Rich Man, Poor Man (46 page)

He sat down at the kitchen table and drank his orange juice and coffee and munched some toast. His mother just drank coffee. Her hair was lank and there were shocking, huge rings of purple sag under her eyes. But with all that, she didn’t seem any worse to him than she had been for the last three years. She would probably live to the age of ninety. He did not begrudge her her longevity. She kept him out of the draft. Sole support of an invalid mother. Last and dearest maternal gift -she had spared him an icebound foxhole in Korea.

‘I had a dream last night,’ she said. ‘About your brother, Thomas. He looked the way he looked when he was eight years old. Like a choirboy at Easter. He came into my room and said, Forgive me, forgive me …’ She drank her coffee moodily. ‘I haven’t dreamt about him in forever. Do you ever hear from him?’

‘No,’ Rudolph said.

‘You’re not hiding anything from me, are you?’ she asked.

‘No. Why would I do that?’

‘I would like to see him once more before I die,’ she said. ‘After all he is my own flesh and blood.’

‘You’re not going to die.’

‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘I have a feeling when spring comes, I’m going to feel much better. We can go for walks again.’

That’s good news.’ Rudolph said, finishing his coffee and standing. He kissed her goodbye. I’ll fix dinner tonight,’ he said. I’ll shop on the way home.’

‘Don’t tell me what it’s going to be,’ she said coquettishly, ‘surprise me.’

‘Okay,’ he said, I’ll surprise you.’

The night watchman was still on duty at the employees’ entrance when Rudolph got to the store, carrying the morning papers, which he had bought on the way over.

‘Good morning, Sam,’ Rudolph said.

‘Hi, Rudy,’ the night watchman said. Rudolph made a point of having all the old employees, who knew him from his first days at the store, call him by his Christian name.

‘You sure are an early bird,’ the night watchman said, ‘When I was your age you couldn’t drag me out of bed on a morning like this.’

That’s why you’re a night watchman at your age, Sam, Rudolph thought, but he merely smiled and went on up to his office, through the dimly lit and sleeping store.

His office was neat and bare, with two desks, one for himself and one for Miss Giles, his secretary, a middle-aged, efficient spinster. There were piles of magazines geometrically stacked on wide shelves, Vogue, French Vogue, Seventeen, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, House and Garden, which he combed for ideas for various departments of the store. The quality of the town was changing rapidly; the new people coming up from the city had money and spent it freely. The natives of the town were more prosperous than they had ever been and were beginning to imitate the tastes of the more sophisticated newer arrivals. Calderwood fought a stubborn rearguard action against the transformation of his store from a solid lower-middle-class establishment to what he called a grab bag of fads and fancy gewgaws, but the balance sheet could not be gainsaid as Rudolph pushed through one innovation after another, and each month it was becoming easier for Rudolph to put his ideas into practice. Calderwood had even agreed, after nearly a year of opposition, to wall off part of what had been an unnecessarily capacious delivery room and turn it into a liquor store, with a line of fine French wines that Rudolph, remembering what Boylan had taught him on the subject through the years, took pleasure in selecting himself.

He hadn’t seen Boylan since the day of the Commencement exercises. He had called twice that summer to ask if Boylan

was free for dinner and Boylan had said, ‘No’, curtly, each time. Every month, Rudolph sent a hundred dollar cheque to Boylan, towards repaying the four thousand dollar loan. Boylan never cashed the cheques, but Rudolph made sure that if at any time Boylan decided to cash them all at once there would be enough money in the account to honour them, Rudolph didn’t think about Boylan often, but when he did, he realised that there was contempt mixed with gratitude he felt for the older man. With all that money, Rudolph thought, all that freedom, Boylan had no right to be as unhappy as he was. It was a symptom of Boylan’s fundamental weakness, and Rudolph, fighting any signs of weakness in himself, had no tolerance for it in anybody else. Willie Abbott and Teddy Boylan, Rudolph thought, there’s a good team.

Rudolph spread the newspapers on his desk. There was the Whitby Record, and the edition of the New York Times that came upon the first train of the morning. The front page of the Times reported heavy fighting along the 38th parallel and new accusations of treason and infiltration by Senator McCarthy in Washington. The Record’s front page reported on a vote for new taxes for the school board (not passed) and on the number of skiers who had made use of the new ski area nearby since the season began. Every city to its own interests.

Rudolph turned to the inside pages of the Record. The half-page two-colour advertisement for a new line of wool dresses and sweaters was sloppily done, with the colours bleeding out of register, and Rudolph made a note on his desk pad to call the paper that morning about it

Then he opened to the Stock Exchange figures in the Times and studied them for fifteen minutes. When he had saved a thousand dollars he had gone to Johnny Heath and asked him, as a favour, to invest it for him. Johnny, who handled some accounts in the millions of dollars, had gravely consented, and worried over Rudolph’s transactions as though Rudolph were one of the most important of his firm’s customers. Rudolph’s holdings were still small, but they were growing steadily. Looking over the Stock Exchange page, he was pleased to see that he was almost three hundred dollars richer this morning, on paper, than he had been the morning before. He breathed a quiet prayer of thanks to his friend Johnny Heath, and turned to the crossword puzzle and got out his pen and started on it. It was one of the pleasantest moments of the day. If he managed to finish the puzzle before nine o’clock, when the store opened, he started the day’s work with a faint sense of triumph.

14 across. Heep. Uriah, he printed neatly.

He was almost finished with the puzzle, when the phone rang. He looked at his watch. The switchboard was at work early, he noted approvingly. He picked up the phone with his left hand. Yees?’ he said, printing ubiquitous in one of the vertical columns.

‘Jordache? That you?*

‘Yes. Who’s this?’

‘Denton, Professor Denton.’

‘Oh, how are you, sir?’ Rudolph said. He puzzled over Sober in five letters, a the third letter.

‘I hate to bother you,’ Denton said. His voice sounded peculiar, as though he were whispering and was afraid of being overheard. ‘But can I see you sometime today?’

‘Of course,’ Rudolph said. He printed staid along the lowest line of the puzzle. He saw Denton quite often, when he wanted to borrow books on business management and economics at the college. ‘I’m in the store all day.’

Denton’s voice made a funny, sliding sound in the phone. ‘I’d prefer it if we could meet somewhere besides the store. Are you free for lunch?’

‘I just take forty-five minutes….’

‘That’s all right. We’ll make it someplace near you.’ Denton sounded gaspy and hurried. In class he was slow and sonorous. ‘How about Ripley’s? That’s just around the corner from you, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Rudolph said, surprised at Denton’s choice of a restaurant. Ripley’s was more of a saloon than a restaurant and was frequented by workmen with a thirst rather than anybody who was looking for a decent meal. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place you’d think an ageing professor of history and economics would seek out. ‘Is twelve-fifteen all right?’

‘Ill be there, Jordache. Thank you, thank you. It’s most kind of you. Until twelve-fifteen, then,’ Denton said, speaking very quickly. ‘I can’t tell you how I appreciate… ‘ He seemed to hang up in the middle of his last sentence.

Rudolph frowned, wondering what was bothering Denton, then put the phone down. He looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. The doors were open. His secretary came into the office and said, ‘Good morning, Mr Jordache.’

‘Good morning, Miss Giles,’ he said and tossed the Times into the wastebasket, annoyed. Because of Denton he hadn’t finished the puzzle before nine o’clock.

He made his first round of the store for the day, walking

slowly, smiling at the clerks, not stopping or seeming to notice when his eye caught something amiss. Later in the morning, back in his office, he would dictate polite memos to the appropriate department head that the neckties piled on the counter for a sale were not arranged neatly enough, that Miss Kale, in cosmetics, had on too much eye make-up, that the ventilation in the fountain and tea shop was not sufficient

He looked with special interest at the departments that had not been there until he had induced Calderwood to put them in - the little boutique, which sold junk jewellery, Italian sweaters, French scarves and fur hats and did a surprising amount of business; the fountain and tea shop (it was amazing how women never stopped eating all day), which not only showed a solid profit on its own but had become a meeting place for lunch for many of the housewives of the town who then rarely got out “of the store without buying something; the ski shop, in a corner of the old sporting goods department, presided over by an athletically built young man named Larsen who dazzled the local girls on the nearby slopes on winter Sundays and who was being criminally underpaid considering how much trade he lured into the shop merely by sliding down a hill once a week. The young man had offered to teach Rudolph how to ski, but Rudolph had declined, with a smile. He couldn’t afford to break a leg, he explained.

The record counter was his idea, too, and that brought in the young trade with their weirdly lavish allowances. Calderwood, who hated noise, and who couldn’t stand the way most young people behaved (his own three daughters, two of them now young ladies and the third a pallid teenager, behaved with cowed Victorian decorum), had fought bitterly against the record counter. ‘I don’t want to run a goddam honky-tonk,’ he had said. ‘Deprave the youth of America with those barbaric noises that pass for music these days. Leave me in peace, Jordache, leave a poor old fashioned merchant in peace.’

But Rudolph had produced statistics on how much teenagers in America spent on records every year and had promised to have soundproof booths put in and Calderwood as usual had capitulated. He often seemed to be irritated with Rudolph, but Rudolph was unfailingly polite and patient with the old man and in most things had learned how to manage him. Privately, Calderwood boasted about his pipsqueak of an assistant manager and how clever he himself had been in picking the boy out of the herd. He had also doubled his salary, with no urging from Rudolph, and had given him a bonus at

Christmas of three thousand dollars. ‘He is not only modernising the store,’ Calderwood had been heard to say, although not in Rudolph’s presence, ‘the sonofabitch is modernising me. Well, when it comes down to it, that’s what I hired a young man for.’

Once a month, Rudolph was invited to dinner at the Calderwoods’ house, grim Puritanical affairs, at which the daughters spoke only when spoken to and nothing stronger than apple juice was served. The oldest daughter, Prudence, who was also the prettiest, had asked Rudolph to escort her to several of the country club dances, and Rudolph had done so. Once away from her father, Prudence did not behave with Victorian decorum, but Rudolph carefully kept his hands off her. He was not going to do anything as banal or as dangerous as marrying the boss’s daughter.

He was not marrying anybody. That could come later. Three months ago, he had received an invitation to Julie’s wedding. She was marrying a man called Fitzgerald in New York. He had not gone to the wedding and he had felt the tears come to his eyes when he had composed the telegram of congratulations. He had despised himself for the weakness and had thrown himself more completely into his work and almost managed to forget Julie.

He was wary of all other girls. He could tell as he walked through the store that there were girls who looked at him flirtatiously, who would be delighted to go out with him: Miss Sullivan, raven haired, in the Boutique; Miss Brandywine, tall and lithe, in the Youth Shop; Miss Soames, in the Record Shop, small, blonde, and bosomy, jiggling to the music, smiling demurely as he passed; maybe six or seven others. He was tempted, of course, but he fought the temptation down, and behaved with perfect, impersonal courtesy to everybody. There were no -parties at Calderwood’s, so there was no occasion on which, with the excuse of liquor and celebration, any real approach could be made.

The night with Mary Jane in New York and the forlorn telephone call in the deserted lobby of the St Moritz Hotel had steeled him against the pull of his own desire.

Of one thing he was certain - the next time he asked a girl to marry him, he was going to be damn sure she would say yes.

As he repassed the record counter, he made a mental note to try to get some older woman in the store tactfully to suggest

to Miss Soames that perhaps she ought to wear a brassiere under her sweater.

He Was going over the drawings for the March window with Bergson, the young man who prepared the displays, when the phone rang.

‘Rudy,’ it was Calderwood, ‘can you come down to my office for a minute?’ The voice was flat, giving nothing away.

‘I’ll be right there, Mr Calderwood,’ Rudolph said. He hung up. ‘I’m afraid these’ll have to wait a little while,’ he said to Bergson. Bergson was a find. He had done the sets for the summer theatre in Whitby. Rudolph liked them and had approached him about a job as window designer for Calderwoods during the winter. Until Bergson had come on the scene the windows had been done haphazardly, with the different departments fighting for space and then doing their own displays without any reference to what was being shown in any window beside their own. Bergson had changed all that. He was a small, sad young man who couldn’t get into the scene designers’ union in New York. He was grateful for the winter’s work and put all his considerable talent into it. Used to working on the cheap for summer-theatre productions, he made use of all sorts of unlikely inexpensive materials and did the art work himself.