Rich Man, Poor Man (92 page)

‘Have you got a good word to say for anybody?’ ‘Sure. Albert Camus. But he’s dead. That reminds me. How’s that other poet, Evans Kinsella?’ ‘He’s alive,’ Gretchen said.

“That’s great news,’ said Billy. ‘That’s really sensational news.’

If Colin hadn’t died he wouldn’t be like this, Gretchen thought. He would be completely different. An absent-minded, busy man gets behind the wheel of a car and bits a tree and the impact spreads and spreads, never stopping, through the generations. ‘ ‘Do you ever come down to New York?’ she asked. ‘Once in a while.’ ‘If you’ll let me know, the next time you’re coming,’ she

said, ‘I’ll get tickets for a show. Bring your girl, if you want. I’d like to meet her.’

‘She’s nothing much,’ Billy said,

‘Anyway, let me know.’

‘Sure.’

‘How are you doing in your work?’ she asked.

Billy made a face.

‘Rudolph says you’re not doing very well. He says there’s a chance that you’ll be dropped from school.’

‘Being Mayor of this burg must be an easy job,’ Billy said, ‘if he has time to check up on how many classes I cut a semester.’

‘If you get kicked out, you’ll be drafted. Do you want that?’

‘Who cares?’ Billy said. ‘The Army can’t be more boring than most of the courses around here.’

‘Do you ever think about me?’ Immensely wrong. Classically wrong. But she had said it. ‘How do you mink I’d feel if you were sent to Viet Nam?’

‘Men fight and women weep,’ Billy said. ‘Why should you and I be different?’

‘Do you do anything about trying to change things? About stopping the war, for example? A lot of students all over the country are working day and night to … ‘

‘Kooks,’ Billy said. ‘Wasting their time. The war’s too good a racket for too many big shots. What do they care what a few spastic kids do? If you want, 111 take your button and wear it. Big deal. The Pentagon will quake when they hear that Billy Abbott is protesting against the bomb.’

‘Billy,’ Gretchen stopped walking and faced him, ‘are you interested in anything?’

‘Not really,’ he said calmly. ‘Is there something wrong with that?’

‘All I hope,’ Gretchen said, ‘is that it’s a pose. A silly, adolescent pose.’

‘It’s not a pose,’ he said. ‘And.I’m not an adolescent, in case you haven’t noticed. I’m a big, grown man and I think everything stinks. If I were you, I’d forget about me for a while. If it’s any hardship to you to send me the money to keep me in school, don’t send it. If you don’t like the way I am and you’re blaming yourself for the way I turned out, maybe you’re right, maybe you’re not. I’m sorry to have to talk this way, but there’s one thing I know I don’t want to be and that’s a hypocrite. I think you’ll be happier if you don’t have to worry about me, so you go back to my dear Uncle Rudolph and to your dear Evans Kinsella and I’ll go back to my ball game.’ He turned and strode

away, along the path towards the playing fields.

Gretchen watched him until he was just a small blue-and-grey figure in the distance, then walked slowly, heavily, towards where she had parked Rudolph’s car.

There was no sense in staying for the whole weekend anymore. She had a quiet dinner with Rudolph and Jean and took the morning train down to New York.

When she got back to her hotel, there was a message from Evans saying that he couldn’t have dinner with her that night

1967

On the plane down to Dallas, Johnny Heath, sitting next to him, was going through a briefcase full of papers. Rudolph was going through his own briefcase full of papers. He had to submit the budget for the next year to the town council and he frowned as he went over the thick booklet which contained the Comptroller’s estimates. The price of everything was going up, the police and fire departments, the public school staffs, and the clerical employees were all due for a rise in salary; there was ah alarming increase in the number of welfare recipients, especially in the Negro section of town; a new sewage-disposal plant was on the books; everybody was fighting tax increases; state and federal aid were being kept at their old levels. Here I am, he thought, at thirty thousand feet, worrying about money again.

Johnny Heath was worrying about money in the seat next to his, too, but at least it was his own money, and Rudolph’s. Brad Knight had moved his office from Tulsa to Dallas after his father had died, and the purpose of their trip was to confer with Brad about their investments in the Peter Knight and Son Oil Company. Suddenly, Brad had seemed to have lost his touch, and they had found themselves investing in one dry hole after another. Even the wells that had come in had suffered from a series of disasters, salt water, collapsing shale, unpredictable, expensive formations to drill through. Johnny Heath had made some quiet investigations and was sure Brad had been rigging his report and was stealing from them and had been doing so for some time. The figures Johnny had come up with looked conclusive, but Rudolph refused to move against Brad until they had it out in person. It seemed impossible to him that a man he hadicnown so long and so well could turn like that. Despite Virginia Calderwood.

When the plane landed, Brad wasn’t at the airport to greet them. Instead, he had sent an assistant, a burly, tall man in a brown straw hat, a string tie, and a madras jacket, who made Mr Knight’s excuses (he was tied up in a meeting, the assistant said) and drove with them in an air-conditioned Cadillac along a road that throbbed in heat mirages, to the hotel in the centre of Dallas where Brad had rented a suit with a saloon and two bedrooms for Johnny and Rudolph.

The hotel was brand new and the rooms were decorated in what the decorator must have thought was a Lone Star improvement of Second Empire. On a long table against the wall were ranged six bottles of bourbon, six of Scotch, six of gin and vodka, plus a bottle of vermouth, a filed ice bucket, dozens of bottles of Coke and soda water, a basket of lemons, a huge bowl of oversized fruit, and an array of glasses of all sizes.

‘You’ll find beer and champagne in the refrigerator in the closet,’ the assistant said. ‘If that’s your pleasure. You’re the guests of Mr Knight.’

‘We’re only staying overnight,’ Rudolph said.

‘Mr Knight told me to make you gentlemen comfortable,’ the assistant said. ‘You’re in Texas now.’

‘If they had this stuff at the Alamo,’ Rudolph said, ‘they’d still be holding out.’

The assistant laughed politely and said that Mr Knight was almost sure to be free by five p.m. It was a little past three now. ‘Remember,’ he said, as he left, ‘if you gentlemen need anything, you call me at the office, hear?’

‘Window dressing,’ Johnny said, with a gesture for the suite and the table loaded with drink.

Rudolph felt a twinge of irritation with Johnny and his automatic reflex of suspicion in all situations.

‘I have some calls to make,’ Rudolph said. ‘Let me know when Brad arrives.’ He went into his own room and closed the door.

He called his home first. He tried to call Jean at least three

times each day. He had finally taken Gretchen’s advice and there was no liquor in the house, but Whitby was full of liquor stores and bars. No worry today. Jean was cheerful and bright. It was raining-in Whitby. She was taking Enid to her first children’s party. Two months before, she had had an accident while driving drunk with Enid in the rear seat. The car had been demolished but aside from a few scratches neither of them had been hurt. ‘What’s it like in Dallas?’ she asked.

‘All right for Texans, I suppose,’ Rudolph said. ‘Intolerable for the rest of the human race.’ ‘When will you be back?’ ‘As soon as possible.’

‘Hurry,’ she said: He hadn’t told her why he and Johnny had had to come to Texas. Sober, she was depressed by duplicity.

He then called his office at the Town Hall and got his secretary on the phone. His secretary was a young man, a little effeminate, but usually serene. He wasn’t serene this afternoon. There had been a demonstration of students that morning in front of the offices of the Sentinel because of an editorial in favour of the continued existence of the ROTC at the university. Rudolph had approved the editorial himself, as it was moderate and had not advocated compulsory military training but said it should be open to those students who felt that they wanted a career in the armed forces or even those students who felt that in case of need they would like to be ready to defend their country. The sweet voice of reason had not helped to mollify the demonstrators. A rock had been thrown through a plate-glass window and the police had had to be called. President Dorlacker, of the university, had phoned, in a black mood, the secretary said, and had said, quote, If he’s the Mayor, why isn’t he at his desk? Unquote. Rudolph had not deigned to tell the secretary the nature of his business. Police Chief Ott-man had been into the office, looking harassed. Something very, very important, Ottman had said. The Mayor was to get back to him soonest. Albany had telephoned twice. A Black delegation had presented a petition about something to do with a swimming pool.

That’s enough, Walter,’ Rudolph said, wearily. He hung up the phone and lay back on the baby-blue, slippery silk bedspread. He got ten thousand dollars a year for being Mayor of Whitby. And he donated the entire amount to charity. Public service. He got up from the bed, maliciously pleased to see that his

shoes had left a stain on the silk, and went into the living room. Johnny was sitting at a huge desk, going over his papers in his shirt sleeves. There’s no doubt about it, Rudy,’ Johnny said, ‘the sonofabitch has taken us for a ride.’

‘Later, please,’ Rudolph said. ‘I’m busy being a devoted and self-sacrificing public servant at the moment.’ He poured a Coke over some ice and went to the window and looked out at Dallas. Dallas glittered in the baking sun, rising from its desolate plain like a senseless eruption of metal and glass, the result of a cosmic accident, unconnected and arbitary.

Rudolph went back into his bedroom, and gave thenumber of the office of the Chief of Police in Whitby to the telephone operator. While waiting for the call to come through he looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like a man who needed a vacation. He wondered when he was going to have his first heart attack. Although in America only businessmen were supposed to have heart attacks, and theoretically he had abandoned all that. Professors lived forever, he had read somewhere, and most generals.

When he got Ottman on the phone, Ottman sounded mournful. But he always sounded mournful. His metier, which was crime, offended him. Bailey, the former Chief of Police, whom Rudolph had put in jail, had been a hearty and happy man. Rudolph often regretted him. The melancholy of integrity.

‘We’ve opened up a can of worms, Mr Mayor,’ Ottman said. ‘Officer Slattery picked up a Whitby freshman at eight-thirty this morning in a diner, smoking a marijuana cigarette. At eight-thirty in the morning!’ Ottman was a family man who kept regular hours, and the mornings were precious to him. The boy had one and one-third other ounces of the drug on him. Before we booked him, he talked and talked. He says in his dormitory there are at least fifty kids who smoke hash and marijuana. He says if we go there we’ll find a pound of the stuff at least. He’s got a lawyer and he’ll be out on bail by this evening, but by now the lawyer must have told a few people and what am I supposed to do? President Dorlacker called me a little while ago and told me to stay away from the campus, but its bound to be all over town and if I stay away from the campus what does that make me look like? Whitby University isn’t Havana or Buenos Aires, for Christ’s sake, it’s within the city limits and the law’s the law, for Christ’s sake.’

I picked a great day to come to Dallas, Rudolph thought. ‘Let me think for a minute, Chief,’ he said.

‘If I can’t go in there, Mr Mayor,’ Ottman said, ‘you can have my resignation as of this minute.’

Oh, God, Rudolph thought, honest menl Some day he was going to try marijuana himself and see what all the fuss was about. Maybe it would be just the thing for Jean.

“The lawyer for the kid is Leon Harrison’s lawyer, too,’ Ottman said. ‘Harrison’s already been in here and asked what I intend to do. He’s talking about calling a special meeting of the board of trustees.’

‘All right, Chief,’ Rudolph said. ‘Call Dorlacker and tell him you’ve spoken to me and that I’ve ordered a search for eight o’clock tonight. Get a warrant from Judge Satterlee’ and tell your men to leave their clubs at home. I don’t want anybody to get hurt. The news’ll get around and maybe the kids’ll have the sense to get rid of the stuff before you bit the dormitory.’

‘You don’t know kids these days, Mr Mayor,’ Ottman said sorrowfully. ‘They ain’t got the sense to wipe their ass.’

Rudolph gave him the number of the hotel in Dallas and told him to get back to him after the raid that evening. He hung up and finished his Coke. The lunch on the plane coming down had been dreadful and he had heartburn. He had foolishly drunk the two Manhattans the stewardess had plunked down on his tray. For some reason he drank Manhattans when he was in the air. Never on the ground. What significance there?

The phone rang. He waited for Johnny to pick it up in the other room, but it wasn’t ringing in the other room. ‘Hello,’ he

said.

‘Rudy?’ It was Gretchen’s voice.

‘Yes.’ There had been a coolness between them since she had told him that Jean was an alcoholic. Gretchen had been right, but that only made the coolness more pronounced.

‘I called Jean at your house,’ Gretchen said, ‘and she told me where you are. I hope I’m not disturbing you.’ She sounded disturbed herself.

‘No, no,’ Rudolph lied. ‘I’m just dawdling idly in that well known holiday spot, Dallas Les Bains. Where are you anyway?’

‘Los Angeles. I wouldn’t have called you, but I’m out of my mind.’

Depend upon families to pick the right time and place to be out of their minds.

‘What is it?’ Rudolph asked.

‘It’s Billy. Did you know he dropped out of school a month ago?’

‘No,’ Rudolph said. “He hardly ever whispered his secrets to me, you know.’

Tie’s down in New York, living with some girl …’ ‘Gretchen, darling,’ Rudolph said, ‘there are probably half a million boys Billy’s age in New York right this minute living with some girl. Be thankful he isn’t living with some boy.’