoes. ‘I suppose they’re all right,’ she said. She thought she had pretty feet, too, narrow and not too long, and slender ankles.

‘I became an expert on feet in this man’s army,’ Arnold said. He said it without self-pity, as another man might have said, ‘I learned how to fix radios in the Army,’ or, The Army taught me how to read maps.’ His absence of compassion for himself made her feel a rush of pity for the soft-spoken, slow-moving boy. ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said. The nurses tell me the doctors’ve done wonders for your leg.’

“Yeah,’ Arnold chuckled. ‘Just don’t bet on old Arnold gaining a lot of ground from here on in.’

‘How old are you, Arnold?’

Twenty-two. You?’

‘Nineteen.’

He grinned. ‘Good ages, huh?’

‘I suppose so. If we didn’t have a war.’

‘Oh, I’m not complaining,’ Arnold said, pulling at his cigarette. ‘It got me out of St Louis. Made a man of me.’ There was the tone of mockery in his voice. ‘Ain’t a dumb kid no more. I know what the score is now and who adds up the numbers. Saw some interesting places, met some interesting folk. You ever been in Cornwall, Miss Jordache? That’s in England.’