Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 34 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

“All right,” Rudolph said. “We can stop talking about it. I don’t know what I can do, but I promise you I’ll do something. Fair enough?”

Billy nodded miserably, mopped some more, put the handkerchief away.

“Now let’s finish our lunch,” Rudolph said. He didn’t eat much more, but watched Billy clean his plate, then order apple pie à la mode and clean that plate. Fourteen was an all-absorbing age. Tears, death, pity, apple pie, and ice cream mingled without shame.

After lunch, in the car driving over to the school, Rudolph said, “Go up to your room. Pack a bag. Then come down and wait for me in the car.”

He watched the boy go into the building, neat in his Sunday go-to-chapel suit, then got out of the car and followed. Behind him, a touch-tackle game was in progress on the drying lawn, boys crying, “Throw it to me, throw it to me,” in one of the hundreds of games of their youth that Billy never joined.

The Common Room off the hallway was full of boys playing Ping-Pong, sitting over chess boards, reading magazines, listening to the Giant game on a transistor radio. From upstairs came the roar of a folk-singing group from another radio. Politely, the boys around the Ping-Pong table made way for him, older man, as he walked across the room, toward the doorway of the Fairweathers’ apartment. They seemed like fine boys, good looking, healthy, well mannered, content, the hope of America. If he were a father he would have been happy to see his own son in this company this Sunday afternoon. But among them, his nephew, misfitted, felt that he was going to die. The Constitutional right to be a misfit.

He rang the bell to the Fairweather apartment and the door was opened by a tall, slightly stooping man, with a lock of hair hanging over his forehead, a healthy complexion, a ready and welcoming smile. What nerves a man must have to be able to live in a house full of boys like this.

“Mr. Fairweather?” Rudolph said.

“Yes?” Amiable, easy.

“I hate to disturb you, but I’d like to talk to you for a moment. I’m Billy Abbott’s uncle. I was …”

“Oh, yes,” Fairweather said. He extended his hand. “My wife told me you paid her a visit before lunch. Won’t you please come in?” He led the way down a book-lined hallway into the book-lined living room, the noise from the Common Room miraculously extinguished with the closing of the door. Sanctuary from youth. Insulation from the young by books. Rudolph wondered if perhaps when Denton had offered him the post at the college, the book-lined life, he had made the wrong choice.

Mrs. Fairweather was sitting on the couch, drinking a cup of coffee, her child sitting on the floor leaning against her knee, turning the pages of a picture book, the setter sprawled, asleep, against her. Mrs. Fairweather smiled at him, raised her cup in greeting.

They can’t be that happy, Rudolph thought, conscious of jealousy.

“Please sit down,” Fairweather said. “Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thank you, I’ve just had some. And I can only stay a minute.” Rudolph sat, stiffly, feeling awkward because he was an uncle, not a father.

Fairweather sat comfortably next to his wife. He was wearing green-stained tennis shoes and a wool shirt, making the most of Sunday afternoon. “Did you have a good talk with Billy?” he asked. There was a little pleasant holdover of the South in his voice, gentlemanly Tidewater Virginia.

“I had a talk,” Rudolph said. “I don’t know how good it was. Mr. Fairweather, I want to take Billy away with me. For a few days at least. I think it’s absolutely necessary.”

The Fairweathers exchanged glances.

“It’s as bad as that, is it?” the man said.

“Pretty bad.”

“We’ve done everything we can,” Fairweather said, but without apology.

“I realize that,” Rudolph said. “It’s just that Billy’s a certain kind of boy, certain things have happened to him—in the past, recently …” He wondered if the Fairweathers had ever heard of Colin Burke, mourned the vanished talent. “There’s no need to go into it. A boy’s reasons can be fantasy, but his feelings can be horribly real.”

“So you want to take Billy away?” Mr. Fairweather said.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“In ten minutes.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Fairweather said.

“For how long?” Fairweather asked calmly.

“I don’t know. A few days. A month. Perhaps permanently.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. From outside the window, thinly, came the sound of a boy calling signals in the touch-tackle game, 22, 45, 38, Hut! Fairweather stood up and went over to the table where the coffee pot was standing and poured himself a cup. “You’re sure you don’t want some, Mr. Jordache?”

Rudolph shook his head.

“The Christmas holidays come in just two and a half weeks,” Fairweather said. “And the term-end examinations begin in a few days. Don’t you think it would be wiser to wait until then?”

“I don’t think it would be wise for me to leave here this afternoon without Billy,” Rudolph said.

“Have you spoken to the headmaster?” Fairweather asked.

“No.”

“I think it would be advisable to consult with him,” Fairweather said. “I don’t really have the authority to …”

“The less fuss we make, the fewer the people who talk to Billy,” Rudolph said, “the better it will be for the boy. Believe me.”

Again the Fairweathers exchanged glances.

“Charles,” Mrs. Fairweather said to her husband, “I think we could explain to the headmaster.”

Fairweather sipped thoughtfully at his coffee, still standing at the table. A ray of pale sunlight came through the windows, outlining him against the bookshelves behind him. Healthy, pondering man, head of family, doctor of young souls.

“I suppose we could,” he said. “I suppose we could explain. You will call me in the next day or two and tell me what’s been decided, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

Fairweather sighed. “There’re so many defeats in this quiet profession, Mr. Jordache,” he said. “Tell Billy he’s welcome to come back any time he wishes. He’s bright enough to make up any time he’s lost.”

“I’ll tell him,” Rudolph said. “Thank you. Thank you both for everything.”

Fairweather escorted him back along the hallway, opened the door into the turmoil of boys, didn’t smile as he shook Rudolph’s hand and closed the door behind him.

As Rudolph drove away from the school, Billy, in the front seat beside him, said, “I never want to see this place again.” He didn’t ask where they were going.

It was half-past five when they got to Whitby and the street lights were on in the wintry darkness. Billy had slept a good deal of the way. Rudolph dreaded the moment when he would have to introduce his mother to her grandson. “Spawn of the harlot,” might not be beyond the powers of his mother’s rhetoric. But he had the appointment with Calderwood after the Calderwood Sunday supper, which would be over by seven, and it would have been impossible to take Billy back to New York and then arrive in Whitby on time. And even if he had had the time to drive the boy down to the city, to whom could he have turned him over? Willie Abbott? Gretchen had asked him to bypass Willie in the matter and he had done so and there was no having it both ways. And after what Billy had said about his father at lunch, being put in Willie’s alcoholic care could hardly have seemed like much of an improvement over staying in school.

Briefly, Rudolph had considered putting Billy in a hotel, but had discarded the idea as too cold-blooded. This was no night for the boy to spend alone in a hotel. Also, it would have been cowardly. He would have to face the old lady down.

Still, when he awakened the boy as he stopped the car in front of the house, and led him through the door, he was relieved to see that his mother was not in the living room. He looked down the hallway and saw that her door was closed. That meant she had probably had a fight with Martha and was sulking. He could confront her alone and prepare her for her first meeting with her grandson.

He went into the kitchen with Billy. Martha was sitting at the table reading a newspaper and there was a smell of something cooking coming from the oven. Martha was not fat, as his mother spitefully described her, but in fact was an angular, virginal, gaunt woman of fifty, sure of the world’s displeasure, anxious to give back as good as she got.

“Martha,” he said, “this is my nephew, Billy. He’s going to stay with us for a few days. He’s tired and he needs a bath and some hot food. Do you think you can give him a hand? He’ll sleep in the guest room, next to mine.”

Martha smoothed out the newspaper on the kitchen table. “Your mother said you weren’t going to be in for dinner.”

“I’m not. I’m going out again.”

“Then there’ll be enough for him,” Martha said. “She—” with a savage gesture of the head toward the part of the house inhabited by his mother—“she didn’t say nothing about no nephews.”

“She doesn’t know yet,” Rudolph said, trying to make his voice sound cheery, for Billy’s sake.

“That’ll make her day,” Martha said. “Finding out about nephews.”

Billy stood quietly to one side, testing the atmosphere, not liking it.

Martha stood up, her face no more disapproving, really, than usual, but how could Billy know that? “Come on, young man,” Martha said. “I guess we can make room for a skinny little thing like you.”

Rudolph was surprised at what was, in Martha’s vocabulary, practically a tender invitation.

“Go ahead, Billy,” he said. “I’ll be up to see you in a little while.”

Billy followed Martha out of the kitchen, hesitantly. Attached now to his uncle, any separation was full of risk.

Rudolph heard their footsteps going up the stairs. His mother would be alerted that someone strange was in the house. She recognized his tread and invariably called out to him when he was on his way to his room.

He got some ice out of the refrigerator. He needed a drink after the almost teetotaling day and before the meeting with his mother. He carried the ice out into the living room and was pleased to find that the living room was warm. Brad must have sent over an engineer yesterday for the furnace. His mother’s tongue would at least not be honed by cold.

He made himself a bourbon and water, with plenty of ice, sank into a chair, put his feet up, and sipped at his drink, enjoying it. He was pleased with the room, not too heavily furnished, with modern, leather chairs, globular glass lamps, Danish wood tables and simple, neutral-colored curtains, all of it making a carefully thought-out contrast with the low-beamed ceiling and the small eighteenth-century, square-paned windows. His mother complained that it looked like a dentist’s waiting room.

He finished his drink slowly, in no hurry for the scene ahead of him. Finally, he pushed himself up out of the chair, went down the hallway, and knocked on the door. His mother’s bedroom was on the ground floor so that she wouldn’t have to manage the stairs. Although, now, since the two operations, one for phlebitis, the second for cataracts, she got around fairly well. Complainingly, but well.

“Who is it?” The voice was sharp behind the closed door.

“It’s me, Mom,” Rudolph said. “You asleep?”

“Not any more,” she said.

He pushed the door open.

“Not with people tramping up and down like elephants all over the house,” she said from the bed. She was propped up against lacy pillows, wearing a pink bed jacket that was trimmed with what seemed to be some kind of pinkish fur. She was wearing the thick glasses that the doctor had prescribed for her after the operation. They permitted her to read, watch television, and go to the movies, but they gave a wild, blank, soulless stare to her hugely magnified eyes.

Doctors had done wonders for her since they had moved to the new house. Before that, when they were still living over the store, although Rudolph had pleaded with his mother to undergo the various operations he was sure she needed, she had adamantly refused. “I will be nobody’s charity patient,” she had said, “being experimented on by interns who shouldn’t be allowed to put a knife to a dog.” Rudolph’s protestations had fallen then on deaf ears. While they lived in the poor apartment nothing could convince her that she was not poor and doomed to suffer the fate of the poor once confided to the cold care of an institution. But once they made the move and Martha read the write-ups in the newspapers about Rudy’s successes to her and she had ridden in the new car that Rudy had bought, she went boldly into surgery, after ascertaining that the men who treated her were the best and most expensive available.

She had been literally rejuvenated, resuscitated, brought back from the lip of the grave, by her belief in money. Rudy had thought that decent medical care would make his mother’s last years a little more comfortable. Instead, they had almost made her young. With Martha glooming at the wheel, she now went out in Rudy’s car whenever it was free; she frequented beauty parlors (her hair was almost blue and waved); patronized the town’s movie houses; called for taxis; attended Mass; played bridge with newly found church acquaintances twice a week; fed priests on nights when Rudy was not at home; had bought a new copy of Gone With the Wind, as well as all the novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes.

A wide variety of clothes and hats for all occasions were stored in the wardrobe in her room, which was as full of furniture as a small antique shop, gilt desks, a chaise longue, a dressing table with ten different flasks of French perfume on it. For the first time in her life her lips were heavily rouged. She looked ghastly, Rudolph thought, with her painted face and gaudy dresses, but she was infinitely more alive than before. If this was the way she was making up for the dreadful years of her childhood and the long agony of her marriage, it was not up to him to deprive her of her toys.

He had played with the idea of moving her to an apartment of her own in town, with Martha to tend her, but he could not bear the thought of the expression on her face at the moment when he would take her through the door of the house for the last time, stricken by the ingratitude of a son whom she had loved above all things in her life, a son whose shirts she had ironed at midnight after twelve hours on her feet in the store, a son for whom she had sacrificed youth, husband, friends, her other two children.

So she stayed on. Rudolph was not one to miss payment on his debts.

“Who is it upstairs? You’ve brought a woman into the house,” she said accusingly.

“I’ve never brought a woman into the house, as you put it, Mom,” Rudolph said, “although if I wanted to, I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”

“Your father’s blood,” his mother said. Dreadful charge.

“It’s your grandson. I brought him home from school.”

“That was no six-year-old boy going up the staircase,” she said. “I have ears.”

“It isn’t Thomas’s son,” Rudolph said. “It’s Gretchen’s son.”

“I will not hear that name,” she said. She put her hands to her ears. Television-watching had left its mark on her gestures.

Rudolph sat on the edge of his mother’s bed and gently took her hands down, holding them. I have been lax, he thought. This conversation should have been held years ago.

“Now listen to me, Mom,” he said. “He’s a very good boy and he’s in trouble and …”

“I won’t have that whore’s brat in my house,” she said.

“Gretchen is not a whore,” Rudolph said. “Her son is not a brat. And this is not your house.”

“I was waiting for the day you would finally say those words,” she said.

Rudolph ignored the invitation to melodrama. “He’s going to stay only a few days,” he said, “and he needs kindness and attention and I’m going to give it to him and Martha’s going to give it to him and you’re going to give it to him.”

“What will I ever tell Father McDonnell?” His mother looked, eyes magnified and blank, up toward Heaven, before whose gates stood, theoretically, Father McDonnell.

“You’re going to tell Father McDonnell that you have finally learned the virtue of Christian charity,” Rudolph said.

“Ah,” she said, “you’re a fine one to talk about Christian charity. Have you ever seen the inside of a church?”

“I haven’t got time to argue,” Rudolph said. “Calderwood is expecting me any minute now. I’m telling you how you’re going to behave with the boy.”

“I will not allow him in my presence,” she said, quoting from some portion of her favorite reading. “I will close my door and Martha will serve my meals on a tray.”

“You can do that if you want, Mom,” Rudolph said quietly. “But if you do, I’m cutting you off. No more car, no more bridge parties, no more charge accounts, no more beauty parlors, no more dinners for Father McDonnell. Think about it.” He stood up. “I’ve got to go now. Martha’s prepared to give Billy dinner. I suggest you join them.”

Tears as he closed his mother’s bedroom door. What a cheap way to threaten an old lady, he thought. Why didn’t she just die? Gracefully, unwaved, unrinsed, unrouged.

There was a grandfather’s clock in the hallway and he saw that he had time to phone Gretchen if he made an immediate connection to California. He put in the call and made himself another drink while waiting for the call to come through. Calderwood might smell the liquor on his breath and disapprove, but he was past that, too. As he sipped his drink he thought of what he had been doing the day before at just this hour. Entwined in twilit warmth in the soft bed, the red-wool stockings strewn on the floor, the sweet warm breath mingled with his, rum and lemon. Had his mother once lain sweetly in a lover’s arms on a cold December afternoon, clothes carelessly discarded in lover’s haste? The image refused to materialize. Would Jean, old, one day lie in a fussed-up bed, eyes staring behind thick glasses, old lips rouged in scorn and avarice? Better not to think about it.

The phone rang and it was Gretchen. He explained the afternoon as quickly as he could and said that Billy was safely with him and that if she thought best he would put Billy on a plane to Los Angeles in two or three days, unless, of course, she wanted to come East.

“No,” she said. “Put him on a plane.”

A tricky little sense of pleasure. An excuse to get to New York on Tuesday or Wednesday. Jean.

“I don’t have to tell you how grateful I am, Rudy,” Gretchen said.

“Nonsense,” he said. “When I have a son I will expect you to take cafe of him. I’ll let you know what plane he’s on. And maybe one day soon, I’ll come out and visit you.”

The lives of others.

Calderwood himself answered the door when Rudolph rang. He was dressed for Sunday, even though his Sabbath duties were behind him, dark suit with vest, white shirt, somber tie, his high, black shoes. There never was enough light in the frugal Calderwood house and it was too dark for Rudolph to see what sort of expression Calderwood had on his face as he said, neutrally, “Come in, Rudy. You’re a little late.”

“Sorry, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said. He followed the old man, who walked heavily now, a certain measured number of steps between him and the grave, to be economized, doled out.

Calderwood led him into the somber oak-paneled room he called his study, with a big mahogany desk and cracked oak and leather easy chairs. The glassed bookcases were filled with files, records of bills paid, twenty-year-old transactions that Calderwood still didn’t trust putting in the modest basement vaults where the ordinary business files were kept, open to any clerk’s prying eye.

“Sit down.” Calderwood gestured toward one of the leather and oak easy chairs. “You’ve been drinking, Rudy,” he said mournfully. “My sons-in-law, I regret to say, are also drinkers.” Calderwood’s two older daughers had married some time before, one a man from Chicago, another a man from. Arizona. Rudolph had the feeling that the girls had picked their mates not out of love, but geography, to get away from their father.

“That isn’t what I brought you here to talk about though,” Calderwood said. “I wanted to speak to you man-to-man, when Mrs. Calderwood and Virginia were not on the premises. They have gone to the movie show and we can speak freely.” It was not like the old man to indulge in elaborate preliminaries. He seemed ill at ease, which also was not like him.

Rudolph waited, conscious that Calderwood was fiddling with objects on his desk, a paper opener, an old-fashioned inkstand.

“Rudolph …” Calderwood cleared his throat portentously. “I’m surprised at your behavior.”

“My behavior?” For a wild instant Rudolph thought that Calderwood had somehow found out about himself and Jean.

“Yes. It’s not like you at all, Rudy.” The tone was sorrowful now. “You’ve been like a son to me. Better than a son. Truthful. Open. Trustworthy.”

The old Eagle Scout, covered with merit badges, Rudolph thought, waiting, wary.

“Suddenly something has come over you, Rudy,” Calderwood continued. “You have been operating behind my back. With no apparent reason. You know you could have come to the door of my house and rung my bell and I would have been glad to welcome you.”

“Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said, thinking, old age here, too. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I am talking about the affections of my daughter Virginia, Rudy. Don’t deny.”

“Mr. Calderwood …”

“You have been tampering with her affections. Gratuitously. You have stolen where you could have demanded.” There was anger in the voice now.

“I assure you, Mr. Calderwood, that I haven’t …”

“It’s not like you to lie, Rudy.”

“I’m not lying. I don’t know …”

“What if I told you the girl has confessed everything?” Calderwood boomed.

“There’s nothing to confess.” Rudolph felt helpless, and at the same time like laughing.

“Your story differs from my daughter’s. She has told her mother that she is in love with you and that she intends to go to New York City to learn to be a secretary to be free to see you.”

“Holy God!” Rudolph said.

“We do not use the name of God in vain in this house, Rudy.”

“Mr. Calderwood, the most I’ve ever done with Virginia,” Rudolph said, “is buy her a lunch or an ice cream soda when I’ve bumped into her at the store.”

“You’ve bewitched her,” Calderwood said. “She’s in tears five times a week about you. A pure young girl doesn’t indulge in antics like that unless she’s been led on artfully by a man.”

The Puritan inheritance has finally exploded, Rudolph thought. Land on Plymouth Rock, hang around for a couple of centuries in the bracing air of New England, prosper, and go crackers. It was all too much for one day—Billy, the school, his mother, now this.

“I want to know what you intend to do about it, young man.” When Calderwood said young man, he was apt to be dangerous. Instantaneously, Rudolph’s mind flashed over the possibilities—he was well entrenched, but the final power in the business lay with Calderwood. There could be a fight, but in the long run Calderwood could get him out. That silly bitch Virginia.

“I don’t know what you want me to do, sir.” He was stalling for time.

“It’s very simple,” Calderwood said. Obviously he had been thinking about the problem ever since Mrs. Calderwood had come to him with the happy news about their daughter’s shame. “Marry Virginia. But you must promise not to move down to New York.” He was demented about New York City, Rudolph decided. Haunt of evil. “I will make you a full partner with me. Upon my death, after I make adequate provisions for my daughters and Mrs. Calderwood, you will get the bulk of my shares. You will have voting control. I shall never bring up this conversation again and there will be no reproaches. In fact, I shall put it out of my mind forever. Rudy, I couldn’t be happier than to have a boy like you in the family. It has been my fondest wish for years and both Mrs. Calderwood and I were disappointed when we invited you to partake of the hospitality of our home that you seemed to take no interest in any of our daughters, although they are all pretty, in their way, and well brought up, and if I may say so, independently wealthy. I have no idea why you thought you couldn’t approach me directly when you had made your choice.”

“I haven’t made any choice,” Rudolph said distractedly. “Virginia’s a charming girl, and she’ll make the best of wives, I’m sure. I had no inkling she had any interest in me whatever …”

“Rudy,” Calderwood said sternly. “I’ve known you a long time. You’re one of the smartest men I’ve ever met. And you have the nerve to sit there and tell me …”

“Yes, I do.” The hell with the business. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll sit right here with you and wait until Mrs. Calderwood and Virginia come home and I’ll ask her point-blank in front of both of you whether I’ve ever made any advances to her, if I’ve ever as much as tried to kiss her.” It was all pure farce but he had to go on with it. “If she says yes, she’s lying, but I don’t care. I’ll walk out right now and you can do whatever you want with your goddamn business and your goddamn stocks and your goddamn daughter.”

“Rudy!” Calderwood’s voice was shocked, but Rudolph could see that he had suddenly become uncertain of his ground.

“If she’d had the sense to tell me long ago that she loved me,” Rudolph went on swiftly pressing his advantage, reckless now, “maybe something would have come of it. I do like her. But it’s too late now. Yesterday evening, if you must know, in New York City, I asked another girl to marry me.”

“New York City,” Calderwood said, resentfully. “Always New York City.”

“Well, do you want me to sit here and wait until the ladies come home?” Rudolph crossed his arms menacacingly.

“This could cost you a lot of money, Rudy,” Calderwood said.

“Okay, it could cost me a lot of money.” Rudolph said it firmly, but he could feel the sick quiver inside his stomach.

“And this—this lady in New York,” Calderwood said, sounding plaintive. “Has she accepted you?”

“No.”

“Love, by God!” The insanity of the tender emotion, the cross-purposes of desire, the sheer anarchy of sex, was too much for Calderwood’s piety. “In two months you’ll forget her and then maybe you and Virginia …”

“She said no for yesterday,” Rudolph said. “But she’s thinking it over. Well, should I wait for Mrs. Calderwood and Virginia?” He still had his arms crossed. It kept his hands from trembling.

Calderwood pushed the inkstand irritably back to the edge of the desk. “Obviously you’re telling the truth, Rudy,” Calderwood said. “I don’t know what possessed my foolish daughter. Ah—I know what my wife will say—I brought her up all wrong. I made her shy. I over-protected her. If I were to tell you some of the arguments I’ve had with that woman in this house. It was different when I was a boy, I’ll tell you that. Girls didn’t go around, telling their mothers they were in love with people who never even looked at them. The damned movies. They rot women’s brains. No, you don’t have to wait. I’ll handle it alone. Go ahead. I have to compose myself.”

Rudolph stood up and Calderwood with him. “Do you want some advice?” Rudolph asked.

“You’re always giving me advice,” Calderwood said petulantly. “When I dream it’s always about you whispering in my ear. For years. Sometimes I wish you’d never showed up that summer at the store. What advice?”

“Let Virginia go down to New York and learn to be a secretary and leave her alone for a year or two.”

“Great,” Calderwood said bitterly. “You can say that. You have no daughters. I’ll see you to the door.”

At the door, he put his hand on Rudolph’s arm. “Rudy,” he said, pleading, “if the lady in New York says no, you’ll think about Virginia, won’t you? Maybe she’s an idiot, but I can’t stand to see her unhappy.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said ambiguously, and went down to his car.

Mr. Calderwood was still standing in the open doorway, lit by the frugal hall light, as Rudolph drove away.

He was hungry, but decided to wait before going to a restaurant for dinner. He wanted to return to the house and see how Billy was doing. He also wanted to tell him that he had talked to Gretchen and that he would be going out to California in two or three days. The boy would sleep better after hearing that news, the specter of the school no longer hanging over him.

When he opened the front door with his key he heard voices in the kitchen. He went silently through the living and dining rooms and listened outside the kitchen door. “There’s one thing I like to see in a growing boy—” Rudolph recognized his mother’s voice—“and that’s a good appetite. I’m happy to see you appreciate food, Billy. Martha, give him another slice of meat and some more salad. No back talk, Billy, about not eating salad. In my house, all children eat salad.”

Holy God! Rudolph thought.

“There’s another thing I like to see in a boy, Billy,” his mother went on. “Old as I am, and I should be beyond such feminine weaknesses—and that’s good looks combined with good manners.” The voice was coquettish, cooing. “And you know whom you remind me of—and I never said so to his face for fear of spoiling him—there’s nothing worse than a vain child—you remind me of your Uncle Rudolph and he was by common agreement the handsomest boy in town and he grew up into the handsomest young man.”

“Everybody says I look like my father,” Billy said, with the bluntness of his fourteen years, but not aggressively. From his tone he was obviously feeling at home.

“I have not had the good fortune ever to meet your father,” the mother said, a slight chill in her speech. “No doubt there must be a certain resemblance here and there, but fundamentally you resemble my branch of the family, especially Rudolph. Doesn’t he, Martha?”

“I can see some signs,” Martha said. She was not out to give the mother a perfect Sunday night supper.

“Around the eyes,” the mother said. “And the intelligent mouth. In spite of the difference in the hair. I never think hair makes too much difference. There’s not much character in hair.”

Rudolph pushed the door and went into the kitchen. Billy was seated at one end of the table, flanked by the two women. Hair flattened down wet after his bath, Billy looked shining clean and smiling as he packed into his food. The mother had put on a sober-brown dress and was consciously playing grandmother. Martha looked less grumpy than usual, her mouth less thin, welcoming a bit of youth into the household.