Henry answered, “The point in doing so is that you will then have done what I have told you to do.”
The young man twiddled his mustache, took in the look in his teacher’s eyes, and decided to let the matter drop.
A month later, taking lunch in the cafeteria shared by faculty and graduate students, Barbara Horowitz asked if she might sit with him. By all means. Henry was struggling to his feet when she touched him on the shoulder and restrained him.
“Miss Horowitz,” as Henry referred to her in class, was in her thirties, dark, sturdy, her hair provocatively set in a Dutch-boy bob utterly incongruous with her brassy temperament. She had attended Reed College in Oregon and gone to work in Walla Walla for the daily newspaper. After a few years she quit to join the staff of a weekly whose guiding lights were Rolling Stone magazine and The Village Voice. For Beetle she wrote about rock music and the shooting stars of rock land, and about civil rights, racism, imperialism, the military-industrial complex and nutrition.
The magazine folded, but her contributions to it had been noticed by regional editors, and now the editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had sponsored her for a Columbia School of Journalism slot. Her ideological zeal was at missionary-high level and in class she was provocative but never ill-mannered. Henry would not argue with Miss Horowitz, but in correcting her papers he would indicate where she was simply attitudinizing. Henry was quick to acknowledge that the line between reporting and editorializing was not clear, that as a writer for Time magazine he was hardly equipped to be censorious on the point. But the writer absolutely needed to know, and to communicate to the reader, that he knew what he was up to. “Otherwise you are engaged in guile, and you don’t want that, or, at least, shouldn’t want that.” Miss Horowitz listened to what he had to say and paid attention to what he wrote on her papers.
Within ten minutes, Miss Horowitz had persuaded Mr. Chafee to call her Barbara. He said he was prepared to do so from now on, that he inclined not to use first names unless asked to do so. Whereupon he asked her to call him Henry.
“You are a quiet fascist creep, Henry, you know that?”
“Yes,” Henry said, sipping his iced tea. “Would you rather I were a noisy fascist creep?”
She laughed. “While I’m at it, why did you land so hard on Little Lord Fauntleroy that first week?”
“You’re referring to Andrew Bradford III.”
“Who else?”
“Imagine exposing yourself to such ridicule, asking out loud, Why read The Taming of the Shrew?”
“You’re evading me. Remember, Henry, I am a skilled journalistic interrogator. I didn’t ask you why people should read the The Taming of the Shrew. I didn’t even suggest it’s dumb to ask the question. I asked you why you knocked little Andrew out of the ring just for asking?”
Henry sighed. He was about to reply when Barbara interrupted him—“God, I wish you would shave off that beard, so I could find out what you look like.”
“Now who’re you picking on?”
“Whom am I picking on.”
“I don’t use the objective whom except after a preposition.”
“In that case you can edit The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare didn’t know about your rule. ‘Of all thy suitors, here I charge thee, tell/Whom thou lovest best: see thou dissemble not.’ ”
“Nice going,” Henry said. “And what’s more, I give up. What do I have to do to get just a little quiet from you?”
“Denounce U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, contribute to the fund to build a sanitarium to park Barry Goldwater in, and go march in Mississippi.”
Henry laughed. At the end of lunch he felt ten years younger.
And at the end of the semester he asked Barbara Horowitz if she would marry him.
“Are you sure you’re not a homosexual, Henry?”
“At this point,” he said, “I am quite certain.”
They were seated at Maxwell’s Plum. Her hand reached under the table and gripped his. She lowered her head to hide the tear, but he had seen it. He felt within him an irrepressible devotion to this independent, raucous, opinionated woman with her bob-cut hair and flashing eyes. She had become everything, and more, as he discovered how urgent was an appetite he had kept in place all these years. She tightened her grip on his hand and Henry Chafee felt an elation he hadn’t ever felt before, something so deep and consuming he knew of it only as an abstraction he had encountered in his reading. He knew now that it really existed.
Thirty
THE NEW YORK TIMES gave Barbara Horowitz a job. She had elected to retain her maiden name. At the little civil wedding ceremony Danny served as best man (Caroline agreed with Henry that at this moment there was no alternative to tapping Danny). Henry, straight-faced and clean-shaven, asked her whether she desired him to change his own name to Horowitz. She had already changed the name of Henry to “Henny.” “I don’t want to call you by the same name everybody else does, and you’ve made it clear you don’t much like ‘Hank.’ So it’s Henny, same thing Ann Boleyn called Henry the Eighth.” Henry—Henny—let it go, along with his beard. At the newspaper she quickly earned the respect of her editors and was soon writing features under the supervision of the style setter, editor Charlotte Curtis. It was the year of a heated municipal campaign in New York City, with rising Republican star John Lindsay ready to abandon his seat in the Congress in order to run for Mayor. She was assigned to do several stories on Lindsay’s background and temperament—his public life had been well chronicled over the years.
She did a series of six stories on the enormously tall, extraordinarily handsome congressman, about whom it was pretty much taken for granted that he would one day make a bid for a presidential nomination. What stood most stolidly in his way was of course Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who wished to be President, and who dominated New York politics.
Barbara Horowitz explained to her readers that John Lindsay’s inner circle reasoned that he would need to appeal to liberal circles in New York to win support. He was, after all, a Republican seeking voters in a city resolutely Democratic. In one story she predicted that if Lindsay won, there would be tension between him and the Governor—whose problem was the opposite of Lindsay’s: Nelson Rockefeller needed to woo conservative Republicans. Rockefeller was the principal liberal figure in the Republican Party. He had contended against Barry Goldwater for the Republican nomination a year earlier and, when Goldwater won, pointedly refused to campaign for him. “Governor Rockefeller is mending fences on his right while John Lindsay is using a battering ram to attract New Yorkers on the left,” Barbara Horowitz informed her readers. The city editor then assigned her to do a portrait of Abraham Beame, the City Controller and likeliest winner of a Democratic primary. “Horowitz”—she liked to see herself thus identified—found the assignment tough going, inasmuch as the short, elderly candidate was resolutely uncolorful. She complained one afternoon to her editor that Beame “has never ovulated.”
“Has never what?”
“Just an expression.”
“Well, find a different expression,” Curtis said. “… I know, I know, Abe Beame isn’t John Lindsay, he doesn’t make the ladies swoon over him, doesn’t go to Broadway shows, didn’t shine as a student at Yale, doesn’t represent the Silk Stocking district. So he wears black socks on the beach. So he’s a pol? So write something interesting about pols.”
Barbara Horowitz did, and Henry, reading her story in the morning paper, told her she was an alchemist. She affected to be indifferent to the compliment. “Have you ever done a cover story on a pol?” she asked.
Yes, he had done Mayor Daley.
“That doesn’t count,” Barbara objected. “Daley’s fascinating.”
Henry explained that pols become fascinating if they exercise power, but in order to do that they generally have to win elections.
To round out the political coverage, the Times told her to do a feature on Conservative Party candidate William F. Buckley, Jr. She spent a few days
reading his books, his columns, and listening to one of his campaign speeches. She reported to the City Editor that she could not do a feature on him, but would gladly volunteer to serve on it if ever an execution squad were organized. Charlotte Curtis told her to do her duty, goddamnit, and she ground out a story about one third of which was blue-penciled as too tendentious.
She was pulled away from municipal politics to do “a big story” on the FDR Library—the paper would publish several features on the twentieth anniversary of the death of President Roosevelt. Barbara called Henry at Time and told him of the assignment. “Stop everything and quick, call your sister-in-law, Lila, tell her what a sweet and talented thing I am, and would she please give me the next four days of her time.”
Lila O’Hara hadn’t been at the small wedding and had never laid eyes on Barbara Horowitz. She insisted on being told which train Barbara would be on—Lila would meet it. “Tell Barbara to look for the tall lady with glasses and an ice-cream cone in her hand. They’ve got the best ice cream in Dutchess County at the drugstore across the street.”
• • • •
No fewer than six scholars were at work on some aspect of the Roosevelt story. And one of those six, Max Huxley from the University of Chicago graduate school, was writing not about Roosevelt, but about the Library. He was twenty-five years old, slim, studious, direct, persevering, and attracted to unusual juxtapositions; he tended to look out for relationships, e.g., between the style and dimensions of FDR’s tombstone and the period during the war when he specified what these should be. He was a steadfastly curious young man, familiar with the protocols of academic scholarship but unfamiliar with the ways of journalists. Working side by side with Barbara Horowitz, he saw an opportunity to learn exactly how a reporter from a serious daily newspaper met deadlines and crashed through obstacles that would hold up an academic researcher for a week or a month or a year.
And Barbara saw in Max Huxley an opportunity quickly to accelerate her knowledge of the Library, that extraordinary complex founded by Roosevelt himself in 1941, which had become a permanent repository for over two hundred separate collections making up over seventeen million pages of manuscripts, over a hundred thousand photographs, and thousands of feet of motion picture film. Already there were over thirty thousand books covering the life and times of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Barbara gravitated toward Max and he was obliging. He let her spend several hours reading his tidy notes, from which she got a quick general, and also profound, idea of the activity of the Center.
Barbara Horowitz, accustomed to writing under every kind of pressure, marveled at young Huxley’s notes, which appeared to have been prepared and written without any trace of pressure or haste. After a few dozen pages, Barbara wondered if Max had ever—ever in his life—made a simple typographical error. (“You might as well look for a typo in the text of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address on the monument,” she told Henry over the telephone.) For that reason her attention was arrested on one page where in ink he had placed three question marks (???) at the margin of a paragraph that dealt with recent contributions to the Library, listed for 1964. The documents revealed the receipt of 2,875,000 shares in Martino Enterprises, Inc., at an appraised value of over one hundred million dollars.
She walked over to Huxley, who was taking notes at another desk in the library. “Max, what’re the question marks all about?”
There were others in the large room, working within earshot, so Max answered in a whisper. “The gift didn’t come from Martino. It came from something called the Hyde Park Capital Fund. I never heard of the Hyde Park Capital Fund. And how did they get the stock? I’m going to Albany tomorrow to look up the records of the Capital Fund.”
“Anything screwy going on?”
“I hope so. It would certainly liven up my thesis.”
“Let me know if you find out anything interesting?”
Max smiled. “Waal,” he drawled out the word, “why give the New York Times a scoop that belongs to the University of Chicago?” And then, after a pause of exaggerated concentration, with a little smile, “Sure.”
And Max did.
Late the following afternoon he told Barbara that the Hyde Park Capital Fund had for two years owned the Martino stock. And that the two listed officers and directors of the Capital Fund were one C. Malone, and D. O’Hara. “Obviously that’s Daniel O’Hara, since he was president of Martino Enterprises until a few days ago. But what was he doing with all that stock for almost two years? And where did the dividends go during that period? But it’s easy enough to take the next step.”
Of course. Just ask Lila.… Did Max mind if she tagged along?
No. Sure, come along.
Lila O’Hara received them together: Max Huxley, with whom she had dealt for the better part of a month, rounding up information he requested—whose scholarly attitude she approved of; and Barbara Horowitz, whom she had met only two days before, at the railroad station, and instantly liked.
What, Max began by asking, was the Hyde Park Capital Fund?
“Oh, I’m not all that sure. Old Martino was a man who liked to do things his own way, and I guess he told Malone and my brother to hang on to the stock for a year or so, for whatever reason—maybe the hotel chain was being reorganized, or something like that—and then to turn it over to us. Sorry, can’t be more detailed than that.”
“Well, who can be more ‘detailed’ about the arrangement?” Max persevered.
Lila now turned cold. “Max, we are a research center, but this doesn’t mean that we encourage the dilettante. Some Chicago University don with nothing very important in mind wants a graduate student to spend a hundred pages in a thesis nobody’s going to read on what happened between Monday and Tuesday; I mean, who cares, Max? I certainly don’t, nor do my colleagues.”
Barbara was startled. Max turned to his notepad.
Lila lit a cigarette and said, “Do you have any more questions?”
Max said yes, but he’d rather put them to her the following day, as he hadn’t arranged them in the proper order.
“What about you, Barbara?” Lila’s voice was back to normal.
Barbara said she was getting along fine but would certainly call on Lila before she began to write her story.
Max and Lila walked out of the library. Max said to her, “You know where my favorite place is to sit down around here for a few minutes?”
No, Barbara didn’t know. Max motioned her to follow him.
They walked to the front entrance of the mansion. Max showed the guard—he was friendly with all of them, at this point—his working pass, Barbara showed hers. She followed him into the oaken hallway, up four stairs to the central corridor. Over to the third door. It was open. He turned in, showed his pass again to the guard standing by the velvet cord. Max lifted it from the hook attached to the stanchion and signaled to Barbara to walk on through. They passed across the thick embroidered carpet, around the bookcase that jutted into the room, to a couch in the little alcove from which they could view the imposing desk at the other end of the large, comfortable study of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“He had the couch here for an assistant to use while FDR was examining any of the books around us. You can take notes on the table here”—he pointed to the heavy unadorned table with the black leather stretched across. “FDR dictated a lot, reading from the table, to his secretary, seated where we are. It’s kind of fun sitting here. The tourists don’t get this deep into the FDR study. But the guards give us scholars the run of the house. Barbara?”
“Yes?”
“What was that all about with Lila? That outburst? Not at all like her. Something’s fishy. The records show that Martino Enterprises spins off three and a half to four million dollars a year. So where did that money go between November 1963, when the old man died, and April 1964, when the dividends from Martino Enterprises began to flow into Hyde Park?”
“I don’t know. But Lila was pretty tender on t
he point, I agree. I just don’t understand it. What are you going to do?”
“I’ll begin by asking Mr. O’Hara for an appointment. Then I’ll get a copy of the will from probate. Then I’ll ask to see the accountant of Martino Enterprises, whoever he is. Then I’ll look for the tax receipts, from the day Giuseppe Martino died.”
“Have you any idea what’s going on, Max?”
“No I don’t. But I can’t figure out what the purpose was of the Hyde Park Capital Fund. Whatever its purpose, it belongs in my thesis.”
“And in my newspaper. Max. Dear Max. I have to tell you this, that I’m going to have to pursue this story on my own. But if it turns out to be a story and if we publish it, I’ll give full credit to you for raising the question in the first place.”
“I understand. But don’t get ahead of me on trying to get the interviews with O’Hara and Martino’s accountant; give me a couple of days.”
“Max, what on earth is going on? What do you think?”
“That depends.… I wonder what FDR would have said, if this kind of thing had been plopped on his desk there?”
“Maybe he would have said, ‘You need a good lawyer,’ and quoted his rates.”
Thirty-one
MR. MALONE on line two, Mr. O’Hara.” Danny picked up the telephone.
“Morning, Cutter.… What? Hold it. Cutter, call me back, but on my private line.”
“Okay.” They both hung up.
The second line came directly to Danny’s desk. It rang. “Yes, Cutter, tell me about it.… Max Huxley. Yes. Well, he called in here a few days ago, wanted to see me about Martino’s will. Margie put him off—till one day next week, I think. Why?… You saw him?—Cutter. Where are you?” Danny looked down at his watch. “Meet me at the Yale Club. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”
He told Margie he was going to the Yale Club to meet a prospective client. On arriving at Vanderbilt Avenue, Danny went to the bar on the third floor. He ordered a gin and tonic and walked with it to a card table in the rear of the room. Cutter showed up, carrying his inevitable briefcase. He declined a drink, and sat down.
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