by Irwin Shaw
In his plans Rudolph had argued for a place for a good restaurant, as well as the theater, to attract trade in the evenings as well. The theater, used for plays during the summer, could be turned into a movie house for the rest of the year. He also proposed building a middle-priced housing development along the lake, and suggested that the marshy and up to now unusable land at one end of Calderwood’s holdings could be used for light industry.
Coached by Johnny Heath, Rudolph had meticulously outlined all the benefits the law allowed on enterprises of this kind.
He was sure that his arguments for making a public company out of the new Calderwood Association were bound to sway the old man. The real assets and the earning power, first of the store and then of the center, would insure a high price of issue for the stock. When Calderwood died, his heirs, his wife and three daughters, would not be faced with the possibility of having to sell the business itself at emergency prices to pay the inheritance taxes, but could sell off blocks of stock while holding onto the controlling interest in the corporation.
In the year that Rudolph had been working on the plan and digging into corporation and tax and realty laws, he had been cynically amused by the manner in which money protected itself legally in the American system. He had no moral feeling about trying to turn the law to his own advantage. The game had rules. You learned the rules and abided by them. If there were another set of rules you would abide by them.
Professor Denton was waiting for him, at the bar, uncomfortable and out of place among other patrons, none of whom looked as though he had ever been near a college.
“Good of you,” Denton said, in a low, hurried voice, “good of you to come, Jordache. I’m drinking bourbon. Can I order you something?”
“I don’t drink during the day,” Rudolph said, then was sorry he said it, because it sounded disapproving of Denton, who was drinking at a quarter past noon.
“Quite right,” Denton said, “quite right. Keep the head clear. Ordinarily, I wait until the day’s work is over myself, but …” He took Rudolph’s arm. “Perhaps we can sit down.” He waved toward the last booth of the row that lined the wall opposite the bar. “I know you have to get back.” He left some change on the bar for his drink, carefully counting it out, and still with his hand holding Rudolph’s arm, guided him to the booth. They sat down facing each other. There were two greasy menus on the table and they studied them.
“I’ll take the soup and the hamburger,” Denton said to the waitress. “And a cup of coffee. How about you, Jordache?”
“The same,” Rudolph said.
The waitress wrote the order down laboriously on her pad, illiteracy a family heritage. She was a woman of about sixty, gray haired and shapeless in an incongruously pert, revealing orange uniform with a coquettish, small, lace apron, age paying its iron debt to the ideal of youthful America. Her ankles were swollen and she shuffled flatly as she went back toward the kitchen. Rudolph thought of his mother, of her dream of the neat little candlelit restaurant that had never materialized. Well, she had been spared the orange uniform.
“You’re doing well, Jordache,” Denton said, hunched over the table, his eyes worried and magnified behind the thick, steel-rimmed glasses. He waved his hand impatiently, to ward off any contradiction. “I hear, I hear,” he said. “I get reports from many sources. Mrs. Denton, for one. Faithful customer. She must be in the store three times a week. You must see her from time to time.”
“I ran into her only last week,” Rudolph said.
“She tells me the store is booming, booming, a new lease on life, she says. Very big-city. All sorts of new things. Well, people like to buy things. And everybody seems to have money these days. Except college professors.” Indigence creased Denton’s forehead briefly. “No matter. I didn’t come here to complain. No doubt about it, Jordache, you did well to turn down the job in the department. The academic world,” he said bitterly. “Rife with jealousy, cabals, treachery, ingratitude, a man has to walk as if on eggs. Better the world of business. Give and take. Dog eat dog. Frankly. On the up and up.”
“It isn’t exactly like that,” Rudolph said mildly. “Business.”
“No, of course not,” Denton said. “Everything is modified by character. It doesn’t pay to ride a theory too hard, you lose sight of the reality, the living shape. At any rate, I’m gratified at your success, and I’m sure that there was no compromise of principle involved, none whatsoever.”
The waitress appeared with their soup. Denton spooned it in. “Yes,” he said, “if I had it to do all over again, I’d avoid the ivy-covered walls like the plague. It has made me what you see today, a narrow man, an embittered man, a failure, a coward …”
“I wouldn’t call you any of those things,” Rudolph said, surprised at Denton’s description of himself. Denton had always seemed to Rudolph to be pleased with himself, enjoying acting out his visions of economic villainy before a captive audience of young people.
“I live in fear and trembling,” Denton said through the soup. “Fear and trembling.”
“If I can help you in any way,” Rudolph began. “I’d …”
“You’re a good soul, Jordache, a good soul,” Denton said. “I picked you out immediately. Serious among the frivolous. Compassionate among the pitiless. On the search for knowledge where others were merely searching for advancement. Oh, I’ve watched you carefully through the years, Jordache. You’re going to go far. Mark my words. I have been teaching young men for over twenty years, thousands of young men, they have no secrets from me, their future has no mysteries for me. Mark my words, Jordache.”
Denton finished his soup and the waitress came and put down their hamburger steaks and coffee.
“And you won’t do it by riding roughshod over your fellow men,” Denton went on, darting at his hamburger with his fork. “I know your mind, I know your character, I observed you through the years. You have a code, a sense of honor, a fastidiousness of mind and body. These eyes don’t miss much, Jordache, in class or out.”
Rudolph ate silently, waiting for the spate of approval to die down, knowing that Denton must have a great favor to ask to be so effusive before making his demand.
“Before the war,” Denton went on, chewing, “there were more young men of your mold, clear seeing, dependable, honorable. Most of them are dead now, killed in places whose names we have almost forgotten. This generation—” he shrugged despairingly. “Crafty, careful, looking to get something for nothing, hypocritical. You’d be astounded at the amount of cheating I find in each examination, term papers. Ah, if I had the money, I’d get away from it all, live on an island.” He looked nervously at his watch. “Time, ever on the wing,” he said. He peered around the dark bar conspiratorially. The booth next to theirs was empty and the four or five men hunched over the bar near the doorway were well out of earshot. “Might as well get to the nub of it.” Denton dropped his voice and leaned forward over the table. “I’m in trouble, Jordache.”
He’s going to ask me for the name of an abortionist, Rudolph thought wildly. Love on the Campus. He saw the headlines. History Professor Makes History by Moonlight with Coed. Doctor in Jail. Rudolph tried to keep his face noncommittal and went on eating. The hamburger was gray and soggy and the potatoes were oily.
“You heard what I said?” Denton whispered.
“You’re in trouble, you said.”
“Exactly.” There was a professorial tone of approval—the student had been paying attention. “Bad trouble.” Denton sipped at his coffee, Socrates and hemlock. “They’re out to get me.”
“Who’s out to get you?”
“My enemies.” Denton’s eyes scanned the bar, searching out enemies, disguised as workmen drinking beer.
“When I was in school,” Rudolph said, “you seemed to be well liked everywhere.”
“There are currents, currents,” Denton said, “eddies and whirlpools that the undergraduate never has an inkling of. In the faculty rooms, in the offices of pow
er. In the office of the President himself. I am too outspoken, it is a failing of mine. I am naive, I have believed in the myth of academic freedom. My enemies have bided their time. The vice-chairman of the department, I should have fired him years ago, a hopeless scholar; I restrained myself only out of pity, lamentable weakness. As I said, the vice-chairman, yearning for my job, has prepared a dossier, scraps of gossip over a drink, lines out of context, insinuations. They are preparing to offer me up as a sacrifice, Jordache.”
“I think you’d better tell me specifically what’s happening,” Rudolph said. “Then perhaps I’d be able to judge if I could help.”
“Oh, you could help, all right, no doubt about that.” Denton pushed the half-eaten hamburger away from him. “They have found their witch,” he said. “Me.”
“I don’t quite understand …”
“The witch hunt,” Denton said. “You read the papers like everybody else. Throw the Reds out of our schools.”
Rudolph laughed. “You’re no Red, Professor, you know that,” he said.
“Keep your voice low, boy.” Denton looked around worriedly. “One does not broadcast on this subject.”
“I’m sure you have nothing to worry about, Professor,” Rudolph said. He decided to make it seem like a joke. “I was afraid it was something serious. I thought maybe you’d got a girl pregnant.”
“You can laugh,” Denton said. “At your age. Nobody laughs in a college or a university anymore. The wildest charges. A five-dollar contribution to an obscure charity in 1938, a reference to Karl Marx in a class, for God’s sake, how is a man to teach the economic theories of the nineteenth century without mentioning Karl Marx! An ironic joke about prevalent economic practices, picked up by some stone-age moron in a class in American History and repeated to the moron’s father, who is the Commander of the local American Legion Post. Ah, you don’t know, boy, you don’t know. And Whitby gets a yearly grant from the State. For the School of Agriculture. So some wind-bag of an upstate legislator makes a speech, forms a committee, demands an investigation, gets his name in the newspaper. Patriot, Defender of the Faith. A special board has been set up within the university, Jordache, don’t mention it to a soul, headed by the President, to investigate charges against various members of the faculty. They hope to head off the State, throw them a few bodies, mine chief among them, not imperil the grant from the State. Does the picture grow clearer, Jordache?”
“Oh, Christ,” Rudolph said.
“Exactly. Oh, Christ. I don’t know what your politics are …”
“I don’t have any politics,” Rudolph said. “I vote independently.”
“Excellent, excellent,” Denton said. “Although it would have been better if you were a registered Republican. And to think that I voted for Eisenhower.” He laughed hollowly. “My son was in Korea and he promised to end the war. But how to prove it. There is much to be said for public balloting.”
“What do you want me to do, Professor?” Rudolph asked. “Specifically?”
“Now we come to it,” Denton said. He finished his coffee. “The board meets to consider my case one week from today. Tuesday at two P.M. Mark the hour. I have only been allowed to see a general outline of the charges against me; contributions to Communist front organizations in the thirties, atheistic and radical utterances in the classroom, the recommendation of certain books for outside reading of a doubtful character. The usual academic hatchet job, Jordache, all too usual. With the temper of the country what it is, with that man Dulles roaring up and down the world, preaching nuclear destruction, with the most eminent men traduced and dismissed like errand boys in Washington, a poor teacher can be ruined by a whisper, the merest whisper. Luckily, they still have a sense of shame at the university, although I doubt it will last the year, and I am to have a chance to defend myself, bring in witnesses to vouch for me …”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Whatever you will, boy,” Denton said, his voice broken. “I do not plan to coach you. Say what you think of me. You were in three of my classes, we had many instructive hours outside the courses, you have been to my house. You’re a clever young man, you are not to be fooled. You know me as well as any man in this town. Say what you will. Your reputation is high, your record at the university was impeccable, not a blot on it, you are a rising young businessman, untainted, your testimony will be of the utmost value.”
“Of course,” Rudolph said. Premonitions of trouble. Attacks. Calderwood’s attitude. Dragging the store into politics on the Communist issue. “Of course I’ll testify,” he said. This is the wrong day for something like this, he thought annoyedly. He suddenly and for the first time understood the exquisite pleasure that cowards must enjoy.
“I knew you would say that, Jordache.” Denton gripped his hand emotionally across the table. “You’d be surprised at the refusals I’ve had from men who have been my friends for twenty years, the hedging, the pusillanimity. This country is becoming a haunt of whipped dogs, Jordache. Do you wish me to swear to you that I have never been a Communist?”
“Don’t be absurd, Professor,” Rudolph said. He looked at his watch. “I’m afraid I’ve got to get back to the store. When the board meets next Tuesday I’ll be there.” He dug into his pocket for his money clip. “Let me pay my share.”
Denton stopped him with a gesture. “I invited you. You’re my guest. Go ahead, boy, go ahead. I won’t keep you.” He stood up, looked around for a last time to see if anybody was making a point of watching them, then, satisfied, put out his hand and shook Rudolph’s hand fervently.
Rudolph got his coat and went out of the bar. Through the fogged window he saw Denton stop and order a drink at the bar.
Rudolph walked slowly back toward the store, leaving his coat open, although the wind was keen and the day raw. The street looked as it always looked and the people passing him did not seem like whipped dogs. Poor Denton. He remembered that it was in Denton’s classes that he had been given the first glimmerings of how to make himself successfully into a capitalist. He laughed to himself. Denton, poor bastard, could not afford to laugh.
He was still hungry after the disastrous meal, and once in the store, he went to the fountain in the basement and ordered a malted milk and drank it among the soprano twitterings of the lady shoppers all around him. Their world was safe. They would buy dresses at fifty dollars that afternoon, and portable radios and television consoles and frying pans and living room suites and creams for the skin and the profits would mount and they were happy over their club sandwiches and ice cream sodas.
He looked over the calm, devouring, rouged, spending, acquiring faces, mothers, brides, virgins, spinsters, mistresses, listened to the voices, breathed in the jumbled bouquet of perfumes, congratulated himself that he was not married and loved no one. He thought, I cannot spend my life serving these worthy women, paid for his malted milk, and went up to his office.
On his desk, there was a letter. It was a short one. “I hope you’re coming to New York soon. I’m in a mess and I have to talk to you. Love, Gretchen.”
He threw the letter in the wastebasket and said, “Oh, Christ,” for the second time in an hour.
It was raining when he left the store at six-fifteen. Calderwood hadn’t said a word since their talk in the morning. That’s all I needed today, rain, he thought miserably, as he made his way through the streaming traffic on the motorcycle. He was almost home when he remembered that he had promised his mother that he would do the shopping for dinner. He cursed and turned the machine back toward the business section, where the stores remained open until seven. A surprise, he remembered his mother saying. Your loving son may be out on his ass in two weeks, Mother, will that be surprise enough?
He did his shopping hastily, a small chicken, potatoes, a can of peas, half an apple pie for dessert. As he pushed his way through the lines of housewives he remembered the interview with Calderwood and grinned sourly. The boy wonder financier, surrounded by admiring beauties
, on his way to one of his usual elegantly prepared repasts at the family mansion, so often photographed for Life and House and Garden. At the last minute, he bought a bottle of Scotch. This was going to be a night for whiskey.
He went to bed early, a little drunk, thinking, just before he dropped off to sleep. The only satisfactory thing I did all day was run this morning with Quentin McGovern.
The week was routine. When he saw Calderwood at the store, Calderwood made no mention of Rudolph’s proposition, but spoke to him of the ordinary business of the store in his usual slightly rasping and irritable tone. There was no hint either in his manner or in what he said of any ultimate decision.
Rudolph had called Gretchen on the phone in New York (from a pay station—Calderwood did not take kindly to private calls on the store’s phones) and Gretchen had sounded disappointed when he told her he couldn’t get down to the city that week, but would try the following weekend. She had refused to tell him what the trouble was. It could wait, she said. If it could wait, he thought, it couldn’t be so bad.
Denton didn’t call again. Perhaps he was afraid that if given a chance at further conversation Rudolph would withdraw his offer to speak in his behalf before the board next Tuesday afternoon. Rudolph found himself worrying about his appearance before the board. There was always the chance that some evidence would be produced against Denton that Denton didn’t know about or had hidden that would make Rudolph seem like a confederate or a liar or a dupe. What worried him more, though, was that the board was bound to be hostile, prepared to do away with Denton, and antagonistic to anyone who stood in the way. All his life Rudolph had attempted to get people, especially older people in authority, to like him. The thought of facing a whole room full of disapproving academic faces disturbed him.
