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

She said yes, conditionally. Perhaps she thought she loved him. He was a good-looking man, with that Indian head of black hair and a sober, industrious, thin face and clear, brown eyes that seemed soft and considerate when they looked at her. When he touched her it was with the utmost deceptive gentleness, as though she were made of china. When she told him she had been born out of wedlock (her phrase) he said he already knew it, from the Muellers, and that it didn’t make any difference, in fact, it was a good thing, there wouldn’t be any in-laws to disapprove of him. He himself was cut off from what remained of his family. His father had been killed on the Russian front in 1915 and his mother had remarried a year later and moved to Berlin from Cologne. There was a younger brother he had never liked, who had married a rich German-American girl who had come to Berlin after the war to visit relatives. The brother now lived in Ohio, but Axel never saw him. His loneliness was apparent and it matched her own.

Her conditions were stringent. He was to give up his job on the Lakes. She didn’t want a husband who was away most of the time and who had a job that was no better than a common laborer’s. And they were not to live in Buffalo, where everyone knew about her birth and the orphanage and where at every turn she would meet people who had seen her working as a waitress. And they were to be married in church.

He had agreed to everything. Oh, diabolical, diabolical. He had some money saved up and through Mr. Mueller he got in touch with a man who had a bakery in Port Philip whose lease was for sale. She made him buy a straw hat for the trip to Port Philip to conclude the deal. He was not to go wearing his usual cloth cap, that hangover from Europe. He was to look like a respectable American businessman.

Two weeks before the wedding, he took her to see the shop in which she was going to spend her life and the apartment above it in which she was going to conceive three children. It was a sunny day in May and the shop was freshly painted, with a large, green awning to protect the plate-glass window, with its array of cakes and cookies, from the sun. The street was a clean, bright one, with other little shops, a hardware store, a dry-goods store, a pharmacy on the corner. There was even a milliner’s shop, with hats wreathed in artificial flowers on stands in the window. It was the shopping street for a quiet residential section that lay between it and the river. Large, comfortable houses behind green lawns. There were sails on the river and a white excursion boat, up from New York, passed as they sat on a bench under a tree looking across the broad stretch of summer-blue water. They could hear the band on board playing waltzes. Of course, with his limp, they never danced.

Oh, the plans she had that sunny May waltzing rivery day. Once they were established, she would put in tables, redecorate the shop, put up curtains, set out candles, serve chocolate and tea, then, later, buy the shop next door (it was empty that first day she saw it) and start a little restaurant, not one like the Muellers’, for working men, but for traveling salesmen and the better class of people of the town. She saw her husband in a dark suit and bow tie showing diners to their table, saw waitresses in crisp muslin aprons hurrying with loaded platters out of the kitchen, saw herself seated behind the cash register, smiling as she rang up the checks, saying, “I hope you enjoyed your dinner,” sitting down with friends over coffee and cake when the day’s work was over.

How was she to know that the neighborhood was going to deteriorate, that the people she would have liked to befriend would consider her beneath them, that the people who would have liked to befriend her she would consider beneath her, that the building next door was to be torn down and a large, clanging garage put up beside the bakery, that the millinery shop was to vanish, that the houses facing the river would be turned into squalid apartments or demolished to make place for junkyards and metal-working shops?

There were never any little tables for chocolate and cakes, never any candles and curtains, never any waitresses, just herself, standing on her feet twelve hours a day summer and winter, selling coarse loaves of bread to grease-stained mechanics and slatternly housewives and filthy children whose parents fought drunkenly with each other in the street on Saturday nights.

Her torment began on her wedding night. In the second-class hotel in Niagara Falls (convenient to Buffalo). All the fragile hopes of the timid, rosy, frail young girl who had been photographed smiling in bridal white beside her unsmiling, handsome groom just eight hours before disappeared in the blood-stained, creaking Niagara bed. Speared helplessly under the huge, scarred, demonically tireless, dark, male body, she knew that she had entered upon her sentence of life imprisonment.

At the end of her week of honeymoon she wrote a suicide note. Then she tore it up. It was an act she was to repeat again and again through the years.

During the day, they were like other honeymooning couples. He was unfailingly considerate, he held her elbow when they crossed the street, he bought her trinkets and took her to the theater (the last week in which he ever showed any generosity to her. Very soon she discovered she had married a fanatical miser). He took her into ice cream parlors and ordered huge whipped cream sundaes (she had a child’s sweet tooth) and smiled indulgently at her like a favorite uncle as she spooned down the heaped confections. He took her for a ride on the river under the Falls and held her hand lovingly when they walked in the sunlight of the northern summer. They never discussed the nights. When he closed the door behind them after dinner it was as though two different and unconnected souls swooped down to inhabit their bodies. They had no vocabulary with which to discuss the grotesque combat in which they were engaged. The severe upbringing of the Sisters had left her inhibited and full of impossible illusions of gentility. Whores had educated him and perhaps he believed all women who were worthy of marriage lay still and terrified in the marriage bed. Or perhaps he thought all American women.

In the end, of course, after months had passed, he recognized that fatalistic, lifeless rejection for what it was, and it enraged him. It spurred him on, made his attacks wilder. He never went with other women. He never looked at another woman. His obsession slept in his bed. It was her misfortune that the one body he craved was hers and was at his disposal. For twenty years he besieged her, hopelessly, hating her, like the commander of a great army incredibly being held at bay before the walls of a flimsy little suburban cottage.

She wept when she discovered that she was pregnant.

When they fought it was not about this. They fought about money. She learned that she had a sharp and hurtful tongue. She became a shrew for small change. To get ten dollars for a new pair of shoes and, later on, for a decent dress for Gretchen to wear to school, took months of bitter campaigning. He begrudged her the bread she ate. She was never to know how much money he had in the bank. He saved like a lunatic squirrel for a new ice age. He had been in Germany when a whole population had been ruined and he knew it could happen in America, too. He had been shaped by defeat and understood that no continent was immune.

The paint was flaking off the walls of the shop for years before he bought five cans of whitewash and repainted. When his prosperous, garage-owning brother came from Ohio to visit him and offered him a share in a new automobile agency he was acquiring, for a few thousand dollars which he could borrow from his brother’s bank, Axel threw his brother out of the house as a thief and schemer. The brother was chubby and cheerful. He took a two-week holiday in Saratoga every summer and went to the theater in New York several times a year with his fat, garrulous wife. He was dressed in a good wool suit and smelled nicely of bay rum. If Axel had been willing to borrow money like his brother, they would have lived in comfort all their lives, could have been freed from the slavery of the bakery, escaped from the slum into which the neighborhood was sinking. But her husband would not draw a penny from the bank or put his name on a note. The paupers of his native country, with their tons of worthless money, watched with gaunt eyes over every dollar that passed through his hands.