The Dead Celebrities Club

by Susan Swan

  Pater’s social pedigree is not worth mentioning, but his father had been a lowly Presbyterian minister, and I’ve always thought this self-righteous forebear was the reason for Pater’s antipathy to business. Lying on my cot, I doodle his angry face the day I told him I was going into hedge funds — his long, saturnine face used to cloud over during our talks, and that afternoon his expression had turned murderous — so I add a few boughs of pine, as if his shouts have singed the virgin timber.

  I do my best to fringe their tips in a refined, Asian sort of way, but a cook is only as good as his utensils. That is to say, there is only so much you can do with cheap graphite, even if the 4B pencil comes in handy for shading outlines. How I wish I could put my hands on the brush pens I left at home. A brush pen would be just the thing for darkening in the branches of the pine tree.

  Pleased with my sketch, I stick it in the drawer under my bunk and let my mind drift into the sort of meandering thoughts I indulged in at college, where I was attempting to live out Pater’s plan for my life. In those years, my father tried to direct me away from airy flights of visionary thinking toward steadfast analysis of historical battles, as if the boundary between rational thought and daydreaming is ironclad instead of the mysterious palimpsest I know it to be.

  I think again of my light bulb moment, my idea about a dead pool where the prisoners will be invited to bet on the death of aging celebrities. Nugent’s appearance in the parking lot reminded me of our boarding school bet that let the overworked and underappreciated boys gamble on which of our teachers would be the first to push up daisies. (More on About to Die later.)

  Outside, darkness is falling, and although I’m as circumscribed as an astronaut in his capsule, things seem less dire than they did this morning. At least tonight I’m free to doodle, and doodling is a form of thinking; it’s less purpose-driven than the paintings an artist does in the heroic solitude of his studio, and doodling is more self-serving too, even if I am doing it in a room of fifty or more slumbering scofflaws. Like me, a few of them are still awake, and small halos of light spill from their reading lamps, each man a lighthouse in the gloom of the dormitory, where the overhead led ceiling panels glow spookily, neither too dim nor too bright, illuminating the darkness.

  11

  Tim Nugent

  A GOOGLE SEARCH for “North Bay, Ontario” turns up images of sandy beaches and broad-leaved trees, along with aerial shots of the town sitting like a footnote on a wide harbour that opens onto a large, light-filled lake. Tim finds these scenes reassuring because water and trees are what he remembers about his hometown, a forest outpost in which human buildings looked out of place. He was ashamed of the town’s dusty red brick stores, nostalgic souvenirs of a more prosperous age when the town’s logging and mining industries were going strong in what he and his friends jokingly called The Armpit of the North.

  He hardly ever thinks of North Bay now; it has been thirty-five years since he moved to the States where people used to go to live out their best hope, and, just like Dale Paul, he wanted to be American. (Okay, so the United States used to be a nicer place, but he still likes it, even with the nasty political partisanship and the winner-and-loser mentality that explains why so many won’t get help if they fall between the cracks.) He decided to immigrate to the U.S. the day he saw Robert Kennedy on television advising his kids to drink their milk so they could grow up and be president.

  When he left North Bay to board at Munson Hall, the Pauls took him under their wing. Mrs. Paul talked the school into letting him go there for Sunday dinners on the “out” weekends, those twice-monthly occasions when the boarders could visit the homes of friends. Meredith had been kind to him too. Very kind. He blushes at the memory. And now here she sits at a table by the window overlooking Strawberry Lake. How long has it been since he saw her last? Twenty-five years? Thirty? She seems to be watching the play of light on the water, oblivious, if that is possible, to the chatter in the pub. Its decor reminds him of the après-ski lounges of their youth: barnboard walls, faux Tiffany lamps, and thick wooden beams on the ceiling.

  Meredith has on a tie-dyed blouse and a long skirt. She has worn hippie clothes since he first knew her. What’s more, she still wears her strange glasses — the result of a freak accident — and she’s kept her hair is in braids. To his surprise, she’s aged better than he has. Of course, she has lived a quieter life. She stands up and waves when she sees him, and he waves back. He always liked her husky voice and the way her face dimples up when she smiles. Googie Paul used to say Meredith was too “approachable” for a young woman, not to mention a young woman with one eye.

  Meredith, you haven’t changed much, he says, smiling.

  Neither have you. She smiles back.

  Liar. It’s my years at the Post. And … He lets her fill in the blank. I’m freelancing now.

  You should try teaching at a girls’ college.

  Hard job?

  She hesitates. Well, not really. It suits me. Googie is sick, so we’re staying up here for a few more days.

  It’s hard to believe she’s eighty-six. She used to be beautiful.

  In certain lights she still is. Meredith sighs and looks down at her lovely, long-fingered hands. Do you think Dale Paul is being persecuted for his attitudes?

  Among other things. It’s good to see you, Kis. We’re old pals, aren’t we?

  The phrase old pals hovers in the air.

  I suppose. Dale Paul tells me you’re writing his memoir.

  He’s good copy, isn’t he? And I know where he comes from. But I still need to research his early influences. You can help me fill in what I can’t remember.

  You want my help?

  Of course I do. He pats her hand, and she jerks it away. Your recall was always better than mine, Tim adds, turning red. I’ll be speaking to all his friends, along with business associates like Conrad Black and Warren Buffett.

  I’m not going to betray him.

  No one wants you to do that. But you know him as your kid brother. Who else can say that? Readers will soften toward him when they discover he has a vulnerable side.

  She looks at him fearfully as if the word vulnerable makes her uneasy. I guess you’ll want to know everything, then? Well, time to powder my face, she says. Her bad eye seems to shine as fierce and wild as her good one. Is she thinking about the messy business with Earl? Or what happened the last time they were all together? He’s pissed with himself for not putting that together sooner.

  12

  Dale Paul

  An inmate will be limited in the number of letters, books, photographs, magazines, and newspapers that can be stored in their designated storage space. Nothing is to be tacked, stapled, or scotch-taped to any surface except to bulletin boards. Ordinarily, photographs, particularly those of family and friends, are approved, since they represent meaningful ties to the community.… Nude or sexually suggestive photos (individual prints or copies as opposed to those from publications) present special concerns about personal safety, security, and good order, particularly when the subject is an inmate’s relative, friend, or acquaintance.…

  — FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS, INMATE

  ADMISSION AND ORIENTATION HANDBOOK

  THE NEXT DAY a note arrives from my mother in her shaky hand. She and Meredith are still at the inn on Strawberry Lake because Googie hasn’t been well enough to travel. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Prisons won’t allow me visits for a month so I have time to settle in. (Settle in! As if I am at some folksy summer camp!) To help me adjust, Meredith has personally delivered Mother’s package of fruit and digestive cookies.

  Darling boy,

  I hate to think of you consorting with hoodlums while we sip our tea in the lap of luxury. It just gives me the shudders. Please, Dale Paul, don’t make friends too quickly. Others are not who they seem when you first meet them.

  All my love,

>   Googie

  Despite myself, I laugh out loud. Mother is still worried I will be raped even though I have told her over and over that rapes don’t happen in low-security prisons. In fact, not many terrible things happen here. She retorted that terrible things happen everywhere.

  I consider telling her that my new home is a caterwauling hub of male noise, a cacophonous racket of men talking too loudly and doors banging shut with a hideous metal clang. And the heat. I walk around feeling perpetually clammy, an unpleasant soaked-through sensation. The Bureau of Prisons is unwilling to pay for air conditioners, and the temperature of the buildings, where the men cook and play cards, has been in the high nineties, a lousy portent for the fast approaching summer months. (All right, so there are water coolers and ice machines.) It is even hotter in our shoddy dorms, where everyone sleeps in cubicles or cubes. Each cube has three bunk beds with a desk, and our bunk beds are, just as you’d expect, iron hard.

  Then there are endless head counts, including the ones at 3:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m., when the C.O. shines his flashlight into your eyes. However, complaining will only make Mother fret more.

  Dear Mother:

  Thank you for writing. Nothing untoward has happened to me and I don’t expect it will. Fortunately, I have been receiving excellent guidance from my two bunkmates. They are decent fellows despite their crimes: Marvin Bailey Jr. was born in Brooklyn. Derek Williams was born in Yorkshire, England; he is an ex-drug addict who cured himself by taking up yoga. So please don’t worry. In many ways, prison is just like board-ing school; and, much as I did there, I need friends to help me get through the experience. After all, we are always new boys at something.

  Your loving son,

  Dale Paul

  13

  The warden shall allow each inmate a minimum of four hours visiting time per month. The Warden may limit the length or frequency of visits only to avoid chronic overcrowding. The Warden may establish a guideline for the maximum number of persons who may visit an inmate at one time, to prevent overcrowding in the visiting room or unusual difficulty in supervising a visit. Exceptions may be made to any local guideline when indicated by special circumstances, such as distance the visitor must travel, frequency of the inmate’s visits, or health problems of the inmate or visitor.

  — FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS, INMATE

  ADMISSION AND ORIENTATION HANDBOOK

  THE NEW YORK Times has run a front-page story about me going to prison. Its headline reads: “THE PENSION FUND WHALE GOES AWAY FOR TWELVE YEARS.” Full disclosure: when the word whale is affixed to a financial man, it means someone who isn’t afraid to bet large.

  The copy of the Times is in the law library, where I am writing a long, complaining letter about the American prosecutorial system and its scurrilous practice of throwing every charge in the book at a defendant so they will plead guilty to one or two of them.

  Two photographs accompany the story. One features Meredith, Caroline, and me in the prison parking lot, facing down the media cavalcade. The other picture shows two derelict men posing in front of a broken-down car; the passenger door has been left open to showcase the innards of the ancient automobile: sleeping bags, a crumpled assortment of shirts and jackets, along with a small camping stove. The younger man is holding the handles of the older man’s wheelchair, and I have to look twice before I recognize Esther’s golf caddy, Arnie, and his father, Joshua. The caption beneath the photo quips: “Dale Paul sipped champagne while his clients ate dog food.” How can Arnie make up such lies? Ham and cheese loaf, certainly. Possibly ice milk. Arnie ate junk food long before his investments with me went south.

  The story of my alleged villainy has been carried over to page fourteen of the business section and prominently displayed above the weather map and a series of stock market graphs. Larded with unconscionable exaggerations, the Times compares me with the hustlers in the energy company known for cooking its books and says I defrauded the American military of two billion dollars.

  The story also refers to me as a long-ago associate of the media scion Earl Lindquist. A long-ago associate. The term must have come straight from the lips of Earl’s mealy-mouthed public relations officer.

  The final paragraph claims I “managed to fool our veterans and thou-sands of decent, hardworking Americans.” Well, well, Arnie was a veteran, yes. He fought in the first Gulf War and has a limp to prove it. That is the reason I tried to help him. And now the Times is suggesting I deliberately talked him into scummy investments, using my reputation for business acumen to convince my pal that my hedge funds were on the up and up.

  14

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, around 4:00 p.m., I’m startled by the sound of the scofflaws shouting and cheering. Martino is bringing in the mailbag. I hurry over, and he fishes out some letters from his sack and hands them to me. Each letter has been stamped with the Bureau of Prisons seal. The first one is from Sofia Rigby, who has sent me a picture of her son taken several years before Tony’s beheading by Islamic extremists, when he was a well-known photojournalist in the Middle East. In the photo, he wears a necklace of cameras, and his mouth is open, as if he is speaking. Sofia’s note says:

  Dear Dale Paul:

  We have no money to bring our son’s remains back from the Middle East, if and when his body is found by our troops, so Ted has taken a job driving North Shore cabs with Arnie. Yes, that’s what my husband, the four-star American general, has come to! We’re living off the smell of an oil rag, as my grandmother used to say. May you rot in hell!

  Sofia Rigby

  Living off the smell of an oil rag. Sofia has a flare for Victorian metaphors.

  When I glance again at the photograph, I realize why she sent it. In the photo, their son looks as if he is accusing me from the grave, uttering a string of blasphemous phrases condemning me to the hell that Sofia believes in. She and her husband are evangelicals. They converted Arnie to their silly faith after I introduced them.

  The spelling and grammar in the next letter are appalling:

  Mr. Paul:

  I here you are lockedup. I hope it is for good because you fucked things up royelly for me and my buddies who went to Iraq. How can you walk this earth and feel okay? You are the divil himself. I hope you die in prison.

  Wesley Randall

  Royelly. The divil himself. Now there is a man who isn’t afraid of sounding hyperbolic.

  15

  Tim Nugent

  HE HAD COME here for what?

  And he must do what?

  Kill Roberta? Oh no!

  And again he lowered his head and gazed into the fascinating and yet treacherous depths of that magnetic, bluish, purple pool, which, as he continued to gaze, seemed to change its form kaleidoscopically to a large, crystalline ball. But what was that moving about in this crystal? A form! It came nearer — clearer — and as it did so, he recognized Roberta struggling and waving her thin white arms out of the water and reaching toward him! God! How terrible! The expression on her face!

  — THEODORE DREISER, AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, 1925

  THE WARDEN STILL hasn’t returned Tim Nugent’s calls, so it was a relief when Meredith phoned and asked him to drop by the inn. He needs the distraction, although he has begun to enjoy the peace and quiet of the village.

  He’s had time to finish the long-winded Dreiser novel about a murder in the Adirondacks. What an ending for an impoverished Midwestern kid! The boy died in the electric chair after he let his pregnant girlfriend drown so he was free to marry an heiress. Chances are Dale Paul could relate. When Esther became pregnant, his old friend married her in a shotgun wedding, as people used to call those unhappy occasions. Then Esther had a miscarriage. Everyone was surprised when Dale Paul stayed married to her, and a decade or so later they had Davie.

  Around four o’clock, Nugent sets out to see Meredith. He takes a back street and passes the shrubs of dogwood bea
ring white blossoms outside the country homes; the outside walls of some of the houses are covered in bark. That’s Adirondacks style: strips of cedar over everything.

  The fresh mountain air makes him want to escape the village and go for a hike. Resorts in the off-season depress him — they exude the sense that real life is going on elsewhere — but he has a social call to make.

  Meredith’s inn sits atop a small hill overlooking the lake. Tim mounts the tiers of stone steps to its door and cautiously inspects the lobby. The date on its wall plaque reads 1888.

  He notes the contrast between his modest motel and the posh inn with its confection of chandeliers and plush carpets. Well, he was never at home in Dale Paul’s world. What do those people contribute to the public good? They live off their inheritances and borrow their snooty attitudes from the British aristocrats.

  As he peeks into the inn’s elegant dining room, he can hear his father’s voice in his ear; it was as if Aaron were still alive. Just listen to yourself, son! You don’t have two pennies to rub together! You’re a sixty-two-year-old man who has to scramble for money. Who was fool enough to let his ex-wives take what they wanted.

  His father used to send Tim job ads from the local paper when Tim was a boarder at Munson Hall. If you don’t get an education, son, you’ll end up a bum was how he signed his letters.

  Aaron disapproved of Tim’s marriages and affairs. He didn’t understand why Tim preferred female company to the noisy get-togethers of male friends. His father had liked Meredith, so it’s possible Aaron would be pleased to see that circumstances were conspiring to pull Tim back into the Pauls’ old-moneyed circles. How odd the way life does this. How strange to work hard to escape the world of your childhood only to find yourself drawn into it all over again.