Wise Men: A Novel Page 9

  “ ’Cause Jerry’s younger than you.”

  “ ’Cause I’m better than him. And because I’m nobody’s second. I have a second. You’re my second.”

  There was a long silence. A window was open to the beach. High in the trees there were crows cawing. My father walked over to a chair and tried to sit. He missed the seat, stumbled for a moment, and put one knee onto the ground, as if he’d decided to stop and pray. Robert took my father’s drink from his hand and poured it into a houseplant.

  “Why don’t you hit the sack, Art?” Robert said.

  “Why’s that?” my father said, turning over, lifting himself into the chair. Then he pitched his voice upward, like he was talking to a baby, or a puppy. “I hurt your feelings, Bobby.”

  “You’re getting unruly. That’s why.”

  “I’m just speaking the truth to God’s ears,” he said, singing the words.

  Robert Ashley laughed at this.

  “What’s so funny, Bob?”

  “You get really stupid when you’re drunk.”

  “How stupid do I get, Bob? Tell me.”

  “Why don’t you just get up and go to bed, huh? Let’s spare the family a big scene.”

  “Why don’t you suck my dick, Bob,” my father said. He started to unzip his fly. “Here. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  All of this shocked me. I tried not to show it. At that moment my mother and Emily began to back into the kitchen. Robert didn’t seem bothered.

  “OK, Art,” he said. “Get up.”

  “Oh, shove off, Bob.”

  “Get up, Art.” Robert said. “You’re going to say something you truly regret.”

  “Oh, I will?”

  “It looks that way,” Robert said. He smiled at my father, which seemed to me to be an impossible gesture of faith in him. “And then where will you be?”

  “I’ll be right over there,” he said, pointing out the window. “In my goddamned fucking chair. In back of my goddamned house. With my little goddamned slice of the ocean to stare at. That’s where I’ll be.”

  “Let’s get you to bed,” Robert said, trying to lift him up.

  “Get your hands off me.”

  “Don’t cause a scene,” Robert said. He said it like a warning.

  “We’re among friends,” my father said. “Just speak your mind. Do you have something you want to tell me, Robert? The boy won’t care.” Now he regarded me. He looked positively threatening, I thought. “You won’t care, will you, Hilly?”

  “I do,” Robert said. “I care. And I want you to get up on your feet and go to bed before we have any more trouble.”

  “You thought they wanted you, didn’t you?” he said. “You did, didn’t you? Is that why you think they came? For you? You didn’t know they were only here for me? You probably had a little speech prepared! Isn’t that rich!”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, Art, that I’m happy doing this kind of work?” he said. “You want to go, go!”

  “Oh, everybody knows you’re upset over it.”

  “I’m fine, Art. If you want to switch sides, go. You want to start fucking the little guy, be my guest.”

  “We’re better than Silver and Silver. I’m better than Silver and Silver. That’s a fact, Bob. I can’t just toss away our reputation because some asshole twerp from some fancy white shoe firm comes over and tries to woo me. It’s a snow job. Didn’t your father ever teach you the difference between a good opportunity and a bunch of bullshit?”

  Robert stood over my father, bent at the waist slightly, like a cocktail waiter expecting to receive another order. They appeared to me as if they might start whispering to one another. My father crossed his legs at the ankle. He had on long white pants and leather loafers, which he wore without socks. He smiled at Robert. It was an ugly smile: a big, mocking thing.

  “Oh, what do you want me from, Bob? I came over to meet your little girl here. She’s awful nice. Awful nice girl. Is that what you want me to say? It’s true. She’s a lovely girl. She’s got on a lovely green dress. Is that good enough?”

  Robert appeared genuinely confused by this. He tried again to lift my dad from his seat.

  “You’d have fucked up whatever case they gave you, Bob,” my father said.

  “OK, Art,” Robert was saying. “That’s enough.”

  “Whatever it was. You’d have ruined it.”

  “Please, Art. Get up.”

  “Jerry wasn’t here for you,” my father said. “He was here for me. Everybody knows that. They were just entertaining you. They were just being polite. Even my dumb nigger knew that.”

  “Hilly,” Robert said, turning to me. “Help me get him up.”

  I stayed where I was. I felt like the whole of the last few years was coming to a head right here in Robert’s living room.

  “I turned them away because I’m going to do what they do, and do it better. Why the hell not?”

  “Because what they do is evil,” Robert said.

  “Evil! Ha! You’re a little boy! Evil!”

  “Art, cut it out.”

  “Fuck you, Bob. How’s that?” My father said it again, slowly, spit flying everywhere. “Fuck you. How’s that sound? That good enough for you? Fuck you.”

  Robert threw the first punch. The punch landed square against my father’s teeth, knocking a slot cleanly out of his smile. (The next morning, Lem Dawson would recover the tooth, wrap it in tissue, and leave it on my father’s desk.)

  My father tried to get up, and when he couldn’t, he called out to me for help.

  “Hilly, get me on my feet,” he yelled.

  I didn’t move. A part of me wanted Robert to tear him apart. My dad looked at me. He was on his side. His face was red. A trickle of blood on the carpet. He said it again.

  “Help me up, Hilly.”

  I backed away. A few minutes ago I’d basically pushed Lem into the sand because I was coming to my father’s defense. Now that it mattered, I found that I couldn’t get involved. I stayed stuck where I was.

  “Damn it, Hilly. Get me up so I can clean his clock.”

  “I’m not getting involved in this,” I managed, finally.

  “Get me up, Hilly. My friend here needs a lesson taught to him.”

  I held my ground. “No.”

  “Hilly, get me up so I can lick him one. Come on, Hilly!”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Now you’re sorry. Now? You’ll be sorry. How’s that? I’ll get myself up. And then you’ll be sorry.”

  But he didn’t get up. Robert pulled him up—and hit him again. Robert seemed to snap at some point. Perhaps it was because for so many years he’d been degraded, his confidence eroded, chipped at, stolen; for years his had been the face in soft focus in the Times, his name an afterthought. I could see the tension welling in Robert’s face, and in his arms. Robert had kept his military physique, something my father had let go by that point, and I was shocked at the speed and the crude force with which he dispatched my father. When my father was finally on his feet he knew what was coming, and for a split instant, standing against the living room wall, a photo of Iwo Jima behind him, he seemed for the first time like a small boy to me: his eyes widened, he tried to put his hands up, and he whimpered.

  There was a series of blows, perhaps six or seven, all of them to the head. Robert had backed my father up into the corner of the room. I remembered at that moment all the stories my father had told me of Robert’s heroism in the war, and I could see evidence, however crudely, of his instincts. I thought of the way I’d tried to beat up that pitcher at Wren’s Bridge High. Robert had my father blocked the way a true fighter traps his opponent against the ropes. His footwork was pristine: he stepped into everything, and he moved so lightly. His punches were exact, crisp, and punishing. My father was likely unconscious by the last of them, although up to that point he’d been merely grinning. It was an odd, sadistic grin, and it sickened me to see it.

  R
obert seemed to realize what he’d done only after my father crumpled to the floor. By then, Lem had appeared to try to end the fighting. He didn’t look at me when he came in. Not once. My father was bleeding from both eyes, his nose, and his lips, and when Robert saw this, he began at first to weep; then he clapped his hands over his mouth in shock, and then—and I will never forget this—he ran away, down the steps, across the patio, and out over the lip of the shore, crying the entire way.

  Later, I brought cotton balls and alcohol from the first aid kit Robert kept in his kitchen to the second-floor bathroom, where my father was seated on the toilet, his shirt off, his face swelled, cuts over both eyes, blood on his pants. He had his army flask on the floor, next to his feet. My mother was crying, pressing a damp washcloth to his wounds. Garbled noises came out of my father’s mouth. He was trying to moan, but it hurt him too much to do it right. His head lolled on his shoulders, and as I stood watching, he rested himself against the tile backsplash.

  The door was ajar slightly. It was a small bathroom, the walls painted a dull, muted orange. All of Robert’s house was dull in this way, as if he wanted nothing to rouse the flat, steady Kansan inside of him. There were two sconces on either side of the sink, the light warm against my parents’ skin. My mother was on the floor. Her black party dress was up over her knees. On the vanity, she’d put all her jewelry—a turquoise necklace, her gold bracelets, earrings, a brooch. The floor was slick with water and hydrogen peroxide. I stood near the door for a moment so they couldn’t see me. My mother’s hands were shaking.

  “Do you need to go to the hospital?” she asked.

  “Wha—?” he asked. His head rested against the tile.

  She asked him again, and once more he didn’t respond. Finally, she screamed at him in a way that he couldn’t ignore, her hands clutching at his cheeks. Only then did he seem alert. No. I hadn’t heard her yell at him like this since I was young, when we were living in New Haven, before we were rich. I turned to leave, clipping my arm against the doorjamb.

  My father turned toward me. “Is that Hilly?” he asked. He tried to get up. My mother put her hand flat against him. “Hilly? Is that you?”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Bring him in here,” he said to my mother.

  “I’m right here,” I said. “Can you see me?”

  “Of course I can’t see you,” he said. “Look at me.”

  With his full attention trained on me, his face—swollen, red, stained with blood—was such a shock that I couldn’t look at him.

  “I brought you alcohol,” I said.

  “A drink?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “The other kind. Rubbing alcohol.”

  He sat forward. He kicked over the flask. Scotch spilled on the floor, on the hem of my mother’s skirt. I held out the alcohol and the cotton balls.

  “Here,” my mother said, reaching. “Give it.”

  My father grabbed the bottle of alcohol. He held it up to his face, trying to read it. His glasses had been ruined.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Did he break anything?”

  “Besides his hand?” my father asked. “I don’t know. I’m gonna shoot him when I’m better.”

  “Art,” my mother said.

  “No. I’m gonna find him and kill him fucking dead. Nobody treats me like that.”

  “He was crying,” I offered.

  “He was crying? Of course he was crying. That figures.”

  To see him this way—shirtless, bloodied, woozy, talking about killing the man who had prevented the Germans from killing him—was as unsurprising as it was terrible. They each had been so silently disappointed in the other for so long: Robert in my father’s spending, the gradual, moneyed shift in character, the notion that he would “switch sides,” and now his abdication of the Brooklyn case; my father in Robert’s modesty, his primness, the idea that beneath his steadfast propriety lay a withering disapproval.

  “Do you want me to do anything?” I asked.

  “When your father calls for your help, you do something,” he said, slowly. He tried to get up. My mother sat him down. “You help him. You always help your father. You always come to him when he needs help.”

  “I didn’t want to get involved,” I said. I put my hands in my pockets.

  “You are involved. You’re my son. Because you’re my son, you’re always involved.”

  “Arthur.” My mother tried to reason.

  “When a man is being pummeled, when he’s being punched, when another man is scratching your father like a girl, you step in,” he said. “That’s your responsibility.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You humiliated me,” he said. “You made me look like a fool, Hilly.”

  “Arthur, leave the boy alone,” my mother said.

  She was on her feet—without shoes, just her pale, ordinary feet, white and freckled beneath Robert’s bathroom lamp. Her dress was wet with my father’s blood, and she didn’t care. This was my mother, I thought, my real mother, the woman from New Haven, the woman who had been cooking and angry when the Boston Airways flight went down. The other woman, the woman who had been a perfect party guest just an hour ago, loaded down with jewels, woozy on gin, was someone who up until now I hadn’t realized was something of a stranger to me.

  “Hilly,” she started to say, “let me deal with this. Let me deal with him. Why don’t you go downstairs, try to find Robert—”

  “Did you like that,” my father asked her, “the way he took it to me? Did ya like that, Ruthie?”

  “Shut up, Art. God, you sound like a monster.”

  “Hilly,” he said, turning back to me. The way his face was damaged, it looked as if he were squinting at me. He grabbed at my legs. His blood smeared the fabric of my pants. “Why’d you let it happen, Hilly? Why’d you let him humiliate me?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said. I took a long breath. “Robert humiliated you. I just watched.”

  It took a moment for this to register with my father. He hated that I didn’t see him the way the rest of the world saw him. I didn’t care that he was famous now. I hadn’t ever cared. My father reached for his flask, took a swig from it, then threw it at me, hitting me square in the jaw. I backed up beyond the door, clutching my face. It startled me more than it hurt.

  “OK then,” my father said, shutting me out of the room. “See what happens the next time you need anything from me, Hilly.”

  Eight

  I walked home along the road. It was past midnight now. The moon was covered by clouds. Wind pushed against the shore. The bugs were gone, and so were the birds. There were crickets somewhere. My eyes grew used to the dark, and from the road I could see the ocean, the shape of the waves, and in the opposite direction I could see the furry quills of the cottontails rustling. I couldn’t walk out here without thinking of Lem. Our house was still dimmed at the end of the path. Lem’s apartment, though, the peak of which I could see now, was warm with light. I scuffed my feet in the dirt, thinking of how he’d turned down our offers of a bicycle, or a car, so that he could walk near here, near the water. Now I understood: I thought of him, of what I’d caught him doing, of the plain anguish of his guilt, the way he had so many of my father’s papers in his hands. As much as I wished for a decent explanation, I knew what I’d seen. It made sense to me. His existence here on Bluepoint had been, for so long, quiet and steady and uneventful, with his books and his paintings and his photographs, and then suddenly we had arrived, bringing with us all of our profligacy, our wild arguments and secrets and tempers, our crude sense of his position in our lives. I wondered whether, if our situations were reversed, Lem’s and mine, I’d have done anything different. And thinking about it in this way, from Lem’s perspective, caused me to feel a grave sense of regret at the way I’d treated him. I rubbed at the welt growing on my head. My father’s flask had bruised me. This, I thought, wincing at the pain
, was what I had defended, what had caused me to push Lem into the sand: a man who thought it all right to hurl a hunk of pewter at me. I stopped on the path. The closer I got to Lem’s house, the worse I felt. The most grievous part of an evening like this was the knowledge that the morning would come eventually, and with it, a new brightness on our sins, all of ours: Lem’s, mine, Robert’s, and especially my father’s.

  A few minutes later, I heard a car’s engine behind me. A pair of headlights strobed across the gravel. I could tell by sound alone that it wasn’t a car I knew. The engine from Robert’s car was smooth. And the Fleetwood sounded as if it had within it a parade of drummers, everyone beating in time to the pistons. The car behind me slowed, the engine humming as it pulled alongside me. It was a Packard. The hood was missing its ornament. Before she rolled down the windows, I knew it was Savannah. A map of the outer Cape was opened on the dash. She reached to turn the stereo down. Gershwin was playing: clarinets, timpani, cymbals.

  She leaned across the seat. For a moment it seemed that she didn’t know what to say. The expression on her face was one of confusion, as if she still hadn’t figured out why she’d come all this way. The silence was so long—she just stared at me, blinking, and I did the same—that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d suddenly thrown the car into reverse and driven home.

  When she finally did speak, her voice was quiet, hoarse, as if she’d been yelling all evening. “I was really hoping that was you,” she said.

  I looked around. We were alone. I knew that fact with certainty, but still, I checked. I went to the car slowly, nervously, and put my hands on the lip of the open window.

  “What would you have done if it wasn’t me?” I asked.

  “If it was your father?” she asked, giggling slightly. “I don’t know. Maybe I’d have hit him.”

  I managed a weak laugh. “He’s already in rough shape tonight,” I said.

  This comment passed without notice. Maybe she knew somehow. Maybe Lem had called the pay phone at Emerson Oaks, told her what Robert had done to my father. She was smiling. She had gloss on her lips, I noticed. I was crazy about her. I knew it then. Beside her on the seat was a pile of some of the clothing I’d brought her.