Rich Man, Poor Man

Rudolph shook hands with the fighter, who said, “Glad to meet you, sir.”

“It was an awfully good fight,” Rudolph said, although what he would have liked to say was, Poor young man, please never put on another pair of gloves again.

“Yeah,” the fighter said. “He awful strong, your brother.”

“I was lucky,” Thomas said. “Real lucky. I got five stitches over my eye.”

“It wasn’t a butt, Tommy,” Virgil said. “I swear it wasn’t a butt.”

“Of course not, Virgil,” Thomas said. “Nobody said it was. Well, I just wanted to say hello, make sure you’re all right.” He hugged the boy’s shoulders again.

“Thanks for comin’ by,” Virgil said. “It’s nice of you.”

“Good luck, kid,” Thomas said. Then he and Rudolph shook hands gravely with all the other people in the room and left.

“It’s about time,” Teresa said as they appeared in the hall.

I give the marriage six months, Rudolph thought as they went toward the exit.

“They rushed that boy,” Thomas said to Rudolph as they walked side by side. “He had a string of easy wins and they gave him a main bout. I watched him a couple of times and I knew I could take him downstairs. Lousy managers. You notice, the bastard wasn’t even there. He didn’t even wait to see if Virgil ought to go home or to the hospital. It’s a shitty profession.” He glanced back to see if Gretchen objected to the word, but Gretchen seemed to be moving in a private trance of her own, unseeing and unhearing.

Outside, they hailed a taxi and Gretchen insisted upon sitting up front with the driver. Teresa sat in the middle on the back seat, between Thomas and Rudolph. She was overpoweringly perfumed, but when Rudolph put the window down she said, “For God’s sake, the wind is ruining my hair,” and he said, “I’m sorry,” and wound the window up again.

They drove back to Manhattan in silence, with Teresa holding Thomas’s hand and occasionally bringing it up to her lips and kissing it, marking out her possessions.

When they came off the bridge, Rudolph said, “We’ll get out here, Tom.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to come with us?” Thomas said.

“It’s the best Chinese food in town,” Teresa said. The ride had been neutral, she no longer felt in danger of being attacked, she could afford to be hospitable, perhaps in the future there was an advantage there for her. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“I have to get home,” Gretchen said. Her voice was quivering, on the point of hysteria. “I just must get home.”

If it hadn’t been for Gretchen, Rudolph would have stayed with Thomas. After the noise of the evening, the public triumph, the battering, it seemed sad and lonely to leave Thomas merely to go off to supper with his twittering wife, anonymous in the night, unsaluted, uncheered. He would have to make it up to Thomas another time.

The driver stopped the car and Gretchen and Rudolph got out. “Good-bye for now, in-laws,” Teresa said, and laughed.

“Five o’clock tomorrow, Rudy,” Thomas said and Rudolph nodded.

“Good night,” Gretchen whispered. “Take care of yourself, please.”

The taxi moved off and Gretchen gripped Rudolph’s arm, as though to steady herself. Rudolph stopped a cruising cab and gave the driver Gretchen’s address. Once in the darkness of the cab, Gretchen broke down. She threw herself into Rudolph’s arms and wept uncontrollably, her body racked by great sobs. The tears came to Rudolph’s eyes, too, and he held his sister tightly, stroking her hair. In the back of the dark cab, with the lights of the city streaking past the windows, erratically illuminating, in bursts of colored neon, the contorted, lovely, tear-stained face, he felt closer to Gretchen, bound in stricter love, than ever before.

The tears finally stopped. Gretchen sat up, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m such a hateful snob. That poor boy, that poor, poor boy …”

The baby sitter was asleep on the couch in the living room when they came into the apartment. Willie hadn’t come home yet. There had been no calls, the baby sitter said. Billy had read himself to sleep quietly and she had gone up and turned off his light without awakening him. She was a girl of about seventeen, a high-school student, bobby-soxed, pretty, in a snub-nosed, shy way, and embarrassed at being caught asleep. Gretchen poured two Scotches and soda. The baby sitter had straightened out the room and the newspapers, which had been strewn around, were now in a neat pile on the window sill and the cushions were plumped out.

There was only one lamp lit and they sat in shadow, Gretchen with her feet curled up under her on the couch, Rudolph in a large easy chair. They drank slowly, exhausted, blessing the silence. They finished their drinks and silently Rudolph rose from his chair and refilled the glasses, sat down again.

An ambulance siren wailed in the distance, somebody else’s accident.

“He enjoyed it,” Gretchen said finally. “When that boy was practically helpless and he hit him so many times. I always thought—when I thought anything about it—that it was just a man earning a living—in a peculiar way—but just that. It wasn’t like that at all tonight, was it?”

“It’s a curious profession,” Rudolph said. “It’s hard to know what really must be going on in a man’s head up there.”

“Weren’t you ashamed?”

“Put it this way,” Rudolph said. “I wasn’t happy. There must be at least ten thousand boxers in the United States. They have to come from somebody’s family.”

“I don’t think like you,” Gretchen said coldly.

“No, you don’t.”

“Those sleazy purple trunks,” she said, as though by finding an object on which she could fix her revulsion, she could exorcise the complex horror of the entire night. She shook her head against memory. “Somehow I feel it’s our fault, yours, mine, our parents’, that Tom was up there in that vile place.”

Rudolph sipped at his drink in silence. I wouldn’t know, Tom had said in the dressing room, being on the outside the way I was. Excluded, he had reacted as a boy in the most simple, brutal way, with his fists. Older, he had merely continued. They all had their father’s blood in them, and Axel Jordache had killed two men. As far as Rudolph knew, Tom at least hadn’t killed anybody. Perhaps the strain was ameliorating.

“Ah, what a mess,” Gretchen said. “All of us. Yes, you, too. Do you enjoy anything, Rudy?”

“I don’t think of things in those terms,” he said.

“The commercial monk,” Gretchen said harshly. “Except that instead of the vow of poverty, you’ve taken the vow of wealth. Which is better in the long run?”

“Don’t talk like a fool, Gretchen.” Now he was sorry he had come upstairs with her.

“And the two others,” she continued. “Chastity and obedience. Chaste for our Virgin Mother’s sake—is that it? Obedience to Duncan Calderwood, the Pope of Whit-by’s Chamber of Commerce?”

“That’s all going to change now,” Rudolph said, but he was unwilling to defend himself further.

“You’re going to go over the wall, Father Rudolph? You’re going to marry, you’re going to wallow in the fleshpots, you’re going to tell Duncan Calderwood to go fuck himself?”

Rudolph stood up and went over and poured some more soda into his glass, biting back his anger. “It’s silly, Gretchen,” he said, as calmly as possible, “to take tonight out on me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, but her voice was still hard. “Ah—I’m the worst of the lot. I live with a man I despise, I do work that’s mean-spirited and piddling and useless, I’m New York’s easiest lay … Do I shock you, brother?” she said mockingly.

“I think you’re giving yourself a title you haven’t earned,” Rudolph said.

“Joke,” Gretchen said. “Do you want a list? Begi

“What does Willie think about all this?” Rudolph asked, ignoring the jibe. No matter how it had started and for whatever reasons, Joh