The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “I was frightened. I thought they were going to attack us—because of what had happened.”

  “Because Mr. McCoy had hit one of them?”

  “Yes.” Eyes downcast, perhaps in shame.

  “Did they threaten you verbally or through any sort of gesture?”

  “No, they did not.” More shame.

  “But you thought they might attack you.”

  “Yes.” A humble tone.

  A kindly voice: “Could you explain why?”

  “Because we were in the Bronx, and it was at night.”

  A gentle, paternal voice: “Is it also possible that it was because these two young men were black?”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  “Do you think Mr. McCoy felt the same way?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he at any time, verbally, indicate that he felt that way?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t remember exactly, but we talked about it later, and he said it was like being in a fight in the jungle.”

  “A fight in the jungle? These two young men walking toward you, after one of them has been struck by Mr. McCoy’s car—this was like a fight in the jungle?”

  “That was what he said. Yes.”

  Kramer paused to let that sink in. “All right. The two young men are approaching Mr. McCoy’s car. What did you do then?”

  “What did I do?”

  “What did you do—or say?”

  “I said, ‘Sherman, watch out.’ ” Shuhmun. One of the jurors giggled.

  Kramer said, “Would you repeat that, please, Mrs. Ruskin? Repeat what you said to Mr. McCoy?”

  “I said, ‘Shuhmun, watch out.’ ”

  “Now, Mrs. Ruskin…if you’ll permit me…You have a distinctive accent. You give Mr. McCoy’s first name a soft pronunciation. Shuhmun. Isn’t that correct?”

  A regretful but becoming little smile crossed her face. “I guess so. You’re a better judge than I am.”

  “Well, would you pronounce it in your own way for us, just once more? Mr. McCoy’s first name.”

  “Shuhmun.”

  Kramer turned toward the jurors and just looked at them. Shuhmun.

  “All right, Mrs. Ruskin, what happened next?”

  She told how she slid behind the wheel and Mr. McCoy got in the passenger seat, and she sped off, very nearly hitting the young man who had escaped injury when Mr. McCoy was driving. Once they were safely back on the expressway, she had wanted to report the incident to the police. But Mr. McCoy would have none of it.

  “Why was he reluctant to report what had happened?”

  “He said he was driving when it happened, and so it was his decision to make, and he wasn’t going to report it.”

  “Yes, but he must have offered a reason.”

  “He said it was just an incident in the jungle, and it wouldn’t do any good to report it anyway, and he didn’t want word to get back to his employer and his wife. I think he was more worried about his wife.”

  “Knowing that he had hit someone with his car?”

  “Knowing that he had picked me up at the airport.” Eyes downcast.

  “And that was reason enough not to report that a young man had been struck and, as it turns out, gravely injured?”

  “Well—I don’t know. I don’t know everything that was on his mind.” Softly; sadly.

  Very good, Maria Teresa! An able pupil! Most becoming, to confess the limits of your knowledge!

  And thus the lovely Widow Ruskin sank Mr. Sherman McCoy like a stone.

  Kramer left the grand-jury room in the state of bliss known chiefly to athletes who have just won a great victory. He tried hard to suppress a smile.

  “Hey, Larry!”

  Bernie Fitzgibbon was hurrying toward him down the hall. Good! Now he had a war story and a half for the black Irishman.

  But before he could get out the first word about his triumph, Bernie said, “Larry, have you seen this?”

  He thrust a copy of The City Light toward him.

  Quigley, who had just come in, picked up The City Light from Killian’s desk and read it for himself. Sherman sat beside the desk in the miserable fiberglass armchair and averted his eyes, but he could still see it, the front page.

  A band across the top read: EXCLUSIVE! NEW MCCOY CASE SHOCKER!

  On the upper left-hand side of the page was a picture of Maria in a low-cut dress with the tops of her breasts welling up and her lips parted. The picture was set into a headline of enormous black type that read:

  Come

  Into My

  Rent-Controlled

  Love Nest!

  Below, a band of smaller type:

  Millionairess Maria Entertained

  Mccoy In $331-A-Month Tryst

  Pad By Peter Fallow.

  Killian was behind the desk, leaning back in his swivel chair and studying Sherman’s gloomy face.

  “Look,” said Killian, “don’t worryboudit. It’s a sleazy story, but it don’t hurt our case any. Maybe it helps. It tends to undermine her credibility. She comes off looking like a hooker.”

  “That’s very true,” said Quigley, in a voice that was supposed to be encouraging. “We already know where she was when her husband was dying. She was in Italy shacked up with some kid named Filippo. And now here’s this guy Winter saying she had guys up there all the time. This Winter’s a prince, ain’t he, Tommy?”

  “A real lovable landlord,” said Killian. Then to Sherman: “If Maria rats you out, then this can only help. Not a lot, but some.”

  “I’m not thinking about the case,” said Sherman. He sighed and let his great chin sink down to his collarbone. “I’m thinking about my wife. This will do it. I think she’d halfway forgiven me, or at least she was going to be with me, she was going to keep our family together. But this will do it.”

  “You got involved with a high-class hooker,” said Killian. “It happens all the time. It’s not that big a deal.”

  Hooker? To his own surprise, Sherman felt an urge to defend Maria. But what he said was: “Unfortunately, I swore to my wife that I’d never…never done anything but flirt with her once or twice.”

  “You really think she believed that?” said Killian.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Sherman. “I swore that was the truth, and then I asked her to forgive me. I made a big point of it. And now she learns with the rest of New York, with the rest of the world, from the front page of a tabloid, that I was…I don’t know…” He shook his head.

  “Well, it wasn’t as if it was anything serious,” said Quigley. “The woman’s a high-class hooker, like Tommy says.”

  “Don’t call her that,” said Sherman in a low, melancholy voice, without looking at Quigley. “She’s the only decent person in this whole mess.”

  Killian said, “She’s so decent she’s gonna rat you out, if she ain’t already done it.”

  “She was prepared to do the right thing,” said Sherman. “I’m convinced of that, and I shoved her good instincts right back in her face.”

  “Gedoudahere. I don’t believe I’m listening to this.”

  “She didn’t call me up and ask me to meet her in that apartment in order to do me in. I went there wired…to do her in. What did she have to gain by seeing me? Nothing. Her lawyers probably told her to have nothing to do with me.”

  Killian nodded. “That’s true.”

  “But that isn’t the way Maria’s mind works. She isn’t cautious. She isn’t going to turn legalistic, just because she’s in a tight corner. I once told you her medium was men, and that’s the truth, just the way a…a…a dolphin’s medium is the sea.”

  “Would you settle for a shark?” said Killian.

  “No.”

  “Okay, have it your way. She’s a mermaid.”

  “You can call her what you want. But I’m convinced that whatever she was going to do in this case concerning me, a man she’d been involved with, she wasn’t goi
ng to do it behind a screen of lawyers—and she wasn’t going to come wired…for evidence. Whatever was going to happen, she wanted to see me, be next to me, have a real talk with me, an honest talk, not some game with words—and go to bed with me. You may think I’m crazy, but that’s exactly what she wanted to do.”

  Killian just raised his eyebrows.

  “I also believe she didn’t go to Italy to duck out of this case. I think she went for exactly the reason she said. To get away from her husband…and from me…and I don’t blame her…and to go have fun with a good-looking boy. You can call that being a hooker if you want, but she’s the only one in this whole thing who’s walked in a straight line.”

  “That’s a neat trick, walking on your back,” said Killian. “What’s C. S. Lewis’s emergency night-line number? We got a whole new concept of morality going here.”

  Sherman drove his fist into his hand. “I can’t believe what I’ve done. If I had only played it straight with her! Me!—with my pretensions of respectability and propriety! And now look at this.”

  He picked up The City Light, more than ready to drown himself in his public shame. “ ‘Love nest’…‘tryst pad’…a picture of the very bed where ‘the millionairess Maria entertained McCoy’…This is what my wife picks up, she and a couple of million other people…and my daughter…My little girl’s almost seven. Her little friends will be perfectly capable of filling her in on what all this means…and ready and eager…You can be sure of that…Imagine. That sonofabitch, Winter, he’s so slimy he takes the press in to take a picture of the bed!”

  Quigley said, “They’re wild men, Mr. McCoy, these landlords in the rent-controlled buildings. They’re maniacs. They got one thing on their minds from morning to night, and that’s getting tenants out. Ain’t no Sicilian hates anybody worse than a rent-control landlord hates his tenants. They think the tenants are stealing their life’s blood. They go crazy. This guy sees Maria Ruskin’s picture in the paper, and she’s got a twenty-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, and he flips out and goes running to the newspaper.”

  Sherman opened the newspaper to page 3, where the full story began. There was a picture of the front of the brownstone. Another picture of Maria, looking young and sexy. A picture of Judy looking old and haggard. Another picture of himself…and his aristocratic chin…and a big grin…

  “That’ll do it,” he said to himself, but loud enough for Killian and Quigley to hear. Sinking, sinking, diving down into his shame…Reading aloud:

  “ ‘Winter said he had information that Mrs. Ruskin was paying $750 a month under the table to the actual leaseholder, Germaine Boll, who then paid the $331 controlled rent.’ That’s true,” said Sherman, “but I wonder how he knew it? Maria didn’t tell him, and I’m sure Germaine didn’t tell him. Maria mentioned it to me once, but I never mentioned it to a soul.”

  “Where?” asked Quigley.

  “Where what?”

  “Where were you when she told you about it?”

  “I was…It was the last time I was in the apartment. It was the day the first story came out in The City Light. It was the day that big lunatic, that Hasidic monster, came barging in.”

  “Ayyyy,” said Quigley. A smile spread over his face. “You see it, Tommy?”

  “No,” said Killian.

  “Well, I do,” said Quigley. “I could be wrong, but I think I see it.”

  “See what?”

  “That sneaky sonofabitch,” said Quigley.

  “Whaddaya talking about?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Quigley, still grinning. “Right now I’m going over there.”

  He left the room and went walking down the corridor at a good clip.

  “What’s he doing?” asked Sherman.

  “I’m not sure,” said Killian.

  “Where’s he going?”

  “I don’t know. I let him do what he wants. Quigley is a force of nature.”

  Killian’s telephone rang, and the receptionist’s voice came over the intercom. “It’s Mr. Fitzgibbon on 3–0.”

  “I’ll take it,” said Killian, and he picked up the telephone. “Yeah, Bernie?”

  Killian listened, with his eyes looking down, but every now and then they turned up and picked out Sherman. He took some notes. Sherman could feel his heart starting to bang away.

  “On what theory?” said Killian. He listened a bit more. “That’s bullshit, and you know it…Yeah, well, I’m…I’m…What?…Whose part’s it going into?…Unh hunh…” After a while he said, “Yeah, he’ll be there.” He looked up at Sherman when he said that. “Okay. Thanks, Bernie.”

  He hung up and said to Sherman, “Well…the grand jury has returned an indictment against you. She ratted you out.”

  “He told you that?”

  “No. He can’t talk about what goes on inside the grand jury. But he put it there between the lines.”

  “What does this mean? What happens now?”

  “The first thing that happens is, tomorrow morning the D.A. petitions the court to set higher bail.”

  “Higher bail? How can they do that?”

  “The theory is that now that you’ve been indicted, you’ll have an increased motivation to flee the jurisdiction of the court.”

  “But that’s absurd!”

  “Of course it is, but that’s what they’re doing, and you got to be there for it.”

  A terrible realization was beginning to come over Sherman. “How much will they ask for?”

  “Bernie don’t know, but it’ll be a lot. Half a million. A quarter of a million, anyway. Some bullshit figure. It’s just Weiss playing for the headlines, playing for the black vote.”

  “But—can they actually put it that high?”

  “It all depends on the judge. The hearing’s before Kovitsky, who’s also the supervising judge of the grand jury. He’s got a pair a stones. With him, at least you got a fighting chance.”

  “But if they do it—how long do I have to raise the money?”

  “How long? As soon as you post the bond, you’re out.”

  “I’m out?” Terrible realization—“What do you mean, out?”

  “Out of custody.”

  “But why would I be in custody?”

  “Well, as soon as a new bail is set, you’re in custody until you post bond, unless you post it immediately.”

  “Wait a minute, Tommy. You don’t mean that if they raise my bail tomorrow morning, they put me in custody immediately, right there, as soon as the bail is set?”

  “Well, yeah. But don’t jump to conclusions.”

  “You mean they take me right there in the courtroom?”

  “Yeah, if—but don’t—”

  “Take me and put me where?”

  “Well, the Bronx House of Dentention, probably. But the point is—”

  Sherman began shaking his head. He felt as if the lining of his skull were inflamed. “I can’t do that, Tommy.”

  “Don’t immediately assume the worst! There’s things we can do.”

  Still shaking his head: “There’s no way I can get half a million dollars this afternoon and put it in a bag.”

  “I’m not talking”—tawkin—“about anything like that, f’r Chrissake. It’s a bail hearing. The judge has to hear the arguments. We got a good argument.”

  “Oh sure,” said Sherman. “You said yourself the thing’s a political football.” He hung his head and shook it some more. “Jesus Christ, Tommy, I can’t do it.”

  Ray Andriutti was whaling down his pepperoni and his coffee swill, and Jimmy Caughey held half a roast-beef hero up in the air like a baton while he talked to somebody on the telephone about some piece a shit he’d been assigned to. Kramer wasn’t hungry. He kept reading the story in The City Light. He was fascinated. Rent-controlled love nest, $331 a month. The revelation didn’t really affect the case much one way or the other. Maria Ruskin wouldn’t come off as quite the sympathetic little lovely who had wowed them in the grand-jury room, but she’d make a
good witness all the same. And when she did her “Shuhmun” duet with Roland Auburn, he’d have Sherman McCoy cocked and locked. Rent-controlled love nest, $331 a month. Did he dare call Mr. Hiellig Winter? Why not? He should interview him in any case…see if he can amplify the relationship of Maria Ruskin and Sherman McCoy as it pertains to…to…to rent-controlled love nest, $331 a month.

  Sherman walked out of the living room and into the entry gallery and listened to the sound of his shoes on the solemn green marble. Then he turned and listened to himself walking across the marble to the library. In the library there was still one lamp, by a chair, that he hadn’t turned on. So he turned it on. The entire apartment, both floors, was blazing with light and throbbing with stillness. His heart was working away at a good clip. In custody—tomorrow they would put him back in there! He wanted to cry out, but there was no one in this vast apartment to cry out to; nor anyone outside it.

  He thought of a knife. In the abstract, it was so steely efficient, a long kitchen knife. But then he tried to enact it in his mind. Where would he thrust it in? Could he stand it? What if he made a bloody mess of it? Throw himself out a window. How long before he hit the pavement from this height? Seconds…interminable seconds…in which he would think of what? Of what it would do to Campbell, of how he was taking the coward’s way out. Was he even serious about it? Or was this just superstitious speculation, in which he presumed if he thought of the worst he could bear…the actual…back in there? No, he couldn’t bear it.

  He picked up the telephone and called the number in Southampton again. No answer; there had been no answer all evening, despite the fact that, according to his mother, Judy and Campbell, Bonita, Miss Lyons, and the dachshund had left the house on East Seventy-third Street for Southampton before noon. Had his mother seen the newspaper article? Yes. Had Judy seen it? Yes. His mother hadn’t even been able to bring herself to comment on it. It was too sordid to discuss. Then how much worse it had been for Judy! She hadn’t gone to Southampton at all! She had decided to disappear, taking Campbell with her…to the Midwest…back to Wisconsin…A flash of memory…the bleak plains punctuated only by silvery aluminum water towers, in the shape of modernistic mushrooms, and clumps of wispy trees…A sigh…Campbell would be better off there than in New York living with the degraded memory of a father who in fact no longer existed…a father cut off from everything that defined a human being, except his name, which was now that of a villainous cartoon that newspapers, television, and slanderers of every sort were free to make sport of as they saw fit…Sinking, sinking, sinking, he gave himself up to ignominy and self-pity…until on about the twelfth ring someone picked up the telephone.