Rich Man, Poor Man (5 page)

‘No.’

‘Jordache,’ Arnold said. That a name from around these parts?’

‘No,’ Gretchen said. ‘It’s German. My father came over from Germany. He was wounded in the leg too. In the First War. He was in the German army.’

Arnold chuckled. They get a man coming and going, don’t they?’ he said. ‘He do much running, your pa?’

‘He limps a little,’ Gretchen spoke carefully. ‘It doesn’t seem to interfere too much.’

‘Yeah, Cornwall.’ Arnold rocked back and forth a little on the table. He seemed to have had enough of talk about wars and wounds. “They got palm trees, little old towns, make St Louis look like it was built the day before yesterday. Big, wide beaches. Yeah. Yeah, England. Folk’re real nice. Hospitable. Invite you to their homes for Sunday dinner. They surprised me. Always felt the English were uppity. Anyway, that was the general impression about ‘em in the circles in which I moved in St Louis as a young man.’

Gretchen felt he was making fun of her, gently, with the ironic formal pronouncement. ‘People have to learn about each other,’ she said stiffly, unhappy about how pompous she was sounding, but somehow put off, disturbed, forced on the defensive by the soft, lazy country voice.

They sure do,’ he agreed. They sure do.’ He leaned on his hands and turned his face towards her. What have I got to learn about you, Miss Jordache?’

‘Me?’ A forced little laugh was surprised out of her. ‘Nothing. I’m a small-town secretary who’s never been anyplace and who’ll never go anyplace.’

‘I wouldn’t agree to that, Miss Jordache,’ Arnold said seriously. ‘I wouldn’t agree to that at all. If ever I saw a girl that was due to rise, it’s you. You got a neat, promising style of handling yourself. Why, I bet half the boys in this building’d ask you to marry them on the spot, you gave them any encouragement.’ ‘I’m not marrying anyone yet,’ Gretchen said. ‘Of course not.’ Arnold nodded soberly. ‘No sense in rushing, lock yourself in, a girl like you. With a wide choice.’ He stubbed his cigarette out in an ash tray on the table, then reached automatically into the package in the pocket of the bathrobe for a fresh one, which he neglected to light. ‘I had a girl in Cornwall for three months,’ he said. The prettiest, most joyous, loving little girl a man could ever hope to see. She was married, but that made never no mind. Her husband was out in Africa sorriewhere since 1939 and I do believe she forgot what he looked like. We went to pubs together and she made me Sunday dinner when I got a pass and we made love like we was Adam and Eve in the Garden.’

He looked thoughtfully up at the white ceiling of the big empty room. ‘I became a human being in Cornwall,’ he said. ‘Oh, yeah, the Army made a man out of little Arnold Sims from St Louis. It was a sorrowful day in that town when the orders came to move to fight the foe.’ He was silent, remembering the old town near the sea, the palm trees, the joyous, loving little girl with the forgotten husband in Africa.

Gretchen sat very still. She was embarassed when anybody, talked of making love. She wasn’t embarrassed by being a virgin, because that was a conscious choice on her part, but she was embarrassed by her shyness, her inability to take sex lightly and matter-of-factly, at least in conversation, like so many of the girls she had gone to high school with. When she was honest with herself, she recognised that a good deal of her

feeling was because of her mother and father, their bedroom separated from hers by only a narrow hallway. Her father came clumping up at five in the morning, his slow footsteps heavy on the stairs, and then there would be the low sound of his voice, hoarsened by the whiskey of the long night, and her mother’s complaining twitterings and then the sounds of the assault and her mother’s tight, martyred expression in the morning.

And tonight, in the sleeping building, in the first really intimate conversation she had had alone with any of the men, she was being made a kind of witness, against her will, of an act, or the ghost and essence of an act, that she tried to reject from her consciousness. Adam and Eve in the Garden. The two bodies, one white, one black. She tried not to think about it in those terms, but she couldn’t help herself. And there was something meaningful and planned in the boy’s revelations - it was not the nostalgic, late-at-night reminiscences of a soldier home from the wars - there was a direction in the musical flowing whispers, a target. Somehow, she knew the target was herself and she wanted to hide.

‘I wrote her a letter after I was hit,’ Arnold was saying, ‘but I never got no answer. Maybe her husband come home. And from that day to this I never touched a woman. I got hit early on and I been in hospital ever since. The first time I got out was last Saturday, We had an afternoon pass, Billy and me.’ Billy was the other Negro in the ward. ‘Nothin’ much for two coloured boys to do in this valley. It ain’t Cornwall, I’ll tell you that’ He laughed. ‘Not even any coloured folk around. Imagine that, being sent to maybe the one hospital in the United States that’s in a town without any coloured folk. We drank a couple of beers that we got in the market and we took the bus upriver a bit, because we heard there was a coloured family up at the Landing. Turned, out it was just an old man from South Carolina, living all by himself in an old house on the river, with all his family gone and forgotten. We gave him some beer and told him lies about how brave we were in the war, and said we’d come back fishin’ on our next pass. Fishin’!’

‘I’m sure,’ Gretchen said, looking at her watch, ‘that when you get out of the hospital for good and go back home you’ll find a beautiful girl and be very happy again.’ Her voice sounded prissy and false and nervous all at the same time and she was ashamed of herself, but she knew she had to get out of that room. ‘It’s awfully late, Arnold …’ She started to get

off the table, but he held her arm in his hand, not hard, but firmly.

It ain’t all that late, Miss Jordache,’ Arnold said. ‘To tell you the truth, I been waiting for just such an occasion, all alone like this.’ ‘I have to catch a bus, Arnold, I…’ ‘Wilson and me, we’ve been discussing you.’ Arnold didn’t let go of her arm. ‘And we decided on our next pass, that’s this Saturday, we would like to invite you to spend the day with us.’

That’s very kind of you and Wilson,’ Gretchen said. She had difficulty trying to keep her voice normal. ‘But I’m terribly busy on Saturdays.’

‘We figured it wouldn’t do to be seen in the company of two black boys,’ Arnold went on, his voice flat, neither menacing nor inviting, ‘being as how this is your town and they’re not used to seeing things like that around here, and we’re only enlisted men… ‘ That really has nothing to do with …’ ‘You take the bus up to the Landing at twelve-thirty,’ Arnold continued, as though there had been no interruption. ‘Well go earlier and give that old man five bucks to buy himself a bottle of whiskey and go to the show and we’ll fix up a nice meal for the three of us in his house. You turn left direcdy at the bus stop and walk on about a quarter of a mile down to the river and it’s the only house there, sitting real pretty on the bank, with nobody around to snoop or make a fuss, just the three of us, all folksy and friendly.’

‘I’m going home now, Arnold,’ Gretchen said loudly. She knew she would be ashamed to call out, but she tried to make him think she was ready to shout for help.

‘A good meal, a couple of nice long drinks,’ Arnold said, whispering, smiling, holding her. ‘We been away a long time, Miss Jordache.’

‘I’m going to yell,’ Gretchen said, finding it hard to speak. How could he do it - be so polite and friendly in one breath and then … She despised herself for her ignorance of the human race.

‘We have a high opinion of you, Miss Jordache, Wilson and me. Ever since I first laid eyes on you I can’t think about anybody else. And Wilson says it’s the same with him …’

‘You’re both crazy. If I tell the Colonel…’ Gretchen wanted to pull her arm away, but if anybody happened to come in and saw them struggling, the explanations would be painful.

‘As I said, our opinion is high,’ Arnold said, ‘and we’re willing to pay for it. We got a lot of back pay accumulated, Wilson and me, and I been particularly lucky in the crap game in the ward. Listen careful, Miss Jordache. We got eight hundred dollars between us and you’re welcome to it. Just for one little afternoon on the river…’ He took his hand off her arm and, unexpectedly, jumped down from the table, landing lightly on his good foot. He started limping out, his big body made clumsy by the floating maroon bathrobe. He turned at the door. ‘No need to say yes or no this minute, Miss Jordache,’ he said politely. Think on it. Saturday’s two days away. We’ll be there at the Landing, from eleven a.m. on. You just come anytime you get your chores done, Miss Jordache. We’ll be waiting on you.’ And he limped out of the room, standing very straight and not holding on to the walls for support.

For a moment, Gretchen sat still. The only sound she heard was the hum of a machine somewhere in the basement, a sound she didn’t remember ever having heard before. She touched her bare arm, where Arnold’s hand had held it, just below the elbow. She got off the table and turned off the lights, so that if anybody came in, they wouldn’t see what her face must look like. She leaned against the wall, her hands against her mouth, hiding it. Then she hurried to the locker-room and changed into her street clothes and almost ran out of the hospital to the bus stop.

She sat at the dressing table wiping off the last of the cold cream from the delicately veined pale skin under her swollen eyes. On the table before her stood the jars and vials with the Woolworth names of beauty - Hazel Bishop, Coty. We made love like Adam and Eve in the Garden.

She mustn’t think of it, she mustn’t think about it. She would call the Colonel tomorrow and ask to be transferred to another block. She couldn’t go back there again.

She stood up and took off her bathrobe and for a moment she was naked in the soft light of the lamp over the dressing table. Reflected in the mirror, her high, full breasts were very white and the nipples stood disobediently erect. Below was the sinister, dark triangle, dangerously outlined against the pale swell of her thighs. What can I do about it, what can I do about it?

She put on her nightgown and put out the light and climbed into the cold bed. She hoped that this was not going to be one of the nights that her father picked to claim her mother. There was just so much that she could bear in one night.

The bus left every half hour on the way upriver towards Albany. On Saturday it would be full of soldiers on weekend passes. All the battalions of young men. She saw herself buying the ticket at the bus terminal, she saw herself seated at the window looking out at the distant, grey river, she saw herself getting off at the stop for Landing, standing there alone, in front of the gas station; under her high-heeled shoes she felt the uneven surface of the gravel road, she smelled the perfume she couldn’t help but wear, she saw the dilapidated, unpointed frame house on the bank of the river, and the two dark men, glasses in their hands, waiting silently, knowing executioners, figures of fate, not rising, confident, her shameful pay in their pockets, waiting, knowing she was coming, watching her come to deliver herself in curiosity and lust, knowing what they were going to do together.

She took the pillow from beneath her head and put it between her legs and clamped it hard.

The mother stands at the lace-curtained window of the bedroom staring out at the cindery back yard behind the bakery. There are two spindly trees there, with a board nailed between them, from which swings a scuffed, heavy, leather cylinder, stuffed with sand like the heavy bags prize fighters use to train on. In the dark enclosure, the bag looks like a hanged man. In other days in the back gardens on the same street, there were flowers and hammocks strung between the trees. Every afternoon, her husband puts on a pair of wool-lined gloves and goes out into the back yard and flails the bag for twenty minutes. He goes at the bag with a wild, concentrated violence, as though he is fighting for his life. Sometimes, when she happens to see him at it, when Rudy takes over the store for her for a while to let her rest, she has the feeling that it isn’t a dead bag of leather and sand her husband is punishing, but herself.

She stands at the window in a green sateen bathrobe, soiled at the collar and cuffs. She is smoking a cigarette and the ash drifts down unnoticed onto the robe. She used to be the neatest and most meticulous of girls, clean as a blossom in a glass vase. She was brought up in an orphanage and the Sisters knew how to inculcate strict habits of cleanliness. But she is a slattern now, loose-bodied and careless about her hair and skin and her

clothes. The Sisters taught her a love of religion and affection for the ceremonies of the Church, but she has not been to Mass for almost twenty years. When her first child, her daughter, Gretchen, was born, she arranged with the Father for the christening, but her husband refused to appear at the font and forbade her then or ever again to give as much as a penny in contribution to the Church. And he a born Catholic.

Three unbaptized and unbelieving children and a blaspheming, Church-hating husband. Her burden to bear.

She had never known her father or mother. The orphanage in Buffalo had been her mother and father. She was assigned a name. Pease. It might have been her mother’s name. When she thought of herself it was always as Mary Pease, not Mary Jordache, or Mrs Axel Jordache. The Mother Superior had tqld her when she left the orphanage that it might well have been that her mother was Irish, but nobody knew for sure. The Mother Superior had warned her to beware of her fallen mother’s blood in her body and to abstain from temptation. She was sixteen at the time, a rosy, frail girl with bright golden hair. When her daughter had been born she had wanted to name the baby Colleen, to memorialize her Irish descendance. But her husband didn’t like the Irish and said the girl’s name would be Gretchen. He had known a whore in Hamburg by that name, he said. It was only a year after the wedding, but he already hated her.

She had met him in the restaurant on the Buffalo lake front where she worked as a waitress. The orphanage had placed her there. The restaurant was run by an ageing German-American couple named Mueller and the people at the orphanage had chosen them as employers because they were kindly and went to Mass and allowed Mary to stay with them in a spare room above their apartment. The Muellers were good to her and protected her and none of the customers dared to speak improperly to her in the restaurant. The Muellers let her off three times a week to continue her education at night school. She was not going to be a waitress in a restaurant all her life.