Rich Man, Poor Man (64 page)

The phone rang and Rudolph picked it up, but it wasn’t Gretchen. It was Calderwood’s voice, flat and twangy and old. Saturdays and Sundays didn’t mean much to Calderwood, except for the two hours on Sunday morning he spent in church. ‘Rudy,’ Calderwood said, as usual without any polite preliminaries, ‘you going to be up here this evening?’

‘I hadn’t planned to, Mr Calderwood, I have some things to do here over the weekend and there’s a meeting scheduled downtown for Monday and …’

‘I’d like to see you as soon as can be, Rudy.’ Calderwood sounded testy. As he bad grown older he had become impatient and bad tempered. He seemed to resent his increasing wealth and the men who had made it possible, as he resented the necessity of depending more and more upon dealing with financial and legal people in New York for important decisions.

‘Ill be in the office on Tuesday morning, Mr Calderwood,’ Rudolph said. ‘Can’t it wait until then?’

‘No, it can’t wait until then. And I don’t want to see you in

the office. I want you to come to the house.’ The voice on the telephone was grating and tense. ‘I’ll wait until tomorrow night after supper, Rudy.’

‘Of course, Mr Calderwood,’ Rudy said. The phone clicked, as Calderwood hung up, without saying goodbye.

Rudolph frowned at the phone as he put it down. He had tickets for the Giant game at the Stadium for himself and Jean Sunday afternoon and Calderwood’s summons meant he’d have to miss it. Jean had had a boy friend on the team when she went to Michigan and she knew a surprising amount about football so it was always fun to go to a game with her. Why didn’t the old man just lie down and die?

The phone rang again and this time it was Gretchen. Ever since Burke’s death, something had gone out of her voice, a sharpness, an eagerness, a quick music that had been special to her ever since she was a young girl. She sounded pleased to hear Rudolph, but dully pleased, like an invalid responding to a visit in her hospital bed. She said she was all right, that she was being kept busy going through Colin’s papers and sorting them and answering letters of condolence that still came drifting in and conferring with lawyers about the estate. She thanked him for the cheque he had mailed her the week before, saying that when the estate was finally settle she would pay back all the money he bad sent her.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Rudolph said. ‘Please. You don’t have to pay back anything.’

She ignored that. ‘I’m glad you called,’ she said. ‘I was going to call you myself and ask for another favour.’

‘What it is?’ he asked, then said, ‘hold on a second,’ because the bell was ringing on the intercom from downstairs. He hurried over to the box and pushed the button.

There’s a Miss Prescott in the lobby, Mr Jordache.’ It was the doorman, protecting him.

‘Send her up, please,’ Rudolph said, and went back to the phone. ‘I’m sorry, Gretchen,’ said, ‘what were you saying?’

‘I got a letter from Billy from school yesterday,’ she said, ‘and I don’t like the way it sounds. There’s nothing that you can grasp in it, but that’s the way he is, he never really tells you what’s bothering him, but somehow I have the feeling he’s in despair. Do you think you could find the time to go and visit him and see what’s wrong?’

Rudolph hesitated. He doubted that the boy liked him enough to confide in him and he was afraid he might do more

harm than good by going to the school. ‘Of course I’ll, go,’ he said, ‘if you want. But don’t you think it might be better if his father went?’

‘No,’ Gretchen said. Tie’s a bungler. If there’s a wrong word to be said, hell say it.’

The front door was ringing now. ‘Hold on again, Gretchen,’ Rudolph said. There’s somebody at the door.’ He hurried over to the door and threw it open ‘I’m on the phone,’ he said to Jean and trotted back into the room. ‘Back again, Gretchen,’ he said, using his sister’s name to show Jean he wasn’t talking to another lady. ‘I tell you what I’ll do - I’ll drive up to the school tomorrow morning and take him to lunch and see what’s up.’

‘I hate to bother you,’ Gretchen said. ‘But the letter was so -so dark.’

‘It’s probably nothing. He came in second in a race or he flunked an algebra exam or something like that. You know how kids are.’

‘Not Billy. I tell you, he’s in despair.’ She sounded unlike herself, near tears.

‘I’ll call you tomorrow night, after I see him,’ Rudolph said. ‘Will you be home?’ ‘Ill be home,’ she said.

He put down the phone slowly, thinking of his sister alone, waiting for a telephone call, in the isolated house on the mountain crest, overlooking the city and (lie sea, going over her dead husband’s papers. He shook his head. He would worry about her tomorrow. He smiled across the room at Jean, sitting neatly on a straight-backed wooden chair, wearing red-woollen stockings and moccasins, her hair brushed and bright and pulled together low on the nape of her neck in a black-velvet bow, and falling down her back freely below the bow. Her face, as always, looked scrubbed and schoolgirlish. The slender, beloved body was lost in a floppy camel’s-hair polo coat. She was twenty-four years old, but at moments like this she seemed no more than sixteen. She had been out on a job and she had her her camera equipment with her, which she had dumped carelessly on the floor next to the front door.

You look as though I ought to offer you a glass of milk and a cookie,’ he said.

“You can offer me a drink,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on the streets since seven this morning. Not too much water.’

He went over and kissed her forehead. She smiled, rewarding him. Young girls, he thought, as he went into the

kitchen and got a pitcher of water.

While she drank the bourbon, she checked the list of art galleries in Sunday’s Times. When he was free on Saturdays they usually made the rounds of galleries. She worked as a freelance photographer and many of her assignments were for art magazines and catalogue publishers,

‘Put on comfortable shoes,’ she said. ‘We’re in for a long afternoon.’ She had a surprisingly low voice, with husky overtones, for such a small girl.

‘Where you walk,’ he said, ‘I shall follow.’

They were just going out the door when the phone rang again. ‘Let it ring,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

She stopped in the doorway. ‘Do you mean to say you can hear a telephone ring and not answer it?’

‘I certainly can.’

‘I never could. It might be something absolutely wonderful.’

‘Nothing wonderful has ever happened to me over the phone. Let’s get out of here.’

‘Answer it. It’ll bother you all day if you don’t.’

‘No it won’t.’

‘It’ll bother me, I’ll answer it.’ She started back into the room.

‘All right, all right.’ He pushed past her and picked up the phone.

It was his mother, calling from Whitby. From the tone in which she said, ‘Rudolph,’ he knew the conversation was not going to be wonderful.

‘Rudolph,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to interfere with your holiday - ‘ It was his mother’s fixed conviction that he left Whitby for New York only for unseemly, secret pleasures. ‘But the heating’s gone off and I’m freezing in this draughty old place - ‘ Rudolph had bought a fine old low-ceilinged eighteenth-century farmhouse on the outskirts of town three years before, but his mother referred to it at all times as this crumbling dark hole or this draughty old place.

‘Can’t Martha do anything about it?’ Rudolph asked. Martha was the live-in maid who kept the house, cooked, and took care of his mother, a job for which Rudolph felt she was grossly underpaid.

‘Martha!’ his mother snorted. ‘I’m tempted to fire her on the spot.’

‘Mom

‘When I told her to go down to look at the furnace, she flatly refused’ His mother’s voice rose a half octave. ‘She’s afraid of cellars. She said for me to put on a sweater. If you

weren’t so lenient with her, she wouldn’t be so free with her advice about putting on sweaters, I guarantee. She’s so fat, swilling down our food, she wouldn’t feel cold at the North Pole. When you get back home, if you ever do deign to come back home, I implore you to have a word with that woman.’

‘I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon and I’ll talk to her,’ Rudolph said. He was aware of Jean smiling maliciously at him. Her parents lived somewhere in the Midwest and she hadn’t seen them for two years. ‘In the meanwhile, Mom, call the office. Get Brad Knight. He’s on today. Tell him I told you to ask him to send one of our engineers.’ ‘Hell think I’m an old crank.’ ‘He won’t think anything. Do as I say, please.’ ‘You have no idea how cold it is up here. The wind just howls under the windows. I don’t know why we can’t five in a decent new house like everybody else.’

This was an old song and Rudolph ignored it. When his mother had finally realised that Rudolph was making a good deal of money she had suddenly developed a gluttonous taste for luxury. Her charge account at the store made Rudolph wince every month when the bills came in.

Tell Martha to build a fire in the livingroom,’ Rudolph said, ‘and close the door and you’ll be warm in no time.’

Tell Martha to build a fire,’ his mother said. ‘If she’ll condescend. Will you be home in time for dinner tomorrow night?’ ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘I have to see Mr Calderwood.’ It wasn’t quite a He. He wasn’t going to dine with Calderwood, but he was going to see him. In any case, he didn’t want to have dinner with his mother.

‘Calderwood, Calderwood,’ his mother said. ‘Sometimes I think I’ll scream if I ever hear that name again.’ ‘I have to go now, Mom. Somebody’s waiting for me.’ He heard his mother begin to cry as he hung up. ‘Why can’t old ladies just He down and die?’ he said to Jean. The Eskimos do it better. They expose them. Come on, let’s get out of here before anybody else calls.’

As they went out the door he was glad to see that Jean was leaving her camera equipment in the flat. That meant she’d have to come back with him that afternoon to pick it up. She was unpredictable in that department. Sometimes she’d come in with him when they’d been out together as though it were inconceivable that she could do anything else. Other times, without any explanation, she’d insist on getting into a taxi and going downtown alone to the apartment she shared with another girl. Then, on several occasions, she had merely appeared at his door, on the off chance that he’d be home.

She went her own way, Jean, and pleased her own appetites. He had never even seen the place she lived in. She always met him at his apartment or in a bar uptown. She didn’t explain this, either. Young as she was, she seemed self-reliant, confident. Her work, as Rudolph had seen when she came up to Whitby with the proofs after the opening of the Port Philip centre, was highly professional, surprisingly bold for a girl who had seemed so young and shy when he had first met her. She wasn’t shy in bed, either, and however she behaved and for whatever reasons, she was never coy. She never complained that because of his work in Whitby there were long periods when he couldn’t see her, two weeks at a time. It was Rudolph who complained of their separations, and he found himself plotting all sorts of stratagems, unnecessary appointments in the city, merely for an evening with Jean.

She was not one of those girls who lavished a full autobiography on her lover. He learned little about her. She came from the Midwest. She was on bad terms with her family. She had an older brother who was in the family firm, something to do with drugs. She had finished college at the age of twenty. She had majored in sociology. She had been interested in photography ever since she was a child. To get anywhere, you had to start in New York, so she had come to New York. She liked the work of Carrier-Bresson, Penn, Capa, Duncan, Klein. There was room among those names for a woman’s name. Perhaps, eventually, it would be hers.

She went out with other men. Not described. In the summer she sailed. Names of craft unmentioned. She had been to Europe. A Yugoslavian island to which she would like to return. She was surprised that he had never been out of the United States.

She dressed youthfully, with a fresh eye for colours that at first glance seemed to clash, but then, after a moment, subtly complemented each other. Her clothes, Rudolph could see, were not expensive and after the first three times he had gone out with her, he was fairly certain he was familiar with her entire wardrobe.

She did the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle raster than he did. Her handwriting was without frills, like a man’s. She liked new painters whose work Rudolph couldn’t appreciate or understand. ‘Keep looking,’ she said, ‘and then one day, a door will open, you will suddenly cross the barrier.’

She never went to church. She never cried at sad movies. She never introduced him to any of her ‘friends. She was unimpressed by Johnny Heath. She didn’t mind getting her hair wet in the rain. She never complained about the weather or traffic jams. She never said, ‘I love you.’

‘I love you,’ he said. They were lying close together in bed, his hand on her breast, the covers pulled up under their chins. It was seven o’clock in the evening and the room was dark. They had strolled through twenty galleries. He had crossed no barriers. They had had lunch in a small Italian restaurant, where the proprietors had no objection to girls with red-wool stockings. He had told her at lunch that he couldn’t take her to the game tomorrow and told her why. She wasn’t disturbed. He had given her the tickets. She said she would take a man she knew who had once played tackle for Columbia. She ate heartily.

They had been cold when they came in from their wanderings around the city, because the December afternoon had turned bitter early, and he had made them both hot tea spiked with rum.

‘It would be nice if we had a fire,’ she said, curled up on the sofa, her moccasins kicked off on the floor.

“The next apartment I rent,’ he said.

When they kissed they both tasted of rum, perfumed with lemon.

They made love unhurriedly, completely.

This is what a Saturday afternoon in New York in. the winter should be like,’ she said, when they had finished and were lying together quietly. ‘Art, spaghetti, rum, and lust.’

He laughed, pressed her closer. He regretted his years of abstinence. Then he wasn’t so sure. Perhaps it was because of the abstinence that he was ready for her, free for her.