Страница 30 из 194
He knew his mother would be disappointed that he wasn’t going to take her for a walk this afternoon, but the way his father was behaving all of a sudden, the miracle might happen and his father might actually take her for a walk himself.
He wished he was as confident about getting to the top as his father and mother were. He was intelligent, but intelligent enough to know that intelligence by itself carried no guarantees along with it. For the kind of success his mother and father expected of him you had to have something special—luck, birth, a gift. He did not know yet if he was lucky. He certainly could not count upon his birth to launch him on a career and he was doubtful of his gifts. He was a co
Rudolph had many small talents and no definite direction. He wasn’t bad on the horn, but he didn’t fool himself that he was any Be
Rudolph had the gift of being liked. He knew that and knew that was why he had been elected president of his class three times in a row. But he felt it wasn’t a real gift. He had to plan to be liked, to be agreeable to people, and seem interested in them, and cheerfully take on thankless jobs like ru
He felt that he was built in two layers, one that only he knew about and the other which was displayed to the world. He wanted to be what he seemed but he was doubtful that he could ever manage it. Although he knew that his mother and his sister and even some of his teachers thought he was handsome, he was uncertain about his looks. He felt he was too dark, that his nose was too long, his jaws too flat and hard, his pale eyes too light and too small for his olive skin, and his hair too lower-class dull black. He studied the photographs in the newspapers and the magazines to see how boys at good schools like Exeter and St. Paul’s dressed and what college men at places like Harvard and Princeton were wearing, and tried to copy their styles in his own clothes and on his own budget.
He had scuffed white-buckskin shoes with rubber soles and now he had a blazer but he had the uneasy feeling that if he were ever invited to a party with a group of preppies he would stand out immediately for what he was, a small-town hick, pretending to be something he wasn’t.
He was shy with girls and had never been in love, unless you could call that stupid thing for Miss Lenaut love. He made himself seem uninterested in girls, too busy with more important matters to bother with kid stuff like dating and flirting and necking. But in reality he avoided the company of girls because he was afraid that if he ever got really close to one, she would find out that behind his lofty ma
In a way he envied his brother. Thomas wasn’t living up to anyone’s estimate of him. His gift was ferocity. He was feared and even hated and certainly no one truly liked him, but he didn’t agonize over which tie to wear or what to say in an English class. He was all of one piece and when he did something he didn’t have to make a painful and hesitant selection of attitudes within himself before he did it.
As for his sister, she was beautiful, a lot more beautiful than most of the movie stars he saw on the screen, and that gift was enough for anybody.
“This goose is great, Pop,” Rudolph said, because he knew his father expected him to comment on the meal. “It really is something.” He had already eaten more than he wanted, but he held out his plate for a second portion. He tried not to wince when he saw the size of the piece that his father put on the plate.
IV
Gretchen ate quietly. When am I going to tell them, what’s the best moment? On Friday she had been given two weeks notice at the Works. Mr. Hutchens had called her into his office and after a little distracted preliminary speech about how efficient she was and conscientious and how her work was always excellent and how agreeable it was to have her in the office, he had come out with it. He had received orders that morning to give her notice, along with another girl in the office. He had gone to the manager to remonstrate, Mr. Hutchens said, his dry voice clicking with real distress, but the manager had said he was sorry, there was nothing he could do about it. With the end of the war in Europe there were going to be cutbacks on government contracts. A falling-off in business was expected and they had to economize on staff. Gretchen and the other girl were the last two clerks to be hired in Mr. Hutchens’ department and so they had to be the first to go. Mr. Hutchens had been so disturbed that he had taken out his handkerchief several times while talking to her and blown his nose aridly, to prove to her that it was none of his doing. Three decades of working with paper had left Mr. Hutchens rather papery himself, like a paid bill that has been tucked away for many years and is brittle and yellowed and flaking at the edges, when it is brought out to be examined. The emotion in his voice as he spoke to her was incongruous, like tears from a filing cabinet.
Gretchen had to console Mr. Hutchens. She had no intention of spending the rest of her life working for the Boylan Brick and Tile Works, she told him, and she understood why the last to be hired had to be the first to go. She did not tell Mr. Hutchens the real reason why she was being fired and she felt guilty about the other girl, who was being sacrificed as camouflage to Teddy Boylan’s act of vengeance.
She had not yet figured out what she was going to do and she hoped to be able to wait until her plans were set before telling her father about her dismissal. There was bound to be an ugly scene and she wanted to have her defenses ready. Today, though, her father was behaving like a human being for once, and perhaps at the end of the meal, ripened by wine and basking in his pleasure in the one child, he might prove to be lenient with another. With the dessert, she decided.