by Burton Hersh
“Sylvan, you are essentially a mumser. I think you should consider applying for membership in another congregation.”
“I’ve thought of that,” Dad said. “But I’m smitten with you.”
It was a mixed lot. Linda’s father had made the trip. Tall, friendly if a little taciturn, he had the preoccupied look much of the time of a Randolph Scott/Gary Cooper-style lawman who missed his six-guns. I saw where Sonny got a lot of his duende.
Sonny himself showed up with –- of all people – Olivia. She watched the proceedings with no small amusement. “Did you bring your pistol?” Dad stage-whispered to her when he got the chance.
“Natuerlich.”
“Please don’t shoot anybody until I give you the heads-up. I’ve got a list.”
Wendy brought little Carlos, already a handful. I had the feeling Ramon might not have attended our wedding, except that he wanted badly to have a look at his new-born grandson. Ramon seemed less jittery if a lot older. Actually, Dad and Ramon had been back and forth more often over the course of the previous summer than during the heyday of the hedge fund. Dad was advising Ramon on securities. On Dad’s advice Ramon had liquidated his riskier assets before the market tanked and paid off his looming Mafia stakeholders. Ramon listened to Dad when stocks cratered and had also moved in and bought several hundred thousand shares each of Ford and Oshkosh. Somebody from Dad’s prep school had an inside track with the important military suppliers around the Middle West and tipped him off that Oshkosh was on the cusp of a big Pentagon contract.
Both stocks turned into ten-baggers, as market parlance has it; the gains made Ramon whole again. He wouldn’t require our capital. The next spring Rick and Wendy relocated to Coral Gables so that -- between martial arts tournaments -- Rick could apply his freshly acquired financial management degree to reinvigorating Ramon’s Sunrise Medical Ventures.
Ramon was pleased. High-strung and instinctively refined – his family had originated as nobility in Segovia – Ramon always made an effort with Wendy, although her brash style and easy-going manners keep Ramon on edge. At feeding time she had a way of flopping out a bub in front of anybody and everybody and nourishing the hell out of hungry little Carlos.
* * *
Some people let you down, and some people keep showing you more and more. St. Petersburg is an invigorating hodge-podge of colleges and trade schools and universities, art galleries and theater groups and grab-bag cultural smorgasbords like Bob Devin Jones’ 620 club, where action painting meets soul music meets open-speaker poetry night on wide-open turf everybody around town seems to be pawing the ground to claim.
Legitimized by marriage, Linda wanted it all. Without giving up her new department-manager slot at Walmart she enrolled in night courses. I think she worries a lot about Sonny, who spent a long night a week before Osama Bin Laden got taken out mapping the exits and guard positions inside that bristling Pakistani compound. Sonny assured his sister that he had prepared for this ordeal by fasting until the thunder beings came to him in a vision and helped him prepare his spirit. Now Linda worries less.
She herself is definitely settling in. She destroyed all opposition in neighborhood eight-ball tournaments. Most important, as the months passed, Linda discovered classical music. Mother took her to a Shostakovich concert at the Mahaffey, and halfway through the first violin concerto Linda erupted in tears. Linda needed music, badly. After that the two never missed a performance of the Florida Symphony.
For Christmas in 2008 I gave Linda her first violin and a year of lessons. Having been a prodigy as a pow-wow dancer, I suppose the concentration and instinct for rhythm came naturally to her. Her teacher was amazed, and by the time baby Sylvan came along in January Linda could play the little rascal a tolerable cadenza.
Sylvan Ten Bears Landau. Trips off the tongue. Ten Bears was Linda’s father’s Indian name, although I never heard him addressed as anything but Sam. At three our son keeps reminding me of Sonny – willowy, easily alarmed and inherently skeptical, touchy and inclined to sulk if things don’t go his way, magnetic and irresistibly handsome. Already, he is very much in charge every time his half-brother Carl visits. He can dominate with a gesture. If something or somebody offends little Sylvan his eyes narrow, just like Sonny’s.
Left alone five minutes he will attempt to ride Penelope around the living room of our bungalow in the Pink Streets. He has a good touch with the colicky little Chinese orphan Carol and Buckley adopted. Two months after she arrived Carol turned up pregnant, but Lin Kee still owns them both.
Dad keeps it to himself, but I can see that Ten Bears is primus inter pares among his proliferating grandchildren. Both of them are skeptics, they argue, each betrays a deep if carefully hedged commitment to life. To Mother’s delight, Dad was selected to occupy a visiting chair at Oxford for a semester recently. Every time he called his first question was: “How’s that dratted papoose?”
So things are settling down. My law practice is flourishing – after running Muldavey Court for years I understand troubled property; to have it bruited around town that I have a good hand when it comes to stalling foreclosures in the Age of Obama hasn’t hurt one bit. I’m deeply in love. Mother is on top of her immunities. I can tolerate Dad.
It could be a lot worse.
Book Two Sneak Peek
Sneak Peek At
* * *
Wet Work
* * *
Book Two
Burton Hersh
24
Chapter 1
What shocks me now is how long it took to dope the whole thing out. Because I was there, early, while it was all coming together.
For me it started in D.C. that October. Admittedly I was preoccupied, keyed up from months of overwork and apprehensive as hell. Not long after 10 o’clock the following morning I was scheduled to mount my oral argument in front of all nine black-robed justices of the Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court! Me, Michael Landau! My mouth went dry running through the talking points.
It had taken the best part of two years; we were ecstatic the previous May when we first got word that four of the Supremes OK’d our petition for review. The Florida courts had blockaded us all along; on short notice Exhibitors Association vs. Florida was at the top of the docket. Everything depended on me.
I had been going over my presentation in the hotel room all afternoon and broke it off to make my way down the street and meet up with Dad at dinner. It seemed to me I was prepared to justify every allegation in our brief, pound home the logic of my case, blanket every conclusion with precedents. I intended to go in unprotected – no notes. It was important as hell, everybody told me, to radiate self-assurance.
Except Dad, of course. “I’d try for pitiful,” he recommended. “Maybe tremble as you round into your summation, stutter. The barefoot boy attorney from the Florida boondocks, on fire with idealism and maybe a little tongue-tied expounding civil liberties. Can you imagine how many puffed-up ganefs in tailored suits the so-called entertainment industry has paraded in front of these prima donnas to make the same case you’re making?”
“It has a history,” I had to admit. I was the lead attorney for the West Florida Association of Independent Film Exhibitors. I would be defending my clients’ right to bring out a German film that had done a lot of business in Europe. Playing to the rednecks on the Christian Right, our oily Florida governor had sent his staties around to confiscate the prints after the first showing.
“And you don’t think you’re pushing the envelope?” Dad’s strong, stubby fingers rotated the stem of his Martini glass provocatively. He was at Georgetown that fall, delivering the Perlemutter Lectures on Modern Economic Thought. Now he was testing my conviction. “What was that movie you’re supposed to be defending?”
“Originally, Mit Meiner Scheide Verteidige Ich Das Abendland.”
Dad turned toward Saria, whom we had both just met. Saria was my Comanche wife Linda’s half-sister, born into that scattered reservation family a
matter of weeks after Linda’s lawman father made an honest woman out of her half-breed mother, a bypassing social worker. Motivated from the start, Saria had ground through the University of Oklahoma College of Law and picked up an LL.M in Native American Affairs. A onetime classmate of Saria’s groused to me afterwards that it was reverse discrimination that snagged her a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Grover – “Lefty” – Stynehenge, who liked to rattle on about his Apache great-grandmother. Stynehenge was a throwback, the cantankerous old cowboy liberal on the bench.
“Provocative title, right?” Dad asked Saria.
“You got me— what language was that?” Saria was sipping Vermouth. She had that Indian way of hanging back in conversation, pupils all but lost beneath those deep epicanthic folds, obviously missing very little. Then suddenly she unloaded, coltish, capitalizing on that prairie drawl. From time to time she reached back gingerly as if to steady herself and straightened a comb sunk like a talisman in the heavy mounded clump of braids above her long neck.
Dad studied Saria for a moment. He was balding fast at this stage. The two Martinis he had already dispatched were reddening his massive scholar’s forehead, his bulging, Slavic eyes were aglitter. “German. It’s..the title is a little provocative.”
I had never seen Dad back off like that before. “What it means,” I told Saria, “is: ‘With My Vagina I Will Defend The West.’ It’s a kind of a quasi-pornographic farce set in the Third Reich. Remember the propaganda films Leni Riefenstahl used to mill out for Hitler?”
“The Triumph of the Will!” Dad said. “What an epiphany! How our susceptible little Jewish hearts thrilled in Minneapolis when that showed up at the World Theater.”
“I’m getting the needle,” I explained to Saria. “Dad thinks that sort of stuff is trash. What we’re all about is broadening the first amendment. The Court’s been deadlocked since 1967 when Redrup vs. New York was published. Which meant, essentially, stay away from erections and penetration. That’s not a lot of guidance. For our exhibitors.”
“But chazerai like this has redeeming social value? Michael!” Dad loved to ride me when I took myself too seriously.
“It has its statement to make. A very energetic hooker shows up, and flashes the goods around, and voila, social betterment.”
“I suppose,” Dad said. He turned to Saria. “So -- what does your guy think? Or shouldn’t I ask?”
Saria favored us with a wispy little smile. “Take it from me, professor, the secretaries here are all over our butts about what goes on in chambers. Don’t ask, don’t tell, you know? Especially individual cases.”
“Sylvan, please. You’re family.”
“Everybody knows where Justice Stynehenge comes out on personal-liberty issues,” Saria said. “Lefty is definitely – he’s no-way hypocritical. He can be pissy. But never ever hypocritical.”
“After five wives? He’s got a lot to be straightforward about.”
Saria crimped her lips at the corners. “Is Dad here always a panic like this?”
“You’re looking at good behavior.”
Saria let her eyes drift closed, then opened them again. “This term comin’ up already looks a wee bit hairy,” Saria said. “You ought to see the docket. Mor’n a hundred cases. Then after the conference the Chief gets the word out he needs our written opinions overnight. Holdover liberal-types like Lefty, older members mostly, they get to grind away around the clock.”
“How about the clerks?” I asked Saria.
“Not with any decision that amounts to anything, no way with our justice. You ought to follow him around in chambers, humpin’ in and out on two canes. Arthritis is eating the old bugger up alive. He still intends to draft just about every word himself.”
“Besides our all-important first-amendment breakthrough, what else is coming up?” I wondered.
“A lot of heavy-duty crud. The word is they’ll probably get around to partial-birth abortion, finally. With all that fireworks in the newspapers about how left-wing authoritarianism is on the rise in Latin America, the rumor is the Court may get serious about the War Powers Resolution this term. Who gets to declare war. Before the troops go in.”
“That would be a refreshing development,” Dad said.
“They tell me Tea Party gunslingers are muttering about taking back responsibility for Congress. Revisit the Constitution. Nobody except the Chief Justice, or maybe some accountant at Halliburton, really wants a ball-buster like Iraq again. Although right his minute I’d betcha the Chief gonna pressure those three brain-dead toadies of his to stick with him. Lefty would definitely be the swing vote on that baby.”
Dad looked up suddenly from his Cobb salad. “You actually think there’s something in the works? I thought I saw an editorial last week in the Journal. Fuming over some kind of mutual-defense protocol involving Chavez in Venezuela and Nicaragua and Bolivia and Costa Rica. Particularly poisonous about that president of Costa Rica, Consuela something.”
“Raposa,” Saria said. “Consuela Raposa. Lefty goes on a lot about her, she inveigled ol’ Lefty down there last year and gave him a medal.” Saria checked the comb in her hair. “You got to hope they don’t dick around with Costa Rica. I got there on a grant the summer after my first year in law school. It was a riot, a class-A democratic grab-it-in-the-dark party. Pura Vida, baby!”
Dad was reddening fast, on the edge of vehemence. “The crap the right is leaking to The Wall Street Journal is that all those Costa Rican socialists are reneging on discredited old trade agreements. Oil, gold, whatever. I heard some projection-of-power lunatic around the Vice President’s Office is already beating the drum, this administration wants its own war. Go in fast under the radar and turn somebody upside down before the public catches on.”
“That’s what frosts Lefty,” Saria said. “He says it always starts out like that, some pissy little skirmish, or whatever the president calls it. And then we get really involved. Then Congress papers it over with some kind of a resolution. Not really a declaration of war, but too late to pull out. ”
“You’ve got that right.” Dad rolled his eyes. “Where are those strict constructionists when we need them? A handful of helicopter support troops, and overnight, bang! Viet Nam. Jesus!”
Our table fell quiet. Beyond the plate-glass windows of our steak-house porch on Q. Street the horde of bureaucrats was thinning. Evening was settling in but it was stifling outside. Men still wearing neckties with their suitcoats flapping over their shoulders, half out of breath after hustling up Connecticut Avenue from the Dupont Circle Metro Station, headed toward the neighborhood’s bowfront apartments along meticulously landscaped renovations. Bicycles, a leering black panhandler in a tee-shirt stenciled “Give To The Overendowed.”
Dad was uncharacteristically silent. “My father served in Viet Nam,” I said to Saria. “Those things stay with you.”
Saria adjusted the comb in her hair. “We have a brother in the service,” she volunteered. “Buffalo Hump.”
I must have brightened up. “You mean Sonny. We certainly know him. He’s helped out our side of the family more than—I can’t really—“
“A hell of a lot,” Dad put in. He was signaling me to shut up.
“Sonny is my half-brother,” Saria said. “But he’s better than a brother. He’s awesome. Our father isn’t – he tends to have….outside interests. When I wasn’t away at the schools, Sonny brought me up.” That wisp of a smile again. “When he wasn’t away at schools. Valley Forge Military Academy! Where they dump maggots in the oatmeal.”
“He told me about that,” I said. Our little filets finally arrived.
“We don’t eat that much meat,” Saria said. “You go ahead take mine, I think the onion rings are going to be enough. I never was that crazy about red meat or anything. One time our father got clobbered and told me that my mother’s name was Arapaho and all my kin were dog eaters. Crazy, what sticks in your head.” She poured a lumpy stream of blue cheese dressing across the romai
ne lettuce in her salad and knocked back another Vermouth. “Did either of you know the justice has Indian blood?”
“Somebody told me that,” I said.
“He maintains Apache, but look at how his eyes droop halfway to his cheekbones. I’d say it could be Navaho. Shoshone at the outside.”
“That or old age,” Dad said. “Time catches up with you.”
“Maybe it’s that rheumatoid arthritis.” Saria hesitated. “The joke around chambers is how he glommed onto Hasna because she’s so beefy and muscular. Before her it used to take a couple of flunkies to work those fancy cowboy boots onto those skinny little feet every morning. With her it’s grab one ankle, push – it’s on! We joke he married her to guarantee those painless injections.”
“Lefty takes a lot of shots?”
“He lives on Bourbon and methotrexate pills. Embrel when it gets too bad, bang, right into the stomach muscles. That’s how they met – Lefty can get abusive when he’s drinking, and after a while that last woman gave up and moved out on him, took off for their camp in Florida. Hasna was a visiting nurse. We say she came around to give him an injection one time, and he ended up giving her one.” Neither of us laughed. “Kind of a shitty story to put out there about Lefty,” Saria acknowledged. “Robing Room humor.”
Untitled
Look for the following installments:
Wet Work
Comanche Country
Acknowledgments
A number of literary people have now read and responded to The Hedge Fund. Let me now indicate a few whose comments seemed most germane and useful. First – he deserves a paragraph of his own – I want to thank the inimitable George Pequignot for his discerning and unmatched help with our publishing ventures over what is now decades. An original and powerful writer himself, his legerdemain all around the universe of computer composition and printing details has been genuinely indispensable.