Rich Man, Poor Man (48 page)

‘I think you’d better tell me specifically what’s happening,’

Rudolph said. ‘Then perhaps I’d be able to judge if I could help.’

‘Oh you could help, all right, no doubt about that.’ Denton pushed the half-eaten hamburger away from him. “They have found their witch,’ he said. ‘Me.’

‘I don’t quite understand–—’

‘The witch hunt,’ Denton said. ‘You read the papers like everybody else. Throw the Reds out of our schools.’

Rudolph laughed. ‘You’re no Red, Professor, you know that,’ he said.

‘Keep your voice low, boy.’ Denton looked around worriedly. ‘One does not broadcast on this subject’

‘I’m sure you have nothing to worry about, Professor,’ Rudolph said. He decided to make it seem like a joke. ‘I was afraid it was something serious. I thought maybe you’d got a. girl pregnant’

‘You can laugh,’ Denton said. ‘At your age. Nobody laughs in a college or a university anymore. The wildest charges. A five-dollar contribution to an obscure charity in 1938, a reference to Karl Marx in a class, for God’s sake, how is a man to teach the economic theories of the nineteenth century without mentioning Karl Marx! An ironic joke about prevalent economic practices, picked up by some stoneage moron in a class in American History and repeated to the moron’s father, who is the Commander of the local American Legion Post. Ah, you don’t know, boy, you don’t know. And Whitby gets a yearly grant from the State. For the School of Agriculture. So some windbag of an upstate legislator makes a speech, forms a committee, demands an investigation, gets his name in the newspaper. Patriot Defender of the Faith. A special board has been set up within the university, Jordache, don’t mention it to a soul, headed by the President, to investigate charges against various members of the faculty. They hope | to head off the State, throw them a few bodies, mine chief among them, not imperil the grant from the State. Does the picture grow clearer, Jordache?’

‘Oh, Christ,’ Rudolph said.

‘Exactly. Oh, Christ. I don’t know what your politics are… ‘

I don’t have any politics,’ Rudolph said. ‘I vote independently.’

‘Excellent, excellent,’ Denton said. ‘Although it would have been better if you were a registered Republican. And to think that I voted for Eisenhower.’ He laughed hollowly. ‘My son was in Korea and he promised to end the war. But how to prove it. There is much to be said for public balloting.’

‘What do you want me to do, Professor?’ Rudolph asked. ‘Specifically?’

‘Now we come to it,’ Denton said. He finished his coffee. The board meets to consider my case one week from today. Tuesday at two p.m. Mark the hour. I have only been allowed to see a general outline of the charges against me: contributions to Communist front organisations in the thirties, atheistic and radical utterances in the classroom, the recommendation of certain books for outside reading of a doubtful character. The usual academic hatchet job, Jordache, all too usual. With the temper of the country what it is, with, that man Dulles roaring up and down the world, preaching nuclear destruction, with the most eminent men traduced and dismissed like errand boys in Washington, a poor teacher can be ruined by a whisper, the merest whisper. Luckily, they still have a sense of shame at the university, although I doubt it will last the year, and I am to have a chance to defend myself, bring in witnesses

to vouch for me___’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Whatever you will, boy,’ Denton said, his voice broken. ‘I do not plan to coach you. Say what you think of me. You were in three of my classes, we had many instructive hours outside the course, you have been to my house. You’re a clever young man, you are not to be fooled. You know me as well as any man in this town. Say what you will. Your reputation is high, your record at the university was impeccable, not a blot on it, you are a rising young businessman, untainted, your testimony will be of the utmost value.’

‘Of course,’ Rudolph said. Premonitions of trouble. Attacks. Calderwood’s attitude. Dragging the store into politics on the Communist issue. ‘Of course I’ll testify,’ he said. This is the wrong day for something like this, he thought annoyedly. He suddenly and for the first time understood the exquisite pleasure that cowards must enjoy.

‘I knew you would say that, Jordache.’ Denton gripped his hand emotionally across the table. ‘You’d be surprised at the refusals I’ve had from men who had been my friends for twenty years, the hedging, the pusillanimity. This country is becoming a haunt of whipped dogs, Jordache. Do you wish me to swear to you that I have never been a Communist?’

‘Don’t be absurd, Professor,’ Rudolph said. He looked at his watch. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to get back to the store. When the board meets next Tuesday I’ll be there.’ He dug into his pocket for his money clip. ‘Let me pay my share.’

Denton stopped him with a gesture. ‘I invited you. You’re my guest. Go ahead, boy go ahead. I won’t keep you.’ He stood up, looked around for a last time to see if anybody was making a point of watching them, then, satisfied, put out his hand and shook Rudolph’s hand fervently.

Rudolph got his coat and went out of the bar. Through the fogged window he saw Denton stop and order a drink at the bar.

Rudolph walked slowly back towards the store, leaving his coat open, although the wind was keen and the day raw. The street looked as it always looked and the people passing him did not seem like whipped dogs. Poor Denton. He remembered that it was in Denton’s classes that he had been given the first glimmerings of how to make himself successfully into a capitalist, He laughed to himself. Denton, poor bastard, could not afford to laugh.

He was still hungry after the disastrous meal, and once in the store he went to the fountain in the basement and ordered a malted milk and drank it among the soprano twitterings of the lady shoppers all around him. Their world was safe. They would buy dresses at fifty dollars that afternoon, and portable radios and television consoles and frying pans and livingroom suites and creams for the skin and the profits would mount and they were happy over their club sandwiches and ice cream sodas.

He looked over the calm, devouring, rouged, spending, acquiring faces, mothers, brides, virgins, spinsters, mistresses, listened to the voices, breathed in the jumbled bouquet of perfumes, congratulated himself that he was not married and loved no one. He thought, I cannot spend my life serving these worthy women, paid for his malted milk, and went up to his office.

On the desk there was a letter. It was a short one. ‘I hope you’re coming to New York soon. I’m in a mess and I have to talk to you. Love, Gretchen.’

He threw the letter in the wastebasket and said, ‘Oh, Christ,’ for the second time in an hour.

It was raining when he left the store at six-fifteen. Calderwood hadn’t said a word since their talk in the morning. That’s all I needed today, rain, he thought miserably, as he made his way through the steaming traffic on the motorcycle. He was almost home when he remembered that he had promised his mother

that he would do the shopping for dinner. He cursed and turned the machine back towards the business section, where the stores remained open until seven. A surprise, he remembered his mother saying. Your loving son may be out on his ass in two weeks, Mother, will that be surprise enough?

He did his shopping hastily, a small chicken, potatoes, a can of peas, half an apple pie for dessert. As he pushed his way through the lines of housewives he remembered the interview with Calderwood and grinned sourly. The boy wonder financier, surrounded by admiring beauties, on his way to one of his usual elegantly prepared repasts at the family mansion, so often photographed for Life and House and Garden. At the last minute, he bought a bottle of Scotch. This was going to be a night for whiskey.

He went to bed early, a little drunk, thinking, just before he dropped off to sleep. The only satisfactory thing I did all day was run this morning with Quentin McGovern.

The week was routine. When he saw Calderwood at the store, Calderwood made no mention of Rudolph’s proposition, but spoke to him of the ordinary business of the store in his usual slightly rasping and irritable tone. There was no hint either in his manner or in what he said of any ultimate decision.

Rudolph had called Gretchen on the phone in New York (from a pay station - Calderwood did not take kindly to private calls on the store’s phones) and Gretchen had sounded disappointed when he told her he couldn’t get down to the city that week, but would try the following weekend. She had refused to tell him what the trouble was. It could wait, she said. If it could wait, he thought, it couldn’t be so bad.

Denton didn’t call again. Perhaps he was afraid that if given a chance at further conversation Rudolph would withdraw his offer to speak on his behalf before the board next Tuesday afternoon. Rudolph found himself worrying about his appearance before the board. There was always me chance that some evidence would be produced against Denton that Denton didn’t know about or had hidden that would make Rudolph seem like a confederate or a liar or a dupe. What worried him more, though, was that the board was bound to be hostile, prepared to do away with Denton, and antagonistic to anyone who stood in the way. All his life Rudolph had attempted to get people, especially older people in authority, to like him. The thought of facing a whole room full of disapproving academic faces disturbed him.

Throughout the week he found himself making silent speeches to those imagined, unrelenting faces, speeches in which he defended Denton honourably and well while at the same time charming his judges. None of these speeches he composed seemed, in the end, worthwhile. He would have to go into the board as relaxed as possible, gauge the temper of the room and extemporaneously do the best he could for both Denton and himself. If Calderwood knew what he intended to do…

By the weekend he was sleeping badly, his dreams lascivious but unsatisfactory, images of Julie dancing naked before a body of water, Gretchen stretched out in a canoe, Mary Jane opening her legs in bed, then sitting up, her breasts bare, her face contorted, accusing him. A ship pulled away from a pier, a girl, her skirt blowing in the wind, smiled at him as he ran desperately down the pier to catch the ship, he was held back by unseen hands, the ship pulled away, open water… .

Sunday morning, with church bells ringing, he decided he couldn’t stay in the house all day, although he had planned to go over a copy of the papers he had given Calderwood and make some corrections and additions that had occurred to him during the week. But his mother was at her worst on Sundays. The bells made her mournful about her lost religion and she was apt to say that if only Rudolph would go with her, she would attend Mass, confess, take Communion. The fires of hell are waiting for me,’ she said over breakfast, ‘and the church and salvation are only three blocks away.’

‘Some other Sunday, Mom,’ Rudolph said. ‘I’m busy today.’

‘I may be dead and in hell by some other Sunday,’ she said.

‘We’ll just have to take that chance,’ he said, getting up from he table. He left her weeping.

It was a cold, clear day, the sun a bright wafer in the pale winter sky. He dressed warmly, in a fleece-lined surplus Air Force jacket, a knitted wool cap, and goggles, and took the motorcycle out of the garage. He hesitated about which direction to take. There was nobody he wanted to see that day, no destination that seemed promising. Leisure, the burden of modern man.

He got on the motorcycle, started it, hesitated. A car with skis on its roof sped down the street, and he thought, why not, that’s as good a place as any, and followed the car. He remembered that Larsen, the young man in the ski department, had told him that mere was a barn near the bottom

of the tow that could be converted into a shop for renting skis on the weekend. Larsen had said that there was a lot of money to be made there. Rudolph felt better as he followed the car with the ski rack. He was no longer aimless.

He was nearly frozen when he got to the slope. The sun, reflected off the snow, dazzled him and he squinted at the brightly coloured figures swooping towards him down the hill. Everybody seemed young, vigorous, and having a good time, and the girls, tight pants over trim hips and round buttocks, made lust a healthy outdoor emotion for Sunday morning.

He watched, enjoying the spectacle for a while, then became melancholy. He felt lonely and deprived. He was about to turn away and get his machine and go back to town, when Larsen came skimming down off the hill and made a dashing, abrupt stop in front of him, in a cloud of snow.

‘Hi, Mr Jordache,’ Larsen said. He had two rows of great shining white teeth and he smiled widely. Behind him two girls who had been following him came to a halt.

‘Hello, Larsen,’ Rudolph said. ‘I came out to see that barn you told me about.’

‘Sure thing,’ Larsen said. Supple, in one easy movement, he bent over to free himself from his skis. He was bareheaded and his longish, fine, blond hair fell over his eyes as he bent over. Looking at him, in his red sweater, with the two girls behind him, Rudolph was sure that Larsen hadn’t dreamt about any boat pulling away from a pier the night before.

‘Hello, Mr Jordache,’ one of the girls said. ‘I didn’t know you were a skier.’

He peered at her and she laughed. She was wearing big green-tinted snow goggles that covered most of her small face. She pushed the goggles up over her red-and-blue woollen hat. ‘I’m in disguise,’ she said.

Now Rudolph recognised her. It was Miss Soames, from the Record Department. Jiggling, plump, blonde, fed by music.

‘Good morning, good morning,’ Rudolph said, somehow flustered, noticing how small Miss Soames’s waist was, and how well rounded her thighs and hips. ‘No, I’m not a skier. I’m a voyeur.’

Miss Soames laughed. There’s plenty to voyeur about up here, isn’t there?’

‘Mr Jordache …’ Larsen was out of his skis by now, ‘may I present my fiancée. Miss Packard.’

Miss Packard took off her goggles, too, and revealed herself to be as pretty as Miss Soames, and about the same age. ‘Pleasure,’ she said. Fiancee. People were still marrying.