by Burton Hersh
Mother really wasn’t well. She was headache-prone in any case, and increasingly her ankles swelled and the joints of her beautiful hands turned blue and ached in the dank Mid-Atlantic cold. Putting threadbare old Monument through his paces, she coughed for minutes at a time and her lungs hurt. Mother’s rheumatologist ascribed many of her symptoms to horses, they looked great but they were as often as not galloping depositories for the most nefarious of the protein allergens. But it was more than that. Mother had lupus.
But not to worry. These days lupus was a manageable condition.
My parents were stunned.
What would help, the rheumatologist offered, was a change of climate. Out of the chilly weather. Some sunny place. South of the Mason-Dixon line, if they followed his reasoning.
Dad let it be known that he was willing to relocate if he got an offer he liked. Meanwhile, the rejuvenated stock market was beginning to feed on its own momentum. Hit-and-run arbitragers and underfunded portfolio insurance strategists had panicked the deacons of Wall Street into gambles Dad felt made no sense. He put up Mother’s securities against cash loans and shorted the averages. On October 19, 1987, “Black Monday,” the Dow Jones Industrial Average collapsed, giving up almost a quarter of its valuation in one sickening session. Just before the closing bell, on heavy margin, Dad locked in naked calls on a dozen oversold Blue Chips they’d acquired that bounced back within a week and left Mother very nearly five million dollars richer.
The same week Dad got the job offer he wanted. SFUTB, Southern Florida University of Tampa Bay, was looking for a department head in economics for its newly established satellite in downtown St. Petersburg. Somebody with a name, published. Dad flew down the next morning.
A month later we relocated. After the duty-ridden, white-collar ethos of Philadelphia there was a backwash of unembarrassed self-indulgence about St. Petersburg. Give everything a try, the humidity excuses anything.
This was a place mostly to enjoy yourself furtively. There was a rumor around the Bay Area that whenever the mob in Tampa knocked off anybody over fifty they trucked the corpse over the Howard Frankland Causeway at night and propped the remains up on a bench in a St. Petersburg park. It might take months before the local authorities realized this wasn’t just another retiree napping in the sun.
I think Dad liked the fundamental earthiness of the place, the Caribbean languors. Termites owned the real estate ultimately, humidity was rotting every timber. I suspect we settled into our big Mediterranean Revival palazzo on Snell Isle in good part because Dad expected that so much hewn stone might stand up. The house was basically Morocco as Addison Mizner must have envisioned Morocco – towering doorways with molded concrete frames embossed with floral designs, a portico of Moorish arches backing up a new travertine patio that extended to the sea wall. That went in last – Dad had his pool and the Jacuzzi grotto installed before the travertine went down.
Upstairs, along the loggia wing, Mother and Father each had a suite with a very large office and a private library and a sitting room. Mother had been picking up prints and a few water colors by the expressionists she loved, and displayed them all around her office. I remember several unabashed nudes and a café scene by Georg Grosz and corpses in a trench during the Great War by Otto Dix and a pencil drawing, by Klimt, I believe it was, of a teenage boy sprawled over the edge of a Viennese four-poster receiving head from a naked matron whose heavy, fanning hair almost covered her ample backside. Both my little sisters liked to sneak in there when Mother was out and peep at her art collection.
They were growing up. Virtually every summer, to ground us in the real America, Dad arranged for all of us to take a month’s lease on one of the guest units in his parents’ condominium, adjacent to the Jewish golf club on the outskirts of Minneapolis. Dad’s father, Barney Landau, came up from nothing and put together a substantial estate jobbing caps and scarves. Mini – Miriam, our grandmother from an old Rhenish family – was one of the outstanding mah jongg players in her Hadassah chapter. By then Grandpa Barney was permanently retired, and grumpy from inactivity. He had an annoying propensity to lecture the young, so Mother saw to it that both my mouthy sisters stayed out of his way.
With Wendy, the oldest girl, that was easier. She had a round face and snapping black-coffee eyes and bristling eyebrows and coarse, heavy hair like Dad’s, but she was taller, like Mother, with smooth, extended muscles and a boisterous intensity all her own. She tended to be something of a wiseass. By the summer of 1997, when I was about to enter my last full year at Exeter and Wendy was starting her sophomore year at Choate, she was already emerging as a star on the private school tennis circuit. Barney’s club had a well-developed tennis ladder, so Wendy tramped over there every morning to hit balls with the pro.
I got back to the unit one broiling afternoon when the rest of them were shopping downtown. Something moved in the girls’ bedroom, and so I barged in unthinking and confronted Wendy bare-ass on her bed, pink from the shower with her knees spread and a joint in her back teeth pluming blue smoke while her right hand was poised to introduce a chattering vibrator between those long, hollow thighs. I was too stunned to say anything. I’d groped a date or two but I had never before come face to face with the meat-market rawness of unprotected cunt.
Wendy examined me between half-closed lids. “Getting an eyeful, Mikey?” she muttered huskily. “It’s a Choate thing.” I could not move. “You ought to fill your pockets.” She eased the vibrator in and reached around to fondle her emerging clitoris. “Not stopping now,” she got out. “Not this high.”
The wryness of the marijuana was making me start to tear. My heart was hammering.
“Go ahead and watch if you’re that weird,” Wendy mumbled. Her pelvis was heaving.
I still felt rooted, but somehow I backed up and slid out into the hall.
Even that, I suppose, qualified as one of those primordial Minnesota experiences for which Dad insisted we go back every summer. Both of our parents detested the pre-packaged, market-tested emptiness Americans mistook for vacations. Every summer our Dad and I would take a week out of our layover with Grandpa Barney and Mini and push off by canoe into northern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. Throughout his own adolescence Dad had explored this gigantic preserve, from the Gunflint all through the Canadian fastness of Hunter’s Island. Even pontoon planes were precluded from overflying this wilderness of low granite outcroppings and blueberries and hundreds upon hundreds of miles of lake chains. Anybody stricken with an attack of appendicitis four days in could kiss his butt goodbye.
Normally Dad was voluble, wisecracking. But once we had picked up the beef jerky and the freeze-dried vegetables and the canoe and all the gear the outfitter in Ely bounced into our rented station wagon Dad began to throttle down. The scenery absorbed him. Certain days we paddled the major lakes all afternoon without a word, silent enough to glide in next to the astonished loons. Dad’s paddle barely raised a ripple, he never seemed to rudder much even to change direction or shoot the rapids of the hardscrabble rivers along our route.
One night, after we had pissed all over the embers of our campfire, a black bear arrived to forage among the cooking scraps and caught us in our half-crumpled Rocky Mountain tent. We stood up – Dad unsheathed a Bowie knife – but the bear decided merely to hug us inside the canvas and wheeze its asthmatic wheeze, inches from our faces, and lumber back into the brambles. “We stank too bad to think about eating,” Dad confided.
After we made camp we stripped down and swam and soaped up and swam and smeared on fresh mosquito repellent, and then Dad liked to go out alone in the canoe and cast dry flies to pick up some kind of bass for dinner. Usually he got something. Once a considerable walleye hit. Dad carved its gullet out and kept it moist and for the rest of the week we trolled all day with that and dragged along anything we caught on a stringer, still flipping and churning.
On long portages Dad always slid into the food pack and slung up the canoe and eased the yoke ar
ound his thick farmer’s neck. This left me with the much lighter equipment pack and the paddles as we stumbled forward, sometimes for miles, up stony paths and across still-flowing creek beds to where we could put the canoe in again and start up the next lake chain.
Sometimes – rarely – we ran into other parties. I remember a pair of very brawny girls who had been on the trail for a month. The taller one was menstruating and they had long since run out of rags. She was bleeding openly down the inside of her thigh; the heavy-duty smell of iron she gave off was attracting flies, which clustered. She didn’t really seem to care, or notice. Everybody was fighting too hard merely to keep going.
By the middle of the week we were invariably sunburned, and Dad’s sensitive bald spot had started to peel. He was always burly if never fat, but by the end of a week in the woods he started looking carved, much younger.
Everybody seemed happy enough to see us once we got back to Minneapolis. They’d all been busy. Only Carol, our baby sister, ever seemed to care much either way whether we were around or gone. This came up later, during her therapy. She’d secretly felt excluded, that induced her anorexia. We were somehow responsible. She’d wanted to go too, she told her analyst . We’d refused to take her.
* * *
I’m not that sure that I looked like a much better prospect than Carol to either of my parents at that stage. I think they sent me to prep in New England in hopes the small classes and ice-water showers would wake me up in time. Phillips Exeter was the real world – unforgiving. I was acceptably tall – taller than both parents – but closer to gangling than particularly well-knit. By really putting out I ultimately made second string on the soccer team and a few times got to swim the third lap during swimming meets. I was best at debating. My boards were good enough to get me into Amherst.
At Amherst I joined one of the off-campus fraternities, the Dekes. At Dad’s behest I majored in government. I think Dad felt we could use a lawyer in the family. Cautiously, Dad had begun diverting some of Mother’s capital into picking up the big, palatial three and four bedroom condominium units in the high rises behind the yacht club along with the occasional antebellum manse headed toward rooming-house status and vest-pocket Tierra Verde estates and the retail outlets. Once the market cooled, Dad started to acquire plainer properties.
They translated into rentals. Rentals are a slippery slope. What begins as an immaculate arms-length operation, with brokers and syndicates of genteel investors and ironclad rental agreements, degenerates into a rolling fiasco of jumped leases and rump-sprung couches teetering out the back windows of shabby two-deckers above rusty vans idling in the night alley and headed for the Carolinas. This sort of property management provides the most graphic example in Christendom of ground-level vulture capitalism, with lawyers flapping day and night above the sordid proceedings
Dad preferred to see this side of his investments as conducive to social betterment. Providing for Joe Sixpack, the well-intentioned goofus unlucky enough not to have married Mother. Once I was out of law school and slaved through a stultifying summer and part of a fall in smog-bound Philadelphia as an associate at Humper, Fardle and Wrath -- Great-Uncle Lionel’s connections brought that beauty off -- I succumbed to Dad’s half-joking blandishments and relocated -- along with my then-wife Janice -- in gradually awakening St. Petersburg. By then enough third-generation trust fund income had kicked in so I could afford to lease a modest law office on sleepy Central Avenue. My penance was to run Dad’s slumlord acquisitions.
Before the year was out I had a partner. Buckley Glickman had been a fellow Deke in college. We weren’t that close at the time. Buckley claimed some shirt-tail relationship on his mother’s side to the oil-rich Buckley family in Connecticut. I had always regarded William F. Buckley, Jr. as a pundit whose stammered condescension masked a lot of air space where preparation should have been. As it turned out, bad judgment and too much sailing resulted in a late-life bankruptcy, so not much in a financial way was to be expected from that side of Buckley’s family. On the Glickman side there was a spate of marriages and a lopsided investment in non-performing Las Vegas casinos.
I began to notice while we were both in law school that Buckley made a point of sitting with me and Janice at college reunion events. We’d both been recognizably out-group, besides which Buckley came over as little too Society and more than a little flighty. But I was loosening up -- sometimes after a couple of drinks what Buckley would blurt out could get amusing as hell. We began to exchange e-mails.
To start with, it had been my expectation that, as a lawyer helping my father out, I might get pulled in occasionally to witness somebody’s signature or – rarely – round up the sheriff and serve an eviction notice. The first years I seemed to be on call every day, for everything from co-signing leases to fencing with my ambulance-chasing colleagues who advertised enthusiastically on television that they could keep you in your house indefinitely, whether you made your payments or not. Too often, they could.
Meanwhile, Buckley Glickman had been putting in his time as one among a dozen or so trainees in the legal bullpen of a New York publisher of high-gloss gardening magazines. His salary was barely enough to rent one fifth of a bedroom floor in mid-Manhattan. In hopes of upgrading his resume with an eye toward something on Wall Street he’d signed up for night courses in international finance at The New School, jammed, he tweeted me, with sallow aspirants to overnight billions from every blowhole around the planet from the tent cities of Mongolia to the meandering cesspools of Bangladesh. Exchanges on the internet led to a telephone call we both laughed through. Before I hung up I’d offered Buckley a job.
Physically, Buckley reminded me a little of my sister Carol, so why was I surprised when they seemed to hit it off? They both had rumpled sandy-blond hair, both smoked – furtively – , they were both nail-biters. Buckley’s high-speed takeouts seemed to reassure Carol, to hint there was a world in which she might be appreciated.
That world wasn’t us. Carol’s psychologist had been lamenting that our family standards were so high she’d batter herself to pieces pretending to keep up. Competition anxieties supposedly triggered sieges of anorexia. That, and the ambivalence the psychologist ascribed to our helter-skelter approach to sexuality.
Family life. The psychologist obviously came from a different social universe. We weren’t exhibitionists, exactly, and while the women were a little careful about towels and how they moved in the surging water nobody really bothered with bathing suits once they were immersed in Dad’s steaming Jacuzzi. Mornings, Dad himself liked to swim a few laps starkers before he pulled himself together before classes.
Mother definitely went along. She savored his bohemian impulses, which she would refer to with a wink as the Last-Train-For-Istanbul, or Balkan, side of his complex personality. I remember one cocktail hour when she turned around as she was lowering herself into the Jacuzzi and he exclaimed “What a tush! I could make a meal out of something like that.” The sisters were just getting into the age when a crack like that could paint a very rich picture, and Wendy laughed and Carol threw a towel around herself and scampered toward the main house.
I suppose our parents were influenced by their exploits in Europe. Dad was under contract at Random House to write a frank, all-encompassing critique and biography of John Maynard Keynes. Sabbaticals took them again and again to England. Over country weekends exchanges got heated – not Cliveden-level restraint at all, shouting matches at times – and after things broke up bedroom doors would open and close until dawn.
Several times they ended their stretches abroad in Berlin. Mother developed contacts. Her patrician good looks and Dad’s genius for effrontery amused people in the reawakened capital. One couple invited them several times to uninhibited holidays on the nudist beaches adjoining Sylt.
Her doctor had been right -- the wet oceanside air off Tampa Bay and the prevailing Southern culture were what it took to relieve mother. Her hands looked better. The slow-moving, ind
ulgent Florida mannerisms resonated to her energy levels. A suspicion was starting to find its way around town that Dad wasn’t merely another college professor, that he was running money north of eight figures. Dad heard about that, and stepped up his contributions to the Free Clinic and the Florida Symphony.
Money, as economists like to say, is fungible. But expectations are also fungible. There is Mercedes 300 rich, but there is also Gulfstream IV rich, and I suppose even a dedicated academic with a character as solid as Dad’s wasn’t above occasional fantasies of opulence. The Clinton years had turned out to be very slow. By now Dad understood that fortunes were not built dubbing around with blue chips. The big money – the insider money – came from special situations. That kind of information was not lying around in the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida. You needed contacts, well connected friends. Then Ramon showed up.
* * *
I myself had relocated to St. Pete in 2005. Janice and I had met while I was still buried in paperwork in the tomblike research library on the top floor of Humper, Fardle and Wrath. She was just out of junior college by then and had signed on as an intern. She was an extremely clean girl, almost always chipper, and – like her parents in Chappaqua – a dedicated, churchgoing Congregationalist. It seems to me, in retrospect, she never actually cast a shadow.
When we moved to St. Petersburg Dad helped me find an inexpensive brick-faced bungalow in the Pink Streets, on the Oval Crescent Annex to Serpentine Drive, a few blocks shy of Pinellas Point. During our early months Janice kept taking me aside to reassure me that our snug little bungalow was definitely cute, if maybe a little cramped.