Wise Men: A Novel

by Stuart Nadler

  “Oh, that’s nice.”

  Another chime, this one from above us, Billings’s name pronounced with a sort of urgency reserved for tardy high school students. Dr. Billings? Dr. Billings, if you’re in the hospital…

  “Funny,” he said, “that you had only girls. Girls always had such sway over you. And what’d you do? You went out and had four of them. I’m sorry you never had a son. There is something wonderful about a son. Makes you the last one, you know that?”

  “The last what?”

  “The last Wise man,” he said, missing the irony in this, the stupid, old, foolish joke.

  For the next few minutes, he took telephone calls, largely ignoring the regulations against having a working cell phone in a hospital waiting room, shrugging at the orderlies who stopped to bug him about it, as if to say, What are you gonna do about it? I wondered if he knew that I had that box, that I had the Brooklyn Pages. When he was off the phone for good, I wanted to tell him.

  “If I ask you something, will you tell me the truth?”

  “It depends, Hilly.”

  “Did you kill Lem Dawson?”

  He stifled a cough. I’d surprised him with the question. Then a nurse came out into the waiting room and called for him. I helped him up to his feet. He looked at the crutches. “Throw them away,” he said.

  “You didn’t answer me,” I said.

  “Still? You’re still thinking about this?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have this b—”

  He was standing in front of Robert’s plaque. He turned to it. “Saint Bobby. Oh, Bobby.” Then he turned to me. “Let it go, kid. For the love of God.”

  “But—”

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Tell me who did it.”

  “You think so little of me. Still. After everything. I guess I lost with you. I tried and I lost. I was always the villain. But you don’t understand. There are things I’d tell a stranger that I wouldn’t tell you. And I hate that.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question,” I said.

  He looked at the nurse and then he looked at me and then he looked at the plaque beside him, Robert’s name in big capital letters. This hospital exists because of the generosity of Robert Ashley, veteran, attorney, and a longtime resident of Bluepoint.

  “Seriously, Hilly. Let it go.”

  “No,” I said. “I refuse.”

  Later I would think of what happened next as the only moment in our life together when he’d been completely honest with me, a fact I would revise and revisit and turn over and rejudge and deny for years. He grabbed my face with both hands, as if he were about to kiss my cheeks, and he brought my ear to his mouth so that he could whisper into it: “He wasn’t supposed to be killed.” Then he let go of me, but he was glaring, his eyes wide with what looked like terror. “That was an accident. Do you understand?” he asked me. “We would never do that. Never. Ever.”

  Billings came to take my father away. Ten minutes later he was free. He streamed through the waiting room, not stopping to look at me. He had another pair of crutches. The doctors thought he still needed some assistance. His limp was slight, more like a hint of a limp than evidence of any real injury. He was on his telephone. “Dad!” I called. “Hey! Dad!”

  A limousine was waiting for him at the curb. The electric doors slid open for him, and he crossed onto the sidewalk, chucked the crutches into the bushes, and got in the car.

  Ten

  The interior of the Broad Neck hotel is a farce, more like a Ralph Lauren store than a whaler’s bar, which evidently is supposed to be the idea. Thick white rope. Desiccated coral, sitting on a shelf. A patently fake starfish aligned beside it. Wistful fake Turner canvases hung over decorative fireplaces. Old, staged photographs of rugby squads and golf teams. Burnished sailing trophies on the side tables. Fish on the menu, but not the fish native to the ocean here, not cod or bluefish, but salmon, Chilean sea bass, shrimp. I was here to see Theo Cantor and found him at the bar, an empty mug of tea beside his left elbow, a half-finished grilled cheese on a huge plate, yellow notebooks arranged in a neat pile. I hadn’t wanted to come. But he’d been bugging me, calling three times a day, leaving messages with all of my daughters. This was the evening my father had had his cast removed, twelve hours after he’d gotten into his limousine.

  Before I reached him, Theo stood up from the bar. He was in brown board shorts, his legs an unseemly shade of white, the backs of his calves as hairless as my daughter’s. “Hilly,” he said, wheeling around just as I got within earshot of him. “I need to show you something.”

  “I don’t have tons of time, Theo.”

  “Really,” he said. “Come. Please.”

  He led me to me a conference room off the lobby. A long table surrounded by tall, leather-backed chairs occupied the lion’s share of the space. A small video projector sat on the table.

  “Dug this up last week,” he said, turning off the lights, turning on the projector. “I think it’s important you see it.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Just wait,” he said.

  A moment later the screen—one of those small pull-down jobs you see in conference rooms everywhere—went dark. The image was coming from a digital projector, but it was clear that whatever this was had originally been shot on film. Suddenly there were the telltale marks of celluloid scratches, flickers, a lens flare, a jagged piece of editing tape rushing by. Then, a leader counting down to zero. Finally, an airport hangar emerged on screen. The camera is on the front of a car, or a golf cart, and we’re going down a runway. It’s winter. The trees are bare. You can see them in the distance, lining the pavement. Beside me, Theo was biting the end of a Bic pen. “I’ve watched this, like, a hundred times already. I just want you to know where I’m coming from,” he says.

  We’re near water. You can’t see it, exactly, but I know it’s there. There are gulls hovering, and the wind, evident on a ribbon tied to something near the wheel well visible in the lower left-hand corner of the frame, is strong. I’ve lived by the ocean most of my life, and I can tell when there is water nearby. The car turns, and we see, just then, a bluff that for a moment I don’t recognize. As the camera pans to reveal the jet, I realize this is Logan Airport.

  The aircraft is so much smaller than I imagined. For a moment we see it being wheeled out of the hangar. A team of mechanics pushes the craft. There are four of them, all in dark jumpsuits. You can see one man, shot close up, say the word Chickadee, his lips and mouth and teeth flashing. The yellow of the nose is rendered a light shade of gray. Funny that you can sort of make out color in a black-and-white film.

  Theo leans over the table. “Promotional video for the airline. I found a whole bunch of these in a warehouse in Rhode Island. After your father ruined the company, the owners locked everything away. Nobody’s alive now, of course. Their grandkids didn’t care when I asked to see what I could find. So now it’s mine until somebody sues me to get it back.”

  A white flash on the screen serves as a cut. Now we’re inside the plane. The interior is modest. Cloth chair backs. A runner on the aisle, with two bright stripes. Two seats on the left, one on the right. We go all the way to the back. This is where the crash originated. The engine on the left side stalled because of faulty wiring here. I know this because I remember listening to my father rehearse his closing argument for the case in our old kitchen in New Haven. The door to the restroom is ajar. So is the curtain to the small space where the meals were prepared, just two hot plates, a drip coffee maker, and an icebox. The cameraman wheels around to show the cockpit. But there is a man in the way, one of the repairmen. Theo, again, leans over the table, then he pauses the picture.

  “Everybody always wants to know why I’m so particularly obsessed with this plane crash. With your father. This is the answer,” he said, pointing at the screen. “This is why I won’t stop calling you.”

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “My grandfather,�
� he said.

  “Really?”

  “Such a smart guy,” he said, sitting down. “MIT trained. Air force instructor. Total genius, they say.”

  “He’s young here.”

  “Baby face,” he said. “He’s thirty-five.”

  I looked. The man on screen seemed younger.

  “See,” Theo said, “he was the head mechanic on the flight. His first job. Moved the whole family up from Roanoke to Waltham to work at Logan. After the plane crashed, they say he was the first guy at the scene. They say he knew when it took off. Probably bullshit. He wanted to know what went wrong. Then your father came along. Basically, my grandfather took all the blame in the lawsuit.”

  “I see.”

  “Ruined his life.”

  I nodded.

  “I mean, I don’t want to get into a whole sob story,” Theo said, continuing to chew on the end of his pen cap. “But let’s just say it was awful.”

  “So this is your idea of payback?” I asked. “Writing this book?”

  “No, no, no. He’d killed himself long before I was born. I never knew the guy. My dad barely knew the guy.”

  “My God.”

  “Right. Well. Every story the media did on your father, every time he was in the paper, that was like a drill boring its way into my grandfather’s gut.”

  “Terrible,” I said.

  “I don’t hold a grudge. My father… well, he holds a grudge. Big goddamned grudge. But, see, I’m just fascinated. You’d be too. It’s my story. I have to get my story down on paper. You know?”

  He was talking about the crash, his grandfather, my father. This is how American society works, he was saying. You take two men born in basically the same year. One man works his whole life, studies, learns the science of aviation, the physics of it, serves his country; he has a son, he gets a chance to work on an airplane, he paints the nose of it yellow because that’s his wife’s favorite color. Her nickname is Bunny. So the plane’s name is Bunny, although the boys like the way Chickadee sounds instead. He makes a small mistake. He fails to check a simple circuit near the wing. Maybe someone was joking with him and he forgot to check it, and when he went back to his work, he assumed he’d looked at it, when he hadn’t. He’s consumed with the guilt. Every time Arthur Wise rattles off the names of the victims, it’s as if a cancer blossoms. Finally, a suicide. Fitting for an engineer, it’s a hanging. A simple equation of force, height, mass. He does it in the basement. Gets up on a wooden box, kicks it out from beneath him. The box has the words Boston Airways printed on it. It’s filled with manuals. After the crash, and until he died, all he did was pore over the manuals, trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. And then there’s Arthur Wise. A plane crashes, families are aggrieved, lawsuits are filed, millions of dollars are made, a whole generation grows up in luxury. There’s an equation, Theo was saying, that had his grandfather’s life going in a downward arc and my father’s life going up exponentially. Then, he says, there’s you and me.

  But I wasn’t listening. While he was talking, Theo had stood and opened the shades. In the past few years the town government of Bluepoint had installed some arcade games on the boardwalk, booths where you could get Italian ice or soft serve or fried clams or pulled taffy or neon plastic sunglasses or henna tattoos. That’s when I saw you. I should say that it was the first time I saw evidence of you rather than say that it was the first time I saw you. That would come six months later. But it was your mother and your father, Sammy and Ethan, and they were walking together and drinking milk shakes, just out for a walk. Your mother had a T-shirt on, a white T-shirt, and it was tight against her body, and I saw just a hint of what would become her pregnant belly. A tiny bump: you!

  Eventually Theo stopped talking, and we started the interview. The one I promised him. And as you might grow to realize if you ever read Mr. Cantor’s book, I lied. I told him bald fictions. The business about Lem Dawson having a bad temper, and how that temper, in my opinion, led to a fight that led to his murder in prison? Of course that was a lie. Lem was so docile. It had been trained into him, a tool to avoid conflict. The business about my father’s grief over Lem’s death, about how he had wanted to lift the charges against Lem, about how he had wanted to give money to Savannah throughout her life? All a lie. I could go on. You get the picture. Perhaps you will think less of me for harming a man I had already harmed so badly. The lies are what went into that book you have on your shelf, that book you might grow to take to be the truth, and that’s the reason for all of this. I don’t know—if I hadn’t lied, maybe I wouldn’t have done this. This book. This story; my story. This is what you need to know about me and my father.

  See: I’d thought he was gone for good when I got back from the hospital. He’d have gone to New York, I thought, to his house on Riverside that my mother had loved so much, or to L.A., to his house on the golf course in Bel Air, that house where he once bragged to me that he had lemons growing in the backyard. Do you believe that, Hilly? Real fucking lemons! But a few hours after he left the hospital, I heard his limousine arrive back at Bluepoint. Suddenly without a cast or without crutches, he was moving around with the vigor of a man half his age. I was in the study then, and I left him alone. When I saw him again, a few hours later, he was kneeling in the dirt near the fence that circled Bob’s house. He had a can of paint beside him. A brush. A scraper. He was finishing the job.

  I went out onto the patio. It was warm. It was almost September, and the days had begun to grow shorter. Far out on the water there were dolphins. “Look!” I yelled. “Dolphins! Dad!” But he didn’t hear me. So I started over to Robert’s house.

  I had the box in my hand. The box with the Brooklyn Pages inside. When I was maybe a hundred yards away, I stopped to open it. I read just the first one. My curiosity allowed me just the one single glance. My father stood up. He had paint on his pants. He was staring at Robert’s house. I unfolded the paper. It was the bottom layer of a carbon set, the sheet you removed if you wanted to save your correspondence. Lem must have filed all of these away. This must have been his plan. He’d show these to my father, and my father would give him money to keep them a secret, and he and Savannah would go. I thought of her then. Just as the wind began to come across me. Savannah at sixteen, smiling out from behind the hanging laundry. Behind me, up on her uncle’s staircase. She had waved at me that last morning. How I wish I had waved back! How I wish I had done something, anything, other than what I did!

  I looked down to the paper in my hands. Here was a handwritten letter signed by my father. “Robert, please stop worrying that I’m going to take this damn job and leave you. All the money in heaven couldn’t separate me from you. I told you that last night. I am yours and you are mine. And no one knows about us. Not Lem Dawson. Not Ruthie. Not the boys from Silver & Silver. Not even goddamned J. Edgar Hoover could ever find out. That’s what all this money gets us. What else is there to say: I love you. This—you and me—this is eternity.”

  I put it down then. I thought I heard something behind me, and when I turned around, I swear to you I thought for a moment I’d find her behind me, Savannah, catching me the way I’d caught Lem, her face stern, still young, still healthy. Of course there was nothing there but the sea and the sky and our old family home. I closed the box. My father was painting the fence now. There were tears on his cheeks. I went to him.

  About the Author

  Stuart Nadler is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Recently, he was the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic. He is the author of the story collection The Book of Life.

  ALSO BY STUART NADLER

  The Book of Life

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  Contents

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  PART II

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  PART III

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Stuart Nadler

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2013 by Stuart Nadler

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown and Company