Irwin Shaw: Rich Man, Poor Man. Beggarman, Thief

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 toward 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, gray river, she saw herself getting off at the stop for the 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, unpainted 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.

VI

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 at 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 awhile 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 told 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.

She had met him in the restaurant on the Buffalo lake front where she worked as a waitress. The orphanage had placed her there. The restaurant was run by an aging German-American couple named Mueller and the people at the orphanage had chosen them as employers because they were kindly and went to Mass and allowed Mary to stay with them in a spare room above their apartment. The Muellers were good to her and protected her and none of the customers dared to speak improperly to her in the restaurant. The Muellers let her off three times a week to continue her education at night school. She was not going to be a waitress in a restaurant all her life.

Axel Jordache was a huge, silent young man with a limp, who had emigrated from Germany in the early 1920s and who worked as a deckhand on the Lake. steamers. In the winter, when the Lakes were frozen over, he sometimes helped Mr. Mueller in the kitchen as a cook and baker. He hardly spoke English then and he frequented the Muellers’ restaurant so that he could have someone to talk to in his native tongue. When he had been wounded in the German army and couldn’t fight any more they had made him into a cook at the hospital in Frankfurt.

Because, during another war, a young man had come out of a hospital alienated and looking for exile, she was standing tonight in a shabby room, over a shop in a slum, where every day, twelve hours a day, she had given up her youth, her beauty, her hopes. And no end in sight.

He had been most polite. He never as much as tried to hold her hand and when he was in Buffalo between voyages he would walk her to night school and wait to accompany her home. He had asked her to correct his English. Her English was a source of pride to her. People told her they thought she came from Boston when they heard her talk and she took it as a great compliment. Sister Catherine, whom she admired above all the teachers in the orphanage, came from Boston, and spoke crisply and with great precision and had the vocabulary of an educated woman. “To speak slovenly English,” Sister Catherine had said, “is to live the life of a cripple. There are no aspirations denied a girl who speaks like a lady.” She had modeled herself on Sister Catherine and Sister Catherine had given her a book, a history of Irish heroes, when she had left the orphanage. “To Mary Pease, my most hopeful student,” was written in a bold, upright hand on the flyleaf. Mary had modeled her handwriting on Sister Catherine’s, too. Somehow, Sister Catherine’s teaching had made her believe that her father, whoever he was, must have been a gentleman.

With Mary Pease coaching him in the silvery Back Bay accents of Sister Catherine, Axel Jordache had learned how to speak proper English very quickly. Even before they were married, he spoke so well that people were surprised when he told them that he had been born in Germany. There was no denying it, he was an intelligent man. But he used his intelligence to torment her, torment himself, torment everyone around him.

He hadn’t even kissed her before he proposed to her. She was nineteen at the time, her daughter Gretchen’s age, and a virgin. He was unfailingly attentive, always cleanly bathed and shaved and he always brought her small gifts of candy and flowers when he returned from his trips.

He had known her for two years before he proposed.

He hadn’t dared to speak earlier, he said, because he was afraid she would reject him because he was a foreigner and because he limped. How he must have laughed to himself as he saw the tears come to her eyes at his modesty and his lack of confidence in himself. He was a diabolical man, weaving lifetime plots.