“Got away with murder because of Dad,” Orso said. “Shit. I knew I should have been smarter about choosing my parents.”
7
The doorman at 740 Park Avenue ran an eye over the young woman Cassidy followed into the lobby. He touched the brim of his hat and said, “Good evening, Mr. Cassidy,” and raised an eyebrow, a man-to-man gesture of admiration. She was worth admiring. She had auburn hair cut short against the fashion of the day; a narrow, intelligent face; large, dark eyes, a thin-lipped, severe mouth that promised a dark and interesting sensuality; and a lush body in a black cocktail dress enlivened by an embroidered silk emerald shawl. High heels set off her dancer’s legs. Her name was Marie (formerly Mary) LaGrange (formerly Kowalski), a Broadway actress who was beginning to excite some notice from the critics and the theater community. She had been singled out as “the only good thing” in The Belles of Canton, a sex romp that closed three days after opening. She had parlayed that into the part of the younger sister with the club foot in Going Around the Other Way, a turgid but sincere kitchen-sink drama that had lasted a hundred twenty-three performances, and she had auditioned for a juicy part in Tom Cassidy’s new play, A Way of the World. It was, Cassidy was sure, coincidence that she found the producer’s son so fascinating. Cassidy’s father was a successful Broadway producer, and Marie was not the first actress who found Cassidy attractive during the casting process. He knew how it would end. If she did not get the part, there would be a couple of weeks of withdrawal, some tears of regret, a promise of continuing friendship to show that it had been him, not the opportunity, that had attracted her. If she did get the part, the break would be quick and surgical. His role was over. The theater was a tough business. A girl had to hustle if she was going to make it. No harm, no foul. Fun while it lasted.
As they rode up in the elevator at 740 Park Avenue, he wondered how the callback had gone. Marie stood close to the door, so the elevator man, a white-haired Irish gnome named Jimmy, only had to turn a little to appreciate her profile.
“How’s it going, Jimmy?”
“Great, Mr. Cassidy. Great. You know why?”
“Why?”
“’Cause I realized it’s a wonderful world. No matter where you are, beauty is all around us.” He brought the car to a smooth halt, clashed the doors open, and gave Cassidy a wink, “Even in an elevator.” Cassidy followed Marie out into the chatter and laughter of the cocktail party being given by his sister, Leah, and her husband, Mark Buckman.
The elevator opened directly into the large front hall paved in black-and-white tiles with a staircase that curved up to the second floor. The large living room was off the hall through a wide arched doorway. The furniture was expensive and comfortable, big sofas, deep chairs, American antique tables, some of which held silver-framed pictures of family members. Cassidy stopped in the archway, as he often did, to admire the painting by Claude Monet of La Gare Du Nord that hung over the fireplace where birch logs burned. The triangle of the station’s roof gave structure to the painting. A train engine was a dark blob in the low center, and behind it was the impression of an apartment building, everything softened by clouds of steam and smoke.
Two maids dressed in black uniforms with white lace–trimmed aprons circulated through the crowd of guests offering hors d’oeuvres from silver trays. A bartender mixed drinks at a small bar in the corner, and a servant in black trousers and a white jacket carried them to the thirsty.
Cassidy’s brother-in-law, Mark Buckman, stood near the windows overlooking Park Avenue talking to a group of businessmen in dark suits, and their women in cocktail dresses, girdled and coiffed, and wearing the jewelry one could wear without ostentation this early in the evening. The privileged of New York, secure in their belief that the world was ordered to their satisfaction. Mark was a stocky, powerful man in his mid-thirties. He had an open face and an easy manner. He had gone bald in his twenties and now shaved his head daily, and his skull looked like it could stop a bullet. He was a former Yale hockey star who had the reputation as a player who could see the whole rink, who was aware of all the skaters and where they were going. It was an alertness that he still possessed, and he gave Cassidy a slight tilt of his head to acknowledge his arrival without losing a beat of what was being said to him. Cassidy had been wary of him when he first dated Leah, but in the seven years that they had been married, he had grown to like him and respect him. Mark had inherited a hundred thousand dollars from his grandfather and had run it into a fortune before he was thirty with the same apparent ease with which he had scored goals. The men around him were older, but it was clear that he held their attention. The ability to make money brought great respect in this crowd.
“There’s your father,” Marie said. “I’m going to go say hello. Are you coming?”
“You go ahead. I’ll see him later.” His father waved him over from where he stood near the fireplace. Cassidy waved back and mouthed, “Five minutes.” Marie stopped twice, once to air kiss Albert London, an elegant silver-haired man of sixty-five, one of America’s greatest stage actors and a director with a string of hits on Broadway, a useful man to know. She stopped again to kiss and body press the best-looking man in the room, a young actor named Newman who had just opened in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. She laughed at something he said, touched him on the cheek, and whirled away. She looked back once to show him how difficult it was to leave him.
Cassidy looked for his sister and saw her coming down the stairs from the second floor. She saw him and posed for a moment with her arms flung wide and her hip cocked and then came down in a rush, a quick switch from elegant sophisticate to tomboy, typical of her, that made him smile. They met in the hall, and hugged and then she pushed back and looked him over carefully.
“Uh-huh.”
“Uh-huh, what?”
“Tomcat. I look at you and I think, tomcat, battle scarred and dragging a little, but still howling on the fences at night.”
“Thank you. I feel much better about myself now. You, however, continue to be beautiful, though, I suppose, it will all fall away someday and you’ll be one of those lumpy old East Side ladies with blue hair and a huge purse eating lunch at Longchamps.”
“Oh, you shit. I will get you for that.”
She was a beautiful woman. Her hair was as black and smooth as a raven’s wing. She wore a blue cocktail dress that matched her eyes, and dark red high heels that matched the small rubies in her necklace and earrings. The planes and angles of her face, so like his own, were more abrupt and prominent than he remembered and it suddenly struck him that she was nearly thirty, that the girl he had grown up with was gone, replaced by a woman of poise and confidence. In the early days with Mark, she had chafed under the restrictions of marriage, and he had half expected her to bolt just to show that she could. Maybe the birth of her children had brought her this new calm. Still, he sensed that there remained something dangerous inside her like an unexploded charge.
“I was just upstairs making sure the boys weren’t killing each other.” She and Mark had three-year-old twins.
“How are you, really?” He was always aware of how close she was to running off the rails.
“I’m fine. I’m great. How could I not be? I have all this.” She waved a hand at the apartment. “My husband loves me, loves our children, loves to make even more money. I think I have that in the right order.” She took his cigarette from him for a drag and gave it back. “Have you seen Dad?”
“From across a crowded room.”
“Let’s go say hello.”
But she was distracted by a maid who needed clarification about something in the kitchen.
“Hi, Dad.” Tom Cassidy turned from rearranging the burning logs with a poker.
“Michael.” He put the poker back in its stand and hugged his son, a holdover from his Russian childhood, a gesture of affection imported to the Upper East Side of New York where men rarely touched except in games or combat. Tom Cassidy had been born T
omas Kasnavietski, but he had changed his name when he made his way to America as a fifteen-year-old fleeing service in the Tsar’s army. A new future, a new name.
“A great little actress, that Marie LaGrange. She’s going to be wonderful for us. It’s as if the part was written for her.” His father spoke only in superlatives and with a strong Russian accent. He believed that tomorrow would always be a better day, that every project was due for smashing success. His optimism knew no bounds, and it sometimes grated on Cassidy like fingernails on a chalkboard. “She’s a sweet girl. You could do worse, you know.”
Sweet girl, my ass, Cassidy thought. She’s about as sweet as a straight razor. So she was cast. She had the part. Why hadn’t she told Cassidy?
“We’re doing a stage reading tomorrow. Two o’clock. Can you come?”
“I’m on the job tomorrow, Dad.”
“A couple of hours. They’ll never know. The first read-through’s always exciting. I’d love to know what you think of the piece.” His father was always trying to persuade him to give up the cops and come into the business.
“Not tomorrow.”
“We’re in rehearsal starting Monday. Come soon.”
“Sure. Soon.” An easy deflection.
“Great. Great. You’re going to love this play. Everyone’s going to love this play. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever read. There’s a bit in the first act when…”
“Tom, we have to go. We’re meeting Robbie Lantz for dinner at seven,” Tom’s wife Megan interrupted. “Hello, Michael.”
“Megan.” He brushed his stepmother’s cheek in a kiss, and as she pulled away she left a trace of perfume. Ma Griffe. His mother had worn it. Did Megan know that? Did she wear it because his father asked her to? Would a man ask his second wife to wear the perfume his dead wife had worn?
Cassidy’s mother had died by what Cassidy thought of as accidental suicide. She had taken pills but timed the thing so that Tom would find her when he came home at an appointed hour, find her and save her and love her more for having saved her. But he was late, as he often was, and she died from the miscalculation. Cassidy had found her, and when he did, he realized that he had dreamed of her death a month before it happened, dreamed of finding her. He was sixteen then, and when he’d had the dream, he had dismissed it as an awful nightmare. How was he to know it was prophecy? If he had known he might have been able to stop it. He carried that like a stone in his heart.
“I’ll go say good-bye to Leah,” Tom said and moved away.
“How are you, Michael?” Megan asked.
“I’m fine.”
“Good.” Her smile said she did not believe him. She was a striking blonde, a former dancer now in her forties, trim, strong, intelligent, calm, and direct. She was fiercely protective of Tom Cassidy. She organized his life, entertained the people he needed entertained, ran his household impeccably, reminded him of obligations he might have forgotten, sent notes of congratulations or condolence in his name to those who should have them, took an interest in his work without being obtrusive, and checked him subtly when his enthusiasms threatened to run him aground, the perfect wife. For the first few years that she had been with his father Cassidy had fought his instinct to like her. Guilt for his mother’s death, rage that someone could replace her, something, a question for a headshrinker, which he didn’t care to ask or answer. But the animosity was gone now, anyway. She was a good person, hard to dislike.
“How’s the play?”
“Not good.”
The answer surprised him, not for its directness, he expected that from her, but because his father’s selection of plays to produce was usually flawless. Not every one had been a smash hit, but none had been disasters. “Really not good?”
“Really not.”
“Have you told him?”
“Yes. We had a fight about it. We don’t usually fight, but that night we did. It’s an unfunny comedy about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things.”
“That sounds like a great evening in the theater. What made him choose it?”
“The central character is a man who escaped from bad beginnings, is now a big success in America, and has fallen in love with a younger woman.”
“Ahh.”
“Yes. He reads into it things that are not there but that he wishes were there. And he has hired a young French director, a darling of the avant garde, who has the sense of humor of a toothache and thinks the whole thing is a metaphor for the death of colonialism in the twentieth century.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. It’s going to be a great couple of months waiting for the crash.”
Tom Cassidy reappeared and put his arm around Megan’s waist. “Are we off? We don’t want to keep Robbie waiting.” This from a man who had never been on time since birth. “Michael, come to the run-through. A couple of hours.”
“I’ll try. It sounds like too much fun to miss.”
Megan winked. Tom Cassidy clapped him on the shoulder, and they left.
Cassidy worked through the room looking for Marie, but the actor Newman and Marie were no longer at the party. So that’s why she wanted to come. She must have heard Newman would be at the party. He went to the bar and asked for a martini. So it was done. He had served his purpose. Did he feel anything, a sense of loss? No. He felt relieved. He raised his glass to the bartender. “Happy days.”
“Yes, sir. Happy days.”
“Frank, make me one of those silver bullets like you made for Mr. Cassidy.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Buckman. Coming up. Twist or an olive?”
“Olive.” Mark Buckman took a handful of peanuts from a cut-glass bowl on the bar. “Having fun?”
“I can barely contain my excitement,” Cassidy said.
“Yeah. A dull crowd. Well-bred, polite, civic minded, proper, successful, and boring.”
“Why do you invite them?”
“It’s expected of us. They invite us. We invite them. The iron rules of social intercourse. And I’m making money with some of them. I guess that counts for something. Do you want to stay for dinner? It would liven up the table.
“No, thanks. Thelonious Monk’s playing at The Vanguard. I want to catch the early set.” He loved his sister and liked Mark, but most of their friends were rich people whom he found insular and self-satisfied, as if the money had sanded off their interesting edges.
“Yeah, I don’t blame you,” Mark said, as if reading his mind. “I’d go with you if I thought I could get away with it. Come on, one more drink. At least I can send you out of here fueled. And I want to talk to you about something. Five minutes, and then you’re free.”
The library was a male sanctuary. The walls were lacquered with many coats of a deep red. The chairs and sofa were tobacco leather, and there were hunting and sailing prints in gold frames on the walls. A man named Peter Sanborn, a classmate of Cassidy’s older brother Brian, was waiting for them by the windows in the last of the evening light. Sanborn was a tall, narrow-shouldered man with a small, pinched face that always reminded Cassidy of a praying mantis. He tilted slightly forward with his shoulders hunched when he walked or stood, which added to the impression. “Michael, how are you? You look well. How’s Brian? Give him my best when you see him, will you? I really must call him. I don’t think I’ve seen him since the last reunion. We should get together.” Sanborn had been brought up with all the proper manners: he inquired politely about the lives of others, pretended interest in what they told him, looked a man in the eye when speaking, shook hands firmly.
It was all a lie.
He was a member of a very small club, old New York money, which extended its membership to old Boston money, old Philadelphia money, and a few families from Virginia, and he believed to the bone that he was better than anyone who was not in that club, not that he would ever be so crass as to say it, but it was evident from the thinly veiled contempt he had for almost anyone who came under his eye. He was an arrogant prick, and he had always been an arrogant pr
ick. He had probably sneered at the doctor who pulled him out. There had been a moment, years ago, in a playground in Central Park when Cassidy was ten when Sanborn had explained to a group of older boys that “Cassidy’s father is a Russian, but at least he’s not a Russian Jew, at least I think not.” Cassidy had felt the insult clearly, not so much from the words, but from the complete disdain with which they were delivered, and he had taken a step toward the bigger boy, fists clenched, when Brian stopped him.
“It isn’t worth it. He’s a jerk. Let it go.” That was Brian’s way, the conciliator. Cassidy wanted to punch Sanborn in the mouth even if he lost the fight.
As Brian pulled him away he heard Sanborn complain, “What’s wrong with him? Their father is Russian, isn’t he? And he isn’t a Jew, is he? So what’s the big deal?”
“How are you, Peter? Still abusing the peasants on the plantation?”
“Oh, no. Father sold the farm two years ago. It wasn’t producing financially, and he’d only held on to it for the bird shooting, but since he broke his hip, well, there you are.”
So much for Sanborn’s sense of irony.
“What’s up, Mark?” Cassidy took a sip of the martini. Cold, clear, mineral. Something loosened inside him, and he settled in one of the big comfortable chairs.
“I wanted to pick your brains a bit about Cuba.” Mark sat on the sofa opposite and put his feet up on the coffee table.
Sanborn stood rigidly at the end of the sofa as if undecided where to light. “I still don’t understand why you think a New York policeman is going to have any insight that might be of value to us.”
Mark raised his eyebrows to Cassidy—what are you going to do? Then, patiently to Sanborn. “He was there when Castro took over. He has met some of the players. He’s a smart man.” To Cassidy, “We have some investments in Cuba. We’re concerned about rumors coming out of Havana that Castro is thinking of nationalizing some of the industries, that he is tending toward a socialist view of post-revolution Cuba.”
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