Rich Man, Poor Man (53 page)

The door burst open and Teresa charged in, scowling under her pancake makeup. ‘You fellows going to talk in here all night?’ she demanded.

‘Okay, okay, honey,” Thomas said. ‘We were just coming out. Do you want to come and have something to eat with us, you and Gretchen?’ he asked Rudolph.

‘We’re going to eat Chinese,’ Teresa said. ‘I am dying to

eat Chinese.’

‘I’m afraid not tonight, Tom,’ Rudolph said. ‘Gretchen has to get home. She has to relieve the baby-sitter.’ He caught the quick flicker of Thomas’s eyes from him to his wife and then back again and he was sure Thomas was thinking, he doesn’t want to be seen in public with my wife.

But Thomas shrugged and said amiably. ‘Well, some other time. Now we know we’re all alive.’ He stopped abruptly in the doorway as though he had suddenly thought of something. ‘Say,’ he said, ‘you going to be in town tomorrow around five?’

Tommy,’ his wife said loudly, ‘are we going to eat or ain’t we going to eat?’

‘Shut up,’ Thomas said to her. ‘Rudy?’

‘Yes.’ He had to spend the whole day in town, with architects and lawyers.

“Where can I see you?’ Thomas asked.

‘I’ll be at my hotel. The Hotel Warwick on ..’

‘I know where it is,’ Thomas said. ‘I’ll be there.’

Gretchen joined them in the hallway. Her face was strained and pale, and for a moment Rudolph was sorry he had brought her along. But only for a moment She’s a big girl now, he thought, she can’t duck everything. It’s enough that she has so gracefully managed to duck her mother for ten years.

As they passed the door to another dressing room, Thomas stopped again. ‘I just have to look in here for a minute,’ he said, ‘say hello to Virgil. Come on in with me, Rudy, tell him you’re my brother, tell him what a good fight he put up, it’ll make him feel better.’

‘Well never get out of this goddamn place tonight,’ Teresa said.

Thomas ignored her and pushed open the door and motioned for Rudolph to go in first. The Negro fighter was still undressed. He was sitting, droop-shouldered, on the rubbing table, his hands hanging listlessly between his legs. A pretty young coloured girl, probably his wife or sister, was sitting quietly on a camp chair at the foot of the table and a white handler was gently applying an icebag to a huge swelling on the fighter’s forehead’. Under the swelling the eye was shut tight. In a comer of the room an older, light-coloured Negro with grey hair, who might have been the fighter’s father, was carefully packing away a silk robe and trunks and shoes. The fighter looked up slowly with, his one good eye as Thomas and Rudolph came into the room.

Thomas put his arm gently around his opponent’s shoulders. “How you feeling, Virgil?’ he asked.

‘I felt better,’ the fighter said. Now Rudolph could see that he couldn’t have been more than twenty years old.

‘Meet my brother, Rudy, Virgil,’ Thomas said. ‘He wants to tell you what a good fight you put up.’

Rudolph shook hands with the fighter, who said. ‘Glad to meet you, sir.’

‘It was an awfully good fight,’ Rudolph said, although what he would have liked to say was, Poor young man, please never put on another pair of gloves again.

‘Yeah,’ the fighter said. ‘He awful strong, your brother.’

‘I was lucky,’ Thomas said. ‘Real lucky. I got five stitches over my eye.’

Tt wasn’t a butt, Tommy,’ Virgil said. ‘I swear it wasn’t a butt.’

‘Of course not, Virgil,’ Thomas said. ‘Nobody said it was. Well, I just wanted to say hello, make sure you’re all right’ He hugged the boy’s shoulders again.

Thanks for comin’ by,’ Virgil said. ‘It’s nice of you.’

‘Good luck, kid,’ Thomas said. Then he and Rudolph shook hands gravely with all the other people in the room and left.

‘It’s about time,’ Teresa said as they appeared in the hall,

I give the marriage six months, Rudolph thought as they went towards the exit.

They rushed that boy,’ Thomas said to Rudolph as they walked side by side. ‘He had a string of easy wins and they gave him a main bout. I watched him a couple of times and I knew I could take him downstairs. Lousy managers. You notice, the bastard wasn’t even there. He didn’t even wait to see if Virgil ought to go home or to the hospital. It’s a shitty profession.’ He glanced back to see if Gretchen objected to the word, but Gretchen seemed to be moving in a private trance of her own, unseeing and unhearing.

Outside they hailed a taxi and Gretchen insisted upon sitting up front with the driver. Teresa sat in the middle on the back seat, between Thomas and Rudolph. She was overpoweringly perfumed, but when Rudolph put the window down she said, ‘For God’s sake, the wind is ruining my hair,’ and he said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and wound the window up again.

They drove back to Manhattan in silence, with Teresa holding Thomas’s hand and occasionally bringing it up to her lips and kissing it, marking out her possessions.

When they came off the bridge, Rudolph said, ‘Well get out here, Tom.’

‘You’re sure you don’t want to come with us?’ Thomas said.

‘It’s the best Chinese food in town,’ Teresa said. The ride had been neutral, she no longer felt in danger of being attacked, she could afford to be hospitable, perhaps in the future there was an advantage there for her. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’

‘I have to get home,’ Gretchen-said. Her voice was quivering, on the point of hysteria. ‘I just must get home.’

If it hadn’t been for Gretchen, Rudolph would have-stayed with Thomas. After the noise of the evening, the public triumph, and battering, it seemed sad and lonely to leave Thomas merely to go off to supper with his twittering wife, anonymous in the night, unsaluted, uncheered. He would have to make it up to Thomas another time.

The driver stopped the car and Gretchen and Rudolph got out. ‘Goodbye for now, in-laws,’ Teresa said, and laughed.

‘Five o’clock tomorrow, Rudy,’ Thomas said and Rudolph nodded.

‘Good night,’ Gretchen whispered. Take care of yourself, please.’

The taxi moved off and Gretchen gripped Rudolph’s arm, as though to steady herself. Rudolph stopped a cruising cab and

gave the driver Gretchen’s address. Once in the darkness of the cab, Gretchen broke down. She threw herself into Rudolph’s arms and wept uncontrollably, her body racked by great sobs. The tears came to Rudolph’s eyes, too, and he held his sister tightly, stroking her hair. In the back of the dark cab, with the lights of the city streaking past the windows, erratically illuminating, in bursts of coloured neon, the contorted, lovely tear-stained face, he felt closer to Gretchen, bound in stricter love, than ever before.

The tears finally stopped. Gretchen sat up, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. Tm sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m such a hateful snob. That poor boy, that poor, poor boy … ‘

The baby-sitter was asleep on the couch in the livingroom when they came into the apartment. Willie hadn’t come in yet. There had been no calls, the baby-sitter said. Billy had read himself to sleep quietly, and she had gone up and turned off his light without awakening him. She was a girl of about seventeen, a highschool student, bobby-soxed, pretty, in a snub-nosed, shy way, and embarrassed at being caught asleep. Gretchen poured two Scotches and soda. The baby-sitter had straightened out the room and the newspapers, which had been strewn around, were now in a neat pile on the window sill and the cushions were pumped out.

There was only one lamp lit and they sat in shadow, Gretchen with her feet curled up under her on the couch, Rudolph in a large easy chair. They drank slowly, exhausted, blessing the silence. They finished their drinks and silently Rudolph rose from his chair and refilled the glasses, sat down again.

An ambulance siren wailed in the distance, somebody else’s accident,

‘He enjoyed it,’ Gretchen said finally. ‘When that boy was practically helpless and he hit him so many times. I always thought - when I thought anything about it - that it was just a man earning a living - in a peculiar way - but just that. It wasn’t like that at all tonight, was it?’

‘It’s a curious profession,’ Rudolph said. ‘It’s hard to know what really must be going on in a man’s head up there.’

‘Weren’t you ashamed?’

‘Put it this way,’ Rudolph said. ‘I wasn’t happy. There must be at least ten thousand boxers in the United States. They have to come from somebody’s family.’

‘I don’t think like you,’ Gretchen said coldly.

‘No, you don’t’

‘Those sleazy purple trunks,’ she said, as though by finding an object on which she could fix her revulsion, she could exorcise the complex horror of the entire night. She shook her head against memory. ‘Somehow I feel it’s our fault, yours, mine, our parents’, that Tom was up there in that vile place.’

Rudolph sipped at his drink in silence. I wouldn’t know, Tom had said in the dressing room, being on the outside the way I was.. Excluded, he had reacted as a boy in the most simple, brutal way, with his fists. Older, he had merely continued. They all had their father’s blood in them, and Axel Jordache had killed two men. As far as Rudolph knew, Tom at least hadn’t killed anybody. Perhaps the strain was ameliorating.

‘Ah, what a mess,’ Gretchen said. ‘All of us. Yes, you, too. Do you enjoy anything, Rudy?’

‘I don’t think of things in those terms,’ he said,

The commercial monk,’ Gretchen said harshly. ‘Except that instead of poverty, you’ve taken the vow of wealth. Which is better in the long run?’

‘Don’t talk like a fool, Gretchen.’ Now he was sorry he had come upstairs with her.

‘And the two others,’ she continued. ‘Chastity and obedience. Chaste for our Virgin Mother’s sake - is that it? Obedience to Duncan Calderwood, the Pope of Whitby’s Chamber of Commerce?’

‘That’s all going to change now,’ Rudolph said, but he was unwilling to defend himself further.

‘You’re going to go over the wall, Father Rudolph? You’re going to marry, you’re going to wallow in the fleshpots, you’re going to tell Duncan Calderwood to go fuck himself?’

Rudolph stood up and went over and poured some more soda into’ his glass, biting back his anger. ‘It’s silly, Gretchen,’ he said, as calmly as possible, ‘to take tonight out on me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but her voice was still hard. ‘Ah -I’m the worst of the lot. I live with a man I despise, I do work that’s mean spirited and piddling and useless, I’m New York’s easiest lay… Do I shock you, brother?’ she said mockingly.

‘I think you’re giving yourself a title you haven’t earned,’ Rudolph said.

‘Joke,’ Gretchen said. ‘Do you want a list? Beginning with Johnny Heath? Do you think he’s been so good to you because of your shining bright eyes?’

‘What does Willie think about all this?’ Rudolph asked,

ignoring the jibe. No matter how it had started and for whatever reasons, Johnny Heath was now his friend.

‘Willie doesn’t think about anything but infesting bars and occasionally screwing some drunken broad and getting by in this world with as little work and as little honour as possible. If he somehow was given the original stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, his first thought would be which sponsors he could sell it to at the highest price to advertise vacation tours to Mount Sinai.’

Rudolph laughed and despite herself Gretchen had to laugh, too. There’s nothing like a failing marriage,’ she said, ‘to bring out flights of rhetoric’

Rudolph’s laughter was part relief. Gretchen had switched targets and he no longer was under attack. ‘Does Willie know what your opinion is of him?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ Gretchen said. ‘He agrees with it. That’s the worst thing about him. He says there’s not a man or a woman or a thing in this world that he admires, especially himself. He’d be deeply dissatisfied with himself, he told me, if he was anything but a failure. Beware romantic men.’ ‘Why do you live with him?’ Rudolph asked bluntly. ‘Do .you remember the note I sent you saying I was in a mess and I wanted to see you?’

‘Yes,’ Rudolph remembered it very well, remembered that whole day very well. When he had come down to New York the next week and asked Gretchen what the trouble was she had said, ‘Nothing, it’s blown over.’

‘I’d more or less decided I wanted to ask Willie for a divorce,’ Gretchen said, ‘and I wanted your advice.’ ‘What changed your mind?’

Gretchen shrugged. ‘Billy got sick. Nothing. For a day the doctor thought it was appendicitis, but it wasn’t. But Willie and I stayed up with him all night and as I looked at him lying all white faced and in pain on the bed and Willie hovering over him, so obviously loving him, I couldn’t bear the thought of making him another one of those poor forlorn statistics -child of a broken marriage, permanently homesick, preparing for the psychiatrist’s couch. Well … ‘ her voice hardened, ‘that charming fit of maternal sentimentality has passed on. If our parents had divorced when I was nine, I’d be a better woman than I am today.’

‘You mean you want a divorce now?’ ‘If I get custody of Billy,’ she said. ‘And that’s one thing he won’t give me.’

Rudolph hesitated, took a long drink of his whiskey. ‘Do you want me to see what I can do with him?’ He wouldn’t have offered to interfere if it hadn’t been for the tears in the taxicab.

‘If it’ll do any good,’ Gretchen said. ‘I want to sleep with one man not ten, I want to be honest, do something useful, finally. God, I should like The Three Sisters. Divorce is my Moscow. Give me one more drink, please.’ She held out her glass.

Rudolph went over to the bar and filled both their glasses. ‘You’re running low on Scotch,’ he said.

‘I wish that were true,’ she said.

There was the sound of an ambulance siren again, wailing, diminishing, a warning as it approached, a lament as it departed. The Doppler phenomenon. Was it the same accident, completing the round trip? Or one of an endless series, limitless blood on the streets of the city?

Rudolph handed her her drink and she sat curled up on the couch, staring at it.

A clock chimed somewhere. One o’clock.

‘Well,’ Gretchen said, ‘I guess they’re finished eating Chinese by now, Tommy and that lady. Is it possible that he has the only happy marriage in the history of the Jordaches? Do they love, honour and Cherish each other as they eat Chinese and warm the bosomy marriage bed?’