Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 53 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

“Rudolph,” Jeanne said. “Neither good nor bad. Think of it as Rodolfo. That has a better sound, doesn’t it?”

“Much better.”

“Good,” she said teasingly. “From now on I will call you Rodolfo.”

“Rodolfo Jordache,” he said. It gave him a new, more dashing view of himself. “Jordache. That’s my family name. I’m at the Hôtel du Cap.” All defenses down now. Names and addresses. Each at the other’s mercy. “One more thing. I’m married.”

“I expected as much,” Jeanne said. “Your affair. Just as my marriage is my affair.”

“My wife is with me in Antibes.” He didn’t feel he had to tell her that they were not on the best of terms, either. “Give me your telephone number.”

She got up and went over to a little desk where there was a pen and some paper and wrote down her telephone number. She gave him the slip of paper and he folded it carefully and put it in his pocket.

“Other times,” she said, “you will have to rent a hotel room. The children will be here.”

Other times.…

“Now,” she said, “I’ll call you a taxi.” They went into the salon and she dialed a number, spoke quickly for a moment, waited a little while, said, “Très bien,” hung up. “The taxi will be here in five minutes,” she said. Before she opened the front door for him they kissed, a long, grateful, healing kiss. “Good night, Rodolfo,” she said. She smiled, a smile he knew he would remember for a long time.

«  »

The taxi was waiting for him when he got down to the street, its diesel motor making it sound like a launch waiting to put out to sea. Voyages.

“L’hôtel Negresco,” Rudolph said as he got in. When the taxi started, he looked back at the house. It was imperative for him to be able to find it again, to recognize it in his dreams. When they got to the Negresco he made sure he was not run down as he crossed to where his car was parked. Then, at the wheel of his rented car, he drove slowly and very carefully on the deserted road along the sea to Antibes.

When he reached the port he slowed down even more, then abruptly swung the car into the parking lot and got out and walked along the quay to where the Clothilde was berthed in the silent harbor. There were no lights to be seen on the Clothilde. He didn’t want to wake Wesley or Bunny. He took off his shoes and climbed down from the deck into the dory lying alongside, slipped the line, sat amidships and noiselessly put the oars through the locks. He rowed almost soundlessly away from the ship toward the middle of the harbor, then, pulling more strongly, toward the harbor entrance, the tarry smell of the water strong in his nostrils, mixed with the flowery fragrance from shore.

He had acted almost automatically, not asking himself why he was doing this. The pull of the oars against his shoulders and arms gave him a sober pleasure, and the sigh of the small bow wave against the sides of the dory seemed a fitting music with which to end the night.

The city of Antibes, looming shadows, with a light here and there, receded slowly as he headed toward the red and green lights that marked the channel into the sea. The rhythm of his body as he bent forward, then leaned back, satisfied him. How many times had these same oars moved in the hands of his brother. His own hands were soft against the smooth wood, polished by the strong hands of his brother. The thought that perhaps in the morning his palms would be blistered pleased him.

Being alone on the dark surface of the water was a benediction to him and the blinking lights of the harbor entrance comforted him, with their promise of safe anchorages. Grief was possible here, but also hope. “Thomas, Thomas,” he said softly as he went out into the sea and felt its gentle swell lift the dory. He remembered, as he rowed, all the times they had failed each other, and the end, when they had forgotten the failures or at least forgiven them.

He felt tireless and serene, alone in the dark night, but then he heard the coughing of a small fishing boat putting out to sea behind him, one small acetylene lamp at its bow. The fishing boat passed near him and he could see two men in it staring curiously at him. He was conscious of how strange it must look to them, a man in a dark business suit, alone, headed out to sea at that hour. He kept on rowing until they were out of sight, then let the oars dangle and stared up at the starlit sky.

He thought of his father, that enraged and pitiful old man, who had also rowed in darkness, who had picked a night of storm for his last voyage. Suicide had been possible for his father, who had found the peace in death he had never achieved in life. It was not possible for him. He was a different man, with different claims upon him. He took one long, deep breath, then turned the dory around and rowed back to the Clothilde, his hands burning.

Quietly, he tied up to the Clothilde’s stern, climbed the ladder and went ashore. He put on his shoes, a rite observed, a ceremony celebrated, and got into his car and started the engine.

It was past three in the morning when he got to the hotel. The lobby was deserted, the night concierge yawning behind the desk. He asked for his key and was turning toward the elevator when the concierge called after him. “Oh, Mr. Jordache. Mrs. Burke left a message for you. You are to call her whenever you get in. She said it was urgent.”

“Thank you,” Rudolph said wearily. Whatever it was, Gretchen would have to wait until morning.

“Mrs. Burke told me to call her when you got in. No matter what time.” She had guessed he would try to avoid her, had taken steps to make sure he couldn’t.

“I see,” said Rudolph. He sighed. “Call her, please. Tell her I’ll come to her room as soon as I look in on my wife.” He should have stayed the night in Nice. Or rowed till dawn. Faced everything in daylight.

“One more thing,” said the concierge. “There was a gentleman here asking for you. A Mr. Hubbell. He said he was from Time Magazine. He used the telex.”

“If he comes here and asks for me again, tell him I’m not in.”

“I understand. Bonne nuit, monsieur.”

Rudolph rang for the elevator. He had planned to telephone Jeanne, say good night to her, try to tell her what she had done for him, listen to the husky voice, with its rough, sensual shading, fall off to sleep with the memory of the night to take the weight from his dreams. He could forget that now. He shuffled into the elevator, feeling old, got off at his floor, opened the door to the suite as silently as he could. The lights were on, both in the salon and in the bedroom in which Jean slept. Since the murder she refused to sleep in the dark. As he approached her doorway she called out, “Rudolph?”

“Yes, dear.” He sighed. He had hoped she was asleep. He went into her room. She was sitting up in bed, staring at him. Automatically he looked for a glass or a bottle. There was no glass or bottle and he could tell from her face she hadn’t been drinking. She looks old, he thought, old. The drawn face, the dull eyes over the lacy nightgown made her look like a malicious sketch of the woman she would be forty years from now.

“What time is it?” she asked harshly.

“After three. You’d better go to sleep.”

“After three. The consulate in Nice keeps odd hours, doesn’t it?”

“I took the night off,” he said.

“From what?”

“From everything,” he said.

“From me,” she said bitterly. “That’s become quite a habit, hasn’t it? A way of life with you, wouldn’t you say?”

“Let’s discuss it in the morning, shall we?” he said.

She sniffed. “You stink of perfume,” she said. “Shall we discuss that in the morning, too?”

“If you wish,” he said. “Good night.”

He started out of the room. “Leave the door open,” she called. “I have to keep all avenues of escape open.”

He left the door open. He wished he could pity her.

He went into his bedroom through the salon, closing his own door behind him. Then he unlocked the door that led from his room into the corridor and went out. He didn’t want to have to explain to Jean that he had to see Gretchen about something that his sister thought was urgent.

Gretchen’s room was down the corridor. He went past the pairs of shoes left out by the guests to be shined while they slept. Europe was on the brink of Communism, he thought, but shoes were still shined by future commissars, budding Trotskies, between midnight and six each morning.

He knocked on Gretchen’s door. She opened it immediately, as though she had been standing there, alerted by the concierge’s call, as though she couldn’t bear to wait the extra second or two it would have taken her to cross the room and confront her brother. She was in a terry cloth bathrobe, light blue, the blue almost identical with the blue of the dress Jeanne had been wearing in the café. With her small pale face, dark hair and strong, graceful body, she bore a striking resemblance to Jeanne, he thought. Echoes everywhere. The idea hadn’t occurred to him before.

“Come in,” she said. “I’ve been so worried. God, where’ve you been?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. “Can’t it wait till morning?”

“It can’t wait until morning,” she said, closing the door. She sniffed. “You smell heavenly, Brother,” she said sarcastically. “And you look as though you’ve just been laid.”

“I’m a gentleman,” Rudolph said, trying to make light of the accusation. “Gentlemen don’t discuss matters like that.”

“Ladies do,” she said. She had her vulgar side, Gretchen.

“Let’s drop it, please,” he said. “I need some sleep. What’s so damned urgent?”

Gretchen fell back into a big armchair, sprawling, as though she were too tired to stand anymore. “Bunny Dwyer called an hour ago,” she said flatly. “Wesley’s in jail.”

“What?”

“Wesley’s in jail in Cannes. He got into a fight in a bar and nearly killed a man with a beer bottle. He hit a cop and the police had to subdue him. Is that urgent enough for you, Brother?”

A Biography of Irwin Shaw

Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an award-winning American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. His novel The Young Lions (1948) is considered a classic of World War II fiction. From the early pages of the New Yorker to the bestseller lists, Shaw earned a reputation as a leading literary voice of his generation.

Shaw was born Irwin Shamforoff in the Bronx, New York, on February 27, 1913. His parents, Will and Rose, were Russian Jewish immigrants and his father struggled as a haberdasher. The family moved to Brooklyn and barely survived the Depression. After graduating from high school at the age of sixteen, Shaw worked his way through Brooklyn College, where he started as quarterback on the school’s scrappy football team.

“Discovered” by a college teacher (who later got him his first assignment, writing for the Dick Tracy radio serials), Shaw became a household name at the age of twenty-two thanks to his first produced play, Bury the Dead. This 1935 Broadway hit—still regularly produced around the world—is a bugle call against profit-driven barbarity. Offered a job as a Hollywood staff scriptwriter, Shaw then contributed to numerous Golden Era films such as The Big Game (1936) and The Talk of the Town (1942). While continuing to write memorable stories for the New Yorker, he also penned The Gentle People (1939), a play that was adapted for film four different times.

World War II altered the course of Shaw’s career. Refusing a commission, he enlisted in the army, and was shipped off to North Africa as a private in a photography unit in 1943. After the North African campaign, he served in London during the preparations for the invasion of Normandy. After D-Day, Shaw and his unit followed the front lines and documented many of the most important moments of the war, including the liberations of Paris and the Dachau concentration camp.

The Young Lions (1948), his epic novel, follows three soldiers—two Americans and one German—across North Africa, Europe, and into Germany. Along with James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, The Young Lions stands as one of the great American novels of World War II. In 1958, it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.

In 1951, wrongly suspected of Communist sympathies, Shaw moved to Europe with his wife and six-month-old son. In Paris, he was neighbors with journalist Art Buchwald and friends with the great French writers, photographers, actors, and moviemakers of his generation, including Joseph Kessel, Robert Capa, Simone Signoret, and Louis Malle. In Rome, Shaw gave author William Styron his wedding lunch, doctored screenplays, walked with director Federico Fellini on the Via Veneto, and got the idea for his novel Two Weeks in Another Town (1960).

Finally, he settled in the small Swiss village of Klosters and continued writing screenplays, stage plays, and novels. Rich Man, Poor Man (1970) and Beggerman, Thief (1977) were made into the first famous television miniseries. Nightwork (1975) will soon be a major motion picture. Shaw died in the shadow of the Swiss peaks that had inspired Thomas Mann’s great novel The Magic Mountain.

Shaw as a young soldier crossing North Africa from Algiers to Cairo in 1943.

Shaw’s US Army record.

Shaw just after D-Day in Normandy, France, in 1944.

A few weeks after D-Day, Shaw and his Signal Corps film crew liberate Mont Saint-Michel.

A 1944 letter from Shaw to his wife, Marian, describing the “taking” of Mont Saint-Michel, as well as a nerve-wracking night under a cathedral when he almost shot a group of monks, believing them to be Germans.

Shaw as a warrant-officer in Austria in 1945, with Signal Corps Captain Josh Logan (left) and Colonel Anatole Litvak (center), who became his lifelong friends.

Shaw, Marian, and their son, Adam, on the terrace of the newly built Chalet Mia in Klosters, Switzerland, in 1957.

Shaw at home with Marian at Chalet Mia, Klosters, in 1958.

Shaw (center) skiing in Klosters in 1960 with (left to right) Noel Howard (an actor), an unidentified Hollywood producer, Marian Shaw, Jacques Charmoz (a French World War II pilot, cartoonist, and painter), and Jacqueline Tesseron.

Shaw in Klosters in 1960 with (from left to right) Kathy Parrish, her husband Robert Parrish (an Academy Award–winning film editor and director), and Peter Viertel (a screenwriter, novelist, and Shaw’s coauthor for the play The Survivors). Shaw’s friendship with Viertel started before the war, when they both lived in Malibu.

Shaw with Irving P. “Swifty” Lazar, the legendary talent agent who represented him, in Evian, France, in 1963.

Shaw playing tennis in Klosters in 1964.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Portions of this book appeared in PLAYBOY in a slightly different form.

Copyright © 1969, 1970 by Irwin Shaw

cover design by Andrea Uva

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

Also Available from Open Road Media

Beggarman, Thief,

the sequel to Rich Man, Poor Man

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