Wise Men: A Novel Page 17

  “Sorry,” Davis said, shaking his head. “I don’t know her.”

  And then I asked him. “Could you ask around for me? I’m looking to talk to her.”

  “What do you want with her?” he asked me, which was, after all, the key question.

  “We used to know each other,” I said, pretending to be interested in this strange charade of a baseball game going on just feet from me. “That’s all.”

  My anxiety about seeing Savannah had become something physical now. Sweat dropped onto my pad. Only when it cramped did I realize I’d been tapping my foot for an hour. Writing felt suddenly oppressive. To fix a grip on my pen was impossible. If the line between insane behavior and plain old stupid behavior involves some small bit of regret, some awareness of one’s own lack of reason, I felt I was hovering at that intersection: afflicted and obsessed and maybe a little creepy, but convinced, nonetheless, that I ought to be here. Savannah was here in Iowa. I knew it. I was sure she was here. If her father was here, she’d be close by. I felt this the way that someone who wakes at night to see their candlesticks moving believes in their heart that a ghost is in their room, the way that my father believed that the crash of Boston Airways had been his fate. I’d looked for her name on so many hundreds of dispatches from the AP wire. And now I was looking at her father. She was here.

  Eventually, Davis pointed out, to a bright red spot along the center-field fence. “See that?” he asked. “That’s Lauren.”

  “That’s your girl?”

  He winced. “Right.”

  “She’s pretty,” I said.

  “Too pretty.”

  “No one’s too pretty.”

  “That’s crap. You sound like my mom.”

  “You’re mom’s probably right.”

  “She’s miles out of my league.”

  I squinted. “Does she know you exist?”

  He laughed. “Sure. But I’m kind of hoping for a little bit more than that.”

  “Go talk to her,” I said. She was standing behind the fence, clapping. She was cheering, I noticed, for Charles.

  “See: that’s the problem.”

  “Can’t talk to her?”

  He shook his head. “No. I get all clammed up.”

  “I was like that,” I said.

  “She’s got this messed-up father. Everybody in town knows it.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Drinks. Gambles. You name it. I want to do something, but I don’t know how to go about bringing it up.”

  For a moment I thought of telling Davis about my own father, but instead we both watched Charles mow down two more guys—both firemen, both huge, each of whom swung like his life depended on it.

  “I guess we should’ve believed Slim,” Davis said.

  “Window goes back up. Everybody’s happy.”

  Davis was lost, though, his attention redirected, as if by a magnet, to Lauren’s position along the center-field fence. Her hair, caught up in some wind, blew up against a billboard for Peterson’s Oil.

  “Go try it out,” I said, nudging my head toward Slim.

  “No way,” he said.

  “Go for it,” I said. “What’s the worst that happens?”

  “I humiliate myself.”

  “It’ll give you something to talk to Lauren about.”

  “True,” he said.

  “So if you humiliate yourself, I don’t see how you’d be in a worse place than you are now.”

  “Also true.”

  “If you hit him—”

  “Oh, I won’t.”

  “Do it. Come on.” I put the ten dollars I owed him flat in his palm. They were my last ten dollars. I closed his fingers around the bill.

  He was opening his band back up when we heard it: the loud thwack of a wooden bat slamming into one of Slim’s pitches. It was a high fly ball, carried far back into the corner near the left-field foul pole. Everyone around us got to their feet to see if it would clear the fence. Sportswriters often call contact like this a towering shot. It’s one of those useless, meaningless aphorisms we all use when we’re lazy. But in this case, because the ball dinged itself against the town’s water tower, the adage became, for the first time in my experience, something true.

  The kid who’d hit it was still standing at home plate. He was young, maybe not sixteen, a dusty Cubs cap pushed back on his head, so that his hair poked out on the back and on the sides. I wondered how it’d happened. Had Charles just gotten tired? Had his age caught up to him? Had his curve failed to break?

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  Davis shook his head. “Somebody who just won a lot of money.”

  He gave me his name, but I didn’t write it down. It didn’t matter, because a moment after the ball landed in the parking lot on the other side of Gaithersburg Grounds, Charles Ewing figured out who I was. I couldn’t say why he hadn’t noticed me the day before when I’d been right in front of him. Maybe it was because he’d been exhausted. Maybe it was because he found it easier to place me now that something terrible had just happened to him. And something terrible had just happened: he’d had the money he needed to fix his window, and now it was gone. I saw the flicker of recognition flash across his face. He ripped his hat off, stepped off the mound, and pointed at me. “What are you doing here?” he yelled. “Can’t you just leave me alone!”

  Four

  “Of course I don’t have five hundred dollars on my own,” Jenny said, coughing into the telephone. “What kind of stupid question is that?”

  It was midnight now, and I was back in my hotel. I’d come straight back here, even though a half dozen people had stopped to tell me that Charles wanted to talk. One man grabbed my shoulder: “Hey, guy… hey, guy, Slim says you two are old acquaintances. Is that true? You? Really? Hey, guy… I’m talking to you. Why are you walking away? Slim says you two need to speak.” But I just kept moving. Whatever hope I’d had that he’d forgiven me had vanished when I’d seen how angry he was.

  There’d been a message from Jenny waiting at reception. CALL HOME, it read, the capitalized letters put there, so said the receptionist, because Jenny had demanded it. Across the line, she sounded as if I’d woken her—drowsy, hoarse, a dry cough snapping at the receiver. “You need to come home,” she’d said. “I’m tired of you being out there. I need my boyfriend home.” But I wanted to know if we had any money. I wanted to help Charles fix his window.

  “What about your paycheck?” I asked. “Have you been paid yet this week?”

  “Not yet, Hilly.”

  “I called my bank,” I offered. “They weren’t any help. I’m already overextended.”

  “You maxed out your credit card? Another one?” she asked me. She’d begun to yell now. “Are you kidding me?”

  “I’m not proud of it.”

  “How does Arthur Wise’s son max out his credit cards? I don’t understand that.”

  “By using them,” I said.

  “Very funny, Hilly. How many is that now? Four?”

  I paused a moment. “Five,” I said.

  “What do you need five hundred dollars for, anyway? I thought you already had your ticket home?”

  “I need the money,” I said. “For incidentals.”

  “Incidentals? What does that mean?”

  “Listen,” I said, sighing into the phone. “Do we have five hundred dollars or not?”

  “What’s happened to you? Are you in prison or something? Do you need a lawyer? Have you been on a bender for the past two days? What happened to my boyfriend? My lovable, normal boyfriend?”

  “I’m in my hotel room,” I said. “Everything is fine. I’m still normal. I just need five hundred dollars.”

  Five hundred dollars would fix the window. He’d never take my money if I tried to give it to him. We were alike in this way. He’d leave that blue tarp up at the diner forever if it meant that he didn’t have to take my money. I understood that. So my plan was to give it to Davis, tell him to give it to Ch
arles, to pretend it was his. Or his father’s. I didn’t want the credit. I just wanted him to have his window back. After that, I was going to go home. Coming here to Ebbington had been a mistake.

  Jenny’s breath through the phone was thin, rushed, suspicious. “What is it? Did you meet somebody else out there? You did, didn’t you? Your father was right.”

  “No,” I said.”I didn’t meet anybody.”

  Before I’d left, we went through our normal routine where she followed me to the cab, even though her hair was wet and tied up behind her head. This was one of the reasons I loved her—she did things like this. She insisted on making our own traditions. She’d put her hands on my cheeks. “Don’t talk to strangers,” she’d tell me. “I’m a full-grown man,” I’d say. “You don’t have anything to worry about.” Then she’d say, “I’m gonna miss you, Hilly. Hurry home.”

  “You want to know something, Hilly?”

  “Please,” I said, exhausted. “What? Tell me.”

  “You know, your dad sent me that cake this morning—” she started.

  “You told me.”

  “He also sent some money. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

  I sighed. “Of course he did.”

  “I didn’t know if I should tell you. But I told him the fridge needed to be replaced. And that the roof was leaking. And he sent the money along with the cake.”

  “Send it back.”

  “I feel like I’m in some bad gangster movie, Hilly. It’s ten thousand dollars,” she said, whispering the amount of money.

  “Oh God.”

  “It’s all in hundred-dollar bills. A hundred hundred-dollar bills. All this money is stressing me out. I keep thinking somebody’s gonna rob me. Like, somebody knows it’s in here somehow, and they’re just gonna come in off the street and hold me hostage and rob me. And I’m having an awful hard time listening to you begging me—me—for five hundred dollars. That’s about what I make in a month, Hilly.”

  “We can’t touch that money. That’s not on the table.”

  “Actually,” she said, laughing, “it’s on our kitchen table right now. I’m looking at it.”

  “What I meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” she said. “But I think you might need to get over yourself.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “It’s not complicated, actually. It’s embarrassing. It’s childish. Here we are, living in this crappy little apartment. And you’ve got millions in the bank. Millions!”

  “It’s not that much,” I said.

  “Actually,” she said, “I did a little digging around.”

  I could hear the shuffling of papers. I thought of what I’d hidden away—photographs of my father and mother; press clippings; letters from Robert; every statement from McKinley & Sons. I kept all of it in a closet inside a locked trunk, one of the few remnants of my old life that I kept around. It was the trunk my mother bought for me when I’d gone off to college. She’d cried when she wrote the check for it, telling me that she found it hard to rationalize the notion that she was paying to have her baby move out on her forever.

  Jenny cleared her throat. “According to the good bankers at McKinley and Sons, you’ve got quite a lot of millions, actually.”

  “I’ve told you. That’s not my money,” I said.

  “The statement has your name on it.”

  “It’s my father’s money.”

  “Mmm,” she said, making with her mouth the most circumspect sound I’d ever heard her make. “I think that’s bullshit.”

  “If I take five hundred dollars, say. Just five hundred. And I spend it. You know what’s gonna happen?” I asked.

  “No, Hilly. Tell me.”

  “My father’s gonna show up. That’s what’s gonna happen.”

  “Oh God. That’s sounds awful. Just awful. He’s just gonna show up. Your dad. Oh no!”

  “He gave you ten thousand dollars in cash. Like in a gangster movie. Just like you said. You don’t find that suspicious?”

  “Honestly, Hilly. It’s one in the morning here. And you’re calling me desperate for five hundred dollars. So, in fact, I think you’re the suspicious one.” Silence. She coughed. From a thousand miles away, I heard a car honk its horn out on Mount Vernon Street. Then I heard the sound of car keys jingling in the phone. “You know what? I’m going to go into the city in the morning. I’m just going to drive to McKinley and Sons, and I’m going to have them wire you the money your father left. ’Cause it’s just sitting there. And, I mean, look at you: you’re in some crappy hotel in Ohio with no money, calling me in the middle of the night.”

  “Iowa,” I said. “I’m not not in Ohio.”

  “I’m tired of this. We don’t need to take all of the money, Hilly. We can even leave most of it. But let’s do the right thing. Let’s take some of it. Let’s get a nice house somewhere. Let’s move on. You and me. Let’s move on with our lives.”

  This startled me. To hear it put this way. Suddenly, it was the truest thing I’d ever heard. I sat quietly for a moment.

  “I’m coming home,” I said.

  “Good,” she said.

  “I miss you. I shouldn’t have come out here. You’re right. There are broken windows in Boston.”

  “And black people,” she said, laughing.

  “It was a mistake. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “I’m still sick, by the way. Thanks for asking,” she said.

  “I’ll take you to the doctor tomorrow afternoon.”

  Behind me, someone was knocking on the door to my hotel room. My credit card, I thought. Not again. In two decades I’d gone from our house on Riverside Drive—all forty-five rooms of it, with our butlers, our chauffeured limousines, our dinners overlooking the Hudson, lobsters and foie gras and porterhouse cuts the size of a small child—to this: having some waiter take kitchen shears to my charge card.

  “Jenny, I’ll call you in the morning, OK? I’ll call you from the airport.”

  “Hilly?” she asked. “What do I do with this money? It’s just sitting here on the table.”

  “Leave it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Leave it and we’ll figure it out together. You and me.”

  Again, someone knocked on the door. This time Jenny heard. “Hilly, who’s at your door? It’s so late!”

  “It’s going to be the hotel clerk cutting up my credit card,” I said, resignation in my voice. “I’m pretty sure that’s who it’s gonna be.”

  “You sure you don’t need me to wire you some of this cash?”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. And then I told her I loved her and hung up the phone. Finally, I thought. She was right. We’d move on. Coming here might have been a mistake, but it was the perfect kind of mistake. The mistake that might finally get Savannah out of my system. Maybe coming here had helped me kick the habit.

  Another knock. I had the door chained. My editor had told me always to chain my door in a hotel because people sometimes forget which room is theirs, and because the last thing you want during the night is some drunk trying to jimmy open your door, convinced that his key is broken and that you’re sleeping in his bed with his wife. I heard noise behind the door. The people at my bank in Beacon Hill must have had a change of heart and denied my extension.

  But when I opened the door, it wasn’t the hotel clerk. And it wasn’t Charles Ewing. I’d had the quick flash that he might have sought me out, however unlikely the possibility. But a young woman was waiting there. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, her voice full, imploring, young. She was the girl Davis had wanted to impress so badly, Lauren Becker. “You’re that reporter guy, right? You’re doing that story on the diner, yeah? The guy from Boston?”

  Lauren was pretty—prettier than in the picture that Davis had shown me. She was seventeen, nearly as tall as I was. She was in a black cable-knit sweater that hung nearly to her knees and that she’d rolled up to her elbows. Her
face was thin, and in the glow of the hallway lamp above us, she seemed unbothered by anything, despite the fact that she was here, and despite the manifold other evidence of what Davis had hinted was a terrible home life: the skin on her fingers was picked bare and red; small iridescent slivers like a musical staff were raised on her left arm, halfway between her wrist and her elbow. This was a decade or two before I’d ever heard of anyone doing this—cutting—and I thought nothing of it. Her eyes were clear. I noticed then that she had a duffel at her feet; blue, canvas, her initials stitched on by hand.

  “I’m sorry to just come up here like this,” she started, her voice quiet. “I didn’t think the guy at the desk would actually give me your room number.”

  “You’re Davis’s girl,” I said.

  This made her frown. “I’m not his girl,” she said. “I’m his friend.”

  I recognized something in Lauren’s posture that I’d had myself since the moment I arrived in Iowa: the silent hope that someone might come out of nowhere and give me what I was looking for. My father had taught me that when someone wanted something from you, their body would always betray their motives. She twitched twice, an uncontrolled pair of little beats of her head, as if to some song playing somewhere. Tap tap. And she kept looking past me, into my hotel room. She couldn’t look me in the eyes.

  “I heard you were looking for Charles’s daughter,” she said, simply. “Davis said something.”

  “I am,” I said. “Do you know her?”

  She nodded. I felt my legs wobble. My conversation with Jenny might as well have been ten years ago.

  “You do?” I managed.

  She bit her lip bashfully. “I do. So, you really want to find her, huh?”

  “I’ve been looking for her,” I said.

  “That’s what Davis said. He said you were asking around. Said you seemed like you really wanted to find her.”

  “I was. But nobody knew her.”

  This didn’t seem to surprise Lauren. “Is she in trouble?”

  “No,” I said. “I used to know her. That’s all. A long time ago.”

  “You’re an old friend?”