Wise Men: A Novel

by Stuart Nadler

  I was still outside the diner a few minutes later when the police officer told me to go. “Do what he said, buddy,” the officer said. “Come back tomorrow. He’ll be in a better mood.”

  Two

  That Sunday, in October of 1972, my father appeared as a guest on Meet the Press. I have a recording of the broadcast, downloaded from the web. For whatever reason, my copy is without sound—an error in the transfer from film to tape to the tiny file at home on my computer, streaming now in my office as I write this, flickering, mute, everyone long dead but him. Everyone a ghost but my dad. His hands are locked at the knuckles on the desk, behind the folded tent of his name tag. Unlike the other guests, my father has no middle name. I’ve seen his birth certificate, held it in my hands. That section is blank on account of his father—my namesake—who believed that in America, brevity won the day, that two names bested three. Consider the founding fathers. Adams, Madison, Franklin, Washington, Jefferson. No middle names. So for him, just Arthur: Celtic for bear, Gaelic for stone. Perfect for my father: the stone bear. And then, Wise. That name. He’d worn it better than I had. To me it was a lark, as ridiculous as anything, a source for mockery. How could the name Wise ever be uttered without it sounding like a joke?

  This isn’t early color television, but it might as well be. There is the saturation of his hair dye, singed, almost, by an overhead top light, black at the part, blacker than in 1947, the black hair of a boy, but on the body and face of a fifty-five-year-old. There is the rainbow of the peacock feathers on the NBC logo, the red matching the red of my father’s pocket square. There is the glint in the diamond of his tie bar: a few thousand dollars there. There is the pinched flaw in his Windsor knot: immaculate blue silk, one of a closetful, fifty dollars each. Beneath the flimsy desk, he’s likely to have on something Italian. Black Bruno Magli. One hundred dollars new in New York. What would become known as the OJ Simpson shoe. These were his favorites. There is the way his hands quiver as Lawrence Spivak begins to ask him something, his shirt cuff lifting. Nerves on national television; just a trace of sweat on his hairline; no French cuffs today. But there’s the watch, Cartier, possibly the same one he tried to give me that day in Bluepoint. He seems just as imposing to me on screen as he did in reality. Of course, he looks just like me. At a certain point his reputation should have faded. Men, even great men, have only a short moment when everything—luck, skill, ambition—works perfectly in concert. But not him. On tape, he is quite a good deal younger than I am now. But still. Your father is always older, always.

  The picture cuts now to a photograph of a parked airplane. The edit is jumpy, the image coming on, then going away, then coming back, the V-hold straining. It’s unclear to me if this was how the image was broadcast or if this is just how it was recorded, digitized, streamed to me. Again: the plane, stationary on a nondescript runway, a big jetliner, with a row of windows closed to the sun. A logo on the tail fin tells me that this is probably Sunbeam Air Flight 81. Takeoff out of Denver, 11:00 a.m., August 1972. Estimated arrival at LAX, 1:03 p.m. The plane was found in pieces in the Rockies, the cockpit six miles from the tail. His nickname has become Arthur Crash, but it might as well be Arthur Cash. Robert Ashley once wrote to me that if I were to look outside on an average day, an average clear day where you could see jets coasting by at forty thousand feet, and I picked out just one flight—any flight, like a kid picking just one card from a street magician—there was a good chance my father was making some money off it. Either because of insurance or some judgment on the airline, or because they had asked him to make sure they couldn’t be sued the way Boston Airways was sued. Every jet wake: cash. Every sonic boom: cash. Every landing, smooth or not: cash.

  Now: a shot of Nixon. There’s a rumor that the president might make my father the head of the FAA. When I look closely, I can read the initials FAA on Spivak’s mouth, and then there’s my father’s big, bright smile.

  I didn’t need to work. Not at the paper. Not anywhere. For nearly twenty years now, my father had kept an interest-bearing account for me in New York at McKinley & Sons. If I could dream it—a penthouse in Paris, parasailing in Puerto Vallarta, a villa fronting the clear sea of the Adriatic, a fleet of yachts, a ski chalet, an oil refinery in El Paso, even my own private baseball club, that thing I’d asked for so long ago in New Haven—I had the cash for it. If I’d wanted to, I could have walked into any of McKinley’s branches in New York or Chicago and one of the McKinley boys would have been obligated to cut me a check on the spot. But shortly after Lem was arrested, I’d left for Dartmouth, and afterward, for the most part, I had little to do with my family or their money. They were in New York, and I’d settled in Boston. At the beginning, in my early twenties, I saw them on holidays. For my thirtieth, my father threw me a party at Honey’s on Fifth, where at the end of the night, he tried to give me a beautiful waxed twin-cylinder Jaguar that he’d had parked out front. He’d dangled the keys in front of me. “Take it! It goes really fast! It’s yours!” For my thirty-fifth he’d tried to give me a part of Wise & Ashley, which probably could have kept five generations of my grandchildren afloat. But I took nothing. I wanted to work. If nothing else, he’d given me this. “It’s waiting for you,” my father said that night, after I refused him. He tried to give me a kiss on the cheek. I backed away. “It’ll always be waiting for you.”

  For a while, out of duty or guilt or some combination of the two, I called him whenever I was in the city so we could meet for an awkward lunch someplace loud and conspicuous, someplace where we could be together but ignore the troubles between us. He hated the way I dressed, the work I did, the women I dated. But, more important, he knew that I considered him responsible for Lem’s death, that this was the reason I’d never touch his money. He considered my forgiveness of Lem’s crime a character flaw, evidence that at my core I lacked the strength of convictions that had made him such a success. My mother suffered the most from all of this. I had nothing against her, really. There were times when she’d drop the pretense and she’d seem to me to be the same woman she’d been before she got rich. The same woman I remembered dancing to the radio in New Haven. But she refused to think that my father could have had anything to do with Lem’s murder, and I did. How could I not? He could have dropped the charges. After all, they were just letters. And then, that knife? Reports had it as a long knife, not some jailhouse shiv—a real weapon. How had a knife like that ended up in Lem’s jail cell?

  When I woke that Sunday in my hotel room outside Ebbington, this was the episode of Meet the Press airing on television, this last bit the part I remember catching: Spivak thanking everyone for coming, a quick shot of my father behind his desk, and then a word from their sponsors. I’d woken late, and I was groggy. Driving back to my hotel after I’d left Foreman’s, I’d somehow ended up at the edge of a field miles away from where I needed to be. Two wrong turns had deposited me on a road so narrow that the side mirrors on my rental whacked at the planted corn edging the pavement. I was exhausted and still shaken from seeing Charles. Then a funny thing happened: the hills began to look like the sea. Indeed, the whole place looked like I had come upon Bluepoint somehow from an entrance I hadn’t ever known of—some detour that cut across the country, to the Atlantic. When the wind got at the peaks of the crop, I swore they were waves. A spinning windmill from a thousand yards was suddenly a lifeguard’s chair; the curved spine on a farm sprinkler became the iron trusses on the Sagamore.

  I had a message from Jenny waiting for me, slipped under the door while I slept. It read, simply: Your boss told me where you were. Call home.

  Home: my street in Beacon Hill, the line of brick row houses that rose up Mount Vernon to the big old building where I had my apartment. It was a simple, small two-bedroom with a view of the Charles. When I’d last talked to Jenny, I was at the office, arranging my ticket out to Iowa. She’d moved in because the lease on her apartment in Allston was up, and because I wanted to see her more often. I’d thought that if s
he were around more, then I might stop thinking about Savannah and she might replace whatever it was that made it so I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Almost on cue, the apartment started to fall apart, as soon as she was there. The roof started to leak. The radiators needed an overhaul. Our landlord tried to patch it all up, but the problems kept coming: my television refused to change channels; my turntable ruined every record I tried to play; the refrigerator I’d been forced to buy stopped cooling the food and started spoiling everything I bought. Without my father’s money, I couldn’t afford to fix it all.

  My hotel room in Iowa wasn’t much better: spare, smoked in, the carpet worn through, marks on the wall where the headboard hit the paint. The bed was a twin, just big enough for a twelve-year-old. At the foot of the mattress was a writing desk, and beside that, an ashtray the size of a salad bowl. The curtains opened onto a slow-moving curl in the river, which was thin, calm, a felled tree crossing it like a makeshift footbridge.

  Across the line, Jenny was hoarse.

  “I’m exhausted,” she told me. “I’ve been exhausted ever since you left. Just wiped out.” She took a long, reedy breath, as if trying to sit up or to steel her strength. “I’ve been drinking coffee all day. And I can’t wake up. Maybe you should come home. Maybe I’m sick.”

  I got up off the bed and walked to the window. There were people on the riverbanks, fishing, and I wondered if they could see into my room. I hated that feeling—of being watched. At home, Jenny was the opposite. Because she’d grown up with brothers, she had a boy’s notion of modesty, which meant that she had none.

  “Maybe you should call my doctor,” I said.

  Our telephone was in the kitchen, but the cord went everywhere. I thought of her, barefoot, going from one room to another, swiping a finger through the dust on the mantel.

  “What are you doing in Ohio?” Jenny asked.

  “Iowa,” I said.

  “What, honey?” Her voice was a sweet sort of hoarseness; butterscotch.

  “I’m in Iowa,” I said, “not Ohio.”

  “What happened in Iowa? What could possibly happen there?”

  “Someone put a brick through a window.”

  “Hmmm. Black guy’s window?”

  “Yep.”

  “Stupid question: there are black guys in Iowa?”

  I sighed. “There are. I just saw the window. Talked to some cops.”

  “Oh, Hilly, what are you doing out there? Is it dangerous?”

  “It’s not dangerous,” I said. “It’s just work.”

  “Are you sure? Don’t make the wrong people angry. OK? Don’t piss the wrong people off.”

  “I’ll try,” I said, doing my best to sound cocksure, tough, unshakable.

  “Windows break everywhere,” she said. “I’m sure someone put a brick through a window here today. In Boston. Where you live. I don’t understand why you need to go so far away.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “But I think I could get something good here.” I went to the window again, pulled back the drapes, brown and starchy in my hands, like reams of burlap hanging on a rod. The boys on the river were out in T-shirts, despite the cold. Midwesterners were immune to the weather, I was learning. I needed a winter coat, and there were kids outside like it was the summer. “It’d be a think piece. How even the smallest, most peaceful towns are more like the big cities than we know.”

  “I’m not your editor,” she said. “You don’t need to convince me.”

  “I know,” I told her, even though, of course, I felt I did. The hotel was called the Garden. It was my fourth hotel room that month. My job, if nothing else, kept me away from Jenny more and more. There’d been a time in my twenties when I’d lived like this: six cities in seven days; every meal alone in a restaurant; my editor’s telegrams awaiting me at reception. Those first years, I took everything they threw at me: spring training, Ivy League football, high school hockey, even a stint in Barrows, Maine, for a rafting contest between two now-defunct girls’ colleges. I was young, and I thought hotels were glamorous. Now, just walking through the front door, fiddling with the keys, having my credit card run on carbon paper—all of it exhausted me. The Garden felt like a hospital room. The sheets were stiff, musty, unwashed. This was a place you came to do secretive, shameful, terrible things. Why else would you come to Ebbington?

  “There are more people in Brooklyn than in the entire state of Iowa. Did you know that? I’m looking that up right now in the World Almanac.”

  “It’s not surprising,” I said.

  “I hate being sick,” she said, her voice breaking. “I’m afraid I might throw up. I hate throwing up. I’m so tired, it’s like I’m walking in a swimming pool. That’s how hard it is.”

  “Did you call the doctor? It’s probably just a virus. You’ll be better tomorrow.”

  A sigh. Quiet. Delicate. I imagined her adjusting the bracelets on her arm, something she did when she was nervous; she collected them. She liked plain gold bangles, and already I’d gotten her two. She had them going up both arms, halfway to the elbow.

  “How long does it take to file a story on a broken window?” she asked, her voice suddenly higher. Maybe she was sitting at our kitchen table, wearing one of my old dress shirts over her underpants.

  “I have to interview the guy whose window it is.”

  “Then?”

  “Then, probably interview some more cops. Then get a few people on the street to tell me what they think. Then, I come home,” I said.

  From across the line I heard the sound of a kitchen chair wincing against the hardwood. We had a tiny galley kitchen, the sort of thing that made you want to do anything but cook. Even if our oven worked. It was hard to have two people in the space at once.

  “When, Hilly? When does that happen? Like, tomorrow? Can you even fly out of Iowa? Do they even have planes there?”

  I wanted to get off the phone, wind down the conversation, do that trick with your voice that everyone understands is the cue to end the call. I had to get into town, to see Charles. “I don’t know. It happens when it happens. Listen, go to the doctor. Then call me to tell me what she says.”

  She cleared her throat. “Your father says I should go see his doctor. Some guy on Cape Cod.”

  “Did he call?” I asked.

  Another prolonged silence. Now I could hear with certainty her bracelets clinking together. “Yeah. We talked for a minute. Is that bad?”

  “He have anything interesting to say?”

  “The usual,” she said, chuckling. “Money money money. Plane crash plane crash plane crash.”

  “That it?”

  “He said he was calling from a boat. Said it was some fancy phone. Is that even possible?”

  “Who knows.”

  “Said he was docked with some millionaire client of his.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “And…” She hedged. “He had a cake sent to the house.”

  “A cake?”

  “Yes. A cake.” She tsked her tongue. “It’s something people eat for dessert, Hilly.”

  “What’s my father doing sending you a cake?”

  “I mentioned that when I was sick, my mother used to make me this vanilla cake with green frosting. So he sent me a cake. It has blue frosting. But it’s close enough.”

  I laughed. “His assistant sent it.”

  “It was a nice gesture, Hilly. Very nice.”

  My father. I could see him out on a boat somewhere, six rum and Cokes deep, chatting up my girlfriend, thinking of a way to make me look bad.

  “You shouldn’t accept anything from my father,” I said.

  “Oh, I know the drill, Hilly,” she said, feigning exhaustion. “I called some of the neighborhood boys over and made them test the cake before I ate anything. Nobody died.”

  I laughed. “You think that’s funny.”

  “He’s plenty nice to me,” she said. “I don’t get involved in any of your power struggles.”

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nbsp; “He likes pretty girls. You were probably the highlight of his day.”

  “What would your mother think of that?”

  “That’s a good question, Jenny.”

  She’d figured out that I was Arthur Wise’s son quick enough. A few magazine articles, a few photo spreads, and the mystery wasn’t that difficult to unravel. It still isn’t. She’d never pressed me about our relationship, and so I’d never really talked about him. She’d gotten it in her head that our major disagreement was over money; he wanted to give it to me, and I wanted to be more self-reliant. It was easier to let this slide than to explain everything.

  Jenny went on: “He kept asking about the account,” she said. “Said he could have Billy McKinley come by and talk to us if we were interested.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Maybe you should just take it.”

  “You want it, right? That’s why you’re saying I should take it?”

  “What if I do want it? Is that so bad? Money doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person.”

  “No. But that much money magnifies whatever might be bad in you.”

  “What about poverty? What does poverty do?”

  “We’re not poor,” I said.

  “Tell that to our bed frame that keeps breaking,” she said.