As Bob crossed Main Street and entered the fund’s office building, he turned to watch David walking up the other side of Main. Bob felt a sense of gratitude and privilege, a feeling of status he never felt before. This must be how a prince feels…special. All the years he’d lived without a father, all the anguish of feeling somehow inferior to other men, was now lifted from his subconscious. He felt the casting off of the stigma boys and their fathers had heaped on him over many years.
Acceptance and equality Bob had always sought but never received was something he no longer needed. A nascent inferiority complex that made him feel unsure of himself was leaving him. It would take some getting used to. Dark fears that others with fathers knew things he didn’t were being swept away by the light of confidence. He was freed from that niggling demon! As he rode up the elevator to his office, he closed his eyes and whispered, “Thank you, David.”
While Bob rode up the elevator to his office, David crossed Main Street from east to west, from a block north of the fund’s office building. David proceeded north two more blocks. When he thought enough time and distance had passed, he re-crossed Main Street from the west to the east and walked alone back to the bank building. He reentered the vault, summoning the custodian once again to retrieve his safe boxes and leave him with the boxes in the private viewing room. “I can’t believe I forgot to pick up a stock certificate while I was just here,” he lied.
It was of no consequence, a superfluous remark, since custodians are sworn to silence and not allowed in the viewing rooms with the vault’s customers under any circumstances. Once alone in the viewing room, David removed the codicil he’d showed Bob and replaced it with a similar one that left Bob a half million dollars instead of the one that left Bob the companies. There was no fear in his eyes while he performed the switch. Thereafter he never spoke a word to Bob or gave any hint about the switch.
As David left the bank and crossed Main to return to his office, a curtain from an office window high above slowly closed. Barbara returned to her desk in the lobby. She had witnessed the entire sequence.
Neither man let on to anyone about their deal and to many in the office the closeness of the two men caused rumors to swirl, but there was nothing tangible ever observed. Barbara instinctively knew she’d witnessed something important. Reaching into her memory for the wisdom of her father, she closed her eyes and recalled David scurrying back to the bank after running his route up Main Street and back down again. What was it Chief often said?
“Every animal has a central tendency that can be observed. Every animal returns to the core centerline of its behavior, for that is the soul of the animal. That is what it is.”
She kept her eyes closed and remembered when Chief took her on her very first hunt. It was pitch black in the middle of a moonless night. Chief drove his old station wagon to Ravine Road and parked facing the ravine. They got out quietly and Chief retrieved two .22 caliber rifles from the back of the station wagon. Each rifle had a flashlight taped to the bottom of its barrel. They crept forward to the edge of the ravine, the tribal garbage dump set across it. Chief whispered to her to be quiet and listen. At first she heard nothing, then faint noises of movement and items rolling down into the ravine. At that exact moment, Sparrow and her father turned on their flashlights.
Rats were everywhere. Some scurried off while others stood fixed in place, blinded by the light. Then Sparrow and Chief shot rats.
“This was good experience for you, Sparrow,” Chief complimented at the time. “What did you learn?”
“I learned that rats eat in darkness,” said Sparrow.
“And what else did you learn about rats?”
“Many of them run from the light, but some ignored the light until we started shooting. Then they all ran from us and hid away.”
“That is good, Sparrow. A rat lives in darkness, in secrecy of night. When you shine light on the rat and you attack it, the rat will scurry for his hiding place. That is the central tendency of the rat. Rat feed on the humans’ leftovers, and the rat eats the weak and the very young. They breed readily and reproduce more rats. The rats are predators, but they’re also prey for cat, coyote, wolf, hawk, eagle, owl, and snake. They will all eat them. Rats are afraid of their predators, but unlike mice, rats are dangerous and will attack there is no escape route. Never attack a rat directly or corner it, for it will bite you. Rats carry disease. Catch them in the open when they least suspect any danger and attack them from a distance, as we did. This is the end of your first hunting lesson, Sparrow, the lesson of the rat.”
Barbara’s revelation came to her that night when she was home alone. David’s behavior was like a rat’s. He scurried like one returning to its nest of safety. He didn’t go far from his nest, and he went there in secret when he thought no one saw him. Barbara could only puzzle the meaning of the sequence of events she saw that day. She remembered the words of her father, “You must never attack a rat directly or corner a rat. A rat will bite you.” Barbara kept her own counsel and bided her time.
ECHO
As days passed, a nagging doubt gnawed at Bob. The exhilarating feeling of being the anointed special son of David slowly drifted back to Earth. Bob didn’t want to let go of the feeling. Special was special, he told himself, ashamed for ever doubting David. After all, they’d split millions before on a handshake. Sure, David could be trusted, Bob reasoned. David invited him to his house practically every morning when Bob was in town, gave him many gifts, including a fancy car. They’d lunched together over a hundred times, and besides, David had no apparent heirs. He was childless. Maybe he couldn’t have kids; Bob never asked. He could think of no reason why David wouldn’t keep their agreement. Why couldn’t he trust David to never change the codicil in the bank vault?
Then the voice of doubt reared up from the earth. It rose like vapor steams lifting into the sunlight on a warm Appalachian Mountain spring morning. The spirit of doubt rose on fresh buoyant air and displaced the cool confidence of Bob’s descending exhilaration. From the musings of his languid semi-conscious thought, his mother’s voice came through in her insistent embittered certainty. The refrain of her incessant assertions echoed her deeply held belief, imprinting again upon him that which was instilled in him as a young boy, and in her, and likewise her ancestors before her. Estella’s admonitions echoed in his mind whenever he thought of her.
“Bob, don’t be a fool. You can never trust a Jew. They are sons of bitches. They’ll always find some way to break a deal, to cheat you. They never deal in good faith, never. They always mislead you with a false impression. It’s passed on to them as children. It’s in their blood. It’s who they are. They never care about the other person or how they hurt them. They have no honor. Cheating a gentile is honor to them. Their loyalties are like quicksilver, ever changing. Always remember, a Jew sucked the life out of your dear father!”
Perhaps the greatest irony of her rants was that she concealed from her son his real parentage out of her protective instincts. Bob recalled more of his mother’s old prejudices.
“Tell me the answer to this. Why did the Germans hate the Jews? It was just Hitler’s propaganda you always say, but who ran the banks that impoverished the German people? Who gave them the impossible credit terms? Who tried to starve them? Who were the bankers who pushed Wilson to go into the Great War? Who were the bankers who were going to lose a fortune on loans to Britain and France if America didn’t enter that war? Who were the bankers who pushed the impossible reparations on the German people after that war? Jews will forgive another Jew’s debts but they will never forgive a gentile’s. When they fight a gentile over money, they will fight to destroy the gentile: his credit, his employment, his family, his reputation, everything he has. They don’t care. What did the fish merchant give us after he worked your father to death? Nothing! We got nothing from him, just a condolence card.
“You were a two-year-old baby. I had to work in a hosiery mill making silk stockings for rich wom
en in New York. My fingers were filled with needle punctures from the machines. They weren’t safe, but the Jews who ran the place didn’t care. When I punctured a finger and bled on a stocking, I got fined for ruining the merchandise. I worked twelve-hour days and got twenty minutes for lunch. I had to raise my hand to get permission to go to the bathroom. Then I had to come to Florence’s and get you and take you home and take care of you. I had no rest. I lived years with no rest. They were cruel bastards, Bob. You always say we can’t blame them, that it’s just how it was, the best they could do, the best we could get. Times were bad, yes they were, but they didn’t have to be cruel. They see us gentiles, as goyim, animals to use and throw away. Don’t ever forget that.
“Two girls, their parents made them work there in that hell hole their family needed money so badly. One day on their lunch break, those two sisters went up to the roof of that ten-story building and jumped off together holding hands. They died. Next day they were replaced. The work didn’t stop for even five minutes to remember them.”
Bob remembered Mother sometimes cried when she talked about the silk mill. Often her story about poor Patty echoed in his mind. As Mother told it she was a pretty girl, a beauty. She cried a lot and was always unhappy because her parents made her work. They lived near the river in a small house near the tracks. It happened after midnight on a cold winter’s night. It was in the damp air that numbs your ears and makes your nose run and makes you shiver all over. That’s the kind of night it was when Patty did herself in.
She told Estella the day before that she was never going to come to work in the silk mill again, and her parents were never going to beat her again for refusing to go to work. That night Patty stood in a flimsy nightgown, nothing else—not even shoes, poor thing. Right in front of an oncoming coal train she stood. They found pieces of her broken body scattered over half a mile, but back at the silk mill they never stopped the work, not for a moment of silent prayer, nothing.
“We were lower than the animals, lower than the groundhogs and the possums, and the Jews who ran that place never showed us they cared one wit that we lived like dirt. Remember that.” His mother’s words haunted him.
“I know the Jews, my son. Some day you will know them like I’ve known them. I see their ways. Some of them play the will game with their shiksas. They’ll make an innocent girl into a sex slave and a house slave by promising her she’ll get this or that in the will—a house, a fortune, whatever. Then they die. She gets nothing and she is ruined. No man will take her anymore. She’s older, used goods. The Jew gives all to his own children, never to his shiksa. He’ll even give to his divorced Jew wife before he gives to his shiksa who gave him her life of service and even her love. It’s the eternal game Jews play. You give to them first, they give to you later, but they never do their part. Remember, the fish merchant never gave us even a discount after all your dad did for that man. So just stop telling me that you can do business with all these wonderful Jews you know. Times are different now, you say. You just wait. When you can see the end of your life like I can see mine now, then you just look back and see if you feel like you do now, or if you feel like I do now. One of us is right and one of us is wrong.”
What is the mind if not the playground for controversy’s wrestling matches with conjecture? When not on task, the mind idles away its protein fuels in bursts of reason or fits of fantasy. It flits about as a finch in a nest-building frenzy as it pulls in this fact or that and fits one fact into place or removes it after that fact is secured in its place, because the removed fact doesn’t fit with its other constructs any more than the finch’s newly brought construction prizes of horsehairs or ribbons. Yet the mind must at last rest, as the finch too does rest, when all pieces seem fitted together as best the gray matter can meld the jumbled scattered facts it knows or thinks it knows into a sensible, reasoned cohesion. The finch lays an egg in its constructed masterpiece, whereas the mind reposes within its construct of reason and logic a course of action or non-action as the case befits. Revealing the laid egg and revealing the mind’s construct carries risks of a lost effort, but to meet the task of birth of chick or birth of action set into motion by the mind, the risks must both be taken or the mind’s venture, like the finch’s egg, will be stillborn.
Bob’s mind wrestled with his mother’s assertions. He hoped the struggle would resolve itself some way, yet it did not. Estella’s life was hard; there was no doubt of that. Bob remembered her sitting in the big living room chair and crying softly in the evenings, the trips the two of them took with the bushel baskets to walk along the tracks where the coal trains passed, how they picked up fallen lumps of anthracite and trudged along until their baskets were half full and heavy, and how they kept the tiny house warm in the winter with those lumps of coal. Bob remembered how he saved up to buy a fishing reel from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue and how he used that reel to cast for sunfish perch and bass at the Cedar Dam below the house. How he proudly brought them to mother for scaling after he first gutted them, and how those tiny spiny scaly fish were many times their meal.
Estella cried for joy when the first Social Security check came to her for Bob’s welfare. It was eight dollars a month and he was a ten-year-old. It wasn’t much, but it meant the world to them back then. She had beaten and whipped him but also nurtured him, bought him his first bicycle and his ice skates and his baseball glove. There was a special bond formed between this single mother and her only child. She raised him to be tough, like his real father. Despite the beatings Bob received, he came to know his mother always meant well by him and loved him as no one else ever could. Mothers, the good ones, love their kids like that.
Now his mother was telling him through her voice from long ago that he was a fool to trust a Jew, but David was a Jew who’d always kept his word to him, who made Bob feel special. David filled the aching void Bob had often felt since his childhood. It was something he never outgrew. He couldn’t do that, but now it didn’t matter; the void was now filled. This was a business partner who split over four million dollars on a handshake. Then, as asked, David left him the companies in writing.
Was mother an anti-Semite? Yes, she was. Does that mean that I must be an anti-Semite? Was my own experience the same as mother’s? How can I possibly justify trusting her counsel? Would that be any way to regard a partner? Shouldn’t I break free of Mother’s mold? Am I engaging in madness to even give this matter any thought?
Bob needed to make peace with himself. He’d already switched career paths, and he was making good progress building UGGA’s assets. If I go back to David and ask for a copy of the codicil, having seen it, would he cease trusting me? Would he think I’m going to just sit around and wait for him to die? Would David think the firm would never grow? Would his pride be hurt and our special relationship destroyed? These thoughts churned in his mind and gave him a restless night. He awoke believing he’d wrestled an angel.
Despite his mental quandaries, Bob believed in logic and the scientific method of reasoning. Things happened for a reason. State the facts as you knew them and the truth tests out. Theorems could be postulated and they’d hold up to scrutiny or they would collapse. If such and such were true, then did not such and such have to also be true or not be true? The facts would lead to truth.
If David were sincere, why not make a contract? But he was sincere about splitting major money with a handshake. Why would David not leave him the companies? He had no children. The cold business logic of pushing further for a definitive contract might only serve to harm the close confidential relationship he had with David. The man was given to bizarre behaviors at times, but he was fun to be around. They laughed easily together about almost everything and everyone. What purpose would it serve to put pressure on their friendship or on their father-son relationship?
Yet, aside from his mother’s admonitions, there was that one personal observation Bob made about David’s behavior that didn’t find a logical fitting place. He was vexed by what
he saw while watching David’s eyes in the bank vault. It was a look that spanned hundreds of generations. It was instinctive, impossible to conceal.
Bob couldn’t let go of the thought that David, for that brief fleeting instant, showed fear in his eyes that someone was watching him, that someone might see him showing the codicil to Bob. That had to be the reason for the look. It was the only thing that fit. Why?
Bob’s mind conjured up some dark scenarios. Did David want no witnesses? Could that be for my own protection somehow? That seems too remote to contemplate. Animals that show fear like that show it for their own safety, not some fawn or cub hidden in the brush nurtured on mother’s milk. Newborns do not drink water. Has David done this before? That seems highly doubtful. There would be talk and likely litigation. Maybe David was fearful someone else would see the quart jars of diamonds. There are several possibilities to ponder.
Bob’s mind returned again and again to those eyes, that clear flicker of terrified fear. He needed to checkmate his own fears, put his dilemma in a mouse jar, and find peace of mind without trampling upon David’s feelings. He assured himself he was thinking soundly.
OLD MAC
Old Mac was counsel for the corporate underwritings Bob did the prior year. Mac also happened to be the attorney David used for some of his personal matters. In the course of working together on the due diligence investigations of the respective securities’ issuers, Bob and Mac became amicable toward each other, sharing a number of lunches and beers together. Mac made good money on that business. When Bob called Mac to take him to lunch, for no other stated reason than they hadn’t seen each other for a while, he readily accepted.
At lunch the two relived past times and congratulated each other on their successes. Then Bob asked Mac for advice on a personal matter. He relayed to Mac the bank vault scene and described the codicil David had showed him, complete with four witnesses’ signatures.
When The Butterflies Come Page 18