Rich Man, Poor Man (26 page)

There’s no need,’ she said.

‘I’ll wipe the dishes,’ he said, with great authority.

‘My man,’ she said. She smiled again, beyond ambition, confident in her simplicities.

The next evening after work, on his way home from the garage on his wobbly Iver Johnson he was passing the town library. On a sudden impulse, he stopped, leaned the bike against a railing, and went in. He hardly read anything at all, not even the sports pages of the newspapers, and he was not a frequenter of libraries. Perhaps in reaction to his brother and his sister, always with their noses in books, and full of fancy sneering ideas.

The hush of the library and the unwelcoming examination of his grease-stained clothes by the lady librarian made bim ill at ease, and he wandered around among the shelves, not

knowing which book of all these thousands held the information he was looking for. Finally, he had to go to the desk and ask the lady.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. She was. stamping cards, making out prison sentences for books with a little mean snapping motion of her wrist.

‘Yes?’ she looked up, unfriendly. She could tell a non-book-lover at a glance.

‘I want to find out something about Saint Sebastian, ma’am,’ he said.

‘What do you want to find out about him?’ ‘Just anything,’ he said, sorry he had come in now. ‘Try the Encyclopedia Britannica,’ the lady said. ‘In the Reference Room. SARS to SORC She knew her library, the lady.

‘Thank you very much, ma’am.’ He decided that from now on he would change his clothes at the garage and use Coyne’s sand-soap to get out the top layer of grease from his skin, at least. Clothilde would like that better, too. No use being treated like a dog when you could avoid it.

It took him ten minutes to find the Encyclopedia Britannica. He pulled out SARS to SORC and took it over to a table and sat down with the book SEA-URCHIN-SEA-WOLF, SEA-WRACK-SEBASTINANO DEL PIOMBO. The things that some people fooled with!

There it was, ‘SEBASTIAN, ST, a Christian martyr whose festival is celebrated on Jan. 20.’ Just one paragraph. He couldn’t have been so damned important.

‘After the archers had left him for dead,’ Tom read, ‘a devout woman, Irene, came by night to take his body away for burial, but finding him still alive, carried him to her house, where his wounds were dressed. No sooner had he wholly recovered than he hastened to confront the emperor, who ordered him to be instantly carried off and beaten to death with rods.’ Twice, for Christ’s sake, Tom thought. Catholics were nuts. But he still didn’t know why Clothilde had said Saint Sebastian when she had looked at him naked in the bathtub.

He read on. ‘St Sebastian is specially invoked against the plague. As a young and beautiful soldier, he is a favourite subject of sacred art, being most generally represented undraped, and severely though not mortally wounded with arrows.’

Tom closed the book thoughtfully. ‘A young and beautiful soldier, being most generally represented undraped . . , ‘ Now

he knew. Clothilde. Wonderful Clothilde. Loving him with-: out words, but saying it with her religion, with her food, her body, everything.

Until today he had thought he was kind of funny looking, a snotty kid with a flat face and a sassy expression. Saint Sebastian. The next time he saw those two beauties, Rudolph and Gretchen, he could look them straight in the eye. I have been compared by an older, experienced woman to Saint Sebastian, a young and beautiful soldier. For the first time since he had left home he was sorry he wasn’t going to see his brother and sister that night.

He got up and put the book away. He was about to leave the reference room when it occurred to him that Clothilde was a Saint’s name, too. He searched through the volumes and took out CASTIR to COLE.

Practised now, he found what he was looking for quickly, although it wasn’t Clothilde, but ‘CLOTILDA’ SI (d. 544) daughter of Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks.’

Tom thought of Clothilde sweating over the stove in the Jordache kitchen and washing Uncle Harold’s underwear and was saddened. Daughter of the Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks. People didn’t think of the future when they named babies.

He read the rest of the paragraph, but Clothilda didn’t seem to have done all that much, converting her husband and building churches and stuff like that, and getting into trouble with her family. The book didn’t say what entrance requirements she had met to be made a saint.

Tom put the book away, eager to get home to Clothilde. But he stopped at the desk to say, ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ to the lady. He was conscious of a sweet smell. There was a bowl of narcissus on the desk, spears of green, with white flowers, set in a bed of multi-coloured pebbles. Then, speaking without thinking, he said, ‘Can I take out a card please?’

The lady looked at him, surprised. ‘Have you ever had a card anywhere before?’ she asked. ‘No, ma’am. I never had the time to read before.’ The lady gave him a queer look, but pulled out a blank card and asked him his name, age, and address. She printed the information in a funny backward way on the card, stamped the date, and handed the card to him. ‘Can I take a book out right away?’ he asked. ‘If you want,’ she said.

He went back to the Encyclopedia Britannica and took out SARS to SORC. He wanted to have a good look at that paragraph and try to memorise it. But when he stood at the desk to have it stamped, the lady shook her head impatiently. ‘Put that right back,’ she said. ‘That’s not supposed to leave the Reference Room.’

He returned to the Reference Room and put the volume back. They keep yapping at you to read, he thought resentfully, and then when you finally say okay, I’ll read, they throw a rule in your face.

Still, walking out of the library, he patted his back pocket several times, to feel the nice stiffness of the card in there.

There was fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and apple sauce for dinner and blueberry pie for dessert. He and Clothilde ate in the kitchen, not saying much.

When they had finished and Clothilde was clearing off the dishes, he went over to her and held her in his arms and said, ‘Clotilda, daughter of the Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks.’

She looked at him, wide-eyed. ‘What’s that?’

I wanted to find out where your name came from,’ he said. ‘I went to the library. You’re a king’s daughter and a king’s

wife.’

She looked at him a long time, her arms around his waist Then she kissed him on the forehead, gratefully, as if he had brought home a present for her.

There were two fish in the straw creel already, speckled on the bed of wet fern. The stream was well stocked as Boylan had said. There was a dam at one edge of the property where the stream entered the estate. From there the stream wound around the property to another dam with a wire fence to keep the fish in, at the other edge of the property. From there it fell in a series of cascades down towards the Hudson.

Rudolph wore old corduroys and a pair of fireman’s rubber boots, bought secondhand and too big for him, to make his way along the banks, with the thorns and the interlaced branches tearing at him. It was a long walk up the hill from the last stop on the local bus line, but it was worth it. His own private trout stream. He hadn’t seen Boylan or anybody else on the property any of the times he had come up there. The

stream was never closer at any point to the main house than five hundred yards.

It had rained the night before and there was rain in the grey, late-afternoon air. The brook was a bit muddy and the trout were shy. But just slowly moving upstream, getting the fly lightly, lightly, where he wanted it, with nobody around, and the only sound the water tumbling over the rocks, was happiness enough. School began again in a week and he was making the most of the last days of the holiday.

He was near one of the stream’s two ornamental bridges, working the water, when he heard footsteps on gravel. A little path, overgrown with weeds, led to the bridge. He reeled in and waited. Boylan, hatless, dressed in a suede jacket, a paisley scarf, and jodhpur boots, came down the path and stopped on the bridge. ‘Hello, Mr Boylan,’ Rudolph said. He was a little uneasy, seeing the man, worried that perhaps Boylan hadn’t remembered inviting him to fish the stream, or had merely said it for politeness’ sake, not really meaning it. ‘Any luck?’ Boylan asked. There’re two in the basket.’

‘Not bad for a day like this,’ Boylan said, examining the muddied water. ‘With flies.’

‘Do you fish?’ Rudolph moved nearer the bridge, so that they wouldn’t have to talk so loud.

*I used to,’ Boylan said. ‘Don’t let me interfere. I’m just taking a walk. I’ll be back this way. If you’re still here, perhaps you’ll do me the pleasure of joining me in a drink up at the ouse.’

‘Thank you,’ Rudolph said. He didn’t say whether he’d it or not.

With a wave, Boylan continued his walk. Rudolph changed the fly, taking the new one from where it was stuck in the band of the battered old brown felt hat he used when it rained or when he went fishing. He made the knots precisely, losing no time: Perhaps one day he would be a surgeon, suturing incisions. ‘I think the patient will five, nurse.’ How many years? Three in pre-med, four in medical school, two more as an intern. Who had that much money? Forget it. On his third cast, the fly was taken. There was a thrash of water, dirty white against the brown current. It felt like a big one. He played it carefully, trying to keep the fish away from rocks and brushwood anchored in the stream. He didn’t know, how long it took him. Twice the fish was nearly his and twice it streaked away, taking line with it. The third time, he felt it tiring. He waded out with his net. The water rushed in over the top of his fireman’s boots, icy cold. It was only when he had the trout in the net that he was conscious that Boylan had come back and was on the bridge watching him.

‘Bravo,’ Boylan said, as Rudolph stepped back on shore, water squelching up from the top of his boots. ‘Very well done.’ Rudolph killed the trout and Boylan came around and watched him as he laid the fish with the two others in the creel. ‘I could never do that,’ Boylan said. ‘Kill anything with my hands.’ He was wearing gloves. ‘They look like miniature sharks,’ he said, ‘don’t they?’

They looked like trout to Rudolph. ‘I’ve never seen a shark,’ he said. He plucked some more fern and stuffed it in the creel, around the fish. His father would have trout for breakfast. His father liked trout. A return on his investment in the birthday rod and reel. ‘Do you ever fish in the Hudson?’ Boylan asked. ‘Once in a while. Sometimes, in season, a shad gets up this far.’

‘When my father was a boy, he caught salmon in the Hudson,’ Boylan said. ‘Can you imagine what the Hudson must have been like when the Indians were here? Before the Roosevelts. With bear and lynx on the shores and deer coming down to the banks.’

‘I see a deer once in a while,’ Rudolph said. It had never occurred to him to wonder what the Hudson must have looked like with Iroquois canoes furrowing it.

‘Bad for the crops, deer, bad for the crops,’ Boylan said. Rudolph would have liked to sit down and take his boots off and get the water out, but he knew his socks were darned, and he didn’t cherish the idea of displaying the thick patches of his mother’s handiwork to Boylan.

As though reading his mind, Boylan said, ‘I do believe you ought to empty the water out of those boots. That water must be cold.’

‘It is.’ Rudolph pulled off one boot, then another. Boylan didn’t seem to notice. He was looking around him at the overgrown wood that had been in his family’s possession since just after the Civil War. ‘You used to be able to see the house from here. There was no underbrush. Ten gardeners used to work this land, winter and summer. Now the only ones who come are the state fisheries people once a year. You can’t get anybody anymore. No sense to it, really, anyway.’ He

studied the massed foliage of the shrub oak and blossomless dogwood and alder. Trash trees,’ he said. ‘The forest primeval. Where only Man is vile. Who said that?’

‘Longfellow,’ Rudolph said. His socks were soaking wet, as he put his boots back on. ‘You read a lot?’ Boylan said. ‘We had to learn it in school.’ Rudolph refused to boast.

‘I’m happy to see that our educational system does not neglect our native birds and their native wood-notes wild,’ Boylan said.

Fancy talk again, Rudolph thought. Who’s he impressing? Rudolph didn’t much like Longfellow, himself, but who did Boylan think he was to be so superior? What poems have you written, brother?

‘By the way, I believe there’s an old pair of hip-length waders up at the house. God knows when I bought them. If they fit you, you can have them. Why don’t you come up and try them on?’

Rudolph had planned to go right on home. It was a long walk to the bus and he had been invited for dinner at Julie’s house. After dinner they were to go to a movie. But waders … They cost over twenty dollars new. Thank you, sir,’ he said.

‘Don’t call me sir,’ Boylan said. ‘I feel old enough as it is.’

They started towards the house, on the overgrown path. ‘Let me carry the creel,’ Boylan said.

‘It’s not heavy,’ Rudolph said.

‘Please,’ said Boylan. ‘It will make me feel as though I’ve done something useful today.’

He’s sad, Rudolph thought with surprise. Why, he’s as sad as my mother. He handed the creel to Boylan, who slung it over his shoulder.

The house sat on the hill, huge, a useless fortress in Gothic stone, with ivy running wild all over it, defensive against knights in armour and dips in the Market.

‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’ Boylan murmured.

“Yes,’ Rudolph said.

‘You have a nice turn of phrase, my boy.’ Boylan laughed. ‘Come on in.’ He opened the massive oak front doors.

My sister has passed through here, Rudolph thought. I should turn back.

But he didn’t.

They went into a large, dark, marble-floored hall, with a big staircase winding up from it. An old man in a grey alpaca

jacket and bow tie appeared immediately, as though merely by entering the house Boylan set up waves of pressure that drove servants into his presence.