The great lawyer was feeding his witness the lines, the questions required to be put if the respondent was to come clean. Bernard was dredging his mind to find the precise answers the inquisitor really wanted to hear. He decided to keep it simple. Vague, but inspirational in general and with colour in the detail. So, generations before him, his great-great-grandfather, from west Wales originally, left the land and back-breaking poverty to do back-breaking work, to the east, in the coal pits of the industrialised valleys, for wages. Marriage and family and a cohort of mining sons and coalminers’ daughters followed on in a chronological wake. Rachel Kellerman said he described it so vividly, that she could see it. Could see it how it was, how she remembered seeing it, when she was sixteen, in the movies, crying when she saw John Ford’s picture How Green Was My Valley. She said it had made her want to read the book. Maybe she would now finally get around to it. Now that she’d met Burr-naard, and touched the real thing. Bernard shuffled on his seat with the pleasure he was giving. Mary Ellen confessed she’d never seen the movie, never read the book. Saul Kellerman snorted and said Hollywood hocus-pocus. Bernard ploughed on.
Until him, he said, all the men in his family, his forbears, had worked underground. In the pits. Until him. He was the one who’d escaped. They’d wanted him to escape. Via grammar school and then to university. Or School, as you say he said, and smiled for them. His father had always been politically aware, he said, since the 1930s, like in Huey Long’s day he added, and, well just naturally he guessed, supported the communists in the union. Not the Labor men? asked Saul. Bernard said, well yes that, too, broadly, but more than that, too, and nodded to himself. Saul helped with the detail. He mused about the Cold War, Suez, Hungary, CND, and so on. Bernard said that he was, of course, very young at the time and that his father had died, around four years ago, before he went off to School in England. That was tough, Rachel said, and her husband speculated under his breath – “Black lung, I bet” – but with such supressed vehemence that Bernard found the immanent sympathy of the three of them verging on a physical bond. He dropped his head, and let the silence, a better one this time, take over again. It seemed that his father had in this company, paid his dues for him.
* * * * *
At the dinner table a mood of self-reflected, communal glory settled over the entire party. Glory by the will-power of self-association. Saul Kellerman began to tell stories. Celebrity tales. Badmouth yarns. Loaded anecdotes. Mary Ellen had relaxed into laughter. Like Saul Kellerman she drank Chablis with her food, and unlike her host, found laughing, eating and drinking more and more demanding. Rachel drank only red wine, Gevrey Chambertin was what the label on the bottle told Bernard, and she ate silently and sparingly. Bernard had his crystal goblet filled to the brim with the garnet coloured wine , and he, in turns, admired and ate the thickly sliced turkey, the creamy coleslaw, the tangy cranberry sauce, the unusual (for him, he said) butternut squash and the sautéed rosemary-and-garlic potatoes. His blue-and-white china plate was piled high by Saul Kellerman, twice over, and he was sated both by the food before him and the admiring company with whom he sat. Dessert was to be apple-cobbler but the decision was to wait awhile, to rest, though not from drinking. That continued from the bottles Saul Kellerman had opened and placed around the table which he left in order to fetch, for him and Bernard, two cigars whose closed ends he snipped off from their plump tubes of fragrant leaf.
He rolled the cigars, one at a time, between his fingers and let them whisper in his ear. He sniffed the aroma of rot and decay. He gave one to Bernard. “Havana,” he said. “A gift from Cuba.” Then he said, “That bastard Kennedy.” He lit the end of his cigar with the flame from a battered Zippo lighter and leaned across to light Bernard’s cigar. He drew gently on his smouldering Havana and his guest watched and did the same. Puffs of smoke rose in blue whorls above their heads and flattened out into low clouds, pungent with ordure and the heady sweetness of black soil. Kellerman held his cigar in front of him. He contemplated its slow burn. It glowed with little, winking sparks of fire. It pulsated in his sturdy hand. Mary Ellen began to feel queasy. Bernard puffed and sucked, and floated into an out-of-body giddiness. Saul Kellerman grew solemn.
“The thing is”, he said, “that cunt, LBJ, for all his Texan chicanery, had more spunk than all of the Kennedys, a bunch of rich kids playing god, ever had. Civil rights? Johnson. Labour rights? Johnson. Poverty programmes? Johnson. Square deal, New Deal, Fair Deal? Johnson’s in that line, not JFK. Take Vietnam away, Kennedy’s poisonous legacy to him, and he knocks fuckin’ Camelot into Kingdom Come. Yeah, something of ole’ Huey Long about Lyndon, I think. We’ll have to see. 1968 isn’t too far away for him now. He’d better do his thing.”
Kellerman put his cigar into the onyx ashtray his wife had brought to the table. Its smoke drifted upwards, a writhing column of waste.
Saul Kellerman had moved on to the pontificating state which was the counterpoint to his judgmental mode.
“Except. Except, of course. What of the common man? Black and white. What will they do for the common man, these bastards, eh Bernard? Nothing. Nothing. They’ll have to do it for themselves. In your country, Bernard, in Wales maybe they got that. Maybe that’s why your old man was a communist. People gotta do it for themselves, but it won’t just happen. You know, if they can’t, can’t see it straight for now, they need a light to guide them, to help them, to stop them being such dumb, helpless bastards.”
It was warm in the room in the open-plan house where the Kellermans lived. The sun was still beating its rays against the house’s wrap-around windows. A central heating boiler in the basement had kicked in on its late November timer to increase the heat coming from the discreetly boxed-in wall radiators. Saul Kellerman and Bernard Jenkins had taken off their jackets and sat at the table with their shirt-sleeves rolled up above the wrist. Rachel Kellerman, alone, was untroubled by the warmth. Mary Ellen asked, her voice noticeably slurred, if she could have a glass of iced water. Bernard wanted the talk to be distributed amongst them, again, for it to return to the bonhomie, the conversational ease enjoyed earlier, when he, Bernard, had been centre stage in the Kellerman’s open-plan house.
“I think, uh, Saul,” he said “that we all have to, uh, find our own way.”
The moment it was said, he knew that he meant it but that its meaning was not clear to him. Not yet.
“That’s horse-shit, Burrn-aard” said Saul Kellerman, and he picked up his cigar and waggled it in front of his own red and looming face. He growled at Bernard. “Not everyone can be in a position to do that, or even to feel capable of it. That’s the lie of the American fuckin’ Dream. That they can. Truth is people get beaten down. People get fooled. People get fuckin’ socially lobotomised. It’s how the System works. Jesus, your old man knew that, kid.”
Bernard looked at Mary Ellen whose face appeared translucently pale in the light. Rachel Kellerman took out another un-tipped cigarette and reached over the table for her husband’s lighter. She looked quizzically at Bernard as if to elicit a response from him, or else see him be run over, be bulldozed by Saul Kellerman, like everyone he’d ever met. Bernard’s response was a question.
“Perhaps not everyone is crushed?” he wondered. “Perhaps we all have, uh, an inner strength, one that only we know…” was as far as he got before Saul Kellerman began thumping the table.
“What is this? You been reading Reader’s Digest, or the mottoes in Fortune Cookies, or something? Let me spell this out again for you Burrn-aard. People just get the juice sucked out of them.”
Kellerman wet his lower lip with the tip of his tongue, a gesture of innocence and good faith, a sign of a yearning to have his point understood. He started again but more quietly, in a concerned, fraternal tone.
“Look, kid. Let’s put it this way. Let me give you a-for-instance, Bernard. Two days ago, just before this Thanksgiving, I was in Manhattan for a conference-call with some slick, high-rolling Attorneys, with whom I have, God-for
give me, sometimes have to associate. Doesn’t matter what about, just to say I’d been in offices like theirs too many times for the good of my soul. Worked in them. Made filthy moolah in them. Mid-town, pre-war offices. Architecturally stunning inside and out. Get the picture, huh?
So, the meeting ends. It’s on the sixteenth floor. I say less-than-happy goodbyes. Have a great Thanksgiving, and all that. I leave. I walk to the elevator. There is, of course, in buildings like this one, an elevator boy. Or, in this case, an elevator man. I press the button. The elevator arrives. The door opens. There’s a gilded cage. It rolls back. I step in. I say ‘Ground floor’ before he can say anything. I don’t look at him. I don’t register whether he’s a Negro, a Puerto Rican, young, old, white, yellow. He’s a blank to me. All I’m doing is thinking of the sour end of the business I’ve been discussing for hours. He’s operating the elevator. I’m riding in the elevator. We go down. I get out. I don’t look at him. I don’t thank him. Only, as I’m walking away, do I hear him thanking me and hoping I’ll have a Nice Day. And, presumably, he goes back up. And down. And up. All and every Nice Day. Serving guys like me in our button-down Brooks Brothers shirts and Oxford brogues, and three fuckin’ piece suits. And its only when I’m back on the train to Westchester, sitting at the bar with a large dry martini in front of me, only then Bernard, do I think of him. Don’t ask me why. I dunno. But I did. And I feel ashamed. Ashamed of myself, of course, Bernard. But also, and here’s the crunch, of him. What, in life, has led him to be this up-and-down, down-and-up, thank-you-so-much, servile clown?
He needs a wage? Ok, I can grant that. But, tell me, of this wage slave, where’s a remnant of human dignity in what he does? In what he’s forced by the System to do! Alone, for chrissake, alone in his cage. In his prison. For what? Eight hours at a time? It’s soul-destroying. It’s mindless. It’s anonymous. It’s without human worth. No end-in-sight. Just pressing buttons for people who could press them for themselves. And smiling, and thanking people like me. Just like a Step ‘n Fetchit out of a Jim Crow South or off a Plantation like Mary Ellen’s family probably once had, eh honey? And, oh sure, I coulda looked at him, smiled back, even thanked him. Maybe given him the tip he no doubt expected. And if I had, and this is my point, Bernard, and I’m sure it would’ve been your old man’s, too, my point is that I’d have been colluding in his self-imprisonment, in his self-denial, in his self-sacrifice, in his own acceptance of his own-fate. People like the elevator man are vessels that need to be emptied of the shit that is drowning them from within. They have to be emptied before they can be filled up with new hopes, with the guts to help turn this awful American world upside-down. You do see, don’t you?”
Saul Kellerman halted abruptly. His hands had not moved, but now he pulled them together and clasped them. His eyes were shining. He might have been tearful. Mary Ellen shuddered upright, her pallor now a mottled green. She staggered from the table. Her chair fell over. Rachel Kellerman said that it was back in the hallway, on the right, honey. Mary Ellen half-fell from the table, half-stumbled across the room. A door slammed. The indiscreet sound of gulping and vomiting came from the bathroom. A faucet was run as cover for the noise of Mary Ellen’s condition. Drunk, and now sick with it. Bernard had kept his eyes on Saul Kellerman’s unwontedly motionless hands all during the lawyer’s closing statement. The noises-off, of choking and retching and gurgling, jolted him back to himself. Saul Kellerman was not expecting a reply to his rhetoric. What he was given was a riposte which made Rachel Kellerman sit up, and listen.
“What do you know what that guy feels? Or what he thinks? Or what he does outside that cage you put him in? You don’t know. You said it yourself, you didn’t even bother to talk to him. For you he’s just an object, isn’t he? But he’s a subject, too, Mr Kellerman. An individual subject who thinks. Who feels. Who acts. He may not feel what you want him to feel. He may not think what you expect, you know. And he acts, perhaps, in the only way he can. He might even have been being ironic, have you thought of that?”
Bernard smeared a sticky hand across his mouth. Saul Kellerman decided to pity him.
“You’re fuckin’ romanticising the brain-dead, Burr-naard. Ok, he may not be able to entirely help that his cerebellum has become desiccated through society’s abuse, but, there we are, as I said, it is.”
“No. No”, Bernard groaned. “That’s where you are, Saul. Do you know if he goes home and listens to Beethoven? You do not. Or that he reads Dickens or poetry? You do not. You just judge. You don’t look and you don’t listen. And you don’t really see. Other people are other, that’s what you don’t like”
“You can’t really believe in any of that, can you? Of a guy like that? Up and down. Down and up. Well, do you Burrn-aard?”
“It’s not important whether I do or not,” Bernard told him. “Or whether it’s true or not.”
“Then it’s even more horse-shit, my friend,” Kellerman spat out at him.
“No. It’s being human,” said Bernard. “The human bit, Saul, and by the way you used to be right about my name. It is Bernard. The human part means that if the lift attendant was stupid, if he was illiterate, a philistine, a political know-nothing, whatever, he’s still somebody, and that makes him something. That entitles him to your attention. Your respect even. Maybe for just not being you. For being himself. For being other. But you, at best, you turn him into an object of pity, a vessel to be filled with your good works, a project to be turned around. You care, Mr Kellerman, I acknowledge that. But you don’t love, do you?”
“My, my, my,” said Rachel Kellerman. Saul Kellerman glared at his wife. He said that this was a waste of his time. That he’d warned her they didn’t know who these people were. The invitation was all her soft-hearted, do-gooding, liberal-thinking fault. Serve her right. And this Burrn-aard, or whatever his real name was, was a moralising rat-fink whose own father, if he could hear him, would be embarrassed at the way the religiose creep had turned out. Mention of his father gave Bernard a jolt, an instant’s reflection on what his old man would really feel about what had been said and done that afternoon. He decided, and instantly too, that he knew what his father would have felt, and that he would never ask him. Bernard lowered his head. He bunched his fists.
Saul Kellerman grunted, out loud, that, Jesus H Christ, this was a sorry excuse for the son of a Welsh coalminer. He pushed his chair away from the table. He walked to the glass wall that led to the garden and slid open a partition door. He stumbled through it and onto the lawn which sloped imperceptibly towards the unseen ocean. He did not close the door. Rachel Kellerman opened her mouth to speak. She stopped when Mary Ellen re-appeared and lurched towards the open door, whispering something about needing some fresh air and being back soon. She walked hesitatingly, vaguely, towards Saul Kellerman who turned at her approach, and her saying his name. He said something back to her, and she leaned into him. He seemed to Rachel Kellerman and Bernard Jenkins to be holding her up. He had his long arms across her sunken shoulders. He eased her slowly down the path to the copse at the garden’s end, the dark wood beyond which the ocean lapped the shore. Bernard squinted into the distance as the two figures became lost to sight. He half-rose from his chair. Rachel Kellerman placed tapered fingers on his hand and stroked it. She said, “Hey, don’t worry. Whatever else, Saul is not like that. Trust me on this. He’ll just be talking,” and she poured them both another glass of Gevrey Chambertin. She clinked her glass against his. She said to Bernard Jenkins, “Come on, Burrn-aard, I’ll show you something.”
In a far recess on the left-hand side of the room in Rachel Kellerman’s open plan home was a wooden railed-off section near the book-cased wall. Within that smaller space was a cast-iron spiral stair, a dozen or so steps, which went down into a den. Saul Kellerman’s private space. His wife went down the stairs first, beckoning Bernard on and down into a square cement-walled study with no windows. Books lined three walls from floor to ceiling. On the fourth wall were framed photograp
hs of Saul Kellerman. Kellerman shaking hands with released and relieved clients. Kellerman with famous faces in restaurants, in bars, on public platforms. There were framed newspaper reports of trials, and mis-trials. There were signed letters of thanks and of commendation. There were framed Degree diplomas, from City University of New York and from Harvard Law School. There were no photographs of Rachel Kellerman on the wall, or on the old-fashioned knee-hole desk that squatted, with its wooden Captain’s chair, in the centre of the room underneath its one, hanging light. Rachel Kellerman made a half-circle with her arms and pirouetted around the desk. She said, “This is Saul. This, Burrn-aard, is what you need to understand. A kid from the Bronx. From a poor neighbourhood even for the Bronx. A tough neighbourhood. His father was first-generation American. From Lithuania. His mother the same, just a boat or so before him. A living from peddling, from push-carts, around the streets. Then as a tailor. Saul, a stand-out ‘A’ student in High School. Scholarships to City University in New York, then, wow! to Harvard. See what I mean. He’s a decorated war hero. A stellar career at the Bar. Me, I guess. What’s not to like, huh, Burrn-aard? What’s not to like, you tell me.”
She had been carrying her wine glass with her. She put it down on her husband’s desk. She leaned back against it, and looked wistful, and, Bernard Jenkins thought, quite lovely. He swayed, a little drunkenly, nearer to her. Rachel Kellerman looked at him. She pointed an index finger at him.
All That Lies Beneath Page 3
