Irwin Shaw: Rich Man, Poor Man

Three mornings later, Rudolph called Thomas and made a date for lunch with him at P. J. Moriarty’s, on Third Avenue. The atmosphere there was male and plain and not likely to make Thomas feel ill at ease or give him the idea that Rudolph was showing off.

Thomas was waiting for him at the bar when he came in, a drink in front of him. ‘Well,’ Rudolph said, as he sat down on the stool next to his brother’s, ‘the lady’s on her way to Nevada.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Thomas said.

‘I drove her to the airport myself,’ Rudolph said, ‘and watched the plane take off.’

‘Christ, Rudy,’ Thomas said, ‘you’re a miracle worker.’

‘Actually, it wasn’t so hard,’ Rudolph said. He ordered a martini, to get over the effects of a whole morning with Teresa Jordache. ‘She’s thinking of remarrying, too, she says.’ This was a lie, but Rudolph said it convincingly. ‘And she saw the wisdom of not dragging her good name, as she calls it, through the courts in New York.’

‘Did she hit you for dough?* Thomas asked. He knew his wife.

‘No,’ Rudolph lied again. ‘She says she makes good money and she can afford the trip.’

‘It doesn’t sound like her,’ Thomas said doubtfully.

‘Maybe life has mellowed her.’ The martini was sustaining. He had argued with the woman for two whole days and had finally agreed to pay for her round-trip fare, first class, her hotel bill in Reno for six weeks, plus five hundred dollars a week, for what Teresa had described as loss of trade. He had paid her half in advance and would pay her the rest when she came back and gave him the papers that formally ended her marriage.

They had a good, solid lunch, with two bottles of wine, and Thomas became a little maudlin and kept telling Rudy how graceful he was and how stupid he had been all these years not

to realise what a great guy he had for a brother. Over cognacs, he said, ‘Look, the other day you said you were going to do some travelling when your wife got out of the clinic. The first two weeks in July I haven’t got a charter. Ill keep it open and you and your wife can come on board, as my guests, and we’ll do a little cruising. And if Gretchen can come, bring her along, too. You’ve got to meet Kate. Christ, the divorce’ll be final by then and you can come to my wedding. Come on, Rudy, I won’t take no for an answer.’

‘It depends upon Jean,’ Rudolph said. ‘How she feels…”

‘It’ll be the best thing in the world for her,’ Thomas said. There won’t be a bottle of liquor on board. Rudy, you just got to do it’

‘Okay,’ Rudy said. The first of July. Maybe it’ll do us both good to get out of this country for a while.’

Thomas insisted upon paying for the lunch. ‘It’s the least I can do,’ he said. ‘I got a lot to celebrate. I got back an eye and got rid of a wife all in the same month.’

The Mayor was wearing a sash, the bride was dressed in cornflower blue and did not look pregnant. Enid was wearing white gloves and was holding her mother’s hand and was frowning a little at the mysterious games the grownups were playing in a language she did not understand. Thomas was brown and healthy again. He had put back the weight he had lost and his muscular neck bulged at the collar of the white shirt he was wearing. Wesley stood just behind his father, a tall, graceful boy of fifteen in a suit whose sleeves were too short for him, his face deeply tanned, and his blond hair bleached by the Mediterranean sun. They were all tanned because they had been cruising for a week and had only come back to Antibes for the ceremony. Gretchen, Rudolph thought looked superb, her dark hair with just a little animal sheen of grey in it, severely drawn around the bony, wide-eyed, magnificent face. Queenlike, Rudolph thought nobly tragic. Rhetoric went with weddings. Rudolph knew that the single week on the sea had made him look years younger than when he had stepped off the plane at Nice. He listened, amused, to the Mayor, who was describing, in a rich Midi accent, full of rolling hard g\ the duties expected of the bride. Jean understood French, too, and they exchanged little smiles as the Mayor went on. Jean hadn’t had a drink since she had come down from the clinic and she looked dear

and beautifully fragile in the room full of Thomas’s friends from the harbour, with their weather-worn, strong dark faces, above unaccustomed neckties and jackets. There was an aura of voyages in the sunny, flower-bedecked Mayor’s office, Rudolph thought, a tang of salt, the flavours’of a thousand ports.

Only Dwyer seemed sad, touching the white carnation in his button-hole. Thomas had told Rudolph Dwyer’s story and Rudolph thought perhaps the sight of his friend’s happiness made Dwyer regret the girl in Boston he had foresworn for the Clothilde.

The Mayor was robust and obviously liked this part of his job. He was as sun-darkened as the seamen around him. When I was the mayor of another town, Rudplph thought, I didn’t spend much time in the sun. He wondered if the Mayor was worried about kids smoking pot in dormitories and whether or not to order the police to use tear gas. Whitby, too, at certain seasons, looked idyllic.

When he had first met Kate, Rudolph had been disappointed in his brother’s choice. He was partial to pretty women and Kate, with her flat, dark, humble face, and her stubby body, was certainly not pretty in any conventional terms. She reminded him of some of the native women in Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, he’ thought, have much to answer for. With all those long, slender beauties, they have tuned us out from simpler and more primitive appeals.

Kate’s speech, shy, uneducated, and Liverpudlian, had jarred on his ears in the beginning, too. It was curious, Rudolph thought, how Americans, with their ideas of the English formed by visiting actors and lecturers, were more snobbish about British accents than those of their own countrymen.

But after a day or two of watching Kate with Tom and Wesley, uncomplainingly doing all sorts of chores on board the ship, handling the man and the boy with the most transparent, undemonstrative love and trust, he had felt ashamed of his first reactions to the woman. Tom was a lucky man, and he told him so and Tom had soberly agreed.

The Mayor came to the end of his speech, rings were exchanged, bride and groom kissed each other. The Mayor kissed the bride, beaming, as though he had brilliantly performed some extraordinarily delicate bureaucratic function.

The last wedding Rudolph had attended had been that of Brad Knight and Virginia Calderwood. He preferred this one.

Rudolph and Gretchen signed the register, after the newlyweds. Rudolph hesitantly kissed the bride. There were finger—

mangling handshakes all around, and the entire party trooped out into the sunlight of the town that had been founded more than two thousand years ago by men who must have looked very much like the men who accompanied his brother in the wedding procession.

There was champagne waiting for them at Chez Felix au Port and melon and bouillabaisse for lunch. An accordionist played, the Mayor toasted the bride, Pinky Kimball toasted the bridegroom in Southampton French, Rudolph toasted the couple in French that made the guests gaze at him with wonder and got him a great round of applause when he finished. Jean had brought along a camera and took roll after roll of photographs to commemorate the occasion. It was the first time since the night she had broken her cameras that she had taken any pictures. And Rudolph hadn’t suggested it. She had suggested it herself.

The lunch broke up at four o’clock and all guests, some of them weaving now, paraded the bridal couple back to where the Clothilde lay at the quay. On the after deck there was a big crate tied up in red ribbon. It was Rudolph’s wedding gift and he had arranged for it to be put aboard during the festivities. He had had it shipped over from New York to Thomas’s agent, with instructions to hold it until the wedding day.