Rich Man, Poor Man

He patted the bulge of his wallet under his jacket. He had collected the seven hundred dollars from the bookie on the way downtown. Maybe he could get away with giving Teresa just two hundred of it, two fifty if she made a stink.

He pulled the wallet out. He had been paid off in hundreds. He took out a bill and studied it. Founding father, Benjamin Franklin, stared out at him, looking like somebody’s old mother. Lightning on a kite, he remembered dimly; at night all cats are gray. He must have been a tougher man than he looked to get his picture on a bill that size. Did he once say, Gentlemen we must hang together or we will hang separately? I should have at least finished high school, Thomas thought, vague in the presence of one hundred dollars’ worth of history. This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private and is redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve Bank. If this wasn’t lawful money, what the hell was? It was signed in fancy script by somebody called Ivy Baker Priest, Treasurer of the United States. It took a someone with a name like that to give out with double talk about debts and money and get away with it.

Thomas folded the bill neatly and slipped it by itself in a side pocket, to be put with the other hundred-dollar bills, reposing in the dark vault for just such a day as this.

The man on the seat in front of him was reading a newspaper, turned to the sports page. Thomas could see that he was reading about last night’s fight. He wondered what the man would say if he tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Mister, I was there, how would you like an account of the battle right from the middle of the ring?” Actually, the reports of the fight in the papers had been pretty good and there had been a picture on the back page of the News of Virgil trying to get up the last time and himself in a neutral corner. One newspaperman had even said the fight had raised him into the ranks of the contenders for the title and Schultzy had called him all excited, right before he left the house, to say that a promoter over from England had seen the fight and was offering them a bout in London in six weeks. “We’re going international,” Schultzy had said excitedly. “We can fight all over the Continent. And you’ll knock ’em dead. They ain’t got anybody half as good even as Virgil Walters in England at your weight. And the guy said he’d give us some of the purse under the table and we won’t have to declare it to the goddamn income tax.”

So, all in all, he should have been feeling pretty good, sitting there in the train, with the prison falling away behind him, full of a lot of guys who probably were a damn sight smarter than he was and maybe less guilty of one thing and another, too. But he wasn’t feeling good. Teresa had given him a load of grief about not telling her about the bet and about his la-di-da family, as she called them. She was sore because he’d never said anything about them, as though he was hiding some fucking treasure or something.

“That sister of yours looked at me like I was dirt,” Teresa had said. “And your fancy brother opened the window as though I smelled like horseshit and he pulled away to his side of the cab like if he happened to touch me for a second he’d catch the clap. And after not seeing their brother for ten years they were just too fine even to come and have a cup of coffee with him, for God’s sake. And you, the big fighter, you never said a word, you just took it all.”

This had been in bed, after the restaurant, where she had eaten in sullen silence. He had wanted to make love to her, as he always did after a fight, because he didn’t touch her for weeks before a fight and his thing was so hard you could knock out fungoes to the outfield with it, but she had closed down like a stone and wouldn’t let him near her. For Christ’s sake, he thought, I didn’t marry her for her conversation. And it wasn’t as though even in her best moments Teresa was so marvelous in bed. If you mussed her hair while you were going at it hammer and tongs, she’d complain bloody murder, and she was always finding excuses to put it off till tomorrow or next week or next year and when she finally opened her legs it was like a tollgate being fed a counterfeit coin. She came from a religious family, she said, as though the Angel Michael with his sword was standing guard over all Catholic cunts. He’d bet his next purse his sister Gretchen, with her straight hair and her no make-up and her black dress and that ladylike don’t-you-dare-touch-the-hem-of-my-garment look would give a man a better time in one bang than Teresa in twenty ten-minute rounds.

So he’d slept badly, his wife’s words ringing in his ears. The worst of it was that what she said was true. Here he was a big grown man, and all his brother and sister had to do was come into the room and he felt just the way they had made him feel when he was a kid—slimy, stupid, useless, suspect.

Go win fights, have your picture in the papers, piss blood, go have people cheer you and clap you on the back and ask you to appear in London; two snots you thought you’d never see or hear from again show up and say hello, just hello, and everything you are is nothing. Well, his goddamn brother, momma’s pet, poppa’s pet, blowing his golden horn, opening taxi windows, was going to be in for a shock from his nothing pug brother today.

For a crazy moment he thought maybe he wouldn’t get off the train, he’d go on to Albany and make the change and arrive in Elysium, Ohio, and go to the one person in the whole world who had touched him with love, who had made him feel like a whole man, when he was just a kid of sixteen. Clothilde, servant to his uncle’s bed. St. Sebastian, in the bathtub.

But when the train pulled into Port Philip, he got off and went to the bank, just as he had pla

II

She tried not to show her impatience as Billy played with his lunch. Superstitiously (children sensed things that transcended the years) she had not dressed yet for the afternoon ahead of her, but was sitting with him in her work clothes, slacks and a sweater. She picked at her food, without appetite, trying not to scold the boy as he pushed bits of lamb chop and lettuce around his plate.

“Why do I have to go to the Museum of Natural History?” Billy demanded.

“It’s a treat,” she said, “a special treat.”

“Not for me. Why do I have to go?”

“The whole class is going.”

“They’re dopes. Except for Conrad Franklin they’re all dopes.” Billy had had the same morsel of lamb chop in his mouth for what seemed like five minutes. Occasionally, he would move it symbolically from one side of his mouth to the other. Gretchen wondered if, finally, she should hit him. The clock in the kitchen suddenly ticked louder and louder and she tried not to look at it, but couldn’t resist. Twenty to one. She was due uptown at a quarter to two. And she had to take Billy to school, hurry back, bathe and dress, carefully, carefully, and then make sure not to arrive panting as though she had just run a marathon.

“Finish your lunch,” Gretchen said, marveling at the motherly calmness of her voice, on this afternoon when she felt anything but motherly. “There’s Jello for dessert.”

“I don’t like Jello.”

“Since when?”

“Since today. And what’s the sense in going to see a lot of old stuffed animals? At least if they want us to look at animals we could go see some live ones.”

“On Sunday,” Gretchen said, “I’ll take you to the zoo.”

“I told Conrad Franklin I’d go over to his house on Sunday,” Billy said. He reached into his mouth and took out the piece of lamb chop and put it on his plate.

“That’s not a polite thing to do,” Gretchen said, as the clock ticked.

“It’s tough.”

“All right,” Gretchen said, reaching for his plate. “If you’re through, you’re through.”