Wise Men: A Novel Read online

  “I can’t tell you that, Hilly. You know that.” Then he saw me staring again at his wrist. “You want a watch like this?”

  “That’s OK,” I said.

  “No,” he said, taking off his watch. He put it next to me, on my seat. “It’s yours. I have enough watches. You keep it.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “It’s there. Take it. Leave it. Whichever you want.”

  “Isn’t it expensive? Why would you give me something that expensive?”

  “It’s just money, Hilly. You get it, you spend it. It’s just how it is. You can’t take it with you. It’ll all be yours eventually, anyway.”

  My father’s wealth, I had begun to realize, surpassed what most men considered to be normal. Occasionally, I caught something in his behavior, or in his posture, that seemed to me to be close to shame: shame for his good fortune, or an accumulated shame for the misfortune of others. His childhood had been lived a hair’s breadth above poverty. And now this. At seventeen I wasn’t sure exactly how wealthy we were. All I knew was that we had started off without anything, the three of us happily striving in our bungalow in New Haven, and now I was driving my father’s Cadillac, opening it up on Route 6, the speedometer climbing as effortlessly as the second hand on my father’s new watch. Beneath my feet the car hummed, and when the transmission shifted, I could feel the possibility in the engine.

  We passed by a second set of high, smooth dunes. These were larger and more impressive than the first, and for a brief moment we were alone with them, just our black car and all that sand.

  “It’s like the moon might be,” my father said as we passed. He was squinting out the window. His voice was thin, high, almost wistful, a rarity for him. “Don’t you think?”

  “I’m not sure I know what the moon looks like,” I said.

  He turned to me. I had one hand on the wheel—my right hand—and I had my left knee jutted up in just such a way as to keep us straight. This was how Lem had driven.

  “Two hands, Hilly.”

  “There’s no one on the road,” I said. “It’s empty. It’s just us.”

  “Do what I say,” he told me.

  I put two hands on the wheel. We were headed south, toward the rotary at Orleans.

  “So, what did you think of the way Robert took out your old man?” he asked. “Pretty brutal, huh?”

  “I think he got in some lucky shots,” I said.

  “Nah.” He laughed. He touched a long, rough gash on his cheek. “There’s no luck in doing this to somebody.”

  “It’s gonna scar,” I said.

  “Maybe the women will like it.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “You always want the broads to notice you,” he said.

  “How’d he learn to fight like that?”

  “In the service,” he said.

  “Is that how he saved your life?”

  He nodded. “Something like that.”

  “Why didn’t you take the job with Silver and Silver?” I asked.

  He touched his fingers gingerly to his face. “I’m not talking about that with you, Hilly. That’s none of your business. Frankly, it’s none of anyone’s business right now except Robert’s.”

  “Are you really going to switch sides?”

  “I’m a lawyer. There’s no such thing as a side except for the side I’m on. It’s not a sport.”

  We were passing by a row of closed seafood shacks. There were young men out in the driveways, loading in the morning haul through the kitchen doors. The harbormaster’s truck was parked in the clearing, its bed filled with lobster traps and a stack of wooden clam barrels. I caught my father looking lustily out the window at the trucks and the stacked traps and at a pair of boys out in the grass, taking a hose to the long wooden boiling vats. Just the sight of this seemed to make my father happy, and when he began to interrogate me, he did it with a smile.

  “Last night,” he said. “You went out in the car. You go see that Negro girl?”

  I felt his hand on the back of my headrest. “Who?”

  “That young girl. The pretty colored one. The one that Lem has in his apartment. The one who was here last night?”

  I knew enough about this to lie. “I think you’re still a little drunk.”

  He grinned. “I saw you this morning,” he said. “You were arguing with Lem.”

  “We weren’t arguing. We were talking.”

  “He was pointing at you, Hilly. I saw it.”

  I don’t know how it became clear to me that we weren’t going anywhere in my father’s Fleetwood, but at that moment I knew that he’d given me his car keys so that we could speak freely in that perfect way that an automobile makes possible: we could talk without looking at each other.

  “It wasn’t what it seemed like,” I said.

  “Didn’t he point at you?” he asked.

  “He may have. But we were just talking.”

  “About what, Hilly?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, thinking at that moment of Savannah—her shy wave—and all of Lem’s clothing drying on the line.

  “You were just talking to him,” my father said. “How could you not know what you were talking about?”

  “It was probably about baseball,” I said.

  “That’s what you usually talk about, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “It is. Sometimes. He has a friend who was a ballplayer.”

  “No kidding. Like Jackie Robinson?”

  “Sort of. Actually, he struck out Jackie Robinson. A couple of times.”

  He whistled. “How about that.”

  “That’s probably what we were talking about.”

  “Probably? Hilly, it was only a few minutes ago.” He made a show of consulting his new wristwatch, taking the Cartier off my seat and tapping the glass face of it. “He was pointing his finger at you not even fifteen minutes ago,” he said. “You’re lying to me. Why would you do that, Hilly? What don’t you want to tell me?”

  “I’m being honest,” I said.

  “In my experience, Hilly, whenever someone says that, they’re not being honest. They want you to think that. But it’s a lie.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “You had my bag yesterday. My leather bag. Why’d you have my bag?”

  “Oh, who cares!” I yelled out, into the car. “You lie all the time. You fired your client because of that ham? Like you’re some pious Jew!”

  “What was the girl doing here last night? And where did you go with all that stuff you had piled up in the car last night? All your mother’s clothing? And what was Lem saying to you this morning?”

  My father was a professional. His lack of a reaction to my counterpunch was effortless. All good litigators possessed this trick, I knew. It was an ability to redirect questioning, to take new information and craft a separate and effective line of attack. A great attorney was like a skilled battlefield general: able to survey a huge mess, some unexpected movement, and still make a clean kill. The truth was that if I told my father about Savannah, she’d be the one to suffer. I knew this implicitly. But I also knew—terribly, inevitably—that my father would get me to say something.

  “You know, Hilly, I think we ought to just cut this out, and I think you should tell me what was happening.”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “It’s an impossibility,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “You and that girl.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He frowned. “I know something about it,” he said, and then he coughed. “Impossibilities, that is.” He had both of his hands on his knees. Like he might be sick. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Why are so you convinced that something happened?”

  “He told me, Hilly. That’s why. Lem told me this morning about you and the girl, and I just think we ought to talk about it before someone gets in trouble.”

  “I don’t believ
e you,” I said.

  “Well, he told Robert. But it’s close enough,” he said, and then he laughed to himself. “At some point this morning, Bob saw Lem out in the grass. So they had themselves a chat. Bob’s a pretty nice guy. People tell him things. Lem would never tell me anything.”

  “I know,” I said, bitterly.

  “Show me at least a little respect, Hilly,” he said. “I don’t know why you think I’m some monster.”

  “You made him run up and down the beach all summer like he was a mule! You’re a slave driver!”

  “I didn’t tell him to go that way,” he said. “I offered him a car. I told you that.”

  “You should have made him take a car! You just liked seeing him suffer!”

  “You’re wrong, Hilly. I offered him whatever he needed. I told him all that running was foolish. But he demanded it. He likes the water, he says.”

  His voice was calm, and not wholly unkind, but I was immediately furious—at him, for bringing me out here, for knowing about Savannah. It wasn’t yet noon. The sun was already high, and the air was warm. The roads were empty. “Pull over,” my father said. “Next place it looks good, stop.”

  I wanted to tell him something other than what he knew to be the truth, which was that I had been caught kissing Lem’s niece. I’d thought I would know what he’d say to me when he found out, and what would happen to Savannah, and I’d even thought I would know what awaited Lem because of it all. But I couldn’t have. Being caught with Savannah was one thing. But what I hated most was that Lem Dawson, who had been my friend, and whose reputation and comfort and dignity I’d tried to protect, had been the one to turn me in.

  It seemed so easy.

  “What he told you is a lie,” I said quickly. “I didn’t have anything to do with the girl. He’s trying to get out of what he’s done. He’s the one who’s done something wrong.”

  My father grinned. He was only thirty-five years old. He didn’t have a gray hair on his head. He had rolled down the window to let in some air. That grin: his straight white teeth flashing at me, one of them missing, all of them taunting my surrender.

  “What do you mean, Hilly?” he asked. “What’s he done?”

  “I caught him,” I said. I was looking out through the windshield at a patch of sea grass, still and unwavering, and at a squirrel furrowing around near the road, a nut in its teeth. “I caught Lem. Last night. He was reading your papers. The ones you and Robert send. The Brooklyn Pages. Your work correspondence. I yelled at him. I wanted to tell you, but he wouldn’t let me. That’s why I had your bag.”

  Ten

  Not even three hours later he was gone. It was my mother who told me he was going, but it was my father who went up into his apartment, followed by Robert Ashley, the two of them glum-looking and dressed in black. Behind them were four members of the Massachusetts State Police, guns drawn. By then it was evening, and two lines of cruisers had parked on the front grass, their sirens on, blue light washing and then not and then washing on the side of the house. Rain loomed.

  It would be days before I discovered what the charges were—theft of personal items—and another month before I learned that my father had refused to drop the charges, but I was there, on the lawn, when two troopers took Lem down the catwalk staircase, his arms cuffed behind him, his head down. He was dressed, just as he had been when I’d first seen him, like he was going to church, in dark slacks and a fine white shirt. He didn’t look up to me, not when he passed me, not when I called out to him and tried to block the troopers from arresting him. My father, his face still bruised and swollen, had the officers hold Lem upright so that he could spit at him and punch him twice in the head with his balled fists. He screamed at Lem. Where are the goddamned papers, boy! Lem’s knees buckled at the impact, and then the cops took him away. When the caravan of squad cars left, their lights flashing, sirens coming on, I saw his dark head bobbing in the back window of the last car, a fine silhouette.

  Four months later, he was dead, killed in prison, a knife in the neck. I was at Dartmouth when it happened, but still I blamed myself then, just as I blame myself now. News reports on his death were, predictably, scant. One short mention of it occurred in the police blotter of a paper called the Boston Mission, in print for only three years, during the 1950s: A prisoner named Lemuel H. Dawson was found dead in the visitor’s area of the state penitentiary last night at seven in the evening. Dawson was reportedly stabbed. Authorities say that the room was crowded at the time of his murder. Police believe another inmate was the culprit.

  Right after they took Lem away, my father finally came into the house and looked at me solemnly. “You did the right thing by telling me,” he said. And then Robert, his hands still bruised and wrapped in white bandages, put a soothing arm on my shoulder. “It’s tough, kid. I know,” he said. Then, clearly agitated, he pulled me aside. “We’re missing the Brooklyn Pages. Most of them. Do you know where he might have kept them?” I shook my head. Of course I didn’t.

  For the rest of the summer the apartment sat empty. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would look out at it. He’d lived there for nearly five years before we’d arrived, and so quickly we’d had him put in jail. This, I decided, was the true gift my father had, not a gift for oratory, or for managing the press, but for degrading those who disagreed with him, who crossed him. Lem had left the windows open in his kitchen so that mist from the sea could water his plants. Somehow, this always made me choke up.

  As summer ended, my mother began to talk of her plans for the whole structure—the garage, the back patio, and the living space above it. She wanted to level it, she told me one morning over cold muffins and orange juice. This was the first hint that my parents were going to build something enormous on their land. Of course they wouldn’t just stay in a small cottage. “I’d like a studio to paint in,” she said.

  “But you don’t paint,” I offered. “You’ve never painted. You probably couldn’t even paint a circle.”

  “Well,” she said, breaking open a muffin, “I might start. All sorts of ladies like me paint.”

  “Ladies like you?”

  “Wealthy ladies, Hilly.”

  “Did you know he was a painter?” I asked.

  “Who, Hilly?”

  “Lem?”

  “Mr. Dawson the houseboy? That fellow we had arrested?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Lem the houseboy.”

  “Is that so?” she said, tilting her head backward, as if considering the notion on the face of the clouds. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe that. What makes you say that?”

  “He told me so.”

  “Hilly, you’re just making up stories now.”

  “Why is it so hard to believe?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I just never imagined it.”

  “He painted every day,” I said.

  “He showed you these paintings?”

  “Well, no.” I said.

  “So how do you know if he was telling you the truth?” she asked.

  “He was telling me the truth,” I said.

  “Was this before or after you discovered him with your father’s papers, Hilly?”

  I blushed and got up from my seat. “Let me go get them,” I said. “The paintings up there. I’ll show you.”

  “You can’t go up there!” she cried, reaching across the table to stop me.

  I had been silent on the matter of Lem until now. My complicity in the situation had gone unmentioned since the evening he’d been taken away, when a detective for the state police took a very brief statement from me, in which I merely said that I’d told my father I’d caught Lem reading something that apparently he wasn’t supposed to read. Since then, every mention of him by my parents I answered with a steely sort of silence. At night, when I went to sleep, I tried to imagine him in prison, how much he might be suffering, and then I tried to discover an angle from which I was not guilty for his fate. Of course, I never came up with anything good
to make myself feel better.

  And then, two days before we left Bluepoint for the summer, a team of men came to empty his apartment, lining up all of Lem’s belongings on the lawn: his furniture, his bookshelves, his stacks of detective novels, a paper folder full of photographs, and of course his leather portfolio. It was a slow process, the men combing over every inch of Lem’s belongings. I didn’t know whether they were looking for the Brooklyn Pages or whether they were looking for something good to take home for themselves. When it was done, my father and mother were down the beach, at Robert’s house. Perhaps the sight of a man’s paltry belongings spread out on the grass, so much small stuff under such a big sky, made it clear how foolish we had all acted over someone who really had nothing that we didn’t have in dozens.

  At some point it began to rain, first lightly, and then, hours later, very heavily, so that the ground where the portfolio was resting flooded into small gullies, drenching the bottom of the leather, staining it, and finally toppling it, so that it lay in the mud, its zipper half-open. It was a fine piece of leather, surely expensive. I wondered how he’d afforded it. It was terrible to think of his paintings stained with water. So I went up and got them and brought them into the house. I was afraid of what my father might do if he saw me there, but I had to do it. At that point, I still figured that Lem would eventually get out of jail.

  It took me almost a half hour to reach Savannah and Charles by telephone, and another ten minutes of pleading before they would agree to come. They had every reason to distrust me, something I admitted to them. But it was the paintings that brought them to the beach that last time. “He’ll want them,” I said. “You know he will.”

  When they came, Savannah got out first and went wordlessly to Lem’s belongings, piling up what she could into the trunk. I followed her as she worked, trying to get her to look at me. None of it mattered. At one point, she whipped around and hissed at me. “You my little dog or something? Stop following me. Get. Get, doggy.”

  Savannah took the portfolio from the house, running it to the car. Charles was the one who found the box. I’d forgotten about the box. When I saw it sitting in the mud, so wet, I started to cry. When Charles saw it, he put his hands up against the wood on the side of the garage. His knuckles clenched, and then, slowly, I saw him lower his body, so that his forehead was resting on the top of his knee. His hat fell into the mud, and when he bent to retrieve it, I think he discovered the extent of the damage. He opened the top of the box. He gasped, cried slightly, and tried desperately to dry the top few pieces of paper, taking off his coat and reaching inside the thing to stanch the wet sketches with his jacket. “They’re running,” he cried, turning to Savannah, letting go of the leather. “They’re running!” The wind blew some papers out onto the wet grass. Photographs and sketches and notes streamed out of it, too, everything blown out over the grass and the sea by the wind. I went out onto lawn, determined to help, but Charles stood and put his hand up to stop me.