Rich Man, Poor Man

by Irwin Shaw

  After lunch, they got into the car and drove out of Whitby for New York, leaving their dead behind them.

  They reached the Hotel Algonquin at a little after seven. Gretchen and Billy were staying there, because there was no room for them in Rudolph’s one-bedroom apartment, where Jean was waiting for him. Rudolph asked Gretchen if she and Billy wanted to have dinner with him and Jean, but Gretchen said this was no day to meet a new sister-in-law. Rudolph invited Thomas, too, but Thomas, who was sitting low in the front seat, said, “I have a date.”

  When Billy got out of the car, Thomas got out too, and put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “I have a son, too, Billy,” Thomas said. “A lot younger than you. If he grows up anything like you, I’ll be a proud father.”

  For the first time in three days, Billy smiled.

  “Tom,” Gretchen said, standing under the hotel’s canopy, “am I ever going to see you again?”

  “Sure,” Thomas said. “I know where to reach you. I’ll call you.”

  Gretchen and her son went into the hotel, a porter carrying the two bags.

  “I’ll get a cab from here, Rudy,” Thomas said. “You must be anxious to get home to your wife.”

  “I’d like a drink,” Rudolph said. “Let’s go in the bar here and …”

  “Thanks. I’m pressed for time,” Thomas said. “I got to be on my way.” He kept peering over Rudolph’s shoulder at the traffic on Sixth Avenue.

  “Tom,” Rudolph insisted, “I have to talk to you.”

  “I thought we were all talked out,” Thomas said. He tried to hail a cab, but the driver was off duty. “You got nothing more to say to me.”

  “No?” Rudolph said savagely. “Don’t I? What if I told you you’re worth about sixty thousand dollars as of the close of the market today? Would that make you change your mind?”

  “You’re a great little old joker, aren’t you, Rudy?” Thomas said.

  “Come on in to the bar. I’m not joking.”

  Thomas followed Rudolph into the bar.

  The waiter brought them their whiskies and then Thomas said, “Let’s hear.”

  “That goddamn five thousand dollars you gave me,” Rudolph said. “You remember that?”

  “Blood money,” Thomas said. “Sure I remember.”

  “You said to do anything I wanted with it,” Rudolph said. “I think I recall your exact words, ‘Piss on it, blow it on dames, give it to your favorite charity …’”

  “That sounds like me.” Thomas grinned.

  “Well, what I wanted to do with it was invest it,” Rudolph said.

  “Always a head for business,” Thomas said. “Even as a kid.”

  “I invested it in your name, Tom,” Rudolph said deliberately. “In my own company. There haven’t been much in the way of dividends so far, but what there’ve been I’ve plowed back. But the stock has been divided four times and it’s gone up and up. I tell you, you have about sixty thousand dollars in shares that you own outright.

  Thomas gulped down his drink. He closed his eyes and pushed at his eyeballs with his fingers.

  “I tried to get hold of you time and time again in the past two years,” Rudolph said. “But the phone company said your phone was disconnected and when I sent letters to your old address, they always came back with a stamp on them saying ‘Unknown at this address.’ And Ma never told me she was in touch with you until she went to the hospital. I read the sports pages, but you seemed to have dropped out of sight.”

  “I was campaigning in the West,” Thomas said, opening his eyes. The room looked blurry now.

  “Actually, I was just as glad I couldn’t find you,” Rudolph said, “because I knew the stock would keep going up and I didn’t want you to be tempted to sell prematurely. In fact, I don’t think you ought to sell now.”

  “You mean I can go somewhere tomorrow,” Thomas asked, “and just say I got some stock I want to sell and somebody’ll give me sixty thousand dollars, cash?”

  “I told you I don’t advise you to …”

  “Rudy,” Thomas said, “you’re a great guy and all that and maybe I take back a lot of what I’ve been thinking about you all these years, but right now I ain’t listening to any advice. All I want is for you go give me the address of the place where that man is waiting to give me that sixty thousand dollars cash.”

  Rudolph gave up. He wrote out Johnny Heath’s office address, and gave it to Thomas. “Go to this place tomorrow,” he said, “I’ll call Heath and he’ll be expecting you. Please, Tom, be careful.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Rudy. From now on I’ll be so careful, you won’t even recognize me.” Thomas ordered another round of drinks. When he lifted his arm to call the waiter, his jacket slipped back and Rudolph saw the pistol stuck in the belt. But he didn’t say anything. He had done what he could for his brother. He could do no more.

  “Wait a minute for me here, will you?” Thomas said. “I have to make a phone call.”

  He went into the lobby and found a booth and looked up the number of TWA. He dialed the number and asked about flights the next day to Paris. The girl at TWA told him there was a flight at eight P.M. and asked him if he wished to make a reservation. He said, “No thank you,” and hung up, then called the Y.M.C.A. and asked for Dwyer. It was a long time before Dwyer came to the phone and Thomas was just about ready to hang up the phone and forget him.

  “Hello,” Dwyer said, “who’s this?”

  “Tom. Now listen to …”

  “Tom!” Dwyer said excitedly. “I’ve been hanging around and hanging around waiting to hear from you. Jesus, I was worried. I thought maybe you were dead …”

  “Will you stop running off at the mouth?” Thomas said. “Listen to me. There’s a TWA plane leaving Idlewild for Paris tomorrow night at eight o’clock. You be there at the Reservations Counter at six-thirty. All packed.”

  “You meant you got reservations? On a plane?”

  “I don’t have them yet,” Thomas said, wishing Dwyer wasn’t so excitable. “We’ll get them there. I don’t want my name on any lists all day.”

  “Oh, sure, sure, Tom, I understand.”

  “Just be there. On time.”

  “I’ll be there. Don’t you worry.”

  Thomas hung up.

  He went back to the bar and insisted on paying for the drinks.

  Outside, on the sidewalk, just before he got into the cab, that drew up next to the curb, he shook hands with his brother.

  “Listen, Tom,” Rudolph said, “let’s have dinner this week. I want you to meet my wife.”

  “Great idea,” Thomas said. “I’ll call you Friday.”

  He got into the cab and told the driver, “Fourth Avenue and Eighteenth Street.”

  He settled back in the cab luxuriously, holding on to the paper bag with his belongings. When you had sixty thousand dollars everybody invited you to dinner. Even your brother.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 1

  1963

  It was raining when she drove up to the house, the torrential, tropical rain of California that flattened flowers, bounced off the tiles of roofs, like ricocheting silvery bullets and sent bulldozed hillsides sliding down into neighbors’ gardens and swimming pools. Colin had died two years ago but she still automatically looked into the open garage to see if his car was there.

  She left her books in the 1959 Ford and hurried to the front door, her hair soaking, even though it was only a few yards. Once inside she took off her coat and shook her wet hair. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon, but the house was dark and she turned on the front hall light. Billy had gone off on a camping trip to the Sierras with friends for the weekend and she hoped that the weather was better up in the mountains than down on the coast.

  She reached into the mailbox. There were some bills, some circulars, a letter from Venice, in Rudolph’s handwriting.

  She went into the living room, turning on lights as she went. She kicked off her wet shoes, made herself a Sco
tch and soda, and seated herself on the couch, her legs curled up under her, pleased with the warmly lit room. There were no whispers in the shadows anymore. She had won the battle with Colin’s ex-wife and she was going to stay in the house. The judge had awarded her a temporary allowance from the estate, against a final settlement, and she didn’t have to depend upon Rudolph anymore.

  She opened Rudolph’s letter. It was a long one. When he was in America, he preferred to phone, but now that he was wandering around Europe, he used the mails. He must have had a lot of time on his hands, because he wrote often. She had had letters from him from London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Paris, St.-Jean-de-Luz, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Geneva, Florence, Rome, Ischia, Athens, and from little inns in towns that she had never heard of where he and Jean stopped en route for the night.

  “Dear Gretchen”—she read—“It’s raining in Venice and Jean is out in it taking pictures. She says it’s the best time to get the quality of Venice, water on water. I’m snug in my hotel, undriven by art. Jean also likes to take pictures of people for the series she’s doing under the worst possible circumstances. Hardship and age, she tells me, preferably the two together, tell more about the character of a people and a country than anything else. I do not.attempt to argue with her. I prefer handsome young people in sunshine, myself, but I am only her Philistine husband.

  “I am enjoying to the utmost the glorious fruits of sloth. Within me, after all the years of hustle and toil, I have discovered a happy, lazy man, content to look at two masterpieces a day, to lose myself in a foreign city, to sit for hours at a cafe table like any Frenchman or Italian, to pretend I know something about art and haggle in galleries for paintings by new men whom nobody ever heard about and whose works will probably make my living room in Whitby a chamber of horrors when I eventually get back there.

  “Curiously enough, with all our traveling, and despite the fact that Pa came from Germany and probably had as much German in him as American, I have no desire to visit the country. Jean has been there, but isn’t anxious to go back. She says it’s too much like America, in all essential ways. I’ll have to take her opinion on the subject.

  “She is the dearest woman alive and I am terribly uxorious and find myself carting her cameras around so as not to miss a moment with her. Except when it rains, of course. She has the sharpest of eyes and I have seen and understood more about Europe in six months with her than I would in sixty years alone. She has absolutely no literary sense and never reads a newspaper and the theater bores her, so I fill in that section of our communal life. She also drives our little Volkswagen very well, so I get a chance to moon and sightsee and enjoy things like the Alps and the valley of the Rhone without worrying about falling off the road. We have a pact. She drives in the morning and drinks a bottle of wine at lunch and I drive in the afternoon, sober.

  “We don’t stay in the fancy places, as we did on our honeymoon, because as Jean says, now it’s for real. We do not suffer. She talks freely to everybody and with my French and her Italian and everybody’s English, we find ourselves striking up friendships with the widest variety of people—a wine-grower from Burgundy, a masseur on the beach at Biarritz, a rugby player from Lourdes, a non-objective painter, priests galore, fishermen, a bit-part actor in the French movies, old English ladies on bus tours, ex-commandos in the British army, GI’s based in Europe, a representative in the Paris Chamber of Deputies who says the only hope for the world is John Fitzgerald Kennedy. If you happen to bump into John Fitzgerald Kennedy, pass the word on to him.

  “The people it is almost impossible not to love are the English. Except for other English. The English are dazed, although it doesn’t do to tell them so. Somehow, all the wheels of power went wrong, and after winning the war with their last ounce of blood and courage, they gave the whole thing away to the Germans. I don’t want the Germans, or anybody, to starve, but the English had a right to expect that they could live in a world at least approximately as comfortable as the old enemy once the guns fell silent. Chalk one up against us, I’m afraid.

  “Whatever you do, you must make sure that Billy gets a good dose of Europe before he’s twenty, while it’s still Europe and before it becomes Park Avenue and the University of Southern California and Scarsdale and Harlem and the Pentagon. All those things, or at least some of them, may be good for us, but it would be sad to see it happen to places like Rome and Paris and Athens.

  “I have been to the Louvre, to the Rijks-museum in Amsterdam, to the Prado, and I have seen the lions at Delos and the gold mask in the museum in Athens, and if I had seen nothing else and had been deaf and mute and unloved, these things alone would have been worth much more than the six months of my life I have been away.”

  The phone rang and Gretchen put the letter down and got up and answered. It was Sam Corey, the old cutter who had worked with Colin on the three pictures he had made. Sam called faithfully, at least three times a week, and occasionally she would go with him to the showing of a new film at the studio that he thought would interest her. He was fifty-five years old, solidly married, and was comfortable to be with. He was the only one of the people who had been around Colin that she had kept up with.

  “Gretchen,” Sam said, “we’re running one of the Nouvelle Vague pictures that just came in from Paris tonight. I’ll take you to dinner after.”

  “Sorry, Sam,” Gretchen said. “Somebody, one of the people from my classes, is coming over to work with me.”

  “School days, school days,” Sam croaked, “dear old golden rule days.” He had left school in the ninth grade and was not impressed with higher education.

  “We’ll do it some other night, eh, Sam?”

  “Sure thing,” he said. “Your house wash down the hill yet?”

  “Just about.”

  “California,” Sam said.

  “It’s raining in Venice, too,” Gretchen said.

  “How do you get top-secret information like that?”

  “I’m reading a letter from my brother Rudolph. He’s in Venice. And it’s raining.”

  Sam had met Rudolph when Rudolph and Jean had come out to stay with her for a week. After they had left Sam had said Rudolph was okay, but he was crazy about his wife.

  “When you write him back,” said Sam, “ask him if he wants to put five million dollars in a little low-budget picture I would like to direct.”

  Sam, who had been around enormously wealthy people for so long in Hollywood, believed that the sole reason for the existence of a man who had more than a hundred thousand dollars in the bank was to be fleeced. Unless, of course, he had talent. And the only talents Sam recognized were those involved in making films.

  “I’m sure he’ll be delighted to,” Gretchen said.

  “Keep dry, Baby,” Sam said, and hung up.

  Sam was the calmest man she knew. In the storms of temperament that he had been through in the years in the studios, he had survived serenely, knowing what he knew, running a hundred thousand miles of film through his hands, catching mistakes, patching up other men’s blunders, never flattering, doing the utmost with the material he was handed, walking off pictures when the people making them became insufferable, going through one style after another with imperturbable efficiency, something of an artist, something of a handyman, loyal to the few directors, who, despite failures, were always what Sam considered pro’s, committed to their craft, painstaking, perfectionist. Sam had seen Colin’s plays and when Colin had come to Hollywood had sought Colin out and said he wanted to work with him, modest, but secure enough in what he did to know that the new director would be grateful for his experience and that their collaboration would be fruitful.

  After Colin died, Sam had a long talk with Gretchen and had warned her that if she just was going to hang around Hollywood, doing nothing, just being a widow, she would be miserable. He had seen her with Colin enough in the course of the three films Colin had made, with Sam as the cutter, to understand that Colin had depended upon her, and with reason.
He had offered to take her in with him, teach her what he knew about the business. “For a lone woman in this town,” he had said, “the cutting room is the best place. She isn’t on her own, she isn’t flinging her sex around, she isn’t challenging anybody’s ego, she has something methodical and practical to do, like baking a cake, every day.”

  Gretchen had said, “Thank you, no,” at the time, because she didn’t want to profit, even by that much, on Colin’s reputation, and had opted for the graduate course. But every time she talked to Sam she wondered if she hadn’t said no too quickly. The people around her in school were too young, moved too fast, were interested in things that seemed useless to her, learned and discarded huge gobs of information in hours while she still was painfully struggling with the same material for weeks and weeks.

  She went back to the couch and picked up Rudolph’s letter again. Venice, she remembered, Venice. With a beautiful young wife who, just by chance, happened to turn out to be rich. Rudolph’s luck.

  “There are murmurs of unrest from Whitby,”—she read.—“Old man Calderwood is taking very unkindly to my prolonged version of the Grand Tour and even Johnny, who has a Puritan conscience under that egg-smooth debauchee face, hints delicately to me that I have vacationed long enough. In fact, I don’t even see it as a vacation, although I have never enjoyed anything more. It is the continuation of my education, the continuation that I was too poor to pay for when I got out of college and went to work full time in the store.

  “I have many things to solve when I get back, which I am slowly turning over in my mind even as I look at a Titian in the Doges’ Palace or drink an espresso at a table in the Piazza San Marco. At the risk of sounding grandiose, what I have to decide is what to do with my life. I am thirty-five years old and I have enough money, both capital and yearly income, so that I can live extremely well for the rest of my life. Even if my tastes were wildly extravagant, which they’re not, and even if Jean were poor, which she isn’t, this would still be true. Once you are rich in America, it takes genius or overpowering greed to fall back into poverty. The idea of spending the rest of my life buying and selling, using my days to increase my wealth, which is already more than sufficient, is distasteful to me. My acquisitive instinct has been deadened by acquisition. The satisfaction I might get by opening new shopping centers throughout the country, under the Calderwood sign, and gaining control of still more companies, is minimum. A commercial empire, the prospects of which enchant men like Johnny Heath and Bradford Knight, has small charms for me and running one seems to me to be the drabbest kind of drudgery. I like travel and would be desolate if I were told that I could not come here ever again, but I cannot be like the characters in Henry James, who, in the words of E. M. Forster, land in Europe and look at works of art and at each other and that is all. As you can tell, I’ve used my new-found leisure to do some reading.