Rich Man, Poor Man (81 page)

‘Denton,’ Harrison said. ‘I remember the name. He got picked out for being a Red.’

‘I’ve looked into the record thoroughly, Mr Harrison,’ Dorlacker said, ‘and I’ve found that there never was any kind of accusation against Professor Denton or any formal investigation. Professor Denton resigned to work in Europe.’

‘He was a Red of some kind,’ Harrison said doggedly. ‘We have enough wild men as it is on this campus without importing any new ones.’

‘At the time,’ Dorlacker said gently, ‘the country was under the McCarthy cloud and a great number of estimable people were made to suffer groundlessly. Fortunately, that is far behind us, and we can judge a man by his abilities alone. I, for one,

am happy to be able to demonstrate that Whitby is guided only by strict scholastic standards.’

‘If you put that man in here,’ Harrison said, ‘my paper will have something to say about it.’

‘I consider your remark unseemly, Mr Harrison,’ Dorlacker said, without heat, ‘and I’m certain that upon reflection you will think better of it. Unless somebody else has more to add, I believe it is time to put the appointment to a vote.’

‘Jordache,’ Harrison said, ‘I don’t suppose you had anything to do with this?’

‘Actually, I did,’ Rudolph said. ‘Professor Denton was the most interesting teacher I had when I was an undergraduate here. I also found his recent book most illuminating.’

‘Vote, vote,’ Harrison said. ‘I don’t know why I bother to come to these meetings.’

His was the only vote against Denton and Rudolph planned to send a cable to the exile in Geneva as soon as the meeting was over.

There was a knock on the door and Dorlacker said, ‘Come in.’

His secretary entered. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,’ she said to Dorlacker, ‘but there’s a call for Mr Jordache. I said that he was in a meeting, but… ‘

Rudolph was out of his chair and walking towards the secretary’s phone in the anteroom.

‘Rudy,’ Jean said. ‘I think you’d better come here. Quick. The pains are starting.’ She sounded happy and unworried.

‘I’ll be right there,’ he said. ‘Make my excuses to President Dorlacker and the members of the board, please,’ he said to the secretary. ‘I have to take my wife to the hospital. And will you please call the hospital and tell them to get in touch with Dr Levine and say that Mrs Jordache will be there in about a half hour.’

He ran out of the office and all the way to where his car was parked. He fumbled with the lock, cursing whoever had stolen the radio in New York City, and for a wild moment looked in the car parked next to his to see if by chance the keys were in the ignition. They weren’t. He went back to his own car. This time the lock turned and he jumped in and sped through the campus and down the quiet streets towards home.

Waiting all through the long day, holding Jean’s hand, Rudolph didn’t know how she could stand it. Dr Levine was calm. It was normal, he said, for a first birth. Dr Levine’s calmness made Rudolph nervy. Dr Levine just dropped in casually

from time to time during the day, as though it were just a routine social call. When he suggested that Rudolph go down to the hospital cafeteria to have some dinner, Rudolph had been shocked that the doctor could think he could leave his suffering wife and gorge himself, abandoning her to her agony. ‘I’m a father,’ he said, ‘not an obstetrician.’

Dr Levine had laughed. ‘Fathers have been known to eat, also,’ he had said. They have to keep their strength up.’

Materialistic, casual bastard. If ever they were crazy enough to have another baby, they’d hire somebody who wasn’t a machine.

The child was born just before midnight A girl. When Dr Levine came out of the delivery room for a minute to tell Rudolph the news that mother and child were fine, Rudolph wanted to tell Dr Levine that he loved him.

He walked beside the rolling bed on which Jean was being taken back to her room. She looked flushed and small and exhausted and when she tried to smile up at him the effort was too much for her.

‘She’s going to sleep now,’ Dr Levine said. ‘You might as well go home.’

But before he went out of the room, she said, in a surprisingly strong voice, ‘Bring my Leica tomorrow, Rudy, please. I want to have a record of her first day.’

Dr Levine took him to the nursery to see his daughter, asleep with five other infants, behind glass. Dr Levine pointed her out. ‘There she is.’

All six infants looked alike. Six in one day. The endless flood. Obstetricians must be the most cynical men the world.

The night was cold outside the hospital. It had been warm that morning when he left the house and he hadn’t taken a coat. He shivered as he walked towards his car. This time he had neglected to lock the doors, but the new radio was still there.

He knew he was too excited to sleep and he would have liked to call somebody and have a drink in celebration of fatherhood, but it was past one o’clock now and he couldn’t awaken anybody.

He turned the heater on in the car and was warm by the time he stopped the car in his driveway. Martha had left the lights on to guide him home. He was crossing the front lawn when he saw the figure move in the shadow of the porch.

‘Who’s there?’ he called sharply.

The figure came slowly into the light It was Virginia Calderwood, a scarf over her head, in a fur-trimmed grey coat.

‘Oh, Christ, Virginia,’ he said, “what are you doing here?’

‘I know all about it.’ She came up and stood close to him, staring at him, her eyes large and dark in her pale, thin, pretty face. ‘I kept calling the hospital for news. I said I was your sister. I know everything. She’s had the child. My child.’

‘Virginia, you’d better go home.’ Rudolph stepped back a little, so that she couldn’t touch him. ‘If your father finds out that you’ve been hanging around here like this, hell…’

‘I don’t care what anyone finds out,’ Virginia said. Tm not

ashamed.’

‘Let me drive you home,’ Rudolph said. Let her own family cope with her madness, not him. And not on a night like this. ‘What you need is a good night’s sleep and you’ll..;’

‘I have no home,’ Virginia said. ‘I belong in your arms. My father doesn’t even know I’m in town. I’m here, with you, where I belong.’

‘You don’t belong here, Virginia,’ Rudolph said despairingly. Devoted to sanity himself, he was helpless in the face of aberration. ‘I live here with my wife.’

‘She lured you away from me,’ Virginia said. ‘She came between one true love and another. I prayed for her to die in the hospital today.’

‘Virginia!’ He had not been really shocked by anything she had said or done before. He had been annoyed or amused or pitying, but this was beyond annoyance or amusement or pity. For the first time it occurred to him that she might be dangerous. He would call the hospital as soon as he got into the house and warn them to keep Virginia Calderwood away from the nursery or his wife’s room. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said soothingly, ‘get in. my car and I’ll take you home.’

‘Don’t try to treat me like a child,’ she said. ‘I’m no child. And I have my own car parked down the block. I don’t need anyone to drive me any place.’

‘Virginia,’ he said, ‘I’m awfully tired and I really have to get some sleep. If there’s anything you really have to talk to me about, call me in the morning.’

‘I want you to make love to me,’ she said, standing there, staring at him, her hands sunk in the pockets of her coat, looking normal, everyday, neatly dressed. ‘I want you to make love to me tonight. I know you want to do it. Fve seen it in your eyes from the beginning.’ She spoke in a rushed, flat whisper. ‘It’s just that you haven’t dared. Like everybody else, you’re afraid of my father. Come on. I’m worth trying. You keep thinking of me as a little girl, When you first saw me in my

father’s house. Well, I’m nobody’s little girl, don’t worry about that. I’ve been around. Maybe not as much as your precious wife with her photographer friend - oh, you’re surprised I know about that - I made it my business to know, I tell you, and I could tell you plenty more if you want to hear.’

But by this time, he had opened the door and slammed and locked it behind him, leaving her raving there on the porch and beating with her fists on the door. He went to all the doors of the house and the windows on the ground floor and made sure they were locked. When he came back to the front door the hammering of small, mad, feminine fists had stopped. Luckily, Martha had slept through it all. He turned the light out on the porch, from inside. After he had called the hospital, he climbed wearily to the bedroom he shared with Jean.

Happy birthday, daughter, in this quiet, respectable town, he thought, just before he fell asleep.

It was Saturday afternoon in the country club bar, but early, and the bar was empty because most of the members were still out on the golf course and on the tennis courts. Rudolph had the bar to himself, as he drank his beer. Jean was still in the women’s locker room getting dressed. She had only been out of the hospital five weeks, but she had beaten him in two straight sets. Rudolph smiled as he remembered how gleeful she had been as she came off the court, victorious.

The clubhouse was a low, nondescript, rambling clapboard structure. The club was always on the point of going into bankruptcy and accepted anyone who paid the low initiation fees and had summer memberships for the people who came up only for the season. The bar was adorned with the faded photographs of people in long, flannel pants who had won club tournaments thirty years ago and a fly-specked photograph of Bill Tilden and Vincent Richards, who had once played an exhibition match on the club courts.

While waiting for Jean, Rudolph picked up the weekend edition of the Whitby Sentinel and was immediately sorry he had done so. On the front page there was an article about the hiring of Professor Denton by the college, with all the old insinuations and made-up quotes from unidentified sources which expressed concern that the impressionable youth, of the college were going to be exposed to such a doubtful influence. That sonofabitch Harrison,’ Rudolph said.

‘You want something, Mr Jordache?’ asked the bartender, who was reading a magazine at the other end of the bar.

‘Another beer, please, Hank,’ Rudolph said. He tossed the paper aside, At that moment, he decided that if he could swing it, he was going to buy Harrison’s paper. It would be the best thing he could do for the town. And it shouldn’t be too difficult to do. Harrison hadn’t shown a profit on it for at least three years and if he didn’t know that it was Rudolph who was after it, he probably would be willing to let it go at a fair price. Rudolph resolved to talk to Johnny Heath about procedure on Monday.

He was sipping his beer, trying to forget about Harrison until Monday, when Brad Knight came in from the golf course with the other three men in his foursome. Rudolph winced at the orange pants that Brad was wearing. ‘You entered in the Ladies’ Handicap Cup?’ he asked Brad as the men came up to the bar and Brad slapped him on the back.

Brad laughed. ‘Male plumage, Rudy,’ he said. ‘In nature always more brilliant than the female’s. On weekends, I’m the natural man. This round is on me, Hank. I’m the big winner.’

The men ordered and went over their cards. Brad and his partner had won close to three hundred dollars. Brad was one of the best golfers in the club and played a hustler’s game, often starting badly and then getting his opponents to double bets. Well, that was his business. If people could lose nearly a hundred and fifty dollars apiece on a Saturday afternoon, Rudolph supposed they could afford it. But it made him uneasy to listen to men taking that much of a loss so lightly. He was not a born gambler.

‘I saw Jean on the court with you,’ Brad said. ‘She looks just great.’

‘She comes from tough stock,’ Rudolph said. ‘Oh, by the way, thanks for the present for Enid.’ Jean’s mother’s maiden name had been Enid Cunningham and as soon as Jean had been strong enough to talk lucidly, she had asked Rudolph if he minded naming the child after her mother. ‘We’re rising in the world, we Jordaches,’ Rudolph had said. “We are moving into three-name, ancestral territory.’ There had been no christening ceremony and there would be none. Jean shared his atheism, or as he himself preferred to think of it, his agnosticism. He had merely written the name in on the birth certificate, thinking as he did so that Enid Cunningham Jordache was a lot of letters for a seven-pound child to start life with. Brad had sent a sterling silver porringer with matching saucer and pusher for the baby. They now had eight sterling silver porringers in the house. Brad was not terribly original. But he had also started a

savings account for the child with a deposit of five hundred dollars. ‘You never know,’ Brad had said when Rudolph had protested at the size of the gift, ‘when a girl has to pay for an abortion, fast.’

One of the men Brad had been playing with was the chairman of the greens committee, Eric Sunderlin, and he was talking about his pet project, lengthening and improving the course. There was a large parcel of abandoned farm and timber land adjoining the course and Sunderlin was circulating a petition among the club members to float a loan and buy it. ‘It would put us in the big time,’ Sunderlin was saying. ‘We could even have a stab at a PGA tournament. We’d double our membership.’

Everything in America, Rudolph thought resentfully, has a built-in tendency to double itself and move into the big time. He himself didn’t play golf. Still, he was grateful that they were talking about golf at the bar and not about the article in the Sentinel.

‘What about you, Rudy?’ Sunderlin asked, finishing his Tom Collins. ‘Are you going to sign up with the rest of us?’

‘I haven’t given it much thought,’ Rudolph said. ‘Give me a couple of weeks to think it over.’ ‘What’s there to think over?’ Sunderlin asked aggressively. ‘Good old Rudy,’ Brad said. ‘No snap decisions. He minks it over for two weeks if he has to have a haircut’

‘It would help if a man of your stature was behind us,’ Sunderlin said. ‘I’ll be after you.’

‘I’m sure you will, Eric,’ Rudy said. Sunderlin laughed at this tribute to him and he and the two other men went off to the showers, their spiked golf shoes clattering on the bare wooden floor. It was a club rule that spikes were not to be worn in the bar or restaurant or card room, but nobody paid any attention to it. If we ever move into the big time, Rudolph thought, you will have to take off your shoes.