Three Daughters: A Novel

by Consuelo Saah Baehr

  He turned her wrist and read the plastic ID band: Rashid, Asha. “Asha,” he crooned softly, “it’s all over. You’re safe and sound. You’re all better. Can you hear me?”

  Her eyes opened slowly. They were very large and very dark. “Yes.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Like a truck ran over me. Who are you?”

  He looked chagrined. “I don’t like to admit it, but I’m the truck.” She smiled. “Paul Halaby. I’m your doctor.”

  “You were holding my hand when I woke up.” It was a gentle accusation coated with faint gratitude.

  “Of course. I was very worried about you.”

  “Don’t worry.” Her voice became faint. “That awful pain is gone. Thanks.”

  “No thanks required,” he answered gallantly.

  “Oh, yes, they are.”

  If the girl’s father had even been mildly aware of the care and expertise Paul Halaby used with his daughter, he would have shown his gratitude in an extravagant way. As it was, John Beckwith outlined in minute detail what could have gone wrong and how Paul’s finesse had made it right. He made an elaborate diagram (the word pregnancy was never used) to show each delicate step and the consequences of mismanagement. When he was through, Rashid Ibn Rashid was burning with fervor to show Paul Halaby his gratitude. There was nothing too good for the doctor who had saved his Asha’s life.

  Rashid didn’t like to give unimaginative rewards. Expensive jewelry, tickets to Europe, even cars didn’t leave the recipients with any lasting benefits. He much preferred to give seed money that would create a new ongoing source of wealth.

  He had been known to offer no-interest loans for down payments on property, for stock purchases, and for fledgling businesses. He was uncanny at discovering the needs of the recipient and creating the most imaginative financial-aid package. To help him he had the services of a first-rate private investigator, who was an FBI retiree.

  For Dr. Paul, who had saved his beloved firstborn, Asha, his plans were elaborate. Money was nothing compared to what the good doctor had done for him.

  The first of many confusing calls came to Paul two weeks after Asha Rashid was sent home with prescriptions for an antibiotic and iron pills.

  “Dr. Halaby, this is Linda Peters, Bethesda Realty. I showed you the house on Bradley.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you still interested?”

  “Very much. It isn’t sold, is it?”

  “Well . . . yes and no. Someone has made a substantial down payment in your name. The papers are in order and ready for your signature. In the meantime, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have the keys. Would you like to come and pick them up or shall I bring them to you?”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “Not at all. The house is being purchased through the Mara Management Company. I only met the lawyer. As I understand it, they’re holding the mortgage, which you are to repay, interest-free. Dr. Halaby”—her voice became low and confidential—“somebody at Mara Management sure does like you.”

  “Could you bring the keys to Bedford Hospital? Just leave them at the desk. Oh, and thank you. Thank you very much.” He felt odd. And there was a buzz in his head. He tried repeatedly to dredge up some connection that would make what had happened logical. He looked up the Mara Management Company in the phone book and asked for the president.

  “You mean Mr. Rashid?” asked the operator.

  “Is that the president? Mr. Rashid?”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I connect you?”

  “No. Well, yes. I guess you’d better.”

  “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “Paul Halaby.”

  “Thank you.”

  The voice on the line, with its distinct accent, brought back all of his childhood. “Is this Paul Halaby who saved my daughter’s life?”

  “Yes, but I want you to understand that any good doctor would have done the same. I think you feel I did more than I did and perhaps you’re reacting from relief and emotion. I’m flabbergasted to hear that you’ve made a down payment on a house for me. How did you even know I wanted that house? That’s an extraordinary thing to do. Maybe you’d like to reconsider?”

  “I don’t want to reconsider. That house is only the beginning of what I’m going to do for you. Tell me, Paul, when can we meet?”

  Their lives changed dramatically. It wasn’t only the house. They received invitations to lavish dinners and mixed with the power elite of the city. Rashid sat patiently with Paul, explaining why it would be a good idea for him to get into the stock market. “There’s money to be made and why shouldn’t you make it?”

  “I don’t know anything about the market.” Paul, quite rightly, demurred.

  “Don’t worry. My broker will take care of you,” said Rashid. “He won’t let you—how you say it?—lose your shirt.”

  Paul’s practice underwent a change in clientele. Before, his office was mostly filled with middle-class wives who were proudly wearing maternity tops by the fifth month and sometimes paid with crumpled bills. Now his nurse often sent in fastidious women in linen shifts who paid with pastel checks. Their pregnancies never bloomed in the same gargantuan way. Their heavy gold bracelets, dangling from thin tan arms, made a sound that pleased him. Sometimes these women asked if they could have cesareans so they wouldn’t stretch down there. “No, my dear,” he would say, enjoying their brashness and their expensive perfumes, “you certainly may not.” The new women weren’t afraid to question his advice or call him by his first name. When he thought they were being too familiar, he’d become firm and cranky and tell them some gruesome story of how dieting during pregnancy could result in an underweight baby for whom birth would become an unbearable stress.

  Rashid insisted on the Halabys’ appearance at his enclave at least once a week for dinner and spoke to Paul on the phone more often. Star caught Paul smiling the dazed, wondering smile of a man who felt blessed and lucky. She was less enchanted. She didn’t quite believe that all this largesse came without a stiff price tag. What’s more, she had the odd premonition that Rashid really wished that she were not part of the package.

  Real estate agents called it “nervous money” and claimed they knew before anyone else where the next trouble spot would be by the cash bundles that came to them across the oceans.

  Rashid had not sent his money from across the ocean, only across town. He had arrived in Washington via London at age thirty with seven hundred dollars and a severe case of jaundice. He regained his health gratis at the National Institutes of Health. They found him an interesting guinea pig. His roommate was a stockbroker who was dying of cancer, and in a breathtaking six months of reckless trading, he was able to amass three hundred thousand dollars for himself; he parlayed Rashid’s seven hundred into just under eight thousand.

  When Rashid left the Institutes weak but recovered, he scoured the District for a building that cost seven thousand dollars but was worth fifteen. Many days, rather than spend his capital, he dined on half-eaten fruit salads and fancy bread, T-bones and filets rescued from restaurant garbage. After four months of daily preoccupation, he found the right property, paid cash, and then used the building as collateral for two others.

  In 1940, before the war plunged Washington into a housing crisis, the letter streets of M through Q were lined with narrow, well-built residences and commercial buildings that were going begging. Rashid couldn’t buy them up fast enough. They were streets of potential gold lying right on the edge of the creeping commercial heart of the city.

  He was the first to recognize the commercial value of the land around the circle that connected Maryland to the District line. Soon after he bought the acreage, it was planned as the most luxurious shopping complex south of Fifth Avenue, attracting prestigious stores and the moneyed residents of both sides of the District line. He had been the first to
raze five one-family homes on Connecticut Avenue above the Calvert Street Bridge to make room for multistory apartment complexes.

  In ten years, Rashid Ibn Rashid was transformed from a cadaverously thin, unkempt, dangerous-looking foreigner to a benefactor of the National Gallery of Art and the National Symphony Orchestra.

  When he was ready to buy his permanent residence, a unique mansion came on the market situated on a cul-de-sac off Connecticut Avenue halfway between the Calvert Street Bridge and Chevy Chase Circle. In that rarified neighborhood, an acre of land was considered extravagant. The house had two acres.

  The deal was surrounded in secrecy, not because Rashid was politically sensitive but because he had ingrained in him the taboo of broadcasting his moves. He was the consummate Bedouin, moving his tent in the stealth of night to surprise his enemy. That his tent was now a quarter-million-dollar mansion made no difference. Connecticut Avenue was just another wadi across which lived hostile tribes waiting to rob him of his grazing grounds and herds. He had no desire to display his wealth for strangers. It was solely for use as a power base for his family and his entourage.

  The house had been refurbished in authentic Biedermeier and Empire but he ordered it gutted and redone in a Bauhaus style he had seen in a magazine. The decorating firm had a hoot over it, yet the Gropius style was a reasonable translation of the Bedouin tent with its minimalist decor, where form also followed function. The bathrooms were the only departure from simplicity. They were lined in marble, and the faucets were plated in gold that the zealous maids rubbed away with harsh cleansers.

  The first servant he hired was a chauffeur. He had never learned to drive and he liked to visit his properties every day. Next was a male secretary-cum-interpreter who ironed out the finer points of the language. He added a wing for his servants and another for his wife and two daughters. Rashid slept all over the house. Sometimes it was on a divan in one of the large drawing rooms, sometimes on a small French daybed that barely accommodated his two-hundred-pound frame. When the gravure section of the Washington Times-Herald ran a cover story on the new magnate, he confided to the interviewer, “I sleep all over the house because I don’t like to go to bed. This way I fool myself.”

  Rashid appeared softhearted and slightly foolish. In reality he had twice wielded the saber that had separated a thief from his hand. Like all sons of the desert, he was inculcated with the belief that a thirst for blood was synonymous with manhood. In his new life, killing was not practical, so he learned to control through fear and money.

  His decent plain-faced wife and two daughters were sacrosanct—and the joy of boutique owners along Wisconsin Avenue. One daughter was shy and obedient, determined to excel in science and become a doctor. The other daughter was a nymphomaniac who had attended Foxcroft, a posh girls’ prep school, but had also been sleeping with boys since the age of fifteen. She was attractive in a hard way from too many sessions at Elizabeth Arden. She had had her hairline resculpted, her eyebrows repositioned, her skin defoliated. By age twenty, her flippant attitude toward birth control had almost taken her life. It was at this point that Rashid Ibn Rashid’s shadow spread like a malevolent moving canopy over the lives of Paul and Star Halaby.

  “Daddy, can I come in? It’s dark in here. Are you praying or sleeping?”

  “Thinking . . . maybe praying. Come in, come in. How do you feel, habibty?”

  “Better. Better every day. The chauffeur checked me out of the hospital, but I don’t know if he paid or not.”

  “Don’t worry. They’ll send the bill. Come. Come sit next to me. Maybe you should be in bed. Have you seen your mother?”

  “Mama went to cook some soup for me. I’ll get in bed, but first I want to tell you something.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.” She bent over to kiss him and he kissed her back several times on her forehead and her eyes and the top of her head. She sat very close to him and he held her hand. “Something happened when I came out of the ether in the recovery room. Something I can’t stop thinking about. Dr. Paul was holding my hand. He was tapping it and whispering, ‘Asha, can you hear me? Are you awake? Tell me how you’re feeling. Is the pain better?’ He was so sweet and gentle. He didn’t even know I was listening. I saw his face—just his eyes over the mask—and he was so concerned, Daddy. The pain was so awful, so dreadful, and he was the one who took it away. I can’t help thinking about him. That’s the kind of man I want to marry. Someone strong but kind. So capable. So gentle.” She began to cry. “I’ve never had anyone”—she gulped and sniffled—“talk to me with such feeling. It was beautiful. I’ve never felt like that before. So emotional.”

  “But why are you crying, habibty?”

  “Because he’s already married.”

  “Shush now. Don’t cry. Here, take my handkerchief and blow your nose. Nothing’s so bad. Go to bed now and rest. I’ll take you myself. Forget about everything for today and just sleep. Tomorrow . . . who knows? Everything will look different to you.”

  39.

  YOU MARRY AMERICANI?

  I’M SURPRISED.

  The first time he met the Halabys, he said, “How dee do?” And then, looking sheepish, added, “How do you say it? How do you do?” He knew perfectly well how to say it but pretended to be socially clumsy. He looked straight at Paul. “You marry Americani? I’m surprised.”

  Paul looked alarmed. “She’s not American. She’s from one of the first families of my homeland. Her grandfather was Sheik Jamal. Her father began the wine industry on the West Bank. He has the best vineyards in Judea and the oldest olive groves.”

  “You’re telling me that only Arab blood flows through those veins? Hah! No, no, no. La! This is an American face.”

  “She’s all Arab,” Paul insisted.

  Rashid shrugged and did a little dance with his eyebrows as if to say, I can’t account for all the strange things on this earth. “Well, Star, of the famous lineage, come and sit by me tonight. And your mother”—he continued when they had begun to eat—“she’s Arab, too?” His voice dwindled to make a point.

  “Yes.” There’s something wrong. He was being sarcastic. Why?

  “Hmm.” He smiled. It was insulting. He might as well have called her a liar.

  As if tuning in to her thoughts, he became solicitous, assessing each of her selections from the serving platters.

  “Tell me, Star”—he enjoyed using her name—“do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “No.”

  “Strange. No son to carry on Sheik Jamal’s name.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll carry it on.”

  “Aha.” He laughed as if she had said something hilarious. “That’s the spirit. You’re a strong woman, hah?”

  “Very strong.” Everything he said had several meanings, and she found herself emphasizing what she said, too.

  “Good. You can bear Paul many sons.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Shu?” It was the unique Bedouin cry to signify emotional surprise. “What then?”

  “I’m interested in having children, of course, but also I’m drawn to business.”

  “Shu! Business? What business?”

  She was sorry she had brought it up. He would hardly be sympathetic to the idea of a woman in business. “A friend and I are getting our real-estate licenses. Eventually—you understand we’re still a long way from this, but eventually—we’d like to buy and manage property. Small houses. Fix them up . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “But you just purchased a house. Paul tells me it’s magnificent.”

  “I don’t mean a house to live in. I mean property.” She was saying too much. Was it the money that made him so charismatic? Or was it the innocent concern to feed her the most succulent morsels from his own plate? “You know”—she tried to make a joke of it—“an empire.”

&nb
sp; He made his hands into fists, one inside the other. “You’ve been bitten also, is that it?” She expected him to disapprove. “All right.” He rose. “Come with me. I have something to show you.”

  He led her into a paneled room with a massive desk, behind which was a carved map of the metropolitan area with winking lights scattered at various locations. “The lights are my properties.” He grunted with satisfaction.

  “The brightest light is your latest? Or your largest?”

  “My first and smallest. A row house on P Street. I love that house. It was the one that made me delirious with happiness. My valet lives in it now and sometimes I plead with him to let me sleep in it.”

  “I can understand that. Certain houses arouse a kind of delirium. Do you share your secrets of success?”

  “There are no secrets. It’s plain common sense. Very simple. But people are afraid of the obvious. You want advice?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. What is the most obvious thing? We would all like to buy cheap in a forgotten neighborhood and then see it become—how you say?—popular. Desirable. The other way is to find empty space—just a few years ago Chevy Chase Circle was a field of weeds. And now . . . and who would think Hyattsville would become a bedroom community? That was—how you say it?—the boondocks.”

  “You bought into those places before they were built up?”

  “Mmm.” He touched his head. “I used this. When I was a hungry young man, I had all day to think about getting wealthy. I went to the Bureau of Records and watched to see who came to apply for building permits and where. There were two or three men who were the commercial builders in those years. There was Rosenberg, Roth, and Gilbert. I kept track of everything they did. I hung around where the blueprints were reproduced and paid the man a few dollars. He showed me everything.”