Rich Man, Poor Man

“Wait a minute,” Mrs. Jardino said. “When you left, your father was still alive, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Thomas said.

“Well, he’s dead,” she said. There was a certain satisfaction in her voice. “He drowned. In the river. And then your mother moved away and then they tore the building down and now …” bitterly, “there’s a supermarket there cutting our throats.”

A customer came in and Mrs. Jardino began to weigh five pounds of potatoes and Thomas went out of the shop.

He went and stood in front of the supermarket for awhile, but it didn’t tell him anything. He thought of going down to the river, but the river wasn’t going to tell him anything, either. He walked back toward the station. He passed a bank and went in and rented a safety deposit box and put forty-nine hundred of the five thousand dollars in the box. He figured he might as well leave his money in Port Philip as anywhere. Or throw it into the river in which his father had drowned.

He supposed he might be able to find his mother and brother by going to the post office, but he decided against the effort. It was his father he had come to see. And pay off.

Chapter 2

1950

Capped and gowned, Rudolph sat in the June sunlight, among the other graduates in rented black.

“Now, in 1950, at the exact mid-point of the century,” the speaker was saying, “we Americans must ask ourselves several questions: What do we have? What do we want? What are our strengths and weaknesses? Where are we going?” The speaker was a cabinet member, up from Washington as a favor for the President of the college, who had been a friend of his at Cornell, a more illustrious place of learning.

Now at the exact mid-point of the century, Rudolph thought, moving restlessly on the camp chair set up on the campus lawn, what do I have, what do I want, what are my strengths and weaknesses, where am I going? I have a B.A., a debt of four thousand dollars, and a dying mother. I want to be rich and free and beloved. My strength—I can run the two-twenty in 23:8. My weakness? I am honest. He smiled inwardly, i

The man from Washington was a man of peace. “The curve of military power is rising everywhere,” he said in solemn tones. “The only hope for peace is the military might of the United States. To prevent war the United States needs a force so big and strong, so capable of counterattack as to serve as a deterrent.”

Rudolph looked along the rows of his fellow graduates. Half of them were veterans of World War II, in college on the G.I. Bill of Rights. Many of them were married, their wives sitting with newly set hair in the rows behind them, some of them holding infants in their arms because there was nobody to leave them with in the trailers and cluttered rented rooms which had been their homes while their husbands had struggled for the degrees being awarded today. Rudolph wondered how they felt about the rising curve of military power.

Sitting next to Rudolph was Bradford Knight, a, round-faced florid young man from Tulsa, who had been a sergeant in the infantry in Europe. He was Rudolph’s best friend on the campus, an energetic, overt boy, cynical and shrewd behind a lazy Oklahoma drawl. He had come to Whitby because his captain had graduated from the school and recommended him to the Dean of Admissions. He and Rudolph had drunk a lot of beer together and had gone fishing together. Brad kept urging Rudolph to come out to Tulsa with him after graduation and go into the oil business with him and his father. “You’ll be a millionaire before you’re twenty-five, son,” Brad had said. “It’s over-flowin’ country out there. You’ll trade in your Cadillac every time the ashtrays have to be emptied.” Brad’s father had been a millionaire before he was twenty-five, but was in a low period now (“Just a little bad run of luck,” according to Brad) and couldn’t afford the fare East at the moment for his son’s graduation.

Teddy Boylan wasn’t at the ceremony, either, although Rudolph had sent him an invitation. It was the least he could do for the four thousand dollars. But Boylan had declined. “I’m afraid I can’t see myself driving fifty miles on a nice June afternoon to listen to a Democrat make a speech on the campus of an obscure agricultural school.” Whitby was not an agricultural school, although it did have an important agricultural department, but Boylan still resented Rudolph’s refusal even to apply to an Ivy League university when he had made his offer in 1946 to finance Rudolph’s education. “However,” the letter had gone on in Boylan’s harsh, heavily accented handwriting, “the day shall not go altogether uncelebrated. Come on over to the house when the dreary mumblings are over, and we’ll break out a bottle of champagne and talk about your plans.”

Rudolph had decided for several reasons to choose Whitby rather than to take a chance on Yale or Harvard. For one, he’d have owed Boylan a good deal more than four thousand dollars at the end, and for another, with his background and his lack of money, he’d have been a four-year outsider among the young lords of American society whose fathers and grandfathers had all cheered at Harvard–Yale games, who whipped back and forth to debutantes’ balls, and most of whom had never worked a day in their lives. At Whitby, poverty was normal. The occasional boy who didn’t have to work in the summer to help pay for his books and clothes in the autumn was unusual. The only outsiders, except for an occasional stray like Brad, were bookish freaks who shu

Another reason that Rudolph had chosen Whitby was that it was close enough to Port Philip so that he could get over on Sundays to see his mother, who was more or less confined to her room and who, friendless, suspicious, and half mad, could not be allowed just to founder into absolute neglect. In the summer of his sophomore year, when he got the job after hours and on Saturdays at Calderwood’s Department Store, he had found a cheap little two-room apartment with a kitchenette in Whitby and had moved his mother in with him. She was waiting for him there, now. She hadn’t felt well enough to come to the graduation, she said, and besides, she would disgrace him, the way she looked. Disgrace was probably too strong a word, Rudolph thought, looking around at the neatly clothed, sober parents of his classmates, but she certainly wouldn’t have dazzled anybody in the assemblage with her beauty or her style of dress. It was one thing to be a dutiful son. It was a very different thing not to face facts.

So—Mary Pease Jordache, sitting in a rocking chair at the window of the shabby apartment, cigarette ashes drifting down on her shawl, legs swollen and almost useless, was not there to see her son rewarded with his roll of imitation parchment. Among the other absentees—Gretchen, linked by blood, detained in New York by a crisis with her child; Julie, being graduated herself that day from Barnard; Thomas, more blood, address unknown; Axel Jordache, blood on his hands, sculling through eternity.

He was alone this day and it was just as well.

“The power of the military establishment is appalling,” the speaker was saying, his voice magnified over the public address system, “but one great thing on our side is the wish of the ordinary man everywhere for peace.”

If Rudolph was an ordinary man, the cabinet member was certainly speaking for him. Now that he had heard some of the stories about the war in bull sessions around the campus he no longer envied the generation before his which had stood on Guadalcanal and the sandy ridges of Tunisia and at the Rapido River.

The fine, intelligent, educated voice sang on in the su