Immediately, I got calls from my girls. They’d seen the initial report on CNN’s home page. I have four daughters. Sammy was our first, followed by our twins Rachel and Elliot, and then my baby, Eliza. Having four daughters means living in a perennial state of reciprocal concern. I worry over them, and all of them combine their considerable power and charm and wit to worry over me. A day does not pass without one of them Skyping me, their pixelated, adorable faces beaming back at me from my laptop. They do this constantly, especially since their mother passed. My girls are like the McKinley boys—they’ve spread out around the globe, all of them having kept the name Wise (three of them are married), each one a satellite of their mother and me.
My father’s crash occurred eighteen months after Jenny died. She and I were married for over thirty years. Except for the very, very beginning, for reasons that are obvious, we were happy together. Occasionally, we were so happy together that our life took on that particular weightlessness that elides time, so much so that it would come as a shock to us to celebrate our tenth or fifteenth or twenty-fifth anniversary. She would laugh in a particularly sad way when time struck her, as if she were saying, Oh, right, this all isn’t just permanent, is it?
Cancer took her, but she was gone long before that. Chemotherapy is what kills people sick with a malignant tumor. The person left afterward is not really the person, just the skin and bones. Part of the soul is shed at some point, along with all the hair. That comment may offend people, and I apologize if it does. I shouldn’t speak in such generalities. So let me try again: chemotherapy is what killed her. For a while we believed it would work. We tried to think that such a medicine (the italics, obviously, are mine) really could work, that by wiping out the entirety of the body’s complex set of defenses, we were making her stronger. So it happened that her soul was gone long before her body passed. Every drip of morphine carried her away. Drip, drip, drip; less, less, less. If she’d made it to January, we’d have made thirty-five years.
About her death, I’d like to say only this: when she went, we were all there, all of us—me and all our children. When it happened, when the last of it came and went, I didn’t know what to do. What do you do? Those first moments afterward, the first minute or two, the ridiculousness of it all, the quiet, the new permanence. There were doctors there with us—just in case—and then, after a while, there was some murmuring about having the men from the funeral home come to take her away. But I couldn’t, you understand? We had been together so long. People say that all the time. I know that. But what they mean, I think, is that they were together in the larger sense, together in their fidelity. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But Jenny and I were always together, always in close proximity. If she went somewhere, I went with her. We were conjoined. We had no jobs. We were here, after all. In Bluepoint. All this time. Where would we have gone? So, when the man from the funeral home wanted to take her away, I fought him, literally, with my hands. At one point, I called out: You’re not just going to take my wife away so that I never see her again! You can’t! You can’t!
Maybe this book should include our time together. I’m aware that she appears as some sort of footnote. But, really, what’s the point of reading a happy story?
I reacted to Jenny’s death the same way that I reacted to my mother’s death, which came ten years earlier: I took apart the house. The impetus to begin the deconstruction here was not, as some have speculated, a means by which to aggravate my father and to reject his money, but, more simply, the result of death, of loss. It’s a way to honor the living—to take away the space they knew, to let that go the way the dead have gone. The Ancient Egyptians believed this. And, in the absence of any coherent religious dogma, I believe it too. My father had long since deeded Bluepoint to me, and so he had no recourse to stop me when I had a team of contractors come out from Boston and literally pry away the first of the two additions. When he gave me the house, he claimed he didn’t want it anymore, that he had other houses. This had always been his plan—to give it to me. He thought it would bring us closer.
More than anything, the house in Bluepoint was my mother’s. She’d built it for herself, and after she was gone I didn’t want it anymore. They took it out of the ground, first with huge sticks, the way you might pry open a jammed car door. Then they took it off the beach by cranes. Then they put it on an enormous truck and literally just drove it all away. The butterfly had one wing now. The press loved this. My father was found at his house on 107th Street by a team of freelancers hoping to do a story on his life. The video footage is funny to see: his shocked face. For the first time the news media were his friends. “Are you serious?” he asked. “My house? The goddamned idiot. You’re kidding.” When, finally, he is convinced that the story is true—a miniature television is proffered, the video shown to him—he curses me out. “My son the idiot! What an asshole! Print that. My son the asshole!”
Two
Five months after the crash, my father came back to Bluepoint to live. He arrived one afternoon in a dark Mercedes, attended to by a team of nurses, all of whom were men, and all of whom were black. He had steadfastly refused any contact from me while he was in the hospital, rejecting my telephone calls, my letters, my emails, and, with the help of Sammy, my text messages. Part of this was that he didn’t want me to see him in such a state—in traction, in casts, on a morphine drip. And part of this was that he still hated what I’d done to the house. So the first I saw of him was in a lifestyle feature in People magazine: PLANE-CRASH EXPERT RECUPERATES FROM HIS OWN BRUSH WITH DEATH. The article was the first volley in a PR blitz intended to stave off the hemorrhaging that followed the whole ordeal. Since Wise & Ashley had a client roster that represented nearly every major player in the aerospace industry, the crash had hurt business. Robert had told me that in the first week following the crash, they’d lost nearly a quarter of their business to rival firms. Thus: the blitz. The photograph accompanying the story in People showed him at the helm of a Gulfstream G550, one hand on the controls, one hand on his knee. He looked strong. In the picture he was wearing a leather jacket. And, because he refused to be photographed without one: a necktie.
He’d done much of his rehab at Duke University Medical Center, and then, when he was somewhat better and more agile, at Mass General, where all sorts of brilliant young Harvard students doted on him and came at all hours to his bedside to ask him advice on the markets. Again, I’d learned this from the Boston Globe. This was followed by stories in the Times (ARTHUR WISE GETS BACK ON HIS FEET), stories in the Journal (SIXTY YEARS AFTER FAMOUS CRASH, ARTHUR WISE RISES AGAIN), and a long, hagiographic profile on Bloomberg entitled THE WISDOM OF KING ARTHUR, which was so riddled with falsehoods and tall tales and bald lies that I couldn’t finish it.
My daughter Eliza had left to get him, driving her ten-year-old baby-blue Toyota Corolla and returning in the Mercedes. It was midday when they arrived, just after a rain, the road up to the house muddy, beach weeds coming up through the asphalt. I hadn’t repaved the drive in years, and, watching the car trying to tackle the considerable bumps and craters and gullies between the road and the house, Robert shook his head. He was beside me on the porch. Bringing my father to Bluepoint had been his idea. The salt air and the relative quiet and the proximity to his granddaughters—these being the chief reasons. My father had to be convinced. He’d been gone ever since I took the house apart.
“That’s going to make him crazy,” he said. “All the bumps.”
“You’re the one who wanted him to come back here,” I said. “You know how I’ve kept the place.”
“Still. Maybe we should have spruced things up a bit. Paved. Landscaped.”
Eliza got out first. She has always loved her grandfather. He doted on her when she was young, seeing some fire in her that he didn’t see in me, or in any of my other kids. She shared his nose, his taste for rye, and some of his zest for the political tussle. When we needed someone to go get him, she jumped at the opportunity.
She frowned and then pointed at the Mercedes. “Right here,” she said. “He junked the Toyota without telling me.”
Robert laughed. “At least his spending muscles didn’t need to be rehabbed.”
Then I heard my father call out: “What kind of asshole buys his daughter a used Corolla?”
I turned to Robert. “They didn’t need to work on his mood either, I guess.”
The nurses set out the wheelchair, but because it was muddy, and because the wheels, even without my father weighing them down, had sunk into the wet ground, the men had to carry him up to the porch. He was in a suit—Zegna, chocolate brown, a blue tie, a white pocket square, a pair of ridiculous alligator-skin shoes. It took two men to carry him, and as they did, he closed his eyes. I’m sure he felt pathetic at the whole ordeal, but he looked less like an invalid than like a king being carried by his subjects.
When they put him down, he wheeled around in his chair to get a look at the place.
“Look at this!” he called out. “Look at what you did to my house!”
“Good to see you, too, Dad.”
“It’s just the cottage! You got rid of everything!”
“Right,” I said. “Since Jenny died. I’m pretty sure you knew that.”
Robert chimed in: “You knew that, Art. We told you.”
My father wheeled forward a few feet. “The other wing! You junked both wings!”
“I like it this way,” I said. “And I didn’t junk either of them. People bought the other wings. They’re living in them. It was way too big for us.”
He slapped the arm of his chair and then winced. Both of his elbows had pins in them now. “This is bullshit!”
“You hungry?” I leaned down to talk to him.
“Don’t infantilize me. Stand up. Stop crouching.”
I stood up. “OK. No crouching.”
“Robert!” he cried. “Robert!”
Robert came around to the front of the chair. Since the crash, he’d spent half of every week with my father, using the firm’s new jet to taxi back and forth between New York and Durham, and then, after my father was transferred to Mass General, to Boston.
“Calm down, Art,” Robert said. “Go easy on the kid.”
“Bob, I want to stay with you. In your place. I can’t do this here. I can’t.”
Robert looked at me as if waiting for my approval.
“It’s fine in the house,” I said. “Really. It’s clean. It’s airy. We’ve got your bedroom made up.”
“I don’t recognize you, Hilly,” my father said. “You’re an old man.”
“So are you,” I said, which, after a moment, made him laugh.
The truth, however, was that he looked good. He looked younger in the sunlight. Younger than I’d expected, at least. His face was still relatively unlined, still marked with that famous seriousness of his. Age, if it had done anything to him, had softened him. His features, which were my features, had become round where they had been square, especially his cheekbones, which my mother had always loved. He had a key chain in his hands, and absently, while avoiding looking my way, he fiddled with the keys. He looked out over my shoulder for a few minutes while he debated what to do. It had been raining for most of the last week, and the mud was a brownish gold near the street where the grass had thinned and gone bald and where the mailmen had left their shoe prints like fossil markings by the fence posts. It was a deep black by the house, smudged by eelgrass and filthy gulls and a pair of forgotten, rusted lobster traps, and so many scampering sandpipers running in a line between the bumper of my truck and the rusted hull of a beachside trash barrel. This was what my father seemed to be looking at, the truck.
“Is that your truck?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“A Jew in a truck,” he said, scoffing. “That’s absurd.”
“It’s a good truck,” I said.
“What do you do in it? Haul things?” He laughed.
“Sometimes.”
“A Jew in a truck,” he said again. “You’re always trying to be someone you’re not.”
I looked at Robert, smiling. “If you want him, he’s yours.”
“Where’s Eliza?” my father said, calling out for my daughter. “Eliza, honey!”
She came around. She is beautiful in a way that nobody in the Wise family has managed to be: effortless, uncontrived, gorgeous in no makeup.
“What’s up, Grandpa?”
“What’s up?” He laughed. “What is up is that I want to be brought over to Robert’s house. Could you have my boys take me over there?”
She snickered. The nurses were standing around on the lawn, laughing among themselves. Eliza looked out at them and then back at my father. “Your boys?” she asked. “You mean the nurses? The men over there?”
“The black fellows. Could you? Please?”
“Dad,” I said.
“Oh, I know, Hilly. I know. I’m using the wrong terminology, aren’t I? What is it now? I’m never sure what’s allowed and what isn’t.”
Three
In the morning, I went by Robert’s. My father was out on the patio with a carafe of orange juice, a chess set, and a laptop with the morning news splayed on the screen. He had, like Robert, successfully migrated from paper to paperless without any friction, unlike me, who stubbornly clung to everything my daughters told me was bound to disappear from the world: the New York Times, paperback books, stationery sets, 35-mm film, pickup trucks. Aligned on the edge of the patio were my father’s loafers. His bare feet were crossed beneath the table, wet with sand and wiggling in the cool air.
“Sit down,” he said to me, waving me toward his setup. “Come and I’ll beat your brains out at chess.”
“I don’t play chess,” I said.
“I could teach you,” he said.
“I haven’t had enough coffee. Otherwise I’d be up for it.”
“Otherwise nothing. Otherwise I’d beat your brains out.”
I looked at the board. It was a vanity set, everything cut from good marble, the knights fashioned into perfect little horse heads, their eyes made with real turquoise. I’d lied, of course. When I’d worked at the Spectator, some Russians in the newsroom had taught me the game, and I was sure that in a few shrewd moves I could beat my father soundly.
I sat down. Robert was out in the yard, painting his fence. He did this every other year. It was an old fence, and occasionally the wind would break some planks and he’d have to fix those as well, the whole project usually taking him a week of solid work. For the past ten years—ever since my mother had passed—he and my father had spent more time in Los Angeles, where they had houses near one another on a golf course in Bel Air. This left the house here in Bluepoint often in need of repair. Now it was more than the fence that needed mending. The insides were falling apart: the floorboards were warped from humidity, windows were cracked, the electricity was spotty on the second floor, ceiling fans were caked with grime so thick that to let them spin was to subject yourself to a blizzard of debris. What I liked about Robert’s house, especially when he was gone from the Cape and I was the only person here, was that inside, it was as if no time had passed. Everything was old; nothing had been upgraded—not the stove, not the furnace, not the faucet fixtures (these especially looked so old-fashioned to me), not the lighting, not the bookshelves, not the plumbing or the wiring or the cooling system. Aside from an expensive alarm system, some new windows, and a new roof, everything remained as it was in 1952.
My father, smiling, his lips wet with orange pulp, pointed out to Robert, who was kneeling in the sand, his khakis streaked with white paint. “Idiot,” he said gleefully.
“Why’s he an idiot?” I asked.
“Hire somebody. Don’t do it yourself.”
“He likes it.”
“He’s ninety. He shouldn’t be working that hard.”
At this, as if he’d heard us, Robert sto
od up, wiped something off on his pants, fished around for a hammer, and then promptly ripped off three rotted planks from the fence. Behind him he had his laundry out on the line. Still, after so long, he hadn’t bought himself a washer or a dryer.
“You know how much money he’s worth?” my father whispered.
“So what?”
“He’s trying to prove something.”
“You sound like you’re competing with him,” I said, taking a bishop into my hand.
“Even if I knew how to fix a fence, I wouldn’t want to do it,” he said. “Why does he even need a fence?”
“I didn’t know you played chess.”
“I learned in the hospital. They had all these tiny little Mexicans trolling around in there, emptying out my bedpans and whatnot. They taught me. They just wanted to hustle me out of my money, I think,” he said. “I actually got pretty good.”
His laptop beeped at him, and he hammered out something on his keyboard. Post-9/11, Wise & Ashley had been tasked with writing what my father was calling doomsday stipulations into the various contracts that airlines were drafting for their pilots, their stewards, their mechanics, their passengers. His left hand wasn’t yet perfectly healed, and so he typed for the most part with just his right—a hunt-and-peck method that must have exhausted him; he’d been the first person I knew who could type as quickly as he thought, the sound of his fingers on the keyboard of his Underwood like a team of carpenters assembling a house.
When he was finished, he looked up at me. He put his hands together. He had a big, gaudy Cartier on his left wrist. This was a new watch. His favorite had been ruined in the crash. There were liver spots, or sun spots, or simply a combination of the two, dotting his forearms, like a constellation’s worth of tattoos.
“You seem well,” I said. “All things considered.”
“I’m in pain all the time.”
“I wanted to visit.”
Wise Men: A Novel Page 24