Wise Men: A Novel

by Stuart Nadler

  “Don’t joke,” Sammy said. “Eliza? You’ll take him, right?”

  “Are you sure you can’t do it online?” Todd tried again.

  “Jesus, Todd. Give it a rest,” Sammy said.

  “Like: how much could you possibly be moving?” Todd asked.

  My father needed a place to sit, and there were no seats available. Lacking a chair, he pointed at Greg, who is Rachel’s husband. Like Rachel, he is a fiction writer, something my father has claimed on various occasions, to their faces, to be a useless, vain profession.

  “Give me your seat, Gary,” my father said.

  “It’s Greg.”

  “Who’s Greg?”

  “I’m Greg.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since always, Mr. Wise. Since always.”

  “Good to meet you, Greg. Now give me your seat.”

  Greg and Rachel, being the two artists in the family, keep abnormal hours, and they’d just awoken and were sips into their first cup of coffee. What remained of Greg’s hair was spastically askew on his scalp. The room was laughing now. Even Rachel. But Greg stiffened. My father was hovering over him, and to show his impatience, he lifted the cuff of his left arm to consult the face of his watch, a different watch from the day before, this one covered in diamonds.

  Seeing this, Ethan squinted as if he’d been blinded. “Bling! Check out Arthur’s bling! How much that watch cost, Arthur?”

  “More than the house you grew up in,” my father said, sitting down slowly, turning to Todd. “You,” he said, pointing his way. “You. Mr. Internet. Let me ask you a question.”

  “I didn’t mean to pry,” Todd said.

  “No,” my father said, taking out from the inside pocket of his blazer a folded piece of white paper. “Let’s look. Let me ask you your advice, Todd.”

  “I’m an idiot; you don’t want my advice.”

  “But I do. Maybe I can log on.”

  It’s funny how bonds form among spouses in a family, where the fault lines lie, where the allegiances are fostered. For whatever reason—an effortless confidence, his being a Jew, a genuinely cheerful sense of humor—Ethan escaped the Wise scorn. Todd looked helplessly toward his brother-in-law. Ethan, however, was unmoved. “Dude. Concentrate. The Big Man needs your help.”

  “Joke all you want,” my father said, waving the paper at Todd. “But this is a printout of last night’s various trading activities for some of our Asian partners. The Nikkei was a wreck last night.”

  “I hate when that happens,” Ethan said. “All my Asian holdings get wiped out.”

  “I bet you do,” my father said, not missing a beat. The paper was quartered, and my father flattened it on the table. Suddenly he had everyone’s attention. Rachel and Eliza leaned over, their glasses perched on the bridge of their mother’s nose. “This here,” he said, pointing. “This is a company called TurTec. Their manufacturing base is in Singapore.” My father looked up to Todd. “You know that Singapore is a nation, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Could you find it on a map?”

  “Unlikely, sir.”

  My father smiled. “Right, well, their offices, for various reasons, are in Tokyo. They happen to make the polymer that coats the turbine on a jet that crashed in Brazil two months ago. Did you hear about that crash?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I saw a headline on the web.”

  “Right. Well, many people died. Crashes in the Amazon are awful. Some of the areas of the crash site were unreachable. It takes eons for the recovery. Animals usually get to the victims before the medics do.”

  “OK. I’ll make a mental note not to crash in the Amazon.”

  My father winced. “Try not to crash anywhere, son.”

  “Right. Good advice.”

  “This airline, the one that crashed, the one in question, it was Estonian.”

  “Estonian?” Todd asked.

  “Another sovereign nation.”

  “Right.”

  It wasn’t entirely clear why my father had begun to give the family a lesson about the business of Wise & Ashley. Part of it, I’m guessing, was atrophy: he’d been away so long from it all, he needed to work. And part of, probably, was a sense he’d gotten, not unfairly, that he was being pitied. Nothing bothered him more than pity. All prideful men hate being looked at the way that Todd and Greg looked at my father. Pity, as my father saw it, existed in direct opposition to dignity, and my father had always received every ounce of his dignity from his work.

  He went on: “Turns out, initial forensic tests indicate the turbine combusted in midair. Turbines usually don’t just combust. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes a goddamned Canadian goose gets stuck in there. But they don’t usually combust unless they’ve been hit by a missile. I’m sure you knew that, Gary.”

  Greg frowned.

  “Now, apparently, some jackwagon on the internet’s spread a rumor that the crash was caused because the polymer was defective, that it’s burn temperature was too low. A whole slew of lawsuits have been filed. Their stock is falling. We, of course, represent TurTec and a host of their subsidiaries. First thing we need to do is move money between the companies, top to bottom. Otherwise, they can’t meet deadline to their vendors. Suddenly, since this rumor started, there’s been a run on their funds. That’s our job, being that our finance division manages their assets. Second: legal needs to figure out our stance on some pretty thorny jurisdictional issues.”

  “Of course,” Todd said. “Jurisdictional. That sounds confusing.”

  My father crossed his arms across his chest and grinned. “The suit’s been filed in Washington State. Of all places.”

  “Washington? I thought this was all Asian, and… um, Estonian?” Todd was trying. By now, the room was manically entertained. I felt for him.

  “America’s got the most plaintiff-friendly courts,” my father said. “Which means juries give you more money. Which means anybody who’s got half a brain tries to get their case filed here.”

  “But that’s crazy,” Todd said. “Were there even any Americans on board?”

  “No. But the seats were manufactured outside Seattle,” he said. “This is why you need a lawyer.” My father slammed his hand down against the table. “Everybody wants a piece of the action once something goes wrong. Everybody thinks they deserve to get paid if somebody dies.”

  “So you’re trying to get the case tried somewhere else?” Todd asked.

  “Doesn’t that seem fair to you?” my father asked.

  Rachel spoke up. “Isn’t this, like, exactly the opposite of what you guys did in the Boston Airways crash?”

  At this I interceded. “All right, legal lessons are over for the day. If he wants to go into the city, let’s get him into the city.”

  “No,” my father said.

  “Well, actually, yes,” Rachel said. “In the Boston crash, you defended the victims. You found fault in the jet. Now you’re defending the airline. Even though there might be a problem with the turbine.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the turbine!” he yelled.

  She took out her cell phone. “The New York Times says—”

  “You think I give a fuck what the New York Times says?”

  “At least admit that you’ve flip-flopped here.”

  My father turned to me. “Hilly, what’s wrong with these people? They’re all idiots.” He turned to the men: Ethan, Todd, and Greg. “You’re all idiots! Get a degree in something useful!”

  Rachel went on. “I mean, that’s fine, if that’s what it is. But just recognize the hypocrisy.”

  “Hypocrisy!”

  “Let’s get up, Dad,” I said.

  “It’s bald hypocrisy. People died in the crash. What’s the difference between them and the people you originally defended?”

  “Those people hired me,” he said. “And now, the airline has hired me. That’s the difference.”

  “So you just go where the money is?”

  �
�Young lady.” My father was pointing at her, his hand shaking.

  “What’s the strategy?” she asked. “You just gum up the works as much as you can? Stall the litigation until you get a settlement?”

  “No!”

  “You get the case tried in Estonia? Or someplace where there are… what did you call them? Plaintiff-friendly courts?”

  “I’m tired,” my father said, turning to me. “Your children are communists.”

  “Oh! Now we’re communists!” Rachel was up on her feet. “You cannot—I repeat—cannot expect me to respect you when you just toss around words like that. Do you even know what that means? If you ever got your nose out of all that Frankfurt School bullshit. If you ever stopped just regurgitating Marcuse—”

  My father grabbed my wrist. “Don’t you have a driver around here, Hilly? Can’t your driver take me into the city?”

  “I don’t have a driver. I drive myself.”

  “Right,” my father said. “In your truck.”

  “Exactly.”

  My father turned to Ethan. “Do you believe that he drives a truck? A Jew in a truck. Who ever heard of such a thing?”

  Ethan laughed heartily at this, which broke the tension in the room—his big-bellied, kindhearted laughter. Robert came in just then, dressed to work on his fence, his pants streaked with white paint and sprayed with sawdust. He looked straight at my father. “Art, the nurses told me you’re going to Boston. Are you crazy? You don’t need to go in to the office. We’ve got hundreds of people working on TurTec.”

  “That settles it,” my father said, pointing to Eliza. “You’re taking me. Let’s take your new car. Maybe if you’re nice I’ll buy your husband one, too.”

  Eliza frowned. “I don’t have a husband, Grandpa. You know that.”

  “Right. I’ll buy you a husband, then, too. According to Robert, we’re probably employing hundreds of men who’d kill to be your husband.”

  My father whistled for his nurses to help him to his feet. Robert watched this with a marked expression of pain on his face, as if to see his old friend struggle so much to do something as simple as stand hurt his body as much as it hurt my father’s.

  “Art,” Robert tried.

  “Bob?”

  “Art, stay. Come help with the house.”

  “Do what? Paint? I don’t paint. You shouldn’t be painting either. You’re running the company now.”

  “We’ve got good men on the job.”

  “How many clients have we lost since the crash, Bob?”

  “Art.”

  “How many? You know how many clients we lost on my watch?”

  “Art.”

  “None! Not one fucking client!”

  “We’ve got, literally, hundreds of people working on TurTec. This is covered, so thoroughly.”

  “This is why I never let you run the show, Bob. Never delegate something you can’t do yourself. Rule number one in our business.”

  “Come by the house, Art. We don’t have to paint. Why don’t you help me hang some pictures.”

  The nurses were helping my father put on his coat. All of the sudden he was cold constantly. Even in the summer. “Pictures,” my father said, giggling, looking to Ethan. “Pictures. You believe this guy? Pssh. Pictures.”

  Five

  Later that afternoon, I went across the beach to help Robert hang his pictures. Mostly they were paintings he’d bought while in New York and on a vacation alone in Paris. If he allowed himself any luxuries, this was it: fine art. His tastes were as catholic as my father’s were unwavering. Among the new canvases was one by George Condo, of an evil clown. For a while we both marveled at it. Of course, there were experts there to do the actual installation. These canvases were far too valuable for us to handle ourselves. When Robert had asked my father to help him, what he meant was that he wanted help trying to figure out where to hang everything, a simple job, seeing as there were only a few rooms with enough clear wall space. Robert seemed especially upset that my father had left to go to Boston. I wouldn’t understand this until later, but apparently some of these paintings were presents for him.

  He had all the windows open in his house. The living room, where he and my father had fought with their fists, was bright and airy, and you could hear the waves. He had the radio tuned to the BBC World Service. A cinnamon candle flickered on the windowsill. I was of little help to him. He wanted to do all the real work. When the men got up on ladders, Robert got up on them, too. It was amazing to see him do this at ninety, refusing to slow down. My only job was to say whether the canvases seemed level or not, a redundant task, since later they’d go over everything with a laser level.

  He was handing me a magazine when he collapsed. Seconds later, he had no pulse. He’d lost consciousness with his eyes open and something close to a pucker on his lips. As if he’d been thinking of kissing someone the moment he left us.

  Right before all this we’d been talking football with the workers. The Patriots were getting set to start their training camp. We’d been talking about the Super Bowl, the David Tyree catch. In the history of devastating Boston sports losses, this was the worst. Robert was quiet for a moment, and then, having begun, I think, to feel that his heart was failing, he murmured something I didn’t catch, and then, forcefully, he said my father’s name. Arthur.

  By the time we got word to my father, hours had passed. His cell phone was off. And my daughter’s cell phone was buried in her purse. It was evening. We were all at the hospital at Broad Neck, in the near-empty waiting room, the televisions muted, a small skylight above us, streaked with rain and grime. There was a plaque with Robert’s name on it not even fifteen feet from my chair. Evidently at some point in the 1980s, he’d paid for the place to be built, and now he’d been pronounced dead in one of its emergency rooms. When I got hold of her, Eliza told me that they were chartering a helicopter to get out to the Cape, and an hour after that we all heard the chopper descending to the roof, that whoof-whoof-whoof sound. I wasn’t sure what my father knew or what he didn’t know. The boys had taken charge of the situation, and they had been texting with Eliza, and she had been texting with them, and when, finally, my daughter arrived with my father, it was clear to me that she hadn’t had the courage to tell him the truth. He was shuffling through the narrow hallway near the waiting room, past the reception desk, past the array of dormant stretchers and pharmacy trays and past the line of orderlies who had stopped in their tracks because they knew my father’s face. He was dragging his left leg as he went. “Robert! Robert!” he cried. He was a mess—his pants had a stain on them, his shirt was untucked, his tie was loose, and he was trying to talk and sob and breathe at all at once.

  I got up to stop him, to talk to him, and he tried to push me down. “Where is he?”

  I caught hold of Eliza’s attention. She was panicked. She mouthed some words to me that were, in effect: He’s been like this the whole way.

  “Hilly?” my father looked up at me. “Hilly?”

  “He’s gone.”

  He turned around then. I guess I thought he was doing this because he didn’t want us to see him. But what he was really doing was looking for someone else to tell him something different.

  “Dad.”

  “Is there a doctor?”

  “No. He’s been gone for hours.”

  “Where?”

  “Dad.”

  “Where?”

  “Gone. Dead.”

  “No no no.”

  “It was very quick. I saw it happen.”

  “But I just went for the afternoon,” he said. “I was coming back. Why didn’t he wait?”

  “Wait for what, Grandpa?” This was Sammy. Of all my daughters, she is one whose heart exists in closest proximity to her soul. What I mean by that is that she is pure, and there is little of the noise in her that weighs on all of us: fears and shame and guilt and worry.

  “Wait until I was home,” my father said. He was grabbing Sammy’s wrists. “He shou
ld have waited until I was there.”

  “I guess it just happened. That’s what the doctors said. Nobody could have predicted it,” she said.

  “Is it true?” he asked. “Really? Is it true? Is he dead? He saved my life. He was such a tough son of a bitch. How could it be true?”

  “Dad.” I put my hand on his back.

  “Hilly?” He looked at me as if he’d just discovered I was there. “Hilly. What are we going to do?”

  “The company will be fine,” I said.

  He laughed then. And then: “The company.”

  “Do you want to see him?” I asked.

  He shook his head. Suddenly he looked frightened. “I couldn’t do that. No. I couldn’t.”

  “OK. They were keeping him in case you wanted to.”

  “Keeping him?”

  “The funeral parlor will take him now.”

  “Hilly?” he said, looking up at me.

  “Yes?”

  “I was terrible to him, wasn’t I? In the house. Earlier. When we left. Was he upset? Was he? Hilly? Tell me the truth.”

  Six

  There are two incidents that I’d like to mention here.

  The first is this: about eight years before Robert died, I saw Savannah in Washington DC. I was there for some work with my foundation. We hadn’t spoken since I’d left Iowa. I’d sent her a few letters over the years, just short notes to say that I was thinking of her, that I hoped she was well, and each time they came back to me unopened. And then, when the internet made all of this easier, I tried to reach Savannah that way, without success. I could include a page here of all my unanswered emails. I’m such a sap that I always wrote her on her birthday. But I wasn’t sure what good that would do. By now, you get the point.

  I’d come out of a steak house to sneak a cigarette. My daughters had all been on me to quit, but after a while, a habit becomes more than a habit and something like a part of you, like your arm. It was a Tuesday—summer, hot as hell—but she was wearing a black trench coat. She was heading south, near that part of the Potomac that bends around the Lincoln Memorial. That’s where I guessed she might be going. She’d had a few books on Lincoln in the house in Iowa, and it didn’t seem to me to be such a stretch that she might take the opportunity while in town to visit the monument. I was sixty-five years old. She was sixty-four. Of course, I followed her. At a certain point, she turned west, into the city, and I stayed close to her as she passed the Treasury and the Old Executive Building and at least a portion of the White House. She moved well. She had taken care of her body, whereas I hadn’t. In her coat and her heels, she had a sophistication about her that I didn’t recognize or remember. I don’t think I had any idea what I’d say if I caught up to her. All I knew was that I needed to do it. So much had changed, even if at my core I still maintained the most childish, pure affection for her. What was left was… I don’t know what to call it: kindness? warmth? love? My daughters belong to a generation which believes that sentimentality yields weakness, that expressions of love unadorned with irony are saccharine. How wrong they are! They’ve mistaken the word sentiment for the contrived emotion they get from television and movies, and, sadly, they’ve refused to allow themselves to have emotion in public, or even in private, for fear that it isn’t real, for fear that any overt display of feeling must be fake. To say that I went after her with confidence would be a lie; I went after her with sentimentality in my heart! My legs shook at the knees; my hands clammed with sweat. I thought of the last time I saw her. It was just an ordinary moment. We were on her couch, just where I’d gotten the telephone call from my father. I told her about Jenny and said I had to go. She said: Yeah, I guess you do, don’t you? Then she’d looked at me, relieved that all my efforts to find her would end in some neat, orderly way.