The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  “Let’s get out of here while we still can,” Luke said to me.

  We backed up toward the ambulance doors. George had gotten out and Luke slipped in from the driver’s side. How much time had we spent? Tick tick tick. The earth continued on its stiff compulsory rounds. The sun was gone, sunk for good, headed for the Far East, but I think there is a moment, a moment of universal darkness, when it shines on no one. Luke’s followers had not made a move toward their vehicles but stood there watching us, a human forest. The ambulance’s interior light went on and then was gone when George closed the door. I remember doing a few quick calculations of how long it would take us—going fifty-five, sixty-five—to get Esther to the hospital. I remember noting my hunger, and I remember wondering where Luke would eat that night, where he would sleep. I remember wondering if I should go back to my substitute-teaching job tomorrow and then remembering it would be Saturday. My day off, and Joan’s day off, too. I remember thinking of Joan. An impulse to stretch out next to her, to hold her body one more time. And I also remember thinking it was too late for that, too late. I hurried to the passenger side to let myself in. I remember most of all how unusually cold the door handle was as I yanked it open.

  Afterword

  CLEARLY it would not have been possible for me to compose this admittedly incomplete memoir of my father (and me) without the help of a great many people. Some I need not acknowledge here because I have done so personally, but there are others whose assistance I would like to formally appreciate.

  First of all, I would like to acknowledge Neil Schwartz, who not only has written extensively about Luke but who also made me privy to his notes and the transcripts of literally hundreds of interviews and who, after the bulk of this book was completed (and I, frankly, had no heart to go back through it) gave me a telephone number in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where none other than Sergei Karpanov was waiting for my call. Sergei, who I am not acknowledging here, since he had no intention of helping me in any way, and who was only interested in somehow finding a way in which my book might exonerate him and gain him entrance back into the States, sounded winded, exhausted, and small. It was hard to reconcile that unctuous and anxious-to-please voice with the photos I’d seen of the ferocious knucklehead who palled around with my father.

  “To me, the story that I killed little Katarina is the greatest lie of the twentieth century,” Sergei said to me, in the weary voice of a man who does not expect to be believed. His breath traveled through the edifice of his words like wind through a ruined city. “Why would I harm her? I was living a good life—thanks to your father. Girls, celebrities, anything I wanted. It would take a madman to throw it away. And if I was a madman I belonged in a hospital, not a stinking jail.” Even here, making the familiar, despairing little point, he seemed hopeless and put upon. He was a magician who had plunged his hand into the top hat a hundred times and each time come up rabbitless, but who was condemned by his own inflexible nature to try it over and over again.

  I need to thank Neil for more than his extensive storehouse of Lukology. Not only did he create the occasion on which my mother finally told me that Luke was my father but, after Esther and I returned from Italy, Neil gently and gallantly courted her. It was a courtship that might have begun out of a certain morbid careerism on Neil’s part—what biographer could finally resist romancing the love of his subject’s life?—but soon it developed into one of the very best relationships my mother ever had. Neil was respectful, attentive, adoring, and, while he never presumed to be a stepfather or even a father figure to me, he treated me incredibly well in my earliest teenage years. He took me to ball games, we skated in Washington Square Park, and he even taught me twenty or so chords on the guitar during that phase when I felt genetically destined to be a singer. Once, when I was about fifteen, in a paroxysm of hungry-hearted need, I threw my arms around Neil and kissed his soft, freshly shaved face. Neil, who was sitting on our sofa and writing (undoubtedly about Luke) in his spiral notebook, gathered me in his arms and held me. But the real pinnacle of his kindness was that he said nothing while we sat there, and never mentioned the incident, and never looked questioningly at me, and never expected it to happen again—which it didn—t.

  Best here, then, to also thank Neil’s friend Marty Drizdo, who, while appearing nowhere in the preceding pages, shared with me his many valuable insights into l—affaire Karpanov. It was Marty who, after abandoning his own book, bitterly enti- ded Luke Fairchild: Guru to the Lemmings, provided me with a fairly complete picture of where Sergei got his forged Finnish passport (information I could not use because of legal constraints) and the various cities throughout the world where Sergei hid from justice, or, if one were to accept Karpanov’s story, where he kept himself a jump ahead of another false arrest. It was also from Drizdo that I was able to ascertain that the various post-Katarina violent felonies attributed to Sergei were—and here legal constraints dictate my diction—not necessarily baseless rumors.

  Drizdo arrived with Neil for Esther’s funeral at the Riverside Chapel. They must have walked over from the subway stop at Seventy-ninth and Broadway, because they looked chilled and windblown, the backs of their black suits were wet from the rain the wind blew beneath their umbrellas. I was standing under the overhang beneath the massive funeral hall, that auditorium of the dead, watching as a few Riverside employees, six security men (courtesy of Luke) built like brick shithouses, and ten city cops coped with the surge of reporters, camera crews, freelancers, autograph hounds, and faithful Fairchildians who had learned of Esther’s funeral, despite all our attempts to keep it off the radio and television and out of the papers, to keep it from being sucked into the swirl of publicity and gossip. Special passes had been delivered by courier to anyone who belonged there that day, but already we’d run into a few forgeries, and now I was posted to double-check the people whom security let through. An Entertainment Tonight helicopter had been hovering over Amsterdam Avenue, but a sudden soaking gale had blown it toward Central Park and now it was gone.

  Marty Drizdo hadn’t been sent a pass to my mother’s funeral and he had mistakenly assumed he could come in on Neil’s ticket. One of the cops, who was sick of standing in the rain and who, it turned out, had all of Dad’s Christian records, was getting a little carried away with his responsibilities, and he pushed Marty forcefully back, causing the poor man to slip on the wet pavement. I quickly intervened, said it was fine for Marty to be admitted, and took Drizdo by one hand while Neil grabbed the other and we pulled him to his feet. A few of the photographers recognized me and fired their power-drive Nikons at us. The domino principle might not have been applicable in Southeast Asia, but it sure did hold at Riverside Chapel. The paparazzi’s attentions engendered a small riot of interest—not only in the media but among all the hangers-on who were willing to loiter in the filthy rain on the chance they might catch a glimpse of some grieving celebrity.

  Neil, Marty, and I took shelter in Riverside’s lobby. Now that he was safe and on his feet again, Drizdo was furious, letting forth a stream of invective that strongly suggested a morbid preoccupation with anal sadism. Neil tried to shut him up with a glance and then turned to me. Neil looked much as he had when I first met him, well over twenty years before. Now his whiskers and hair were white as linen, making his face and body seem incongruously youthful. He looked like a summer- stock actor hastily powdered to look old.

  “Are you okay, Billy?” he said. His teeth were worn, nicotine-stained; his breath was a mixture of mortality and mouth- wash, like lamb with mint jelly. He put his hand on my shoulder and I realized that Neil had not touched me since that evening on Sullivan Street so many years ago, when I had kissed his cheek.

  I nodded, and then shrugged. It would have been insane to say “Yes, I’m all right, I’m fine,” and it would have been melodramatic to say “No, I’m terrible, my life has been radically diminished,” he didn’t need to hear that, he could just assume it.

  And Neil—if you are reading
this—thank you for nodding and then saying, “Yeah, me too.” And thank you for embracing me and thank you, as well, for whispering to me as we embraced, “She had the biggest heart of anyone who ever lived.” I acknowledge you for feeling that way, and I acknowledge you for saying it to me when I really needed to hear it, and I also acknowledge you for helping me finally shed tears from eyes that had been sirocco dry since an hour or two after my mother died of an embolism in the back of an ambulance on the New York State Thruway.

  I must also acknowledge the various musicians who played with my father over the course of four decades, many of whom drifted in and out of my mother’s life when I was a child, as the Seven Dwarfs might have, had things not worked out with Snow White and the Prince, and Snow White had taken a little walk-up apartment a stone’s throw from the forest. In those prefeminist days of Luke’s early career, when rock and roll was a boys’ club and girls were prizes in a sexual scavenger hunt, Esther, being unattainable, became a sort of den mother to the boys in the band—she sewed buttons on their shirts before gigs and pressed cool wash cloths on feverish heads in drunken hotels after, she even taught wild-man drummer Milan Tom- janovick how to read—and the guys never forgot her. They came for dinners, played chess with me, looked over my homework, while frowning and scratching their heads; they kept in touch. Nearly all of them knew I was Luke’s son and knew that he denied me, but they never mentioned it. Like all good players, they knew what to leave out. The music, the past, the memories made us a family. They were avuncular with me: I had ersatz uncles with earrings, I had ersatz uncles in velour pants and pirate shirts, and I had more than one or two ersatz uncles with monkeys on their backs. I could have done worse.

  They all came to Riverside Chapel, and when they saw me they tried to be cheerful. They hated funerals, and by now they had attended dozens upon dozens. They had buried colleagues who died of overdoses, or from AIDS, or from car wrecks, or who had blown their brains out, or otherwise violently ended life. They had buried parents and brothers and sisters and wives and lovers and children. The earth was fertile with the remains of their dead. They shook my hand, they clasped my shoulder, they did not quite look me in the eyes. They looked as if they would have rather been on the road, or in a studio. No hard feelings. I would have rather been somewhere else, too. They made a semicircle around me and then they all said something that they apparently said often: “Hurrah for the next one that goes!”

  Mike Silverman, Dutch Conners, Ken Yoshiba, Graham Ross, Skeeter Thomas, and Harley Caswell, all were as helpful as could be in my search for Luke, though my father, after taking the cure for heroin addiction, and once again coming to the mistaken notion that he had been given a clean slate upon which to begin life anew, had his new law firm get all the old sidemen to sign statements promising they would never write about Luke. A check for ten grand was given to each who signed, and they all signed. They would have done it for less. They would have done it for nothing. They still loved him and they still treasured the time they had spent with him. Even getting them to talk to me about Luke was difficult, especially when they learned I was writing this book. And when they did open up, it was impossible to get them to say anything that put Luke in a bad light. That was okay; there were plenty of others who would.

  Which brings me to Loren Nelson, who deserves acknowledgment here, though most of what he told me did not find its way into these pages. Had I been writing a book about why Luke Fairchild does not deserve to be thought of as a legitimate folk singer, however, Loren’s insights into Luke’s early Greenwich Village folk-club career would have doubtlessly proven valuable. Had I been writing a book about why the young Esther Rothschild was so alluring and so magnetic, and how living with her was as close to heaven as a young man could get in New York City, then Loren’s torrent of late-night remarks would also have come in handy. When Loren arrived at Riverside Chapel for my mother’s funeral, I made no move toward him; I was fine with him being there—in fact, I myself had put him on the list—but I was wary of his bitterness and the wide swath of permission to express it that he had somehow managed to cut for himself over the years. Loren had dropped out of my mother’s life more than thirty years ago, and had left the Village not long after, and he seemed lost and isolated in the lobby. If anyone remembered or recognized him from the old, old days, they pretended otherwise. I was talking to Little Joe and Felix and Tess when I noticed Loren reaching into the pocket of his black silk jacket and taking out a white satin skullcap and placing it carefully on his head. Low-grade anti-Semite that he was, it surprised me that Loren had come with his own yarmulke—but perhaps it was just his idea of traveling wisely in alien territory, like bringing quinine tablets to the Amazon. I didn’t see him again until Luke and I, along with Little Joe, Neil Schwartz, and a man named Ezra Rudy, a cabinet maker and poet who had been Esther’s lover intermittently over the past six years, carried my mother’s coffin out to the hearse. Loren was standing next to Joan Odiak, holding his canary-yellow umbrella over her, and though nearly everyone was silent as we trudged past them holding our tragic cargo, Joan was up on her toes whispering something into Loren’s ear, and he was nodding, not yet allowing himself to smile, but it didn’t seem like he’d be able to hold out long.

  I learned later that Loren and Joan went to dinner that evening. I’m not assuming they spent that night together; I’m not in a position to know, since I never again slept in my old apartment after Esther’s death. (It was all I could bear to have lost my best friend in the world. To spend the night with a woman who did not love me would have been, on top of that, intolerable.) However, I do know that Joan and Loren began seeing each other with some regularity after that and that Joan eventually moved into the cottage Loren bought for himself with the proceeds of the sale of his Southampton house, and that the two of them developed a mail-order business selling expensive boating equipment imported from England, caps and compasses and twenty-thousand-dollar sails. The whole enterprise surprised me, but as Luke once put it: “Known a lot of people / Their lives pass like shadows on the walls…”

  As for Joan herself, I would like to thank her for abiding with me while I prepared to write this book. Joan has perhaps been ill treated in some of my remarks and descriptions. Sorry about that, Joan.

  I would also like to thank Father Richard Parker, not only for his memories of Luke’s Christian period, but for his putting me in contact with Alice Burns and members of her Bible study group, who also were generous with their stories and recollections. There was neither time nor room for Father Parker to speak during the long service at Riverside Chapel. Between the music and the many, many personal reminiscences—which I listened to with Luke on one side of me and my grandfather on the other—the funeral took over two hours. Though inexpressibly moved by the service, I admit to feeling that the time was dragging on. (Luke and I were planning to sneak off as soon as the ceremonies were finished. We were going to drive up to Leyden and lock up Esther’s house—though we ended up getting sloppy drunk on a bottle of gin she had hidden away, and we slept in her house, with Luke in her bed and me on the sofa. The next morning, Luke wanted to drive further north, with no particular destination. We ended up in Montreal, until he was recognized in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, and then we went to Quebec City for another day and a half, and then we drove hours and hours to Toronto, where we stayed in a mansion owned by a Chinese banker friend of Luke’s, where we drank many liters of red wine out of the dusty old bottles and tried to sober up in our host’s spacious cedar sauna. When we first entered Brian Lu’s home, Luke introduced me as his son, though when I confronted him with this later that evening he refused to admit to it. All right, fine, all in good time, is what I thought. The next day, we abandoned the car, probably forever, at the Toronto airport (“We drove that car through the northern tier / Then ditched it in a lot. / The boy asked me who I was / I said ask me who I’m not”—“After,” 1997, unrecorded), and flew to New York, where Luke’s private jet wa
s awaiting us, and from there we flew elsewhere, to a place I am not at liberty to mention because we didn’t have proper documentation and had to get in on a visa made of Luke’s celebrity and cash (“Just me and the kid / A couple of Yids / Looking for a quiet spot”—Ibid.).

  After the caravan of cars made the long, rainy journey across the East River, Father Parker was given a chance to say a few words at the cemetery in Queens, where my mother was placed in a grave next to her mother, a site purchased by Irv many years before, with two extra places left, one for him and one for me. Judging by the names on the gravestones in this part of the necropolis—Berger, Spitzer, Lenhoff—Parker might well have been the first cleric in a turned collar to ever pray over a body here. Standing between Louis Provanzano, who in the late forties had been a socialist city councilman from the Upper West Side, and a rabbi named Steven Medoff, Father Parker intoned “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …” while the cemetery crew, in their yellow slickers and black knee-high boots, waited to lower my mother into the earth. When Parker was finished and it was Rabbi Medoff’s turn to speak—and suddenly the secular, anecdotal man who had orated at Riverside Chapel was speaking Hebrew and swaying back and forth—Father Parker folded his small, reddened hands over his full Friar Tuck belly and never took his eyes off of Luke. And when the graveside service was over and the coffin was lowered into the narrow, precise hole that had been dug for it—even if she were to come to life down there she would never escape; the box was flush against the stony soil, with its weave of severed roots—Father Parker walked straight to Luke and offered his cold, eczema-ravaged hand in greeting. I had been so absorbed in looking after Irv, who, after seeming so sharp and attentive during the memorial at Riverside, was now suddenly a very old and feeble man, tearful, trembling, and confused, that until Luke took Parker’s hand I had failed to notice that my father had dissolved into tears. His face was twisted into a grimace of nearly unbearable pain, with that kind of grief that looks almost like madness.