Rich Man, Poor Man (78 page)

‘We don’t stay in the fancy places, as we did on our honeymoon, because as Jean says, now it’s for real.

We find ourselves striking up friendships with the widest variety of people - a winegrower from Burgundy, a masseur on the beach at Biarritz, a rugby player from Lourdes, a non-objective painter, priests galore, fishermen, a bit-part actor in the French movies, old English ladies on bus tours, ex-commandos in the British army, GIs based in Europe, a representative in the Paris Chamber of Deputies who says the only hope for the world is John Fitzgerald Kennedy. If you happen to bump into John Fitzgerald Kennedy, pass the word on to him.

The people it is almost impossible not to love are the English. Except for other English. The English are dazed, although it doesn’t do to tell them so. Somehow, all the wheels of power went wrong, and after winning the war, with their last ounce of blood and courage, they gave the whole thing away to the Germans. I don’t want the Germans, or anybody, to starve, but the English had a right to expect that they could live in a world at least approximately as comfortable as the old enemy once the guns fell silent. Chalk one up against us, I’m afraid.

‘Whatever you do, you must make sure that Billy gets a good dose of Europe before he’s twenty, while it’s still Europe and before it becomes Park Avenue and the University of Southern California and Scarsdale and Harlem and the Pentagon. All those things, or at least some of them, may be as good for us, but it would be sad to see it happen to places like Rome and Paris and Athens.

‘I have been to the Louvre, to the Rijks-museum in Amsterdam, to the Prado, and I have seen the lions at Delos and the gold mask in the museum in Athens, and if I had seen nothing else and had been deaf and mute and unloved, these things alone would have been worth much more than the six months of my life I have been away.’

The phone rang and Gretchen put the letter down and got up and answered. It was Sam Corey, the old cutter who had worked with Colin on the three pictures he had made. Sam called faithfully, at least three times a week, and occasionally she would go with him to the showing of a new film at the studio that he thought would interest her. He was fifty-five years old, solidly married, and was comfortable to be with. He was the only one of the people who had been around Colin that she had kept up with.

‘Gretchen,’ Sam said, ‘we’re running one of the Nouvelle Vague pictures that just came in from Paris tonight. I’ll take you to dinner after.’

‘Sorry, Sam,’ Gretchen said. ‘Somebody, one of the people from my classes, is coming over to work with me.’

‘School days, school days,’ Sam croaked, ‘dear old golden rule days.’ He had left school in the ninth grade and was not impressed with higher education. ‘We’ll do it some other night, eh, Sam?’ ‘Sure thing,’ he said. ‘Your house wash down the hill yet?’ ‘Just about.’ ‘California,’ Sam said. ‘It’s raining in Venice, too,’ Gretchen said. ‘How do you get top-secret information like that?’ ‘I’m reading a letter from my brother, Rudolph. He’s in Venice. And it’s raining.’

Sam had met Rudolph when Rudolph and Jean had come out to stay with her for a week. After they had left Sam had

said Rudolph was okay, but he was crazy about his wife.

‘When you write him back,’ said Sam, ‘ask him if he wants to put five million dollars in a little low-budget picture I would like to direct’

Sam, who had been around enormously wealthy people for so long in Hollywood, believed that the sole reason for the existence of a man who had more than a hundred thousand dollars in the bank was to be fleeced. Unless, of course, he had talent. And the only talents Sam recognised were those involved in making films. ‘I’m sure he’ll be delighted to,’ Gretchen said. ‘Keep dry, baby,’ Sam said, and hung up. Sam was the calmest man she knew. In the storms of temperament that he had been through in the years in the studios, he had survived serenely, knowing that he knew, running a hundred thousand miles of film through his hands, catching mistakes, patching up other men’s blunders, never flattering, doing the utmost with the material he was handed, walking off pictures when the people making them became insufferable, going through one style after another with imperturbable efficiency, something of an artist, something of a handyman, loyal to the few directors who, despite failures, were always what Sam considered pros, committed to their craft, painstaking, perfectionist. Sam had seen Colin’s plays and when Colin had come to Hollywood had sought Colin out and said he wanted to work with him, modest, but secure enough in what he did to know that the new director would be grateful for his experience and that their collaboration would be fruitful.

Sam had a long talk with Gretchen and

had warned her that if she just was going to hang around Hollywood, doing nothing, just being a widow, she would be miserable. He had seen her with Colin enough in the course of the three films Colin had made, with Sam as cutter, to understand that Colin had depended upon her, and with reason. He had offered to take her in with him, teach her what he knew about the business. ‘For a lone woman in this town,’ he had said, ‘the cutting room is the best place. She isn’t on her own, she isn’t flinging her sex around, she isn’t challenging anybody’s ego, she has something methodical and practical to do, like baking a cake every day.’ Gretchen had said, ‘Thank you, no,’ at the time, because she didn’t want to profit, even by that much, On Colin’s reputation, and had opted for the graduate course. But every time she talked to Sam she wondered if she hadn’t said no too quickly. The people around her in school were too young, moved too fast, were interested in things that seemed useless | to her, learned and discarded huge gobs of information in hours while she still was painfully struggling with the same material for weeks and weeks.

She went back to the couch and picked up Rudolph’s letter again, Venice, she remembered, Venice. With a beautiful young wife, who, just by chance, happened to turn out to be rich. Rudolph’s luck.

‘There are murmurs of unrest from Whitby,’ - she read -‘Old man Calderwood is taking very unkindly to my prolonged version of the Grand Tour and even Johnny, who has a Puritan conscience under that egg-smooth debauchee face, hints delicately to me that I have vacated long enough. In fact, I don’t even see it as a vacation, although I have never enjoyed anything more. It is the continuation of my education, the continuation that I was too poor to pay for when I got out of college and went to work full time in the store.

‘I have many things to solve when I get back, which I am slowly turning over in my mind even as I look at a Titian in the Doges’ Palace or drink an expresso at a table in the Piazza

San Marco, At the risk of sounding grandiose, what I have to decide is what to do with my life. I am thirty-five years old and I have enough money, both capital and yearly income, so that I can live extremely well for the rest of my fife. Even if my tastes were wildly extravagant, which they’re not, and even if Jean were poor, which she isn’t, this would still be true. Once you are rich in America, it takes genius or overpowering greed to fall back into poverty. The idea of spending the rest of my life buying and selling, using my days to increase my wealth, which is already more than sufficient, is distasteful to me. My acquisitive instinct has been deadened by acquisition. The satisfaction I might get by opening new shopping centres throughout the country, under the Calderwood sign, and gaining control of still more companies, is minimum. A commercial empire, the prospects of which enchant men like Johnny Heath and Bradford Knight, has small charms for me and running one seems to me to be the drabbest kind of drudgery. I like travel and would be desolate if I were told that I could not come here ever again, but I cannot be like the characters in Henry James, who, in the words of E. M. Forster, land in Europe and look at works of art and at each other and that is all. As you can tell, I’ve used my new-found leisure to do some reading.

‘Of course, I could set myself up as a philanthropist and dole out sums to the deserving poor or deserving artists or deserving scientists and scholars, but although I give, I hope generously, to many causes, I can’t see putting myself into the position of arbiter in such matters. It certainly is not a full-time vocation, at least not for me.

‘It must seem funny to you, as it does to me, for anyone in the Jordache family to be worrying so because he has money, but the swings and turns of American life are so weird that here I am doing just that.

‘Another complication. I love the house in Whitby and I love Whitby itself. I do not, really, want to live anywhere else. Jean, too, some time ago, confessed that she liked it there, and said that if we ever had children she would prefer bringing them up there than in the city. Well, I shall see to it that she’ll have children, or at least a child, to bring up. We can always keep a small apartment in New York for when we want a bit of worldly excitement or when she has work to do in the city. But there is nobody in Whitby who just does nothing. I would be immediately branded as a freak by my neighbours, which wouldn’t make the town as attractive to me as it now is. I don’t want to turn into a Teddy Boylan.

‘Maybe when I get back to America, I’ll buy a copy of the Times and look through the want-ads.

‘Jean has come in, soaked and happy and a little drunk. The rain drove her into a cafe and two Venetian gentlemen plied her with wine. She sends her love. This has been a long, egotistical letter. I expect one of equal lengthy equally egotistical, from you. Send it to the American Express in Paris. I don’t know just when well be in Paris, but we’ll be there some time in the next couple of weeks and they’ll hold the letter for me. Love to you and Billy, Rudolph. PS - Have you heard from Tom? I haven’t heard a word from him since the day of Mom’s funeral.’

Gretchen put down the flimsy sheets of airmail stationery, covered densely with her brother’s firm, clearly formed handwriting. She finished her drink and decided against another one. She got up and went to the window and looked out. The rain was pouring down. The city below her was erased by water. She mused over Rudolph’s letter. They were friendlier through the mails than when they saw each other. In writing, Rudolph showed a hesitant side, a lack of pride and confidence, that was endearing and that he somehow hid at other times. When they were together, at one moment or another, the urge to wound him swept over her. His letters showed a largeness of spirit, a willingness to forgive that was the sweeter because it was tacit and he never showed any signs that he knew that there was anything that needed. forgiving. Billy had told her about his assault on Rudolph at the school and Rudolph had never even mentioned it to her and had been warm and thoughtful with the boy every time he saw him. And the letters were always signed ‘Love to you and Billy.’ I must learn generosity, she thought, staring out at the rain. She didn’t know what to do about Tom. Tom didn’t write her often, but he kept her abreast of what he was doing. But as he had done with his mother, he had made her promise to say nothing of his whereabouts to Rudolph. Right now, right this day, Tom was in Italy, too. On the other side of he peninsula, it was true, and farther south, but in Italy. She had received a letter from him just a few days before, from a place called Porto Santo Stefano, on the Mediterranean, above Rome. Tom and a friend of his called Dwyer had finally found the boat they were looking for at a price they could manage and had been working on it in a shipyard there all autumn and winter, to get it ready for service by June first. ‘We do everything ourselves, - Tom had written in his large, boyish handwriting, on ruled paper - ‘We took the Diesels apart piece by piece and we put them together again piece by piece and they’re as good as new. We’ve rewired the entire boat, caulked and scraped the hull, trued the propellers, repaired the generator, put in a new galley, painted the hull, painted the cabins, bought a lot of secondhand furniture and painted that. Dwyer turns out to be quite an interior decorator and I’d love you to see

what he’s done with the saloon and the cabins. We’ve been putting in a fourteen-hour day seven days a week, but it’s worth it. We live on board, even though the boat is up on blocks on dry land, and save our money. Neither Dwyer or me can cook worth a damn, but we don’t starve. When we go out on charter we’ll have to find somebody who can cook to crew with us. I figure we can make do with three in crew. If Billy would like to come over for the summer we have room for him on board and plenty of work. When I saw him he looked as though a summer’s hard work out in the open might do him a lot of good.

‘We plan to put the boat in the water in ten days. We haven’t decided on a name yet. When we bought it it was called the Penelope II, but that’s a little too fancy for an ex-pug like me. Talking about that - nobody hits anybody here. They argue a lot, or at least they talk loud, but everybody keeps his hands to himself. It’s restful to go into a bar and be sure you won’t have to fight your way out. They tell me it’s different south of Naples, but I wouldn’t know.

The man who runs the shipyard here is a good guy and from what I gather, asking around, he is giving us a very good deal on everything. He even found us two charters already. One in June and one in July, and he says more will be coming up. I had some run-ins with certain Italian in the U.S., but these Italians are altogether different. Nice people. I am learning a few words in Italian, but don’t ask me to make a speech.

‘When we get into the water, my friend Dwyer will be the skipper, even though it was my money that bought the boat. He’s got third mate’s papers and he knows how to handle a boat. But he’s teaching me. The day I can get into a harbour on my own without busting anything, I am going to be the skipper. After expenses, we’re splitting everything, because he’s a pal and I couldn’t have done it without him.

‘Again, I got to remind you of your promise not to tell Rudy anything. If he hears I did something crazy like buying a leaky old boat on the Mediterranean with the money he made for me, he’ll split a gut. His idea of money is something you hide in the bank. Well, everybody to his own pleasure. When I have the business on a good, solid, paying basis, I’ll write and tell him and invite him to come on a cruise with us, with his wife. Free. Then he can see for himself just how dumb his brother is.