Rich Man, Poor Man (89 page)

The boy came to attention, as though Thomas were General MacArthur, and said, ‘This way, sir.’ They obviously taught respect for the older generation at Hilltop Military Academy.

Maybe that was why Teresa had sent the kid here. She could use all the respect going.

The boy opened the door to a big office. Two women were working at desks behind a small fence. ‘Here you are, sir,’ the boy said, and clicked his heels before turning smartly back into the hallway. Thomas went over towards the nearest desk behind the fence. The woman there looked up from the papers she was making checks on and said, ‘May I help you, sir?’ She was not in uniform and she didn’t click her heels.

‘I have a son in the school,’ Thomas said. ‘My name is Jordache. I’d like to speak to whoever is in charge here.’

The woman gave him a peculiar look, as though the name meant something not particularly pleasant to her. She stood up and said, ‘I’ll tell Colonel Bainbridge you’re here, sir. Won’t you please take a seat.’ She indicated a bench along the wall and waddled off to a door on the other side of the office. She was fat and about fifty and her stockings were crooked. They were not tempting the young soldiers with too much sex at the Hilltop Military Academy.

After a little while she’ came out of the door and opened a gate in the little fence and said, ‘Colonel Bainbridge will see you now, sir. Thank you for waiting.’ She led Thomas to the rear of the room and closed the door after him as he went into Colonel Bainbridge’s office. There were more flags there and photographs of General Patton and General Eisenhower and of Colonel Bainbridge looking fierce in a combat jacket and pistol and helmet, with binoculars hanging around his neck, taken during World War Two. Colonel Bainbridge himself, in a regular U.S. Army uniform, was standing behind his desk to greet Thomas. He was thinner than in the photograph, with almost no hair, and he was wearing silver-rimmed glasses and no weapons or binoculars and he looked like an actor in a war play.

‘Welcome to Hilltop, Mr Jordache,’ Colonel Bainbridge said. He was not standing at attention but he gave the impression that he was. ‘Won’t you sit down?’ His expression was peculiar, too, a little like the doorman’s at Rudolph’s building.

If I stay in America much longer, Thomas thought as he sat down, I guess I’ll have to change my tailor.

‘I don’t want to take up much of your time, Colonel,’ Thomas said. ‘I just came up here to see my son Wesley.’

‘Yes, of course, I understand,’ Bainbridge said. He was stumbling a little over his words. ‘There’s a games period shortly and we’ll have him sent for.’ He cleared his throat embarrassedly. ‘It’s a pleasure to have a member of the young

man’s family finally visit the school. I am correct in assuming that you are his father, am I not?’

‘That’s what I told the lady outside,’ Thomas said.

‘I hope you’ll forgive me for the question, Mr ,. . Mr Jordache,’ Bainbridge said, looking distractedly at General Eisenhower on the wall, ‘but in Wesley’s application it was clearly stated that his father was dead.’

The bitch, Thomas thought, oh, the stinking, miserable bitch. ‘Well,’ he said, Tm not dead.’

‘I can see that,’ Bainbridge said nervously. ‘Of course I can see that. It must be a clerical error of some kind, although it’s hard to understand how … ‘

‘I’ve been away a few years,’ Thomas said. ‘My wife and I are not on friendly terms.’

‘Even so.’ Bainbridge’s hand fluttered over a small model brass cannon on his desk. ‘Of course, one doesn’t meddle in intimate family matters… I’ve never had the honour of meeting Mrs Jordache. Our communication was entirely by mail. It is the same Mrs Jordache, isn’t it?’ Bainbridge said desperately. ‘In the antique business in New York?’

‘She may handle some antiques,’ Thomas said. ‘I wouldn’t know. Now, I want to see my son.’

‘They’ll be finished with drill in five minutes,’ Bainbridge said. ‘I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you. Very happy. Seeing his father may just be what he needs at this particular moment

‘Why? What’s the matter with him?’

‘He’s a difficult boy, Mr Jordache, very difficult. We have our problems with him.’

‘What problems?’

‘He’s extraordinarily … uh … pugnacious.’ Bainbridge seemed happy to have found the word. ‘He’s constantly getting into fights. With everyone. No matter what age or size. On one occasion last term he even hit one of the instructors. General science. The instructor missed a whole week of classes. He’s very … adept … shall we say, with his fists, young Wesley. Of course, we like a boy to show a normal amount of aggressiveness in a school of this nature, but Wesley … ‘ Bainbridge sighed. ‘His disagreements are not ordinary schoolboy fights. We’ve had to hospitalise boys, upperclassmen … To be absolutely frank with you, there’s a kind of, well, the only word is adult, adult viciousness about the boy that we on the staff consider very dangerous,’

Jordache blood, Thomas thought bitterly, fucking Jordache blood.

‘I’m afraid I have to tell you, Mr Jordache, that Wesley is on probation this term, with no privileges,’ Bainbridge said.

‘Well, Colonel,’ Thomas said, ‘I have some good news for you. I’m going to do something about Wesley and his problems.’

‘I’m glad to hear that you propose to take, the matter in hand, Mr Jordache,’ Bainbridge said. ‘We’ve written innumerable letters to his mother but she seems to be too busy even to reply.’

‘I propose to take him out of school this afternoon,’ Thomas said. ‘You can stop worrying.’

Bainbridge’s hand trembled on the brass cannon on his desk. ‘I wasn’t suggesting anything as drastic at that, sir,’ he said. His voice quavered a little. The battlefields of Normandy and the Rhine basin were far behind him and he was an old man, dressed up like a soldier.

‘Well, I’m suggesting it, Colonel.’

Bainbridge stood up too, behind his desk. ‘I’m afraid it’s most… most irregular,’ he said. ‘We would have to have his mother’s written permission. After all, all our dealings have been with her. She has paid the tuition for the entire school year. We would have to authenticate your relationship with the boy.’

Thomas took out his wallet and drew his passport from it and put it on the desk in front of Bainbridge. ‘Who does this look like?’ he asked.

Bainbridge opened the little green book. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘your name is Jordache. But otherwise … Really, sir, I must get in touch with the boy’s mother … ‘

‘I don’t want to waste any more of your time, Colonel,’ Thomas said. He dug into his inside pocket once more and brought out the Police Department report on Teresa Jordache, alias Theresa Laval. ‘Read this, please,’ he said, handing the paper to the Colonel.

Bainbridge glanced at the report, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. He handed the paper back to Thomas, as though he were afraid that if it lay around his office one moment more it would go permanently into the files of the school.

‘Do you still want to keep the kid?’ Thomas asked brutally.

‘Of course, this alters things,’ Bainbridge said. ‘Considerably.’

A half hour later, they drove out the gate of the Hilltop Military Academy. Wesley’s footlocker was on the back seat and

Wesley, still in uniform, was up front beside Thomas. He was big for his age, sallow skinned and pimpled, and around his sullen eyes and wide, set mouth, he resembled, as a son does his father, Axel Jordache. He had not been effusive when he was brought in to see Thomas and had seemed neither glad nor sorry when he was told he was being taken from the school and he hadn’t asked where Thomas was taking him.

Tomorrow,’ Thomas said, as the school disappeared behind them, ‘you’re going to get some decent clothes. And you’ve had your last fight.’

The boy was silent.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Don’t call me sir. I’m your father,’ Thomas said.

1966

For a few minutes at a time, while she was working, Gretchen forgot that it was her fortieth birthday. She sat on the high, steel stool in front of the moviola, pushing the levers, gazing intently into the glass screen. She ran film and sound track together, her hands in dirty white-cotton gloves, emulsion stained. The spoor of film. She made swift marks in soft red pencil, giving the strips to her assistant to splice and file. From adjacent cutting rooms on the floor in the building on Broadway, where other companies rented rooms, came scraps of voices, screeches, explosions, orchestral passages, and the shrill gabble as track was run backward at high speed. Engrossed in her own labour she hardly noticed the noise. It was part of the furniture of a cutting room, with the clacking machines, the distorted sounds, the round tins of film stacked on the shelves. This was her third picture as a head cutter. Sam Corey had taught her well as his assistant and then, after praising her highly to directors and producers, had sent her off on her own, to get her first independent job. Skilled and imaginative with no

ambition to become a director herself that would arouse jealousy, she was in great demand and could pick and choose among the jobs offered her.

The picture she was working on now was being shot in New York and she found the city’s impersonal variety exhilarating after the inbred, ambiguously jovial, big-family atmosphere of Hollywood, where everybody lived in everyone else’s pocket In her free hours she tried to continue with the political activities that had taken up a great deal of her time in Los Angeles since Colin’s death. With her assistant, Ida Cohen, she went to meetings where people made speeches about the war in Viet Nam and school bussing. She signed dozens of petitions and tried to get the important people in the movie business to sign them, too. All this helped her assuage her sense of guilt about having given up her studies in California. Also, Billy was now of a draftable age, and the thought of her one son being killed in Viet Nam was intolerable to her. Ida had no sons but was even more intense about the meetings, demonstrations, and petitions than Gretchen. They both wore Ban the Bomb buttons on their blouses and on their coats.

When she wasn’t going to meetings in the evenings, Gretchen went as often as she could to the theatre, with a renewed appetite for it, after the years of being away. Sometimes she went with Ida, a small dowdy, shrewd woman of about her own age, with whom she had developed a steady friendship, sometimes she went with Evans Kinsella, the director of the picture, with whom she was’ having an affair, sometimes with Rudolph and Jean, when they were in town, or with one or another of the actors she met when she visited the locations on which they were shooting.

The images passed before her on the glass screen and she grimaced. The way Kinsella had done the shooting made it difficult to get the tone that she felt the sequence needed. If she couldn’t somehow correct it by more ingenious cutting, or if Kinsella himself couldn’t come up with some ideas on it, she knew that eventually the whole scene would have to be reshot.

She stopped for a cigarette. The film tins she and Ida used for ash trays were always brimming with butts. Here and there stood empty coffee containers, lipstick stained.

Forty years old, she thought, inhaling.

Nobody today had as yet congratulated her. With good reason. Although she had looked for a telegram, at least, in her box at the hotel, from Billy. There had been no telegram. She hadn’t told Ida, now rewinding long strips of film on spools out

of a big canvas basket. Ida was past forty herself, why drive in another spike? And she certainly hadn’t told Evans. He was thirty-two. A forty-year-old woman did not remind a thirty-two-year-old lover of her birthday.

She thought of her dead mother, forty years ago today. First born, a girl, to a girl scarcely more than twenty herself. If Mary Pease Jordache had known that day what words were going to pass between herself and the new infant in her arms, what tears would she have shed? And Billy… ?

The door opened and Evans Kinsella came in. He was wearing a white, belted raincoat over his corduroy slacks and red polo shirt and cashmere sweater. He made no sartorial concessions to New York. His raincoat was wet. She hadn’t looked out of the window for hours and didn’t know it was raining.

‘Hi, girls,’ Evans said. He was a tall thin man with tousled black hair and a blue-black beard that made him look as if he needed a shave at all times. His enemies said he looked like a wolf. Gretchen varied between thinking he was alertly handsome and Jewishly ugly, although he was not a Jew. Kinsella was his real name. He had been in analysis for three years. He had already made six pictures, three of which had been very successful. He was a lounger. As soon as he entered a room he leaned against something or sat on a desk, or if there were a couch handy lay down and put his feet up. He was wearing suede desert boots.

He kissed Ida on the cheek, then Gretchen. He had made one picture in Paris and had learned to kiss everybody there. The picture had been disastrous. ‘A foul day,’ he said. He swung himself up on one of the high, metal cutting-benches. He made a point of seeming at home wherever he was. ‘We got in two set-ups this morning and then the rains came. Just as well. Hazen was drunk by noon.’ Richard Hazen was the male star of the picture. He was always drunk by noon. ‘How’s it going here?’ Evans asked. ‘We ready to run?’

‘Just about,’ Gretchen said. She was sorry she hadn’t realised how late it was. She would have done something about her hair and put on fresh make-up to be ready for Evans. ‘Ida,’ she said, ‘will you take the last sequence with you and tell Freddy to run it after the rushes?’

They went down the hall to the small projection room at the end of the corridor. Evans pinched her arm secretly. ‘Gretchen,’ he said, ‘beautiful tailor in the vineyards.’

They sat in the darkened projection room and watched the rushes of the day before, the same scene, from different angles,

done over and over again, that would one day, they hoped, be arranged into one harmonious flowing entity and be shown on huge screens in theatres throughout the world. As she watched, Gretchen thought again how Evans’ talent, kinky and oblique, showed in every foot of film he shot. She made mental notes of how she would make the first cut of the material. Richard Hazen had been drunk before noon yesterday, too, she saw. In two years nobody would give him a job.