Rich Man, Poor Man

Chapter 1

It was raining when she drove up to the house, the torrential, tropical rain of California that flattened flowers, bounced off the tiles of roofs, like ricocheting silvery bullets and sent bulldozed hillsides sliding down into neighbors’ gardens and swimming pools. Colin had died two years ago but she still automatically looked into the open garage to see if his car was there.

She left her books in the 1959 Ford and hurried to the front door, her hair soaking, even though it was only a few yards. Once inside she took off her coat and shook her wet hair. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon, but the house was dark and she turned on the front hall light. Billy had gone off on a camping trip to the Sierras with friends for the weekend and she hoped that the weather was better up in the mountains than down on the coast.

She reached into the mailbox. There were some bills, some circulars, a letter from Venice, in Rudolph’s handwriting.

She went into the living room, turning on lights as she went. She kicked off her wet shoes, made herself a Scotch and soda, and seated herself on the couch, her legs curled up under her, pleased with the warmly lit room. There were no whispers in the shadows anymore. She had won the battle with Colin’s ex-wife and she was going to stay in the house. The judge had awarded her a temporary allowance from the estate, against a final settlement, and she didn’t have to depend upon Rudolph anymore.

She opened Rudolph’s letter. It was a long one. When he was in America, he preferred to phone, but now that he was wandering around Europe, he used the mails. He must have had a lot of time on his hands, because he wrote often. She had had letters from him from London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Paris, St.-Jean-de-Luz, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Geneva, Florence, Rome, Ischia, Athens, and from little inns in towns that she had never heard of where he and Jean stopped en route for the night.

“Dear Gretchen”—she read—“It’s raining in Venice and Jean is out in it taking pictures. She says it’s the best time to get the quality of Venice, water on water. I’m snug in my hotel, undriven by art. Jean also likes to take pictures of people for the series she’s doing under the worst possible circumstances. Hardship and age, she tells me, preferably the two together, tell more about the character of a people and a country than anything else. I do not.attempt to argue with her. I prefer handsome young people in sunshine, myself, but I am only her Philistine husband.

“I am enjoying to the utmost the glorious fruits of sloth. Within me, after all the years of hustle and toil, I have discovered a happy, lazy man, content to look at two masterpieces a day, to lose myself in a foreign city, to sit for hours at a cafe table like any Frenchman or Italian, to pretend I know something about art and haggle in galleries for paintings by new men whom nobody ever heard about and whose works will probably make my living room in Whitby a chamber of horrors when I eventually get back there.

“Curiously enough, with all our traveling, and despite the fact that Pa came from Germany and probably had as much German in him as American, I have no desire to visit the country. Jean has been there, but isn’t anxious to go back. She says it’s too much like America, in all essential ways. I’ll have to take her opinion on the subject.

“She is the dearest woman alive and I am terribly uxorious and find myself carting her cameras around so as not to miss a moment with her. Except when it rains, of course. She has the sharpest of eyes and I have seen and understood more about Europe in six months with her than I would in sixty years alone. She has absolutely no literary sense and never reads a newspaper and the theater bores her, so I fill in that section of our communal life. She also drives our little Volkswagen very well, so I get a chance to moon and sightsee and enjoy things like the Alps and the valley of the Rhone without worrying about falling off the road. We have a pact. She drives in the morning and drinks a bottle of wine at lunch and I drive in the afternoon, sober.

“We don’t stay in the fancy places, as we did on our honeymoon, because as Jean says, now it’s for real. We do not suffer. She talks freely to everybody and with my French and her Italian and everybody’s English, we find ourselves striking up friendships with the widest variety of people—a wine-grower from Burgundy, a masseur on the beach at Biarritz, a rugby player from Lourdes, a non-objective painter, priests galore, fishermen, a bit-part actor in the French movies, old English ladies on bus tours, ex-commandos in the British army, GI’s based in Europe, a representative in the Paris Chamber of Deputies who says the only hope for the world is John Fitzgerald Kennedy. If you happen to bump into John Fitzgerald Kennedy, pass the word on to him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“School days, school days,” Sam croaked, “dear old golden rule days.” He had left school in the ninth grade and was not impressed with higher education.

“We’ll do it some other night, eh, Sam?”

“Sure thing,” he said. “Your house wash down the hill yet?”

“Just about.”

“California,” Sam said.

“It’s raining in Venice, too,” Gretchen said.

“How do you get top-secret information like that?”

“I’m reading a letter from my brother Rudolph. He’s in Venice. And it’s raining.”

Sam had met Rudolph when Rudolph and Jean had come out to stay with her for a week. After they had left Sam had said Rudolph was okay, but he was crazy about his wife.

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

Sam, who had been around enormously wealthy people for so long in Hollywood, believed that the sole reason for the existence of a man who had more than a hundred thousand dollars in the bank was to be fleeced. Unless, of course, he had talent. And the only talents Sam recognized were those involved in making films.

“I’m sure he’ll be delighted to,” Gretchen said.

“Keep dry, Baby,” Sam said, and hung up.

Sam was the calmest man she knew. In the storms of temperament that he had been through in the years in the studios, he had survived serenely, knowing what he knew, running a hundred thousand miles of film through his hands, catching mistakes, patching up other men’s blunders, never flattering, doing the utmost with the material he was handed, walking off pictures when the people making them became insufferable, going through one style after another with imperturbable efficiency, something of an artist, something of a handyman, loyal to the few directors, who, despite failures, were always what Sam considered pro’s, committed to their craft, painstaking, perfectionist. Sam had seen Colin’s plays and when Colin had come to Hollywood had sought Colin out and said he wanted to work with him, modest, but secure enough in what he did to know that the new director would be grateful for his experience and that their collaboration would be fruitful.

After Colin died, Sam had a long talk with Gretchen and had warned her that if she just was going to hang around Hollywood, doing nothing, just being a widow, she would be miserable. He had seen her with Colin enough in the course of the three films Colin had made, with Sam as the cutter, to understand that Colin had depended upon her, and with reason. He had offered to take her in with him, teach her what he knew about the business. “For a lone woman in this town,” he had said, “the cutting room is the best place. She isn’t on her own, she isn’t flinging her sex around, she isn’t challenging anybody’s ego, she has something methodical and practical to do, like baking a cake, every day.”

Gretchen had said, “Thank you, no,” at the time, because she didn’t want to profit, even by that much, on Colin’s reputation, and had opted for the graduate course. But every time she talked to Sam she wondered if she hadn’t said no too quickly. The people around her in school were too young, moved too fast, were interested in things that seemed useless to her, learned and discarded huge gobs of information in hours while she still was painfully struggling with the same material for weeks and weeks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jean has just come in, soaked and happy and a little drunk. The rain drove her into a cafe and two Venetian gentlemen plied her with wine. She sends her love.

“This has been a long egotistical letter. I expect one of equal length, equally egotistical, from you. Send it to the American Express in Paris. I don’t know just when we’ll be in Paris, but we’ll be there sometime in the next couple of weeks and they’ll hold the letter for me. Love to you and Billy, Rudolph. P.S. Have you heard from Tom? I haven’t had a word from him since the day of Mom’s funeral.”

Gretchen put down the flimsy sheets of air-mail stationery, covered densely with her brother’s firm, clearly formed handwriting. She finished her drink and decided against another one. She got up and went to the window and looked out. The rain was pouring down. The city below her was erased by water.

She mused over Rudolph’s letter. They were friendlier through the mails than when they saw each other. In writing, Rudolph showed a hesitant side, a lack of pride and confidence, that was endearing and that he somehow hid at other times. When they were together, at one moment or another, the urge to wound him swept over her. His letters showed a largeness of spirit, a willingness to forgive that was the sweeter because it was tacit and he never showed any signs that he knew that there was anything that needed forgiving. Billy had told her about his assault on Rudolph at the school and Rudolph had never even mentioned it to her and had been warm and thoughtful with the boy every time he saw him. And the letters were always signed “Love to you and Billy.”

I must learn generosity, she thought, staring out at the rain.

She didn’t know what to do about Tom. Tom didn’t write her often, but he kept her abreast of what he was doing. But as he had done with his mother, he made her promise to say nothing of his whereabouts to Rudolph.

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

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

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

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

“You don’t write much, but in your letters I get the impression things aren’t so hot with you. I’m sorry. Maybe you ought to change whatever it is you’re doing and do something else. If my friend Dwyer wasn’t so close to being a fag as to make no difference, I’d ask you to marry him, so you could be the cook. Joke.

“If you have any rich friends who like the idea of a Mediterranean cruise this coming summer, mention my name. No joke.

“Maybe it seems gaga to you and Rudy, your brother’s being a yacht captain but I figure it must be in the blood. After all Pa sailed the Hudson in his own boat. One time too many. Not such a joke.

“The boat is painted white, with blue trim. It looks like a million dollars. The shipyard owner says we could sell it like it is right now and make 10,000 dollars profit. But we’re not selling.

“If you happen to go East you could do me a favor. See if you can find out where my wife is and what she’s doing and how the kid is. I don’t miss the flag and I don’t miss the bright lights, but I sure miss him.

“I am writing such a long letter because it is raining like crazy here and we can’t finish the second coat of the deck house (blue). Don’t believe anybody who tells you it doesn’t rain on the Mediterranean.

“Dwyer is cooking and he is calling me to come eat. You have no idea how awful it smells. Love and kisses, Tom.”

Rain in Porto Santo Stefano, rain in Venice, rain in California. The Jordaches weren’t having much luck with the weather. But two of them, at least, were having luck with everything else, if only for one season. “Five o’clock in the afternoon is a lousy time of day,” Gretchen said aloud. To stave off self-pity, she drew the curtains and made herself another drink.

It was still raining at seven o’clock, when she got into the car and went down to Wilshire Boulevard to pick up Kosi Krumah. She drove slowly and carefully down the hill, with the water, six inches deep, racing ahead of her, gurgling at the tires. Beverly Hills, city of a thousand rivers.

Kosi was taking his master’s in sociology and was in two of her courses and they sometimes studied together, before examinations. He had been at Oxford and was older than the other students and more intelligent, she thought. He was from Ghana and had a scholarship. The scholarship, she knew, was not a lavish one, so when they worked together, she tried to arrange to give him dinner first at the house. She was sure he wasn’t getting quite enough to eat, although he never talked about it. She never dared to go into restaurants too far off campus with him, as you never knew how headwaiters would behave if a white woman came in with a black man, no matter how properly dressed he was and regardless of the fact that he spoke English with a pure Oxford accent. In class there never was any trouble and two or three of the professors seemed even unduly to defer to him when he spoke. With her, he was polite but invariably distant, almost like a teacher with a student. He had never seen any of Colin’s movies. He didn’t have the time to go to movies, he said. Gretchen suspected he didn’t have the money. She never saw him with girls and he didn’t seem to have made any friends except for herself. If she was his friend.

Her practice was to pick him up at the corner of Rodeo and Wilshire in Beverly Hills. He didn’t have a car, but he could take the bus along Wilshire from Westwood, where he lived, hear the university campus. As she came along Wilshire, peering through the spattered windshield, the rain so dense that the wipers couldn’t work fast enough to clear the glass, she saw him standing on the corner, with no raincoat, with not even the collar of his jacket turned up for protection. His head was up and he was looking out at the stream of traffic through his blurred glasses as though he were watching a parade.

She stopped and opened the door for him and he got in leisurely, water dripping from his clothes and forming an immediate pool on the floor around his shoes.

“Kosi!” Gretchen said. “You’re drowning. Why didn’t you wait in a doorway, at least?”

“In my tribe, my dear,” he said, “the men do not run from a little water.”

She was furious with him. “In my tribe,” she mimicked him, “in my tribe of white weaklings, the men have sense enough to come in out of the rain. You … you …” She racked’ her brain for an epithet. “You Israeli!”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then he laughed, uproariously. She had to laugh with him. “And while you’re at it,” she said, “you might as well wipe your glasses, tribesman.”

Obediently, he dried off his glasses.

When they got home, she made him take off his shirt and jacket and gave him one of Colin’s sweaters to wear. He was a small man, just about Colin’s size, and the sweater fit him. She hadn’t known what to do with Colin’s things, so they just lay in the drawers and hung in the closets, where he had left them. Every once in a while she told herself that she should give them to the Red Cross or some other organization, but she never got around to it.

They ate in the kitchen, fried chicken, peas, salad, cheese, ice cream, and coffee. She opened a bottle of wine. Kosi had once told her he had gotten used to drinking wine with his meals at Oxford.

He always protested that he wasn’t hungry and that she needn’t have bothered, but she noticed that he ate every morsel she put before him, even though she wasn’t much of a cook and the food was just passable. The only difference in their eating habits was that he used his fork with the left hand. Another thing he had learned in Oxford. He had gone through Oxford on a scholarship, too. His father kept a small cotton-goods shop in Accra, and without the scholarship there never would have been enough money to educate the brilliant son. He hadn’t been home in six years, but planned to go back and settle in Accra and work for the government as soon as he had written his thesis.

He asked where Billy was. Usually, they all ate together. When Gretchen said that Billy was away for the weekend, he said, “Too bad. I miss the little man.”

Actually, Billy was taller than he, but Gretchen had become accustomed to Kosi’s speech, with its “my dears” and its “little men.”

The rain drummed on the flagstones of the patio outside the window. They dawdled over dinner and Gretchen opened another bottle of wine.

“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I don’t feel like working tonight.”

“None of that, now,” he said reprovingly. “I didn’t make that fearful journey in a flood just to eat.”

They finished the wine as they did the dishes, Gretchen washing and Kosi wiping. The dishwasher had been broken for six months, but there wasn’t much need for it, as there were never more than three people for any one meal and fiddling with the machine was more trouble than it was worth for so few dishes.

She carried the pot of coffee into the living room with her and they each had two cups as they went over the week’s work. He had a quick, agile mind, by now severely trained, and he was impatient with her slowness.

“My dear,” he said, “you’re just not concentrating. Stop being a dilettante.”

She slammed the book shut. It was the third or fourth time he had reprimanded her since they had sat down at the desk together. Like a—like a governess, she thought, a big black mammy governess. They were working on a course on statistics and statistics bored her to stupefaction. “Not everyone can be as goddamn clever as you,” she said. “I was never the brightest student in Accra, I never won a scholarship to …”

“My dear Gretchen,” he said quietly, but obviously hurt, “I never claimed to be the brightest student anywhere …”

“Never claimed, never claimed,” she said, thinking, hopelessly, I’m being shrill. “You don’t have to claim. You just sit there being superior. Or stand out in the rain like some idiotic tribal god, looking down on the poor, cowardly white folk slinking past in their decadent Cadillacs.”

Kosi stood up, stepped back. He took off his glasses and put them in his pocket “I’m sorry,” he said “This relationship doesn’t seem to be working out …”

“This relationship,” she taunted him. “Where did you learn to talk like that?”

“Good night, Gretchen,” he said. He stood there, his mouth tight, his body taut. “If you’ll just give me the time to change back into my shirt and jacket … I won’t be a minute.”

He went into the bathroom. She heard him moving around in there. She drank what was left in her cup. The coffee was cold and the sugar at the bottom of the cup made it too sweet. She put her head in her hands, her elbows on the desk, above the scattered books, ashamed of herself. I did it because of Rudolph’s letter this afternoon, she thought. I did it because of Colin’s sweater. Because of nothing to do with that poor young man with his Oxford accent.

When he came back, wearing his shirt and jacket, still shapeless and damp, she was standing, waiting for him. Without his glasses his close-cropped head was beautiful, the forehead wide, the eyelids heavy, the nose sharply cut, the lips rounded, the ears small and flat against the head. All done in flawless, dark stone, and all somehow pitiful and defeated.

“I shall be leaving you now, my dear,” he said.

“I’ll take you in the car,” she said, in a small voice.

“I’ll walk, thank you.”

“It’s still pouring,” she said.

“We Israelis,” he said somberly, “do not pay attention to the rain.”

She essayed a laugh, but there was no answering glint of humor.

He turned toward the door. She reached out and seized his sleeve. “Kosi,” she said. “Please don’t go like that.”

He stopped and turned back toward her. “Please,” she said. She put her arms loosely around him, kissed his cheek. His hands came up slowly and held her head between them. He kissed her gently. Then not so gently. She felt his hands sliding over her body. Why not? she thought, why not, and pressed him to her. He tried to pull away and move her toward the bedroom, but she dropped onto the couch. Not in the bed in which she and Colin had lain together.

He stood over her. “Undress,” he said.

“Put out the lights.”

He went over to the switch on the wall and the room was in darkness. She heard him undressing as she took off her clothes. She was shivering when he came to her. She wanted to say, “I have made a mistake, please go home,” but she was ashamed to say it.

She was dry and unready but he plunged into her at once, hurting her. She moaned, but the moan was not one of pleasure. She felt as though she were being torn apart. He was rough and powerful and she lay absolutely still, absorbing the pain.

It was over quickly, without a word. He got up and she heard him feeling his way across the room toward the light switch. She jumped up and ran into the bathroom and locked the door. She washed her face repeatedly in cold water and stared at her reflection in the mirror above the basin. She wiped off what was left of her lipstick which had smeared around her mouth. She would have liked to take a hot shower, but she didn’t want him to hear her doing it. She put on a robe and waited as long as she dared, hoping he would be gone when she went out. But he was still there, standing in the middle of the living room, dressed, impassive. She tried to smile. She had no idea of how it came out.

“Don’t you ever do anything like that again to anybody, my dear,” he said evenly. “And certainly not to me. I will not be tolerated. I will not be condescended to. I will not be part of anybody’s program of racial integration.”

She stood with her head lowered, unable to speak.

“When you get your degree,” he went on in the same flat, malevolent tone, “you can play Lady Bountiful with the poor bastards in the charity clinics, the beautiful, rich white lady proving to all the niggers and all the little greasers how democratic and generous this wonderful country is and how loving and Christian educated beautiful white ladies who don’t happen to have husbands can be. I won’t be here to see it. I’ll be back in Africa, praying that the grateful little niggers and the grateful little greasers are getting ready to slit your throat.”

He went out silently. There was only the smallest sound as the front door closed.

After a while, she cleared the desk they had been working on. She put the cups and saucers and the coffee pot in the sink in the kitchen and piled the books on one side of the desk. I’m too old for school books, she thought. I can’t cope. Then, walking painfully, she went around and locked up. Arnold Simms, in your maroon bathrobe, she thought as she switched off the lights, rest easy. I have paid for you.

In the morning, she didn’t attend her two Saturday classes, but called Sam Corey at the studio and asked if she could come over and talk to him.

Chapter 2

Even pregnant as she was, Jean insisted upon coming down and having breakfast with him every day. “At the end of the day,” she said, “I want to be as tired as you. I don’t want to be one of those American women who lie around all day and then when their husbands come home, drag the poor beasts out every evening, because they’re bursting with unused vigor. The energy gap has ruined more marriages by half than adultery.”

She was nearly at term and even under the loosely flowing nightgown and robe she was wearing, the bulge was huge and clumsy. Rudolph had a pang of guilt when he watched her. She had had such a neat delicate way of walking and now she was forced to balance herself painfully, belly protruding, pace careful, as she went from room to room. Nature has provided women with a kind of necessary lunacy, he thought, for them to desire to bring children into the world.

They sat in the dining room, with the pale April sun streaming through the windows, while Martha brought them fresh coffee. Martha had changed miraculously since his mother’s death. Although she ate no more than before, she had filled out and was now matronly and comfortable. The sharp lines of her face had disappeared and the everlasting downward twitch of her mouth had been replaced by something that might even have been a smile. Death has its uses, Rudolph thought, watching her gently place the coffee pot in front of Jean. In the old days she would have banged it down on the table, her daily accusation against Fate.

Pregnancy had rounded Jean’s face and she no longer looked like a schoolgirl fiercely determined to get the best marks in the class. Placid and womanly, her face glowed softly in the sunlight.

“This morning,” Rudolph said, “you look saintly.”

“You’d look saintly, too,” Jean said, “if you hadn’t had any sex for two months.”

“I hope the kid turns out to be worth all this,” Rudolph said.

“He’d better.”

“How is it this morning?”

“Okay. He’s marching up and down wearing paratroop boots, but otherwise okay.”

“What if it’s a girl?” Rudolph asked.

“I’ll teach her not to overlap,” Jean said. They both laughed.

“What have you got to do this morning?” he asked.

“There’s a nurse coming to be interviewed, and the furniture’s coming for the nursery and Martha and I have to put it in place and I have to take my vitamins and I have to weigh myself,” Jean said. “A big morning. How about you?”

“I have to go to the university,” Rudolph said. “There’s a board of trustees’ meeting. Then I ought to look in at the office …”

“You’re not going to let that old monster Calderwood nag at you again, are you?”

Ever since Rudolph had told Calderwood he intended to retire from the business in June, Calderwood had argued with him almost every time he saw him. “Who retires at the age of thirty-six, for the Lord’s sake?” Calderwood kept repeating.

“I do,” Rudolph had once replied, but Calderwood had refused to believe him. Suspicious, as always, Calderwood felt that Rudolph was really maneuvering for more control and had hinted that if Rudolph would stay he would give it to him. Calderwood had even offered to move the main office down to New York, but Rudolph said he no longer wanted to live in New York. Jean now shared his attachment to the old farmhouse in Whitby and was pouring over plans with an architect to enlarge it.

“Don’t worry about Calderwood,” Rudolph said, standing. “I’ll be home for lunch.”

“That’s what I like,” Jean said. “A husband who comes home for lunch. I’ll make love to you after lunch.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind.” He leaned over to kiss the dear, smiling face.

It was early and he drove slowly, enjoying the town. Small children in bright-colored parkas were riding tricycles on the sidewalks or played on the drying lawns, burgeoning with the first frail green of spring. A young woman in slacks pushed a baby carriage in the sunshine. An old dog dozed on the warm steps of a big gingerbread house, painted white. Hawkins, the mailman, waved at him and he waved back. Slattery, standing beside his prowl car and talking to somebody’s gardener, saluted him with a smile; two professors from the biology department, walking toward the university deep in conversation, looked up long enough to indicate a mild hello. This part of town, with its trees and large wooden houses and quiet streets, had an innocent nineteenth-century neighborly air, before the wars, before booms and depressions. Rudolph wondered how he ever had been anxious to get away from the town, where he was known and greeted at every turn, for the anonymous uncertainties and stony hostility of New York.

He had to pass the athletic field on the way to the Administration Building and he saw Quentin McGovern in a gray suit, jogging along the track. He stopped the car and got out and Quentin came over to him, a tall, serious young man, his skin gleaming with the sweat of his exercise. They shook hands. “I don’t have my first class till eleven,” Quentin said. “And it was a nice day for running, after being indoors on the boards all winter.”

They didn’t run in the morning anymore. Since his marriage, Rudolph had taken up tennis, for Jean’s sake. Anyway, it was too Spartan a deed to make himself get up every morning at seven o’clock in all weathers from the bed of his bride to pound around a track for three-quarters of an hour, trying to keep pace with a young athlete at the top pitch of his form. Besides, it made him feel old. There was time enough for that bit.

“How’s it going, Quentin?” Rudolph asked.

“Not bad. I’m twenty-two eight for the two twenty and the Coach says he’s going to run me in the four forty and the relay as well.”

“What does your mother say now?”

Quentin smiled, remembering the cold winter mornings. “She says for me not to get too swell-headed. Mothers don’t change.”

“How about your work in school?”

“They must have made a mistake at the office,” Quentin said. “They put me on the Dean’s List.”

“What does your mother say about that?”

“She says it’s because I’m colored and they want to show how liberal they are.” Quentin smiled faintly.

“If you have any further trouble with your mother,” Rudolph said, “tell her to call me.”

“I’ll do that, Mr. Jordache.”

“Well, I’ve got to be going. Give my regards to your father.”

“My father’s dead, Mr. Jordache,” Quentin said quietly.

“I’m sorry.” Rudolph got back into his car. Christ, he thought. Quentin’s father must have worked at least twenty-five years at Calderwood’s. You’d think somebody would have had the sense to pass the word around.

The morning was no longer as pure and pleasurable as it had been before his conversation with Quentin.

All the parking places were taken in front of the. Administration Building and Rudolph had to leave his car almost five hundred yards away. Everything is turning into a parking lot, he thought irritably, as he locked the car. The radio had been stolen out of it some time before, in New York, and Rudolph now locked the car wherever he left it, even if he was only going to be five minutes. He had had a mild argument with Jean on the subject, because she refused to lock the car at any time and even left the front door of the house open when she was home alone. You could love your neighbor, he had told her, but it was foolish to ignore the larceny in his heart.

As he was testing the door, he heard his name called. “Hey, Jordache!” It was Leon Harrison, who was also on the board of trustees and was on his way to the meeting. Harrison was a tall, portly man of about sixty, with senatorial white hair and a misleading heartiness of manner. He was the publisher of the local newspaper, which he had inherited from his father, along with a great deal of real estate in and around Whitby. The newspaper was not doing very well, Rudolph knew. He wasn’t sorry about it. It was badly run by a small, underpaid, drunken, broken-down staff of men who had been thrown off other papers all across the country. Rudolph made a point in not believing anything he read in Harrison’s paper, even reports on the weather.

“How are you, boy,” Harrison said, putting his arm around Rudolph’s shoulder as they walked toward the Administration Building. “All prepared to put a fire under us old fogies again this morning?” He laughed loudly, to show his lack of malice. Rudolph had had many dealings with Harrison, not all of them agreeable, about the Calderwood advertising in his paper. Harrison had started out calling him, boy, then Rudy, then Jordache, and by now was back to boy, Rudolph noted.

“Just the same routine suggestions,” Rudolph said. “Like burning down the Science Building to get rid of Professor Fredericks.” Fredericks was the head of the department and Rudolph was sure that it was safe to say that the science courses were the worst in any university the size of Whitby north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Fredericks and Harrison were cronies and Fredericks often wrote scientific articles for Harrison’s paper, articles that made Rudolph blush with shame for the university. At least three times a year Fredericks would write an article acclaiming a new cure for cancer that would appear on the editorial page of the Whitby Sentinel.

“You businessmen,” Harrison said largely, “you never can appreciate the role of pure science. You want to see a return on your investment every six months. You expect to see the simoleons come pouring out of every test tube.”

When it suited his convenience, Harrison, with his acres of choice downtown property and his interest in a bank, was very much the hard-headed businessman. At other times, publisher that he was, immersed in printer’s ink, he was a literary figure, decrying the elimination of Latin as a required subject for graduation or inveighing against a new English syllabus because it did not include enough of the works of Charles Dickens.

He tipped his hat grandly to a woman instructor in the psychology department who crossed their path. He had old-fashioned manners and up-to-date hatreds, Harrison. “I hear there’re some interesting things going on down at Dee Cee,” he.said.

“There are always interesting things going on at Dee Cee,” Rudolph said.

“More interesting than usual,” said Harrison. “There’s a rumor that you’re going to step down.”

“I never step down,” Rudolph said and then was sorry he said it. The man brought out the worst in him.

“If you do happen to step down,” Harrison persisted, “who’s the next in line? Knight?”

“The matter hasn’t come up,” Rudolph said. Actually, the matter had come up, between him and Calderwood, but no decision had been reached. He didn’t like to lie, but if you didn’t lie to a man like Harrison you would deserve canonization.

“Dee Cee means a lot to this town,” Harrison said, “largely thanks to you, and you know I’m not a man who indulges in flattery, and my readers have a right to know what’s going on behind the scenes.” The words were banal and innocuous, but there was a threat there, and both Harrison and Rudolph understood it.

“If anything happens,” Rudolph said, “your readers will be the first to know.”

As he went up the steps of the Administration Building, with Harrison at his side, Rudolph couldn’t help but feel that the morning was deteriorating rapidly.

The President of the university was a new, youngish, brisk man from Harvard, by the name of Dorlacker, who stood for no nonsense from his board. He and Rudolph were friendly and he came over to the house quite often with his wife and talked freely, mostly about getting rid of the majority of the board of trustees. He detested Harrison.

The meeting ran along familiar lines. The finance committee chairman reported that although endowments were going up, costs were going up even faster and advised raising the price of tuition and putting a freeze on the number of scholarships. The motion was tabled for further study.

The board was reminded that the new wing for the library would be ready for the fall term and had not yet been given a name. It was recalled from the last meeting that Mr. Jordache had suggested that it be called the Kennedy Wing, or even better, have the whole building, now merely called the Memorial Library, be renamed the Kennedy Library.

Harrison protested that the late President had been a controversial figure, and had represented only half the country and that a university campus was no place to introduce divisive politics. On a vote, it was decided to call the new wing the Kennedy Wing, leaving the entire building under its old title, the Memorial Library. The President drily appointed Mr. Harrison to find out for the board what or whom the library was in memory of.

Another member of the board, who also had had to park at some distance from the Administration Building, said that he thought there ought to be a strict rule that no students be allowed to own automobiles. Impossible to enforce, Dorlacker said, therefore unwise. Perhaps a new parking lot could be built.

Harrison was disturbed by an editorial in the student newspaper, calling for a ban-the-bomb demonstration. The editor should be disciplined for introducing politics to the campus and for disrespect for the government of the United States. Dorlacker explained that it was his opinion that a university was not the place to put down freedom of speech in America. On a vote, it was decided not to discipline the editor.

“This board,” Harrison growled, “is running away from its responsibilities.”

Rudolph was the youngest member of the board and he spoke softly and deferentially. But because of his alliance with Dorlacker and his ability to dig up endowments from alumni and foundations (he had even got Calderwood to donate fifty thousand dollars toward the new library wing) and his close knowledge of the town and its inter-relation with the university, he was the most influential member of the board and he knew it. What had started as almost a hobby and a mild boost to his ego had become a ruling interest in his life. It was with pleasure that he dominated the board and pushed one project after another down the throats of the die-hards like Harrison on the board. The new wing on the library, the expanded courses in sociology and foreign affairs, the introduction of a resident artist and the expansion of the Art School, the donation for two weeks a year of the theater at the Shopping Center to the Drama Department had all been his ideas. Remembering Boylan’s sneer, Rudolph was resolved that before he got through, nobody, not even a man like Boylan, could call Whitby an agricultural school.

As an added satisfaction, he could at the end of each year deduct a good part of his travel expenses, both in the United States and abroad, from his income tax, as he made it a point to visit schools and universities wherever he went, as part of his duties as a trustee of the university. The training he had received at the hands of Johnny Heath had made this almost automatic. “The amusements of the rich,” Johnny called the game with the Internal Revenue Service.

“As you know,” Dorlacker was saying, “at this meeting we are to consider new appointments to the faculty for the next school year. There is one department post that will be open—the head of the department of economics. We have inspected the field and conferred with the members of the department and we would like to offer for your approval the name of an ex-head of what used to be the combined departments of history and economics here, a man who has been gaining valuable experience in Europe for the past few years, Professor Lawrence Denton.” As he spoke the name, Dorlacker casually turned toward Rudolph. There was the barest hint of a wink. Rudolph had exchanged letters with his old teacher and knew that Denton wanted to come back to America. He was not made to be a man without a country, Denton had written, and his wife had never gotten over being homesick. Rudolph had told Dorlacker all about Denton and Dorlacker had been sympathetic. Denton had helped his own case by using the time in Europe to write a book about the rebirth of the German economy, which had gotten respectful reviews.

Denton’s resurrection was only poetic justice, Rudolph thought. He had not testified in his old friend’s behalf at a time when it might have helped. But if he had testified the chances were that he never would have been elected to the board of trustees and been able to politick for Denton’s reinstatement. There was something pleasingly ironic about the situation that made Rudolph smile to himself as Dorlacker spoke. He knew that between them Dorlacker and he had canvassed enough votes to put Denton across. He sat back comfortably, in silence, allowing Dorlacker to make the necessary moves.

“Denton,” Harrison said. “I remember the name. He got kicked out for being a Red.”

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

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

“At the time,” Dorlacker said gently, “the country was under the McCarthy cloud and a great number of estimable people were made to suffer groundlessly. Fortunately, that is far behind us, and we can judge a man by his abilities alone. I, for one, am happy to be able to demonstrate that Whitby is guided only by strict scholastic standards.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a knock on the door and Dorlacker said, “Come in.”

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

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

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

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

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

Waiting all through the long day, holding Jean’s hand, Rudolph didn’t know how she could stand it. Dr. Levine was calm. It was normal, he said, for a first birth. Dr. Levine’s calmness made Rudolph nervy. Dr. Levine just dropped in casually from time to time during the day, as though it were just a routine social call. When he suggested that Rudolph go down to the hospital cafeteria to have some dinner, Rudolph had been shocked that the doctor could think he could leave his suffering wife and gorge himself, abandoning her to her agony. “I’m a father,” he said, “not an obstetrician.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who’s there?” he called sharply.

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

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

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

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

“I don’t care what anyone finds out,” Virginia said. “I’m not ashamed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I want you to make love to me,” she said, standing there, staring at him, her hands sunk in the pockets of her coat, looking normal, everyday, neatly dressed. “I want you to make love to me tonight. I know you want to do it. I’ve seen it in your eyes from the beginning.” She spoke in a rushed, flat whisper. “It’s just that you haven’t dared. Like everybody else, you’re afraid of my father. Come on. I’m worth trying. You keep thinking of me as a little girl, like when you first saw me in my father’s house. Well, I’m nobody’s little girl, don’t worry about that. I’ve been around. Maybe not as much as your precious wife with her photographer friend—oh, you’re surprised I know about that—I made it my business to know, I tell you, and I could tell you plenty more if you want to hear.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She comes from tough stock,” Rudolph said. “Oh, by the way, thanks for the present for Enid.” Jean’s mother’s maiden name had been Enid Cunningham and as soon as Jean had been strong enough to talk lucidly, she had asked Rudolph if he minded naming the child after her mother. “We’re rising in the world, we Jordaches,” Rudolph had said. “We are moving into three-name, ancestral territory.” There had been no christening ceremony and there would be none. Jean shared his atheism, or as he himself preferred to think of it, his agnosticism. He had merely written the name in on the birth certificate, thinking as he did so that Enid Cunningham Jordache was a lot of letters for a seven-pound child to start life with. Brad had sent a sterling silver porringer with matching saucer and pusher for the baby. They now had eight sterling silver porringers in the house. Brad was not terribly original. But he had also started a savings account for the child with a deposit of five hundred dollars. “You never know,” Brad had said when Rudolph had protested at the size of the gift, “when a girl has to pay for an abortion, fast.”

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

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

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

“I haven’t given it much thought,” Rudolph said. “Give me a couple of weeks to think it over.”

“What’s there to think over?” Sunderlin asked aggressively.

“Good old Rudy,” Brad said. “No snap decisions. He thinks it over for two weeks if he has to have a haircut.”

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

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

Brad remained at the bar and ordered another drink. He always had a high flush on his face, but it was impossible to tell whether it was from the sun or from drink.

“A man of your stature,” Brad said. “Everybody in this town always talks about you as though you’re ten feet tall.”

“That’s why I stick to this town,” Rudolph said.

“You going to stay here when you quit?” Brad didn’t look at Rudolph while he spoke, but nodded at Hank as Hank put his glass in front of him on the bar.

“Who said anything about quitting?” Rudolph had not talked to Brad about his plans.

“Things get around.”

“Who told you?”

“You are going to quit, aren’t you?”

“Who told you?”

“Virginia Calderwood,” Brad said.

“Oh.”

“She overheard her father talking to her mother.”

Spy, information gatherer, demented night-lurker, on quiet feet, Virginia Calderwood, listening in and out of shadows.

“I’ve been seeing her the last couple of months,” Brad said. “She’s a nice girl.”

Student of character, Bradford Knight, originally from Oklahoma, open Western plains, where things were what they seemed to be.

“Uhuh,” Rudolph said.

“Have you and the old man discussed who’s going to take your place?”

“Yes, we’ve discussed it.”

“Who’s it going to be?”

“We haven’t decided yet.”

“Well,” Bradford said, smiling, but more flushed than ever, “give an old college chum at least ten minutes notice before it’s announced, will you?”

“Yes. What else has Miss Calderwood told you?”

“Nothing much,” Brad said offhandedly. “That she loves me. Stuff like that. Have you seen her recently?”

“No.” Rudolph hadn’t seen her since the night Enid was born. Six weeks wasn’t recently.

“We’ve had some laughs together,” Brad said. “Her appearance is deceptive. She’s a fun girl.”

New aspects of the lady’s character. Given to laughter. A fun girl. Merriment on porches at midnight.

“Actually,” Brad said, “I’m considering marrying her.”

“Why?” Rudolph asked. Although he could guess why.

“I’m tired of whoring around,” Brad said. “I’m getting on toward forty and it’s becoming wearing.” Not the whole answer, friend, Rudolph thought. Nowhere nearly the whole answer.

“Maybe I’m impressed with your example,” Brad said. “If marriage is good enough for a man of your stature—” He grinned, burly and red. “It ought to be good enough for a man of mine. Conjugal bliss.”

“You didn’t have much conjugal bliss the last time.”

“That’s for sure,” Brad said. His first marriage, to the daughter of an oil man, had lasted six months. “But I was younger then. And I wasn’t married to a decent girl like Virginia. And maybe my luck’s changed.”

Rudolph took a deep breath. “Your luck hasn’t changed, Brad,” he said quietly. Then he told Brad about Virginia Calderwood, about the letters, the phone calls, the ambushes in front of his apartment, the last crazy scene just six weeks ago. Brad listened in silence. All he said, at the end, was, “It must be plain glorious to be as wildly desirable as you, kid.”

Jean came up then, shining from her shower, her hair tied back in a velvet bow, her brown legs bare in moccasins. “Hi, Mom,” Brad said, getting off his bar stool and kissing her. “Let me buy everybody a drink.”

They talked about the baby and golf and tennis and the new play that was going into the Whitby Theater, which was opening for the season next week. Virginia Calderwood’s name wasn’t mentioned, and after he had finished his drink, Brad said, “Well, me for a shower,” and signed for the drinks and ambled off, a thickening, aging man in orange pants, his expensive golf shoes making a pecking noise with their spikes on the scarred wooden floor.

Two weeks later, the invitation to the wedding of Miss Virginia Calderwood to Mr. Bradford Knight was in the morning mail.

The organ struck up the wedding march and Virginia came down the aisle on her father’s arm. She looked pretty, delicate, fragile, and composed, in her bridal white. She did not look at Rudolph as she passed him, although he was standing in a front pew, with Jean beside him. Bradford Knight, bridegroom, sweating a little and flushed in the June heat, was waiting at the altar, with Johnny Heath, best man, both of them in striped pants and Prince Alberts. People had been surprised that Rudolph hadn’t been chosen as best man, but Rudolph had not been surprised.

It’s my doing, Rudolph thought, as he half listened to the service. I brought him here from Oklahoma, I took him into the business, I refused the bride. It’s my doing, am I responsible?

The wedding lunch was held at the Country Club. The buffet was laid on a long table under an awning and tables were set all around the lawn, under brightly colored umbrellas. A band played on the terrace, where the bride and bridegroom, now dressed for traveling, had led the first dance, a waltz. Rudolph had been surprised at how well Brad, who did not seem like a graceful man, had danced. Rudolph had kissed the bride dutifully. Virginia had smiled at him with exactly the same smile she had given everybody else. Maybe, Rudolph thought, it’s all over, she’s going to be all right.

Jean had insisted upon dancing with him, although he had protested, “How can you dance in the middle of the day?”

“I love weddings,” Jean said, holding him close. “Other people’s.” Then, maliciously, “Shouldn’t you get up and make a toast to the bride? You might mention what a loyal friend she is—waiting outside your door night after night to make sure you got home safely and calling you at all hours to see if you were afraid in the dark and offering to keep you company in your poor lonely bed?”

“Ssh,” Rudolph said, looking around apprehensively. He hadn’t told her about the night of the hospital.

“She does look beautiful,” Jean said. “Are you sorry about your choice?”

“In despair,” he said. “Now, dance.”

The boys in the band were a combination from the college and Rudolph was saddened by how well they played. He remembered his days with the trumpet when he was about their age. The young did everything so much better these days. The boys on the Port Philip track team were running the two twenty, his old distance, at least two seconds faster than he had ever run it. “Let’s get off this damned floor,” he said. “I feel crowded.”

They went over and had a glass of champagne and talked to Brad’s father, who had come from Tulsa for the occasion, wearing a wide-brimmed Stetson hat. He was weatherbeaten and thin and had deep sun-creases in the back of his neck. He didn’t look like a man who had won and lost fortunes, but rather like a small-part player in the movies, hired to play the sheriff in a Western.

“Brad sure has talked enough about you, sir,” old man Knight said to Rudolph. “And about your beautiful young bride.” He raised his glass gallantly to Jean, who had taken off her hat and who now looked not bridal, but coeducational. “Yes, sir, Mister Jordache,” old man Knight went on, “my son Brad is eternally in your debt, and don’t think he don’t know it. He was turning on his own tail out there in Oklahoma, hardly knowing where his next square meal was coming from when he got the call from you to come East. And I was in mighty poor straits myself at the time, I don’t mind telling you, and I couldn’t raise the price of a broken-down oil rig to help my boy. I’m proud to say I’m back on my own two feet again, now, but for awhile there it really looked like poor old Pete Knight was finally ready to be put to rest. Me and Brad were living in one room and eating chili three times a day for sustenance when like a bolt from the blue, the call came from his friend Rudy. I told him when he came home from the service, now you see here, Brad, you take the offer of the United States Government, and you get yourself to a college with that old GI Bill of Rights, from now on a man ain’t going to be worth spit in this country if he ain’t been to college. He’s a good boy, Brad, and he had the sense to listen to his pa, and now look at him.” He beamed across the dance floor to where his son and Virginia and Johnny Heath were drinking champagne among a group of the younger guests. “All dressed up, drinking champagne, with all the future in the world, married to a beautiful young heiress. And if ever he says he doesn’t owe it all to his friend Rudy, his pa’ll be the first to call him a liar.”

Brad and Virginia came over with Johnny to pay their respects to Knight and the old man took Virginia onto the floor to dance with her, while Brad danced with Jean.

“You’re not celebrating much today, are you, Rudy?” Johnny asked. Nothing escaped those sleepy eyes in that smooth round face.

“The bride is pretty, the champagne plentiful, the sun is shining, my friend thinks he’s got it made for life,” Rudolph said. “Why shouldn’t I be celebrating?”

“As I said,” Johnny said.

“My glass is empty,” said Rudolph. “Let’s get some more wine.” He started toward the end of the buffet table under the awning, where the bar had been set up.

“We’re going to have an answer on Monday from Harrison,” Johnny said. “I think he’s going to go for the deal. You’ll have your toy.”

Rudolph nodded. Although it annoyed him when Johnny, who didn’t see how any real money could ever be made out of the Sentinel, called it a toy. Whatever his feelings were, Johnny, as usual, had come through. He had found a man called Hamlin, who was putting together a chain of small-town newspapers, to act as the buyer of record. He was contracted to sell out his interest to Rudolph three months later. Hamlin was a hard dealer and he had demanded three percent of the purchase price for his services, but he had beaten down Harrison’s first demands so far that it was worthwhile to meet his conditions.

At the bar, Rudolph was clapped on the back by Sid Grossett, who had been Mayor of Whitby until the last election, and who was sent every four years as a delegate to the Republican convention. He was a hardy, friendly man, a lawyer by profession, who had successfully squashed rumors that he had taken bribes while he was in office, but had chosen not to run at the last election. Wisely, people said. The present mayor of the town, a Democrat, was at the other end of the bar, equally drinking Calderwood’s champagne. Everybody had turned out for the wedding.

“Hi, young man,” Grossett said. “I’ve been hearing about you.”

“Good or bad?” Rudolph asked.

“Nobody ever hears anything bad about Rudolph Jordache,” Grossett said. He wasn’t a politician for nothing. “Hear, hear,” Johnny Heath said.

“Hi, Johnny.” A handshake for everybody. There was always another election. “I got it from the horse’s mouth,” Grossett said. “You’re quitting Dee Cee at the end of the month.”

“Who’s the horse this time?”

“Mr. Duncan Calderwood.”

“The emotions of the day must have gone to the poor old man’s head,” Rudolph said. He didn’t want to talk about his business to Grossett, or answer questions about what he was going to do next. There was plenty of time for that later.

“The day any emotions go to Duncan Calderwood’s head,” Grossett said, “you call me. I’ll come running. He tells me he doesn’t know what your future plans are. In fact, he said, he didn’t know if you had any plans. But just in case you’re open to suggestions—” He swiveled around, sniffing the air for possible Democrats. “Maybe we could talk in a day or two. Maybe you could come around to my office some afternoon next week.”

“I’m going to be in New York next week.”

“Well, there’s no sense beating about the bush,” Grossett said. “Have you ever thought you’d like to go into politics?”

“When I was twenty,” Rudolph said. “Now that I’m old and wise …”

“Don’t give me that,” Grossett said roughly. “Everybody thinks about going into politics. Especially somebody like you. Rich, popular, with a big success behind you, a beautiful wife, looking for new worlds to conquer.”

“Don’t tell me you want to run me for President, now that Kennedy’s dead,” Rudolph said.

“I know that’s a joke,” Grossett said earnestly. “But who knows if it’ll still be a joke ten years, twelve years from now? No. You got to start politics on a local level, Rudy, and right here in this town you’re everybody’s fair-haired boy. Am I right, Johnny.” He turned, pleadingly, to the best man.

“Everybody’s fair-haired boy.” Johnny nodded.

“Up from poverty, went to college right here, handsome, educated, public-spirited.”

“I’ve always felt I was actually private spirited,” Rudolph said, to cut off the praise.

“Okay, be smart. But just look at all the goddamn committees you’re on. And you haven’t got an enemy in the world.”

“Don’t insult me, Sid.” Rudolph was enjoying baiting the insistent little man, but he was listening more closely than he seemed to be.

“I know what I’m talking about.”

“You don’t even know whether I’m a Democrat or a Republican,” Rudolph said. “Ask Leon Harrison and he’ll tell you I’m a Communist.”

“Leon Harrison is an old fart,” Grossett said. “If I had my way I’d take up a collection to buy his paper away from him.”

Rudolph couldn’t refrain from winking at Johnny Heath.

“I know what you are,” Grossett went plugging on. “You’re a Kennedy-type Republican. It’s a winning model. Just what the old Party needs.”

“Now that you’ve got the pin in me, Sid,” Rudolph said, “mount me and put me in a glass case.” He disliked being categorized, no matter what the category.

“The place I want to put you is in the Whitby Town Hall,” Grossett said. “As Mayor. And I bet I can do it. How do you like that? And from then on, up the ladder, up the ladder. I suppose you wouldn’t like to be a Senator, the Senator from New York, I suppose that rubs you the wrong way, doesn’t it?”

“Sid,” Rudolph said gently, “I’ve been teasing you. I’m flattered, really I am. I’ll be in next week to see you, I promise. Now, let’s remember this is a wedding, not a smoke-filled hotel room. I’m off to dance with the bride.”

He set down his glass and gave Grossett’s shoulder a friendly pat, then went looking for Virginia. He hadn’t danced with her yet and if he didn’t go around the floor at least once with her, there would undoubtedly be talk. It was a small town and there were sharp eyes and tongues everywhere.

Good Republican, potential Senator, he approached the bride where she stood, demure and gay, under an awning, her hand light and loving on her new husband’s arm. “May I have the honor?” Rudolph asked.

“Anything I have is yours,” Brad said. “You know that.”

Rudolph swung Virginia onto the floor. She danced bridally, her hand cool in his, her touch on his back feathery, her head thrown back proudly, conscious of being watched by girls who wished they were in her place today, by men who wished they were in her husband’s.

“All happiness,” Rudolph said. “Many, many years of happiness.”

She laughed softly. “I’ll be happy,” she said, her thighs touching his. “Never fear. I’ll have Brad for a husband and you for a lover.”

“Oh, Christ,” Rudolph said.

With the tip of a finger she touched his lips to silence him, and they finished the dance. As he walked her back to where Brad was standing, he knew that he had been too optimistic. Things were not going to work out all right. Never in a million years.

He did not throw rice along with the other guests as the newlyweds drove off in Brad’s car to begin their honeymoon. He was on the front steps of the club, next to Calderwood. Calderwood didn’t throw any rice either. The old man was frowning, but it was hard to tell whether it was because of something he was thinking or because the sun was in his eyes. As the guests drifted back for one last glass of champagne, Calderwood remained on the steps, looking into the shimmering summer afternoon distance in which his last daughter had disappeared with her husband. Earlier, Calderwood had said to Rudolph that he wanted to talk to him so Rudolph gave a sign to Jean that he would meet her later and she left the two men alone.

“What do you think?” Calderwood said finally.

“It was a beautiful wedding.”

“Not about that.”

Rudolph shrugged. “Who knows how a marriage is going to turn out?”

“He expects he’s going to get your job now.”

“That’s normal,” Rudolph said.

“I wish to God it was you riding off down to New York with her this afternoon.”

“Life doesn’t work out that neatly most of the time,” Rudolph said.

“It certainly doesn’t.” Calderwood shook his head. “I don’t trust him completely,” he said. “I hate to say that about any man who’s worked loyally for me the way he has and who’s married my daughter, but I can’t hide it from myself.”

“He’s never made a wrong move since he came here,” Rudolph said. Except one, he thought. Not believing what I told him about Virginia. Or worse, believing it and marrying her anyway. But he couldn’t tell Calderwood that.

“I know he’s your friend,” Calderwood said, “and he’s smart as a fox and you’ve known him a long time and you had enough confidence in him to bring him here and give him a big load of responsibility, but there’s something about him—” Calderwood shook his big, sallow, death-marked head again. “He drinks, he’s a whoremonger—don’t contradict me, Rudy, I know what I know—he gambles, he comes from Oklahoma …”

Rudolph chuckled.

“I know,” Calderwood said. “I’m an old man and I have my prejudices. But there they are. I guess I’ve been spoiled by you, Rudy. I never dealt with a man in my whole life I knew I could trust the way I trust you. Even when you talked me into acting against my better judgment—and you’d be surprised how many times that’s happened—I knew you’d never do anything that you thought was against my interests or was underhanded or would reflect against my reputation.”

“Thank you, Mr. Calderwood,” Rudolph said.

“Mr. Calderwood, Mr. Calderwood,” the old man said peevishly. “Are you still going to be calling me Mr. Calderwood on my death bed?”

“Thank you, Duncan.” It was an effort to say Duncan.

“To turn the whole damn shebang over to that man.” There was a cranky, aged complaint in Calderwood’s voice. “Even if it’s after I die. I don’t feel like doing it. But if you say so …” He trailed off unhappily.

Rudolph sighed. There is always someone to betray, he thought. “I don’t say so,” he said quietly. “There’s a young lawyer in our legal department by the name of Mathers …”

“I know him,” Calderwood said. “Light-complected fellow with glasses and two kids. From Philadelphia.”

“He has a degree from the Wharton School of Business that he took before he went to Harvard Law. He’s been with us more than four years. He knows every department. He asks all the right questions. He’s been in and out of my office. He could earn a lot more than he does here in any one of a dozen law firms in New York, but he likes living here.”

“Okay,” Calderwood said. “Tell him tomorrow.”

“I would prefer it if you told him, Duncan.” Second Duncan in his life.

“As usual,” Calderwood said. “I don’t like to do what you’re telling me to do, and I know you’re right. I’ll tell him. Now let’s go back and drink some more of that champagne. I paid enough for it, God knows, I might as well drink it.”

The new appointment was announced the day before the newlyweds were due back from the honeymoon.

Brad took it calmly, like a gentleman, and never queried Rudolph about who had made the decision. But three months later he quit his job and he and Virginia went out to Tulsa, where Brad’s father had made a place for him in his oil business. On Enid’s first birthday, he sent a check for five hundred dollars to the bank to be deposited in Enid’s savings account.

Brad wrote regularly, jovial, breezy, friendly letters. He was doing very well, he wrote, and was making more money than he ever had before. He liked Tulsa, where the golf bets were on a generous Western scale and on three successive Saturdays he had won more than a thousand dollars a round. Virginia was liked by everyone and had made dozens of friends. She had taken up golf. Brad invited Rudolph to invest with him—“It’s like picking money off a tree,” was the way he put it. He said he wanted somehow to pay back all that Rudolph had done for him, and this was one way of doing it.

Out of a sense of guilt—he could not forget the moment on the steps of the Country Club with Duncan Calderwood—Rudolph started taking shares in wells that Brad prospected, drilled, and managed. Besides, as Johnny Heath pointed out, for a man in his income bracket, considering the twenty-seven-per-cent depletion tax allowance that the oil industry enjoyed, it was more than worth the gamble. Johnny checked on the credit rating of Peter Knight and son, found it was A one, then matched Rudolph’s investments dollar for dollar.

Chapter 3

Thomas squatted on the forward deck, whistling tunelessly, polishing the bronze spool of the anchor winch. Although it was only early June, it was already warm and he worked barefooted and stripped to the waist. His torso was dark brown from the sun, as dark as the skin of the swarthiest Greeks or Italians on any of the ships in the harbor of Antibes. His body wasn’t as hard as it had been when he was fighting. The muscles didn’t stand out in ridges as they had then, but were smoother, not as heavy. When he was wearing something to cover his small bald spot, as he was now, he looked younger than he had two years ago. He tilted the white American gob’s hat, which he wore with the rim turned down all around, over his eyes, to protect him from the glare of the sun off the water.

From the engine room below there was the sound of hammering. Pinky Kimball was down there with Dwyer, working on a pump. The first charter of the year began tomorrow and the port engine had overheated on a trial run. Pinky, who was the engineer on the Vega, the biggest ship in the harbor, had volunteered to come over and take a look at it. Dwyer and Thomas could handle simple repairs themselves, but when it came to anything really complicated they had to ask for help. Luckily, Thomas had struck up a friendship with Kimball during the winter and Kimball had given them a hand on various things as they got the Clothilde into shape for the summer. Thomas had not explained to Dwyer why he had decided to call the ship the Clothilde when they changed it from the Penelope at Porto Santo Stefano. To himself, he had said, a ship had to be called by a woman’s name, why not Clothilde? He certainly wasn’t going to call it Teresa.

He was happy on the Clothilde, although even in his own eyes it wasn’t one of the smartest craft on the Mediterranean. He knew its superstructure was a little topheavy and presented too much surface to the wind and its top speed was only twelve knots, cruising speed ten knots, and it rolled alarmingly in. certain seas. But everything that two determined men, working month after month, could do to make a craft snug and seaworthy had been done to the peeling hulk they had bought at Porto Santo Stefano two and a half years before. They had had two good seasons, and while neither of them had gotten rich off the boat, they both had some money in the bank, in case of trouble. The season coming up looked as though it was going to be even better than the first two and Thomas felt a calm pleasure as he burnished the bronze spool and saw it reflect the sun from its surface. Before taking to sea he would never have thought that a simple, brainless act like polishing a piece of metal could give him pleasure.

It was the same with everything on the ship. He loved to stroll from bow to stern and back again, touching the hand rails, pleased to see the lines curled into perfect spiral patterns on the calked, pale, teak deck, admiring the polished brass handles on the old-fashioned wheel in the deck house and the perfectly arranged charts in their slots and the signal flags tightly rolled in their pigeonholes. He, who had never washed a dish in his life, spent long hours in the galley scrubbing pans until they shone and making sure that the icebox was immaculate and fresh smelling, the range and oven scrubbed. When there was a charter on board he and Dwyer and whoever they signed on as a cook dressed in tan drill shorts and immaculate white cotton T-shirts with Clothilde printed across the chest in blue. In the evenings, or in cold weather, they wore identical heavy navy-blue sailor’s sweaters.

He had learned to mix all sorts of drinks and serve them frosty and cold in good glasses, and there was one party, Americans, who swore they only took the ship for his Bloody Marys. A pleasure craft on the Mediterranean, going between one country and another, could be a cheap holiday for a drunkard, because you could take on case after case of duty-free liquor and you could buy gin and whiskey for about a dollar and a half a bottle. He rarely drank anything himself, except for a little pastis and an occasional beer. When charters came aboard he wore a peaked captain’s cap, with the gilt anchor and chain. It made his clients’ holidays more seagoing, he felt.

He had learned a few words of French and Italian and Spanish, enough to go through harbor-master formalities and do the shopping, but too little to get into arguments. Dwyer picked up the languages quickly and could rattle away with anybody.

Thomas had sent a photograph of the Clothilde, spraying through a wave, to Gretchen and Gretchen had written back that she kept it on the mantelpiece of her living room. One day, she wrote, she would come over and take a trip with him. She was busy, she wrote, doing some sort of job at a movie studio. She said that she had kept her promise and had not told Rudolph where he was or what he was doing. Gretchen was his one link with America and the times when he felt lonely or missed the kid, he wrote to her. He had asked Dwyer to write his girl in Boston, whom Dwyer still said he was going to marry, to try to go down to the Aegean Hotel when she had the time and talk to Pappy, but the girl hadn’t replied yet.

Some year soon, no matter what, he was going to go to New York and try to find his kid.

He hadn’t had a single fight since Falconetti. He still dreamed about Falconetti. He wasn’t sentimental about him, but he was sorry Falconetti was dead and the passage of time hadn’t persuaded him that it wasn’t his fault that the man had thrown himself overboard.

He finished with the winch and stood up. The deck was promisingly warm under his bare feet. As he went aft, running his hands along the newly varnished mahogany-colored rails, the hammering below stopped and Kimball’s flaming red hair appeared, as he came out of the saloon and onto the deck. To get to the engine room, you had to pick up sections of the floor from the saloon. Dwyer appeared after Kimball. They were both wearing oil-stained green overalls, because there was no keeping clean in the confined space of the engine room. Kimball was wiping his hands on a piece of waste, which he threw overboard. “That ought to do it, mate,” Kimball said. “Why don’t we give it a spin?”

Thomas went into the pilot house and started the engines while Dwyer and Pinky cast off from the dock and clambered forward to bring up the hook, Dwyer working the winch and cleaning off the harbor muck from the chain with the hose before it dropped into the well. They had a lot of chain out, for stability, and the Clothilde was almost in the middle of the harbor before Pinky gave the sign that they were clear and helped Dwyer bring the hook on board with the gaff.

By now Thomas was skilled at handling the ship and only when he was coming into a very crowded harbor, with a bad wind blowing, did he hand over the wheel to Dwyer. Today, he turned the bow toward the harbor entrance and, keeping the speed down until they were outside, chugged beyond the fishermen with their rods at the end of the rampart and around the buoy before he increased speed, turning toward the Cap d’Antibes, leaving the fortress of the Vieux Carré on its hill, behind them. He watched the gauges of both engines and was relieved to see that the port engine wasn’t heating up. Good old Pinky. Through the winter he must have saved them at least a thousand dollars. The ship he was on, the Vega, was so new and so pampered that there was almost nothing for him to do when they were in port. He was bored on it and delighted to be able to putter about in the Clothilde’s cluttered, hot engine room.

Kimball was a knotty Englishman whose freckled face never got tan, but remained a painful hot pink all summer. He had a problem with the drink, as he put it. When he drank he became pugnacious and challenged people in bars. He quarreled with his owners and rarely stayed on one ship more than a year, but he was so good at his job that he never had any trouble finding other berths quickly. He only worked on the very big yachts, because his skill would be wasted on smaller craft. He had been raised in Plymouth and had been on the water all his life. He was amazed that somebody like Thomas had wound up the owner-skipper of a ship like the Clothilde in Antibes harbor, and was making a go of it. “Yanks,” Kimball said, shaking his head. “They’re fucking well capable of anything. No wonder you own the world.”

He and Thomas had been friendly from the beginning, greeting each other as they passed on the quay or buying each other beers in the little bar at the entrance to the port. Kimball had guessed that Thomas had been in the ring and Thomas had told him about some of his fights and what it was like and about the win in London and the later two dives he had had to take and even about the last fight in the hotel room with Quayles in Las Vegas, which had especially delighted Kimball’s belligerent heart. Thomas had not told him about Falconetti and Dwyer knew enough to keep quiet on that subject.

“By God, Tommy,” Kimball said, “if I knew I could fight like that I would clean out every bar from Gib to Piraeus.”

“And get a knife between your ribs in the process,” Thomas said.

“No doubt you’re right,” Kimball agreed. “But man, the pleasure before!”

When he got very drunk and saw Thomas he would pound the bar and shout, “See that man? If he wasn’t a friend of mine, I’d drive him into the deck.” Then loop an affectionate tattooed arm around Thomas’s neck.

Their friendship had been cemented one night in a bar in Nice. They hadn’t gone to Nice together, but Dwyer and Thomas had wandered into the bar, near the port, by accident. There was a cleared space around the bar and Kimball was holding forth, loudly, to a group that included some French seamen and three or four flashily dressed but dangerous-looking young men of a type that Thomas had learned to recognize and avoid—small-time hoodlums and racketeers, doing odd jobs along the Côte for the chiefs of the milieu with headquarters in Marseilles. His instinct told him that they were probably armed, if not with guns, certainly with knives.

Pinky Kimball spoke a kind of French and Thomas couldn’t understand him, but he could tell from the tone of Kimball’s voice and the grim looks on the faces of the other patrons of the bar that Kimball was insulting them. Kimball had a low opinion of the French when he was drunk. When he was drunk in Italy, he had a low opinion of Italians. When he was drunk in Spain, he had a low opinion of the Spanish. Also, when he was drunk, he seemed to forget how to count and the fact that he was alone and outnumbered at least five to one only spurred him on to greater feats of scornful oratory.

“He’s going to get himself killed here tonight,” Dwyer whispered, understanding most of what Kimball was shouting. “And us, too, if they find out we’re his friends.”

Thomas grasped Dwyer’s arm firmly and took him with him to Kimball’s side, at the bar.

“Hi, Pinky,” he said cheerfully.

Pinky swung around, ready for new enemies. “Ah,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m telling these maquereaux a few home truths for their own good.”

“Knock it off, Pinky,” Thomas said. Then, to Dwyer. “I’m going to say a few words to these gentlemen. I want you to translate. Clearly and politely.” He smiled cordially at the other men in the bar, arranged now in an ominous semicircle. “As you see, gentlemen,” he said, “this Englishman is my friend.” He waited while Dwyer nervously translated. There was no change in the expression of the faces lined up around him. “He is also drunk,” Thomas said. “Naturally, a man does not like to see a friend damaged, drunk or sober. I will try to prevent him from making any more speeches here, but no matter what he says or has said, there will be no trouble here tonight. I am the policeman tonight in this bar and I am keeping the peace. Please translate,” he said to Dwyer.

As Dwyer was translating, haltingly, Pinky said, disgustedly, “Shit, mate, you’re lowering the flag.”

“What is further,” Thomas went on, “the next round of drinks is on me. Barman.” He was smiling as he spoke, but he could feel the muscles tightening in his arms and he was ready to spring on the biggest one of the lot, a heavy-jawed Corsican in a black leather jacket.

The men looked at each other uncertainly. But they hadn’t come into the bar to fight and while they grumbled a little among themselves they each came up to the bar and accepted the drinks that Thomas had bought for them.

“Some fighter,” Pinky sneered. “Every day is Armistice day with you, Yank.” But he allowed himself to be led safely out of the bar ten minutes later. When he came over to the Clothilde the next day, he brought a bottle of pastis with him and said, “Thanks, Tommy. They’d have kicked in my skull in the next two minutes if you hadn’t come along. I don’t know what it is comes over me when I have a few. And it’s not as though I ever win. I’ve got scars from head to toe in tribute to my courage.” He laughed.

“If you’ve got to fight,” Thomas said, remembering the days when he felt he had to fight, no matter whom and for no matter what reason, “fight sober. And pick on one man at a time. And don’t take me along. I’ve given all that up.”

“What would you have done, Tommy, boy,” Pinky said, “if they’d jumped me?”

“I’d have created a diversion,” Thomas said, “just long enough for Dwyer to get you out of the saloon, and then I’d have run for my life.”

“A diversion,” Pinky said. “I’d pay a couple of bob to have seen that diversion.”

Thomas didn’t know what it was in Pinky Kimball’s life that changed him from a friendly, amiable, if profane man, into a suicidal, fighting animal when he got a few drinks in him. Sometime, perhaps, he’d have it out with him.

Pinky came into the pilot house, looked at the gauges, listened critically to the throb of the Diesels. “You’re ready for the summer, lad,” he said. “On your own craft. And I envy you.”

“Not quite ready,” Thomas said. “We’re missing one in crew.”

“What?” Pinky asked. “Where’s that Spaniard you hired last week?”

The Spaniard had come well recommended as a cook and steward and he hadn’t asked for too much money. But one night, when he was leaving the ship to go ashore, Thomas had seen him putting a knife into his shoe, alongside his ankle, hidden by his pants.

“What’s that for?” Thomas had asked.

“To make respect,” the Spaniard said.

Thomas had fired him the next day. He didn’t want anybody aboard who had to keep a knife in his shoe to make respect. Now he was short-handed.

“I put him ashore,” Thomas said to Pinky, as they crossed outside the bay of La Garoupe. He explained why. “I still need a cook-steward. It doesn’t make much difference the next two weeks. My charter just wants the boat during the day and they bring their own food aboard. But I’ll need somebody for the summer.”

“Have you ever thought about hiring a woman?” Pinky asked.

Thomas grimaced. “There’s a lot of heavy work beside the cooking and stuff like that,” he said. “A strong woman,” Pinky said.

“Most of the trouble in my life,” Thomas said, “came because of women. Weak and strong.”

“How many days a summer do you lose,” Pinky asked, “with your charters grousing that they’re wasting their valuable time, waiting in some godforsaken port just to get their washing and ironing done?”

“It is a nuisance,” Thomas agreed. “You got somebody in mind?”

“Righto,” Pinky said. “She works as a stewardess on the Vega and she’s pissed off with her job. She’s crazy about the sea and all she sees all summer long is the inside of the laundry.”

“Okay,” Thomas said, reluctantly.

“I’ll talk to her. And tell her to leave her knives at home.”

He didn’t need a woman aboard as a woman. There were plenty of girls to be picked up around the ports. You had your fun with them, spent a few bucks on them for a dinner and maybe a night club and a couple of drinks and then you moved on to the next port, without complications. He didn’t know what Dwyer did for sex and thought it better not to ask.

He turned the Clothilde around, to go back to the harbor. She was ready. There was no sense in using up fuel. He was paying for his own fuel until tomorrow, when the first charter began.

At six o’clock he saw Pinky coming down the quay with a woman. The woman was short and a little thick in the body and wore her hair in two plaits on either side of her head. She had on a pair of denim pants, a blue sweater, and espadrilles. She kicked off her espadrilles before she came up the gangplank in the stern of the ship. In the Mediterranean harbors most of the time you tied up stern to the quay, unless there was room to come alongside, which there rarely was.

“This is Kate,” Pinky said. “I told her about you.”

“Hello, Kate.” Thomas put out his hand and she shook it. She had soft hands for a girl who worked in the laundry room and could do heavy work on deck. She was English, too, and came from Southampton and looked about twenty-five. She spoke in a low voice when she talked about herself. She could cook, as well as do laundry, she said, and she could make herself useful on deck, and she spoke French and Italian, “not mightily,” she said, with a smile, but she could understand the météo on the radio in both languages and could follow a charted course and stand watches, and drive a car if ever that was necessary. She would work for the same salary as the Spaniard with the knife. She wasn’t really pretty, but healthy and buxom in a small, brown way, with a direct manner of looking at the person she was talking to. In the winter, if she was laid off, she went back to London and got a job as a waitress. She wasn’t married, and she wasn’t engaged and she wanted to be treated like any member of the crew, no better and no worse.

“She’s a wild English rose,” Pinky said. “Aren’t you, Kate?”

“None of your jokes, Pinky,” the girl said. “I want this job. I’m tired of going from one end of the Med to the other all dressed up in a starched uniform with white cotton stockings, like a nurse, and being called Miss or Mademoiselle. I’ve been taking a glance at your ship, Tom, from time to time, as I’ve passed by, and it’s pleased me. Not so big to be hoity-toity and British Royal Yacht Club. It’s nice and clean and friendly looking. And it’s a dead sure thing there won’t be many ladies coming aboard that need to have their ballgowns pressed all one hot steaming afternoon in Monte Carlo harbor for a ball at the Palace that night.”

“Well,” Thomas said, defending the elegance of his clientele, “we don’t exactly cater to paupers.”

“You know what I mean,” the girl said. “I’ll tell you what. I don’t want you to take a pig in a poke. Have you had your dinner yet?”

“No.” Dwyer was down in the galley messing around desolately with some fish he’d bought that morning, but Thomas could tell by the sounds coming from the galley that nothing of any importance had as yet been done.

“I’ll cook you a dinner,” the girl said. “Right now. If you like it, you take me on, I’ll go back to the Vega and clear out my things tonight and come aboard. If you don’t like it, what have you lost? If you’re hungry the restaurants in town keep open late. And Pinky, you can stay and eat with us.”

“Okay,” Thomas said. He went down to the galley and told Dwyer to get out of there, they had a cook from the Cordon Bleu, at least for a night. The girl looked around the galley, nodded approvingly, opened the icebox, opened drawers and cupboards to see where everything was, looked at the fish that Dwyer had bought and said he didn’t know how to buy fish, but that they’d do in a pinch. Then she told them both to get out of there, she’d call them when dinner was ready. All she wanted was to have somebody to go into Antibes to get some fresh bread and two ripe Camembert cheeses.

They ate on the after deck, behind the pilot house, instead of in the little dining alcove forward of the saloon that they would have used if there had been clients aboard. Kate had set the table and somehow it looked better than when Dwyer did it. She had put two bottles of wine in an icebucket, uncorked them, and put the bucket on a chair.

She had made a stew of the fish, with potatoes, garlic, onions, tomatoes, thyme, a lot of rock salt and pepper, and a little white wine and diced bacon. It was still light when they sat down at the table, with the sun setting in the cloudless, greenish-blue sky. The three men had washed, shaved, and put on fresh clothes and had had two pastis apiece while sitting on deck, sniffing the aromas coming from the galley. The harbor itself was quiet, with just the sound of little ripples lapping at hulls to be heard.

Kate brought up a big tureen with the stew in it. Bread and butter were already on the table, next to a big bowl of salad. After she served them all, she, sat down with them, unhurried and calm. Thomas, as captain, poured the wine.

Thomas took a first bite, chewed it thoughtfully. Kate, her head down, also began to eat. “Pinky,” Thomas said, “you’re a true friend. You’re plotting to make me a fat man. Kate, you’re hired.”

She looked up and smiled. They raised their glasses to the new member of the crew.

Even the coffee tasted like coffee.

After dinner, while Kate was doing the dishes, the three men sat out in the silent evening, smoking cigars that Pinky had produced, watching the moon rise over the mauve hills of the Alpes Maritimes.

“Bunny,” Thomas said, leaning back in his chair and spreading his legs in front of him, “this is what it’s all about.”

Dwyer did not contradict him.

Later, Thomas went with Kate and Pinky to where the Vega was berthed. It was late and the ship was almost dark, with very few lights showing, but Thomas waited some distance away while Kate went on board to collect her things. He didn’t want to get into an argument with the skipper, if he happened to be awake and angry about losing a hand on five minutes’ notice.

A quarter of an hour later Thomas saw Kate coming noiselessly down the gangplank, carrying a valise. They walked together, along the fortress wall, past the boats moored one next to another to where the Clothilde was tied up. Kate stopped for a moment, looked gravely at the white-and-blue boat, groaning a little with the pull of the water against the two lines that made it fast to the quay. “I’m going to remember this evening,” she said, then kicked off her espadrilles and, holding them in her hand, went barefooted up the gangplank.

Dwyer was waiting up for them. He had made up the extra bunk in Thomas’s cabin for himself and put clean sheets for Kate on the bunk in the other cabin that he had been living in alone. Thomas snored, because of his broken nose, but Dwyer was going to have to get used to it. At least for awhile.

A week later, Dwyer moved back to his own cabin, because Kate moved into Thomas’s. She said she didn’t mind Thomas’s snoring.

The Goodharts were an old couple who stayed at the Hotel du Cap every June. He owned cotton mills in North Carolina, but had handed over the business to a son. He was a tall, erect, slow-moving heavy man with a shock of iron-gray hair and looked like a retired colonel in the Regular Army. Mrs. Goodhart was a little younger than her husband, with soft white hair. Her figure was good enough so that she could get away with wearing slacks. The Goodharts had chartered the Clothilde for two weeks the year before and had liked it so much that they had arranged a similar charter with Thomas for this year by mail early in the winter.

They were the least demanding of clients. Each morning at ten, Thomas anchored as close inshore as he could manage opposite the row of the hotel’s cabanas and the Goodharts came out in a speedboat. They came with full hampers of food, prepared, in the hotel kitchen, and baskets of wine bottles wrapped in napkins. They were both over sixty and if the water was at all rough the transfer could be tricky. On those days, their chauffeur would drive them down to the Clothilde in Antibes harbor. Sometimes there would be other couples, always old, with them, or they would tell Thomas that they were to pick up some friends in Cannes. Then they’d chug out to the straits between the Isles de Lérins, lying about four thousand yards off the coast, and anchor there for the day. It was almost always calm there and the water was only about twelve feet deep and brilliantly clear so that you could see the seagrass waving on the bottom. The Goodharts would put on bathing suits and lie on mattresses in the sun, reading or dozing, and occasionally dive in for a swim.

Mr. Goodhart said that he felt safer about Mrs. Good-hart’s swimming when Thomas or Dwyer swam beside her. Mrs. Goodhart, who was a robust woman with full shoulders and young, strong legs, swam perfectly well, but Thomas knew that it was Mr. Goodhart’s way of telling him that he wanted Thomas and anybody else on the boat to feel free to enjoy the clear, cool water between the islands whenever they felt like taking a dip.

Sometimes, if they had guests, Thomas would spread a blanket for them on the after deck and they would play a few rubbers of bridge. Both Mr. and Mrs. Goodhart were soft-spoken and enormously polite with each other and everybody else.

Promptly at one-thirty every day, they were ready for the first drink, invariably a Bloody Mary, which Thomas made for them. After that, Dwyer unrolled the awning, and in its shade they ate the food they had brought with them from the hotel. On the table there would be cold langouste, cold roast beef, fish salad or cold loup de mer with a green sauce, melon with prosciutto, cheese, and fruit. They always brought along so much food, even when they had friends with them, that there was plenty left over for the crew, not only for lunch, but for dinner, too. With their meal they each had a bottle of white wine apiece.

The only thing Thomas had to worry about was the coffee and now with Kate aboard that was no problem. The first day of the charter she came up from the galley with the coffee pot, dressed in white shorts and white T-shirt with the legend Clothilde stretched tightly across her plump bosom and when Thomas introduced her, Mr. Goodhart nodded approvingly and said, “Captain, this ship is improving every year.”

After lunch, Mr. and Mrs. Goodhart went below for their siesta. Quite often, Thomas heard muffled sounds that could only come from lovemaking. Mr. and Mrs. Goodhart had told Thomas they had been married more than thirty-five years and Thomas marveled that they still did it and still so obviously enjoyed it. The Goodharts shook his entire conception of marriage.

Around about four o’clock, the Goodharts would reappear on deck, grave and ceremonious, as usual, in their bathing suits, and would swim for another half hour, with either Dwyer or Thomas accompanying them. Dwyer swam poorly and there were one or two times when Mrs. Goodhart was more than a hundred yards away from the Clothilde that Thomas thought there was a good chance she’d have to tow Dwyer back to the boat.

At five o’clock promptly, showered, combed, and dressed in cotton slacks, white shirt, and a blue blazer, Goodhart would come up on deck from below and say, “Don’t you think it’s time for a drink, Captain?” and, if there were no guests aboard, “I’d be honored if you’d join me.”

Thomas would prepare two Scotch and sodas and give the signal to Dwyer, who would start the engines and take the wheel. With Kate handling the anchor up forward, they would start back toward the Hotel du Cap. Seated on the aft deck Mr. Goodhart and Thomas would sip at their drinks as they pulled out of the straits and went around the island, with the pink-and-white towers of Cannes across the water on their port side.

On one such afternoon, Mr. Goodhart said, “Captain, are there many Jordaches in this part of the world?”

“Not that I know of,” Thomas said. “Why?”

“I happened to mention your name to the assistant manager of the hotel yesterday,” Mr. Goodhart said, “and he said that a Mr. and Mrs. Rudolph Jordache were sometimes guests at the hotel.”

Thomas sipped at his whiskey, “That’s my brother,” he said. He could feel Mr. Goodhart glancing at him curiously, and could guess what he was thinking. “We’ve gone our different ways,” he said shortly. “He was the smart one of the family.”

“I don’t know.” Mr. Goodhart waved his glass to take in the boat, the sunlight, the water churning away from the bows, the green and ochre hills of the coast. “Maybe you were the smart one. I worked all my life and it was only when I became an old man and retired that I had the time to do something like this two weeks a year.” He chuckled ruefully. “And I was considered the smart one of my family.”

Mrs. Goodhart came up then, youthful in slacks and a loose sweater and Thomas finished his drink and went and got a whiskey for her. She matched her husband drink for drink, day in and day out.

Mr. Goodhart paid two hundred and fifty dollars a day for the charter, plus fuel, and twelve hundred old francs a day for food for each of the crew. After the charter the year before he had given Thomas five hundred dollars as a bonus. Thomas and Dwyer had tried to figure out how rich a man had to be to afford two weeks at that price, while still paying for a suite at what was probably one of the most expensive hotels in the world. They had given up trying. “Rich, that’s all, rich,” Dwyer had said. “Christ, can you imagine how many hours thousands of poor bastards in those mills of his in North Carolina have to put in at the machines, coughing their lungs out, so that he can have a swim every day?” Dwyer’s attitude toward capitalists had been formed young by a Socialist father who worked in a factory. All workers, in Dwyer’s view of labor, coughed their lungs out.

Until the Goodharts, Thomas’s feeling about people with a great deal of money, while not quite as formally rigid as Dwyer’s, had been composed of a mixture of envy, distrust, and the suspicion that whenever possible a rich man would do whatever harm he could to anyone within his power. His uneasiness with his brother, which had begun when they were boys, for other reasons, had been compounded by Rudolph’s rise to wealth. But the Goodharts had shaken old tenets of faith. They had not only made him reflect anew on the subject of marriage, but about old people as well, and the rich, and even about Americans in general. It was too bad that the Goodharts came so early in the season, because after them, it was likely to be downhill until October. Some of the other charter parties they took on more than justified Dwyer’s darkest strictures on the ruling classes.

On the last day of the charter, they started back toward the hotel earlier than usual because the wind had sprung up and the sea beyond the islands was full of whitecaps. Even between the islands the Clothilde was rolling and pulling at her chain. Mr. Goodhart had drunk more than usual, too, and neither he nor his wife had gone below for their siesta. When Dwyer upped anchor they were still in their bathing suits, with sweaters, against the spray. But they stayed out on deck, like children at a party that was soon to end, hungry for the last drop of joy from the declining festival. Mr. Goodhart was even a little curt with Thomas when Thomas didn’t automatically produce the afternoon whiskeys.

Once they were out of the lee of the islands it was too rough to use the deck chairs and the Goodharts and Thomas had to hold onto the after rail while they drank their Scotch and sodas.

“I think it’s going to be impossible to get the dinghy into the hotel landing,” Thomas said. “I’d better tell Dwyer to go around the point and into Antibes.”

Mr. Goodhart put out his hand and held Thomas’s arm as Thomas started toward the pilot house. “Let’s just take a look,” Mr. Goodhart said. His eyes were a little bloodshot. “I like a little rough weather from time to time.”

“Whatever you say, sir,” Thomas said. “I’ll go tell Dwyer.”

In the pilot house, Dwyer was already fighting the wheel. Kate was seated on the bench that ran along the rear of the structure, munching a roast beef sandwich. She had a hearty appetite and was a good sailor in all seas.

“We’re in for a blow,” Dwyer said. “I’m going around the point.”

“Go to the hotel,” Thomas said.

Kate looked over her sandwich at him in surprise.

“Are you crazy?” Dwyer said. “All the speedboats must have gone back to the harbor hours ago, with this wind. And we’ll never get the dinghy in.”

“I know,” Thomas said. “But they want to take a look.”

“It’s a pure waste of time,” Dwyer grumbled. They had a new charter beginning the next morning at St. Tropez and they had planned to start immediately after discharging the Goodharts. Even with a calm sea and no wind, it would have been a long day, and they would have had to prepare the ship for the new clients en route. The wind was from the north, the mistral, and they would have to hug the coast for protection, which made the voyage much longer. They would also have to reduce speed to keep the hull from pounding too badly. And there would be no question, in this weather, of doing any work below while they were moving.

“It’s only a few more minutes,” Thomas said soothingly. “They’ll see it’s impossible and we’ll make for Antibes.”

“You’re the captain,” Dwyer said. He pulled viciously at the wheel as a wave quartered against their port side and the Clothilde yawed.

Thomas stayed in the pilot house, keeping dry. The Goodharts remained out on deck, soaked by spray, but seeming to enjoy it. There were no clouds and the high afternoon sun shone brightly and when the spray swept over the deck, the two old people shimmered in brief rainbows.

As they passed Golfe Juan, far off to port, with the boats at anchor in the little harbor already bobbing, Mr. Goodhart signaled to Thomas that he and Mrs. Goodhart wanted another drink.

When they got within five hundred yards of the palisade on which the cabanas stood, they saw that the waves were breaking over the little concrete dock to which the speedboats were usually tied. The speedboats, as Dwyer had predicted, were all gone. At the regular swimming place farther along the cliff, the red flag was up and the chain was across the swimming ladder below the restaurant of Eden Roc. The waves went crashing in high over the steps, then pulled back, frothing and green-white, leaving the ladder uncovered down to the last rung before the next wave roared in.

Thomas left the shelter of the pilot house and went out on deck. “I’m afraid I was right, sir,” he said to Mr. Goodhart. “There’s no getting a boat in with this sea. We’ll have to go into port.”

“You go into port,” Mr. Goodhart said calmly. “My wife and I have decided we’ll swim in. Just get the ship in as close as you can without endangering her.”

“The red flag’s up,” Thomas said. “Nobody’s in the water.”

“The French,” Mr. Goodhart said. “My wife and I have swum in surf twice as bad as this at Newport, haven’t we, dear?”

“We’ll send the car around to the harbor to pick up our things later, Captain,” Mr. Goodhart said.

“This isn’t Newport, sir,” Thomas said, making one last attempt. “It’s not a sandy beach. You’ll get thrown against the rocks if you …”

“Like everything in France,” Mr. Goodhart said, “it looks worse than it is. Just pull in as close to shore as you think is wise and we’ll do the rest. We both feel like a swim.”

“Yes, sir,” Thomas said. He went back into the pilot house, where Dwyer was spinning the wheel, first revving up one engine, then another, to make tight circles that brought the ship at its closest about three hundred yards from the ladder. “Bring her in another hundred yards,” Thomas said. “They’re going to swim for it.”

“What do they want to do,” Dwyer asked, “commit suicide?”

“It’s their bones,” Thomas said. Then, to Kate, “Put on your bathing suit.” He himself was wearing swimming trunks and a sweater.

Without a word, Kate went below for her bathing suit.

“As soon as we’re off,” Thomas said to Dwyer, “pull away. Get well off the rocks. When you see we’ve made it, head for port. We’ll get a ride in a car and join you. One trip in this stuff is enough. I don’t want to swim back.”

Kate came up in two minutes, in an old, bleached, blue suit. She was a strong swimmer. Thomas took off his sweater and they both went out on deck. The Goodharts had taken off their sweaters and were waiting for them. In his long, flowered swimming trunks, Mr. Goodhart was massive and tanned by his holiday. His muscles were old muscles, but he must have been powerful in his prime. The little wrinkles of age showed in the skin of Mrs. Goodhart’s still shapely legs.

The swimming raft, anchored midway between, the Clothilde and the steps, was dancing in the waves. When a particularly large one hit it it would go up on end and stand almost perpendicularly for a moment.

“I suggest we make for the raft first,” Thomas said, “so we can take a breather before we go in the rest of the way.”

“We?” Mr. Goodhart said. “What do you mean, we?” He was definitely drunk. And so was Mrs. Goodhart.

“Kate and I decided we’d like a swim this afternoon, too,” Thomas said.

“As you wish, Captain,” Mr. Goodhart said. He climbed over the rail and dove in. Mrs. Goodhart followed. Their heads, gray and white, bobbed up and down in the dark green, frothing water.

“You stick with her,” Thomas said to Kate. “I’ll go with the old man.”

He dove overboard and heard Kate splash in just after him.

Getting to the raft wasn’t too difficult. Mr. Goodhart swam an old-fashioned trudgeon stroke and kept his head out of the water most of the time. Mrs. Goodhart swam an orthodox crawl and when Thomas turned to look at her she seemed to be swallowing water and breathing hard. But Kate was close beside her at all times. Mr. Goodhart and Thomas climbed onto the raft, but it was too rough to stand up on and they stayed on their knees as they helped pull Mrs. Goodhart up. She was gasping a little and she looked as though she was going to be sick.

“I think we ought to stay here for awhile,” Mrs. Goodhart said, trying to keep her balance on the wet cord surface of the heaving raft. “Until it calms down a little.”

“It’s going to get worse, Mrs. Goodhart,” Thomas said. “In a few minutes you won’t have a chance of getting in.”

Dwyer, worried about being too close to shore, had gone out another five hundred yards and was circling there. Anyway, there was no chance of getting Mrs. Goodhart up on the rolling boat in that sea without hurting her badly.

“You’ll just have to come in with us right now,” Thomas said to Mrs. Goodhart.

Mr. Goodhart didn’t say anything. He was sober now.

“Nathaniel,” Mrs. Goodhart said to her husband, “will you tell him I’m going to stay here until the sea calms a bit.”

“You heard what he said,” Mr. Goodhart said. “You wanted to swim in. Swim in.” He toppled into the water.

By now there were at least twenty people clustered on the rocks, safely out of reach of the spume, watching the group on the raft.

Thomas took Mrs. Goodhart’s hand and said, “In we go. Together.” He stood up shakily and brought her to her feet and they jumped in, holding hands. Once in the sea, Mrs. Goodhart was less frightened and they swam side by side toward the ladder. As they came closer to the rocks, they felt themselves being swept forward by a wave, then sucked back as it broke against the rocks and receded. Thomas trod water and shouted, to be heard above the noise of the sea. “I’ll go in first. Then Mrs. Goodhart. Watch how I do it. I’ll go in on a wave and catch onto the railing and hold on. Then, I’ll give you the signal when to start. Swim as hard as you can. I’ll grab you when you get to the ladder. Just hold onto me. You’ll be all right.” He wasn’t sure that anybody would be all right, but he had to say something.

He waited, looking over his shoulder at the oncoming waves. He saw a big one, thrashed hard with his arms, rode it in, smashed against the steel of the ladder, grabbed the railing, hung on against the pull away. Then he stood up, faced seaward. “Now!” he shouted at Mrs. Goodhart, and she came in fast, high above him for an instant, then breaking down. He grabbed her, held her tight, just managing to keep her from sliding back. Hurriedly, he pushed her up the ladder. She stumbled, but got to the safety of the rock platform before the next wave crashed in.

Mr. Goodhart, when he came in, was so heavy that, for a moment, Thomas lost his grip and he thought they were both going to be washed back. But the old man was strong. He swung in the water and grabbed the other pipe, holding onto Thomas at the same time. He didn’t need any help up the ladder, but climbed it decorously, looking coldly at the silent group of spectators above him, as though he had caught them prying into some intensely private affair of his own.

Kate came in lightly and she and Thomas climbed the ladder together.

They got towels from the locker room attendant and dried themselves off, although there was nothing to do about their wet suits.

Mr. Goodhart called the hotel for his car and chauffeur and merely said, “That was very well done, Captain,” when the car came down for Thomas and Kate. He had borrowed terrycloth robes for himself and Mrs. Goodhart and had ordered them all drinks at the bar while Kate and Thomas were drying themselves off. As he stood there, in the long robe, like a toga, you’d never think that he had been drinking all afternoon and had nearly got them all drowned just fifteen minutes before.

He held the door of the car open for Kate and Thomas. As Thomas got in, Mr. Goodhart said, “We have to settle up, Captain. Will you be in the harbor after dinner?”

Thomas had planned to set out for St. Tropez before sunset, but he said, “Yes, sir. We’ll be there all evening.”

“Very good, Captain. We’ll have a farewell drink aboard.” Mr. Goodhart closed the car door and they drove up the driveway, with the pines along its borders thrashing their branches about in the increasing wind.

When Thomas and Kate got out of the car on the quay they left two wet spots on the upholstery where they had been sitting in their bathing suits. The Clothilde hadn’t come into the harbor yet and they sat with towels wrapped around their shoulders on an overturned dinghy on the quay and shivered.

Fifteen minutes later the Clothilde came into port. They grabbed the lines from Dwyer, made her fast, jumped on board, and rushed to put on dry clothes. Kate made a pot of coffee and as they drank it in the pilot house, with the wind whistling through the rigging, Dwyer said, “The rich. They always find a way of making you pay.” Then he got out the hose, attached it to a water line on the quay and they all three of them began to scrub down the ship. There was salt crusted everywhere.

After dinner, which Kate prepared from the food left over from the Goodharts’ lunch, she and Dwyer went into Antibes with the week’s sheets, pillowcases, and towels. Kate did all the personal laundry, but the heavy items had to be done ashore. The wind had died down as suddenly as it had risen, and while the sea was still thundering at the harbor walls outside, the port itself was calm and the Clothilde’s buffers were merely nudging gently at the boats on either side from time to time.

It was a clear, warm night, and Thomas sat on the afterdeck, smoking a pipe, admiring the stars, waiting for Mr. Goodhart. He had made up the bill and it was in an envelope in the pilot house. It didn’t amount to very much—just fuel, laundry, a few bottles of whiskey and vodka, ice and the twelve hundred francs a day for food for himself and the two others. Mr. Goodhart had given him a check for the charter itself the first day he had come aboard. Before going ashore, Kate had packed the Goodharts’ belongings, extra bathing suits, clothes, shoes, and books, in two of the hotel baskets. The baskets were on deck, near the after rail.

Thomas saw the lights of Mr. Goodhart’s car coming up to the quay. He stood up as the car stopped and Mr. Goodhart got out and came up the gangplank. He was dressed for the evening, in a gray suit and white shirt and dark silk tie. Somehow he looked older and frailer in his city clothes.

“May I offer you something to drink?” Thomas asked.

“A whiskey would be nice, Captain,” Mr. Goodhart said. He was absolutely sober now. “If you’ll join me.” He sat down in one of the folding canvas-and-wood chairs while Thomas went to the saloon for the drinks. On his way up, he went into the pilot house and got the envelope with the bill.

“Mrs. Goodhart has a slight chill,” Mr. Goodhart said, as Thomas gave him the glass. “She’s gone to bed for the night. She especially commanded me to tell you how much she enjoyed these two weeks.”

“That’s very kind of her,” Thomas said. “It was a pleasure having her with us.” If Mr. Goodhart wasn’t going to mention the afternoon’s adventure, he wasn’t going to say a word about it, either. “I made up the bill, sir,” he said. He gave the envelope to Mr. Goodhart. “If you want to go over it and …”

Mr. Goodhart waved the envelope negligently. “I’m sure it’s in order,” he said. He took the bill out, squinted at it briefly in the light of the quay lamp post. He had a checkbook with him and he wrote out a check and handed it to Thomas. “There’s a little something extra there for you and the crew, Captain,” he said.

Thomas glanced at the check. Five-hundred-dollar bonus. Like last year. “It’s most generous of you, sir.” Oh, for summers of Goodharts!

Mr. Goodhart waved off gratitude. “Next year,” he said, “perhaps we can make it a full month. There’s no law that says that we have to spend the whole summer in the house in Newport, is there?” He had explained that ever since he was a boy he had spent July and August in the family house in Newport and now his married son and two daughters and their children spent their holidays there with Mrs. Goodhart and himself. “We could give the house over to the younger generation,” Mr. Goodhart went on, as though trying to convince himself. “They could have orgies or whatever the younger generation has these days when we’re not around. Maybe we could steal a grandchild or two and go on a real cruise with you.” He settled comfortably back in his chair, sipping at his drink, playing with this new idea. “If we had a month, where could we go?”

“Well,” Thomas said, “the party we’re picking up tomorrow at St. Tropez, two French couples, are only taking the boat for three weeks and with any break in the weather, we can go down the coast of Spain, the Costa Brava, Cadaques, Rosas, Barcelona, then across to the Balearics. And after them, we come back here and there’s an English family who want to go south—that’s another three week cruise—the Ligurian coast, Portofino, Porto Venere, Elba, Porto Ercole, Corsica, Sardinia, Ischia, Capri …”

Mr. Goodhart chuckled. “You’re making Newport sound like Coney Island, Captain. Have you been to all those places?”

“Uhuh.”

“And people pay you for it?”

“A lot of them make you earn your money, and more,” Thomas said. “Not everybody’s like you and Mrs. Goodhart.”

“Old age has sweetened us, perhaps,” Mr. Goodhart said slowly. “In some ways. Do you think I might have another drink, Captain?”

“If you don’t plan to do any more swimming tonight,” Thomas said, rising and taking Mr. Goodhart’s glass.

Mr. Goodhart chuckled. “That was a horse’s ass thing to do today, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, sir, it was.” Thomas was surprised at Mr. Good-hart’s using an expression like that. He went below and mixed two more drinks. When he came back on deck, Mr. Goodhart was stretched out in his chair, his long legs crossed at the ankles, his head back, looking up at the stars. He took the glass from Thomas’s hand without changing his position.

“Captain,” he said, “I’ve decided to pamper myself. And my wife. I’ll make a firm commitment with you right now. Starting June first next year we’ll take the Clothilde for six weeks and go south to all those pretty names you were reeling off. I’ll give you a deposit tonight. And when you say no swimming, nobody will swim. How does that strike you?”

“It would be fine for me, but …” Thomas hesitated.

“But what?”

“The Clothilde’s all right for you using it during the day the way you do, going to the islands … but for six weeks, living aboard … I don’t know. For some people it’s fine, but for others, who are used to luxury …”

“You mean for spoiled old crocks like my wife and myself,” Mr. Goodhart said, “it’s not grand enough, is that it?”

“Well,” Thomas said uncomfortably, “I wouldn’t like you not to enjoy yourselves. The Clothilde rolls quite a bit in rough weather and it’s pretty stuffy down below when we’re under way, because we have to close all the portholes, and there’s no proper bath, just showers, and …”

“It’ll do us good. We’ve had it too easy all our lives. Oh, it’s ridiculous, Captain.” Mr. Goodhart sat up. “You make me ashamed of myself. To have you feel as though going around the Mediterranean on a boat as nice as this one is roughing it for me and my wife. God, it sends cold shivers down my spine to think of the opinion people must have of us.”

“People get used to living in different ways,” Thomas said.

“You’ve lived yours the hard way, haven’t you?” Mr. Goodhart said.

“No worse than a lot of others.”

“You don’t seem any the worse for it,” Mr. Goodhart said. “In fact, if I may say so, if my son had turned out like you, I’d be more pleased with him than I am now. Considerably more pleased.”

“It’s hard to know,” Thomas said neutrally. If he knew about Port Philip, he thought, burning the cross on VE day, and hitting my father, and taking money for screwing married ladies in Elysium, Ohio, if he knew about blackmailing Sinclair in Boston, and throwing fights, and about Quayles and Quayles’s wife in Las Vegas, and about Pappy and Teresa and Falconetti, maybe he wouldn’t be sitting there being friendly, with a glass in his hand, wishing his son was more like me. “There’s a lot of things I’ve done I’m not so goddamn proud of,” he said.

“That doesn’t make you any different from the rest of us, Captain,” Goodhart said quietly. “And while we’re on the subject—forgive me for this afternoon. I was drunk and I had had two weeks of watching three splendid young people happily working together, moving around like graceful animals, and I felt old and I didn’t want to feel old and I wanted to prove that I wasn’t all that old and I risked all our lives. Knowingly, Captain, knowingly. Because I was sure you weren’t going to let us make that swim alone.”

“It’s better not to talk about it, sir,” Thomas said. “Anyway, no harm was done.”

“Old age is an aberration, Tom,” Mr. Goodhart said bitterly. “A terrible, perverted aberration.” He stood up and put his glass down carefully. “I’d better be getting back to the hotel and see how my wife is doing,” he said. He extended his hand and Thomas shook it. “Until next June first,” he said and strode off the ship, carrying the two baskets with him.

When Kate and Dwyer came back, with the freshly laundered linen, all Thomas said was that Mr. Goodhart had been and gone and that they had their first charter, six weeks, for the following year.

Dwyer had a letter from his girl. She had been down to the Aegean Hotel, but she had no information for Tom, she said, because Pappy was dead. He had been found, knifed and with a gag in his mouth, in his room, the new man at the desk had told her. Three months ago.

Thomas listened to the news without surprise. That was the kind of business Pappy had run and he had finally paid his dues.

There was something else in the letter that was obviously bothering Dwyer, but he didn’t tell the others what it was, although Thomas could guess. Dwyer’s girl didn’t want to wait any more and she wouldn’t leave Boston and if Dwyer wanted to marry her he’d have to go back to America. He hadn’t asked Thomas’s advice yet, but if he had, Thomas would have told him that no dame was worth it.

They went to bed early, because they were going to set out for St. Tropez at four in the morning, before the wind sprang up.

Kate had made up the big bed in the master cabin for herself and Thomas for the night, because there were no clients on board. It was the first time they had a chance to make love in comfort and Kate said she wasn’t going to miss it. In the cabin they shared forward, they had two narrow bunks, one above the other.

Kate’s stocky, solid, full-breasted body was not made for showing off clothes, but her skin was wonderfully soft and she made love with gentle avidity and as Thomas lay later, with her in his arms in the big bed, he was grateful that he was not old, that his girl was not in Boston, that he had allowed himself to be persuaded by Pinky to have a woman on board.

Before she went to sleep, Kate said, “Dwyer told me tonight that when you bought the boat you changed the name. Who was Clothilde?”

“She was a queen of France,” Thomas said. He pulled her closer to him. “She was somebody I knew as a boy. And she smelled like you.”

The cruise to Spain wasn’t bad, although they hit some weather off Cap Cruz and had to stay in port for five days at a stretch. The French couples consisted of two paunchy Parisian businessmen and two young women who were definitely not their wives. There was some trading going on between the couples in the after cabins, but Thomas hadn’t come to the Mediterranean to teach French businessmen how to behave. As long as they paid their bills and kept the two ladies from walking around in high heels and poking holes in the deck, he wasn’t going to interfere with their fun. The ladies also lay on deck with the tops of their bikinis off. Kate took a poor view of that, but one of the ladies had really sensational tits and it didn’t interfere with the navigation too much, although if there had been any reefs on the course while Dwyer was at the wheel, Dwyer would have most likely run them aground. That particular lady also made it clear to Thomas that she wouldn’t mind sneaking up on deck in the middle of the night to have a go with him while her Jules was snoring away below. But Thomas told her he didn’t come with the charter. You got into enough complications with clients without any of that.

Because of the delay caused by the storm, the two French couples got off at Marseilles, to catch the train up to Paris. The two businessmen had to meet their wives in Paris to go to Deauville for the rest of the summer. When they paid Thomas off at the dock in front of the Maine in the Vieux Port, the two Frenchmen gave Thomas fifty thousand francs as a tip, which wasn’t bad, considering they were Frenchmen. After they had gone, Thomas took Kate and Dwyer to the same restaurant that Dwyer and Thomas had eaten at when they first came to Marseilles on the Elga Andersen. It was too bad that the Elga Andersen wasn’t in port. It would have been satisfying to sail across her rusty bows in the shining white-and-blue Clothilde and dip the flag in salute to the old Nazi captain.

They had three days before picking up the next charter in Antibes, and again Kate made up the big bed in the master cabin for herself and Thomas. She had had the portholes and the doors wide open all evening to get out the smell of perfume.

“That poule,” Kate said as they lay in the darkness. “Parading around naked. You had a hard on for three weeks running.”

Thomas laughed. There were times when Kate talked like any sailor.

“I don’t like the way you laugh,” Kate said. “Let me warn you—if I ever catch you grabbing any of that stuff, I’m going to go out and jump into the kip with the first man I see as I walk off the boat.”

“There’s one sure way,” Thomas said, “that you can keep me honest.”

Kate then made sure that he was going to be honest. That night, anyway. As she lay in his arms he whispered, “Kate, every time I make love to you I forget one more bad thing in my life.” A moment later he could feel her tears on his shoulders.

Luxuriously, they slept late the next morning and when they sailed out of the harbor in the sunlight, they even took time off to do a little sight-seeing. They went out to the Châteaud if and walked around the fortress and saw the dungeon where the Count of Monte Cristo was supposed to have been chained. Kate had read the book and Thomas had seen the movie. Kate translated the signs that told how many Protestants had been imprisoned in the place before being sent to the galleys.

“There’s always somebody sitting on somebody else’s back,” Dwyer said. “If it’s not the Protestants sitting on the Catholics, it’s the Catholics sitting on the Protestants.”

“Shut up, you Communist,” Thomas said.

“Are you a Protestant?” he asked Kate.

“Yes.”

“I’m going to imprison you in my galley,” he said.

By the time they got back onto the Clothilde and started East, the last whiff of perfume had vanished from the main cabin.

They sailed without stopping, with Dwyer taking eight full hours at night at the wheel so that Thomas and Kate could sleep. They reached Antibes before noon. There were two letters waiting for Thomas, one from his brother, and one in a handwriting he didn’t recognize. He opened the letter from Rudolph first.

“Dear Tom,”—he read,—“I finally got news of you after all this time and I must say it sounds as if you’re doing all right for yourself. A few days ago I received a call at my office from a Mr. Goodhart, who told me he had been on your boat, or ship, as I believe you fellows like to call it. It turns out that we have done some business with his firm, and I guess he was curious to see what your brother looked like. He invited Jean and myself over for a drink and he and his wife turned out to be charming old people, as you must know. They were most enthusiastic about you and about your ship and the life you lead. Maybe you’ve made the best investment of the century with the money you made on Dee Cee. If I weren’t so busy (it looks as though I’m going to allow myself to be talked into running for mayor of Whitby this fall!), I’d take a plane with Jean immediately and come over to sail the deep blue sea with you. Maybe next year. In the meantime, I’ve taken the liberty of suggesting renting the Clothilde (as you see the Goodharts were most explicit about everything) to a friend of mine who is getting married and would like to spend his honeymoon on the Mediterranean. Perhaps you remember him—Johnny Heath. If he bothers you, put him adrift in a raft.

“But seriously, I am very happy for you and I’d like to hear from you and if there’s anything I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to let me know what it is. Love, Rudolph.”

Thomas scowled as he read the letter. He didn’t like to be reminded that it was because of Rudolph that he now owned the Clothilde. Still, the letter was so friendly, the weather was so fine, and the summer was going so well, it was silly to spoil things by remembering old grudges. He folded the letter carefully and put it in his pocket. The other letter was from Rudolph’s friend and asked if he could charter the Clothilde from September fifteenth to the thirtieth. It was the end of the season, and they had nothing on the books, and it would be found money. Heath said he only wanted to sail up and down the coast between Monte Carlo and St. Tropez, and with only two people on board and very little mileage to cover, it would be a lazy way to end the season.

Thomas sat down and wrote a letter to Heath, telling him he’d meet him either at the Nice airport or the Antibes station on the fifteenth.

He told Kate about the new charter and how it was his brother who had arranged it, and she made him write a letter of thanks to Rudolph. He had signed it and was just going to seal the envelope, when he remembered that Rudolph had written him that if there was anything he could do for him not to hesitate to let him know what it was. Well, why not, he thought. It couldn’t do any harm. In a P.S. he wrote, “There’s one thing you can do for me. For various reasons I haven’t been able to come back to New York so far but maybe those reasons don’t hold any more. I haven’t had any news of my kid for years and I don’t know where he is or whether I’m still married or not. I’d like to come over and see him and if possible take him back here with me for awhile. Maybe you remember the night you and Gretchen came back after my fight in Queens, there was my manager, a man I introduced you to called Schultzy. Actually his name is Herman Schultz. The last address I had for him is the Bristol Hotel on Eighth Avenue, but maybe he doesn’t live there any more. But if you ask somebody in the Garden office if they know where you can lay your hands on Schultzy they’re bound to know if he’s still alive and in town. He’s likely to have some news about Teresa and the kid. Just don’t tell him where I am for the time being. But ask him if the heat’s still on. He will understand. Let me know if you find him and what he says. This will be a real good turn and I will be really grateful.”

He air-mailed the two letters at the Antibes post office and then went back to the ship to get it ready for the English party.

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

For a few minutes at a time, while she was working, Gretchen forgot that it was her fortieth birthday. She sat on the high steel stool in front of the moviola, pushing the levers, gazing intently into the glass screen. She ran film and sound track together, her hands in dirty white-cotton gloves, emulsion stained. The spoor of film. She made swift marks in soft red pencil, giving the strips to her assistant to splice and file. From adjacent cutting rooms on the floor in the building on Broadway, where other companies rented rooms, came scraps of voices, screeches, explosions, orchestral passages, and the shrill gabble as track was run backward at high speed. Engrossed in her own labor she hardly noticed the noise. It was part of the furniture of a cutting room, with the clacking machines, the distorted sounds, the round tins of film stacked on the shelves.

This was her third picture as a head cutter. Sam Corey had taught her well as his assistant and then, after praising her highly to directors and producers, had sent her off on her own, to get her first independent job. Skilled and imaginative, with no ambition to become a director herself that would arouse jealousy, she was in great demand and could pick and choose among the jobs offered her.

The picture she was working on now was being shot in New York and she found the city’s impersonal variety exhilarating after the inbred, ambiguously jovial, big-family atmosphere of Hollywood, where everybody lived in everyone else’s pocket. In her free hours she tried to continue with the political activities that had taken up a great deal of her time in Los Angeles since Colin’s death. With her assistant, Ida Cohen, she went to meetings where people made speeches about the war in Viet Nam and school busing. She signed dozens of petitions and tried to get the important people in the movie business to sign them, too. All this helped her assuage her sense of guilt about having given up her studies in California. Also, Billy was now of a draftable age, and the thought of her one son being killed in Viet Nam was intolerable to her. Ida had no sons but was even more intense about the meetings, demonstrations, and petitions than Gretchen. They both wore Ban the Bomb buttons on their blouses and on their coats.

When she wasn’t going to meetings in the evenings, Gretchen went as often as she could to the theater, with a renewed appetite for it, after the years of being away. Sometimes she went with Ida, a small, dowdy, shrewd woman of about her own age, with whom she had developed a steady friendship, sometimes she went with Evans Kinsella, the director of the picture, with whom she was having an affair, sometimes with Rudolph and Jean, when they were in town, or with one or another of the actors she met when she visited the locations on which they were shooting.

The images passed before her on the glass screen and she grimaced. The way Kinsella had done the shooting made it difficult to get the tone that she felt the sequence needed. If she couldn’t somehow correct it by more ingenious cutting, or if Kinsella himself couldn’t come up with some ideas on it, she knew that eventually the whole scene would have to be reshot.

She stopped for a cigarette. The film tins she and Ida used for ash trays were always brimming with butts. Here and there stood empty coffee containers, lipstick stained.

Forty years old, she thought, inhaling.

Nobody today had as yet congratulated her. With good reason. Although she had looked for a telegram, at least, in her box at the hotel, from Billy. There had been no telegram. She hadn’t told Ida, now rewinding long strips of film on spools out of a big canvas basket. Ida was past forty herself, why drive in another spike? And she certainly hadn’t told Evans. He was thirty-two. A forty-year-old woman did not remind a thirty-two-year-old lover of her birthday.

She thought of her dead mother, forty years ago today. First born, a girl, to a girl scarcely more than twenty herself. If Mary Pease Jordache had known that day what words were going to pass between herself and the new infant in her arms, what tears would she have shed? And Billy …?

The door opened and Evans Kinsella came in. He was wearing a white, belted raincoat over his corduroy slacks and red polo shirt and cashmere sweater. He made no sartorial concessions to New York. His raincoat was wet. She hadn’t looked out the window for hours and didn’t know it was raining.

“Hi, girls,” Evans said. He was a tall, thin man with tousled black hair and a blue-black beard that made him look as if he needed a shave at all times. His enemies said he looked like a wolf. Gretchen varied between thinking he was alertly handsome and Jewishly ugly, although he was not a Jew. Kinsella was his real name. He had been in analysis for three years. He had already made six pictures, three of which had been very successful. He was a lounger. As soon as he entered a room he leaned against something or sat on a desk, or if there were a couch handy lay down and put his feet up. He was wearing suede desert boots.

He kissed Ida on the cheek, then Gretchen. He had made one picture in Paris and had learned to kiss everybody there. The picture had been disastrous. “A foul day,” he said. He swung himself up on one of the high, metal cutting benches. He made a point of seeming at home wherever he was. “We got in two set-ups this morning and then the rains came. Just as well. Hazen was drunk by noon.” Richard Hazen was the male star of the picture. He was always drunk by noon. “How’s it going here?” Evans asked. “We ready to run?”

“Just about,” Gretchen said. She was sorry she hadn’t realized how late it was. She would have done something about her hair and put on fresh make-up to be ready for Evans. “Ida,” she said, “will you take the last sequence with you and tell Freddy to run it after the rushes?”

They went down the hall to the small projection room at the end of the corridor. Evans pinched her arm secretly. “Gretchen,” he said, “beautiful toiler in the vineyards.”

They sat in the darkened projection room and watched the rushes of the day before, the same scene, from different angles, done over and over again, that would one day, they hoped, be arranged into one harmonious flowing entity and be shown on huge screens in theaters throughout the world. As she watched, Gretchen thought again how Evans’ talent, kinky and oblique, showed in every foot of film he shot. She made mental notes of how she would make the first cut of the material. Richard Hazen had been drunk before noon yesterday, too, she saw. In two years nobody would give him a job.

“What do you think?” Evans asked, when the lights went up.

“You might as well quit every morning by one,” Gretchen said, “if Hazen’s working.”

“It shows, eh?” Evans was sitting slouched low in his chair, his legs over the back of the chair in front of him.

“It shows,” Gretchen said.

“I’ll talk to his agent.”

“Try talking to his bartender,” Gretchen said.

“Drink,” Evans said, “Kinsella’s curse. When drunk by others.”

The room went dark again and they watched the sequence Gretchen had been working on all day. Projected that way, it seemed even worse to Gretchen than it had been on the moviola. But when it was over and the lights went up again, Evans said, “Fine. I like it.”

Gretchen had known Evans for two years and had already done a picture with him before this one and she had come to recognize that he was too easily pleased with his own work. Somewhere in his analysis he had come to the conclusion that arrogance was good for his ego and it was dangerous to criticize him openly. “I’m not so sure,” Gretchen said. “I’d like to fiddle with it some more.”

“A waste of time,” Evans said. “I tell you it’s okay.”

Unlike most directors he was impatient in the cutting room and careless about details.

“I don’t know,” Gretchen said. “It seems to me to drag.”

“That’s just what I want right there,” Evans said. “I want it to drag.” He argued like a stubborn child.

“All those people going in and out of doors,” Gretchen persisted, “with those ominous shadows with nothing ominous happening …”

“Stop trying to make me into Colin Burke.” Evans stood up abruptly. “My name is Evans Kinsella, in case it slipped your mind, and Evans Kinsella it will remain. Please remember that.”

“Oh, stop being an infant,” Gretchen snapped at him. Sometimes the two functions she served for Evans became confused.

“Where’s my coat? Where did I leave my goddamn coat?” he said loudly.

“You left it in the cutting room.”

They went back to the cutting room together, Evans allowing her to carry the cans of film they had just run and which she picked up from the projectionist. Evans put on his coat, roughly. Ida was making out the sheet for the film they had handled that day. Evans started out of the door, then stopped and came back to Gretchen. “I had intended to ask you to have dinner with me and take in a movie,” he said. “Can you make it?” He smiled placatingly. He dreaded the thought of being disliked, even for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said. “My brother’s coming to pick me up. I’m going up to his place for the weekend.”

Evans looked forlorn. He was capable of sixty moods a minute. “I’m free as a bird this weekend. I’d hoped we could …” He looked over at Ida, as though he wished she were out of the room. Ida continued working stolidly on her sheets.

“I’ll be back Sunday night in time for dinner,” Gretchen said.

“Okay,” Evans said. “I suppose I’ll have to settle for that. Give my regards to your brother. And congratulate him for me.”

“For what?”

“Didn’t you see his picture in Look? He’s famous all over America. This week.”

“Oh, that,” Gretchen said. The magazine had run a piece under the title “Ten Political Hopefuls Under Forty,” and there had been two photographs of Rudolph, one with Jean in the living room of their house, one at his desk in the town hall. Rising fast in Republican councils, the article had said about handsome young Mayor with beautiful, rich young wife. Moderate liberal thinker, energetic administrator. Was not just another theoretical politician; had met a payroll all his life. Had streamlined town government, integrated housing, cracked down on industrial pollution, jailed former police chief and three patrolmen for accepting bribes, raised a bond issue for new schools; as influential trustee of Whitby University had been instrumental in making it a co-educational institution; far-seeing town-planner, had experimented with closing off center of town to traffic on Saturday afternoons and evenings so that people could stroll about in a neighborly fashion while they did their shopping; had used the Whitby Sentinel, of which he was the publisher, as a platform for hardhitting articles on honest government, both local and national, and had won awards for newspapers in cities of under fifty thousand population; had made a forceful speech at a convention of mayors in Atlantic City and had been enthusiastically applauded; had been invited to the White House for thirty minutes with a select committee of other mayors.

“Reading that piece,” Gretchen said, “you’d think he’s done everything but raise the dead in Whitby. It must have been written by a lady journalist who’s wildly in love with him. He knows how to turn on the charm, my brother.”

Evans laughed. “You don’t let emotional attachments cloud your opinions of your near and dear ones, do you?”

“I just hope my near and dear ones don’t believe all the gush people write about them.”

“The barb has found its mark, sweetie,” Evans said. “I now am going home to burn all my scrapbooks.” He kissed Ida good-bye first, then Gretchen, and said, “I’ll pick you up at your hotel at seven Sunday night.”

“I’ll be there,” Gretchen said.

“Out into the lonely night,” Evans said, as he left, pulling the belt of his white raincoat tight around his slim waist, young double agent playing his dangerous game in a low-budget movie.

Gretchen had an idea of just how lonely the night and the weekend were likely to be. He had two other mistresses in New York. That she knew of.

“I can never make up my mind,” Ida said, “whether he’s a jerk or a genius.”

“Neither,” Gretchen said and began putting the sequence that displeased her on the moviola again, to see if there was anything she could do with it.

Rudolph came into the cutting room at six-thirty, looking politically hopeful in a dark-blue raincoat and a beige cotton rain hat. Next door a train was going over a trestle on the sound track and farther down the hall an augmented orchestra was playing the 1812 Overture. Gretchen was rewinding the sequence she was working on and the dialogue was coming out in whistling, loud, incomprehensible gibberish.

“Holy man,” Rudolph said. “How can you stand it?”

“The sounds of honest labor,” Gretchen said. She finished rewinding and gave the spool to Ida. “Go home immediately,” she said to her. If you didn’t watch her, and if she didn’t have a meeting to go to, Ida would stay every night until ten or eleven o’clock, working. She dreaded leisure, Ida.

Rudolph didn’t say Happy Birthday when they went down in the elevator and out onto Broadway. Gretchen didn’t remind him. Rudolph carried the small valise Gretchen had packed in the morning for the weekend. It was still raining and there wasn’t a cab to be had, so they started walking in the direction of Park Avenue. It hadn’t been raining when she had come to work and she didn’t have an umbrella. She was soaked by the time they reached Sixth Avenue.

“This town,” Rudolph said, “needs ten thousand more taxis. It’s insane, what people will put up with to live in a city.”

“Energetic administrator,” Gretchen said. “Moderate liberal thinker, far-seeing town-planner.”

Rudolph laughed. “Oh, you read that article. What crap.” But she thought he sounded pleased.

They were on Fifty-second Street and the rain was coming down harder than ever. In front of Twenty-One he stopped her and said, “Let’s duck in here and have a drink. The doorman’ll get us a taxi later.”

Gretchen’s hair was lank with the rain and the backs of her stockings were splattered and she didn’t relish the idea of going into a place like Twenty-One looking bedraggled and wearing a Ban the Bomb button on her coat, but Rudolph was already pulling her to the door.

Inside, four or five different door guarders, hatcheck girls, managers, and head waiters said, “Good evening, Mr. Jordache,” and there was considerable handshaking. There was nothing much that Gretchen could do to repair the ruin of her hair and stockings, so she didn’t bother to go to the ladies’ room, but went into the bar with Rudolph. Because they weren’t having dinner, they didn’t ask for a table, but went to the far corner of the bar, which was empty. Near the entrance there were people grouped three deep, men with booming advertising and oil voices who almost certainly did not want to ban the bomb, and women who had obviously just come from Elizabeth Arden and who always found taxis. The lighting was low and artful and was designed to make it worthwhile for women to spend the afternoon getting their hair done and their faces massaged at Elizabeth Arden.

“This’ll destroy your reputation in this place,” Gretchen said. “Coming in with someone who looks the way I look tonight.”

“They’ve seen worse,” Rudolph said. “Much worse.”

“Thanks, brother.”

“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” Rudolph said. “Actually, you’re beautiful.”

She didn’t feel beautiful. She felt wet and shabby and old and tired and lonely and wounded. “This is my night for self-pity,” she said. “Pay no heed.”

“How’s Jean?” Gretchen asked. Jean had had a miscarriage with her second child and had taken it hard and the times Gretchen had seen her she had seemed remote and subdued, dropping suddenly out of conversations or getting up in the middle of a sentence and walking off into another room. She had quit her photography and when Gretchen had asked her once when she was going back to it she had merely shaken her head.

“Jean?” Rudolph said shortly. “She’s improving.”

A barman came up and Rudolph ordered a Scotch and Gretchen a martini.

Rudolph lifted his glass to her. “Happy birthday,” he said.

He had remembered. “Don’t be nice to me,” she said, “or I’ll cry.”

He took an oblong jeweler’s box from his pocket and put it on the bar in front of her. “Try it on for size,” he said.

She opened the box, which had Cartier inscribed on it. Inside was a beautiful gold watch. She took off the heavy steel watch she was wearing and clipped on the slim gold band. Time, jeweled and fleeing, exquisitely. The day’s one gift. She kissed Rudolph’s cheek, managed not to cry. I must make myself think better of him, she thought. She ordered another martini.

“What other loot did you get today?” Rudolph asked.

“Nothing.”

“Did Billy call?” He said it too casually.

“No.”

“I ran into him two days ago on the campus and reminded him,” Rudolph said.

“He’s awfully busy,” Gretchen said defensively.

“Maybe he resented my telling him about it and suggesting he call you,” Rudolph said. “He’s not too fond of his Uncle Rudolph.”

“He’s not too fond of anybody,” Gretchen said.

Billy had matriculated at Whitby because when he finished high school in California he said he wanted to go East to college. Gretchen had hoped he would go to UCLA or the University of Southern California, so that he could still live at home, but Billy had made it clear that he didn’t want to live at home any more. Although he was very intelligent, he didn’t work, and his marks weren’t good enough to get him into any of the prestige schools in the East. Gretchen had asked Rudolph to use his influence to have him accepted at Whitby. Billy’s letters were rare—sometimes she wouldn’t hear from him for two months at a time. And when they did come they were short and consisted mostly of lists of courses he was taking and projects for the summer holidays, always in the East. She had been working more than a month now in New York, just a few hours away from Whitby, but he hadn’t come down once. Until this weekend she had been too proud to go up to see him but she finally couldn’t bear it any longer.

“What is it with that kid?” Rudolph said.

“He’s making me suffer,” Gretchen said.

“What for?”

“For Evans. I tried to be as discreet as possible—Evans never stayed overnight at the house and I always came home to sleep, myself, and I never went on weekends with him, but, of course, Billy caught on right away and the freeze was on. Maybe women ought to have fits of melancholy when they have babies, not when they lose them.”

“He’ll get over it,” Rudolph said. “It’s a kid’s jealousy. That’s all.”

“I hope so. He despises Evans. He calls him a phoney.”

“Is he?”

Gretchen shrugged. “I don’t think so. He doesn’t measure up to Colin, but then, neither did I.”

“Don’t run yourself down,” Rudolph said gently.

“What better occupation could a lady find on her fortieth birthday?”

“You look thirty,” Rudolph said. “A beautiful, desirable thirty.”

“Dear brother.”

“Is Evans going to marry you?”

“In Hollywood,” Gretchen said, “successful directors of thirty-two don’t marry widows of forty, unless they’re famous or rich or both. And I’m neither.”

“Does he love you?”

“Who knows?”

“Do you love him?”

“Same answer. Who knows? I like to sleep with him, I like to work for him, I like to be attached to him. He fulfills me. I have to be attached to a man and feel useful to him and somehow Evans turned out to be the lucky man. If he asked me to marry him, I’d do it like a shot. But he won’t ask.”

“Happy days,” Rudolph said thoughtfully. “Finish your drink. We’d better be getting on. Jean’s waiting for us in the apartment.”

Gretchen looked at her watch. “It’s now exactly eighteen minutes past seven, according to Mr. Cartier.”

It was still raining outside, but a taxi drove up and a couple got out and the doorman protected Gretchen with a big umbrella as she ran for the cab. Outside Twenty-One, you’d never guess that the city needed ten thousand more taxis.

When Rudolph let them into the apartment, they heard the violent sound of metal on metal. Rudolph ran into the living room with Gretchen on his heels. Jean sat on the floor, in the middle of the room, with her legs spread apart, like a child playing with blocks. She had a hammer in her hand and she was methodically destroying a pile of cameras and lenses and camera equipment that lay between her knees. She was wearing a pair of slacks and a dirty sweater and her unwashed hair hung down, masking her face, as she bent over her work.

“Jean,” Rudolph said, “what the hell are you doing?”

Jean looked up, peering slyly through her hair. “His Honor the Mayor wants to know what his beautiful, rich young wife is doing. I’ll tell his Honor the Mayor what his beautiful, rich young wife is doing. She is making a junk pile.” Her speech was thick and she was drunk. Jean smashed the hammer down on a big wide-angle lens and splintered it.

Rudolph grabbed the hammer from her. She did not struggle. “His Honor the Mayor now has taken the hammer from his beautiful rich young wife’s hand,” Jean said. “Don’t worry, little junk pile. There are other hammers. You’ll grow up and one day you’ll be one of the biggest, most beautiful junk piles in the world and his Honor the Mayor will claim it as a public park for the citizens of Whitby.”

Still holding the hammer, Rudolph glanced over at Gretchen. There was a shamed, frightened look in his eyes. “Christ, Jean,” he said to his wife, “there’s at least five thousand dollars’ worth of stuff there.”

“Her Honor the Mayor’s wife doesn’t need cameras,” Jean said. “Let people take pictures of me. Let poor people take pictures. Talented people. Hoopla!” She made a spreading, gay ballet gesture with her arms. “Bring on the hammers. Rudy, darling, don’t you think you ought to give your beautiful rich young wife a drink?”

“You’ve had enough to drink.”

“Rudolph,” Gretchen said, “I’d better be off. We’re not going to Whitby tonight.”

“Beautiful Whitby,” Jean said. “Where the beautiful rich young wife of his Honor the Mayor smiles at Democrats and Republicans alike, where she opens charity bazaars and appears faithfully at her husband’s side at banquets and political meetings, where she is to be seen at Commencements and Fourth of July celebrations and the home games of the Whitby University football team and the dedication of new science laboratories and the ground-breaking ceremonies for housing projects with real toilets for colored folk.”

“Cut it out, Jean!” Rudolph said harshly.

“Really, I think I’d better go,” Gretchen said. “I’ll call you in …”

“Sister of his Honor the Mayor, what’s your rush to leave?” Jean said. “Who knows, one day he may need your vote. Stay and we’ll have a nice cosy little family drink. Maybe if you play your cards right, he may even marry you. Stay and listen. It may be in … instructive.” She stumbled on the word. “How to be an appendage, in a hundred easy lessons. I’m having visiting cards printed up. Mrs. Rudolph Jordache, ex-career girl, now in the appendage business. One of the ten most hopeful appendages in the United States. Parasitism and hypocrisy a specialty. Courses given in appendaging.” She giggled. “Any true-blue American girl guaranteed a diploma.”

Rudolph didn’t try to stop Gretchen as she went out of the room and into the hallway, leaving him standing in his raincoat, the hammer in his hand, staring down at his drunken wife.

The elevator door opened directly into the apartment and Gretchen had to wait in the hallway and she heard Jean say, in a childish, aggrieved voice, “People are always taking away my hammers,” before the elevator door opened and she could flee.

When she got back to the Algonquin she called Evans’s hotel, but there was no answer from his apartment. She left a message with the operator that Mrs. Burke had not left for the weekend and could be reached all night at her hotel. Then she took a hot bath and changed her clothes and went down to the hotel dining room and had dinner.

Rudolph called at nine the next morning. She was alone. Evans hadn’t called. Rudolph said that Jean had gone to sleep after Gretchen had left and had been contrite and ashamed when she woke up and was all right now and they were going to Whitby after all and they’d wait for Gretchen in the apartment.

“You’re sure you don’t think it’s wiser to spend the day alone with her?” Gretchen asked.

“It’s better when we’re not alone,” Rudolph said. “You left your bag here, in case you think you’ve lost it.”

“I remember,” Gretchen said. “I’ll be up at your place by ten.”

As she dressed she puzzled over the scene the night before and remembered Jean’s less violent, but almost equally strange behavior at other times. Now it all added up. She had managed to hide it from Gretchen until now, because Gretchen hadn’t seen her all that often. But it was plain now—Jean was an alcoholic. Gretchen wondered if Rudolph realized it, and what he was going to do about it.

By a quarter to ten Evans hadn’t called, and Gretchen went down in the elevator and into the sun of Forty-fourth Street, a slender, tall woman, with fine legs, her hair soft and black, her skin unblemished and pale, her tweed suit and jersey blouse exactly right for a gracious country weekend. Only the Ban the Bomb button, worn like a brooch on the well-tailored lapel, might indicate to the passerby that not everything was as it seemed on that sunny American spring morning of 1966.

The debris of the cameras had been cleared away from the living room. Rudolph and Jean were listening to a Mozart piano concerto on the radio when Gretchen came in. Rudolph seemed unruffled and although Jean was pale and a little shaky when she stood up to kiss Gretchen hello, she, too, seemed to have recovered from the night before. She gave Gretchen a quick glance, that perhaps asked for pity and understanding, but after that, in her normal, quick, low-timbred voice, with a hint of gaiety that didn’t seem forced, she said, “Gretchen, don’t you look smashing in that suit. And tell me where I can get one of those buttons. The color goes with my eyes.”

“Yes,” Rudolph said. “I’m sure it’ll make a big hit the next time we have to go down to Washington.” But his voice was tender and he laughed, relaxed.

Jean held his hand, like a child on an outing with a father, as they went downstairs and waited for the man from the garage to bring the car. Her hair was washed and shone chestnut brown, and she had it tied in back with a bow and she was wearing a very short skirt. Her legs, without stockings, were lovely, slender, straight, and already tanned. As usual, she looked no more than eighteen.

While they were waiting for the car, Rudolph said to Gretchen, “I called my secretary and told her to get in touch with Billy and tell him we were expecting him for lunch at our place.”

“Thank you, Rudy,” Gretchen said. She hadn’t seen Billy in so long that for their first meeting it would be much better if there were others around.

When the car came, the two women sat in front with Rudolph. He turned on the radio. Mozart, unworried and spring-like, accompanied them as far as the Bronx.

They drove through dogwood and tulips and skirted fields where men and boys were playing baseball. Mozart gave way to Loesser on the radio, and Ray Bolger sang, irresistibly, “Once in love with Amy, Always in love with Amy,” and Jean sang along with the radio, in a low, true, sweet voice. They all remembered Bolger in the show and how much pleasure he had given them. By the time they reached the farmhouse in Whitby, where the first twilight-colored lilacs were budding in the garden, the night before was almost as if it had never happened. Almost.

Enid, now two, blonde and round, was waiting for them. She leaped at her mother and they embraced and kissed each other again and again. Rudolph carried Gretchen’s bag as he and Gretchen went up the stairs to the guest room. The room was crisp and sparkling, full of flowers.

Rudolph put her bag down and said, “I think you have everything you need.”

“Rudy,” Gretchen said, keeping her voice low, “we ought to skip drinks today.”

“Why?” He sounded surprised.

“You mustn’t tempt her. Jean. Even if she doesn’t take any herself—seeing others drink …”

“Oh,” Rudolph said negligently, “I wouldn’t worry about that. She was just a little upset last night …”

“She’s an alcoholic, Rudy,” Gretchen said gently.

Rudolph made a dismissive, light gesture. “You’re being melodramatic,” he said. “It’s not like you. Every once in a while she goes on a little bender, that’s all. Even as you and I.”

“Not even as you and I,” Gretchen said. “She shouldn’t touch one drop. Not even a sip of beer. And as much as possible, she should be kept away from people who drink. Rudy, I know. Hollywood is full of women like her. In the beginning stages, like her, and in later stages, horrible stages, the way she’s liable to be. You’ve got to protect her.”

“Nobody can say I don’t protect her.” There was a thin edge of anger in his voice.

“Rudy, lock up every bottle of liquor in this house,” Gretchen said.

“Calm yourself,” Rudolph said. “This isn’t Hollywood.”

The phone was ringing downstairs and then Jean called up and said, “Gretchen, it’s Billy, for you. Down here.”

“Please listen to me,” Gretchen said.

“Go talk to your son,” Rudolph said coldly.

On the phone, Billy’s voice was very grown-up. “Hello, Mother. It’s wonderful that you could come up.” He had begun calling her Mother when Evans had appeared on the scene. Before that it had been Mummy. She had thought it childish for a boy as big and as old as he, but now, on the phone, she longed for the Mummy. “Say, I’m awfully sorry,” Billy said. “Will you make my excuses to Rudolph? He invited me to come to lunch, but there’s a softball game on here at one o’clock and I’m pitching, so I’m afraid I’ll have to ask for a raincheck.”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “I’ll make your excuses. When will I see you?”

“Well, it’s a little difficult to say.” Billy sounded honestly perplexed. “There’s a kind of giant beer-fest after the game at one of the houses and …”

“Where’re you playing?” Gretchen said. “I’ll come down and watch you. We can visit between the innings.”

“Now you sound sore.”

“I’m not sore, as you put it. Where’re you playing?”

“There’s a whole bunch of fields on the east side of the campus,” Billy said. “You can’t miss it.”

“Good-bye, Billy,” Gretchen said, and hung up. She went out of the hall where the phone was and into the living room. Jean was on the couch, cradling Enid and rocking her back and forth. Enid was making small cooing noises. Rudolph was shaking up Daiquiris.

“My son sends his regrets,” Gretchen said. “He has weighty affairs that will detain him all afternoon. He cannot lunch.”

“That’s too bad,” Rudolph said. But his mouth hardened for a moment. He poured the cocktails for himself and Gretchen. Jean, occupied with her child, said she was not drinking.

After lunch, Gretchen borrowed the car and drove to the Whitby University campus. She had been there before but now she was struck afresh by the quiet, countrified beauty of the place, with its homely old buildings spread out haphazardly on acres of green, its wandering graveled walks, the tall oaks and elms. Because it was Saturday afternoon there were few students about and the campus dozed in a peaceful sunny trance. It was a place to look back upon, she thought, an image for later nostalgia. If a university was a place that prepared young people for life, these peaceful lawns, these unpretentious welcoming halls and classrooms might be found wanting. The life Whitby’s graduates would have to face in the last third of the twentieth century was almost certainly not going to be anything like this.

There were three desultory baseball games in progress on the playing fields. The most desultory, in which almost half the players were girls, was the one in which Billy was playing. The girl who was in field had a book with her. She sat on the grass reading it and only looked up and ran after a ball when her teammates shouted at her. The game must have been going on for some time, because as Gretchen came up behind the first-base line there was a mild argument between the first-baseman and some of the members of the opposing team who were sprawled on the grass awaiting their turn at bat, about whether the score was nineteen to sixteen or eighteen to fifteen. It could hardly have made any difference to anyone whether or not Billy had played.

Dressed in fringed blue jeans stained with bleach, and a gray T-shirt, Billy was pitching, just lobbing it up to the girls, but throwing the ball hard to the boys when they came to bat. Billy didn’t see Gretchen immediately and she watched him, tall and moving lazily and gracefully, his hair too long over the face that was a beautiful, improved version, sensual, strong, dissatisfied, of Willie Abbott’s face, the forehead as broad and high, the eyes deeper set and darker, the nose longer, with tense, wide nostrils, a single asymmetrical dimple in the right cheek when he smiled, his teeth pure, youthful white.

If only he will live up to his face, Gretchen thought, as her son tossed the ball up to a pretty, chubby girl, who swung and missed and cried, in mock despair, “I’m hopeless!”

It was the third out of the inning and Billy saw Gretchen standing behind first base and came over to her and said, “Hi, Mother,” and kissed her. There was a little crinkle of amusement around his eyes as he glanced at the Ban the Bomb button. “I told you you’d find us without trouble.”

“I hope I’m not interfering,” she said. The wrong tone, she knew. Love me, I’m your mother.

“No, of course not,” he said. “Say, kids,” he called, “somebody bat for me. I have a visitor. I’ll see you all later at the house.” He didn’t introduce her to anyone. “Why don’t we take a little walk? I’ll show you around.”

“Rudolph and Jean were disappointed you couldn’t come for lunch,” Gretchen said, as they walked away from the game. Wrong tone again.

“Were they?” Billy said evenly. “I’m sorry.”

“Rudolph says he’s invited you over again and again and you never come.”

Billy shrugged. “You know how it is,” he said. “Something’s always coming up.”

“I’d feel better if you went there once in awhile,” Gretchen said.

“I’ll go. Sometime. We can discuss the generation gap. Or how everybody on the campus smokes pot. His newspaper’s great on those subjects.”

“Do you smoke pot?”

“Mother, darling, come into the twentieth century.”

“Don’t condescend to me,” she said sharply.

“It’s a nice day,” he said. “I haven’t seen you for a long time. Let’s not argue. That building over there is the dormitory where I lived when I was a freshman.”

“Was your girl there in that game?” He had written her that he was interested in a girl in one of his classes.

“No. Her mother and father are here for the weekend and she has to pretend I don’t exist. Her father can’t stand me and I can’t stand him. I’m an immoral, depraving influence, her father says. He’s Neanderthal.”

“Have you got a good word to say for anybody?”

“Sure. Albert Camus. But he’s dead. That reminds me. How’s that other poet, Evans Kinsella?”

“He’s alive,” Gretchen said.

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

If Colin hadn’t died he wouldn’t be like this, Gretchen thought. He would be completely different. An absent-minded, busy man gets behind the wheel of a car and hits a tree and the impact spreads and spreads, never stopping, through the generations.

“Do you ever come down to New York?” she asked.

“Once in awhile.”

“If you’ll let me know, the next time you’re coming,” she said, “I’ll get tickets for a show. Bring your girl, if you want. I’d like to meet her.”

“She’s nothing much,” Billy said.

“Anyway, let me know.”

“Sure.”

“How are you doing in your work?” she asked.

Billy made a face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Billy,” Gretchen stopped walking and faced him, “are you interested in anything?”

“Not really,” he said calmly. “Is there something wrong with that?”

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 6

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re only staying overnight,” Rudolph said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s it like in Dallas?” she asked.

“All right for Texans, I suppose,” Rudolph said. “Intolerable for the rest of the human race.”

“When will you be back?”

“As soon as possible.”

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

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

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

He got up from the bed, maliciously pleased to see that his shoes had left a stain on the silk, and went into the living room. Johnny was sitting at a huge desk, going over his papers in his shirt sleeves. “There’s no doubt about it, Rudy,” Johnny said, “the sonofabitch has taken us for a ride.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rudy?” It was Gretchen’s voice.

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it?” Rudolph asked.

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

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

“He’s down in New York, living with some girl …”

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

“Of course it isn’t that,” Gretchen said. “He’s being drafted, now that he’s not a student anymore.”

“Well, it might do him some good,” Rudolph said. “A couple of years in the Army might make a man of him.”

“You have a baby daughter,” Gretchen said bitterly. “You can talk like that. I have one son. I don’t think a bullet through his head is going to make a man of my son.”

“Now, Gretchen,” Rudolph said, “don’t make it so automatic. Induct the boy and two months later send the corpse home to mother. There are an awful lot of boys who serve their time and come home without a scratch.”

“That’s why I’m calling you,” Gretchen said. “I want you to make sure that he comes home without a scratch.”

“What can I do?”

“You know a lot of people in Washington.”

“Nobody can keep a kid out of the draft if he’s goofed school and he’s in good health, Gretchen. Not even in Washington.”

“I’m not so sure about that, either,” Gretchen said, “from some of the things I’ve heard and read. But I’m not asking you to try to keep Billy out of the Army.”

“Then what are you trying to get me to do?”

“Use your connections to make sure that once Billy is in, he doesn’t ever get sent to Viet Nam.”

Rudolph sighed. The truth was that he did know some people in Washington who could most probably do it and who would most probably do it if he asked them. But it was just the sort of petty, privileged, inside politicking that he despised the most. It offended his sense of rectitude and cast a shadow on his entire reason for going into public life. In the world of business it was perfectly normal for a man to come to you and ask you to place a nephew or a cousin in some favored position. Depending upon how much you owed the man or how much you expected to get from him in the future, or even how much you liked him, you helped the nephew or cousin, if you could, without thinking twice about it. But to use the power you had gained by the votes of people to whom you had promised impeccable representation and the sternest respect for the law to deliver your sister’s son from the threat of death while actively or tacitly approving of sending thousands of other boys the same age to their destruction was another thing.

“Gretchen,” he said over the slight buzz of wire between Dallas and Los Angeles, “I wish you could figure out some other way …”

“The only other person I know who might be able to do something,” Gretchen said, her voice rising, “is Colin Burke’s brother. He’s a general in the Air Force. He’s in Viet Nam right now. I bet he’d just fall all over himself with eagerness to keep Billy from hearing a shot fired.”

“Not so loud, Gretchen,” Rudolph said, holding the phone away from his ear. “I hear you perfectly well.”

“I’m going to tell you something.” She was shouting hysterically now. “If you don’t help, I’m coming to New York and I’m taking Billy with me to Canada or Sweden. And I’m going to make one hell of a loud noise about why I’m doing it.”

“Christ, Gretchen,” Rudolph said, “what’s wrong with you—are you approaching the menopause or what?”

He heard the phone slam at the other end. He got up slowly and went over to the window and looked out at Dallas. It didn’t look any better from the bedroom than it had from the salon.

Family, he thought. Without reasoning it out, he had always been the one to try to protect his family. He was the one who helped his father at the ovens and made the deliveries for the bakery; he was the one who had kept his mother alive. He was the one who had had the shabby dealings with detectives and the painful scene with Willie Abbott and had helped Gretchen with her divorce and befriended her second husband. He was the one who had made the money for Tom, so that he could escape the savage life he had fallen into. He was the one who had gone to Colin Burke’s funeral on the other edge of the continent to comfort his sister at the worst moments of her sorrow. He was the one who had taken the responsibility of taking Billy, ungrateful and derisive as he was, out of his school when Billy was suffering there; he was the one who had gotten Billy into Whitby, when the boy’s marks were hardly good enough to get him into a trade school. He was the one who had hunted down Tom at the Aegean Hotel, for his mother’s sake, and had learned all about West Fifty-third Street and put up the money for Schultz and made the arrangement with the lawyer for Tom’s reunion with his son and his divorce from a prostitute …

He had not asked for gratitude and, he thought wryly, he had gotten damn little for it. Well, he hadn’t done it for gratitude. He was honest with himself. He was conscious of the duties owed to himself and others and wouldn’t have been able to live comfortably with himself if he hadn’t fulfilled them.

Duties never end. It is their essential characteristic.

He went over to the phone and asked for Gretchen’s number in California. When she answered, he said, “All right, Gretchen. I’ll stop over in Washington on the way North and see what I can do. I think you can stop worrying.”

“Thank you, Rudy,” Gretchen said in a small voice. “I knew you’d come through.”

Brad arrived at the suite at five-thirty. Texas sun and Texas liquor had made him ruddier than ever. Also heavier and more expansive. He was wearing a dark, summer-weight, striped suit and a ruffled blue shirt with huge pearl cufflinks. “Sorry I couldn’t meet you at the airport, but I hope my boy treated you all right.” He poured himself a slug of bourbon over ice and beamed at his friends. “Well, it’s about time you fellas came down and paid me a visit and took a look for yourselves at where your money’s coming from. We’re bringing in a new well and maybe tomorrow I’ll hire a plane and we’ll fly over and take a look at how it’s doing. And I’ve got tickets on the fifty-yard line for Saturday. The big game of the season. Texas against Oklahoma. This town’s got to be seen to be believed on that weekend. Thirty thousand happy drunks. I’m sorry Virginia’s not here to welcome you. She’ll be heartbroken when she hears you’ve been and gone. But she’s up North visiting her Pappy. I hear he’s not too well. I hope it’s nothing serious. I’m real fond of the old critter.”

It was too painful, the Western heartiness, the lush hospitality, the desperate rush of Southern blarney. “Cut it out, please, Brad,” Rudolph said. “For one thing, we know why Virginia’s not here. And it isn’t to visit her Pappy, as you describe him.” Two weeks ago Calderwood had come to Rudolph’s office and had told him that Virginia had left Brad for good because Brad had taken up with some movie actress in Hollywood and was commuting between Dallas and Hollywood three times a week and was having money troubles. It was after Calderwood’s visit that Rudolph had begun to suspect something and had called Johnny.

“Pardner,” Brad said, drinking, “I don’t know what all you’re talking about. I just talked to my wife and she said she expected to be coming home any day now and …”

“You didn’t just talk to your wife and she’s not coming home, Brad,” Rudolph said. “And you know it.”

“And you know a lot of other things, too,” Johnny said. He was standing between Brad and the door, almost as if he expected Brad to make a sudden run for it. “And so do we.”

“By God,” Brad said, “if you fellas weren’t my lifelong buddies, I’d swear you sounded hostile.” He was sweating, despite the air-conditioning and his blue shirt was darkly stained. He filled his glass again. His stubby, manicured fingers were shaking as he fumbled with the ice.

“Come clean, Brad,” Johnny said.

“Well …” Brad laughed, or tried to laugh. “Maybe I’ve been stepping out a little on my wife, here and there. You know how I am, Rudy, I don’t have the strength of character you have, I can’t resist a little bit of soft, cuddly poontang when it’s waved in my face. But Virginia’s taking it too big, she …”

“We’re not interested in you and Virginia,” Johnny said. “We’re interested in where our money’s gone to.”

“You get a statement every month,” Brad said.

“We sure do,” Johnny said.

“We’ve run into a little hard luck recently.” Brad wiped his face with a large, monogrammed, linen handkerchief. “Like my Pappy, bless his soul, used to say about the oil business, if you don’t like the waves, don’t go in the water.”

“We’ve been doing some checking,” Johnny said, “and we figure that in the last year you’ve stolen roughly seventy thousand dollars apiece from me and Rudy.”

“You fellas must be kidding,” Brad said. His face was almost purple now and his smile was fixed, as though it were permanently ironed on the florid, stretched skin over the damp collar. “You are kidding, aren’t you? This is some kind of practical joke. Jesus, a hundred and forty thousand dollars!”

“Brad …” Rudolph said warningly.

“Okay,” Brad said. “I guess you’re not kidding.” He sank down heavily on the flowered couch, a thick, round-shouldered weary man against the gay colors of the best piece of furniture in the best suite of the best hotel in Dallas, Texas. “I’ll tell you how it happened.”

The way it happened was that Brad had met a starlet by the name of Sandra Dilson a year before when he had gone out to Hollywood to scout around for more investors. “A sweet, innocent young thing,” were Brad’s words for Miss Dilson. He’d gone ape for her, he said, but it was a long time before she’d let him touch her. To impress her he’d started buying her jewelry. “You have no idea what they charge for stones out there in that town,” Brad said. “It’s as though they printed their own money.” And to impress her further, he’d bet heavily when they went to the races. “If you want to know the truth,” Brad said, “that girl is walking around with about four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry on her back that I paid for. And there were times in bed with her,” he said defiantly, “that I felt it was worth it, every cent of it. I love her and I lost my head over her and in a way I’m proud of it and I’m willing to take the consequences.”

To find the money, Brad had started to falsify the monthly statements. He had reported prospecting and drilling for oil in holes that had been abandoned as dry or worthless years before and had hiked up the cost of equipment ten or even fifteen times what the actual price would have been. There was a bookkeeper in his office who was in on it, but whom he paid to keep quiet and to work with him. There had been some ominous inquiries from other people who invested with him, but up to now he had been able to fend them off.

“How many investors have you got backing you at this moment?” Johnny asked.

“Fifty-two.”

“Fifty-two idiots,” Johnny said bitterly.

“I never did anything like this before,” Brad said ingenuously. “My reputation in Oklahoma and Texas is as clean as a hound’s tooth. You ask anyone. People trusted me. And they had a right to.”

“You’re going to go to jail, Brad,” Rudolph said.

“You wouldn’t do that to me, to your old friend, Brad, who sat next to you the day you graduated from college, would you, Rudy?”

“I certainly would,” Rudolph said.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Johnny said, “before we start talking about jail. I’m more interested in seeing if we can get our money back than in sending this moron to jail.”

“That’s it,” Brad said eagerly, “that’s the way to talk. Sensibly.”

“What have you got in the way of assets?” Johnny asked. “Right now?”

“That’s it,” repeated Brad. “Now we’re talking business. It’s not as though I’m wiped out. I still have credit.”

“When you walk out of this room, Brad,” Rudolph said, “you won’t be able to borrow ten cents from any bank in the country. I’ll see to that.” He found it hard not to show his disgust.

“Johnny …” Brad appealed to Heath. “He’s vindictive. Talk to him. I can understand he’s a little sore, but to be vindictive like that …”

“I asked you about your assets,” Johnny said.

“Well,” Brad said, “on the books, it’s not so … so optimistic.” He grinned, hopefully. “But from time to time, I’ve been able to accumulate a little cash. For a rainy day, you might say. I’ve got it in safety-deposit boxes here and there. It’s not enough to pay off everybody, of course, but I could go pretty far toward paying you fellas back.”

“Is it Virginia’s money?” Rudolph asked.

“Virginia’s money!” Brad snorted. “Her old man tied up the money he gave her so tight, I couldn’t buy a hot dog with any of it if I was dying of hunger in a ballpark.”

“He was a lot smarter than we were,” Rudolph said.

“Jesus, Rudolph,” Brad complained, “you don’t have to keep rubbing it in. I feel bad enough as it is.”

“How much is there in cash?” Johnny asked.

“You understand. Johnny,” Brad said, “it’s not on the company’s books anywhere or anything like that.”

“I understand,” Johnny said. “How much?”

“Close to a hundred thousand. I could give each of you nearly fifty thousand dollars on account. And I’d personally guarantee to pay the rest back later.”

“How?” Rudolph asked brutally.

“Well, there’s still some wells being dug …” Rudolph could tell he was lying. “And then I could go to Sandra and explain how I’m in a little hole for the time being and ask her to give me back the jewelry, and …”

Rudolph shook his head, wonderingly. “You really believe she’d do that?”

“She’s a fine little girl, Rudy. I have to introduce her to you sometime.”

“Oh, grow up, for Christ’s sake,” Rudolph said.

“You wait here,” Johnny said to Brad. “I want to talk to Rudy alone.” He ostentatiously took the papers he had been working on with him as he went toward Rudolph’s bedroom door.

“You fellas don’t mind if I mix myself a little drink while I’m waiting, do you?” Brad said.

Johnny closed the door behind them when he and Rudolph were in the bedroom. “We have a decision to make,” he said. “If as he says he’s got close to a hundred thousand cash, we can take it and cut our losses. That is, about twenty thousand give or take a few dollars in one way or another. If we don’t take it, we have to report it and ask for a creditors’ meeting and probably put him through bankruptcy. If we don’t start criminal proceedings. All his creditors would have an equal shot at the money, or at least pro rata, according to the size of their investments and the amount he actually owes them.”

“Does he have the right to pay us off like that, preferentially?”

“Well, he isn’t in bankruptcy yet,” Johnny said. “I think it would stand up in a court of law.”

“Nothing doing,” Rudolph said. “Let him throw it into the pot. And let’s get the safety-deposit box keys from him tonight, so he can’t lift the money before we can stop him.”

Johnny sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that,” he said. “When knighthood was in flower.”

“Just because he’s a crook,” Rudolph said, “doesn’t mean that I’m going to be a crook to cut my losses, as you say.”

“I said I thought it would probably stand up in a court of law,” Johnny said.

“Not good enough,” Rudolph said. “Not good enough for me.”

Johnny looked speculatively at Rudolph. “What would you do if I went to him and said, okay, I’ll take my half, and drop out of the rest of it?”

“I’d report it at the creditors’ meeting,” Rudolph said evenly, “and make a motion to sue you for recovery.”

“I surrender, dear,” Johnny said. “Who can stand up to an honest politician?”

They went back into the living room. Brad was standing at the window, a full glass in hand, tickets at the fifty yard line for the big game of the season in his wallet, gazing out at the rich, friendly city of Dallas. Johnny explained what they had decided. Brad nodded, numbly, not quite understanding.

“And we want you back here tomorrow morning at nine o’clock,” Rudolph said. “Before the banks open. We’ll go around with you to those safety-deposit boxes you spoke about and we’ll take care of the money for you. We’ll give you a receipt for your files. If you’re not here by one minute before nine, I’ll call the police and make out a complaint for fraud.”

“Rudy …” Brad said plaintively.

“And if you want to hold onto those fancy, pearl cufflinks,” Rudolph said, “you’d better hide them someplace, because by the end of the month the sheriff is going to come around to seize your property, every bit of property you own, including that pretty, frilled shirt you’re wearing, to satisfy your debts.”

“You guys,” Brad said brokenly. “You guys … you don’t know what it’s like. You’re rich, you’ve got wives with millions, you’ve got everything you want. You don’t know what it’s like to be somebody like me.”

“Don’t break our hearts,” Rudolph said roughly. He had never been as angry with anyone in his whole life. He had to restrain himself from jumping on the man and trying to strangle him. “Just be here at nine o’clock.”

“Okay. I’ll be here,” Brad said. “I don’t suppose you want to have dinner with me …?”

“Get out of here before I kill you,” Rudolph said.

Brad went to the door. “Well,” he said, “have a good time in Dallas. It’s a great city. And remember …” He gestured for the suite, the liquor. “All this on my bill.”

Then he went out.

Rudolph didn’t have time to call home the next morning. Brad came over at nine o’clock, as ordered, red eyed and looking as though he hadn’t slept all night, with a collection of keys for safety-deposit boxes in various Dallas banks. Ottman hadn’t called the night before, although Rudolph and Johnny had dined in the hotel to be ready for his call. Rudolph took it as a sign that all had gone smoothly on the Whitby campus and that Ottman’s fears had been exaggerated.

Rudolph and Johnny, with Brad in tow, went to the office of a lawyer whom Johnny knew. There, the lawyer drew up a power of attorney, for Johnny to act as Rudolph’s representative. Johnny was going to stay in Dallas to sort out the mess. Then, with a clerk from the lawyer’s office as a witness, they went from bank to bank and watched as Brad, not wearing his pearl cufflinks, opened the boxes and took out neat packages of cash. All four men counted the bills methodically, before the clerk made out a receipt, which Rudolph and Johnny signed, acknowledging that they had received the sum from Bradford Knight, and the date. The lawyer’s clerk would then duly witness the slip of paper, after which they would all go up to the main floor from the bank’s vault and deposit the money in a joint account in Rudolph’s and Johnny’s names, all withdrawals to be made on presentation of both signatures. Rudolph and Johnny had planned the procedure the night before, knowing that from now on anything to do with Bradford Knight would have to stand up to scrutiny.

After the last box had been emptied, the final figure stood at ninety-three thousand dollars. Brad had been almost accurate in his estimate of what he had hidden away for what he had called a rainy day. Neither Johnny nor Rudolph asked him where the money had come from. That would be somebody else’s job.

The visit to the lawyer’s office and the round of the banks had taken up most of the morning and Rudolph had to hurry to catch his plane, which was to leave Dallas for Washington at noon. As he rushed out of the suite, carrying his bag and small briefcase, he saw that the only bottles of the array in the salon that had been opened had been the one Coke he had taken himself and the fifth of bourbon that Brad had drunk from.

Brad had offered him the use of his car to take him to the airport. “This morning, anyway,” he had said, trying to smile, “I still got my Cadillac. Might as well enjoy it.” But Rudolph had refused and called for a taxi. As he climbed into the taxi he asked Johnny to telephone his office in Whitby and tell his secretary that he couldn’t get home tonight, but would be staying over at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.

On the plane he did not eat the lunch nor drink the two Manhattans. He got the Comptroller’s estimates out of his briefcase and tried to work, but he couldn’t concentrate on the figures before him. He kept thinking about Brad, doomed, branded, bankrupt, with a jail sentence hanging over his head. Ruined for what? For a money-digging Hollywood tart. It was sickening. He loved her, Brad had said, it had been worth it. Love, the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. At least in Texas. It was almost impossible to associate Brad with the emotion. He was a man born, Rudolph saw now, for saloons and brothels. Maybe he had known it all the time and had refused to acknowledge it. Still, it was always difficult to believe in the existence of the love of others. Perhaps his refusal to accept the fact that Brad actually was capable of love was condescension on his part. He himself loved Jean, he thought, but would he face ruin for her? The answer had to be no. Was he then more superficial than the blubbering, sweating man in the ruffled shirt? And was he responsible in some way for the hideous day his friend was passing through now and the even more hideous days to come? When he had killed Brad’s chances with Calderwood on the steps of the Country Club, the afternoon of the wedding, had he subconsciously prepared Brad’s fate for him? When he had invested in Brad’s business, out of guilt, hadn’t he really known that one day Brad would revenge himself, and in the only way possible to Brad, by cheating? And had he not, in fact, wanted it to happen to rid himself finally of Brad because Brad had not believed him about Virginia? And even more disturbingly, if he had succumbed to Virginia Calderwood’s proposals and slept with her, would she have married Brad, and in marrying him, carried her husband out of the area of his friend’s protection? For there was no doubt about it—he had protected Brad through the years, first in calling him East for a job that dozens of other men could initially have done better, then in training him carefully (and overpaying him in the process) so that in Brad’s mind at least the idea of being awarded the top post in the firm was a reasonable one. At what point was it moral to stop protecting a friend? Never?

It would have been easier to allow Johnny Heath to go down to Dallas and handle the matter alone. Johnny had been Brad’s friend, too, and the best man at his wedding, but it had never been the same thing as between Rudolph and Brad. Somehow, it had been more hurtful to Brad to have to answer to Rudolph, face to face. God knows, it would have been easy for Rudolph to have pleaded pressure of work in Whitby and sent Johnny off on his own. He had considered it, but rejected it as cowardly. He had made the trip to maintain his own self-esteem. Self-esteem might be another way of saying vanity. Had his continued success dulled his sensibilities, led him into complacency and self-righteousness?

When the bankruptcy was finally settled, he decided, he would somehow pension Brad off. Five thousand dollars a year, paid secretly, so that neither Brad’s creditors nor the government could touch it? Would the money, which Brad would so desperately need and have to accept, pay for the sting of having to accept it from a man who had turned his back on him?

The seat-belt sign went on. They were making the approach for the landing. Rudolph put the papers back into his briefcase, sighed, and hooked up his belt.

When he got to the Mayflower there was a message waiting for him from his secretary. It was urgent, the message read, for him to call his office as soon as possible.

He went up to his room, where nobody had bothered to supply any liquor, and called his office. Twice, the line was busy, and he nearly decided to abandon the attempt to reach his office and get in touch with the Senator who was most likely to help him in keeping Billy Abbott out of harm’s way in the United States army. It was not something that could be arranged over the phone and he hoped to make an appointment for lunch the next day and then take an afternoon plane for New York.

On the third try, he got his secretary. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Mayor,” Walter said, sounding exhausted, “but I’m afraid you’d better get up here right away. After the office closed last night and I’d gone home, all hell broke loose, I just found out about it this morning or I’d have tried to get through to you sooner.”

“What is it? What is it?” Rudolph asked impatiently.

“It’s all terribly confused and I’m not sure that I have the sequence of events all straight,” Walter said. “But when Ottman tried to go into the dormitory last night, they had it barricaded, the students, I mean, and they wouldn’t let the police in. President Dorlacker tried to get Ottman to call the police off, but Ottman refused. Then when they tried to get in again, the students began to throw things. Ottman got hit in the eye with a stone, nothing serious, they say, but he’s in the hospital, and the police gave up, at least for last night. Then other students organized a mass march and I’m afraid they demonstrated in front of your house. I went out to your house just awhile ago and the lawn is in frightful condition. Mrs. Jordache is under sedation and …”

“You can tell me the rest of the story when I get there,” Rudolph said. “I’m getting the first plane out of Washington.”

“I thought that’s what you would do,” Walter said, “and I took the liberty of sending Scanlon down with your car. He’ll be waiting at La Guardia.”

Rudolph picked up his bags and hurried down to the lobby and checked out. Billy Abbott’s military career would have to hang in abeyance for awhile.

Scanlon was a fat man who wheezed when he talked. He was on the police force, but was nearly sixty years old and was scheduled for retirement. He suffered from rheumatism and it was almost as an act of mercy that he had been assigned as chauffeur to Rudolph. As an object lesson in civic economy Rudolph had sold the former mayor’s car, which had been owned by the town, and used his own car.

“If I had it to do all over again,” Scanlon said breathily, “I swear to God I’d never sign on any police force in a town where there was college students or niggers.”

“Scanlon, please,” Rudolph said. He had been trying to correct Scanlon’s vocabulary since the first day, with little success. He was sitting up front with the old patrolman, who drove at a maddeningly slow pace. But he would have been offended if Rudolph took the wheel.

“I mean it, sir,” Scanlon said. “They’re just wild animals. With no more respect for the law than a pack of hyenas. As for the police—they just laugh at us. I don’t like to tell you your business, Mr. Mayor, but if I was you, I’d go right to the Governor and ask for the Guard.”

“There’s time enough for that,” Rudolph said.

“Mark my words,” said Scanlon. “It’ll come to it. Look what they’ve done down in New York and out in California.”

“We’re not New York or California,” Rudolph said.

“We got students and niggers,” Scanlon said stubbornly. He drove silently for awhile. Then he said, “You shoulda been at your house last night, Mr. Mayor, then maybe you’d know what I was talking about.”

“I heard about it,” Rudolph said. “They trampled the garden.”

“They did a lot more than that,” Scanlon said. “I wasn’t there myself, but Ruberti was there, and he told me.” Ruberti was another policeman. “It was sinful what they did, Ruberti told me, sinful. They kept calling for you and singing dirty-minded songs, young girls, using the dirtiest language anybody ever heard, and they pulled up every plant in your garden and then when Mrs. Jordache opened the door …”

“She opened the door?” Rudolph was aghast. “What did she do that for?”

“Well, they started throwing things at the house. Clods of dirt, beer cans, and yelling, ‘Tell that motherfucker to come out.’ They meant you, Mr. Mayor, I’m ashamed to say. There was only Ruberti and Zimmermann there, the whole rest of the force was up at the college, and what could just two of them do against those howling wild Indians, maybe three hundred of them. So like I said, Mrs. Jordache opened the door and yelled at them.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Rudolph said.

“You might as well hear it now from me as later from somebody else,” Scanlon said. “When Mrs. Jordache opened the door, she was drunk. And she was stark naked.”

Rudolph made himself stare straight ahead at the tail lights of the cars ahead of him and into the blinding beams of light of the cars going the other way.

“There was a kid photographer there, from the school paper,” Scanlon went on, “and he took some flashlight pictures. Ruberti went for him, but the other kids made a kind of pocket and he got away. I don’t know what use they think they’re going to make of the pictures, but they got them.”

Rudolph ordered Scanlon to drive directly to the university. The main administration building was brilliantly floodlit and there were students at every window, throwing out thousands of pieces of paper from the files and shouting at the line of policemen, alarmingly few, but armed with their clubs now, who cordoned off the building. As he drove up to where Ottman’s car was parked under a tree, Rudolph saw what use had been made of the photograph of his wife taken naked the night before. It had been enormously blown up and it was hanging from a first-story window. In the glare of the floodlights, the image of Jean’s body, slender and perfect, her breasts full, her fists clenched and threatening, her face demented, hung, a mocking banner, over the entrance of the building, just above the words carved in the stone, “Know the truth and the truth shall make ye free.”

When Rudolph got out of the car, some of the students at the windows recognized him and greeted him with a wild, triumphant howl. Somebody leaned out the window and shook Jean’s picture, so that it looked as though she were doing an obscene dance.

Ottman was standing beside his car, a big bandage over one eye, making his cap sit on the back of his head. Only six of the policemen had helmets. Rudolph remembered vetoing a request from Ottman for two dozen more helmets six months before, because it had seemed an unnecessary expense.

“Your secretary told us you were on your way,” Ottman said, without any preliminaries, “so we held off on any action until you got here. They have Dorlacker and two professors locked in there with them. They only took the building at six o’clock tonight.”

Rudolph nodded, studying the building. At a window on the ground floor he saw Quentin McGovern. Quentin was a graduate student now and had a job as an assistant in the chemistry department. Quentin was grinning down at the scene. Rudolph was sure that Quentin saw him and he felt that the grin was directed, personally, at him.

“Whatever else happens tonight, Ottman,” Rudolph said, “I want you to arrest that black man there, the third window from the left on the ground floor. His name is McGovern and if you don’t get him here get him at his home.”

Ottman nodded. “They want to talk to you, sir. They want you to go in there and discuss the situation with them.”

Rudolph shook his head. “There’s no situation to be discussed.” He wasn’t going to talk to anybody under the photograph of his naked wife. “Go in and clear the building.”

“It’s easier said than done,” Ottman said. “I’ve already called on them three times to come out. They just laugh.”

“I said clear the building.” Rudolph was raging, but cold. He knew what he was doing.

“How?” Ottman asked.

“You’ve got weapons.”

“You don’t mean you want us to use guns?” Ottman said incredulously. “As far as we know, none of them is armed.”

Rudolph hesitated. “No,” he said. “No guns. But you’ve got clubs and you’ve got tear gas.”

“You sure you don’t want us just to sit tight and wait till they get tired?” Ottman said. He sounded more tired himself than any of the students in the building would ever be. “And if things don’t improve, ask for the Guard, maybe?”

“No, I don’t want to sit and wait.” Rudolph didn’t say it, but he knew that Ottman knew he wanted that picture down immediately. “Tell your men to start with the grenades.”

“Mr. Mayor,” Ottman said slowly, “you’ll have to put that in writing for me. Signed.”

“Give me your pad,” Rudolph said.

Ottman gave him the pad, and Rudolph used the fender of Ottman’s car to steady it and wrote out the order, making sure that his handwriting was clear and legible. He signed his name and gave the pad back to Ottman, who tore off the top sheet on which Rudolph had written and carefully folded the piece of paper and put it in the pocket of his blouse. He buttoned the pocket of the blouse and then went along the line of police, some thirty strong, the town’s entire force, to give his orders. As he passed them, the men began to put on their gas masks.

The line of police moved slowly across the lawn toward the building, their shadows-, in the blaze of the floodlights, intense on the brilliant green grass. They did not keep a straight line, but wavered uncertainly, and they looked like a long, wounded animal, searching not to do harm, but to find a place to hide from its tormentors. Then the first grenade was shot off through one of the lower windows and there was a shout from within. Then more grenades were sent through other windows and the faces that had been there disappeared and one by one the policemen, helping each other, began to climb through the windows into the building.

There hadn’t been enough police to send around to the back of the building, and most of the students escaped that way. The acrid smell of the gas drifted out toward where Rudolph was standing, looking up toward where Jean’s picture was still hanging. A policeman appeared at the window above and ripped it away, taking it in with him.

It was all over quickly. There were only about twenty arrests. Three students were bleeding from scalp wounds and one boy was carried out with his hands up to his eyes. A policeman said he was blinded but that he hoped it was only temporary. Quentin McGovern was not among the group arrested.

Dorlacker came out with his two professors, their eyes tearing. Rudolph went over to him. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Dorlacker squinted to see who was addressing him. “I’m not talking to you, Jordache,” he said. “I’m making a statement to the press tomorrow and you can find out what I think of you if you’ll buy your own paper tomorrow night.” He got into somebody’s car and was driven away.

“Come on,” Rudolph said to Scanlon. “Drive me home.”

As they drove away from the campus, ambulances passed them, their sirens going. A school bus, for the students who had been arrested, lumbered past them.

“Scanlon,” Rudolph said, “as of tonight, I’m no longer Mayor of this town, am I?”

Scanlon didn’t answer for a long time. He scowled as he watched the road and he wheezed like an old man when he had to turn a corner. “No, Mr. Jordache,” he finally said, “I wouldn’t think you were.”

Chapter 7