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Rudolph made a note of the tu. In an old French grammar he had once looked through, the student was instructed that the second-person singular was to be used for servants, children, non-commissioned soldiers, and social inferiors.
“Un petit peu.”
“Moi, j’étais en France quand j’étais jeune,” Boylan said, the accept rasping. “Avec mes parents. J’ai veçu mon premier amour à Paris. Quand c’était? Mille neuf cent vingt-huit, vingt-neuf. Comment s’appelait-elle? A
She might have been delicious, Boylan’s first love, Rudolph thought, tasting the profound joys of snobbery, but she sure didn’t work on his accent.
“Tu as l’envie d’y aller? En France?” Boylan asked, testing him. He had said he could speak a little French and Boylan wasn’t going to let him get away with it unchallenged.
“J’irai, je suis sûr,” Rudolph said, remembering just how Miss Lenaut would have said it. He was a good mimic. “Peut-être après l’Université. Quad le pays sera rétabli.”
“Good God,” Boylan said, “you speak like a Frenchman.”
“I had a good teacher.” Last bouquet for poor Miss Lenaut, French cunt.
“Maybe you ought to try for the Foreign Service,” Boylan said. “We could use some bright young men. But be careful to marry a rich wife first. The pay is dreadful.” He sipped at the wine. “I thought I wanted to live there. In Paris. My family thought differently. Is my accent rusty?”
“Awful,” Rudolph said.
Boylan laughed. “The honesty of youth.” He grew more serious. “Or maybe it’s a family characteristic. Your sister matches you.”
They ate in silence for awhile, Rudolph carefully watching how Boylan used his knife and fork. A good gun, with beautiful ma
Perkins took away the fish dishes and served some chops and baked potatoes and green peas. Rudolph wished he could send his mother up for some lessons in the kitchen here. Perkins presided over the red wine, rather than poured it. Rudolph wondered what Perkins knew about Gretchen. Everything, probably. Who made the bed in the room upstairs?
“Has she found a job yet?” Boylan asked, as though there had been no interruption in the conversation. “She told me she intended to be an actress.”
“I don’t know,” Rudolph said, keeping all information to himself. “I haven’t heard from her recently.”
“Do you think she’ll be successful?” Boylan asked. “Have you ever seen her act?”
“Once. Only in a school play.” Shakespeare battered and reeling, in homemade costumes. The seven ages of man. The boy who played Jacques nervously pushing at his beard, to make sure it was still pasted on. Gretchen looking strange and beautiful and not at all like a young man in her tights, but saying the words clearly.
“Does she have talent?” Boylan asked.
“I think so. She has something. Whenever she came onto the stage everybody stopped coughing.”
Boylan laughed. Rudolph realized that he had sounded like a kid. “What I mean …” He tried to regain lost ground. “Is, well, you could feel the audience focusing on her, being for her, in a way that they weren’t for any of the other actors. I guess that’s talent.”
“It certainly is.” Boylan nodded. “She’s an extraordinarily beautiful girl. I don’t suppose a brother would notice that.”
“Oh, I noticed it,” Rudolph said.
“Did you?” Boylan said absently. He no longer seemed interested. He waved for Perkins to take the dishes away and got up and went over to a big phonograph and put on the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, very loud, so that they didn’t talk for the rest of the meal. Five kinds of cheese on a wooden platter. Salad. A plum tart. No wonder Boylan had a paunch.
Rudolph looked surreptitiously at his watch. If he could get out of there early enough maybe he could catch Julie. It would be too late for the movies, but maybe he could make up to her, anyway, for standing her up.
After di
Boylan sat sunk in a deep chair, his eyes almost closed, concentrating on the music, occasionally taking a sip of the brandy. He might just as well have been alone, Rudolph thought resentfully, or with his Irish wolfhound. They probably had some lively evenings here together, before the neighbors put out the poison. Maybe he’s getting ready to offer me a position as his dog.
There was a scratch on the record now and Boylan made an irritated gesture as the clicking recurred. He stood up and turned off the machine. “I’m sorry about that,” he said to Rudolph. “The revenge of the machine age on Schuma
“Thank you.” Rudolph stood up, gratefully.
Boylan looked down at Rudolph’s feet. “Oh,” he said. “You can’t go like that, can you?”
“If you’ll give me my boots …”
“I’m sure they’re still soaking wet inside,” Boylan said. “Wait here a minute. I’ll find something for you.” He went out of the room and up the stairway.
Rudolph took a long look around the room. How good it was to be rich. He wondered if he ever was going to see the room again. Thomas had seen it once, although he had not been invited in. He came down into the living-room bare-assed, with his thing hanging down to his knees, he’s a regular horse, and made two whiskies and called up the stairs, “Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?”
Now that he had had a chance to listen to Boylan, Rudolph recognized that Tom’s caricature of the man’s voice had been an accurate one. He had caught the educated flattening out on the “there,” and the curious way he had of making questions not sound like questions.
Rudolph shook his head. What could Gretchen have been thinking of? “I liked it.” He heard her voice again in the Port Philip House bar. “I liked it better than anything that had ever happened to me.”
He walked restlessly around the room. He looked at the album of the symphony that Boylan had cut off. Schuma
Boylan came into the room. He was carrying a little overnight bag and a pair of mahogany-colored moccasins. “Try these on, Rudolph,” he said.
The moccasins were old but beautifully polished, with thick soles and leather tassels. They fit Rudolph perfectly. “Ah,” Boylan said, “you have narrow feet, too.” One aristocrat to another.
“I’ll bring them back in a day or two,” Rudolph said, as they started out.
“Don’t bother,” Boylan said. “They’re old as the hills. I never wear them.”
Rudolph’s rod, neatly folded, and the creel and net were on the back seat of the Buick. The fireman’s boots, still damp inside, were on the floor behind the front seat. Boylan swung the overnight bag onto the back seat and they got into the car. Rudolph had retrieved the old felt hat from the table in the hallway, but didn’t have the courage to put it on with Perkins watching him. Boylan turned on the radio in the car, jazz from New York, so they didn’t talk all the way to Vanderhoff Street. When Boylan stopped the Buick in front of the bakery, he turned the radio off.