Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

Chapter 11

1946

I

The lights were down low in the Westerman basement. They had it fixed up as a sort of den and they gave parties there. There was a party on tonight, about twenty boys and girls, some of them dancing, some of them necking a little in the dark corners of the room, some of them just listening to Benny Goodman playing “Paper Doll” on a record.

The River Five didn’t practice much anymore there because some guys back from the Army had started a band, too, and were getting most of the dates. Rudolph didn’t blame people for hiring the other band. The guys were older and they played a lot better than the River Five.

Alex Dailey was dancing closely with Lila Belkamp in the middle of the room. They told everybody they were going to get married when they got out of school in June. Alex was nineteen and a little slow in school. Lila was all right, a little gushy and silly, but all right. Rudolph wondered if his mother had looked anything like Lila when she was nineteen. Rudolph wished he had a recording of his mother’s speech the night his father came home from Elysium, to play to Alex. It should be required listening for all prospective bridegrooms. Maybe there wouldn’t be such a rush to the church.

Julie was sitting on Rudolph’s lap in a broken-down old easy chair in a corner of the den. There were other girls sitting on boys’ laps around the room, but Rudolph wished she wouldn’t do it. He didn’t like the idea of people seeing him like that and guessing how he was feeling. There were some things that ought to be kept private. He couldn’t imagine Teddy Boylan letting any girl sit in his lap in public, at any age. But if he even hinted about it to Julie, she’d blow up.

Julie nuzzled her head around and kissed him. He kissed her back, of course, and enjoyed it, but wished she’d quit.

She had applied to Barnard for the fall and was pretty sure of getting in. She was smart in school. She wanted Rudolph to try to get into Columbia, so they would be right next to each other in New York. Rudolph pretended he was considering Harvard or Yale. He never could get himself to tell Julie that he wasn’t going to college.

Julie snuggled closer, her head under his chin. She made a purring sound that at other times made him chuckle. He looked over her head at the other people at the party. He was probably the only virgin among the boys in the room. He was sure about Buddy Westerman and Dailey and Kessler and most of the others, although maybe there were one or two who probably lied when the question came up. That wasn’t the only way he was different from the others. He wondered if they’d have invited him if they knew that his father had killed two men, that his brother had been in jail for rape, that his sister was pregnant (she had written him to tell him, so that it wouldn’t come as a horrid surprise, she said) and living with a married man, that his mother had demanded thirty thousand dollars from his father if he wanted to go to bed with her.

The Jordaches were special, there was no doubt about that.

Buddy Westerman came over and said, “Listen, kids, there’s punch upstairs and sandwiches and cake.”

“Thanks, Buddy,” Rudolph said. He wished Julie would get the hell off his lap.

Buddy went around passing the word along to the other couples. There was nothing wrong with Buddy. He was going to Cornell, and then to law school, because his father had a solid law practice in town. Buddy had been approached by the new group to play bass for them, but out of loyalty to the River Five had said no. Rudolph gave Buddy’s loyalty just about three weeks to wear out. Buddy was a born musician and as he said, “Those guys really make music,” and you couldn’t expect Buddy to hold out forever, especially as they didn’t get more than one date a month any more.

As he looked at the boys in the room, Rudolph realized that almost every one of them knew where he was going. Kessler’s father had a pharmacy and Kessler was going to go to pharmaceutical school after college and take over the old man’s business. Starrett’s father dealt in real estate and Starrett was going to Harvard and to the school of business there, to make sure he could tell his father how to use his money. Lawson’s family had an engineering concern and Lawson was going to study engineering. Even Dailey, who probably was too slow to get into college, was going into his father’s plumbing supply business.

There was a great opening for Rudolph in the ancestral oven. “I am going into grains.” Or perhaps, “I intend to join the German army. My father is an alumnus.”

Rudolph felt a sick surge of envy for all his friends. Benny Goodman was playing the clarinet like silver lace on the phonograph and Rudolph envied him. Maybe most of all.

On a night like this you could understand why people robbed banks.

He wasn’t going to come to any more parties. He didn’t belong there, even if he was the only one who knew it.

He wanted to go home. He was tired. He was always tired these days, somehow. Aside from the bicycle route in the morning, he had to tend the store every day from four to seven, after school closed. The widow had decided she couldn’t work the whole day, she had children at home to take care of. It had meant giving up the track and the debating teams and his marks were slipping, too, as he never seemed to find the energy to study. He’d been sick, too, with a cold that started after Christmas and seemed to be hanging on all winter.

“Julie,” he said, “let’s go home.”

She sat up straight on his lap, surprised.

“It’s early,” she said, “it’s a nice party.”

“I know, I know,” he said, sounding more impatient than he intended. “I just want to get out of here.”

“We can’t do anything in my house,” she said. “My folks have people over for bridge. It’s Friday.”

“I just want to go home,” he said.

“You go.” She got off his lap and stood over him angrily. “I’ll find somebody else to take me home.”

He was tempted to spill out everything he had been thinking. Maybe she’d understand then.

“Boy, oh boy,” Julie said. There were tears in her eyes. “This is the first party we’ve been to in months and you want to go home practically before we get here.”

“I just feel lousy,” he said. He stood up.

“It’s peculiar,” she said. “Just the nights you’re with me you feel lousy. I bet you feel just fine the nights you go out with Teddy Boylan.”

“Oh, lay off Boylan, will you, Julie?” Rudolph said, “I haven’t seen him for weeks.”

“What’s the matter—he run out of peroxide?”

“Joke,” Rudolph said wearily.

She turned on her heel, her pony tail swinging, and went over to the group around the phonograph. She was the prettiest girl in the room, snub-nosed, scrubbed, smart, slender, dear, and Rudolph wished she would go away someplace for six months, a year, and then come back, after he had gotten over being tired, and had a chance to figure everything out in peace and they could start all over again.

He went upstairs and put on his coat and left the house without saying good night to anyone. Judy Garland was on the phonograph now, singing “The Trolley Song.”

It was raining outside, a cold, drifting, February misty river rain, blowing at him in the wind. He coughed inside his coat, with the wet trickling down inside his turned-up collar. He walked slowly toward home, feeling like crying. He hated these spats with Julie, and they were becoming more and more frequent. If they made love to each other, really made love, not that frustrating, foolish necking that made them both ashamed after it, he was sure they wouldn’t be scratching at each other all the time. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It would have to be hidden, they’d have to lie, they’d have to sneak off somewhere like criminals. He had long ago made up his mind. It was going to be perfect or it wasn’t going to happen.

The hotel manager threw open the door of the suite. There was a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. There was a smell of jasmine and thyme in the air. The two bronzed young people looked around the room coolly, glanced at the Mediterranean. Uniformed bellboys brought in many pieces of leather luggage and distributed them around the rooms.

“Ça vous plaît, Monsieur?” the manager asked.

“Çava,” the bronzed young man said.

“Merci, Monsieur.” The hotel manager backed out of the room.

The two bronzed young people went out onto the balcony and looked at the sea. They kissed against the blueness. The smell of jasmine and thyme became stronger.

Or …

It was only a small log cabin, with the snow piled high against its sides. The mountains reared behind it. The two bronzed young people came in shaking the snow from their clothes, laughing. There was a fire roaring in the fireplace. The snow was so high it covered the windows. They were all alone in the high world. The two bronzed young people sank down to the floor in front of the fire.

Or …

The two bronzed young people walked along the red carpet on the platform. The Twentieth Century to Chicago stood on the tracks, gleaming. The two young people went past the porter in his white coat, into the car. The stateroom was full of flowers. There was the smell of roses. The two bronzed young people smiled at each other and strolled through the train to the club car for a drink.

Or …

Rudolph coughed miserably in the rain as he turned into Vanderhoff Street. I’ve seen too goddamn many movies, he thought.

The light from the cellar was coming up through the grating in front of the bakery. The Eternal Flame. Axel Jordache, the Unknown Soldier. If his father died, Rudolph thought, would anyone remember to put out the light?

Rudolph hesitated, the keys to the house in his hand. Ever since the night his mother had made that crazy speech about thirty thousand dollars, he had felt sorry for his father. His father walked around the house slowly and quietly, like a man who has just come out of a hospital after a major operation, a man who had felt the warning tap of death on his shoulder. Axel Jordache had always seemed strong, terrifyingly strong, to Rudolph. His voice had been loud, his movements abrupt and careless. Now his long silences, his hesitant gestures, his slow, apologetic way of spreading a newspaper or fixing himself a pot of coffee, careful not to make any unnecessary noise, was somehow frightening. Suddenly, it seemed to Rudolph that his father was preparing himself for his grave. Standing in the dark hallway with his hand on the banister, for the first time since he was a little boy he asked himself whether he loved his father or not.

He went over to the door leading to the bakery, unlocked it and passed through it to the back room and descended into the cellar.

His father wasn’t doing anything, just sitting on his bench, staring ahead of him at the oven, the bottle of whiskey on the floor beside him. The cat lay crouched in the corner.

“Hello, Pa,” Rudolph said.

His father turned his head slowly toward him and nodded.

“I just came down to see if there was something I could do.”

“No,” his father said. He reached down and picked up the bottle and took a small swig. He offered the bottle to Rudolph. “Want some?”

“Thanks.” Rudolph didn’t want any whiskey, but he felt his father would like it if he took some. The bottle was slippery from his father’s sweat. He took a swig. It burned his mouth and throat.

“You’re soaking wet,” his father said.

“It’s raining out.”

“Take off your coat. You don’t want to sit there in a wet coat.”

Rudolph took off his coat and hung it on a hook on the wall. “How’re things, Pa?” he asked. It was a question he had never asked his father before.

His father chuckled quietly, but didn’t answer. He took another swig of the whiskey.

“What’d you do tonight?” Axel asked.

“I went to a party.”

“A party.” Axel nodded. “Did you play your horn?”

“No.”

“What do people do at a party these days?”

“I don’t know. Dance. Listen to music. Kid around.”

“Did I ever tell you I went to dancing school when I was a boy?” Axel said. “In Cologne. In white gloves. They taught me how to bow. Cologne was nice in the summertime. Maybe I ought to go back there. They’ll be starting everything up from scratch there now, maybe that’s the place for me. A ruin for the ruins.”

“Come on, Pa,” Rudolph said. “Don’t talk like that.”

Axel took another drink. “I had a visitor today,” he said. “Mr. Harrison.”

Mr. Harrison was the owner of the building. He came on the third of each month for the rent. He was at least eighty years old, but he never missed collecting. In person. It wasn’t the third of the month, so Rudolph knew that the visit must have been an important one. “What’d he want?” Rudolph said.

“They’re tearing down the building,” Axel said. “They’re going to put up a whole block of apartments with stores on the ground floor. Port Philip is expanding, Mr. Harrison says, progress is progress. He’s eighty years old, but he’s progressing. He’s investing a lot of money. In Cologne they knock the building down with bombs. In America they do it with money.”

“When do we have to get out?”

“Not till October. Mr. Harrison says he’s telling me early, so I’ll have a chance to find something else. He’s a considerate old man, Mr. Harrison.”

Rudolph looked around him at the familiar cracked walls, the iron doors of the ovens, the window open to the grating on the sidewalk. It was queer to think of all this, the house he had known all his life, no longer there, vanished. He had always thought he would leave the house. It had never occurred to him that the house would leave him.

“What’re you going to do?” he asked his father.

Axel shrugged. “Maybe they need a baker in Cologne. If I happen to find a drunken Englishman some rainy night along the river maybe I could buy passage back to Germany.”

“What’re you talking about, Pa?” Rudolph asked sharply.

“That’s how I came to America,” Axel said mildly. “I followed a drunken Englishman who’d been waving his money around in a bar in the Sankt Pauli district of Hamburg and I drew a knife on him. He put up a fight. The English don’t give up anything without a fight. I put the knife in him and took his wallet and I dropped him into the canal. I told you I killed a man with a knife that day with your French teacher, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Rudolph said.

“I’ve always meant to tell you the story,” Axel said. “Anytime any of your friends says his ancestors came over on the Mayflower, you can say your ancestors came over on a wallet full of five-pound notes. It was a foggy night. He must’ve been crazy, that Englishman, going around a district like Sankt Pauli with all that money. Maybe he thought he was going to screw every whore in the district and he didn’t want to be caught short of cash. So that’s what I say, maybe if I can find an Englishman down by the river, maybe I’ll make the return trip.”

Christ, Rudolph thought bitterly, come on down and have a nice cosy little chat with old Dad in his office …

“If you ever happened to kill an Englishman,” his father went on, “you’d want to tell your son about it, now, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t think you ought to go around talking about it,” Rudolph said.

“Oh,” Axel said, “you planning to turn me over to the police? I forgot you were so high principled.”

“Pa, you ought to forget about it. It’s no good thinking about it after all these years. What good does it do?”

Axel didn’t answer. He drank reflectively from the bottle.

“Oh, I remember a lot of things,” he said. “I get a lot of remembering-time down here at night. I remember shitting my pants along the Meuse. I remember the way my leg smelled the second week in the hospital. I remember carrying two-hundred-pound sacks of cocoa on the docks in Hamburg, with my leg opening up and bleeding every day. I remember what the Englishman said before I pushed him into the canal. ‘I say there,’ he said, ‘you can’t do that.’ I remember the day of my marriage. I could tell you about that, but I think you’d be more interested in your mother’s report. I remember the look on the face of a man called Abraham Chase in Ohio when I laid five thousand dollars on the table in front of him to make him feel better for getting his daughters laid.” He drank again. “I worked twenty years of my life,” he went on, “to pay to keep your brother out of jail. Your mother has let it be known that she thinks I was wrong. Do you think I was wrong?”

“No,” Rudolph said.

“You’re going to have a rough time from now on, Rudy,” Axel said. “I’m sorry. I tried to do my best.”

“I’ll get by,” Rudolph said. He wasn’t at all sure he would.

“Go for the money,” Axel said. “Don’t let anybody fool you. Don’t go for anything else. Don’t listen to all the crap they write in the papers about Other Values. That’s what the rich preach to the poor so that they can keep raking it in, without getting their throats cut. Be Abraham Chase with that look on his face, picking up the bills. How much money you got in the bank?”

“A hundred and sixty dollars,” Rudolph said.

“Don’t part with it,” Axel said. “Not with a penny of it. Not even if I come dragging up to your door starving to death and ask you for the price of a meal. Don’t give me a dime.”

“Pa, you’re getting yourself all worked up. Why don’t you go upstairs and go to bed. I’ll put in the hours here.”

“You stay out of here. Or just come and talk to me, if you want. But stay away from the work. You got better things to do. Learn your lessons. All of them. Step careful. The sins of the fathers. Unto how many generations. My father used to read the Bible after dinner in the living room. I may not be leaving you much, but I sure as hell am leaving you well visited with sins. Two men killed. All my whores. And what I did to your mother. And letting Thomas grow up like wild grass. And who knows what Gretchen is doing. Your mother seems to have some information. You ever see her?”

“Yeah,” Rudolph said.

“What’s she’s up to?”

“You’d rather not hear,” Rudolph said.

“That figures,” his father said. “God watches. I don’t go to church, but I know God watches. Keeping the books on Axel Jordache and his generations.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Rudolph said. “God doesn’t watch anything.” His atheism was firm. “You’ve had some bad luck. That’s all. Everything can change tomorrow.”

“Pay up, God says.” Rudolph had the feeling his father wasn’t talking to him anymore, that he would be saying the same things, in the same dreamlike dead voice if he were alone in the cellar. “Pay up, Sinner, I will afflict you and your sons for your deeds.” He took a long drink, shook himself, as though a shiver had run coldly through his body. “Go to bed,” he said. “I got work to do.”

“Good night, Pa.” Rudolph took his coat off the hook on the wall. His father didn’t answer, just sat there, staring, holding the bottle.

Rudolph went upstairs. Christ, he thought, and I thought it was Ma who was the crazy one.

II

Axel took another drink from the bottle, then went back to work. He worked steadily all night. He found himself humming as he moved around the cellar. He didn’t recognize the tune for a while. It bothered him, not recognizing it. Then he remembered. It was a song his mother used to sing when she was in the kitchen.

He sang the words, low,

Schlaf’, Kindlein, schlaf’

Dein Vater hüt’ die Schlaf’

Die Mutter hüt die Ziegen,

Wir wollen das Kindlein wiegen?

His native tongue. He had traveled too far. Or not far enough.

He had the last pan of rolls ready to go into the oven. He left it standing on the table and went over to a shelf and took down a can. There was a warning skull-and-bones on the label. He dug into the can and measured out a small spoonful of the powder. He carried it over to the table and picked up one of the raw rolls at random. He kneaded the poison into the roll thoroughly, then reshaped the roll and put it back into the pan. My message to the world, he thought.

The cat watched him. He put the pan of rolls into the oven and went over to the sink and stripped off his shirt and washed his hands and face and arms and torso. He dried himself on flour sacking and redressed. He sat down, facing the oven, and put the bottle, now nearly empty, to his lips.

He hummed the tune his mother had sung in her kitchen when he was a small boy.

When the rolls were baked, he pulled out the pan and left them to cool. All the rolls looked the same.

Then he turned off the gas in the ovens and put on his mackinaw and cap. He went up the steps into the bakery and went out. He let the cat follow him. It was dark and still raining. The wind had freshened. He kicked the cat and the cat ran off.

He limped toward the river.

He opened the rusty padlock of the warehouse and turned on a light. He picked up the shell and carried it to the rickety wharf. The river was rough, with whitecaps, and made a sucking, rushing sound as it swept past. The wharf was protected by a curling jetty and the water there was calm. He put the shell down on the wharf and went back and got the oars and turned out the light and snapped the padlock shut. He carried the oars back to the wharf and lay them down along the edge, then put the shell in the water. He stepped in lightly and put the oars into the outriggers.

He pushed off and guided the shell out toward open water. The current caught him and he began to row steadily out toward the river’s center. He went downstream, the waves washing over the sides of the shell, the rain beating in his face. In a little while the shell was low in the water. He continued to row steadily, as the river ran swiftly down toward New York, the bays, the open ocean.

The shell was almost completely awash as he reached the heart of the river.

The shell was found, overturned, the next day, near Bear Mountain. They didn’t ever find Axel Jordache.