“I was a mess. It was ugly.”
“Still. I called. I texted, even.”
“I got them all. But there were media in the halls. It was terrible, Hilly. You’d have been ambushed. And we all know what happens to you when you’re ambushed.”
This, of course, was a reference to my outburst outside the library in Hove, an event that my father, surprisingly, had loved. I’d been told he’d tacked a photograph of my screaming face onto a bulletin board in the cafeteria of Wise & Ashley, with a caption running beneath it that read: Don’t mess with the boss’s boy. He’s got millions. Lots of millions!
I folded my hands across my chest. The patio was quiet with just the two of us. The only sounds were of my father’s wheelchair, which squeaked beneath him as he fidgeted, and the lolling of the ocean out behind us. Occasionally Robert would bang at a fence post, testing its firmness, or we’d hear him scraping away paint with a flat-faced chisel.
My father laid his right arm flush against the table. Running from the crook of his elbow to the joint of his wrist was a long red scar like a line of fishing tackle. After a moment, he noticed me staring.
“In the crash,” he was saying, “a piece of something tore this open. It came either from the seat back or from the tray. I was lying there, looking at it. My arm, it was just torn open.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I had this flash that I was back in the war.”
“Really?”
“You saw that sort of thing all the time. People spliced open in the most unnatural ways. But, you know, as soon as it happened, I snapped out of it and I thought to myself that I should sue whoever had that tray designed. Then I remembered that we designed it.” His laugh was dry, a cackle. “You fucking believe that?”
“I didn’t know you were designing parts of planes now,” I asked.
“Oh, Hilly, you were never really interested in it all. It bores you.” He tapped at his keyboard. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”
He pushed the chair back from the table and rolled up one leg of his pants. Here was another scar. “This one,” he said, running his finger across two inches of raised red skin, “this is from the surgeons. My heart, apparently, was blocked to shit. Plane crash probably saved me, they said. They took some arteries.”
“I had no idea.”
“Apparently they also gave me some bovine valve,” he said.
“A cow?”
He nodded and then leaned into me. “I won’t eat a steak now,” he said, and then chuckled. “You believe that? I can’t. It just doesn’t taste good. It’s the fucking strangest thing.”
“You should have at least taken my telephone calls,” I said. “I mean, even one of them would have done.”
He pointed at his teeth. “They had me wired shut, Hilly,” he said. “I couldn’t even get a word out. I sounded like somebody was holding me hostage and had me gagged.”
“Still.”
“Look at us,” he said. “Together for five minutes, and we’re already on the verge of an argument.”
“I’m not trying to fight.”
“Your feelings are hurt. I can see it. You were always so sensitive.” He pointed out at my house. “I mean—all that dismantling. People die. You can’t just tear down the house because of it.”
“Sure I can. I did it pretty easily. It’s amazing what people will do for the money.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You let Robert come see you in North Carolina,” I said.
“Robert is my friend,” he said. “He was there in the war with me. It doesn’t bother him to see somebody banged up the way I was banged up.”
“It would have bothered me?”
“Of course. You’re so goddamned fragile. Your daughters are tougher than you are.”
They were all out on the beach now, attempting to go swimming. In May on Cape Cod, the water is basically untouchable. When the waves rolled back, they all ran in up to their ankles, and then, like birds, they ran back ahead of the tide, shrieking and laughing. My father fished out his pack of Old Golds and offered me one. I waved him away. I’d been off them a year by that point, but I still wanted one.
“Were you scared?” I asked.
“When? When the plane was crashing?” He smirked, lit the cigarette, blew the exhaust all over me. “What the fuck do you think, Hilly? The plane was crashing.”
“I mean, did you have faith the pilot would land it?”
“No. Not the way we fell. We had total power-down. The tail dipped. Usually…” he trailed off then.
“Apparently he did an amazing job.”
“He walked away with only a few scrapes. Me? His boss? I wouldn’t call that amazing.”
I leaned back in my plastic chair. (Robert had a plastic patio set—he was frugal to the end.) Out on the shoreline, the sea grass was high and buzzing with yellow jackets or beach gnats, and a weak breeze blew at a wooden swing Robert had hung years and years ago from the one still-strong pine in the yard.
My father was looking out to where Lem Dawson’s apartment once stood.
“You can’t even see where it was anymore,” he said.
“Let’s not talk about that.”
“Do you remember the first time we came here together?” he asked. “There was that poor dog trapped in the house. The old owners had left it. Do you remember that? And he came out to get it?”
“It was a cat,” I said.
He grinned. “It was a dog. A collie. You were sobbing.”
“I was not,” I said. “Mom was screaming. Not sobbing.”
“Screaming? No. She never screamed.”
“She was screaming.” Now I’d made him agitated.
“I probably have a photograph somewhere,” he said. “We have so many photographs from that first summer.”
“A picture? Of the cat? Who’d have taken the picture of a cat?”
“The dog? Who else? Dawson. Lem Dawson.”
“You think he took a picture of that?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re wrong,” I said.
By then, though, he had turned toward the street, his attention now on a white sedan that had parked in the dirt outside Robert’s house. He grimaced and looked at me. “He needs to put up gates,” he said to me. “And you need to put your gates back up. People have no sense of privacy anymore.”
“I don’t believe in gates,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. “What do you believe in, Hilly? Seriously?”
A young man was out on the gravel. He was dressed casually—in blue jeans, a black button-down, a foolish-looking cap. He had a canvas messenger bag slung over his shoulder, white earbuds stuffed into a pocket and spilling out. I got up to meet him, my father by that point pecking away at his keyboard, a series of beeps drawing his attention from the driveway to his screen. Before I was off the patio, the kid had his business card out for me to take.
“Theo,” he was saying, “Theo Cantor. Durham Herald-Sun. Wondering if I could get a minute of your time.”
I took his card. “Look—” I started to say, knowing what the kid was here for, having had to deal over the years with a small amount of unannounced visitors coming by Bluepoint with their microcassette recorders and their notepads and now their stealth digital cameras.
“You’re Hilton Wise, right?” Theo asked.
“I am.”
“I’m writing a book on your father,” he said. He had something else to give me—a piece of paper, which contained information about his project, documentation to back up his claim.
“I can’t help you,” I said.
“Of course you can. But I understand that you don’t want to.”
“Whichever,” I said, turning around to leave while raising up the business card in such a way as to thank him politely for making the effort.
“I’ve just got back from Iowa,” he said, calling out. “From a town called Hove. About forty minutes or so from Cedar Rapids.”
I stopped, or slowed, trying not to look too conspicuous. Of course, my having been there wasn’t a secret. The most famous moment of my life had occurred there. Even perfect strangers knew that.
“I talked to some people there who remember you.”
“All right.” I held up his card. “Got your info. Again, thanks for coming.”
“The book’s going to come out regardless,” he said.
“Good luck with it.”
“Would you at least try to work with our fact-checkers when the time comes?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It depends what your questions are,” I said. Again I held up the card. “But thanks for coming.”
“You were a reporter,” he said. “You know how this works. I’ve already basically got the story.”
“And what story is that?”
He reached into his bag and took out a photograph of a headstone. “Here. Come look at it.”
“I don’t have my glasses,” I said.
“I took this picture myself yesterday. Just so you know I’m not here scamming you.”
It was Lem Dawson’s tombstone. He told me this because I couldn’t really see it. Later, inside, alone, I’d see that the stone was a simple gray thing, weathered, the lettering worn and flattened, some dead grass around it, just the dates of his birth and death carved on its face. I had the picture in my hand, the wind at it, the paper wobbling and flopping in that way that heavy paper does.
“Where’d you take this?” I asked.
“Nearby.”
“Nearby here?”
“Walpole. Near the prison there.”
“I never knew that it was there.”
He was writing all this down.
“That’s all off the record,” I said.
He looked up from his notepad. “Ah, man, it’s already down.”
“Tear it up.”
“But—”
By now Robert Ashley had come out onto the lawn behind me. He was squinting, drenched with white paint, a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other. Theo took a step toward him, another business card at the ready.
“Mr. Ashley, my name is Theo Cantor. I’m a reporter for—”
“You get off my property right now, Mr. Cantor,” Robert said, his hammer raised.
Theo stumbled then, his bag falling off his shoulder and, with him, into the mud. Robert took a step closer now. “There are channels, young man. Proper channels to go through to get a hold of me. This… this, coming here, arriving like this… this is not a proper channel. Do you understand me?”
The kid was resilient, though, and, watching him right himself, grab yet another business card (the previous one had fallen into the mud with him), I thought of all the young stringers I’d known at the paper years ago. I’d never really possessed the unchecked aggression that a good reporter needs, the ability to dive headlong into hostile, unknown situations, the drive to drag yourself up from the mud and grab another business card.
“I’m writing a book about Arthur Wise,” Theo was saying. “And I’m just looking for somebody to answer my questions.
Now Robert lowered his hammer. “He’s got no comment. I’ve got no comment. Hilly’s got no comment.”
Robert had succeeded in backing Theo up to his car, an impressive bit of menacing that made me remember Robert in his youth—the man who’d knocked my father unconscious with such savagery. Robert had always taken care of himself. If you didn’t know, you’d have guessed he was seventy. A few minutes later, the kid was gone. My daughters were up at the house now, all of them trying to cheer up their grandfather, all of them with sweaters over their bathing suits, their hair bundled up atop their heads, all of them, in parts and in pieces, their mother.
I showed Robert the photograph of Lem’s tombstone and he scoffed. “Jesus.”
“You shouldn’t have treated him like that,” I said.
“You don’t understand,” Robert said.
“I was a reporter for a long time,” I said. “I understand perfectly.”
He was still holding the picture, glaring at it. He’d gone pale. In the last few months, Robert had become more of a public figure than he had in the preceding fifty-odd years. Suddenly there were news articles about him. ASHLEY EMERGES TO RUN FIRM HE HELPED START. (This ran in the Economist, with a very flattering picture of Robert standing by his desk in the office on Park Avenue.) He’d confided in me, with no small amount of pleasure and self-satisfaction, that the demands for press had been so great that he’d had to hire his own publicist. A very fine-looking young woman, he told me. A half century with his name on the door, and now he’d finally gotten his chance to steer the ship. Of course, at their age, he and my father were just figureheads. He gave me the picture of the tombstone.
“I can’t have any other bad news come out right now. I can’t have anything that we’re not controlling. It’s been open season on our clients since the crash. Any more bad news, we might just tip over. This is bad. A biography? People smell blood.”
I didn’t care about any of that, though. “Did you know that Lem was buried near here?”
He gripped his hammer. “Of course I did, Hilly. I bought the plot myself.”
Four
There is no real town to speak of in Bluepoint. The peninsula of the Cape narrows, so that the main thoroughfare exists simply as an artery between dunes, a stretch of road through the moonscape that connects Wellfleet to Provincetown. There is a place to buy liquor, a place to worship if you’re a Catholic, and a building in which to pay your property-tax bill or to convene at noon with your buddies before heading off to the water for an afternoon of angling for bluefish. A string of impossibly small beach cabins fronts the ocean, three dozen shacks, everyone packed together with an urban density, and the road there is nothing but a paved, flattened top of the sandy dam between the sea and the marshes preceding the schooners at the yacht club. And there are homes: ours, Robert Ashley’s, and those of a few hundred lucky people. For cigarettes and burgers and oysters, or for late-night videos, rum drinks, a copy of the Times, a wind chime carved from petrified wood, a batik sundress, a straw hat, some sunblock, a copy of Yo-Yo Ma playing the Bach cello concertos, or for any of those things that people yearn for when they come to the ocean, one needs to head elsewhere. In Bluepoint, there is little to do but to sit out on your deck, in your yard, or on the beach, beneath the sun, with a book or a glass of iced tea—or with a radio beside you, broadcasting the Red Sox game—while you lie in a hammock. This is Bluepoint.
I’d lived here long enough that I was known in town as my own man and not as my father’s son. In the history of my life, this was no small achievement. For years, I had no real occupation other than to raise my children and to look over the foundation I’d set up in order to give most of my money away. This part is boring—foundations, charity, galas, the good deeds rich people do to feel less guilty. So I’ll just skip it. Sometimes I wondered what people here knew about me. It was difficult to tell. A photograph at our grocery—it’s called the Trap, as in lobster trap—had me in a suit and tie, dedicating the local restoration society. And another photograph showed me shaking hands with Bill Clinton sometime before all the business with Lewinsky. Still: I was just another guy in town, and except for the occasional reporter, no one bothered me. All of this was true until my father came back. The news had spread, and neighbors had begun to send food to the house, with cards for him: casseroles, muffins, bagels, and—because someone had read that it was his favorite—a plate of smoked trout. Already two police cruisers had swung by, ostensibly claiming to be on the lookout for any trespassers but really just looking to meet my dad, get his autograph, take a picture with him. So now, for the first time in a long time, things for me seemed different. I’d gone into town to get dinner with Sammy the day my father came, and the waitress, someone who’d known me for probably thirty years, took my picture with her cell phone. When I asked why, she reached out and touched my arm.
; “Well, you’re famous, sweetie,” she said. “That’s why.”
“But you’ve known me all this time.”
“And now I want your picture. So what? Sue me?” Then, having realized that she’d just told Arthur Wise’s son to sue her, she suddenly looked stricken. “No. Don’t sue me. Please. I was joking.”
On his second day, while all of my girls were in the kitchen preparing breakfast, and their husbands were arguing about various golf courses and exotic vacation rentals and NFL quarterbacks, my father demanded to be taken at once into Boston. A branch office of Wise & Ashley occupied six floors in one of the new skyscrapers downtown, and he wanted to go into the office. It was eleven o’clock. He had eased his way slowly into the room, eschewing his walking cane for the rims and ledges of every windowsill and chair back he passed.
“I need to do some banking, and I need to get a conference call together,” he said. “Who’s up for taking me?”
“Why don’t you have one of your nurses take you?” Eliza said.
“Out of the question,” my father said. “They’re all city boys. Not a one of them knows how to drive.”
“Why don’t you try logging on to the web and doing it that way?.”
This was Todd, my daughter Elliott’s husband. When he was younger, Todd had been a hair’s breadth away from making the Olympic team as a shot-putter, his best attempt falling short by some tiny distance. Like most shot-putters, he had a frame better suited to assembling automobiles or foisting steel onto the mouth of a smithy than to playing the violin in the Boston Symphony, which is what he did now.
“I’m talking about doing real business. And moving real money, son,” my father said. He has never learned the names of any of the men. He was, of course, dressed immaculately: black suit, shoes shined to a reflective sheen, a presidentially red tie. “You can’t just log on and move the type of money I want to move.”
“Yeah, Todd. Seriously.” This was Ethan, Sammy’s husband, always ready with a quip. He is my favorite, something he knows, something all of the boys know. There is a rule that one cannot have a favorite child, but there is no rule governing their spouses.
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