Rich Man, Poor Man (58 page)

‘Wesley Pease,’ his mother said. ‘It’s a fine name.’ Thomas didn’t bother to remind her that the boy’s name was Wesley Jordache, nor did he tell her that he had fought Teresa for a week to try to get her to settle for a less fancy name. But Teresa had wept and carried on and he’d given in.

His mother stared at the photograph, her eyes dampening. She kissed the snapshot. ‘Dear little beautiful thing,’ she said. Thomas didn’t remember her ever kissing him as a child. ‘You must take me to see him, she said. ‘Sure.’ ‘Soon.’

‘When I come back from England,’ he said, ‘England! We’ve just found each other again and you’re leaving for the other side of the earth!’ ‘It’s only for a couple of weeks.’

‘You must be doing very well,’ she said, ‘to be able to afford vacations like that.’

I have a job to do there,’ he said. He was reluctant to use the word fight. They pay my way.’ He didn’t want her to get the idea that he was rich, which he wasn’t, by a long shot. In the Jordache family, it was safer to cry poverty. One woman grabbing at every cent that came into the house was enough for one family.

I hope you’re saving your money,’ she said. ‘In your profession , . . ‘

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about me. He looked around him. ‘It’s a cinch Rudy’s saving his money.’

‘Oh,’ she said. The apartment. It’s not very grand, is it? But I can’t complain. Rudy pays for a woman to come in and clean every day and do the shopping for me the days I can’t make the stairs. And he say’s he’s looking for a bigger place. On the ground floor somewhere, so it’ll be easier for me, without steps. He doesn’t talk to me much about his work, but there was an article last month in the paper all about how he was one of the up-and-coming young businessmen in town, so I suppose he’s doing well enough. But he’s right to be thrifty. Money was the tragedy of the family. It made an old woman of me before my time.’ She sighed, self-pitying. ‘Your father was demented on the subject. I couldn’t get ten dollars from him for the barest necessities of life without a pitched battle every time. When you’re in England you might make some confidential inquiries, find out if anyone has seen him there. He’s liable to be anyplace, that man. After all, he was European, and it would be the most natural thing in the world for him to go back there to hide out.’

Off her rocker, he thought. Poor old lady. Rudy hadn’t prepared him for this. But he said, ‘I’ll ask around when I get over there.’

You’re a good boy,’ she said. ‘I always knew deep down that you were essentially a good boy, but swayed by bad companions. If I had had the time to be a proper mother to my family, I could have saved you from so much trouble. You must be strict with your son. Loving, but strict. Is your wife a good mother to him?’

‘She’s okay,’ he said. He preferred not to talk about Teresa. He looked at his watch. The conversation and the dark apartment were depressing him. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s nearly one o’clock. Why don’t I take you out to lunch? I have a car downstairs?’

‘Lunch? In a restaurant. Oh, wouldn’t that be lovely,’ she said girlishly. ‘My big strong son taking his old mother out to lunch.’

‘We’ll go to the best place in town,’ he said.

On his way home, driving Schultzy’s car down towards New York late in the afternoon, he thought about the day, wondering if he would ever make the trip again.

The image of his mother formed in adolescence, that of a scolding, perpetually disapproving hard woman, fanatically devoted to one son, to the detriment of another, was now replaced by that of a harmless and pitiful old lady, pathetically lonely, pleased by the slightest attention, and anxious to be loved.

At lunch he had offered her a cocktail and she had grown a little tipsy, had giggled and said, ‘Oh I do feel naughty.’ After lunch he had driven her around town and was surprised to see that most of it was practically unknown to her. She had lived there for years, but had seen practically nothing of it, not even the university from which her son had been graduated. ‘I had no idea it was such a beautiful place,’ she kept saying over and over again, as they passed through neighbourhoods where comfortable, large houses were set among trees and wintry lawns. And when they passed Calderwood’s, she said, ‘I had

no idea it was so big. You know, I’ve never been in there. And to think that Rudy practically runs it!’

He had parked the car and had walked slowly with her along the ground floor and insisted on buying her a suede handbag for fifteen dollars. She had had the salesgirl wrap up her old bag and carried the new one proudly over her arm as they left the store.

She had talked a great deal in the course of the afternoon, telling him for the first time about her life in the orphanage (‘I was the brightest girl in the class. They gave me a prize when I left.’), about working as a waitress, being ashamed of being illegitimate, about going to night school in Buffalo to improve herself, about not ever letting a man even kiss her until she married Axel Jordache, about only weighing ninety-two pounds on the day of her wedding, about how beautiful Port Philip was the day she and Axel came down to inspect the bakery, about the white excursion boat going by up the river, with the band playing waltzes on the deck, about how nice the neighbourhood was when they first came there and her dream of starting a cosy little restaurant, about her hopes for her family …

When he took her back to the apartment she asked him if she could have the photograph of his son to frame and put on the table in her bedroom and when he gave it to her, she hobbled into her room and came back with a photograph of herself, yellowed with age, taken when she was nineteen, in a long, white dress, slender, grave, beautiful. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I want you to have this.’

She watched silently as he put it carefully in his wallet in the same place that he had kept his son’s picture.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I feel closer to you somehow than to anybody in the whole world. We’re the same kind of people. We’re simple. Not like your sister and your brother. I love Rudy, I suppose, and I should, but I don’t understand him. And sometimes I’m just afraid of him. While you … ‘ She laughed. ‘Such a big, strong young man, a man who makes his living with his fists… . But I feel so at home with you, almost as though we were the same age, almost as though I had a brother. And today … today was so wonderful. I’m a prisoner who has just come out from behind the walls.’ He kissed her and held her and she clutched at him briefly. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I haven’t smoked a single cigarette since you arrived.’

He drove slowly through the dusk, thinking about the afternoon. He came to a roadhouse and went in and sat at the empty bar and had a whiskey. He took out his wallet and stared at the young girl who had turned into his mother. He was glad he had come to see her. Perhaps her favour wasn’t worth much, but in the long race for that meagre trophy he had finally won. Alone in the quiet bar he enjoyed an unaccustomed tranquillity. For an hour, at least, he was at peace. Today, there was one less person in the world that he had to hate.

1960

The morning was a pleasant one, except for the smog that lay cupped, a thin, metallic soup, in the Los Angeles basin. Barefooted, in her nightgown, Gretchen went through the open French windows, sliding between the still curtains, out on to the terrace, and looked down from her mountain top at the stained but sunlit city and the distant flat sea below her. She breathed deeply of the September morning air, smelling of wet grass and opening flowers. No sound came from the city and the early, silence was broken only by the calls of a covey of quail crossing the lawn.

Better than New York, she thought for the hundredth time, much better than New York.

She would have liked a cup of coffee, but it Was too early for Doris, the maid, to be up, and if she went into the kitchen to make the coffee herself Doris would be awakened by the sound of running water and clinking metal and would come fussing out, apologising but aggrieved at being deprived of rightful sleep. It was too early to awake Billy, too, especially with the day he had ahead of him, and she knew better than to rouse Colin, whom she had left sleeping in the big bed, flat on his back, frowning, his arms crossed tightly, as though in his dreams he was watching a performance of which he could not possibly approve.

She smiled, thinking of Colin, sleeping, as she sometimes told him, in his important position. His other positions, and she had told him about them in detail, were amused, vulnerable, pornographic and horrified. She had been awakened by a thin shaft of sunlight coming through a rift in the curtains and had been tempted to reach for him and unfold those clenched arms. But Colin never made love in the morning. Mornings were for murder, he said. Used to New York theatrical hours, he had never taken kindly to the matinal necessities of the studios, and was, as he freely admitted, a savage before noon.

She went around to the front of the house, padding happily through the dewy grass with her bare feet, her transparent cotton nightgown blowing around her body as she walked. They had no neighbours and the chance of any cars passing by at this hour was almost nil. Anyway, in California, nobody cared how you dressed. She often sunbathed naked in the garden and her body was a deep brown after the summer. Back East she had always been careful to stay out of the sun, but if you weren’t brown in California people assumed that you were either ill or too poor to take a holiday.

The newspaper was lying in the front driveway, folded and bound by a rubber band. She opened it up and glanced at the headlines as she walked slowly back around the house. Nixon and Kennedy had their pictures on the front page and they were promising everybody everything. She mourned briefly for Adlai Stevenson and wondered if it was morally right for somebody as young and good looking as John Fitzgerald Kennedy to run for the Presidency. ‘Charm boy,’ Colin called him, but Colin had charm thrown at him every day by actors and its effect on him was almost invariably negative.

She reminded herself to make sure to apply for absentee ballots for herself and Colin, because they were going to be in New York in November and every vote against Nixon was going to be precious. Although now that she no longer wrote for magazines she didn’t get too worked up about politics. The McCarthy period had disillusioned her with the value of private righteousness and alarmed public utterance. Her love for Colin, whose politics were, to say the least, capricious, had led her to abandon old attitudes along with old friends. Colin described himself at various times as a socialist without hope, a nihilist, a single-taxer, and a monarchist, depending upon whom he was arguing with at the moment, although he usually wound up voting for the Democrats. Neither he nor Gretchen was involved in the passionate political activities of the movie colony, the feting of candidates, the signing of advertisements, the fund-raising cocktail parties. In fact, they hardly ever went to any parties at all. Colin didn’t like to drink much and he found the boozy, aimless conversation of the usual Hollywood gatherings intolerable. He never flirted, so the presence of battalions of pretty ladies available at the functions of the rich and famous had no attraction for him. After the loose, gregarious years with Willie, Gretchen welcomed the domestic days and quiet nights with her second husband.

Colin’s refusal to ‘go public’, as he phrased it, had not damaged his career. As he said, ‘Only people without talent have to play the Hollywood game.’ He had asserted his talent with his first picture, confirmed it with his second, and now, with his third picture in five years in the final cutting and mixing stage, was established as one of the most gifted directors of his generation. His only failure had come when he had gone back to New York, after completing his first picture, to put on a play that closed after only eight performances. He had disappeared for three weeks after that. When he returned he was morose and silent and it had been months before he felt he was ready to go to work again. He was not a man designed for failure and he had made Gretchen suffer along with him. It had not helped, either, that Gretchen had told him in advance that she didn’t think the play was ready for production. Still, he always asked for her opinions on every aspect of his work and demanded absolute frankness, which she gave him. Right now she was troubled by a sequence in his new film, which they had seen together in rough cut at the studio the night before. Only Colin, she, and Sam Corey, the cutter, had seen it. She had felt there was something wrong, but couldn’t give coherent reasons why. She hadn’t said anything after the running, but she knew he would question her at breakfast. As she went back into the bedroom, where Colin was still sleeping in his important position, she tried to remember the sequence of the film, frame by frame, so that she could make sense when she spoke about it.

She looked at the bedside clock and saw that it was still too early to wake Colin. She put on a robe and went into the livingroom. The desk in the corner of the room was strewn with books and manuscripts and reviews of novels torn out of the Sunday Times Book Review section and Publisher’s Weekly and the London newspapers. The house was not a large one and there was no other place for the never-diminishing pile of print that they both attacked methodically, searching for possible ideas for films.

Gretchen took a pair of glasses off the desk and sat down to finish the newspaper. They were Colin’s glasses, but they fitted her well enough so that she didn’t bother to go back into the bedroom to get her own. Matched imperfections.

On the theatre page there was a review from New York of a new play that had just opened, with a rave for a young actor whom nobody had ever heard of before, and she made a note to get tickets for the play for herself and Colin as soon as she

got into the city. In the listing of movies for Beverly Hills she saw that Colin’s first picture was being revived over the weekend and she neatly tore out the listing to show it to him. It would make him less savage at breakfast.

She turned to the sports section to see what horses were running at Hollywood Park that afternoon. Colin loved the races and was a not inconsiderable gambler and they went as often as they could. The last time they had gone he had won enough to buy her a lovely spray brooch. There didn’t seem to be any jewellery on today’s card and she was about to put the paper down when she saw a photograph of two boxers sparring in training. Oh, God, she thought, there he is again. She read the caption under the photograph. ‘Henry Quayles with Spar-mate Tommy Jordache at Las Vegas in workout for middleweight fight next week.’