by Irwin Shaw
“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 t
o 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?”
“It sure is,” Rudolph said. It was a bigger day than she realized, he thought, remembering what Tom had told him earlier about her. The barman came over with their drinks and a siphon bottle. “Not too much soda, please,” Gretchen said.
The barman splashed some soda in Gretchen’s glass. “How about you?” He held the siphon over Rudolph’s glass.
“The same,” Rudolph said, acting eighteen.
Gretchen raised her glass. “To that well-known ornament to Port Philip society,” she said, “the Jordache family.”
They drank. Rudolph had not yet developed a taste for Scotch. Gretchen drank thirstily, as though she wanted to finish the first one fast, so that there would be time for another one before the train came in.
“What a family.” She shook her head. “The famous Jordache collection of authentic mummies. Why don’t you get on the train with me and come live in New York?”
“You know I can’t do that,” he said.
“I thought I couldn’t do it, too,” she said. “And I’m doing it.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’re you going? What happened?”
“A lot of things,” she said vaguely. She took a long swig of her whiskey. “A man mostly.” She looked at him defiantly. “A man wants to marry me.”
“Who? Boylan?”
Her eyes dilated, grew darker in the dim saloon. “How do you know?”
“Tommy told me.”
“How does he know?”
Well, why not, he thought, She asked for it. Jealousy and shame for her made him want to hurt her. “He went up to the hill and looked in through a window.”
“What did he see?” she asked coldly.
“Boylan. Naked.”
“He didn’t get much of a show, poor Tommy.” She laughed. The laugh was metallic. “He’s not much to look at, Teddy Boylan. Did he have the good luck to see me naked, too?”
“No.”
“Too bad,” she said. “It would have made his trip worthwhile.” There was something hard and self-wounding in his sister that Rudolph had never seen in her before. “How did he know I was there?”
“Boylan called upstairs to ask you if you wanted to have your drink there.”
“Oh,” she said. “That night. That was a big night. Some time I’ll tell you about it.” She studied his face. “Don’t look so stormy. Sisters have a habit of growing up and going out with fellas.”
“But Boylan,” he said bitterly. “That puny old man.”
“He’s not that old,” she said. “And not that puny.”
“You liked him,” he said accusingly.
“I liked it,” she said. Her face became very sober. “I liked it better than anything that ever happened to me.”
“Then why’re you running away?”
“Because if I stay here long enough, I’ll wind up marrying him. And Teddy Boylan’s not fit for your pure, beautiful little sister to marry. It’s complicated, isn’t it? Is your life complicated, too? Is there some dark, sinful passion you’re nursing in your bosom, too? An older woman you visit while her husband’s at the office, a …?”
“Don’t make fun of me,” he said.
“Sorry.” She touched his hand, then gestured toward the bartender.
When he came over, she said, “One more, please.” As the bartender went back to fill the order, she said, “Ma was drunk when I left. She finished all your birthday wine. The blood of the lamb. That’s all that family needs—” She spoke as though they were discussing the idlosyncracies of strangers. “A drunken crazy old lady. She called me a harlot.” Gretchen chuckled. “A last loving farewell to the girl going to the big city. Get out,” she said harshly, “get out before they finish crippling you. Get out of that house where nobody has a friend, where the doorbell never rings.”
“I’m not crippled,” he said.
“You’re frozen in an act, Brother.” The hostility was out in the open now. “You don’t fool me. Everybody’s darling, and you don’t give a good goddamn if the whole world lives or dies. If that’s not being crippled, put me in a wheelchair any day.”
The bartender came over and put her drink down in front of her and half filled the glass with soda.
“What the hell,” Rudolph said, standing up, “if that’s what you think of me, there’s no sense in my hanging around any more. You don’t need me.”
“No, I don’t,” she said.
“Here’s the ticket for your bag.” He handed her the slip of paper.
“Thanks,” she said woodenly. “You’ve done your good deed for the day. And I’ve done mine.”
He left her sitting there in the bar, drinking her second whiskey, her lovely, oval face flushed at the cheek bones, her eyes shining, her wide mouth avid, beautiful, hungry, bitter, already a thousand miles removed from the dingy apartment above the bakery, removed from her father and mother, her brothers, her lover, on her way to a city that engulfed a million girls a year.
He walked slowly toward home, tears for himself in his eyes. They were right, they were right about him, his brother, his sister; their judgments on him were just. He had to change. How do you change, what do you change? Your genes, your chromosomes, your sign of the zodiac?
As he neared Vanderhoff Street, he stopped. He couldn’t bear the thought of going home yet. He didn’t want to see his mother drunk, he didn’t want to see that stunned, hating look, like a disease, in his father’s eyes. He walked on down toward the river. There was a faint afterglow from the sunset and the river slid by like wet steel, with a smell like a deep, cool cellar in chalky ground. He sat on the rotting wharf near the warehouse in which his father kept his shell and looked out toward the opposite shore.
