Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 38 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

The half hour took a long time passing.

The knock on the door was not Pappy’s. “Who’s there?” Thomas whispered. He was uncertain about the tone of his voice after not talking to anyone but Pappy for a week. And you didn’t hold long conversations with Pappy.

“It’s me. Rudy.”

Thomas unlocked the door. Rudolph came into the room and Thomas locked the door before they shook hands. Thomas didn’t ask him-to sit down. Rudolph didn’t need a haircut, he wasn’t going bald and he was wearing a pressed seersucker country-gentleman kind of suit because the weather had turned warm. He must have a laundry bill a yard long, Thomas thought.

Rudolph smiled tentatively. “That man downstairs is pretty mysterious about you,” he said.

“He knows what he’s doing.”

“I was here about two weeks ago.”

“I know,” Thomas said.

“You didn’t call.”

“No.”

Rudolph looked curiously around the room. The expression on his face was peculiar, as though he didn’t quite believe what he saw. “I suppose you’re hiding from somebody,” he said.

“No comment,” Thomas said. “Like they say in the newspapers.”

“Can I help you?”

“No.” What could he say to his brother? Go look for a man called Falconetti, longitude 26.24, latitude 38.31, depth ten thousand feet? Go tell some gangster in Las Vegas with a sawed-off shotgun in the trunk of his car he was sorry he’d beaten up Gary Quayles, he wouldn’t do it again?

“I’m glad to see you, Tom,” Rudolph said, “although this isn’t exactly a social visit.”

“I gathered that.”

“Mom is dying,” Rudolph said. “She wants to see you.”

“Where is she?”

“In the hospital at Whitby. I’m on my way there now and if you …”

“What do you mean dying? Dying today or dying next week or dying in a couple of years?”

“Dying any minute,” Rudolph said. “She’s had two heart attacks.”

“Oh, Christ.” It had never occurred to Thomas that his mother could die. He even had a scarf that he’d bought for her in Cannes, in his sea bag. The scarf had an old map of the Mediterranean on it, in three colors. People you were bringing presents to didn’t die.

“I know you’ve seen her from time to time,” Rudolph said, “and that you’ve written her letters. She turned religious, you know, and she wants to make her peace with everybody before she goes. She asked for Gretchen, too.”

“She doesn’t have to make her peace with me,” Thomas said. “I got nothing against the old lady. It wasn’t her fault. I gave her a rough time. And what with our god-damn father …”

“Well,” Rudolph said, “do you want to come with me? I have the car downstairs in front of the door.”

Thomas nodded.

“You’d better pack some things in a bag,” Rudolph said. “Nobody knows exactly how long …”

“Give me ten minutes,” Thomas said. “And don’t wait in front of the door. Drive around for awhile. Then in ten minutes come up Fourth Avenue going north. I’ll be walking that way, near the curb. If you don’t see me, go back two blocks below here and drive up Fourth Avenue again. Make sure the door on the right side isn’t locked. Go slow. What kind of car you got?”

“A Chevrolet, 1960. Green.”

Thomas unlocked the door. “Don’t talk to anybody on the way out.”

When he’d locked the door again, he threw some things into his shaving kit. He didn’t have a valise, so he stuffed two shirts and some underwear and socks and the scarf, wrapped in tissue paper, into the bag in which Pappy had brought the last bottle of bourbon. He took a gulp of bourbon to steady his nerves. He decided that he might need the whiskey on the trip, so he put the half-empty bottle in another bag.

He put on a tie and the blue suit which he had bought in Marseilles. If your mother was dying you had to be dressed for the occasion. He took the Smith and Wesson out of the dresser drawer, checked the safety, stuck it in his belt, under his jacket, and unlocked the door. He peeked out. There was nobody in the hallway. He went out, locked the door and dropped the key into his pocket.

Pappy was behind the desk but didn’t say anything when he saw Thomas going through the lobby carrying the shaving kit under his left arm and the paper bags in his left hand. Thomas blinked as the sun hit him outside the hotel. He walked quickly, but not as though he was trying to get away from anything, toward Fourth Avenue.

He had only walked a block and a half up the Avenue when the Chevy drew up alongside. He took one last look around and jumped inside.

Once they got out of the city he began to enjoy the trip. The breeze was cool, the countryside light green. Your mother was dying and you were sorry about that, but your body didn’t know anything about mothers dying, it just knew it liked to be cool and moving and out of prison and breathing country air. He took the bottle out of the bag and offered it to Rudolph, but Rudolph shook his head. They hadn’t talked much. Rudolph had told him that Gretchen had remarried and that her husband had been killed not long ago. He also told Thomas that he had just gotten married. The Jordaches never learn, Thomas thought.

Rudølph drove fast and he concentrated on the road. Thomas took a swig from the bottle from time to time, not enough to start getting drunk, just enough to keep him feeling good.

They were going seventy when they heard the siren behind them. “Damn it,” Rudolph said, as he pulled over to the side.

The State trooper came up to them and said, “Good afternoon, sir.” Rudolph was the sort of man cops said, “Good afternoon, sir,” to. “Your license, please,” the trooper said, but he didn’t examine the license until he’d taken a good look at the bottle on the front seat between Rudolph and Thomas. “You were going seventy in a fifty-mile zone,” he said, staring coldly at Thomas, with his wind-beaten face, busted nose, and his Marseilles blue suit.

“I’m afraid I was, officer,” Rudolph said.

“You fellas’ve been drinking,” the trooper said. It was not a question.

“I haven’t touched a drop,” Rudolph said, “and I’m driving.”

“Who’s he?” The trooper pointed with the hand holding Rudolph’s license at Thomas.

“He’s my brother,” Rudolph said.

“You got any identification?” The trooper’s voice was hard and suspicious as he spoke to Thomas.

Thomas dug into his pocket and produced his passport. The trooper opened it as though it were loaded. “What’re you doing carrying your passport around?”

“I’m a seaman.”

The trooper gave Rudolph his license, but put Thomas’s passport in his pocket. “I’ll hold onto this. And I’ll take that.” He gestured toward the bottle and Rudolph gave it to him. “Now turn around and follow me.”

“Officer,” Rudolph said, “why don’t you just give me the ticket for speeding and let us go on our way. It’s absolutely imperative for us to …”

“I said turn around and follow me,” the trooper said. He strode back to his car, where another trooper was sitting at the wheel.

They had to drive back more than ten miles the way they had come, to the State Troopers’ barracks. Thomas managed to get the pistol out from under his belt and slide it under the seat without Rudolph’s noticing it. If the cops searched the car, it would be six months to a year, at least. Concealed weapon. No permit. The trooper who arrested them explained to a sergeant that they had been speeding and that they had committed a further violation by having an opened bottle of liquor in a moving vehicle and that he wanted a sobriety test run on them. The Sergeant was impressed by Rudolph and was apologetic, but he smelled both their breaths and made them take a breathing test and he made Thomas piss in a bottle.

It was dark by the time they got out of the building, without the whiskey, but with a ticket for speeding. The Sergeant had decided neither of them was drunk, but Thomas saw that the trooper who had arrested them took a long hard look at his passport before he gave it back to him. Thomas was unhappy about it, because there were plenty of cops who traded with the gangs, but there was nothing he could do about it.

“You should’ve known better than to offer me a ride,” Thomas said when they were back on the road. “I get arrested for breathing.”

“Forget it,” Rudolph said shortly and stepped on the gas.

Thomas felt under the seat. The gun was still there. The car hadn’t been searched. Maybe his luck was changing.

They got to the hospital a little after nine but the nurse at the entrance stopped Rudolph and whispered to him for awhile. Rudolph said, “Thank you,” in a funny voice, then came over to Thomas and said, “Mom died an hour ago.”

II

“The last thing she said,” Gretchen was saying, “was, ‘You tell your father, wherever he is, that I forgave him.’ Then she went into a coma and never came out of it.”

“She was nutty on the subject,” Thomas said. “She asked me to be on the lookout for him in Europe.”

It was late that night and the three of them were sitting in the living room of the house that Rudolph had shared, with his mother for the last few years. Billy was asleep upstairs and Martha was weeping in the kitchen for the woman who had been her daily opponent and tormentor. Billy had begged to be allowed to come East to see his grandmother for one last time and Gretchen had decided that death was a part of a child’s education, too, and brought him along. Her mother had forgiven Gretchen, too, before they had put her in the oxygen tent for the last time.

Rudolph had already made the arrangements for the funeral. He had spoken to Father McDonnell and consented to the whole rigamarole, as he had told Jean when he had called her in New York. Eulogy, Mass, the whole thing. But he stopped at having the windows of the house closed and the blinds drawn. He was only going to coddle his mother up to a certain point. Jean had said morosely she’d come up if he wanted but he had said there was no sense in that.

The cable in Rome had had an unsettling effect on her. “Families,” she said. “Always goddamn families.” She had drunk a great deal that night and all the way back on the plane. If he hadn’t held her he was sure she would have fallen going down the steps from the plane. When he left her in New York she was in bed, looking frail and worn out. Now, facing his brother and sister in the hushed house he had shared with the dead woman, Rudolph was thankful his wife was not with him.

“After all this time,” Thomas said, “when your mother dies you’re pissing in a bottle for a cop.” Thomas was the only one drinking, but he was sober.

Gretchen had kissed him at the hospital, and held him close and in her grief she wasn’t the snooty, superior woman, looking down her nose at him, that he had remembered, but warm, loving, familiar. Thomas felt there was a chance they would forget the past and be reconciled finally. He had enough enemies in the world as it was, without keeping up a running battle with his family.

“I dread the funeral,” Rudolph said. “All those old ladies she used to play bridge with. And what the hell will that idiot McDonnell have to say?”

“She was broken in spirit by poverty and lack of love and she was devoted to God,” Gretchen said.

“If I can keep him to that,” Rudolph said.

“Excuse me,” Thomas said. He went out of the room and to the guest bedroom he was sharing with Billy. Gretchen was in the second extra room. Nobody had gone into their mother’s room yet.

“He seems different, doesn’t he?” Gretchen said, when she and Rudolph were alone.

“Yeah.”

“Subdued. Beaten, somehow.”

“Whatever it’ is,” Rudolph said, “it’s an improvement.”

They heard Thomas’s footsteps coming down the stairs and they broke off the conversation. Thomas came into the room, carrying something soft wrapped in tissue paper. “Here,” he said, handing it to Gretchen, “here’s something for you.”

Gretchen unwrapped the gift, spread out the scarf with the old map of the Mediterranean on it in three colors. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s lovely.” She got up and kissed him. For some reason the kiss unnerved him. He felt he might do something crazy, like breaking down and crying or smashing furniture or going up and getting the Smith and Wesson and shooting out the window at the moon. “I bought it in Cannes,” Thomas said, “for Mom.”

“Cannes?” Rudolph said. “When were you in Cannes?”

Thomas told him and they figured out that they must have been there at the same time, at least one day. “That’s terrible,” Rudolph said. “Brothers just passing each other by like that. From now on, Tom, we’ve got to keep in touch with each other.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. He knew he wanted to keep seeing Gretchen, but Rudolph was another matter. He had suffered too much at Rudolph’s hands. “Yeah,” Thomas said. “I’ll have my secretary send you a copy of my itinerary in the future.” He stood up. “I’m going to bed. I’ve had a long day.”

He went up the stairs. He wasn’t all that tired. He just didn’t want to be in the same room with Rudolph. If he’d known where the funeral home was, he’d have slipped out of the house and gone there and sat up all night with the body of his mother.

He didn’t want to wake Gretchen’s kid, asleep in blue pajamas in the other bed, so he didn’t turn on the light as he undressed, but just left the door open a little so that enough light came in from the hallway to see what he was doing. He didn’t have any pajamas and he wondered if the kid would comment on his sleeping in his shorts when he woke in the morning. Probably not. The kid seemed like a nice boy and he wouldn’t know automatically that he was supposed to have a low opinion of his uncle. The kid smelled clean, soapy. He had tried to comfort Gretchen at the hospital, hugging her, both of them crying. He didn’t remember ever having hugged his mother.

Looking at the kid made him think about Wesley. He had to see him. He had to do something about him. He couldn’t let him be brought up all his life by a tramp like Teresa.

He closed the door and got into the soft, clean bed. Rudolph slept in a bed like this every night of his life.

III

Teddy Boylan was at the funeral. So were a great many other people. The newspapers in Whitby and Port Philip had considered the news of the death of the mother of that leading citizen Rudolph Jordache important enough to display the obituary prominently. There wasn’t much to say about Mary Jordache, but the newspapers made up for it with descriptions of Rudolph’s honors and accomplishments, Chairman of the Board of Dee Cee Enterprises, President Junior Chamber of Commerce of Whitby, graduate cum laude, Whitby University. Member of the Board of Trustees, Whitby University, Member Town Planning Committee of both Whitby and Port Philip, bold and forward-looking merchant and real-estate developer. There was even a mention of the fact that Rudolph had run the two twenty for the Port Philip track team and that he had played the trumpet in a jazz combination called the River Five in the middle 1940’s.

Poor Mom, Rudolph thought, as he surveyed the crowded church, she would have enjoyed seeing so many people come out for a ceremony in her honor.

Father McDonnell was worse and longer than Rudolph feared and he tried not to listen to the lies spoken above the flower-banked coffin. He hoped Gretchen wasn’t taking it too hard, remembering the other coffin in the crematorium in California. He glanced at her. There was no sign on her face that she was remembering anything.

The birds were singing in the cemetery trees, pleased with the onset of summer. At the grave, as the coffin was being lowered, to the sobs of the bridge ladies, Rudolph and Thomas and Gretchen stood side by side, Gretchen holding Billy by the hand.

Boylan caught up with them as they walked away from the grave toward the line of waiting black limousines. “I don’t want to intrude,” he said, as they halted, “Gretchen, Rudolph—I just wanted to say how sorry I was. Such a young woman.”

For a moment, Rudolph was confused. His mother had looked ancient to him, was ancient. She had been old at thirty, had started dying before that. For the first time her real age made a conscious impression on him. Fifty-six. Just about Boylan’s age. No wonder Boylan said, “Such a young woman.”

“Thank you, Teddy,” Rudolph said. He shook hands with Boylan. Boylan didn’t look ready for the grave. His hair was the same color as always, his face was tanned and unlined, his carriage was as erect, his shoes were as well shined as ever.

“How’ve you been, Gretchen?” Boylan asked. The mourners had stopped behind the group, not wishing to push past them on the narrow graveled walk between the gravestones. As usual, Boylan accepted without thinking about it the fact that others waited on his pleasure.

“Very well, thank you, Teddy,” Gretchen answered.

“I take it this is your son.” Boylan smiled at Billy, who stared at him soberly.

“Billy, this is Mr. Boylan,” Gretchen said. “He’s an old friend.”

“How do you do, Billy.” Boylan shook the boy’s hand. “I hope we meet again on a happier occasion.”

Billy said nothing. Thomas was regarding Boylan through narrowed eyes, hiding, Rudolph thought, what could only have been a desire to laugh under the lowered lids. Was Thomas remembering the night he had seen Boylan parading naked around the house on the hill, preparing a drink to take to Gretchen, in bed upstairs? Graveyard thoughts.

“My brother, Thomas,” Rudolph said.

“Oh, yes,” Boylan said. He didn’t offer to shake hands. He spoke to Rudolph. “If you have the time, Rudy,” he said, “with all your multifarious activities, perhaps you could give me a ring and we could get together for dinner sometime. I want to confess that I was wrong and you were right about your choice of career. And bring Gretchen along, if she’s available. Please.”

“I’m leaving for California,” Gretchen said.

“What a pity. Well, I won’t keep you any longer.” He made a little bow and stepped back, a slender, expensively maintained figure, brilliantly out of place, even in his dark suit, in the drab march of small-town mourners.

As they walked toward the first limousine, from which Rudolph had steadfastly barred Father McDonnell, Gretchen realized, with a little shock, how much alike Rudolph and Boylan were, not in looks, of course, and she hoped not in character, but in attitudes, turns of speech, gestures, choice of clothes, manner of moving. She wondered if Rudolph knew how much he owed to the man and whether he would be pleased if she pointed it out to him.

She thought about Boylan on the trip back to Rudolph’s house. She supposed she ought to think about her mother, whose grave was being filled with earth at that moment in the sunny cemetery, full of the summery sound of birds. But she thought about Boylan. There was no sense of loving or desire, but no feeling, either, of distaste or hatred or wish for revenge. It was like taking an old girlhood toy, a special doll, out of a forgotten trunk and holding it curiously, trying to remember how you felt when it meant something to you and not succeeding and deciding to throw it away or give it to some later child down the block. First love. Be my Valentine.

When they got to the house they all decided they needed a drink. Billy, who looked pale and drawn, complained that he had a headache and went upstairs and lay down. Martha, despite her unceasing flow of tears, went into the kitchen to prepare a cold lunch.

Rudolph made martinis for Gretchen and himself and gave some bourbon over ice to Thomas, who had taken off his coat, which was uncomfortably tight across his massive shoulders. He had unbuttoned his collar, too, and was sitting hunched forward on a straight-backed wooden chair, his elbows resting on his thighs, his hands hanging between his legs. He makes every place he sits look like a stool in the corner of a ring, Rudolph thought, as he gave him the drink.

They raised their glasses, although they did not mention their mother.

They had decided to leave for New York all together after lunch, because they didn’t want to be in the house for the calls of condolence. Great heaps of flowers had been delivered, but Rudolph had instructed Martha to send all but one bunch to the hospital where his mother had died. The flowers he had kept, daffodils, made a little yellow explosion on the coffee table in front of the couch. The windows were open and the sun streamed in, a smell of warm grass came in from the lawn. The low-beamed eighteenth-century room was handsome, subdued and orderly, not quaint or cluttered, not aggressively modern, Rudolph’s taste.

“What are you going to do with the house?” Gretchen asked. “Now?”

Rudolph shrugged. “Keep it, I suppose. I still have to be up here a good part of the time. Although, it’s a lot too big for me now. Would you like to come and live here?”

Gretchen shook her head. The debates with the lawyers went on and on. “I’m committed to California.”

“What about you?” Rudolph asked Thomas.

“Me?” Thomas said, surprised. “What the hell would I do here?”

“You’d find something.” Rudolph was careful not to say, “I’ll find you something.” He sipped at the martini, grateful for it. “You must admit it’s an improvement on where you stay in New York.”

“I don’t plan to stay there long. Anyway, this is no place for me. The people here look at me as though I’m an animal in the zoo.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Rudolph said.

“Your friend Boylan wouldn’t shake my hand at the cemetery. If you don’t shake a man’s hand in a cemetery, where the hell would you shake his hand?”

“He’s a special case.”

“He sure is.” Thomas began to laugh. The laughter wasn’t loud, but it was somehow alarming in the atmosphere.

“What’re you laughing about?” Rudolph asked as Gretchen looked at Thomas puzzledly.

“The next time you see him,” Thomas said, “tell him he was right not to shake my hand.”

“What’re you talking about, Tom?”

“Ask him if he remembers the night of VE Day. The night they burned a cross on his property and there was the fire.”

“What’re you saying?” Rudolph asked sharply. “That you did it?”

“Me and a friend.” Thomas stood up and went over to the sideboard and refilled his glass.

“Why did you do it?” Gretchen asked.

“Boyish high spirits,” Thomas said, as he put in some more ice. “We just won the war.”

“But why did you pick on him?” Gretchen asked.

Thomas fiddled with his drink, pushing the ice down, his back to Gretchen. “He happened to be involved with a lady I knew at the time,” he said. “I didn’t approve of the involvement. Should I mention the lady’s name?”

“There’s no need,” Gretchen said quietly.

“Who was the friend?” Rudolph asked.

“What difference does it make?”

“It was that Claude, Claude What’s-his-name that you used to hang around with, wasn’t it?”

Thomas smiled, but didn’t answer. He drank standing up, leaning against the sideboard.

“He disappeared right after that,” Rudolph said. “I remember now.”

“He sure did,” said Thomas. “And I disappeared right after him, if you remember that.”

“Somebody knew you boys had done it,” Rudolph said.

“Somebody.” Thomas nodded ironically.

“You’re lucky you didn’t go to jail,” Gretchen said.

“That’s what Pa was intimating,” said Thomas. “When he kicked me out of town. Well, there’s nothing like a funeral to get people to remembering the good old days, is there?”

“Tom,” Gretchen said, “you’re not like that any more, are you?”

Thomas crossed over to where Gretchen was sitting on the couch and bent over and kissed her forehead gently. “I hope I’m not,” he said. Then he straightened up and said, “I’ll go up and see how the kid’s doing. I like him. He’ll probably feel better if he’s not alone.”

He took his drink with him as he went upstairs.

Rudolph mixed two more martinis for himself and Gretchen. He was glad to have something to do with his hands. His brother was not a comfortable man to be with. Even after he went out of a room, he left an air of tension, of anguish.

“God,” Gretchen said finally, “it doesn’t seem possible that we all have the same genes, does it?”

“The runt of the litter,” Rudolph said. “Who is it—you, me—him?”

“We were awful, Rudy, you and I,” Gretchen said.

Rudolph shrugged. “Our mother was awful. Our father was awful. You knew why they were awful, or at least you thought you knew why—but that didn’t change matters. I try not to be awful.”

“You’re saved by your luck,” Gretchen said.

“I worked pretty hard,” Rudolph said defensively.

“So did Colin. The difference is, you’ll never run into a tree.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Gretchen, that I’m not dead.” He couldn’t hide the hurt in his voice.

“Don’t take it the wrong way, please. I’m glad that there’s somebody in the family who’ll never run into a tree. It’s certainly not Tom. And I know it isn’t me. I’m the worst, maybe. I carried the luck of the whole family. If I hadn’t been on a certain road at lunchtime near Port Philip one Saturday afternoon, all our lives would’ve been completely different. Did you know that?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Teddy Boylan,” she said matter-of-factly. “He picked me up. I am what I am today largely because of him. I’ve slept with the men I’ve slept with because of Teddy Boylan. I ran away to New York because of Teddy Boylan. I met Willie Abbott because of Teddy Boylan and despised him finally because he wasn’t different enough from Teddy Boylan and I loved Colin because he was the opposite of Teddy Boylan. All those scolding articles I wrote that everybody thought were so smart, were digs at America because it produced men like Teddy Boylan and made life easy for men like Teddy Boylan.”

“That’s maniacal …. The luck of the family! Why don’t you go consult the gypsies and wear an amulet and be done with it?”

“I don’t need any gypsies,” Gretchen went on. “If I hadn’t met Teddy Boylan and laid him, do you think Tom would have burned a cross on his hill? Do you think he’d have been sent away like a criminal if there’d never been a Teddy Boylan? Do you think he’d be just what he is today if he’d stayed in Port Philip with his family around him?”

“Maybe not,” Rudolph admitted. “But there would’ve been something else.”

“Only there wasn’t anything else. There was Teddy Boylan, screwing his sister. As for you—”

“I know all I have to know about me,” Rudolph said.

“You do? You think you’d have gone to college without Teddy Boylan’s money? You think you’d dress the way you do or be so interested in success and money and how to get there the fastest way possible without Teddy Boylan? Do you think somebody else would have sought you out and taken you to concerts and art galleries and pampered you through school, and given you all that lordly confidence in yourself, if it hadn’t been Teddy Boylan?” She finished her second martini.

“Okay,” Rudolph said, “I’ll build a monument in his honor.”

“Maybe you should. You certainly can afford it now, with your wife’s money.”

“That’s below the belt,” Rudolph said angrily. “You know I didn’t have the faintest idea …”

“That’s what I was talking about,” Gretchen said. “Your Jordache awfulness is turned into something else by your luck.”

“How about your Jordache awfulness?”

Gretchen’s entire tone changed. The sharpness went out of her voice, her face became sad, soft, younger. “When I was with Colin I wasn’t awful,” she said.

“No.”

“I don’t think I’m ever going to find a Colin again.”

Rudolph reached out and touched her hand, his anger blunted by his sister’s continuing sorrow. “You wouldn’t believe me,” Rudolph said, “if I told you I think you will.”

“No,” she said.

“What’re you going to do? Just sit and mourn forever?”

“No.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“I’m going back to school.”

“School?” Rudolph said incredulously. “At your age?”

“Postgraduate school,” Gretchen said. “At UCLA. That way I can live at home and take care of Billy, all at the same time. I’ve been to see them and they’ve agreed to take me.”

“To study what?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“I’m not laughing at anything today,” Rudolph said.

“I got the idea from the father of a boy in Billy’s class,” Gretchen said. “He’s a psychiatrist.”

“Oh, Christ,” Rudolph said.

“That’s more of your luck,” Gretchen said. To be able to say, Oh, Christ, when you hear the word psychiatrist.”

“Sorry.”

“He works part time at a clinic. With lay analysts. They’re people who aren’t M.D.’s, but who’ve studied analysis, who’ve been analyzed, and are licensed to treat cases that don’t call for deep analysis. Group therapy, intelligent children who refuse to learn how to read or write or are wilfully destructive, kids from broken homes who have retreated into themselves, girls who have been made frigid by their religion or by some early sexual trauma, and who are breaking up with their husbands, Negro and Mexican children who start school far behind the others and never catch up and lose their sense of identity …”

“So,” Rudolph said. He had been listening impatiently. “So, you’re going to go out and solve the Negro problem and the Mexican problem and the religious problem all on your own, armed with a piece of paper from UCLA, and …”

“I will try to solve one problem,” Gretchen said, “or maybe two problems, or maybe a hundred problems. And I’ll be solving my own problem at the same time. I’ll be busy and I’ll be doing something useful.”

“Not something useless like your brother,” Rudolph said, stung. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Not at all,” Gretchen said. “You’re being useful in your own way. Let me be useful in mine, that’s all.”

“How long is all this going to take?”

“Two years, minimum, for the degree,” Gretchen said. “Then finishing the analysis …”

“You’ll never finish,” he said. “You’ll find a man and …”

“Maybe,” Gretchen said. “I doubt it, but maybe …”

Martha came in, red eyed, and said that lunch was ready on the dining-room table. Gretchen went upstairs to get Billy and Thomas and when they came down the entire family went into the dining room and had lunch, everybody being polite to everybody else, saying, “Please pass the mustard,” and “Thanks,” and “No, I think that’s enough for me right now.”

After lunch, they got into the car and drove out of Whitby for New York, leaving their dead behind them.

They reached the Hotel Algonquin at a little after seven. Gretchen and Billy were staying there, because there was no room for them in Rudolph’s one-bedroom apartment, where Jean was waiting for him. Rudolph asked Gretchen if she and Billy wanted to have dinner with him and Jean, but Gretchen said this was no day to meet a new sister-in-law. Rudolph invited Thomas, too, but Thomas, who was sitting low in the front seat, said, “I have a date.”