by Auster, Paul
There were twelve typed pages folded up inside, a Last Will and Testament prepared by the Court Street law firm of Flynn, Bernstein, and Vallero, duly signed, witnessed, and executed on June 5, 2000, just one day before I had talked to Harry on the phone at the Chowder Inn. I scanned the contents of the document, and within three minutes I understood what he’d meant by his grand gesture, his splurge of splurges, his vast swan dive into eternal greatness. He had been referring to the will I now held in my hands, which was indeed something great, something altogether surprising and great, and which proved that he had listened to my warnings far more closely than I had imagined. Even as he’d refused to follow my advice, he had hedged his bets by embracing the possibility that Gordon was about to turn on him, and if such a betrayal were to come to pass, he felt that his life would be over – if not literally, then at least in the sense that the inner destruction would be more than he could bear. He had said as much to me at our dinner on June first: If you’re right about Gordon, then my life’s finished anyway. To think about Gordon as a duplicitous avenger was also to think about his own death. The first thought led naturally to the second, and in the end the two thoughts were one and the same. Hence the will. It was an overly dramatic step, perhaps, a near-hysterical response to the distress roiling inside him, but who could fault him for wanting to take (in his words) some precautions? In light of what had happened earlier that day, it turned out to be an act of supreme wisdom.
The two beneficiaries named in the will were Tom Wood and Rufus Sprague. They were to inherit the building on Seventh Avenue along with the business known as Bright-man’s Attic, including all goods and moneys that appertained to said business. Other, smaller bequests were mentioned as well – various books, paintings, and articles of jewelry to be given to people whose names were unfamiliar to me – but the bulk of Harry’s estate was going to Tom and Rufus, with all income from Brightman’s Attic to be divided equally between them. Considering that there was no mortgage on the building, and considering the value of the books and manuscripts in the room where I was currently sitting, the inheritance would amount to a small fortune, more money than either one of them had ever dreamed of. At the last possible moment, Harry had pulled off his grand gesture, his splurge of splurges. He had taken care of his boys.
I realized then how badly I had underestimated him. The man might have grown up into an imp and a scoundrel, but a part of him had remained the ten-year-old child who had fantasized about rescuing orphans from the bombed-out cities of Europe. For all his wisecracking irreverence, for all his peccadilloes and falsehoods, he had never stopped believing in the principles of the Hotel Existence. Good old Harry Brightman. Funny old Harry Brightman. If there had been a bottle of something on the desk, I would have poured myself a glass and raised a toast to his memory. Instead, I picked up the phone and dialed Gordon’s number. In the long run, that probably amounted to the same thing.
He didn’t answer, but a message came on after four rings and I heard his voice for the first time – an unusually calm and guarded voice, I felt, with little affect or inflection. Fortunately, he gave a second number where he could be reached (I assumed Trumbell’s), which spared me the bother of having to look it up myself. I dialed again, fully expecting no one to be in, imagining that Dryer and Trumbell were out somewhere whooping it up, celebrating their triumph in Brooklyn that afternoon. Just as I was beginning to wonder if I should leave a message on the machine, the phone stopped ringing and I heard Dryer’s voice for the second time in thirty seconds. To play it safe, I asked if I could talk to Gordon Dryer, even though I knew for certain that he was the man on the other end of the line.
“Speaking,” he said. “Who is this?”
“Nathan,” I replied. “We’ve never met, but I believe you’ve heard of me. Harry Brightman’s friend. The fortune-teller.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do. When you and your friend visited Harry today, someone was standing on the other side of the door, listening in on your conversation. At one point, Harry mentioned my name. ‘I should have listened to Nathan,’ he said, and you asked him, ‘Who’s Nathan?’ That’s when Harry told you I was a fortune-teller. Remember now? We’re not talking about the distant past, Mr. Dryer. You heard those words just a few hours ago.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the messenger of bad tidings. I’m the man who issues threats and warnings, who tells people what to do.”
“Oh? And what am I supposed to do?”
“I like your sarcasm, Gordon. I hear that coldness in your voice, and it confirms my feelings about who you are. Thank you. Thank you for making my job so simple.”
“All I have to do is hang up the phone, and that’s the end of the conversation.”
“But you’re not going to hang up, are you? You’re scared shitless, and you’ll do anything to find out what I know. Am I right or wrong?”
“You don’t know a damn thing.”
“Guess again, Gordon. Let me try out some names on you, and we’ll see what I know and don’t know.”
“Names?”
“Dunkel Frères. Alec Smith. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ian Metropolis. Myron Trumbell. How’s that? Do you want me to go on?”
“All right, so you know who I am. Big deal.”
“Yes, big deal. Because I know what I know, I’m in a position to get what I want from you.”
“Ah. So that’s it. You want money. You want us to cut you in on the deal.”
“Wrong again, Gordon. I’m not interested in money. There’s just one thing you have to do for me. A very easy thing. It won’t take but a minute of your time.”
“One thing?”
“Call up the moving company you hired for tomorrow and cancel the order. Tell them you’ve changed your mind and won’t be needing the van.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because your scam has done gone backfired on you, Gordon. The whole thing blew up in your face about five minutes after you left Harry’s store.”
“What do you mean?”
“Harry’s dead.”
“What?”
“Harry’s dead. He went running after you along Seventh Avenue as you were driving away in the cab. The strain was too much for him. His heart gave out, and he died there on the street.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe it, buster. Harry’s dead, and you killed him. Poor, stupid Harry. All he ever did was love you, and you pay him back by luring him into some crummy extortion scheme. Nice work, kid. You must be very proud of yourself.”
“It’s not true. Harry’s alive.”
“Call the morgue at Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, then. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask the guys in the white coats.”
“I will. That’s exactly what I’ll do.”
“Good. In the meantime, don’t forget to call the movers. Harry’s books stay in Harry’s store. If you show up at Brightman’s Attic tomorrow, I’ll break your neck. And then I’ll turn you over to the cops. Do you understand me, Gordon? I’m letting you off easy. I know all about the forged manuscript page, the ten-thousand-dollar check, everything. It’s just that I don’t want to see Harry’s name get dragged into it. The man’s dead, and I’ll be damned if I do anything to hurt his reputation now. But that’s only if you act like a good boy. You do what I tell you to do, or else I switch to Plan B and go after you with everything I’ve got. Do you hear me? I’ll have you busted and thrown into jail. I’ll fuck you up so bad, you won’t want to live anymore.”
ADIEU
Rufus wanted no part of the building or the store. He wanted no part of Brooklyn, no part of New York City, no part of America. The only America he believed in was the one that had Harry Brightman in it, and now that Harry had left the country, Rufus felt it was time for him to be going home.
“I’ll live with my granny in Kingston,” he said. “She’s my friend, the only friend I h
ave in the world.”
Such was his startling reaction to the news of Harry’s will. As for Tom, he just sat there in silence, not knowing what to think.
I returned to the upstairs apartment a little past ten. Nancy had already gone home to be with her children; Lucy had fallen asleep in front of the television and had since been transferred to Harry’s bed, where she was stretched out on top of the covers with her clothes on and her mouth open, gurgling softly in the warm New York night; Tom and Rufus were in the living room, sitting in chairs and smoking. Tom looked pensive as he dragged on his Camel Filter. Rufus, who was puffing on what appeared to be a joint, looked a little crazed.
High or not, he talked with great clarity after I read Harry’s will to them. His mind was made up, and no matter what Tom said to him, he wouldn’t budge from his position. The only thing he wanted was to talk about Harry, which he proceeded to do at great length, giving a long-winded, emotional account of their first meeting – Rufus in tears, having just been thrown out of the apartment he shared with his friend Tyrone, and Harry stepping out of the darkness, putting his arm around his shoulder, and asking if there was anything he could do to help – and then moving on to the thousand selfless acts Harry had bestowed on him over the past three years, in particular the offer of a job, but also paying for the costumes and jewelry he used in his Tina Hott performances, not to speak of Harry’s unflagging generosity with the doctors’ bills and his willingness to spring for the expensive medicines that were keeping Rufus alive. Was there ever a man as good as Harry Brightman? he asked. Not that he knew of, he said, answering his own question, and then, for the umpteenth time that night, he broke down and wept.
“You don’t have any choice,” Tom said, finally emerging from his dazed silence. “Whether you stay here or not, the money belongs to both of us. We’re partners, and there’s no way I’m going to steal your share. Half and half, Rufus. We split everything right down the middle.”
“Just send me the money for my meds,” Rufus whispered. “I don’t want anything else.”
“We’ll sell the building and the store,” Tom said. “We’ll get rid of everything and share the profits.”
“No, Tommy,” Rufus said. “You keep it. You’re so smart, man, you’ll make yourself rich if you hold on. This place isn’t for me. I don’t know nothing about books. I’m just a freak, man, a little colored freak who doesn’t belong here. A girl in a boy’s body. A dying boy who wants to go home.”
“You’re not going to die,” Tom said. “Your health is good.”
“We all die, baby,” Rufus said, lighting up another joint. “Don’t take it so hard. I’m cool with it, man. My granny will take good care of me. Just remember to call every once in a while, okay? Promise me that, Tommy. If you forget my birthday, I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you.”
As I listened to this exchange between the two young men, I began to feel somewhat choked up myself. It wasn’t like me to succumb to strong displays of sentiment, but I was still reeling from my talk with Dryer, which had taken a lot more out of me than I had expected it would. I had assumed the role of tough guy for the confrontation, and I had borne down on him with a viciousness that made me sound like some gravel-voiced hood from an old B-movie. It wasn’t that Dryer didn’t deserve the full treatment, but until the words came out of my mouth, I hadn’t known I was capable of such coarseness, of such brutality. Now, just minutes after that talk had ended, I was in the upstairs apartment again, listening to Rufus Sprague turn down the very things Dryer had wanted to steal from Harry. The contrast was too stark, too overwhelming not to feel moved by the differences between the two men. And yet Harry had loved them both, had stuck by each one of them with the same helpless ardor, the same unquestioning devotion. How was such a thing possible? I asked myself. How could a person so thoroughly misjudge one man and at the same time so accurately penetrate the true character of another? Rufus was just twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. Physically, he resembled an exotic creature from some alien planet, and with his small, perfect head, his honey-colored face, and his slender, elongated limbs, he was the very embodiment of the weakling, the pushover, the pansy. But there was something fierce in him as well, an unusual sort of idealism that rejected the vanities and desires that make the rest of us so vulnerable to the temptations of the world. For his sake, I hoped he would change his mind about the inheritance. I hoped he would start thinking like the rest of us and accept the property that had been left to him, but as I listened to Tom argue with him for the next two hours, I realized it was never going to happen.
The following day was given over to practical chores. Phone calls to Harry’s friends (handled by Rufus), calls to Bette in Chicago and fellow book dealers in New York (handled by Tom), and calls to various funeral parlors around Brooklyn (handled by me). In his will, Harry had left instructions that his body should be cremated, but he hadn’t stipulated how or where the ashes should be disposed of. After a lengthy discussion, it was decided that we would scatter them in a wooded area of Prospect Park. By New York City law, you aren’t supposed to dump the ashes of dead people in public places, but we figured that if we secluded ourselves in some remote, rarely traveled spot, no one would notice us. The bill for burning Harry’s body and securing the remains in a metal box tallied up to just over fifteen hundred dollars. With no one else in a position to contribute, I covered the entire cost myself.
On the afternoon of the ceremony – Sunday, June eleventh – I left Lucy with a babysitter and walked to the park with Tom, who carried the box of ashes in a green shopping bag with the Bright-man’s Attic logo on it. The weather had been vile since the start of the weekend, a sweltering, oppressive, ninety-six-degree onslaught of humidity and pounding light, and Sunday was the worst day of all, one of those barely breathable moments when New York is turned into an equatorial jungle outpost, the hottest, foulest place on earth. Simply to move was to feel your body awash in sweat.
The weather was probably responsible for the sparse turnout. Harry’s Manhattan friends had opted to stay at home in their air-conditioned apartments, and our number was therefore reduced to a smattering of neighborhood loyalists. Among them were three or four Seventh Avenue shopkeepers, the owner of Harry’s regular lunch spot, and the woman who had cut and dyed his hair. Nancy Mazzucchelli was present, of course, as was her husband, the ersatz James Joyce, better known as Jim or Jimmy. It was the first time I had met him, and I’m sorry to report that I was not favorably impressed. He was as tall and handsome as Tom had advertised, but he kept grumbling about the heat and the gnats swarming in the woods, and I took those complaints as a sign of childishness and inappropriate self-regard, particularly when he had come to pay his last respects to a man who would no longer have the pleasure of complaining about anything.
But no matter. There was only one thing that counted that day, and it wasn’t connected to Nancy’s husband or the weather. It was all about Rufus, who turned up twenty minutes after the rest of the party had assembled, striding into the gnat-filled copse just as we were about to begin the ceremony without him. By then, the prevailing opinion was that he had chickened out, that the prospect of seeing Harry reduced to an urnful of ashes had been too much for him, and he hadn’t been up to the ordeal. Nevertheless, we gave him the benefit of the doubt, standing around in the turgid, suffocating air for all those minutes as we mopped our faces and checked the time on our wristwatches, hoping we had been wrong. When he finally appeared, it took a few moments before anyone recognized him. It wasn’t Rufus Sprague who had joined us – it was Tina Hott, and the transformation was so radical, so mesmerizing, that I actually heard someone behind me gasp.
He was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Decked out in full widow’s regalia, with a tight black dress, three-inch black heels, and a black pillbox hat with a delicate black veil, he had turned himself into an incarnation of absolute femininity, an idea of the feminine that surpassed anything that existed in the realm o
f natural womanhood. The auburn wig looked like real hair; the breasts looked like real breasts; the makeup had been applied with skill and precision; and Tina’s legs were so long and lovely to look at, it was impossible to believe that they were attached to a man.
But there was more to the effect she created than mere surface trappings, more than just clothes or wigs or makeup. The inner light of the feminine was there as well, and Tina’s dignified, sorrowful bearing was a perfect representation of grieving widowhood, a performance by an actress of immense talent. All through the ceremony, she didn’t say a word, standing among us in total silence as people delivered short speeches about Harry and Tom then opened the box and spread the ashes out on the ground. It seemed as if our business had been concluded, but before we turned to go, a chubby black boy of about twelve emerged from the fringes of the small forest and approached the group. There was a portable CD player in his outstretched arms, and he carried it as if he were bearing a crown on a velvet pillow. The boy, who was later identified as Rufus’s cousin, placed the boom box at Tina’s feet and pushed a button. Suddenly, Tina opened her mouth, and as the first bars of orchestral music came pouring through the speakers, she began lip-synching the words of the song that followed. After a moment or two, I recognized the voice of Lena Horne, singing the old song from Show Boat, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” This was how Tina Hott performed in her Saturday night cabaret appearances: not as a singer, but as a faux-singer, mouthing the words of show tunes and jazz standards as sung by legendary female vocalists. It was magnificent and absurd. It was funny and heartbreaking. It was moving and comical. It was everything it was and everything it wasn’t. And there was Tina, gesturing with her arms as she pretended to belt out the words of the song. Her face was all tenderness and love. Her eyes were wet with tears, and we all stood there transfixed, not knowing whether to cry with her or to laugh. As far as I’m concerned, it was one of the strangest, most transcendent moments of my life.