Wise Men: A Novel

by Stuart Nadler

  By now, he had privately confided to me that he blamed himself for Robert dying the way he had, his logic being that the plane crash had scarred the company and thrust Robert into a position that at his age he couldn’t maintain without suffering an undue amount of stress. I’d let him say all of this because he seemed so convinced by it all, and of course because I had no hope of providing any clarity to what by now was an obstinacy so hardened that a diamond could not have marred it. I guess I let him say this because I also believed it somewhat. Like any businessman, my father had wanted to cut costs, and he’d done so with his airplanes, which, if it were anybody but him, would’ve been simply a dangerous decision to make. For my father it was catastrophically stupid. But still: to hear him still call it his office stung me a little bit. I may have been living here now. I may have raised my girls here. My wife may have died beneath this roof. None of this mattered. It was his. All of it. Still.

  I followed my father and his nurses into the house, up the steps and into our living room. A group of three or four newspapermen were waiting to get a comment from my father. If there was ever an illustration of how my father’s fame had faded, this was it. In his heyday, there’d have been forty people. Now there were four.

  Here, for the very last time, I saw him conduct a press conference:

  Q: Can you comment on Mr. Ashley’s death?

  A: (after a considerable pause) Robert was my closest friend for sixty years.

  Q: What did he mean to you, Mr. Wise?

  A: (laughter) Next question, please.

  Theo Cantor was waiting for me in my office, standing in the doorway, his notepad out, his neat, blocky handwriting filling the page. I’d gone there to put away the letter from Savannah’s lawyer. “What are you doing here?” I asked, brushing past him.

  “I was invited,” he said. He flipped through the pages in his notepad. Wedged into it he had a cutout from the Cape Cod Gazette, the article folded so that the notice for Robert’s memorial was visible to me. “A nice touch for you guys,” he said, “if not a little surprising.”

  “Is that a newspaper?” I asked. “I thought your generation didn’t know what those things were.”

  “Yeah, well, I had someone very old tell me what they were and how they worked.”

  Theo was a good-looking kid, a bit scrawny. His hands betrayed his anxiety: fingernails cracked, dried, bitten, torn off; one cuticle caked with blood. I expected this. Young reporters suffer all sorts of terrible nutritional deficiencies and physical trauma in the service of their profession. This new generation had it worse, I thought, than my generation, the sudden boom of news outlets and web organs creating the unlikely scenario in which reporters were discouraged from writing too much or delving with too eager an eye into any subject; brevity had won the war. Theo, however, seemed different in this regard. It took a certain mixture of arrogance and ambition and stupidity to want to write the first biography of a very public man. My old editor at the Spectator used to call this particular quality swagger, and he’d claimed that it manifested itself in one of two ways: either as a fool’s errand, haplessly chasing around your subject, digging in his trash, paying off his mistresses; or as an illness, a compulsion, a deeply illogical catatonia that kept propelling you toward your goal, even when the original purpose of it seemed obscured. I hadn’t yet figured out where Theo fell on the spectrum.

  “I was a little shocked you all agreed to this today,” Theo said. “Given the general secrecy.”

  “You’re in my office,” I said. “You find any big secrets?”

  “You got a moment to talk?” he asked. He was putting away his notebook, sliding it into a fashionable leather attaché and, in the process, removing a slim laptop.

  “This is a funeral,” I said. “I don’t have time to play computer games with you.”

  “Why are you so hostile to me?” Cantor asked.

  “Can I give you a piece of advice? Don’t ever say anything like that. You sound weak. And pathetic. You’re a reporter. People are going to lose respect for you. That’s the arrangement.”

  He ignored me, cleared a space on my desk, opened his computer, and cued an audio file for me to listen to. Without looking up at me, he started to talk: “So, I started working on this book on your father, I don’t know, a year and a half ago? Long story short, I’ve got a friend at the Air and Space Museum. You know? The Smithsonian? Anyway, a little while ago he forwards me this.”

  He pushed a button, and all of the sudden, a loud whooshing noise came from the speakers: radio interference.

  “I don’t have time for this,” I said.

  “I think you do,” he said, his eyebrows raised. “Here. Listen.”

  A man’s voice came across the recording then. “This is Bunny. Repeat. This is Bunny. BA Eighty-Eight. This is Bunny.”

  Cantor flexed and unflexed his fist. “BA stands for Boston Airways.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I told you. Smithsonian.”

  “Is this the crash?”

  “The moments before it. Air traffic recording.”

  “Right.”

  “They’re very calm,” he said. “It goes on. They’re having trouble gaining altitude.”

  The call came across the air: “Pulling up. Pulling up. Pullllllllllling up.” Silence. Crushed air. Then: “Nothing. Still can’t gain anything. Throttle’s unresponsive.”

  Theo stopped it then. “The crash isn’t on there.”

  “No?”

  “I brought this to you as a sign of good faith,” he said, turning the file off. “I figured that if I were you, this would be a pretty important thing to have.”

  I wanted to keep listening to the recording. This was something Theo could see in my expression. He took a small thumb drive from his pocket and gave it to me. It was tiny, an inch and a quarter long, blue like the logo for Boston Airways had been blue.

  “It’s on there,” he said.

  “How’s that possible? This thing is tiny.”

  He smiled. “Ask one of your daughters to show you how it works.”

  “Why are you giving this to me?”

  “As a sign of goodwill. I said that.”

  “What do you want in return?”

  “I want to interview you for this book.”

  “Look—”

  “There’s all this strange stuff in your father’s story.”

  “Half the crap people write about him is bullshit.”

  “I know that. It’s the other things, though. The things people haven’t written about.” He sat on the edge of my desk. “He won’t talk to me. I’ve been trying for a year. Maybe more. He’s just not interested in what I have to say. People get like that. They figure it doesn’t matter. But it does. I’m crafting his legacy here.”

  I laughed. The comment was preposterous.

  “It’s true, Hilton.”

  “Hilly,” I said. “Nobody calls me Hilton.”

  “Let me show you something else,” he said.

  He lifted his bag up onto the desk and took out a paper folder. In it, he had a letter from Savannah’s lawyer, printed on the same stationery I’d just put away.

  “This is from Savannah Stockton’s lawyer,” he said, closing the folder before I could finish reading it. “Basically, it says that she’s refusing to talk with me.”

  “What is it you’re after?”

  “I want to know what happened to Mr. Dawson,” he said. “She’s his only living relative.”

  “He died in jail,” I said. “That’s what happened.”

  “I know that. But it’s suspicious. So I’m interested.”

  “How do you even know about him?”

  “You ever hear of a guy named Jerry Silver?”

  “No,” I said, losing patience. All of this seemed suspicious, and finding suspicion in innocuous encounters was something my father did, not something I did.

  “You probably met him at some point or another,” Theo said.

>   “Never heard of him.”

  “Classic corporate superstar. Owned New York’s legal world until your father toppled him.”

  “Still not ringing a bell.”

  “Had his hands in everything.”

  “Get to the point, Theo.”

  “I’ve got his diaries. That’s the sort of thing I do—research journals and diaries and all that. But there’s this business in there about him coming to visit your dad. They wanted to poach him. Keep him from doing what he did, which was ruining them. And there’s this bit in there about Dawson. Apparently there was a party here, and they riled him up a little bit.”

  “Jerry,” I said.

  “Jerry Silver? This ringing a bell now?”

  “Maybe,” I said, remembering perfectly how Jerry Silver had drunkenly shaken my hand, and how, later, they’d all laughed at having woken Lem up in the middle of the night. The Big Black Wolf, they’d called him.

  “Well, that’s it. I found it interesting. Did a little digging. Found out your father had the guy arrested. Found out the guy was murdered in prison. I mean, what else is there to explain? You start writing a book about somebody, and you stumble on that shit? That’s gold.”

  “Gold, huh?”

  “If it’s not gold, it’s something close. It’s fascinating.”

  He paused then. I waited.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  He laughed. “No! Does there need to be anything else?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I’ve hit a brick wall, Hilly. And I don’t mean that lightly. I mean, seriously. A brick wall. A hard, serious, impenetrable brick wall.”

  I shook my head. “Honestly, if you haven’t gotten anywhere with this, I don’t think I’m going to be able to help.”

  “You’ll help if you’ll talk.”

  “I was young,” I said. “Lem was my friend.”

  “This on the record?” His pad was out suddenly.

  “Sure,” I said. I was tired. I needed a drink. I rubbed my palms against my eyes. My daughters were at the door now. All of them. All in black funeral dresses. Their husbands were behind them—Ethan and Greg and Todd. Sammy cleared her throat. “Daddy, you should thank people for coming.”

  I looked back at Theo. “Put that on the record. It’s true. He was my friend. I have your card,” I said. “I’ll call you.”

  “I need something better than that.” He pointed at the thumb drive. “I’ve got more stuff like that.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “I’ve got pieces of the plane.”

  “Pieces?” This astonished me.

  “We could trade.”

  I shook his hand. “I’ll give you one hour. How’s that sound? One hour. Nothing more. I’ll call you.”

  “With the truth?”

  “The absolute truth.”

  Eight

  Of course, up to that point the absolute truth was far from the actual truth. I wouldn’t know this until two months after Robert’s funeral, when Savannah came to Bluepoint with her family. That she came at all was a surprise. It was a long haul simply so that we could exchange a small jewelry box.

  The box: by now I knew that’s what she had. Neither she nor Lauren had confirmed this to me. But I knew. I remembered seeing her take it from Lem’s apartment long ago, and I remembered seeing it again on the high shelf in her pantry in Iowa. I had no idea what was inside. As I recalled, it was too small to hold anything truly scandalous. It couldn’t hold a gun, or a camera, or photographs, or, given the technology of 1952, a recording device. It was the size of a fist, and a small fist at that. So that ruled out postcards, books, knives. For a while, I was convinced there were bullet casings inside, or maybe a single key that belonged to a safety-deposit box.

  After I got Savannah’s letter, I’d sent a response through Lauren asking her if she wouldn’t mind coming back to Bluepoint to return it herself. It was a long shot, I knew, but I thought it was worth it just to ask. After what had happened in Washington DC, I hadn’t expected that she’d agree to it, and at first she’d refused. She wanted simply to FedEx us the box and be done. But I pressed on. I had Lauren ask her again. “Say that I’d love to have her here. Tell her that.” Lauren seemed dubious. “Why do you want her to come? Just have her send the box,” she’d told me. Why did I want her to come? I just did. That’s the best answer I have. But I’ll try to do better: Part of me missed her; part of me was curious; part of me felt guilty for what had happened to her. And part of me—most of me—was lonely. I told Lauren all of this, and in what I thought was a last-ditch effort, I told Savannah this, albeit in much more generous language, writing her via Lauren, sending along with my note a photograph of my family: all of my girls, their husbands, and all our various dogs and cats. On the back of the picture, I wrote: Bring your family, Savannah. It’ll be fun. I signed it: The Wise Family. When she agreed, Lauren called me to tell me the news. “I won’t say that she sounded excited. But she said yes. She’ll come for six hours.”

  “She put a time limit on me?” I asked.

  “Oh my. It never ends with you two,” she said.

  I’m tempted now to say that all of this made me aflutter with some adolescent stirrings, or that I was rendered sleepless with anticipation by all of it, or even that I fell into some fantasy over having her back here again at the house, distracting her husband so that the two of us could be alone—her in a sarong, her in some tennis whites, her in a black two-piece, her with enormous, buggy white sunglasses and nothing else, her and me on the beach, her and me in the back of my truck. But none of it is true. Something about the way I thought about her had changed. Before Jenny became pregnant with Sammy, if I thought of Savannah, it was like trying to concentrate on something dangerous. The old fear was gone now, replaced by shame—first for her uncle, and then for the way I’d left her standing in her kitchen in Iowa, and then for the way I’d followed her in Washington. And the allure of it all was gone, too. Time does that; it kills the mystique, replaces the boundlessness of wishing and hoping with some well-earned, necessary clarity.

  Of course, there’s a bigger reason why I didn’t think about any of this. Not even five minutes after I got word that Savannah had agreed to come back to Bluepoint, Sammy came into my office with Ethan. They smiled and sat down and handed me a ridiculously overpriced cigar. “We’ve known for a while,” she told me, not able to actually say what it was they knew. Laughter escaped her, and for an instant she was my tiny black-haired toddler again. “But then Robert died. And it didn’t seem right to be happy.” I got up to hug them and to cry with them, and for all of us to start jumping up and down for joy. My father wheeled by the door, having heard the commotion. “There’s always time for happiness,” I said into Sammy’s ear. “Always.”

  And then I watched Ethan tell Arthur Wise that he was going to be a great-grandfather. His response?

  “Good goddamned Lord.”

  Savannah arrived at Bluepoint on a Wednesday at the beginning of August, with her husband, Hershel, and her son, Charles. They came in a rented Jeep Patriot the color of a candied cherry, American flags stuck to the pair of antennas on the roof, approaching the house very slowly. Hershel disembarked first. I was out on the porch, waiting. He called out to me.

  “Are you Hilton Wise?” he asked. “Or are we very lost?”

  “I am,” I said. “You made it!”

  He came to the porch alone. I could see Savannah and her son through the windows of their Jeep. Hershel looked more or less the way he’d looked in those pictures that had hung on the walls of his house in Iowa. Of course, prior to seeing him again, I’d forgotten entirely what he looked like. He could have been my postman and I wouldn’t have known. But that’s how memory functions: the moment he stepped out of the car, some trigger clicked in me, and I could recall with vivid familiarity all those shots of him in his uniform. He was older now, of course, his hair perfectly white, his posture the posture of a soldier. He had the handshak
e of a soldier, also.

  “It’s good to meet you finally,” he said, crushing my hand—really crushing it—in his. Even though he suggested some gladness in our introduction, what I think he really meant was: So. This is the guy who won’t stop bothering my wife.

  “Did you have an easy trip, I hope?”

  “Terrible,” he said.

  “You’re killing me,” I said, looking at my hand. “Christ.”

  “My wife’s a wreck over this,” he said, squeezing, if it were possible, harder.

  “That was never my intention,” I said. “Please let go of my hand.”

  “I need you to promise that this won’t be a bad scene.”

  “You have my word.”

  He let go of my hand then. With a big, cheerful, put-on smile, he waved Savannah and Charles out from the Jeep. Hershel turned back to me.

  “My boy’s got no idea about any of the history behind all this,” he said. “He doesn’t know anything about you.”

  “Understood.”

  She got out then. Immediately I saw that she was frail, ill, her body clearly ravaged by something. Hershel went to her, jumping off the porch and going to her, grabbing hold of her right arm. Charles—a spitting image of Hershel, despite sharing his name with Slim—got on her left. She moved so slowly. I wanted at that moment to rush inside, to call Lauren, to protest. Why hadn’t she told me?

  “Do you need a hand?” I called out.

  “Oh, two helpers is more than fine, Hilly,” she said sweetly.

  The boy was looking around in much the same way that so many visitors have looked around the first time they arrive here—at the wide sweep of the shore, the waves, the bluffs and rocks and birds and high grass.