Wise Men: A Novel

by Stuart Nadler

  For a few moments I lost track of her. There were crowds outside the southern wing of the White House—protestors, tourists, police officers on horseback. When I found her again she was entering the lobby of a restaurant. The buckle on her purse caught my eye as the sun hit it. The restaurant was called Evelyn’s. It was a brightly lit, aristocratic sort of place, everyone in suit jackets and polished shoes. I stood on the curb near Blair House. This was Clinton’s last year in office, and near me men were holding signs and hollering about Ken Starr and the blue dress and all that tawdry business, and for a long moment I stood there among them, trying to summon some confidence.

  The front room of Evelyn’s was wide and open and frigid, and there was a raw bar stationed off to the side of the door, filled with ice and oysters and crabs. This made me think of the house in Bluepoint, the kitchen specifically, and the dull shucking knife lying near one of Jenny’s dish towels. Savannah was at the bar, sitting with a tall glass of white wine. She saw me and grimaced. I stayed where I was. Maybe she knew I’d been following her, or maybe she thought I’d just stumbled in the door and found her this way. She stood up, called over to the bartender, leaned across the two feet of maple that separated them, and raised her hand to pantomime a writing motion. The bartender was young, with the same black hair I used to have, and, watching them together, I had the thought that this could have been an image of the two of us together, years ago, if things had been different. When they were finished, the bartender nodded, and then she left, quickly taking her coat and her bag and going out through the back.

  Earlier that afternoon I’d been given a citation for work that the foundation was doing, and all in all it should have been a happy day for me. I’d been received by the president in the West Wing, talked sports with him, told him that he was wrong that the quality of professional baseball was on the wane, told him stories about my childhood, met his wife and his daughter. Later, I got to see the First Residence. (To be open about it: I was offered the Lincoln Bedroom for the night, but I refused.) Those things bore me. The award was a fraud, just some certificate of thanks, an institutional dose of gratitude for being rich and not being an asshole about it.

  The bartender was still writing when I came over. “That’s for me,” I said, pointing at the letter.

  The bartender looked up, suitably confused.

  “That woman, the woman who asked you to write this. She was a friend of mine.”

  “Oh, then,” the bartender said, looking at me with a poorly cloaked expression of pity—or was it misery?—on his face.

  He left the letter for me. It was written on the back of a cocktail bill, the old-fashioned kind, green and blue, printed on hard card stock, the print engraved and raised off the sheet.

  It read as follows:

  I have nothing to say to you. If you ever see me again, don’t follow me.

  Mrs. Hershel Stockton

  Just before my dad’s crash, I saw Savannah again. Or I thought I did. This was in New York.

  From the back, anybody can look like her. Give me a tall woman with cropped dark hair and a wool coat, a purposeful stride, a good smile, and my blood pressure will spike. In New York, this happened whenever I visited, on the express trains that run the west side of the island, in Battery Park, in a window seat at Grimaldi’s, in the American wing at the Met, at the meat counter at Ottomanelli’s as I was ordering a pair of lamb legs, and once on the rock wall at Riverside Park, right near our old home. Three times on the Northeast Corridor from New York to Boston I’ve disturbed strangers, thinking they were her. Normally, I convince myself that my eyes are deceiving me, that Savannah is not so distinctive that I might see her clearly from five blocks, or from six rows away on a speeding train. A shrink once told me that this was a sign of love: that seeing the object of your desire everywhere is a primal form of wishful thinking. But I really did believe I saw her walking along the west side of Central Park. I was there to visit Eliza. I have an apartment I keep off the park: just a studio. It was the first truly warm day of the year, and I’d exited the subway early so that I could walk home in the good weather. I’d just turned seventy-three, and, aside from a nagging injury to the Achilles tendon on my left foot, I could usually walk a good distance before the pain acted up. (My wife would disagree if she were alive to read this; it was a skill of hers.)

  I’d stopped at the corner of 81st Street, where the big, gleaming cube of the Hayden Planetarium sits alongside the park like an oversized paperweight plopped down onto the avenue. I’d just bought myself a bottle of water when the woman came bounding down the front of the museum’s northern steps, turned right, and walked past me. She was consumed with her cell phone, thumbing some urgent communiqué into it, and her elbow clipped mine. A moment before, I’d been looking in the opposite direction, east, across the park, in the direction of the Metropolitan’s roof garden, where a few days earlier I’d gone to see Rachel read from her book of short stories. For some reason I’d felt an odd compulsion to turn my head toward this woman. This happens from time to time: How do we know when we’re being watched? How do we know to turn to see that? Although I’ve never been inclined to look to the universe for signs, I seem to constantly find myself interpreting the slightest coincidences—this woman’s elbow grazing mine—as omens intended just for my benefit.

  I limped across the street, and then with some effort I called out after her. First: Hey! Hey, you! Then: Savannah! Savannah! Savannah! And then finally: Savannah Stockton! It’s me, Hilly Wise! Stop! Meanwhile, the woman had turned south and had begun to walk toward Columbus Circle. The city was in chaos that day. A delegation from Iran or maybe from Venezuela had come to town in order to deliver remarks at the United Nations, and the motorcade had snarled traffic east across the island. The intersection at 72nd was a snarl of horns and shouting, none of which seemed to bother this woman, whom I still believed was Savannah. She took an iPod out of her purse and plugged the earphones into her ears.

  I began to run after her. I did this as best as I could manage, and for a block I managed fairly well. But then she really opened some distance between us, and I stopped. By now, the pain in my foot had become considerable, and I’d drawn some attention. Suddenly there were private-school boys everywhere. They were from the Dalton School, across the park. The boys were all wearing blue neckties. One of them stopped to help me.

  “Hey, dude,” he said, greeting me. “You having a heart attack or something?”

  I was sweating and must have looked awful. “Could you stop that woman?” I said to the boy.

  “You gonna die right here on the step, dude?” he asked again. “Dude? You OK, dude? You croaking or something?”

  “No,” I said, laughing. “I’m not dying.”

  He was probably fourteen, a freshman, his forehead marked with a horizontal line of acne, a mustache thinly struggling to exist on the top of his lip.

  “Could you please go get that woman?” I said.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “That woman,” I said, pointing. The street was filled with women. “That woman in the black coat. She’s an old friend of mine, and I need to see her.”

  “She, like, a girlfriend or something, dude?”

  “Something like that,” I said breathlessly.

  “Dude! That chick was your girlfriend? The black chick? Nice: chocolate-and-vanilla swirl!”

  “Could you go get her?”

  To see this boy run down Columbus! Like a goddamned missile. I sat down on the front stoop of a tenement and started to nurse my foot, rubbing my thumbs against the tendon in the way I’d seen my physical therapists do. I wondered then, just as I wonder now, why I continued to feel the need to see her, why I saw her ghost everywhere, why she appeared to me in my dreams. Since Iowa, we’d been in contact exactly one time, and that was the encounter I began with.

  A moment later, the Dalton boy was leading this woman down the street. I could see her hesitating, stopping in place on the sidewalk, and the
n the boy gripping her by the wrist. It was clear from a block’s distance that it wasn’t her, and I felt immediately shamed, both for the boy I’d sent running (his youth had prevented him from breaking a sweat) and for the woman, who was so confused, and who, we both soon discovered, spoke not a lick of English. Thinking on it now, she was too young to be Savannah. She might have been younger than I was, and, to be honest, I may have known this even before I went after her. Such things are difficult to know with certainty in retrospect. I had just become a widower, and I had no idea how to be alone. If you pay attention, widowers do this all the time. They search. They get desperate. They can’t be by themselves. They marry the wrong woman really, really quickly.

  For a long moment, we all stood there, all three of us, silent. The woman, for what it’s worth, did look like her. They shared the high cheeks and the same coat.

  Finally, the boy from Dalton pushed us together, one hand on each of our backs.

  “Dude. Give her a hug or something. Don’t be so shy!”

  And so I hugged this stranger. The poor woman must have been so utterly puzzled. I gripped her lightly at first, and then harder, at the shoulders, my arms on her like handcuffs, and then—I shudder to admit this—I began to weep. She wasn’t Savannah. If she was, I’d never have done what I did. But for a moment I pretended she was. And I wept.

  But enough of the sentimental stuff.

  Seven

  I mention Savannah here because of a letter I received not even an hour after we’d held the service for Robert’s funeral. It had been sent from the offices of Rutherford & Schultz, the New York firm where Lauren Becker was the star attorney. I’ll reproduce the most salient part of the letter here:

  In light of recent events, Mrs. Stockton wishes to transfer to you and to your father certain properties that are in her possession. She wishes to do so with assurances as to the threat of prosecution, penalties, or civil litigation. This letter should not imply that these properties were obtained illegally, or that my client’s possession of such properties indicates in any capacity behavior that could be construed by you or your attorneys as criminal.

  This was hand delivered to me just after I’d crossed the beach from Robert’s house to mine, Lauren’s signature inked neatly onto the bottom of the stationery. She’d added a yellow sticky to the papers that said, Hi, Hilly! I miss you! The process server was a young man, maybe twenty, headphones jammed into his ear. He’d been waiting for me by the house, looking bored, idling between his knuckles an unlit cigarette that he couldn’t wait to light. I’d been crying just a moment before all this. My face was red and wet, and when the poor kid gave me the letter, he looked stricken. “Who knows?” he said, giving me a weak slug on the shoulder. “It might be good news?”

  I read it right there, leaning against my fence post, just as everyone was filing into my living room. The idea had been to have a small service, but, Robert being Robert, so many people had called to ask us permission to attend. Some of these were acquaintances or former associates at the firm, and some of these were old hands from the Truman administration, or the Ford administration, or even the Clinton administration (by the end, Robert had become, quietly, what we’d call now a centrist Democrat). Some of these were judges before whom Robert had argued cases and won, and some were the heads of various aviation firms whose finances Robert’s litigation had greatly affected. And some of these were people whose life Robert had touched in some small private way: nurses, landscapers, beach lifeguards, shoeshines, hotel-desk clerks, telephone-company men, HVAC installers, deckhands, auto mechanics, shell fisherman. We’d had orders to scatter his ashes at sea near the house, which was something we couldn’t accommodate, owing to all sorts of regulations prohibiting the disposal of human remains inside a national park. Instead, we’d had a tiny stone erected on the cusp of the beach, just a little pretty rock with his name on it. We buried some of his clothes there—some of his lumberjack shirts and some paint-splattered pants. And we kept his ashes in his house, interred in a simple wooden box made from trees taken from his hometown in Kansas. It’s important to note that my father arranged all of this. Newspaper reports afterward had the crowd near two hundred people.

  My girls had been the ones to suggest opening up Bluepoint to anyone who wanted to come, and this was what we did, posting a notice on the internet, putting out the word on the radio and on local television. My father had been the sole outlier in our group, his claim being that people would come simply because it was our house and not out of any particular sense of mourning. Later, of course, we’d discover that he was right and that a good amount of those who’d come had done so merely because our house was open, when for so long it had been hidden behind gates. And, even though I wish it weren’t the case, I did see some people wandering around my living room, looking bored and disappointed by my modesty.

  Part of the reason for the crowd was the media attention. Suddenly, on the evening news, for instance, you’d see this trick where they’d show a photograph of, say, my father speaking to Spiro Agnew, the two of them on the South Lawn of the White House, and they’d zoom past Agnew and my father to find Robert’s face, obscured maybe, by some Secret Service agents. Because news photographers prefer fast lenses, Robert would be in soft focus, and they’d need to sharpen his blurry face into something recognizable. Over all this, a news announcer would intone: Always the man in the background, Robert Ashley often had an audience with America’s most powerful men. He did more to shape America’s policy toward how, and how safely, we all travel through the air than any man in the history of this country. My father couldn’t tear himself away from the television—the first time, really, I ever saw him watch more than a few minutes of what he still in 2008 called the idiot box. I found him this way one night, the room dark, my father in a suit but barefoot. He turned to me, drunk, red-eyed, and said, “Have you heard, Hilly? The next time you fly, you should thank Bob for your safety.”

  “They just do this sort of thing,” I said. “They’re filling time.”

  “Those little masks that come down when the plane loses pressure? Robert fucking invented them. The black box? Robert fucking invented that, too. Haven’t you heard?”

  “Dad—”

  “No, Brian Williams is right about him. He’s up in heaven now, making heaven safer. You think he’s inspecting the wings on the angels?”

  Because he was in his chair, and because he needed help to get across the beach, my father was the last of the crowd to get to the house from the funeral, his nurses behind him, pushing, enduring his abuse. When he saw the letter from Savannah’s lawyer, he assumed I’d been served.

  “Who’s suing you?” he asked.

  “Nobody,” I said, stuffing the thing in my pocket.

  “Looks like you’re getting sued. I know that look. I cause that look.”

  “Just some legal business for the foundation.”

  “Are they suing to have you removed from the board?” he asked, his best attempt at humor in days immediately eclipsed by the pain of having to be lifted from his chair and placed on his feet. With both hands on the nearest railing, he winced. His nurses were doing the work—one man had him by his armpits; another waited for him with an ordinary pair of wooden crutches. He had a cast on his left leg now. He’d reinjured it in the hospital hallway, walking when he should have been in his wheelchair. “If you need a lawyer, I know a few,” he said, righting himself, still trying to joke, wincing again. Then, turning away from me: “I’ll be in my office. Please try to keep these vultures away.”

  His office was now my laundry room. Jenny had done this decades ago, replacing the long wooden desk, the crates of wasted Underwood ribbons, the acres of caked Old Gold ash, with a sturdy washer/dryer combo and a system of white particleboard shelving onto which she’d put the usual gallons of softener and detergent, but also the various nautical bric-a-brac that my parents had collected. She’d been loath to do all of this. She’d loved my father in a way very fe
w people loved him. He had, after all, gotten me to come home to her. She’d been the one who kept calling it his office, even after we’d been doing laundry there for twenty years. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to hear her say, in that sweet, strange Baltimore accent of hers, “Hilly, I’m going to the office to do some laundry.” All of her work was still there, the machines, the shelves, her terrible homemade needlepoint, her equally horrible watercolors, the plumbing up through the floorboards where my father had liked to place his tiny motorized fan. He still gravitated there. Maybe out of habit. Or maybe because the window there offered the most unobstructed view of the ocean.