Wise Men: A Novel Page 2

  “What would you do if, say, you were to have more money than you’d ever thought possible?” He asked me this as we rolled up to the house. My mother was sitting on the front steps in a striped housedress, smoking a cigarette fitted into a short, stubby black holder. More and more, I saw her begin to assume these small affectations of what she believed aristocracy might be like. Being wealthy, I knew even then, was just an idea for her. She’d never known a rich person.

  I shrugged. “I’d buy tickets to some ball games,” I said.

  Beside me, my father tried to suppress his eager joy. “How about a gift, then? If I were to get you a gift. Anything you wanted. Anything. What would it be? Would you like a trip overseas? Or how about a car?”

  He wanted me to go bigger, so I did. “How about a baseball team?” I asked. He laughed. Then I laughed. “You asked me, didn’t you?”

  Robert Ashley came out onto the front steps then. He had a copy of the newspaper in his hands. My father was on the front page, a photograph of his face set beside a picture of that Boston Airways jet. Robert smiled, flashed us a thumbs-up.

  “What’s he so happy about?” I asked.

  “We’re getting close. That’s what.”

  One week later, while I sat through a discussion of John Keats and his tuberculosis, our principal came into my class, whispered something into my teacher’s ear, and then navigated the rows of wooden desks to hand me a small envelope. He had a delirious smile on his face, as if he’d only just finished a laughing fit before coming to find me. The letter was handwritten and had only two words on it: We won! I knew right away what it meant, of course, and because the kid beside me stole the card and passed it around to all my classmates, so did everyone else.

  Hours later, the news had spread, and while I was trying to eat my lunch in the cafeteria, a crowd gathered around me. My name is Hilton Samuel Wise—named after each of my grandfathers—but I have always been known as Hilly. That afternoon in the lunchroom, everyone around me began to clap and say my name—Hilly, Hilly, Hilly—as if I, and not my father, had done something extraordinary. When I left that day, walking the short distance back to our house on Hamilton, I turned at the curb to look back at my classmates, some of them lingering around to watch me go. Pauline McNamee was there, waving. So was Anthony Jackson, the pitcher for the school team whom I’d punched a few weeks earlier. They’d all gathered to see evidence of what had already spread around our school in that cunningly quick way of a good rumor: the Wise family had won.

  In my research, I’ve come across a printed interview from Thanksgiving 1952. I will reproduce its most interesting section below.

  Q: What happens now, Mr. Wise? Will you continue to take on the airline industry?

  A: (Laughter) If they continue to keep me interested.

  Q: Do you think you are the most famous young lawyer in America?

  A: Famous? I don’t know how those things work. Who measures? I’d like to meet this man. Are you him? Are you that man?

  Q: What about the best? Are you the best lawyer in America?

  A: No. Definitely not the best. I didn’t do anything special here. There are men like me in every city. I’m not even close to the best.

  Q: The luckiest?

  A: How about the richest? How’s that? Print that. I’m probably the richest. That’s probably true.

  Between 1948 and 1952, hundreds of airplanes crashed across the globe. Some of these were military aircraft. Some of these were cargo planes, the only passengers onboard the skeleton crew required to bring the jet from one place to another. But a good deal of these were commercial aircrafts carrying innocent, unsuspecting passengers. Out of these disasters, my father became the lead plaintiff’s attorney in a dozen class-action lawsuits similar in design and scope to the one that had ruined Boston Airways. He had found a strategy that worked, and people wanted him on their side. Rather than battle in court with him, the enormous corporate defense firms hired to represent the affected airlines offered settlements as quickly as my father filed suit. They wanted nothing to do with him. The money came fast, and it was huge. We were rich.

  What I remember is the instant accumulation of wealth: overcoats from Harrocourts; shoes from Dunbartons; silk ties from Saks or Bloomingdales; shoes straight from Italy, delivered by parcel; a pashmina from Afghanistan for my mother; a walking cane cut from Brazilian wood for my father, something he looked at, laughed at, and then put away until he said he might need it. There were steaks at Honey’s on Fifth; lobster at Nero’s; caviar from Zabar’s in the tin at midnight; spaghetti and clams at Lucitti’s. There were my mother’s cigarettes from Nat Sherman, arranged in the colors of the rainbow, held in a pewter clapping case. She smoked, always, from violet to red, right to left, like the text of the Torah. There was a silver-plated revolver, bought for my father by Robert, and then a matching one, except in gold, bought for Robert by my father. I remember a leatherbound collection of Heraclitus, Herodotus, Sophocles, in the original Greek. I don’t have a memory for what came when, and to whom it went. But there was more. There were furs, I know, never taken from the box. They were still there twenty years later, sitting in storage in the basement of Bergdorf’s. There was art: Chagall. We are Jews, and so we bought Chagalls. There was jewelry: bracelets fitted with Ethiopian turquoise; diamonds mined from West Africa; hematite strung up on a flossy gold necklace, imported from New South Wales; Chinese jade; pearls pried loose from Bora-Bora oysters; Siberian lapis lazuli; gold-rush nuggets dug from the earth at Mount Shasta and melted into rings.

  There were also houses. First, there was the house on Riverside Drive, which my father allowed my mother to choose: a freestanding beast off 107th Street that had belonged once to a Turkish tobacco magnate—so much white marble; one enormous parlor, fit with a Venetian chandelier; a half-dozen fireplaces; and a limestone patio with a view of the flatlands in Edgewater. My mother thought that corner of Riverside was the prettiest, with the park out front, all of Manhattan to the south, Jersey to the west, and, from the roof, a gray-green hint of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Because of this house, I’m a New Yorker, quick to anger, difficult to shake, able to pass unmarked through a crowd, capable of simultaneously managing a sandwich, the 7 train, and a detective novel. But because of what my father bought next—the big thing, the best thing, my favorite thing, the only thing he ever really demanded we buy—some part of me has always felt most at home in New England. Then, men like my father gave their houses names the way they gave their dogs names, but for whatever reason—ignorance, stubbornness, a rare show of modesty—he never did this. He made the purchase over the telephone, and I remember that when he hung up the receiver, he turned to me, and said, “My grandfather milked cows in the coldest, worst part of Poland, Hilly. Now your grandchildren are going to have their own goddamned piece of the American coastline to call home.” And then he leaned back, took off his glasses, and laughed. He slammed his fist down against the table. It was as if he’d just pulled off a magic trick. “What do you say, Hilly? How do you like that?”

  Two

  The first time we saw the house in Bluepoint my mother screamed. We’d parked in the driveway, the tires loud against the pebbles underneath. She stepped out of the car, looked at the house, the ocean behind it, the white gulls circling overhead. Then she edged her sunglasses down to the point of her nose and let out an astonished yelp. Her reaction delighted my father. He had one foot up on the running board of the car. The engine was still running.

  “Pretty damn good, right, Ruthie?”

  She turned to him, one hand over her mouth. He was beaming. He jumped off the car’s runner. “I knew you’d like it,” he said.

  Bluepoint was a town on the far edge of the flexed arm of Cape Cod, a sanded dot on the map between Wellfleet and Truro. We’d driven up from Wren’s Bridge that morning, making the trip in less than six hours. The house was simple, just a small two-bedroom saltbox. The shingles were stained so that the wood looked wet. T
he front door was red. The grass needed cutting. There were mosquitoes. All in all, it was the sort of house we saw every day in Wren’s Bridge or New Haven, but still, as we stood on the rocky driveway, my mother yelped.

  He turned to me. “What do you think?”

  I shrugged. “Not bad,” I said.

  “Not bad, Hilly? It’s far better than that! It’s a hell of a lot better than not bad!”

  The yard was big enough for a baseball game. This was something I liked about it. The street was quiet but dusty. The air was filled with salt, and the wind had teased my hair up above my head. My father was dressed in what amounted then to his summer uniform: a gray vest, a pair of slacks, and a white oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbow. Except for the vest, I was dressed in exactly the same clothes. It was the end of June 1952, six weeks after the Boston Airways case had closed for good. In a few months, I was supposed to start classes at Dartmouth, and my father was trying to groom me, or train me, or make it so that when I went out into the world with his name, I didn’t embarrass anyone. Dartmouth was something he’d arranged for me. I didn’t have anything close to the grades to get in. But still, he was famous now. He wanted his son in the Ivy League, and that’s where I was going. He’d tried to get me into Yale, to get me back to New Haven, but evidently admissions there had some standards of decency they weren’t willing to compromise.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and led me to the bluffs that sat above the beach. I knew the ocean mostly from New Haven, where Long Island Sound abutted the city, everything gray and unforgiving, the horizon marked by hydroelectric plants. We stood there together for a few moments at the edge of our lawn, where the earth gave way to a slope of loose sand, and then a sharp bluff, and then the Atlantic. He pointed toward a spot down the beach where the grass had been cleared, the ground tilled up. A small white house, very much like ours, sat dappled by sun. “Robert’s going to live there,” he said. He still had his hand on my shoulder, and every few moments he muttered to me, “What do you think of this, son?” I shrugged again. I was seventeen, and I didn’t understand what it meant to own a piece of the beach, the status of it, the way it would make people think of him. If the early part of his life was a battle, this house marked his victory. He wore brow-line eyeglasses then, and I saw him take them off and fold them into his hands and wipe at his eyes.

  At some point a pod of dolphins appeared on the surface of the water, their silver hides emerging in small crescent-shaped ripples. My father slowly put his eyeglasses back onto his face, and then, having straightened them, took a step toward the sea, first testing the firmness of the eroding shoreline with the toe of his loafer and then standing with his head craned forward.

  “They’re not real,” he said, turning to me, grinning, and then laughing. “They can’t be, right, Hilly?”

  “Why wouldn’t they be real?” I answered. “It’s the ocean, isn’t it?”

  “Nah,” he said, shaking his head.

  “They’re clearly real,” I said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He wasn’t listening. He went one step farther out onto the silty ledge. He was afraid the ground would give way, and he reached out for me to steady him. The sea grass came up to his knees. Each of his steps disturbed a cloud of gnats. He peered out. “Nah,” he said, turning to me. “Definitely not real.”

  “Do you think somebody put fake dolphins in the sea—just for you?”

  He smirked. He was putting me on. Every day was a show for him. “It’s pretty, right? I hope you like. I got it for all of us.”

  By then, my attention had shifted to a small two-story garage out behind the house. My father had parked his new Cadillac a few feet from its open mouth. It was a bright day, and I could see inside to the second floor, where a finely dressed black man was standing, watching me as I was watching him. I managed a weak wave, and after a long moment, he waved back.

  My father saw that I was waving.

  “Didn’t think they’d actually do it,” he said. He still seemed giddy from seeing the dolphins.

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “The sellers threw in their boy.”

  “Their what?”

  “Their caretaker,” he said, fluttering his hands in front of himself to indicate that I was supposed to understand that he wasn’t sure which term to use. Servant. Butler. Housekeeper. Valet. He was walking back to the front of the house. Then he looked over to me. “They told me they thought he might move. Also said he might stay. I said, let him stay if he wants to. If he’s good, I’ll take him on. Don’t know how much work he’s gonna get cleaning up after us three, though. But, he’s cheap. And by cheap, I mean very cheap.”

  We came back around to the front of the house, where my mother was still standing beside the car. She had her sandals in her hands. I went ahead to tell her about the dolphins. When I was younger, she used to take me to the aquarium in Mystic. She loved that sort of thing—tapping at the glass to see if the fish would move, hearing small facts about each new species. She’d always seemed so much like a kid when we went to an aquarium or a museum, her curiosity rising up in her. That was the best part of having a young mother: she remembered what it was like to be excited by something new.

  In the sun, wearing a brand-new coat and shoes and jewelry, she seemed so pretty. She’d curled her hair for the drive, and it was still hanging in tight ringlets. That was when I noticed that she’d never stopped screaming; she’d only stopped doing so aloud. Her hand was up against her mouth. What I’d first thought was her happiness—she screamed a little at everything in those early years: a good chocolate cake, a baby in a stroller that smiled at her, every mention of my father in the newspaper—I saw now was actual fear. She lifted her hand to point at the house.

  “What is it?” my father asked. He began to run to her. “Ruthie?”

  I saw it before he did: resting on the window’s ledge, just inside the living room window, was a dead cat. It was a big cat, a fluffy tuxedo cat, obviously a pet, and it had died with its paws against the glass, as if it the poor thing had been trying to push itself out of the house before it lost its struggle. Because we were there, my mother felt the liberty to scream loudly now. “It’s a cat! A house cat!” She stumbled forward and slumped despondently on the hood of the Cadillac.

  My father and I looked nervously at the window. Neither of us was very good with animals, and neither of us wanted to go move a dead cat. This much we could communicate to each other without words.

  “Probably a present from one of my admirers,” my father said finally. “Don’t you think?”

  “What in the hell,” I offered.

  “I can’t believe they left her here,” I heard a man say. He was the black man I’d seen above the garage. He was running toward the house, moving quickly. He was wearing fine gray slacks and a white dress shirt, which he began to unbutton.

  “I told them not to do it,” he said, taking my father’s keys. “I told them I’d find her a home.”

  A few moments later he wrapped his shirt around the cat as a makeshift body bag. It was a Sunday morning, and he was, I realized, dressed for church.

  His name was Lem Dawson. He was a small man, with tiny hands, chewed nails, a corona of white hair from temple to temple, and a hint of the South in his vowels. He was a smoker, and his clothes betrayed this whenever he passed by me. It had been his responsibility to prepare for our visit, and to do so he’d turned the soil in the gardens, putting beach plum into the ground, pink tulips, and white hydrangeas with blossoms as big as softballs. Because the locks had been changed, he said that he hadn’t been able to stock our refrigerator with the jams and freshly prospected littlenecks he said we would love. He said this to us when we met him, his hand out to shake my father’s, an overture my dad refused. “What’s a littleneck?” my father asked. “Is that a kind of chicken?” My mother refused to shake his hand, too. All she wanted from him was that he check the house twice over for any other abandon
ed house pets. “Please,” she said, still quivering. “Make sure it’s clear.”

  The house itself was spare, white, the floorboards bleached, the back windows open to the water. Salt air in the kitchen. Twin wicker settees in the living room, a shipman’s lanterns on a side table, a tide chart, two years old, folded on the lip of a broken radiator like a road map. We went back into the kitchen, where my father stood, one hand on the stove’s handle, one on his belt, breathing vigorously, his nostrils flared. “I really like this house,” he said, and then he took his shoes off, and then his socks. He rolled his pants up above his knees while both Lem Dawson and I stood and watched, and then he walked out through the back door, leaving it open, his feet in the high grass, mosquitoes buzzing as he went. I saw him stand out on the shore for a while, looking blankly at the sea before he disappeared down to the beach.

  My mother was on the telephone with Robert, who had stayed behind in New York to close up the rented houses in Wren’s Bridge, and who was planning to come north the following week, carrying with him everything my mother had just bought for our new home: French linens, new breakfast china, the paperback romance novels that she would love no matter her level of wealth, and all the heaps of beach clothing she’d picked out from Abercrombie & Fitch. I could hear her in the hallway off the kitchen. “It’s fine here,” she was saying. “But it’s in the middle of nowhere. I told him we should go to the Catskills. That’s where everyone else is. Arthur thinks he knows everything. Oh, Robert, I’m bored already. And there was a dead cat. Have I told you about the cat, yet? Maybe you should send a car for me.”