Irwin Shaw - Rich Man, Poor Man

Thomas read the card. ‘What the hell is this?.’ he asked Rudolph.

‘Open it and find out.’

Dwyer went to get a hammer and chisel and the bridegroom stripped down to the waist and, with all the guests crowding around, broke open the crate. Inside it was a beautiful Ben-dix radar set and scanner. Before leaving New York, Rudolph had spoken to Mr Goodhart and asked him what Thomas would like best for the Clothilde and Mr Goodhart had suggested the radar.

Thomas held the set up triumphantly, and the guests applauded Rudolph again, as though he personally had invented and manufactured the machine with his own hands.

There were tears in Thomas’s eyes, a little drunken to be sure, as he thanked Rudolph. ‘Radar,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wanting this for years.’

‘I thought it made a fitting wedding present,’ Rudolph said. ‘Mark the horizon, recognise obstacles, avoid wrecks.’

Kate, seagoing wife, kept touching the machine as though it were a delightful young puppy.

‘I tell you,’ Thomas said, this is the greatest goddamn wedding anybody ever had.’

The plan was to set sail that afternoon for Portofino. They would stay along the coast past Monte Carlo, Menton, and San Remo, then cross the Gulf of Genoa during the night and make a landfall on the Italian mainland some time the next morning. The meleo was good^nd the entire voyage, according to Thomas, shouldn’t take more than fifteen hours.

Dwyer and Wesley wouldn’t allow Thomas or Kate to touch a line, but made them sit enthroned on the after deck while they got the Clothilde under way. As the anchor finally came up and the ship turned its nose seaward, from various boats in the harbour there came the sound of horns, in salute, and a fishing boat full of flowers accompanied them to the buoy, with two men strewing the flowers in their wake.

As they hit the gentle swell of open water they could see the white towers of Nice far off across the Baie des Anges.

‘What a nice place to live,’ Rudolph said. ‘France.’

‘Especially,’ Thomas said, ‘if you’re not a Frenchman.’

Gretchen and Rudolph sat in deck chairs near the stern of the Clothilde, watching the sun begin to set behind them. They were just opposite the Nice airport and could watch the jets swoop in, one every few minutes. Coming in, their wings gleamed in the level sunlight and nearly touched the silvery sea as they landed. Taking off, they climbed above the escarpment of Monaco, still brightly sunlit to the east. How pleasant it was to be moving at ten knots, Rudolph thought, and watch everybody else going at five hundred.

Jean was below putting Enid to bed. When she was on deck Enid wore a small orange life-jacket and she was attached by a line around her waist to a metal loop on the pilot house to make sure she wasn’t lost overboard. The bridegroom was forward sleeping off his champagne. Dwyer was with Kate in ttie galley preparing dinner. Rudolph had protested about this and had invited them all to dinner in Nice or Monte Carlo, but Kate had insisted. ‘I couldn’t think of a better thing to do on my wedding night,’ Kate had said. Wesley, in a blue turtle-neck sweater, because it was getting cool, was at the wheel. He moved around the boat barefooted and sure handed, as though he had been born at sea.

Gretchen and Rudolph were wearing sweaters, too. What a luxury it is,’ Rudolph said, ‘to be cold in July.’

“You’re glad you came, aren’t you?’ Gretchen asked.

‘Very glad,’ Rudolph said.

The family restored,’ Gretchen said. ‘No, not even that. Assembled, for the first time. And by Tom of all people.’

“He’s learned something we never quite learned,’ Rudolph said.

‘He certainly has. Have you noticed - wherever he goes, he moves in an atmosphere of love. His wife, Dwyer, all those friends at the wedding. Even his own son.’ She laughed shortly.

She had talked to Rudolph about her visit with Billy in Brussels before she had come down to Antibes to join them, so Rudolph knew what was behind the laugh. Billy, safe in an Army office as a typist and clerk, was, she had told Rudolph, cynical, ambitionless, sweating out his time, mocking of everything and everybody, including bis mother, incurious about the wealth of the Old World about him, shacking up with silly girls in Brussels and Paris, one after the other, smoking marijuana, if he wasn’t going in for stronger stuff, risking jail with the same lack of interest that he had risked getting kicked out of college, unwavering in his icy attitude towards his mother. At their last dinner in Brussels, Gretchen had reported, when the subject of Evans Kinsella had finally come up, Billy had been savage. ‘I know all about people your age,’ he had said. ‘Big phoney ideals, going into raptures about books and plays and politicians that just make people my age horse laugh, out saving the world and going from one crap-talking artist to another to pretend you’re still young and the Nazis have just been licked and the brave new world is just around the corner or at the next bar or in the next bed.’

‘In a way,’ Gretchen had told Rudolph, ‘maybe he’s right. Hateful but right. When he says the word phoney. You know better than anyone about me. When the time came I didn’t tell him, “Go to prison,” or “Desert.” I just called on my influential brother and saved my son’s miserable skin and let other mothers persuade their sons to go to prison or desert or march on the Pentagon, or go die in the jungle someplace. Anyway, I’ve signed my last petition.’

There was nothing much Rudolph could say to that. He had been the necessary accomplice. They were both guilty as charged.

But the week on the sea had been so healing, the wedding so gay and optimistic, that he had consciously put it all from

his mind. He was sorry that the sight of Wesley at the wheel, brown and agile, had made them both, inevitably, think about Billy.

‘Look at him,’ Gretchen was saying, staring at Wesley. ‘Brought up by a whore. With a father who never got past the second year in high school, who hasn’t opened a book since then and who’s been beaten and hunted and knocked down and lived ever since he was sixteen with the scum of the earth. And no questions asked. When Tom decided the time was right he got his kid and took him to another country and made him learn another language and threw him in with a whole group of ruffians who can barely read and write. And he’s made him go to work at an age when Billy was still asking for two dollars on Saturday night to go to the movies. As for the amenities of family life.’ She laughed. That boy sure has his share of elegant privacy, living in the next room to a little English peasant girl who’s bis father’s mistress, with his father’s illegitimate child in her belly. And what’s the result? He’s healthy and useful and polite. And he’s so devoted to his father Tom doesn’t ever have to raise his voice to him. All he has to do is indicate what he wants the boy to do and the boy does it. Christ,’ she said, Ve’d better start rewriting all those books on child care. And one thing that boy is sure of. No draft board is going to send him to Viet Nam. His father will see to that. I’ll tell you something - if I were you, as soon as Enid is big enough to walk around this boat without falling overboard, I’d send her over here to let Tom bring her up for you. Lord, I could use a drink. Tom must have one bottle of something stashed away on this Woman’s Christian Temperance Union vessel.’

‘I imagine he has,’ Rudolph said. ‘Ill ask.’ He got up from his chair and went forward. It was getting dark and Wesley was putting the running lights on. Wesley smiled at him as he passed him. ‘I guess the excitement was too much for the old man,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t even been up to check whether I’m heading into the Alps or not.’