Wise Men: A Novel Read online

  “Savannah,” she said. She didn’t look me in the eyes. “It was nice to meet you.” She lowered her head and gave me half of a humiliating curtsy. “Sorry we disturbed your day.”

  My father went off toward the house before the Packard left, Charles backing up down the long drive, his muffler once again scraping the dirt. Savannah had pulled the brim on her hat down on her face. To hide, I figured. At the sight of the car backing up, Lem cried out to my father.

  “It’s Sunday,” he said. “Least you can do is let a man go worship.”

  My father turned, one hand on the handle to the patio door. “Least you can do is shut the fuck up and do what I’m paying you to do. How’s that?”

  I stood for a long while, holding the baseball. Lem eventually took his shears and got onto his knees to begin pruning flowers.

  “Who were those people?” I asked. “Are they family?”

  He rolled his eyes. “I got things to do, Hilly. In case you haven’t heard.”

  “Is she your niece or something? Savannah?”

  He seemed surprised that I knew her name. “Look,” he said, the points of the shears in his hand sharp, new, and polished. It was hot. Already he had sweat on his forehead, perhaps from the weather, perhaps from arguing with my father. He lowered the shears so that they were pointed at me. “I got orders to get back to work. So how about you leave me alone.”

  Four

  Most mornings my father was at his desk by eight. The racket of his Underwood would wake me. He was always typing. A mile down the shore, Robert Ashley was doing the same thing. His house was a twin of ours except that he lacked a telephone connection. Apparently, when the houses were being built, the local telephone company had balked at trying to run a line that far out toward the water. Because of this, dozens of times a day my father called Lem to his office to hand him a sealed envelope, or a stack of papers, or sometimes a box of documents, with the instructions to run it over across the beach to Robert. And Robert did the same, exchanging my father’s papers with a set of his own, so that all during the morning and early afternoon, I could find Lem running their mail back and forth. They typed on carbon paper, so every document existed in double, one for each of their files. For Lem, the trips between the houses weighed twice as much as they should have.

  He took the beach path, which at that point included a boardwalk built from rickety blue planks. When the boardwalk ended there were rocks and sand. The road between our houses was paved, but Lem claimed that it was shorter to go by the beach. He’d make the first of his trips quickly, running down the slope behind our house and off toward Robert’s back door. Lem kept a key to Robert’s house on a ring he had clipped to his belt. He ran because he had other chores to do—he cooked breakfast for my mother, he tended to the gardens, he folded linens, he did our laundry, he cleaned our bathrooms, he straightened our various messes, and he unpacked whatever it was that my mother had bought that week. There were, just in the first month alone, nearly two dozen deliveries: beach furniture, wicker picnic baskets, hats from Paul Stuart, tweed from Oxley & Hawlings, tubes of zinc oxide from Leifbaums, boxes of Florida oranges, insect repellent, English gin, Old Gold cigarettes, crates of Dewar’s, Christofle stemware, and furniture from Florence Knoll. Even though Lem was a very good runner, by late in the afternoon, after he’d done the trip a dozen times, I’d find him exhausted, sweating, crouched at a low crook among the dunes where he thought nobody could see him. I knew that the arrangement made Robert uncomfortable. I’d see him out in the yard, watching Lem run, something close to remorse on his face, a glass of water waiting in his hand. But my father didn’t care whether Lem was tired or whether making a grown man do something so ridiculous was beneath his stature. When I complained to him and said that perhaps Lem might be better off using a car, or at the least a bicycle, my father laughed at me. “First off, Hilly, I offered him the Cadillac. My new Cadillac. And a bicycle. I even offered to buy him a motorcycle. He turned it all down. Says he likes the outdoors. Likes the water.”

  “He was just being nice,” I said. “Obviously he needs something.”

  “Nice? What does that even mean? Either you want a bike or you don’t. It’s not that hard a concept to get.”

  “It’s cruel, making him run like that.”

  “So, you’re telling me I’ve got the one colored boy in all America who can’t manage a simple run, Hilly? Men like him got an engine. Only thing that stops them is their laziness. And that’s congenital, Hilly. It’s my job to get him moving. And if you catch him slacking, it’s your job, too.”

  After a month of watching Lem struggle under my father’s orders, I found myself in such a position. I heard him struggling as he came up the bluff. The last bit near our house was the toughest, purely and steeply uphill. He had a crate in his arms the size of an apple box and, on top of that, a pile of envelopes balanced in two stacks. All of them were emblazoned with the familiar square art deco logo of Wise & Ashley. It was the W that had become so iconic: the two columns on either side, like glass skyscrapers rising, their serifs like balustrades, the connection at the center marked with a barely perceptible pearl.

  Lem glared at me, panting.

  “Hi there,” I offered.

  Another long moment. His eyes on me. I wondered what was darker: his irises or his pupils. I had iced tea beside me. The glass sweated. He’d brewed it that morning. His brow flickered.

  “How about grabbing something,” he said.

  I saw his fingers flex beneath the box.

  “Uh—” I stood up. Instinctively I looked to see if my father was watching me. This was certainly not allowed. Helping Lem. Helping any man like Lem. The curtains at my father’s window stirred in the sea breeze. They were new curtains, of course, bright blue, stitched from fine cotton, ordered from Wanamaker’s or Bloomingdales or Saks. Maybe even from Paris; Printemps. There was the faint murmur of my father’s radio; he listened to the news all afternoon.

  “Just take the box, at least,” he said.

  “You made it all this way,” I said. “It’s just another few steps.”

  “Can I have a sip of your iced tea?” he asked.

  I looked down at my cup. The imprint of my lips was clear on the glass. I hated acting like this.

  “I might be getting sick,” I said. I held it in my hands. “But I guess, if you need it.”

  He turned around toward the house, also trying, it was clear, to see if my father was watching us. Finally, when Lem was content that my father was, as usual, locked in his office, or drunkenly examining all the new things my mother had bought, he dropped everything onto the ground. He put his hands onto his knees.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “Oh, now you’re interested?”

  “I was interested before,” I said.

  “Usually, when someone asks for help, a man gives it.”

  I was quiet. He had the box between his legs. The letters had become shuffled. There were perhaps a dozen of them. Droplets of sweat fell onto the top envelope in a crisp, wet rhythm. That would make my father angry—the sweat, the drops. Lem continued to suck for air. Behind him there were birds out over the water. Far out, there was a lighthouse, visible only on the clearest days. Sun had burned through the clouds in stripes. It was a gorgeous afternoon, and this was a beautiful place to sit to see it; it occurred to me that maybe he took the path by the beach to be closer to it all.

  He arched his back. “Your damn father’s got me running every other minute.”

  I frowned. “Sorry.”

  “He’s trying to kill me.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “No,” Lem said. “He told me. He said: ‘This case is going to get so tough, I might end up killing you before summer’s over.’ ”

  “He was joking,” I said.

  Lem tried to right himself, thought better of it, and clutched again at his knees. “Said he’d need to shoot me if I pulled up limp. Like I’m a goddamned horse.”


  “It’s a joke. Trust me.”

  “Is he watching me? Turn and see. He watching me?”

  I turned. My father’s office window was empty. “No,” I said.

  “All right, then,” he said, looking at his wristwatch, “I’m gonna get a glass of water. Change my shirt. Then I’ll get this to him.”

  “Maybe you should do that after you deliver the letters,” I said.

  He scoffed at me, stood up, and went off toward his apartment, grabbing the box with his hand, and then the letters, his feet heavy on the staircase, the wood creaking beneath him, the entire structure swaying in the light wind.

  “Why are you taking it all upstairs if you have to bring it back down?” I asked.

  He turned and smiled. “Your dad says I’m not supposed to let this out of my sight. He also said he might shoot me. So, you do the math.”

  He moved slowly, hunched, every step an effort. As he got to the top of the staircase, wind blew some of the letters down onto the ground. Lem hadn’t noticed. I went to fetch them. Beside the logo of Wise & Ashley was a simple red stamp: BROOKLYN.

  Brooklyn stood for a case my father and Robert had that year against the New York City Subway System. A man named Rooney had lost his foot on the tracks beneath Flatbush Avenue and was suing the city over what he and my father claimed were dangerous working conditions. The case involved a dump truck’s worth of paperwork, and most if not all of what Lem ferried back and forth that summer were documents my father and Robert called the Brooklyn Pages. Often, he’d call Lem into his office to give him a new stack, and say something like, “Another slim volume to add to the Brooklyn Pages.” By the second week of the summer, the volume of the traffic involving these pages grew. And as I stood that day on the beach, with those envelopes that the wind had blown off Lem’s stack, I worried for him. If any of these envelopes went missing, my father would go ballistic. “Lem!” I yelled, calling up. “You dropped something.”

  I turned to see my father’s window. The shades were pulled.

  “Lem!” I tried again, before climbing up the stairs.

  I went slowly at first, afraid of what I might find, or of what might happen to me if I were found. His apartment was a small space, two wood-paneled rooms, each of them without any furniture aside from a mattress and a row of bookshelves. In neat, orderly piles set up beside his bed, he had his clothing arranged by color. Through the open bathroom door, I could see a duplicate of the uniform my father required, hanging on a hook. In his kitchen, behind a louvered window that looked down onto the yard, he had a row of Christmas cactuses, each of them a different shade of red.

  “Got those in Mexico,” he said, coming up from behind me, seeing that I was captivated by them. “A few years back. Nice, right?”

  I touched my finger to a thin point on the cactus nearest me. “When were you in Mexico?” I asked.

  He smiled. “A few years ago. ’Forty-seven and ’forty-eight. Good country. Big. Hot as hell.”

  “What were you doing there?” I didn’t know how to ask him whether he’d been in Mexico doing what he was doing here, working as another man’s servant, just the way he was for my father, but he seemed to understand this.

  “I’m no professional houseboy, Hilly. If that’s what you’re getting at.”

  I blushed. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You wanted to,” he said. He had on a fresh shirt, white, crisp, the color of a bleached sail, and he buttoned it slowly.

  “I did not,” I said.

  He grinned. “Fine. You were thinking it, though.”

  On the wall beside me was a photograph of two people I assumed were his parents: his elderly mother and father, standing in coveralls against a whitewashed barn, their expressions flat and serious. Tacked above this was a photograph of an older woman, a white woman with white hair, holding a house cat. He pointed at the cat.

  “Recognize her?” he asked.

  I squinted. And then I put my hand over my mouth. “Is it?”

  He nodded. “Name was Ernest,” he said. “Funny name for a girl cat, isn’t it?”

  “Funny name for a cat, period.”

  “Funny lady,” he said.

  “Who is she?”

  He buttoned his shirt, then folded the cuffs up above his elbows. “Lady Henckin,” he said. “She’s who lived here before you. I met her in Mexico. And she brought me here. It’s a long story with a sad ending, so I’ll just cut it right there.”

  “Why’s it sad?”

  He shrugged. “Well, y’all live here now,” he said. “That’s why.”

  I laughed. He was always joking and laughing, and I had simply expected this to be another one of his jokes. But he had begun to lift my father’s box of documents off the ground and had turned to the door when I called him back.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “What now, Hilly? I got things to do. Your daddy probably wants me to go change the oil in his car or something.”

  “Why were you in Mexico? What were you doing there?”

  “I was trying it out,” he said.

  “What do you mean, trying it out? Trying what out? What does that mean?”

  “Trying it out. Seeing if I liked it.”

  “Liked it for what?”

  “For living there. For being someplace else. Other than where I was from.”

  “Which is where?”

  He paused, put the box down. I was exhausting him.

  “Georgia,” he said, slowly. “Macon, Georgia. You heard of it?”

  “Of course,” I said. I pointed at the photograph of the elderly couple. “These your parents?”

  He shook his head. “Grandparents.” I thought he might say something about them, but he wouldn’t even look at their picture.

  “So you were thinking of just moving to Mexico?” I asked. The concept seemed ridiculous.

  “For a minute,” he said, and then he seemed to laugh quietly to himself. “It didn’t last long. Believe it or not, I actually prefer it up here.”

  “Here here?” I asked.

  “Up until a few months ago,” he said, “yes.”

  “Up until a few months ago,” I repeated. “Until we moved here?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What were you really doing in Mexico?” Now that I was in his apartment, I wanted to know more about him. We’d been here a month, and I’d watched him run up and down the beach and do countless errands for my mom and dad. But there was more to him. I knew it. I’d seen it in him when Savannah and Charles Ewing had come by that day, and I saw it now.

  He pointed beyond the bookshelf, to a space on the floor where a large leather portfolio and a smaller black box lay against the wall. They were unmarked, and, like everything in Lem’s apartment, they were immaculately clean.

  “What are they?”

  “My paintings and drawings are inside. Paintings in the portfolio. Drawings in the box.”

  I laughed mockingly. “You paint and draw? That’s what you were doing in Mexico?”

  “Do you ask so many questions because your father’s a lawyer? Or is that just something you do on your own?”

  I went to open it and he stopped me.

  “No,” he said. “You can’t open it.”

  “Why?”

  “The work’s not finished.”

  “So?”

  “A real artist doesn’t show work that’s not finished.”

  “Oh,” I said, laughing. “So you’re a real artist?”

  “Are you being smart?”

  “I just didn’t expect it from you, that’s all.”

  He leered at me. “What’s that’s supposed to mean? I don’t look like a real artist?”

  “I don’t know what a real artist looks like, I guess.”

  “Probably not a man that looks like me, though, right?”

  “Oh, come on. I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, you got my life story now.”

  “So,” I said, “are you any good?”
/>   “Why are you so interested all the sudden? I’ve been here a month with you, and you barely said hello.”

  I could have told him that my father had told me not to have anything to do with him. But I had the sense that Lem already knew this.

  “Just because my father’s the way he is,” I said, letting the thought hang for a moment, “doesn’t mean I can’t be friendly. Or friends.”

  This made him laugh. “All right. Let’s get going, Hilly.” He waved me to the door.

  “No,” I said. “I’d like to see what’s in there. Come on. Please. Show me one. I’m interested.”

  He bit his lip. “I can’t,” he said.

  “I’ll pay you,” I said.

  “You people and your money,” he said.

  “Are you nervous about what I’ll say?”

  “I just don’t do that,” he said.

  “Do what? Show people your paintings?”

  He shifted uneasily. “I’m a perfectionist,” he said.

  “So nobody’s ever seen it?”

  “Lady Henckin did.”

  “She was the only person? You’ve only shown one person?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “That’s crazy! You’re nervous,” I said. “Admit it. Show me. I’ll be nice.”

  He shook his head. “Not gonna happen.”

  “So. What happened to her?” I asked.

  “Cancer. Got her lungs. At least, that’s what I heard.” He touched his hand to his chin. He had the hint of a white beard growing. “One day they left. Changed the locks on me. Then you showed up. That’s basically what happened.”

  “Why’d you show her your paintings and nobody else?”

  “She was nice,” he said, shrugging.

  “I’ll be nice.”

  “You’re not as nice as her.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You wouldn’t give me a sip of your iced tea.”

  I blushed again, but this time, I could tell the effect was more pronounced, an itching redness up from my neck to my brow. Seeing this, Lem cocked his head and winked pitifully at me. “After she died,” he said, “I thought I’d move. Thought I’d go somewhere new. Go to Paris. You ever been there?”