Rich Man, Poor Man (54 page)

There was the sound of a key in the front door lock, ‘Ah,’ Gretchen said, ‘the veteran is returning home, wearing his medals.’

Willie came into the room, walking straight. ‘Hi, darling,’ he said, and went over and kissed Gretchen’s cheek. As always, when he hadn’t seen Willie for some time, Rudolph was surprised at how short he was. Perhaps that was his real flaw -his size. He waved at Rudolph. ‘How’s the merchant prince tonight?’ he said.

‘Congratulate him,’ Gretchen said. ‘He signed that deal today.’

‘Congratulations,’ Willie said. He squinted around the room. ‘God, it’s dark in here. What’ve you two been talking about -death, tombs, foul deeds done by night?’ He went over to the bar and poured the last of the whiskey. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘we need a fresh bottle.’

Automatically, Gretchen stood up and, went into the kitchen.

Willie looked after her anxiously. ‘Rudy,’ he whispered, ‘is she sore at me for not coming home to dinner?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Willie said. ‘Otherwise, I’d be getting Lecture Number 725. Thanks, darling,’ he said as Gretchen came into the room carrying a bottle. He took the bottle from her, opened it, and strengthened his drink. ‘What’d you kids do tonight?’ he asked.

‘We had a family reunion,’ Gretchen said, from her place on the couch. ‘We went to a prizefight.’

‘What?’ Willie said puzzedly. ‘What is she talking about, Rudy?’

‘She can tell you about it later.’ Rudolph stood up, leaving most of his last whiskey undrunk. ‘I’ve got to be moving along. I have to get up at the crack of dawn.’ He felt uncomfortable sitting there with Willie, pretending that this night was no different from others, pretending that he had not heard what Gretchen had said about him and about herself. He bent over and kissed Gretchen and Willie accompanied him to the door.

Thanks for coming by and keeping the old girl company,’ Willie said. ‘It makes me feel like less of a shit, leaving her alone. But it was unavoidable.’

It wasn’t a butt, Tommy, Rudolph remembered, I swear it wasn’t a butt. ‘You don’t have to make any excuses to me, Willie,’ he said.

‘Say,’ Willie said, ‘she was joking, wasn’t she? That stuff about the prizefight? What is it - a kind of riddle, or something?’

‘No. We went to a fight.’

‘I’ll never understand that woman,’ Willie said. ‘When I want to watch a fight on television, I have to go to somebody else’s house. Ah, well, I suppose she’ll tell me about it’ He pressed Rudolph’s hand warmly, and Rudolph went out the door. He heard Willie locking it securely behind him and fixing the anti-burglar chain. The danger is inside, Willie, Rudolph wanted to say. You are locking it |n with you. He went down the stairs slowly. He wondered where he would be tonight, what evasions he would be offering, what cuckoldry and dissatisfaction would have been in the air, if that night in 1950, room 923 in the St Moritz Hotel had answered?

If I were a religious man, he thought, going out into the night, I would believe that God was watching over me.

He remembered his promise to try to do what he could to get Gretchen a divorce, on her terms. There was the logical first step to be taken and he was a logical man. He wondered where he could find a reliable private detective. Johnny Heath

would know. Johnny Heath was made for New York City. Rudolph sighed, hating the moment ahead of him when he would enter the detective’s office, hating the detective himself, still unknown to him, preparing, all in the week’s work, to spy on the breakdown and end of love.

Rudolph turned and took a last look at the building he had just left and against which he was sworn to conspire. He knew he’d never be able to mount those steps again, shake that small, desperate man’s hand again. Duplicity, too, must have its limits.

He had pissed blood in the morning, but not very much and he wasn’t hurting. The reflection of his face in the train window when they went through a tunnel was a little sinister, because of the slash of bandage over his eye, but otherwise, he told himself, he looked like anybody else on the way to the bank. The Hudson was cold blue in the October sun and as the train passed Sing Sing he thought of the prisoners peering out at the broad river running free to the sea, and he said, ‘Poor bastards,’ aloud.

He patted the bulge of his wallet under his jacket. He had collected the seven hundred dollars from the bookie on the way downtown. Maybe he could get away with giving Teresa just two hundred of it, two fifty if she made a stink.

He pulled the wallet out. He had been paid off in hundreds. He took out a bill and studied it. Founding father, Benjamin Franklin, stared out at him, looking like somebody’s old mother. Lightning on kite, he remembered dimly; at night all cats are grey. He must have been a tougher man than he looked to get his picture on a bill that size. Did he once say, Gentlemen we must hang together or we will hang separately? I should have at least finished high school, Thomas thought, vague in the presence of one hundred dollars’ worth of history. This

note is legal tender for all debts, public and private and redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve Bank. If this wasn’t lawful money, what the hell was? It was signed in fancy script by somebody called Ivy Baker Priest, Treasurer of the United States. It took a woman with a name like that to give out with double talk about debts and money and get away with it

Thomas folded the bill neatly and slipped it by itself in a side pocket, to be put with the other hundred dollar bills, reposing in the dark vault for just such a day as this.

The man on the seat in front of him was reading a newspaper, turning to the sports page. Thomas could see that he was reading about last night’s fight. He wondered what the man would say if he tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Mister, I was there, how would you like an account of the battle right from the middle of the ring?’ Actually, the reports of the fight in the papers had been pretty good and there had been a picture on the back page of the News of Virgil trying to get up the last time and himself in a neutral corner. One newspaperman had even said the fight had raised him into the ranks of the contenders for the title and Schultzy had called him all excited, right before he left the house, to say that a promoter over from England had seen the fight and was offering them a bout in London in six weeks. ‘We’re going international,’ Schultzy had said excitedly. ‘We can fight all over the Continent. And you’ll knock ‘em dead. They ain’t got anybody half as good even as Virgil Walters in England at your weight. And the guy said he’d give us some of the purse under the table and we won’t have to declare it to the goddamn income tax.’

So, all in all, he should have been feeling pretty good, sitting there in the train, with the prison falling away behind him, full of a lot of guys who probably were a damn sight smarter than he was and maybe less guilty of one thing and another, too. But he wasn’t feeling good. Teresa had given him a load of grief about not telling her about the bet and about his la-di-da family, as she called them. She was sore because he’d never said anything about them, as though he was hiding some fucking treasure or something.

‘That sister of yours looked at me like I was dirt,’ Teresa had said. ‘And your fancy brother opened the window as though I smelled like horseshit and he pulled away to his side of the cab like if he happened to touch me for a second he’d catch the clap. And after not seeing their brother for ten years

they were just too fine even to come and have a cup of coffee with him, for God’s sake. And you, the big fighter, you never said a word, you just took it all.’

This had been in bed, after the restaurant, where she had eaten in sullen silence. He had wanted to make love to her, as he always did after a fight, because he didn’t touch her for weeks before a fight and his thing was so hard you could knock out fungoes to the outfield with it, but she had closed down like a stone and wouldn’t let him near her. For Christ’s sake, he thought, I didn’t marry her for her conversation. And it wasn’t as though even in her best moments Teresa was so marvellous in bed. If you mussed her hair while you were going at it hammer and tongs, she’d complain bloody murder, and she was always finding excuses to put it off till tomorrow or next week or next year and when she finally opened her legs it was like a tollgate being fed a counterfeit coin. She came from a religious family, she said, as though the Angel Michael with his sword was standing guard over all Catholic cunts. He’d bet his next purse his sister Gretchen, with her straight hair and her no make-up and her black dress and that ladylike don’t-you-dare-touch-the-hem-of-my-garment look would give a man a better time in one bang than Teresa in twenty ten-minute rounds.

So he’d slept badly, his wife’s words ringing in his ears. The worst of it was that what she said was true. Here he was a big grown man, and all his brother and sister had to do was come into the room and he felt just the way they had made him feel when he was a kid - slimy, stupid, useless, suspect.

Go win fights, have your picture in the papers, piss blood, go have people cheer you and clap you on the back and ask you to appear in London; two snots you thought you’d never see or hear from again show up and say hello, just hello, and everything you are is nothing. Well, his goddamn brother, momma’s pet, poppa’s pet, blowing his golden horn, opening taxi windows, was going to be in for a shock from his nothing pug brother today.

For a crazy moment he thought maybe he wouldn’t get off the train, he’d go on to Albany and make the change and arrive in Elysium, Ohio, and go to the one person in the whole world who had touched him with love, who had made him feel like a whole man, when he was just a kid of sixteen. Clothilde, servant to his uncle’s bed. Saint Sebastian, in the bathtub.

But when the train pulled into Port Philip, he got off and went to the bank, just as he had planned.

She tried not to show her impatience as Billy played with his lunch. Superstitiously (children sensed things that transcended the years) she had not dressed yet for the afternoon ahead of her, but was sitting with him in her work clothes, slacks and a sweater. She picked at her food, without appetite, trying not to scold the boy as he pushed bits of lamb chop and lettuce around his plate.

‘Why do I have to go to the Museum of National History?’ Billy demanded. ‘It’s a treat,’ she said, ‘a special treat.’ ‘Not for me. Why do I have to go?’

The whole class is going.’

They’re dopes. Except for Conrad Franklin they’re all dopes.’

Billy had had the same morsel of lamb chop in his mouth for what seemed like five minutes. Occasionally, he would move it symbolically from one side of his mouth to the other. Gretchen wondered if, finally, she should hit him. The clock in the kitchen suddenly ticked louder and louder and she tried not to look at it, but couldn’t resist. Twenty to one. She was due uptown at quarter to two. And she had to take Billy to school, hurry back, bathe and dress, carefully, carefully, and then make sure not to arrive panting as though she had just run a marathon.

‘Finish your lunch,’ Gretchen said, marvelling at the motherly calmness of her voice, on this afternoon when she felt anything but motherly. There’s Jello for dessert.’

‘I don’t like Jello.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since today. And what’s the sense in going to see a lot of old stuffed animals? At least if they want us to look at animals we could go see some live ones.’

‘On Sunday,’ Gretchen said, ‘I’ll take you to the zoo.’

‘I told Conrad Franklin I’d go over to his house on Sunday,’ Billy said. He reached into his mouth and took out the piece of lamb chop and put it on his plate.

That’s not a polite thing to do,’ Gretchen said, as the clock ticked.

‘It’s tough.’

‘All right,’ Gretchen said, reaching for his plate. ‘If you’re through you’re through.’

Billy held on to the plate. ‘I haven’t finished my salad.’

Deliberately, he cut a lettuce leaf into geometric forms with his fork.

He is asserting his personality, Gretchen made herself think, to keep from hitting him. It bodes well for his future.

Unable to bear watching his measured game with the lettuce, she got up and took a cup of Jello out of the refrigerator.

‘Why’re you so nervous today?’ Billy asked. ‘Jumping around.’

Children and their goddamn intuition, Gretchen thought Not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of radar do we come. She put the Jello down on the table. ‘Eat your dessert,’ she said, ‘it’s getting late.’

Billy folded his arms and leaned back. ‘I told you I don’t like Jello.’

She was tempted to say that he’d eat his Jello or he’d sit there all day. Then she had the dark suspicion that that was exactly what Billy wanted her to say. Was it possible that in that mysterious pool of emotion, love, hate, sensuality, greed, that lay within a child, somehow he knew what her errand uptown was going to be and that in his own instinctive way he was defending himself, defending his father, guarding the unity of the home in which he felt himself, with casual childish arrogance, the centre?

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘No Jello. Let’s go.’

Billy was a good winner. No smile of triumph lit his face. Instead, he said. “Why do I have to go see a lot of old dead stuffed animals?’

She was hot and panting as she unlocked the door. She had practically run all the way from the school gates, after depositing Billy. The phone was ringing, but she let it ring as she hurried into the bathroom, stripping off her clothes. She took a warm shower, looked briefly and critically at her body in the long mirror as she stood there, glistening wetly, before she towelled herself off. I could have gone either way, she thought, plump or thin. Thank God I went thin. But not too. My body, the luring, damp house of my soul. She laughed and went naked into the bedroom and took out the diaphragm which she kept hidden under a pile of scarves. Oh, well-used device. She put it in carefully, sinning. One day they have to invent something better than a piece of machinery.

As she touched herself, she remembered the curious flush of desire that had come over her the night before when she had finally gone to bed. The images of the fighters, white and black,