Rich Man, Poor Man

The air of crisis, of hidden conflicts, the strange look in her father’s eyes when he had come back into the living room and told Rudolph to come with him, had finally pushed Gretchen to action. There would never be a better day to leave than this Sunday afternoon.

She packed carefully. The bag wasn’t big enough to take everything she might need and she had to choose deliberately, putting things in, then taking them out in favor of other things that might be more useful. She hoped that she could get out of the house before her father came back, but she was prepared to face him and tell him that she had lost her job and was going down to New York to look for another. There had been something in his face as he started downstairs with Rudolph that was passive and stu

She had to turn almost every book upside down before she found the envelope with the money in it. That crazy game her mother played. There was a fifty-fifty chance that her mother would wind up in an asylum. Eventually, she hoped, she would be able to learn to pity her.

She was sorry that she was going without a chance to say good-bye to Rudolph but it was growing dark already and she didn’t want to reach New York after midnight. She had no notion of where she was going to go in New York. There must be a Y.W.C.A. somewhere. Girls had spent their first nights in New York in worse places.

She looked around her stripped room without emotion. Her good-bye to her room was flippant. She took the envelope, now empty of money, and laid it squarely in the middle of her narrow bed.

She lugged the suitcase out into the hallway. She could see her mother sitting at the table, smoking. The remains of the di

Her mother turned her head slowly and blearily toward her. “Go to your fancy man,” she said thickly. Her vocabulary of abuse dated from earlier in the century. She had finished all the wine and she was drunk. It was the first time Gretchen had seen her mother drunk and it made her want to laugh.

“I’m not going to anybody,” she said. “I lost my job and I’m going to New York to look for another one. When I’m settled, I’ll write you and let you know.”

“Harlot,” the mother said.

Gretchen grimaced. Who said harlot in 1945? It made her going unimportant, comic. But she forced herself to kiss her mother’s cheek. The skin was rough and seamed with broken capillaries.

“False kisses,” the mother said, staring. “The dagger in the rose.”

What books she must have read as a young girl!

The mother pushed back a wisp of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, in the gesture that had been weary since she was twenty-one years old. It occurred to Gretchen that her mother had been born worn out and that much should be forgiven her because of it. For a moment she hesitated, searching for some vestige of affection within her for the drunken woman sitting wreathed in smoke at the cluttered table.

“Goose,” her mother said disdainfully. “Who eats goose?”

Gretchen shook her head hopelessly and went out into the hallway and picked up the bag and struggled down the staircase with it. She unlocked the door below and pushed the suitcase out over the sill into the street. The sun was just setting and the shadows on the street were violet and indigo. As she picked up the bag, the streetlamps went on, lemony and pale, doing premature and useless service.

Then she saw Rudolph hurrying down the street toward the house. He was alone. She put down her bag and waited for him. As he approached she thought how well the blazer fit him, how neat he looked, and was glad she had spent the money.

When Rudolph saw her, he broke into a run. “Where’re you going?” he said as he came up to her.

“New York,” she said lightly. “Come along?”

“I wish I could,” he said.

“Help a lady to a taxi?”

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

“Not here,” she said, glancing at the bakery window. “I want to get away from here.”

“Yeah,” Rudolph said, picking up her bag. “This is for sure no place to talk.”

They started down the street together to look for a taxi. Good-bye, good-bye, Gretchen sang to herself, as she passed the familiar names, good-bye Clancy’s Garage, Body Work, good-bye Soriano’s Hand Laundry, good-bye Fenelli’s, Prime Beef, good-bye the A and P, good-bye Bolton’s Drug Store, good-bye Wharton’s Paints and Hardware, good-bye Bruno’s Barber Shop, good-bye Jardino’s Fruits and Vegetables. The song inside her head was lilting as she walked briskly beside her brother, but there was a minor undertone in it. You leave no place after nineteen years without regrets.

They found a taxi two blocks farther on and drove to the station. While Gretchen went over to the window to buy her ticket, Rudolph sat on the old-fashioned valise, thinking, I am spending my eighteenth year saying goodbye in every station of the New York Central railroad.

Rudolph couldn’t help but feeling a little bruised by the rippling lightness in his sister’s movements and the pinpoints of joy in her eyes. After all, she was not only leaving home, she was leaving him. He felt strange with her now, since he knew she had made love with a man. Let her screw in peace. He must find a more melodious vocabulary.

She touched him on the sleeve. “The train won’t be along for more than a half hour,” she said. “I feel like a drink. Celebrate. Put the valise in the baggage room and we’ll go across the street to the Port Philip House.”

Rudolph picked up the valise. “I’ll carry it,” he said. “It costs ten cents in the baggage room.”

“Let’s be big for once.” Gretchen laughed. “Squander our inheritance. Let the dimes flow.”

As he took a check for the valise, he wondered if she had been drinking all afternoon.

The bar of the Port Philip House was empty except for two soldiers who were moodily staring at glasses of wartime beer near the entrance. The bar was dark and cool and they could look out through the windows at the station, its lights now on in the dusk. They sat at a table near the back and when the bartender came over to them, wiping his hands on his apron, Gretchen said, firmly, “Two Black and White and soda, please.”

The barman didn’t ask whether or not they were over eighteen. Gretchen had ordered as if she had been drinking whiskey in bars all her life.

Actually, Rudolph would have preferred a Coke. The afternoon had been too full of occasions.

Gretchen poked at his cheek with two fingers. “Don’t look so glum,” she said. “It’s your birthday.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Why did Pa send Tommy away?”

“I don’t know. Neither of them would tell me. Something happened with the Tinkers. Tommy hit Pa. I know that.”

“Wooh …” Gretchen said softly. “Quite a day, isn’t it?”

“It sure is,” Rudolph said. It was a bigger day than she realized, he thought, remembering what Tom had told him earlier about her. The barman came over with their drinks and a siphon bottle. “Not too much soda, please,” Gretchen said.

The barman splashed some soda in Gretchen’s glass. “How about you?” He held the siphon over Rudolph’s glass.

“The same,” Rudolph said, acting eighteen.

Gretchen raised her glass. “To that well-known ornament to Port Philip society,” she said, “the Jordache family.”

They drank. Rudolph had not yet developed a taste for Scotch. Gretchen drank thirstily, as though she wanted to finish the first one fast, so that there would be time for another one before the train came in.