Wise Men: A Novel Read online

  “Paris?” I asked. “As in Paris, France?”

  He nodded. I blinked. Lem lit a cigarette. They were hand rolled and smelled hard and crisp. He offered me one, grinning slyly.

  “Other people are doing it,” he said. “Going to France. People like me.”

  “Is that so?” I asked.

  He stood beside me, nodding and looking out toward the window, full of its usual view: the sky, striated with clouds, bruised blue at its edges; the white dunes; daisies near the porch, planted close to each other, like sisters; paint chipping from the house. The light was on his face, the smoke from his cigarette escaping him slowly.

  “You think you’ll just move out to Paris, be some fancy French painter?” I asked.

  “Sure beats being here, being your father’s carrier pigeon.” He didn’t turn to look at me. “I’d done every sort of job a man can do. Cooked, cleaned, built houses in Atlanta, lugged fruit in California. I shot armadillos for two weeks in Texas. And I like armadillos. But this, Hilly, this is the worst.”

  “Then leave,” I said.

  “Not that easy,” he said. He shook his head. Every word came out slowly. “Not that easy.”

  “He’s gonna get Robert a phone. It’ll get better,” I said.

  “I don’t understand why they don’t just work in the same office,” he said.

  I smiled. “My father hates having people around. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that.”

  He laughed. I looked for a place to ash my cigarette, and he gave me a small dish.

  “Really, though,” I said, “I’m sure Robert will get a phone.”

  Lem narrowed his eyes at me when I said this. “I’ll believe it when I see it, Hilly. Besides. I got a plan. I won’t be here long. I’m getting out. Gotta do what you gotta do. You know?”

  Beneath us, my father walked out onto the deck, a tumbler in his hand. We both watched him. He wore white trousers and a navy collared shirt. It was past noon. He was looking out at the ocean, and the wind was on him; he looked content. Lem grunted. I watched my father a while longer. He squinted out at the water. Ever since Boston Airways, there was always so much trouble in his expression, as if he expected at any moment to have to fight to fend off thieves.

  “I read that your father knows the name of every person in that crash,” Lem said. “Is that true?”

  It surprised me to hear Lem mention the case. I’m not sure why I supposed that he wouldn’t have heard of my father, or why, once we’d move to Bluepoint, Lem wouldn’t have done some of his own research. Especially here. The Boston Airways flight had cascaded right over Cape Cod before it crashed in Rhode Island.

  “That’s probably bullshit,” I said.

  This made him laugh. “You think so?”

  “Half the stuff in those articles people write about him is bullshit,” I said.

  “People say all that money he’s got is nothing but blood money,” Lem said.

  I must have looked blankly at him. “I don’t know if that’s true,” I said. “Someone hired him. He did his job. That’s the system we have.”

  In the window’s reflection I saw Lem raise his eyebrows when I said this. He didn’t want to engage me in an argument any more than I wanted to engage him. He left the room for a moment, to refill his glass or to change his pants, and when he did, I wondered why I’d come to my father’s defense so quickly. This was the way it went between fathers and sons, I figured. No matter the disagreements, no matter the undesirable trace of yourself that you saw in your father, sometimes there was still a pull to loyalty. It was an instinct to unlearn. I could still remember the very beginning of it all, when he’d had me sit down at the kitchen table and look over the blueprints of that jet.

  If I’d wanted to, I could have looked at Lem’s paintings then. The box was sitting there. The portfolio was resting against the wall. The room was empty. But I wouldn’t do it. Instead, I got up to look around his room. Everything seemed assiduously organized: the linens on his bed had been creased with hospital corners; his floors didn’t have any dust; his windows were so perfectly clear that the point at which the glass ended and the outdoors began seemed somehow inexact. I looked at his books. Most of them were books about painters. On a small wooden desk was a pile of writing paper, a black pen, and a rubber stamp, which I turned over. It had his initials, L. D., the letters square, firm, respectable. Beside all of this was an Underwood typewriter, black, fairly new, just like my father’s.

  That was when I saw, at the bottom of a pile of papers at the corner of his desk, beside a small black jewelry case, the clear, unmistakable W in the logo of Wise & Ashley. It was the torn mouth of an envelope, the teeth of the paper calling attention to itself. I looked behind me for Lem, heard him in the kitchen, the water running, a glass chiming, rinsing. Quickly, I pulled at the envelope. Two came with it. Both had already been opened, both were addressed to Robert, both were done so in my father’s drunken, smeared, left-handed penmanship. I looked back again. More water, Lem’s footsteps, the sound of a dish towel coming off cheap plastic rollers. So gently, I puckered open the envelope. The look of the type from my father’s Underwood was something I knew well. He wore a ribbon down to its last moments, so stingy, even when he was so rich; the sentence was short and the type was faint, streaked.

  I saw only this: By now you know that people are trying to poach me.

  “Hilly,” Lem called out. I dropped the letter. “I gotta get going.”

  Five

  Newsreel footage from the period shows my father with a limp, which is something I don’t remember about him. To see it now raises my suspicions. It’s a stiff-legged thing, his right leg locked at the knee. There were footraces at the North Atlantic Yacht Club most weeks. We joined because my father didn’t have a choice. For a man of his stature, with his money, it would have appeared unseemly to reject their invitations, and my father, if nothing else, had become a slave to social conventions since Boston Airways. (That my father was a Jew and that the club’s unofficial stance toward Jews was not something anyone would consider kosher didn’t seem to matter to him. My father was famous. What club doen’t want a famous member?) Quickly after he joined, they made him governor. The footraces came about spontaneously, usually at the bad end of some drunken bragging. He didn’t always win these races—I have photographs that show, clearly, Robert Ashley besting the field by a good distance—although club journal reports from the time indicate that he did win more than a few. That he could win a race with a bad leg leads me to believe that the limp was something he affected when in the presence of someone truly distinguished. Plainly put: I think he was faking it.

  A short news clip of my father from the summer of 1952 shows him beside an associate of Jack Kennedy, at that time the congressman from Massachusetts’s Tenth District, a district that included the entirety of Cape Cod, a speck of which was our house in Bluepoint. Kennedy, in ’52, was a few months away from running against Henry Cabot Lodge for the commonwealth’s Senate seat and had sent an emissary to curry favor with my father—a needless trip, for my father was a conservative in the most stringent sense: aggressive in his stance toward Communism, aggressive in his stance toward regulations of the market, and aggressive toward what he considered the cowardice of liberalism. This was a secret, of course. My father had become something of a liberal hero since bankrupting Boston Airways, protecting the little guy against huge corporate interests. But to mention Franklin Roosevelt in his presence was to arm my father unnecessarily with an hour’s worth of anger against the man he liked to call the Dictator from Hyde Park. To mention Kennedy—both his father, the ambassador, whom my father tolerated despite his advocacy of European appeasement, and the son, who was considered widely, especially on the Cape, to be a gallavanter—was to see my father at his most gleeful. This, he liked to say, laughing, is what our future opposition looks like. And by this, I think he meant the specter of a young Jack Kennedy: lanky, promiscuous, wildly juvenile.

  In
the clip, my father is joking with someone off camera—my copy of the film doesn’t contain the original sound, just a postproduction voice-over wondering about the congressman’s future plans. My father has a wide, easy smile and is terribly young and, in some ways, very awkward. He’s wearing a brown hat and at a certain point is shown walking beside Kennedy’s guy, limping, his left foot dragging, swinging, landing softly. This is at our home, and there are beauty shots of the sea, the back face of our house, my mother at thirty-five, wearing a white summer dress and a scarf, smiling, waving, playing with someone’s golden Labrador. Everything to her is still new and wonderful.

  My father is on camera, speaking for only a moment. He is walking, limping. This time, it’s his left leg. Asked whether he has any aspirations to seek government office, he answers flatly:

  “The money isn’t anywhere good enough.”

  Interesting to me, though, is a fleeting image of Lem Dawson. With the film strung up on an editing table, it’s possible to slow it enough to see Lem emerging from his apartment door. The camera is panning quickly across the yard, a reporter exclaiming: Saturday saw a visit from the Kennedy camp to the new beach house of New York attorney Arthur Wise. Lem is, for the instant, caught unaware of the scene. He’s in his coveralls and has a straw hat on his head. He seems to be in a rush. He has a stack of letters in his hands. No one had bothered to tell him what was happening that day. This is the only picture of Lem that I know of.

  When the men from Silver & Silver came to Bluepoint that August, I sat on a bank of cinder blocks outside Lem’s apartment to watch their limousines park in the dirt oval by the main house. There were two cars, black, as long as hammerheads, their engines whirring softly before they cut out. My father had told me to get out of the house. “Make yourself sparse, Hilly,” he’d said. He didn’t want me around when these men came inside. But I knew better. He was nervous. Silver & Silver was the largest corporate defense firm in America. Just in the first months since the Boston Airways suit was finalized, they’d negotiated big settlements with my father. They’d come to Bluepoint to woo him to their side. They were tired of losing to him, tired of handing him so much money.

  They’d sent four men to do the recruitment. Each of them was impeccably dressed. They all wore shined oxfords and dark wool suits, despite the heat. And they’d all brought gifts: bottles of whiskey, a crate of cured Providence sausages, a basket of Tallahassee navel oranges, and a bouquet of Dutch ice-hued orchids. My father greeted them warmly. He knew most them from the courtroom. It was always odd to me that, no matter how fiercely they battled, they all got along with one another. Some of it was respect—the way boxers hug after a fight. But some of it was genuine. When I watched my father hug Jerry Silver, and clap him on the back, and show him the house in pretty much the same way he’d shown me the house two months earlier, I could see that he thought of Jerry as his friend. Still, I knew he wasn’t going to take the job. Even though he hadn’t said anything to me, I had the feeling that my father was never going to go work for somebody else. He had everything he wanted now. No matter how much they offered him, they had nothing to offer him.

  I went out to Lem’s apartment, and we shared a cigarette outside on the cinder blocks. From where we were, we could see everybody, but they were too busy looking out at the ocean and the house to notice us. Jerry Silver was the most garrulous of the bunch. It was his father’s firm. He had a dark crew cut and a loud Brooklyn accent.

  “That man’s been shaking your father’s hand for two minutes,” Lem said, laughing into his fist. “He must really want your father to feel appreciated.”

  I nodded. “Smart man.”

  We’d all been warned of their arrival a week earlier. My father had gathered us in the dining room. Robert had wanted my father to turn them away without notice, the same way he’d been ignoring all of the letters that came to our house asking for legal advice. Robert was a true liberal and thought that what the big defense firms did was immoral; part of the crash settlements always involved a refusal to accept blame. But at least some of these men had worked in the highest levels of the government, and most had access to America’s largest corporations—their client lists, their political contacts, their tips about stocks and bonds. It was a delicate balance: he wanted to reject them but have them leave thinking only the best of him.

  While the men met—my father and Robert and the lawyers from Silver & Silver—Lem took me out for a ride in the Cadillac. We left without telling anyone. Lem was allowed to use the car only to do errands like picking up groceries or garden supplies. So long as we came back with a bag of food from the store in Wellfleet, we were fine to take the car anywhere we wanted. I didn’t think much about going with Lem. I think my father would have wanted me to think twice, or to think whatever it was about black people that he thought. But ever since I’d heard that Lem was a painter, ever since I had heard that small part of his life’s story, I thought I knew something about him that nobody else did. I might have even understood him. I thought we might even be friends. So I went. It was easy. I had nothing else to do. I just got in the car, and we were gone.

  Lem seemed apprehensive at first. He was worried, I’m sure, about crashing the car. The roads were slick with sand. But then, on the stretch between Truro and Wellfleet, where the road is flat and the dunes are high and there is the thick, heavy stench of the sea, a curtain of salt and brine, he opened it up, really swelling the engine, the radio going, Big Boy Crudup singing “That’s All Right,” the speedometer rising, the windows down, wind bearing in on my face, and everywhere inside myself I felt the undeniable thrill of speed, speed at its reckless, foolish, idiotic core. After a moment, he slowed down and laughed to himself.

  “It’d be a crime if your father had this car and never once got it going the way it’s supposed to.”

  We emerged near Wellfleet Bay, the grassy swampland scorched by summer, the scaly oaks thin like pencils and filled with squirrels and doves, the roadsides marked every quarter mile by oystermen shucking and polishing and squirting lemon halves. I’d been up and down this road dozens of times since we’d come out to the Cape, but with Lem Dawson everything familiar became new. I sat up in my seat, took a cigarette from the pack of Fatima Golds skittering on the dash, struck a match, and took a searing inhalation.

  In a clipped voice Lem told me we were going to a hotel called the Emerson Oaks. “To see some friends,” he said. And then, forming the most minute, arrogant, amused smile: “You’re gonna have to start getting your own pack soon, Hilly.”

  The Emerson Oaks was a summer resort in a town called Fairmont, fifteen miles inland, neither on the bay nor on the ocean but stuck in the dead-land middle ground of the inner Cape, the very territory my mother had lately begun to call by all sorts of terrible, unfair names. (It’s worth noting that my mother, after only a month, had become nearly unrecognizable in her attempt to appear effortlessly rich. The scorn of being seen as nouveau riche, with all its attendant foolishness, its gauche sensibilities, scared my mother, even if she didn’t understand exactly why someone might have these opinions. Her tack was to become overly negative, full of false conviction, and occasionally cruel. Thus, the inner Cape, a perfectly beautiful place, with immaculate lakes and gorgeous dunes—where the Kennedys lived—was suddenly beneath her.)

  The Emerson Oaks wasn’t itself a large hotel, but a series of small cottages set up in the woods and rented out each summer to Boston union men who couldn’t afford a beach house. From the street, I could see only the very top of the crest of the building that housed the Emerson’s dining room. It had a blue roof, an odd choice, peaked like a wizard’s cap, a perfect triangle, under which were four windows paned in squares of eight. A dirt path led us in a winding arc by the cabins, where I saw, in a short span, a man and a woman lying out on their beach towels, a pair of boys snapping each other with a wet wound-up shirt, and a group of teenage girls in canary-colored one-pieces, sitting on the green rotted planks of a picn
ic table, licking vanilla ice cream cones.

  Each cabin had at its back door a small clearing of grass, sun bleached and white as hay. Some residents had brought with them soaking tubs, plastic pools, volleyball nets that sagged in the wet earth or a strong breeze. There were wooden crates out in the high weeds, filled with ice and long-necked beers, and there were smothered campfires, still smoldering hours after day had broken. The cabins themselves were small, shuttered with black planks of louvered maple, their roofs made from pitched plywood affixed with cheap stick-on shingles painted to look like brickwork. We drove slowly. The ground had been paved once but was worn now, the drive nothing but huge lumps of loose concrete interspersed with windblown beach sand. I had my arm out the window. It felt good to be away from home, to be out exploring. The stereo was on low, a man’s deep voice advertising a Kenmore air conditioner. I could hear kids out on the grounds but couldn’t see them. Between each cabin there were a few trees, the trunks as tall as buildings, packed so tightly that little light came through and hit the ground. Everywhere there were pine needles as sharp as knives, so hard and brittle and cooked from the sun that as we drove, the loudest sound was the noise they made when our tires rolled over them. There was a man-made lake with a sad, halting fountain at its center, the water spurting rhythmically from its spout. On the water there were docks shaped like Ys.

  I worried that Lem was lost. The car was moving as slowly as possible without the engine stalling. He had himself perched over the wheel. By now, the pines outnumbered the cabins, and the buildings we passed were badly worn, clearly empty, badly neglected. A spider’s web—so intricate, so enormous, so ingeniously erected—stretched across the entryway of one cabin, spanning a big red Dutch door. I could see it briefly as we passed, when the light was perfect, the thread clear for only an instant: fleeting, flossy, brilliant.