Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

There was a confused sound of music and cheering growing stronger outside. Then she heard the trumpet, and recognized it. Rudolph was playing beneath the window. She got up from the table and opened the window and looked out. There he was, at the head of what looked like a thousand boys and girls, playing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” up to her.

She waved down at him, feeling the tears start. Rudolph ordered the boys with the cannon to fire a salute for her and the boom echoed along the street. She was crying frankly now and had to take out her handkerchief. With a last wave, Rudolph led his army down the street, his trumpet playing them on.

She went in and sat down at the table, sobbing. He has saved my life, she thought, my beautiful son has saved my life.

She tore up the letter and went into the kitchen and burned the scripts in the soup pot.

V

A good many of the soldiers were drunk. Everybody who could walk and get into a uniform had fled the hospital without waiting for passes as soon as the news had come over the radio, but some of them had come back with bottles and the common room smelled like a saloon as men in wheel chairs and on crutches reeled around the room, shouting and singing. The celebration had degenerated into destruction after supper and men were breaking windows with canes, tearing posters down from the walls, ripping books and magazines into handfuls of confetti, with which they conducted Mardi-gras battles amid drunken whoops of laughter.

“I am General George S. Patton,” shouted a boy to no one in particular. He had a steel contraption around his shoulders that kept his shattered arm sticking out above his head. “Where’s your necktie, soldier? Thirty years KP.” Then he seized Gretchen with his good arm and insisted on dancing with her in the middle of the room to the tune of “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” which the other soldiers obligingly sang for him. Gretchen had to hold the boy tight to keep him from falling. “I’m the greatest, highest-class, one-armed, 105-millimeter ballroom dancer in the world and I’m going to Hollywood tomorrow to waltz with Ginger Rogers. Marry me, baby, we’ll live like kings on my total disability pension. We won the war, baby. We made the world safe for total disability.” Then he had to sit down, because his knees wouldn’t support him anymore. He sat on the floor and put his head between his knees and sang a verse of “Lili Marlene.”

There was nothing Gretchen could do for any of them tonight. She kept a fixed smile on her face, trying to intervene when the confetti battles became too rough and looked as though they would become real fights. A nurse came to the door of the room and beckoned to Gretchen. Gretchen went over to her. “I think you’d better get out of here,” the nurse said in a low, worried voice. “It’s going to be wild in a little while.”

“I don’t really blame them,” Gretchen said. “Do you?”

“I don’t blame them,” the nurse said, “but I’m staying out of their way.”

There was a crash of glass from the room. A soldier had thrown an empty whiskey bottle through a window. “Fire for effect,” the soldier said. He picked up a metal waste basket and hurled it through another window. “Put the mortars on the bastards, Lieutenant. Take the high ground.”

“It’s a lucky thing they took their guns away from them before they came here,” said the nurse. “This is worse than Normandy.”

“Bring on the Japs,” someone shouted. “I’ll beat ’em to death with my first-aid kit. Banzai!”

The nurse tugged at Gretchen’s sleeve. “Go on home,” she said. “This is no place for a girl tonight. Come early tomorrow and help pick up the pieces.”

Gretchen nodded and started toward the locker room to change, as the nurse disappeared. Then she stopped and turned back and went down the corridor from which the wards angled off. She went into the ward where the bad head and chest wounds were cared for. It was dimly lit here, and quiet. Most of the beds were empty, but here and there she could see a figure lying still under blankets. She went to the last bed in the corner, where Talbot Hughes lay, with the glucose dripping into his arm from the bottle rigged on its stand next to the bed. He was lying there with his eyes open, enormous and feverishly clear in the emaciated head. He recognized her and smiled. The shouting and singing from the distant common room sounded like the confused roar from a football stadium. She smiled down at him and sat on the edge of his bed. Although she had seen him only the night before he seemed to have grown ominously thinner in the last twenty-four hours. The bandages around his throat were the only solid thing about him. The doctor in the ward had told her Talbot was going to die within the week. There really was no reason for him to die, the wound was healing the doctor said, although he would never be able to speak again, of course. But by this time, by any normal calculation, he should have been taking nourishment and even walking around a little. Instead, he was fading quietly away day by day, politely and irresistibly insisting upon dying, making no fuss, a trouble to no one.

“Would you like me to read to you tonight?” Gretchen asked.

He shook his head on the pillow. Then he put out his hand toward hers. He grasped her hand. She could feel all the fragile birdlike bones. He smiled again and closed his eyes. She sat there, motionless, holding his hand. She sat like that for more than fifteen minutes, not saying anything. Then she saw that he was sleeping. She disengaged her hand gently, stood up, and walked softly out of the room. Tomorrow she would ask the doctor to tell her when he thought Talbot Hughes, victorious, was about to go. She would come and hold his hand, representative of his country’s sorrow, so that he would not be alone when he died, twenty years old, everything unspoken.

She changed into her street clothes quickly and hurried out of the building.

As she went out the front door, she saw Arnold Simms leaning against the wall next to the door, smoking. This was the first time she had seen him since the night in the common room. She hesitated for a moment, then started toward the bus stop.

“Evenin’, Miss Jordache.” The remembered voice, polite, countrified.

Gretchen made herself stop. “Good evening, Arnold,” she said. His face was bland, memoryless.

“The boys finally got themselves something to yell about, didn’t they?” Arnold gestured with a little movement of his head toward the wing which contained the common room.

“They certainly did,” she said. She wanted to get away, but didn’t want to appear as if she were afraid of him.

“These little old Yoonited States went and did it,” Arnold said. “’Twas a mighty fine effort, wouldn’t you say?”

Now he was making fun of her. “We all should be very happy,” she said. He had the trick of making her pompous.

“I’m very happy,” he said. “Yes, indeed. Mighty happy. I got good news today, too. Special good news. That’s why I waited on you out here. I wanted to tell you.”

“What is it, Arnold?”

“I’m being discharged tomorrow,” he said.

“That is good news,” she said. “Congratulations.”

“Yup,” he said. “Officially, according to the Yoonited States Medical Corps, I can walk. Transportation orders to installation nearest point of induction and immediate processing of discharge from the service. This time next week I’ll be back in St. Louis. Arnold Simms, the immediate civilian.”

“I hope you’ll be …” She stopped. She had nearly said happy, but that would have been foolish. “Lucky,” she said. Even worse.

“Oh, I’m a lucky fella,” he said. “No one has to worry about l’il ole Arnold. Got some more good news this week. It was a big week for me, a giant of a week. I got a letter from Cornwall.”

“Oh, isn’t that nice.” Prissy. “That girl you told me about wrote you.” Palm trees. Adam and Eve in the Garden.

“Yep.” He flicked away his cigarette. “She just found out her husband got killed in Italy and she thought I’d like to know.”

There was nothing to say to this, so she kept quiet.

“Well, I won’t be seeing you any more, Miss Jordache,” he said, “unless you happen to be passin’ through St. Louis. You can find me in the telephone book. I’ll be in an exclusive residential district. I won’t keep you no longer. I’m sure you got a victory ball or a country club dance to go to. I just wanted to thank you for everything you done for the troops, Miss Jordache.”

“Good luck, Arnold,” she said coldly.

“Too bad you didn’t find the time to come on down to the Landing that Saturday,” he said, drawling it out flatly. “We got ourselves two fine chickens and roasted them and had ourselves quite a picnic. We missed you.”

“I’d hoped you weren’t going to talk about that, Arnold,” she said. Hypocrite, hypocrite.

“Oh, God,” he said, “you so beautiful I just want to sit down and cry.”

He turned and opened the door to the hospital and limped in.

She walked slowly toward the bus stop, feeling battered. Victory solved nothing.

She stood under the light, looking at her watch, wondering if the bus drivers were also celebrating tonight. There was a car parked down the street in the shadow of a tree. The motor started up and it drove slowly toward her. It was Boylan’s Buick. For a moment she thought of running back into the hospital.

Boylan stopped the car in front of her and opened the door. “Can I give you a lift, ma’am?”

“Thank you very much, no.” She hadn’t seen him for more than a month, not since the night they had driven to New York.

“I thought we might get together to offer fitting thanks to God for blessing our arms with victory,” he said.

“I’ll wait for the bus, thank you,” she said.

“You got my letters, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Yes.” There had been two letters, on her desk at the office, asking her to meet him in front of Bernstein’s Department Store. She hadn’t met him and she hadn’t answered the letters.

“Your reply must have been lost in the mail,” he said. “The service these days is very hit and miss, isn’t it?”

She walked away from the car. He got out and came up to her and held her arm.

“Come up to the house with me,” he said harshly. “This minute.”

His touch unnerved her. She hated him but she knew she wanted to be in his bed. “Let go of me,” she said, and pulled her arm savagely out of his grasp. She walked back to the bus stop, with him following her.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll say what I came to say. I want to marry you.”

She laughed. She didn’t know why she laughed. Surprise.

“I said I want to marry you,” he repeated.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, “you go on down to Jamaica, as you planned, and I’ll write you there. Leave your address with my secretary. Excuse me, here’s my bus.”

The bus rolled to a stop and she jumped up through the door as soon as it opened. She gave the driver her ticket and went and sat in the back by herself. She was trembling. If the bus hadn’t come along, she would have said yes, she would marry him.

When the bus neared Port Philip she heard the fire engines and looked up the hill. There was a fire on the hill. She hoped it was the main building, burning to the ground.

VI

Claude hung on to him with his good arm, as Tom drove the bike down the narrow back road behind the Boylan estate. He hadn’t had much practice and he had to go slowly and Claude moaned in his ear every time they skidded or hit a bump. Tom didn’t know how bad the arm was, but he knew something had to be done about it. But if he took Claude to the hospital, they’d ask how he happened to get burned and it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out the connection between the boy with the burned arm and the cross flaming on the Boylan hill. And Claude sure as hell wouldn’t take the blame alone. Claude was no hero. He’d never die under torture with his secret forever clamped between his lips, that was for sure.

“Listen,” Tom said, slowing the bike down so that they were hardly moving, “you got a family doctor?”

“Yeah,” Claude said. “My uncle.”

That was the kind of a family to have. Priests, doctors, there probably was a lawyer uncle, too, who would come in handy later on, after they were arrested.

“What’s the address?” Tom asked.

Claude mumbled the address. He was so frightened he found it almost impossible to speak. Tom speeded up and keeping on back roads, found his way to the big house on the outskirts of the town, with a sign on the lawn that said, “Dr. Robert Tinker, M.D.”

Tom stopped the bike and helped Claude off. “Listen,” he said, “you’re going in there alone, you understand, and no matter what you tell your uncle, you don’t mention my name. And you better get your father to send you out of town tonight. There’s going to be an awful mess in this town tomorrow and if anybody sees you walking around with a burned hand it’ll take them just about ten seconds to come down on you like a load of bricks.”

For answer, Claude moaned, and hung onto Tom’s shoulder. Tom pushed him away. “Stand on your own two feet, man,” Tom said. “Now get in there and make sure you see your uncle and nobody else. And if I ever find out that you gave me away I’ll kill you.”

“Tom,” Claude whimpered.

“You heard me,” Tom said. “I’ll kill you. And you know I mean it.” He pushed him toward the door of the house.

Claude staggered toward the door. He reached up his good hand and rang the bell. Tom didn’t wait to see him go in. He hurried off down the street. Above the town the fire was still blazing, lighting up the sky.

He went down to the river near the warehouse in which his father kept his shell. It was dark along the bank and there was the acid odor of rusting metal. He took off his sweater. It had the sick smell of burnt wool, like vomit. He found a stone and tied it into the sweater and heaved the bundle out into the river. There was a dull splash and he could see the little fountain of white water against the black of the current, as the sweater sank. He hated to lose the sweater. It was his lucky sweater. He had won a lot of fights while wearing it. But there were times when you had to get rid of things and this was one of them.

He walked away from the river toward home, feeling the chill of the night through his shirt. He wondered if he really was going to have to kill Claude Tinker.

Chapter 6

I

With his German food, Mary Jordache thought, as Jordache came in from the kitchen, carrying the roast goose on a platter with red cabbage and dumplings. Immigrant.

She didn’t remember when she had seen her husband in such a high mood. The surrender of the Third Reich that week had made him jovial and expansive. He had devoured the newspapers, chuckling over the photographs of the German generals signing the papers at Rheims. Now, on Sunday, it was Rudolph’s seventeenth birthday, and Jordache had decreed a holiday. No other birthday in the family was celebrated by more than a grunt. He had bought Rudolph a fancy fishing rod, God knew how much it cost, and had told Gretchen that she could keep half her salary from now on instead of the usual quarter. He had even given Thomas the money for a new sweater to replace the one he said he lost. If the German army could be brought to surrender every week, life might be tolerable in the home of Axel Jordache.

“From now on,” Jordache had said, “we eat Sunday dinner together.” The bloody defeat of his race, it seemed, had given him a sentimental interest in the ties of blood.

So they were all seated at the table, Rudloph self-consciously the focus of the occasion, wearing a collar and tie, and sitting very erect, like a cadet at table at West Point; Gretchen in a lacy, white shirtwaist looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, the whore; and Thomas, with his gambler’s dodgy smile, all neatly washed and combed. Thomas had changed unaccountably since VE day, too, coming right home from school, studying all evening in his room, and even helping out in the shop for the first time in his life. The mother permitted herself the first glimmerings of timid hope. Perhaps by some unknown magic, the falling silent of the guns in Europe would make them a normal family.

Mary Jordache’s idea of a normal American family was largely formed by the lectures of the nuns in the orphanage and later on by glances at the advertisements in popular magazines. Normal American families were always well-washed and fragrant and smiled at each other constantly. They showered each other with gifts for Christmas, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and Mother’s Day. They had hale old parents who lived on farms in the country and at least one automobile. The sons called the father sir and the daughters played the piano and told their mothers about their dates and everybody used Listerine. They had breakfast, dinner, and Sunday lunch together and attended the church of their choice, and took holidays at the seashore en masse. The father commuted to business every day in a dark suit and had a great deal of life insurance. None of this was completely formulated in her mind, but it was the misty standard of reference against which she compared her own circumstances. Both too shy and too snobbish to mix with her own neighbors, the reality of the life of the other families who lived in the town was unknown to her. The rich were out of her reach and the poor were beneath her contempt. By her reckoning, hazy and unsystematic as it was, she, her husband, Thomas, and Gretchen, were not a family in any way that she could accept or that might give her pleasure. Rather they were an abrasive group collected almost at random for a voyage which none of them had chosen and during which the best that could be hoped for was that hostilities could be kept to a minimum.

Rudolph, of course, was excepted.

II

Axel Jordache put the goose down on the table with satisfaction. He had spent all morning preparing the meal, keeping his wife out of the kitchen, but without the usual insults about her cooking. He carved the bird roughly, but competently, and set out huge portions for all, serving the mother first, to her surprise. He had bought two bottles of California Riesling and he filled all their glasses ceremoniously. He raised his glass in a toast. “To my son Rudolph, on his birthday,” he said huskily. “May he justify our hopes and rise to the top and not forget us when he gets there.”

They all drank seriously, although the mother saw Thomas make a little grimace. Perhaps he thought the wine was sour.

Jordache did not specify just which top he expected his son to rise to. Specifications were unnecessary. The top existed, a place with boundaries, densities, privileges. When you got there you recognized it and your arrival was greeted with hosannahs and Cadillacs by earlier arrivals.

III

Rudolph ate the goose delicately. It was a little fatty to his taste and he knew that fact caused pimples. And he ate sparingly of the cabbage. He had a date later in the afternoon with the girl with the blonde pigtail who had kissed him outside Miss Lenaut’s house and he didn’t want to be smelling of cabbage when he met her. He only sipped at his wine. He had decided that he was never going to get drunk in his whole life. He was always going to be in full control of his mind and his body. He had also decided, because of the example of his mother and father, that he was never going to get married.

He had gone back to the house next to Miss Lenaut’s the following day and loitered obviously across the street from it. Sure enough, after about ten minutes the girl had come out wearing blue jeans and a sweater and waved to him. She was just about his age, with bright-blue eyes and the open and friendly smile of someone who has never had anything bad happen to her. They had walked down the street together and in half an hour Rudolph felt that he had known her for years. She’d just moved into the neighborhood from Connecticut. Her name was Julie and her father had something to do with the Power Company. She had an older brother who was in the Army in France and that was the reason she’d kissed him that night, to celebrate her brother’s being alive in France with the war over for him. Whatever the reason, Rudolph was glad that she had kissed him, although the memory of that first brush of the lips between strangers made him diffident and awkward for awhile.

Julie was crazy about music and liked to sing and thought he played a marvelous trumpet and he had half promised her that he would get his band to take her along with them to sing with them on their next club date.

She liked serious boys, Julie said, and there was no doubt about it, Rudolph was serious. He had already told Gretchen about Julie. He liked to keep saying her name. “Julie, Julie …” Gretchen had merely smiled, being a little bit too patronizingly grown-up for his taste. She had given him a blue-flannel blazer for his birthday.

He knew his mother would be disappointed that he wasn’t going to take her for a walk this afternoon, but the way his father was behaving all of a sudden, the miracle might happen and his father might actually take her for a walk himself.

He wished he was as confident about getting to the top as his father and mother were. He was intelligent, but intelligent enough to know that intelligence by itself carried no guarantees along with it. For the kind of success his mother and father expected of him you had to have something special—luck, birth, a gift. He did not know yet if he was lucky. He certainly could not count upon his birth to launch him on a career and he was doubtful of his gifts. He was a connoisseur of others’ gifts and an explorer of his own. Ralph Stevens, a boy in his class, could hardly make a B average overall, but he was a genius in mathematics and was doing problems in calculus and physics for fun while his classmates were laboring with elementary algebra. Ralph Stevens had a gift which directed his life like a magnet. He knew where he was going because it was the only way he could go.

Rudolph had many small talents and no definite direction. He wasn’t bad on the horn, but he didn’t fool himself that he was any Benny Goodman or Louis Armstrong. Of the four other boys who played in the band with him, two were better than he and the other two were just about as good. He listened to the music he made with a cool appreciation of what it was worth and he knew it wasn’t worth much. And wouldn’t be worth much more, no matter how hard he worked on it. As an athlete, he was top man in one event, the two-twenty hurdles, but in a big city high school, he doubted if he could even make the team, as compared with Stan O’Brien, who played fullback for the football team, and had to depend upon the tolerance of his teachers to get marks just good enough to keep him eligible to play. But on a football field O’Brien was one of the smartest players anybody had ever seen in the state. He could feint and find split-second holes and make the right move every time, with that special sense of a great athlete that no mere intelligence could ever compete with. Stan O’Brien had offers of scholarships from colleges as far away as California and if he didn’t get hurt would probably make All-American and be set for life. In class, Rudolph did better on the English Literature tests than little Sandy Hopewood, who edited the school paper and who flunked all his science courses regularly, but all you had to do was read one article of his and you knew that nothing was going to stop Sandy from being a writer.

Rudolph had the gift of being liked. He knew that and knew that was why he had been elected president of his class three times in a row. But he felt it wasn’t a real gift. He had to plan to be liked, to be agreeable to people, and seem interested in them, and cheerfully take on thankless jobs like running school dances and heading the advertising board of the magazine and working hard at them to get people to appreciate him. His gift of being liked wasn’t a true gift, he thought, because he had no close friends and he didn’t really like people himself very much. Even his habit of kissing his mother morning and evening and taking her for walks on Sundays was planned for her gratitude, to maintain the notion he knew she had of him as a thoughtful and loving son. The Sunday walks bored him and he really couldn’t stand her pawing him when he kissed her, though, of course, he never showed it.

He felt that he was built in two layers, one that only he knew about and the other which was displayed to the world. He wanted to be what he seemed but he was doubtful that he could ever manage it. Although he knew that his mother and his sister and even some of his teachers thought he was handsome, he was uncertain about his looks. He felt he was too dark, that his nose was too long, his jaws too flat and hard, his pale eyes too light and too small for his olive skin, and his hair too lower-class dull black. He studied the photographs in the newspapers and the magazines to see how boys at good schools like Exeter and St. Paul’s dressed and what college men at places like Harvard and Princeton were wearing, and tried to copy their styles in his own clothes and on his own budget.

He had scuffed white-buckskin shoes with rubber soles and now he had a blazer but he had the uneasy feeling that if he were ever invited to a party with a group of preppies he would stand out immediately for what he was, a small-town hick, pretending to be something he wasn’t.

He was shy with girls and had never been in love, unless you could call that stupid thing for Miss Lenaut love. He made himself seem uninterested in girls, too busy with more important matters to bother with kid stuff like dating and flirting and necking. But in reality he avoided the company of girls because he was afraid that if he ever got really close to one, she would find out that behind his lofty manner he was inexperienced and clownish.

In a way he envied his brother. Thomas wasn’t living up to anyone’s estimate of him. His gift was ferocity. He was feared and even hated and certainly no one truly liked him, but he didn’t agonize over which tie to wear or what to say in an English class. He was all of one piece and when he did something he didn’t have to make a painful and hesitant selection of attitudes within himself before he did it.

As for his sister, she was beautiful, a lot more beautiful than most of the movie stars he saw on the screen, and that gift was enough for anybody.

“This goose is great, Pop,” Rudolph said, because he knew his father expected him to comment on the meal. “It really is something.” He had already eaten more than he wanted, but he held out his plate for a second portion. He tried not to wince when he saw the size of the piece that his father put on the plate.

IV

Gretchen ate quietly. When am I going to tell them, what’s the best moment? On Friday she had been given two weeks notice at the Works. Mr. Hutchens had called her into his office and after a little distracted preliminary speech about how efficient she was and conscientious and how her work was always excellent and how agreeable it was to have her in the office, he had come out with it. He had received orders that morning to give her notice, along with another girl in the office. He had gone to the manager to remonstrate, Mr. Hutchens said, his dry voice clicking with real distress, but the manager had said he was sorry, there was nothing he could do about it. With the end of the war in Europe there were going to be cutbacks on government contracts. A falling-off in business was expected and they had to economize on staff. Gretchen and the other girl were the last two clerks to be hired in Mr. Hutchens’ department and so they had to be the first to go. Mr. Hutchens had been so disturbed that he had taken out his handkerchief several times while talking to her and blown his nose aridly, to prove to her that it was none of his doing. Three decades of working with paper had left Mr. Hutchens rather papery himself, like a paid bill that has been tucked away for many years and is brittle and yellowed and flaking at the edges, when it is brought out to be examined. The emotion in his voice as he spoke to her was incongruous, like tears from a filing cabinet.

Gretchen had to console Mr. Hutchens. She had no intention of spending the rest of her life working for the Boylan Brick and Tile Works, she told him, and she understood why the last to be hired had to be the first to go. She did not tell Mr. Hutchens the real reason why she was being fired and she felt guilty about the other girl, who was being sacrificed as camouflage to Teddy Boylan’s act of vengeance.

She had not yet figured out what she was going to do and she hoped to be able to wait until her plans were set before telling her father about her dismissal. There was bound to be an ugly scene and she wanted to have her defenses ready. Today, though, her father was behaving like a human being for once, and perhaps at the end of the meal, ripened by wine and basking in his pleasure in the one child, he might prove to be lenient with another. With the dessert, she decided.

V

Jordache had baked a birthday cake and he came in from the kitchen carrying it, eighteen candles alight on the icing, seventeen and one to grow on, and they all actually were singing “Happy birthday to you, dear Rudolph,” when the doorbell rang. The sound stopped the song in mid-verse. The doorbell almost never rang in the Jordache house. No one ever came to visit them and the mailman dropped the letters through a slot.

“Who the hell is that?” Jordache asked. He reacted pugnaciously to all surprises, as though anything new could only be an attack of one kind or another.

“I’ll go,” Gretchen said. She had the instantaneous certainty that it must be Boylan downstairs at the door, with the Buick parked in front of the shop. It was just the sort of demented thing he was liable to do. She was running down the stairs as Rudolph blew out the candles. She was glad that she was all dressed up and had done her hair that morning for Rudolph’s party. Let Teddy Boylan mourn over what he was never going to get anymore.