Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 39 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

When Billy got out of the car, Thomas got out too, and put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “I have a son, too, Billy,” Thomas said. “A lot younger than you. If he grows up anything like you, I’ll be a proud father.”

For the first time in three days, Billy smiled.

“Tom,” Gretchen said, standing under the hotel’s canopy, “am I ever going to see you again?”

“Sure,” Thomas said. “I know where to reach you. I’ll call you.”

Gretchen and her son went into the hotel, a porter carrying the two bags.

“I’ll get a cab from here, Rudy,” Thomas said. “You must be anxious to get home to your wife.”

“I’d like a drink,” Rudolph said. “Let’s go in the bar here and …”

“Thanks. I’m pressed for time,” Thomas said. “I got to be on my way.” He kept peering over Rudolph’s shoulder at the traffic on Sixth Avenue.

“Tom,” Rudolph insisted, “I have to talk to you.”

“I thought we were all talked out,” Thomas said. He tried to hail a cab, but the driver was off duty. “You got nothing more to say to me.”

“No?” Rudolph said savagely. “Don’t I? What if I told you you’re worth about sixty thousand dollars as of the close of the market today? Would that make you change your mind?”

“You’re a great little old joker, aren’t you, Rudy?” Thomas said.

“Come on in to the bar. I’m not joking.”

Thomas followed Rudolph into the bar.

The waiter brought them their whiskies and then Thomas said, “Let’s hear.”

“That goddamn five thousand dollars you gave me,” Rudolph said. “You remember that?”

“Blood money,” Thomas said. “Sure I remember.”

“You said to do anything I wanted with it,” Rudolph said. “I think I recall your exact words, ‘Piss on it, blow it on dames, give it to your favorite charity …’”

“That sounds like me.” Thomas grinned.

“Well, what I wanted to do with it was invest it,” Rudolph said.

“Always a head for business,” Thomas said. “Even as a kid.”

“I invested it in your name, Tom,” Rudolph said deliberately. “In my own company. There haven’t been much in the way of dividends so far, but what there’ve been I’ve plowed back. But the stock has been divided four times and it’s gone up and up. I tell you, you have about sixty thousand dollars in shares that you own outright.

Thomas gulped down his drink. He closed his eyes and pushed at his eyeballs with his fingers.

“I tried to get hold of you time and time again in the past two years,” Rudolph said. “But the phone company said your phone was disconnected and when I sent letters to your old address, they always came back with a stamp on them saying ‘Unknown at this address.’ And Ma never told me she was in touch with you until she went to the hospital. I read the sports pages, but you seemed to have dropped out of sight.”

“I was campaigning in the West,” Thomas said, opening his eyes. The room looked blurry now.

“Actually, I was just as glad I couldn’t find you,” Rudolph said, “because I knew the stock would keep going up and I didn’t want you to be tempted to sell prematurely. In fact, I don’t think you ought to sell now.”

“You mean I can go somewhere tomorrow,” Thomas asked, “and just say I got some stock I want to sell and somebody’ll give me sixty thousand dollars, cash?”

“I told you I don’t advise you to …”

“Rudy,” Thomas said, “you’re a great guy and all that and maybe I take back a lot of what I’ve been thinking about you all these years, but right now I ain’t listening to any advice. All I want is for you go give me the address of the place where that man is waiting to give me that sixty thousand dollars cash.”

Rudolph gave up. He wrote out Johnny Heath’s office address, and gave it to Thomas. “Go to this place tomorrow,” he said, “I’ll call Heath and he’ll be expecting you. Please, Tom, be careful.”

“Don’t worry about me, Rudy. From now on I’ll be so careful, you won’t even recognize me.” Thomas ordered another round of drinks. When he lifted his arm to call the waiter, his jacket slipped back and Rudolph saw the pistol stuck in the belt. But he didn’t say anything. He had done what he could for his brother. He could do no more.

“Wait a minute for me here, will you?” Thomas said. “I have to make a phone call.”

He went into the lobby and found a booth and looked up the number of TWA. He dialed the number and asked about flights the next day to Paris. The girl at TWA told him there was a flight at eight P.M. and asked him if he wished to make a reservation. He said, “No thank you,” and hung up, then called the Y.M.C.A. and asked for Dwyer. It was a long time before Dwyer came to the phone and Thomas was just about ready to hang up the phone and forget him.

“Hello,” Dwyer said, “who’s this?”

“Tom. Now listen to …”

“Tom!” Dwyer said excitedly. “I’ve been hanging around and hanging around waiting to hear from you. Jesus, I was worried. I thought maybe you were dead …”

“Will you stop running off at the mouth?” Thomas said. “Listen to me. There’s a TWA plane leaving Idlewild for Paris tomorrow night at eight o’clock. You be there at the Reservations Counter at six-thirty. All packed.”

“You meant you got reservations? On a plane?”

“I don’t have them yet,” Thomas said, wishing Dwyer wasn’t so excitable. “We’ll get them there. I don’t want my name on any lists all day.”

“Oh, sure, sure, Tom, I understand.”

“Just be there. On time.”

“I’ll be there. Don’t you worry.”

Thomas hung up.

He went back to the bar and insisted on paying for the drinks.

Outside, on the sidewalk, just before he got into the cab, that drew up next to the curb, he shook hands with his brother.

“Listen, Tom,” Rudolph said, “let’s have dinner this week. I want you to meet my wife.”

“Great idea,” Thomas said. “I’ll call you Friday.”

He got into the cab and told the driver, “Fourth Avenue and Eighteenth Street.”

He settled back in the cab luxuriously, holding on to the paper bag with his belongings. When you had sixty thousand dollars everybody invited you to dinner. Even your brother.

PART FOUR

Chapter 1

1963

It was raining when she drove up to the house, the torrential, tropical rain of California that flattened flowers, bounced off the tiles of roofs, like ricocheting silvery bullets and sent bulldozed hillsides sliding down into neighbors’ gardens and swimming pools. Colin had died two years ago but she still automatically looked into the open garage to see if his car was there.

She left her books in the 1959 Ford and hurried to the front door, her hair soaking, even though it was only a few yards. Once inside she took off her coat and shook her wet hair. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon, but the house was dark and she turned on the front hall light. Billy had gone off on a camping trip to the Sierras with friends for the weekend and she hoped that the weather was better up in the mountains than down on the coast.

She reached into the mailbox. There were some bills, some circulars, a letter from Venice, in Rudolph’s handwriting.

She went into the living room, turning on lights as she went. She kicked off her wet shoes, made herself a Scotch and soda, and seated herself on the couch, her legs curled up under her, pleased with the warmly lit room. There were no whispers in the shadows anymore. She had won the battle with Colin’s ex-wife and she was going to stay in the house. The judge had awarded her a temporary allowance from the estate, against a final settlement, and she didn’t have to depend upon Rudolph anymore.

She opened Rudolph’s letter. It was a long one. When he was in America, he preferred to phone, but now that he was wandering around Europe, he used the mails. He must have had a lot of time on his hands, because he wrote often. She had had letters from him from London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Paris, St.-Jean-de-Luz, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Geneva, Florence, Rome, Ischia, Athens, and from little inns in towns that she had never heard of where he and Jean stopped en route for the night.

“Dear Gretchen”—she read—“It’s raining in Venice and Jean is out in it taking pictures. She says it’s the best time to get the quality of Venice, water on water. I’m snug in my hotel, undriven by art. Jean also likes to take pictures of people for the series she’s doing under the worst possible circumstances. Hardship and age, she tells me, preferably the two together, tell more about the character of a people and a country than anything else. I do not.attempt to argue with her. I prefer handsome young people in sunshine, myself, but I am only her Philistine husband.

“I am enjoying to the utmost the glorious fruits of sloth. Within me, after all the years of hustle and toil, I have discovered a happy, lazy man, content to look at two masterpieces a day, to lose myself in a foreign city, to sit for hours at a cafe table like any Frenchman or Italian, to pretend I know something about art and haggle in galleries for paintings by new men whom nobody ever heard about and whose works will probably make my living room in Whitby a chamber of horrors when I eventually get back there.

“Curiously enough, with all our traveling, and despite the fact that Pa came from Germany and probably had as much German in him as American, I have no desire to visit the country. Jean has been there, but isn’t anxious to go back. She says it’s too much like America, in all essential ways. I’ll have to take her opinion on the subject.

“She is the dearest woman alive and I am terribly uxorious and find myself carting her cameras around so as not to miss a moment with her. Except when it rains, of course. She has the sharpest of eyes and I have seen and understood more about Europe in six months with her than I would in sixty years alone. She has absolutely no literary sense and never reads a newspaper and the theater bores her, so I fill in that section of our communal life. She also drives our little Volkswagen very well, so I get a chance to moon and sightsee and enjoy things like the Alps and the valley of the Rhone without worrying about falling off the road. We have a pact. She drives in the morning and drinks a bottle of wine at lunch and I drive in the afternoon, sober.

“We don’t stay in the fancy places, as we did on our honeymoon, because as Jean says, now it’s for real. We do not suffer. She talks freely to everybody and with my French and her Italian and everybody’s English, we find ourselves striking up friendships with the widest variety of people—a wine-grower from Burgundy, a masseur on the beach at Biarritz, a rugby player from Lourdes, a non-objective painter, priests galore, fishermen, a bit-part actor in the French movies, old English ladies on bus tours, ex-commandos in the British army, GI’s based in Europe, a representative in the Paris Chamber of Deputies who says the only hope for the world is John Fitzgerald Kennedy. If you happen to bump into John Fitzgerald Kennedy, pass the word on to him.

“The people it is almost impossible not to love are the English. Except for other English. The English are dazed, although it doesn’t do to tell them so. Somehow, all the wheels of power went wrong, and after winning the war with their last ounce of blood and courage, they gave the whole thing away to the Germans. I don’t want the Germans, or anybody, to starve, but the English had a right to expect that they could live in a world at least approximately as comfortable as the old enemy once the guns fell silent. Chalk one up against us, I’m afraid.

“Whatever you do, you must make sure that Billy gets a good dose of Europe before he’s twenty, while it’s still Europe and before it becomes Park Avenue and the University of Southern California and Scarsdale and Harlem and the Pentagon. All those things, or at least some of them, may be good for us, but it would be sad to see it happen to places like Rome and Paris and Athens.

“I have been to the Louvre, to the Rijks-museum in Amsterdam, to the Prado, and I have seen the lions at Delos and the gold mask in the museum in Athens, and if I had seen nothing else and had been deaf and mute and unloved, these things alone would have been worth much more than the six months of my life I have been away.”

The phone rang and Gretchen put the letter down and got up and answered. It was Sam Corey, the old cutter who had worked with Colin on the three pictures he had made. Sam called faithfully, at least three times a week, and occasionally she would go with him to the showing of a new film at the studio that he thought would interest her. He was fifty-five years old, solidly married, and was comfortable to be with. He was the only one of the people who had been around Colin that she had kept up with.

“Gretchen,” Sam said, “we’re running one of the Nouvelle Vague pictures that just came in from Paris tonight. I’ll take you to dinner after.”

“Sorry, Sam,” Gretchen said. “Somebody, one of the people from my classes, is coming over to work with me.”

“School days, school days,” Sam croaked, “dear old golden rule days.” He had left school in the ninth grade and was not impressed with higher education.

“We’ll do it some other night, eh, Sam?”

“Sure thing,” he said. “Your house wash down the hill yet?”

“Just about.”

“California,” Sam said.

“It’s raining in Venice, too,” Gretchen said.

“How do you get top-secret information like that?”

“I’m reading a letter from my brother Rudolph. He’s in Venice. And it’s raining.”

Sam had met Rudolph when Rudolph and Jean had come out to stay with her for a week. After they had left Sam had said Rudolph was okay, but he was crazy about his wife.

“When you write him back,” said Sam, “ask him if he wants to put five million dollars in a little low-budget picture I would like to direct.”

Sam, who had been around enormously wealthy people for so long in Hollywood, believed that the sole reason for the existence of a man who had more than a hundred thousand dollars in the bank was to be fleeced. Unless, of course, he had talent. And the only talents Sam recognized were those involved in making films.

“I’m sure he’ll be delighted to,” Gretchen said.

“Keep dry, Baby,” Sam said, and hung up.

Sam was the calmest man she knew. In the storms of temperament that he had been through in the years in the studios, he had survived serenely, knowing what he knew, running a hundred thousand miles of film through his hands, catching mistakes, patching up other men’s blunders, never flattering, doing the utmost with the material he was handed, walking off pictures when the people making them became insufferable, going through one style after another with imperturbable efficiency, something of an artist, something of a handyman, loyal to the few directors, who, despite failures, were always what Sam considered pro’s, committed to their craft, painstaking, perfectionist. Sam had seen Colin’s plays and when Colin had come to Hollywood had sought Colin out and said he wanted to work with him, modest, but secure enough in what he did to know that the new director would be grateful for his experience and that their collaboration would be fruitful.

After Colin died, Sam had a long talk with Gretchen and had warned her that if she just was going to hang around Hollywood, doing nothing, just being a widow, she would be miserable. He had seen her with Colin enough in the course of the three films Colin had made, with Sam as the cutter, to understand that Colin had depended upon her, and with reason. He had offered to take her in with him, teach her what he knew about the business. “For a lone woman in this town,” he had said, “the cutting room is the best place. She isn’t on her own, she isn’t flinging her sex around, she isn’t challenging anybody’s ego, she has something methodical and practical to do, like baking a cake, every day.”

Gretchen had said, “Thank you, no,” at the time, because she didn’t want to profit, even by that much, on Colin’s reputation, and had opted for the graduate course. But every time she talked to Sam she wondered if she hadn’t said no too quickly. The people around her in school were too young, moved too fast, were interested in things that seemed useless to her, learned and discarded huge gobs of information in hours while she still was painfully struggling with the same material for weeks and weeks.

She went back to the couch and picked up Rudolph’s letter again. Venice, she remembered, Venice. With a beautiful young wife who, just by chance, happened to turn out to be rich. Rudolph’s luck.

“There are murmurs of unrest from Whitby,”—she read.—“Old man Calderwood is taking very unkindly to my prolonged version of the Grand Tour and even Johnny, who has a Puritan conscience under that egg-smooth debauchee face, hints delicately to me that I have vacationed long enough. In fact, I don’t even see it as a vacation, although I have never enjoyed anything more. It is the continuation of my education, the continuation that I was too poor to pay for when I got out of college and went to work full time in the store.

“I have many things to solve when I get back, which I am slowly turning over in my mind even as I look at a Titian in the Doges’ Palace or drink an espresso at a table in the Piazza San Marco. At the risk of sounding grandiose, what I have to decide is what to do with my life. I am thirty-five years old and I have enough money, both capital and yearly income, so that I can live extremely well for the rest of my life. Even if my tastes were wildly extravagant, which they’re not, and even if Jean were poor, which she isn’t, this would still be true. Once you are rich in America, it takes genius or overpowering greed to fall back into poverty. The idea of spending the rest of my life buying and selling, using my days to increase my wealth, which is already more than sufficient, is distasteful to me. My acquisitive instinct has been deadened by acquisition. The satisfaction I might get by opening new shopping centers throughout the country, under the Calderwood sign, and gaining control of still more companies, is minimum. A commercial empire, the prospects of which enchant men like Johnny Heath and Bradford Knight, has small charms for me and running one seems to me to be the drabbest kind of drudgery. I like travel and would be desolate if I were told that I could not come here ever again, but I cannot be like the characters in Henry James, who, in the words of E. M. Forster, land in Europe and look at works of art and at each other and that is all. As you can tell, I’ve used my new-found leisure to do some reading.

“Of course, I could set myself up as a philanthropist and dole out sums to the deserving poor or deserving artists or deserving scientists and scholars, but although I give, I hope generously, to many causes, I can’t see putting myself into the position of arbiter in such matters. It certainly is not a full-time vocation, at least not for me.

“It must seem funny to you, as it does to me, for anyone in the Jordache family to be worrying so because he has money, but the swings and turns of American life are so weird that here I am doing just that.

“Another complication. I love the house in Whitby and I love Whitby itself. I do not, really, want to live anywhere else. Jean, too, sometime ago, confessed that she liked it there, and said that if we ever had children she would prefer bringing them up there than in the city. Well, I shall see to it that she’ll have children, or at least a child, to bring up. We can always keep a small apartment in New York for when we want a bit of worldly excitement or when she has work to do in the city. But there is nobody in Whitby who just does nothing. I would be immediately branded as a freak by my neighbors, which wouldn’t make the town as attractive to me as it now is. I don’t want to turn into a Teddy Boylan.

“Maybe when I get back to America, I’ll buy a copy of the Times and look through the want-ads.

“Jean has just come in, soaked and happy and a little drunk. The rain drove her into a cafe and two Venetian gentlemen plied her with wine. She sends her love.

“This has been a long egotistical letter. I expect one of equal length, equally egotistical, from you. Send it to the American Express in Paris. I don’t know just when we’ll be in Paris, but we’ll be there sometime in the next couple of weeks and they’ll hold the letter for me. Love to you and Billy, Rudolph. P.S. Have you heard from Tom? I haven’t had a word from him since the day of Mom’s funeral.”

Gretchen put down the flimsy sheets of air-mail stationery, covered densely with her brother’s firm, clearly formed handwriting. She finished her drink and decided against another one. She got up and went to the window and looked out. The rain was pouring down. The city below her was erased by water.

She mused over Rudolph’s letter. They were friendlier through the mails than when they saw each other. In writing, Rudolph showed a hesitant side, a lack of pride and confidence, that was endearing and that he somehow hid at other times. When they were together, at one moment or another, the urge to wound him swept over her. His letters showed a largeness of spirit, a willingness to forgive that was the sweeter because it was tacit and he never showed any signs that he knew that there was anything that needed forgiving. Billy had told her about his assault on Rudolph at the school and Rudolph had never even mentioned it to her and had been warm and thoughtful with the boy every time he saw him. And the letters were always signed “Love to you and Billy.”

I must learn generosity, she thought, staring out at the rain.

She didn’t know what to do about Tom. Tom didn’t write her often, but he kept her abreast of what he was doing. But as he had done with his mother, he made her promise to say nothing of his whereabouts to Rudolph.

Right now, right this day, Tom was in Italy, too. On the other side of the peninsula, it was true, and farther south, but in Italy. She had received a letter from him just a few days before, from a place called Porto Santo Stefano, on the Mediterranean, above Rome. Tom and a friend of his called Dwyer had finally found the boat they were looking for at a price they could manage and had been working on it in a shipyard there all autumn and winter, to get it ready for service by June first. “We do everything ourselves,”—Tom had written in his large, boyish handwriting, on ruled paper.—“We took the Diesels apart piece by piece and we put them together again, piece by piece and they’re as good as new. We’ve rewired the entire boat, calked and scraped the hull, trued the propellers, repaired the generator, put in a new galley, painted the hull, painted the cabins, bought a lot of second hand furniture and painted that. Dwyer turns out to be quite an interior decorator and I’d love you to see what he’s done with the saloon and the cabins. We’ve been putting in a fourteen-hour day seven days a week, but it’s worth it. We live on board, even though the boat is up on blocks on dry land, and save our money. Neither Dwyer or me can cook worth a damn, but we don’t starve. When we go out on charter we’ll have to find somebody who can cook to crew with us. I figure we can make do with three in crew. If Billy would like to come over for the summer we have room for him on board and plenty of work. When I saw him he looked as though a summer’s hard work out in the open might do him a lot of good.

“We plan to put the boat in the water in ten days. We haven’t decided on a name yet. When we bought it it was called the Penelope II, but that’s a little too fancy for an ex-pug like me. Talking about that—nobody hits anybody here. They argue a lot, or at least they talk loud, but everybody keeps his hands to himself. It’s restful to go into a bar and be sure you won’t have to fight your way out. They tell me it’s different south of Naples, but I wouldn’t know.

“The man who runs the shipyard here is a good guy and from what I gather, asking around, he is giving us a very good deal on everything. He even found us two charters already. One in June and one in July and he says more will be coming up. I had some run-ins with certain Italians in the U.S., but these Italians are altogether different. Nice people. I am learning a few words in Italian, but don’t ask me to make a speech.

“When we get into the water, my friend Dwyer will be the skipper, even though it was my money that bought the boat. He’s got third mate’s papers and he knows how to handle a boat. But he’s teaching me. The day I can get into a harbor on my own without busting into anything, I am going to be the skipper. After expenses, we’re splitting on everything, because he’s a pal and I couldn’t have done it without him.

“Again, I got to remind you of your promise not to tell Rudy anything. If he hears I did something crazy like buying a leaky old boat on the Mediterranean with the money he made for me, he’ll split a gut. His idea of money is something you hide in the bank. Well, everybody to his own pleasure. When I have the business on a good, solid, paying basis, I’ll write and tell him and invite him to come on a cruise with us, with his wife. Free. Then he can see for himself just how dumb his brother is.

“You don’t write much, but in your letters I get the impression things aren’t so hot with you. I’m sorry. Maybe you ought to change whatever it is you’re doing and do something else. If my friend Dwyer wasn’t so close to being a fag as to make no difference, I’d ask you to marry him, so you could be the cook. Joke.

“If you have any rich friends who like the idea of a Mediterranean cruise this coming summer, mention my name. No joke.

“Maybe it seems gaga to you and Rudy, your brother’s being a yacht captain but I figure it must be in the blood. After all Pa sailed the Hudson in his own boat. One time too many. Not such a joke.

“The boat is painted white, with blue trim. It looks like a million dollars. The shipyard owner says we could sell it like it is right now and make 10,000 dollars profit. But we’re not selling.

“If you happen to go East you could do me a favor. See if you can find out where my wife is and what she’s doing and how the kid is. I don’t miss the flag and I don’t miss the bright lights, but I sure miss him.

“I am writing such a long letter because it is raining like crazy here and we can’t finish the second coat of the deck house (blue). Don’t believe anybody who tells you it doesn’t rain on the Mediterranean.

“Dwyer is cooking and he is calling me to come eat. You have no idea how awful it smells. Love and kisses, Tom.”

Rain in Porto Santo Stefano, rain in Venice, rain in California. The Jordaches weren’t having much luck with the weather. But two of them, at least, were having luck with everything else, if only for one season. “Five o’clock in the afternoon is a lousy time of day,” Gretchen said aloud. To stave off self-pity, she drew the curtains and made herself another drink.

It was still raining at seven o’clock, when she got into the car and went down to Wilshire Boulevard to pick up Kosi Krumah. She drove slowly and carefully down the hill, with the water, six inches deep, racing ahead of her, gurgling at the tires. Beverly Hills, city of a thousand rivers.

Kosi was taking his master’s in sociology and was in two of her courses and they sometimes studied together, before examinations. He had been at Oxford and was older than the other students and more intelligent, she thought. He was from Ghana and had a scholarship. The scholarship, she knew, was not a lavish one, so when they worked together, she tried to arrange to give him dinner first at the house. She was sure he wasn’t getting quite enough to eat, although he never talked about it. She never dared to go into restaurants too far off campus with him, as you never knew how headwaiters would behave if a white woman came in with a black man, no matter how properly dressed he was and regardless of the fact that he spoke English with a pure Oxford accent. In class there never was any trouble and two or three of the professors seemed even unduly to defer to him when he spoke. With her, he was polite but invariably distant, almost like a teacher with a student. He had never seen any of Colin’s movies. He didn’t have the time to go to movies, he said. Gretchen suspected he didn’t have the money. She never saw him with girls and he didn’t seem to have made any friends except for herself. If she was his friend.

Her practice was to pick him up at the corner of Rodeo and Wilshire in Beverly Hills. He didn’t have a car, but he could take the bus along Wilshire from Westwood, where he lived, hear the university campus. As she came along Wilshire, peering through the spattered windshield, the rain so dense that the wipers couldn’t work fast enough to clear the glass, she saw him standing on the corner, with no raincoat, with not even the collar of his jacket turned up for protection. His head was up and he was looking out at the stream of traffic through his blurred glasses as though he were watching a parade.

She stopped and opened the door for him and he got in leisurely, water dripping from his clothes and forming an immediate pool on the floor around his shoes.

“Kosi!” Gretchen said. “You’re drowning. Why didn’t you wait in a doorway, at least?”

“In my tribe, my dear,” he said, “the men do not run from a little water.”

She was furious with him. “In my tribe,” she mimicked him, “in my tribe of white weaklings, the men have sense enough to come in out of the rain. You … you …” She racked’ her brain for an epithet. “You Israeli!”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then he laughed, uproariously. She had to laugh with him. “And while you’re at it,” she said, “you might as well wipe your glasses, tribesman.”

Obediently, he dried off his glasses.

When they got home, she made him take off his shirt and jacket and gave him one of Colin’s sweaters to wear. He was a small man, just about Colin’s size, and the sweater fit him. She hadn’t known what to do with Colin’s things, so they just lay in the drawers and hung in the closets, where he had left them. Every once in a while she told herself that she should give them to the Red Cross or some other organization, but she never got around to it.