In public with Stacy Shanahan, thirty-four years younger than he and showing her pregnancy from the fifth month on, Futterman feels a touch—sometimes more than a touch—awkward. What is this man, at sixty-six with thinning gray hair, a slight slouch, a small but distinct pot belly, doing with this beautiful—and Stacy is one of those women who become even more beautiful when pregnant—young woman. He is her father, Futterman imagines people seeing them together conclude, maybe even, who knows, her grandfather.
Futterman is much relieved to discover that his son, who is given the name Daniel, is born without any of the defects that children born of older fathers sometimes have. The child, as even Stacy’s family acknowledge, looks more like a Futterman than a Shanahan. The boy’s mother goes along with Futterman’s wish to have a bris performed.
Futterman’s Schiller Street apartment is redecorated and largely refurnished. They decide to turn the extra bedroom into a nursery for Daniel. When the painters are done, Stacy moves into the same bedroom as her husband. On their first wedding anniversary, at a dinner for just the two of them at Charlie Trotter’s, Futterman tears up their pre-nup, an act that he would have strongly advised any of his clients against doing.
Out walking his son in the child’s Swedish pram along Astor Street or State Parkway, Futterman is identifiably the very model of the second-family man. Whenever anyone uses the phrase second family to him, he smiles and says that he prefers to think of himself instead as a second-story man. The second story is his current life with a young wife and infant son, and he hasn’t the least notion of how the plot of this second story is going to play out. For reasons not entirely clear to him, Futterman doesn’t spend much time worrying about it.
Remittance Man
By his younger son Lenny’s rough count, Samuel Greenspan’s funeral service, at Piser Funeral Home off Skokie Boulevard, is attended by no fewer than 400 people. Sam was a successful man, in the cardboard-box business, the manufacturer and supplier in his day to most of the major appliance stores in Chicago. He was a heavy donor to all the Jewish charities, president for many years of the men’s club at Ner Tamid Synagogue. He lived to age eighty-three, the last seven of them as a widower. Lenny’s mother died of liver cancer at age seventy-six. At his father’s funeral, Lenny sits in the front row, next to his older brother Gordon, who now runs Greenspan Box, Gordon’s wife Arlene, and their two daughters, Lindsay and Maya.
People walk past the family to pay their respects, most of whom Lenny does not know: old customers, recent neighbors, his brother’s friends. Lenny left Chicago in his early twenties, and has spent nearly all his adult life in New York. Now fifty-three, he considers himself a naturalized New Yorker. He is a writer, Lenny, a magazine journalist and author of narrative nonfiction. He hasn’t published a book in the past five years. Just before his first article was published in GQ, he dropped the span from the name Greenspan. The world, an ever smaller and smaller part of it, knows him as Leonard Greene. An attorney charged him $600 to accompany him to court to have his name legally changed.
Lenny pasted on that final e with Graham Greene in mind. Not that he wrote like, or even aspired to write like, Graham Greene. Instead of guilt-ridden and God-haunted Catholics, Lenny writes about businessmen, celebrities, the well-heeled who must come to terms with their affluence, their complicated domestic arrangements, their family sagas. He began publishing at the tail end of the New Journalism boom, and a few of his books—one about the designers of a new computer, another about a murder-suicide in the Hamptons—were well-reviewed and even sold to the movies. The Hamptons book was optioned and re-optioned by producers for several years, and every now and then there would be an announcement that Tom Hanks or George Clooney or Brad Pitt had expressed interest in starring in it. But nothing ever came of it.
A slow writer and a nervous reporter, Lenny takes far too long to finish an article or complete a book and as a result has made far too little from his publications to live off them. He once tried his hand at editing, at a magazine called Avenue, but found he had no gift for restructuring the work of others; he could barely structure his own. He takes occasional teaching jobs, when offered, and has taught journalism courses at the New School, at NYU, at Hunter, at Boston University, and once spent a year teaching creative nonfiction at the University of Missouri.
From the age of twenty-four, when he left Chicago for New York, Lenny has been sent a monthly check for $2,500 by his father. Nobody but Sam Greenspan and Lenny knew about it, not even Lenny’s brother Gordon or their mother. “Keep it under your hat, kid,” said Sam Greenspan, who, Lenny always enjoyed noting, had no fear of clichés. “Let this be strictly between you, me, and the lamp post.” The twenty-five-hundred a month, while it does not allow Lenny to live grandly, certainly not in Manhattan, is what keeps him afloat. The checks arrived on the first of every month, written out in his father’s hand, like clockwork, religiously, as Sam, who also didn’t mind mixing a metaphor, might have put it. Was it in an Anthony Powell novel or a Simon Raven novel that Lenny first came across the term “remittance man”? He can’t recall. The concept, though, sticks in his mind. A remittance man was someone who for one reason or another was considered a family disgrace, and sent money to stay away from home. Lenny was pleased to have his father’s monthly checks, couldn’t have continued to live in New York without them, but from time to time he couldn’t help wondering if he himself didn’t qualify as a remittance man of sorts—though it was unclear to him what, if anything, might have constituted his disgrace.
In a purely—when younger he used to think it a grimly—commercial family, Lenny is the son with talent, specifically literary talent. His teachers recognized it early: in his love of reading, his facility with language, his ability to make up stories that charmed his grade- and high-school classmates. His parents and older brother did not so much disdain this talent as fail to notice it. Lenny’s mother took the commercial course at Marshall High School. His father read only the Chicago newspapers. His brother Gordon was a business major at the University of Illinois. Apart from a World Book Encyclopedia and the weekly issue of Time, there weren’t any books or magazines in the Greenspan house.
Lenny sent home copies of the magazines with his articles in them to his parents and his brother as they were published. He inscribed copies of his four books, and dedicated one of them to his parents. “Keep up the good work” is the most in the way of a response he ever got out of the old man, on Greenspan Box, Inc. stationery in notes dictated to and typed by his secretary, Estelle Fishman. He was certain that neither of his parents ever read his books. Gordon once wrote to say that Arlene “enjoyed” his Hamptons tale.
The Greenspans weren’t a family that went around telling one another how much they loved one another. Yet Lenny, in the Greenspan way, loved his father. He was a fair and honorable man, Sam Greenspan. And, of course, generous. More than once Lenny told his father how much he appreciated his financial support, but Sam shook him off by saying that if he couldn’t afford it he wouldn’t do it. Lenny was always planning to write him a careful letter setting out just how appreciative he was, but, somehow, he never got around to it. Lenny has come to understand that he is one of life’s spectators, with a seat on the sidelines watching other people do their dance. He lives, as he has always lived, in his mind, in his imagination. He’s had his lady friends; lived for a couple of months, at different times, with two of them—one a poet, the other a photographer who, swept away by feminism, moved out when she turned to lesbianism. But he has never come close to marrying. Nor has he felt the least desire to have children. His books, he tells himself, are his children.
Lenny lives to write, but in recent years he now finds himself increasingly challenged by it. His ideas do not resonate with his editors; four book proposals were rejected on the grounds that there were other works under contract that dealt with the same subject matter. He turns out the occasional piece, usually review
s of novels, and appears on this or that panel on the future of magazines. He is always on the lookout for a teaching gig. He has a rent-stabilized studio apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen, where he has lived for nearly thirty years without a new appliance or a new paint job. The apartment allows him, if he is careful, to make do on his income and his father’s monthly stipend.
Henry James, Lenny read somewhere, thought the two most beautiful words in the English language were “summer afternoon.” For Lenny in recent years the two worst words in the English language are “writer’s block,” from which, little as he likes to believe it, even now, he suffers acutely. He forces himself to be at his computer by 9:00 a.m. He writes and writes, but nothing pleases him. Over the past seven years he has begun no fewer than fourteen novels. (He keeps the manuscripts of his aborted efforts in a suitcase in his front hall closet.) On one he got as far as page 216 before realizing that it was hollow, dead in the water, a corpse lying there on the page. He takes long walks uptown along Madison Avenue, glimpsing the high-maintenance women, straining to imagine stories into which to place them, waiting for useful ideas to arrive. But the ideas that show up turn out to be frauds.
Five years ago Lenny had a short story in the New Yorker. He followed this up four months later with a second story—striking while the iron was hot, his father would have said—but the editor who had accepted his first story had left, and a different editor greeted his second story with a cold note of rejection, making plain that what Lenny writes isn’t really his sort of thing. He sent the story to the Sewanee Review, which accepted it and paid him $150 for it; no one he knew ever saw it there.
On Lenny’s visits to Chicago—he comes in every year for a week at Passover—neither his parents nor his brother questioned him about the progress of his work or the fact that he hasn’t for some while sent them copies of a new book. The few old Chicago friends he sees on these visits are sufficiently impressed with him as “a published author,” as one of them once put it while introducing him to his wife’s divorced sister, not to question the absence of a continuing flow of books from him. His father used sometimes to ask, “So how’s business, kid?” and then accept Lenny’s vague answers—“Going along,” “Not bad,” “Could be worse”—without further questioning.
Lenny knows he has been lucky to have been born the son of a generous father, and understands that it was Sam who made it possible for him to work, as he thought of it, with a net under him. When the notion sometimes came to him that, upon his father’s death, he figured to inherit a respectable sum of money, which might put him out of the financial wars for good, he did his best to put it out of mind. He prefers to think he is better than that; he is a writer, the novelist Leonard Greene, not some over-age spoiled rich kid, a trust-fund baby. Yet the possibility of a serious inheritance coming his way never quite disappears from the back of his mind: It is his unwritten 401(k), his insurance policy against the future.
Sometimes Lenny drifts into thoughts of what he would do if he had a million, or even three-quarters of a million dollars, or whatever his share of the inheritance from his father will turn out to be. Without money worries, he might live a year in Europe, in Italy, specifically in Tuscany, which he’d long ago visited with his poet lady friend and much liked. Such a year, a complete change of scene, might, he thinks, reinvigorate him, break up his writer’s block. A substantial sum in the bank would in itself be a natural confidence-builder.
Even when he knew he hadn’t long to live, Sam Greenspan never made any mention of his will to Lenny. Nor did Lenny have any but the crudest idea of how wealthy his father might be. When Lenny was a boy, he once asked his mother if they were rich. “We’re not rich,” she told him, “we’re comfortable.” Unthinkable, he knew, to ask his father the same question. The Greenspans always lived modestly, without pretension, well below their means.
In what novel did Lenny read that a person “is wealthy when he can meet the demands of his imagination”? It certainly applied to Sam Greenspan. His father, Lenny felt, was good at making money but did not have much imagination when it came to spending it. He was pleased to help his sons, to buck up a poor relative in a time of crisis with a check for a couple of grand, to make generous donations to his Jewish charities. He didn’t need to fly the Concorde or sail the QE2 or drive a Mercedes or do anything flashy.
Before his parents moved from their three-flat on Talman Avenue into their two-bedroom apartment on the 15th floor in Winston Towers, Lenny, then a junior at the University of Wisconsin, asked his father why he didn’t buy an apartment in one of the elegant buildings on Lake Shore Drive. Living on the Drive he would be closer to his place of business on west Adams, cutting down on his drive to and from work and giving him the comfort of doormen and building staff and the pleasure of a view of Lake Michigan.
“What do I need it for?” Sam answered. “Every time I want to use my car I have to call down and have some flunky bring it up and tip him a buck. That’s not the way I care to live.” Case closed.
When Lenny’s mother wanted her husband to buy a condo in Boca Raton, where some of her friends now wintered, Sam said: “An elephant graveyard! Nothing down there but hospitals, Walmarts, and old Jews walking around in pastel-colored pants carrying home the remains from their lunches in Styrofoam boxes. If I want to see old people, I don’t have to go to Florida. All I have to do is look in the mirror.” Case closed on Florida.
Sam Greenspan had had two heart attacks, the first of which caused sufficient damage to make bypass surgery too risky to attempt. He had been living with congestive heart failure for more than four years. Toward the end he was in a wheelchair and had a Bulgarian woman preparing his meals, doling out his pills, and cooking (badly) for him. Lenny began visiting his father every other month, staying in the guest room in the Winston Towers apartment for a week at a time, but the truth was, however genuine the love between them, he and his father hadn’t all that much to say to each other. They talked about the news, about the more colorful of Sam’s old customers, about how much Sam hated losing his independence now that he was ill. Money never came up for discussion.
When Sam could no longer come down to Greenspan Box, Gordon would call the old man every afternoon to report on what was in the mail, what new orders had come in, what the competition was up to. Gordon still asked his father’s advice, though he didn’t really need it. Lenny assumed that his father was much more open with his older son, a businessman like himself after all, than he was with his younger. Lenny also assumed that Gordon had a precise idea of their father’s wealth, though, like their father, he isn’t saying much.
The day after the funeral Lenny and his brother drive down to the office on south Michigan Avenue of Irv Kornfeld, their father’s attorney. Taking the Kennedy Expressway into the Loop, the brothers haven’t all that much to say to each other. The six-year difference in their ages has always kept them from ever establishing anything like intimacy, even though for a good stretch they shared a bedroom in the apartment on Talman. Yet their interests have always been so far apart that there has never been the least rivalry between them. As kids, Gordon was an athlete and a joiner, president of the Sammy house his last year at Illinois, and Lenny was a reader who wasn’t unhappy spending a lot of time by himself and steered clear of fraternities at Wisconsin.
A book on the importance of birth order Lenny once read made the general point that firstborn children tended to be more conservative, later children more radical. Gordon seems to qualify here. Lenny views his brother—slightly contemptuously, if truth be known—as a man who has always played it safe. He married his high-school girlfriend, he went into his father’s business, his current passion for Christ’s sake is golf. Except for the golf—Sam Greenspan viewed it, Lenny knew, as a game strictly for morons—Gordie did everything his father approved. Lenny never looked to his father for approval. How could the old man approve things he didn’t know the first t
hing about? He felt that he aimed higher in life than his brother. He was aiming for the world’s approval.
Halfway down to the Loop, speeding along in Gordon’s white Audi, after a bit of small talk about the weather and who was notably absent from their father’s funeral, Lenny asks his brother if he knows anything about the arrangements in their father’s will. “Not a thing,” Gordon says. “Dad played his cards close to his vest, especially when it came to money.”
“How much do you suppose he left?”
“Nowhere near as much as he might have done four years ago. He took a terrific hit in the stock market. That much I do know.”
“Did Dad ever talk to you about me?” Lenny asked.
“Not really,” Gordon said. “But don’t take it personally. I’m not sure that he talked all that much about me, either. I remember, though, he once told me that he thought you were a dreamer. Another time, as if out of nowhere, he said, ‘You know, your kid brother, when he bet that his talent is up to his ambition, has made a bigger bet than maybe he knows.’”
“I don’t think we ever had a real conversation,” Lenny says. “When I was a kid, he mostly lectured me. You know, on all the standard things: Save for a rainy day, people know more about you than you think, that kind of thing. When I grew older and had something to contribute to the conversation, he didn’t show much interest in what I had to say.”
“Lots of successful men are like that. They do the talking, you do the listening. But he gave us the down payment on our first house. He picked up the dental bills for the girls’ braces. He offered to pay their college tuition, though I told him that I didn’t need him to do that. Some people express love through money. There are worse ways, I suppose.”
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