Praise for Wavemaker II:
“A stunning first novel.”
—Mindi Dickstein, St. Petersburg Times
“Subtly, cunningly, with a perfect instinct for the implicating detail, Mary-Beth Hughes has graphed the contours of the self-sabotaging human heart. Wavemaker II flashes forward relentlessly, every page peeling back further the mask of public power to expose the private corruptions of love. More a detonation than a debut.”
—Sven Birkerts
“[Wavemaker II ] is so ridiculously good that I’m sure to exhaust my supply of adjectives before I come close to expressing my admiration for it.… There is much to praise about Wavemaker II: its lovely spare prose, perfect pacing, details sharp and lethal as ice picks, and a handful of terrifying scenes into which Hughes writes so fearlessly that readers will be left wrung and stricken. Finally, though, what sets the novel apart is a raw power, an unselfconscious intensity and elegance, a rare breadth and depth of vision … sounds like genius to me.”
—Darcy Cosper, Bookforum
“With insight and compassion, Hughes lays bare the Clemenses’ intricate dramas.… [An] artful first novel.”
—Lisa Shea, O Magazine
“In her admirable debut novel, Wavemaker II, Mary-Beth Hughes stitches together a complex story of an unraveling family.… While the story line is full of daring shifts in point of view and authentic historical details, what holds the work together is the essential authority and music of the narrative voice.… It’s a grim and yet lyrically vivid period in this young family’s life, when nothing is going right, when the world is in league against them, and Hughes captures this with a wondrous array of sensual detail and a keen eye for the telling gestures and the crystallized perception.”
—Fred Leebron, Ploughshares
“Highly original … [A] lyrical, poignant debut … in succinct, clipped sentences, Hughes relays intricate, heart-wrenching details … moving and vital.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This first novel offers rich, nuanced characterizations ripe for book club discussion. Dozens of memorable scenes showcase Hughes’ eye for penetrating detail.… Highly recommended for all fiction collections.”
—Christine Perkins, Library Journal (starred review)
“In this glorious book about a glamorous, doomed family, Mary-Beth Hughes has taken a small, intricately knotted story from American history and unraveled it into a compelling narrative about the healing power of illness and the transcendence of the human spirit.… Hughes creates vivid scenes right from the heart.”
—Susan Cheever
“It takes a deft and sensitive writer to fill out the reality of such a story without being hobbled by the trueness of the characters and circumstances.… This novel evokes what a factual account of a life cannot bring us—the true beauty of human conflict, its tensions and releases, sensory assaults and pleasures, and the unconscious awkwardness and grace of it. For Mary-Beth Hughes, this is a truly impressive debut.”
—Sarah Goodrum, Bookpage
“I found it impossible to turn a page without being moved by this gorgeously written and deeply felt story of one father’s public act and its devastating personal ramifications. Wavemaker II ’s complex message and its depiction of Roy Cohn are especially important now, when America is once again forced to make gordian decisions about her civil liberties.”
—Sheri Holman
“Wavemaker II comes out of a time when America was in one of its troubled childhoods, the years following Korea and preceding the hippies, when so many of us alive today were born, years which in retrospect appear almost to have been made up of the stuff of this novel: cocktails, big spending, surprising sex, weird politics. This is a book full of that special brand of American hopefulness and optimism that ran people ragged. Mary-Beth Hughes has given us a novel that is mysterious, intelligent, elegant.”
—Donald Antrim
Wavemaker II
MARY-BETH HUGHES
Copyright © 2002 by Mary-Beth Hughes
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The estate of Roy M. Cohn has not
authorized this work.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hughes, Mary-Beth.
Wavemaker II / Mary-Beth Hughes. —1st ed.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9806-8
1. Cohn, Roy M.—Fiction. 2. Cohn, Roy M.—Friends and associates—Fiction.
3. Prisoners’ families—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title:
Wavemaker 2. II. Title: Wavemaker Two. III. Title.
PS3608.U56 W38 2002
813’.6—dc21 2001045872
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
For my mother and father,
and for Paulie.
Peace and Love.
Memorial Day, 1964
The marshals looked like ordinary men. They were not in good shape, they did not have wary eyes. Their man was not handcuffed to either of them, and when the steak was served they ate with appetite. Both men took the beer that was offered. After dinner they drank Scotch. They drove a blue car, not a black one; an Impala. They bit corn off the cob in a yard full of old trees: holly, sycamore, oak, pine. A hill sloped down to a creek, more than that, a small channel, wide and deep enough for pleasure boats to come back and forth and dock in the slips. Each yard had a slip, and at this house a Boston Whaler was tied up.
The hostess was young, about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and pretty, with blond streaks in her hair and the top pulled back and pinned. She wore a Chinese jacket with silk frog closures. And when she bent down, one of the marshals, but not both, looked to the gap left between those closures for a glimpse of her lacy brassiere. The other marshal was thinking of his boy. His son was slow in school and might have to go to summer classes. The marshal and his wife fought about this. At every chance, each hit the other surely and swiftly with the evidence that the boy’s poor progress could be traced back to the accused. The marshal believed his wife’s slow brain cells had diluted his own good stock and produced a son who couldn’t think his way out of the first grade.
The second man watched the pretty hostess with some pleasure. When their ward got up from the plastic latticework of his recliner and walked up the back steps to the porch, neither marshal blinked. The hostess refilled their glasses from a small bar set away from the heat of the grill. More Scotch. The evening was warm, and a velvet light settled on the lawn and the trees. At nightfall, they’d be leaving. Now the woman followed her husband up the steps and into the house. Their two children, William Junior and Ann Louise—Bo and Lou-Lou—stayed out on the lawn under the care of the next-door neighbors, the Maguires.
The marshal with the slow son looked at the two children lying a short distance away on grass as smooth as a carpet. The children had their cheeks to the blades of grass, and when they pressed their faces, small hectic weaves imprinted there. They were listening to the worms. They could hear the rumbl
e of earth moving. The boy’s eyes were red with blood, more than bloodshot, almost filled where the whites should be. When his sister looked at him, confirming the loud worms, she looked beyond those terrible bruises and her brother laughed, then coughed. There are worse things than being stupid, the marshal thought. And he had the first kind thought for his wife in some time. He thought of her pregnant, visiting her folks on another Memorial Day when he’d been working, what else. He’d traveled down to the shore to be with them at the end of a long, tedious day with a felon who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. A foul-tongued sick fuck. The marshal’s mind was dead. He rode the local train down through about a hundred shore towns and arrived in Manasquan. His mother-in-law, stout as a bull, met him at the station in the green Chevrolet.
In the driveway, his father-in-law had the saw out. The stogie in his mouth was soaked. He bobbed his head toward the side yard. Behind the honeysuckle, the marshal’s wife sat on the low, thick branch of an oak tree, but still—he ran. What do you think you’re doing? She yawned, in no danger. He could see the shape of her belly, a white pear that erased completely, for the time being, all the things the felon had said, and he was so grateful to her he held out his hand for her swinging leg and kissed her heel and ankle and her toes all around the rubber V of her flip-flop.
Inside the house, Kay Clemens saw the cake would take a while to thaw. When she first got the word that Will was coming home for a visit, she bought a cake, then froze it, because they might be late and the cake would dry out. But they were right on time and now everyone would be drunk before she could serve it. It might be good if her husband was drunk, good and bad. Eight weeks since he’d been home. He didn’t even like cake. What was she thinking.
She wandered through the house, a long ranch style, with a layout of airy, sunny, low-ceilinged rooms, interweaving one into the next: dining, living, study, guest, master, and here he was, sitting head in his hands at the edge of his side of their bed, just as he used to sit most mornings waiting for black coffee in a mug. She was up at six anyway, on her third cup by the time he stirred. Now she wondered, What did he do? How did his day begin?
Will? she said. Dear heart. But her husband did not move. She sat beside him on the bed and smoothed down the silk jacket and tucked her hands beneath her thighs and waited. She stood up and listened in the doorway. She closed the door, flipped down the little hook lock. She sat beside her husband again and placed a hand against the curve of his neck. The smell of his clothing was so sharp, a desperate clean, and she thought about finding a shirt that was softer, a golf shirt maybe, from the drawerful he had, maybe something blue. She thought of his shirts but held still. She could smell the soap he used, which had no perfume, a kind of scent like shoe polish in a tin.
Her husband didn’t say anything. She withdrew her cheek and hands, and started with the frog closures on her jacket. Her husband released his head from his palms and, still looking down, watched the top of her instep sliding slightly in the black embroidered sandal. He watched her fingers push at the knots, then watched as she dropped the jacket back off her shoulders to the bed. She sat still, not doing anything, wearing the kind of brassiere she often wore, a full-coverage affair that clasped at the waist level in the back. Her belly rounded out just beneath the stiff ruff. She unzipped her black silk toreador trousers. Lifted her bottom off the bed just long enough to shimmy them off her hips. Dropped the trousers down to her sandaled feet. Started to lift her feet, then left them there, swaddled in black. She looked at the puddle of fabric. He looked at her ribbed, cinched waist. He looked to the cups, a bull’s-eye effect in stitching, and her shoulders, rounded slightly, not interrupted by bone.
Outside the door, there was a commotion coming toward them, like a beehive cracked open and the bees gaining volume and density, they could hear footsteps coming through the house. Hey, hey, came the voices, and Gert Maguire was knocking lightly on the door. Kay, she said. She kept the syllable tight, deliberately unemphatic. Kay heard Gert’s footsteps move away from the door. And quickly, quickly, back into her clothes, God, now, not everything buttoned. A frantic back look to her husband, and she was pressing hard at the hook on the door. Gert stood in the front foyer beyond the small corridor that led to the master suite. Red Maguire was on the phone with the pediatrician, who’d meet them at the hospital; the ambulance was already on the way, and the men who drove it, men Kay Clemens routinely brought gifts to, New York strip steaks by the dozen.
Past Gert, and followed by Gert, out through the living, dining, pantry, kitchen, porch to the yard to her son, Bo, held steady in the arms of a United States marshal. Down two steps, her frog clasps not quite done but who was watching now, and she knelt by her son and slowly took him from the man, brought her baby into her arms, her boy whose eyes were not quite closed. He was not conscious, How long, she said, how long? It would be the first thing anyone needed to know. The ambulance made its rude, loud way, backing up the gravel drive, backing onto the grass, and the emergency team, her friends, were beside her, oxygen first, then a stretcher. Kay kissed her daughter, Lou-Lou, who did not cry, and glanced at Gert to arrange all things in that glance: her daughter’s homework, sleep, school the next day. And then she stepped into the back of the ambulance in time to see the heart monitor register a beat strong enough, strong enough at least for her son to make it in time, once again, to the hospital. They would go local then, the next day, move him to New York.
Will Clemens stood at the top of the brick step. He looked at the wracked gravel, the tire marks on the lawn, and his mouth twisted, he pressed the heel of a hand to his eye.
Lou-Lou moved toward her father. One marshal put his hands in his pockets, took them out, then slipped past Will on the steps to make a phone call in the kitchen. When he came back, he said to the marshal with the interest in Kay’s brassiere: Let’s take a look at the water. The two walked down the gentle slope past the sycamore trees to watch the pleasure boats return at sundown to their slips.
When the marshals climbed back up the hill after a protracted observation of a thirty-five-foot trimaran, Will and Lou-Lou were seated on the screened porch. The Maguires tidied up. They dismantled the grill, collapsed the bar, wrapped the leftovers, loaded the dishwasher. The marshals both needed to use the facilities, and Gert directed them to the children’s bath through the den. One looked over the bookshelves while waiting for his partner: all leather-bound sets, no mysteries, no magazines, no newspapers. A big television, cabinet console. Three golf trophies, the type a club gives for no real reason. The marshals traded places. In the yellow bathroom, almost by rote, the second man slid open the mirrored medicine cabinet: a battalion of clear plastic, all made out to the boy in care of the mother, more than he’d ever seen in a home, this was extraordinary. He didn’t touch any but bent closer to read the dates, dosages, then drew the mirror closed. The house was so quiet. The street too. A cul-de-sac without a lot of traffic. It was getting dark.
The marshals made their way back to the porch. So, we’ll give it a minute. They sat down at the glass-top table, both folding their hands as if in casual prayer. Will swatted at something buzzing around his head. In the twilight, the Maguires were walking through the pine trees, across the yards, already pretty far gone. Lou-Lou, between them, knocked into Gert’s hip. Gert reached around, pulled her closer. Will didn’t watch. The insect had his full attention. No one spoke. Ten, fifteen minutes passed this way.
The phone rang. Will sat still. The marshal stood, looked at Will, then crossed to the door and into the house. He picked up on the seventh ring. Yes, sir. Got it. Okay. Okay. Yes, sir. Goodbye.
He stood in the door frame, All right, we’re going to the hospital, and he nodded several times. Will said, Oh God, and tried not to cry, and said, Two seconds, and went back through the kitchen, dining room, living room, den to the children’s bath, opened the same mirrored cabinet and emptied one vial from an uppermost shelf into the stiff paraffin-scented pocket of his shirt.
June 3
It was a small dinner in an apartment that stared into the Met, peeked in at the national treasures. At one tall window, a telescope big enough to spot Pluto was set up. Roy looked through it: columns. And on the marble pedestal next to the telescope, a hand of God, Rodin, that anyone could hold.
Roy thought Esther looked a little odd tonight and wished she’d stop sewing her own clothes. Or at least stop wearing them to the gatherings with the big gazoos. But then she was here, and that was more important. And if she wanted to wear an orange velvet turtleneck with sleeves like a bat from Transylvania, wasn’t it her prerogative.
Roy adjusted the tight collar on his shirt, something from Turnbull & Asser. He knew about them already, before anyone. And Esther had helped him. She was very involved with fashion, and very soon she would be fashion, a woman whose clothing line sold in Saks Fifth Avenue. Her own label. Her own atelier off Seventh where the furs rolled on carts just like the dead animals down on Gansevoort. It was in the works.
Roy’s mother, Muddy, liked Esther, and how could she not? Sylvia Kinder’s youngest. Muddy knew Esther from the time she was not very smart in kindergarten. What was all that? Roy was much older, six, seven years, that put him in seventh grade when all the trouble happened to Esther, and never much since. So Esther was in the girls’ bathroom at the little day school, not Horace Mann where her three brothers had gone. She wasn’t that bright, let’s face it, her mother knew right away. And pretty was a matter of taste.
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