The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

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  The Rich Mans’s Table

  Scott Spencer

  For my son, Asher

  Once there was a rich man who dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted splendidly every day. At his gate lay a poor beggar named Lazarus, who was covered with sores. Lazarus longed to eat the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table.

  —Luke 16:19-21

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Afterword

  Author’s Acknowledgments

  A Biography of Scott Spencer

  Prologue

  WHEN I was a child I joked as a child, but now I am older and have put aside childish things. Then I knew only the half of things. Now I see a little more, and there are times when I can scarcely bear to remember that sallow little runt running around MacDougal, Thompson, and Sullivan Streets in New York City with my fatherless friend Charlie O’Mara, playing “Is That Your Dad?” I want to say it was our favorite game, but there was nothing really with which to compare it. The game was our bond, our curse, the secret we kept between us and which radiated at the core of our buddyhood.

  “Is That Your Dad?” was not something we set time aside for, or proposed, or prepared for in any way. We played it all of the sudden. Half of its entertainment value was its unexpectedness, or, to be more precise, the unverbalized, ad hoc quality that allowed us to pretend it was unexpected. We played the game the way some young girls end up having sex, with a kind of delusionary self-kidding, so we could tell ourselves that it was something that “just happened.” In the couple of years Charlie and I were best friends we played “Is That Your Dad?” more and more frequently, until it was the undeclared entirety of our time together. We played it on weekends, we played it after school; we begged our mothers not to send us to camp so we could play it all summer.

  “Is That Your Dad?” was based on the fact that not only were both Charlie and I fatherless, but neither of us had ever had contact with our dads. Charlie went to a public school in the neighborhood, P.S. 41, and in his grade there were, by his count, nine out of thirty kids who lived with their mother. Of the nine, five spent weekends with their father, and half a handful of the holidays—usually the unsentimental ones, like Columbus Day or Veterans Day. One of the kids in Charlie’s grade spent a full fifty percent of his time with his father; one flew to Atlanta every summer to spend three months with his father; and the final two had dead fathers. All of them were thus disqualified from playing our sad little game. I went to a private school in the neighborhood, the Little Red Schoolhouse. There were only seventeen kids in my class. Little Red was a sweet, open-hearted bastion of progressive education and drew students from all over the city who came from left- wing, artistic, bohemian households. Nevertheless, the only possible participant from my class was a girl named Merle Klein, a heavy, sullen girl with a face as blunt and expressionless as a knee, whose mother, an anthropologist, returned pregnant from Labrador and carried Merle to term. But Merle wouldn’t have wanted to play with Charlie and me; she never had anything to do with anyone except for a few of the teachers and she never laughed, and I was certain she’d fail to find the humor in her own fatherlessness.

  The game went like this. Either Charlie or I would suddenly pick someone out of a crowd, or it could be someone waiting to cross the street, or even sleeping on a bench. We’d stop in our tracks, feign amazement, and, pointing, say, “Is that your dad?? There! Over there!” The other person was then obligated to also stop in his tracks and approach whoever had been pointed to. Then he would have to accost the “dad”and thrust himself upon the stranger’s paternal mercy. Often, the joke within the joke would be the man’s absurd unsuitability. He might be a snoozing drunk, or a man so fat he had to walk with two canes, he might be a priest, or a flamboyantly swish homosexual. He might be a loony shouting through a bullhorn about Armageddon on the corner of Bleecker and Tenth, or a junkie jiggling his change on a tenement porch stoop waiting for his connection. At other times, the phantom father might be a much more plausible candidate: a guy working in a bookstore, a cabbie sipping coffee at a red light, an artist with paint-spattered shoes and brushes in his shirt pocket, chomping on a cannoli as he strolled down Sullivan Street.

  One day in the summer of 1973, when I was nine years old and Charlie was ten, we were coming out of the Waverly Theater, on Sixth Avenue. It was a soon-to-be-stormy afternoon: the sky seethed like an ocean; the headlights of the cars were as yellow as egg yolks in the watery, purplish light. We’d just seen a movie about two people who met in a singles bar, went back to the man’s apartment, made love, woke up, started quarreling, made up, and then, at the very end of the movie, told each other their first names. It was completely meaningless to both of us, like seeing a film about the occupational hazards of boot making. I’d wolfed down a huge box of buttered popcorn and felt like I’d eaten the inside of a mattress. It might not have been August, but it certainly felt like it; the city was an old cook stove leaking gas. We crossed Sixth Avenue; we were going to go either to my apartment on Sullivan or to Charlie’s on West Third. We were bored with the day, bored with each other—but in that way children have, which is to say we would have howled in agony if anyone had tried to separate us.

  As soon as we were on the east side of Sixth Avenue, Charlie stopped. He rarely failed to give his all to “Is That Your Dad?” and today was no exception. His heavily hooded eyes snapped open, his lips moved soundlessly, his finger trembled as he pointed to a man in his thirties. Today’s father was tall but stooped, with a skim-milk pallor that suggested he rarely saw the daylight. He had wavy black hair, muttonchop sideburns, and he dressed in jeans and a blue work shirt. He looked high- strung, opinionated, and sad. He was the kind of downtown New York Jew that, even as a child, I knew and liked.

  “Is that your father?” Charlie said. “There. Over there.”

  I usually laughed or groaned at Charlie’s choices, but this time it was different. The guy he picked out actually seemed possible, desirable. I remember the pang that went through me, I remembered it all through growing up, and I remember it now, with the stinging, humbling clarity with which you remember a slap in the face. I had not gone through my nine years on earth without longing for a father, but until now the longing had always had a utilitarian dimension. Which is to say, I was not one to sob silently in my bed, but I was not above invoking my fatherlessness in front of my mother or my grandparents if it served my purposes—if it made them feel sorry for me and perhaps induced them to give me privileges I otherwise would not have received. But now, suddenly, the wanting of a father opened within me like an umbrella, sticking me with its rods, lifting my heart and shoving it up into my throat.

  The very plausibility of Charlie’s choice made me realize how reasonable it was to want a father. I was not asking for the world, after all. I was not asking for X-ray vision or a magic lamp. All I wanted was a father. And the sight of that man, who was now stepping into the street to look north at the clock on top of what once was the Women’s House of Detention, and then stepping back to safety, with his expression betraying neither satisfaction nor alarm with the time of day—the very ordinary mystery of him made him appear not just possible as a father—he seemed ideal. He had dark circles beneath his eyes. He was surely not the sort of man to make
a fuss about bedtime. He looked unhealthy and would surely understand why there were some days you couldn’t get out of bed for school, and some days it was all you could do to hold down a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

  I was taking too long to play my part of the game. Charlie looked at me with something near alarm, and then he leaned into me with his shoulder, the way animals petition your attention by rubbing against you.

  “Dad?” I called, cupping my hands on the sides of my mouth. The lights were green all the way up to Fourteenth Street and the cars and trucks moved with a quick steady hiss. Thunder rolled like ball bearings around the stone bowl of sky clamped over the city. There was a death-defying, and maybe even a death-wishing, aspect to the game, which called for your making your way toward the fictive father no matter what the obstacles, and so I wound my way across the four lanes of traffic, dodging taxis, feinting left and right, stepping back and then racing forward, until I was at Muttonchops’s side. Like most young boys, I was fearless to the point of insanity, a zealot in the true religion of childhood, the indestructible self.

  “Dad?” I said, looking up at the stranger. Now that I was close to him, I smelled the stale tobacco on his wrinkled shirt, saw the broken veins in his eyes, scrawled like red EKG lines. “Dad? Dad? Is that you?”

  There was nothing improvised in this bit of psychotic patter; it was all carefully encoded in the rules of the game. What you could say afterward, that could be improvised. You could beg for money, or bring news of far-fetched family developments (inheritances, kidnappings). If the targeted male seemed harmless enough, you could even get physical, fall to your knees and wrap your arms around his legs, or climb into his lap if he was sitting on a bench; you could follow him for blocks, humiliating him with your entreaties, and depending on the neighborhood and the time of day, you’d have up to five thousand witnesses, ten percent of whom could be counted on to glare at the paternal patsy: How could you deny this child? What kind of deadbeat dad are you?

  Today’s “Dad” looked at me now without horror, without nervousness, or annoyance, or even much surprise: his gaze held mostly concern, and I think I knew right there that I had crossed a line—not the line between good and bad behavior, but that other, more fateful line between good and bad luck.

  “Billy?” the stranger, who evidently was not a total stranger, said.

  I let go of him. I backed away. But that was not the end of it.

  “Billy Rothschild?” he said, and though his voice still had that interrogative lilt with which we expose our uncertainty, his eyes were calm and sure of themselves.

  I turned and hurried away. “He knew me, man!” I said to Charlie, as we began blindly running. “He fucking knew me!” We ran west on Bleecker Street, past Zito’s bakery and Ottomanelli’s meat store, with its savage displays of pheasants and rabbits in the window, and on and on, until the familiar food stores gave way to antique stores with their otherworldly displays of leather-clad mannequins curled up on Queen Anne sofas and little satin Satans riding American Flyer sleds in a windowful of artificial snow.

  An hour later, I returned home. Home, then, was five bright rooms on the second floor of an old blue brick walkup building on Sullivan Street, and as I made my way up that woozy stairway, which seemed to me as unstable as a gangplank, there was only one thing on my mind, and that was the hope, both passive and fervent, that my mother was home, for, despite my closing in on the age when boys are meant to begin putting a little distance between themselves and their mothers, she was still the world to me.

  I was not disappointed. I let myself in—the door, with its trinity of locks (Yale, Medeco, and Fox), opened to our wooden-plank-floor kitchen. A crystal hung by a length of fishing line in the window, where, on better days, it captured the sinking sun and squeezed it out in the form of a half-dozen rainbows that shimmered on the walls, the ceiling, the edge of the sink. The smell of curry was in the air. Music from the radio played—dignified, pessimistic, probably Gustav Mahler. And sitting at the kitchen table was my mother, Esther, with Neil Schwartz, the man who an hour earlier I had called Dad. I felt naked and ashamed, caught, and my face burned with shame.

  “Oh, there you are,” my mother said. “We were just talking about you.” Her voice was musical, slightly deep for a woman—only her laughter and crying went toward the soprano range—and in its combination of Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, and WQXR (our local classical music station) it represented to me all that was humane and reassuring: fairness, forgiveness, nonviolence, poetry, freedom, pleasure, and pleasure’s limits.

  I didn’t say anything. I closed the door behind me, flipped the Medeco, and prepared myself to face the music. Though she wasn’t a pushover, my mother wasn’t wired for punishing, and I was not one of those kids with a quaking sense of consequence. Nevertheless, I felt I had disgraced myself and, worse, that I had humiliated her. The aloneness that being without a father caused me to feel was something I tried to keep secret from her, and now my terrible secret was out. This man had somehow found out where I lived and had told her that I, her son, her weak and ungrateful son, was accosting strangers on the street and asking them if they might be my father. I would have rather been caught smoking or stealing. I would have rather fallen down the stairs and broken my arm.

  Neil Schwartz rose from his chair and announced that he had someplace else he must be, and my mother rose, too, took his hands in hers, and offered her Indian-princess cheek for him to kiss.

  “I’d like to take you up on that dinner invitation sometime,” Neil said.

  “I’d like that,” she said. “Call me.”

  “I will. But do you really mean it?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Neil didn’t exactly look glad—his morose features showing happiness would have been as difficult as an egg timer measuring the wind—but there was some hint of relief on his face. He seemed to contemplate giving her a final goodbye smooch, but he thought better of it and turned to me.

  “Take it easy, Billy,” he said. Before letting himself out, Neil winked and pointed his finger at me as if it were a gun, cocking the thumb, and I had all the sour, slightly contemptuous thoughts about him common in fatherless boys who pine for a man’s love.

  I sat down at the kitchen table and Esther relocked the door and then dragged her chair next to mine, sat, and took my hands. Her touch was tender, and I blurted out: “It was just a game!”

  “Billy,” she said, “I think It’s time I told you who your father is.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I know this is something that’s been on your mind,” she said, her voice suddenly pleading. Is there anything more upsetting than hearing a parent ask for mercy and understanding? “And I’ve wanted to tell you. I’ve gotten bad advice—but it was my fault for taking it. You deserve to know, Billy. I mean, the truth, this time.”

  The truth? The moment she said those words, the fictitious father she had given me clutched his chest, keeled over, and died of heart failure. I realize now that she had to this moment in my little life told me very little, next to nothing, but I had somehow pieced together the little scraps, evasions, and non sequiturs she had dolorously doled out to me and had constructed a straw man of a father, a camera-shy goofball who lived far away, not much more than a boy himself, whom she did not know how to contact. I even gave this man a name: Zero, after Zero Mostel, a hero of my grandfather’s, but also after the number, the absence, the void.

  “I want to tell you who your father is, Billy. I think you’re old enough to know.”

  And then, in a feverish flash, it struck me that she was about to say it was Neil Schwartz. But I was wrong—though Neil was, in fact, in our life, already by that time scraping out a living writing about my father, with two books already published and another half-dozen to come.

  But I didn’t get to dwell on the possibility that my father was Neil for very long. Now that she had set the stage to finally tell me the truth, my mother wanted to get on with it.<
br />
  “Now, Billy,” she said, drawing and brushing my hair off my forehead. “It’s kind of a big deal, and I think maybe it would be best if you didn’t tell people. It’s why I didn’t want to tell you until you were older.”

  “I am older.”

  “I know that. You’ve really grown up.”

  She smiled and let out a long sigh. She knew we were crossing a bridge and that fife would never be the same.

  “It’s Luke.”

  “Luke?”

  She looked a little disappointed, faintly amazed. How could I not know? To her, Luke needed no explanation, no second name; he was like Elvis, Jesus, Marilyn. But then she remembered: I was only nine years old. He was not the bard of my generation.

  “Luke Fairchild, sweetie—that’s who your father is. He was my boyfriend for a couple of years. More like three, I guess.”

  I nodded. Luke Fairchild. I knew he was famous. I knew we had his records and that people who came to visit us were continually talking about him. His picture was in shop windows all over our neighborhood. Often, I had overheard my mother listening to his records on the stereo set, softly as I went to sleep. More than a few times I had found her on the sofa, asleep, while an empty wine bottle dozed next to her on the carpet, and the phonograph needle clicked and hissed in the grooveless circle around the red label on one of his records.

  “So then where is he?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. He moves around. A lot. He’s got a lot of houses.”

  “So he’s rich.”

  “Yes, he is, in terms of money.”

  I winced with filial impatience. My mother was so very, very moral. Yet who was she to say something like “in terms of money” when she didn’t even know where the father of her son was?

  “So how come he doesn’t ever come to see you?”

  “Sometimes when people are very close and then they aren’t anymore It’s too hard to see each other.”