She knew it was from you?
I was the logical candidate, wasn’t I?
And you never saw her?
Not after she went to Mexico, no. That was in 1950, 1951.
All those years she never got in touch with you?
Directly just that once, when she got arrested in Michigan. But then she’d send me those things in the mail I mentioned, the tapes and the clippings and things. It was a way of keeping in touch.
Arthur closed his eyes. I thought he might be weeping, but perhaps he was just trying to preserve the memories. I changed direction. You knew the girl in that picture I showed you was Meta Dierdorf, didn’t you?
He opened his eyes and waited a beat. Yes.
Why did you lie to me then?
A pained expression crossed his face. She was somebody I simply hadn’t expected to come up. And I didn’t want to give anything away I didn’t have to. So I lied. I’d never seen the picture before. And I never knew they had this … episode together. Arthur stared at me sadly. I’ve always liked you, Jack. I just never thought of you as the hound of heaven.
I wasn’t sure that was intended as a compliment. Who is Max, Arthur?
A lawyer. Like Blue said.
He fixed the Ypsilanti beef?
He made it go away, yes.
So he knows what strings to pull?
Arthur was getting back into form: When you hire lawyers, you expect them to know what strings to pull.
Even in pain and as old as he was, Arthur was not entirely leveling with me. I think he was incapable of it. I did not know exactly what he was omitting, or why, but I knew I was not getting the whole story.
Does Max have a last name?
Yes.
I was trying to be patient: Then what is Max’s last name, Arthur?
Arthur hesitated, as if running over the possibilities.
Look, Arthur, I said. If a drug charge was settled in Ypsilanti in 1979, then the charge sheet and the name of counsel are a matter of public record. And by now you know that sooner or later I am going to track down that counsel’s name, and if counsel was a local Ypsilanti lawyer appearing for an out-of-state attorney, then I, or an intermediary, in this case a cop I know in Detroit named Maury Ahearne, an eight-hundred-pound gorilla, believe me, one of us, count on it, is going to drag the name of that out-of-state attorney from the local attorney. I have not come this far, Arthur, to let you jerk my chain.
Riordan, Arthur said. His name is Max Riordan.
Denis Maxwell (“Max”) Riordan, Jimmy Riordan’s nephew and the junior United States senator from Florida, a Republican from Orlando, listened to what I had to say and then threatened suit if I implied that anything illicit had transpired between his uncle and Morris Lefkowitz. Uncle Jimmy was Mr. Lefkowitz’s attorney, no more, Max Riordan said, a right guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States of America, any citizen is entitled to representation, whatever public attitudes of revulsion may exist toward that citizen, the defense of Jimmy Hoffa by Edward Bennett Williams being in this great tradition. In any event, Max Riordan continued, my uncle and Morris Lefkowitz were never social friends or business partners, their relationship was protected by the attorney-client privilege, Morris Lefkowitz was never arrested in seventy-seven years of robust good health, the James Francis Riordan Chair in Jurisprudence at the University of Florida Law School is one of the nation’s most prestigious endowed professorships, and the annual James Francis Riordan Lecture in Miami was eagerly anticipated in the legal community, F. Lee Bailey has been a Riordan Lecturer, and Edwin Meese as well, and to imply, as you seem to be implying, Mr. Broderick, that my uncle Jimmy was just trying retroactively, and out of a guilty conscience, to buy himself a good name, is criminal slander, et cetera and so forth, and to be frank, I expected more from the son of Hugh Broderick, who served this nation and so many of its presidents so well.
Max Riordan was an idiot, but then I have always had a low tolerance for politics and politicians. He was up for reelection, a difficult race, and the idea that he would sue me for unspecified allegations about Jimmy Riordan and Morris Lefkowitz was a bluff, not the sort of thing he would wish played out in the tabloids during a political campaign. He had his uncle’s name, but not the smarts I had come to appreciate so as I dug into the history of James Francis Riordan. In any event, I was more interested in something else.
Where is Blue Tyler’s daughter now?
I don’t know.
Of course you do, Senator. Jimmy Riordan never let anything go. He would have had her name and the name of her adopted parents in his papers.
That information would be privileged, Mr. Broderick.
Senator, Jimmy Riordan’s will was probated in New York. According to the terms of that will—and I had my lawyers look it up in Manhattan Surrogate Court before I came here—you were his sole noninstitutional beneficiary. There was also a single trust, set up in 1949, and the will stipulated that upon your uncle’s death, or if he were to become physically or mentally impaired, you would succeed him as its trustee. As you did in 1969, when James Francis Riordan suffered the cerebral incident that ultimately caused his death. A portion of the income from that trust went to a couple named Moira and Brendan Kean for the care and upbringing of their adopted daughter, and of that daughter only, not of subsequent issue should there be any. The balance of the income went to increase the value of the trust. When the adoptive daughter came of age, or upon the death of her adoptive parents, whichever came first, she would become the beneficiary of the trust. If her adoptive parents were still alive, they would receive an allowance from the trust, unless the trustee, with cause, decided otherwise. Am I on the money so far?
Max Riordan, R-Fla., stared at me without replying.
Brendan Kean was a former assistant D.A. in Queens, I continued. Chief prosecutor in all the rougher homicide cases. A city kid. Grew up in Inwood, went to St. John’s and St. John’s Law School. Right?
Still no reply.
He went into private practice. Specializing in criminal law. He was one of the lawyers your uncle Jimmy hired to defend Jacob King in the Philly Wexler case.
Max Riordan stirred uncomfortably in his chair.
Brendan Kean and his wife had no kids. And if your uncle was going to place Jacob King’s child, he wasn’t going to place it with someone he didn’t know. Someone he wasn’t sure of. That was never Jimmy Riordan’s way.
What do you hope to gain from this, Mr. Broderick?
Nothing, Senator. I just want to close a book that never should have been opened in the first place.
I thought it would end after I saw Max Riordan. Brendan and Moira Twomey Kean were never told the name of their daughter’s natural parents, nor of Jimmy Riordan’s role in the adoption. Lack of evidence notwithstanding, however, I would have been surprised if Brendan Kean, given his background, had not made a few discreet inquiries, and perhaps even some discoveries. The Keans named the girl Teresa, and never had any other children of their own. Teresa was by all accounts a loving child given only to the usual rebellions of adolescence—youthful experimentations with sex and controlled substances—a bright student as well, who earned a scholarship to Smith and married soon after graduation. The marriage did not last. A second marriage also ended in divorce. Having no children, she applied to Yale Law School and was accepted; on admission to the bar three years later, she reclaimed her maiden name and worked in her father’s Manhattan law office until his death in a small plane crash in 1977, on a flight to his summer house at Cape May, on the Jersey shore. After his death, she moved to Washington as an advocate for an organization lobbying on behalf of victims’ rights, a not-insubstantial irony, considering her natural father’s propensity for making victims. In time, she became the organization’s president and spokesperson. As it happened, I was aware of Teresa Kean’s name and had seen her briefly several times, arguing her case on the Sunday talk shows and the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. She seemed bright, articulate, and attrac
tive, but otherwise she had made little impression on me, advocacy politics not being an area in which I had much interest. Her mother was still living, in a retirement community in California, and Teresa Kean visited her regularly. She knew she was adopted, had known since she was a little girl, but had never shown any inclination to discover the names or whereabouts of her natural parents.
I told Max Riordan I would not attempt to contact Teresa Kean, and that if in the natural course of events I did happen upon her, the secret of her birth was safe with me. I also told him that if my path did cross Melba Mae Toolate’s again, as was not unlikely if she were still alive, I would not reveal to her anything I had learned about her daughter.
There it should have ended.
But life is rarely so simple.
RETROSPECTIVE
I
My father was invariably referred to as “Billionaire Hugh Broderick” in the press, to the point that a few years ago, when I was doing publicity on a picture I wrote (and the fact that the screenwriter was doing publicity is a comment in itself on the quality of the film, which the stars and the director were now pretending they had nothing to do with), the interviewer asked if it was not true, as he had heard, that once when I was a child I had asked my father why he was not called Bill instead of Hugh if his first name was Billionaire. If memory serves, I laughed heartily at this absurdity; the exchange occurred on a live morning television show, and however much one might like to call the host an asshole, it is the rare guest who, at 7:00 A.M., can summon the kidney to do so. The laugh was taken to mean assent, and as so often happens, this assumed assent found its way into the texts about my father, with the result that the story has turned up in two books about him, and a television documentary as well, the story having achieved the status of holy writ, a means of humanizing a man who in truth was only rarely capable of being human.
My father favored me with the same indifference he showed toward the rest of mankind, the blood kinship between us offering me no special discount. I actually rather liked the old bastard, especially the way he never backed down. He fucked my first wife—after we had divorced, it is true, but I do not think it would have made much difference if we had still been married; she was there for the taking, and he was a taker—and he made no apologies for it when some years later I confronted him with the fact. I could not emulate him in many ways—he was sui generis, an ignoble savage for whom convention was just another piece of china that deserved to be smashed, and I had been civilized, Lord Greystoke to his Tarzan, but we did share an arrogance, in my case watered down, although less so as I grow older, and perhaps more a product of his money, and my share of it, than of his genetic pool. Unlike most of my compatriots in the picture business, I had a listed telephone number, and my father was the reason. Until the day he died, his name was always in the directory, “BRODERICK, Hugh,” with both his office and home numbers listed. Often he would pick up the telephone himself, when it rang, beating secretary or butler to it, always answering without the amenity of “Hello,” just a simple “Yes,” or occasionally a disconcerting “What is it?” More often than not, “What is it?” would elicit a surprised, “Who’s this?” To which my father would reply, “Who you were calling,” and then hang up, advantage Hugh Broderick. It was this constant search for any edge, however small, that led him to list his telephone numbers in the first place; many of the people who called were those he had bested in some business venture or whose abilities he had publicly denigrated, and who in turn wanted satisfaction. A mistake. My father had the manners of a billy club and the tact of a fart; abuse was his natural dialect, his way of keeping trim. So I also listed my number, less to imitate him—a pale way, at best—than because I could imagine the waves of his contempt coming at me from beyond the grave if it were unlisted. You’re just like all those other Hollywood Hebrews, he would have said, a phrasing he often used when trying to get a rise out of me—he seldom failed to do so—because not to respond was to run the risk of being told that my backbone had the tensile strength of a strand of linguini. Listing my phone number was really just a painless affect—who would call a screenwriter anyway?—leading to only a few unwanted calls, most of which could be brushed off.
Although occasionally there were those that couldn’t.
“Yes.” With age, I answered the telephone the same way my father had, and for much the same reason.
“Mr. Broderick?”
“Yes.”
“Will you hold for Barbados Brown?”
I was once more reading Melba Mae Toolate’s birthday letters to her unknown daughter, now known to me, and saw no reason to hold for anyone with a name as ridiculous as Barbados Brown. “No.”
A moment later, the telephone rang again. A rich, velvety voice. “Mr. Broderick, this is Barbados Brown.”
“Yes.” She seemed to think I would know who she was, or perhaps would say something about her name.
“From Oprah.” A pause. “Winfrey.” When I still did not respond, “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
“Yes.”
“I’m Oprah’s executive producer and head talent coordinator.”
“Yes.”
“And we—that is to say Oprah and I—would really love to have you on a show we’re planning.”
“No.”
A laugh meant to be engaging. “You are the most monosyllabic man.”
I did not answer.
“Or the rudest.
“Thank you for calling, Ms. Brown.”
“A full sentence. We’re actually getting somewhere. You know, I didn’t think you people listed their telephone numbers out there …”
“Out where?”
“Hollywood.”
“I don’t live in Hollywood.”
“Well, it’s all the same thing.”
“No, it’s not. Hollywood has a different area code.”
“See, we’re having a conversation.”
“Ms. Brown …”
“Call me Barbados …”
Not as long as I can draw breath, sweetheart. I thought of hanging up, but she would just call back again. I waited.
“My mother actually named me Barbra. After Streisand. Because I’m from Brooklyn too. Then as I got in touch with my ethnicity, I changed it.”
She sounded like a guest on her own show. In spite of my resolve, I said, “Because your family came from Barbados?”
“See, my name is such an icebreaker …”
I knew I should have kept my mouth shut. This time I did. Too late.
“Actually my roots are in the Antilles.”
“Not specifically Barbados, though …”
“The world of negritude.”
I took a deep, unfortunately audible, breath.
“Do you have difficulty relating to people of color, Mr. Broderick?”
I wondered how often she had pulled that one on recalcitrant guests. “No, I don’t, Ms. Brown. But I am not going on your show, you are wasting your time and mine …”
“But I saw you once on GMA, and you were wonderful. I remember that hilarious anecdote about your father. Bill.” The bitch must have ordered up the tape. “You’ve worked for Sydney Allen, haven’t you?”
I did not reply. I had a bad vibration about where this was going, and Sydney Allen’s name only confirmed it.
“I’m sure you know Sydney wants Oprah to star in his new film.” In other words, Sydney must have told Oprah she was perfect for the part as a way of getting on the show to start some preproduction heat on Empire. Or perhaps Oprah was hustling Sydney for a part. “Triplets. Did you do the screenplay?”
I had never even heard of Triplets. But then Sydney’s plate was always full.
“It’s such a delicious idea. About an African-American woman—Oprah, of course—whose sister and her European-American husband—Sydney said he was looking for a young Bob Redford—are killed in a plane crash, and he’d been raising his three children from his first marriage—they’re Anglo-Saxon, of course �
��”
“… and triplets.” Shame was foreign to Sydney Allen.
“That’s right. You’re not the grouch you pretend to be, Mr. Broderick.”
I think she expected me to say Call me Jack. “It’s been nice talking to you, Ms.…”
“I haven’t even told you what your show is about, Jack.”
“It doesn’t matter, Ms. Brown, I’m not going to be on it. So thank you for—”
“Jack, I am told—or rather Oprah was told—that you had rediscovered Blue Tyler …”
That fucking Sydney Allen.
“… and she was a bag lady or something in Minnesota, is that right?”
“No.” Minnesota was not Michigan. And bag ladies did not have small annuities from Arthur French.
“Then you didn’t find her?”
“Ms. Brown, I have nothing to say on this subject.”
“Then you did find her?”
“Good-bye, Ms. Brown.”
“And isn’t it true she has a child, a little girl, who must be almost thirty or something now?”
“I have no idea.”
“No idea if she has a daughter, or no idea if …”
“Please, Ms. Brown.”
“… if Jacob King was its father.”
“Good-bye, Ms. Brown.”
“Oprah’s going to do this show, Jack, whether you’re on it or not, but you’re the only one who can protect her memory, her dignity. That’s why you’d be such an addition to the show. A necessity. It’ll all be done in such good taste, not like Geraldo, all he’d want to know is who she balled. We’ll have clips from Red River Rosie and Carioca Carnival and Little Sister Susan, we’ve gone through boxes of Kleenex looking at those films, they’re not even on tape, did you know that? Oprah had to get prints from Cosmopolitan Pictures, and then we had to rent a screening room. Sydney and his producer, a Mr. Martin …”
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