They ate in silence for awhile, Rudolph carefully watching how Boylan used his knife and fork. A good gun, with beautiful manners.
Perkins took away the fish dishes and served some chops and baked potatoes and green peas. Rudolph wished he could send his mother up for some lessons in the kitchen here. Perkins presided over the red wine, rather than poured it. Rudolph wondered what Perkins knew about Gretchen. Everything, probably. Who made the bed in the room upstairs?
“Has she found a job yet?” Boylan asked, as though there had been no interruption in the conversation. “She told me she intended to be an actress.”
“I don’t know,” Rudolph said, keeping all information to himself. “I haven’t heard from her recently.”
“Do you think she’ll be successful?” Boylan asked. “Have you ever seen her act?”
“Once. Only in a school play.” Shakespeare battered and reeling, in homemade costumes. The seven ages of man. The boy who played Jacques nervously pushing at his beard, to make sure it was still pasted on. Gretchen looking strange and beautiful and not at all like a young man in her tights, but saying the words clearly.
“Does she have talent?” Boylan asked.
“I think so. She has something. Whenever she came onto the stage everybody stopped coughing.”
Boylan laughed. Rudolph realized that he had sounded like a kid. “What I mean …” He tried to regain lost ground. “Is, well, you could feel the audience focusing on her, being for her, in a way that they weren’t for any of the other actors. I guess that’s talent.”
“It certainly is.” Boylan nodded. “She’s an extraordinarily beautiful girl. I don’t suppose a brother would notice that.”
“Oh, I noticed it,” Rudolph said.
“Did you?” Boylan said absently. He no longer seemed interested. He waved for Perkins to take the dishes away and got up and went over to a big phonograph and put on the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, very loud, so that they didn’t talk for the rest of the meal. Five kinds of cheese on a wooden platter. Salad. A plum tart. No wonder Boylan had a paunch.
Rudolph looked surreptitiously at his watch. If he could get out of there early enough maybe he could catch Julie. It would be too late for the movies, but maybe he could make up to her, anyway, for standing her up.
After dinner, Boylan had a brandy with the demitasse, and put on a symphony. Rudolph was tired from the long afternoon’s fishing. The two glasses of wine he had drunk made him feel blurred and sleepy. The loud music was crushing him. Boylan was polite, but distant. Rudolph had the feeling the man was disappointed in him because he hadn’t opened up about Gretchen.
Boylan sat sunk in a deep chair, his eyes almost closed, concentrating on the music, occasionally taking a sip of the brandy. He might just as well have been alone, Rudolph thought resentfully, or with his Irish wolfhound. They probably had some lively evenings here together, before the neighbors put out the poison. Maybe he’s getting ready to offer me a position as his dog.
There was a scratch on the record now and Boylan made an irritated gesture as the clicking recurred. He stood up and turned off the machine. “I’m sorry about that,” he said to Rudolph. “The revenge of the machine age on Schumann. Shall I take you on down to town now?”
“Thank you.” Rudolph stood up, gratefully.
Boylan looked down at Rudolph’s feet. “Oh,” he said. “You can’t go like that, can you?”
“If you’ll give me my boots …”
“I’m sure they’re still soaking wet inside,” Boylan said. “Wait here a minute. I’ll find something for you.” He went out of the room and up the stairway.
Rudolph took a long look around the room. How good it was to be rich. He wondered if he ever was going to see the room again. Thomas had seen it once, although he had not been invited in. He came down into the living-room bare-assed, with his thing hanging down to his knees, he’s a regular horse, and made two whiskies and called up the stairs, “Gretchen, do you want your drink up there or do you want to come down for it?”
Now that he had had a chance to listen to Boylan, Rudolph recognized that Tom’s caricature of the man’s voice had been an accurate one. He had caught the educated flattening out on the “there,” and the curious way he had of making questions not sound like questions.
Rudolph shook his head. What could Gretchen have been thinking of? “I liked it.” He heard her voice again in the Port Philip House bar. “I liked it better than anything that had ever happened to me.”
He walked restlessly around the room. He looked at the album of the symphony that Boylan had cut off. Schumann’s Third, the Rhenish Symphony. Well, at least he had learned something today. He would recognize it when he heard it again. He picked up a silver cigarette lighter a foot long and examined it. There was a monogram on it. T.B. Purposely expensive gadgets for doing things that cost nothing to the poor. He flicked it open. It spouted flame. The burning cross. Enemies. He heard Boylan’s footsteps on the marble floor in the hall and hurriedly doused the flame and put the lighter down.
Boylan came into the room. He was carrying a little overnight bag and a pair of mahogany-colored moccasins. “Try these on, Rudolph,” he said.
The moccasins were old but beautifully polished, with thick soles and leather tassels. They fit Rudolph perfectly. “Ah,” Boylan said, “you have narrow feet, too.” One aristocrat to another.
“I’ll bring them back in a day or two,” Rudolph said, as they started out.
“Don’t bother,” Boylan said. “They’re old as the hills. I never wear them.”
Rudolph’s rod, neatly folded, and the creel and net were on the back seat of the Buick. The fireman’s boots, still damp inside, were on the floor behind the front seat. Boylan swung the overnight bag onto the back seat and they got into the car. Rudolph had retrieved the old felt hat from the table in the hallway, but didn’t have the courage to put it on with Perkins watching him. Boylan turned on the radio in the car, jazz from New York, so they didn’t talk all the way to Vanderhoff Street. When Boylan stopped the Buick in front of the bakery, he turned the radio off.
“Here we are,” he said.
“Thank you very much,” Rudolph said. “For everything.”
“Thank you, Rudolph,” Boylan said. “It’s been a refreshing day.” As Rudolph put his hand on the handle of the car door, Boylan reached out and held his arm lightly.
“Ah, I wonder if you’d do me a favor.”
“Of course.”
“In that bag back there …” Boylan twisted a little, holding onto the wheel to indicate the presence of the leather overnight bag behind him. “… there’s something I’d particularly like your sister to have. Do you think you could get it to her?”
“Well,” Rudolph said, “I don’t know when I’ll be seeing her.”
“There’s no hurry,” Boylan said. “It’s something I know she wants, but it’s not pressing.”
“Okay,” Rudolph said. It wasn’t like giving away Gretchen’s address, or anything like that. “Sure. When I happen to see her.”
“That’s very good of you, Rudolph.” He looked at his watch. “It’s not very late. Would you like to come and have a drink with me someplace? I don’t fancy going back to that dreary house alone for the moment.”
“I have to get up awfully early in the morning,” Rudolph said. He wanted to be by himself now, to sort out his impressions of Boylan, to assess the dangers and the possible advantages in knowing the man. He didn’t want to be loaded with any new impressions, Boylan drunk, Boylan with strangers at a bar, Boylan perhaps flirting with a woman, or making a pass at a sailor. The idea was sudden. Boylan, the fairy? Making a pass at him. The delicate hands on the piano, the gifts, the clothes that were like costumes, the unobtrusive touching.