Rich Man, Poor Man

“Tom,” Gretchen said, “you’re not like that any more, are you?”

Thomas crossed over to where Gretchen was sitting on the couch and bent over and kissed her forehead gently. “I hope I’m not,” he said. Then he straightened up and said, “I’ll go up and see how the kid’s doing. I like him. He’ll probably feel better if he’s not alone.”

He took his drink with him as he went upstairs.

Rudolph mixed two more martinis for himself and Gretchen. He was glad to have something to do with his hands. His brother was not a comfortable man to be with. Even after he went out of a room, he left an air of tension, of anguish.

“God,” Gretchen said finally, “it doesn’t seem possible that we all have the same genes, does it?”

“The runt of the litter,” Rudolph said. “Who is it—you, me—him?”

“We were awful, Rudy, you and I,” Gretchen said.

Rudolph shrugged. “Our mother was awful. Our father was awful. You knew why they were awful, or at least you thought you knew why—but that didn’t change matters. I try not to be awful.”

“You’re saved by your luck,” Gretchen said.

“I worked pretty hard,” Rudolph said defensively.

“So did Colin. The difference is, you’ll never run into a tree.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Gretchen, that I’m not dead.” He couldn’t hide the hurt in his voice.

“Don’t take it the wrong way, please. I’m glad that there’s somebody in the family who’ll never run into a tree. It’s certainly not Tom. And I know it isn’t me. I’m the worst, maybe. I carried the luck of the whole family. If I hadn’t been on a certain road at lunchtime near Port Philip one Saturday afternoon, all our lives would’ve been completely different. Did you know that?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Teddy Boylan,” she said matter-of-factly. “He picked me up. I am what I am today largely because of him. I’ve slept with the men I’ve slept with because of Teddy Boylan. I ran away to New York because of Teddy Boylan. I met Willie Abbott because of Teddy Boylan and despised him finally because he wasn’t different enough from Teddy Boylan and I loved Colin because he was the opposite of Teddy Boylan. All those scolding articles I wrote that everybody thought were so smart, were digs at America because it produced men like Teddy Boylan and made life easy for men like Teddy Boylan.”

“That’s maniacal …. The luck of the family! Why don’t you go consult the gypsies and wear an amulet and be done with it?”

“I don’t need any gypsies,” Gretchen went on. “If I hadn’t met Teddy Boylan and laid him, do you think Tom would have burned a cross on his hill? Do you think he’d have been sent away like a criminal if there’d never been a Teddy Boylan? Do you think he’d be just what he is today if he’d stayed in Port Philip with his family around him?”

“Maybe not,” Rudolph admitted. “But there would’ve been something else.”

“Only there wasn’t anything else. There was Teddy Boylan, screwing his sister. As for you—”

“I know all I have to know about me,” Rudolph said.

“You do? You think you’d have gone to college without Teddy Boylan’s money? You think you’d dress the way you do or be so interested in success and money and how to get there the fastest way possible without Teddy Boylan? Do you think somebody else would have sought you out and taken you to concerts and art galleries and pampered you through school, and given you all that lordly confidence in yourself, if it hadn’t been Teddy Boylan?” She finished her second martini.

“Okay,” Rudolph said, “I’ll build a monument in his honor.”

“Maybe you should. You certainly can afford it now, with your wife’s money.”

“That’s below the belt,” Rudolph said angrily. “You know I didn’t have the faintest idea …”

“That’s what I was talking about,” Gretchen said. “Your Jordache awfulness is turned into something else by your luck.”

“How about your Jordache awfulness?”

Gretchen’s entire tone changed. The sharpness went out of her voice, her face became sad, soft, younger. “When I was with Colin I wasn’t awful,” she said.

“No.”

“I don’t think I’m ever going to find a Colin again.”

Rudolph reached out and touched her hand, his anger blunted by his sister’s continuing sorrow. “You wouldn’t believe me,” Rudolph said, “if I told you I think you will.”

“No,” she said.

“What’re you going to do? Just sit and mourn forever?”

“No.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“I’m going back to school.”

“School?” Rudolph said incredulously. “At your age?”

“Postgraduate school,” Gretchen said. “At UCLA. That way I can live at home and take care of Billy, all at the same time. I’ve been to see them and they’ve agreed to take me.”

“To study what?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“I’m not laughing at anything today,” Rudolph said.

“I got the idea from the father of a boy in Billy’s class,” Gretchen said. “He’s a psychiatrist.”

“Oh, Christ,” Rudolph said.

“That’s more of your luck,” Gretchen said. To be able to say, Oh, Christ, when you hear the word psychiatrist.”

“Sorry.”

“He works part time at a clinic. With lay analysts. They’re people who aren’t M.D.’s, but who’ve studied analysis, who’ve been analyzed, and are licensed to treat cases that don’t call for deep analysis. Group therapy, intelligent children who refuse to learn how to read or write or are wilfully destructive, kids from broken homes who have retreated into themselves, girls who have been made frigid by their religion or by some early sexual trauma, and who are breaking up with their husbands, Negro and Mexican children who start school far behind the others and never catch up and lose their sense of identity …”

“So,” Rudolph said. He had been listening impatiently. “So, you’re going to go out and solve the Negro problem and the Mexican problem and the religious problem all on your own, armed with a piece of paper from UCLA, and …”

“I will try to solve one problem,” Gretchen said, “or maybe two problems, or maybe a hundred problems. And I’ll be solving my own problem at the same time. I’ll be busy and I’ll be doing something useful.”

“Not something useless like your brother,” Rudolph said, stung. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Not at all,” Gretchen said. “You’re being useful in your own way. Let me be useful in mine, that’s all.”

“How long is all this going to take?”

“Two years, minimum, for the degree,” Gretchen said. “Then finishing the analysis …”

“You’ll never finish,” he said. “You’ll find a man and …”

“Maybe,” Gretchen said. “I doubt it, but maybe …”

Martha came in, red eyed, and said that lunch was ready on the dining-room table. Gretchen went upstairs to get Billy and Thomas and when they came down the entire family went into the dining room and had lunch, everybody being polite to everybody else, saying, “Please pass the mustard,” and “Thanks,” and “No, I think that’s enough for me right now.”

After lunch, they got into the car and drove out of Whitby for New York, leaving their dead behind them.

They reached the Hotel Algonquin at a little after seven. Gretchen and Billy were staying there, because there was no room for them in Rudolph’s one-bedroom apartment, where Jean was waiting for him. Rudolph asked Gretchen if she and Billy wanted to have di

When Billy got out of the car, Thomas got out too, and put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “I have a son, too, Billy,” Thomas said. “A lot younger than you. If he grows up anything like you, I’ll be a proud father.”

For the first time in three days, Billy smiled.

“Tom,” Gretchen said, standing under the hotel’s canopy, “am I ever going to see you again?”