Wise Men: A Novel Page 3

  I was left alone in the kitchen with Lem. He’d changed his clothes. He leaned back against the counter, a blue work shirt unbuttoned, a stained white undershirt on underneath, khaki trousers hitched above the ankle, green-and-blue striped socks, a pack of cigarettes in his hand. He had a thin mustache, as delicate as if he’d drawn it with a marker. He saw me, looked down to his hands, and then raised his eyebrows.

  “Your papa let you smoke?” he asked. “Or does he think you’re too young?”

  I shook my head. “No. I probably shouldn’t.”

  Still, he held out the pack for me. I looked out to see if my father was nearby before I grabbed one.

  It was our first conversation. Even then, Lem could see how much sway my father held over me.

  Three

  That first week was brutal, heat in waves from the steel girders on the boat docks, the birds dunking their heads in the onrushing tide to cool themselves. Inside, our new house sweltered. Even with the windows open, we had no relief. My mother grew quickly irritated, first with the heat, and then with the house itself. Having decided that she disliked the furniture that had come with the place—all the wicker and the white wood end tables and the nautical bric-a-brac—she set off for Boston to buy something that fit her style. Whatever that style was; until now she’d never had the money to really know. She’d always loved home decor magazines, collecting them when we lived in New Haven and keeping the pictures she liked in a series of carefully organized paper folders, but our house was nothing like the ones she’d seen in Better Homes and Gardens or House Beautiful, those open rooms full of Tiffany lamps or wax-dripped candelabras. This was rustic. It was spare. Some of the windows were painted shut. The bugs near the sea bothered her. So did the scent of seaweed, and the faint tracks of loose sand that were suddenly everywhere. My father, though, had none of these problems. He’d installed himself in one of the bedrooms on the house’s second floor, a room to which he’d taken so much paperwork, an antique rolltop, an Underwood Universal, and a loud electric fan. He had Lem place a fresh bowl of iced water under the fan every hour. At first my father called him by his name, the way he’d call after a bartender he knew: Mr. Lem Dawson! Mr. Lem Dawson! But on the last day of that week, when we were all waiting around for Robert and my mother to come, he lost his patience. From then on he called Lem Boy!

  Regarding Lem: our first night in the house, my father pulled me aside and told me to stay away from him or, if I couldn’t, to keep to myself around him. I wasn’t supposed to let Lem know anything about us. Not our sudden wealth, not our family history, not our address in New York, not even that we were Jews. He said this to me in the front room. It was dark. My father was drinking. He claimed that he was concerned about his privacy. Bluepoint wasn’t a popular vacation spot for somebody of my father’s new social status, but it made a great deal of sense, he told me, if what you wanted was to be left alone. “You want to be left alone?” I asked him.

  “When I’m here, I don’t want anybody to be able to find me.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because sometimes men just need a place to go. To retreat. To be away. That’s why I bought this place.” He told me that Bluepoint appeared so infrequently, on even good maps, that a man determined to find us might not even be capable of doing so. But I knew that what my father was truly worried about was having someone like Lem, which is to say a Negro, living so near us, carrying with him all of what my father considered to be the various indignities of a man of his race. He didn’t need to tell me that he was worried about being called upon to serve as an attorney for an aggrieved black man; I could see it on him. There was a noticeable hitch in his voice whenever the subject of Lem was raised, a breaking point in his speech, his apprehension becoming clear. My father, for all his apparent gifts, his certain, precise locution, his big, brash voice, his ability to sway a jury, never learned to wear his circumspection well. He believed such a thing—this was his word of choice, and by thing he meant involving himself in any small way in the matters of the struggles of black Americans—was a trap he wouldn’t be able to extricate himself from. He’d said as much to Robert Ashley once, in New Haven, when Robert had wanted to take on a black man as a client. “The last thing I need are these people after me for help. God knows how they are when they know someone’s on their side. Everything’s a fucking church sermon.” Still, he kept him on. My father liked having somebody to do things for him. He liked ordering people around. My father thrived on control.

  For all of his abilities, he had no general skills as a parent—no ability to cook, other than to open a can, something he did with a serviceman’s utility, cleaving the lid whole with the knife he’d been given in the war. And for a while that first week, with my mother in Boston, we subsisted that way, on condensed soup for lunch and dinner, even in the heat, just the way we’d done in New Haven when we couldn’t afford any better. Because of the heat we ate outside at a badly worn picnic table off the patio. It was red as a Radio Flyer, chewed at by wood beetles, flanked only by one bench, so that we had to eat side by side. It was the only time in our life that we did this. Lem offered to make our meals. He was a decent cook, he said, and could make for us food far better than a scalding bowl of tomato broth. “That’s what I’m here for,” he said. To which my father replied: “I haven’t figured out exactly why you’re here.”

  Most of the time we ate in total silence. I tried to talk to him about baseball, about how the Red Sox were faring now that Ted Williams was off in Korea. I even tried to talk to him about what I wanted to study when I went off to Dartmouth in the fall, but he couldn’t be bothered to pay much attention to me. He had other cases coming up, other clients. Planes kept crashing, law suits kept arriving. There was work that needed to be done on the house, on Robert’s house. There were people constantly calling to talk to him, to interview him, to ask him for legal advice. There was my mother to worry about. And there was Lem, always at the edge of our meals, hovering, waiting for my father to give him direction or orders. The tension between all of us—between Lem and my father and me—was clear and uncomfortable. Every meal seemed to make it worse, the quiet between us deepening, Lem watching us in silence from a cinder-block bench he’d fashioned outside the garage.

  This all began to change our second Sunday at Bluepoint. My father was awake earlier than usual. The weather had cooled finally, and fog from the bay had come across to the sea side of the Cape. Robert Ashley was coming that afternoon with my mother. He’d called the night before and suggested that we put some flowers around the place to spruce it up. “That might make Ruthie feel better about all this,” he told my dad. “She might stop saying that you made such a big mistake buying this place.” Early that morning my father walked out into the backyard, up the rickety catwalk staircase that led to Lem Dawson’s apartment, and knocked loudly on his door. He wanted Lem to drive out into town, buy the flowers, come back, and do the plantings. I’d have done it myself if he’d asked. I had my license now, and I was itching for the chance to drive my father’s new Cadillac, or to do anything, really, other than the very little I was doing. Lem answered the door slowly, as if he already knew that his day was about to be ruined. I was down on the yard, watching all of this. It’d taken me a few tries, but I’d finally hung a tire from the backyard poplar. Even though I hadn’t pitched my last season in high school, I still figured I had a decent chance to make the squad at Dartmouth. It was, after all, the Ivy League. How good did I really need to be?

  Lem had music going. Piano, trumpet, an insistent high hat. He was wearing a suit. I heard my father’s voice. “What’s this? Where do you think you’re going?”

  A car pulled up to the house just then. It was a Packard, most of the name carved out over the grille—the second A was missing. Its muffler was dislodged from the undercarriage, and as it slowed to park behind my father’s Cadillac, the bottom end of the car scraped against a high bump in the ground. At the wheel was a black man a
bout Lem’s age but with large, round eyeglasses, a dark suit, and a thin gray tie. Beside him was a young woman in a wide-brimmed white hat. My father grabbed hold of the railing. “What’s the big idea, boy? You throwing a party at my house? You call the whole goddamned NAACP over for a clambake?”

  They got out of the Packard, the young woman shielding her eyes from the sun and then resting her back against the car door, her hands set nervously behind her. She had on a halter-neck dress, red with small white spots, her shoulders bare. My father slapped a closed fist against the banister. Everyone looked up, and I saw the man, his arm on the hood of the Packard, laugh quietly to himself. My father disappeared into Lem’s apartment.

  The man at the Packard scoffed again and then turned his attention to me. “What are you trying to do?” he asked. He adjusted his eyeglasses with the point of his finger.

  “Trying to get it through the tire,” I said, holding up the ball.

  “That’s it?” The man laughed. “That’s not hard.”

  “With a curveball,” I said, trying to make what had been an impossible task sound relatively simple.

  “Might hurt your arm if you do it wrong,” he said, walking toward me. “You know that, don’t you?” He reached out to touch my shoulder slightly, and instinctively, at the glancing contact, I looked up fearfully to see if my father had seen. I was relieved he hadn’t.

  I blew air through my teeth. Of course I’d never heard anything about hurting your arm. I was a hack of a pitcher. Real pitchers were artists. I was the worst kind: a pretender. “I know,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”

  The door to Lem’s apartment was still open. It was clear they were arguing, even though by now my father was making sure to lower his voice. He’d come out onto the landing, looked out at the water, and then turned back to Lem. His fists were clenched, and periodically he pointed down to the flower bed or to the piles of mulch or the back porch, which was strewn with birdseed and leaves. I heard my mother’s name uttered, and then Robert Ashley’s name, and then I saw my father look at his wristwatch, as if to say that there wasn’t much time left in the day before they arrived together.

  I’d made way over to stand beside the girl. She was pretty, and dressed up, and I wanted to talk to her. I’d been out at the beach for a week, basically in the middle of nowhere, with no one to talk to but my dad. She looked about my age, and about as uncomfortable to be here as I did. While I was standing there beside her, the man took our picture with a small camera.

  “Would you put that damn thing away,” she said, shooing him away with her hand.

  “What? You two make a good picture,” he said, smiling.

  She looked at me. “He won this stupid camera playing poker.”

  “Twenty-one,” he said. “Not poker.”

  “Now he’s shooting off pictures every five seconds,” she said. “Thinks he knows what he’s doing with it.”

  “Fine,” he said, putting the camera back inside his car. Then he turned to me. “If we can’t take pictures, let’s see the boy go at it, then.”

  “See what?” I asked.

  “Your curve. Show me what you got.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just practicing.”

  He came and took the ball. “You can’t do it. You’re bluffing me. Let me show you how to do it.”

  “That’s Charles Ewing,” the girl said as he went away. She’d come toward me, walking slowly, just as Charles stalked off with my ball. She seemed less interested in me than she was in the view behind me—the sea, the dunes, a blue tarp the team of carpenters had left on what was to become Robert’s house. After a moment, she sighed, her shoulders rising and then falling. “You never heard of him, have you? Before this minute, you never heard of a guy named Charles Ewing, right?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Thought so,” she said.

  “Should I have heard of him?”

  “You like baseball?”

  I nodded. And then laughed a little. “I love baseball.”

  “Then you ought to know Charles Ewing,” she said. She pursed her lips doubtfully. “According to him, that is.”

  Charles was walking deliberately across the grass. He was, I realized, counting off sixty paces.

  “He’s always trying to prove himself,” she said, snickering. “Even to kids.”

  “I’m not a kid,” I said.

  She looked me up and down. I was in short pants, bare feet; my hair hadn’t been cut in weeks. “You could’ve fooled me,” she said, smiling.

  Although I was usually terrible at this sort of thing, and although it seemed impossible to me, the thought crossed my mind that she might be flirting back at me. “So what? Is he your father or something?” I asked.

  The sun was in her eyes. She put up a hand to shield herself. Her expression was suspicious, her head tilted away from me, an infinitely small calibration of doubt. She smiled in a way that I took to mean that he might have been her father, but even if he was, it was none of my business.

  “You all live here?” she asked, looking beyond me now, out at the water.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “So all of this is yours?”

  I turned. “Not all of it,” I said.

  “But a lot of it?”

  “I guess.”

  “Damn.” A high, long whistle split between her teeth.

  “My father’s a lawyer,” I said.

  “He a lawyer for a president or something?”

  “No,” I said.

  “He famous?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Kind of.”

  “That’s what I heard,” she said. “On the way over here, I heard we were going to see some famous person’s house. That’s why I bought myself a new dress.” She ran her hands down from her neck to her waist like a showroom model. This was supposed to be a joke. I realized this a moment too late, and she smirked dismissively at me. I guess I had overlooked what were obvious signs of wear in her outfit: loose threads, a tiny hole on the hem, a soft, dull stain at her navel. It wasn’t a new dress at all. Her shoes were worn, the buckle on her left foot assisted by twine.

  She pointed down toward Robert’s house. “That your place, also?”

  “That’s my father’s colleague’s house,” I said.

  “He famous, too?”

  “Not as much,” I said.

  Then she whistled again. “Y’all got an entire corner of the world, don’t you?” she said, smiling, her teeth showing finally. Her hair moved—she had it tied behind her with a white ribbon—and when it did I could smell the sugar in her shampoo. “That must be nice.”

  I felt so quickly incapable of moving at the proper speed, or at any speed, really, as if by smiling at me, she’d actually took hold of my ankles or my shoulders. This had happened before, in Wren’s Bridge with Pauline McNamee. After she’d kissed me, I’d just frozen stiff. She’d wanted to kiss me again, had even leaned in to do it, but I couldn’t. I was stuck, in shock. Now it was happening again. She was saying something to me, but I’d missed it. I was thinking about the fact that she was clearly, undoubtedly flirting with me, and that I was clearly flirting with her. Now she’d noticed that I was in a daze, so she repeated what she’d said. “It must be nice to be that rich,” she said. What I wanted to say in response was that two years ago we’d been living in New Haven in four rented rooms; that this, our corner of the world, was so new that I still woke up in the morning thinking I was elsewhere. But I didn’t do anything except blink foolishly at her. She was like a comic-book villain: by looking at me calmly she’d obliterated any trace of my intelligence or charm or wit—really, any trace of my personality.

  Finally, she stepped toward me—a wonderful moment of terror—and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  She pointed behind me, out to where Charles was standing on the grass, tossing the ball in his hand. I was standing between him and the tire.

/>   “You’re in his way,” she whispered.

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” She grinned. She knew I was a wreck. “I think he wants to show you how good he is.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “First thing you want to do,” Charles called out to me, “is disguise the pitch in your hand.”

  “Oh please,” the girl called out. “Stop giving a lecture to the boy.”

  “I got ten that he misses,” I said.

  “He won’t miss,” she said. “Unfortunately for all of us.” And then, to Charles: “You’re a show-off!”

  He turned and scowled. “I’m gonna show him how to throw this thing right. His daddy sure not doing it.” He looked up over his left shoulder at Lem’s apartment. My father was still inside, and periodically the sound of his angry, recriminating, exacting voice came down onto the lawn. At this, Charles let out a burst of cocky laughter, and then, a moment later, he whipped a blazingly paced curveball across the grass, his windup as perfect as an illustration in a textbook, his arms clasped behind his head and then pumping in front of his chest. The kick of his right leg propelled the rest of his body, his chest perpendicular to the ground for the briefest instant. The ball sailed toward the tire—there was never a doubt it wouldn’t ace the thing—with such speed that I took a sharp, shocked breath at the sight of it. And then, just as it seemed the ball had begun to rise a bit high, the speed of its trajectory lifting it on the wind, the pitch broke, just like someone had swatted it out of the air. It was the finest pitch I’d ever witnessed.

  Above us, my father and Lem appeared on the staircase. Now Lem was dressed in his coveralls and his work shoes. Charles saw this and then looked down at his feet before he quickly and wordlessly walked back to the Packard. The girl lingered for a moment, looking out at the water, and then up at Lem with what I knew was an expression of deep disappointment. When she walked past me to get back to the car, I asked her quietly what her name was.