CHAPTER 3

Rudolph was sitting at the little upright piano, trying to pick out the melody of “On a Clear Day,” when he heard the bell ring and Mrs. Burton come out of the kitchen to answer it. He saw her pass in the hall on the way to the front door. She had her hat and coat on. She only came in during the day as she had to go home each evening to feed her own family in Harlem. From the kitchen he heard the laughter of Enid, who was having her supper with her nurse there. Rudolph wasn’t expecting anyone and he kept working on the melody. Getting the piano had turned out to be a good idea. He had originally bought it because the new nurse he had hired had a sweet voice and he had overheard her singing softly to Enid. She said she could play the piano a bit and he thought it would be useful for Enid to listen to someone actually making music in her own home. If it turned out that Enid had any talent it would be better for her than just hearing it from a box, as though Bach and Beethoven were as commonplace as an electric light, to be turned on or off by pushing a switch. But when the piano had been in the house for a few days he had found himself sitting down at it himself and fooling around with chords, then melodies. He had a good ear and he could pass hours amusing himself and not thinking of anything but the music at his fingertips. Whatever distracted him, even for a few minutes at a time, was so much profit. He had almost decided to take formal lessons.

He heard Mrs. Burton come into the living room. “There’s a young man at the door, Mr. Jordache,” Mrs. Burton said, “who says he’s your nephew. Should I let him in?” Since Rudolph had moved to the two top floors of a brownstone, without a doorman, Mrs. Burton had been nervous about burglars and muggers and always kept the door chained. The neighbors, she complained, were careless about the front door and left it unlocked, so anyone could prowl the staircase.

Rudolph stood up. “I’ll go see who it is,” he said. In the letter from Brussels the week before from Billy, Billy hadn’t said anything about coming to America. From the letters Billy had been writing him he seemed to have grown up into a nice, intelligent young man and on an impulse Rudolph had sent the thousand dollars Billy had asked for. Now he wondered if Billy had gotten into trouble with the army and deserted. That would explain the request for money. As for Wesley, there had been no word from him since Nice, and that was almost nine months ago.

Mrs. Burton followed him down the hallway. Outside the partially opened door, across the chain, Wesley was standing in the dim light of the ceiling bulb.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Burton,” Rudolph said. He slipped the chain free and opened the door. “Come in, Wesley.” He put out his hand. After the slightest of pauses Wesley shook it.

“Will you be needing me any more tonight?” Mrs. Burton asked.

“No, thanks.”

“Then I’ll be moving along home. Have a nice weekend, Mr. Jordache.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Burton.” He closed the door behind her when she had left. Wesley merely stood there, his face thin, pale and expressionless, the ghost of his father as a boy, hostile and alert. He was in the same suit he had worn when he had left the jail in Grasse and it was smaller on him now than it had been then. He seemed to have grown and broadened considerably since their last meeting. His hair, Rudolph was happy to see, was not too long, but cropped at the neck.

“I’m glad to see you,” Rudolph said as they went into the living room. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“A beer would be nice,” Wesley said.

“Make yourself comfortable.” Rudolph went into the kitchen where Enid was eating with the nurse. The nurse was a solid woman of about forty, with a marvelously gentle way of making Enid behave.

“Your Cousin Wesley is here, Enid,” Rudolph said as he got a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator. He was about to tell her to come into the living room and say hello to Wesley after she had eaten, but thought better of it. He didn’t know what Wesley had come for. If it was because of some emotional problem or dramatic adolescent disaster, it would only complicate matters to have Enid in the room. He kissed the top of her head and went into the living room with the beer and a glass. Wesley was standing awkwardly in the middle of the room just where Rudolph had left him. Rudolph poured the beer for him.

“Thank you,” Wesley said. “Aren’t you having anything to drink?”

“I’ll have some wine with dinner. Sit down, sit down.” Wesley waited for Rudolph and then sat in a chair facing him. He drank thirstily.

“Well,” Rudolph said, “how’re things? What brings you to New York?”

“I went to the wrong address,” Wesley said. Rudolph noted that the boy didn’t answer his question. “The doorman didn’t want to tell me where you’d moved to. He wouldn’t believe I was your nephew. I had to show him my library card.” He sounded resentful, as though Rudolph had moved four blocks farther north just to avoid him.

“Didn’t you get the letter I sent you?” Rudolph said. “I wrote you my new address the day I rented this apartment.”

“I didn’t get any letters.” Wesley shook his head. “No, sir, no letters.”

“Not even the one about how the estate would probably be finally settled and how much your share will be?”

“Nothing.” Wesley drank again.

“What happens to your mail?” Rudolph tried to keep the irritation out of his voice.

“Maybe my mother doesn’t approve of my getting mail. Anyway, that’s my guess.”

“Did you eat dinner yet?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell you over dinner what was in the letter I sent you.”

“I didn’t hitchhike all the way from Indianapolis to talk about money, Uncle Rudy,” Wesley said softly. “It’s a—well, I guess you might say it’s a social visit.”

“Does your mother know you’re here?”

Wesley shook his head. “We’re not on very good speaking terms, my mother and me.”

“You didn’t run away from home, did you?”

“No. It’s the Easter vacation. I left a note saying I’d be back in time for school.”

“That’s a relief,” Rudolph said dryly. “How’re you doing in school?”

“Okay. I’m a hotshot in the French class.” He grinned boyishly. “I teach my friends all the dirty words.”

“They can come in handy,” Rudolph said, smiling. “At times.” Then more seriously, “Why did you have to hitchhike?”

“Money,” Wesley said.

“Your mother gets quite a nice sum each month for your support for the time being,” Rudolph said. “There’s certainly enough for bus fare once a year to New York.”

“Not a red cent,” Wesley said. “I’m not complaining. I work after school. I get along.”

“Do you?” Rudolph said skeptically. “Is that the only suit you have?”

“Like a whole suit—yeah. I got some sweaters and jeans and stuff like that for school and work. And there’s an old mackinaw I wore in the winter that belongs to Mr. Kraler’s son, he’s a soldier, he’s in Vietnam, so I don’t freeze.”

“I think I’ll have to write your mother a letter,” Rudolph said. “She’s not allowed to use your money for herself.”

“Don’t make waves, please, Uncle Rudy,” Wesley said carefully, putting his glass down on the floor beside him. “There’s enough crap going on in that house without that. She says she’ll give me every cent of the money she’s supposed to if I go to church with her and Mr. Kraler, like a decent Christian.”

“Oh,” Rudolph said, “I’m beginning to get the picture.”

“Some picture, eh?” Wesley grinned boyishly again. “The Spanish Inquisition in Indianapolis.”

“I think I’ll have a drink after all,” Rudolph said. He got up and went over to the sideboard and mixed himself a martini. “You want another beer, Wesley?”

“That’d be nice.” Wesley picked up the glass from the floor, stood up and handed it to Rudolph.

“Enid’s in the kitchen. Would you like to say hello to her?” He saw Wesley hesitate. “Her mother’s not in there with her. I wrote you we were divorced.” He shook his head annoyedly. “I don’t suppose you got that letter, either.”

“Nope.”

“Damn it. From now on I’ll write you care of General Delivery. Didn’t you ever think it was queer that nobody wrote you?”

“I guess I never thought much about it.”

“Didn’t you write Bunny or Kate?”

“Once or twice,” Wesley said. “They didn’t answer, so I gave up. Do you hear from them?”

“Of course,” Rudolph said. Dwyer sent him a monthly report, with the bills from the Clothilde. Dwyer had had to be told that Rudolph had bought the ship. The court-ordered official appraisal of the value of the boat had been a hundred thousand—Dwyer had been correct about that—but no other buyers had offered anything near that price and Dwyer had taken the ship for the winter to Saint-Tropez, where it was berthed now. “They’re fine. Kate’s had a baby. A boy. You’ve got a brother. A half brother, anyway.”

“Poor little bastard,” Wesley said, but the news seemed to cheer him. The blood survives, Rudolph thought. “When you write to Kate,” Wesley said, “tell her I’ll drop in on her in England someday. Kids. That makes my old man the only one in the family with more than one kid. He told me one night that he’d like to have five. He was great with kids. A couple would come on board with the worst little spoiled brat you ever saw and in a week my old man’d have him saying sir to everybody, standing up when grown-ups came on board, hosing down the decks in port, minding his language—everything.” He fiddled with his beer, uncomfortably. “I don’t like to boast, Uncle Rudy, but look what he did for me. I may not be much, even now, but you should have seen me when he grabbed me out of school—I was spastic.”

“Well, you’re not spastic now.”

“Anyway,” Wesley said, “I don’t feel spastic. That’s something.”

“It certainly is.”

“Talking about kids—you think it would be all right if I went in and said hello to Enid?”

“Of course,” Rudolph said, pleased.

“She still talk a blue streak?”

“Yes,” Rudolph said as he led the way into the kitchen, “more than ever.”

For once, Enid was shy when they entered the kitchen and Wesley said, “Hello, Enid, I’m your cousin, Wesley. Remember?”

Enid looked up at him soberly, then turned her head away. “It’s late,” the nurse said defensively. “She gets a little temperamental this time of day.”

“I’ll come around in the morning sometime,” Wesley said. In the small kitchen, his deep, mature voice sounded brassy and harsh and Enid put her hands over her ears.

“Manners, miss,” the nurse said.

“I guess I talk too loud,” Wesley said apologetically, as he followed Rudolph out of the kitchen. “You get in the habit on a boat, with the wind and the noise of the water and all.”

In the living room, Rudolph poured the martini out of the shaker into a glass and twisted a piece of lemon peel over the top of the drink. He raised his glass to Wesley, suddenly glad that the boy had come to see him, had asked to see Enid. Maybe, he thought, in some dim, distant future we will be something like a family again. He had little left, he thought, self-pityingly; a family was something to cling to. Even the letter he had received from Billy, with its rather timid, offhand request for money, had been cordial in tone. With no sons of his own, he knew that if the boys permitted it, he would be their friend, more than friend. Lonely, no longer married, Jeanne an almost forgotten incident in the past, with his own child in the hands of a highly competent woman and still at an age at which he thought of her as no more than a kind of charming toy, he knew that once he began communicating with his nephews he would soon need them more than they would ever need him. He hoped that day would come—and soon.

“Whatever reason brought you to New York,” he said, moved, as he raised his glass, “I’m very happy to see you.”

Wesley raised his glass, too, self-consciously. “Thanks.”

“No more fights in bars, I hope,” Rudolph said.

“Don’t worry,” Wesley said soberly. “My fighting days’re over. Though sometimes it’s pretty tough to hold back. There’re a lot of blacks in the school and the whites pick on them and they pick on the white boys. I guess I have the reputation of being chicken. But, what the hell, I can live with it. I learned my lesson. Anyway, I promised my father, the day he took me out of military school. I forgot only once. It wasn’t what you would call a normal occasion.” He stared down into his glass, grim, looking older than his years. “Just the once. Well, every dog is entitled to one bite, like they say. I guess I owe it to my father to keep my promise. It’s the least I …” He stopped. His mouth tightened. Rudolph was afraid the boy was going to cry.

“I guess you do,” he said quickly. “Where’re you staying in New York?”

“The YMCA. Not too bad.”

“Look,” said Rudolph, “I’m taking Enid down to Montauk to her mother’s tomorrow morning for the week, but I’ll be coming back myself on Sunday. Why don’t you ride down with me, get a breath of sea air …?” He stopped as he saw Wesley eyeing him warily.

“Thanks,” Wesley said. “That would be nice. But some other time. I have to be getting back to Indianapolis.”

“You won’t have to hitchhike. I’ll give you the air fare back.” When will I ever stop offering people money, he thought despairingly, instead of what they’ve really come for?

“I’d rather not,” Wesley said. “Actually, I like to hitch rides. You get to talk to a lot of different kinds of people.”

“Whatever you say,” Rudolph said, rebuffed, but not blaming the boy for not wanting to run the risk of having to see Jean again, being reminded all over again. “Still,” he said, “if you’d rather stay here for the night, I can fix you up on the sofa.… I don’t have a guest room, but you’d be comfortable.” Hospitality, family solidarity, not dollar bills.

“That’s nice of you,” Wesley said carefully, “but I’m fixed at the Y.”

“The next time you come to New York let me know in advance. There’re some nice hotels in the neighborhood and it would be convenient. We could take in a couple of shows, things like that.…” He stopped short. He didn’t want the boy to think that he was attempting to bribe him.

“Sure,” Wesley said unconvincingly. “Next time. This time, Uncle Rudy, I want to talk to you about my father.” He stared soberly at Rudolph. “I didn’t have the chance to know my father well enough. I was just a kid, maybe I’m still just a kid, but I want to know what he was like, what he was worth.… Do you understand what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“I keep making up lists, names of people who knew my father at different times in his life—and you and Aunt Gretchen are first on that list. That’s natural, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so. Yes. That’s natural.” He was afraid of the questions he was going to be asked, the answers that he would be forced to give the tall, solemn, overgrown boy.

“When I got to know him—” Wesley went on, “just the short time we had together—I thought he was some kind of hero, a saint, almost, the way he treated me and Kate and Dwyer, how he got everybody to do what he wanted without ever even raising his voice, how, no matter what came up, he could handle it. But I know he wasn’t always like that, I know my opinion of him was a kid’s opinion. I’ve got to get a real fix on my father. For my own sake. Because that’ll help me to get a fix on myself. On what kind of man I want to be, what I want to do with my life.… It sounds kind of mixed up, doesn’t it …?” He moved his bulky shoulders, as though he was irritated with himself.

“It’s not so mixed up, Wesley,” Rudolph said gently. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, anything I can remember. But first, I think, we ought to go out and have dinner.” Postpone the past—the first rule of civilization.

“I could use a good meal,” Wesley said, standing up. “I just ate junk food on the road. And the stuff I eat at home—” He made a face. “My mother is a health food nut. Fine for squirrels. Uncle Rudy,” he smiled, “everybody keeps telling me how rich you are. Can you afford a steak?”

“I guess I’m rich enough for that,” Rudolph said. “Anyway, a few times a year. Just wait here for me while I go up and say good night to the baby and get a jacket.”

He was taking the jacket out of the closet when the phone rang. “Hello,” he said, as he picked up the phone.

“Rudy …” It was Gretchen’s voice. “What are you doing for dinner?” She was always most brusque and direct when she was slightly embarrassed. He hadn’t spoken to her in weeks and it was a strange time for her to call, at a quarter past seven on a Friday evening.

“Well …” He hesitated. “I’ve had an unexpected visitor. Wesley. He hitchhiked in from Indianapolis. I’m taking him to dinner. Would you like to join us?”

“Is there anything special he wants to talk to you about?” She sounded disappointed.

“Not that I know of. Not anything he wouldn’t want to say in front of you, as far as I know.”

“I wouldn’t like to interfere …”

“Don’t be silly, Gretchen. Is there anything special you want to talk to me about?” The last time they had had a meal together she had seemed distracted and had let drop enough hints for him to guess that she was having trouble with the Hollywood director with whom she was working and having an on-again, off-again affair. What was his name? Kinsella. Evans Kinsella. Arrogant Hollywood sonofabitch. Gretchen had had luck once in her life with a man and that man had run a car into a tree. Rudolph supposed that Kinsella had something to do with her call, but she could bring that up if she wished after he had packed Wesley off to the YMCA.

“I just called,” Gretchen said, “because I’m at something of a loose end for the evening. My boyfriend stood me up. For a change.” She laughed mirthlessly. “So I thought about family. Weekends are a good time for loose ends and family.” But she still didn’t say whether she would come to dinner. Instead she said, “How’s Wesley?”

“Getting along,” Rudolph said. “Bigger than ever. As serious as ever. More so.”

“In trouble?” she asked.

“No more than you and I,” he said lightly.

“Do you think he’d object to seeing me?”

“Absolutely not. In fact he said we were at the top of the list of people he wanted to see.”

“What did he mean by that?” She sounded worried.

“I’ll fill you in after dinner. He wants a steak.” He told her the name of the restaurant.

He hung up and put on his jacket and went downstairs. Wesley was standing in the middle of the living room staring about him. “You know something,” Wesley said and grinned as he said it. “This is my idea of a real Christian home.”

As they went down Third Avenue toward the restaurant, Rudolph noted how much like his brother Tom Wesley walked—the same almost-slouch, with a warning swinging of the shoulders. When he and Tom were young, Rudolph had thought it was a conscious pose, an advertisement that here was a predatory and dangerous male on the loose, to be avoided. Later as a grown man, Rudolph saw his brother’s manner of walking as a way of avoiding pain, a signal that he wanted the world to leave him alone.

Rudolph’s own gliding, slow walk, with shoulders stiff, was a manufactured gait, which he had developed as a youth because he thought it was gentlemanly, Ivy League. He no longer cared about seeming gentlemanly and he had met enough Ivy Leaguers in business not to be anxious to be taken as one of them. But his way of walking was now a part of him. To change it now would be an affectation.

When he had told Wesley that Gretchen was dining with them, Wesley’s face had brightened and he’d said, “That’s great. She’s swell, a real lady. What a difference between her and some of the dames we had to put up with on the boat.” He wagged his head humorously. “Money coming out of their ears, their tits showing day and night, and treating everybody like dirt.” The two beers had loosened his vocabulary. “You know, I sometimes wonder how it happens some women who never lifted a finger in their lives can act like they own the whole goddamn world.”

“They practice in front of a mirror,” Rudolph said.

“Practice in front of a mirror.” Wesley laughed. “I got to remember that. Aunt Gretchen works, doesn’t she?”

“Very hard,” Rudolph said.

“I guess that’s what does it. If you don’t work, you’re just shit. You don’t mind the way I talk, do you?” he asked anxiously.

“Not at all.”

“My father was kind of free talking,” Wesley said. “He said he didn’t like people who talked as though they had an anchor up their ass. He said there was a difference between talking dirty and talking ugly.”

“Your father had a point there.” Rudolph, who had never gotten over his boyhood aversion to swearing and carefully censored his speech at all times, suddenly wondered if his brother had included him among the people who spoke as though they had an anchor up their ass.

“You know,” Wesley went on, “Bunny thought your sister was something special, too. He told me you should have married somebody like her.”

“That would have been a little awkward,” Rudolph said, “seeing that we were sister and brother and I wasn’t the pharaoh of Egypt.”

“What’s that?” Wesley said.

“I’m sorry,” Rudolph said. His embarrassment—jealousy?—at Wesley’s open admiration for his sister had made him pedantic in self-defense. “It was the custom in ancient Egypt in the families of the pharaohs.”

“I get it,” Wesley said. “I guess I’m not what you might call well educated.”

“You’re young yet.”

“Yeah,” Wesley said, brooding over his youth.

The boy had good stuff in him, Rudolph was sure, and it was criminal that by law the Kralers were given the right to warp or destroy it. He was going to see Johnny Heath in the morning when Johnny and his wife came to drive down to Montauk with him and Enid. He’d ask Johnny once more if there weren’t some legal way to get the boy out of his mother’s clutches.

“What about education?” Rudolph said. “Are you going on to college?”

The boy shrugged. “My mother says it’d be a waste of money on me. I read a lot, but not what they tell me to read in school. I’ve been studying up some on the Mormons. I guess I wanted to find out if Mr. Kraler and my mother were like they are because they’re Mormons or because they’re my mother and Mr. Kraler.” He grinned. “The way I figure it now, they started out as awful people, and their religion brought out the worst in them. But,” he said seriously, “it’s a queer religion. They sure were brave, the Mormons, fighting off the whole United States and all, and going in wagons halfway across America and settling in the desert and making it bloom, the way they say. But all those wives! I look at my mother and I swear, it makes you wonder why anybody would ever want to get married. You listen for ten minutes to my mother and one wife is one wife too many. Marriage in general …” He scowled. “Our family, for instance. You got divorced, Aunt Gretchen got divorced, my father got divorced … What’s it all about? I ask myself.”

“You’re not the first man to ask himself that question,” Rudolph said. “Maybe it’s the times we live in. We’re adjusting to new stances in each other, as the sociologists would put it, and perhaps we’re not ready for it.”

“There’s a girl in school,” Wesley said, scowling again, “pretty as a ripe red apple and older than me. I … well … I fooled around with her in the back of a car, in her own house, when her parents were out—a couple of times—and she started talking about marriage. I couldn’t get her off the subject. I just stopped seeing her. You going to get married again?” He peered fiercely at Rudolph, suspecting wedding bells.

“It’s hard to say,” Rudolph said. “At the moment I have no plans.”

“Religion is a funny thing,” Wesley said abruptly, as though the exchange about marriage had embarrassed him and he wanted to get away from it as quickly as possible. “I want to believe in God,” Wesley said earnestly. “After all, there had to be something that started the whole shebang going, wasn’t there? I mean how we got here, what we’re doing here, how everything works, like how we have air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat. I read the whole Bible through the last few months. There’re no answers there, I tell you—at least not for me.”

Oh, dear nephew, Rudolph wanted to say, when your uncle was sixteen he was there before you. And found no answers.

“What are you supposed to believe?” Wesley asked. “Do you believe in those copper plates the Mormons say Joseph Smith found in upstate New York and never showed to anybody? How do they expect people to believe stuff like that?”

“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 …”

Wesley nodded soberly. “Maybe it’s lucky Kraler’s kid is in Vietnam. Who knows what he’d do for me if I had to eat dinner every night with him?”

“There have been second sons before your father,” Rudolph said, “in worse families, and they didn’t go around trying to destroy everything they touched. I don’t like to say this, Wesley, but until the day of our mother’s funeral, I believed that your father was born with an affinity for destruction, an affinity that gave him great pleasure. Destruction of all kinds. Including self-destruction.”

“It sure turned out that way,” Wesley said bitterly, “didn’t it?”

“What he did that night in Cannes,” Rudolph said, “was admirable. By his lights. And to tell the truth, by my lights, too. You mustn’t forget that.”

“I’ll try not to forget it,” Wesley said. “But it’s not easy. Waste, that’s what I think it really was. Crazy macho waste.”

Rudolph sighed. “I think we’ve told you everything we could for now, as honestly as we could. We’ll save the anecdotes for another time. You must be tired. I’ll send you a list of names of people you might want to talk to who’ll perhaps be more helpful than we’ve been. Finish your dinner and then I’ll ride you over to the YMCA.”

“No need,” Wesley said shortly. “I can walk through the park.”

“Nobody walks through the park in New York at night alone,” Gretchen said.

Wesley stared at her coldly. “I do,” he said.

Christ, Rudolph thought, as he watched the boy finish the last bit of his steak, he looks and sounds just like his father. God help him.