Irwin Shaw - Rich Man, Poor Man

‘A long time. She’s got a son aged nine.’

Thomas nodded. ‘She was bound not to hang around long. God, what a hot-looking dame. She looks better than ever, doesn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she still as much of a shit as she used to be?’

‘Don’t talk like that, Tom,’ Rudolph said. ‘She was an awfully nice girl and she’s grown into a very good woman.’

‘I guess I’ll have to take your word for it, Rudy,’ Thomas said cheerfully. He was combing his hair carefully before a cracked mirror on the wall. ‘I wouldn’t know, being on the outside the way I was.’

“You weren’t on the outside.’

“Who you kidding, brother?’ Thomas said flatly. He put the comb in his pocket, took a last critical look as his scarred, puffed face, with the diagonal white slash of adhesive tape above his eye. ‘I sure am a beauty tonight,’ he said. ‘If I’d have known you were coming. I’d’ve shaved.’ He turned and put a bright-tweed jacket over the turtle-neck sweater. ‘You look as though you’re doing all right, Rudy,’ he said. ‘You look like a goddamn vice-president of a bank.’

‘I’m not complaining,’ Rudolph said, not pleased with the vice-president.

‘You know,’ Thomas said, ‘I went up to Port Philip a few years ago. For Auld Lang Syne. I heard Pop is dead!’

‘He killed himself,’ Rudolph said.

‘Yeah, that’s what the fruit-lady said.’ Thomas patted his breast pocket to make sure his wallet was in place. The old house was gone. No light in the cellar window for the prodigal son,’ he said mockingly. ‘Only a supermarket. I still remember they had a special that day. Lamb shoulders. Mom alive?’

‘Yes. She lives with me.”

“Lucky you.’ Thomas grinned. ‘Still in Port Philip?’

‘Whitby.’

‘You don’t travel much, do you?’

There’s plenty of time.’ Rudolph had the uncomfortable feeling that his brother was using the conversation to tease him, undermine him, make him feel guilty. He was accustomed to controlling conversations himself by now and it took an effort not to let his irritation show. As he had watched his

brother dress, watched him move that magnificent and fearsome body slowly and braisedly, he had felt a huge sense of pity, love, a confused desire somehow to save that lumbering, brave, vengeful almost-boy from other evenings like the one he had just been through; from the impossible wife, from the bawling crowd, from the cheerful, stitching doctors, from the casual men who attended him and lived off him. He didn’t want that feeling to be eroded by Thomas’s mockery, by that hangover of ancient jealousy and hostility which by now should have long since subsided.

‘Myself,’ Thomas was saying, ‘I been in quite a few places. Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Hollywood, Tia Juana. Name it and I’ve been there. I’m a man broadened by travel.’

The door burst open and Teresa charged in, scowling under her pancake makeup. ‘You fellows going to talk in here all night?’ she demanded.

‘Okay, okay, honey,” Thomas said. ‘We were just coming out. Do you want to come and have something to eat with us, you and Gretchen?’ he asked Rudolph.

‘We’re going to eat Chinese,’ Teresa said. ‘I am dying to

eat Chinese.’

‘I’m afraid not tonight, Tom,’ Rudolph said. ‘Gretchen has to get home. She has to relieve the baby-sitter.’ He caught the quick flicker of Thomas’s eyes from him to his wife and then back again and he was sure Thomas was thinking, he doesn’t want to be seen in public with my wife.

But Thomas shrugged and said amiably. ‘Well, some other time. Now we know we’re all alive.’ He stopped abruptly in the doorway as though he had suddenly thought of something. ‘Say,’ he said, ‘you going to be in town tomorrow around five?’

Tommy,’ his wife said loudly, ‘are we going to eat or ain’t we going to eat?’

‘Shut up,’ Thomas said to her. ‘Rudy?’

‘Yes.’ He had to spend the whole day in town, with architects and lawyers.

“Where can I see you?’ Thomas asked.

‘I’ll be at my hotel. The Hotel Warwick on ..’

‘I know where it is,’ Thomas said. ‘I’ll be there.’

Gretchen joined them in the hallway. Her face was strained and pale, and for a moment Rudolph was sorry he had brought her along. But only for a moment She’s a big girl now, he thought, she can’t duck everything. It’s enough that she has so gracefully managed to duck her mother for ten years.

As they passed the door to another dressing room, Thomas stopped again. ‘I just have to look in here for a minute,’ he said, ‘say hello to Virgil. Come on in with me, Rudy, tell him you’re my brother, tell him what a good fight he put up, it’ll make him feel better.’

‘Well never get out of this goddamn place tonight,’ Teresa said.

Thomas ignored her and pushed open the door and motioned for Rudolph to go in first. The Negro fighter was still undressed. He was sitting, droop-shouldered, on the rubbing table, his hands hanging listlessly between his legs. A pretty young coloured girl, probably his wife or sister, was sitting quietly on a camp chair at the foot of the table and a white handler was gently applying an icebag to a huge swelling on the fighter’s forehead’. Under the swelling the eye was shut tight. In a comer of the room an older, light-coloured Negro with grey hair, who might have been the fighter’s father, was carefully packing away a silk robe and trunks and shoes. The fighter looked up slowly with, his one good eye as Thomas and Rudolph came into the room.

Thomas put his arm gently around his opponent’s shoulders. “How you feeling, Virgil?’ he asked.

‘I felt better,’ the fighter said. Now Rudolph could see that he couldn’t have been more than twenty years old.

‘Meet my brother, Rudy, Virgil,’ Thomas said. ‘He wants to tell you what a good fight you put up.’

Rudolph shook hands with the fighter, who said. ‘Glad to meet you, sir.’

‘It was an awfully good fight,’ Rudolph said, although what he would have liked to say was, Poor young man, please never put on another pair of gloves again.

‘Yeah,’ the fighter said. ‘He awful strong, your brother.’

‘I was lucky,’ Thomas said. ‘Real lucky. I got five stitches over my eye.’

Tt wasn’t a butt, Tommy,’ Virgil said. ‘I swear it wasn’t a butt.’

‘Of course not, Virgil,’ Thomas said. ‘Nobody said it was. Well, I just wanted to say hello, make sure you’re all right’ He hugged the boy’s shoulders again.

Thanks for comin’ by,’ Virgil said. ‘It’s nice of you.’

‘Good luck, kid,’ Thomas said. Then he and Rudolph shook hands gravely with all the other people in the room and left.

‘It’s about time,’ Teresa said as they appeared in the hall,

I give the marriage six months, Rudolph thought as they went towards the exit.

They rushed that boy,’ Thomas said to Rudolph as they walked side by side. ‘He had a string of easy wins and they gave him a main bout. I watched him a couple of times and I knew I could take him downstairs. Lousy managers. You notice, the bastard wasn’t even there. He didn’t even wait to see if Virgil ought to go home or to the hospital. It’s a shitty profession.’ He glanced back to see if Gretchen objected to the word, but Gretchen seemed to be moving in a private trance of her own, unseeing and unhearing.

Outside they hailed a taxi and Gretchen insisted upon sitting up front with the driver. Teresa sat in the middle on the back seat, between Thomas and Rudolph. She was overpoweringly perfumed, but when Rudolph put the window down she said, ‘For God’s sake, the wind is ruining my hair,’ and he said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and wound the window up again.