The Stark Truth

by Peter Israel

  When we reached the lobby, she said:

  “Excuse me, but I can’t resist. You’re Stark Thompson’s son, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am, but—”

  “You look so much like him, I can’t believe it. It’s absolutely uncanny.”

  Of course the Stark Thompson she remembered would have been only a little older than I was, there in that Roman hotel lobby, but she said it was a “déjà voo” that wiped out more years than she wanted to think about. I agreed to meet her for a drink that afternoon, when Susan must have been doing some museum, and then she told me the story.

  She had been his mistress, probably only one of them, during that period of the corporate seals. She claimed to have been a film actress, said they’d met in California. Then she’d moved to New York, where he’d set her up in a little pied-à-terre in Murray Hill. They were “together” (her word) for over a year, and then she got pregnant. It had been her doing, she confessed, though she’d never admitted it to him, and though she’d wanted to have the baby, he’d insisted on an abortion. He’d sent her out of the country; that was what one did in those days. Then, not long after she came back, they’d broken up. His doing, I gathered. She’d gotten, she said, a very generous financial settlement.

  Strangely, she held no grudge against him. On the contrary, she let on that she’d known many men since but that there was only one Stark Thompson. The year she’d been with him, she said, remained one of her happiest memories—to the extent that, that afternoon in the hotel bar, her gloved hand touching my arm and a why-not twinkle in her eyes, she invited me to spend an hour or two with her the next day.

  Take it as a comment on the state of my marriage that I accepted. For her, she said, giggling, it was “déjà voo all over again.” Whether this meant that I resembled my father in bed as well as in the elevator I couldn’t say, but when I was leaving her room on the floor below ours in that Roman hotel, she called after me, “Please give him my love when you see him, Tommy, will you? Tell him Muriel sends her love.”

  This, however, I failed to do.

  I worked for the firm one summer when I was in prep school, as messenger, mailroom hand, and general gofer. By this time it—or we—had moved uptown, one of a series of moves that would end in the current habitat high above the Avenue of the Americas. Few people remember it today, but not that long ago the legal profession in New York was concentrated downtown: Centre Street, Lafayette Street, Broadway, and of course the Wall Street area. The northward migration of the 1950s and 1960s reflected not only the need to “follow the clients,” as more and more big corporations established themselves in the glass and steel towers of midtown, but the diminished role of the courtroom in legal practice. This has since changed again, but at the time I’m talking about, courtroom skills were somehow looked down upon in the larger firms, a kind of necessary specialty but not necessarily a highly rewarded one. The accepted goal of the profession in those years was to keep the client out of court.

  In any case, I spent most of that summer either perspiring on public transportation or trying to convince one Rosa Maria Castigliano, a secretary in the firm’s employ, that she could do worse than accept my youthful favors. That I finally succeeded in the latter probably struck me as a heady achievement at the time—God knows I worked at it—but I found the job itself exceedingly boring, and since the cost of my commuter ticket and street-corner lunches came out of my pay, which was on the order of forty dollars a week, I doubt I retained much cash from the exercise.

  As for the other family-appointed goal—for me to “learn how other people lived”—well, yes, I guess I did learn why “other people’s” beaches were jammed on summer weekends and why, in the poorer city neighborhoods, the crime rate went up every July and August. And why, conversely, the seersucker- and poplin-clad members of the firm contrived to take most Fridays off in summer, and sometimes Mondays.

  This “character-building” aspect of summer work may have reflected Thompson class traditions and precepts, but for me, the question was one of simple necessity, i.e., how to scrounge together enough money to pay off the debts I’d incurred the previous school year. So, in subsequent summers, while my peers sailed and partied the eastern coasts, or toured Europe, or climbed mountains, or even in rarer cases marched for civil rights, I worked as a bartender and part-time tennis instructor at a succession of resort hotels. Even so, money was ever a near thing for me, and how to extract it from the family became a virtual obsession during my college years.

  I was a so-so student at Yale. At the time, which was before they started accepting women and Orientals, it was still possible for any reasonably intelligent youth of proper background to coast through the best schools on what was called “a gentleman’s average.” Indeed, there was little incentive to do better. In the careers ahead of us—banking, Wall Street, publishing, advertising, the professions—the grades we’d achieved as undergraduates couldn’t have mattered less. I got into the law school of my choice (or my father’s choice) by acing the law boards and with a last-minute push from some well-placed old grads.

  While at it, I should say that the much-vaunted events and social stirrings that are supposed to have swept the Youth of the Sixties somehow passed me by. I never marched anywhere. To hear my fellow baby-boomers reminisce today, you would think that every last one of us—how many millions?—was at Woodstock that weekend in August 1969. Except, that is, for me. I can remember the first time I smoked grass (it was in the top row of my prep school football stadium—a most daring feat at the time), but the people I knew were much more into booze and women than the mind trips of the psychedelics and the radicals.

  The Vietnam War? Yes, we were well aware of it, at first as a vague menace, then a looming one. The key question was, How did we—as individuals, not as a society—get out of it? I myself, thanks to an indulgent draft board, school deferments, and, later, a high number in the lottery, managed to luck out. One or two people I knew went to Canada, although that was considered extreme. And a certain number served, none with distinction or even pride, but no one I knew with that residual scarring, emotional or physical, we’ve heard so much about since.

  Vietnam, in fact, was much more traumatic for the Senator than for me. A confirmed Democrat, he fulminated against the naïveté of Jack Kennedy, compounded by the total and insane idiocy of that Texan, not for getting us into a war but into one we couldn’t win. Maintaining (with reason) that they had wrecked the Democratic Party for years to come, he himself voted for Nixon in 1968.

  I come then to my last year at law school, to two—what should I call them?—councils, neither of which, curiously, I attended. It was my father who brought me news of the first, Mac Coombs of the second.

  The occasion for both meetings, as it turned out, was that I had recently made one Susan (“Sukie”) Bartlett of Boston, Mass., big, as they say, with child. Or potentially big. Or so I’d been informed by Miss Bartlett, who, having missed her period, had gone to a Beacon Hill gynecologist, who, she said, had confirmed her suspicions. The event had allegedly taken place on Cape Cod in the summer home of a friend of mine, which, in January, was so cold that virtually the only way to keep from freezing was to make love, which had been our purpose in going there in the first place. Furthermore, Miss Bartlett wanted the child, because Miss Bartlett wanted to marry me. Further still, I had somehow convinced myself that I wanted to marry her back.

  The Senator, when I finally tracked him down, thought I’d gone off my rocker.

  “God Almighty, Tommy, you don’t have to marry the girl!” he said with a dramatic, dismissing flourish of the hand. “Buy her an abortion, for God’s sake. It’ll be much cheaper in the long run. I can guarantee it, and I speak from personal experience.”

  The reference, I supposed, was to the fact that, having recently been divorced for the third time, he was on the one hand enjoying his freedom (which lasted but briefly) and on the other bemoaning his allegedly penurious condition. My f
ather chronically pleaded poverty, yet I never knew him or any of his wives to suffer from want, and that omits such other Muriels as he may have left behind him with their “generous financial settlements.”

  We’d met for lunch at the club in New York. He was very tanned, in January, his nose peeling. It turned out that instead of ducking me (which I’d assumed) during the week of dire emergency I’d just lived through, he’d been off in the West Indies with some new playmate.

  I put my case to him with all the conviction I could muster. This was my habitual posture in those years, pleading my case for money while he, usually distracted and invariably impatient, searched for the loopholes in my argumentation. In this instance, he could find none. I loved the girl; I wanted to marry her; I needed money. At the same time, I had no job lined up after graduation. My class standing was insufficient to attract either the more prestigious firms or the clerkships the law school itself so highly touted. Besides, I’d have to spend the summer taking the cram course for the bar exam.

  In the end the Senator could find nothing better than: “If you insist on marrying her, Tommy, then you’re an even bigger asshole than I took you for.”

  “I guess that makes me a very large one indeed,” I countered, channeling my anger into irony. But he couldn’t budge me, and I think I succeeded not only in exasperating him but finally in boring him.

  “I’ll get back to you,” he said as we shook hands on Fifth Avenue, he very sharp in his chesterfield and homburg. “I’m not promising anything, but I’ll get back to you.”

  It took him two weeks, fourteen more days, for me, of an increasingly hysterical Susan. In hindsight, I’d have to agree he was right, for my marriage was to teeter for years until it finally crashed—the alleged pregnancy, by the way, which brought it about would end in an alleged miscarriage, and it took us five more years to generate a child—but at the time I’d already boxed myself in.

  The two councils, then.

  The Senator called me one night to tell me that the family—not he, but the family—had agreed as a wedding gift to underwrite the purchase of a house in the $150,000 range, at a cost to me of prime less one percent, but with a share in the appreciation in the event of its sale. Up until then, I hadn’t even known of the existence of this family Council, which dealt with matters involving the Thompson inheritance. It was composed of senior members of the clan, my father included, and apparently its main activities were to approve the investment decisions made by the Trustee and to decide on occasional grants, usually in the form of loans, to family members in need. In my case, the family continued to profit from itself, for I continued paying prime less one percent long after I stopped living in the place, and its considerable appreciation in value over the years would, whenever it was sold, enrich the family’s coffers more than my own.

  As for the rest of it, the Senator said, I was to talk to Mac Coombs as soon as possible. Before I could ask what about, he’d hung up.

  I went down to New York again two days later and saw Mac in his office. He was a big, gruff-looking man, which belied his urbane, even gentle manner. He too had once done a stint in government service, a feature of the firm’s early days and key perhaps to its growth, but by the time I’m talking about he’d become much more of an inside man, or a “lawyer’s lawyer.” While people like my father roamed the world, drumming up business, it was Mac who made sure we made money out of it, and in his later years, even though it went against his own better judgment, it was he who watchdogged our rapid expansion through the absorption of, and in some cases the acquisition of, other smaller firms.

  “I’m happy to tell you, Tommy,” he said after we’d shaken hands, “that the partners have decided unanimously to invite you to join the firm as a provisional first-year associate. You should know that there was some discussion of nepotism—you happen to be a first for us—but we do have openings to fill and assuming you graduate and pass the bar in good order, we’ll be delighted to have you.”

  This was the good news and so, under the circumstances, was my starting salary. Then, in a sterner but still official tone:

  “I want to make clear that you’ll be treated no differently than anybody else. The law, you know, is like a series of pyramids. You climb your way up the steps of one—college, law school, joining a firm—only to find that there’s another one to climb. Your salary may sound good to you now—at least I hope it does, it’s a hell of a lot more than I ever made at the beginning—but you’ll earn it many times over. You’ll work nights and you can forget about weekends. You’ll be doing the drudge work we all had to do once. And when you do get to the top of the pyramid, there’s no guarantee that you’ll make partner, none at all. I want to make myself very clear on that point.”

  I didn’t react to what I took to be the basic indoctrination speech. I was wondering instead why my father had interceded for me, even though it turned out he’d been absent from the partners’ meeting and had abstained from the vote. Cynically, I could tell myself that dumping the problem in Mac Coombs’s lap had been the simplest way of getting rid of it. But he could also have let me flounder.

  Why hadn’t he? Why had he made Mac, the official caveats notwithstanding, throw me a lifesaver?

  I should, I suppose, have been elated. Instead, the unanswered question set off a vague malaise in me, which Mac Coombs spotted.

  He sat there, a bulky figure in navy blue with rubicund complexion and slicked-back gray hair. He observed me. Then he took his glasses off, put them on the desk, rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles.

  “I’ve known you since you came up to my knee, Tommy,” he said. “I’ve always liked you, too, always thought you had something. I don’t know if you even want my personal advice now, but in case you do, it’s this.”

  He leaned forward, his eyes large and rheumy without the glasses.

  “Don’t take our offer,” he said. “Whatever pressures you’re under right now, find some other way to beat them. Go somewhere else—anywhere. I think it would be a mistake for you to work here.”

  The suggestion, I knew, was offered out of kindness. I thanked Mac for it, and if it sounds strange that I didn’t ask him to elaborate, much less take him up on it, I think this was because, the way I saw things, I had no choice.

  6

  Kitty’s father had been a furrier—actually, according to Ted Goldmark, a cutter for a furrier. I forget the more technical term for it, but Goldmark père was the one who sized and matched the skins, transforming them into the minks and sables and beavers that adorned the bodies of American women, at least until the time when the slaughter of animals for warmth fell out of fashion. By that time, though, Solomon Goldmark had already gone to his maker, having seen his children through college, Katherine through Barnard and Theodore, strange though it always seemed to me, through my own alma mater.

  It took me a long time to find out this much, also to learn that there was a widow Goldmark still alive in Florida, supported by her late husband’s pension and insurance as well as regular checks from her two children. Kitty’s secretiveness on the subject wasn’t because of their Jewishness but because her father, a devout union man, had also been something of a Marxist-socialist and even, in his youth, had played some small, undefined role in one of the plots to assassinate Trotsky.

  (I learned this last from her brother. Kitty herself denied it. According to Kitty, her father had been a furrier. Not a cutter to a furrier, mind you, but a furrier.)

  Why this compulsion, though, to rush ahead? Is it because it embarrasses me now, Kitten, to admit that you took me by storm? Or to recall how, captive, I waited for your summonses? And dreaded the empty, endless weekends without you?

  My only competition, it seemed, was her business. Katherine Goldmark Enterprises gave parties for the well-heeled, but the way Kitty did it, she herself had to see to everything, from the design and content of the invitations to the cleanup after the last guest had toddled off. She supervised a small part-time arm
y of waiters, chefs, bartenders, truckers, and musicians, and she did it with an almost ferocious attention to detail—the only way, she maintained, to make a profit. At the time I’m talking about, she had just embarked on her first takeover: a small catering business run by a group of Connecticut women who had been losing money steadily.

  Mondays and Tuesdays usually constituted her weekends, although that’s when she caught up on her paperwork. Often she’d call me midafternoon at the office, asking if I could make an emergency meeting at her apartment concerning the Sprague estate. Of course I could, did, on the run, cursing meanwhile the effrontery of the well-heeled for holding their receptions and soirées on Saturdays and Sundays. But as driven as Kitty was in her business, the moment I showed up, her telephone-answering machine went on and the outside world was cut off.

  “You’re my island, my darling,” she’d say to me in calmer moments. “My sanity, my health. Come”—arms extended—“play island with me.” But there were few such calm moments. More often we made love ravenously, violently, in every room of her apartment, on every rug, couch, chair, on the cold tile of her kitchen, in the warm, bursting bubbles of her Jacuzzi, against the windows that gave out on the park and the smoked-glass mirrors that lined her dressing room, standing, kneeling, sitting, lying. I came to know every nook, cranny, crevice, every blemish, of her lustrous body, knew them by heart with my eyes, hands, mouth, lips, tongue, and, yes, my cock. Yet never did I have enough of her. All I needed was her call, the brief chuckle that accompanied her summons, and, wherever she’d found me, I was on my way. To me, her apartment was like some airborne cave, a bewitched and magical aerie where the world got left behind. Here we did everything together: ate, drank, loved, bathed, slept, and, yes, once a month, even went over the Sprague account, the latest printout stuffed into my briefcase because I knew she would ask to see it.