Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  I loved this house. I associated its beauty with a feeling of “specialness” that hovered, palpably but unexpressed, beneath the surface of adult conversations. The concept of “taste” came to emblemize a host of qualities pertaining to education and sophistication, and, though unknown to me at the time, social status. The house felt invulnerable and indestructible; I could hardly know then how naive such feelings were or that in the not-too-distant future, this bastion of security would, along with virtually every other relic of my family’s quotidian existence, be whisked away in the debacle attending Morris’s death. I had thought of the house as the foundation of our family, but in the larger reality to which children are not privy, the actual foundation of the house was money, and the bedrock of that money was the national economy, which was about to teach my mother, my sister, and me an exceptionally strict definition of the term interdependence.

  My grandfather had made himself wealthy, lost everything, and made himself wealthy again. So did his son. My father’s investment brokerage firm, Morris Cohon and Company, produced the capital for personal investments in antiques, cattle, oil, and land. He was, for a time, president of both the Hudson-Manhattan Railroad and the Phoenix-Campbell Oil Company. He was the invisible banker and partner of John Walton and Company, a famous Manhattan dealer in museum-quality English and American colonial furniture. Morris and a partner in Harlingen, Texas, were among the first to import white Charolais cattle into the United States, painting black spots on them and running them across the Rio Grande as Holsteins to defy strict import quotas, then raising them on a series of ranches they owned. They assiduously bought up extraneous bloodlines to give themselves dominance in the rapidly growing market, and this dominance secured Morris the chair of the National Association of Charolais Breeders for some years.

  Morris never created a corporate shell for these affairs, because regulations would have made it cumbersome to move money among his various interests, and he was a man who did not like to wait. While this arrangement gave him the flexibility he wanted, it also left his sole partner in all his ventures exposed and vulnerable to creditors at his death. That partner was my mother.

  Growing up wealthy has its downsides as well as its advantages. As a child, I was continually abashed by the sense of exclusion that accompanied my status as “rich.” Though my father was not among the five percent privileged to live without working, we were definitely flush. I remember the embarrassment of being delivered to school in a chauffeur-driven limousine. The gift of an expensive miniature football uniform with shoulder pads, numbered jersey, regulation pants, helmet, and spikes was a humiliation when I tried to play football against far more expert and fearless peers in jeans and T-shirts. Wealth, to a child, is something that sets you apart, something other children tease you about. It makes you look different and feel different and does you no service in your own milieu. I possessed no personal money, authority, or autonomy whatsoever. I owned only a surfeit of unspecified confusions about why all my “wonderful” advantages made me feel powerless and lonely.

  Early memories place me in the front seat of a leather-roofed Cadillac limo beside a succession of uniformed chauffeurs: Chris, who had refused to dig a foxhole on Iwo Jima because he believed he was going to die anyway and did not want to go to the trouble; Percy, who quit in a huff one day because my mother asked him to carry something out to the garage, and he “didn’t carry”; rascally Melvin, who’d once killed a man in Arkansas but was now a deacon in his church; and Jim, the only white chauffeur, a surly Irishman who drank surreptitiously while he drove. Riding in the limo, staring out the window at other kids playing on the street, I was envious of their ease and autonomy. No one seemed to care about them, and they didn’t seem sad about it at all. They had no money, no responsibilities, and didn’t seem “special” in any way. They seemed happy, they dressed as they liked, and they had friends they knew how to play with. I understood that I was supposed to feel sorry for them, but I would have rather been them. They might have felt the same way, watching me drive by, but I remember being aware, even then, that one day I would demand of myself that I stand alone on the streets as well, to pass or fail its cold tests and judgments on my own merits and thus discover the extent of my true limits and abilities. All that prevented me, at the time, was too much anxious parental attention and too much money.

  The money problem resolved itself. I remember the beginning of my father’s financial tumble very clearly because it was the day the U.S. government invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. I was home when he walked into the living room of our summerhouse near Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard, poured a water glass half full of scotch, and knocked it back. He was standing at the big salt-specked windows, staring over the expanse of scrubby blueberry and salt brush that grew thick and wild between our house and the ocean. His hands were on his hips, and his legs were spread as if facing an adversary. He stood absolutely immobile, and there was something unnerving about his stillness. I was afraid to approach him. I learned later that this day marked the beginning of the end of the life he had imagined and built for himself.

  He had secured all his save-your-life money as well as the savings of other relatives in American government bonds, bought on margin for a small percentage of their worth, freeing dollars to pursue more profitable investment opportunities elsewhere. If the value of the bonds ever dropped, he would have to pony up, but that almost never happened with government bonds.

  War is never normal, however, and with its attack the United States had effectively (if not officially) declared war on Cuba. One repercussion of the international humiliation that followed our defeat there was that the bottom fell out of the American bond market. At the time that I returned home from the caravan, my father’s firm was paying close to four hundred thousand dollars a year in interest on outstanding debt incurred to cover those margin losses.

  To add insult to the injury, the invasion coincidentally marked the beginning of an unusual ten-year “flat spot” for Wall Street, which lasted through the sixties and into the seventies. Entrepreneurial brokers responded with practices that Morris considered shabby or dangerous, so while his colleagues managed to stay afloat through “creative” financial arrangements, he refused to forsake his principles of sound business practice and dug in, mortgaging here and borrowing there, anticipating an eventual upswing, the cyclical return of prosperity.

  The cornucopia stocked with plenty metamorphosed into a water spiral disappearing down a drain. Without my mother’s knowledge, more money was borrowed and farms were mortgaged or sold off to deter the inevitable. Morris’s inner life became intolerable; illnesses chipped away at his strength and, sad to say, his character. He sought relief from kidney stone attacks with Demerol and became addicted for the rest of his life, tired, and despondent. His behavior grew more erratic.

  One night when I was visiting from California, I found him standing unconscious at the refrigerator, propping himself up on the open door. He had taken too much Demerol and Seconal trying to sleep and come downstairs to eat, hoping to diminish the effects. I threw his arm over my shoulder and led him up the stairs to his room. At the end of the hall, he suddenly threw a totally committed punch into the wall, smashing the plaster. The hall light had projected our shadows onto the wall; in his stupor, he had mistaken them for assailants and attacked without hesitation.

  His life was haunted by phantoms, and he stayed stoned more and more often. One night, he passed out over a lit stove, burning himself badly. Just before he went into the hospital for the last time, he had my mother take his picture and then, very uncharacteristically, told her to make six copies. In the hospital, he lost his grip and tumbled into that dark, dollar-shaped rectangle awaiting each of us. His last words were “Oh, boy,” repeated over and over in escalating intensity, until the silence indicated to my mother, pacing the hallway, that he had died.

  Coincidentally, the week after he died so did his lifelong accountant, the only person who underst
ood all the byzantine intricacies concerning his money. Another week later, Mother received a million-dollar check from the sale of one of Morris’s farms. The business chewed through it in eight days. “In his hands it would have been worth five million,” Ruth said numbly. It might have staved off the final disaster had he lived, but she had already been crushed by serial ironies and reversals, and this last was simply one more.

  When I drove the Meat and Bone Wagon into the driveway, the principals and creditors of Morris Cohon and Company were entreating Ruth for her husband’s minuscule personal insurance in order “to keep the firm going.” It was a chaotic time for her, and I was not much help. She had been simultaneously widowed and bankrupted, humiliated to learn that she had been living on borrowed money for years, money that she felt personally (and ignorantly) responsible for, as if she were depriving these poor bankers and investors (many of whom had been friends) of food. Complicating matters was the fact that as Morris’s legal partner, who had signed unread papers at his instructions, she was personally liable for his mountain of debt.

  Sam, Ariel, Colleen Bear, Josephine, and I—along with Sam’s stupid black Great Dane, Crow, a gigantic, clumsy dog I loathed—invaded this precarious environment. Our arrival would have been a nightmare in the best of times, and the fact that my mother did not kill each and every one of us and the dogs should certify her without question as the first Jewish saint. Sam is an impulsive woman. She has moved more often than most people redecorate, and she treats impulses like commands. She had invited Colleen to join us on a whim, but the two began to quarrel. Furthermore, Colleen became infested with scabies, and her skin became encrusted with itching red papules and eruptions. Before it was diagnosed by a horrified Park Avenue doctor, she had infected everyone in the house except my mother.

  Once Colleen was cured, Sam sent her home and began quarreling with my mother, who assumed that her own household did not require a second mistress and resented being rudely and thoughtlessly colonized by wild people. Sam, in turn, took umbrage at Ruth’s authority, and things became very tense.

  The Martha’s Vineyard house was sold, as were all the farms but Turkey Ridge, and even that one, Morris’s first and favorite, was finally put on the block. Estate specialists pored over the Englewood house, tagging the rugs, silver, and crockery, the drop-leaf tables and Chippendale chairs. Drapes and gilt-edged mirrors were examined and carefully appraised. Even the hand-carved mantel had a price tag taped to it. Ruth stayed mildly drunk for two days, watching people amble casually through the detritus of her life, fingering and critiquing her personal treasures in front of her as if she were invisible. Business partners and acquaintances who might have helped her took advantage of her distress and made yard-sale offers for the book collections, the silver, and the rugs. Gawkers treasure-hunted through the rooms, commenting to companions how they “loved” this or “hated” that and describing how they would alter things if the house were theirs. My mother reeled from room to room, offer to offer, unprotected and completely alone.

  God knows what prospective buyers made of the stoned, longhaired, and exceedingly cranky cadaver with bones in his ears, rolling cigarettes at the kitchen table and regarding them with undisguised disdain. I didn’t understand how to help. To me, these people were already wealthy so that paying them back at Ruth’s expense for investments that were gambling losses, not bread-and-butter money, seemed like an injustice to my mother. I treated them like ambulance chasers and pimps. I knew that I should have been doing something for Ruth, but my efforts to comfort her were pitifully ineffectual because I was part of the problem. The least I could do to help, I decided, was to move my menagerie from under her roof. Therefore, we migrated eighty miles west to the Delaware Water Gap and settled in at Turkey Ridge.

  As we departed, my mother gave me unequivocal admonitions to take good care of the farm. She wanted it to remain impeccable for a top-dollar sale. My personal though unexpressed hope was to arrange for my father to be reburied there. This task assumed a symbolic importance in my imagination as an act that might compensate both Morris and Ruth for a host of disappointments and transgressions that they’d suffered from my behavior. It would be an act of contrition and a demonstration to her of my power to make things happen in the world. To make a reburial possible, however, the farm first had to be secured from creditors.

  Turkey Ridge was Morris’s pride and joy. Beginning with an original homestead and 150 acres bought forty years earlier, he had assiduously collected almost three thousand acres of farms, forest, pasture, and cropland only two hours from New York City. A brochure my mother designed to facilitate the sale reminded prospective buyers that the land was “within a five-hour drive of sixty million people.” The centerpiece was the eighteenth-century house with a whitewashed stone foundation and wooden siding capped by a slate roof. It had been modernized well, with a good kitchen and central heating to augment the three original fireplaces. The house was surrounded by over an acre of perfectly groomed lawn bisected by a dramatically curving long driveway of sparkling white gravel. The original barn and outbuildings had been repaired and repainted classic red with green trim. They were still in use, and Morris had added a heated garage, bull barns, open hay sheds, and sturdy oak corrals, all constructed of lumber milled from our own trees. He had spent many nights laboring over blueprints he’d drawn himself, meticulously refining his plans for these structures.

  The fields grew thick with his personally prescribed mixture of grasses and clover, and when they were dotted with white Charolais, the grass was so abundant, rising above their knees, that the cattle resembled tufted clouds that had settled to earth. It was his heaven, a picture of bucolic splendor matted by charming stone fences and framed by the shadowy second-growth hardwood forest surrounding it all.

  Besides being his refuge, Turkey Ridge was Morris’s justification for his time in thrall to Wall Street. It was the Wall Street money that bought the cattle, built the physical plant, and employed the men who kept the fences taut and trim, the buildings painted, and the grounds lovingly cared for.

  Morris’s intimacy and identification with the place was touching. Whenever the weather even hinted rain or snow, he called the chauffeur of the moment to drive him there to spend the night. Somehow the buffeting of inclement weather increased the sense of shelter and protection he received from the house. It was not unusual to walk outside on snowy mornings and find him under the snow in a sleeping bag, as if he could not get intimate enough with that earth.

  This was the most appropriate place to bury him, and I resolved to do it if I could.

  It was difficult living alone with just Sam and Ariel after the rough-and-tumble intimacy and mutual support of commune life. The stresses and strains between Sam and me, never easy in the best of times, were now unbuffered by others. The house was large, cold, and utterly quiet, without distractions. There was firewood to cut and poultry to tend, the beautiful yellow pine floors to care for, and the inevitable truck repairs, but despite the good work, it was lonely, and the loneliness frayed both of us. Even Josephine began snarling at strangers.

  My father’s old business associate and crony, Joe Konwiser, arrived unexpectedly one day. Joe was a droopy-eyed, gravel-voiced Wall Street hipster in his late sixties. He had once done some minor jail time, taking the fall for the principals in a soured stock deal, and was undyingly grateful to my father for having given him a chance to work again. Gratitude did not diminish the accuracy of his appraisals, however. He considered my mother “a class act who deserved better” and my father “the most self-destructive son of a bitch I’ve ever known.”

  Joe loved them both and intended to help. I had known Joe all my life. He and his glamorous wife Jean, a smoky blonde who existed in her own personal film noir, had always been fixtures in our lives. I trusted him as an intimate family friend and counselor. Working a Pall Mall cigarette pensively, he suggested pointedly that I could be of more service to my mother. I listened attentively, e
ager for the opportunity, but the plan he described seemed preposterous. He told me that if I came into the brokerage firm and told the creditors that I wanted to run it for my family, there was a chance that they might suspend interest payments on the debt and give us time to get the business in good order. Our leverage was the threat that we would declare immediate bankruptcy and settle with them for a nickel on every dollar of debt. We still had many good salespeople left, he argued, as well as a top-flight research division, all the old clients, and a great reputation.

  “Your father invented the over-the-counter business,” Joe said. “He brought out [the public offering] Mallinckrodt Chemical and found Xerox when they were making cafeteria trays.” I wasn’t sure what all this signified but gathered that it was impressive to the cognoscenti. “The business made a fucking fortune once,” Joe declared emphatically. “Why not again?”

  Joe was a lifelong salesman and nothing if not persuasive. His eyes appeared ancient and sage, and his raspy voice detailed his plan with hypnotic certainty. He was blunt about utilizing my guilt over having delayed my return so long, and dismissed all my excuses for that delay as “bullshit.”

  What Joe skillfully avoided mentioning was that the indispensable asset possessed by Morris Cohon and Company was Morris Cohon. He was the man who could multiply six-digit numbers in his head, who played chess every week with master player Edward Lasker, who debated economics with Paul Swayze and Leo Huberman, editors of the Monthly Review. Morris was the genius. I was the one who couldn’t figure out when Train A would intersect Train B.