Rich Man, Poor Man by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online Page A

Saturday’s two days away. We’ll be there at the Landing, from eleven a.m. on. You just come anytime you get your chores done, Miss Jordache. We’ll be waiting on you.’ And he limped out of the room, standing very straight and not holding on to the walls for support.
    For a moment, Gretchen sat still. The only sound she heard was the hum of a machine somewhere in the basement, a sound she didn’t remember ever having heard before. She touched her bare arm, where Arnold’s hand had held it, just below the elbow. She got off the table and turned off the lights, so that if anybody came in, they wouldn’t see what her face must look like. She leaned against the wall, her hands against her mouth, hiding it. Then she hurried to the locker-room and changed into her street clothes and almost ran out of the hospital to the bus stop.
    She sat at the dressing table wiping off the last of the cold cream from the delicately veined pale skin under her swollen eyes. On the table before her stood the jars and vials with the Woolworth names of beauty - Hazel Bishop, Coty. We made love like Adam and Eve in the Garden.
    She mustn’t think of it, she mustn’t think about it. She would call the Colonel tomorrow and ask to be transferred to another block. She couldn’t go back there again.
    She stood up and took off her bathrobe and for a moment she was naked in the soft light of the lamp over the dressing table. Reflected in the mirror, her high, full breasts were very white and the nipples stood disobediently erect. Below was the sinister, dark triangle, dangerously outlined against the pale swell of her thighs. What can I do about it, what can I do about it?
    She put on her nightgown and put out the light and climbed into the cold bed. She hoped that this was not going to be one of the nights that her father picked to claim her mother. There was just so much that she could bear in one night.
    The bus left every half hour on the way upriver towards Albany. On Saturday it would be full of soldiers on weekend passes. All the battalions of young men. She saw herself buying the ticket at the bus terminal, she saw herself seated at the window looking out at the distant, grey river, she saw herself getting off at the stop for Landing, standing there alone, in front of the gas station; under her high-heeled shoes she felt the uneven surface of the gravel road, she smelled the perfume she couldn’t help but wear, she saw the dilapidated, unpointed frame house on the bank of the river, and the two dark men, glasses in their hands, waiting silently, knowing executioners, figures of fate, not rising, confident, her shameful pay in their pockets, waiting, knowing she was coming, watching her come to deliver herself in curiosity and lust, knowing what they were going to do together.
    She took the pillow from beneath her head and put it between her legs and clamped it hard.
     
    The mother stands at the lace-curtained window of the bedroom staring out at the cindery back yard behind the bakery. There are two spindly trees there, with a board nailed between them, from which swings a scuffed, heavy, leather cylinder, stuffed with sand like the heavy bags prize fighters use to train on. In the dark enclosure, the bag looks like a hanged man. In other days in the back gardens on the same street, there were flowers and hammocks strung between the trees. Every afternoon, her husband puts on a pair of wool-lined gloves and goes out into the back yard and flails the bag for twenty minutes. He goes at the bag with a wild, concentrated violence, as though he is fighting for his life. Sometimes, when she happens to see him at it, when Rudy takes over the store for her for a while to let her rest, she has the feeling that it isn’t a dead bag of leather and sand her husband is punishing, but herself.
    She stands at the window in a green sateen bathrobe, soiled at the collar and cuffs. She is smoking a cigarette and the ash drifts down unnoticed onto the