The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

  He needs to say something, to break this poisonous spell, but the only thing she might want to hear is that he didn’t mean it, that nothing will change. And that he can’t say, surprised by his certainty.

  And he is surprised again when she doesn’t tightly coil her hair, when she abandons the pins that litter the counter, when she lifts the mass and lets it fall, as if setting loose a dark cloud.

  “You look spectacular,” he says, and it’s true, and he hopes the compliment will soften her. Her black eyes are gleaming, but not with pleasure, and she offers him the tightest of smiles. She arches her trim feet and steps into her sandals, silk blush-colored rosettes across her toes as if she walks in a garden, the heels so high she nearly reaches his height.

  “You look nice, too,” she says, without looking at him in his tux, refusing to allow her eyes to be caught by his. “Shall we get on with it. Your mother said pictures out by the meditation pool.”

  “Are the girls—”

  “They’re wearing the matching dresses your mother gave them on her birthday. I told them they can swim again after, if they want to. Your mom hired Blanca and she said she’d go in with them.”

  “That’s great. About Blanca, rather than a stranger. Did you ask if she might be—”

  “It seemed premature. After all, we may not need her.”

  She does not speak these short sentences quickly. Instead, she permits their meaning to stretch out. And Simon understands that the trip together to Colombia may be off the table, that his idea of the two of them there, finding their way back to an earlier happiness, making love morning and night, sightseeing during conference breaks, drinking aguardiente or Cuba libres together at charming outdoor cafés, like the one in his story, may not happen, will definitely not happen, unless he backtracks completely.

  Elena is making things perfectly clear: if he insists on exploring Judaism, everything they have been to each other is in jeopardy.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ROMA REFRAINS FROM ACTING on both her professional and wifely instincts. Tonight is not the night to ask Harry what’s troubling him, to have him explain his curious detachment in the pool and at lunch, his irregular nap with Isabel, when the few times he’s ever napped he was knocked out by the flu, the trance she found him in staring at his computer. Something is afoot, amiss, out of balance, but she will put on a happy smile and they will experience this memorable evening unmarred by the loving interrogation in which she’d like to engage.

  “This is me,” she says, twirling around in her gown, and Harry, standing in the bathroom, looks at his wife. She’s arranged her hair, bohemian she calls it, tendrils falling around her face, and the yellow diamond drop earrings he gave her on her sixtieth are aflame, her eyes lit up. Her silk gown as magnificent as she is, narrow sleeves to her elbows, the eye-catching long V down her back, sculptured drapes falling around her, grazing her toes. She is a goddess, a golden statue in a golden dress, a treasure. She takes away the little breath left in him.

  “You’re ravishing. Breathtaking. Can I meet you outside? Give me ten minutes?”

  Breathtaking is what he said, though he seems out of breath, a slight rattling wheeze Roma’s never heard him make, but he smiles at her and she smiles back and twirls around once more. Then she is picking up her golden wrap, her golden bag, blowing him a kiss, and is out their bedroom door, calling to their daughters as she naturally would, asking who’s ready.

  HALF DRESSED IN THE wing collar shirt, bow tie already in sharp triangles around his neck, he stares at the hanging tuxedo, loath to put it on. But he must, and when he does, the soft, rich fabric stings him as if made of nettles, sits like a lie upon his skin.

  He imagines himself as the fly that could have been caught in the web. Standing in his spacious bedroom in his palatial desert house wearing a tuxedo, he is a free man because the web captured another and the spider gobbled that other up and was sated.

  He is devastated by those articles, about events that occurred only after he traded in his old life, extinguished his memories of that year, settled his young family in Palm Springs. He possessed absolutely no knowledge about any of it, but there could be no question the blame was his to bear. What he read defied comprehension; crucial questions remain unanswered.

  There had been a joint FBI and SEC investigation into five years of the firm’s activities. It was in the fifth year that Harry had made his illegal trades while Max Stern was out on medical leave. Had every one of those five years been of interest, or was the expansive time frame federal subterfuge and they had been focused only on that last year?

  When the investigation began, Max’s leukemia was in remission and he had been back at the firm six months. Named by Carruthers as the liaison to the federal agencies, Stern was beginning to produce subpoenaed files when a death temporarily halted everything. Going 120 miles an hour on a summer night in his new cherry-red 1987 Ferrari F40, Carruthers hit a concrete bridge abutment, died on impact in that single-car crash.

  The articles didn’t hint at what Harry was still pondering: Had Carruthers been engaged in his own insider trading? Had he been facing arrest? Had he deliberately killed himself? Had he given Harry the settlement authority, without any corporate record of that action, without obtaining board approval, in order to set Harry up as a potential patsy, if things went wrong? Is that why Carruthers never hired someone new to take over for Stern? Or had Carruthers not cared who might be the patsy, so long as he had someone, and he already had Max? Is that why he didn’t change Stern’s confidential access codes when he put Harry in charge, so that every settlement looked as if it had been executed by Stern? And during the six months between Harry’s resignation and Stern’s reappearance, had it been Carruthers settling trades under Stern’s name?

  After the funeral, the investigation geared up again. Stern complied with all the court orders, turned over every file, and then, in short order, was arrested, on the hook for having held all settlement authority for the years in question. Arrested despite his yearlong medical leave, despite his exhortations that he had no personal knowledge of the trades under examination. The evidence was damning—Stern’s name on settlements totaling $41 million in illegal profits from suspected use of verboten insider information. What wasn’t reflected in that total was Harry’s own illicit money, the $18 million he sent through the convolutions of the black market banking system, where it eventually wound up in that CST account in the Caymans. He was stunned to learn about the $21 million found in offshore accounts under fake names, and the $11 million found in secret firm accounts that seemed to belong to no one, and the puzzling $9 million idling in several of the firm’s overflow accounts with blank paperwork and no signatories at all. He had been in charge then and had not comprehended the nature of those trades, that his money wasn’t the only dirty money at the firm that he’d settled, sent out into the yonder.

  Why hadn’t Stern mentioned Harry when he was being interrogated by the authorities? Had he not known? Had Carruthers not told him? Harry had never mentioned it during those calls when he checked in on Max that year of his illness, but wouldn’t Stern, when he returned, have insisted on learning who had been executing his job? Harry would have, but Stern, who knows—having risen from his sickbed, perhaps his relief at being able to suit up and return to work was all he could focus on.

  It hadn’t mattered that Stern signed an affidavit attesting to his medical leave, as did his oncologist, who detailed the many rounds of chemotherapy and radiation he had endured, as did the nurses and technicians, as did his family and friends, swearing he’d been hard at death’s door: Max Stern’s user name and password had been continuously active, without any break in the pattern, and no one would say otherwise. The firm’s traders refused to exonerate Stern. The trades were settled, they said, and no one else had the authority—what other conclusion could be drawn? Harry understood the impulse, to protect their own skins, but why hadn’t they angled the interrogative spotlight on him? It was com
mon knowledge he settled trades during Stern’s absence, yet nowhere in the articles did the name Harry Tabor appear.

  It made no sense, until it did. It wasn’t that he’d been given a pass by those blond, pale-eyed men, not at all. It was, instead, that despite his years at the firm, despite once being their boss, despite his warm and frank personality and his bonhomie, he was never a member of their closed universe, and with his absence, he slipped from their minds, as if he’d never been.

  He saw it starkly: those traders, bosom buddies since their days at private kindergartens, at boarding schools, at the top Ivy Leagues, stamping their feet and bumping their pugnacious fists together in some private ritual by which they chose their scapegoat. Harry was long gone, but there was Stern, a man without standing, for he, too, was outside their tight world, and how easily they fingered the one remaining Jew at the firm, that rarest of creatures, a wholly innocent man, captured for slaughter, or at least railroaded into jail.

  Stern had insisted on a polygraph. When the results were inconclusive, his lawyer argued that expert medical testimony would prove that long courses of chemotherapy and radiation and daily medications to fight against the recurrence of a life-ending disease altered one’s heartbeat, one’s breathing, the production of sweat from one’s glands. Only an innocent man would demand the pneumographs wrapped around his chest, the blood pressure cuff around his arm, the electrodes attached to his fingertips, to be tested to see if he was lying. And it was Stern, not the FBI or the SEC, who demanded the first polygraph, then the second, then the third, and when the results of all three were identical, the lawyer argued that this was a surfeit of proof that his client was innocent, that the chemo, radiation, and meds were responsible for the precisely repeated anomalies. Guilt in this case could not be inferred from an inconclusive test. His client was not only entitled to the presumption of innocence; he was, in fact, an innocent man.

  The traders all accepted plea deals—limited to the payment of fines and the suspension of their licenses until they completed the terms of their mild probations—but Stern refused to negotiate. He had been wrongfully ensnared in a scheme he had no part of, had not known existed, for which he had not financially benefited in any way, the transactions occurring in his absence, while he was fighting for his life, and he wanted his day in court.

  A monthlong trial on numerous charges of insider trading, wire fraud, and civil money laundering, and then that innocent man was found guilty on all counts. The trial judge stated that five years of records told an incontrovertible truth, and handed down a jail sentence incongruous at the time for white-collar crimes. Twelve years for Max. Harry saw photos in those articles of Stern handcuffed and escorted out of the courtroom. He pictured Stern in a crummy van, in leg irons, attached by a heavy chain to real criminals, violent criminals, being taken upstate to prison.

  Stern’s wife divorced him and returned to her maiden name; his sons and daughter refused to visit. Harry and Max used to privately wish each other Shana Tovah when the High Holidays came around, they’d been the same kind of Reform Jews, but he read that Max Stern had undergone a prison transformation, had immersed himself in a serious course of Judaic instruction, had converted to Modern Orthodox, and inside his imprisoning home, in a special ceremony held in the visitors’ room, he had been ordained a rabbi. Which also made no sense.

  Harry had never given Stern another thought when he walked away from Carruthers Investments, and these revelations about Stern, they are still walloping him, hitting him hard as a boxer’s punch, sending him reeling from this final fillip of upheaval in his personal universe.

  While Stern was locked up, Harry was building a new life from scratch and flourishing—that aberrant year extinguished entirely from his mind. He was loving his family, watching his infant son crawl, then walk, and every morning, overflowing with confidence, enthusiasm, and energy, he drank his coffee, then drove to the building he had purchased, pushing open the doors of his brainchild CST, where with beneficent élan, he was releasing Jews from their own imprisonment, lifting them out of their villages, towns, and cities, in countries with oppressive regimes, flying them to this promised land in this desert, helping them build from scratch their lives in this new world about which they had dreamt for so long.

  HE TUCKS HIS WALLET and cell phone into the inside pocket of his jacket, his emotions cresting to the surface in this bedroom where such great love and so much life has taken place, memorizing what he sees—that drawing in luscious verdigris tones they bought for their tenth anniversary, that twined and braided bronze sculpture for their twentieth, that black-and-white photograph of spectral calla lilies for their twenty-fifth, that massive painting over the bed, like an explosion of energized stars, for their thirty-seventh, that large pulsating piece for their most recent anniversary, blown by distant Polish lips into a Mobius vase, the glass so vibrantly red it might have been mixed with fresh blood.

  He feels his hesitation, the reluctance of his steps through the house, a man heading to the gallows when he enters his study once again. He monkeys with the computer, then shuts it down entirely. From the desk drawer, he retrieves the speech he labored over for weeks and weeks, thanking the city, the nominating committee, everyone, for the Man of the Decade honor, gingerly holding it, then folding the paper into the tiniest, tightest square he can, palming it hard, before putting it into his breast pocket. He can’t imagine reading it aloud to the gathered, estimable crowd.

  But right now, it’s picture time.

  And there is the family gathered around the meditation pool.

  Esmeralda’s daughter Blanca, whom he has known since she was a toddler, is shooting photos like a professional, with the camera Simon and Elena bought him for the big 7-0 and he’s not yet used. All of Blanca’s life is ahead of her. She wants to be a child psychologist like Roma, is eager to transfer from the College of the Desert to UCLA, and Roma has written her a recommendation, and when Blanca is ready Roma will provide introductions to her colleagues in Los Angeles. He is focusing on Blanca because it is too difficult to think of his children. But he must.

  He looks carefully at each exceptional one, how radiant they are, living amazing lives each and every day, their futures expansive and infinite. And his granddaughters, already peerless so early in their young lives, though he is aware he lacks any ability this moment to see into their futures, to imagine anything concrete so far in the distance.

  The chatter dies away when he appears. Their faces a collective of smiles and gleaming teeth and sunned cheeks, excitement sparking off every last one. They have been waiting for the man of the hour, of the decade, of nothing.

  “You all look smashing,” he says, his thoughts bucking, wanting to stampede past all of this, to what might lie ahead, but then Roma catches his eyes.

  At the long, narrow pool, lavender under the softening sun, he takes his place in their midst and prepares to be photographed, smiling a Harry Tabor smile to hide his juddering distress, his internal tumult, his deep remorse. This man, whose world has spun off its axis, is smiling as hard as he can.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE STRETCH LIMOUSINE SENT by the city seems as long as any Bronx city block Harry once walked as a kid. Roma and Elena are providing last-minute instructions to Blanca. Lucy and Isabel are racing around their father and aunts, and Harry, stifling inside his tuxedo, looks at the pinking horizon. He has relished the desert heat all these many years, but tonight he finds it vibrational, frightening, parching the last of the air in his lungs.

  The driver says with a slight bow, “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Tabor.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Roma says, “I’ll be right back,” the click of her heels changing tunes as she moves up the drive and into the house, and Harry feels simultaneously marooned and relieved to be free of her exacting stare.

  “Dad, you look very handsome,” Phoebe says, and the only response he can locate in his brain is “It’s very hot,” which sets off a chain reaction—the dr
iver waving his hand at his shiny chariot, saying, “Please, it’s much cooler inside,” and Elena shrugging her shoulders, climbing in, followed by Phoebe, the two women arranging their gowns at their feet, followed by Simon and Camille, who cross their suited legs, and Camille pats the space next to her and says, “Here, Dad,” and he feels unhinged making his way in, his hands grasping the leather, his feet slow to follow, and when he’s nearly seated, the little girls stick their heads through the open door, almost butting his chest, Lucy chanting, “Party, party, party, party.”

  “Say good night to everyone,” Blanca says to the girls as she takes their hands. They twist their necks, calling out, “Night-night,” and then Lucy is saying, “Pool, pool, pool, pool,” identifying a place Harry would rather be, the word fading as Blanca leads them away.

  “Dad,” Camille says, “this afternoon Phoebe and I were wondering whatever happened to our dogs? To King David and Queen Esther?”

  Startled, Harry stares at Camille. This minute she’s asking him about those loving, low-to-the-ground dogs he recalled so vividly this morning, when he had not thought of them in more than three decades? Will he start crying right here and right now? He might, he feels the tingling in his eyes, but the salty tide reverses course when Simon says, “What dogs? When did we have dogs?”

  “Camille and I had dogs in Connecticut,” Phoebe says to Simon, then turns again to her father, but whatever she is about to ask him is lost when Roma reappears, holding her cell phone aloft. “Sorry, everyone, I forgot this.” She enters the car quickly, lightly, taking her place across from Harry, smoothing her golden gown around her, thanking the driver shutting the door.