Rich Man, Poor Man

Chapter 1

Dominic Joseph Agostino sat at the little desk in his office behind the gym with the newspaper spread out in front of him to the sports page, reading about himself. He had his Ben Franklin reading glasses on and they gave a mild, studious look to his round, ex-pug’s face, with the broken nose and the small, dark eyes under the heavy scar tissue. It was three o’clock, the mid-afternoon lull, and the gym was empty, the best time of day. There wouldn’t be anything much doing until five o’clock when he gave a calisthenics class to a group of club members, middle-aged businessmen most of them, fighting their waistlines. After that he might spar a few rounds with some of the more ambitious members, being careful not to damage anybody.

The article about him had come out the night before, in a box on the sports page. It was a slow day. The Red Sox were out of town and weren’t going anyplace, anyway, and they had to fill the sports page with something.

Dominic had been born in Boston, and had been introduced in his fighting days as Joe Agos, the Boston Beauty, because he lacked a punch and had to do a lot of dancing around to keep from getting killed. He had fought some good lightweights in the late twenties and thirties and the sportswriter, who was too young ever to have seen him fight, had written stirring accounts of his matches with people like Canzoneri and McLarnin, when Canzoneri and McLarnin were on the way up. The sportswriter had written that he was still in good shape, which wasn’t all that true. The sportswriter quoted Dominic as saying jokingly that some of the younger members of the exclusive Revere Club were beginning to get to him in the sparring sessions in the gym and that he was thinking of getting an assistant or putting on a catcher’s mask to protect his beauty in the near future. He hadn’t said it all that jokingly. The article was friendly, and made Dominic sound like a wise old veteran of the golden days of the sport who had learned to accept life philosophically in his years in the ring. He had lost every cent he’d ever made, so there wasn’t much else left but philosophy. He hadn’t said anything about that to the writer and it wasn’t in the article.

The phone on his desk rang. It was the doorman. There was a kid downstairs who wanted to see him. Dominic told the doorman to send the kid up.

The kid was about nineteen or twenty, wearing a faded blue sweater and sneakers. He was blond and blue-eyed and baby-faced. He reminded Dominic of Jimmy McLarnin, who had nearly torn him apart the time they had fought in New York. The kid had grease-stained hands, even though Dominic could see that he had tried to wash it all out. It was a cinch none of the members of the Revere Club had invited the kid up for a workout or a game of squash.

“What is it?” Dominic asked, looking up over his Ben Franklin glasses.

“I read the paper last night,” the kid said.

“Yeah?” Dominic was always affable and smiling with the members and he made up for it with non-members.

“About how it’s getting a little tough for you, Mr. Agostino, at your age, with the younger members of the club and so on,” the kid said.

“Yeah?”

“I was thinking maybe you could take on an assistant, kind of,” the kid said.

“You a fighter?”

“Not exactly,” the kid said. “Maybe I want to be. I seem to fight an awful lot of the time …” He grinned. “I figure I might as well get paid for it.”

“Come on.” Dominic stood up and took off his glasses. He went out of the office and through the gym to the locker room. The kid followed him. The locker room was empty except for Charley, the attendant, who was dozing, sitting up at the door, his head on a pile of towels.

“You got any things with you?” Dominic asked the kid.

“No.”

Dominic gave him an old sweat suit and a pair of shoes. He watched as the kid stripped. Long legs, heavy, sloping shoulders, thick neck. A hundred and fifty pounds, fifty-five, maybe. Good arms. No fat.

Dominic led him out to the corner of the gym where the mats were and threw him a pair of sixteen-ounce gloves. Charley came out to tie the laces for both of them.

“Let’s see what you can do, kid,” Dominic said. He put up his hands, lightly. Charley watched with interest.

The kid’s hands were too low, naturally, and Dominic jabbed him twice with his left. But the kid kept swarming in.

After three minutes, Dominic dropped his hands and said, “Okay, that’s enough.” He had rapped the kid pretty hard a few times and had tied him up when he came in close, but with all that, the kid was awfully fast and the twice he had connected it had hurt. The kid was some kind of a fighter. Just what kind of fighter Dominic didn’t know, but a fighter.

“Now listen, kid,” Dominic said, as Charley undid the laces on his gloves, “this isn’t a barroom. This is a gentlemen’s club. The gentlemen don’t come here to get hurt. They come to get some exercise while learning the manly art of self-defense. You come swinging in on them the way you did with me, you wouldn’t last one day here.”

“Sure,” the kid said, “I understand. But I wanted to show you what I could do.”

“You can’t do much,” Dominic said. “Yet. But you’re fast and you move okay. Where you working now?”

“I was over in Brookline,” the kid said. “In a garage. I’d like to find something where I can keep my hands clean.”

“When you figure you could start in here?”

“Now. Today. I quit at the garage last week.”

“How much you make there?”

“Fifty a week,” the kid said.

“I think I can get you thirty-five here,” Dominic said. “But you can rig up a cot in the massage room and sleep here. You’ll have to help clean the swimming pool and vacuum the mats and stuff like that and check the equipment.”

“Okay,” the kid said.

“You got a job,” Dominic said. “What’s your name?”

“Thomas Jordache,” the kid said.

“Just keep out of trouble, Tom,” said Dominic.

He kept out of trouble for quite some time. He was quick and respectful and besides the work he had been hired to do, he cheerfully ran errands for Dominic and the members and made a point of smiling agreeably, at all times, with especial attention to the older men. The atmosphere of the club, muted, rich, and friendly, pleased him, and when he wasn’t in the gym he liked to pass through the high-ceilinged, dark, wood-paneled reading and gaming rooms, with their deep leather armchairs and smoked-over oil paintings of Boston during the days of sailing ships. The work was undemanding, with long gaps in the day when he just sat around listening to Dominic reminisce about his years in the ring.

Dominic was not curious about Tom’s past and Tom didn’t bother to tell him about the months on the road, the flophouses in Cincinnati and Cleveland, and Chicago, about the jobs at filling stations, or about the stretch as a bellboy in the hotel in Syracuse. He had been making good money at the hotel steering whores into guests’ rooms until he had to take a knife out of a pimp’s fist because the pimp objected to the size of the commission his girls were passing on to the nice baby-faced boy they could mother when they weren’t otherwise occupied. Thomas didn’t tell Dominic, either, about the drunks he had rolled on the Loop or the loose cash he had stolen in various rooms, more for the hell of it than for the money, because he wasn’t all that interested in money.

Dominic taught him how to hit the light bag and it was pleasant on a rainy afternoon, when the gym was empty, to tap away, faster and faster, at the bag, making the gym resound with the tattoo of the blows. Once in awhile, when he was feeling ambitious, and there were no members around, Dominic put on the gloves with him and taught him how to put together combinations, how to straighten out his right hand, how to use his head and elbows and slide with the punches, to keep up on the balls of his feet and how to avoid punches by ducking and weaving as he came in instead of falling back. Dominic still didn’t allow him to spar with any of the members, because he wasn’t sure about Thomas yet and didn’t want any incidents. But the squash pro got him down to the courts and in just a few weeks made a fair player of him and when some of the lesser players of the club turned up without a partner for a game, Thomas would go in there with them. He was quick and agile and he didn’t mind losing and when he won he learned immediately not to make the win too easy and he found himself collecting twenty to thirty dollars a week extra in tips.

He became friendly with the cook in the club kitchen, mostly by finding a solid connection for buying decent marijuana and doing the cook’s shopping for him for the drug, so before long he was getting all his meals free.

He tactfully stayed out of all but the most desultory conversations with the members, who were lawyers, brokers, bankers, and officials of shipping lines and manufacturing companies. He learned to take messages accurately from their wives and mistresses over the telephone and pass them on with no hint that he understood exactly what he was doing.

He didn’t like to drink, and the members, as they downed their post-exercise whiskies at the bar, commented favorably on that, too.

There was no plan to his behavior; he wasn’t looking for anything; he just knew that it was better to ingratiate himself with the solid citizens who patronized the club than not. He had knocked around too much, a stray in America, getting into trouble and always finishing in brawls that sent him on the road again. Now the peace and security and approval of the club were welcome to him. It wasn’t a career, he told himself, but it was a good year. He wasn’t ambitious. When Dominic talked vaguely of his signing up for some amateur bouts just to see how good he was, he put the old fighter off.

When he got restless he would go downtown and pick up a whore and spend the night with her, honest money for honest services, and no complications in the morning.

He even liked the city of Boston, or at least as much as he had ever liked any place, although he didn’t travel around it much by daylight, as he was pretty sure that there was an assault and battery warrant out for him as a result of the last afternoon at the garage in Brookline, when the foreman had come at him with a monkey wrench. He had gone right back to his rooming house that afternoon and packed and got out in ten minutes, telling his landlady he was heading for Florida. Then he had booked into the Y.M.C.A. and lain low for a week, until he had seen the article in the newspaper about Dominic.

He had his likes and dislikes among the members, but was careful to be impartially pleasant to all of them. He didn’t want to get involved with anybody. He had had enough involvements. He tried not to know too much about any of the members, but of course it was impossible not to form opinions, especially when you saw a man naked, his pot belly swelling, or his back scratched by some dame from his last go in bed, or taking it badly when he was losing a silly game of squash.

Dominic hated all the members equally, but only because they had money and he didn’t. Dominic had been born and brought up in Boston and his a was as flat as anybody’s, but in spirit he was still working by the day in a landlord’s field in Sicily, plotting to burn down the landlord’s castle and cut the throats of the landlord’s family. Naturally, he concealed his dreams of arson and murder behind the most cordial of manners, always telling the members how well they looked when they came back after a vacation, marveling about how much weight they seemed to have lost, and being solicitous about aches and sprains.

“Here comes the biggest crook in Massachusetts,” Dominic would whisper to Thomas, as an important-looking, gray-haired gentleman came into the locker room, and then, aloud, to the member, “Why, sir, it’s good to see you back. We’ve missed you. I guess you’ve been working too hard.”

“Ah, work, work,” the man would say, shaking his head sadly.

“I know how it is, sir.” Dominic would shake his head, too. “Come on down and I’ll give you a nice turn on the weights and then you take a steam and a swim and a massage and you’ll get all the kinks out and sleep like a babe tonight.”

Thomas watched and listened carefully, learning from Dominic, useful dissembler. He liked the stony-hearted ex-pug, committed deep within him, despite all blandishments, to anarchy and loot.

Thomas also liked a man by the name of Reed, a hearty, easy-going president of a textile concern, who played squash with Thomas and insisted upon going onto the courts with him, even when there were other members hanging around waiting for a game. Reed was about forty-five and fairly heavy, but still played well and he and Thomas split their matches most of the time, Reed winning the early games and just losing out when he began to tire. “Young legs, young legs,” Reed would say laughing, wiping the sweat off his face with a towel, as they walked together toward the showers after an hour on the courts. They played three times a week, regularly, and Reed always offered Thomas a Coke after they had cooled off and slipped him a five-dollar bill each time. He had one peculiarity. He always carried a hundred-dollar bill neatly folded in the right-hand pocket of his jacket. “A hundred-dollar bill saved my life once,” Reed told Thomas. He had been caught in a dreadful fire one night in a night club, in which many people had perished. Reed had been lying under a pile of bodies near the door, hardly able to move, his throat too seared to cry out. He had heard the firemen dragging at the pile of bodies and with his last strength he had dug into his pants pocket, where he kept a hundred-dollar bill. He had managed to drag the bill out and work one arm free. His hand, waving feebly, with the bill clutched in it, had been seen. He had felt the money being taken from his grasp and then a fireman had moved the bodies lying on him and dragged him to safety. He had spent two weeks in the hospital, unable to talk, but he had survived, with a firm faith in the power of a single one-hundred-dollar bill. When possible, he advised Thomas, he should always try to have a hundred-dollar bill in a convenient pocket.

He also told Thomas to save his money and invest in the stock market, because young legs did not remain young forever.

The trouble came when he had been there three months. He sensed that something was wrong when he went to his locker to change after a late game of squash with Brewster Reed. There were no obvious signs, but he somehow knew somebody had been in there going through his clothes, looking for something. His wallet was half out of the back pocket of his trousers, as though it had been taken out and hastily stuffed back. Thomas took the wallet out and opened it. There had been four five-dollar bills in it and they were still there. He put the five-dollar bill Reed had tipped him into the wallet and slipped the wallet back in place. In the side pocket of his trousers there were some three dollars in bills and change, which had also been there before he had gone to the courts. A magazine which he had been reading and which he remembered putting front cover up on the top shelf was now spread open on the shelf.

For a moment Thomas thought of locking up, but then he thought, hell, if there’s anybody in this club so poor he has to steal from me, he’s welcome. He undressed, put his shoes in the locker, wrapped himself in a towel and went to the shower room, where Brewster Reed was already happily splashing around.

When he came back after the shower, there was a note pinned onto the inside of the locker door. It was in Dominic’s handwriting and it read, “I want you in my office after closing time. D. Agostino.”

The curtness of the message, the fact of its being written at all when he and Dominic passed each other ten times an afternoon, meant trouble. Something official, planned. Here we go again, he thought and almost was ready to finish dressing and quietly slip away, once and for all. But he decided against it, had his dinner in the kitchen, and afterward chatted unconcernedly with the squash pro and Charley in the locker room. Promptly at ten o’clock, when the club closed, he presented himself at Dominic’s office.

Dominic was reading a copy of Life, slowly turning the pages on his desk. He looked up, closed the magazine and put it neatly to one side of the desk. He got up and looked out into the hall to make sure it was empty, then closed his office door. “Sit down, kid,” he said.

Thomas sat down and waited while Dominic sat down opposite him behind the desk.

“What’s up?” Thomas asked.

“Plenty,” Dominic said. “The shit is hitting the fan. I’ve been getting reamed out all day.”

“What’s it got to do with me?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out,” Dominic said. “No use beatin’ around the bush, kid. Somebody’s been lifting dough out of people’s wallets. Some smart guy who takes a bill here and there and leaves the rest. These fat bastards here’re so rich most of ’em don’t even know what they have in their pockets and if they do happen to miss an odd ten or twenty here or there, they think maybe they lost it or they made a mistake the last time they counted. But one guy is sure he don’t make no mistakes. That bastard Greening. He says a ten-dollar bill was lifted from his locker while he was working out with me yesterday and he’s been on the phone all day today talking to other members and now suddenly everybody’s sure he’s been robbed blind the last few months.”

“Still, what’s that got to do with me?” Thomas said, although he knew what it had to do with him.

“Greening figured out that it’s only begun since you came to work here.”

“That big shit,” Thomas said bitterly. Greening was a cold-eyed man of about thirty who worked in a stock broker’s office and who boxed with Dominic. He had fought light-heavy for some school out West and kept in shape and took no pity on Dominic, but went after him savagely for three two-minute rounds four times a week. After his sessions with Greening, Dominic, who didn’t dare really to counter hard, was often bruised and exhausted.

“He’s a shit all right,” Dominic said. “He made me search your locker this afternoon. It’s a lucky thing you didn’t happen to have any ten-dollar bills there. Even so, he wants to call the police and have you booked on suspicion.”

“What did you say to that?” Thomas asked.

“I talked him out of it,” Dominic said. “I said I’d have a word with you.”

“Well, you’re having a word with me,” Thomas said. “Now what?”

“Did you take the dough?”

“No. Do you believe me?”

Dominic shrugged warily. “I don’t know. Somebody sure as hell took it.”

“A lot of people walk around the locker room all day. Charley, the guy from the pool, the pro, the members, you …”

“Cut it out, kid,” Dominic said. “I don’t want no jokes.”

“Why pick on me?” Thomas asked.

“I told you. It only started since you came to work here: Ah, Christ, they’re talking about putting padlocks on all the lockers. Nobody’s ever locked anything here for a hundred years. The way they talk they’re in the middle of the biggest crime wave since Jesse James.”

“What do you want me to do? Quit?”

“Naah.” Dominic shook his head. “Just be careful. Keep in somebody’s sight all the time.” He sighed. “Maybe it’ll all blow over. That bastard Greening and his lousy ten bucks … Come on out with me.” He stood up wearily and stretched. “I’ll buy you a beer. What a lousy day.”

The locker room was empty when Thomas came through the door. He had been sent out to the post office with a package and he was in his street clothes. There was an interclub squash match on and everybody was upstairs watching it. Everybody but one of the members called Sinclair, who was on the team, but who had not yet played his match. He was dressed, ready to play, and was wearing a white sweater. He was a tall, slender young man who had a law degree from Harvard and whose father was also a member of the club. The family had a lot of money and their name was in the papers often. Young Sinclair worked in his father’s law office in the city and Thomas had overheard older men in the club saying that young Sinclair was a brilliant lawyer and would go far.

But right now, as Thomas came down the aisle silently in his tennis shoes, young Sinclair was standing in front of an open locker and he had his hand in the inside pocket of the jacket hanging there and he was deftly taking out a wallet. Thomas wasn’t sure whose locker it was, but he knew it wasn’t Sinclair’s, because Sinclair’s locker was only three away from his own on the other side of the room. Sinclair’s face, which was usually cheerful and ruddy, was pale and tense and he was sweating.

For a moment, Thomas hesitated, wondering if he could turn and get away before Sinclair saw him. But just as Sinclair got the wallet out, he looked up and saw Thomas. They stared at each other. Then it was too late to back away. Thomas moved quickly toward the man and grabbed his wrist. Sinclair was panting, as though he had been running a great distance.

“You’d better put that back, sir,” Thomas whispered.

“All right,” Sinclair said. “I’ll put it back.” He whispered, too.

Thomas did not release his wrist. He was thinking fast. If he denounced Sinclair, on one excuse or another he would lose his job. It would be too uncomfortable for the other members to be subjected daily to the presence of a lowly employee who had disgraced one of their own. If he didn’t denounce him … Thomas played for time. “You know, sir,” he said, “they suspect me.”

“I’m sorry.” Thomas could feel the man trembling, but Sinclair didn’t try to pull away.

“You’re going to do three things,” Thomas said. “You’re going to put the wallet back and you’re going to promise to lay off from now on.”

“I promise, Tom. I’m very grateful …”

“You’re going to show just how grateful you are, Mr. Sinclair,” Thomas said. “You’re going to write out an IOU for five thousand dollars to me right now and you’re going to pay me in cash within three days.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Sinclair said, sweat standing out on his forehead.

“All right,” Thomas said. “I’ll start yelling.”

“I bet you would, you little bastard,” Sinclair said.

“I’ll meet you in the bar of the Hotel Touraine, Thursday night at eleven o’clock,” Thomas said. “Pay night.”

“I’ll be there.” Sinclair’s voice was so low that Thomas could barely hear it. He dropped the man’s hand and watched as Sinclair put the wallet back into the jacket pocket. Then he took out a small notebook in which he kept a record of petty expenses he laid out on errands and opened it to a blank page and handed Sinclair a pencil.

Sinclair looked down at the open notebook thrust under his nose. If he could steady his nerves, Thomas knew, he could just walk away and if Thomas told anybody the story he could laugh it off. But never completely laugh it off. Anyway, his nerves were shot. He took the notebook, scribbled in it.

Thomas glanced at the page, put the notebook in his pocket and took back the pencil. Then he gently closed the locker door and went upstairs to watch the squash.

Fifteen minutes later Sinclair came onto the court and beat his opponent in straight games.

In the locker room later, Thomas congratulated him on his victory.

He got to the bar of the Touraine at five to eleven. He was dressed in a suit with a collar and tie. Tonight he wanted to pass for a gentleman. The bar was dark and only a third full. He carefully sat down at a table in a corner, where he could watch the entrance. When the waiter came over to him, he ordered a bottle of Bud-weiser. Five thousand dollars, he thought, five thousand … They had taken that amount from his father and he was taking it back from them. He wondered if Sinclair had had to go to his father to get the money and had had to explain why he needed it. Probably not. Probably Sinclair had so much dough in his own name he could lay his hands on five thousand cash in ten minutes. Thomas had nothing against Sinclair. Sinclair was a pleasant young man, with nice, friendly eyes and a soft voice and good manners who from time to time had given him some pointers on how to play drop shots in squash and whose life would be ruined if it became known he was a kleptomaniac. The system had just worked out that way.

He sipped at his beer, watching the door. At three minutes after eleven, the door opened and Sinclair came in. He peered around the dark room and Thomas stood up. Sinclair came over to the table and Thomas said, “Good evening, sir.”

“Good evening, Tom,” Sinclair said evenly and sat down on the banquette, but without taking off his topcoat.

“What are you drinking?” Thomas asked, as the waiter came over.

“Scotch and water, please,” Sinclair said with his polite, Harvard way of talking.

“And another Bud, please,” said Thomas.

They sat in silence for a moment, side by side on the banquette. Sinclair drummed his fingers briefly on the table, scanning the room. “Do you come here often?” he asked.

“Once in awhile.”

“Do you ever see anybody from the Club here?”

“No.”

The waiter came over and put down their drinks. Sinclair took a thirsty gulp from his glass. “Just for your information,” Sinclair said, “I don’t take the money because I need it.”

“I know,” Thomas said.

“I’m sick,” Sinclair said. “It’s a disease. I’m going to a psychiatrist.”

“That’s smart of you,” Thomas said.

“You don’t mind doing what you’re doing to a sick man?”

“No,” Thomas said. “No, sir.”

“You’re a hard little son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“I hope so, sir,” said Thomas.

Sinclair opened his coat and reached inside and brought out a long, full envelope. He put it down on the banquette between himself and Thomas. “It’s all there,” he said. “You needn’t bother to count it.”

“I’m sure it’s all there,” Thomas said. He slipped the envelope into his side pocket.

“I’m waiting,” Sinclair said. Thomas took out the IOU and put it on the table. Sinclair glanced at it, tore it up and stuffed the shreds into an ashtray. He stood up. “Thanks for the drink,” he said. He walked toward the door past the bar, a handsome young man, the marks of breeding, gentility, education, and good luck clearly on him.

Thomas watched him go out and slowly finished his beer. He paid for the drinks and went into the lobby and rented a room for the night. Upstairs, with the door locked and the blinds down, he counted the money. It was all in hundred-dollar bills, all new. It occurred to him that they might be marked, but he couldn’t tell.

He slept well in the big double bed and in the morning called the Club and told Dominic that he had to go to New York on family business and wouldn’t be in until Monday afternoon. He hadn’t taken any days off since he’d started working at the Club, so Dominic had to say okay, but no later than Monday.

It was drizzling when the train pulled into the station and the gray, autumnal drip didn’t make Port Philip look any better as Thomas went out of the station. He hadn’t brought his coat, so he put up the collar of his jacket to try to keep the rain from going down his neck.

The station square didn’t look much different. The Port Philip House had been repainted and a big radio and television shop in a new, yellow-brick building was advertising a sale in portable radios. The smell of the river was still the same and Tom remembered it.

He could have taken a taxi, but after the years of absence he preferred to walk. The streets of his native town would slowly prepare him—for just what he was not quite sure.

He walked past the bus station. The last ride with his brother Rudolph. You smell like a wild animal.

He walked past Bernstein’s Department Store, his sister’s rendezvous point with Theodore Boylan. The naked man in the living room, the burning cross. Happy boyhood memories.

He walked past the public school. The returned malarial soldier and the samurai sword and the Jap’s head spouting blood.

Nobody said hello. All faces in the mean rain looked hurried, closed, and unfamiliar. Return in Triumph. Welcome, Citizen.

He walked past St. Anselm’s, Claude Tinker’s uncle’s church. By the Grace of God, he was not observed.

He turned into Vanderhoff Street. The rain was coming down more strongly. He touched the bulge in the breast of his jacket that concealed the envelope with the money in it. The street had changed. A square prisonlike building had been put up and there was some sort of factory in it. Some of the old shops were boarded up and there were names he didn’t recognize on the windows of other shops.

He kept his eyes down to keep the rain from driving into them, so when he looked up finally he was stupidly puzzled because where the bakery had been, where the house in which he was born had stood, there was now a large supermarket, with three stories of apartments above it. He read the signs in the windows. Special Today, Rib Roast. Lamb Shoulder. Women with shopping bags were going in and out of a door which, if the Jordache house had been still there, would have opened onto the front hallway.

Thomas peered through the windows. There were girls making change at the front desks. He didn’t know any of them. There was no sense in going in. He was not in the market for rib roasts or lamb shoulders.

Uncertainly, he continued down the street. The garage next door had been rebuilt and the name on it was a different one and he didn’t recognize any of the faces there, either. But near the corner he saw that Jardino’s Fruits and Vegetables was still where it always had been. He went in and waited while an old woman argued with Mrs. Jardino about string beans.

When the old woman had gone, Mrs. Jardino turned to him. She was a small, shapeless woman with a fierce, beaked nose and a wart on her upper lip from which sprang two long, coarse, black hairs. “Yes,” Mrs. Jardino said. “What can I do for you?”

“Mrs. Jardino,” Thomas said, putting down his coat collar to look more respectable, “you probably don’t remember me, but I used to be a … well … a kind of neighbor of yours. We used to have the bakery. Jordache?”

Mrs. Jardino peered nearsightedly at him. “Which one were you?”

“The youngest one.”

“Oh, yes. The little gangster.”

Thomas tried a smile, to compliment Mrs. Jardino on her rough humor. Mrs. Jardino didn’t smile back. “So, what do you want?”

“I haven’t been here for awhile,” Thomas said. “I’ve come back to pay a family visit. But the bakery isn’t there any more.”

“It’s been gone for years,” Mrs. Jardino said impatiently, arranging apples so that the spots wouldn’t show. “Didn’t your family tell you?”

“We were out of touch for awhile,” Thomas said. “Do you know where they are?”

“How should I know where they are? They never talked to dirty Italians.” She turned her back squarely on him and fussed with bunches of celery.

“Thank you very much, just the same,” Thomas said and started out.

“Wait a minute,” Mrs. Jardino said. “When you left, your father was still alive, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Thomas said.

“Well, he’s dead,” she said. There was a certain satisfaction in her voice. “He drowned. In the river. And then your mother moved away and then they tore the building down and now …” bitterly, “there’s a supermarket there cutting our throats.”

A customer came in and Mrs. Jardino began to weigh five pounds of potatoes and Thomas went out of the shop.

He went and stood in front of the supermarket for awhile, but it didn’t tell him anything. He thought of going down to the river, but the river wasn’t going to tell him anything, either. He walked back toward the station. He passed a bank and went in and rented a safety deposit box and put forty-nine hundred of the five thousand dollars in the box. He figured he might as well leave his money in Port Philip as anywhere. Or throw it into the river in which his father had drowned.

He supposed he might be able to find his mother and brother by going to the post office, but he decided against the effort. It was his father he had come to see. And pay off.

Chapter 2

Capped and gowned, Rudolph sat in the June sunlight, among the other graduates in rented black.

“Now, in 1950, at the exact mid-point of the century,” the speaker was saying, “we Americans must ask ourselves several questions: What do we have? What do we want? What are our strengths and weaknesses? Where are we going?” The speaker was a cabinet member, up from Washington as a favor for the President of the college, who had been a friend of his at Cornell, a more illustrious place of learning.

Now at the exact mid-point of the century, Rudolph thought, moving restlessly on the camp chair set up on the campus lawn, what do I have, what do I want, what are my strengths and weaknesses, where am I going? I have a B.A., a debt of four thousand dollars, and a dying mother. I want to be rich and free and beloved. My strength—I can run the two-twenty in 23:8. My weakness? I am honest. He smiled inwardly, innocently regarding the Great Man from Washington. Where am I going? You tell me, brother.

The man from Washington was a man of peace. “The curve of military power is rising everywhere,” he said in solemn tones. “The only hope for peace is the military might of the United States. To prevent war the United States needs a force so big and strong, so capable of counterattack as to serve as a deterrent.”

Rudolph looked along the rows of his fellow graduates. Half of them were veterans of World War II, in college on the G.I. Bill of Rights. Many of them were married, their wives sitting with newly set hair in the rows behind them, some of them holding infants in their arms because there was nobody to leave them with in the trailers and cluttered rented rooms which had been their homes while their husbands had struggled for the degrees being awarded today. Rudolph wondered how they felt about the rising curve of military power.

Sitting next to Rudolph was Bradford Knight, a, round-faced florid young man from Tulsa, who had been a sergeant in the infantry in Europe. He was Rudolph’s best friend on the campus, an energetic, overt boy, cynical and shrewd behind a lazy Oklahoma drawl. He had come to Whitby because his captain had graduated from the school and recommended him to the Dean of Admissions. He and Rudolph had drunk a lot of beer together and had gone fishing together. Brad kept urging Rudolph to come out to Tulsa with him after graduation and go into the oil business with him and his father. “You’ll be a millionaire before you’re twenty-five, son,” Brad had said. “It’s over-flowin’ country out there. You’ll trade in your Cadillac every time the ashtrays have to be emptied.” Brad’s father had been a millionaire before he was twenty-five, but was in a low period now (“Just a little bad run of luck,” according to Brad) and couldn’t afford the fare East at the moment for his son’s graduation.

Teddy Boylan wasn’t at the ceremony, either, although Rudolph had sent him an invitation. It was the least he could do for the four thousand dollars. But Boylan had declined. “I’m afraid I can’t see myself driving fifty miles on a nice June afternoon to listen to a Democrat make a speech on the campus of an obscure agricultural school.” Whitby was not an agricultural school, although it did have an important agricultural department, but Boylan still resented Rudolph’s refusal even to apply to an Ivy League university when he had made his offer in 1946 to finance Rudolph’s education. “However,” the letter had gone on in Boylan’s harsh, heavily accented handwriting, “the day shall not go altogether uncelebrated. Come on over to the house when the dreary mumblings are over, and we’ll break out a bottle of champagne and talk about your plans.”

Rudolph had decided for several reasons to choose Whitby rather than to take a chance on Yale or Harvard. For one, he’d have owed Boylan a good deal more than four thousand dollars at the end, and for another, with his background and his lack of money, he’d have been a four-year outsider among the young lords of American society whose fathers and grandfathers had all cheered at Harvard–Yale games, who whipped back and forth to debutantes’ balls, and most of whom had never worked a day in their lives. At Whitby, poverty was normal. The occasional boy who didn’t have to work in the summer to help pay for his books and clothes in the autumn was unusual. The only outsiders, except for an occasional stray like Brad, were bookish freaks who shunned their fellow students and a few politically minded young men who circulated petitions in favor of the United Nations and against compulsory military service.

Another reason that Rudolph had chosen Whitby was that it was close enough to Port Philip so that he could get over on Sundays to see his mother, who was more or less confined to her room and who, friendless, suspicious, and half mad, could not be allowed just to founder into absolute neglect. In the summer of his sophomore year, when he got the job after hours and on Saturdays at Calderwood’s Department Store, he had found a cheap little two-room apartment with a kitchenette in Whitby and had moved his mother in with him. She was waiting for him there, now. She hadn’t felt well enough to come to the graduation, she said, and besides, she would disgrace him, the way she looked. Disgrace was probably too strong a word, Rudolph thought, looking around at the neatly clothed, sober parents of his classmates, but she certainly wouldn’t have dazzled anybody in the assemblage with her beauty or her style of dress. It was one thing to be a dutiful son. It was a very different thing not to face facts.

So—Mary Pease Jordache, sitting in a rocking chair at the window of the shabby apartment, cigarette ashes drifting down on her shawl, legs swollen and almost useless, was not there to see her son rewarded with his roll of imitation parchment. Among the other absentees—Gretchen, linked by blood, detained in New York by a crisis with her child; Julie, being graduated herself that day from Barnard; Thomas, more blood, address unknown; Axel Jordache, blood on his hands, sculling through eternity.

He was alone this day and it was just as well.

“The power of the military establishment is appalling,” the speaker was saying, his voice magnified over the public address system, “but one great thing on our side is the wish of the ordinary man everywhere for peace.”

If Rudolph was an ordinary man, the cabinet member was certainly speaking for him. Now that he had heard some of the stories about the war in bull sessions around the campus he no longer envied the generation before his which had stood on Guadalcanal and the sandy ridges of Tunisia and at the Rapido River.

The fine, intelligent, educated voice sang on in the sunny quadrangle of red-brick Colonial buildings. Inevitably, there was the salute to America, land of opportunity. Half the young men listening had had the opportunity to be killed for America, but the speaker was looking forward this afternoon, not toward the past, and the opportunities he mentioned were those of scientific research, public service, aid to those nations throughout the world who were not as fortunate as we. He was a good man, the cabinet member, and Rudolph was glad that such a man was near the seat of power in Washington, but his view of opportunity in 1950 was a bit lofty, evangelical, Washingtonian, all very well for a Commencement exercise, but not likely to coincide with the down-to-earth views of the three hundred or so poor men’s sons who sat before him in black robes waiting to receive their degrees from a small, underfinanced school known, if it was known at all, for its agricultural department, and wondering how they were going to start earning a living the next day.

Up front, in the section reserved for professors, Rudolph saw Professor Denton, the head of the History and Economics departments, squirming in his seat and turning to whisper to Professor Lloyd, of the English Department, sitting on his right. Rudolph smiled, guessing what Professor Denton’s comments would be on the cabinet member’s ritualistic pronouncements. Denton, a small, fierce, graying man, disappointed because by now he realized he would rise no higher in the academic world, was also a kind of outdated Midwestern Populist, who spent a good deal of his time in the classroom ranting about what he considered the betrayal of the American economic and political system, dating back to the Civil War, by Big Money and Big Business. “The American economy,” he had said in class, “is a rigged crap table, with loaded dice. The laws are carefully arranged so that the Rich throw only sevens and everybody else throws only snake-eyes.”

At least once a term he made a point of referring to the fact that in 1932, by his own admission before a congressional committee, J. P. Morgan had not paid a cent in income tax. “I want you gentlemen to keep this in mind,” Professor Denton would declaim bitterly, “while also keeping in mind that in the same year, on a mere tutor’s salary, I paid five hundred and twenty-seven dollars and thirty cents in tax to the Federal Government.”

The effect on the class, as far as Rudolph could discern, was not the one Denton sought. Rather than firing the students up with indignation and a burning desire to rally forth to do battle for reform, most of the students, Rudolph included, dreamed of the time when they themselves could reach the heights of wealth and power, so that they, too, like J. P. Morgan, could be exempt from what Denton called the legal enslavement of the electorate body.

And when Denton, pouncing upon some bit of news in The Wall Street Journal describing some new wily tax-saving amalgamation or oil jobbing that kept millions of dollars immune from the federal treasury, Rudolph listened carefully, admiring the techniques that Denton lovingly dissected, and putting everything carefully down in his notebooks, against the blessed day when he perhaps might be faced with similar opportunities.

Anxious for good marks, not so much for themselves as for the possible advantages later, Rudolph did not let on that his close attention to Denton’s tirades were not those of a disciple, but rather those of a spy in enemy territory. His three courses with Denton had been rewarded with three A’s and Denton had offered him a teaching fellowship in the History Department for the next year.

Despite his secret disagreement with what he thought were Denton’s naive positions, Denton was the one instructor Rudolph had come to like in all the time he had been in the college, and the one man he considered had taught him anything useful.

He had kept this opinion, as he had kept almost all his other opinions, strictly to himself, and he was highly regarded as a serious student and a well-behaved young man by the faculty members.

The speaker was finishing, with a mention of God in his last sentence. There was applause. Then the graduates were called up to receive their degrees, one by one. The President beamed as he bestowed the rolls of paper bedecked with ribbon. He had scored a coup getting the cabinet member to his ceremony. He had not read Boylan’s letter about an agricultural school.

A hymn was sung, a decorous march played. The black robes filed down through the rows of parents and relatives. The robes dispersed under the summer foliage, of oak trees, mixing with the bright colors of women’s dresses, making the graduates look like a flock of crows feeding in a field of flowers.

Rudolph limited himself to a few handshakes. He had a busy day and night ahead of him. Denton sought him out, shook his hand, a small, almost hunchbacked man with thick, silver-rimmed glasses. “Jordache,” he said, his hand enthusiastic, “you will think it over won’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Rudolph said. “It’s very kind of you.” Respect your elders. The academic life, serene, underpaid. A Master’s in a year, a Ph.D. a few years later, a chair perhaps at the age of forty-five. “I am certainly tempted, sir.” He was not tempted at all.

He and Brad broke away to turn in their robes and go, as prearranged, to the parking lot. Brad had a pre-war Chevy convertible, and his bags, already packed, were in the trunk. Brad was ready to take off for Oklahoma, that overflowing country.

They were the first ones out of the parking lot. They did not look back. Alma Mater disappeared around a bend in the road. Four years. Be sentimental later. Twenty years from now.

“Let’s go by the store for a minute,” Rudolph said. “I promised Calderwood I’d look in.”

“Yes, sir,” Brad said, at the wheel. “Do I sound like an educated man?”

“The ruling class,” Rudolph said.

“My time has not been wasted,” Brad said. “How much do you think a cabinet member makes a year?”

“Fifteen, sixteen thousand,” Rudolph hazarded.

“Chickenfeed,” Brad said.

“Plus honor.”

“That’s another thirty bucks a year at least,” Brad said. “Tax free. You think he wrote that speech himself?”

“Probably.”

“He’s overpaid.” Brad began to hum the tune of “Everything’s Up-to-Date in Kansas City.” “Will there be broads there tonight?”

Gretchen had invited them both to her place for a party to mark the occasion. Julie was to come, too, if she could shake her parents.

“Probably,” Rudolph said. “There’re usually one or two girls hanging around.”

“I read all that stuff in the papers,” Brad said querulously, “about how modern youth is going to the dogs and how morality has broken down since the war and all, but I’m not getting any of that little old broken-down morality, that’s for sure. The next time I go to college it’s going to be coed. You’re looking at a pure-bred, sex-starved Bachelor of Arts, and I ain’t just talking.” He hummed gaily.

They drove through the town. Since the war there had been a lot of new construction, small factories with lawns and flower-beds pretending to be places of recreation and gracious living, shop-fronts redone to look as though they were on eighteenth-century village streets in the English counties, a white clapboard building that had once been the town hall and was now a summer theater. People from New York had begun buying farmhouses in the adjoining countryside and came up for weekends and holidays. Whitby, in the four years that Rudolph had spent there, had grown visibly more prosperous with nine new holes added to the golf course and an optimistic real-estate development called Greenwood Estates, where you had to buy at least two acres of land if you wanted to build a house. There was even a small artists’ colony and when the President of the university attempted to lure staff away from other institutions, he always pointed out that Whitby was situated in an up-and-coming town, improving in quality as well as size, and that it had a cultural atmosphere.

Calderwood’s was a small department store on the best corner of the main shopping street of the town. It had been there since the 1890s, first as a kind of general store serving the needs of a sleepy college village with a back country of solid farms. As the town had grown and changed its character, the store had grown and changed accordingly. Now it was a long, two-story structure, with a considerable variety of goods displayed behind plate-glass windows. Rudolph had started as a stock boy in busy seasons, but had worked so hard and had come up with so many suggestions that Duncan Calderwood, descendant of the original owner, had had to promote him. The store was still small enough so that one man could do many different jobs in it, and by now Rudolph acted as part-time salesman, window dresser, advertising copy writer, adviser on buying, and consultant on the hiring and firing of personnel. When he worked full time in the summer, his salary was fifty dollars a week.

Duncan Calderwood was a spare, laconic Yankee of about fifty, who had married late and had three daughters. Aside from the store, he owned a good deal of real estate in and around the town. Just how much was his own business. He was a closemouthed man who knew the value of a dollar. The day before, he had told Rudolph to drop around after the graduation exercises were over, he might have an interesting proposition to put to him.

Brad stopped the car in front of the entrance to the store.

“I’ll just be a minute,” Rudolph said, getting out.

“Take your time,” Brad said. “I’ve got my whole life ahead of me.” He opened his collar and pulled his tie loose, free at last. The top of the car was down and he lay back and closed his eyes luxuriously in the sunlight.

As Rudolph went into the store, he glanced approvingly at one of the windows, which he had arranged three nights before. The window was deyoted to carpentry tools and Rudolph had set them out so that they made a severe abstract pattern, uncluttered and gleaming. From time to time Rudolph went down to New York and studied the windows of the big stores on Fifth Avenue to pick up ideas for Calderwood’s.

There was a comfortable, female hum of shopping on the main floor and a slight, typical odor of clothes and new leather and women’s scents that Rudolph always enjoyed. The clerks smiled at him and waved hello as he went toward the back of the store, where Calderwood’s private office was located. One or two of the clerks said, “Congratulations,” and he waved at them. He was well liked, especially by the older people. They did not know that he was consulted on hiring and firing.

Calderwood’s door was open, as it always was. He liked to keep an eye on what was happening in the store. He was seated at his desk, writing a letter with a fountain pen. He had a secretary, who had an office beside his, but there were some things about his business he didn’t want even his secretary to know. He wrote four or five letters a day by hand and stamped them and mailed them himself. The door to the secretary’s office was closed.

Rudolph stood in the doorway, waiting. Although he left the door open, Calderwood did not like to be interrupted.

Calderwood finished a sentence, reread it, then looked up. He had a sallow, smooth face with a long blade of a nose and receding black hair. He turned the letter face down on his desk. He had big farmer’s hands and he dealt clumsily with frail things like sheets of paper. Rudolph was proud of his own slender, long-fingered hands, which he felt were aristocratic.

“Come in, Rudy,” Calderwood said. His voice was dry, uninflected.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Calderwood.” Rudolph stepped into the bare room in his good, blue, graduation suit. There was a giveaway Calderwood calendar on the wall, with a colored photograph of the store on it. Aside from the calendar the only other adornment in the room was a photograph of Calderwood’s three daughters, taken when they were little girls, on the desk.

Surprisingly, Calderwood stood up and came around the desk and shook Rudolph’s hand. “How did it go?” he asked.

“No surprises.”

“You glad you did it?”

“You mean go to college?” Rudolph asked.

“Yes. Sit down.” Calderwood went back behind his desk and sat on the straight-backed wooden chair. Rudolph seated himself on another wooden chair on the right side of the desk. In the furniture department on the second floor there were dozens of upholstered leather chairs, but they were for customers only.

“I suppose so,” Rudolph said. “I suppose I’m glad.”

“Most of the men who made the big fortunes in this country, who are making them today,” Calderwood said, “never had any real schooling. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Rudolph said.

“They hire schooling,” said Calderwood. It was almost a threat. Calderwood himself had not finished high school.

“I’ll try not to let my education interfere with my making a fortune,” Rudolph said.

Calderwood laughed, dry, economical. “I’ll bet you won’t, Rudy,” he said affably. He pulled open a drawer of the desk and took out a jeweler’s box, with the name of the store written in gilt script on the velvet cover. “Here,” he said, putting the box down on the desk. “Here’s something for you.”

Rudolph opened the box. In it was a handsome steel Swiss wristwatch, with a black suede band. “It’s very good of you, sir,” Rudolph said. He tried not to sound surprised.

“You earned it,” Calderwood said. He adjusted his narrow tie in the notch of his starched white collar, embarrassed. Generosity did not come easily to him. “You put in a lot of good work in this store, Rudy. You got a good head on your shoulders, you have a gift for merchandising.”

“Thank you, Mr. Calderwood.” This was the real Commencement address, none of that Washington stuff about the rising military curve and aid to our less fortunate brothers.

“I told you I had a proposition for you, didn’t I?”

“Yes, sir.”

Calderwood hesitated, cleared his throat, stood up, walked toward the calendar on the wall. It was as though before he took a stupendous final plunge, he had to re-check his figures one last time. He was dressed as always in a black suit with vest, and high-topped black shoes. He liked full support for his ankles, he said. “Rudy,” he began, “how would you like to work for Calderwood’s on a full-time basis?”

“That depends,” Rudolph said, carefully. He had expected this and he had decided what terms he would accept.

“Depends on what?” Calderwood asked. He sounded pugnacious.

“Depends on what the job is,” Rudolph said.

“The same as you’ve been doing,” Calderwood said. “Only more so. A little bit of everything. You want a title?”

“That depends on the title.”

“Depends, depends,” Calderwood said. But he laughed. “Who ever made up that idea about the rashness of youth? How about Assistant Manager? Is that a good enough title for you?”

“For openers,” Rudolph said.

“Maybe I ought to kick you out of this office,” Calderwood said. The pale eyes iced up momentarily.

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” Rudolph said, “but I don’t want to get into any dead ends. I have some other offers and …”

“I suppose you want to rush down to New York, like all the other young damn fools,” Calderwood said. “Take over the city in the first month, get yourself invited to all the parties.”

“Not particularly,” Rudolph said. Actually he didn’t feel ready for New York yet. “I like this town.”

“With good reason,” Calderwood said. He sat down behind his desk again, with a sound that was almost a sigh. “Listen, Rudy,” he said, “I’m not getting any younger; the doctor says I’ve got to start taking it easier. Delegate responsibility, is the way he puts it, take holidays, prolong my life. The usual doctor’s sales talk. I have a high cholesterol count. That’s a new gimmick they got to scare you with, cholesterol count. Anyway, it makes sense. I have no sons …” He glared at the photograph of the three girl children at his desk, triply betrayed. “I’ve done the whole thing myself in here since my father died. Somebody’s got to help take over. And I don’t want any of those high-powered young snots from the business schools, changing everything and asking for a share in the shop after the first two weeks.” He lowered his head and looked at Rudolph measuringly from under his thick black eyebrows. “You start at one hundred a week. After a year we’ll see. Is that fair or isn’t it fair?”

“It’s fair,” Rudolph said. He had expected seventy-five.

“You’ll have an office,” Calderwood said. “The old wrapping room on the second floor. Assistant Manager on the door. But I want to see you on the floor during store hours. We shake on it?”

Rudolph put out his hand. Calderwood’s handshake was not that of a man with a high cholesterol count.

“I suppose you’ll want to take some sort of holiday first,” Calderwood said. “I don’t blame you. What do you want—two weeks, a month?”

“I’ll be here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” Rudolph stood up.

Calderwood smiled, a flare of unconvincing dentures. “I hope I’m not making a mistake,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

He was turning over his unfinished letter and picking up his fountain pen with his big, square hand, as Rudolph left the office.

As he went through the store Rudolph walked slowly, looking around at the counters, the clerks, the customers, with a new, appraising, owning eye. At the doorway, he stopped, took off his cheap watch and put on the new one.

Brad was dozing at the wheel in the sunlight. He sat up as Rudolph got into the car. “Anything new?” he asked, as he started the engine.

“The old man gave me a present.” Rudolph held up his hand to display the watch.

“He’s got a soft heart,” Brad said, as they pulled away from the curb.

“One hundred and fifteen dollars,” Rudolph said, “at the watch counter. Fifty dollars wholesale.” He didn’t say anything about reporting to work at nine o’clock in the morning. Calderwood’s was not overflowing country.

Mary Pease Jordache sat at the window looking down at the street, waiting for Rudolph. He had promised he’d come right home after the Commencement exercises to show her his degree. It would have been nice to arrange some sort of party for him, but she didn’t have the energy. Besides, she didn’t know any of his friends. It wasn’t that he wasn’t popular. The phone was always ringing and young voices would say, “This is Charlie,” or, “This is Brad, is Rudy in?” But somehow he never seemed to bring any of them home. Just as well. It wasn’t much of a home. Two dark rooms over a dry-goods store on a treeless, bare side street. She was doomed to live her life out over stores. And there was a Negro family living right smack across the street from them. Black faces at the window staring at her. Pickaninnies and rapists. She had learned all about them at the orphanage.

She lit a cigarette, her hand shaking, and brushed inaccurately at the ashes from former cigarettes on her shawl. It was a warm June day, but she felt better with her shawl.

Well, Rudolph had made it, despite everything. A college graduate, holding his head high, any man’s match. Thank God for Theodore Boylan. She had never met him, but Rudolph had explained what an intelligent, generous man he was. It was no more than Rudolph deserved, though. With his manners and his wit. People liked to help him. Well, he was on his way now. Though when she’d asked him what he was going to do after college, he’d been vague. He had plans, though, she was sure. Rudolph’was never without plans. As long as he didn’t get caught up with some girl and get married. Mary Pease shivered. He was a good boy, you couldn’t ask for a more thoughtful son; if it hadn’t been for him God knows what would have happened to her since that night Axel disappeared. But once a girl came into the picture, boys became like wild animals, even the best of them, sacrificing everything, home, parents, career, for a pair of soft eyes and the promise under the skirt. Mary Pease Jordache had never met his Julie, but she knew she went to Barnard and she knew about Rudolph’s trips to New York on Sundays, all those miles there and back, coming home at all hours, pale and dark under the eyes, restless and short of speech. Still, Julie had lasted over five years and he should be ready for someone else by now. She would have to talk to him, tell him now was the time to enjoy himself, take his time, there would be hundreds of girls who would be more than honored to throw themselves at his head.

She really ought to have done something special for this day. Baked a cake, gone down and bought a bottle of wine. But the effort of descending and climbing the stairs, making herself presentable for the neighbors … Rudolph would understand. Anyway, he was going to New York that afternoon to be with his friends. Let the old lady sit alone at the window, she thought with sudden bitterness. Even the best of them.

She saw the car turn the corner into the street, its tires squealing, going too fast. She saw Rudolph, his black hair blowing, young Prince. She saw well at a distance, better than ever, but close-up was another story. She had given up reading because it was too much of a strain, her eyes kept changing, no glasses seemed to help for more than a few weeks at a time, old eyes. She was under fifty, but her eyes were dying before her. She let the tears overflow.

The car stopped below her and Rudolph leaped out. Grace, grace. In a fine blue suit. He had a figure for clothes, slender, with wide shoulders and long legs. She pulled back from the window. He had never said anything, but she knew he didn’t like her sitting at the window all day peering out.

She stood up, with an effort, dried her eyes with the edge of her shawl, and hobbled over to a chair near the table which they used for eating. She stubbed out her cigarette as she heard him bounding up the steps.

He opened the door and came in. “Well,” he said, “here it is.” He opened the roll of paper and spread it on the table in front of her. “It’s in Latin,” he said.

She could read his name, in Gothic script.

The tears came again. “I wish I knew your father’s address,” she said. “I’d like him to see this, see what you did without any help from him.”

“Ma,” Rudolph said gently, “he’s dead.”

“That’s what he likes people to believe,” she said. “I know him better than anybody. He’s not dead, he escaped.”

“Ma …” Rudolph said again.

“He’s laughing up his sleeve right this minute,” she said. “They never found the body, did they?”

“Have it your own way,” Rudolph said. “I have to pack a bag. I’m staying in town overnight.” He went into his room and started to throw some shaving things and a pair of pajamas and a clean shirt into a bag. “You got everything you need? Supper?”

“I’ll open a can,” she said. “You going to drive down with that boy in the car?”

“Yes,” he said. “Brad.”

“He’s the one from Oklahoma? The Westerner?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like the way he drives. He’s reckless. I don’t trust Westerners. Why don’t you take the train?”

“What’s the sense in spending money for the train?”

“What good will your money do you if you’re killed, trapped under a car?”

“Ma …”

“And you’ll make plenty of money now. A boy like you. With this.” She, smoothed the stiff paper with the Latin lettering. “Do you ever think of what would happen to me if anything happened to you?”

“Nothing will happen to me.” He clipped the bag shut. He was in a hurry. She saw he was in a hurry. Leave her by the window.

“They will throw me on the garbage heap, like a dog,” she said.

“Ma,” he said, “this is a day for celebration. Rejoicing.”

“I’ll have this framed,” she said. “Enjoy yourself. You earned it. Don’t stay up too late. Where’re you staying in New York? Do you have the phone number, in case there’s an emergency?”

“There won’t be any emergency.”

“In case.”

“Gretchen’s,” he said.

“The harlot,” she said. They did not talk about Gretchen, although she knew he saw her.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. She had gone too far, and she knew it, but she had to make her position clear.

He leaned over and kissed her to say goodbye and to make up for the “Oh, Christ.” She held him. She had doused herself with the toilet water he had bought her for her birthday. She was afraid she smelled like an old woman. “You haven’t told me what your plans were,” she said. “Now your life is really beginning. I thought you would spare me a minute and sit down and tell me what to expect. If you want, I’ll make you a cup of tea …”

“Tomorrow, Ma. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Don’t worry.” He kissed her again and she released him and he was gone, lightfooted, down the stairs. She got up and hobbled over to the window and sat down in her rocking chair, old lady at the window. Let him see her.

The car drove away. He never looked up.

They all leave. Every one of them. Even the best of them.

The Chevy labored up the hill and through the familiar stone gate. The poplar trees that lined the road leading to the house cast a funereal shade, despite the June sunshine. The house quietly decayed behind its unkempt flower borders.

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” Brad said as he rounded the curve into the courtyard. Rudolph had been to the house so often that he no longer had an opinion of it. It was Teddy Boylan’s house, that was all. “Who lives here—Dracula?”

“A friend,” Rudolph said. He had never spoken about Boylan to Brad. Boylan belonged to another compartment of his life. “A friend of the family. He helped me through school.”

“Dough?” Brad asked, stopping the car and staring critically at the stone pile of the building.

“Some,” Rudolph said. “Enough.”

“Can’t he afford a gardener?”

“He’s not interested. Come on in and meet him. There’s some champagne waiting for us.” Rudolph got out of the car.

“Should I button my collar?” Brad asked.

“Yes,” Rudolph said. He waited while Brad struggled with his collar, and pulled up his tie. He had a thick, short, plebeian neck, Rudolph noticed for the first time.

They crossed the graveled courtyard to the heavy oak front doors. Rudolph rang the bell. He was glad he was not alone. He didn’t want to be alone with Teddy Boylan with the news that he had for him. The bell rang in the muffled distance, a question in a tomb, Are you alive?

The door opened. Perkins stood there. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said. There was the sound of the piano being played. Rudolph recognized a Schubert sonata. Teddy Boylan had taken him to concerts at Carnegie Hall and had played a great deal of music for him on his phonograph, pleased at Rudolph’s pleasure in learning about it and his quick ability to tell good playing from bad, mediocre from great. “I was about to give up music before you arrived on the scene,” Boylan had told him once. “I don’t like to listen to it alone and I hate listening to it with people who are faking an interest in it.”

Perkins led the two young men toward the living room. Even in taking five paces, Perkins suggested a procession. Brad straightened out of his usual slouch and walked more erectly, the great dark hall working on him.

Perkins opened the door to the living room. “Mr. Jordache and a friend, sir,” he said.

Boylan finished the passage he was playing and stopped. There was a bottle of champagne in a bucket and two fluted glasses beside it.

Boylan stood up and smiled. “Welcome,” he said, extending his hand to Rudy. “It’s good to see you again.” Boylan had been south for two months and he was very brown, his hair and straight eyebrows sun-bleached. There was some slight little difference in his face that Rudolph puzzled over momentarily, as he shook Boylan’s hand. “May I present a friend of mine,” Rudolph said. “Bradford Knight, Mr. Boylan. He’s a classmate of mine.”

“How do you do, Mr. Knight.” Boylan shook Brad’s hand.

“Happy to make your acquaintance, suh,” Brad said, sounding more Oklahoman than usual.

“You’re to be congratulated today, too, I take it,” Boylan said:

“I reckon so. At least, that’s the theory.” Brad grinned.

“We’ll need a third glass, Perkins.” Boylan moved toward the champagne bucket.

“Yes, sir.” Perkins, leading his lifelong imaginary procession, left the room.

“Was the Democrat edifying?” Boylan asked, twirling the bottle in the ice. “Did he mention malefactors of great wealth?”

“He talked about the bomb,” Rudolph said.

“That Democratic invention,” Boylan said. “Did he say whom we’re going to drop it on next?”

“He didn’t seem to want to drop it on anybody,” Rudolph said. For some reason, Rudolph felt he had to defend the cabinet member. “Actually, he made a great deal of sense.”

“Did he?” Boylan said, twirling the bottle again with the tips of his fingers. “Perhaps he’s a secret Republican.”

Suddenly Rudolph realized what was different about Boylan’s face. There were no more bags under his eyes. He must have got a lot of sleep on his holiday, Rudolph thought.

“You’ve got yourself quite a fine little old place here, Mr. Boylan,” Brad said. He had been staring around him frankly during the conversation.

“Conspicuous consumption,” Boylan said carelessly. “My family was devoted to it. You’re from the South, aren’t you, Mr. Knight?”

“Oklahoma.”

“I drove through it once,” Boylan said. “I found it depressing. Do you plan to go back there now?”

“Tomorrow,” Brad said. “I’ve been trying to get Rudy to go with me.”

“Ah, have you?” Boylan turned to Rudolph. “Are you going?”

Rudolph shook his head.

“No,” Boylan said. “I can’t quite see you in Oklahoma.”

Perkins came in with the third glass and set it down.

“Ah,” said Boylan. “Here we are.” He undid the wire around the cork, his hands working deftly as the wire came away. He twisted the cork gently and as it came out with a dry popping noise he poured the foam expertly into the glasses. Ordinarily, he allowed Perkins to open bottles. Rudolph realized that Boylan was making a special, symbolic effort today.

He handed a glass to Brad and one to Rudolph, then lifted his own. “To the future,” he said. “That dangerous tense.”

“This sure beats Coca-Cola,” Brad said. Rudolph frowned slightly. Brad was being purposely bumpkinish, reacting unfavorably to Boylan’s mannered elegance.

“Yes, doesn’t it?” Boylan said evenly. He turned to Rudolph. “Why don’t we go out into the garden and drink the rest of the bottle in the sunlight? It always seems more festive—drinking wine in the open.”

“Well,” Rudolph said, “we don’t really have much time …”

“Oh?” Boylan raised his eyebrows. “I had thought we could have dinner together at the Farmer’s Inn. You’re invited, too, of course, Mr. Knight.”

“Thank you, suh,” Brad said. “But it’s up to Rudy.”

“There’re some people expecting us in New York,” said Rudolph.

“I see,” Boylan said.

“A party, no doubt. Young people.”

“Something like that.”

“Only natural,” Boylan said. “On a day like this.” He poured more champagne for the three of them. “Will you see your sister?”

“It’s at her house.” Rudolph lied to no man.

“Give her my best,” said Boylan. “I must remember to send a gift for her child. What is it again?”

“A boy.”

Rudolph had told him the day the child was born that it was a boy.

“A small piece of silver,” Boylan said, “for it to eat its darling little porridge from. In my family,” Boylan explained to Brad, “the custom was to give a newly born boy a block of stock. But that was in the family, of course. It would be presumptuous of me to do anything like that for Rudolph’s nephew, although I’m very fond of Rudolph. For that matter, I’m quite attached to his sister, too, although we’ve allowed ourselves to drift apart in the last few years.”

“When I was born my father put an oil well in my name,” Brad said. “A dry hole.” He laughed heartily.

Boylan smiled politely. “It’s the thought that counts.”

“Not in Oklahoma,” Brad said.

“Rudolph,” Boylan said, “I had thought we could discuss various matters quietly over dinner, but since you’re busy, and I understand very well you want to be among young people your own age on a night like this, perhaps you could spare a minute or two now …”

“If you want,” Brad said, “I’ll take a little walk.”

“You are sensitive, Mr. Knight,” Boylan said, a knife-flick of mockery in his voice, “but there’s nothing that has to be hidden between Rudolph and me. Is there, Rudolph?”

“I don’t know,” Rudolph said bluntly. He wasn’t going to play whatever game Boylan was setting up.

“I’ll tell you what I’ve done,” Boylan said, businesslike now. “I’ve bought you a round-trip ticket on the Queen Mary. The sailing is in two weeks, so you’ll have plenty of time to see your friends and get your passport and make whatever arrangements are necessary. I’ve drawn up a little itinerary of places I think you ought to see, London, Paris, Rome, the usual. Round off your education a bit. Education really begins after college. Don’t you agree, Mr. Knight?”

“I can’t do that,” Rudolph said. He put his glass down.

“Why not?” Boylan looked surprised. “You’re always talking about going to Europe.”

“When I can afford it,” Rudolph said.

“Oh, is that all?” Boylan chuckled tolerantly. “You misunderstand. It’s a gift. I think it’ll do you good. Rub off the provincial edges a bit, if you don’t mind my saying so. I might even come over sime time in August and join you in the south of France.” “Thanks, no, Teddy,” Rudolph said. “I can’t.”

“I’m sorry.” Boylan shrugged, dismissing the matter. “Wise men know when to accept gifts and when to turn them down. Even dry holes.” With a nod for Brad. “Of course, if you have something better to do …”

“I have something to do,” Rudolph said. Here it comes, he thought.

“May I inquire what it is?” Boylan poured himself more champagne, without attending to the other glasses.

“I’m starting work tomorrow at Calderwood’s on a full-time basis,” Rudolph said.

“Poor boy,” Boylan said. “What a dreary summer lies ahead of you. I must say your tastes are curious. Preferring to sell pots and pans to sleazy small-town house-wives to going to the south of France. Ah, well, if that’s your decision, you must have your reasons. And after the summer—have you decided to go to law school as I suggested, or to make a stab at the Foreign Service examinations?”

For more than a year now, Boylan had on many occasions urged Rudolph to opt for one or another profession, with Boylan’s preference for the law. “For a young man with no assets but his personality and his wits”—Boylan had written him—“the law is the way to power and preference. This is a lawyer’s country. A good one often becomes indispensable to the companies which hire him. Frequently he finds himself in positions of command. We live in an intricate age, which is daily becoming more intricate. The lawyer, the good lawyer, finally is the only trusted guide through the intricacies and he is rewarded accordingly. Even in politics … Look at the percentage of lawyers in the Senate. Why shouldn’t you crown your career that way? God knows the country could use a man of your intelligence and character instead of some of those dishonest clowns who bumble away on Capitol Hill. Or consider the Foreign Service. Whether we like it or not, we master the world, or should. We should put our best men in positions where they can influence our actions and the actions of our friends and enemies.”

Boylan was a patriot. Out of the mainstream himself, through sloth or fastidiousness, he still had strong and virtuous opinions about the conduct of public life. The one man in Washington Rudolph had heard Boylan praise was James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy. “If you were my own son—Boylan had continued—“I wouldn’t give you different advice. In the Foreign Service you wouldn’t be highly paid, but you would live the life of a gentleman among gentlemen and you could do us all honor. And there would be nothing to prevent you from marrying well and moving on to an ambassadorship. Whatever help I could give you, I would give gladly. I would be rewarded enough if you invited me to the Embassy for lunch once every few months—and could say to myself that in a little way I made it possible.”

Remembering all this, and remembering Calderwood glaring at the photograph of his three daughters that same afternoon, Rudolph thought, feeling oppressed, everybody is looking for a son. A son in some private, particular, impossible image.

“Well, Rudolph,” Boylan was saying, “you haven’t answered me. Which is it going to be?”

“Neither,” Rudolph said. “I told Calderwood I’d stay on at the store for a year at least.”

“I see,” Boylan said flatly. “You don’t aim very high, do you?”

“Yes, I do,” Rudolph said. “In my own way.”

“I’ll cancel the booking for Europe,” Boylan said. “I won’t keep you from your friends any longer. It has been very nice having you here, Mr. Knight. If you ever happen to get away from Oklahoma again, you must come visit me again with Rudolph.” He finished his champagne and went out of the room, his tweed jacket impeccably on his shoulders, the silk scarf a flash of color about his neck.

“Well …” Brad said. “What was that all about?”

“He once had something to do with my sister,” Rudolph said. He started toward the door.

“Chilly bastard, isn’t he?”

“No,” Rudolph said. “Far from it. Let’s get out of here.”

As they drove through the gateway, Brad finally spoke. “There’s something funny about the feller’s eyes. What the hell is it? The skin looks as though—as though—” He puzzled for the exact words he wanted. “As though it’s zippered up at the sides. Hey, you know something—I bet that feller just had his face lifted.”

Of course, Rudolph thought. That was it. It wasn’t all that sleep down South. “Maybe,” he said. “Anything is possible with Teddy Boylan.”

Who are all these people, she thought, looking around her own living room. “Drinks in the kitchen,” she said gaily to a new couple who had just come through the open door. She’d have to wait till Willie came back to get the names. He had gone down to the bar on the corner for more ice. There always was enough Scotch, bourbon, gin, and red wine in half gallon jugs, but never enough ice.

There were at least thirty people in the room, about half of whom she knew, and more to come. How many more she never knew. Sometimes she had the feeling Willie just picked people up in the street and invited them. Mary Jane was in the kitchen, acting as barmaid. Mary Jane was getting over her second husband and you had to invite her to everything. Feeling herself an object of pity, Mary Jane tried to pay her way by helping out with the drinks, rinsing glasses, emptying ashtrays and taking lone stragglers home to bed with her. You needed somebody like that at a party.

Gretchen winced as she watched a Brooks Brothers type let ashes drop onto the floor and a moment later grind the stub of his cigarette into the carpet with his heel. The room looked so pretty when there was nobody in it, pale-rose walls, books in order on the shelves, curtains crisp, the hearth of the fireplace swept, cushions plumped, the wood polished.

She was afraid that Rudolph disapproved of the party, although there was nothing in his manner that showed that he did. As always, when he was in the same room with Johnny Heath, they were off in a corner together, Johnny doing most of the talking and Rudolph most of the listening. Johnny was only about twenty-five, but he was already a partner in a broker’s office in Wall Street, and was reputed to have made a fortune on his own in the stock market. He was an engaging, soft-spoken young man, his face modest and conservative, his eyes quick. She knew that from time to time Rudolph came down to the city to have dinner with Johnny or go to a ball game with him. Whenever she happened to overhear what they were talking about, it was always the same thing—stock deals, mergers, new companies, margins, tax-shelters, all supremely boring to Gretchen, but seemingly fascinating to Rudolph, although he certainly wasn’t in any position to deal in stock, merge with anybody, or form any kind of company.

Once, when she asked Rudolph why he had picked Johnny, of all the people he had met in her house, to latch onto, Rudolph replied, very seriously, “He’s the only friend you have who can educate me.”

Who could know her own brother? Still, she hadn’t meant to have this kind of party for Rudolph’s graduation night and Willie had agreed. But somehow, it always turned out to be the same kind of party. The cast changed somewhat, actors, actresses, young directors, magazine writers, models, girls who worked for Time, Inc., radio producers, an occasional man from an advertising agency who could not be insulted; women like Mary Jane who had just been divorced and told everybody that their husbands were fags, instructors at NYU or Columbia who were writing novels, young Wall Street men who looked as though they were slumming, a dazzlingly sensual secretary who would flirt with Willie after the third drink; an ex-pilot from Willie’s war who would corner her to talk about London; somebody’s discontented husband who would try to make a pass at her late in the evening, and who would probably slip out at the end with Mary Jane.

Even though the cast changed the activity remained almost the same. Arguments about Russia and Alger Hiss and Senator Joe McCarthy, intellectual girls with bangs praising Trotsky … (“Drinks in the kitchen,” she said gaily to a new couple, sunburned, who had obviously been to the beach that day) … somebody who had just discovered Kierkegaard or who had met Sartre and had to tell about it, or who had just been to Israel or Tangier and had to tell about it. Once a month would have been fine. Or if they just didn’t drop their ashes all over the room, even twice a month. They were by and large handsome and educated young people, all somehow with enough money to dress well and buy each other drinks and take a place in the Hamptons for the best part of the summer. Just the sort of people she had dreamed would be her friends when she was a girl in Port Philip. But she had been surrounded by them for nearly five years now. Drinks in the kitchen. The endless party.

Looking purposeful, she made her way to the staircase and started up toward the room under the roof where Billy slept. After Billy was born, they had moved to the top floor of an old brownstone on West Twelfth Street and had converted the attic into a large room and put in a skylight. Aside from Billy’s bed and his toys, there was a big table on which Gretchen worked. There was a typewriter on it and it was piled with books and papers. She liked working in the same room with young Billy and the sound of her typing didn’t bother him, but seemed to serve as a kind of clicking lullaby for him. A child for the machine age, soothed by Remington.

When she turned on the table lamp, she saw that he wasn’t asleep now, though. He lay in the small bed in his pajamas, a cloth giraffe on the pillow beside him, his hands moving above his head slowly through the air, as though to make patterns in the cigarette smoke that drifted up from below. Gretchen felt guilty about the cigarette smoke but you couldn’t ask people not to smoke because a four-year-old boy on another floor might not like it. She went over to the bed and leaned down and kissed Billy’s forehead. There was the clean smell of soap from his bath and the sweet aroma of childish skin.

“When I grow up,” he said, “I am not going to invite anybody.”

Not your father’s child, Gretchen thought. Even though he looked exactly like him, blond, serenely dimpled. NoJordache there at all. Yet. Unless her brother Thomas had looked like that as a child. She kissed him again, leaning low over the bed. “Go to sleep, Billy,” she said.

She went over to the work table and sat down, grateful to be out of the chatter of the room below. She was sure nobody would miss her, even if she sat up there all night. She picked up a book that was lying on the table. Elementary psychology. She opened it idly. Two pages devoted to the blots of the Rorschach test. Know thyself. Know thine enemy. She was taking extension courses at NYU in the late afternoons and at night. If she stuck at it she would have her degree in two years. She had a nagging sense of inadequacy that made her shy with Willie’s educated friends and sometimes with Willie himself. Besides, she liked classrooms, the unhurried sense that she was among people who were not merely interested in money or position or being seen in public.

She had slipped away from the theater after Billy was born. Later, she had told herself, when he’s old enough not to need me all the time. By now she knew she would never try to act again. No loss. She had had to look for work that she could do at home and luckily she had found it, by the simplest of means. She had begun by helping Willie write his criticisms of radio and later television programs, whenever he was bored with them or busy doing something else or had a hangover. At first, he kept signing his name to her pieces, but then he was offered an executive job in the office of the magazine at a raise in pay and she had begun signing the pieces herself. The editor had told her privately that she wrote a lot better than Willie, but she had made her own judgment on Willie’s writing. She had come across the first act of his play one day, while cleaning out a trunk. It was dreadful. What was funny and bright in Willie’s speech turned arch on paper. She hadn’t told him her opinion of his writing or that she had read his play. But she had encouraged him to take the executive job in the office.

She glanced at the sheet of yellow paper in the typewriter. She had penciled in a tentative title. “The Song of the Salesman.” She glanced at random down the page. “The innocent air,” she had written, “which theoretically is a national asset, the property of all Americans, has been delivered to merchants, so that they may beguile us or bully us into buying their products, whether the products are benevolent, needful, or dangerous to us. They sell us soup with laughter, breakfast food with violence, automobiles with Hamlet, purgatives with drivel …”

She frowned. Not good enough. And useless, besides. Who would listen, who would act? The American people were getting what they thought they wanted. Her guests downstairs were most of them in one way or another living off the thing their hostess was denouncing above their heads. The liquor they were drinking was bought with money earned by a man singing the salesman’s song. She tore the sheet of paper from the machine and balled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. She would never get it printed, anyway. Willie would see to that.

She went over to the child’s bed. He had fallen asleep, grasping the giraffe. He slept, miraculously complete. What are you going to buy, what are you going to sell when you are my age? What errors are ahead of you? How much of love will be wasted?

There was a tread on the stairs and she hurriedly bent over, pretending to be tucking in the child. Willie, provider of ice, opened the door. “I wondered where you were,” he said.

“I was restoring my sanity,” she said.

“Gretchen,” he said reproachfully. He was a little flushed from drink and there were beads of perspiration on his upper lip. He had begun to bald, the forehead more Beethovenesque than ever, but somehow he still looked adolescent. “They’re your friends, as well as mine.”

“They’re nobody’s friends,” Gretchen said. “They’re drinkers, that’s all.” She was feeling bitchy. Rereading the lines from her article had crystallized the dissatisfaction that had sent her upstairs in the first place. And, suddenly, she was annoyed that the child resembled Willie so closely. I was there, too, she wanted to say.

“What do you want me to do,” Willie said, “send them home?”

“Yes. Send them home.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Willie said. “Come on down, honey. People’ll begin to wonder what’s wrong with you.”

“Tell them I had a sudden wild urge to breast-feed,” Gretchen said. “In some tribes they breast-feed children until the age of seven. They know everything down there. See if they know that.”

“Honey …” He came over and put his arms around her. She could smell the gin. “Give a little. Please. You’re getting awfully nervy.”

“Oh. You noticed.”

“Of course I noticed.” He kissed her cheek. A nothing kiss, she thought. He hadn’t made love to her in two weeks. “I know what’s wrong,” he said. “You’re doing too much. Taking care of the kid, working, going to school, studying …” He was always trying to get her to drop her courses. “What’re you proving?” he had asked. “You’re the smartest girl in New York as it is.”

“I’m not doing half enough,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go down and pick a likely candidate and go off and have an affair. For my nerves.”

Willie dropped his arms from around her waist and stepped back, martinis receding. “Funny. Hah-hah,” he said coldly.

“On to the cockpit,” she said, putting out the lamp on the table. “Drinks are in the kitchen.”

He grabbed her wrist in the dark. “What’ve I done wrong?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” she said. “The perfect hostess and her mate will now rejoin the beauty and chivalry of West Twelfth Street.” She pulled her arm away from his grasp and went down the stairs. A moment later Willie came down, too. He had stayed behind to plant a martini’d kiss on his son’s forehead.

She saw Rudolph had quit Johnny Heath and was in a corner of the room talking earnestly to Julie, who must have come in while she was upstairs. Rudolph’s friend, the boy from Oklahoma, Babbitt material, was laughing too hard over something that one of the executive secretaries had said. Julie had her hair up and was wearing a soft, black-velvet dress. “I am in a constant battle,” Julie had confided to her, “to suppress the high-school cheerleader in me.” This evening she had managed. Too well. She looked too sure of herself for a girl that young. Gretchen was certain that Julie and Rudolph had never slept with each other. After five years! Inhuman. There was something wrong with the girl, or Rudolph, or both.

She waved to Rudolph but she did not catch his eye and as she went toward him she was stopped by an advertising account executive, too beautifully dressed, and with a haircut that was too becoming. “Mine hostess,” the man said, thin as an English actor. His name was Alec Lister. He had started as a page boy at CBS, but that was long behind him. “Let me congratulate you on an absolutely splendid do.”

“Are you a likely candidate?” she asked, staring at him.

“What?” Lister transferred his glass uneasily from one hand to another. He was not used to being asked puzzling questions.

“Nothing,” she said. “Train of thought, I’m glad you like the animals.”

“I like them very much.” Lister put his imprimatur firmly on the assemblage. “I’ll tell you something else I like. Your pieces in the magazine.”

“I will be known as the Samuel Taylor Coleridge of radio and television,” she said. Lister was one of the guests who could not be insulted, but she was out after all scalps tonight.

“What was that?” He was puzzled for the second time in thirty seconds and he was beginning to frown. “Oh, yes, I get it.” He didn’t seem happy to have gotten it. “If I may make a comment, Gretchen,” he said, knowing that anywhere between Wall Street and Sixtieth Street he could make whatever comment he pleased, “the pieces are excellent, but just a little bit too—well—biting, I find. There’s a tone of hostility in them—it gives them a welcome tang, I have to admit—but there’s a general underlying feeling of being against the whole industry …”

“Oh,” she said calmly, “you caught that.”

He stared at her evenly, all cordiality gone, his office face, cool and pitiless, replacing in a fraction of a second his tolerant English actor party face. “Yes, I caught it,” he said. “And I’m not the only one. In today’s atmosphere, with everybody being investigated, and advertisers being damn careful that they’re not giving their good money to people whose motives might not be acceptable …”

“Are you warning me?” Gretchen asked.

“You might put it like that,” the man said. “Out of friendship.”

“It’s good of you, dear,” she touched his arm lightly, smiling tenderly at him, “but I’m afraid it’s too late. I’m a red, raving Communist, in the pay of Moscow, plotting to destroy NBC and MGM and bring Ralston’s Cereals crashing to the ground.”

“She’s putting on everyone tonight, Alec.” Willie was standing next to her, his hand tightening on her elbow. “She thinks it’s Halloween. Come on into the kitchen, I’ll freshen your drink.”

“Thanks, Willie,” Lister said, “but I’m afraid I have to push on. I have two more parties I said I’d look in on tonight.” He kissed Gretchen’s cheek, a brush of ether on her skin. “Good night, sweets. I do hope you remember what I told you.”

“Chiseled in stone,” she said.

Expressionless, flat-eyed, he made his way toward the door, putting his glass down on a bookcase, where it would leave a ring.

“What’s the matter?” Willie said in a low voice. “You hate money?”

“I hate him,” she said. She pulled away from Willie and wove through the guests, smiling brightly, to where Rudolph and Julie were talking in the corner. They were talking in near whispers. There was an air of tension about them which built an invisible wall around them, cutting them off from all the laughter and conversation in the room. Julie seemed on the verge of tears and Rudolph looked concentrated and stubborn.

“I think it’s terrible,” Julie was saying. “That’s what I think.”

“You look beautiful tonight, Julie,” Gretchen interrupted. “Very femme-fatalish.”

“Well, I don’t feel it.” Julie’s voice quavered.

“What’s the matter?” Gretchen asked.

“You tell her,” Julie said to Rudolph.

“Some other time,” Rudolph said, lips tight. “This is a party.”

“He’s going to work permanently at Calderwood’s,” Julie said. “Starting tomorrow morning.”

“Nothing is permanent,” Rudolph said.

“Stuck away behind a counter for his whole life,” Julie rushed on. “In a little one-horse town. What’s the sense of going to college, if that’s all you’re going to do with it?”

“I told you I’m not going to be stuck anywhere all my life,” Rudolph said.

“Tell her the rest,” Julie said hotly. “I dare you to tell her the rest.”

“What’s the rest?” Gretchen asked. She, too, was disappointed, Rudolph’s choice was inglorious. But she was relieved, too. Working at Calderwood’s, he would continue to take care of their mother and she would not have to face the problem herself or ask for help from Willie. The sense of relief was ignoble, but there was no denying to herself that it existed.

“I’ve been offered the summer in Europe,” Rudolph said evenly, “as a gift.”

“By whom?” Gretchen asked, although she knew the answer.

“Teddy Boylan.”

“I know my parents would let me go, too,” Julie said. “We could have the best summer of our whole lives.”

“I haven’t got time for the best summer of our whole lives,” Rudolph said, biting on the words.

“Can’t you talk to him, Gretchen?” Julie said.

“Rudy,” Gretchen said, “don’t you think you owe yourself a little fun, after the way you’ve been working?”

“Europe won’t go away,” he said. “I’ll go there when I’m ready for it.”

“Teddy Boylan must have been pleased when you turned him down,” Gretchen said.

“He’ll get over it.”

“I wish somebody would offer me a trip to Europe,” Gretchen said. “I’d be on that boat so fast …”

“Gretchen, can you give us a hand?” One of the younger male guests had come over. “We want to play the phonograph and it seems to be kaput.”

“I’ll talk to you two later,” Gretchen said to Rudolph and Julie. “We’ll work something out.” She went over to the phonograph with the young man. She bent down and fumbled for the plug. The colored maid had been in to clean that day and she always left the plug out after she vacuumed. “I bend enough,” she had told Gretchen when Gretchen complained.

The phonograph warmed up with a hollow sound and then it began to play the first record from the album of South Pacific. Childish voices, sweet and American, far away on a make-believe warm island, piped the words to “Dites-moi.” When Gretchen stood up she saw that Rudolph and Julie had gone. I’m not going to have a party in this place for a whole year, she decided. She went into the kitchen and had Mary Jane pour her a stiff drink of Scotch. Mary Jane had long, red hair these days and a great deal of blue eye shadow and long false eyelashes. From a distance she was a beauty but close up things came apart a little. Still, now, in the third hour of the party, with all the men passing through her domain and flattering her, she was at her peak for the day, flashing-eyed, her bright-red lips half open, avid and provocative. “What glory,” she said, whiskey-hoarse. “This party. And that new man, Alec What’s-his-name …”

“Lister,” Gretchen said, drinking, noting that the kitchen was a mess and deciding that she’d do nothing about it till morning. “Alec Lister.”

“Isn’t he dazzling?” Mary Jane said. “Is he attached?”

“Not tonight.”

“Blessings on him,” Mary Jane said, “the dear fellow. He drowned the kitchen in charm when he was in here. And I’ve heard the most terrible things about him. He beats his women, Willie told me.” She giggled. “Isn’t it exciting? Did you notice, does he need a new drink? I’ll appear at his side, goblet in hand, Mary Jane Hackett, the faithful cup-bearer.”

“He left five minutes ago,” Gretchen said, meanly pleased at being able to pass on the information to Mary Jane and wondering at the same time what women Willie was intimate enough with to hear from them that they had been beaten by Alec Lister.

“Ah, well,” Mary Jane shrugged philosophically, “there are other fish in the sea.”

Two men came into the kitchen and Mary Jane swung her red hair and smiled radiantly at them. “Here you are, boys,” she said, “the bar never closes.”

It was a cinch that Mary Jane had not gone two weeks without making love. What’s so wrong with being divorced, Gretchen thought, as she went back into the living room.

Rudolph and Julie walked toward Fifth Avenue in the balmy June evening air. He did not hold her arm. “This is no place to talk seriously,” he had said at the party. “Let’s get out of here.”

But it wasn’t any better on the street. Julie strode along, careful not to touch him, the nostrils of her small nose tense, the full lips bitten into a sharp wound. As he walked beside her on the dark street he wondered if it wouldn’t just be better to leave her then and there. It would probably come sooner or later anyway and sooner was perhaps to be preferred than later. But then he thought of never seeing her again and despaired. Still, he said nothing. In the battle that was being waged between them, he knew that the advantage would have to go to the one who kept silent longest.

“You have a girl there,” she said finally. “That’s why you’re staying in the awful place.”

He laughed.

“Your laughing doesn’t fool me.” Her voice was bitter, with no memory in it of the times they had sung together or the times she had said, I love you. “You’re infatuated with some ribbon clerk or cashier or something. You’ve been sleeping with somebody there all this time. I know.”

He laughed again, strong in his chastity.

“Otherwise you’re a freak,” she said harshly. “We’ve been seeing each other for five years and you say you love me and you haven’t tried once to make love to me, really make love to me.”

“I haven’t been invited,” he said.

“All right,” she said. “I invite you. Now. Tonight. I’m in room 923 at the St. Moritz.”

Wary of traps, fearful of helpless surrenders on a tumbled bed. “No,” he said.

“Either you’re a liar,” she said, “or you’re a freak.”

“I want to marry you,” he said. “We can get married next week.”

“Where will we spend our honeymoon?” she asked. “In the garden-furniture department of Calderwood’s Department Store? I’m offering you my pure-white, virgin body,” she said mockingly. “Free and clear. No strings. Who needs a wedding? I’m a free, liberated, lustful, all-American girl. I’ve just won the Sexual Revolution by a score of ten to nothing.”

“No,” he said. “And stop talking like my sister.”

“Freak,” she said. “You want to bury me along with you forever in that dismal little town. And all this time, I’ve thought you were so smart, that you were going to have such a brilliant future. I’ll marry you. I’ll marry you next week. If you take the trip to Europe and start law school in the autumn. Or if you don’t want to do that, if you just come down here to New York and work here. I don’t care what you do here, I’ll work, too. I want to work. What’ll I do in Whitby? Spend my days deciding which apron to wear when you come home at night?”

“I promise you that in five years you can live in New York or anyplace you say.”

“You promise,” she said. “It’s easy to promise. And I’m not going to bury myself for five years either. I can’t understand you. What in God’s name do you think you’re getting out of it?”

“I’m starting two years ahead of anybody in my class,” Rudolph said. “I know what I’m doing. Calderwood trusts me. He’s got a lot more going for him than just his store. The store’s just a beginning, a base. He doesn’t know it yet, but I do. When I come down to New York I’m not going to be just another college graduate from a school nobody ever heard of, waiting in everybody’s outer office, with his hat in his hand. When I come down, they’re going to greet me at the front door. I’ve been poor a long time, Julie,” he said, “and I am going to do what I have to do never to be poor again.”

“Boylan’s baby,” Julie said. “He’s ruined you. Money! Does money mean that much to you? Just money?”

“Don’t sound like Little Miss Rich Bitch,” he said.

“Even if it does,” she said, “if you went into law …”

“I can’t wait,” he said. “I’ve waited long enough. I’ve been in enough schoolrooms. If I need law, I’ll hire lawyers.” Echo of Duncan Calderwood, that hard-headed man. They hire schooling. “If you want to come along with me, fine. If not …” But he couldn’t say it. “If not,” he repeated lamely. “Oh, Julie, I don’t know. I don’t know. I think I know about everything else, but I don’t know about you.”

“I lied to my father and mother …” She was sobbing now. “So I could be alone with you. But it’s not you. It’s Boylan’s doll. I’m going back to the hotel. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” Weeping uncontrollably, she hailed a cab on the Avenue. It squealed to a halt and she opened the door and got in and slammed the door behind her.

He watched the cab roar away without moving. Then he turned and started back toward the party. He had left his bag there and Gretchen was going to make up a bed for him on the living room couch. 923, he remembered, the number of the hotel room.

Alimonied, Mary Jane did well for herself. Rudolph had never been in a wider or softer bed and in the glow of a lamp on the dressing table (Mary Jane insisted on keeping a light on) the large, warmly carpeted room, its walls pearl-gray silk, showed an expensive decorator’s touch. Deep-green velvet curtains shut out the sounds of the city. The preliminaries (they had been brief) had taken place in the high-ceilinged living room furnished with gilt Directoire pieces and large, gold-tinted mirrors, in which the embracing couple were caught in a vague and metallic luminosity. “The main event takes place inside,” Mary Jane had said, breaking away from a kiss, and without any further agreement from Rudolph had led him into the bedroom. “I’ll get ready in the bathroom,” she said, and kicked off her shoes and walked splendidly and almost steadily into the adjoining bathroom, from which had immediately come the sound of water running and the clink of bottles.

It was a little bit like being in a doctor’s office while he prepared for a minor operation, Rudolph thought resentfully, and he had hesitated before getting undressed. When Mary Jane had asked him to take her home from the party, well after midnight, with only four or five guests still sprawled around, he had no idea that anything like this was going to happen. He felt a bit dizzy from all the drinking he had done and he was worried about what his head would feel like when he lay down. For a moment, he had considered stealing quietly out and through the front door, but Mary Jane, her intuition or her experience at work, had called out sunnily, “I’ll just be a minute more, darling. Make yourself comfortable.”

So Rudolph had undressed, putting his shoes soberly side by side under a chair and folding his clothes neatly on the seat of the chair. The bed was already made up for the night (lace-fringed pillows, he noticed, and pale-blue sheets) and he had slipped under the covers, shivering a little. This was one way of making sure he wouldn’t be knocking on a hotel door that night. 923.

As he lay under the blankets, curious, a little fearful, he closed his eyes. It had to happen some day, he thought. What better day than this?

With his eyes closed, the room seemed to be dipping and wheeling around him and the bed under him seemed to move in an uneasy rhythm, like a small boat anchored in a chop. He opened his eyes just as Mary Jane came into the room, tall, naked, and superb, the long body with the small, round breasts and splendid hips and thighs unwearied by matrimony, unscarred by debauch. She stood over him, looking down at him with hooded eyes, veteran of many seasons, sweeper-up of stragglers, her red hair, dark in the glow of the lamp, swinging down toward him.

His erection was swift and sudden and huge, a pylon, a cannon barrel. He was torn between pride and embarrassment and almost asked Mary Jane to put out the light. But before he could say anything, Mary Jane bent and swept back the covers in a single tearing gesture.

She stood beside the bed, inspecting him, smiling softly.

“Little brother,” she whispered, “little beautiful brother of the poor.” Then, soft-handed, she touched him. He jumped convulsively.

“Lie still,” she ordered. Her hands moved like small, expert animals on him, fur on damask. He quivered. “Lie still, I said,” she said harshly.

It was over soon, shamefully soon, a fierce, arching jet and he heard himself sobbing. She knelt on the bed, kissed him on the mouth, her hands intolerable now, the smell of her hair, cigarette smoke and perfume smothering him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, when she raised her head. “I just couldn’t …”

She chuckled. “Don’t be sorry. I’m flattered. I consider it a tribute.” With a long graceful movement, she slid into bed beside him, pulled the covers over them, clamped him to her, her leg silken over his thighs, his semen oiling them both. “Don’t worry, about any little thing, little brother,” she said. She licked his ear and he was shaken once more by a quiver that started from her tongue and convulsed his body down to the tips of his toes, electrocution by lamp light. “I’m sure that in a very few minutes you’ll be as good as new, little brother.”

He wished she’d stop calling him little brother. He didn’t want to be reminded of Gretchen. Gretchen had given him a peculiar look as he had left with Mary Jane.

Mary Jane’s gift of prophecy in her chosen field had not deserted her. In less than a very few minutes her hands had awakened him once more and he did what Mary Jane had brought him to her bed to do. He plunged into her with all the hoarded strength of years of abstinence. “Oh, Christ, please, that’s enough,” she cried finally, and he let himself go in one great thrust, delivering them both.

Freak, he heard Julie’s bitter voice, freak. Let her come to this room and this woman for testimony.

“Your sister said you were still a virgin,” Mary Jane was saying.

“Let’s not talk about it,” he said shortly.

They were lying side by side now, on their backs, Mary Jane’s leg, just a leg now, thrown lightly across his knee. She was smoking, inhaling deeply, and smoke drifting slowly up when she let it go from her lungs.

“I must discover me some more virgins,” she said. “Is it true?”

“I said let’s not talk about it.”

“It is true.”

“Not anymore, anyway.”

“That’s for fair,” she said. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“A beautiful young man like you,” she said. “The girls must be ravenous.”

“They manage to restrain themselves. Let’s talk about something else.”

“How about that cute little girl you go around with?” Room 923. “What’s her name?”

“Julie.” He did not like saying Julie’s name in this place.

“Isn’t she after you?”

“We were supposed to get married.”

“Were? And now?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“She doesn’t know what she’s missing. It must come in the family,” Mary Jane said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Willie says your sister’s absolutely delirious in the hay.”

“Willie ought to learn to keep his mouth shut.” Rudolph was shocked that Willie would say something like that to a woman, any woman, to anybody about his wife. He would never quite trust Willie again or completely like him again.

Mary Jane laughed. “We’re in the big city now,” she said, “where they burn the gas. Willie’s an old friend of mine. I had an affair with him before he ever met your sister. And occasionally, when he’s feeling down or needs a change of scenery, he still comes around.”

“Does my sister know?” Rudolph tried to keep the sudden anger out of his voice. Willie, that drifting, frivolous man.

“I don’t think so,” Mary Jane said lightly. “Willie’s awfully good at being vague. And nobody signs any affidavits. Did you ever lay her—Gretchen?”

“She’s my sister, for Christ’s sake.” His voice sounded shrill in his ears.

“Big deal,” Mary Jane said. “Sister. From what Willie says, it’d be worth the trouble.”

“You’re making fun of me.” That was it, he told himself, the older, experienced woman amusing herself teasing the simple boy up from the country.

“Hell, no,” Mary Jane said calmly. “My brother laid me when I was fifteen. In a beached canoe. Be a doll, honey, and get me a drink. The Scotch is on the table in the kitchen. Plain water. Never mind the ice.”

He got out of bed. He would have liked to put on some clothes, a robe, his pants, wrap himself in a towel, anything to keep from parading around before those knowing, measuring, amused eyes. But he knew if he did anything to cover himself she would laugh. Damn it, he thought desperately, how did I ever let myself in for anything like this?

The room suddenly seemed cold to him and he felt the goose flesh prickle all over his body. He tried not to shiver as he walked toward the door and into the living room. Gold and shadowy in the metaled mirrors, he made his way soundlessly over the deep carpets toward the kitchen. He found the light and switched it on. Huge white refrigerator, humming softly, a wall oven, a mixer, a juicer, copper pans arranged on the white walls, steel double sink, a dish-washing machine, the bottle of Scotch in the middle of the red formica table, the domestic American dream in the bright white neon light. He took two glasses down from a cupboard (bone china, flowered cups, coffee pots, huge wooden pepper mills, housewifely accoutrements for the non-housewife in the bed in the other room). He ran the water until it was cold and first rinsed his mouth, spitting into the steel sink, xylophones of the night, then drank two long glasses of water. Into the other glass he poured a big slug of Scotch and half filled the glass with water. There was the ghost of a sound, a faint scratching and scurrying. At the back of the sink black insects, fat and armored, roaches, disappeared into cracks. Slob, he thought.

Leaving the light on in the kitchen, he carried the drink back to the mistress of the household in her well-used bed. We aim to serve.

“There’s a doll,” Mary Jane said, reaching up for the glass, long, pointed fingernails glinting crimson. She raised against the pillows, red hair wanton against the pale blue and lace, and drank thirstily. “Aren’t you having one?”

“I’ve drunk enough.” He reached down for his shorts and started to put them on.

“What’re you doing?” she asked.

“I’m going home.” He put on his shirt, relieved to be covered at last. “I’ve got to be at work at nine in the morning.” He strapped on his new watch. A quarter to four.

“Please,” she said, in a small, childish voice. “Please. Don’t do that.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He wasn’t sorry. The thought of being out on the street, dressed, alone, was exhilarating to him.

“I can’t stand being alone at night.” She was begging now.

“Call up Willie,” he said, sitting down and pulling on his socks and slipping into his shoes.

“I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep,” she said.

He tied his shoelaces deliberately.

“Everybody leaves me,” she said, “every goddamn sonofabitch leaves me. I’ll do anything. Stay till six, until daylight, until five please, honey. I’ll suck you, please …” She was crying now.

Tears all night, the world of women, he thought coldly, as he stood up, buttoned his shirt and did up his tie. The sobs echoed behind him as he stood before the mirror. He saw that his hair was mussed, plastered with sweat. He went into the bathroom. Dozens of bottles of perfume, bath-oil, Alka-seltzer, sleeping pills. He combed his hair carefully, erasing the night.

She had stopped crying when he went back into the bedroom. She was sitting up straighter, watching him coldly, her eyes narrowed. She had finished her drink but was still holding her glass.

“Last chance,” she said harshly.

He put on his jacket.

“Good night,” he said.

She threw the glass at him. He refused to duck. The glass hit him a glancing blow on the forehead, then shattered against the mirror over the mantelpiece of the white marble fireplace.

“Little shit,” she said.

He went out of the room, crossed to the front hallway and opened the door. He stepped out through the doorway and closed the door silently behind him and rang for the elevator.

The elevator man was old, good only for short trips, late at night. He looked speculatively at Rudolph as they went down the whining shaft. Does he keep count of his passengers, Rudolph thought, does he make a neat record at dawn?

The elevator man opened the elevator door as they came to a halt. “You’re bleeding, young man,” he said. “Your head.”

“Thank you,” Rudolph said.

The elevator man said nothing as Rudolph crossed the hall and went out into the dark street. Once on the street and out of sight of those rheumy recording eyes, Rudolph took out his handkerchief and put it up to his forehead. The handkerchief came away bloody. There are wounds in all encounters. He walked, alone, his footsteps echoing on the pavement, toward the lights of Fifth Avenue. At the corner he looked up. The street sign read ‘63rd Street.’ He hesitated. The St. Moritz was on Fifty-ninth Street, along the Park. Room 923. A short stroll in the light morning air. Dabbing at his forehead again with his handkerchief he started toward the hotel.

He didn’t know what he was going to do when he got there. Ask for forgiveness, swear, “I will do anything you say,” confess, denounce, cleanse himself, cry love, reach out for a memory, forget lust, restore tenderness, sleep, forget …

The lobby was empty. The night clerk behind the desk looked at him briefly, incuriously, used to lone men late at night, wandering in from the sleeping city.

“Room 923,” he said into the house phone.

He heard the operator ringing the room. After ten rings he hung up. There was a clock in the lobby. 4:35. The last bars in the city had been closed for thirty-five minutes. He walked slowly out of the lobby. He had begun and ended the day alone. Just as well.

He hailed a cruising taxi and got in. That morning, he was going to start earning one hundred dollars a week. He could afford a taxi. He gave Gretchen’s address, but then as the taxi started south, he changed his mind. He didn’t want to see Gretchen and he certainly didn’t want to see Willie. They could send him his bag. “I’m sorry, driver,” he said, leaning forward, “I want Grand Central Station.”

Although he hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours, he was wide-awake when he reported to work at nine o’clock in Duncan Calderwood’s office. He did not punch the time clock, although his card was in its slot. He was through punching clocks.

Chapter 3

Thomas twirled the combination of the padlock and threw open his locker. For many months now, every locker had been equipped with a padlock and members were requested to leave their wallets at the office, where they were put into sealed envelopes and filed in the office safe. The decision had been pushed through by Brewster Reed, whose talismanic hundred-dollar bill had been lifted from his pocket the Saturday afternoon of the weekend Thomas had gone down to Port Philip. Dominic had been pleased to announce this development the Monday afternoon when Thomas reported back to work. “At least,” Dominic said, “now they know it isn’t you and they can’t blame me for hiring a thief, the bastards.” Dominic had also pushed through a raise for Thomas of ten dollars and he was now getting forty-five dollars a week.

Thomas undressed and got into a clean sweatsuit and put on a pair of boxing shoes. He was taking over the five o’clock calisthenics class from Dominic and there were usually one or two members who asked him to spar a couple of rounds with them. He had learned from Dominic the trick of looking aggressive without inflicting any punishment whatever and he had learned enough of Dominic’s phrases to make the members believe he was teaching them how to fight.

He hadn’t touched the forty-nine hundred dollars in the safety deposit box in Port Philip and he still called young Sinclair sir when they met in the locker room.

He enjoyed the calisthenics classes. Unlike Dominic, who just called out the cadences, Thomas did all the exercises with the class, pushups, situps, bicycle riding, straddles, knee bending, touching the floor with the knees straight and the palms of the hand flat, and all the rest. It kept him feeling fit and at the same time it amused him to see all those dignified, self-important men sweating and panting. His voice, too, developed a tone of command that made him seem less boyish than before. For once, he began to wake up in the morning without the feeling that something bad, out of his control, was going to happen to him that day.

When Thomas went into the mat room after the calisthenics, Dominic and Greening were putting on the big gloves. Dominic had a cold and he had drunk too much the night before. His eyes were red and he was moving slowly. He looked shapeless and aging in his baggy sweatsuit and since his hair was mussed, his bald spot shone in the light from the big lamps of the room. Greening, who was tall for his weight, moved around impatiently, shuffling his boxing shoes against the mats with a dry, aggressive sound. His eyes seemed bleached in the strong light and his blond hair, crew-cut, almost platinum. He had been a captain in the Marines during the war and had won a big decoration. He was very handsome in a straight-nosed, hard-jawed, pink-cheeked way and if he hadn’t come from a family that was above such things, he probably could have done well as a hero in Western movies. In all of the time since he had told Dominic that he thought Thomas had stolen ten dollars from his locker, he had never addressed a word to Thomas and now, as Thomas came into the mat room to wait for one of the members who had made a date to spar with him, Greening didn’t even look Thomas’s way.

“Help me with these, kid,” Dominic said, extending his gloves. Thomas tied the laces. Dominic had already done Greening’s gloves.

Dominic looked up at the big clock over the mat room door to make sure that he wouldn’t inadvertently box more than two minutes without resting and put up his gloves and shuffled toward Greening, saying, “Whenever you’re ready, sir.”

Greening came at him fast. He was a straight-up, conventional, schooled kind of fighter who made use of his longer reach to jab at Dominic’s head. His cold and his hangover made Dominic begin to breathe hard immediately. He tried to get inside the jab and put his head out of harm’s way under Greening’s chin while he punched away without much enthusiasm or power at Greening’s stomach. Suddenly, Greening stepped back and brought up his right in an all-out uppercut that caught Dominic flush on the mouth.

The shit, Thomas thought. But he said nothing and the expression on his face didn’t change.

Dominic sat on the mat pushing reflectively at his bleeding mouth with the big glove. Greening didn’t bother to help him up, but stepped back and looked thoughtfully at him, his hands dangling. Still sitting, Dominic held out his gloves toward Thomas.

“Take ’em off me, kid,” Dominic said. His voice was thick. “I’ve had enough exercise for today.”

Nobody said anything as Thomas bent and unlaced the gloves and pulled them off Dominic’s hands. He knew the old fighter didn’t want to be helped up, so he didn’t try. Dominic stood up wearily, wiping his mouth with the wrist band of his sweatsuit. “Sorry, sir,” he said to Greening. “I guess I’m under the weather today.”

“That wasn’t much of a workout,” Greening said. “You should have told me you weren’t feeling well. I wouldn’t have bothered getting undressed. How about you, Jordache?” he asked. “I’ve seen you in here a couple of times. You want to go a few minutes?”

Jordache, Thomas thought. He knows my name. He looked inquiringly over at Dominic. Greening was another story entirely from the pot-bellied, earnest, physical culture enthusiasts Dominic assigned him usually.

A flame of Sicilian hatred glowed momentarily in Dominic’s hooded dark eyes. The time had come to burn down the landlord’s mansion. “If Mr. Greening wants to, Tom,” Dominic said mildly, spitting blood, “I think you might oblige him.”

Thomas put on the gloves and Dominic laced them for him, his head bent, his eyes guarded, saying nothing. Thomas felt the old feeling, fear, pleasure, eagerness, an electric tingling in his arms and legs, his gut pulling in. He made himself smile boyishly over Dominic’s bent head at Greening, who was watching him stonily.

Dominic stepped away. “Okay,” he said.

Greening came right to Thomas, his long left out, his right hand under his chin. College man, Thomas thought contemptuously, as he picked off the jab and circled away from the right. Greening was taller than he but had only eight or nine pounds on him. But he was faster than Thomas realized and the right caught him, hard, high up on the temple. Thomas hadn’t been in a real fight since the time with the foreman at the garage in Brookline and the polite exercises with the pacific gentlemen of the club membership had not prepared him for Greening. Greening feinted, unorthodoxically, with his right, and crashed a left hook to Thomas’s head. The sonofabitch isn’t fooling, Thomas thought, and went in low, looping a left to Greening’s side and following quickly with a right to the man’s head. Greening held him and battered at his ribs with his right hand. He was strong, there was no doubt about it, very strong.

Thomas got a glimpse of Dominic and wondered if Dominic was going to give him some sort of signal. Dominic was standing to one side, placidly, giving no signals.

Okay, Thomas thought, deliciously, here it goes. The hell with what happens later.

They fought without stopping for the usual two-minute break. Greening fought controlledly, brutally, using his height and weight, Thomas with the swift malevolence that he had carefully subdued within himself all these months. Here you are, Captain, he was saying to himself as he burrowed in, using everything he knew, stinging, hurting, ducking, here you are Rich-boy, here you are, Policeman, are you getting your ten dollars’ worth?

They were both bleeding from the nose and mouth, when Thomas finally got in the one he knew was the beginning of the end. Greening stepped back, smiling foolishly, his hands still up, but feebly pawing the air. Thomas circled him, going for the last big one, when Dominic stepped between them.

“I think that’s enough for the time being, gentlemen,” Dominic said. “That was a very nice little workout.”

Greening recovered quickly. The blank look went out of his eyes and he stared coldly at Thomas. “Take these off me, Dominic,” was all he said. He made no move to wipe the blood off his face. Dominic unlaced the gloves and Greening walked, very straight, out of the mat room.

“There goes my job,” Thomas said.

“Probably,” Dominic said, unlacing the gloves. “It was worth it. For me.” He grinned.

For three days, nothing happened. Nobody but Dominic, Greening, and Thomas had been in the mat room and neither Thomas nor Dominic mentioned the fight to any of the members. There was the possibility that Greening was too embarrassed about being beaten by a twenty-year-old kid a lot smaller than he to make a fuss with the committee.

Each night, when they closed up, Dominic would say, “Nothing yet,” and knock on wood.

Then, on the fourth day, Charley, the locker-room man, came looking for him. “Dominic wants to see you in his office,” Charley said. “Right away.”

Thomas went directly to Dominic’s office. Dominic was sitting behind his desk, counting out ninety dollars in ten-dollar bills. He looked up sadly as Thomas came into the office. “Here’s your two weeks’ pay, kid,” he said. “You’re through as of now. There was a committee meeting this afternoon.”

Thomas put the money in his pocket. And I hoped it was going to last at least a year, he thought.

“You should’ve let me get that last punch in, Dom,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Dominic, “I should’ve.”

“Are you going to get into trouble, too?”

“Probably. Take care of yourself,” Dominic said. “Just remember one thing—never trust the rich.”

They shook hands. Thomas went out of the office to get his things out of the locker and went out of the building without saying good-bye to anyone.

Chapter 4

He woke exactly at a quarter to seven. He never set the alarm. There was no need to.

The usual erection. Forget it. He lay quietly in bed for a minute or two. His mother was snoring in the next room. The curtains at the open window were blowing a little and it was cold in the room. A pale winter light came through the curtains, making a long, dark blur of the books on the shelves across from the bed.

This was not going to be an ordinary day. At closing the night before he had gone into Calderwood’s office and laid the thick Manila envelope on Calderwood’s desk. “I’d like you to read this,” he said to the old man, “when you find the time.”

Calderwood eyed the envelope suspiciously. “What’s in there?” he asked, pushing gingerly at the envelope with one blunt finger.

“It’s complicated,” Rudolph said. “I’d rather we didn’t discuss it until you’ve read it.”

“This another of your crazy ideas?” Calderwood asked. The bulk of the envelope seemed to anger him. “Are you pushing me again?”

“Uhuh,” Rudolph said, and smiled.

“Do you know, young man,” Calderwood said, “my cholesterol count has gone up appreciably since I hired you? Way up.”

“Mrs. Calderwood keeps asking me to try to make you take a vacation.”

“Does she, now?” Calderwood snorted. “What she doesn’t know is that I wouldn’t leave you alone in this store for ten consecutive minutes. Tell her that the next time she tells you to try to make me take a vacation.” But he had carried the thick envelope, unopened, home with him, when he left the store the night before. Once he started reading what was in it, Rudolph was sure he wouldn’t stop until he had finished.

He lay still under the covers in the cold room, almost deciding not to get up promptly this morning, but lie there and figure out what to say to the old man when he came into his office. Then he thought, the hell with it, play it cool, pretend it’s just another morning.

He threw back the covers, crossed the room quickly and closed the window. He tried not to shiver as he took off his pajamas and pulled on his heavy track suit. He put on a pair of woolen socks and thick, gum-soled tennis shoes. He put a plaid mackinaw on over the track suit and went out of the apartment, closing the door softly so as not to wake his mother.

Downstairs, in front of the house, Quentin McGovern was waiting for him. Quentin was also wearing a track suit. Over it he had a bulky sweater. A wool stocking hat was pulled down over his ears. Quentin was fourteen, the oldest son of the Negro family across the street. They ran together every morning.

“Hi, Quent,” Rudolph said.

“Hi, Rudy,” said Quentin. “Sure is cold. Mornings like this, my mother thinks we’re out of our minds.”

“She’ll sing a different tune when you bring home a gold medal from the Olympics.”

“I bet,” Quentin said. “I can just hear her now.”

They walked quickly around the corner. Rudolph unlocked the door of the garage where he rented space, and went to the motorcycle. Dimly, at the back of his mind, a memory lurked. Another door, another dark space, another machine. The shell in the warehouse, the smell of the river, his father’s ropy arms.

Then he was back in Whitby again, with the boy in the track suit, in another place, with no river. He rolled out the motorcycle. He pulled on a pair of old wool-lined gloves and swung onto the machine and started the motor. Quentin got on the pillion and put his arms around him and they sped down the street, the cold wind making their eyes tear.

It was only a few minutes to the university ahtletic field. Whitby College was Whitby University now. The field was not enclosed but had a group of wooden stands along one side. Rudolph set up the motorcycle beside the stands and threw his mackinaw over the saddle of the machine. “Better take off your sweater,” he said. “For later. You don’t want to catch cold on the way back.”

Quentin looked over the field. A thin, icy mist was ghosting up from the turf. He shivered. “Maybe my mother is right,” he said. But he took off his sweater and they began jogging slowly around the cinder track.

While he was going to college, Rudolph had never had time to go out for the track team. It amused him that now, as a busy young executive, he had time to run half an hour a day, six days a week. He did it for the exercise and to keep himself hard, but he also enjoyed the early morning quiet, the smell of turf, the sense of changing seasons, the pounding of his feet on the hard track. He had started doing it alone, but one morning Quentin had been standing outside the house in his track suit and had said, “Mr. Jordache, I see you going off to work out every day. Do you mind if I tag along?” Rudolph had nearly said no to the boy. He liked being alone that early in the morning, surrounded as he was all day by people at the store. But Quentin had said, “I’m on the high-school squad. The four-forty. If I know I got to run seriously every morning, it’s just got to help my time. You don’t have to tell me anything, Mr. Jordache, just let me run along with you.” He spoke shyly, softly, not asking for secrets, and Rudolph could see that he had had to screw up his courage to make a request like that of a grown-up white man who had only said hello to him once or twice in his life. Also, Quentin’s father worked on a delivery truck at the store. Labor relations, Rudolph thought. Keep the working man happy. All democrats together. “Okay,” he said. “Come on.”

The boy had smiled nervously and swung along down the street beside Rudolph to the garage.

They jogged around the track twice, warming up, then broke into a sprint for a hundred yards, then jogged once more, then went fast for the two twenty, then jogged twice around the track and went the four-forty at almost full speed. Quentin was a lanky boy with long, skinny legs and a nice, smooth motion. It was good to have him along, since he pushed Rudolph to run harder than he would have alone. They finished by jogging twice more around the track, and finally, sweating, threw on their overclothes and drove back through the awakening town to their street.

“See you in the morning, Quent,” Rudolph said as he parked the motorcycle along the curb.

“Thanks,” Quentin said. “Tomorrow.”

Rudolph waved and went into the house, liking the boy. They had conquered normal human sloth together on a cold winter’s morning, had tested themselves together against weather, speed, and time. When the summer holidays came, he would find some sort of job for the boy at the store. He was sure Quentin’s family could use the money.

His mother was awake when he came into the apartment. “How is it out?” she called.

“Cold,” he said. “You won’t miss anything if you stay home today.” They continued with the fiction that his mother normally went out every day, just like other women.

He went into the bathroom, took a steaming-hot shower, then stood under an ice-cold stream for a minute and came out tingling. He heard his mother squeezing orange juice and making coffee in the kitchen as he toweled himself off, the sound of her movements like somebody dragging a heavy sack across the kitchen floor. He remembered the long-paced sprinting on the frozen track and thought, if I’m ever like that, I’ll ask somebody to knock me off.

He weighed himself on the bathroom scale. One-sixty. Satisfactory. He despised fat people. At the store, without telling Calderwood his real reasons, he had tried to get rid of clerks who were overweight.

He rubbed some deodorant under his armpits before dressing. It was a long day and the store was always too hot in winter. He dressed in gray-flannel slacks, a soft blue shirt with a dark red tie, and put on a brown-tweed sports jacket, with no padding at the shoulders. For the first year as assistant manager he had dressed in sober, dark business suits, but as he became more important in the company’s hierarchy he had switched to more informal clothes. He was young for his responsibilities and he had to make sure that he didn’t appear pompous. For the same reason he had bought himself a motorcycle. Nobody could say as the assistant manager came roaring up to work, bareheaded, on a motorcycle, in all weathers, that the young man was taking himself too seriously. You had to be careful to keep the envy quotient down as low as possible. He could easily afford a car, but he preferred the motorcycle anyway. It kept his complexion fresh and made him look as though he spent a good deal of his time outdoors. To be tanned, especially in winter, made him feel subtly superior to all the pale, sickly looking people around him. He understood now why Boylan had always used a sun lamp. He himself would never descend to a sun lamp. It was deceitful and cheap, he decided, a form of masculine cosmetics and made you vulnerable to people who knew about sun lamps and saw through the artifice.

He went into the kitchen and kissed his mother good morning. She smiled girlishly. If he forgot to kiss her, there would be a long monologue over the breakfast table about how badly she had slept and how the medicines the doctor prescribed for her were a waste of money. He did not tell his mother how much money he earned or that he could very well afford to move them to a much better apartment. He didn’t plan any entertainment at home and he had other uses for his money.

He sat down at the kitchen table and drank his orange juice and coffee and munched some toast. His mother just drank coffee. Her hair was lank and there were shocking, huge rings of purple sag under her eyes. But with all that, she didn’t seem any worse to him than she had been for the last three years. She would probably live to the age of ninety. He did not begrudge her her longevity. She kept him out of the draft. Sole support of an invalid mother. Last and dearest maternal gift—she had spared him an icebound foxhole in Korea.

“I had a dream last night,” she said. “About your brother, Thomas. He looked the way he looked when he was eight years old. Like a choirboy at Easter. He came into my room and said, Forgive me, forgive me …” She drank her coffee moodily. “I haven’t dreamt about him in forever. Do you ever hear from him?”

“No,” Rudolph said.

“You’re not hiding anything from me, are you?” she asked.

“No. Why would I do that?”

“I would like to see him once more before I die,” she said. “After all he is my own flesh and blood.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “I have a feeling when spring comes, I’m going to feel much better. We can go for walks again.”

“That’s good news,” Rudolph said, finishing his coffee and standing. He kissed her good-bye. “I’ll fix dinner tonight,” he said. “I’ll shop on the way home.”

“Don’t tell me what it’s going to be,” she said co-quettishly, “surprise me.”

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll surprise you.”

The night watchman was still on duty at the employees’ entrance when Rudolph got to the store, carrying the morning papers, which he had bought on the way over.

“Good morning, Sam,” Rudolph said.

“Hi, Rudy,” the night watchman said. Rudolph made a point of having all the old employees, who knew him from his first days at the store, call him by his Christian name.

“You sure are an early bird,” the night watchman said. “When I was your age you couldn’t drag me out of bed on a morning like this.”

That’s why you’re a night watchman at your age, Sam, Rudolph thought, but he merely smiled and went on up to his office, through the dimly lit and sleeping store.

His office was neat and bare, with two desks, one for himself and one for Miss Giles, his secretary, a middle-aged, efficient spinster. There were piles of magazines geometrically stacked on wide shelves, Vogue, French Vogue, Seventeen, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, House and Garden, which he combed for ideas for various departments of the store. The quality of the town was changing rapidly; the new people coming up from the city had money and spent it freely. The natives of the town were more prosperous than they had ever been and were beginning to imitate the tastes of the more sophisticated newer arrivals. Calderwood fought a stubborn rear guard action against the transformation of his store from a solid lower-middle-class establishment to what he called a grab bag of fads and fancy gewgaws, but the balance sheet could not be gainsaid as Rudolph pushed through one innovation after another, and each month it was becoming easier for Rudolph to put his ideas into practice. Calderwood had even agreed, after nearly a year of opposition, to wall off part of what had been an unnecessarily capacious delivery room and turn it into a liquor store, with a line of fine French wines that Rudolph, remembering what Boylan had taught him on the subject through the years, took pleasure in selecting himself.

He hadn’t seen Boylan since the day of the Commencement exercises. He had called twice that summer to ask if Boylan was free for dinner and Boylan had said, “No,” curtly, each time. Every month, Rudolph sent a hundred-dollar check to Boylan, toward repaying the four-thousand-dollar loan. Boylan never cashed the checks, but Rudolph made sure that if at any time Boylan decided to cash them all at once there would be enough money in the account to honor them. Rudolph didn’t think about Boylan often, but when he did, he realized that there was contempt mixed with gratitude he felt for the older man. With all that money, Rudolph thought, all that freedom, Boylan had no right to be as unhappy as he was. It was a symptom of Boylan’s fundamental weakness, and Rudolph, fighting any signs of weakness in himself, had no tolerance for it in anybody else. Willie Abbott and Teddy Boylan, Rudolph thought, there’s a good team.

Rudolph spread the newspapers on his desk. There was the Whitby Record, and the edition of the New York Times that came up on the first train of the morning. The front page of the Times reported heavy fighting along the 38th parallel and new accusations of treason and infiltration by Senator McCarthy in Washington. The Record’s front page reported on a vote for new taxes for the school board (not passed) and on the number of skiers who had made use of the new ski area nearby since the season began. Every city to its own interests.

Rudolph turned to the inside pages of the Record. The half-page two-color advertisement for a new line of wool dresses and sweaters was sloppily done, with the colors bleeding out of register, and Rudolph made a note on his desk pad to call the paper that morning about it.

Then he opened to the Stock Exchange figures in the Times and studied them for fifteen minutes. When he had saved a thousand dollars he had gone to Johnny Heath and asked him, as a favor, to invest it for him. Johnny, who handled some accounts in the millions of dollars, had gravely consented, and worried over Rudolph’s transactions as though Rudolph were one of the most important of his firm’s customers. Rudolph’s holdings were still small, but they were growing steadily. Looking over the Stock Exchange page, he was pleased to see that he was almost three hundred dollars richer this morning, on paper, than he had been the morning before. He breathed a quiet prayer of thanks to his friend Johnny Heath, and turned to the crossword puzzle and got out his pen and started on it. It was one of the pleasantest moments of the day. If he managed to finish the puzzle before nine o’clock, when the store opened, he started the day’s work with a faint sense of triumph.

14 across. Heep. Uriah, he printed neatly.

He was almost finished with the puzzle, when the phone rang. He looked at his watch. The switchboard was at work early, he noted approvingly. He picked up the phone with his left hand. “Yes?” he said, printing ubiquitous in one of the vertical columns.

“Jordache? That you?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Denton, Professor Denton.”

“Oh, how are you, sir?” Rudolph said. He puzzled over Sober in five letters, a the third letter.

“I hate to bother you,” Denton said. His voice sounded peculiar, as though he were whispering and was afraid of being overheard. “But can I see you sometime today?”

“Of course,” Rudolph said. He printed staid along the lowest line of the puzzle. He saw Denton quite often, when he wanted to borrow books on business management and economics at the college. “I’m in the store all day.”

Denton’s voice made a funny, sliding sound in the phone. “I’d prefer it if we could meet somewhere besides the store. Are you free for lunch?”

“I just take forty-five minutes …”

“That’s all right. We’ll make it someplace near you.” Denton sounded gaspy and hurried. In class he was slow and sonorous. “How about Ripley’s? That’s just around the corner from you, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Rudolph said, surprised at Denton’s choice of a restaurant. Ripley’s was more of a saloon than a restaurant and was frequented by workmen with a thirst rather than anybody who was looking for a decent meal. It certainly wasn’t the sort of place you’d think an aging professor of history and economics would seek out. “Is twelve-fifteen all right?”

“I’ll be there, Jordache. Thank you, thank you. It’s most kind of you. Until twelve-fifteen, then,” Denton said, speaking very quickly. “I can’t tell you how I appreciate …” He seemed to hang up in the middle of his last sentence.

Rudolph frowned, wondering what was bothering Denton, then put the phone down. He looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. The doors were open. His secretary came into the office and said, “Good morning, Mr. Jordache.”

“Good morning, Miss Giles,” he said and tossed the Times into the wastebasket, annoyed. Because of Denton he hadn’t finished the puzzle before nine o’clock.

He made his first round of the store for the day, walking slowly, smiling at the clerks, not stopping or seeming to notice when his eye caught something amiss. Later in the morning, back in his office, he would dictate polite memos to the appropriate department head that the neck-ties piled on the counter for a sale were not arranged neatly enough, that Miss Kale, in cosmetics, had on too much eye make-up, that the ventilation in the fountain and tea shop was not sufficient.

He looked with special interest at the departments that had not been there until he had induced Calderwood to put them in—the little boutique, which sold junk jewelry, Italian sweaters, French scarves, and fur hats and did a surprising amount of business; the fountain and tea shop (it was amazing how women never stopped eating all day), which not only showed a solid profit on its own but had become a meeting place for lunch for many of the housewives of the town who then rarely got out of the store without buying something; the ski shop, in a corner of the old sporting goods department, presided over by an athletically built young man named Larsen who dazzled the local girls on the nearby slopes on winter Sundays and who was being criminally underpaid considering how much trade he lured into the shop merely by sliding down a hill once a week. The young man had offered to teach Rudolph how to ski, but Rudolph had declined, with a smile. He couldn’t afford to break a leg, he explained.

The record counter was his idea, too, and that brought in the young trade with their weirdly lavish allowances. Calderwood, who hated noise, and who couldn’t stand the way most young people behaved (his own three daughters, two of them now young ladies and the third a pallid teen-ager, behaved with cowed Victorian decorum), had fought bitterly against the record counter. “I don’t want to run a goddamn honky-tonk,” he had said. “Deprave the youth of America with those barbaric noises that passes for music these days. Leave me in peace, Jordache, leave a poor old-fashioned merchant in peace.”

But Rudolph had produced statistics on how much teen-agers in America spent on records every year and had promised to have soundproof booths put in and Calderwood as usual had capitulated. He often seemed to be irritated with Rudolph, but Rudolph was unfailingly polite and patient with the old man and in most things had learned how to manage him. Privately, Calderwood boasted about his pipsqueak of an assistant manager and how clever he himself had been in picking the boy out of the herd. He had also doubled his salary, with no urging from Rudolph, and had given him a bonus at Christmas of three thousand dollars. “He is not only modernizing the store,” Calderwood had been heard to say, although not in Rudolph’s presence, “the sonofabitch is modernizing me. Well, when it comes down to it, that’s what I hired a young man for.”

Once a month, Rudolph was invited to dinner at the Calderwoods’ house, grim Puritanical affairs, at which the daughters spoke only when spoken to and nothing stronger than apple juice was served. The oldest daughter, Prudence, who was also the prettiest, had asked Rudolph to escort her to several of the country club dances, and Rudolph had done so. Once away from her father, Prudence did not behave with Victorian decorum, but Rudolph carefully kept his hands off her. He was not going to do anything as banal or as dangerous as marrying the boss’s daughter.

He was not marrying anybody. That could come later. Three months ago, he had received an invitation to Julie’s wedding. She was marrying a man called Fitzgerald in New York. He had not gone to the wedding and he had felt the tears come to his eyes when he had composed the telegram of congratulations. He had despised himself for the weakness and had thrown himself more completely into his work and almost managed to forget Julie.

He was wary of all other girls. He could tell as he walked through the store that there were girls who looked at him flirtatiously, who would be delighted to go out with him, Miss Sullivan, raven haired, in the Boutique; Miss Brandywine, tall and lithe, in the Youth Shop; Miss Soames, in the Record Shop, small, blonde, and bosomy, jiggling to the music, smiling demurely as he passed; maybe six or seven others. He was tempted, of course, but he fought the temptation down, and behaved with perfect, impersonal courtesy to everybody. There were no parties at Calderwood’s, so there was no occasion on which, with the excuse of liquor and celebration, any real approach could be made.

The night with Mary Jane in New York and the forlorn telephone call in the deserted lobby of the St. Moritz Hotel had steeled him against the pull of his own desire.

Of one thing he was certain—the next time he asked a girl to marry him, he was going to be damn sure she would say yes.

As he repassed the record counter, he made a mental note to try to get some older woman in the store tactfully to suggest to Miss Soames that perhaps she ought to wear a brassiere under her sweater.

He was going over the drawings for the March window with Bergson, the young man who prepared the displays, when the phone rang.

“Rudy,” it was Calderwood, “can you come down to my office for a minute?” The voice was flat, giving nothing away.

“I’ll be right there, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said. He hung up. “I’m afraid these’ll have to wait a little while,” he said to Bergson. Bergson was a find. He had done the sets for the summer theater in Whitby. Rudolph liked them and had approached him about a job as window designer for Calderwood’s during the winter. Until Bergson had come on the scene the windows had been done haphazardly, with the different departments fighting for space and then doing their own displays without any reference to what was being shown in any window besides their own. Bergson had changed all that. He was a small, sad young man who couldn’t get into the scene designers’ union in New York. He was grateful for the winter’s work and put all his considerable talent into it. Used to working on the cheap for summer-theater productions, he made use of all sorts of unlikely inexpensive materials and did the art work himself.

The plans laid out on Rudolph’s desk were on the theme of spring in the country and Rudolph had already told Bergson that he thought they were going to be the best set of windows Calderwood’s had ever had. Glum as Bergson was, Rudolph enjoyed the hours he spent working with him, as compared with the hours he spent with the heads of departments and the head of Costs and Accounting. In an ideal scheme of things, he thought, he would never have to look at a balance sheet or go through a monthly inventory.

Calderwood’s door was open and Calderwood saw him immediately and said, “Come in, Rudy, and close the door behind you.” The papers that had been in the Manila envelope were spread over Calderwood’s desk.

Rudolph sat down across from the old man and waited.

“Rudy,” Calderwood said mildly, “you’re the most astonishing young man I’ve ever come across.”

Rudolph said nothing.

“Who else has seen all this?” Calderwood waved a hand over the papers on his desk.

“Nobody.”

“Who typed them up? Miss Giles?”

“I did. At home.”

“You think of everything, don’t you?” It was not a reproach, but it wasn’t a compliment, either.

Rudolph kept quiet.

“Who told you I owned thirty acres of land out near the lake?” Calderwood asked flatly.

The land was owned by a corporation with a New York address. It had taken all of Johnny Heath’s cleverness to find out that the real owner of the corporation was Duncan Calderwood. “I’m afraid I can’t say, sir,” Rudolph said.

“Can’t say, can’t say.” Calderwood accepted it, with a touch of impatience. “The feller can’t say. The Silent Generation, like they say in Time magazine. Rudy, I haven’t caught you in a lie since the first day I set eyes on you and I don’t expect you to lie to me now.”

“I won’t lie to you, sir,” Rudolph said.

Calderwood pushed at the papers on his desk. “Is this some sort of a trick to take me over?”

“No, sir,” Rudolph said. “It’s a suggestion as to how you can take advantage of your position and your various assets. To expand with the community and diversify your interests. To profit from the tax laws and at the same time protect your estate for your wife and children when you die.”

“How many pages are there in this?” Calderwood said. “Fifty, sixty?”

“Fifty-three.”

“Some suggestion.” Calderwood snorted. “Did you think this up all by yourself?”

“Yes.” Rudolph didn’t feel he had to tell Calderwood that for months he had been methodically picking Johnny Heath’s brain and that Johnny was responsible for the more involved sections of the overall plan.

“All right, all right,” Calderwood grumbled. “I’ll look into it.”

“If I may make the suggestion, sir,” Rudolph said, “I think you should talk this over with your lawyers in New York and your bankers.”

“What do you know about my lawyers in New York?” Calderwood asked suspiciously.

“Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said, “I’ve been working for you for a long time.”

“Okay. Supposing, after studying this some more, I say Yes and do the whole goddamn thing the way you outline it—go public, float a stock issue, borrow from the banks, build the goddamn shopping center near the lake, with a theater, too, like an idiot, supposing I do all that, what’s in it for you?”

“I would expect to be made chairman of the board, with you as president of the company, at an appropriate salary,” Rudolph said, “and an option to buy a certain amount of stock in the next five years.” Good old Johnny Heath. Don’t niggle. Think big. “I would bring in an assistant to help take over here when I’m otherwise occupied.” He had already written Brad Knight in Oklahoma about the job.

“You’ve got everything figured out, haven’t you, Rudy?” Now Calderwood was frankly hostile.

“I’ve been working on this plan for more than a year,” Rudolph said mildly. “I’ve tried to face all the problems.”

“And if I just say no,” Calderwood said, if I just put all this pile of papers in a file and forget it, then what would you do?”

“I’m afraid I’d have to tell you I’m leaving at the end of the year, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said. “I’m afraid I’d have to look for something with more of a future for me.”

“I got along without you for a long time,” Calderwood said. “I could get along without you now.”

“Of course you could,” Rudolph said.

Calderwood looked down morosely at his desk, flicked out a sheet of paper from a pile, glared at it with especial distaste.

“A theater,” he said angrily. “We already have a theater in town.”

“They’re tearing it down next year,” Rudolph said.

“You sure do your homework, don’t you?” Calderwood said. “They’re not going to announce it until July.”

“Somebody always talks,” Rudolph said.

“So it seems. And somebody always listens, don’t they, Rudy?”

“Yes, sir.” Rudolph smiled.

Finally, Calderwood smiled, too. “What makes Rudy run, eh?” he said.

“That’s not my style, at all,” Rudolph said evenly. “You know that.”

“Yes, I do,” Calderwood admitted. “I’m sorry I said it. All right. Get back to work. You’ll be hearing from me.”

He was staring down at the papers on his desk as Rudolph left his office. Rudolph walked slowly among the counters, looking youthful and smiling benevolently as usual.

The plan that he had submitted to Calderwood was a complicated one and he had argued every point closely. The community was growing in the direction of the lake. What was more, the neighboring town of Cedarton, about ten miles away, was linked with Whitby by a new highway and was also growing in the direction of the lake. Suburban shopping centers were springing up all over America and people were becoming accustomed to doing the greater part of their shopping, for all sorts of things, in them. Calderwood’s thirty acres were strategically placed for a market to siphon off trade from both towns and from the upper-middle-class homes that dotted the borders of the lake. If Calderwood didn’t make the move himself, somebody or some corporation would undoubtedly seize the opportunity in the next year or two and besides profiting from the new trade would cut drastically into Calderwood’s volume of business in the Whitby store. Rather than allow a competitor to undermine him, it was to Calderwood’s advantage to compete, even partially, with himself.

In his plans Rudolph had argued for a place for a good restaurant, as well as the theater, to attract trade in the evenings as well. The theater, used for plays during the summer, could be turned into a movie house for the rest of the year. He also proposed building a middle-priced housing development along the lake, and suggested that the marshy and up to now unusable land at one end of Calderwood’s holdings could be used for light industry.

Coached by Johnny Heath, Rudolph had meticulously outlined all the benefits the law allowed on enterprises of this kind.

He was sure that his arguments for making a public company out of the new Calderwood Association were bound to sway the old man. The real assets and the earning power, first of the store and then of the center, would insure a high price of issue for the stock. When Calderwood died, his heirs, his wife and three daughters, would not be faced with the possibility of having to sell the business itself at emergency prices to pay the inheritance taxes, but could sell off blocks of stock while holding onto the controlling interest in the corporation.

In the year that Rudolph had been working on the plan and digging into corporation and tax and realty laws, he had been cynically amused by the manner in which money protected itself legally in the American system. He had no moral feeling about trying to turn the law to his own advantage. The game had rules. You learned the rules and abided by them. If there were another set of rules you would abide by them.

Professor Denton was waiting for him, at the bar, uncomfortable and out of place among other patrons, none of whom looked as though he had ever been near a college.

“Good of you,” Denton said, in a low, hurried voice, “good of you to come, Jordache. I’m drinking bourbon. Can I order you something?”

“I don’t drink during the day,” Rudolph said, then was sorry he said it, because it sounded disapproving of Denton, who was drinking at a quarter past noon.

“Quite right,” Denton said, “quite right. Keep the head clear. Ordinarily, I wait until the day’s work is over myself, but …” He took Rudolph’s arm. “Perhaps we can sit down.” He waved toward the last booth of the row that lined the wall opposite the bar. “I know you have to get back.” He left some change on the bar for his drink, carefully counting it out, and still with his hand holding Rudolph’s arm, guided him to the booth. They sat down facing each other. There were two greasy menus on the table and they studied them.

“I’ll take the soup and the hamburger,” Denton said to the waitress. “And a cup of coffee. How about you, Jordache?”

“The same,” Rudolph said.

The waitress wrote the order down laboriously on her pad, illiteracy a family heritage. She was a woman of about sixty, gray haired and shapeless in an incongruously pert, revealing orange uniform with a coquettish, small, lace apron, age paying its iron debt to the ideal of youthful America. Her ankles were swollen and she shuffled flatly as she went back toward the kitchen. Rudolph thought of his mother, of her dream of the neat little candlelit restaurant that had never materialized. Well, she had been spared the orange uniform.

“You’re doing well, Jordache,” Denton said, hunched over the table, his eyes worried and magnified behind the thick, steel-rimmed glasses. He waved his hand impatiently, to ward off any contradiction. “I hear, I hear,” he said. “I get reports from many sources. Mrs. Denton, for one. Faithful customer. She must be in the store three times a week. You must see her from time to time.”

“I ran into her only last week,” Rudolph said.

“She tells me the store is booming, booming, a new lease on life, she says. Very big-city. All sorts of new things. Well, people like to buy things. And everybody seems to have money these days. Except college professors.” Indigence creased Denton’s forehead briefly. “No matter. I didn’t come here to complain. No doubt about it, Jordache, you did well to turn down the job in the department. The academic world,” he said bitterly. “Rife with jealousy, cabals, treachery, ingratitude, a man has to walk as if on eggs. Better the world of business. Give and take. Dog eat dog. Frankly. On the up and up.”

“It isn’t exactly like that,” Rudolph said mildly. “Business.”

“No, of course not,” Denton said. “Everything is modified by character. It doesn’t pay to ride a theory too hard, you lose sight of the reality, the living shape. At any rate, I’m gratified at your success, and I’m sure that there was no compromise of principle involved, none whatsoever.”

The waitress appeared with their soup. Denton spooned it in. “Yes,” he said, “if I had it to do all over again, I’d avoid the ivy-covered walls like the plague. It has made me what you see today, a narrow man, an embittered man, a failure, a coward …”

“I wouldn’t call you any of those things,” Rudolph said, surprised at Denton’s description of himself. Denton had always seemed to Rudolph to be pleased with himself, enjoying acting out his visions of economic villainy before a captive audience of young people.

“I live in fear and trembling,” Denton said through the soup. “Fear and trembling.”

“If I can help you in any way,” Rudolph began. “I’d …”

“You’re a good soul, Jordache, a good soul,” Denton said. “I picked you out immediately. Serious among the frivolous. Compassionate among the pitiless. On the search for knowledge where others were merely searching for advancement. Oh, I’ve watched you carefully through the years, Jordache. You’re going to go far. Mark my words. I have been teaching young men for over twenty years, thousands of young men, they have no secrets from me, their future has no mysteries for me. Mark my words, Jordache.”

Denton finished his soup and the waitress came and put down their hamburger steaks and coffee.

“And you won’t do it by riding roughshod over your fellow men,” Denton went on, darting at his hamburger with his fork. “I know your mind, I know your character, I observed you through the years. You have a code, a sense of honor, a fastidiousness of mind and body. These eyes don’t miss much, Jordache, in class or out.”

Rudolph ate silently, waiting for the spate of approval to die down, knowing that Denton must have a great favor to ask to be so effusive before making his demand.

“Before the war,” Denton went on, chewing, “there were more young men of your mold, clear seeing, dependable, honorable. Most of them are dead now, killed in places whose names we have almost forgotten. This generation—” he shrugged despairingly. “Crafty, careful, looking to get something for nothing, hypocritical. You’d be astounded at the amount of cheating I find in each examination, term papers. Ah, if I had the money, I’d get away from it all, live on an island.” He looked nervously at his watch. “Time, ever on the wing,” he said. He peered around the dark bar conspiratorially. The booth next to theirs was empty and the four or five men hunched over the bar near the doorway were well out of earshot. “Might as well get to the nub of it.” Denton dropped his voice and leaned forward over the table. “I’m in trouble, Jordache.”

He’s going to ask me for the name of an abortionist, Rudolph thought wildly. Love on the Campus. He saw the headlines. History Professor Makes History by Moonlight with Coed. Doctor in Jail. Rudolph tried to keep his face noncommittal and went on eating. The hamburger was gray and soggy and the potatoes were oily.

“You heard what I said?” Denton whispered.

“You’re in trouble, you said.”

“Exactly.” There was a professorial tone of approval—the student had been paying attention. “Bad trouble.” Denton sipped at his coffee, Socrates and hemlock. “They’re out to get me.”

“Who’s out to get you?”

“My enemies.” Denton’s eyes scanned the bar, searching out enemies, disguised as workmen drinking beer.

“When I was in school,” Rudolph said, “you seemed to be well liked everywhere.”

“There are currents, currents,” Denton said, “eddies and whirlpools that the undergraduate never has an inkling of. In the faculty rooms, in the offices of power. In the office of the President himself. I am too outspoken, it is a failing of mine. I am naive, I have believed in the myth of academic freedom. My enemies have bided their time. The vice-chairman of the department, I should have fired him years ago, a hopeless scholar; I restrained myself only out of pity, lamentable weakness. As I said, the vice-chairman, yearning for my job, has prepared a dossier, scraps of gossip over a drink, lines out of context, insinuations. They are preparing to offer me up as a sacrifice, Jordache.”

“I think you’d better tell me specifically what’s happening,” Rudolph said. “Then perhaps I’d be able to judge if I could help.”

“Oh, you could help, all right, no doubt about that.” Denton pushed the half-eaten hamburger away from him. “They have found their witch,” he said. “Me.”

“I don’t quite understand …”

“The witch hunt,” Denton said. “You read the papers like everybody else. Throw the Reds out of our schools.”

Rudolph laughed. “You’re no Red, Professor, you know that,” he said.

“Keep your voice low, boy.” Denton looked around worriedly. “One does not broadcast on this subject.”

“I’m sure you have nothing to worry about, Professor,” Rudolph said. He decided to make it seem like a joke. “I was afraid it was something serious. I thought maybe you’d got a girl pregnant.”

“You can laugh,” Denton said. “At your age. Nobody laughs in a college or a university anymore. The wildest charges. A five-dollar contribution to an obscure charity in 1938, a reference to Karl Marx in a class, for God’s sake, how is a man to teach the economic theories of the nineteenth century without mentioning Karl Marx! An ironic joke about prevalent economic practices, picked up by some stone-age moron in a class in American History and repeated to the moron’s father, who is the Commander of the local American Legion Post. Ah, you don’t know, boy, you don’t know. And Whitby gets a yearly grant from the State. For the School of Agriculture. So some wind-bag of an upstate legislator makes a speech, forms a committee, demands an investigation, gets his name in the newspaper. Patriot, Defender of the Faith. A special board has been set up within the university, Jordache, don’t mention it to a soul, headed by the President, to investigate charges against various members of the faculty. They hope to head off the State, throw them a few bodies, mine chief among them, not imperil the grant from the State. Does the picture grow clearer, Jordache?”

“Oh, Christ,” Rudolph said.

“Exactly. Oh, Christ. I don’t know what your politics are …”

“I don’t have any politics,” Rudolph said. “I vote independently.”

“Excellent, excellent,” Denton said. “Although it would have been better if you were a registered Republican. And to think that I voted for Eisenhower.” He laughed hollowly. “My son was in Korea and he promised to end the war. But how to prove it. There is much to be said for public balloting.”

“What do you want me to do, Professor?” Rudolph asked. “Specifically?”

“Now we come to it,” Denton said. He finished his coffee. “The board meets to consider my case one week from today. Tuesday at two P.M. Mark the hour. I have only been allowed to see a general outline of the charges against me; contributions to Communist front organizations in the thirties, atheistic and radical utterances in the classroom, the recommendation of certain books for outside reading of a doubtful character. The usual academic hatchet job, Jordache, all too usual. With the temper of the country what it is, with that man Dulles roaring up and down the world, preaching nuclear destruction, with the most eminent men traduced and dismissed like errand boys in Washington, a poor teacher can be ruined by a whisper, the merest whisper. Luckily, they still have a sense of shame at the university, although I doubt it will last the year, and I am to have a chance to defend myself, bring in witnesses to vouch for me …”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Whatever you will, boy,” Denton said, his voice broken. “I do not plan to coach you. Say what you think of me. You were in three of my classes, we had many instructive hours outside the courses, you have been to my house. You’re a clever young man, you are not to be fooled. You know me as well as any man in this town. Say what you will. Your reputation is high, your record at the university was impeccable, not a blot on it, you are a rising young businessman, untainted, your testimony will be of the utmost value.”

“Of course,” Rudolph said. Premonitions of trouble. Attacks. Calderwood’s attitude. Dragging the store into politics on the Communist issue. “Of course I’ll testify,” he said. This is the wrong day for something like this, he thought annoyedly. He suddenly and for the first time understood the exquisite pleasure that cowards must enjoy.

“I knew you would say that, Jordache.” Denton gripped his hand emotionally across the table. “You’d be surprised at the refusals I’ve had from men who have been my friends for twenty years, the hedging, the pusillanimity. This country is becoming a haunt of whipped dogs, Jordache. Do you wish me to swear to you that I have never been a Communist?”

“Don’t be absurd, Professor,” Rudolph said. He looked at his watch. “I’m afraid I’ve got to get back to the store. When the board meets next Tuesday I’ll be there.” He dug into his pocket for his money clip. “Let me pay my share.”

Denton stopped him with a gesture. “I invited you. You’re my guest. Go ahead, boy, go ahead. I won’t keep you.” He stood up, looked around for a last time to see if anybody was making a point of watching them, then, satisfied, put out his hand and shook Rudolph’s hand fervently.

Rudolph got his coat and went out of the bar. Through the fogged window he saw Denton stop and order a drink at the bar.

Rudolph walked slowly back toward the store, leaving his coat open, although the wind was keen and the day raw. The street looked as it always looked and the people passing him did not seem like whipped dogs. Poor Denton. He remembered that it was in Denton’s classes that he had been given the first glimmerings of how to make himself successfully into a capitalist. He laughed to himself. Denton, poor bastard, could not afford to laugh.

He was still hungry after the disastrous meal, and once in the store, he went to the fountain in the basement and ordered a malted milk and drank it among the soprano twitterings of the lady shoppers all around him. Their world was safe. They would buy dresses at fifty dollars that afternoon, and portable radios and television consoles and frying pans and living room suites and creams for the skin and the profits would mount and they were happy over their club sandwiches and ice cream sodas.

He looked over the calm, devouring, rouged, spending, acquiring faces, mothers, brides, virgins, spinsters, mistresses, listened to the voices, breathed in the jumbled bouquet of perfumes, congratulated himself that he was not married and loved no one. He thought, I cannot spend my life serving these worthy women, paid for his malted milk, and went up to his office.

On his desk, there was a letter. It was a short one. “I hope you’re coming to New York soon. I’m in a mess and I have to talk to you. Love, Gretchen.”

He threw the letter in the wastebasket and said, “Oh, Christ,” for the second time in an hour.

It was raining when he left the store at six-fifteen. Calderwood hadn’t said a word since their talk in the morning. That’s all I needed today, rain, he thought miserably, as he made his way through the streaming traffic on the motorcycle. He was almost home when he remembered that he had promised his mother that he would do the shopping for dinner. He cursed and turned the machine back toward the business section, where the stores remained open until seven. A surprise, he remembered his mother saying. Your loving son may be out on his ass in two weeks, Mother, will that be surprise enough?

He did his shopping hastily, a small chicken, potatoes, a can of peas, half an apple pie for dessert. As he pushed his way through the lines of housewives he remembered the interview with Calderwood and grinned sourly. The boy wonder financier, surrounded by admiring beauties, on his way to one of his usual elegantly prepared repasts at the family mansion, so often photographed for Life and House and Garden. At the last minute, he bought a bottle of Scotch. This was going to be a night for whiskey.

He went to bed early, a little drunk, thinking, just before he dropped off to sleep. The only satisfactory thing I did all day was run this morning with Quentin McGovern.

The week was routine. When he saw Calderwood at the store, Calderwood made no mention of Rudolph’s proposition, but spoke to him of the ordinary business of the store in his usual slightly rasping and irritable tone. There was no hint either in his manner or in what he said of any ultimate decision.

Rudolph had called Gretchen on the phone in New York (from a pay station—Calderwood did not take kindly to private calls on the store’s phones) and Gretchen had sounded disappointed when he told her he couldn’t get down to the city that week, but would try the following weekend. She had refused to tell him what the trouble was. It could wait, she said. If it could wait, he thought, it couldn’t be so bad.

Denton didn’t call again. Perhaps he was afraid that if given a chance at further conversation Rudolph would withdraw his offer to speak in his behalf before the board next Tuesday afternoon. Rudolph found himself worrying about his appearance before the board. There was always the chance that some evidence would be produced against Denton that Denton didn’t know about or had hidden that would make Rudolph seem like a confederate or a liar or a dupe. What worried him more, though, was that the board was bound to be hostile, prepared to do away with Denton, and antagonistic to anyone who stood in the way. All his life Rudolph had attempted to get people, especially older people in authority, to like him. The thought of facing a whole room full of disapproving academic faces disturbed him.

Throughout the week he found himself making silent speeches to those imagined, unrelenting faces, speeches in which he defended Denton honorably and well while at the same time charming his judges. None of the speeches he composed seemed, in the end, worthwhile. He would have to go into the board as relaxed as possible, gauge the temper of the room and extemporaneously do the best he could for both Denton and himself. If Calderwood knew what he intended to do …

By the weekend he was sleeping badly, his dreams lascivious but unsatisfactory, images of Julie dancing naked before a body of water, Gretchen stretched out in a canoe, Mary Jane opening her legs in bed, then sitting up, her breasts bare, her face contorted, accusing him. A ship pulled away from a pier, a girl, her skirts blowing in the wind, smiled at him as he ran desperately down the pier to catch the ship, he was held back by unseen hands, the ship pulled away, open water …

Sunday morning, with church bells ringing, he decided he couldn’t stay in the house all day, although he had planned to go over a copy of the papers he had given Calderwood and make some corrections and additions that had occurred to him during the week. But his mother was at her worst on Sundays. The bells made her mournful about her lost religion and she was apt to say that if only Rudolph would go with her, she would attend Mass, confess, take Communion. “The fires of hell are waiting for me,” she said over breakfast, “and the church and salvation are only three blocks away.”

“Some other Sunday, Mom,” Rudolph said. “I’m busy today.”

“I may be dead and in hell by some other Sunday,” she said.

“We’ll just have to take that chance,” he said, getting up from the table. He left her weeping.

It was a cold, clear day, the sun a bright wafer in the pale winter sky. He dressed warmly, in a fleece-lined surplus Air Force jacket, a knitted wool cap, and goggles, and took the motorcycle out of the garage. He hesitated about which direction to take. There was nobody he wanted to see that day, no destination that seemed promising. Leisure, the burden of modern man.

He got on the motorcycle, started it, hesitated. A car with skis on its roof sped down the street, and he thought, why not, that’s as good a place as any, and followed, the car. He remembered that Larsen, the young man in the ski department, had told him that there was a barn near the bottom of the tow that could be converted into a shop for renting skis on the weekend. Larsen had said that there was a lot of money to be made there. Rudolph felt better as he followed the car with ski rack. He was no longer aimless.

He was nearly frozen when he got to the slope. The sun, reflected off the snow, dazzled him and he squinted at the brightly colored figures swooping toward him down the hill. Everybody seemed young, vigorous, and having a good time, and the girls, tight pants over trim hips and round buttocks, made lust a healthy outdoor emotion for a Sunday morning.

He watched, enjoying the spectacle for awhile, then became melancholy. He felt lonely and deprived. He was about to turn away and get his machine and go back to town, when Larsen came skimming down off the hill and made a dashing, abrupt stop in front of him, in a cloud of snow.

“Hi, Mr. Jordache,” Larsen said. He had two rows of great shining white teeth and he smiled widely. Behind him two girls who had been following him came to a halt.

“Hello, Larsen,” Rudolph said. “I came out to see that barn you told me about.”

“Sure thing,” Larsen said. Supple, in one easy movement, he bent over to free himself from his skis. He was bare headed and his longish, fine, blond hair fell over his eyes as he bent over. Looking at him, in his red sweater, with the two girls behind him, Rudolph was sure that Larsen hadn’t dreamt about any boat pulling away from a pier the night before.

“Hello, Mr. Jordache,” one of the girls said. “I didn’t know you were a skier.”

He peered at her and she laughed. She was wearing big green-tinted snow goggles that covered most of her small face. She pushed the goggles up over her red-and-blue woolen hat. “I’m in disguise,” she said.

Now Rudolph recognized her. It was Miss Soames, from the Record Department. Jiggling, plump, blonde, fed by music.

“Good morning, good morning,” Rudolph said, somehow flustered, noticing how small Miss Soames’s waist was, and how well rounded her thighs and hips. “No, I’m not a skier. I’m a voyeur.”

Miss Soames laughed. “There’s plenty to voyeur about up here, isn’t there?”

“Mr. Jordache …” Larsen was out of his skis by now, “may I present my fiancée? Miss Packard.”

Miss Packard took off her goggles, too, and revealed herself to be as pretty as Miss Soames, and about the same age. “Pleasure,” she said. Fiancée. People were still marrying.

“Be back in a half hour or so, girls,” Larsen said. “Mr. Jordache and I have some business to transact.” He stuck his skis and poles upright in the snow, as the girls, with a wave of their hands, skied off to the bottom of the lift.

“They look like awfully good skiers,” Rudolph said as he walked at Larsen’s side back toward the road.

“Mediocre,” Larsen said carelessly. “But they have other charms.” He laughed, showing the magnificent teeth in the brown face. He made sixty-five dollars a week, Rudolph knew. How could he be so happy on a Sunday morning on sixty-five dollars a week?”

The barn was about two hundred yards away, and on the road, a big, solid structure, protected from the weather. “All you’d need,” Larsen said, “is a big iron stove and you’d be plenty warm. I bet you could rent a thousand pairs of skis and two to three hundred pairs of boots out of this place a weekend, and then there’re the Christmas and Easter vacations and other holidays. And you could get two college boys to run it for beans. It could be a gold mine. If we don’t do it, somebody else sure as hell will. This is only the second year for this area, but it’s catching on and somebody’s bound to see the opportunity.”

Rudolph recognized the argument, so much like the one he had used that week on Calderwood, and smiled. In business you sometimes were the pusher and sometimes the pushee. I’m a Sunday pushee, he thought. If we do it, I’ll get Larsen a good hike in salary.

“Who owns this place?” Rudolph asked.

“Dunno,” Larsen said. “It’s easy enough to find out.”

Poor Larsen, Rudolph thought, not made for business. If it had been my idea, I would have had an option to buy it before I said a word to anyone. “There’s a job for you, Larsen,” Rudolph said. “Find out who owns the barn, whether he’ll rent it and for how much, or sell it and for how much. And don’t mention the store. Say you’re thinking of swinging it yourself.”

“I get it, I get it,” Larsen said, nodding seriously. “Keep ’em from asking too much.”

“We can try,” Rudolph said. “Let’s get out of here. I’m freezing. Is there a place to get a cup of coffee near here?”

“It’s just about time for lunch. There’s a place a mile down the road that’s not bad. Why don’t you join me and the girls for lunch, Mr. Jordache?”

Automatically, Rudolph almost said no. He had never been seen outside the store with any of the employees, except once in awhile with one of the buyers or a head of a department. Then he shivered. He was awfully cold. He had to go in someplace. Dancy, dainty Miss Soames. What harm could it do? “Thanks, Larsen,” he said. “I’d like that very much.”

They walked back toward the ski tow. Larsen had a plowing, direct, uncomplicated kind of walk, in his heavy ski boots with their rubber bottoms. The soles of Rudolph’s shoes were of leather and the way was icy and Rudolph had to walk delicately, almost mincingly, to keep from slipping. He hoped the girls weren’t watching him.

The girls were waiting, their skis off, and Miss Soames was saying, “We’re starrrving. Who’s going to nourish the orphans?” even before Larsen had a chance to say anything.

“Okay, okay, girls,” Larsen said commandingly, “we’re going to feed you. Stop wailing.”

“Oh, Mr. Jordache,” Miss Soames said, “are you going to dine with us? What an honor.” She dropped her lashes demurely over freckles, the mockery plain.

“I had an early breakfast,” Rudolph said. Clumsy, he thought bitterly. “I could stand some food and drink.” He turned to Larsen. “I’ll follow you on the machine.”

“Is that beautiful thing yours, Mr. Jordache?” Miss Soames waved toward where the motorcycle was parked.

“Yes,” Rudolph said.

“I yearn for a ride,” Miss Soames said. She had a gushy, cut-up manner of talking, as though confidences were being unwillingly forced from her. “Do you think you could find it in your heart to let me hang on?”

“It’s pretty cold,” Rudolph said stiffly.

“I have two pairs of long woolen underwear on,” Miss Soames said. “I guarantee I’ll be toasty. Benny,” she said to Larsen, as though the matter were settled, “put my skis on your car, like a pal. I’m going with Mr. Jordache.”

There was nothing Rudolph could do about it and he led the way to the machine while Larsen fixed the three pairs of skis on the rack on a brand-new Ford. How does he do it on sixty-five dollars a week? Rudolph thought. For an unworthy moment he wondered if Larsen was honest with his accounts at the ski shop.

Rudolph got onto the motorcycle and Miss Soames swung lightly on behind him, putting her hands around his waist and holding on firmly. Rudolph adjusted his goggles and followed Larsen’s Ford out of the parking lot. Larsen drove fast and Rudolph had to put on speed to keep up with him. It was much colder than before, and the wind cut at his face, but Miss Soames, holding on tighter than ever, shouted in his ear, “Isn’t this bliss?”

The restaurant was large and clean and noisy with skiers. They found a table near a window and Rudolph took off his Air Force jacket while the others stripped themselves of their parkas. Miss Soames was wearing a pale-blue cashmere sweater, delicately shaped over her small, full breasts. Rudolph was wearing a sweater over a wool shirt, and a silk scarf, carefully arranged around his throat. Too fancy, he thought, memories of Teddy Boylan, and took it off, pretending it was warm in the restaurant.

The girls ordered Cokes and Larsen a beer. Rudolph felt he needed something more convincing and ordered an old-fashioned. When the drinks came, Miss Soames raised her glass and made a toast, clinking her glass against Rudolph’s. “To Sunday,” she said, “without which we’d all just die.” She was sitting next to Rudolph on the banquette and he could feel the steady pressure of her knee against his. He pulled his knee away, slowly, so as to make it seem merely a natural movement, but the girl’s eyes, clear and cold blue, were amused and knowing over the rim of her glass as she looked at him.

They all ordered steaks. Miss Soames asked for a dime for the juke box and Larsen was faster out of his pocket than Rudolph. She took the dime from him and climbed over Rudolph to go to the machine, getting leverage by putting her hand on his shoulder, and walking across the room, her tight, lush bottom swinging and graceful, despite the clumsy boots on her feet.

The music blared out and Miss Soames came back to the table, doing little, playful dance steps as she crossed the floor. This time, as she climbed over Rudolph to her place, there was no doubt about what she was doing, and when she sat down, she was closer than before and the pressure of her knee was unmistakable against his. If he tried to move away now, everybody would notice, so he remained as he was.

He wanted wine with his steak, but hesitated to order a bottle because he was afraid the others might think he was showing off or being superior. He looked at the menu. On the back were listed a California red and a California white. “Would anybody like some wine?” he asked, putting the decision elsewhere.

“I would,” Miss Soames said.

“Honey …?” Larsen turned to Miss Packard.

“If everybody else does …” she said, being agreeable.

By the time the meal was over they had drunk three bottles of red wine among them. Larsen had drunk the most, but the others had done their fair share.

“What a story I’ll have to tell the girls tomorrow at the store,” Miss Soames, flushed rosy now, was saying, her knee and thigh rubbing cosily against Rudolph’s. “I have been led astray on a Sunday by the great, unapproachable Mr. Frigidaire himself …”

“Oh, come on now, Betsy,” Larsen said uneasily, glancing at Rudolph to see how he had taken the Mr. Frigidaire. “Watch what you’re saying.”

Miss Soames ignored him, sweeping her blonde hair loosely back from her forehead, with a little, plump, cushiony hand. “With his big-city ways and his dirty California wine, the Crown Prince lured me on to drunkenness and loose behavior in public. Oh, he’s a sly one, our Mr. Jordache.” She put a finger up to the corner of her eye and winked. “When you look at him you’d think he could cool a case of beer with one glance of his eyes. But come Sunday, aha, out comes the real Mr. Jordache. The corks pop, the wine flows, he drinks with the help, he laughs at Ben Larsen’s corny old jokes, he plays footsy with the poor little shopgirls from the ground floor. My God, Mr. Jordache, you have bony knees.”

Rudolph couldn’t help laughing, and the others laughed with him. “Well, you don’t, Miss Soames,” he said. “I’m prepared to swear to that.”

They all laughed again.

“Mr. Jordache, the daredevil motorcycle rider, the Wall of Death, sees all, knows all, feels all,” Miss Soames said. “Oh, Christ, I can’t keep on calling you Mr. Jordache. Can I call you Young Master? Or will you settle for Rudy?”

“Rudy,” he said. If there had been nobody else there, he would have grabbed her, kissed that flushed small tempting face, the glistening, half mocking, half inviting lips.

“Rudy, it is,” she said. “Call him Rudy, Sonia.”

“Hello, Rudy,” Miss Packard said. It didn’t mean anything to her. She didn’t work at the store.

“Benny,” Miss Soames commanded.

Larsen looked beseechingly at Rudolph. “She’s loaded,” he began.

“Don’t be silly, Benny,” Rudolph said.

“Rudy,” Larsen said reluctantly.

“Rudy, the mystery man,” Miss Soames went on, sipping at her wineglass. “They lock him away at closing time. Nobody sees him except at work, no man, no woman, no child. Especially no woman. There are twenty girls on the ground floor alone who weep into their pillows nightly for him, to say nothing of the ladies in the other departments, and he passes them by with a cold, heartless smile.”

“Where the hell did you learn to talk like that?” Rudolph asked, embarrassed, amused, and, at the same time, flattered.

“She’s bookish,” Miss Packard said. “She reads a book a day.”

Miss Soames ignored her. “He is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, as Mr. Churchill said on another occasion. He has been reported running at dawn followed by a young colored boy. What is he running from? What message does the colored boy have for him? He is reported as having been seen in New York, in low neighborhoods. What sins does he commit in the big city? Why doesn’t he commit his sins locally?”

“Betsy,” Larsen said weakly. “Let’s go skiing.”

“Tune in on this same station next Sunday and perhaps all these questions will be answered,” Miss Soames said. “You may now kiss my hand.” She held out her hand, the wrist arched, and Rudolph kissed it, blushing a little.

“I’ve got to get back to town,” he said. The check was on the table and he put down some bills. With tip, it came to fifteen dollars:

When they went outside, a light snow was falling. The mountain was bleak and dangerous looking, its outlines only suggested in the light swirl of snow.

“Thanks for the lunch, Mr. Jordache,” Larsen said. One Rudy a week was enough for him. “It was great.”

“I really enjoyed it, Mr. Jordache,” Miss Packard said, practicing to be Larsen’s wife. “I mean I really did.”

“Come on, Betsy,” Larsen said, “let’s hit the slope, work off some of that wine.”

“I am returning to town with my good and old friend, Rudy, on his death-defying machine,” Miss Soames said. “Aren’t I, Rudy?”

“It’s an awfully cold ride,” Rudolph said. She looked small and crushable in her parka, with her oversized goggles incongruously strapped onto her ski cap. Her head, especially with the goggles, seemed very large, a weighty frame for the small, wicked face.

“I will ski no more today,” Miss Soames said grandly. “I am in the mood for other sports.” She went over to the motorcycle. “Let us mount,” she said.

“You don’t have to take her if you don’t want to,” Larsen said anxiously, responsible.

“Oh, let her come,” Rudolph said. “I’ll go slow and make sure she doesn’t fall off.”

“She’s a funny girl,” Larsen said, still worried. “She doesn’t know how to drink. But she doesn’t mean any harm.”

“She hasn’t done any harm, Benny.” Rudolph patted Larsen’s thick, sweatered shoulder. “Don’t worry. And see what you can find out about that barn.” Back in the safe world of business.

“Sure thing, Mr. Jordache,” Larsen said. He and Miss Packard waved as Rudolph gunned the motorcycle out of the restaurant parking lot, with Miss Soames clinging on behind him, her arms around his waist.

The snow wasn’t thick, but it was enough to make him drive carefully. Miss Soames’s arms around him were surprisingly strong for a girl so lightly made, and while she had drunk enough wine to make her tongue loose, it hadn’t affected her balance and she leaned easily with him as they swept around curves in the road. She sang from time to time, the songs that she heard all day in the record department, but with the wind howling past, Rudolph could only hear little snatches, a phrase of melody in a faraway voice. She sounded like a child singing fitfully to herself in a distant room.

He enjoyed the ride. The whole day, in fact. He was glad his mother’s talk about church had driven him out of the house.

At the outskirts of Whitby, as they were passing the university, he slowed down, to ask Miss Soames where she lived. It wasn’t far from the campus and he zoomed down the familiar streets. It was still fairly early in the afternoon, but the clouds overhead were black and there were lights to be seen in the windows of the houses they passed. He had to slow down at a stop sign and as he did so, he felt Miss Soames’s hand slide down from his waist, where she had been holding on, to his crotch. She stroked him there softly and he could hear her laughing in his ear.

“No disturbing the driver,” he said. “State law.”

But she only laughed and kept on doing what she had been doing.

They passed an elderly man walking a dog and Rudolph was sure the old man looked startled. He gunned the machine and it had some effect. Miss Soames just held on to the place she had been caressing.

He came to the address she had given him. It was an old, one-family clapboard house set on a yellowed lawn. There were no lights on in the house.

“Home,” Miss Soames said. She jumped off the pillion. “That was a nice ride, Rudy. Especially the last two minutes.” She took off her goggles and hat and put her head to one side, letting her hair swing loose over her shoulders. “Want to come inside?” she asked. “There’s nobody home. My mother and father are out visiting and my brother’s at the movies. We can go on to the next chapter.”

He hesitated, looked at the house, guessed what it was like inside. Papa and Mama off on a visit but likely to return early. Brother perhaps bored with the movie and coming rattling in an hour earlier than expected. Miss Soames stood before him, one hand on her hip, smiling, swinging her goggles and ski cap in the other.

“Well?” she asked.

“Some other time, perhaps,” he said.

“Scaredy-cat,” she said, and giggled. Then she ran up the front walk toward the house. At the door she turned and stuck out her tongue at him. The dark building engulfed her.

Thoughtfully, he started the motorcycle and drove slowly toward the center of the town along the darkening streets. He didn’t want to go home, so he parked the machine and went into a movie. He hardly saw the movie and would not have been able to tell what it was about when he got out.

He kept thinking about Miss Soames. Silly, cheap little girl, teasing, teasing, making fun of him. He didn’t like the idea of seeing her in the store next morning. If it were possible he would have had her fired. But she would go to the union and complain and he would have to explain the grounds on which he had had her fired. “She called me Mr. Frigidaire, then she called me Rudy and finally she held my cock on a public thoroughfare.”

He gave up the idea of firing Miss Soames. One thing it all proved—he had been right all along in having nothing to do with anybody from the store.

He had dinner alone in a restaurant and drank a whole bottle of wine by himself and nearly hit a lamp post on the way home.

He slept badly and he groaned at a quarter to seven Monday morning, when he knew he had to get up and run with Quentin McGovern. But he got up and he ran.

When he made his morning round of the store he was careful to avoid going near the record counter. He waved to Larsen in the ski shop and Larsen, red sweatered, said, “Good morning, Mr. Jordache,” as though they had not shared Sunday together.

Calderwood called him into his office in the afternoon. “All right, Rudy,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about your ideas and I’ve talked them over with some people down in New York. We’re going down there tomorrow, we have a date at my lawyer’s office in Wall Street at two o’clock. They want to ask you some questions. We’ll take the 11:05 train down. I’m not promising anything, but the first time around, my people seem to think you got something there.” Calderwood peered at him. “You don’t seem particularly happy, Rudy,” he said accusingly.

“Oh, I’m pleased, sir. Very pleased.” He managed to smile. Two o’clock Tuesday, he was thinking, I promised Denton I’d go before the board two o’clock Tuesday. “It’s very good news, sir.” He smiled again, trying to seem boyish and naive. “I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it—so soon, I mean.”

“We’ll have lunch on the train,” Calderwood said, dismissing him.

Lunch on the train with the old man. That means no drink, Rudolph thought, as he went out of the office. He preferred to be gloomy about that than gloomy about Professor Denton.

Later in the afternoon, the phone rang in his office and Miss Giles answered. “I’ll see if he’s in,” she said. “Who’s calling please?” She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Professor Denton.”

Rudolph hesitated, then stretched out his hand for the phone. “Hello, Professor,” he said heartily. “How’re things?”

“Jordache,” Denton said, his voice hoarse, “I’m at Ripley’s. Can you come over for a few minutes? I’ve got to talk to you.”

Just as well now as later. “Of course, Professor,” he said. “I’ll be right there.” He got up from his desk. “If anybody wants me,” he said to Miss Giles, “say I’ll be back in a half hour.”

When he came into the bar, he had to search to find Denton. Denton was in the last booth again, with his hat and coat on, hunched over the table, his hands cupped around his glass. He needed a shave and his clothes were rumpled and his spectacles clouded and smeared. It occurred to Rudolph that he looked like an old wino, waiting blearily on a park bench in the winter weather for a cop to come and move him on. The self-confident, loud, ironic man of Rudolph’s classrooms, amused and amusing, had vanished.

“Hello, Professor.” Rudolph slid into the booth opposite Denton. He hadn’t bothered to put on a coat for the short walk from the store, “I’m glad to see you.” He smiled, as though to reassure Denton that Denton was the same man he had always known, to be greeted in the usual manner.

Denton looked up dully. He didn’t offer to shake hands. His face, ordinarily ruddy, was gray. Even his blood has surrendered, Rudolph thought.

“Have a drink.” Denton’s voice was thick. He had obviously already had a drink. Or several. “Miss,” he called loudly to the lady in the orange uniform, who was leaning, like an old mare in harness, against the end of the bar. “What’ll you have?” he asked Rudolph.

“Scotch, please.”

“Scotch and soda for my friend, miss,” Denton said. “And another bourbon for me.”

After that, he sat silently for awhile, staring down at the glass between his hands. On the way over from the store, Rudolph had decided what he had to do. He would have to tell Denton that it was impossible for him to appear before the board the next day, but that he would offer to do so any other day, if the board would postpone. Failing that, he would go to see the President that night and say what he had to say. Or if Denton disapproved of that, he would write out his defense of Denton that night for Denton to read before the board when they considered his case. He dreaded the moment when he would have to make these proposals to Denton, but there was no question of not going down to New York with Calderwood on the 11:05 tomorrow morning. He was grateful that Denton kept silent, even for a moment, and he made a big business of stirring his drink when it came, the noise a little musical barrier against conversation for a few seconds.

“I hate to drag you away from your work like this, Jordache,” Denton said, not lifting his eyes, and mumbling now. “Trouble makes a man egotistic. I pass a movie theater and I see people lined up to go in, to laugh at a comedy, and I say, ‘Don’t they know what’s happening to me, how can they go to the movies?’” He laughed sourly. “Absurd,” he said. “Fifty million people were being killed in Europe alone between 1939 and 1945, and I went to the movies twice a week.” He took a thirsty gulp of his drink, bending low over the table and holding the glass with his two hands. The glass rattled as he put it down.

“Tell me what’s happening,” Rudolph said, soothingly.

“Nothing,” Denton said. “Well, that’s not true, either. A lot. It’s over.”

“What are you talking about?” Rudolph spoke calmly, but it was difficult to keep the excitement out of his voice. So, it was nothing, he thought. A storm in a teacup. People finally couldn’t be that idiotic. “You mean they’ve dropped the whole thing?”

“I mean I’ve dropped the whole thing,” Denton said flatly, lifting his head and looking out from under the brim of his battered brown felt hat at Rudolph. “I resigned today.”

“Oh, no,” Rudolph said.

“Oh, yes,” Denton said. “After twelve years. They offered to accept my resignation and drop the proceedings. I couldn’t face tomorrow. After twelve years. I’m too old, too old. Maybe if I were younger. When you’re younger, you can face the irrational. Justice seems obtainable. My wife has been crying for a week. She says the disgrace would kill her. A figure of speech, of course, but a woman weeping seven days and seven nights erodes the will. So, it’s done. I just wanted to thank you and tell you you don’t have to be there tomorrow at two P.M.”

Rudolph swallowed. Carefully, he tried to keep the relief out of his voice. “I would have been happy to speak up,” he said. He would not have been happy, but one way or another he had been prepared to do it, and a more exact description of his feelings would do no good at the moment. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“I have been thrown a lifeline,” Denton said dully. “A friend of mine is on the faculty of the International School at Geneva, I’ve been offered a place. Less money, but a place. They are not as maniacal, it seems, in Geneva. They tell me the city is pretty.”

“But it’s just a high school,” Rudolph protested. “You’ve taught in colleges all your life.”

“It’s in Geneva,” Denton said. “I want to get out of this goddamn country.”

Rudolph had never heard anybody say this goddamn country about America and he was shocked at Denton’s bitterness. As a boy in school he had sung “God shed his Grace on Thee” about his native land, along with the forty other boys and girls in the classroom, and now, he realized that what he had sung as a child he still believed as a grown man. “It’s not as bad as you think,” he said.

“Worse,” Denton said.

“It’ll blow over. You’ll be asked back.”

“Never,” Denton said. “I wouldn’t come back if they begged me on their knees.”

“The Man Without a Country,” Rudolph remembered from grade school, the poor exile being transferred from ship to ship, never to see the shores of the land where he was born, never to see the flag without tears. Geneva, that flagless vessel. He looked at Denton, exiled already in the back booth of Ripley’s Bar, and felt a confused mixture of emotions, pity, contempt. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked. “Money?”

Denton shook his head. “We’re all right. For the time being. We’re selling the house. Real estate values have gone up since I bought it. The country is booming.” He laughed drily. He stood up abruptly. “I have to go home now,” he said. “I’m giving my wife French lessons every afternoon.”

He allowed Rudolph to pay for the drinks. Outside on the street, he put his collar up, looking more like an old wino than ever, and shook Rudolph’s hand slackly. “I’ll write you from Geneva,” he said. “Noncommittal letters. God knows who opens mail these days.”

He shuffled off, a bent, scholarly figure among the citizens of his goddamn country, Rudolph watched him for a moment, then walked back to the store. He breathed deeply, feeling young, lucky, lucky.

He was in the line waiting to laugh, while the sufferers shuffled past. Fifty million dead, but the movies were always open.

He felt sorry for Denton, but overriding that, he felt joyous for himself. Everything from now on was going to be all right, everything was going to go his way. The sign had been made clear that afternoon, the omens were plain.

He was on the 11:05 the next morning with Calderwood, composed and optimistic. When they went into the dining car for lunch, he didn’t mind not being able to order a drink.

Chapter 5

“Why do you have to come and wait, for me?” Billy was complaining, as they walked toward home. “As though I’m a baby.”

“You’ll go around by yourself soon enough,” she said, automatically taking his hand as they crossed a street.

“When?”

“Soon enough.”

“When?”

“When you’re ten.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“You know you mustn’t say things like that.”

“Daddy does.”

“You’re not Daddy.”

“So do you sometimes.”

“You’re not me. And I shouldn’t say it, either.”

“Then why do you say it?”

“Because I get angry.”

“I’m angry now. All the other kids don’t have their mothers waiting for them outside the gate like babies. They go home by themselves.”

Gretchen knew this was true and that she was being a nervous parent, not faithful to Spock, and that she or Billy or both of them would have to pay for it later, but she couldn’t bear the thought of the child wandering by himself around in the doubtful traffic of Greenwich Village. Several times she had suggested to Willie that they move to the suburbs for their son’s sake, but Willie had vetoed the idea. “I’m not the Scarsdale type,” he said.

She didn’t know what the Scarsdale type was. She knew a lot of people who lived in Scarsdale or in places very much like Scarsdale, and they seemed as various as people living anywhere else—drunks, wife-swappers, churchgoers, politicians, patriots, scholars, suicides, whatever.

“When?” Billy asked again, stubbornly, pulling away from her hand.

“When you’re ten,” she repeated.

“That’s a whole year,” he wailed.

“You’ll be surprised how fast it goes,” she said. “Now, button your coat. You’ll catch cold.” He had been playing basketball in the schoolyard and he was still sweating. The late-afternoon October air was nippy and there was a wind off the Hudson.

“A whole year,” Billy said. “That’s inhuman.”

She laughed and bent and kissed the top of his head, but he pulled away. “Don’t kiss me in public,” he said.

A big dog came trotting toward them and she had to restrain herself from telling Billy not to pat him. “Old boy,” Billy said, “old boy,” and patted the dog’s head and pulled his ears, at home in the animal kingdom. He thinks nothing living wishes him harm, Gretchen thought. Except his mother.

The dog wagged his tail, went on.

They were on their own street now, and safe. Gretchen allowed Billy to dawdle behind her, balancing on cracks in the pavement. As she came up to the front door of the brownstone in which she lived, she saw Rudolph and Johnny Heath standing in front of the building, leaning against the stoop. They each were holding a paper bag with a bottle in it. She had just put on a scarf over her head and an old coat and she hadn’t bothered to change from the slacks she was wearing around the house when she had gone to fetch Billy. She felt dowdy as she approached Rudolph and Johnny, who were dressed like sober young businessmen and were even wearing hats.

She was used to seeing Rudolph in New York often. For the past six months or so, he had come to the city two or three times a week, in his young businessman’s suits. There was some sort of deal being arranged, with Calderwood and Johnny Heath’s brokerage house, although when she asked Rudolph about it, and he tried to explain, she never could quite grasp the details. It had something to do with setting up an involved corporation called Dee Cee Enterprises, after Duncan Calderwood’s initials. Eventually, it was supposed to make Rudolph a wealthy man and get him out of the store, and for half the year, at least, out of Whitby. He had asked her to be on the lookout for a small furnished apartment for him.

Both Rudolph and Johnny looked somehow high, as though they had already done some drinking. She could see by the gilt paper sticking out of the brown paper bags that the bottles they were carrying contained champagne. “Hi, boys,” she said. “Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

“We didn’t know we were coming,” Rudolph said. “This is an impromptu celebration.” He kissed her cheek. He had not been drinking.

“Hi, Billy,” he said to the little boy.

“Hi,” Billy said perfunctorily. The relationship between uncle and nephew was tenuous. Billy called his uncle Rudy. From time to time Gretchen tried to get the boy to be more polite and say Uncle Rudolph, but Willie backed up his son, saying, “Old forms, old forms. Don’t bring up the kid to be a hypocrite.”

“Come on upstairs,” Gretchen said, “and we’ll open these bottles.”

The living room was a mess. She worked there now, having surrendered the upstairs room completely to Billy, and there were bits and pieces of two articles she had promised for the first of the month. Books, notes, and scraps of paper were scattered all over the desk and tables. Not even the sofa was immune. She was not a methodical worker, and her occasional attempts at order soon foundered into even greater chaos than before. She had taken to chain-smoking when she worked and ash trays full of stubs were everywhere. Willie, who was far from neat himself, complained from time to time. “This isn’t a home,” he said, “it’s the goddamn city room of a small-time newspaper.”

She noticed Rudolph’s quick glance of disapproval around the room. Was he judging her now against the fastidious girl she had been at nineteen? She had an unreasonable flash of anger against her impeccable, well-pressed brother. I’m running a family, I’m earning a living, don’t forget any of that, brother.

“Billy,” she said, as she hung up her coat and scarf, with elaborate precision, to make up for the state of the room, “go upstairs and do your homework.”

“Aah …” Billy said, more for form’s sake than out of any desire to remain below with the grownups.

“Go ahead, Billy.”

He went upstairs happily, pretending to be unhappy.

Gretchen got out three glasses. “What’s the occasion?” she asked Rudolph, who was working on opening the bottle of champagne.

“We did it,” Rudolph said. “Today we had the final signing. We can drink champagne morning, noon, and night for the rest of our lives.” He got the cork out and let the foam splash over his hand as he poured.

“That’s wonderful,” Gretchen said mechanically. It was difficult for her to understand Rudolph’s single-minded immersion in business.

They touched glasses.

“To Dee Cee Enterprises and the Chairman of the Board,” Johnny said. “The Newest Tycoon of them all.”

Both men laughed, nerves still taut. They gave Gretchen the curious impression of being survivors of an accident, almost hysterically congratulating themselves on their escape. What goes on in those offices downtown, Gretchen wondered.

Rudolph couldn’t sit still. He prowled around the room, glass in hand, opening books, glancing at the confusion of her desk, ruffling the pages of a newspaper. He looked trained down and nervy, with very bright eyes and hollows showing in his cheeks.

By contrast, Johnny looked chubby, soft, smooth, unedged, and now that he had a glass in his hand, composed, almost sleepy. He was more familiar with money and its uses than Rudolph and was prepared for sudden strokes of fortune and misfortune.

Rudolph turned on the radio and the middle of the first movement of the Emperor Concerto blared out. Rudolph grinned. “They’re playing Our Song,” he said to Johnny. “Music to million by.”

“Cut it out,” Gretchen said. “You fellows are making me feel like a pauper.”

“If Willie has any sense,” Johnny said, “he’ll beg, borrow, or steal to scrape up some dough and come in on the ground floor of Dee Cee Enterprises. I mean it. There’s no limit to how high this stuff can go.”

“Willie,” Gretchen said, “is too proud to beg, too well known to borrow, and too cowardly to steal.”

“You’re talking about my friend,” Johnny said, pretending to be shocked.

“He was once a friend of mine, too,” Gretchen said.

“Have some more champagne,” Johnny said, and poured.

Rudolph picked up a sheet of paper from her desk. “‘The Age of Midgets,’” he read. “What sort of title is that?”

“It started out to be an article about the new television programs this season,” Gretchen said, “and somehow I branched out. Last year’s plays, this year’s plays, a bunch of novels, Eisenhower’s cabinet, architecture, public morality, education … I’m aghast at how Billy’s being educated and maybe that really started me off.”

Rudolph read the first paragraph. “You’re pretty rough,” he said.

“I’m paid to be a common scold,” Gretchen said. “That’s my racket.”

“Do you really feel as black as you sound?” Rudolph asked.

“Yes,” she said. She held out her glass toward Johnny.

The telephone rang. “Probably Willie saying he can’t come home for dinner,” Gretchen said. She got up and went to the telephone on the desk. “Hello,” she said, her voice aggrieved in advance. She listened, puzzled. “One moment, please,” she said, and handed the phone to Rudolph. “It’s for you,” she said.

“Me?” Rudolph shrugged. “Nobody knows I’m here.”

“The man said Mr. Jordache.”

“Yes?” Rudolph said into the phone.

“Jordache?” The voice was husky, secretive.

“Yes.”

“This is Al. I put down five hundred for you for tonight. A good price. Seven to five.”

“Wait a minute,” Rudolph said, but the phone went dead. Rudolph stared at the instrument in his hand. “That was the queerest thing. It was a man called Al. He said he put down five hundred for me for tonight at seven to five. Gretchen, do you gamble secretly?”

“I don’t know any Al,” she said, “and I don’t have five hundred dollars and besides, he asked for Mr. Jordache, not Miss Jordache.” She wrote under her maiden name and was listed as G. Jordache in the Manhattan directory.

“That’s the damnedest thing,” Rudolph said. “Did I tell anyone I’d be at this number?” he asked Johnny.

“Not to my knowledge,” Johnny said.

“He must have gotten the numbers mixed up,” Gretchen said.

“That doesn’t sound reasonable,” Rudolph said. “How many Jordaches can there be in New York? Did you ever come across any others?”

Gretchen shook her head.

“Where’s the Manhattan book?”

Gretchen pointed and Rudolph picked it up and opened it to the J’s. “T. Jordache,” he read, “West Ninety-third Street.” He closed the book slowly and put it down. “T. Jordache,” he said to Gretchen. “Do you think it’s possible?”

“I hope not,” Gretchen said.

“What’s all this about?” Johnny asked.

“We have a brother named Thomas,” Rudolph said.

“The baby of the family,” Gretchen said. “Some baby.”

“We haven’t seen him or heard of him in ten years,” Rudolph said.

“The Jordaches are an extraordinarily close-knit family,” Gretchen said. After the work of the day, the champagne was beginning to take effect, and she lolled back on the couch. She remembered that she hadn’t eaten any lunch.

“What does he do?” Johnny said. “Your brother?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Rudolph said.

“If he’s living up to his early promise,” Gretchen said, “he is dodging the police.”

“I’m going to find out.” Rudolph opened the book again and looked up the number of T. Jordache on West Ninety-third Street. He dialled. The phone was answered by a woman, young from the sound of her voice.

“Good evening, madam,” Rudolph said, impersonal, institutional. “May I speak to Mr. Thomas Jordache, please?”

“No, you can’t,” the woman said. She had a high, thin soprano voice. “Who’s this?” Now she sounded suspicious.

“A friend of his,” Rudolph said. “Is Mr. Jordache there?”

“He’s sleeping,” the woman said angrily. “He’s got to fight tonight. He hasn’t got time to talk to anybody.”

There was the sound of the receiver slamming down.

Rudolph had been holding the receiver away from his ear and the woman had talked loudly, so both Gretchen and Johnny had heard every word of the conversation.

“Fighting tonight on the old camp grounds,” Gretchen said. “Sounds like our Tommy.”

Rudolph picked up the copy of the New York Times that was lying on a chair beside the desk and turned to the sports section. “Here it is,” he said. “Main bout. Tommy Jordache versus Virgil Walters, middleweights, ten rounds. At the Sunnyside Gardens.”

“It sounds bucolic,” Gretchen said.

“I’m going,” Rudolph said.

“Why?” Gretchen asked.

“He’s my brother, after all.”

“I’ve gotten along for ten years without him,” Gretchen said. “I’m going to try for twenty.”

“Johnny?” Rudolph turned to Heath.

“Sorry,” Johnny said. “I’m invited to a dinner. Tell me how it works out.”

The telephone rang again. Rudolph picked it up eagerly, but it was only Willie. “Hi, Rudy,” Willie said. There were barroom noises behind him. “No, I don’t have to speak to her,” Willie said. “Just tell her I’m sorry, but I’ve got a business dinner tonight and I can’t make it home until late. Tell her not to wait up.”

Gretchen smiled, lying on the couch. “Don’t tell me what he said.”

“He’s not coming home to dinner.”

“And I’m not to wait up.”

“Something along those lines.”

“Johnny,” Gretchen said, “don’t you think it’s time to open the second bottle?”

By the time they had finished the second bottle, Gretchen had called for a baby sitter and they had found out where Sunnyside Gardens was. She went in and took a shower, did her hair, and put on a dark-wool dress, wondering if it was comme il faut for prizefights. She had grown thinner and the dress was a little loose on her, but she caught the quick glances of approval of the two men at her appearance and was gratified by it. I must not let myself fall into slobhood, she thought. Ever.

When the baby sitter came, Gretchen gave her instructions and left the apartment with Rudolph and Johnny. They went to a nearby steak house. Johnny had a drink with them at the bar and was saying, “Thanks for the drink,” and was preparing to leave when Rudolph said, “I only have five dollars.” He laughed. “Johnny, be my banker for tonight, will you?”

Johnny took out his wallet and put down five ten-dollar bills. “Enough?” he said.

“Thanks.” Rudolph put the bills carelessly in his pocket. He laughed again.

“What’s so funny?” Gretchen asked.

“I never thought I’d like to see the day,” Rudolph said, “when I didn’t know exactly how much money I had in my pocket.”

“You have taken on the wholesome and mind-freeing habits of the rich,” Johnny said gravely. “Congratulations. I’ll see you tomorrow at the office, Rudy. And I hope your brother wins.”

“I hope he gets his head knocked off,” Gretchen said.

A preliminary bout was under way as an usher led them to their seats three rows from ringside. Gretchen noted that there were few women present and that none of them was wearing a black-wool dress. She had never been to a prizefight before and she tuned out the television set whenever one was being shown. The idea of men beating each other senseless for pay seemed brutish to her and the faces of the men around her were just the sort of faces that one would expect at such an entertainment. She was sure she had never seen so many ugly people collected in one place.

The men in the ring did not appear to be doing much harm to each other and she watched with passive disgust as they clinched, wrestled, and ducked away from blows. The crowd, in its fog of tobacco smoke, was apathetic and only once in awhile, when there was the thud of a heavy punch, a sort of sharp, grunting, animal noise filled the arena.

Rudolph, she knew, went to prizefights from time to time and she had heard him discussing particular boxers like Ray Robinson enthusiastically with Willie. She looked surreptitiously over at her brother. He seemed interested by the spectacle in the ring. Now that she was actually seeing a fight, with the smell of sweat in her nostrils and the red blotches on pale skin where blows had landed, Rudolph’s whole character, the subtle, deprecating air of educated superiority, the well-mannered lack of aggressiveness, seemed suddenly suspect to her. He was linked with the brutes in the ring, with the brutes in the rows around her.

In the next fight, one man was cut over the eye and the wound spurted blood all over him and his opponent. The roar of the crowd when they saw the blood sickened her and she wondered if she could sit there and wait for a brother to climb through the ropes to face similar butchery.

By the time the main bout came on, she was pale and sick and it was through a haze of tears and smoke that she saw a large man in a red bathrobe climb agilely through the ropes and recognized Thomas.

When Thomas’s handlers took off his robe and threw it over his shoulders to put the gloves on over the bandaged hands, the first thing Rudolph noticed, with a touch of jealousy, was that Thomas had almost no hair on his body. Rudolph was getting quite hairy, with thick, tight, black curls on his chest and sprouting on his shoulders. His legs, too, were covered with dark hair, and it did not fit with the image he had of himself. When he went swimming in the summer, his hairiness embarrassed him and he felt that people were snickering at him. For that reason he rarely sunbathed and put on a shirt as soon as he got out of the water.

Thomas, except for the ferocious, muscular, overtrained body, looked surprisingly the same. His face was unmarked and the expression was still boyish and ingratiating. Thomas kept smiling during the formalities before the beginning of the bout, but Rudolph could see him flicking the corner of his mouth nervously with his tongue. A muscle in his leg twitched under his shiny silk, purple trunks while the referee was giving the final instructions to the two men in the center of the ring. Except for the moment when he had been introduced (In this corner, Tommy Jordache, weight one fifty-nine and a half), and had raised his gloved hand and looked quickly up at the crowd, Thomas had kept his eyes down. If he had seen Rudolph and Gretchen, he made no sign.

His opponent was a rangy Negro, considerably taller than Tommy, and with much longer arms, shuffling dangerously in his corner in a little dance, nodding as he listened to the advice being whispered into his ear by his handler.

Gretchen watched with a rigid, painful grimace on her face, squinting through the smoke at her brother’s powerful, destructive, bare figure. She did not like the hairless male body—Willie was covered with a comfortable reddish fuzz—and the ridged professional muscles made her shudder in primitive distaste. Siblings, out of the same womb. The thought dismayed her. Behind Thomas’s boyish smile she recognized the sly malevolence, the desire to hurt, the pleasure in dealing pain, that had alienated her when they lived in the same house. The thought that it was her own flesh and blood exposed there under the bright lights in this dreadful ceremony was almost unbearable to her. Of course, she thought, I should have known; this is where he had to end. Fighting for his life.

The men were evenly matched, equally fast, the Negro less aggressive, but better able to defend himself with his long arms. Thomas kept burrowing in, taking two punches to get in one, slugging away at the Negro’s body, making the Negro give ground and occasionally punishing him terribly when he got him in a corner against the ropes.

“Kill the nigger,” a voice from the back of the arena cried out each time Thomas threw a volley of punches. Gretchen winced, ashamed to be there, ashamed for every man and woman in the place. Oh, Arnold Simms, limping, in the maroon bathrobe, saying, “You got pretty feet, Miss Jordache,” dreaming of Cornwall, oh, Arnold Simms, forgive me for tonight.

It lasted eight of the ten rounds. Thomas was bleeding from the nose and from a cut above the eye, but never retreating, always shuffling in, with a kind of hideous, heedless, mechanical energy, slowly wearing his man down. In the eighth round, the Negro could hardly lift his hands and Thomas sent him to the canvas with a long, looping right hand that caught the Negro high on the forehead. The Negro got up at the count of eight, staggering, barely able to get his guard up, and Thomas, his face a bloody smear, but smiling, leapt after him mercilessly and hit him what seemed to Gretchen at least fifty times in the space of seconds. The Negro collapsed onto his face as the crowd yelled ear-splittingly around her. The Negro tried to get up, almost reached one knee. In a neutral corner, Thomas crouched alertly, bloody, tireless. He seemed to want his man to get up, to continue the fight, and Gretchen was sure there was a swift look of disappointment that flitted across his battered face as the Negro sank helplessly to the canvas and was counted out.

She wanted to vomit, but she merely retched drily, holding her handkerchief to her face, surprised at the smell of the perfume on it, among the rank odors of the arena. She sat huddled over in her seat, looking down, unable to watch any more, afraid she was going to faint and by that act announce to all the world her fatal connection to the victorious animal in the ring.

Rudolph had sat through the whole bout without uttering a sound, his lips twisted a little in disapproval at the clumsy bloodthirstiness, without style or grace, of the fight.

The fighters left the ring, the Negro, swathed in towels and robe, was helped through the ropes by his handlers, Thomas grinning, waving triumphantly, as people clapped him on the back. He left the ring on the far side, so that there was no chance of seeing his brother and sister as he made his way to the locker room.

The crowd began to drift out, but Gretchen and Rudolph sat side by side, without saying a word to each other, fearful of communicating after what they had seen. Finally Gretchen said, thickly, her eyes still lowered, “Let’s get out of here.”

“We have to go back,” Rudolph said.

“What do you mean?” Gretchen looked up in surprise at her brother.

“We came,” Rudolph said. “We watched. We have to see him.”

“He’s got nothing to do with us.” As she said this, she knew she was lying.

“Come on.” Rudolph stood up and took her elbow, making her stand. He met all challenges, Rudolph, the cold, veray parfit gentil knight at Sunnyside Gardens.

“I won’t, I won’t …” Even as she was babbling this, she knew Rudolph would lead her inexorably to face Thomas, bloody, victorious, brutal, rancorous.

There were some men standing at the door of the dressing room, but nobody stopped Rudolph as he pushed the door open. Gretchen hung back. “I’d better wait outside,” she said. “He may not be dressed.”

Rudolph paid no attention to what she had said, but held her wrist and pulled her into the room after him. Thomas was sitting on a stained rubbing table with a towel around his middle and a doctor was sewing up the cut over his eye.

“It’s nothing,” the doctor was saying. “One more stitch and it’s done.”

Thomas had his eyes closed, to make it easier for the doctor to work. There was an orange stain of antiseptic above the eyebrow that gave him a clownish, lopsided air. He had obviously already taken his shower, as his hair was dark with water and plastered to his head, making him look like a print of an old-time bare-knuckle pugilist. Grouped around the table were several men, whom Rudolph recognized as having been in or near Thomas’s corner during the fight. A curvy young woman in a tight dress kept making little sighing sounds each time the doctor’s needle went into flesh. She had startling black hair and wore black nylon stockings over outlandishly shapely legs. Her eyebrows, plucked into a thin pencil line, high up, gave her a look of doll-like surprise. The room stank of old sweat, liniment, cigar smoke, and urine from the toilet visible through an open door leading off the dressing room. A bloodstained towel lay on the greasy floor, in a heap with the sweat-soaked purple tights and supporter and socks and shoes that Thomas had worn during the fight. It was sickeningly hot in the room.

What am I doing in a place like this, Gretchen thought. How did I get here?

“There we are,” the doctor said, stepping back, his head cocked to one side, admiring his work. He put on a pad of gauze and a strip of adhesive tape over the wound. “You’ll be able to fight again in ten days.”

“Thanks, Doc,” Thomas said and opened his eyes. He saw Rudolph and Gretchen. “Good Christ,” he said. He smiled crookedly. “What the hell are you two doing here?”

“I have a message for you,” Rudolph said. “A man called Al phoned me this afternoon and told me he’d put five hundred at seven to five for tonight.”

“Good old Al,” Thomas said. But he looked worriedly over at the curvy young woman with the black hair, as though he had wanted to keep this information from her.

“Congratulations on the fight,” Rudolph said. He took a step forward and put out his hand. Thomas hesitated for a fraction of a second, then smiled again, and put out his swollen, reddened hand.

Gretchen couldn’t get herself to congratulate her brother. “I’m glad you won, Tom,” she said.

“Yeah. Thanks.” He looked at her amusedly. “Let me introduce everybody to everybody,” he said. “My brother, Rudolph; my sister, Gretchen. My wife, Teresa, my manager, Mr. Schultz, my trainer, Paddy, everybody …” He waved his hand vaguely at the men he hadn’t bothered to introduce.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Teresa said. It was the suspicious voice of the telephone that afternoon.

“I didn’t know you had family,” Mr. Schultz said. He, too, seemed suspicious, as though having family was somehow perilous or actionable at law.

“I wasn’t sure myself,” Thomas said. “We have gone our separate ways, like they say. Hey, Schultzy, I must be getting to be one helluva draw at the gate if I even get my brother and sister to buy tickets.”

“After tonight,” Mr. Schultz said, “I can get you the Garden. It was a nice win.” He was a small man with a basketball pouch under a greenish sweater. “Well, you people must have a lot to talk about, catch up with the news, as it were, we’ll leave you alone. I’ll drop in tomorrow sometime, Tommy, see how the eye’s doing.” He put on a jacket, just barely managing to button it over his paunch. The trainer gathered up the gear from the floor and put it into a bag. “Nice going, Tommy,” he said, as he left with the doctor, the manager, and the others.

“Well, here we are,” Thomas said. “A nice family reunion. I guess we ought to celebrate, huh, Teresa?”

“You never told me anything about a brother and sister,” Teresa said aggrievedly, in her high voice.

“They slipped my mind for a few years,” Thomas said. He jumped down off the rubbing table. “Now, if the ladies will retire, I’ll put on some clothes.”

Gretchen went out into the hall with her brother’s wife. The hall was empty now and she was relieved to get away from the stink and heat of the dressing room. Teresa was putting on a shaggy red fox coat with angry little movements of her shoulders and arms. “If the ladies will retire,” she said. “As though I never saw him naked before.” She looked at Gretchen with open hostility, taking in the black-wool dress, the low-heeled shoes, the plain, belted polo coat, considering it, Gretchen could see, an affront to her style of living, her dyed hair, her tight dress, her over-voluptuous legs, her marriage. “I didn’t know Tommy came from such a high-toned family,” she said.

“We’re not so high-toned,” Gretchen said. “Never fear.”

“You never bothered to see him fight before tonight,” Teresa said aggressively, “did you?”

“I didn’t know he was a fighter before today,” said Gretchen. “Do you mind if I sit down? I’m feeling very tired.” There was a chair across the hall and she moved away from the woman and sat down, hoping to put an end to conversation. Teresa ruffled her shoulders irritably under the red fox, then began to walk peckishly up and down, her high stiletto heels making a brittle, impatient sound on the concrete floor of the hallway.

Inside the dressing room Thomas was dressing slowly, turning away modestly when he put on his shorts, occasionally wiping at his face with a towel, because the shower had not completely broken the sweat. From time to time he looked across at Rudolph and smiled and shook his head and said, “Goddamn.”

“How do you feel, Tommy?” Rudolph asked.

“Okay. But I’ll piss blood tomorrow,” Thomas said calmly. “He got in a couple of good licks to the kidney, the sonofabitch. It was a pretty good fight, though, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Rudolph said. He didn’t have the heart to say that in his eyes it had been a routine, ungraceful, second-rate brawl.

“I knew I could take him,” Thomas said. “Even though I was the underdog in the betting. Seven to five. That’s a hot one. I made seven hundred bucks on that bet.” He sounded like a small boy boasting. “Though it’s too bad you had to say anything about it in front of Teresa. Now she knows I have the dough and she’ll be after it like a hound dog.”

“How long have you been married?” Rudolph asked.

“Two years. Legally. I knocked her up and I thought what the hell.” Thomas shrugged. “She’s okay, Teresa, a little dumb, but okay. The kid’s worth it, though. A boy.” He glanced maliciously over at Rudolph. “Maybe I’ll send him to his Uncle Rudy, to teach him how to be a gentleman and not grow up to be a poor stupid pug, like his old man.”

“I’d like to see him some day,” Rudolph said stiffly.

“Any time. Come up to the house.” Thomas put on a black turtle-neck sweater and his voice was muffled for a moment as he stuck his head into the wool. “You married yet?”

“No.”

“Still the smart one of the family,” Thomas said. “How about Gretchen?”

“A long time. She’s got a son aged nine.”

Thomas nodded. “She was bound not to hang around long. God, what a hot-looking dame. She looks better than ever, doesn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Is she still as much of a shit as she used to be?”

“Don’t talk like that, Tom,” Rudolph said. “She was an awfully nice girl and she’s grown into a very good woman.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for it, Rudy,” Thomas said cheerfully. He was combing his hair carefully before a cracked mirror on the wall. “I wouldn’t know, being on the outside the way I was.”

“You weren’t on the outside.”

“Who you kidding, brother?” Thomas said flatly. He put the comb in his pocket, took a last critical look at his scarred, puffed face, with the diagonal white slash of adhesive tape above his eye. “I sure am a beauty tonight,” he said. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d’ve shaved.” He turned and put a bright-tweed jacket over the turtle-neck sweater. “You look as though you’re doing all right, Rudy,” he said. “You look like a goddamn vice-president of a bank.”

“I’m not complaining,” Rudolph said, not pleased with the vice-president.

“You know,” Thomas said, “I went up to Port Philip a few years ago. For Auld Lang Syne. I heard Pop is dead.”

“He killed himself,” Rudolph said.

“Yeah, that’s what the fruit-lady said.” Thomas patted his breast pocket to make sure his wallet was in place. “The old house was gone. No light in the cellar window for the prodigal son,” he said mockingly. “Only a supermarket. I still remember they had a special that day. Lamb shoulders. Mom alive?”

“Yes. She lives with me.”

“Lucky you.” Thomas grinned. “Still in Port Philip?”

“Whitby.”

“You don’t travel much, do you?”

“There’s plenty of time.” Rudolph had the uncomfortable feeling that his brother was using the conversation to tease him, undermine him, make him feel guilty. He was accustomed to controlling conversations himself by now and it took an effort not to let his irritation show. As he had watched his brother dress, watched him move that magnificent and fearsome body slowly and bruisedly, he had felt a huge sense of pity, love, a confused desire some-how to save that lumbering, brave, vengeful almost-boy from other evenings like the one he had just been through; from the impossible wife, from the bawling crowd, from the cheerful, stitching doctors, from the casual men who attended him and lived off him. He didn’t want that feeling to be eroded by Thomas’s mockery, by that hangover of ancient jealousy and hostility which by now should have long since subsided.

“Myself,” Thomas was saying, “I been in quite a few places. Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Hollywood, Tia Juana. Name it and I’ve been there. I’m a man broadened by travel.”

The door burst open and Teresa charged in, scowling under her pancake makeup. “You fellows going to talk in here all night?” she demanded.

“Okay, okay, honey,” Thomas said. “We were just coming out. Do you want to come and have something to eat with us, you and Gretchen?” he asked Rudolph.

“We’re going to eat Chinese,” Teresa said. “I’m dying to eat Chinese.”

“I’m afraid not tonight, Tom,” Rudolph said. “Gretchen has to get home. She has to relieve the baby sitter.” He caught the quick flicker of Thomas’s eyes from him to his wife and then back again and he was sure Thomas was thinking, he doesn’t want to be seen in public with my wife.

But Thomas shrugged and said amiably, “Well, some other time. Now we know we’re all alive.” He stopped abruptly in the doorway, as though he had suddenly thought of something. “Say,” he said, “you going to be in town tomorrow around five?”

“Tommy,” his wife said loudly, “are we going to eat or ain’t we going to eat?”

“Shut up,” Thomas said to her. “Rudy?”

“Yes.” He had to spend the whole day in town, with architects and lawyers.

“Where can I see you?” Thomas asked.

“I’ll be at my hotel. The Hotel Warwick on …”

“I know where it is,” Thomas said. “I’ll be there.”

Gretchen joined them in the hallway. Her face was strained and pale, and for a moment Rudolph was sorry he had brought her along. But only for a moment. She’s a big girl now, he thought, she can’t duck everything. It’s enough that she has so gracefully managed to duck her mother for ten years.

As they passed the door to another dressing room, Thomas stopped again. “I just have to look in here for a minute,” he said, “say hello to Virgil. Come on in with me, Rudy, tell him you’re my brother, tell him what a good fight he put up, it’ll make him feel better.”

“We’ll never get out of this goddamn place tonight,” Teresa said.

Thomas ignored her and pushed open the door and motioned for Rudolph to go first. The Negro fighter was still undressed. He was sitting, droop-shouldered, on the rubbing table, his hands hanging listlessly between his legs. A pretty young colored girl, probably his wife or sister, was sitting quietly on a camp chair at the foot of the table and a white handler was gently applying an icebag to a huge swelling on the fighter’s forehead. Under the swelling the eye was shut tight. In a corner of the room an older, light-colored Negro with gray hair, who might have been the fighter’s father, was carefully packing away a silk robe and trunks and shoes. The fighter looked up slowly with his one good eye as Thomas and Rudolph came into the room.

Thomas put his arm gently around his opponent’s shoulders. “How you feeling, Virgil?” he asked.

“I felt better,” the fighter said. Now Rudolph could see that he couldn’t have been more than twenty years old.

“Meet my brother, Rudy, Virgil,” Thomas said. “He wants to tell you what a good fight you put up.”

Rudolph shook hands with the fighter, who said, “Glad to meet you, sir.”

“It was an awfully good fight,” Rudolph said, although what he would have liked to say was, Poor young man, please never put on another pair of gloves again.

“Yeah,” the fighter said. “He awful strong, your brother.”

“I was lucky,” Thomas said. “Real lucky. I got five stitches over my eye.”

“It wasn’t a butt, Tommy,” Virgil said. “I swear it wasn’t a butt.”

“Of course not, Virgil,” Thomas said. “Nobody said it was. Well, I just wanted to say hello, make sure you’re all right.” He hugged the boy’s shoulders again.

“Thanks for comin’ by,” Virgil said. “It’s nice of you.”

“Good luck, kid,” Thomas said. Then he and Rudolph shook hands gravely with all the other people in the room and left.

“It’s about time,” Teresa said as they appeared in the hall.

I give the marriage six months, Rudolph thought as they went toward the exit.

“They rushed that boy,” Thomas said to Rudolph as they walked side by side. “He had a string of easy wins and they gave him a main bout. I watched him a couple of times and I knew I could take him downstairs. Lousy managers. You notice, the bastard wasn’t even there. He didn’t even wait to see if Virgil ought to go home or to the hospital. It’s a shitty profession.” He glanced back to see if Gretchen objected to the word, but Gretchen seemed to be moving in a private trance of her own, unseeing and unhearing.

Outside, they hailed a taxi and Gretchen insisted upon sitting up front with the driver. Teresa sat in the middle on the back seat, between Thomas and Rudolph. She was overpoweringly perfumed, but when Rudolph put the window down she said, “For God’s sake, the wind is ruining my hair,” and he said, “I’m sorry,” and wound the window up again.

They drove back to Manhattan in silence, with Teresa holding Thomas’s hand and occasionally bringing it up to her lips and kissing it, marking out her possessions.

When they came off the bridge, Rudolph said, “We’ll get out here, Tom.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to come with us?” Thomas said.

“It’s the best Chinese food in town,” Teresa said. The ride had been neutral, she no longer felt in danger of being attacked, she could afford to be hospitable, perhaps in the future there was an advantage there for her. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“I have to get home,” Gretchen said. Her voice was quivering, on the point of hysteria. “I just must get home.”

If it hadn’t been for Gretchen, Rudolph would have stayed with Thomas. After the noise of the evening, the public triumph, the battering, it seemed sad and lonely to leave Thomas merely to go off to supper with his twittering wife, anonymous in the night, unsaluted, uncheered. He would have to make it up to Thomas another time.

The driver stopped the car and Gretchen and Rudolph got out. “Good-bye for now, in-laws,” Teresa said, and laughed.

“Five o’clock tomorrow, Rudy,” Thomas said and Rudolph nodded.

“Good night,” Gretchen whispered. “Take care of yourself, please.”

The taxi moved off and Gretchen gripped Rudolph’s arm, as though to steady herself. Rudolph stopped a cruising cab and gave the driver Gretchen’s address. Once in the darkness of the cab, Gretchen broke down. She threw herself into Rudolph’s arms and wept uncontrollably, her body racked by great sobs. The tears came to Rudolph’s eyes, too, and he held his sister tightly, stroking her hair. In the back of the dark cab, with the lights of the city streaking past the windows, erratically illuminating, in bursts of colored neon, the contorted, lovely, tear-stained face, he felt closer to Gretchen, bound in stricter love, than ever before.

The tears finally stopped. Gretchen sat up, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m such a hateful snob. That poor boy, that poor, poor boy …”

The baby sitter was asleep on the couch in the living room when they came into the apartment. Willie hadn’t come home yet. There had been no calls, the baby sitter said. Billy had read himself to sleep quietly and she had gone up and turned off his light without awakening him. She was a girl of about seventeen, a high-school student, bobby-soxed, pretty, in a snub-nosed, shy way, and embarrassed at being caught asleep. Gretchen poured two Scotches and soda. The baby sitter had straightened out the room and the newspapers, which had been strewn around, were now in a neat pile on the window sill and the cushions were plumped out.

There was only one lamp lit and they sat in shadow, Gretchen with her feet curled up under her on the couch, Rudolph in a large easy chair. They drank slowly, exhausted, blessing the silence. They finished their drinks and silently Rudolph rose from his chair and refilled the glasses, sat down again.

An ambulance siren wailed in the distance, somebody else’s accident.

“He enjoyed it,” Gretchen said finally. “When that boy was practically helpless and he hit him so many times. I always thought—when I thought anything about it—that it was just a man earning a living—in a peculiar way—but just that. It wasn’t like that at all tonight, was it?”

“It’s a curious profession,” Rudolph said. “It’s hard to know what really must be going on in a man’s head up there.”

“Weren’t you ashamed?”

“Put it this way,” Rudolph said. “I wasn’t happy. There must be at least ten thousand boxers in the United States. They have to come from somebody’s family.”

“I don’t think like you,” Gretchen said coldly.

“No, you don’t.”

“Those sleazy purple trunks,” she said, as though by finding an object on which she could fix her revulsion, she could exorcise the complex horror of the entire night. She shook her head against memory. “Somehow I feel it’s our fault, yours, mine, our parents’, that Tom was up there in that vile place.”

Rudolph sipped at his drink in silence. I wouldn’t know, Tom had said in the dressing room, being on the outside the way I was. Excluded, he had reacted as a boy in the most simple, brutal way, with his fists. Older, he had merely continued. They all had their father’s blood in them, and Axel Jordache had killed two men. As far as Rudolph knew, Tom at least hadn’t killed anybody. Perhaps the strain was ameliorating.

“Ah, what a mess,” Gretchen said. “All of us. Yes, you, too. Do you enjoy anything, Rudy?”

“I don’t think of things in those terms,” he said.

“The commercial monk,” Gretchen said harshly. “Except that instead of the vow of poverty, you’ve taken the vow of wealth. Which is better in the long run?”

“Don’t talk like a fool, Gretchen.” Now he was sorry he had come upstairs with her.

“And the two others,” she continued. “Chastity and obedience. Chaste for our Virgin Mother’s sake—is that it? Obedience to Duncan Calderwood, the Pope of Whit-by’s Chamber of Commerce?”

“That’s all going to change now,” Rudolph said, but he was unwilling to defend himself further.

“You’re going to go over the wall, Father Rudolph? You’re going to marry, you’re going to wallow in the fleshpots, you’re going to tell Duncan Calderwood to go fuck himself?”

Rudolph stood up and went over and poured some more soda into his glass, biting back his anger. “It’s silly, Gretchen,” he said, as calmly as possible, “to take tonight out on me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, but her voice was still hard. “Ah—I’m the worst of the lot. I live with a man I despise, I do work that’s mean-spirited and piddling and useless, I’m New York’s easiest lay … Do I shock you, brother?” she said mockingly.

“I think you’re giving yourself a title you haven’t earned,” Rudolph said.

“Joke,” Gretchen said. “Do you want a list? Beginning with Johnny Heath? Do you think he’s been so good to you because of your shining bright eyes?”

“What does Willie think about all this?” Rudolph asked, ignoring the jibe. No matter how it had started and for whatever reasons, Johnny Heath was now his friend.

“Willie doesn’t think about anything but infesting bars and occasionally screwing some drunken broad and getting by in this world with as little work and as little honor as possible. If he somehow was given the original stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, his first thought would be which sponsor he could sell it to at the highest price to advertise vacation tours to Mount Sinai.”

Rudolph laughed and despite herself Gretchen had to laugh, too. “There’s nothing like a failing marriage,” she said, “to bring out flights of rhetoric.”

Rudolph’s laughter was part relief. Gretchen had switched targets and he no longer was under attack.

“Does Willie know what your opinion is of him?” he asked.

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “He agrees with it. That’s the worst thing about him. He says there’s not a man or a woman or a thing in this world that he admires, especially himself. He’d be deeply dissatisfied with himself, he told me, if he was anything but a failure. Beware romantic men.”

“Why do you live with him?” Rudolph asked bluntly.

“Do you remember the note I sent you saying I was in a mess and I wanted to see you?”

“Yes.” Rudolph remembered it very well, remembered that whole day very well. When he had come down to New York the next week and asked Gretchen what the trouble was she had said, “Nothing. It’s blown over.”

“I’d more or less decided I wanted to ask Willie for a divorce,” Gretchen said, “and I wanted your advice.”

“What changed your mind?”

Gretchen shrugged. “Billy got sick. Nothing. For a day the doctor thought it was appendicitis, but it wasn’t. But Willie and I stayed up with him all night and as I looked at him lying all white faced and in pain on the bed and Willie hovering over him, so obviously loving him, I couldn’t bear the thought of making him another one of those poor forlorn statistics—child of a broken marriage, permanently homesick, preparing for the psychiatrist’s couch. Well …” her voice hardened, “that charming fit of maternal sentimentality has passed on. If our parents had divorced when I was nine, I’d be a better woman than I am today.”

“You mean you want a divorce now?”

“If I get custody of Billy,” she said. “And that’s one thing he won’t give me.”

Rudolph hesitated, took a long drink of his whiskey. “Do you want me to see what I can do with him?” He wouldn’t have offered to interfere if it hadn’t been for the tears in the taxicab.

“If it’ll do any good,” Gretchen said. “I want to sleep with one man, not ten, I want to be honest, do something useful, finally. God, I should like The Three Sisters. Divorce is my Moscow. Give me one more drink, please.” She held out her glass.

Rudolph went over to the bar and filled both their glasses. “You’re running low on Scotch,” he said.

“I wish that were true,” she said.

There was the sound of an ambulance siren again, wailing, diminishing, a warning as it approached, a lament as it departed. The Doppler phenomenon. Was it the same accident, completing the round trip? Or one of an endless series, limitless blood on the avenues of the city?

Rudolph handed her her drink and she sat curled up on the couch, staring at it.

A clock chimed somewhere. One o’clock.

“Well,” Gretchen said, “I guess they’re finished eating Chinese by now, Tommy and that lady. Is it possible that he has the only happy marriage in the history of the Jordaches? Do they love, honor and cherish each other as they eat Chinese and warm the bosomy marriage bed?”

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 prize fight.”

“What?” Willie said puzzledly. “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 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 prize fight? 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 in 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.

Chapter 6

Chapter 7