Rich Man, Poor Man

“Tell me what’s happening,” Rudolph said, soothingly.

“Nothing,” Denton said. “Well, that’s not true, either. A lot. It’s over.”

“What are you talking about?” Rudolph spoke calmly, but it was difficult to keep the excitement out of his voice. So, it was nothing, he thought. A storm in a teacup. People finally couldn’t be that idiotic. “You mean they’ve dropped the whole thing?”

“I mean I’ve dropped the whole thing,” Denton said flatly, lifting his head and looking out from under the brim of his battered brown felt hat at Rudolph. “I resigned today.”

“Oh, no,” Rudolph said.

“Oh, yes,” Denton said. “After twelve years. They offered to accept my resignation and drop the proceedings. I couldn’t face tomorrow. After twelve years. I’m too old, too old. Maybe if I were younger. When you’re younger, you can face the irrational. Justice seems obtainable. My wife has been crying for a week. She says the disgrace would kill her. A figure of speech, of course, but a woman weeping seven days and seven nights erodes the will. So, it’s done. I just wanted to thank you and tell you you don’t have to be there tomorrow at two P.M.”

Rudolph swallowed. Carefully, he tried to keep the relief out of his voice. “I would have been happy to speak up,” he said. He would not have been happy, but one way or another he had been prepared to do it, and a more exact description of his feelings would do no good at the moment. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“I have been thrown a lifeline,” Denton said dully. “A friend of mine is on the faculty of the International School at Geneva, I’ve been offered a place. Less money, but a place. They are not as maniacal, it seems, in Geneva. They tell me the city is pretty.”

“But it’s just a high school,” Rudolph protested. “You’ve taught in colleges all your life.”

“It’s in Geneva,” Denton said. “I want to get out of this goddamn country.”

Rudolph had never heard anybody say this goddamn country about America and he was shocked at Denton’s bitterness. As a boy in school he had sung “God shed his Grace on Thee” about his native land, along with the forty other boys and girls in the classroom, and now, he realized that what he had sung as a child he still believed as a grown man. “It’s not as bad as you think,” he said.

“Worse,” Denton said.

“It’ll blow over. You’ll be asked back.”

“Never,” Denton said. “I wouldn’t come back if they begged me on their knees.”

“The Man Without a Country,” Rudolph remembered from grade school, the poor exile being transferred from ship to ship, never to see the shores of the land where he was born, never to see the flag without tears. Geneva, that flagless vessel. He looked at Denton, exiled already in the back booth of Ripley’s Bar, and felt a confused mixture of emotions, pity, contempt. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked. “Money?”

Denton shook his head. “We’re all right. For the time being. We’re selling the house. Real estate values have gone up since I bought it. The country is booming.” He laughed drily. He stood up abruptly. “I have to go home now,” he said. “I’m giving my wife French lessons every afternoon.”

He allowed Rudolph to pay for the drinks. Outside on the street, he put his collar up, looking more like an old wino than ever, and shook Rudolph’s hand slackly. “I’ll write you from Geneva,” he said. “Noncommittal letters. God knows who opens mail these days.”

He shuffled off, a bent, scholarly figure among the citizens of his goddamn country, Rudolph watched him for a moment, then walked back to the store. He breathed deeply, feeling young, lucky, lucky.

He was in the line waiting to laugh, while the sufferers shuffled past. Fifty million dead, but the movies were always open.

He felt sorry for Denton, but overriding that, he felt joyous for himself. Everything from now on was going to be all right, everything was going to go his way. The sign had been made clear that afternoon, the omens were plain.

He was on the 11:05 the next morning with Calderwood, composed and optimistic. When they went into the dining car for lunch, he didn’t mind not being able to order a drink.

Chapter 5

1955

“Why do you have to come and wait, for me?” Billy was complaining, as they walked toward home. “As though I’m a baby.”

“You’ll go around by yourself soon enough,” she said, automatically taking his hand as they crossed a street.

“When?”

“Soon enough.”

“When?”

“When you’re ten.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“You know you mustn’t say things like that.”

“Daddy does.”

“You’re not Daddy.”

“So do you sometimes.”

“You’re not me. And I shouldn’t say it, either.”

“Then why do you say it?”

“Because I get angry.”

“I’m angry now. All the other kids don’t have their mothers waiting for them outside the gate like babies. They go home by themselves.”

Gretchen knew this was true and that she was being a nervous parent, not faithful to Spock, and that she or Billy or both of them would have to pay for it later, but she couldn’t bear the thought of the child wandering by himself around in the doubtful traffic of Greenwich Village. Several times she had suggested to Willie that they move to the suburbs for their son’s sake, but Willie had vetoed the idea. “I’m not the Scarsdale type,” he said.

She didn’t know what the Scarsdale type was. She knew a lot of people who lived in Scarsdale or in places very much like Scarsdale, and they seemed as various as people living anywhere else—drunks, wife-swappers, churchgoers, politicians, patriots, scholars, suicides, whatever.

“When?” Billy asked again, stubbornly, pulling away from her hand.

“When you’re ten,” she repeated.

“That’s a whole year,” he wailed.

“You’ll be surprised how fast it goes,” she said. “Now, button your coat. You’ll catch cold.” He had been playing basketball in the schoolyard and he was still sweating. The late-afternoon October air was nippy and there was a wind off the Hudson.

“A whole year,” Billy said. “That’s inhuman.”

She laughed and bent and kissed the top of his head, but he pulled away. “Don’t kiss me in public,” he said.

A big dog came trotting toward them and she had to restrain herself from telling Billy not to pat him. “Old boy,” Billy said, “old boy,” and patted the dog’s head and pulled his ears, at home in the animal kingdom. He thinks nothing living wishes him harm, Gretchen thought. Except his mother.

The dog wagged his tail, went on.

They were on their own street now, and safe. Gretchen allowed Billy to dawdle behind her, balancing on cracks in the pavement. As she came up to the front door of the brownstone in which she lived, she saw Rudolph and Joh

She was used to seeing Rudolph in New York often. For the past six months or so, he had come to the city two or three times a week, in his young businessman’s suits. There was some sort of deal being arranged, with Calderwood and Joh