Irwin Shaw - Rich Man, Poor Man

‘I don’t mind,’ Gretchen said. ‘I sit most of the day in the office.’ But she hoisted herself up to the table beside him, to

show that she was not anxious to leave. They sat side by side, their legs hanging over the side of the table.

‘You got pretty feet,’ Arnold said.

Gretchen looked down at her sensible, low-heeled, brown

shoes. ‘I suppose they’re all right,’ she said. She thought she had pretty feet, too, narrow and not too long, and slender ankles.

‘I became an expert on feet in this man’s army,’ Arnold said. He said it without self-pity, as another man might have said, ‘I learned how to fix radios in the Army,’ or, The Army taught me how to read maps.’ His absence of compassion for himself made her feel a rush of pity for the soft-spoken, slow-moving boy. ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said. The nurses tell me the doctors’ve done wonders for your leg.’

“Yeah,’ Arnold chuckled. ‘Just don’t bet on old Arnold gaining a lot of ground from here on in.’

‘How old are you, Arnold?’

Twenty-two. You?’

‘Nineteen.’

He grinned. ‘Good ages, huh?’

‘I suppose so. If we didn’t have a war.’

‘Oh, I’m not complaining,’ Arnold said, pulling at his cigarette. ‘It got me out of St Louis. Made a man of me.’ There was the tone of mockery in his voice. ‘Ain’t a dumb kid no more. I know what the score is now and who adds up the numbers. Saw some interesting places, met some interesting folk. You ever been in Cornwall, Miss Jordache? That’s in England.’

‘No.’

‘Jordache,’ Arnold said. That a name from around these parts?’

‘No,’ Gretchen said. ‘It’s German. My father came over from Germany. He was wounded in the leg too. In the First War. He was in the German army.’

Arnold chuckled. They get a man coming and going, don’t they?’ he said. ‘He do much running, your pa?’

‘He limps a little,’ Gretchen spoke carefully. ‘It doesn’t seem to interfere too much.’

‘Yeah, Cornwall.’ Arnold rocked back and forth a little on the table. He seemed to have had enough of talk about wars and wounds. “They got palm trees, little old towns, make St Louis look like it was built the day before yesterday. Big, wide beaches. Yeah. Yeah, England. Folk’re real nice. Hospitable. Invite you to their homes for Sunday dinner. They surprised me. Always felt the English were uppity. Anyway, that was the general impression about ‘em in the circles in which I moved in St Louis as a young man.’

Gretchen felt he was making fun of her, gently, with the ironic formal pronouncement. ‘People have to learn about each other,’ she said stiffly, unhappy about how pompous she was sounding, but somehow put off, disturbed, forced on the defensive by the soft, lazy country voice.

They sure do,’ he agreed. They sure do.’ He leaned on his hands and turned his face towards her. What have I got to learn about you, Miss Jordache?’

‘Me?’ A forced little laugh was surprised out of her. ‘Nothing. I’m a small-town secretary who’s never been anyplace and who’ll never go anyplace.’

‘I wouldn’t agree to that, Miss Jordache,’ Arnold said seriously. ‘I wouldn’t agree to that at all. If ever I saw a girl that was due to rise, it’s you. You got a neat, promising style of handling yourself. Why, I bet half the boys in this building’d ask you to marry them on the spot, you gave them any encouragement.’ ‘I’m not marrying anyone yet,’ Gretchen said. ‘Of course not.’ Arnold nodded soberly. ‘No sense in rushing, lock yourself in, a girl like you. With a wide choice.’ He stubbed his cigarette out in an ash tray on the table, then reached automatically into the package in the pocket of the bathrobe for a fresh one, which he neglected to light. ‘I had a girl in Cornwall for three months,’ he said. The prettiest, most joyous, loving little girl a man could ever hope to see. She was married, but that made never no mind. Her husband was out in Africa sorriewhere since 1939 and I do believe she forgot what he looked like. We went to pubs together and she made me Sunday dinner when I got a pass and we made love like we was Adam and Eve in the Garden.’

He looked thoughtfully up at the white ceiling of the big empty room. ‘I became a human being in Cornwall,’ he said. ‘Oh, yeah, the Army made a man out of little Arnold Sims from St Louis. It was a sorrowful day in that town when the orders came to move to fight the foe.’ He was silent, remembering the old town near the sea, the palm trees, the joyous, loving little girl with the forgotten husband in Africa.

Gretchen sat very still. She was embarassed when anybody, talked of making love. She wasn’t embarrassed by being a virgin, because that was a conscious choice on her part, but she was embarrassed by her shyness, her inability to take sex lightly and matter-of-factly, at least in conversation, like so many of the girls she had gone to high school with. When she was honest with herself, she recognised that a good deal of her

feeling was because of her mother and father, their bedroom separated from hers by only a narrow hallway. Her father came clumping up at five in the morning, his slow footsteps heavy on the stairs, and then there would be the low sound of his voice, hoarsened by the whiskey of the long night, and her mother’s complaining twitterings and then the sounds of the assault and her mother’s tight, martyred expression in the morning.

And tonight, in the sleeping building, in the first really intimate conversation she had had alone with any of the men, she was being made a kind of witness, against her will, of an act, or the ghost and essence of an act, that she tried to reject from her consciousness. Adam and Eve in the Garden. The two bodies, one white, one black. She tried not to think about it in those terms, but she couldn’t help herself. And there was something meaningful and planned in the boy’s revelations - it was not the nostalgic, late-at-night reminiscences of a soldier home from the wars - there was a direction in the musical flowing whispers, a target. Somehow, she knew the target was herself and she wanted to hide.

‘I wrote her a letter after I was hit,’ Arnold was saying, ‘but I never got no answer. Maybe her husband come home. And from that day to this I never touched a woman. I got hit early on and I been in hospital ever since. The first time I got out was last Saturday, We had an afternoon pass, Billy and me.’ Billy was the other Negro in the ward. ‘Nothin’ much for two coloured boys to do in this valley. It ain’t Cornwall, I’ll tell you that’ He laughed. ‘Not even any coloured folk around. Imagine that, being sent to maybe the one hospital in the United States that’s in a town without any coloured folk. We drank a couple of beers that we got in the market and we took the bus upriver a bit, because we heard there was a coloured family up at the Landing. Turned, out it was just an old man from South Carolina, living all by himself in an old house on the river, with all his family gone and forgotten. We gave him some beer and told him lies about how brave we were in the war, and said we’d come back fishin’ on our next pass. Fishin’!’

‘I’m sure,’ Gretchen said, looking at her watch, ‘that when you get out of the hospital for good and go back home you’ll find a beautiful girl and be very happy again.’ Her voice sounded prissy and false and nervous all at the same time and she was ashamed of herself, but she knew she had to get out of that room. ‘It’s awfully late, Arnold …’ She started to get

off the table, but he held her arm in his hand, not hard, but firmly.

It ain’t all that late, Miss Jordache,’ Arnold said. ‘To tell you the truth, I been waiting for just such an occasion, all alone like this.’ ‘I have to catch a bus, Arnold, I…’ ‘Wilson and me, we’ve been discussing you.’ Arnold didn’t let go of her arm. ‘And we decided on our next pass, that’s this Saturday, we would like to invite you to spend the day with us.’