Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

Mrs. Jardino peered nearsightedly at him. “Which one were you?”

“The youngest one.”

“Oh, yes. The little gangster.”

Thomas tried a smile, to compliment Mrs. Jardino on her rough humor. Mrs. Jardino didn’t smile back. “So, what do you want?”

“I haven’t been here for awhile,” Thomas said. “I’ve come back to pay a family visit. But the bakery isn’t there any more.”

“It’s been gone for years,” Mrs. Jardino said impatiently, arranging apples so that the spots wouldn’t show. “Didn’t your family tell you?”

“We were out of touch for awhile,” Thomas said. “Do you know where they are?”

“How should I know where they are? They never talked to dirty Italians.” She turned her back squarely on him and fussed with bunches of celery.

“Thank you very much, just the same,” Thomas said and started out.

“Wait a minute,” Mrs. Jardino said. “When you left, your father was still alive, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Thomas said.

“Well, he’s dead,” she said. There was a certain satisfaction in her voice. “He drowned. In the river. And then your mother moved away and then they tore the building down and now …” bitterly, “there’s a supermarket there cutting our throats.”

A customer came in and Mrs. Jardino began to weigh five pounds of potatoes and Thomas went out of the shop.

He went and stood in front of the supermarket for awhile, but it didn’t tell him anything. He thought of going down to the river, but the river wasn’t going to tell him anything, either. He walked back toward the station. He passed a bank and went in and rented a safety deposit box and put forty-nine hundred of the five thousand dollars in the box. He figured he might as well leave his money in Port Philip as anywhere. Or throw it into the river in which his father had drowned.

He supposed he might be able to find his mother and brother by going to the post office, but he decided against the effort. It was his father he had come to see. And pay off.

Chapter 2

1950

Capped and gowned, Rudolph sat in the June sunlight, among the other graduates in rented black.

“Now, in 1950, at the exact mid-point of the century,” the speaker was saying, “we Americans must ask ourselves several questions: What do we have? What do we want? What are our strengths and weaknesses? Where are we going?” The speaker was a cabinet member, up from Washington as a favor for the President of the college, who had been a friend of his at Cornell, a more illustrious place of learning.

Now at the exact mid-point of the century, Rudolph thought, moving restlessly on the camp chair set up on the campus lawn, what do I have, what do I want, what are my strengths and weaknesses, where am I going? I have a B.A., a debt of four thousand dollars, and a dying mother. I want to be rich and free and beloved. My strength—I can run the two-twenty in 23:8. My weakness? I am honest. He smiled inwardly, innocently regarding the Great Man from Washington. Where am I going? You tell me, brother.

The man from Washington was a man of peace. “The curve of military power is rising everywhere,” he said in solemn tones. “The only hope for peace is the military might of the United States. To prevent war the United States needs a force so big and strong, so capable of counterattack as to serve as a deterrent.”

Rudolph looked along the rows of his fellow graduates. Half of them were veterans of World War II, in college on the G.I. Bill of Rights. Many of them were married, their wives sitting with newly set hair in the rows behind them, some of them holding infants in their arms because there was nobody to leave them with in the trailers and cluttered rented rooms which had been their homes while their husbands had struggled for the degrees being awarded today. Rudolph wondered how they felt about the rising curve of military power.

Sitting next to Rudolph was Bradford Knight, a, round-faced florid young man from Tulsa, who had been a sergeant in the infantry in Europe. He was Rudolph’s best friend on the campus, an energetic, overt boy, cynical and shrewd behind a lazy Oklahoma drawl. He had come to Whitby because his captain had graduated from the school and recommended him to the Dean of Admissions. He and Rudolph had drunk a lot of beer together and had gone fishing together. Brad kept urging Rudolph to come out to Tulsa with him after graduation and go into the oil business with him and his father. “You’ll be a millionaire before you’re twenty-five, son,” Brad had said. “It’s over-flowin’ country out there. You’ll trade in your Cadillac every time the ashtrays have to be emptied.” Brad’s father had been a millionaire before he was twenty-five, but was in a low period now (“Just a little bad run of luck,” according to Brad) and couldn’t afford the fare East at the moment for his son’s graduation.

Teddy Boylan wasn’t at the ceremony, either, although Rudolph had sent him an invitation. It was the least he could do for the four thousand dollars. But Boylan had declined. “I’m afraid I can’t see myself driving fifty miles on a nice June afternoon to listen to a Democrat make a speech on the campus of an obscure agricultural school.” Whitby was not an agricultural school, although it did have an important agricultural department, but Boylan still resented Rudolph’s refusal even to apply to an Ivy League university when he had made his offer in 1946 to finance Rudolph’s education. “However,” the letter had gone on in Boylan’s harsh, heavily accented handwriting, “the day shall not go altogether uncelebrated. Come on over to the house when the dreary mumblings are over, and we’ll break out a bottle of champagne and talk about your plans.”

Rudolph had decided for several reasons to choose Whitby rather than to take a chance on Yale or Harvard. For one, he’d have owed Boylan a good deal more than four thousand dollars at the end, and for another, with his background and his lack of money, he’d have been a four-year outsider among the young lords of American society whose fathers and grandfathers had all cheered at Harvard–Yale games, who whipped back and forth to debutantes’ balls, and most of whom had never worked a day in their lives. At Whitby, poverty was normal. The occasional boy who didn’t have to work in the summer to help pay for his books and clothes in the autumn was unusual. The only outsiders, except for an occasional stray like Brad, were bookish freaks who shunned their fellow students and a few politically minded young men who circulated petitions in favor of the United Nations and against compulsory military service.

Another reason that Rudolph had chosen Whitby was that it was close enough to Port Philip so that he could get over on Sundays to see his mother, who was more or less confined to her room and who, friendless, suspicious, and half mad, could not be allowed just to founder into absolute neglect. In the summer of his sophomore year, when he got the job after hours and on Saturdays at Calderwood’s Department Store, he had found a cheap little two-room apartment with a kitchenette in Whitby and had moved his mother in with him. She was waiting for him there, now. She hadn’t felt well enough to come to the graduation, she said, and besides, she would disgrace him, the way she looked. Disgrace was probably too strong a word, Rudolph thought, looking around at the neatly clothed, sober parents of his classmates, but she certainly wouldn’t have dazzled anybody in the assemblage with her beauty or her style of dress. It was one thing to be a dutiful son. It was a very different thing not to face facts.

So—Mary Pease Jordache, sitting in a rocking chair at the window of the shabby apartment, cigarette ashes drifting down on her shawl, legs swollen and almost useless, was not there to see her son rewarded with his roll of imitation parchment. Among the other absentees—Gretchen, linked by blood, detained in New York by a crisis with her child; Julie, being graduated herself that day from Barnard; Thomas, more blood, address unknown; Axel Jordache, blood on his hands, sculling through eternity.

He was alone this day and it was just as well.

“The power of the military establishment is appalling,” the speaker was saying, his voice magnified over the public address system, “but one great thing on our side is the wish of the ordinary man everywhere for peace.”

If Rudolph was an ordinary man, the cabinet member was certainly speaking for him. Now that he had heard some of the stories about the war in bull sessions around the campus he no longer envied the generation before his which had stood on Guadalcanal and the sandy ridges of Tunisia and at the Rapido River.

The fine, intelligent, educated voice sang on in the sunny quadrangle of red-brick Colonial buildings. Inevitably, there was the salute to America, land of opportunity. Half the young men listening had had the opportunity to be killed for America, but the speaker was looking forward this afternoon, not toward the past, and the opportunities he mentioned were those of scientific research, public service, aid to those nations throughout the world who were not as fortunate as we. He was a good man, the cabinet member, and Rudolph was glad that such a man was near the seat of power in Washington, but his view of opportunity in 1950 was a bit lofty, evangelical, Washingtonian, all very well for a Commencement exercise, but not likely to coincide with the down-to-earth views of the three hundred or so poor men’s sons who sat before him in black robes waiting to receive their degrees from a small, underfinanced school known, if it was known at all, for its agricultural department, and wondering how they were going to start earning a living the next day.

Up front, in the section reserved for professors, Rudolph saw Professor Denton, the head of the History and Economics departments, squirming in his seat and turning to whisper to Professor Lloyd, of the English Department, sitting on his right. Rudolph smiled, guessing what Professor Denton’s comments would be on the cabinet member’s ritualistic pronouncements. Denton, a small, fierce, graying man, disappointed because by now he realized he would rise no higher in the academic world, was also a kind of outdated Midwestern Populist, who spent a good deal of his time in the classroom ranting about what he considered the betrayal of the American economic and political system, dating back to the Civil War, by Big Money and Big Business. “The American economy,” he had said in class, “is a rigged crap table, with loaded dice. The laws are carefully arranged so that the Rich throw only sevens and everybody else throws only snake-eyes.”

At least once a term he made a point of referring to the fact that in 1932, by his own admission before a congressional committee, J. P. Morgan had not paid a cent in income tax. “I want you gentlemen to keep this in mind,” Professor Denton would declaim bitterly, “while also keeping in mind that in the same year, on a mere tutor’s salary, I paid five hundred and twenty-seven dollars and thirty cents in tax to the Federal Government.”

The effect on the class, as far as Rudolph could discern, was not the one Denton sought. Rather than firing the students up with indignation and a burning desire to rally forth to do battle for reform, most of the students, Rudolph included, dreamed of the time when they themselves could reach the heights of wealth and power, so that they, too, like J. P. Morgan, could be exempt from what Denton called the legal enslavement of the electorate body.

And when Denton, pouncing upon some bit of news in The Wall Street Journal describing some new wily tax-saving amalgamation or oil jobbing that kept millions of dollars immune from the federal treasury, Rudolph listened carefully, admiring the techniques that Denton lovingly dissected, and putting everything carefully down in his notebooks, against the blessed day when he perhaps might be faced with similar opportunities.

Anxious for good marks, not so much for themselves as for the possible advantages later, Rudolph did not let on that his close attention to Denton’s tirades were not those of a disciple, but rather those of a spy in enemy territory. His three courses with Denton had been rewarded with three A’s and Denton had offered him a teaching fellowship in the History Department for the next year.

Despite his secret disagreement with what he thought were Denton’s naive positions, Denton was the one instructor Rudolph had come to like in all the time he had been in the college, and the one man he considered had taught him anything useful.

He had kept this opinion, as he had kept almost all his other opinions, strictly to himself, and he was highly regarded as a serious student and a well-behaved young man by the faculty members.

The speaker was finishing, with a mention of God in his last sentence. There was applause. Then the graduates were called up to receive their degrees, one by one. The President beamed as he bestowed the rolls of paper bedecked with ribbon. He had scored a coup getting the cabinet member to his ceremony. He had not read Boylan’s letter about an agricultural school.

A hymn was sung, a decorous march played. The black robes filed down through the rows of parents and relatives. The robes dispersed under the summer foliage, of oak trees, mixing with the bright colors of women’s dresses, making the graduates look like a flock of crows feeding in a field of flowers.

Rudolph limited himself to a few handshakes. He had a busy day and night ahead of him. Denton sought him out, shook his hand, a small, almost hunchbacked man with thick, silver-rimmed glasses. “Jordache,” he said, his hand enthusiastic, “you will think it over won’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Rudolph said. “It’s very kind of you.” Respect your elders. The academic life, serene, underpaid. A Master’s in a year, a Ph.D. a few years later, a chair perhaps at the age of forty-five. “I am certainly tempted, sir.” He was not tempted at all.

He and Brad broke away to turn in their robes and go, as prearranged, to the parking lot. Brad had a pre-war Chevy convertible, and his bags, already packed, were in the trunk. Brad was ready to take off for Oklahoma, that overflowing country.

They were the first ones out of the parking lot. They did not look back. Alma Mater disappeared around a bend in the road. Four years. Be sentimental later. Twenty years from now.

“Let’s go by the store for a minute,” Rudolph said. “I promised Calderwood I’d look in.”

“Yes, sir,” Brad said, at the wheel. “Do I sound like an educated man?”

“The ruling class,” Rudolph said.

“My time has not been wasted,” Brad said. “How much do you think a cabinet member makes a year?”

“Fifteen, sixteen thousand,” Rudolph hazarded.

“Chickenfeed,” Brad said.

“Plus honor.”

“That’s another thirty bucks a year at least,” Brad said. “Tax free. You think he wrote that speech himself?”

“Probably.”

“He’s overpaid.” Brad began to hum the tune of “Everything’s Up-to-Date in Kansas City.” “Will there be broads there tonight?”

Gretchen had invited them both to her place for a party to mark the occasion. Julie was to come, too, if she could shake her parents.

“Probably,” Rudolph said. “There’re usually one or two girls hanging around.”

“I read all that stuff in the papers,” Brad said querulously, “about how modern youth is going to the dogs and how morality has broken down since the war and all, but I’m not getting any of that little old broken-down morality, that’s for sure. The next time I go to college it’s going to be coed. You’re looking at a pure-bred, sex-starved Bachelor of Arts, and I ain’t just talking.” He hummed gaily.

They drove through the town. Since the war there had been a lot of new construction, small factories with lawns and flower-beds pretending to be places of recreation and gracious living, shop-fronts redone to look as though they were on eighteenth-century village streets in the English counties, a white clapboard building that had once been the town hall and was now a summer theater. People from New York had begun buying farmhouses in the adjoining countryside and came up for weekends and holidays. Whitby, in the four years that Rudolph had spent there, had grown visibly more prosperous with nine new holes added to the golf course and an optimistic real-estate development called Greenwood Estates, where you had to buy at least two acres of land if you wanted to build a house. There was even a small artists’ colony and when the President of the university attempted to lure staff away from other institutions, he always pointed out that Whitby was situated in an up-and-coming town, improving in quality as well as size, and that it had a cultural atmosphere.

Calderwood’s was a small department store on the best corner of the main shopping street of the town. It had been there since the 1890s, first as a kind of general store serving the needs of a sleepy college village with a back country of solid farms. As the town had grown and changed its character, the store had grown and changed accordingly. Now it was a long, two-story structure, with a considerable variety of goods displayed behind plate-glass windows. Rudolph had started as a stock boy in busy seasons, but had worked so hard and had come up with so many suggestions that Duncan Calderwood, descendant of the original owner, had had to promote him. The store was still small enough so that one man could do many different jobs in it, and by now Rudolph acted as part-time salesman, window dresser, advertising copy writer, adviser on buying, and consultant on the hiring and firing of personnel. When he worked full time in the summer, his salary was fifty dollars a week.

Duncan Calderwood was a spare, laconic Yankee of about fifty, who had married late and had three daughters. Aside from the store, he owned a good deal of real estate in and around the town. Just how much was his own business. He was a closemouthed man who knew the value of a dollar. The day before, he had told Rudolph to drop around after the graduation exercises were over, he might have an interesting proposition to put to him.

Brad stopped the car in front of the entrance to the store.

“I’ll just be a minute,” Rudolph said, getting out.

“Take your time,” Brad said. “I’ve got my whole life ahead of me.” He opened his collar and pulled his tie loose, free at last. The top of the car was down and he lay back and closed his eyes luxuriously in the sunlight.

As Rudolph went into the store, he glanced approvingly at one of the windows, which he had arranged three nights before. The window was deyoted to carpentry tools and Rudolph had set them out so that they made a severe abstract pattern, uncluttered and gleaming. From time to time Rudolph went down to New York and studied the windows of the big stores on Fifth Avenue to pick up ideas for Calderwood’s.

There was a comfortable, female hum of shopping on the main floor and a slight, typical odor of clothes and new leather and women’s scents that Rudolph always enjoyed. The clerks smiled at him and waved hello as he went toward the back of the store, where Calderwood’s private office was located. One or two of the clerks said, “Congratulations,” and he waved at them. He was well liked, especially by the older people. They did not know that he was consulted on hiring and firing.

Calderwood’s door was open, as it always was. He liked to keep an eye on what was happening in the store. He was seated at his desk, writing a letter with a fountain pen. He had a secretary, who had an office beside his, but there were some things about his business he didn’t want even his secretary to know. He wrote four or five letters a day by hand and stamped them and mailed them himself. The door to the secretary’s office was closed.

Rudolph stood in the doorway, waiting. Although he left the door open, Calderwood did not like to be interrupted.

Calderwood finished a sentence, reread it, then looked up. He had a sallow, smooth face with a long blade of a nose and receding black hair. He turned the letter face down on his desk. He had big farmer’s hands and he dealt clumsily with frail things like sheets of paper. Rudolph was proud of his own slender, long-fingered hands, which he felt were aristocratic.

“Come in, Rudy,” Calderwood said. His voice was dry, uninflected.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Calderwood.” Rudolph stepped into the bare room in his good, blue, graduation suit. There was a giveaway Calderwood calendar on the wall, with a colored photograph of the store on it. Aside from the calendar the only other adornment in the room was a photograph of Calderwood’s three daughters, taken when they were little girls, on the desk.

Surprisingly, Calderwood stood up and came around the desk and shook Rudolph’s hand. “How did it go?” he asked.

“No surprises.”

“You glad you did it?”

“You mean go to college?” Rudolph asked.

“Yes. Sit down.” Calderwood went back behind his desk and sat on the straight-backed wooden chair. Rudolph seated himself on another wooden chair on the right side of the desk. In the furniture department on the second floor there were dozens of upholstered leather chairs, but they were for customers only.

“I suppose so,” Rudolph said. “I suppose I’m glad.”

“Most of the men who made the big fortunes in this country, who are making them today,” Calderwood said, “never had any real schooling. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Rudolph said.

“They hire schooling,” said Calderwood. It was almost a threat. Calderwood himself had not finished high school.

“I’ll try not to let my education interfere with my making a fortune,” Rudolph said.

Calderwood laughed, dry, economical. “I’ll bet you won’t, Rudy,” he said affably. He pulled open a drawer of the desk and took out a jeweler’s box, with the name of the store written in gilt script on the velvet cover. “Here,” he said, putting the box down on the desk. “Here’s something for you.”

Rudolph opened the box. In it was a handsome steel Swiss wristwatch, with a black suede band. “It’s very good of you, sir,” Rudolph said. He tried not to sound surprised.

“You earned it,” Calderwood said. He adjusted his narrow tie in the notch of his starched white collar, embarrassed. Generosity did not come easily to him. “You put in a lot of good work in this store, Rudy. You got a good head on your shoulders, you have a gift for merchandising.”

“Thank you, Mr. Calderwood.” This was the real Commencement address, none of that Washington stuff about the rising military curve and aid to our less fortunate brothers.

“I told you I had a proposition for you, didn’t I?”

“Yes, sir.”

Calderwood hesitated, cleared his throat, stood up, walked toward the calendar on the wall. It was as though before he took a stupendous final plunge, he had to re-check his figures one last time. He was dressed as always in a black suit with vest, and high-topped black shoes. He liked full support for his ankles, he said. “Rudy,” he began, “how would you like to work for Calderwood’s on a full-time basis?”

“That depends,” Rudolph said, carefully. He had expected this and he had decided what terms he would accept.

“Depends on what?” Calderwood asked. He sounded pugnacious.

“Depends on what the job is,” Rudolph said.

“The same as you’ve been doing,” Calderwood said. “Only more so. A little bit of everything. You want a title?”

“That depends on the title.”

“Depends, depends,” Calderwood said. But he laughed. “Who ever made up that idea about the rashness of youth? How about Assistant Manager? Is that a good enough title for you?”

“For openers,” Rudolph said.

“Maybe I ought to kick you out of this office,” Calderwood said. The pale eyes iced up momentarily.

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” Rudolph said, “but I don’t want to get into any dead ends. I have some other offers and …”

“I suppose you want to rush down to New York, like all the other young damn fools,” Calderwood said. “Take over the city in the first month, get yourself invited to all the parties.”

“Not particularly,” Rudolph said. Actually he didn’t feel ready for New York yet. “I like this town.”

“With good reason,” Calderwood said. He sat down behind his desk again, with a sound that was almost a sigh. “Listen, Rudy,” he said, “I’m not getting any younger; the doctor says I’ve got to start taking it easier. Delegate responsibility, is the way he puts it, take holidays, prolong my life. The usual doctor’s sales talk. I have a high cholesterol count. That’s a new gimmick they got to scare you with, cholesterol count. Anyway, it makes sense. I have no sons …” He glared at the photograph of the three girl children at his desk, triply betrayed. “I’ve done the whole thing myself in here since my father died. Somebody’s got to help take over. And I don’t want any of those high-powered young snots from the business schools, changing everything and asking for a share in the shop after the first two weeks.” He lowered his head and looked at Rudolph measuringly from under his thick black eyebrows. “You start at one hundred a week. After a year we’ll see. Is that fair or isn’t it fair?”

“It’s fair,” Rudolph said. He had expected seventy-five.

“You’ll have an office,” Calderwood said. “The old wrapping room on the second floor. Assistant Manager on the door. But I want to see you on the floor during store hours. We shake on it?”

Rudolph put out his hand. Calderwood’s handshake was not that of a man with a high cholesterol count.

“I suppose you’ll want to take some sort of holiday first,” Calderwood said. “I don’t blame you. What do you want—two weeks, a month?”

“I’ll be here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” Rudolph stood up.

Calderwood smiled, a flare of unconvincing dentures. “I hope I’m not making a mistake,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

He was turning over his unfinished letter and picking up his fountain pen with his big, square hand, as Rudolph left the office.

As he went through the store Rudolph walked slowly, looking around at the counters, the clerks, the customers, with a new, appraising, owning eye. At the doorway, he stopped, took off his cheap watch and put on the new one.

Brad was dozing at the wheel in the sunlight. He sat up as Rudolph got into the car. “Anything new?” he asked, as he started the engine.

“The old man gave me a present.” Rudolph held up his hand to display the watch.

“He’s got a soft heart,” Brad said, as they pulled away from the curb.

“One hundred and fifteen dollars,” Rudolph said, “at the watch counter. Fifty dollars wholesale.” He didn’t say anything about reporting to work at nine o’clock in the morning. Calderwood’s was not overflowing country.

Mary Pease Jordache sat at the window looking down at the street, waiting for Rudolph. He had promised he’d come right home after the Commencement exercises to show her his degree. It would have been nice to arrange some sort of party for him, but she didn’t have the energy. Besides, she didn’t know any of his friends. It wasn’t that he wasn’t popular. The phone was always ringing and young voices would say, “This is Charlie,” or, “This is Brad, is Rudy in?” But somehow he never seemed to bring any of them home. Just as well. It wasn’t much of a home. Two dark rooms over a dry-goods store on a treeless, bare side street. She was doomed to live her life out over stores. And there was a Negro family living right smack across the street from them. Black faces at the window staring at her. Pickaninnies and rapists. She had learned all about them at the orphanage.

She lit a cigarette, her hand shaking, and brushed inaccurately at the ashes from former cigarettes on her shawl. It was a warm June day, but she felt better with her shawl.

Well, Rudolph had made it, despite everything. A college graduate, holding his head high, any man’s match. Thank God for Theodore Boylan. She had never met him, but Rudolph had explained what an intelligent, generous man he was. It was no more than Rudolph deserved, though. With his manners and his wit. People liked to help him. Well, he was on his way now. Though when she’d asked him what he was going to do after college, he’d been vague. He had plans, though, she was sure. Rudolph’was never without plans. As long as he didn’t get caught up with some girl and get married. Mary Pease shivered. He was a good boy, you couldn’t ask for a more thoughtful son; if it hadn’t been for him God knows what would have happened to her since that night Axel disappeared. But once a girl came into the picture, boys became like wild animals, even the best of them, sacrificing everything, home, parents, career, for a pair of soft eyes and the promise under the skirt. Mary Pease Jordache had never met his Julie, but she knew she went to Barnard and she knew about Rudolph’s trips to New York on Sundays, all those miles there and back, coming home at all hours, pale and dark under the eyes, restless and short of speech. Still, Julie had lasted over five years and he should be ready for someone else by now. She would have to talk to him, tell him now was the time to enjoy himself, take his time, there would be hundreds of girls who would be more than honored to throw themselves at his head.

She really ought to have done something special for this day. Baked a cake, gone down and bought a bottle of wine. But the effort of descending and climbing the stairs, making herself presentable for the neighbors … Rudolph would understand. Anyway, he was going to New York that afternoon to be with his friends. Let the old lady sit alone at the window, she thought with sudden bitterness. Even the best of them.

She saw the car turn the corner into the street, its tires squealing, going too fast. She saw Rudolph, his black hair blowing, young Prince. She saw well at a distance, better than ever, but close-up was another story. She had given up reading because it was too much of a strain, her eyes kept changing, no glasses seemed to help for more than a few weeks at a time, old eyes. She was under fifty, but her eyes were dying before her. She let the tears overflow.