Wise Men: A Novel Read online

  He smiled slightly and nodded. Then he reached in and took the ham into his arm. Wind blew at the ribbon. “Her mother used to tell her we were gonna have a good, proper Christmas together. For once. Eat a ham like that. With the ribbon and everything.”

  In my blind stupidity, I still didn’t understand. I put my hand out and took the ham. “What should I do?”

  Charles looked back at the cabin. We could both hear her crying inside.

  “Go home,” he said. “Forget about us. That’s what you should do.”

  Seven

  When I came back, I went looking for Lem. The party was still going on. I didn’t know whether he was there or not. It was dark now. The only light near our house came from the moon, which was dull, covered by clouds, and which seemed to hang so low that it might as well have been propped up on the lip of our chimney. Far off and across the dunes, Robert’s house was bright still, his dinner party in full swing. I called out for Lem, said his name twice. The air was cool and wet. When I got no response, I walked to the edge of the lawn, put one foot onto the rotted planks where the boardwalk began. I tried again. The side of Robert’s house had two windows, one of which was his kitchen window and was lit now in bright white, as if his new female friend, Emily Baines, had brought with her some capacity to turn his normally dull home—he had a taste for dark brown leather, stained oak, deeply hued Persian rugs—into something stark and new. Even from hundreds of yards away, I could see the figures of my father and Robert and my mother and someone who I figured I was Ms. Baines through this window, drinks in hand, their silhouettes clean, cutout, and recognizable to me. But none of these was Lem’s. I figured that by now my father might have let him off.

  I checked Lem’s apartment, but he wasn’t there. Instead I found a small table covered in paint jars, brushes, rags, two palettes with daubs of dried color. Beside that, a small plate and a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich. Near the window was his kerosene heater. On another table, there were six empty bottles of orange Crush. By his bed, his shoes were aligned perfectly. In the kitchen, his dishes were clean, one new-looking pot hanging from a hook. By the window, he had an illustration of a puppy, torn, I could see, from the Cape Cod Gazette. It was an advertisement: FREE PUPPIES. On it, Lem had written in blue ink: Ask Mr. Wise. Resting against the wall was his leather portfolio and his box of drawings, everything sealed and zippered up, all the art hidden from view. I didn’t dare to open them, even though I knew I could have. Back in his bedroom, I looked at the picture of his grandparents and did some quick math. The picture alone looked twenty years old. Maybe more. And their faces, their wrinkles, the general weariness in their eyes, a certain exhaustion in the way they seemed to be holding their breath, made them seem near seventy. “Ninety years,” I said aloud. Which would have made the year of their birth about 1860. Macon, Georgia; Lincoln’s election year. More than likely they’d been born slaves.

  Eventually I grew bored and left. I took the beach path rather than the road. Down at the water, it was immaculately dark. The moon on the sea did only so much. I walked with my hands up in front of me. I could feel my skin puckering, water spraying me, gulls keening. As I got closer to Robert’s house, I heard music playing, a saxophone and then timpani.

  I knew at his best, Lem could do the trip back and forth from our house to Robert’s in thirteen minutes, and that included whatever time he spent in either house, receiving orders from my father or Robert, taking their parcels, their boxes, their paper folders. Subtracting that dead time, I figured that he could make the trip in six minutes or so. But ten minutes into the walk, I was not even a quarter of the way there. Suddenly I saw how tough this really was, how great an act Lem put on when he came up the hill near our house. The boardwalk beneath my feet betrayed some loose planks. From that point, where the last piece of wood gave way to a series of boulders covered with green algae that looked like the hide of some shelled reptile, I could see only the peak of the roof on Robert’s house. I took off my shoes and walked on the wet sand. I’d worn my best pair to see Savannah. The shore, for a few minutes, was flat and easy, and it was nice to feel my feet in the surf. The tide pulled at my toes. Slowly, my vision adjusted to the darkness. The ground was dappled with newly minted holes where the waves had torn rocks out from the earth and brought them back into the water. I stopped when I came to the dunes. There were two of them, each as tall as a school bus. I turned back. I couldn’t see our house now. Desiccated shells from hermit crabs were everywhere, strewn by the wind and tide. Or perhaps this was just a place they all came to and couldn’t escape. I climbed the first hill slowly, slipping down a few times and succeeding only when I really dug my toes into the ground.

  As I came to the peak, I stopped and sucked for air. I turned back toward our house. Everything was still dark, but now I could see the outline of it, the frame, the general modesty of the whole thing, the basic, crafted simplicity. Really, it was just an average wood house, only right on the ocean. I tried to see it the way my father saw it—as a trophy, as something to show off to his friends. What did the men from Silver & Silver think when they saw it for the first time? Was it impressive? Modest? Shabby? What would President Truman or General Eisenhower think if he came? Or any of the Kennedy boys? Robert had a weather vane bolted to the roof beside his chimney, and I could hear it whirling madly in the breeze. And then I looked down, preparing my route to the bottom of the hill before I crested the next.

  Beneath me, Lem Dawson was sitting against the sand, neatly hidden between both dunes. My father’s leather bag was open across his lap, and he held a ream of papers in his hands. He seemed bewildered by what he was looking at. I was quiet. My breathing was measured, exact. As I watched silently, Lem read. To get enough light he lit matches, burned them down until the flame licked his fingers. I saw him read three or four pieces of paper. He handled each page very carefully, placing it facedown against the briefcase when he was finished. And with every new sheet, he seemed more puzzled.

  Finally, I cleared my throat.

  When he saw me, he flinched and scrambled to his feet, scattering papers and then trying inelegantly to retrieve them. The wind threatened to take them up over the dunes.

  “Damn, Hilly. You scared me.”

  I didn’t answer. He was filing the papers back into my father’s bag, doing it quickly, trying to be discreet, as if I wouldn’t notice. He was terrified that I’d caught him. That was clear.

  “What are you doing all the way out here?” he asked. “Is everything OK? Is something going on at the house?”

  “What’ve you got there?” I asked. “Some mail?”

  “What?” he called out again, clasping the bag shut, looking up to me. “It’s nothing.”

  “Doesn’t look like nothing,” I said, walking down the hill toward him. “I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t be reading those papers, Lem. They don’t belong to you.”

  Lem wiped at his forehead. He looked imploringly at me. “I wasn’t reading anything.”

  “Oh, come on. I’m not stupid. I saw you.”

  “Hilly?” he asked. “Please. You didn’t see. You didn’t see anything.”

  He tried to leave, to walk back toward his apartment. When I reached for the bag, I clipped his back, and he fell awkwardly into the dune, face forward, his nose going into the wet sand before his shoulders and his knees.

  “Just give me the bag,” I said.

  I stood over him. The bag was opened now. I could see the type from my father’s Underwood. His signature flashed at the bottom of one page, looping, jagged, ugly. “This isn’t yours!” I yelled. “This isn’t your job!”

  “Don’t tell on me, Hilly,” he said pitifully. He got up on his knees. He grabbed my foot. “OK? Please don’t tell. I was tired. I was just sitting here. And I got bored. I’ll forget everything I read.”

  He let go of my leg, grabbed the bag, offered it up to me silently. Wind blew at the leather. A page was jutting out of the corner of the bag, crinkled
.

  I started to leave, and he called out for me.

  “Hilly?” he asked.

  I turned. “I don’t even know what to say to you right now, Lem.”

  “We’re friends, right?” he asked. He started to come to me, and I put my hands up. “I’ve been good to you. We’re friends.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve been good to you.”

  I turned my back on Lem and made my way to Robert’s house, shouldering my father’s bag, hurrying away from Lem. I hadn’t expected this—to find him that way, to see him doing something so stupid. And I hadn’t expected to act the way I had. Here was that loyalty again. A moment earlier, I’d been rushing to tell Lem about my visit, to tell him how proud I was of what I’d done. Now this: I didn’t know whether to tell my father or to keep what had just happened a secret. When I got to Robert’s, I saw that everyone was out on the front patio, so I let myself in to the living room through the back door. Robert was the first person I knew to own a television. He liked everything loud, and when I turned on the set, the ball game came across the line with a boom. My father, by that point, was very drunk. It was likely near ten at night, and he’d been drinking since before noon. I could hear him through the walls, and evidently he’d heard me. When he found me, he squinted in my direction rather than looking straight at me. His eyes were very dark. Finally, he straightened himself and pointed to the television. I thought of how Lem had fallen into the wet beach, the way sand had stuck to his face. I had my father’s bag right next to me on the couch.

  “What’s the score?” he asked.

  “Six–two,” I said. I still hadn’t been able to catch my breath. “Red Sox.”

  He seemed to be licking something from the inside of his mouth—a bad taste, some food stuck to his teeth. “OK, good.” Then he laughed. “Or is it good? I forget. Who do you root for now?”

  I looked behind me, worried that Lem might come to the window. “Boston,” I said.

  “Why’s that? You ever even been to Boston?”

  “I don’t know why,” I said. “Ted Williams, maybe.”

  “Does he still play?”

  “Yeah. He does. He’s in Korea, though,” I said.

  My father wrinkled his nose and grunted. “Korea. That’s a shit storm right there.”

  I looked at him. He seemed, impossibly, to be in a kind mood, a rarity these days. “You think I’ll go to Korea?” I asked.

  “Honestly, Hilly, I hope not. You’re a good kid.”

  “Good kids don’t go to war?”

  “Good kids don’t come home from war,” he said.

  “ ’Cause they get killed?”

  He nodded. “That, yes. But also, they just don’t come back the same way.”

  “You fought,” I said. “Is that what happened to you?”

  He let out a short bark of a laugh. “That might be something to have asked my father,” he said. “I can’t answer that for you.”

  He put his hands in his pockets. Then, finally, he saw his leather bag beside me on the sofa. “Hilly”—his voice rising—“what are you doing here?”

  I didn’t have a good answer for this, and I’m sure that my father—my exacting father, on whom nothing was lost—noticed that I was trying to concoct some truth out of thin air. But what he was really asking me, I thought, was why I had his bag with me. I thought of Lem—his pitiful, frightened face.

  “I got tired of waiting around in our house,” I said. “Thought I might watch television.”

  “Where’d you go in the car?” he asked.

  “What car?”

  He sighed. Nothing ever escaped him. “My Cadillac. The car you took tonight.”

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  “Nowhere?”

  “Just to get a burger. And see a movie. Nothing big.”

  “What happened to all the things you had in the car?” he asked.

  “The things?”

  “The junk.”

  I stiffened, sat up on the sofa, nervously fiddled with the buckles on his bag. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “You’re the worst liar I’ve ever seen, Hilly. You’ve been running back and forth to that car all week. You didn’t think I noticed?

  I didn’t know what to say. I saw now how ridiculous I was to think he wouldn’t have seen me. He was looking at his bag. By now, he must have seen that a piece of paper was sticking out from beneath the clasp.

  I touched the bag with my hand. “I thought you might need it,” I said.

  “You got some of the Brooklyn Pages there?” He motioned for it with his head, a small tilt. “Why don’t you give it to me.”

  As he reached for it, my mother came into the room. Unlike my disheveled, drunken father, she still looked coolly elegant, in a black dress and white pearls, carrying a glass of red wine. Behind her, Robert was reaching for her arm. He’d clearly been rushing after her.

  “Arthur,” she said. “Arthur.”

  My father turned to her.

  “Is this true? Is it? Is what Robert just told me, is it true?”

  “What’re you nattering about, Ruthie?”

  Then my mother saw me. In such a short time, she’d become unrecognizable to me. When I was young, we used to listen to music together in the front room of our house in New Haven. She loved Chicago rhythm and blues, and especially the guitar, and we used to root for cloudy days so we might get a stray radio signal bounced our way from the Midwest. She was a terrible dancer, but I loved to watch her dance in our kitchen. She would push aside the tables and the chairs, and she would say, “Look, Hilly, look,” and she would sway her arms and her legs. She was probably making everything up, all the steps, and the dances, and the names that she gave to them. This was ten years ago. It was such a short time in which to have changed so much. Now here she was, all dressed up in pearls. There was music on Robert’s stereo—plinking, tuneless, middling jazz—I knew she would have hated only a few years earlier.

  “Ruthie, please don’t,” Robert was saying.

  “That kind man,” my mother said. “The Irish fellow with the foot. Is it true what Robert just told me?”

  My father smiled. “He doesn’t have a foot, Ruthie. You can’t call him the Irish fellow with the foot if he hasn’t got one.”

  My mother slapped my father’s chest. “Is it true?”

  “The case wasn’t going anywhere,” he said. “So we took the offer.”

  “But, but, but…” My mother searched around for a place to put her wineglass. Behind her, Emily Baines appeared. She was pretty, younger than my mother, supremely uncomfortable. She was wearing a green dress. “But Robert… Robert told me that the offer was garbage. That it was a garbage offer. Isn’t that true, Robert?”

  Robert shook his head and reached for my mother’s arm.

  “Good going, Bob,” my father said.

  “Is it?” my mother asked.

  “It’s a goddamned truckload of money, is what it is. That Irish fellow is gonna be able to buy himself a golden foot if he wants to. Heck, he can buy himself a gold slipper to put his gold foot into.”

  “But Robert said it was garbage. Said you could have won loads more if you went to trial.”

  “You don’t have enough shit?” my father asked. “You’re hurting for more shit to buy?”

  “Not for me,” she said, wounded. “For the Irishman.”

  “He’s gonna be fine,” my father said. “Just fine. The guy’s been living on soda bread and cabbage his whole life. Now he’s gonna have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank.” He wiggled his foot. “He was an idiot in the first place to not hear that train. I mean, who can’t hear a subway car coming?”

  “Arthur, that’s a terrible thing to say,” Robert said.

  “It’s true, Bob,” my father said. “The city’s case was better than ours. I knew it. The union knew it. Our guy was an idiot. I mean—you’ve met him. Tell me he’s not an idiot.”

  “Art,” Robert
cautioned him.

  “The guy brought me a ham.”

  “He didn’t know you don’t eat ham.”

  “He should have.”

  “Did you tell him that you didn’t eat ham?” Robert asked, clearly worried. This was the sort of ridiculous, crazy thing my father always wanted to do, and the sort of thing that was Robert’s job to stop.

  “Of course I did.”

  He shook his head. “You’re kidding me. A fucking ham? That’s why you wanted to stop working on the case and accept the settlement?”

  My father laughed. “Look, at the end of the day, Bob, I don’t see why it’s the city’s responsibility if the guy’s too stupid, or too deaf, or too much of a drunk, to hear a goddamned subway car coming.”

  Robert threw his hands in the air. Hearing my father say this clearly came as a shock to him.

  “But why would you cut the case loose?” my mother persisted.

  “We’ve been on it for too long now, Ruthie. I’m tired of it.” My father looked as though he couldn’t have cared less about the Brooklyn case. “I need to do better work. Bigger work. I’m tired of doing this liberal bullshit.”

  “Then why didn’t you say yes to Jerry Silver?” Robert said.

  My father turned toward Robert.

  “What’s in it for me, Bob?”

  “Money. Isn’t that what you want? That’s what’s in it for you.”

  “It’s not just money,” my father said. “Of course you would think it was about the money.”

  He’d let the word money stretch, adding an extra breath to it, or an emphasis that made everything somehow more sinister than it needed to be. My father looked to me and scoffed. Robert might have saved his life in Cherbourg, might have helped him escape enemy fire, but as a lawyer he was second-rate. This was what my father seemed to be telling me when he scoffed. He expected me to laugh with him, but I stayed quiet.

  “You just didn’t want to be Jerry Silver’s second,” Robert said finally.

  My father nodded. “You’re damn right I didn’t want to be his second. Screw Silver and Silver.”