Wise Men: A Novel Read online

  “You know where we’re going?” I asked.

  “It’s the last one,” Lem said. “That’s where we’re going.”

  I’d thought that the road we were on was a big circle, but instead I saw that it was a long and curving dead end. Its last structure—a tiny white cabin without a roof, without glass in two of its four windows, and with a piece of plywood in place of a front door—was the one we’d been looking for. The roof looked as if it had been blown off. Where it should have been, only a loose blue tarp hung, secured to the frame of the cabin by what seemed like tabletop vises. There were shingles in the grass, and shingles resting on a stack of lobster traps as high as a tall man, and shingles strewn across the road. A rusted Ford the color of a cranberry sat on blocks, its tires scattered on the lawn, awaiting some inventive use.

  “You wait here,” Lem said to me, cutting the engine. He looked at me, perhaps trying to see whether I was frightened by the poverty. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t always been the person I was now, dressed in silly madras shorts and a collared Brooks Brothers shirt. Being poor isn’t something to be proud of, but I hated to be misunderstood. And it seemed somehow worse to be looked at as a rich guy, effete, lazy, incapable of anything, rather than as a poor guy, which was what I’d been most of my life. Lem got out of the car, leaving behind his cigarettes. I stayed behind, edged myself up in my seat to get a better look. The front steps, I noticed, were resting in the pine needles beside the lobster traps. Close by was a bucketful of nails. I’d been wrong: the house hadn’t been wrecked or blown apart; it had never been finished.

  Savannah answered the door. It had been a month since we’d met; she seemed younger somehow. Her hair was done up in braids, and she wore blue jeans cut off above the knee, no socks, a white T-shirt with a red smear across the chest that I figured must have been paint or nail polish or maybe lipstick. In the sun, she was black, very black, darker than Lem by several shades. She smiled. Her teeth were perfectly straight. Her relief at seeing him was so clear that I felt it nearly ten yards away. I opened the car door to join them. She sighed when she saw me. I couldn’t tell if she was glad to see me or annoyed.

  “I came to check on you,” Lem said.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “You don’t need to come look in on me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. There was a radio on in the cabin, the signal not quite full. Her right knee had a bandage across its center. It was your standard adhesive bandage, peachy-cream in color, but on her it was so garish, so mismatched. She looked over at me then, seeing that I was staring. She was effortlessly pretty.

  “Why are you here?” she asked me.

  “He’s my friend,” Lem said.

  “Your friend, or your little boss?” she said.

  “You know who he is,” Lem said quietly.

  She smiled at me, raised her hand, and then affected an English accent. “I apologize I don’t have tea and biscuits to offer.”

  “Come on now,” Lem said.

  “He do whatever you order him to do?” she asked me.

  I stiffened. “I’m not his boss,” I said.

  “Quit it,” Lem said.

  “I’m fine, Lem,” she said, softer now, urgent. “Now get on and go.”

  “Where’s your dad at?” he asked.

  “He’s out.”

  “He was out last time.”

  “He’s always out. What’s new.” She put her hand on her hip.

  Because the front step was missing, there was a gap between where Savannah stood and where we stood, an effect that made her a good deal taller than us. Inside, three buckets sat in a row on the floor directly behind her, blue, plastic, the sort you bought filled with nails at a hardware store. Lem took a step forward.

  “I thought you got the plumbing fixed,” he said.

  She sighed. “It was fixed. Now it’s broken.”

  “You need to call the landlord.”

  “The landlord knows how we live.”

  “What about the roof?” he asked.

  “It’s nice at night,” she said, looking up. “You can kind of see the stars through it. It’s like a tent.”

  I laughed at this and immediately felt bad. But Savannah smiled at me in a way that wasn’t unkind. She seemed to me to be making the best of a sorry situation.

  “You need me to call him for you?” Lem asked.

  “This place is perfectly fine for us,” she said. “We all don’t need a house by the ocean so we can make pretty pictures.”

  Lem took a step closer. “Can I come in?”

  She blinked twice. Despite her bravado, it seemed clear to me that she wanted him to come in, or for him to take her with us in the Cadillac—she’d looked over at the car a few times now, wondering perhaps if she could stow away in the backseat.

  “Let me up,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  Lem put his hands in his pocket. “Sweetie,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You got food?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You got something to eat?”

  “I told you.”

  “You look skinny.”

  “You look ugly,” she said, her eyes wet.

  “Here,” he said, taking from his pocket an envelope. “Take this. Don’t give it to your pop. This is for you. You got it?”

  She took the envelope. “He gonna find it.”

  “Hide it, then.”

  “He still gonna find it. He got a nose for money.”

  I thought of my father’s unused stuff—his guns, his coin collection, the furniture, the useless jewelry, everything in immaculate shape, still as clean as a whistle. I could sell it.

  “I’m gonna leave now,” Lem said. He looked at his watch. “I gotta get back.”

  “You sure?” she asked, her voice high.

  He reached up and took her hand into his, first his right and her right, and then both of her hands cupped in his, as if they might begin to pray together. “You know I got a telephone now,” he said. “Right?”

  She nodded.

  “I gave you the number, right? You just go to a pay phone. Call me collect.”

  “I got it,” she said.

  “Anything happens,” he said.

  Again, a small nod. She lifted her chin slightly, bravely. Lem let her hands go.

  He turned and went to the car quickly, brushing my shoulder, nearly knocking me over. He was crying, I knew. A small whimper had escaped him. I was left there alone, staring at Savannah, her envelope full of money, her bandaged knee. She looked at me straight for a moment, and for a crazy instant I thought I should reach out for her hands the way Lem had, but she looked away.

  “Come again,” she said cheerfully, stepping back into her house, suddenly covered in shadow, the door shutting.

  We went home the same way we came, this time in silence, the moon beginning to show opposite the sun, both in the sky at once. Rain threatened for a minute, the clouds over the sea full and black, and then just as quickly the sky was made clear by the heat. Gulls swarmed. Canada geese, in an arrowhead; one hawk, hunting, floating, and then, as we passed, nose-diving for something: a jet turned down and crashing. Lem drove slowly, both hands on the wheel. Billie Holiday on the car radio, soft, singing “Pennies from Heaven.” He hadn’t said anything since we’d left, and there was little evidence in his expression that anything extraordinary had happened at all.

  “Was that all your money?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Why? You gonna pay me back?”

  “It was a lot of money,” I said, even though there was no way for me to know this aside from the general width of the envelope.

  “You think it’s all the money I got, ’cause I couldn’t have much money, right?”

  “No,” I said. “I just know my father doesn’t pay you much.”

  He laughed, his cigarette bobbing. “You’re right about that.”

  It was near seven at night. The light was
gray now, dim, the air thick with fog, sand blown off the dunes settling on the high grass like snow in summer. The men from Silver & Silver would stay for dinner, I was sure. My father would probably lure them in, allow them to think for a few hours that they had him, that they’d gotten him on their side, before he cut everyone loose. I had begun to figure out the devious designs of my father’s personality: it was a perfect balance to strike, to allow them to think that he’d do it, he’d join them, if only circumstances would allow it. He’d done the same thing to us when we’d moved to Wren’s Bridge, allowing me to think that it was only temporary, that we’d go back home soon, when all along he’d had other ideas. For Silver & Silver, he’d stand at the threshold of the front door, smiling as they climbed back into their limousines, allowing them to think simultaneously, What a good guy, and, What were we thinking, trying to get him to join us?

  “Her dad’s no good,” Lem said abruptly. “There’s not much more to it.” He seemed to want to light another cigarette off the one he’d already lit. Sunlight was in the stubble of his beard. “Her idiot father couldn’t come up with a better name. Just named her after the place she was born.”

  She had seemed so confident that day, I thought, out in her church clothes. Y’all got an entire corner of the world. It stung now to think of it. “How do you know her?” I asked.

  “She’s my niece,” he said. His voice was soft, steely, hopeless. “Her mother was my sister.”

  “Why are they living like that?” I asked.

  He sighed. More birds above us. A man on the shoulder in shorts, walking three retrievers. A group of girls walking to the water at Truro. Lem exhaled loudly. “That’s not really an easy question to answer, Hilly.”

  “She looked like she wanted to come with you. With us.”

  A sharp wince. “I know,” he said.

  I sat up. “Maybe we should go back, Lem. She didn’t have any plumbing. How is that even possible?”

  He put his hand on my forearm, left it there for a moment—a moment of shared contemplation, anxiety, pain—and then took it away.

  “That girl is my business,” he said. “You understand that.”

  “You took with me you. That makes it my business, doesn’t it?”

  “Listen,” he said, his voice rising. “You keep out of my business. I keep out of your business. All right?”

  “What does that even mean?” I replied, my voice rising as well. If he wanted to argue over it, I would argue.

  But Lem merely pointed ahead, through the windshield. We were pulling up to the house then, the bruised sky behind the roof, every lamp on the ground floor turned on, bright, golden. My father and the lawyers were sitting in the front room. Their bodies were dark cutouts against the light. If it had been a secret that we had taken the car, it wasn’t any longer: my father was looking out at us. I couldn’t see the details on his face, the contours of his expression, evidence of his happiness or his displeasure, but I knew it was him. The shape of my father’s body was unmistakable to me, as it is, I imagine, for any son. Lem stopped the car, took the keys into his hand.

  “Don’t tell your father we went to see her,” Lem said.

  “What do I say?” I asked.

  He looked up at the roof of the Cadillac, as if the answer were printed there. “I don’t know. Say I took you to the library.”

  I laughed. My schoolbooks had gone unopened that summer. “He’ll know that’s a lie. We didn’t we get any groceries, either. He’s gonna know something’s up.”

  “Say I took you to the movies.” He was exasperated, nervous now. Maybe it was the notion that my father might not be so happy to have had Lem take his car.

  “What movie?” I asked.

  “Damn it,” he said, turning to me, scowling, his eyes still red from crying. “I don’t fucking care, Hilly. Make something up. Tell your old man I fell asleep. Tell him I’m so tired from picking up after his ass, I fell asleep.”

  He slammed the car door. My father turned, then everyone else turned, and then, so clearly, I could see so many faces, all the lawyers, my mother, in a blue linen shirt, so many eyes tracking Lem’s tall, stooped, nervous body walking across the grass to his apartment. The sound of the door closing had gotten their attention. I stayed in the Cadillac for a while. Lem had left the keys in the ignition, which was something my father liked to do, and I stayed in my seat, the radio tuned to an evening baseball game—Sox, Indians, a repeat of the ’48 pennant. By now, Boston was a ghost of itself, with so many ballplayers off fighting in Korea. I loved to hear Curt Gowdy call the night games. There was something about his voice that always helped put me to sleep. Usually I’d put it on the small radio I had in my bedroom, the speaker right beside my pillow, but tonight, with the lawyers in the house, I had to stay in the car.

  And then my father me woke up, his hand tapping on the glass. I had been dreaming that it was me in that house at Emerson Oaks, and Lem coming to see me. Behind my father, on the front steps, the guys from Silver & Silver were waiting, looking in at me.

  “Get up and say goodbye to our guests,” my father hissed. He was blazingly drunk, one eye larger than the other, a great, frightening smile showing his teeth stained by whiskey and coffee, meat wedged in the crook between his gums and one of his incisors.

  “I fell asleep,” I said stupidly, blinking at my father.

  “No shit you feel asleep,” he said. “Get up and do what I said.”

  “What time is it?” I asked. The radio had gone off-line, just a mess of static. It was dark outside, the moon covered by clouds, the water quiet, great hovering hordes of mosquitoes behind my father’s head.

  “Two,” he said.

  “Two in the morning?”

  My father laughed. “It’s certainly not two in the afternoon, Hilly.”

  I closed my eyes. “I fell asleep,” I said again, and then I shook my head, trying to wake myself. I could smell the afternoon’s cigarette wafting off me—all of Lem’s cigarettes that afternoon—and my father, instantly, could smell it too.

  “You smell like an ashtray,” he said.

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  Behind us, I could hear a big voice, a voice from the Bronx. “This your boy, Wise? Tell him not to be scared of us. Or—no. Tell him we got his phones tapped. Tell him we’ve been listening to his every waking thought.”

  There was raucous, senseless laughter. My father pulled me up by my shirt but did so in such a way that it likely appeared to his visitors, his colleagues, that I’d shot up on my own. I was still growing that summer, caught in the middle of a terrible, uncomfortably late growth spurt that would leave me only a hair’s breadth shorter than Robert Ashley, who was looming behind everyone, still near to the house. I caught his eyes first. He was the only person who still had on his necktie, and he looked a bit sad to be a part of this: the drunkenness, the sad charade of luring these men to Bluepoint. It occurred to me at that moment that Robert hated these men. He thought it was important to defend people who had nothing, who had lost everything. Unlike my father, he saw great honor in that kind of work, not just a quick path to big money. He nodded at me, slightly, and I nodded at him.

  “Hilly,” my father was barking. He had his arm around Jerry. “This is my new friend.”

  “Your new great friend,” the man insisted. “Introduce me properly, Art.”

  “This is Jerry,” my father said. “He’s an important man.”

  “Not as important as your dad here,” Jerry said.

  I shook his hand. “Good to meet you.”

  “You look like your old man,” Jerry said, smiling at me, gripping my hand for too long, just as he’d done to my father hours earlier.

  Jerry wore his hair back across his head, slicked into a wet, oiled sheen. He had a huge forehead, sloping down through his nose, crooked, with a bump like a knuckle. A skinny striped tie looped around his neck, unknotted, blowing in the sea breeze.

  “Your father was telling me all about you
in there,” Jerry said.

  “Is that so?”

  “Says you got a sense of your own purpose in the world,” Jerry said, a line that yielded laughter from my father, and also, I noticed, from Robert Ashley. “Maybe you can work him over. Get him to join up with us. He may not realize it, but we’re the major leagues.”

  “I don’t know how much I can help,” I said. “He’s awful tough to convince.”

  Jerry laughed. “You don’t need to tell me that,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get him signed up all night. Thought if I got him loaded, I’d have a better shot.”

  My father stumbled. What followed was a short, inescapably awkward moment as my father tried to right himself. It was a joke at first, a nod to his lack of sobriety, but then it became grueling to watch—my father stumbling, one knee in the grass, his cap falling off, his hair in his eyes, a line of spittle from his mouth to the lawn. No one went to help him. Perhaps everyone was already too drunk to move. Or perhaps my father had done what he always did, which was to create around himself such an attitude of inapproachability that no one would dare to touch him. My mother stood facing me, her arms crossed against her heart, imperious and matronly. She wanted everyone gone, the evening over, all of us in bed, the next morning to come quickly.

  My father began to laugh at himself, and then everyone began to laugh at him. The noise became so great that the lights went on in Lem Dawson’s apartment, a fact that seemed to delight everyone. The laughter grew raucous. “We’ve woken the Big Black Wolf,” someone said. “Run!”

  Robert Ashley came down off the porch and tried to silence everyone.

  “He’s trying to sleep,” Robert said. “Let the man sleep.”

  More laughter: apparently Robert had become the funniest thing on Cape Cod that evening.

  “Did you hear him?” my father cried. “The black fellow’s trying to sleep! Boo-hoo!”

  Six

  Over those next few days, I began to gather all the surplus that had collected in our house. We’d been at Bluepoint six weeks by then, and already the place was filled with what Robert, with his usual prudent, upright Kansas disdain, called our junk. With my mother out of the house as often as possible, and my father upstairs in his office, I had almost no supervision, and so the task was easy: loaves of white bread, canned preserves, littlenecks, turkey breast, cocoa, boxes of General Mills cereal, Campbell’s, Heinz, Hershey’s, a basket of apples, and a frozen ham sent by my father’s new client in the Brooklyn case, a token of his gratitude. (My father, though eager to renounce all the limits of kosher dining, was still afflicted by a superstitious aversion to pork. The ham had greatly offended him and had become a joke between him and Robert.) The spending at that point had become so reckless that there was no inventory of what was bought and what was consumed and what was wasted. My mother bought things. And then my father bought things. And sometimes they bought the same things. Making a real inventory might have been something Lem could have done if my father hadn’t continued to run him into the ground. Even my mom, whose effort to try to love her life here had so quickly become eclipsed by her boredom, paid no attention to the urgent way I rushed between the pantry and the driveway, loading everything into the backseat and trunk of her Fleetwood. I stole everything. I didn’t care what I took. We didn’t need what I was taking, and someone else did.