Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

“I heard about it,” Rudolph said.

“Curious that they should have picked my place,” Boylan said. “I’m not Catholic and I’m certainly not black or Jewish. The Ku Klux Klan up in these parts must be singularly misinformed. The insurance people keep asking me if I have any particular enemies. Perhaps you’ve heard something in town?”

“No,” Rudolph said carefully.

“I’m sure I have. Enemies, I mean. But they don’t advertise,” Boylan said. “Too bad the cross wasn’t nearer the house. It would be a blessing if this mausoleum burnt down. You’re not drinking your drink.”

“I’m a slow drinker,” Rudolph said.

“My grandfather built for eternity,” Boylan said, “and I’m living through it.” He laughed. “Forgive me if I talk too much. There’re so few opportunities of talking to anybody who has the faintest notion of what you’re saying around here.”

“Why do you live here, then?” Rudolph asked, youthfully logical.

“I am doomed,” said Boylan, with mock melodrama. “I am tied to the rock and the bird is eating my liver. Do you know that, too?”

“Prometheus.”

“Imagine. Is that school, too?”

“Yes.” I know a lot of things, mister, Rudolph wanted to say.

“Beware families,” Boylan said. He had finished his drink fast and he left the mantelpiece to pour another for himself. “You pay for their hopes. Are you family-ridden, Rudolph? Are there ancestors you must not disappoint?”

“I have no ancestors,” Rudolph said.

“A true American,” said Boylan. “Ah, the waders.”

Perkins was in the room, carrying a hip-length pair of rubber boots and a towel, and a pair of light-blue wool socks. “Just put everything down, please, Perkins,” Boylan said.

“Very good, sir.” Perkins put the waders within Rudolph’s reach and draped the towel over the edge of the armchair. He put the socks on the end table next to the chair.

Rudolph stripped off his socks. Perkins took them from him, although Rudolph had intended to put them in his pocket. He had no idea what Perkins could do with a pair of soggy patched cotton socks in that house. He dried his feet with the towel. The towel smelled of lavender. Then he drew on the socks. They were of soft wool. He stood up and pulled on the waders. There was a triangular tear at the knee of one of them. Rudolph didn’t think it was polite to mention it. “They fit fine,” he said. Fifty dollars. At least fifty dollars, he thought. He felt like D’Artagnan in them.

“I think I bought them before the war,” Boylan said. “When my wife left me, I thought I’d take up fishing.”

Rudolph looked over quickly to see if Boylan was joking, but there was no glint of humor in the man’s eyes. “I tried a dog for company. A huge Irish wolfhound. Brutus. A lovely animal. I had him for five years. We were inordinately attached to each other. Then someone poisoned him. My surrogate.” Boylan laughed briefly. “Do you know what surrogate means, Rudolph?”

The school-teacherly questions were annoying. “Yes,” he said.

“Of course,” said Boylan. He didn’t ask Rudolph to define it. “Yes, I must have enemies. Or perhaps he was just chasing somebody’s chickens.”

Rudolph took off the boots and held them uncertainly. “Just leave them anywhere,” Boylan said. “Perkins will put them in the car when I take you home. Oh, dear.” He had seen the rip in the boot. “I’m afraid they’re torn.”

“It’s nothing. I’ll have it vulcanized,” Rudolph said.

“No. I’ll have Perkins attend to it. He loves mending things.” Boylan made it sound as though Rudolph would be depriving Perkins of one of his dearest pleasures if he insisted upon mending the boot himself. Boylan was back at the bar table. The drink wasn’t strong enough for him and he added whiskey to his glass. “Would you like to see the house, Rudolph?” He kept using the name.

“Yes,” Rudolph said. He was curious to find out what an armory was. The only armory he had ever seen was the one in Brooklyn where he had gone for a track meet.

“Good,” Boylan said. “It may help you when you become an ancestor yourself. You will have an idea of what to inflict upon your descendants. Take your drink along with you.”

In the hall there was a large bronze statue of a tigress clawing the back of a water buffalo. “Art,” Boylan said. “If I had been a patriot I would have had it melted down for cannon.” He opened two enormous doors, carved with cupids and garlands. “The ballroom,” he said. He pushed at a switch on the wall.

The room was almost as big as the high school gymnasium. A huge crystal chandelier, draped in sheets, hung from the two-story-high ceiling. Only a few of the bulbs in the chandelier were working and the light through the muffling sheets was dusty and feeble. There were dozens of sheet-draped chairs around the painted wooden walls. “My father said his mother once had seven hundred people here. The orchestra played waltzes. Twenty-five pieces. Quite a club date, eh, Rudolph? You still play at the Jack and Jill?”

“No,” Rudolph said, “our three weeks are finished.”

“Charming girl, that little … what’s her name?”

“Julie.”

“Oh, yes, Julie. She doesn’t like me, does she?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Tell her I think she’s charming, will you? For what it’s worth.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Seven hundred people,” Boylan said. He put his arms up as though he were holding a partner and made a surprising little swooping waltz step. The whiskey sloshed over from his glass onto his hand. “I was in great demand at debutantes’ parties.” He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at his hand. “Perhaps I’ll give a ball myself. On the eve of Waterloo. You know about that, too?”

“Yes,” Rudolph said. “Wellington’s officers. I saw Becky Sharp.” He had read Byron, too, but he refused to show off for Boylan.

“Have you read The Charterhouse of Parma?”

“No.”

“Try it, when you’re a little older,” Boylan said, with a last look around the dim ballroom. “Poor Stendhal, rotting in Civitavecchia, then dying unsung, with his mortgage on posterity.”

All right, Rudolph thought, so you’ve read a book. But he was flattered at the same time. It was a literary conversation.

“Port Philip is my Civitavecchia,” Boylan said. They were in the hall again and Boylan switched off the chandelier. He peered into the sheeted darkness. “The haunt of owls,” he said. He left the doors open and walked toward the rear of the house. “That’s the library,” he said. He opened a door briefly. It was an enormous room, lined with books. There was a smell of leather and dust; Boylan closed the door. “Bound sets. All of Voltaire. That sort of thing. Kipling.”

He opened another door. “The armory,” Boylan said, switching on the lights. “Everybody else would call it a gun room, but my grandfather was a large man.”

The room was in polished mahogany, with racks of shotguns and hunting rifles locked in behind glass. Trophies lined the walls, antlers, stuffed pheasants with long brilliant tails. The guns shone with oil. Everything was meticulously dusted. Mahogany cabinets with polished brass knobs made it look like a cabin on a ship.

“Do you shoot, Rudolph?” Boylan asked, sitting astride a leather chair, shaped like a saddle.

“No.” Rudolph’s hands itched to touch those beautiful guns.

“I’ll teach you, if you want,” Boylan said. “There’s an old skeet trap somewhere on the property. There’s nothing much left here, a rabbit or so, and once in a while a deer. During the season I hear the guns popping around the house. Poachers, but there’s nothing much to be done about it.” He gazed around the room. “Convenient for suicide,” he said. “Yes, this was game country. Quail, partridge, doves, deer. I haven’t fired a gun in years. Perhaps teaching you will reawaken my interest. A virile sport. Man, the hunter.” His tone showed what he thought of this description of himself. “When you’re making your way in the world it may help you one day to be known as a good gun. A boy I knew in college married into one of the biggest fortunes in North Carolina because of his keenness of eye and steadiness of hand. Cotton mills. The money, I mean. Reeves, his name was. A poor boy, but he had beautiful manners, and that helped. Would you like to be rich, Rudolph?”

“Yes.”

“What do you plan to do after college?”

“I don’t know,” Rudolph said. “It depends upon what comes along.”

“Let me suggest law,” Boylan said. “This is a lawyer’s country. And it’s becoming more so each year. Didn’t your sister tell me that you were the captain of the debating team at school?”

“I’m on the debating team.” The mention of his sister made him wary.

“Perhaps you and I will drive down to New York some afternoon and visit her,” Boylan said.

As they left the gun room, Boylan said, “I’ll have Perkins set up the skeet trap this week, and order some pigeons. I’ll give you a ring when it’s ready.”

“We don’t have a phone.”

“Oh, yes,” Boylan said. “I believe I once tried looking it up in the directory. I’ll drop you a line. I think I remember the address.” He looked vaguely up the marble staircase. “Nothing much up there to interest you,” he said. “Bedrooms. Mostly closed off. My mother’s upstairs sitting room. Nobody sits there anymore. If you’ll excuse me a moment, I’ll go up and change for dinner. Make yourself at home. Give yourself another drink.” He looked frail going up the sweeping staircase to the other floors, which would be of no interest to his young guest, except, of course, if his young guest were interested in seeing the bed upon which his sister had lost her virginity.

III

Rudolph went back into the living room and watched Perkins laying a table for dinner in front of the fire. Priestly hands on chalices and goblets. Westminster Abbey. Graves of the poets. A bottle of wine poked out of a silver ice bucket. A bottle of red wine, uncorked, was on a sideboard.

“I have made a telephone call, sir,” Perkins said. “The boots will be ready by Wednesday next.”

“Thank you, Mr. Perkins,” Rudolph said.

“Happy to be of service, sir.”

Two sirs in twenty seconds. Perkins returned to his sacraments.

Rudolph would have liked to pee, but he couldn’t mention anything like that to a man of Perkins’ stature. Perkins whispered out of the room, a Rolls-Royce of a man. Rudolph went to the window and parted the curtains a little and looked out. A fog swirled up from the valley in the darkness. He thought of his brother, Tom, at the window, peering in at a naked man with two glasses in his hands.

Rudolph sipped at his drink. Scotch got a grip on you. Maybe one day he would come back and buy this place, Perkins and all. This was America.

Boylan came back into the room. He had merely changed from the suede jacket to a corduroy one. He still was wearing the checked wool shirt and paisley scarf. “I didn’t take the time for a bath,” Boylan said. “I hope you don’t mind.” He went over to the bar. He had put some sort of cologne on himself. It gave a tang to the air around him.

“The dining room is chilling,” Boylan said, glancing at the table in front of the fire. He poured himself a fresh drink. “President Taft once ate there. A dinner for sixty notables.” Boylan walked over to the piano and sat down on the bench, putting his glass beside him. He played some random chords. “Do you play the violin, by any chance, Rudolph?”

“No.”

“Any other instrument besides the trumpet?”

“Not really. I can fake a tune on the piano.”

“Pity. We could have tried some duets. I don’t think I know of any duets for piano and trumpet.” Boylan began to play. Rudolph had to admit he played well. “Sometimes one gets tired of canned music,” he said. “Do you recognize this, Rudolph?” He continued playing.

“No.”

“Chopin, Nocturne in D-flat. Do you know how Schumann described Chopin’s music?”

“No.” Rudolph wished Boylan would just play and stop talking. He enjoyed the music.

“A cannon smothered in flowers,” Boylan said. “Something like that. I think it was Schumann. If you have to describe music, I suppose that’s as good a way as any.”

Perkins came in and said, “Dinner is served, sir.”

Boylan stopped playing and stood up. “Rudolph, do you went to pee or wash your hands or something?”

Finally. “Thank you, yes.”

“Perkins,” Boylan said, “show Mr. Jordache where it is.”

“This way, sir,” Perkins said.

As Perkins led him out of the room, Boylan sat down at the piano again and started playing from where he left off.

The bathroom near the front entrance was a large room with a stained-glass window, which gave the place a religious air. The toilet was like a throne. The faucets on the basin looked like gold. The strains of Chopin drifted in as Rudolph peed. He was sorry he had agreed to stay for dinner. He had the feeling that Boylan was trapping him. He was a complicated man, with his piano-playing, his waders and whiskey, his poetry and guns and his burning cross and poisoned dog. Rudolph didn’t feel equipped to handle him. He could understand now why Gretchen had felt she had to get away from him.

When he went out into the hall again, he had to fight down the impulse to sneak out through the front door. If he could have gotten his boots without anyone’s seeing him, he might have done it. But he couldn’t see himself walking down to the bus stop and getting on it in stockinged feet. Boylan’s socks.

He went back into the living room, enjoying Chopin. Boylan stopped playing and stood up and touched Rudolph’s elbow formally as he led him to the table, where Perkins was pouring the white wine. The trout lay in a deep copper dish, in a kind of broth. Rudolph was disappointed. He liked trout fried.

They sat down facing each other. There were three glasses in front of each place, and a lot of cutlery. Perkins transferred the trout to a silver platter, with small boiled potatoes on it. Perkins stood over Rudolph and Rudolph served himself cautiously, uneasy with all the implements and determined to seem at ease.

“Truit au bleu,” Boylan said. Rudolph was pleased to note that he had a bad accent, or at least different from Miss Lenaut’s. “Cook does it quite well.”

“Blue trout,” Rudolph said. “That’s the way they cook it in France.” He couldn’t help showing off on this one subject, after Boylan’s phoney accent.

“How do you know?” Boylan looked at him questioningly. “Have you ever been in France?”

“No. In school. We get a little French newspaper for students every week and there was an article about cooking.”

Boylan helped himself generously. He had a good appetite. “Tu parles français?”

Rudolph made a note of the tu. In an old French grammar he had once looked through, the student was instructed that the second-person singular was to be used for servants, children, non-commissioned soldiers, and social inferiors.

“Un petit peu.”

“Moi, j’étais en France quand j’étais jeune,” Boylan said, the accept rasping. “Avec mes parents. J’ai veçu mon premier amour à Paris. Quand c’était? Mille neuf cent vingt-huit, vingt-neuf. Comment s’appelait-elle? Anne? Annette? Elle était délicieuse.”

She might have been delicious, Boylan’s first love, Rudolph thought, tasting the profound joys of snobbery, but she sure didn’t work on his accent.

“Tu as l’envie d’y aller? En France?” Boylan asked, testing him. He had said he could speak a little French and Boylan wasn’t going to let him get away with it unchallenged.

“J’irai, je suis sûr,” Rudolph said, remembering just how Miss Lenaut would have said it. He was a good mimic. “Peut-être après l’Université. Quad le pays sera rétabli.”

“Good God,” Boylan said, “you speak like a Frenchman.”

“I had a good teacher.” Last bouquet for poor Miss Lenaut, French cunt.

“Maybe you ought to try for the Foreign Service,” Boylan said. “We could use some bright young men. But be careful to marry a rich wife first. The pay is dreadful.” He sipped at the wine. “I thought I wanted to live there. In Paris. My family thought differently. Is my accent rusty?”

“Awful,” Rudolph said.

Boylan laughed. “The honesty of youth.” He grew more serious. “Or maybe it’s a family characteristic. Your sister matches you.”

They ate in silence for awhile, Rudolph carefully watching how Boylan used his knife and fork. A good gun, with beautiful manners.

Perkins took away the fish dishes and served some chops and baked potatoes and green peas. Rudolph wished he could send his mother up for some lessons in the kitchen here. Perkins presided over the red wine, rather than poured it. Rudolph wondered what Perkins knew about Gretchen. Everything, probably. Who made the bed in the room upstairs?

“Has she found a job yet?” Boylan asked, as though there had been no interruption in the conversation. “She told me she intended to be an actress.”

“I don’t know,” Rudolph said, keeping all information to himself. “I haven’t heard from her recently.”

“Do you think she’ll be successful?” Boylan asked. “Have you ever seen her act?”

“Once. Only in a school play.” Shakespeare battered and reeling, in homemade costumes. The seven ages of man. The boy who played Jacques nervously pushing at his beard, to make sure it was still pasted on. Gretchen looking strange and beautiful and not at all like a young man in her tights, but saying the words clearly.

“Does she have talent?” Boylan asked.

“I think so. She has something. Whenever she came onto the stage everybody stopped coughing.”

Boylan laughed. Rudolph realized that he had sounded like a kid. “What I mean …” He tried to regain lost ground. “Is, well, you could feel the audience focusing on her, being for her, in a way that they weren’t for any of the other actors. I guess that’s talent.”

“It certainly is.” Boylan nodded. “She’s an extraordinarily beautiful girl. I don’t suppose a brother would notice that.”

“Oh, I noticed it,” Rudolph said.

“Did you?” Boylan said absently. He no longer seemed interested. He waved for Perkins to take the dishes away and got up and went over to a big phonograph and put on the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, very loud, so that they didn’t talk for the rest of the meal. Five kinds of cheese on a wooden platter. Salad. A plum tart. No wonder Boylan had a paunch.

Rudolph looked surreptitiously at his watch. If he could get out of there early enough maybe he could catch Julie. It would be too late for the movies, but maybe he could make up to her, anyway, for standing her up.

After dinner, Boylan had a brandy with the demitasse, and put on a symphony. Rudolph was tired from the long afternoon’s fishing. The two glasses of wine he had drunk made him feel blurred and sleepy. The loud music was crushing him. Boylan was polite, but distant. Rudolph had the feeling the man was disappointed in him because he hadn’t opened up about Gretchen.

Boylan sat sunk in a deep chair, his eyes almost closed, concentrating on the music, occasionally taking a sip of the brandy. He might just as well have been alone, Rudolph thought resentfully, or with his Irish wolfhound. They probably had some lively evenings here together, before the neighbors put out the poison. Maybe he’s getting ready to offer me a position as his dog.

There was a scratch on the record now and Boylan made an irritated gesture as the clicking recurred. He stood up and turned off the machine. “I’m sorry about that,” he said to Rudolph. “The revenge of the machine age on Schumann. Shall I take you on down to town now?”

“Thank you.” Rudolph stood up, gratefully.

Boylan looked down at Rudolph’s feet. “Oh,” he said. “You can’t go like that, can you?”

“If you’ll give me my boots …”

“I’m sure they’re still soaking wet inside,” Boylan said. “Wait here a minute. I’ll find something for you.” He went out of the room and up the stairway.

Rudolph took a long look around the room. How good it was to be rich. He wondered if he ever was going to see the room again. Thomas had seen it once, although he had not been invited in. He came down into the living-room bare-assed, with his thing hanging down to his knees, he’s a regular horse, and made two whiskies and called up the stairs, “Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?”

Now that he had had a chance to listen to Boylan, Rudolph recognized that Tom’s caricature of the man’s voice had been an accurate one. He had caught the educated flattening out on the “there,” and the curious way he had of making questions not sound like questions.

Rudolph shook his head. What could Gretchen have been thinking of? “I liked it.” He heard her voice again in the Port Philip House bar. “I liked it better than anything that had ever happened to me.”

He walked restlessly around the room. He looked at the album of the symphony that Boylan had cut off. Schumann’s Third, the Rhenish Symphony. Well, at least he had learned something today. He would recognize it when he heard it again. He picked up a silver cigarette lighter a foot long and examined it. There was a monogram on it. T.B. Purposely expensive gadgets for doing things that cost nothing to the poor. He flicked it open. It spouted flame. The burning cross. Enemies. He heard Boylan’s footsteps on the marble floor in the hall and hurriedly doused the flame and put the lighter down.

Boylan came into the room. He was carrying a little overnight bag and a pair of mahogany-colored moccasins. “Try these on, Rudolph,” he said.

The moccasins were old but beautifully polished, with thick soles and leather tassels. They fit Rudolph perfectly. “Ah,” Boylan said, “you have narrow feet, too.” One aristocrat to another.

“I’ll bring them back in a day or two,” Rudolph said, as they started out.

“Don’t bother,” Boylan said. “They’re old as the hills. I never wear them.”

Rudolph’s rod, neatly folded, and the creel and net were on the back seat of the Buick. The fireman’s boots, still damp inside, were on the floor behind the front seat. Boylan swung the overnight bag onto the back seat and they got into the car. Rudolph had retrieved the old felt hat from the table in the hallway, but didn’t have the courage to put it on with Perkins watching him. Boylan turned on the radio in the car, jazz from New York, so they didn’t talk all the way to Vanderhoff Street. When Boylan stopped the Buick in front of the bakery, he turned the radio off.

“Here we are,” he said.

“Thank you very much,” Rudolph said. “For everything.”

“Thank you, Rudolph,” Boylan said. “It’s been a refreshing day.” As Rudolph put his hand on the handle of the car door, Boylan reached out and held his arm lightly.

“Ah, I wonder if you’d do me a favor.”

“Of course.”

“In that bag back there …” Boylan twisted a little, holding onto the wheel to indicate the presence of the leather overnight bag behind him. “… there’s something I’d particularly like your sister to have. Do you think you could get it to her?”

“Well,” Rudolph said, “I don’t know when I’ll be seeing her.”

“There’s no hurry,” Boylan said. “It’s something I know she wants, but it’s not pressing.”

“Okay,” Rudolph said. It wasn’t like giving away Gretchen’s address, or anything like that. “Sure. When I happen to see her.”

“That’s very good of you, Rudolph.” He looked at his watch. “It’s not very late. Would you like to come and have a drink with me someplace? I don’t fancy going back to that dreary house alone for the moment.”

“I have to get up awfully early in the morning,” Rudolph said. He wanted to be by himself now, to sort out his impressions of Boylan, to assess the dangers and the possible advantages in knowing the man. He didn’t want to be loaded with any new impressions, Boylan drunk, Boylan with strangers at a bar, Boylan perhaps flirting with a woman, or making a pass at a sailor. The idea was sudden. Boylan, the fairy? Making a pass at him. The delicate hands on the piano, the gifts, the clothes that were like costumes, the unobtrusive touching.

“What’s early?” Boylan asked.

“Five,” Rudolph said.

“Good God!” Boylan said. “What in the world does anyone do up at five o’clock in the morning?”

“I deliver rolls on a bicycle for my father,” Rudolph said.

“I see,” Boylan said. “I suppose somebody has to deliver rolls.” He laughed. “You just don’t seem like a roll-deliverer.”

“It’s not my main function in life,” Rudolph said.

“What is your main function in life, Rudolph?” Absently, Boylan switched off the headlights. It was dark in the car because they were directly under a lamppost. There was no light from the cellar. His father hadn’t begun his night’s work. If his father were asked, would he say that his main function in life was baking rolls?

“I don’t know yet,” Rudolph said. Then aggressively, “What’s yours?”

“I don’t know,” Boylan said. “Yet. Have you any idea?”

“No.” The man was split into a million different parts. Rudolph felt that if he were older he might be able to assemble Boylan into one coherent pattern.

“A pity,” Boylan said. “I thought perhaps the clear eyes of youth would see things in me I am incapable of seeing in myself.”

“How old are you, anyway?” Rudolph asked. Boylan spoke so much of the past that he seemed to stretch far, far back, to the Indians, to President Taft, to a greener geography. It occurred to Rudolph that Boylan was not old so much as old-fashioned.

“What would you guess, Rudolph?” Boylan asked, his tone light.

“I don’t know.” Rudolph hesitated. Everybody over thirty-five seemed almost the same age to Rudolph, except for real tottering graybeards, hunching along on canes. He was never surprised when he read in the papers that somebody thirty-five had died. “Fifty?”

Boylan laughed. “Your sister was kinder,” he said. “Much kinder.”

Everything comes back to Gretchen, Rudolph thought. He just can’t stop talking about her. “Well,” Rudolph said, “how old are you?”

“Forty,” Boylan said. “Just turned forty. With all my life still ahead of me, alas,” he said ironically.

You have to be damn sure of yourself, Rudolph thought, to use a word like “alas.”

“What do you think you’ll be like when you’re forty, Rudolph?” Boylan asked lightly. “Like me?”

“No,” Rudolph said.

“Wise young man. You wouldn’t want to be like me, I take it?”

“No.” He’d asked for it and he was going to get it.

“Why not? Do you disapprove of me?”

“A little,” Rudolph said. “But that’s not why.”

“What’s the reason you don’t want to be like me?”

“I’d like to have a room like yours,” Rudolph said. “I’d like to have money like you and books like you and a car like you. I’d like to be able to talk like you—some of the time, anyway—and know as much as you and go to Europe like you …”

“But …”

“You’re lonesome,” Rudolph said. “You’re sad.”

“And when you’re forty you do not intend to be lonesome and sad?”

“No.”

“You will have a loving, beautiful wife,” Boylan said, sounding like someone reciting a fairy story for children, “waiting at the station each evening to drive you home after your day’s work in the city, and handsome, bright children who will love you and whom you will see off to the next war, and …”

“I don’t expect to marry,” Rudolph said.

“Ah,” Boylan said. “You have studied the institution. I was different. I expected to marry. And I married. I expected to fill that echoing castle on the hill with the laughter of little children. As you may have noticed, I am not married and there is very little laughter of any kind in that house. Still, it isn’t too late …” He took out a cigarette from his gold case and used his lighter. In its light his hair looked gray, his face deeply lined with shadows. “Did your sister tell you I asked her to marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you why she wouldn’t?”

“No.”

“Did she tell you she was my mistress?”

The word seemed dirty to Rudolph. If Boylan had said, “Did she tell you that I fucked her?” it would have made him resent Boylan less. It would have made her seem less like another of Theodore Boylan’s possessions. “Yes,” he said. “She told me.”

“Do you disapprove?” Boylan’s tone was harsh.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You’re too old for her.”

“That’s my loss,” Boylan said. “Not hers. When you see her, will you tell her the offer still holds?”

“No.”

Boylan seemed not to have noticed the no. “Tell her,” he said, “that I cannot bear to lie in my bed without her. I’ll tell you a secret, Rudolph. I wasn’t at Jack and Jill’s that night by accident. I never go to places like that, as you can well imagine. I made it a point to find out where you were playing. I followed you out to my car. I was looking for Gretchen. Maybe I had some foolish notion I could find something of the sister in the brother.”

“I’d better go to sleep,” Rudolph said cruelly. He opened the car door and got out. He reached into the back for his rod and creel and net and the fireman’s boots. He put on the ridiculous felt hat. Boylan sat smoking, squinting through the smoke at the straight line of lights of Vanderhoff Street, like a lesson in drawing class in perspective. Parallel to infinity, where lines meet or do not meet, as the case may be.

“Don’t forget the bag, please,” Boylan said.

Rudolph took the bag. It was very light, as though there were nothing in it. Some new scientific infernal machine.

“Thank you for your delightful visit,” Boylan said. “I’m afraid I got all the best of it. Just for the price of an old pair of torn waders that I was never going to use anymore anyway. I’ll let you know when the skeet trap is up. Roll on, young unmarried roll-deliverer. I’ll think of you at five A.M.” He started the motor of the car and drove off abruptly.

Rudolph watched the red tail lights speeding off toward infinity, twin signals saying Stop! then unlocked the door next to the bakery and lugged all the stuff into the hall. He turned on the light and looked at the bag. The lock was open. The key, on a leather thong, hung from the handle. He opened the bag, hoping that his mother hadn’t heard him come in.

There was a bright-red dress lying in a careless heap in the bag. Rudolph picked it up and studied it. It was lacy and cut low in front, he could tell that. He tried to imagine his sister wearing it, showing practically everything.

“Rudolph?” It was his mother’s voice, from above, querulous.

“Yes, Ma.” He turned the light out hurriedly. “I’ll be right back. I forgot to get the evening papers.” He picked up the bag and got out of the hallway before his mother could come down. He didn’t know whom he was protecting, himself or Gretchen or his mother.