Rich Man, Poor Man

“Here we are,” he said.

“Thank you very much,” Rudolph said. “For everything.”

“Thank you, Rudolph,” Boylan said. “It’s been a refreshing day.” As Rudolph put his hand on the handle of the car door, Boylan reached out and held his arm lightly.

“Ah, I wonder if you’d do me a favor.”

“Of course.”

“In that bag back there …” Boylan twisted a little, holding onto the wheel to indicate the presence of the leather overnight bag behind him. “… there’s something I’d particularly like your sister to have. Do you think you could get it to her?”

“Well,” Rudolph said, “I don’t know when I’ll be seeing her.”

“There’s no hurry,” Boylan said. “It’s something I know she wants, but it’s not pressing.”

“Okay,” Rudolph said. It wasn’t like giving away Gretchen’s address, or anything like that. “Sure. When I happen to see her.”

“That’s very good of you, Rudolph.” He looked at his watch. “It’s not very late. Would you like to come and have a drink with me someplace? I don’t fancy going back to that dreary house alone for the moment.”

“I have to get up awfully early in the morning,” Rudolph said. He wanted to be by himself now, to sort out his impressions of Boylan, to assess the dangers and the possible advantages in knowing the man. He didn’t want to be loaded with any new impressions, Boylan drunk, Boylan with strangers at a bar, Boylan perhaps flirting with a woman, or making a pass at a sailor. The idea was sudden. Boylan, the fairy? Making a pass at him. The delicate hands on the piano, the gifts, the clothes that were like costumes, the unobtrusive touching.

“What’s early?” Boylan asked.

“Five,” Rudolph said.

“Good God!” Boylan said. “What in the world does anyone do up at five o’clock in the morning?”

“I deliver rolls on a bicycle for my father,” Rudolph said.

“I see,” Boylan said. “I suppose somebody has to deliver rolls.” He laughed. “You just don’t seem like a roll-deliverer.”

“It’s not my main function in life,” Rudolph said.

“What is your main function in life, Rudolph?” Absently, Boylan switched off the headlights. It was dark in the car because they were directly under a lamppost. There was no light from the cellar. His father hadn’t begun his night’s work. If his father were asked, would he say that his main function in life was baking rolls?

“I don’t know yet,” Rudolph said. Then aggressively, “What’s yours?”

“I don’t know,” Boylan said. “Yet. Have you any idea?”

“No.” The man was split into a million different parts. Rudolph felt that if he were older he might be able to assemble Boylan into one coherent pattern.

“A pity,” Boylan said. “I thought perhaps the clear eyes of youth would see things in me I am incapable of seeing in myself.”

“How old are you, anyway?” Rudolph asked. Boylan spoke so much of the past that he seemed to stretch far, far back, to the Indians, to President Taft, to a greener geography. It occurred to Rudolph that Boylan was not old so much as old-fashioned.

“What would you guess, Rudolph?” Boylan asked, his tone light.

“I don’t know.” Rudolph hesitated. Everybody over thirty-five seemed almost the same age to Rudolph, except for real tottering graybeards, hunching along on canes. He was never surprised when he read in the papers that somebody thirty-five had died. “Fifty?”

Boylan laughed. “Your sister was kinder,” he said. “Much kinder.”

Everything comes back to Gretchen, Rudolph thought. He just can’t stop talking about her. “Well,” Rudolph said, “how old are you?”

“Forty,” Boylan said. “Just turned forty. With all my life still ahead of me, alas,” he said ironically.

You have to be damn sure of yourself, Rudolph thought, to use a word like “alas.”

“What do you think you’ll be like when you’re forty, Rudolph?” Boylan asked lightly. “Like me?”

“No,” Rudolph said.

“Wise young man. You wouldn’t want to be like me, I take it?”

“No.” He’d asked for it and he was going to get it.

“Why not? Do you disapprove of me?”

“A little,” Rudolph said. “But that’s not why.”

“What’s the reason you don’t want to be like me?”

“I’d like to have a room like yours,” Rudolph said. “I’d like to have money like you and books like you and a car like you. I’d like to be able to talk like you—some of the time, anyway—and know as much as you and go to Europe like you …”

“But …”

“You’re lonesome,” Rudolph said. “You’re sad.”

“And when you’re forty you do not intend to be lonesome and sad?”

“No.”

“You will have a loving, beautiful wife,” Boylan said, sounding like someone reciting a fairy story for children, “waiting at the station each evening to drive you home after your day’s work in the city, and handsome, bright children who will love you and whom you will see off to the next war, and …”

“I don’t expect to marry,” Rudolph said.

“Ah,” Boylan said. “You have studied the institution. I was different. I expected to marry. And I married. I expected to fill that echoing castle on the hill with the laughter of little children. As you may have noticed, I am not married and there is very little laughter of any kind in that house. Still, it isn’t too late …” He took out a cigarette from his gold case and used his lighter. In its light his hair looked gray, his face deeply lined with shadows. “Did your sister tell you I asked her to marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you why she wouldn’t?”

“No.”

“Did she tell you she was my mistress?”

The word seemed dirty to Rudolph. If Boylan had said, “Did she tell you that I fucked her?” it would have made him resent Boylan less. It would have made her seem less like another of Theodore Boylan’s possessions. “Yes,” he said. “She told me.”

“Do you disapprove?” Boylan’s tone was harsh.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You’re too old for her.”

“That’s my loss,” Boylan said. “Not hers. When you see her, will you tell her the offer still holds?”

“No.”

Boylan seemed not to have noticed the no. “Tell her,” he said, “that I ca

“I’d better go to sleep,” Rudolph said cruelly. He opened the car door and got out. He reached into the back for his rod and creel and net and the fireman’s boots. He put on the ridiculous felt hat. Boylan sat smoking, squinting through the smoke at the straight line of lights of Vanderhoff Street, like a lesson in drawing class in perspective. Parallel to infinity, where lines meet or do not meet, as the case may be.

“Don’t forget the bag, please,” Boylan said.

Rudolph took the bag. It was very light, as though there were nothing in it. Some new scientific infernal machine.

“Thank you for your delightful visit,” Boylan said. “I’m afraid I got all the best of it. Just for the price of an old pair of torn waders that I was never going to use anymore anyway. I’ll let you know when the skeet trap is up. Roll on, young unmarried roll-deliverer. I’ll think of you at five A.M.” He started the motor of the car and drove off abruptly.

Rudolph watched the red tail lights speeding off toward infinity, twin signals saying Stop! then unlocked the door next to the bakery and lugged all the stuff into the hall. He turned on the light and looked at the bag. The lock was open. The key, on a leather thong, hung from the handle. He opened the bag, hoping that his mother hadn’t heard him come in.

There was a bright-red dress lying in a careless heap in the bag. Rudolph picked it up and studied it. It was lacy and cut low in front, he could tell that. He tried to imagine his sister wearing it, showing practically everything.