Irwin Shaw - Rich Man, Poor Man

Boylan drove through the town in the direction of Vanderhoff Street. Of course he knows where I live, Rudolph thought He doesn’t even bother to hide it.

‘A charming girl, little Julie,’ Boylan said.

‘Yeah.’

‘You do anything more than kiss her?’

That’s my business, sir.’ Rudolph said. Even in his anger at the man, he admired the way the words came out clipped and cold. Nobody could treat Rudolph Jordache as though Rudolph Jordache was a cad.

‘Of course it is,’ Boylan said. He sighed. “The temptation must be great. When I was your age …’ He left it unfinished,

a suggestion of a procession of virgins, virginal no more.

‘By the way,’ he said in a flat conversational tone, ‘do you hear from your sister?’

‘Sometimes,’ Rudolph said guardedly. She wrote to him care of Buddy Westerman, She didn’t want her mother reading her letters. She was living in YWCA downtown in New York. She had been making the rounds of theatrical offices, looking for a job as an actress, but producers weren’t falling all over themselves to hire girls who had played Rosalind in high school. She hadn’t found any work yet, but she loved New York. In her first letter she had apologised for being so mean to Rudolph the day she left, at the Port Philip House. She had been all churned up and not really responsible for what she was saying. But she still thought it was bad for him to stay on at home. The Jordache family was quicksand, she wrote. Nothing was going to change her opinion about that,

‘Is she well?’ Boylan asked.

‘Okay.’

‘You know I know her,’ Boylan said, without emphasis.

‘Yes.’

‘She spoke to you about me?’

‘Not that I remember,’ Rudolph said.

‘Ah-bah.’ It was difficult what Boylan meant to convey by this. ‘Do you have her address? I sometimes go down to New York and I might find the time to buy the child a good dinner.’

‘No, I don’t have her address,’ Rudolph said. ‘She’s moving.’

‘I see.’ Boylan saw through him, of course, but didn’t press. ‘Well, if you do hear from her, let me know. I have something of hers she might like to have.’

‘Yeah.’ Boylan turned into Vanderhoff and stopped in front of the bakery.

“Well, here we are,’ he said. The home of honest toil.’ The sneer was plain. ‘I bid you goodnight, young man. It’s been a most agreeable evening.’

‘Good night,’ Rudolph said. He got out of the car. Thanks.’

‘Your sister told me you liked to fish,’ Boylan said. ‘We have quite a good stream on the property. It’s stocked every year. I don’t know why. Nobody goes near it any more. If you’d like to give a try, just come any time.’

Thank you,’ Rudolph said. Bribery. And he knew he would be bribed. The slippery innocence of trout. ‘I’ll be along.’

‘Good,’ Boylan said. ‘I’ll have my cook do up the fish for us and we can have dinner together. You’re an interesting boy

and I enjoy talking to you. Maybe when you come up, you’ll have heard from your sister, with her new address.’

‘Maybe. Thanks again.’

Boylan waved and drove off.

Rudolph went in and up to his room through the dark house. He could hear his father snoring. It was Saturday night and his father didn’t work on Saturday night. Rudolph walked past his parents’ door and up the steps to his room carefully. He didn’t want to wake his mother and have to talk to her.

‘I’m going to sell my body, I do declare,’ Mary Jane Hackett was saying. She came from Kentucky. ‘They don’t want talent any more, just bare, fruity flesh. The next call anybody puts out for showgirls I’m going to say, Farewell Stanislavsky, and wiggle my little old Dixie behind for pay.’

Gretchen and Mary Jane Hackett were sitting in the cramped, poster-lined anteroom of the Nichols office on West 46th Street, waiting with a collection of other girls and young men to see Bayard Nichols. There were only three chairs behind the railing which divided the aspirants from the desk of Nichols’s secretary, who was typing with spiky malice, her fingers stabbing at the keys, as though the English language were her personal, enemy, to be dispatched as swiftly as possible.

The third chair on the anteroom was occupied by a character actress who wore a fur stole, even though it was eighty-five degrees in the shade outside.

Without losing a syllable on her machine, the secretary said, ‘Hello, dear,’ each time the door opened for another actor or actress. The word was that Nichols was casting a new play, six characters, four men, two women.

Mary Jane Hackett was a tall, slender, bosomless girl, who made her real money modelling. Gretchen was-too curvy to model. Mary Jane Hackett had been in two flops on Broadway and had played a half-season of summer stock and already spoke like a veteran. She looked around her at the actors standing along the walls, lounging gracefully against the posters of Bayard Nichols’s past productions. “You’d think, with all those hits,’ Mary Jane Hackett said, ‘going all the way back to the dark ages, 1935, for God’s sake, Nichols could afford something grander than this foul little rat trap. At least air conditioning, for heaven’s sake. He must have

the first nickel he ever made. I don’t know what I’m doing here. He dies if he has to pay more than the minimum and even then he gives you a long lecture about how Franklin D. Roosevelt has ruined this country.’

Gretchen looked uneasily over at the secretary. The office was so small, there was no possibility that she hadn’t heard Mary Jane. But the secretary typed on, stolidly disloyal, defeating English.

‘Look at the size of them.’ Mary Jane gestured with a toss of her head at the young men. They don’t come up to my shoulder. If they wrote women’s parts playing all three acts on their knees, I’d stand a chance of getting a job. The American theatre, for God’s sake! The men’re midgets and if they’re over five feet tall they’re fairies.’

‘Naughty, naughty, Mary Jane,’ a tall boy said.

‘When was the last time you kissed a girl?’ Mary Jane demanded.

‘1928’, the boy said. To celebrate the election of Herbert Hoover.’

Everybody in the office laughed good-naturedly. Except the secretary. She kept on typing.

Even though she still had to get her first job, Gretchen enjoyed this new world into which she had been thrown. Everybody talked to everybody else, everybody called everybody by his first name; Alfred Lunt was Alfred to anyone who had ever been in a play with him, even if it was only for two lines at the beginning of the first act; everybody helped everybody else. If a girl heard of a part that was up for casting, she told all her friends and might even lend a particular dress for the interview. It was like being a member of a generous club, whose entrance requirements were not birth or money, but youth and ambition and belief in one another’s talent.

In the basement of Walgreen’s drugstore, where they all congregated over endless cups of coffee, to compare notes, to denigrate success, to mimic matinee idols and lament the death of the Group Theatre, Gretchen was now accepted, and talked as freely as anyone about how idiotic critics were, about how Trigorin should be played in The Seagull, about how nobody acted like Laurette Taylor any more, about how certain producers tried to lay every girl who came into their offices. In two months, in the flood of youthful voices, speaking with the accents of Georgia, Maine, Texas and Oklahoma, the mean streets of Port Philip had almost disappeared, a dot on the curve of memory’s horizon.

She slept till ten in the morning, without feeling guilty. She went to young men’s apartments and stayed there till all hours, rehearsing scenes, without worrying what people would think. A Lesbian at the YWCA, where she was staying until she found a job, had made a pass at her, but they were still good friends and sometimes had dinner and went to the movies together. She worked out in a ballet class three hours a week, to learn how to move gracefully on a stage, and she had changed the way she walked completely, keeping her head so still that she could have balanced a glass of water on it, even when going up and down stairs … Primitive serenity, the ex-ballerina who taught the class called it.