Irwin Shaw - Rich Man, Poor Man

Gretchen shrugged. ‘Billy got sick. Nothing. For a day the doctor thought it was appendicitis, but it wasn’t. But Willie and I stayed up with him all night and as I looked at him lying all white faced and in pain on the bed and Willie hovering over him, so obviously loving him, I couldn’t bear the thought of making him another one of those poor forlorn statistics -child of a broken marriage, permanently homesick, preparing for the psychiatrist’s couch. Well … ‘ her voice hardened, ‘that charming fit of maternal sentimentality has passed on. If our parents had divorced when I was nine, I’d be a better woman than I am today.’

‘You mean you want a divorce now?’ ‘If I get custody of Billy,’ she said. ‘And that’s one thing he won’t give me.’

Rudolph hesitated, took a long drink of his whiskey. ‘Do you want me to see what I can do with him?’ He wouldn’t have offered to interfere if it hadn’t been for the tears in the taxicab.

‘If it’ll do any good,’ Gretchen said. ‘I want to sleep with one man not ten, I want to be honest, do something useful, finally. God, I should like The Three Sisters. Divorce is my Moscow. Give me one more drink, please.’ She held out her glass.

Rudolph went over to the bar and filled both their glasses. ‘You’re running low on Scotch,’ he said.

‘I wish that were true,’ she said.

There was the sound of an ambulance siren again, wailing, diminishing, a warning as it approached, a lament as it departed. The Doppler phenomenon. Was it the same accident, completing the round trip? Or one of an endless series, limitless blood on the streets of the city?

Rudolph handed her her drink and she sat curled up on the couch, staring at it.

A clock chimed somewhere. One o’clock.

‘Well,’ Gretchen said, ‘I guess they’re finished eating Chinese by now, Tommy and that lady. Is it possible that he has the only happy marriage in the history of the Jordaches? Do they love, honour and Cherish each other as they eat Chinese and warm the bosomy marriage bed?’

There was the sound of a key in the front door lock, ‘Ah,’ Gretchen said, ‘the veteran is returning home, wearing his medals.’

Willie came into the room, walking straight. ‘Hi, darling,’ he said, and went over and kissed Gretchen’s cheek. As always, when he hadn’t seen Willie for some time, Rudolph was surprised at how short he was. Perhaps that was his real flaw -his size. He waved at Rudolph. ‘How’s the merchant prince tonight?’ he said.

‘Congratulate him,’ Gretchen said. ‘He signed that deal today.’

‘Congratulations,’ Willie said. He squinted around the room. ‘God, it’s dark in here. What’ve you two been talking about -death, tombs, foul deeds done by night?’ He went over to the bar and poured the last of the whiskey. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘we need a fresh bottle.’

Automatically, Gretchen stood up and, went into the kitchen.

Willie looked after her anxiously. ‘Rudy,’ he whispered, ‘is she sore at me for not coming home to dinner?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Willie said. ‘Otherwise, I’d be getting Lecture Number 725. Thanks, darling,’ he said as Gretchen came into the room carrying a bottle. He took the bottle from her, opened it, and strengthened his drink. ‘What’d you kids do tonight?’ he asked.

‘We had a family reunion,’ Gretchen said, from her place on the couch. ‘We went to a prizefight.’

‘What?’ Willie said puzzedly. ‘What is she talking about, Rudy?’

‘She can tell you about it later.’ Rudolph stood up, leaving most of his last whiskey undrunk. ‘I’ve got to be moving along. I have to get up at the crack of dawn.’ He felt uncomfortable sitting there with Willie, pretending that this night was no different from others, pretending that he had not heard what Gretchen had said about him and about herself. He bent over and kissed Gretchen and Willie accompanied him to the door.

Thanks for coming by and keeping the old girl company,’ Willie said. ‘It makes me feel like less of a shit, leaving her alone. But it was unavoidable.’

It wasn’t a butt, Tommy, Rudolph remembered, I swear it wasn’t a butt. ‘You don’t have to make any excuses to me, Willie,’ he said.

‘Say,’ Willie said, ‘she was joking, wasn’t she? That stuff about the prizefight? What is it - a kind of riddle, or something?’

‘No. We went to a fight.’

‘I’ll never understand that woman,’ Willie said. ‘When I want to watch a fight on television, I have to go to somebody else’s house. Ah, well, I suppose she’ll tell me about it’ He pressed Rudolph’s hand warmly, and Rudolph went out the door. He heard Willie locking it securely behind him and fixing the anti-burglar chain. The danger is inside, Willie, Rudolph wanted to say. You are locking it |n with you. He went down the stairs slowly. He wondered where he would be tonight, what evasions he would be offering, what cuckoldry and dissatisfaction would have been in the air, if that night in 1950, room 923 in the St Moritz Hotel had answered?

If I were a religious man, he thought, going out into the night, I would believe that God was watching over me.

He remembered his promise to try to do what he could to get Gretchen a divorce, on her terms. There was the logical first step to be taken and he was a logical man. He wondered where he could find a reliable private detective. Johnny Heath

would know. Johnny Heath was made for New York City. Rudolph sighed, hating the moment ahead of him when he would enter the detective’s office, hating the detective himself, still unknown to him, preparing, all in the week’s work, to spy on the breakdown and end of love.

Rudolph turned and took a last look at the building he had just left and against which he was sworn to conspire. He knew he’d never be able to mount those steps again, shake that small, desperate man’s hand again. Duplicity, too, must have its limits.

He had pissed blood in the morning, but not very much and he wasn’t hurting. The reflection of his face in the train window when they went through a tunnel was a little sinister, because of the slash of bandage over his eye, but otherwise, he told himself, he looked like anybody else on the way to the bank. The Hudson was cold blue in the October sun and as the train passed Sing Sing he thought of the prisoners peering out at the broad river running free to the sea, and he said, ‘Poor bastards,’ aloud.

He patted the bulge of his wallet under his jacket. He had collected the seven hundred dollars from the bookie on the way downtown. Maybe he could get away with giving Teresa just two hundred of it, two fifty if she made a stink.

He pulled the wallet out. He had been paid off in hundreds. He took out a bill and studied it. Founding father, Benjamin Franklin, stared out at him, looking like somebody’s old mother. Lightning on kite, he remembered dimly; at night all cats are grey. He must have been a tougher man than he looked to get his picture on a bill that size. Did he once say, Gentlemen we must hang together or we will hang separately? I should have at least finished high school, Thomas thought, vague in the presence of one hundred dollars’ worth of history. This

note is legal tender for all debts, public and private and redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve Bank. If this wasn’t lawful money, what the hell was? It was signed in fancy script by somebody called Ivy Baker Priest, Treasurer of the United States. It took a woman with a name like that to give out with double talk about debts and money and get away with it

Thomas folded the bill neatly and slipped it by itself in a side pocket, to be put with the other hundred dollar bills, reposing in the dark vault for just such a day as this.