Rich Man, Poor Man (39 page)

The man from Washington was a man of peace. ‘The curve of military power is rising everywhere,’ he said in solemn tones. ‘The only hope for peace is the military might of the United States. To prevent war the United States needs a force so big and strong, so capable of counter-attack as to serve as a deterrent.’

Rudolph looked along the rows of his fellow graduates. Half of them were veterans of World War II, in college on the GI Bill of Rights. Many of them were married, their wives sitting with newly set hair in the rows behind them, some of them holding infants in their arms because there was nobody to leave them with in the trailers and cluttered rented rooms

which had been their homes while their husbands had struggled for the degrees being awarded today. Rudolph wondered how they felt about the rising curve of military power.

Sitting next to Rudolph was Bradford Knight, a round-faced florid young man from Tulsa, who had been a sergeant in the infantry in Europe. He was Rudolph’s best friend on the campus, an energetic, overt boy, cynical and shrewd behind a lazy Oklahoma drawl. He had come to Whitby because his captain had graduated from the school and recommended him to the Dean of Admissions. He and Rudolph had drunk a lot of beer together and had gone fishing together. Brad kept urging Rudolph to come out to Tulsa with him and go into the oil business with him and his father. ‘You’ll be a millionaire before you’re twenty-five, son,’ Brad had said. ‘It’s overflowin’ country out there. You’ll trade in your Cadillac every time the ashtrays have to be emptied.’ Brad’s father had been a millionaire before he was twenty-five, but was in a low period now (‘Just a little bad run of luck,’ according to Brad) and couldn’t afford the fare East at the moment for his son’s graduation.

Teddy Boylan wasn’t at the ceremony, either, although Rudolph had sent him an invitation. It was the least he could do for the four thousand dollars. But Boylan had declined. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see myself driving fifty miles on a nice June afternoon to listen to a Democrat make a speech on the campus of an obscure agricultural school.’ Whitby was an agricultural school, although it did have an important agricultural department, but Boylan still resented Rudolph’s refusal even to apply to an Ivy League university when he had made his offer in 1946 to finance Rudolph’s education. ‘However,’ the tetter had gone on in Boylan’s harsh, heavily accented handwriting, ‘the day shall not go altogether uncelebrated. Come on over to the house when the dreary mumblings are over, and well break out a bottle of champagne and talk about your plans,’

Rudolph had decided for several reasons to choose Whitby rather than take a chance on Yale or Harvard. For one, he’d have owed Boylan a good deal more than four thousand dollars at the end, and for another, with his background and his lack of money, he’d have been an outsider among the young lords of American society whose fathers and grandfathers had all cheered at Harvard-Yale games, who whipped back and forth to debutantes’ balls, and most of whom had never worked a day in their lives. At Whitby, poverty was normal. The occasional boy who didn’t have to work in the summer to help pay for his books and clothes in the autumn was unusuaL The only outsiders, except for an occasional stray like Brad, were bookish freaks who shunned their fellow students and a few politically minded young men who circulated petitions in favour of the United Nations and against compulsory military service.

Another reason that Rudolph had chosen Whitby was that it was close enough to Port Philip so that he could get over on Sundays to see his mother, who was more or less confined to her room and who, friendless,, suspicious and half mad, could not be allowed just to founder into absolute neglect. In the summer of his sophomore year, when he got the job after hours and on Saturdays at Calderwood’s Department Store, he had found a cheap Utile two-room apartment with a kitchenette in Whitby and had moved his mother in with him. She was waiting for him there, now. She hadn’t felt well enough to come to the graduation, she said, and beside, she would disgrace him, the way she looked. Disgrace was probably too strong a word, Rudolph thought, looking around at the neatly clothed, sober parents of his classmates, but she certainly wouldn’t have dazzled anybody in the assemblage with her beauty or her style of dress. It was one thing to be a dutiful son. It was a very different thing not to face facts.

So - Mary Pease Jordache, sitting in a rocking chair at the window of the shabby apartment, cigarette ashes drifting down on her shawl, legs swollen and almost useless, was not there to see her son rewarded with his roll of imitation parchment. Among the other absentees - Gretchen, linked by blood, detained in New York by a crisis with her child; Julie, being graduated herself that day from Barnard; Thomas, more blood, address unknown; Axel Jordache, blood on his hands, sculling through eternity.

He was alone this day and it was just as well.

‘The power of the military establishment is appalling,’ the speaker was saying, his voice magnified over the public address system,’ but one great thing on our side is the wish of the ordinary man everywhere for peace.’

If Rudolph was an ordinary man, the cabinet member was certainly speaking for him. Now that he had heard some of the stories about the war in bull sessions around the campus he no longer envied the generation before his which had stood on Guadalcanal and the sandy ridges of Tunisia and at the Rapido River.

The fine, intelligent, educated voice sang on in the sunny quadrangle of red-brick Colonial buildings. Inevitably, there was the salute to America, land of opportunity. Half the young men listening had had the opportunity to be killed for America, but the speaker was looking forward this afternoon, not towards the past, and the opportunities he mentioned were those of scientific research, public service, aid to those nations throughout the world who were not as fortunate as we. He was a good man, the cabinet member, and Rudolph was glad that such a man was near the seat of power in Washington, but his view of opportunity in 1950 was a bit lofty, evangelical, Washingtonian; all very well for a commencement exercise, but not likely to coincide with the down-to-earth views of the three hundred or so poor men’s sons who sat before him in black robes waiting to receive their degrees from a small, underfinanced school known, if it was known at all, for its agricultural department, and wondering how they were going to start earning a living the next day.

Up front, in the section reserved for professors, Rudolph saw Professor Denton, the head of the History and Economics Departments, squirming in his seat and turning to whisper to Professor Lloyd, of the English Department, sitting on his right. Rudolph smiled, guessing what Professor Denton’s comments would be on the cabinet members’ ritualistic pronouncements. Denton, a small, fierce greying man, disappointed because by now he realised he would rise no higher in the academic world, was also a kind of outdated Midwestern Populist, who spent a good deal of his time in the classroom ranting about what he considered the betrayal of the American economic and political system, dating back to the Civil War, by Big Money and Big Business. The American economy,’ he said in class, ‘is a rigged crap table, with loaded dice. The laws are carefully arranged to that the Rich throw only sevens and everybody else throws only snake-eyes.’

At least once a term he made a point of referring to the fact that in 1932, by his own admission before a congressional committee, J. P. Morgan had not paid a cent in income tax. ‘I want you gentlemen to keep this in mind,’ Professor Denton would declaim bitterly, ‘while also keeping in mind that in the same year, on a mere tutor’s salary, I paid five hundred and twenty seven dollars and thirty cents in tax to the Federal Government.’

The effect on the class, as far as Rudolph could discern, was not the one Denton sought Rather than firing the students up with indignation and a burning desire to rally forth to do

battle for reform, most of the students, Rudolph included, dreamed of the time when they themselves could reach the heights of wealth and power, so that they, too, like J. P. Morgan, could be exempt from what Denton called the legal enslavement of the electorate body.

And when Denton, pouncing upon some bit of news in the Wall Street Journal describing some new wily tax-saving amalgamation or oil jobbing that kept millions of dollars immune from the Federal treasury, Rudolph listened carefully, admiring the techniques that Denton lovingly dissected, and putting everything carefully down in his notebooks, against the blessed day when he perhaps might be faced with similar opportunities.

Anxious for good marks, not so much for themselves as for the possible advantages later, Rudolph did not let on that his close attention to Denton’s tirades were not those of a disciple, but rather those of a spy in enemy territory. His three courses with Denton had been rewarded with three As and Denton had offered him a teaching fellowship in the History department for the next year.

Despite his secret disagreement with what he thought were Denton’s naive positions, Denton was the one instructor Rudolph had come to like in all the time he had been in the college, and the one man he considered had taught him anything useful.

He had kept this opinion, as he had kept almost all his other opinions, strictly to himself, and he was highly regarded as a serious student and a well-behaved young man by the faculty members.

The speaker was finishing, with a mention of God in his last sentence. There was applause. Then the graduates were called up to receive their degrees, one by one. The President beamed as he bestowed the rolls of paper bedecked with ribbon. He had scored a coup getting the cabinet member to his ceremony. He had not read Boylan’s letter about an agricultural school.

A hymn was sung, a decorous march played. The black robes filed down through rows of parents and relatives. The robes dispersed under the summer foliage, of oak trees, mixing with the bright colours of women’s dresses, making the graduates look like a flock of crows feeding in a field of flowers.

Rudolph limited himself to a few handshakes. He had a busy day and night ahead of him. Denton sought him out, shook his hand, a small, almost hunchbacked man with thick, silver-rimmed glasses. ‘Jordache,’ he said, his hand enthusiastic, ‘you will think it over won’t you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Rudolph said. ‘It’s very kind of you.’ Respect your elders. The academic life, serene, underpaid. A master’s in a year, a PhD a few years later, a chair perhaps at the age of forty-five. ‘I am certainly tempted, sir.’ He was not tempted at all.

He and Brad broke away to turn in their robes and go, as prearranged, to the parking lot. Brad had a pre-war Chevy convertible, and his bags, already packed were in the trunk. Brad was ready to take off for Oklahoma, that overflowing country.

They were the first ones out of the parking lot. They did not look back. Alma Mater disappeared around a bend in the road. Four years. Be sentimental later. Twenty years from now. ‘Let’s go by the store for a minute,’ Rudolph said. ‘I promised Calderwood I’d look in.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Brad said, at the wheel. ‘Do I sound like an educated man?’

The ruling class,’ Rudolph said.

‘My time has not been wasted,’ Brad said. ‘How much do you think a cabinet member makes a year?’ ‘Fifteen, sixteen thousand,’ Rudolph hazarded. ‘Chickenfeed,’ Brad said. ‘Plus honour.’

That’s another thirty bucks a year at least,’ Brad said. Tax free. You think he wrote that speech himself?’ ‘Probably.’

“He’s overpaid.’ Brad began to hum the tune of ‘Everything’s Up-to-date in Kansas City’. Will there be broads there tonight?’

Gretchen had invited them both to her place for a party to mark the occasion. Julie was to come, too, if she could shake her parents.

‘Probably,’ Rudolph said. There’re usually one or two girls hanging around.’

‘I read all that stuff in the papers,’ Brad said querulously, about how modern youth is going to the dogs and how morality has broken down since the war and all, but I’m not getting any of that little old broken-down morality, that’s for sure, The next time I go to college it’s going to be coed. You’re looking at a pure-bred, sex-starved Bachelor of Arts, and I ain’t just talking.’ He hummed gaily. They drove through the town. Since the war there had been a

lot of new construction, small factories and lawns and flowerbeds pretending to be places of recreation and gracious living, shop-fronts redone to look as though they were on 18th century village streets in the English counties, a white clapboard building that had once been the town hall and was now a summer theatre. People from New York had begun buying farmhouses in the adjoining countryside and came up for weekends and holidays. Whitby, in the four years that Rudolph had spent there, had grown visibly more prosperous with nine new holes added to the golf-course and an optimistic real-estate development called Greenwood Estates, where you had to buy at least two acres of land if you wanted to build a house. There was even a small artists’ colony and when the President of the university attempted to lure staff away from other institutions, he always pointed out that Whitby was situated in an up-and-coming town, improving in quality as well as size, and that it had a cultural atmosphere.

Calderwood’s was a small department store on the best corner of the main shopping street of the town. It had been there, since the 1890s, first as a kind of general store serving the needs of a sleepy college village with a back country of solid -farms. As the town had grown and changed its character, the store had grown and changed accordingly. Now it was a long, two-storey structure, a considerable variety of goods displayed behind plate-glass windows. Rudolph had started as a stock boy in busy seasons, but had worked so hard and had come up with so many suggestions that Duncan Calderwood, descendant of the original owner, had had to promote him. The store was still small enough so that one man could do many different jobs in it, and by now Rudolph acted as part time salesman, window dresser, advertising copy writer, adviser on buying, and consultant on the hiring and firing of personnel. When he worked full time in the summer, his salary was fifty dollars a week.