Rich Man, Poor Man (47 page)

The plans laid out on Rudolph’s desk were on the theme of spring in the country and Rudolph had already told Bergson that he thought they were going to be the best set of windows Calderwood’s had ever had. Glum as Bergson was, Rudolph enjoyed the hours he spent working with him, as compared with the hours he spent with the heads of departments and the heads of Costs and Accounting. In an ideal scheme of things, he thought, he would never have to look at a balance sheet or go through a monthly inventory.

Calderwood’s door was open and Calderwood saw, him immediately and said, ‘Come in, Rudy, and close the door behind you.’ The papers that had been in the Manila envelope were spread over Calderwood’s desk.

Rudolph sat down across from the old man and waited.

‘Rudy,’ Calderwood said mildly, “you’re the most astonishing young man I’ve ever come across.’

Rudolph said nothing.

‘Who else has seen all this?’ Calderwood waved a hand over the papers on his desk.

‘Nobody.’

‘Who typed them up? Miss Giles?’

‘I did. At home.’

‘You think of everything, don’t you?’ It was not a reproach, but it wasn’t a compliment, either.

Rudolph kept quiet.

‘Who told you I owned thirty acres of land out near the lake?’ Calderwood asked flatly.

The land was owned by a corporation with a New York address. It had taken all of Johnny Heath’s cleverness to find out that the real owner of the corporation was Duncan Calderwood. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say, sir,’ Rudolph said

‘Cant say, can’t say.’ Calderwood accepted it, with a touch of impatience. The feller can’t say. The Silent Generation, like they say in Time magazine. Rudy, I haven’t caught you in a he since the first day I set eyes on you and I don’t expect you to he to me now.’

‘I won’t lie to you, sir,’ Rudolph said.

Calderwood pushed at the papers on his desk. ‘Is this some sort of trick to take me over?’

‘No, sir,’ Rudolph said. ‘It’s a suggestion as to how you can take advantage of your position and your various assets. To expand with me community and diversify your interests. To profit from the tax laws and at the same time protect your estate for your wife and children when you die.’

‘How many pages are there in this?’ Calderwood said. ‘Fifty, sixty?’

‘Fifty-three.’

‘Some suggestion.’ Calderwood snorted. ‘Did you think this up all by yourself?’

‘Yes.’ Rudolph didn’t feel he had to tell Calderwood that for months he had been methodically picking Johnny Heath’s brain and that Johnny was responsible for the more involved sections of the overall plan.

‘All right, all right,” Calderwood grumbled. ‘I’ll look into it’

‘If I may make the suggestion, sir,’ Rudolph said, ‘I think you should talk this over with your lawyers in New York and your bankers.’

‘What do you know about my lawyers in New York?’ Calderwood asked suspiciously.

‘Mr Calderwood,’ Rudolph said, ‘I’ve been working for you for a long time/

‘Okay. Supposing, after studying this some more, I say Yes and do the whole goddamn thing the way you outline it - go public, float a stock issue, borrow from the banks, build the

goddamn shopping centre near the lake, with a theatre, too, like an idiot, supposing I do all that, what’s in it for you?’

‘I would expect to be made chairman of the board, with you as president of the company, at an appropriate salary,’ Rudolph said, ‘and an option to buy a certain amount of stock in the next five years.’ Good old Johnny Heath. Don’t niggle. Think big. ‘I would bring in an assistant to help take over here when I’m otherwise occupied.’ He had already written Brad Knight in Oklahoma about the job.

‘You’ve got everything figured out, haven’t you, Rudy?’ Now Calderwood was frankly hostile.

‘I’ve been working on this plan for more man a year,’ Rudolph said mildly. ‘I’ve tried to face all the problems.’

‘And if I just say no,’ Calderwood said, ‘if I just put all this pile of papers in a file and forget it, then what would you do?’

‘I’m afraid I’d have to tell you I’m leaving at the end of the year, Mr Calderwood,’ Rudolph said, ‘I’m afraid I’d have to look for something with more of a future for me.’

‘I got along without you for a long time,’ Calderwood said. ‘I could get along without you now.’

‘Of course you could,’ Rudolph said.

Calderwood looked down morosely at his desk, flicked out a sheet of paper from a pile, glared at it with special distaste.

‘A theatre,’ he said angrily. ‘We already have a theatre in town.’

‘They’re tearing it down next year,’ Rudolph said.

‘You sure do your homework, don’t you?’ Calderwood said. They’re not going to announce it until July.*

‘Somebody always talks,’ Rudolph said.

‘So it seems. And somebody always listens, don’t they, Rudy?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Rudolph smiled.

Finally, Calderwood smiled, too. ‘What makes Rudy run, eh?’ he said.

That’s not my style, at all,’ Rudolph said evenly. “You know that’

‘Yes, I do,’ Calderwood admitted. ‘I’m sorry I said it. All right. Get back to work. You’ll be hearing from me.’

He was staring down at the papers on his desk as Rudolph left his office. Rudolph walked slowly among the counters, looking youthful and smiling benevolently as usual.

The plan that he had submitted to Calderwood was a complicated one and he had argued every point closely. The community was growing in the direction of the lake. What was more, the neighbouring town of Cedarton, about ten miles away, was linked with Whitby by a new highway and was also growing in the direction of the lake. Suburban shopping centres were springing up all over America and people were becoming accustomed to doing the greater part of their shopping, for all sorts of things, in them. Calderwood’s thirty acres were strategically placed for a market to siphon off trade from both towns and from the upper-middle-class homes that dotted the borders of the lake. If Calderwood didn’t make me move himself, somebody or some corporation would undoubtedly seize the opportunity in the next year or two and besides profiting from the new trade would cut drastically into Calderwood’s volume of business in the Whitby store. Rather than allow a competitor to undermine him, it was to Calderwood’s advantage to compete, even partially, with himself.

In his plans Rudolph had argued for a place for a good restaurant, as well as the theatre, to attract trade in the evenings as well. The theatre, used for plays during the summer, could be turned into a movie house for the rest of the year. He also proposed building a middle-priced housing development along the lake, and suggested that the marshy and up to now unusable land at one end of Calderwood’s holdings could be used for light industry.

Coached by Johnny Heath, Rudolph had meticulously outlined all the benefits the law allowed on enterprises of this kind.

He was sure that his arguments for making a public company out of the new Calderwood Association was bound to sway the old man. The real assets and the earning power, first of the store and then of the centre, would insure a high price of issue for the stock. When Calderwood died, his heirs, his wife and three daughters, would not be faced with the possibility of having to sell the business itself at emergency prices to pay the inheritance taxes, but could sell off blocks of stock while holding on to the controlling interest in the corporation.

In the year that Rudolph had been working on the plan and digging into corporation and tax and realty laws, he had been cynically amused by the manner in which money protected itself legally in the American system. He had no moral feeling about trying to turn the laws to his own advantage. The game had rules. You learned the rules and abided by them. If there were another set of rules you would abide by them.

Professor Denton was waiting for him, at the bar, uncomfortable and out of place among other patrons, none of whom looked as though they had ever been near a college.

‘Good of you,’ Denton said, in a low, hurried voice, ‘good of you to come, Jordache. I’m drinking bourbon. Can I order you something?’

‘I don’t drink during the day,’ Rudolph said, then was sorry he said it, because it sounded disapproving of Denton, who was drinking at a quarter past noon.

‘Quite right,’ Denton said, ‘quite right. Keep the head clear. Ordinarily, I wait until the day’s work is over myself, but…’ He took Rudolph’s arm. ‘Perhaps we can sit down.’ He waved towards the last booth of the row that lined the wall opposite the bar. ‘I know you have to get back.’ He left some change on the bar for his drink, carefully counting it out, and still with his hand holding Rudolph’s arm, guided him to the booth. They sat down facing each other. There were two greasy menus on the table and they studied them.

‘I’ll take the soup and the hamburger,’ Denton said to the waitress. ‘And a cup of coffee. How about you, Jordache?’

The same,’ Rudolph said.

The waitress wrote the order down laboriously on her pad, illiteracy a family heritage. She was a woman of about sixty, grey haired and shapeless in an incongruously pert, revealing orange uniform with a coquettish, small, lace apron, age paying its iron debt to the ideal of youthful America. Her ankles were swollen and she shuffled flatly as she went back towards the kitchen. Rudolph thought of his mother, of her dream of the neat little candlelit restaurant that had never materialised. Well, she had been spared the orange uniform.

‘You’re doing well, Jordache,’ Denton said, hunched over the table, his eyes worried and magnified behind the thick, steel-rimmed glasses. He waved his hand impatiently, to ward off any contradiction. ‘I hear, I hear,’ he said. ‘I get reports from many sources. Mrs. Denton, for one. Faithful customer. She must be in the store three times a Week. You must see her from time to time.’

‘I ran into her only last week,’ Rudolph said.

‘She tells me the store is booming, booming, a new lease of life, she says. Very big-city. All sorts of new things. Well, people like to buy things. And everybody seems to have money these days. Except college professors.’ Indigence creased Denton’s forehead briefly. ‘No matter. I didn’t come her to complain. No doubt about it, Jordache, you did well to turn down the job in the department. The academic world,’ he said bitterly.

“Rife with jealousy, cabals, treachery, ingratitude, a man has to walk as if on eggs. Better the world of business. Give and take. Dog eat dog. Frankly. On the up and up.’

‘It isn’t exactly like that,’ Rudolph said mildly. ‘Business.’

‘No, of course not,’ Denton said. ‘Everything is modified by character. It doesn’t pay to ride a theory too hard, you lose sight of the reality, the living shape. At any rate, I’m gratified at your success, and I’m sure that there was no compromise of principle involved, none whatsoever.’

The waitress appeared with their soup. Denton spooned it in. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘if I had it to do all over again, I’d avoid the ivy-covered walls like the plague. It has made me what you see today, a narrow man, an embittered man, a failure, a coward___’

‘I wouldn’t call you any of those things,’ Rudolph said, surprised at Denton’s description of himself. Denton had always seemed to Rudolph to be pleased with himself, enjoying acting out his visions of economic villainy before a captive audience of young people.

‘I live in fear and trembling,’ Denton said, through the soup. ‘Fear and trembling.’

‘If I can help you in any way,’ Rudolph began. ‘I’d…’

‘You’re a good soul, Jordache, a good soul,’ Denton said. ‘I picked you out immediately. Serious among the frivolous. Compassionate among the pitiless. On the search for knowledge where others were merely searching for advancement. Oh, I’ve watched you carefully through the years, Jordache. You’re going to go far. Mark my words. I have been teaching young men for over twenty years, thousands of young men, they have no secrets from me, their future has no mysteries for me. Mark my words, Jordache.’

Denton finished his soup and the waitress came and put down their hamburger steaks and coffee.

‘And you won’t do it by riding roughshod over your fellow-men,’ Denton went on, darting at his hamburger with his fork. ‘I know your mind, I know your character, I observed you through the years. You have a code, a sense of honour, a fastidiousness of mind and body. These eyes don’t miss much, Jordache, in class or out.’

Rudolph ate silently, waiting for the spate of approval to die down, knowing that Denton must have a great favour to ask to be so effusive before making his demand.

‘Before the war,’ Denton went on, chewing, ‘there were more young men of your mould, clear seeing, dependable, honourable. Most of them are dead now, killed in places whose names we have almost forgotten. This generation - ‘ he shrugged despairingly. ‘Crafty, careful, looking to get something for nothing, hypocritical. You’d be astounded at the amount of cheating I find in each examination, term papers. Ah, if I had the money, I’d get away from it all, live on an island.’ He looked nervously at his watch. Time, ever on the wing,’ he said. He peered around the dark bar conspiratorially. The booth next to theirs was empty and the four or five men hunched over the bar near the doorway were well out of earshot. ‘Might as well get to the nub of it.’ Denton dropped his voice and leaned forward over the table. ‘I’m in trouble, Jordache.’

He’s going to ask me for the name of an abortionist, Rudolph thought wildly. Love on the Campus. He saw the headlines. History Professor Makes History by Moonlight with Coed. Doctor in Jail. Rudolph tried to keep his face noncommittal and went on eating. The hamburger was grey and soggy and the potatoes were oily.

‘You heard what I said?’ Denton whispered.

‘You’re in trouble, you said.’

‘Exactly.’ There was a professorial tone of approval - the student had been paying attention. ‘Bad trouble.’ Denton sipped at his coffee, Socrates and hemlock. They’re out to get me.’

‘Who’s out to get you?’

‘My enemies.’ Denton’s eyes scanned the bar, searching out enemies, disguised as workmen drinking beer.

“When I was in school,’ Rudolph said, ‘you seemed to be well liked everywhere.’

“There are currents, and currents,’ Denton said, ‘eddies and whirlpools that the undergraduate never has an inkling of. In the faculty rooms, in the offices of power. In the office of the President himself. I am too outspoken, it is a failing of mine, I am naive, I have believed in the myth of academic freedom. My enemies have bided their time. The vice-chairman of the department, I should have fired him years ago, a hopeless scholar; I restrained myself only out of pity, Lamentable weakness. As I said, the vice-chairman, yearning for my job, has prepared a dossier, scraps of gossip over a drink, lines out of context, insinuations. They are preparing to offer me up as a sacrifice, Jordache.’