Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

Chapter 3

1950

Thomas twirled the combination of the padlock and threw open his locker. For many months now, every locker had been equipped with a padlock and members were requested to leave their wallets at the office, where they were put into sealed envelopes and filed in the office safe. The decision had been pushed through by Brewster Reed, whose talismanic hundred-dollar bill had been lifted from his pocket the Saturday afternoon of the weekend Thomas had gone down to Port Philip. Dominic had been pleased to announce this development the Monday afternoon when Thomas reported back to work. “At least,” Dominic said, “now they know it isn’t you and they can’t blame me for hiring a thief, the bastards.” Dominic had also pushed through a raise for Thomas of ten dollars and he was now getting forty-five dollars a week.

Thomas undressed and got into a clean sweatsuit and put on a pair of boxing shoes. He was taking over the five o’clock calisthenics class from Dominic and there were usually one or two members who asked him to spar a couple of rounds with them. He had learned from Dominic the trick of looking aggressive without inflicting any punishment whatever and he had learned enough of Dominic’s phrases to make the members believe he was teaching them how to fight.

He hadn’t touched the forty-nine hundred dollars in the safety deposit box in Port Philip and he still called young Sinclair sir when they met in the locker room.

He enjoyed the calisthenics classes. Unlike Dominic, who just called out the cadences, Thomas did all the exercises with the class, pushups, situps, bicycle riding, straddles, knee bending, touching the floor with the knees straight and the palms of the hand flat, and all the rest. It kept him feeling fit and at the same time it amused him to see all those dignified, self-important men sweating and panting. His voice, too, developed a tone of command that made him seem less boyish than before. For once, he began to wake up in the morning without the feeling that something bad, out of his control, was going to happen to him that day.

When Thomas went into the mat room after the calisthenics, Dominic and Greening were putting on the big gloves. Dominic had a cold and he had drunk too much the night before. His eyes were red and he was moving slowly. He looked shapeless and aging in his baggy sweatsuit and since his hair was mussed, his bald spot shone in the light from the big lamps of the room. Greening, who was tall for his weight, moved around impatiently, shuffling his boxing shoes against the mats with a dry, aggressive sound. His eyes seemed bleached in the strong light and his blond hair, crew-cut, almost platinum. He had been a captain in the Marines during the war and had won a big decoration. He was very handsome in a straight-nosed, hard-jawed, pink-cheeked way and if he hadn’t come from a family that was above such things, he probably could have done well as a hero in Western movies. In all of the time since he had told Dominic that he thought Thomas had stolen ten dollars from his locker, he had never addressed a word to Thomas and now, as Thomas came into the mat room to wait for one of the members who had made a date to spar with him, Greening didn’t even look Thomas’s way.

“Help me with these, kid,” Dominic said, extending his gloves. Thomas tied the laces. Dominic had already done Greening’s gloves.

Dominic looked up at the big clock over the mat room door to make sure that he wouldn’t inadvertently box more than two minutes without resting and put up his gloves and shuffled toward Greening, saying, “Whenever you’re ready, sir.”

Greening came at him fast. He was a straight-up, conventional, schooled kind of fighter who made use of his longer reach to jab at Dominic’s head. His cold and his hangover made Dominic begin to breathe hard immediately. He tried to get inside the jab and put his head out of harm’s way under Greening’s chin while he punched away without much enthusiasm or power at Greening’s stomach. Suddenly, Greening stepped back and brought up his right in an all-out uppercut that caught Dominic flush on the mouth.

The shit, Thomas thought. But he said nothing and the expression on his face didn’t change.

Dominic sat on the mat pushing reflectively at his bleeding mouth with the big glove. Greening didn’t bother to help him up, but stepped back and looked thoughtfully at him, his hands dangling. Still sitting, Dominic held out his gloves toward Thomas.

“Take ’em off me, kid,” Dominic said. His voice was thick. “I’ve had enough exercise for today.”

Nobody said anything as Thomas bent and unlaced the gloves and pulled them off Dominic’s hands. He knew the old fighter didn’t want to be helped up, so he didn’t try. Dominic stood up wearily, wiping his mouth with the wrist band of his sweatsuit. “Sorry, sir,” he said to Greening. “I guess I’m under the weather today.”

“That wasn’t much of a workout,” Greening said. “You should have told me you weren’t feeling well. I wouldn’t have bothered getting undressed. How about you, Jordache?” he asked. “I’ve seen you in here a couple of times. You want to go a few minutes?”

Jordache, Thomas thought. He knows my name. He looked inquiringly over at Dominic. Greening was another story entirely from the pot-bellied, earnest, physical culture enthusiasts Dominic assigned him usually.

A flame of Sicilian hatred glowed momentarily in Dominic’s hooded dark eyes. The time had come to burn down the landlord’s mansion. “If Mr. Greening wants to, Tom,” Dominic said mildly, spitting blood, “I think you might oblige him.”

Thomas put on the gloves and Dominic laced them for him, his head bent, his eyes guarded, saying nothing. Thomas felt the old feeling, fear, pleasure, eagerness, an electric tingling in his arms and legs, his gut pulling in. He made himself smile boyishly over Dominic’s bent head at Greening, who was watching him stonily.

Dominic stepped away. “Okay,” he said.

Greening came right to Thomas, his long left out, his right hand under his chin. College man, Thomas thought contemptuously, as he picked off the jab and circled away from the right. Greening was taller than he but had only eight or nine pounds on him. But he was faster than Thomas realized and the right caught him, hard, high up on the temple. Thomas hadn’t been in a real fight since the time with the foreman at the garage in Brookline and the polite exercises with the pacific gentlemen of the club membership had not prepared him for Greening. Greening feinted, unorthodoxically, with his right, and crashed a left hook to Thomas’s head. The sonofabitch isn’t fooling, Thomas thought, and went in low, looping a left to Greening’s side and following quickly with a right to the man’s head. Greening held him and battered at his ribs with his right hand. He was strong, there was no doubt about it, very strong.

Thomas got a glimpse of Dominic and wondered if Dominic was going to give him some sort of signal. Dominic was standing to one side, placidly, giving no signals.

Okay, Thomas thought, deliciously, here it goes. The hell with what happens later.

They fought without stopping for the usual two-minute break. Greening fought controlledly, brutally, using his height and weight, Thomas with the swift malevolence that he had carefully subdued within himself all these months. Here you are, Captain, he was saying to himself as he burrowed in, using everything he knew, stinging, hurting, ducking, here you are Rich-boy, here you are, Policeman, are you getting your ten dollars’ worth?

They were both bleeding from the nose and mouth, when Thomas finally got in the one he knew was the beginning of the end. Greening stepped back, smiling foolishly, his hands still up, but feebly pawing the air. Thomas circled him, going for the last big one, when Dominic stepped between them.

“I think that’s enough for the time being, gentlemen,” Dominic said. “That was a very nice little workout.”

Greening recovered quickly. The blank look went out of his eyes and he stared coldly at Thomas. “Take these off me, Dominic,” was all he said. He made no move to wipe the blood off his face. Dominic unlaced the gloves and Greening walked, very straight, out of the mat room.

“There goes my job,” Thomas said.

“Probably,” Dominic said, unlacing the gloves. “It was worth it. For me.” He grinned.

For three days, nothing happened. Nobody but Dominic, Greening, and Thomas had been in the mat room and neither Thomas nor Dominic mentioned the fight to any of the members. There was the possibility that Greening was too embarrassed about being beaten by a twenty-year-old kid a lot smaller than he to make a fuss with the committee.

Each night, when they closed up, Dominic would say, “Nothing yet,” and knock on wood.

Then, on the fourth day, Charley, the locker-room man, came looking for him. “Dominic wants to see you in his office,” Charley said. “Right away.”

Thomas went directly to Dominic’s office. Dominic was sitting behind his desk, counting out ninety dollars in ten-dollar bills. He looked up sadly as Thomas came into the office. “Here’s your two weeks’ pay, kid,” he said. “You’re through as of now. There was a committee meeting this afternoon.”

Thomas put the money in his pocket. And I hoped it was going to last at least a year, he thought.

“You should’ve let me get that last punch in, Dom,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Dominic, “I should’ve.”

“Are you going to get into trouble, too?”

“Probably. Take care of yourself,” Dominic said. “Just remember one thing—never trust the rich.”

They shook hands. Thomas went out of the office to get his things out of the locker and went out of the building without saying good-bye to anyone.

Chapter 4

1954

He woke exactly at a quarter to seven. He never set the alarm. There was no need to.

The usual erection. Forget it. He lay quietly in bed for a minute or two. His mother was snoring in the next room. The curtains at the open window were blowing a little and it was cold in the room. A pale winter light came through the curtains, making a long, dark blur of the books on the shelves across from the bed.

This was not going to be an ordinary day. At closing the night before he had gone into Calderwood’s office and laid the thick Manila envelope on Calderwood’s desk. “I’d like you to read this,” he said to the old man, “when you find the time.”

Calderwood eyed the envelope suspiciously. “What’s in there?” he asked, pushing gingerly at the envelope with one blunt finger.

“It’s complicated,” Rudolph said. “I’d rather we didn’t discuss it until you’ve read it.”

“This another of your crazy ideas?” Calderwood asked. The bulk of the envelope seemed to anger him. “Are you pushing me again?”

“Uhuh,” Rudolph said, and smiled.

“Do you know, young man,” Calderwood said, “my cholesterol count has gone up appreciably since I hired you? Way up.”

“Mrs. Calderwood keeps asking me to try to make you take a vacation.”

“Does she, now?” Calderwood snorted. “What she doesn’t know is that I wouldn’t leave you alone in this store for ten consecutive minutes. Tell her that the next time she tells you to try to make me take a vacation.” But he had carried the thick envelope, unopened, home with him, when he left the store the night before. Once he started reading what was in it, Rudolph was sure he wouldn’t stop until he had finished.

He lay still under the covers in the cold room, almost deciding not to get up promptly this morning, but lie there and figure out what to say to the old man when he came into his office. Then he thought, the hell with it, play it cool, pretend it’s just another morning.

He threw back the covers, crossed the room quickly and closed the window. He tried not to shiver as he took off his pajamas and pulled on his heavy track suit. He put on a pair of woolen socks and thick, gum-soled tennis shoes. He put a plaid mackinaw on over the track suit and went out of the apartment, closing the door softly so as not to wake his mother.

Downstairs, in front of the house, Quentin McGovern was waiting for him. Quentin was also wearing a track suit. Over it he had a bulky sweater. A wool stocking hat was pulled down over his ears. Quentin was fourteen, the oldest son of the Negro family across the street. They ran together every morning.

“Hi, Quent,” Rudolph said.

“Hi, Rudy,” said Quentin. “Sure is cold. Mornings like this, my mother thinks we’re out of our minds.”

“She’ll sing a different tune when you bring home a gold medal from the Olympics.”

“I bet,” Quentin said. “I can just hear her now.”

They walked quickly around the corner. Rudolph unlocked the door of the garage where he rented space, and went to the motorcycle. Dimly, at the back of his mind, a memory lurked. Another door, another dark space, another machine. The shell in the warehouse, the smell of the river, his father’s ropy arms.

Then he was back in Whitby again, with the boy in the track suit, in another place, with no river. He rolled out the motorcycle. He pulled on a pair of old wool-lined gloves and swung onto the machine and started the motor. Quentin got on the pillion and put his arms around him and they sped down the street, the cold wind making their eyes tear.

It was only a few minutes to the university ahtletic field. Whitby College was Whitby University now. The field was not enclosed but had a group of wooden stands along one side. Rudolph set up the motorcycle beside the stands and threw his mackinaw over the saddle of the machine. “Better take off your sweater,” he said. “For later. You don’t want to catch cold on the way back.”

Quentin looked over the field. A thin, icy mist was ghosting up from the turf. He shivered. “Maybe my mother is right,” he said. But he took off his sweater and they began jogging slowly around the cinder track.

While he was going to college, Rudolph had never had time to go out for the track team. It amused him that now, as a busy young executive, he had time to run half an hour a day, six days a week. He did it for the exercise and to keep himself hard, but he also enjoyed the early morning quiet, the smell of turf, the sense of changing seasons, the pounding of his feet on the hard track. He had started doing it alone, but one morning Quentin had been standing outside the house in his track suit and had said, “Mr. Jordache, I see you going off to work out every day. Do you mind if I tag along?” Rudolph had nearly said no to the boy. He liked being alone that early in the morning, surrounded as he was all day by people at the store. But Quentin had said, “I’m on the high-school squad. The four-forty. If I know I got to run seriously every morning, it’s just got to help my time. You don’t have to tell me anything, Mr. Jordache, just let me run along with you.” He spoke shyly, softly, not asking for secrets, and Rudolph could see that he had had to screw up his courage to make a request like that of a grown-up white man who had only said hello to him once or twice in his life. Also, Quentin’s father worked on a delivery truck at the store. Labor relations, Rudolph thought. Keep the working man happy. All democrats together. “Okay,” he said. “Come on.”

The boy had smiled nervously and swung along down the street beside Rudolph to the garage.

They jogged around the track twice, warming up, then broke into a sprint for a hundred yards, then jogged once more, then went fast for the two twenty, then jogged twice around the track and went the four-forty at almost full speed. Quentin was a lanky boy with long, skinny legs and a nice, smooth motion. It was good to have him along, since he pushed Rudolph to run harder than he would have alone. They finished by jogging twice more around the track, and finally, sweating, threw on their overclothes and drove back through the awakening town to their street.

“See you in the morning, Quent,” Rudolph said as he parked the motorcycle along the curb.

“Thanks,” Quentin said. “Tomorrow.”

Rudolph waved and went into the house, liking the boy. They had conquered normal human sloth together on a cold winter’s morning, had tested themselves together against weather, speed, and time. When the summer holidays came, he would find some sort of job for the boy at the store. He was sure Quentin’s family could use the money.

His mother was awake when he came into the apartment. “How is it out?” she called.

“Cold,” he said. “You won’t miss anything if you stay home today.” They continued with the fiction that his mother normally went out every day, just like other women.

He went into the bathroom, took a steaming-hot shower, then stood under an ice-cold stream for a minute and came out tingling. He heard his mother squeezing orange juice and making coffee in the kitchen as he toweled himself off, the sound of her movements like somebody dragging a heavy sack across the kitchen floor. He remembered the long-paced sprinting on the frozen track and thought, if I’m ever like that, I’ll ask somebody to knock me off.

He weighed himself on the bathroom scale. One-sixty. Satisfactory. He despised fat people. At the store, without telling Calderwood his real reasons, he had tried to get rid of clerks who were overweight.

He rubbed some deodorant under his armpits before dressing. It was a long day and the store was always too hot in winter. He dressed in gray-flannel slacks, a soft blue shirt with a dark red tie, and put on a brown-tweed sports jacket, with no padding at the shoulders. For the first year as assistant manager he had dressed in sober, dark business suits, but as he became more important in the company’s hierarchy he had switched to more informal clothes. He was young for his responsibilities and he had to make sure that he didn’t appear pompous. For the same reason he had bought himself a motorcycle. Nobody could say as the assistant manager came roaring up to work, bareheaded, on a motorcycle, in all weathers, that the young man was taking himself too seriously. You had to be careful to keep the envy quotient down as low as possible. He could easily afford a car, but he preferred the motorcycle anyway. It kept his complexion fresh and made him look as though he spent a good deal of his time outdoors. To be tanned, especially in winter, made him feel subtly superior to all the pale, sickly looking people around him. He understood now why Boylan had always used a sun lamp. He himself would never descend to a sun lamp. It was deceitful and cheap, he decided, a form of masculine cosmetics and made you vulnerable to people who knew about sun lamps and saw through the artifice.

He went into the kitchen and kissed his mother good morning. She smiled girlishly. If he forgot to kiss her, there would be a long monologue over the breakfast table about how badly she had slept and how the medicines the doctor prescribed for her were a waste of money. He did not tell his mother how much money he earned or that he could very well afford to move them to a much better apartment. He didn’t plan any entertainment at home and he had other uses for his money.

He sat down at the kitchen table and drank his orange juice and coffee and munched some toast. His mother just drank coffee. Her hair was lank and there were shocking, huge rings of purple sag under her eyes. But with all that, she didn’t seem any worse to him than she had been for the last three years. She would probably live to the age of ninety. He did not begrudge her her longevity. She kept him out of the draft. Sole support of an invalid mother. Last and dearest maternal gift—she had spared him an icebound foxhole in Korea.

“I had a dream last night,” she said. “About your brother, Thomas. He looked the way he looked when he was eight years old. Like a choirboy at Easter. He came into my room and said, Forgive me, forgive me …” She drank her coffee moodily. “I haven’t dreamt about him in forever. Do you ever hear from him?”

“No,” Rudolph said.

“You’re not hiding anything from me, are you?” she asked.

“No. Why would I do that?”

“I would like to see him once more before I die,” she said. “After all he is my own flesh and blood.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “I have a feeling when spring comes, I’m going to feel much better. We can go for walks again.”

“That’s good news,” Rudolph said, finishing his coffee and standing. He kissed her good-bye. “I’ll fix dinner tonight,” he said. “I’ll shop on the way home.”

“Don’t tell me what it’s going to be,” she said co-quettishly, “surprise me.”

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll surprise you.”

The night watchman was still on duty at the employees’ entrance when Rudolph got to the store, carrying the morning papers, which he had bought on the way over.

“Good morning, Sam,” Rudolph said.

“Hi, Rudy,” the night watchman said. Rudolph made a point of having all the old employees, who knew him from his first days at the store, call him by his Christian name.

“You sure are an early bird,” the night watchman said. “When I was your age you couldn’t drag me out of bed on a morning like this.”

That’s why you’re a night watchman at your age, Sam, Rudolph thought, but he merely smiled and went on up to his office, through the dimly lit and sleeping store.

His office was neat and bare, with two desks, one for himself and one for Miss Giles, his secretary, a middle-aged, efficient spinster. There were piles of magazines geometrically stacked on wide shelves, Vogue, French Vogue, Seventeen, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, House and Garden, which he combed for ideas for various departments of the store. The quality of the town was changing rapidly; the new people coming up from the city had money and spent it freely. The natives of the town were more prosperous than they had ever been and were beginning to imitate the tastes of the more sophisticated newer arrivals. Calderwood fought a stubborn rear guard action against the transformation of his store from a solid lower-middle-class establishment to what he called a grab bag of fads and fancy gewgaws, but the balance sheet could not be gainsaid as Rudolph pushed through one innovation after another, and each month it was becoming easier for Rudolph to put his ideas into practice. Calderwood had even agreed, after nearly a year of opposition, to wall off part of what had been an unnecessarily capacious delivery room and turn it into a liquor store, with a line of fine French wines that Rudolph, remembering what Boylan had taught him on the subject through the years, took pleasure in selecting himself.

He hadn’t seen Boylan since the day of the Commencement exercises. He had called twice that summer to ask if Boylan was free for dinner and Boylan had said, “No,” curtly, each time. Every month, Rudolph sent a hundred-dollar check to Boylan, toward repaying the four-thousand-dollar loan. Boylan never cashed the checks, but Rudolph made sure that if at any time Boylan decided to cash them all at once there would be enough money in the account to honor them. Rudolph didn’t think about Boylan often, but when he did, he realized that there was contempt mixed with gratitude he felt for the older man. With all that money, Rudolph thought, all that freedom, Boylan had no right to be as unhappy as he was. It was a symptom of Boylan’s fundamental weakness, and Rudolph, fighting any signs of weakness in himself, had no tolerance for it in anybody else. Willie Abbott and Teddy Boylan, Rudolph thought, there’s a good team.

Rudolph spread the newspapers on his desk. There was the Whitby Record, and the edition of the New York Times that came up on the first train of the morning. The front page of the Times reported heavy fighting along the 38th parallel and new accusations of treason and infiltration by Senator McCarthy in Washington. The Record’s front page reported on a vote for new taxes for the school board (not passed) and on the number of skiers who had made use of the new ski area nearby since the season began. Every city to its own interests.

Rudolph turned to the inside pages of the Record. The half-page two-color advertisement for a new line of wool dresses and sweaters was sloppily done, with the colors bleeding out of register, and Rudolph made a note on his desk pad to call the paper that morning about it.

Then he opened to the Stock Exchange figures in the Times and studied them for fifteen minutes. When he had saved a thousand dollars he had gone to Johnny Heath and asked him, as a favor, to invest it for him. Johnny, who handled some accounts in the millions of dollars, had gravely consented, and worried over Rudolph’s transactions as though Rudolph were one of the most important of his firm’s customers. Rudolph’s holdings were still small, but they were growing steadily. Looking over the Stock Exchange page, he was pleased to see that he was almost three hundred dollars richer this morning, on paper, than he had been the morning before. He breathed a quiet prayer of thanks to his friend Johnny Heath, and turned to the crossword puzzle and got out his pen and started on it. It was one of the pleasantest moments of the day. If he managed to finish the puzzle before nine o’clock, when the store opened, he started the day’s work with a faint sense of triumph.

14 across. Heep. Uriah, he printed neatly.

He was almost finished with the puzzle, when the phone rang. He looked at his watch. The switchboard was at work early, he noted approvingly. He picked up the phone with his left hand. “Yes?” he said, printing ubiquitous in one of the vertical columns.

“Jordache? That you?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Denton, Professor Denton.”

“Oh, how are you, sir?” Rudolph said. He puzzled over Sober in five letters, a the third letter.

“I hate to bother you,” Denton said. His voice sounded peculiar, as though he were whispering and was afraid of being overheard. “But can I see you sometime today?”

“Of course,” Rudolph said. He printed staid along the lowest line of the puzzle. He saw Denton quite often, when he wanted to borrow books on business management and economics at the college. “I’m in the store all day.”

Denton’s voice made a funny, sliding sound in the phone. “I’d prefer it if we could meet somewhere besides the store. Are you free for lunch?”

“I just take forty-five minutes …”

“That’s all right. We’ll make it someplace near you.” Denton sounded gaspy and hurried. In class he was slow and sonorous. “How about Ripley’s? That’s just around the corner from you, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Rudolph said, surprised at Denton’s choice of a restaurant. Ripley’s was more of a saloon than a restaurant and was frequented by workmen with a thirst rather than anybody who was looking for a decent meal. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place you’d think an aging professor of history and economics would seek out. “Is twelve-fifteen all right?”

“I’ll be there, Jordache. Thank you, thank you. It’s most kind of you. Until twelve-fifteen, then,” Denton said, speaking very quickly. “I can’t tell you how I appreciate …” He seemed to hang up in the middle of his last sentence.

Rudolph frowned, wondering what was bothering Denton, then put the phone down. He looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. The doors were open. His secretary came into the office and said, “Good morning, Mr. Jordache.”

“Good morning, Miss Giles,” he said and tossed the Times into the wastebasket, annoyed. Because of Denton he hadn’t finished the puzzle before nine o’clock.

He made his first round of the store for the day, walking slowly, smiling at the clerks, not stopping or seeming to notice when his eye caught something amiss. Later in the morning, back in his office, he would dictate polite memos to the appropriate department head that the neck-ties piled on the counter for a sale were not arranged neatly enough, that Miss Kale, in cosmetics, had on too much eye make-up, that the ventilation in the fountain and tea shop was not sufficient.

He looked with special interest at the departments that had not been there until he had induced Calderwood to put them in—the little boutique, which sold junk jewelry, Italian sweaters, French scarves, and fur hats and did a surprising amount of business; the fountain and tea shop (it was amazing how women never stopped eating all day), which not only showed a solid profit on its own but had become a meeting place for lunch for many of the housewives of the town who then rarely got out of the store without buying something; the ski shop, in a corner of the old sporting goods department, presided over by an athletically built young man named Larsen who dazzled the local girls on the nearby slopes on winter Sundays and who was being criminally underpaid considering how much trade he lured into the shop merely by sliding down a hill once a week. The young man had offered to teach Rudolph how to ski, but Rudolph had declined, with a smile. He couldn’t afford to break a leg, he explained.

The record counter was his idea, too, and that brought in the young trade with their weirdly lavish allowances. Calderwood, who hated noise, and who couldn’t stand the way most young people behaved (his own three daughters, two of them now young ladies and the third a pallid teen-ager, behaved with cowed Victorian decorum), had fought bitterly against the record counter. “I don’t want to run a goddamn honky-tonk,” he had said. “Deprave the youth of America with those barbaric noises that passes for music these days. Leave me in peace, Jordache, leave a poor old-fashioned merchant in peace.”

But Rudolph had produced statistics on how much teen-agers in America spent on records every year and had promised to have soundproof booths put in and Calderwood as usual had capitulated. He often seemed to be irritated with Rudolph, but Rudolph was unfailingly polite and patient with the old man and in most things had learned how to manage him. Privately, Calderwood boasted about his pipsqueak of an assistant manager and how clever he himself had been in picking the boy out of the herd. He had also doubled his salary, with no urging from Rudolph, and had given him a bonus at Christmas of three thousand dollars. “He is not only modernizing the store,” Calderwood had been heard to say, although not in Rudolph’s presence, “the sonofabitch is modernizing me. Well, when it comes down to it, that’s what I hired a young man for.”