Wise Men: A Novel

by Stuart Nadler

  At the gate to my father’s house, he slowed. “What to do now, boss?”

  “Stop,” I said. “They’ll let us through.”

  “Why is there a gate?”

  I laughed. “To keep us out.”

  “What is this place? Museum?”

  “House,” I said. “It’s a house.”

  “For how many?”

  “Two,” I said. “Just two.”

  He clicked off the meter. Then he looked back to me, as if to question what I’d said, his right eyebrow arched in outrage. “Serious?”

  “Serious,” I said.

  More money: the fare was enormous, and I gave him an equally extravagant tip. By that point I’d decided I was going to give it all away, all of what Billy McKinley had told me was mine, all that had taken so many hours to sign from my father to me, every cent in the long line that began somewhere in the jet wake of that plane from Boston Airways.

  The guard was off his stool now, shining a flashlight in the car, on Hamid, on me.

  “And you are?” the man at the gate asked Hamid. The guard had the local accent. On the Cape, it’s more British than it is inland, the long vowels really long.

  “His son,” I said, speaking up from the backseat.

  “Come again?”

  Now the light was on me. “His son. I’m his son.”

  “Mr. Wise’s son?”

  “His son!” I yelled. “Hilton Wise.” And then, to Hamid, as if we were buddies now, I whispered, “Why’s everything gotta be so difficult?”

  The guard consulted his clipboard. “I don’t have you on the list.”

  “A list? Is this a nightclub? Call him.”

  “Who? Mr. Wise?” He laughed. As if it were the most ludicrous thing to think to call my father. “He’s busy.”

  “Busy with what? He told me to come. Just make a call from your box, or whatever you have to do.”

  “There’s a party,” the man said. “Can’t you hear the music?”

  And faintly, just then, I could: a trombone sliding, then something like the crash of a snare drum. We were, I knew, a few hundred yards from the house. This used to be part of the flat road that ran between Robert’s house and ours. Erosion had recast the shore, biting off a piece of everything.

  “Please,” I told the guard, “just make the call.”

  I had an Ebbington High baseball cap in my hand. It was the only thing I’d brought with me. There’d been a problem with my suitcase in Chicago, the latch inexplicably refusing to close. As if my clothes had wanted to stay behind in the Midwest. Rather than take it with me, I’d just left it there at the airport, my underwear and my khakis spilling out. But the hat: Savannah had laughed when she saw that I had it. I’d told her the truth when I had to go. “My girlfriend is pregnant,” I said. Although I wanted to see disappointment in her eyes, some reason to stay behind, what I saw instead was relief. Relief that I’d finally be going.

  Whenever I was asked, I said that I hadn’t been to Bluepoint since I was seventeen. I complained about the traffic, or about being so busy that I didn’t have the time to go out and visit. But of course that was all bullshit. In the off season, it was an hour from my house. I could get back and forth and listen to a whole ball game and have a pretty good night. I drove by here as often as I could, stopping at a spot along the road where you could see the crown of the roof, the weather vane, a slice of the water, Robert’s little house, out on the dune. I didn’t bother to turn into the driveway, hidden now by shrubbery, by birch, by two wooden stakes affixed with primitive security cameras.

  So I knew about the additions. There were two of them, one built at the beginning of the Johnson administration, a giant glass wing designed by some Dutch wunderkind who was supposed to turn out to be the next big thing and who, for whatever reason, didn’t. The second was more recent, a wing off the right flank, very much like the first, but less glass, more steel. The old cottage sat in the middle of it all, the gray siding, the red door, the old windows; he’d turned the place into a glass butterfly. I’d seen pictures of the interior in various architectural journals. Of course my father wouldn’t deign to build something like this without getting a little press. Apparently he and my mother slept in their old bedroom. He liked the space, he said. It was small, cold, had the worst view. “It helps me remember where I started,” he said in one of those articles, a blatant lie. If he were being honest, he’d have bought the place in New Haven, the place where we lived when the plane went down. That was where we’d started.

  Hamid was looking at me through the rearview. “What’s matter boss? You don’t want to go?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “This place is nice.”

  “It is.”

  “I’ve seen palaces not look so nice.”

  “I’ll tell my father you said that.”

  “How about I stay. You drive my car.”

  I smiled. “I like to drive.”

  “See? Perfect arrangement.”

  “What’s the typical day—eight hours?”

  “Try double eight.”

  Some lights went up behind the gates, maybe headlights, maybe lamps on the lawn. I sat in the back seat, unmoving.

  “My girlfriend is in there,” I said finally. “She’s pregnant.”

  Hamid nodded. “I understand.”

  “So. I had to come back.”

  “Come back from where?”

  “I found someone I’d been hoping to find for a long time.”

  “Another girl?”

  I nodded. “Another girl.”

  “You sure you don’t want to switch places?”

  “Maybe we should turn back.”

  “No. In a minute we go through the gates. There’s a party. Like the man said.”

  By now my Ebbington cap was a crumpled ball in my fist.

  “We should go,” I said. “Turn back.”

  “Huh?” Hamid looked up. His eyes in the rearview were wide and judging. “You can’t leave. You have a baby.”

  “Turn,” I said. “Go back to the airport.”

  “You can’t, boss. You have a baby.”

  “Turn. Please.”

  “I’m not turning.”

  There was a knocking beside me on the glass. A face straining to see inside the darkened window. And then more knocking.

  “Hilly! Hilly! It’s me! Robert! Open up! Mazel tov! Mazel tov!”

  There is one last thing: before I left Iowa, I took a car out through Ebbington, past Foreman’s Diner. I had the idea that I would go inside to talk to Charles, to make peace. But I couldn’t go inside. After all this, I didn’t have enough courage even to do that. There was a new window in place—I’d had a guy come overnight. Charles would’ve arrived to find it. This one didn’t have the glazing, the lettering, but it was there. I had the limousine park, and I got out on the sidewalk and stood at the glass. When Charles recognized me, he smirked, then smiled in a way that seemed genuine. Then he waved me in. There’s an open seat. Sit. He mouthed the words. I pointed to my car. Gotta go, I waved. No: sit! Stop betting, I mouthed. Huh? Stop gambling.

  And then he threw me an imaginary ball, except that it wasn’t imaginary; he had a piece of aluminum foil wadded up, rolled into a tight ball, and after a moment it was coming straight toward me, and even though I knew there was a window there, I began to flinch, it was coming so fast. Finally, it broke. He’d be dead in eighteen months, a car accident on Route 112, a few miles from the refurbished Hove Library, coming home from an exhibition of photographs of the Negro Leagues. Some guy in Kansas City had unearthed pictures of Charles and had started to tell the world what I’ve been telling you: that he was as good as it got. Apparently at the exhibit he’d been the main attraction, the belle of the ball, the big cheese. It was single car accident, ice on the road, bad brakes on his car, decidedly unsuspicious. When, over the next few days, his obituary was printed, it carried with it, in the opening lines, that familiar refrain that was never as
true as it was for Charles: He may have been the best pitcher you never saw.

  In Bluepoint, Robert Ashley took me out of the car. “You look terrible,” he said, holding me at arm’s length, then hugging me tightly. “Where have you been?”

  I started to answer him, and he hugged me closer. I left the Ebbington hat in the car.

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re here. You’re home.” Robert yelled out at the security guard. “Open the gates! Open the gates! Hilton Wise is back!”

  When we went through the gates, Jenny was the first person I saw. She was waiting out on the landing in front of the old house, in the same spot where I’d once stood with my father the first time we came here. She was wearing a blue pullover and jeans and white flats. Her hair was down at her shoulders. She saw me, put a hand to her stomach, and smiled.

  “Papa Wise,” she said, running to me, jumping into my arms. “Papa Wise.”

  PART

  III

  One

  People are always surprised to hear that, as a rule, I don’t fly. For most of my adult life I’ve had the opportunity to take advantage of all that Wise & Ashley has to offer, including their pilots. My closest friends, and even my children, think this has something to with my father—our shared trouble, our acrimony, our inability to find peace. And I’m guilty in a way of enabling the fiction that this is true. The reality is different, quite different, and, although it’s ridiculous to admit, and often humiliating, I’m simply afraid to fly, afraid of anything that has to do with air travel now, so afraid that for a few years I haven’t done it all. Europe—out of the question. Asia—so out of the question that I laugh when the prospect of a trip to Tokyo comes up. I used to need a few drinks. Then it was some Valium. Then it was a good deal of Valium. Now I just keep my feet on the ground whenever possible. Part of this is an issue of proximity. I’ve been around air disasters my whole life—if not actually physically close, than tangentially. Whole periods of my life can be marked by various crashes, fires, runway overshoots, engine failures. My very name, issued from the lips of a lawyer waiting in the Air India first-class terminal, is enough to earn a reproachful glare from the stewardesses there. We Wise men are anathema to airlines, evidently.

  One night not so long ago, when I had no choice, I was on a flight from Washington to Boston. It had been delayed for hours on the tarmac, first for weather, then for traffic, then for some security concern at another airport. By the time we finally left, my sleeping pill had kicked in, as had the two small bottles of Gray Goose I’d used instead of water. I was asleep when it happened. We were over Wilmington, Delaware. I was in first class. A woman was bringing around freshly baked cookies. As soon as we started going down, she burst into tears. “Oh no,” she said, losing whatever cool she was supposed to project. “This is it!”

  We’d lost power in one of our engines. Apparently this was a temporary problem, a glitch, a dangerous malfunction that our pilots were trained to circumvent. As soon as they’d disengaged the autopilot, the plane started to move in ways that you never want your plane to move. It took the pilots ninety seconds to get us straight again—ninety seconds in which we fell, or, I suppose, we glided, and in which the one hundred or so passengers alongside me began to pray, weep, caterwaul, and, almost in unison, whip out their cell phones to call home.

  A quick lesson in aviation: without power in the engines, the craft has no thrust. Remember Newton. Motion is like marriage: wherever you go, something’s pulling you in the opposite direction. Opposite thrust is drag. Minus the engines doing what they do—namely, thrusting you through space—the drag on the craft causes you to lose speed. So as you’re slowing down, you’re also losing flow velocity over the wings, and as you lose flow velocity, you lose your lift, and lift, as it sounds, is basically what’s keeping you up in the air. Because these things had happened, and because our aircraft’s losing power hadn’t caused the plane to roll or flip, the pilot had the opportunity to keep the plane level as it lost altitude. Which prevented us from spiraling nose first into the ground. Crashing nose first would mean—and this is probably obvious—a catastrophic explosion. I guess I knew all of this as I was going down. I’d been around it for so long that all the information flooded me. I wondered if landing flat was like doing a belly flop off the diving board. Maybe it’ll hurt, I thought. But maybe I’ll live.

  The first clue that we’d all survive came with the subtle hiss of the air conditioner bleeding through the vents, and then, in quick succession, the gentle uptick of the craft’s nose and the gleeful, snorting laughter of our stewardess, cookies still in hand. “Yes!” she called out. “Yes!” Had power not come back, and had the pilots done what pilots are supposed to do, provided they know how to do it, we’d have done what my father likes to call a “scraper.”

  “You come in on your belly like that,” he told me when I called him that night, “the craft is basically ruined. The FAA loves to get their noses up in that shit, too, Hilly. It’s their favorite fucking thing to do. No one’s dead, the jet’s fucked to hell, the carrier’s just looking around, trying to blame somebody. I love those cases. I love scrapers.”

  I thought of this comment when, not even a year later, during the first month of 2008, my father found himself in a scraper all his own when his private jet crashed outside Charlotte, North Carolina. The jet was his favorite. He called it Ruthie, after my mother. A luxury manufacturer had custom-built it for him at their factory near Bellevue, Washington. He’d had the interior paneled with an endangered subspecies of Brazilian teak. In the latrine: an equally rare white marble. All the seats had been removed and replaced with a king-sized mattress fitted with beautiful silk sheets from Tuscany (this was in the back of the cabin), a series of leather couches (midsection), a mahogany desk outfitted with a laptop and a phone and a dozen bottles of scotch (also midsection), and two sleek reclining chairs (these were up front, near the cockpit). On the outside, the plane was clean, all white, the logo for Wise & Ashley printed on the tail fin.

  Apart from the luxury of this plane, and apart from the not-so-small fact that he crashed and I did not, the big difference between what happened to me and what happened to him was that he was alone. There was nobody screaming, nobody talking to him, nobody gripping him to pray, as the woman beside me that night in Providence had done so urgently, saying, “Pray with me, son. Please. Pray to Jesus with me.” He was in the plane all alone.

  Irony wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind. Because he is my father, and because we have shared this curse of a name, my first thoughts were of the newspapers, the internet, the blogs, the wet stream of information that attached itself to anything he did and ran with it. Bad press for him meant people showing up at my house, looking for interviews, comments, annoying my daughters, staking out my bushes. Getting to Bluepoint was difficult in 1952. By 2008 all it took was a few keystrokes on a GPS device. I’m fully aware of how terrible a thing this is to admit, but in my defense, I knew straightaway that my father had survived the crash. Robert Ashley had called me from New York, breathless, crying, nearly incapable of uttering anything except: Crash… plane… he’s alive… Nearly every bone in his body had been broken except, miraculously, his skull and spine.

  I was in Bluepoint when I got word, sitting in the study. It was a gray morning. There was rain over the water in a sheet, the clouds over the bluffs obscuring my view of Robert’s house, empty now for the season. As of a few years ago, I have another view, a view beyond Robert’s house, of a hotel out at Broad Neck. It’s a big resort-style hotel that wouldn’t seem out of place in Aruba or Los Cabos. On Cape Cod, the thing is hideous and awkward. They’ve built a fake lighthouse up behind the main building, and that morning its bleating LED light kept sweeping the shore.

  Robert had to hang up, collect himself, and call me back ten minutes later, after what sounded like a half-dozen glasses of whiskey. He was a mess.

  “They’re saying he’s alive. Did you catch that when I called before?
”

  “I did.” I had my laptop open. A story on CNN’s home page said my father was dead. “But you might want to tell publicity. Let them know he’s alive. CNN says he’s dead.”

  “How in the hell did he make it?”

  “He’s always been lucky.”

  “I should probably tell publicity, huh?”

  “I just said that, Bob.”

  “He’s alive, Hilly. How is he alive?”

  “Should I come?” I asked. “Tell me which hospital, and I’ll come.”

  “I’m going. You stay.”

  “I’ve got nothing to do. Why don’t I come? I should be there.”

  “Stay. I’ll call you when I get there. I’ll be on my phone.”

  “OK.”

  “They have internet in North Carolina, right?”

  I waited a moment. When he was eighty-five, Robert transformed into an avowed tech addict but failed to master some very general concepts.

  “Yes,” I said. “They have the internet in North Carolina.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll send you an email when I get more information.”

  My father wasn’t famous any longer. He belonged to that odd group of forgotten men who were formerly famous. The sort of American who knew his face, or the face, say, of Adlai Stevenson, was dead now. Try showing someone under forty Stevenson’s face and see what you get. The last stop for the famous people of my dad’s era was the obits page. After the crash, I was alerted to the fact that his obituary was already written. All it needed was his date of death. They figured that he’d stopped making news. The crash upended that notion. Within hours, the front of the house was packed with reporters. So here he was, back in the limelight. Of the news anchors who filed stories, only Ted Koppel seemed alert to the potential poetic justice in all of this, and he gave the camera a certain rakish wink the night he delivered the news of the plane going down. The other anchors—Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Wolf Blitzer, even—simply read the prompter. Famous in the fifties and sixties for landmark lawsuits against the aviation industry.