Wise Men: A Novel Page 11

  “What makes you think that nobody has?”

  “You just look it,” she said. “That’s all.”

  I thought to protest, but she had me. I threw my hands up. She reached into the car and put on the stereo. A man’s voice, smooth, easy, sweet, and then a saxophone. I must have strained to see if I recognized who was singing.

  “It’s Nat King Cole,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you know who that is?” she asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, you either do or you don’t,” she said, and then she sighed. “I don’t know why I like you, Hilly Wise. You’re kind of skinny. You’re not really that bright. You got a crazy man for a father running around, yelling at everybody. Plus, you got pimples.”

  “All of this is so nice of you to say.”

  “You’re damn stupid, actually,” she said, shaking her head. “If I had your money I’d be a genius. A real genius.”

  I laughed and looked back over my shoulder, toward the house. “Should I go? Or do you just want to keep me here and insult me?”

  She reached for my hand and pulled me into the car. “Maybe I’m the stupid one.”

  The first thing she said to me when we were in the car was that I shouldn’t try anything too fast on her, and then, not even a moment later, after she had kissed me only twice, she pulled away and whispered into my ear that Lem Dawson was standing outside, in the grass. We both grew very still. This is fine, I told her. This is fine. He’s my friend, I said. She frowned. “He’s not your friend,” she said sadly. “You his master, idiot. He’s your boy.”

  As I got out of the car, I heard her mutter under her breath, “I was right.”

  And that was the last thing I heard her say.

  Nine

  A storm came through that evening. It swept sand up onto the grass from the beach, shaking the oak trees free of their fat, salt-sprayed leaves and tossing my father’s newly planted white hydrangeas onto the lawn, their blossoms lying across the grass like baseballs with their hides beaten off their backs. I lay awake in my bed, unable to sleep. It was four in the morning. Our house was still empty. I kept thinking about Savannah—her long fingers, brown in the bleed-off from the Packard’s headlights, darker at the knuckles; the pale underside of her palm. Lem had taken her up into his apartment. She’d gone wordlessly, obediently, without once looking back. A few times I got up out of bed to look out the window and see if I could get a glimpse of her in his windows. But I couldn’t. Everything there was dark. How were they possibly asleep? I wondered. How could anyone sleep after a day like that? I was still awake two hours later when my father came home. He was drunk again, or drunk still, and I heard him crash into our dining table. It was stacked with long-stemmed wineglasses left out by my mother earlier in the day. Robert Ashley was with him, too. I heard Robert’s small, anxious voice, straining to control my dad’s temper. It was warm, and I stayed there on top of my sheets, with the windows open, the loud crash of the sea unable to drown out my father’s voice. Even from up in my bedroom, I could make out Robert’s insistent, whispering apologies and my father’s full-throated protests, and then at some point the unmistakable sound of my mother’s coffee percolator beginning to boil. The last thing I heard before falling asleep was Robert Ashley imploring my father not to worry. “You need to relax, Art,” he said. “The case is over. We settled.”

  When I finally woke up, late the next morning, I looked out the window to Lem’s apartment. He was out near the cinder blocks, smoking a cigarette. When he saw me, he waved me down to join him. The lawn was a mess: a branch from a pine tree had been severed by the wind and tossed like a javelin through a glass lawn lantern. There were shards everywhere, and pine needles; and in four large pieces, like a pumpkin split by an ax, there was the lantern, lying at Lem’s feet.

  “Wow,” I said. “Look at all this. I must have slept through the worst of it.”

  I walked across the grass to him, smiling, trying to act as if he had no reason to be angry with me. I figured we were even: I’d caught him, he’d caught me. He was leaning against the garage, a garden rake beside him and a pack of Old Golds resting on the pile of stacked cinder blocks.

  “You almost got yourself killed last night,” he said.

  “That’s how you greet me? No good morning?”

  “If Charles found out about that, about you two, he’d have killed you. I’m talking murder. Straight murder. He’d have cut your head off.”

  “Decapitation?” I said, a rising note of incredulity in my voice. “That’s what you’re threatening me with?”

  “Please, Hilly. Don’t act dumb. Not with me. I’ve seen this before.”

  I sat beside him and took one of his cigarettes. The ground was a mess of them. He’d been awake for hours, I guessed.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “I’m not telling you,” he said.

  “Oh God. You’re not her father. Just tell me where she is.”

  “I’m her uncle.”

  “Is that the same difference?”

  He got up and stood over me. He thought I’d be intimidated. His hat was canted on his head, a sharp, dark shadow on his face.

  “Damn it, Hilly, you need to promise me, right here, at this moment, promise to God, that you’ll keep away from her.”

  “I don’t know what you think I was doing,” I said, “but you’re wrong. I know what I saw you doing last night. I think we both do. So why don’t you tell me where she is, Lem?”

  He turned his back to me. I saw his shoulders sink. He pointed up above us to the catwalk staircase. “Just for the night,” he said.

  That she was only a few feet from me was a relief. She’d slept in his bedroom, probably, that small space, the walls the gray of a sparrow’s belly, with that window that looked out onto the patio. He’d have given her the bed and slept on the floor.

  The heat wasn’t bad yet. I figured it was ten-thirty, maybe eleven. I blew smoke out above us. I tried to act like someone confident and older, someone very much like my father. “It was just a kiss, Lem. One kiss. That’s all it was.”

  He shook his head. “You know that if someone else caught you, they’d fuck her up, not you.”

  “No one’s doing anything like that,” I said.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “They’d fuck her up. You get me? That’s how that works, Hilly. Nothing people hate more than what I saw last night.”

  Lem occasionally cussed in my presence, and I should been used to hearing him talk like that. This was different, though, and if I didn’t understand it by the expression he wore—his face was gravely tired, the lines beneath his eyes pronounced in the harsh light—I did by the fierce urgency in his voice. He slammed his hand into the wood shingle beside me.

  “You get what I’m saying, right?” he asked.

  “This isn’t Mississippi,” I managed. “People here aren’t like that.”

  “Don’t matter. You’re an idiot if you think it matters a damn bit that we’re up here in Bluepoint.”

  I looked up at his apartment, hoping for a glimpse of Savannah.

  “That girl’s got no one looking after her,” he said quietly. “You understand how that is?”

  “She’s got her father,” I said. “That’s better than nothing.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “Still better than nothing,” I said. I thought of Savannah’s dolls, the broken mouth, its jagged sewn smile. And then I thought of Savannah, rummaging through the burned remnants of what had been their house, finding in it her mother’s box.

  He laughed mockingly at me. “I didn’t think you’d be the kind of guy to take advantage of your situation, Hilly.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He glared at me. The whites of his eyes were yellow. “I work for your father. She’s my niece. That’s a compromising situation. You understand?”

  “It was her idea,” I said. “She came over on her own. Sh
e likes me. I like her. It’s really not that complicated a situation.”

  “She just wants someone to help her. Look after her. You got more money coming your way than anyone your age in this country. You get that? Does that make sense to you?”

  “I don’t think this has anything to do with money,” I said.

  It was clear the moment this left my mouth that I unsure about it. I thought of Pauline McNamee kissing me at the Wren’s Bridge ice rink. How she’d started in about my father right away. When had a girl my age ever really wanted to kiss me? Savannah had said it herself: I was skinny and pimpled, and I wasn’t very bright.

  Lem took a cigarette from the pack. He seemed to study it before he lit it.

  “You like her?” he asked me, his voice quiet.

  I nodded quickly. Of course I liked her. I was filled with pity for what had happened to her, for what she had seen, for how she lived—those buckets—for how she had lost her mother, and because of all of that, I wanted to keep her safe: I was seventeen.

  “Girl like that, in a situation like that, with her mother, with my sister, getting burned up like that: a girl like that’s bound to do all sorts of foolish shit, Hilly.”

  He was pointing at me. He was a big man when he wanted to be, and to have him standing over me like that, in anger, was plainly intimidating. I backed up two steps, a short distance that he made up by taking two steps toward me, his finger still jutting out at me.

  “Try putting yourself in her shoes,” he was saying. “Try imagining for a minute, Hilly, what you’d do.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  The sun was in Lem’s eyes, and he put up a hand to shield himself. He took a step closer to me, suddenly in shadows. There were only a few inches between us. He put both hands on my shoulders, like he wanted to shake me until I heard him clearly.

  “I’m saying that her mind’s not in the right place. She knows that if something changes, if her father decides he wants to go try to be a ballplayer again, God help us, she’s going to be out on her own. Sixteen. No momma. No way to earn money for food. Nobody knows this like she knows this. You understand now, Hilly?”

  I managed a weak grunt.

  “You think I can take care of her?” he asked me, his voice growing louder. “You think your daddy pays me enough money to feed another person? You think I can get her clothes for school? Or her books? You think I can even get her a bus ticket south so maybe she can get back to her grandmama? Do you?”

  “My dad pays you money,” I said.

  “Eight dollars a week,” he said. “Eight.”

  I blanched.

  “That’s right.” He nodded.

  “W-w-well,” I stammered, “I thought you were both running away, anyway?”

  I knew this startled him. He shuddered a little and fiddled nervously with the brim of his hat. Of course I understood what he meant, however much it hurt to hear it, and after a moment I got up from where we’d been sitting and walked to the cusp of the shore. The tide was low. I could see straight to the seafloor where the water was shallow; there were hundreds of tiny worn stones, smoothed by the current. For a while I stood there and considered what Lem had said to me. I couldn’t admit to him that Savannah was only the second girl I’d ever kissed. And I couldn’t admit that I wished he hadn’t come to interrupt us. But neither of these facts mattered much in comparison with what he’d said. My father was always warning me not be taken advantage of. Whenever we were in the car together, driving in Wren’s Bridge, or driving down Park Avenue in a hired Lincoln, he’d say this to me: men in his position were always at risk for being taken as fools. Because I was his son, and because he was my father, he wanted me to know this, and I had to know how to recognize when someone wanted something from me simply because of who I was. I’d always laughed him off, out of arrogance, and out of what by then was a deeply held belief that my father was a cruel, petty, stupid man. Now I felt for the first time the terrible possibility that my father had been right and I’d been wrong. Perhaps Savannah had come to me seeking protection, in a way, from a situation that for her had become especially precarious. I couldn’t say that, had events been reversed, I wouldn’t have done the same thing. Survival, I knew, was a fickle thing: no one ever cared about scruples when it came to making it to the next day.

  We were a few yards down the beach. I looked back to Lem’s apartment. There was a rustling behind his laundry, a billowing in the linens on the line. The wind turned his work shirts momentarily pregnant. It was her. She was there, above me, lurking. Smiling. Her hand went up slowly, a short, bashful, testing wave.

  Then Lem was gone. Above me the lights flickered on in his apartment, and my father was walking across the grass to talk to me. He’d scared Lem off. I was positive that he’d have no memory of my refusing to intervene in his fight, or of hurling his flask at me. I knew him this well. His face was badly bruised, and swollen, although far less so than it had been a few hours earlier. As he drew closer, he took his car keys from his trousers and tossed them at me.

  “How about you take your old man for a drive, Hilly?”

  I caught the keys easily, one-handed, all of them clanking in my palm. “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I can’t really see,” he said. He thrust his hands into his pockets. He squinted at me. “And I need to do some things inland.”

  His skin was flushed, and he was sweating, even with the cool breeze from the water. He closed his eyes for a moment longer than normal, and I decided that he was still drunk from the evening before. A small dolphin pendant dangled from the key ring. It was an unusually decorative flourish for my father. I thought of the dolphins we’d seen when we first arrived here.

  “What about Robert?” I asked. “Can’t he drive you?”

  “I think he’s still broken up about giving me this beating,” he said, pointing at his face.

  “Right,” I said.

  “He’s sensitive like that.”

  “How does it feel?” I asked. “Your face, I mean.”

  “Doesn’t feel good, Hilly,” he said. Then he pointed at his car. “So, what do you say? When was the last time we just went out for a drive?”

  I turned to look up again at Lem’s apartment—the small louvered window and the wooden ledge behind it, where he had his row of potted Christmas cactuses. On the ground near his front door were dozens of cigarette butts, evidence of how long he’d waited for me to show this morning, and of just how angry I had made him.

  “You want to ask him permission to go?” my father asked, laughing. “You want me to call him down and see if he thinks it’s all right you go out for the afternoon with your father?”

  “No,” I said, “that’s not necessary.”

  “Are you sure? You don’t sound sure. Let me see what old Lem Dawson thinks about the idea.”

  The Fleetwood was parked in the gravel beside the garage, two arching conifers nearby providing decent shade. It was exactly where I’d left it last night. I walked without a word across the grass and into the driver’s seat, struck up the engine quickly—a deep, thunderous sound, my foot on the gas, a cough of exhaust breathing through the tailpipe. I had the door open. My father was standing, looking out at the water. I called out to him, but he didn’t turn. He shifted his feet and put one hand on his hip. There were big, broad sailboats out on the water, and there were, someone had told me, whales passing through on their migration north, or south, whichever it was. We were at the far edge of the continent. Out east, beyond my father, there was the ocean, and there were the great cities of Europe, and beyond that there were the small villages on the Black Sea where his own father had been born and where he’d been forced to flee. I had no idea what my father was looking at, exactly, not then, not on any of the days during which I caught him looking off at the water like that, his eyes narrowed, a serious, mournful expression on his face, but I’ve always thought, as I did at that moment, that he was thinking of his father, whom I knew only as a l
ittle man in a brown topcoat, small, black eyes beneath a great white brow, his hand on the rusted hood of a Studebaker Big Six—one photograph in a gilded frame, which my father kept at the corner of his desk. While he was alive, we couldn’t communicate. My grandfather never learned English well enough to have a real conversation. My grandfather, that little, sweet man, would never have believed how successful his son had become.

  When my father turned around, he seemed glad to find me in the car, and soon I had us off the gravel path on Beachside Grove and out onto Route 6, where the dunes between Bluepoint and Truro were shrouded by mist. My father crossed his legs at the knee, his right foot dangling over the center console. He grew nervous and began to fidget with the stereo dials. His searching brought nothing. It was a cloudy morning, the sky cluttered with heavy, cottony cumulus clouds, and the radio this far out on the narrow arm of the Cape was a mess of broken signals. Occasionally there came the scratchy sound of a man’s voice, a preacher’s, or an announcer for a ball club, listing names I’d never heard of; briefly there was the momentary swell of a string orchestra, the first trilling notes of some symphony I didn’t recognize. My father couldn’t be convinced that slamming his fist against the face of the radio did nothing to affect the reception.

  He had on a new watch. I noticed it then as we drove, and as the light struck through the windshield, glinting off his wrist. It was big and gold, and when he saw me looking at it, he told me that it was a gift from a client. “Cartier,” he said, tapping its front face with his fingernails. “Supposedly this piece of shit costs more than this car. You believe that, Hilly?”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “It was a thank-you gift from a client.”

  “You must have really helped him out,” I said.

  My father laughed in a way that I knew to be fake. “I kept him out of prison,” he said, “so he owed me.”

  “Really? How’d you do that?”

  I looked over to him, and he seemed for a moment as if he wanted to tell me exactly what I’d asked. His nervousness was always most evident in his extremities—his fingers wiggled; his hands reached to straighten the fabric on his knees.