Wise Men: A Novel Read online

  “I’ll look at it when I get home,” I said.

  “Tell that to your crappy fridge. Or that showerhead you bought. Tell that to the crack in the roof that leaks water all over the place.”

  “That,” I said, thinking about the roof, “that’s the landlord’s responsibility.”

  A small, humiliating scoff. “How much, exactly, is a shitload?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He said that you had a shitload of money in that account. He asked me if I knew that.”

  “He did, huh?”

  “He seemed very intent on me knowing that you had a shitload of money.”

  Of course my father would say this to her. To impress the girl I was with.

  “I don’t know how much is in it,” I said.

  “How could you not know?”

  “I’m not interested in his money.”

  “Still. How could you not even know?”

  “I just don’t look. I’m not interested in being rich.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “It’s blood money.”

  “He told me you’d say that.”

  “That’s rich.”

  “No. You’re rich. Somebody else would have sued those airlines, Hilly.”

  “Maybe. But he did. People died and he got rich. There’s no other way to see it.”

  “He seemed to think that you had a good deal of money in that account. He made this whistling sound. I don’t know; when a guy like that whistles at money, I’m inclined to think that means a lot is really a lot. Like, millions.”

  “Well, he made it. He’s fond of the things he makes. Like anybody. You’d whistle at a birdhouse if you made it, if you put it up in the tree and it looked good.”

  “What if I asked you to take the money?” Jenny asked. “What if I demanded that of you?”

  “If I take even a cent, a cent, he’ll expect something from me. He’ll want me to be his little partner in crime.”

  “Crime. That’s ridiculous. You’re acting like a little kid.”

  “It’s true.”

  “When am I going to meet him, Hilly? Two years now, and you haven’t taken me to meet him.”

  “Jenny—”

  “I want to meet him.”

  “Maybe when I get back.”

  “What are you really doing out there, Hilly?”

  “I’m working. I told you. There was a window. A broken window.”

  “There’s no other girl out there?”

  I sat up. “Why would you ask that?”

  “He said that maybe you were going to see another woman.”

  “Who did?”

  “Your papa.”

  I got up. My reflection in the mirror was startling. I’d turned thirty-eight a few months back, and almost on cue I’d started to notice signs of wear: raking arcs at my eyes, some white in my beard. Jenny said it all made me look smart and distinguished, but I knew differently. It was my father’s face. I switched the telephone from my right ear to my left, and suddenly the conversation sounded different; even the sound of my voice seemed pinched, anxious. Did my father know why I’d come here to Iowa?

  “He said that?” I asked. “He said that I was here because of another woman?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, did he, or not?”

  “He implied it.”

  “He’s lying, Jenny. That’s what he does.”

  “If you were—” she was saying. “I mean, if you were there because of some other woman, whoever it was, would you tell me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

  “Are you out there, wherever you are, because you’ve found someone else?” I heard her start to sniffle across the line, and I hoped this was the beginning of a cold and not the beginning of a tantrum. “Seriously?”

  “No. I’m here for work. A man had his window broken by a brick.”

  “If you were lying about this,” she said, “that would be awful. Awful to use a man’s misfortune for your own benefit. And awful to lie to me. It already seems like you keep so much from me.”

  Another glance in the mirror at my guilty, red, stricken face. How had my father known?

  Now Jenny was crying. And for a moment, she put down the telephone on the kitchen counter to fetch a box of tissues. While she was away, I could hear from across the country the muted noise of my apartment: the teakettle brimming, steaming, skittering restlessly on the electric coils of my broken stove; the crackle of the dust-covered needle on my turntable. I had lived there now ten years, the longest I had ever lived anywhere, nearly a full decade longer than I had lived at Bluepoint. From my front steps to Boston Common, it was five minutes on foot; I could get from my bed to home plate at Fenway in twenty. I still liked the city then. Jenny and I went to concerts at the Tea Party: Bowie, dressed up like an alien; T-Rex; Serge Gainsbourg, doing the entirety of Histoire de Melody Nelson. We liked to go to the North End for cannoli and cappuccino. And to the Gardner Museum. Jenny’s favorite painting hung there, Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s Lady in Yellow. It was a simple picture, a woman in evening wear, sitting in a chair, a content expression on her face.

  I could tell she was back on the line because I could hear her small, girlish whimpers.

  “The mail came,” she said.

  “I’ll be home soon,” I said. I sat on the edge of my mattress, kicked off my shoes. “Call my doctor. Don’t call my dad’s doctor.”

  “But there’s stuff for you.”

  “Leave it all on my desk.”

  “There’s a note from him,” she said.

  “Fine. Go ahead,” I said. “Read it.”

  “No,” she said. “I would never read your mail.”

  Again, this made me think of Lem. “No. I want you to. Read it. Just so you know I’m not keeping anything from you.”

  The sound of an envelope tearing. Was this the same sort of envelope my father had used in Bluepoint, with the same logo, the logo I’d seen hidden away on Lem’s desk? I felt my face flush. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my father. Either it had been last Thanksgiving or the Thanksgiving before, and even then it had been unpleasant.

  “OK,” she said. “It’s, like, two paragraphs long. It’s typed.”

  “OK.”

  “You want me to read it to you over the phone? What if there’s something private in there?”

  “Then you’ll know.”

  “It’s just some stuff about the money.”

  “See? It’s always about the money.”

  She began to read.

  There is the matter of your money, which, as you know, is still sitting in that same account with the McKinley boys. I’m fine with it collecting interest, but just know that there are no strings attached. I made it for you, and both your mother and I want you to have an easier life than we did.

  At this, Jenny cleared her throat.

  “Is that it?” I asked quietly. “This is certainly not new.”

  “Maybe you should read the rest when you get home,” she said.

  “Now I’m curious.”

  “Well. Then he says, I don’t know why we can’t seem to make peace, Hilly.”

  “Keep reading,” I said.

  “He says you can come home any time you want. At any moment. No questions asked.”

  “OK. That’s enough. Put it down.”

  “And he says that he loves you. He wrote that. A few times.” I heard her counting. “Ten, actually. He wrote it ten times. Until he ran out of paper.”

  Three

  I ran out of money the next morning. The problem started with breakfast. At a restaurant in town I’d ordered an omelet and coffee, and one of the waiters came over to my table to tell me that my credit card had reached its limit. That I’d found a place in Ebbington to take a credit card at all seemed to me to be a stroke of luck, an omen that my visit here might turn out well. I was off to a poor start. “They’re telling me I need to cut it up,” the waiter said as he h
eld up my card and frowned dramatically. He was whispering across the breakfast counter. “But I don’t like doing that.” I had five cards, and this was the one I thought was the good one. “Let’s pretend I did,” the waiter told me, making a snipping motion with his fingers. “How’s that sound?”

  I kept my money at a small bank in Beacon Hill that advertised good personal service. But when I called over there, I wasn’t met with the kindness they liked to advertise. “Mr. Wise, you can put in an application for an extension of your credit line,” he was telling me, pronouncing the word mister with a drawn-out sense of disappointment, as if my filing such an extension were only a technicality and I had no chance to get any more money from them. “All right,” I said. “Let’s do that. How long does that take?” I could hear his impatient breathing across the line. “Usually a day or so,” he said. “We file it with the main branch. Then we wait for their response. If I get it in before lunch today I can get it back before lunch tomorrow.”

  I sighed. “Expedite it for me. Can you do that?”

  “And why would I do that for you, Mr. Wise? You owe us money.”

  “Because I’m asking you to?” I said, trying to sound as needy as I could. I heard him put the phone down on what must have been the counter. The bank in Beacon Hill still didn’t have the technology to put anybody on hold.

  I was in a telephone booth out on the edge of the hotel’s parking lot. There was a perfectly decent phone in my room, but the sad fact was that I couldn’t afford the charges the call would cost. Jenny worked waiting tables at a French restaurant not far from our apartment. On a good night, she could bring home twenty dollars in tips. With my salary at the paper, we had enough to make our rent every month and to occasionally entertain ourselves on the cheap. But that was about it. A few times over the years, I’d had the opportunity to do something bigger. An article I’d written about redlining in the Chicago suburbs had attracted interest from some editors in New York who wanted me to write a book. But who wanted to write a book? All of that work and effort and privation, so that someone might drop it in the bathtub or leave it at the beach? The truth was that I didn’t want to stop working at the paper. If I did, I couldn’t keep searching through the wire services for Savannah’s name. She’d held me back. I was thirty-eight years old; I had a bad roof, a balky fridge, and five maxed-out credit cards.

  The booth was squalid and hot, and the glass around me had been keyed up and scratched. Everywhere I looked, there were horrible things written. Trucks idled beside me. A wad of gum had been jammed into the loose-change slot. Postcards advertising a strip joint called the Spread Eagle were strewn on the ground. The cord to where the phone book should have been attached was severed and seemed to me like the broken live end of a power line. As I waited, a teenager knocked on the door. I’d thought it was someone waiting for the phone; already a few people had complained that I was hogging the line. The boy had a stack of flyers in his hand. He was young—thirteen or fourteen. At that age I’ve never been able to tell. He had on a cap for the local high school—a blue cap with a big, blocky E sewn onto it.

  “Fund-raiser,” he said. “Five bucks to see if you can hit Slim Ewing.”

  “Is this to help fix Charles’s window?”

  “Charles?” the boy asked. “Who’s Charles? I’m talking Slim. Slim Ewing. Five dollars gets you an at-bat.”

  “How’s it work?” I asked.

  “You hit him, you get all the money in the pot. He gets you, he gets your money. So if you think you really have a chance, go late. When he’s tired. Starts at four,” he said.

  The kid left then, stopping a few steps away to take a loopy practice swing at the air. It looked to me more like a golfer’s swing than a ballplayer’s. I looked down at the flyer. Please come out to help repair Foreman’s Diner. And then, at the bottom: An evening of fun with our local big-leaguer. He shouldn’t have needed to raise money to fix his window. Insurance should have fixed it. If not, he should have had the spare cash to do it. But this was Charles, the same Charles Ewing I’d met in Bluepoint, the same guy I’d seen trying to put a broken fishing rod back together, the guy always looking for a card game, or a risky bet. I thought of Lem at that moment, how he’d told me that Charles was no good.

  Finally, my banker got back on the phone. “We’re prepared to extend you fifty dollars,” he said gruffly. “But this is the last fifty dollars until you start making payments.”

  “Fifty dollars?” I cried. “How about a hundred. Could you possibly, possibly do a hundred?”

  “I’m afraid this isn’t a negotiation, Mr. Wise,” the man said before hanging up on me.

  Fifty dollars settled my tab at the Garden—two nights, one long call to Jenny, tax, my rental and its gasoline, and a copy of the Cedar Rapids Gazette delivered twice to my door—but left me with only ten dollars. I’d already used the twenty I always kept in my wallet for an emergency. Jenny called this my power twenty, to be used only when I was destitute. There’d been a hope that I could get a story from the trip out here and expense the whole thing. But this was too small to make a paper in Boston. Nixon’s FBI wasn’t coming to Ebbington. The Justice Department wasn’t going to investigate a simple shopwindow. There were more pressing matters elsewhere. This wasn’t Birmingham, Alabama, or Detroit in 1967, or Newark, or Washington DC, or Baltimore, or Chicago, or anywhere where people were going to riot. This was Ebbington, Iowa—quiet and green, with corn and soy everywhere. The people here seemed bothered to know that the news had come home, but now that it had, they wanted to forget about it. They wanted all of it gone. I knew this because I’d seen it everywhere I’d gone the last few years. The urgency of the matter had vanished. The young white kids were mad about the war now, or they were still trying to figure out how to design the perfect society, or they were handing out pamphlets for George McGovern, or they’d simply given up on politics and policy and were busy fucking each other and getting high. They certainly weren’t here. My editors would balk if I came back with a story about a rock thrown through a diner window. Jenny was right. There were rocks going through windows in Boston. Who cared about Iowa?

  The plan was to stay one more night. That’s how much I’d given myself. As it was, Jenny wouldn’t let me stay away much longer. She’d called me back an hour after our talk ended last night. “What about your mother?” she’d asked me. “Will you let me meet your mother?” The hour between our conversations had made her furious. At this, I stayed silent.

  I wanted to tell Jenny everything. I wanted to tell her about the summer in Bluepoint, about Jerry Silver coming to recruit my father, about Lem Dawson running up and down the beach, about Lem’s arrest and his murder in prison, about how he’d been killed during visitors’ hours, about how no one seemed to have witnessed the crime, about how I thought my father had had everything to do with it. But Jenny wouldn’t stop. “When was the last time you called your mother?” she asked me. Her own mother was at home in Baltimore, with three sons in Vietnam, so destroyed by anxiety that Jenny claimed she slept only ninety minutes a night. Jenny was constantly taking the bus to see her, bringing her cakes, bringing her jewelry from Filene’s, bringing her makeup and magazines. “Did you even talk to your mother on her birthday this year?” And when I couldn’t tell her the last time we’d spoken, Jenny had hung up on me.

  As I stepped out of the phone booth, another young kid from the local high school stuffed a flyer in my hand, not seeing that I already had one.

  “Come,” the kid said. “Everyone’ll be there. Everyone.”

  Gaithersburg Grounds had been freshly lined that morning. Even though there was no grass, even though the infield and the outfield were indistinguishable from each other, even though the flagpole out in center was bent at the top, as if somebody had tried to hoist up a Cadillac and the thing had buckled under the weight—even though all of this was true, they’d still lined the base paths, the batter’s boxes; they’d hung bunting along the dugout fences, the outf
ield fences; they’d put out new, cushy-looking bases; and for the occasion, they’d built up a small mound for Charles to stand and pitch from, to show all of Ebbington that he still had it, that he could do to them what he’d done to Jackie Robinson. He was going to buckle them, make them fools, hurt their pride. By the time I arrived, the grandstands were full, people standing now on each base path. A few maple leaves, loose from piles raked back off the field, had blown onto the dirt, and a team of boys was running, laughing, trying to bag it all in paper sacks. A wire practice basket stood left of the mound, filled with new baseballs. It was a cool wet day, the air dense with humidity, the exact weather somebody who threw a good curve would pray to have for an exhibition of his talents. A municipal water tower stood fifty yards beyond right field, as tall as an ordinary Manhattan office building, painted the warm cerulean blue of the water in the Mediterranean. Inked onto its front were the words Ebbington, Iowa, and beneath that, Home of the Spartans. If you were to walk beneath it, as I did, waiting for this whole strange afternoon to start, you’d see that the front face of the thing had been dinged hundreds of times, welts like dimples, the paint chipping off the big Roman I in Iowa. Opposite the backstop, at the crest of a steep hill, Ebbington High School stood guard, a big, creepy, gothic building, WPA era, steps and steps and steps leading to an arched doorway, gargoyles perched everywhere like pigeons waiting out bad weather. The kids must come out and play here, I figured: afternoon home-run derby.

  A hundred men had paid five dollars each to try to hit Slim. He’d be something like a human pitching machine; this would be like an evening at the batting cage. The replacement cost for the window at the diner had been estimated at five hundred dollars. This included an identical replication of the hand-lettered welcome sign that had adorned the glass before it’d been destroyed, something of which the town was evidently proud. They hadn’t had any trouble raising the money. I’d learned this from a kid named Davis, to whom I’d promised ten dollars’ worth of fast food to serve as my local stringer. This was a trick I’d learned from a few of my editors. Technically, of course, I couldn’t pay for information. Journalistic ethics prevented me from doing anything like that, even though most everyone I knew did this in some way or another: sweetening your sources, my editor called it. Davis had a taste for a particular pizza shop, where working the register was a particular girl named Lauren Becker, russet haired, freckled in October like it was August and she’d spent the day at the beach. Lauren, it turned out, had a taste for boys who had a taste for things Davis didn’t. He’d shown me a picture he had of her. In it, she wore a navy one-piece and stood in front of a diving quarry. She was gap toothed, cute, probably out of his league. And so for two large pizzas, a bucket’s worth of soda—pop, in his flat local tongue—and my best efforts to tell Lauren Becker that my friend Davis was an indispensable cog in the larger wheel of civil rights, I’d made it his job to stand by my side, to be my gopher, to be my information man. Davis’s dad was a cop in Ebbington, one of the first responders to the whole window thing, as he called it.