Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  “I think I’ll keep it. You yourself said it’s Rudy’s,” Jordache said placidly. “And it shows a lot of talent. A very good likeness.” He shook his head in admiration. “I never guessed Rudy had it in him. I think I’ll have it framed and hang it up back home. You’d have to pay a lot of money to get a nude picture as good as this one on the open market.”

  Miss Lenaut was biting her lips so hard she couldn’t get a word out for the moment. Rudolph stared at his father, dumbfounded. He hadn’t had any clear idea of how his father was going to react, but this falsely innocent, sly, country-bumpkin performance was beyond any concept that Rudolph might ever have had of how his father would behave.

  Miss Lenaut gave tongue. She spoke in a harsh whisper, leaning malevolently over her desk and spitting out the words at Jordache. “Get out of here, you low, dirty, common foreigner, and take your filthy son with you.”

  “I wouldn’t talk like that, Miss,” Jordache said, his voice still calm. “This is a taxpayer’s school and I’m a taxpayer and I’ll get out when I’m good and ready. And if you didn’t strut around with your tail wiggling in a tight skirt and half your titties showing like a two dollar whore on a street corner, maybe young boys wouldn’t be tempted to draw pictures of you stark-assed naked. And if you ask me, if a man took you out of all your brassieres and girdles, it’d turn out that Rudy was downright complimentary in his art work.”

  Miss Lenaut’s face was congested and her mouth writhed in hatred. “I know about you,” she said. “Sale Boche.”

  Jordache reached across the desk and slapped her. The slap resounded like a small firecracker. The voices from the playing field had died down and the room was sickeningly silent. Miss Lenaut remained bent over, leaning on her hands on the desk, for another moment. Then she burst into tears and crumpled onto her chair, holding her hands to her face.

  “I don’t go for talk like that, you French cunt,” Jordache said. “I didn’t come all the way here from Europe to listen to talk like that. And if I was French these days, what with running like rabbits the first shot the dirty Boche fired at them, I’d think twice about insulting anybody. If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll tell you I killed a Frenchman in 1916 with a bare bayonet and it won’t surprise you that I stuck it in his back while he was trying to run home to his Mama.”

  As his father talked, calmly, as though he were discussing the weather or an order for flour, Rudolph began to shiver. The malice in the words was made intolerable by the conversational, almost friendly, tone in which they were delivered.

  Jordache was going on, inexorably. “And if you think you’re going to take it out on my boy here, you better think twice about that, too, because I don’t live far from here and I don’t mind walking. He’s been an A student in French for two years and I’ll be here to ask some questions if he comes back at the end of the term with anything less. Come on, Rudy.”

  They went out of the room, leaving Miss Lenaut sobbing at her desk.

  They walked away from the school without speaking. When they came to a trash basket on a corner, Jordache stopped. He tore the drawing into small pieces, almost absently, and let the pieces float down into the basket. He looked over at Rudolph. “You are a silly bastard, aren’t you?” he said.

  Rudolph nodded.

  They resumed walking in the direction of home.

  “You ever been laid?” Jordache said.

  “No.”

  “That the truth?”

  “I’d tell you.”

  “I suppose you would,” Jordache said. He walked silently for awhile, with his rolling limp. “What’re you waiting for?”

  “I’m in no hurry,” Rudolph said defensively. Neither his father nor his mother had ever mentioned anything about sex to him and this afternoon was certainly the wrong day to start. He was haunted by the sight of Miss Lenaut, dissolved and ugly, weeping on her desk, and he was ashamed that he had ever thought a silly, shrill woman like that worthy of his passion.

  “When you start,” Jordache said, “don’t get hung up on one. Take ’em by the dozen. Don’t ever get to feel that there’s only one woman for you and that you got to have her. You can ruin your life.”

  “Okay,” Rudolph said, knowing that his father was wrong, dead wrong.

  Another silence as they turned a corner.

  “You sorry I hit her?” Jordache said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve lived all your life in this country,” Jordache said. “You don’t know what real hating is.”

  “Did you really kill a Frenchman with a bayonet?” He had to know.

  “Yeah,” Jordache said. “One of ten million. What difference does it make?”

  They were nearly home. Rudolph felt depressed and miserable. He should have thanked his father for sticking up for him that way, it was something that very few parents would have done, and he realized that, but he couldn’t get the words out.

  “It wasn’t the only man I killed,” Jordache said, as they stopped in front of the bakery. “I killed a man when there was no war on. In Hamburg, Germany, with a knife. In 1921. I just thought you ought to know. It’s about time you learned something about your father. See you at supper. I got to go put the shell under cover.” He limped off, down the shabby street, his cloth cap squarely on top of his head.

  When the final marks were posted for the term, Rudolph had an A in French.

  Chapter 4

  I

  The gymnasium of the elementary school near the Jordache house was kept open until ten o’clock five nights a week. Tom Jordache went there two or three times a week, sometimes to play basketball, sometimes merely to shoot the breeze with the boys and young men who gathered there or to play in the mild game of craps that occasionally was held in the boys’ toilet, out of sight of the gym teacher refereeing the permanent game on the basketball court.

  Tom was the only boy his age allowed in the crap game. He had gained entrance with his fists. He had found a place between two of the players in the ring and had kneeled on the floor one night and thrown a dollar into the pot and said, “You’re faded,” to Sonny Jackson, a boy of nineteen waiting to be drafted, and the guiding spirit of the group that congregated around the school. Sonny was a strong, stocky boy, pugnacious and quick to take offense. Tom had chosen Sonny purposely for his debut. Sonny had looked at Tom, annoyed, and pushed Tom’s dollar bill back along the floor toward him. “Go way, punk,” he said. “This game is for men.”

  Without hesitation, Tom had leaned across the open space and backhanded Sonny, without moving from his knees. In the fight that followed, Tom made his reputation. He had cut Sonny’s eyes and lips and had finished by dragging Sonny into the showers and turning the cold water on him and keeping him there for five minutes before he turned the water off. Since then, whenever Tom joined the group in the gymnasium, they made room for him.

  Tonight, there was no game in progress. A gangling twenty-year-old by the name of Pyle, who had enlisted early in the war, was displaying a samurai sword he said he had captured himself at Guadalcanal. He had been discharged from the Army after having malaria three times and nearly died. He was still alarmingly yellow.

  Tom listened skeptically as Pyle described how he had thrown a hand grenade into-a cave just for luck. Pyle said he heard a yell inside and had crawled in with his lieutenant’s pistol in his hand to find a dead Jap captain, with the sword at his side. It sounded to Tom more like Errol Flynn in Hollywood than anybody from Port Philip in the South Pacific. But he didn’t say anything, because he was in a peaceful mood and you couldn’t beat up on a guy who looked that sick and yellow, anyway.

  “Two weeks later,” Pyle said, “I cut off a Jap’s head with this sword.”

  Tom felt a tug at his sleeve. It was Claude, dressed in a suit and tie, as usual, and bubbling a little at the lips. “Listen,” Claude whispered, “I got something to tell you. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait a minute,” Tom said. “I want to hear this.”r />
  “The island was secured,” Pyle was saying, “but there were still Japs hiding out, coming out at night, and shooting up the area and knocking off guys. The C.O. got pissed off and he sent out patrols three times a day. He told us to clean every last one of the bastards out of the area.

  “Well, I’m on one of those patrols and we see one of ’em trying to wade across a creek so we let him have it. He was hit but not bad and he’s sitting up, holding his hands over his head, saying something in Jap. There wasn’t no officers on the patrol, just a corporal and six other guys, and I says, ‘Hey, listen, you guys, just hold him here and I’ll go back to get my samurai sword and we’ll have a regular execution.’ The corporal was a little chicken about it, the orders were to bring in prisoners, but like I said, there were no officers present and after all, that’s what the bastards did all the time to our guys, cut off their heads, and we took a vote and they tied the fucker up and I went back and got my samurai sword. We made him kneel down in the regular way and he did it just like he was used to it. It was my sword so I got to do the job. I picked it up way over my head and clunk! there was his head rolling on the ground like a coconut, with his eyes wide open. The blood spurted out, it must have been close to ten feet. I tell you,” Pyle said, touching the edge of the weapon lovingly, “these swords are something.”

  “Horseshit,” Claude said loudly.

  “What’s that?” Pyle asked, blinking. “What’d you say?”

  “I said horseshit,” Claude repeated. “You never cut off no Jap’s head. I bet you bought that sword in a souvenir shop in Honolulu. My brother Al knows you and he told me you haven’t got the guts to kill a rabbit.”

  “Listen, kid,” Pyle said, “sick as I am, I’ll give you the beating of your life, if you don’t shut up and get out of here. Nobody says horseshit to me.”

  “I’m waiting,” Claude said. He took off his glasses and put them in the breast pocket of his suit. He looked pathetically defenseless.

  Tom sighed. He stepped in front of Claude. “Anybody wants to pick on my friend,” he said, “he has to go through me first.”

  “I don’t mind,” Pyle began, handing the sword to one of the other boys. “You’re young, but you’re fresh.”

  “Knock it off, Pyle,” said the boy who now was holding the sword. “He’ll murder you.”

  Pyle looked uncertainly at the circling faces. There was something sobering that he saw there. “I didn’t come back from fighting in the Pacific,” he said loudly, “to get into arguments with little kids in my home town. Give me my sword, I’m due back at the house.”

  He beat a retreat. The others drifted off without a word, leaving Tom and Claude in possession of the boys’ toilet.

  “What’d you want to do that for?” Tom asked, irritated. “He didn’t mean no harm. And you know they wouldn’t let him take me on.”

  “I just wanted to see the expression on their faces,” Claude said, sweating and grinning. “That’s all. Power. Raw power.”

  “You’re going to get me killed one day with your raw power,” Tom said. “Now what the hell did you have to tell me?”

  “I saw your sister,” Claude said.

  “Hooray for you, you saw my sister. I see her every day. Sometimes twice a day.”

  “I saw her in front of Bernstein’s Department Store. I was riding around on the bike and I went around the block again to make sure and she was getting into a big convertible Buick and a guy was holding the door open for her. She was waiting for him in front of Bernstein’s, that’s for sure.”

  “So, big deal,” Tom said. “She got a ride in a Buick.”

  “You want to know who was driving the Buick?” Behind his glasses, Claude’s eyes were joyous with information. “You’ll drop dead.”

  “I won’t drop dead. Who?”

  “Mr. Theodore Boylan, Esquire,” Claude said. “That’s who. How do you like that for moving up in class?”

  “What time you see them?”

  “An hour ago. I’ve been looking for you all over.”

  “He probably drove her to the hospital. She works in the hospital on week nights.”

  “She isn’t in any hospital tonight, Buddy,” Claude said. “I followed them part of the way on the bike. They took the road up the hill. Toward his place. You want to find your sister tonight, I advise you to look in on the Boylan estate.”

  Tom hesitated. It would have been different if Gretchen was with one of the fellows around her own age, off in a car to the lover’s lane down near the river for a little simple necking. Tease her a little later on. Hideous boy. Get a little of his own back. But with an old man like Boylan, a big shot in the town … He would rather not have to get mixed up in it. You never knew where something like that could lead you.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Claude said, “if it was my sister, I’d look into it. That Boylan has quite a reputation around town. You don’t know some of the things I hear around the house when my father and uncle are talking and they don’t know I’m listening. Your sister may be asking for a big load of trouble …”

  “You got the bike outside?”

  “Yeah. But we need some gas.” The motorcycle belonged to Claude’s brother Al, who had just been drafted two weeks before. Al had promised to break every bone in Claude’s body if he came back and found that Claude had used the machine, but whenever his parents went out at night, Claude pushed it out of the garage, after siphoning off a little gas from the family’s second car, and raced around town for an hour or so, avoiding the police, because he was too young to have a license.

  “Okay,” Tom said. “Let’s see what’s happening up the hill.”

  Claude had a length of rubber tubing slung on the motorcycle and they went behind the school, where it was dark, and opened the gas tank of a Chevy that was parked there and Claude put the tube in and sucked hard, then, as the gasoline came up, filled the tank of the motorcycle.

  Tom got on behind and with Claude driving they spurted through back streets toward the outskirts of town and began to climb the long winding road that went up the hill to the Boylan estate.

  When they got to the main gate, made of huge wrought-iron wings standing open and set into a stone wall that seemed to run for miles on each side, they parked the motorcycle behind some bushes. The rest of the way they’d have to go on foot, so as not to be heard. There was a gatekeeper’s cottage, but since the war nobody had lived in it. The boys knew the estate well. For years, they had been jumping over the wall and hunting for birds and rabbits with BB guns. The estate had been neglected for years and it was more like a jungle than the meadowed park it had been originally.

  They walked through the woods toward the main house. When they got near it, they saw the Buick parked in front. There were no lights on outside, but there was a gleam from a big French window downstairs.

  They moved cautiously toward the flower bed in front of the window. The window came down almost to the ground. One side of it was ajar. The curtains had been drawn carelessly and with Claude kneeling in the loam and Tom standing astride him, they both could look inside at the same time.

  As far as they could see, the room was empty. It was big and square, with a grand piano; a long couch, and big easy chairs and tables with magazines on them. A fire was going in the fireplace. There were a lot of books on the shelves along the walls. A few lamps did for the lighting. The double doors facing the window were open and Tom could see a hallway and the lower steps of a staircase.

  “That’s the way to live,” Claude whispered. “If I had a joint like this, I’d have every broad in town.”

  “Shut up,” Tom said. “Well, there’s nothing doing here. Let’s move.”

  “Come on, Tom,” Claude protested. “Take it easy. We just got here.”

  “This isn’t my idea of a big night,” Tom said. “Just standing out in the cold looking at a room with nobody in it.”

  “Give it a chance to develop, for Christ’s sake,” Claude said. �
�They’re probably upstairs. They can’t stay there all night.”

  Tom knew that he didn’t want to see anybody come into that room. Anybody. He wanted to get away from that house. And stay away. But he didn’t want to look as though he was chickening out. “All right,” he said, “I’ll give it a couple of minutes.” He turned away from the window, leaving Claude on his knees peering in. “Call me if anything happens,” he said.

  The night was very still. The mist rising from the wet ground was getting heavier and there were no stars. In the distance, below them, there was the faint glow of the lights of Port Philip. The Boylan grounds swept away from the house in all directions, a myriad of great old trees, the outline of the fence of a tennis court, some low buildings about fifty yards away that had once been used as stables. One man living in all that. Tom thought of the bed he shared with his brother. Well, Boylan was sharing a bed tonight, too. Tom spat.

  “Hey!” Claude beckoned to him excitedly. “Come here, come here.”

  Slowly, Tom went back to the window.

  “He just come in, down the stairs,” Claude whispered. “Look at that. Just look at that, will you.”

  Tom looked in. Boylan had his back to the window, on the far side of the room. He was at a table with bottles, glasses and a silver ice container on it. He was pouring whiskey into two glasses. He was naked.

  “What a way to walk around a house,” Claude said.

  “Shut up,” Tom said. He watched as Boylan carelessly dropped some ice into the glasses and splashed soda from a siphon into the glasses. Boylan didn’t pick up the glasses right away. He went over to the fireplace and threw another log on the fire, then went to a table near the window and opened a lacquered box and took out a cigarette. He lit it with a foot-long silver cigarette lighter. He was smiling a little.

  Standing there, so close to the window, he was clearly outlined in the light of a lamp. Mussed, bright blond hair, skinny neck, pigeony chest, flabby arms, knobby knees, and slightly bowed legs. His dick hung down from the bush of hair, long, thick, reddened. A dumb rage, a sense of being violated, of being a witness to an unspeakable obscenity, seized Tom. If he had had a gun he would have killed the man. That puny stick, that strutting, smiling, satisfied weakling, that feeble, pale, hairy slug of a body so confidently displayed, that long, fat, rosy instrument. It was worse, infinitely worse, than if he and Claude had seen his sister come in naked.