Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  He could have taken a taxi, but after the years of absence he preferred to walk. The streets of his native town would slowly prepare him—for just what he was not quite sure.

  He walked past the bus station. The last ride with his brother Rudolph. You smell like a wild animal.

  He walked past Bernstein’s Department Store, his sister’s rendezvous point with Theodore Boylan. The naked man in the living room, the burning cross. Happy boyhood memories.

  He walked past the public school. The returned malarial soldier and the samurai sword and the Jap’s head spouting blood.

  Nobody said hello. All faces in the mean rain looked hurried, closed, and unfamiliar. Return in Triumph. Welcome, Citizen.

  He walked past St. Anselm’s, Claude Tinker’s uncle’s church. By the Grace of God, he was not observed.

  He turned into Vanderhoff Street. The rain was coming down more strongly. He touched the bulge in the breast of his jacket that concealed the envelope with the money in it. The street had changed. A square prisonlike building had been put up and there was some sort of factory in it. Some of the old shops were boarded up and there were names he didn’t recognize on the windows of other shops.

  He kept his eyes down to keep the rain from driving into them, so when he looked up finally he was stupidly puzzled because where the bakery had been, where the house in which he was born had stood, there was now a large supermarket, with three stories of apartments above it. He read the signs in the windows. Special Today, Rib Roast. Lamb Shoulder. Women with shopping bags were going in and out of a door which, if the Jordache house had been still there, would have opened onto the front hallway.

  Thomas peered through the windows. There were girls making change at the front desks. He didn’t know any of them. There was no sense in going in. He was not in the market for rib roasts or lamb shoulders.

  Uncertainly, he continued down the street. The garage next door had been rebuilt and the name on it was a different one and he didn’t recognize any of the faces there, either. But near the corner he saw that Jardino’s Fruits and Vegetables was still where it always had been. He went in and waited while an old woman argued with Mrs. Jardino about string beans.

  When the old woman had gone, Mrs. Jardino turned to him. She was a small, shapeless woman with a fierce, beaked nose and a wart on her upper lip from which sprang two long, coarse, black hairs. “Yes,” Mrs. Jardino said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Mrs. Jardino,” Thomas said, putting down his coat collar to look more respectable, “you probably don’t remember me, but I used to be a … well … a kind of neighbor of yours. We used to have the bakery. Jordache?”

  Mrs. Jardino peered nearsightedly at him. “Which one were you?”

  “The youngest one.”

  “Oh, yes. The little gangster.”

  Thomas tried a smile, to compliment Mrs. Jardino on her rough humor. Mrs. Jardino didn’t smile back. “So, what do you want?”

  “I haven’t been here for awhile,” Thomas said. “I’ve come back to pay a family visit. But the bakery isn’t there any more.”

  “It’s been gone for years,” Mrs. Jardino said impatiently, arranging apples so that the spots wouldn’t show. “Didn’t your family tell you?”

  “We were out of touch for awhile,” Thomas said. “Do you know where they are?”

  “How should I know where they are? They never talked to dirty Italians.” She turned her back squarely on him and fussed with bunches of celery.

  “Thank you very much, just the same,” Thomas said and started out.

  “Wait a minute,” Mrs. Jardino said. “When you left, your father was still alive, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Thomas said.

  “Well, he’s dead,” she said. There was a certain satisfaction in her voice. “He drowned. In the river. And then your mother moved away and then they tore the building down and now …” bitterly, “there’s a supermarket there cutting our throats.”

  A customer came in and Mrs. Jardino began to weigh five pounds of potatoes and Thomas went out of the shop.

  He went and stood in front of the supermarket for awhile, but it didn’t tell him anything. He thought of going down to the river, but the river wasn’t going to tell him anything, either. He walked back toward the station. He passed a bank and went in and rented a safety deposit box and put forty-nine hundred of the five thousand dollars in the box. He figured he might as well leave his money in Port Philip as anywhere. Or throw it into the river in which his father had drowned.

  He supposed he might be able to find his mother and brother by going to the post office, but he decided against the effort. It was his father he had come to see. And pay off.

  Chapter 2

  1950

  Capped and gowned, Rudolph sat in the June sunlight, among the other graduates in rented black.

  “Now, in 1950, at the exact mid-point of the century,” the speaker was saying, “we Americans must ask ourselves several questions: What do we have? What do we want? What are our strengths and weaknesses? Where are we going?” The speaker was a cabinet member, up from Washington as a favor for the President of the college, who had been a friend of his at Cornell, a more illustrious place of learning.

  Now at the exact mid-point of the century, Rudolph thought, moving restlessly on the camp chair set up on the campus lawn, what do I have, what do I want, what are my strengths and weaknesses, where am I going? I have a B.A., a debt of four thousand dollars, and a dying mother. I want to be rich and free and beloved. My strength—I can run the two-twenty in 23:8. My weakness? I am honest. He smiled inwardly, innocently regarding the Great Man from Washington. Where am I going? You tell me, brother.

  The man from Washington was a man of peace. “The curve of military power is rising everywhere,” he said in solemn tones. “The only hope for peace is the military might of the United States. To prevent war the United States needs a force so big and strong, so capable of counterattack as to serve as a deterrent.”

  Rudolph looked along the rows of his fellow graduates. Half of them were veterans of World War II, in college on the G.I. Bill of Rights. Many of them were married, their wives sitting with newly set hair in the rows behind them, some of them holding infants in their arms because there was nobody to leave them with in the trailers and cluttered rented rooms which had been their homes while their husbands had struggled for the degrees being awarded today. Rudolph wondered how they felt about the rising curve of military power.

  Sitting next to Rudolph was Bradford Knight, a, round-faced florid young man from Tulsa, who had been a sergeant in the infantry in Europe. He was Rudolph’s best friend on the campus, an energetic, overt boy, cynical and shrewd behind a lazy Oklahoma drawl. He had come to Whitby because his captain had graduated from the school and recommended him to the Dean of Admissions. He and Rudolph had drunk a lot of beer together and had gone fishing together. Brad kept urging Rudolph to come out to Tulsa with him after graduation and go into the oil business with him and his father. “You’ll be a millionaire before you’re twenty-five, son,” Brad had said. “It’s over-flowin’ country out there. You’ll trade in your Cadillac every time the ashtrays have to be emptied.” Brad’s father had been a millionaire before he was twenty-five, but was in a low period now (“Just a little bad run of luck,” according to Brad) and couldn’t afford the fare East at the moment for his son’s graduation.

  Teddy Boylan wasn’t at the ceremony, either, although Rudolph had sent him an invitation. It was the least he could do for the four thousand dollars. But Boylan had declined. “I’m afraid I can’t see myself driving fifty miles on a nice June afternoon to listen to a Democrat make a speech on the campus of an obscure agricultural school.” Whitby was not an agricultural school, although it did have an important agricultural department, but Boylan still resented Rudolph’s refusal even to apply to an Ivy League university when he had made his offer in 1946 to finance Rudolph’s education. “However,” the letter had gone on
in Boylan’s harsh, heavily accented handwriting, “the day shall not go altogether uncelebrated. Come on over to the house when the dreary mumblings are over, and we’ll break out a bottle of champagne and talk about your plans.”

  Rudolph had decided for several reasons to choose Whitby rather than to take a chance on Yale or Harvard. For one, he’d have owed Boylan a good deal more than four thousand dollars at the end, and for another, with his background and his lack of money, he’d have been a four-year outsider among the young lords of American society whose fathers and grandfathers had all cheered at Harvard–Yale games, who whipped back and forth to debutantes’ balls, and most of whom had never worked a day in their lives. At Whitby, poverty was normal. The occasional boy who didn’t have to work in the summer to help pay for his books and clothes in the autumn was unusual. The only outsiders, except for an occasional stray like Brad, were bookish freaks who shunned their fellow students and a few politically minded young men who circulated petitions in favor of the United Nations and against compulsory military service.

  Another reason that Rudolph had chosen Whitby was that it was close enough to Port Philip so that he could get over on Sundays to see his mother, who was more or less confined to her room and who, friendless, suspicious, and half mad, could not be allowed just to founder into absolute neglect. In the summer of his sophomore year, when he got the job after hours and on Saturdays at Calderwood’s Department Store, he had found a cheap little two-room apartment with a kitchenette in Whitby and had moved his mother in with him. She was waiting for him there, now. She hadn’t felt well enough to come to the graduation, she said, and besides, she would disgrace him, the way she looked. Disgrace was probably too strong a word, Rudolph thought, looking around at the neatly clothed, sober parents of his classmates, but she certainly wouldn’t have dazzled anybody in the assemblage with her beauty or her style of dress. It was one thing to be a dutiful son. It was a very different thing not to face facts.

  So—Mary Pease Jordache, sitting in a rocking chair at the window of the shabby apartment, cigarette ashes drifting down on her shawl, legs swollen and almost useless, was not there to see her son rewarded with his roll of imitation parchment. Among the other absentees—Gretchen, linked by blood, detained in New York by a crisis with her child; Julie, being graduated herself that day from Barnard; Thomas, more blood, address unknown; Axel Jordache, blood on his hands, sculling through eternity.

  He was alone this day and it was just as well.

  “The power of the military establishment is appalling,” the speaker was saying, his voice magnified over the public address system, “but one great thing on our side is the wish of the ordinary man everywhere for peace.”

  If Rudolph was an ordinary man, the cabinet member was certainly speaking for him. Now that he had heard some of the stories about the war in bull sessions around the campus he no longer envied the generation before his which had stood on Guadalcanal and the sandy ridges of Tunisia and at the Rapido River.

  The fine, intelligent, educated voice sang on in the sunny quadrangle of red-brick Colonial buildings. Inevitably, there was the salute to America, land of opportunity. Half the young men listening had had the opportunity to be killed for America, but the speaker was looking forward this afternoon, not toward the past, and the opportunities he mentioned were those of scientific research, public service, aid to those nations throughout the world who were not as fortunate as we. He was a good man, the cabinet member, and Rudolph was glad that such a man was near the seat of power in Washington, but his view of opportunity in 1950 was a bit lofty, evangelical, Washingtonian, all very well for a Commencement exercise, but not likely to coincide with the down-to-earth views of the three hundred or so poor men’s sons who sat before him in black robes waiting to receive their degrees from a small, underfinanced school known, if it was known at all, for its agricultural department, and wondering how they were going to start earning a living the next day.

  Up front, in the section reserved for professors, Rudolph saw Professor Denton, the head of the History and Economics departments, squirming in his seat and turning to whisper to Professor Lloyd, of the English Department, sitting on his right. Rudolph smiled, guessing what Professor Denton’s comments would be on the cabinet member’s ritualistic pronouncements. Denton, a small, fierce, graying man, disappointed because by now he realized he would rise no higher in the academic world, was also a kind of outdated Midwestern Populist, who spent a good deal of his time in the classroom ranting about what he considered the betrayal of the American economic and political system, dating back to the Civil War, by Big Money and Big Business. “The American economy,” he had said in class, “is a rigged crap table, with loaded dice. The laws are carefully arranged so that the Rich throw only sevens and everybody else throws only snake-eyes.”

  At least once a term he made a point of referring to the fact that in 1932, by his own admission before a congressional committee, J. P. Morgan had not paid a cent in income tax. “I want you gentlemen to keep this in mind,” Professor Denton would declaim bitterly, “while also keeping in mind that in the same year, on a mere tutor’s salary, I paid five hundred and twenty-seven dollars and thirty cents in tax to the Federal Government.”

  The effect on the class, as far as Rudolph could discern, was not the one Denton sought. Rather than firing the students up with indignation and a burning desire to rally forth to do battle for reform, most of the students, Rudolph included, dreamed of the time when they themselves could reach the heights of wealth and power, so that they, too, like J. P. Morgan, could be exempt from what Denton called the legal enslavement of the electorate body.

  And when Denton, pouncing upon some bit of news in The Wall Street Journal describing some new wily tax-saving amalgamation or oil jobbing that kept millions of dollars immune from the federal treasury, Rudolph listened carefully, admiring the techniques that Denton lovingly dissected, and putting everything carefully down in his notebooks, against the blessed day when he perhaps might be faced with similar opportunities.

  Anxious for good marks, not so much for themselves as for the possible advantages later, Rudolph did not let on that his close attention to Denton’s tirades were not those of a disciple, but rather those of a spy in enemy territory. His three courses with Denton had been rewarded with three A’s and Denton had offered him a teaching fellowship in the History Department for the next year.

  Despite his secret disagreement with what he thought were Denton’s naive positions, Denton was the one instructor Rudolph had come to like in all the time he had been in the college, and the one man he considered had taught him anything useful.

  He had kept this opinion, as he had kept almost all his other opinions, strictly to himself, and he was highly regarded as a serious student and a well-behaved young man by the faculty members.

  The speaker was finishing, with a mention of God in his last sentence. There was applause. Then the graduates were called up to receive their degrees, one by one. The President beamed as he bestowed the rolls of paper bedecked with ribbon. He had scored a coup getting the cabinet member to his ceremony. He had not read Boylan’s letter about an agricultural school.

  A hymn was sung, a decorous march played. The black robes filed down through the rows of parents and relatives. The robes dispersed under the summer foliage, of oak trees, mixing with the bright colors of women’s dresses, making the graduates look like a flock of crows feeding in a field of flowers.

  Rudolph limited himself to a few handshakes. He had a busy day and night ahead of him. Denton sought him out, shook his hand, a small, almost hunchbacked man with thick, silver-rimmed glasses. “Jordache,” he said, his hand enthusiastic, “you will think it over won’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Rudolph said. “It’s very kind of you.” Respect your elders. The academic life, serene, underpaid. A Master’s in a year, a Ph.D. a few years later, a chair perhaps at the age of forty-five. “I am certainly tempted, sir.” He was not tempte
d at all.

  He and Brad broke away to turn in their robes and go, as prearranged, to the parking lot. Brad had a pre-war Chevy convertible, and his bags, already packed, were in the trunk. Brad was ready to take off for Oklahoma, that overflowing country.

  They were the first ones out of the parking lot. They did not look back. Alma Mater disappeared around a bend in the road. Four years. Be sentimental later. Twenty years from now.

  “Let’s go by the store for a minute,” Rudolph said. “I promised Calderwood I’d look in.”

  “Yes, sir,” Brad said, at the wheel. “Do I sound like an educated man?”

  “The ruling class,” Rudolph said.

  “My time has not been wasted,” Brad said. “How much do you think a cabinet member makes a year?”

  “Fifteen, sixteen thousand,” Rudolph hazarded.

  “Chickenfeed,” Brad said.

  “Plus honor.”

  “That’s another thirty bucks a year at least,” Brad said. “Tax free. You think he wrote that speech himself?”

  “Probably.”

  “He’s overpaid.” Brad began to hum the tune of “Everything’s Up-to-Date in Kansas City.” “Will there be broads there tonight?”

  Gretchen had invited them both to her place for a party to mark the occasion. Julie was to come, too, if she could shake her parents.

  “Probably,” Rudolph said. “There’re usually one or two girls hanging around.”

  “I read all that stuff in the papers,” Brad said querulously, “about how modern youth is going to the dogs and how morality has broken down since the war and all, but I’m not getting any of that little old broken-down morality, that’s for sure. The next time I go to college it’s going to be coed. You’re looking at a pure-bred, sex-starved Bachelor of Arts, and I ain’t just talking.” He hummed gaily.