Irwin Shaw: Rich Man, Poor Man

That’s very kind of you and Wilson,’ Gretchen said. She had difficulty trying to keep her voice normal. ‘But I’m terribly busy on Saturdays.’

‘We figured it wouldn’t do to be seen in the company of two black boys,’ Arnold went on, his voice flat, neither menacing nor inviting, ‘being as how this is your town and they’re not used to seeing things like that around here, and we’re only enlisted men… ‘ That really has nothing to do with …’ ‘You take the bus up to the Landing at twelve-thirty,’ Arnold continued, as though there had been no interruption. ‘Well go earlier and give that old man five bucks to buy himself a bottle of whiskey and go to the show and we’ll fix up a nice meal for the three of us in his house. You turn left direcdy at the bus stop and walk on about a quarter of a mile down to the river and it’s the only house there, sitting real pretty on the bank, with nobody around to snoop or make a fuss, just the three of us, all folksy and friendly.’

‘I’m going home now, Arnold,’ Gretchen said loudly. She knew she would be ashamed to call out, but she tried to make him think she was ready to shout for help.

‘A good meal, a couple of nice long drinks,’ Arnold said, whispering, smiling, holding her. ‘We been away a long time, Miss Jordache.’

‘I’m going to yell,’ Gretchen said, finding it hard to speak. How could he do it - be so polite and friendly in one breath and then … She despised herself for her ignorance of the human race.

‘We have a high opinion of you, Miss Jordache, Wilson and me. Ever since I first laid eyes on you I can’t think about anybody else. And Wilson says it’s the same with him …’

‘You’re both crazy. If I tell the Colonel…’ Gretchen wanted to pull her arm away, but if anybody happened to come in and saw them struggling, the explanations would be painful.

‘As I said, our opinion is high,’ Arnold said, ‘and we’re willing to pay for it. We got a lot of back pay accumulated, Wilson and me, and I been particularly lucky in the crap game in the ward. Listen careful, Miss Jordache. We got eight hundred dollars between us and you’re welcome to it. Just for one little afternoon on the river…’ He took his hand off her arm and, unexpectedly, jumped down from the table, landing lightly on his good foot. He started limping out, his big body made clumsy by the floating maroon bathrobe. He turned at the door. ‘No need to say yes or no this minute, Miss Jordache,’ he said politely. Think on it. Saturday’s two days away. We’ll be there at the Landing, from eleven a.m. on. You just come anytime you get your chores done, Miss Jordache. We’ll be waiting on you.’ And he limped out of the room, standing very straight and not holding on to the walls for support.

For a moment, Gretchen sat still. The only sound she heard was the hum of a machine somewhere in the basement, a sound she didn’t remember ever having heard before. She touched her bare arm, where Arnold’s hand had held it, just below the elbow. She got off the table and turned off the lights, so that if anybody came in, they wouldn’t see what her face must look like. She leaned against the wall, her hands against her mouth, hiding it. Then she hurried to the locker-room and changed into her street clothes and almost ran out of the hospital to the bus stop.

She sat at the dressing table wiping off the last of the cold cream from the delicately veined pale skin under her swollen eyes. On the table before her stood the jars and vials with the Woolworth names of beauty - Hazel Bishop, Coty. We made love like Adam and Eve in the Garden.

She mustn’t think of it, she mustn’t think about it. She would call the Colonel tomorrow and ask to be transferred to another block. She couldn’t go back there again.

She stood up and took off her bathrobe and for a moment she was naked in the soft light of the lamp over the dressing table. Reflected in the mirror, her high, full breasts were very white and the nipples stood disobediently erect. Below was the sinister, dark triangle, dangerously outlined against the pale swell of her thighs. What can I do about it, what can I do about it?

She put on her nightgown and put out the light and climbed into the cold bed. She hoped that this was not going to be one of the nights that her father picked to claim her mother. There was just so much that she could bear in one night.

The bus left every half hour on the way upriver towards Albany. On Saturday it would be full of soldiers on weekend passes. All the battalions of young men. She saw herself buying the ticket at the bus terminal, she saw herself seated at the window looking out at the distant, grey river, she saw herself getting off at the stop for Landing, standing there alone, in front of the gas station; under her high-heeled shoes she felt the uneven surface of the gravel road, she smelled the perfume she couldn’t help but wear, she saw the dilapidated, unpointed frame house on the bank of the river, and the two dark men, glasses in their hands, waiting silently, knowing executioners, figures of fate, not rising, confident, her shameful pay in their pockets, waiting, knowing she was coming, watching her come to deliver herself in curiosity and lust, knowing what they were going to do together.

She took the pillow from beneath her head and put it between her legs and clamped it hard.

The mother stands at the lace-curtained window of the bedroom staring out at the cindery back yard behind the bakery. There are two spindly trees there, with a board nailed between them, from which swings a scuffed, heavy, leather cylinder, stuffed with sand like the heavy bags prize fighters use to train on. In the dark enclosure, the bag looks like a hanged man. In other days in the back gardens on the same street, there were flowers and hammocks strung between the trees. Every afternoon, her husband puts on a pair of wool-lined gloves and goes out into the back yard and flails the bag for twenty minutes. He goes at the bag with a wild, concentrated violence, as though he is fighting for his life. Sometimes, when she happens to see him at it, when Rudy takes over the store for her for a while to let her rest, she has the feeling that it isn’t a dead bag of leather and sand her husband is punishing, but herself.

She stands at the window in a green sateen bathrobe, soiled at the collar and cuffs. She is smoking a cigarette and the ash drifts down unnoticed onto the robe. She used to be the neatest and most meticulous of girls, clean as a blossom in a glass vase. She was brought up in an orphanage and the Sisters knew how to inculcate strict habits of cleanliness. But she is a slattern now, loose-bodied and careless about her hair and skin and her

clothes. The Sisters taught her a love of religion and affection for the ceremonies of the Church, but she has not been to Mass for almost twenty years. When her first child, her daughter, Gretchen, was born, she arranged with the Father for the christening, but her husband refused to appear at the font and forbade her then or ever again to give as much as a penny in contribution to the Church. And he a born Catholic.

Three unbaptized and unbelieving children and a blaspheming, Church-hating husband. Her burden to bear.

She had never known her father or mother. The orphanage in Buffalo had been her mother and father. She was assigned a name. Pease. It might have been her mother’s name. When she thought of herself it was always as Mary Pease, not Mary Jordache, or Mrs Axel Jordache. The Mother Superior had tqld her when she left the orphanage that it might well have been that her mother was Irish, but nobody knew for sure. The Mother Superior had warned her to beware of her fallen mother’s blood in her body and to abstain from temptation. She was sixteen at the time, a rosy, frail girl with bright golden hair. When her daughter had been born she had wanted to name the baby Colleen, to memorialize her Irish descendance. But her husband didn’t like the Irish and said the girl’s name would be Gretchen. He had known a whore in Hamburg by that name, he said. It was only a year after the wedding, but he already hated her.