Beggarman, Thief (24 page)

“Well, Moses came down off Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments carved in stone by God,” Rudolph said, relieved that Wesley had not asked him about his own beclouded lack of religion. “A lot of people have believed
that
story for thousands of years.”

“Do you? I mean do
you
believe it?”

“No.”

“In school, too, they tell you a lot of things that just want to make you laugh out loud. They spend hours trying to tell you that black and white are the same thing and all you have to do is go out the door and walk one block and you see it just ain’t so. It was different in France. Or maybe
I
was different in France. I was doing fine in France, even with the language problem—but in Indianapolis …” He shrugged. “Most of the teachers seem full of shit to me. They spend most of the time trying to keep the kids from yelling in classroom and throwing spitballs, if they’re not knifing each other. If college is anything like that, I’d say, Fuck it.” He looked inquiringly at Rudolph. “What’s your opinion about college? I mean, for me?”

“It’s all according to what you want to do with your life,” Rudolph said carefully. He was touched by the boy’s naive garrulousness, his trust that his uncle would not betray him to the adult world.

“Who the hell knows?” Wesley said. “I have some notions. I’m not ready to tell anybody about them yet.” His tone was suddenly cold.

“For example,” Rudolph said, ignoring the change in Wesley’s attitude, “you know something about the sea. You like it, don’t you?”

“I did,” Wesley said bitterly.

“You might want to go into the merchant marine.”

“It’s a dog’s life, Bunny says.”

“Not necessarily. It wasn’t a dog’s life for Bunny on the
Clothilde,
was it?”

“No.”

“It isn’t a dog’s life if you’re an officer on a decent ship, if you get to be a captain …”

“I guess not.”

“There’s a merchant marine academy right here in New York. When you get out of it you’re an officer right off.”

“Ah,” Wesley said reflectively. “Maybe I ought to look into that.”

“I’ll ask around,” Rudolph said, “and write you what I find out. Just remember to ask for your mail at General Delivery.”

While they were waiting for Gretchen to arrive before ordering, Rudolph had a martini. It was as good a time as any to explain about the estate. “All told,” Rudolph said, “after taxes and expenses for lawyers there should be a little over a hundred thousand dollars to be divided.” He didn’t intend to let either Wesley or Kate ever know that it was the amount he had paid for the
Clothilde
so that the estate could be liquidated. “One-third to Kate,” he went on, “one-third in trust for her child, with Kate as the executrix—” He didn’t tell the boy about the endless hours spent in legal wrangling to reach
that
compromise. The Kralers had fought tenaciously to have Teresa, as Wesley’s mother, appointed as the administrator of the whole estate. They had some legal backing for their claim, as Kate was not an American citizen and was domiciled in England. Heath had had to threaten to bring up Teresa’s two convictions as a prostitute and start proceedings to have her declared unfit on moral grounds to be Wesley’s guardian, even though she was the boy’s natural mother. Rudolph knew that for Wesley’s sake he would never have allowed Johnny to go through with the action, but the threat had worked and the Kralers had finally given in and allowed Rudolph to be appointed administrator of the estate, which meant that he had to answer a long list of vengeful questions each month about the disposition of every penny that went through his hands. In addition, they were constantly threatening to sue him for faulty or criminal behavior in protecting Wesley’s interest. What evil angel, Rudolph thought again and again, had touched his brother Tom’s shoulder the day he asked the woman to marry him?

“That leaves approximately one-third to …” He stopped. “Wesley, are you listening?”

“Sure,” the boy said. A waiter had gone by with a huge porterhouse steak crackling on a platter and Wesley had followed its passage across the room hungrily with his eyes. Whatever you could say about him, Rudolph thought, you could never fault him for being spoiled about money.

“As I was saying,” Rudolph continued, “There’s about thirty-three thousand dollars that will be put in a trust fund for you. That should bring in roughly about nineteen hundred dollars a year, which your mother is supposed to use for your support. At the age of eighteen you get the whole thing to use as you see fit. I advise you to leave it in the trust fund. The income won’t be very much but it could help you pay for college if that’s what you want. Are you following me, Wesley?”

Again he had lost the boy’s attention. Wesley was gazing with open admiration at a flashy blond lady in a mink coat who had come in with two paunchy men with gray hair and white ties. The restaurant, Rudolph knew, was a favorite of the more successful members of the Mafia and the girls who came in on their arms made for stern competition with the food.

“Wesley,” Rudolph said plaintively. “I’m talking about money.”

“I know,” Wesley said apologetically. “But, holy man, that is something, isn’t it?”

“It comes with money, Wesley,” Rudolph said. As an uncle he felt he had to instill a true sense of value in the boy. “Nineteen hundred dollars a year may not mean much to you,” he said, “but when I was your age …” Now he knew he would sound pompous if he finished the sentence. “The hell with it. I’ll write it all down in my letter.”

Just then he saw Gretchen come in and he waved to her. Both of the men stood up as she approached the table. She kissed Rudolph on the cheek, then threw her arms around Wesley and kissed him, hard. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you,” she said. Her voice, to Rudolph’s surprise, was trembling. He felt a twinge of pity for her as he watched the two of them, Gretchen staring hard into the boy’s face, fighting with an emotion he could not identify. Perhaps she was thinking of her own son, lost to her, rejecting her, making excuses to her as to why she should not come to Brussels whenever she wrote him that she would like to visit him. “You look wonderful,” Gretchen said, still holding onto the boy. “Although you could use a new suit.”

They both laughed.

“If you’ll stay over until Monday,” Gretchen said, finally releasing Wesley and sitting down, “I’ll take you to Saks and see if they have anything there to fit you.”

“I’m sorry,” Wesley said as he and Rudolph seated themselves. “I’ve got to be on my way tomorrow.”

“You just came here for one day?” Gretchen said incredulously.

“He’s a busy man,” Rudolph said. He didn’t want to listen to Gretchen’s predictable explosion of wrath if she heard about Mr. and Mrs. Kraler’s Christian concept of money for the young. “Now, let’s order. I’m starved.”

Over the meal, Wesley began to ask the questions about his father. “I told Uncle Rudy, back in his house,” Wesley said as he wolfed down his steak, “why I want to know—why I
have
to know, what my old man was like. Really like, I mean. He told me a lot before he died, and Bunny told me even more—but so far it hasn’t added up. I mean, my father’s just bits and pieces for me. There’s all those stories about what a terror he was as a kid and as a young man, how much trouble he got into … how people hated him. How he hated people. You and Uncle Rudy, too.…” He looked gravely first at Gretchen and then at Rudolph. “But then when I saw him with you, he didn’t hate you. He—well—I suppose I got to say it—he loved you. He was unhappy most of his life, he told me—and then—well, he said it himself—he learned to lose enemies—to be happy. Well, I want to learn to be happy, myself.” Now the boy was frankly crying, while at the same time eating large chunks of the rare steak, as though he hadn’t eaten in weeks.

“The crux of the matter,” Gretchen said, putting down her knife and fork and speaking slowly, “is Rudy. Do you mind if I say that, Rudy?”

“Say whatever you want. If I think you’re wrong, I’ll correct you.” Some other time he might tell the boy how and when his father had learned to be happy. The day he found out that Rudolph, unknown to him, had invested the five thousand dollars Tom had laid his hands on by blackmailing a kleptomaniac lawyer in Boston. The return of the blood money, Tom had called it, the same amount their father had to pay to get Tom out of the jail where he was facing a charge of rape. Tom had thrown the hundred-dollar bills on the hotel bed, saying, “I want to pay off our fucking family and this does it. Piss on it. Blow it on dames. Give it to your favorite charity. I’m not walking out of this room with it.” Five thousand dollars which by careful babying along had grown to sixty thousand through the years when Rudolph hadn’t known where Tom was, whether he was alive or dead, and which had finally enabled Tom to buy a ship and rename it the
Clothilde.
“Your father,” he might say at that future date, “became happy through crime, luck and money, and was smart enough to use all three things for the one act that could save him.” He didn’t believe that saying it would help Wesley much. Wesley did not seem inclined to crime, his luck so far had been all bad and his devotion to money nonexistent.

“Rudy,” Gretchen was saying, “was the white-haired boy of the family. If there was any love my parents had to spare, it was for him. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it—he was the one who helped out in the store, he was the one who got the highest marks in school, he was the one who was the star of the track team, he was the one who was expected to go to college. He was the one who got presents, birthday celebrations, he was the only one who had a freshly ironed shirt to go out in, an expensive trumpet, so he could play in a band. All the hope in the family was invested in him. As for me and Tom …” She shrugged. “We were outcasts. No college for me—when I finished high school I was sent out to work and had to pay almost all of my salary into the family kitty. When Rudolph went out with a girl, my mother would make sure he had pocket money to entertain her. When I had an affair, she called me a whore. As for Tom—I’ve heard our parents predict a hundred times that he’d wind up in jail. When they talked to him, which was as little as possible, they snarled at him. I think he said to himself, Well if that’s the way you think I am, that’s what I’m going to be. Frankly, I was terrified of him. He had a streak of violence in him that was frightening. I avoided him. When I was walking down the street with any of my friends I’d pretend I didn’t see him, so I wouldn’t have to introduce him. When he left town and dropped out of sight, I was glad. For years I didn’t even think about him. Now I realize I was wrong. At least we two should have made some sort of combination, a common front against the rest of the family. I was too young then to realize it, but I was afraid he’d drag me down to his level. I was a snob, although never as much a snob as Rudy, and I thought of Tom as a dangerous peasant. When I went to New York and for a while became an actress, then started writing for magazines, I cringed in fear that he’d look me up and make me lose all my friends. When I finally did see him—Rudy took me to see him fight once—I was horrified, both by him and your mother. They seemed to come from another world. An awful world. I snubbed them and fled. I was ashamed that I was connected to them in any way. All this may be too painful for you, Wesley …”

Wesley nodded. “It’s painful,” he said, “but I asked you. I don’t want any fairy tales.”

Gretchen turned to Rudolph. “I hope I haven’t been too rough on you, Rudy, with my little history of the happy childhood we spent together.”

“No,” Rudolph said. “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—you know the rest. I was a prig, Wesley,” he said, tearing at old scars, “and I imagine you guessed that. In fact, I wouldn’t hold it against you if you thought so now. I don’t suppose your father would have used that word. What he would have said, if he had thought it out, was that everything I did was fake—not for myself, but for its effect on other people, mostly older people, people in authority. The way I look back on it now, I use the word prig. But back then the way I acted was an escape hatch from the world my mother and father were caught in.” He laughed ruefully. “The injustice of it is in that it worked. I
did
escape.”

“You ride yourself too hard, Uncle Rudy,” Wesley said quietly. “Why don’t you give yourself a break once in a while? My father said that you saved his life.”

“Did he?” Rudolph said, surprised. “He never told me that.”

“He didn’t hold with praising people to their face,” Wesley said. “He didn’t praise me much, I can tell you that.…” He grinned. He had even white teeth and a sweet smile that changed the entire look of his sharp, brooding face, made it seem boyish and open. Rudolph wished he would smile more. “And he didn’t go overboard praising Bunny or even Kate, except for her cooking, and that was more of a joke than anything else, because she was English. Even when I first got to know him, when he was off by himself and didn’t think anybody was watching him, there was something sad about him, as though there were a lot of bad things that had happened to him that he couldn’t forget. But he did say you saved his life.”

“I only gave him some money that was coming to him,” Rudolph said. “I guess you realize by now that Gretchen was trying to show you how and why your father became what he was as a young man.… That the family made him that way.”

“Yeah,” Wesley said, “I see that.”

“It’s true,” Rudolph said, “and again, it’s not true. There are some excuses, as there always are. It’s not my fault that I was the oldest son, that my father was an ignorant and violent man with a hideous past that had been no fault of his own. It wasn’t my fault that my mother was a frigid, hysterical woman with idiotically genteel pretensions. It wasn’t my fault that Gretchen was a sentimental and selfish little fool.… Forgive me,” he said to Gretchen. “I’m not going through all this for your sake or mine. It’s for Wesley.”

“I understand,” Gretchen said, bent over her food, half hiding her face.

“After all,” Rudolph said, “the three of us had the same genes, the same influences. Maybe that’s why Gretchen said just now that your father was frightening. What she was afraid of was that what she saw in him she saw in herself, and recoiled from it. What I saw in him was a reflection of our father, a ferocious man chained to an impossible job, pathologically afraid of ending his life a pauper—so much so that he finally committed suicide rather than face up to the prospect. I recoiled in my own way. Toward money, respectability …”