Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

When she opened the door, there were two men standing there. She knew them both, Mr. Tinker and his brother, the priest. She knew Mr. Tinker from the Works and everybody knew Father Tinker, a burly, red-faced man, who looked like a longshoreman who had made a mistake in his profession.

“Good afternoon, Miss Jordache,” Mr. Tinker said, taking off his hat. His voice was sober, and his long, flabby face looked as though he had just discovered a terrible error in the books.

“Hello, Mr. Tinker. Father,” Gretchen said.

“I hope we’re not interrupting anything,” Mr. Tinker said, his voice more ceremoniously churchly than that of his ordained brother. “But we have to speak to your father. Is he in?”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “If you’ll come up … We’re just at dinner, but …”

“I wonder if you’d be good enough to ask him to come down, child,” said the priest. He had the round, assured voice of a man who inspired confidence in women. “We have a most important matter to discuss with him in private.”

“I’ll go get him,” Gretchen said. The men came into the dark little hallway and shut the door behind them, as though unwilling to be observed from the street. Gretchen put the light on. She felt peculiar about leaving the two men standing crowded together in the dark. She hurried up the steps, knowing that the Tinker brothers were looking at her legs as she mounted.

Rudolph was cutting the cake as she went into the living room. Everybody looked at her inquiringly.

“What the hell was that about?” Jordache asked.

“Mr. Tinker’s down there,” Gretchen said. “With his brother, the priest. They want to speak to you, Pa.”

“Well, why didn’t you ask them to come up?” Jordache accepted a slice of cake on a plate from Rudolph and took a huge bite.

“They didn’t want to. They said they had a most important matter to discuss with you in private.”

Thomas made a little sucking sound, pulling his tongue over his teeth, as though he had a morsel of food caught between one tooth and another.

Jordache pushed back his chair. “Christ,” he said, “a priest. You’d think the bastards would at least leave a man in peace on a Sunday afternoon.” But he stood up and went out of the room. They could hear his heavy limping tread as he descended the staircase.

Jordache didn’t greet the two men standing in the feeble light of the forty-watt bulb in the hallway. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “what the hell is so important that you’ve got to take a working man away from his Sunday dinner to talk about?”

“Mr. Jordache,” Tinker said, “could we talk to you in private?”

“What’s wrong with right here?” Jordache asked, standing above them on the last step, still chewing on his cake. The hallway smelled of the goose.

Tinker looked up the stairway. “I wouldn’t like to be overheard,” he said.

“As far as I can tell,” Jordache said, “we got nothing to say to each other that the whole goddamn town can’t hear. I don’t owe you any money and you don’t owe me none.” Still, he took the step down into the hallway and opened the door to the street and unlocked the front door of the bakery with the key he always carried in his pocket.

The three men went into the bakery, its big window covered from within by a canvas blind for Sunday.

VI

Upstairs, Mary Jordache was waiting for the coffee to boil. Rudolph kept looking at his watch, worried that he’d be late for his date with Julie. Thomas sat slumped in his chair, humming tunelessly and tapping an annoying rhythm on his glass with his fork.

“Stop that, please,” the mother said. “You’re giving me a headache.”

“Sorry,” Thomas said. “I’ll take up the trumpet for my next concert.”

Never a courteous moment, Mary Jordache thought. “What’s keeping them down there?” she asked querulously. “The one day we’re having a normal family meal.” She turned accusingly on Gretchen. “You work with Mr. Tinker,” she said. “Have you done something disgraceful downtown?”

“Maybe they discovered I stole a brick,” Gretchen said.

“Even one day,” her mother said, “is too much for this family to be polite.” She went into the kitchen to get the coffee, her back a drama of martyrdom.

There was the sound of Jordache coming up the staircase. He came into the living room, his face expressionless. “Tom,” he said flatly, “come on downstairs.”

“I got nothing to say to the Tinker family,” Thomas said.

“They got something to say to you.” Jordache turned and went out of the room and down the stairs again. Thomas shrugged. He pulled at his fingers, tugging with one hand against the other, the way he did before a fight, and followed his father.

Gretchen frowned. “Do you know what it’s all about?” she asked Rudolph.

“Trouble,” Rudolph said gloomily. He knew he was going to be late for Julie.

VII

In the bakery the two Tinkers, one in a navy-blue suit and the other in his shiny, black, priest’s suit, looked like two ravens against the bare shelves and the gray marble counter. Thomas came in and Jordache closed the door behind him.

I’m going to have to kill him, Thomas thought. “Good afternoon, Mr. Tinker,” he said, smiling boyishly. “Good afternoon, Father.”

“My son,” the priest said portentously.

“Tell him what you told me,” Jordache said.

“We know all about it, son,” the priest said. “Claude confessed everything to his uncle, as was only right and natural. From confession flows repentance and from repentance forgiveness.”

“Save that crap for Sunday school,” Jordache said. He was leaning with his back against the door, as though to make sure nobody was going to escape.

Thomas didn’t say anything. He was wearing his little prefight smile.

“The shameful burning of the cross,” the priest said. “On a day consecrated to the memory of the brave young men who have fallen in the struggle. On a day when I celebrated a holy mass for the repose of their souls at the altar of my own church. And with all the trials and intolerance we Catholics have undergone in this country and our bitter efforts to be accepted by our bigoted countrymen. And to have the deed perpetrated by two Catholic boys.” He shook his head sorrowfully.

“He’s no Catholic,” Jordache said.

“His mother and father were-born in the Church,” the priest said. “I have made inquiries.”

“Did you do it or didn’t you do it?” Jordache asked.

“I did it,” Thomas said. That yellow, gutless son of a bitch Claude.

“Can you imagine, my son,” the priest went on, “what would happen to your family and Claude’s family if it ever became know who raised that flaming cross?”

“We’d be driven out of town,” Mr. Tinker said excitedly. “That’s what would happen. Your father wouldn’t be able to give away a loaf of bread in this town. The people of this town remember you’re foreigners, Germans, even if you’d like to forget it.”

“Oh, Christ, now,” Jordache said. “The red, white, and blue.”

“Facts are facts,” Mr. Tinker said. “You might as well face it. I’ll give you another fact. If Boylan ever finds out who it was that set fire to his greenhouse he’ll sue us for our lives. He’ll get a smart lawyer that’ll make that old greenhouse seem like the most valuable property between here and New York.” He shook his fist at Thomas. “Your father won’t have two pennies to rub against each other in his pocket. You’re minors. We’re responsible, your father and me. The savings of a lifetime …”

Thomas could see his father’s hands working, as though he would like to put them around Thomas’s neck and strangle him.

“Keep calm, John,” the priest said to Tinker. “There’s no sense in getting the boy too upset. We have to depend upon his good sense to save us all.” He turned to Thomas. “I will not ask you what devilish impulse moved you to incite our Claude to do this awful deed …”

“He said it was my idea?” Thomas asked.

“A boy like Claude,” the priest said, “growing up in a Christian home, going to Mass every Sunday, would never dream up a desperate scheme like that on his own.”

“Okay,” Thomas said. He sure as hell was going to be out looking for Claude.

“Luckily,” the priest went on, in measured Gregorian tones, “when Claude visited his uncle, Dr. Robert Tinker, that awful night, with his cruelly wounded arm, Dr. Tinker was alone. He treated the boy and extracted the story from him and took him home in his own car. By the grace of God, he was not observed. But the burns are severe and Claude will be in bandages for at least three more weeks. It was not possible to keep him hidden at home safely until he was fully recovered. A maid might become suspicious, a delivery boy might get a glimpse of him, a school friend might pay a visit out of pity …”

“Oh, Christ, Anthony,” Mr. Tinker said, “get out of the pulpit!” His face pale and working convulsively, his eyes bloodshot, he strode over to Thomas. “We drove the little bastard down to New York last night and we put him on a plane to California this morning. He’s got an aunt in San Francisco and he’ll be stashed away until he can get the bandages off and then he’s going to military school and I don’t care if he doesn’t come back to this town before he’s ninety. And if he knows what’s good for him your father’d damn well better get you out of town, too. As far away as possible, where nobody knows you and nobody’ll ask any questions.”

“Don’t worry, Tinker,” Jordache said. “He’ll be out of town by nightfall.”

“He’d better be,” Tinker said threateningly.

“All right now.” Jordache opened the door. “I’ve had enough of the both of you. Get out.”

“I think we ought to go now, John,” the priest said. “I’m certain Mr. Jordache will do the proper thing.”

Tinker had to get in the last word. “You’re being let off easy,” he said. “All of you.” He marched out of the store.

“God forgive you, my son,” the priest said, and followed his brother.

Jordache locked the door and faced Thomas. “You’ve hung a sword over my head, you little shit,” he said. “You’ve got something coming to you.” He limped toward Thomas and swung his fist. It landed high on Thomas’s head. Thomas staggered and then, instinctively, hit back, going off the floor and catching his father flush on the temple with the hardest right hand he had ever thrown. Jordache didn’t fall, but swayed a little, his hands out in front of him. He stared disbelieving at his son, at the blue eyes icy with hatred. Then he saw Thomas smile and drop his hands to his side.

“Go ahead and get it over with,” Thomas said contemptuously. “Sonny boy won’t hit his brave daddy any more.”

Jordache swung once more. The left side of Thomas’s face began to swell immediately and became an angry wine red, but he merely stood there, smiling.

Jordache dropped his hands. The one blow had been a symbol, nothing more. Meaningless, he thought dazedly. Sons.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s over. Your brother’s going to take you on the bus to Grafton. From there you’ll take the first train to Albany. In Albany you’ll change for Ohio. Alone. My brother’ll have to take care of you. I’ll call him today and he’ll be expecting you. Don’t bother packing. I don’t want anybody to see you leaving town with a valise.” He unlocked the bakery door. Thomas went out, blinking in the Sunday afternoon sunlight.

“You wait here,” Jordache said. “I’ll send your brother down. I don’t fancy any farewell scenes with your mother.” He locked the bakery door and limped into the house.

Only after his father was gone did Thomas touch the tender, swollen side of his jaw.

VIII

Ten minutes later, Jordache and Rudolph came down. Thomas was leaning against the bakery window, staring calmly across the street. Rudolph was carrying the jacket of Thomas’s one suit, striped and greenish. It had been bought two years before and was too small for him. He couldn’t move his shoulders freely when he put it on and his hands dangled far out of the tight sleeves.

Rudolph looked dazed and his eyes widened when he saw the welt on Thomas’s cheek. Jordache had the appearance of a sick man. Under the naturally dark tint of his skin, there was a wash of pallid green and his eyes were puffy. One punch, Thomas thought, and look what happens to him.

“Rudolph knows what he has to do,” Jordache said. “I gave him some money. He’ll buy your ticket to Cleveland. Here’s your uncle’s address.” He handed Thomas a slip of paper.

I’m moving up in class, Thomas thought, I have uncles for emergencies, too. Call me Tinker.

“Now get moving,” Jordache said. “And keep your trap shut.”

The boys started down the street. Jordache watched, feeling the vein throb in his temple where Thomas had hit him and not seeing anything clearly. His sons moved off in a blur down the sunny empty slum street, the one tallish and slender and well dressed in the gray-flannel slacks and a blue blazer, the other almost as tall but wider and looking childish in the jacket that was too small for him. When the boys had disappeared around a corner, Jordache turned and walked in the opposite direction, toward the river. This was one afternoon he had to be alone. He would call his brother later. His brother and his wife were just slobs enough to take in the son of a man who had kicked them out of his house and hadn’t even said thank you for the yearly Christmas card that was the only evidence that two men who had been born long ago in the same house in Cologne and who were living in different parts of America were, in fact, brothers. He could just hear his brother saying to his fat wife, in that ineradicable German accent, “After all, vat can ve do? Blut is thicker than vater.”

“What in hell happened?” Rudolph asked as soon as they were out of their father’s sight.

“Nothing,” Thomas said.

“He hit you,” Rudolph said. “Your jaw’s a sight.”

“It was a terrible blow,” Thomas said mockingly. “He’s next in line for a shot at the title.”

“He came upstairs looking sick,” Rudolph said.

“I clipped him one.” Thomas grinned, remembering.

“You hit him?”

“Why not?” Thomas said. “What’s a father for?”

“Christ! And you’re still alive?”

“I’m alive,” said Thomas.

“No wonder he’s getting rid of you.” Rudolph shook his head. He couldn’t help being angry at Thomas. Because of Thomas he was missing his date with Julie. He would have liked to pass her house, it was only a few blocks out of the way to the bus station, but his father had said he wanted Thomas out of town immediately and with nobody knowing about it. “What the hell is the matter with you, anyway?”

“I’m a high-spirited, red-blooded, normal American boy,” Thomas said.

“It must be real trouble,” Rudolph said. “He gave me fifty bucks for the train fare. Anytime he shells out fifty bucks, it must be something enormous.”

“I was discovered spying for the Japs,” Thomas said placidly.

“Oh, boy, you’re smart,” Rudolph said, and they walked the rest of the way to the bus station in silence.

They got off the bus at Grafton near the railroad station and Thomas sat under a tree in a little park across the square from the station while Rudolph went in to see about Thomas’s ticket. The next train to Albany was in fifteen minutes and Rudolph bought the ticket from the wizened man with a green eyeshade behind the wicket. He didn’t buy the ticket for the connection to Cleveland. His father had told him he didn’t want anybody to know Thomas’s final destination, so Thomas was going to have to buy the ticket himself at the station in Albany.

As he took the change, Rudolph had an impulse to buy another ticket for himself. In the opposite direction. To New York. Why should Thomas be the first one to escape? But of course, he didn’t buy any ticket to New York. He went out of the station and past the dozing drivers waiting in their 1939 taxis for the arrival of the next train. Thomas was sitting on a bench under a tree, his legs sprawled out in a V, his heels dug into the scrubby lawn. He looked unhurried and peaceful, as though nothing was happening to him.

Rudolph glanced around to make sure nobody was watching them. “Here’s your ticket,” he said, handing it to Thomas, who looked at it lazily. “Put it away, put it away,” Rudolph said. “And here’s the change for the fifty dollars. Forty-two fifty. For your ticket from Albany. You’ll have a lot left over, the way I figure it.”

Thomas pocketed the money without counting it. “The old man must have shit blood,” Thomas said, “when he took it out from wherever he hides his dough. Did you see where he keeps it?”

“No.”

“Too bad. I could come back some dark night and lift it. Although I don’t suppose you’d tell me, even if you knew. Not my brother Rudolph.”

They watched a roadster drive up with a girl at the wheel and a lieutenant in the Air Force beside her. They got out of the car and went into the shade of the tiled overhang of the depot. Then they stopped and kissed. The girl was wearing a pale-blue dress and the summery wind twirled it around her legs. The lieutenant was tall and very tan, as though he had been in the desert. He had medals and wings on his green Eisenhower jacket and he was carrying a stuffed flight bag. Rudolph heard the roar of a thousand engines in foreign skies as he watched the couple. Again, he felt the pang because he had been born too late and missed the war.

“Kiss me, darling,” Thomas said, “I bombed Tokyo.”

“What the hell are you proving?” Rudolph said.

“You ever get laid?” Thomas asked.

The echo of his father’s question the day Jordache hit Miss Lenaut disturbed Rudolph. “What’s it to you?”

Thomas shrugged, watching the two people go through the open door of the station. “Nothing. I just thought I’m going to be away a long time, maybe we ought to have a heart-to-heart talk.”

“Well, if you must know, I haven’t,” Rudolph said stiffly.

“I was sure of it,” Thomas said. “There’s a place called Alice’s in town on McKinley, you can get a good piece of tail for five bucks. Tell them your brother sent you.”

“I’ll take care of myself my own way,” Rudolph said. Although he was a year older than Thomas, Thomas was making him feel like a kid.

“Our loving sister is getting hers regularly,” Thomas said. “Did you know that?”

“That’s her business.” But Rudolph was shocked. Gretchen was so clean and neat and politely spoken. He couldn’t imagine her in the sweaty tangle of sex.

“Do you want to know who with?”

“No.”

“Theodore Boylan,” Thomas said. “How do you like that for class?”

“How do you know?” Rudolph was sure that Thomas was lying.

“I went up and watched through the window,” Thomas said. “He came down into the living room bare-assed, with his thing hanging down to his knees, he’s a regular horse, and made two whiskies and called up the stairs, ‘Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?’” Thomas simpered as he imitated Bolyan.

“Did she come down?” Rudolph didn’t want to hear the rest of the story.

“No. I guess she was having too good a time where she was.”

“So you didn’t see whoever it was.” Rudolph fell back on logic to preserve his sister. “It might have been anybody up there.”

“How many Gretchens you know in Port Philip?” Thomas said. “Anyway, Claude Tinker saw them drive up the hill together in Boylan’s car. She meets him in front of Bernstein’s when she’s supposed to be at the hospital. Maybe Boylan got wounded in a war, too. The Spanish-American War.”

“Jesus,” Rudolph said. “With an ugly old man like Boylan.” If it had been with someone like the young lieutenant who had just gone into the station, she would still have remained his sister.

“She must be getting something out of it,” Thomas said carelessly. “Ask her.”

“You ever tell her you knew?”

“Nah. Let her screw in peace. It’s not my cock. I just went up there for laughs,” Thomas said. “She don’t mean anything to me. La-di-da, la-di-da, where do babies come from, Mummy?”

Rudolph wondered how his brother could have perfected his hatred so young.

“If we were Italians or something,” Thomas said, “or Southern gentlemen, we’d go up that hill and avenge the honor of the family. Cut off his balls or shoot him or something. I’m busy this year, but if you want to do it, I give you permission.”

“Maybe you’ll be surprised,” Rudolph said. “Maybe I will do something.”

“I bet,” Thomas said. “Anyway, just for your information, I’ve already done something.”

“What?”

Thomas looked consideringly at Rudolph. “Ask your father,” he said, “he knows.” He stood up. “Well, I better be getting along. The train’s due.”

They went out onto the platform. The lieutenant and the girl were kissing again. He might never come back, this might be the last kiss, Rudolph thought; after all, they were still fighting out in the Pacific, there were still the Japanese. The girl was weeping as she kissed the lieutenant and he was patting her back with one hand to comfort her. Rudolph wondered if there ever would be a girl who would cry on a station platform because he had to leave her.

The train came in with a whoosh of country dust. Thomas swung up onto the steps.

“Look,” Rudolph said, “if there’s anything you want from the house, write me. I’ll get it to you somehow.”

“There’s nothing I want from that house,” Thomas said. His rebellion was pure and complete. The undeveloped, childish face seemed merry, as if he were going to a circus.

“Well,” Rudolph said lamely. “Good luck.” After all, he was his brother and God knew when they would ever see each other again.

“Congratulations,” Thomas said. “Now you got the whole bed to yourself. You don’t have to worry about my smelling like a wild animal. Don’t forget to wear your pajamas.”

Giving nothing, right up to the last moment, he went into the vestibule and into the car without looking back. The train started and Rudolph could see the lieutenant standing at an open window waving to the girl, who was running along the platform.

The train gathered speed and the girl stopped running. She became conscious of Rudolph looking at her and her face closed down, erasing public sorrow, public love. She wheeled and hurried off, the wind whipping her dress about her body. Warrior’s woman.

Rudolph went back to the park and sat on the bench again and waited for the bus back to Port Philip.

What a goddamn birthday.

IX

Gretchen was packing a bag. It was a big, frayed, yellow-stippled, cardboardish rectangle, studded with brass knobs, that had held her mother’s bridal trousseau when she arrived in Port Philip. Gretchen had never spent a night away from home in her whole life so she had never had a valise of her own. When she had made her decision, after her father had come up from the conference with Thomas and the Tinkers, to announce that Thomas was going away for a long time, Gretchen had climbed to the narrow little attic where the few things that the Jordaches had collected and had no further use for were stored. She had found the bag and brought it down to her own room. Her mother had seen her with the bag and must have guessed what it meant, but had said nothing. Her mother hadn’t talked to her in weeks, ever since the night she had come in at dawn after the trip to New York with Boylan. It was as though she felt that conversation between them brought with it the contagion of Gretchen’s rank corruption.

The air of crisis, of hidden conflicts, the strange look in her father’s eyes when he had come back into the living room and told Rudolph to come with him, had finally pushed Gretchen to action. There would never be a better day to leave than this Sunday afternoon.

She packed carefully. The bag wasn’t big enough to take everything she might need and she had to choose deliberately, putting things in, then taking them out in favor of other things that might be more useful. She hoped that she could get out of the house before her father came back, but she was prepared to face him and tell him that she had lost her job and was going down to New York to look for another. There had been something in his face as he started downstairs with Rudolph that was passive and stunned and she guessed that today might be the one day she could walk past him without a struggle.

She had to turn almost every book upside down before she found the envelope with the money in it. That crazy game her mother played. There was a fifty-fifty chance that her mother would wind up in an asylum. Eventually, she hoped, she would be able to learn to pity her.

She was sorry that she was going without a chance to say good-bye to Rudolph but it was growing dark already and she didn’t want to reach New York after midnight. She had no notion of where she was going to go in New York. There must be a Y.W.C.A. somewhere. Girls had spent their first nights in New York in worse places.

She looked around her stripped room without emotion. Her good-bye to her room was flippant. She took the envelope, now empty of money, and laid it squarely in the middle of her narrow bed.

She lugged the suitcase out into the hallway. She could see her mother sitting at the table, smoking. The remains of the dinner, the goose carcass, the cold cabbage, the dumplings jellied in slime, the stained napkins, had remained untouched all these hours on the table, as her mother had sat there, wordless, staring at the wall. Gretchen went into the room. “Ma,” she said, “this is going-away day, I guess. I’m packed and I’m leaving.”

Her mother turned her head slowly and blearily toward her. “Go to your fancy man,” she said thickly. Her vocabulary of abuse dated from earlier in the century. She had finished all the wine and she was drunk. It was the first time Gretchen had seen her mother drunk and it made her want to laugh.

“I’m not going to anybody,” she said. “I lost my job and I’m going to New York to look for another one. When I’m settled, I’ll write you and let you know.”

“Harlot,” the mother said.

Gretchen grimaced. Who said harlot in 1945? It made her going unimportant, comic. But she forced herself to kiss her mother’s cheek. The skin was rough and seamed with broken capillaries.

“False kisses,” the mother said, staring. “The dagger in the rose.”

What books she must have read as a young girl!

The mother pushed back a wisp of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, in the gesture that had been weary since she was twenty-one years old. It occurred to Gretchen that her mother had been born worn out and that much should be forgiven her because of it. For a moment she hesitated, searching for some vestige of affection within her for the drunken woman sitting wreathed in smoke at the cluttered table.

“Goose,” her mother said disdainfully. “Who eats goose?”

Gretchen shook her head hopelessly and went out into the hallway and picked up the bag and struggled down the staircase with it. She unlocked the door below and pushed the suitcase out over the sill into the street. The sun was just setting and the shadows on the street were violet and indigo. As she picked up the bag, the streetlamps went on, lemony and pale, doing premature and useless service.

Then she saw Rudolph hurrying down the street toward the house. He was alone. She put down her bag and waited for him. As he approached she thought how well the blazer fit him, how neat he looked, and was glad she had spent the money.

When Rudolph saw her, he broke into a run. “Where’re you going?” he said as he came up to her.

“New York,” she said lightly. “Come along?”

“I wish I could,” he said.

“Help a lady to a taxi?”

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

“Not here,” she said, glancing at the bakery window. “I want to get away from here.”

“Yeah,” Rudolph said, picking up her bag. “This is for sure no place to talk.”

They started down the street together to look for a taxi. Good-bye, good-bye, Gretchen sang to herself, as she passed the familiar names, good-bye Clancy’s Garage, Body Work, good-bye Soriano’s Hand Laundry, good-bye Fenelli’s, Prime Beef, good-bye the A and P, good-bye Bolton’s Drug Store, good-bye Wharton’s Paints and Hardware, good-bye Bruno’s Barber Shop, good-bye Jardino’s Fruits and Vegetables. The song inside her head was lilting as she walked briskly beside her brother, but there was a minor undertone in it. You leave no place after nineteen years without regrets.

They found a taxi two blocks farther on and drove to the station. While Gretchen went over to the window to buy her ticket, Rudolph sat on the old-fashioned valise, thinking, I am spending my eighteenth year saying goodbye in every station of the New York Central railroad.

Rudolph couldn’t help but feeling a little bruised by the rippling lightness in his sister’s movements and the pinpoints of joy in her eyes. After all, she was not only leaving home, she was leaving him. He felt strange with her now, since he knew she had made love with a man. Let her screw in peace. He must find a more melodious vocabulary.

She touched him on the sleeve. “The train won’t be along for more than a half hour,” she said. “I feel like a drink. Celebrate. Put the valise in the baggage room and we’ll go across the street to the Port Philip House.”

Rudolph picked up the valise. “I’ll carry it,” he said. “It costs ten cents in the baggage room.”

“Let’s be big for once.” Gretchen laughed. “Squander our inheritance. Let the dimes flow.”

As he took a check for the valise, he wondered if she had been drinking all afternoon.

The bar of the Port Philip House was empty except for two soldiers who were moodily staring at glasses of wartime beer near the entrance. The bar was dark and cool and they could look out through the windows at the station, its lights now on in the dusk. They sat at a table near the back and when the bartender came over to them, wiping his hands on his apron, Gretchen said, firmly, “Two Black and White and soda, please.”

The barman didn’t ask whether or not they were over eighteen. Gretchen had ordered as if she had been drinking whiskey in bars all her life.

Actually, Rudolph would have preferred a Coke. The afternoon had been too full of occasions.

Gretchen poked at his cheek with two fingers. “Don’t look so glum,” she said. “It’s your birthday.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Why did Pa send Tommy away?”

“I don’t know. Neither of them would tell me. Something happened with the Tinkers. Tommy hit Pa. I know that.”

“Wooh …” Gretchen said softly. “Quite a day, isn’t it?”