by Sarah Blake
“Shall I leave?”
“No, no. Stay. It’ll be good for you two to meet.”
“Good for me?” Moss asked casually.
Ogden paused. “Yes, Moss. And for him, I expect, as well.”
“Good of you to say.”
Ogden ignored Moss’s irony.
“Yes, all right.” He nodded to Mrs. Meecham, who had poked her head around the door. “Send him in.”
Ogden had been out of the country when Proc Smedley had telegrammed to advise that the firm should snap up Len Levy. You won’t be sorry, Smedley had written. Hell, you might even make him a partner. Smedley had good instincts, always had, and proof in the pudding was that Len Levy had been at his desk only six weeks, and already he’d made an appointment with Ogden.
Ballsy? You bet, Ogden thought to himself, buttoning his jacket with one hand as he made his way around the desk.
“Sir?”
“Come in, Levy,” Ogden said. “Come in.”
On first glance, Levy was a big fellow, substantial, clean-cut, and with a disarming grin, a firm handshake, and a ready nod in response to Ogden’s invitation to sit.
“This is my son, Moss. Moss, Mr. Levy.”
“Glad to meet you.” Moss held out his hand.
“Mr. Milton.” Len shook his hand.
Moss grimaced. “Moss. Please.”
“Moss will be coming to work for us in September,” Ogden said, his eyes on his son. “You may find yourselves at neighboring desks. I’ve promised Moss this one last summer before the ax.”
“The ax?” Len raised his eyebrows.
Moss threw himself into the other chair in front of Ogden’s desk. “That’s right. The chopper. The clamp.”
And a job, thought Len.
Ogden moved from the window, where he glimpsed again, just before turning, the far triangle of that sail, past the channel marker and heading out to sea.
“Do you sail, Levy?” he asked.
“Sir?”
“Sailing.” Ogden rounded the desk on his way back to his chair. “Do you sail?”
“I don’t.”
Ogden sat.
“I rowed in college, though,” Len offered.
“Sit.” Ogden gestured to him. “What seat? Stroke, I imagine; you’ve got the shoulders.”
“Number two seat, actually.”
Ogden raised his eyebrows. The lighter weights were usually set in the bow of the boat.
“We were a big eight,” Len observed with a slight smile.
Ogden nodded. “Columbia?”
“That’s right.”
“I hope you weren’t on the crew that beat Harvard in ’fifty-four?” asked Moss.
Len shook his head. “I was still in Korea in ’fifty-four.”
“The army?”
“Yes,” Len said. He didn’t offer any more.
But there was more to tell, Ogden reflected. He was struck by a quite unusual calm in the young man, not seeming to need, as many men his age did, to explain himself. As if he had been born to the spot where he’d arrived, as if there was nothing whatsoever in his way. And not for the first time Ogden considered it was this single trait that guaranteed the result.
“That’s all right, then,” he joked. “I’m afraid there wouldn’t be a spot here long for a victorious Lion.”
“Understood,” said Len, smiling and pushing slightly back in the chair, his hands on his knees.
What had he understood? Ogden wondered.
“Interrupting a party, am I?” Jack Higginson poked his head through the doorway.
“Hello, Jack.” Ogden greeted his partner with an inward sigh.
Jack slid forward, hand extended, dressed in bow tie and blue blazer as though he had blown in here on the way to the Yacht Club. Moss and Len rose to their feet.
“Hello, Moss.” Jack gripped his arm.
“And—Levy? What brings you up here?”
“I had an idea I wanted to run by Mr. Milton,” Len answered smoothly, “but as long as I’ve got you both here—”
He is ballsy, thought Ogden.
“That’s my cue, I think,” said Moss.
“Stay, Moss,” Ogden pressed. “I’d like you to hear Levy’s idea.”
Moss glanced at Len and sat back down.
“Fire away,” Ogden said, ignoring his partner’s surprise.
“Please.” Jack Higgins pointed and then settled himself in Len’s emptied chair.
For the first time, Levy seemed to hesitate. Ogden wondered whether it was nerves, or whether it was the wind-up to the punch. And realized how he relished this uncertainty. He hadn’t been so taken with anyone in a long while.
Len remained on his feet. “Milton Higginson is one of the great investment banks, one of the oldest—”
Jack nodded, catching Ogden’s eye.
“And one of the best, extending its influence all over the country, advising all sorts of companies, from small to quite large.”
He paused.
“But Milton Higginson is missing a piece of the pie.”
Here we go. Moss smothered a smile.
“In every one of these companies, there are employees,” Len observed, “men who could certainly be advised toward entering the stock market.”
“What’s that?” Jack exclaimed. “The employees?”
Len nodded. “It seems to me, sir, that they form a vastly untapped market for our expertise. We already advise banks where to invest; why not the men—and women for that matter, why not the secretaries, too—who work here?”
“That extends quite far past our reach,” Jack warned.
Len nodded. “That’s the point, sir. What if you went past the usual parties? Opened other avenues. Created more clientele.”
“Interesting idea,” Ogden offered. “You are suggesting that ordinary people inside banks—clerks, accountants, even janitors—might enter the stock market.”
“And we’d advise them.”
“It’s brilliant.” Moss pushed himself forward. “Open up Wall Street. Invite anyone in—”
Len nodded at him, surprised.
“My son,” Ogden observed with a slight smile, “appears to be a Democrat.”
“That’s all very well,” sniffed Jack, “but that’s not what this firm does.”
Len fixed his eyes on Ogden. “You wouldn’t be sorry.”
“Of course not,” Ogden said with a gleam in his eye. “Because I haven’t promised you a damn thing.”
“But you listened.”
And in that moment Ogden realized the force of the younger man’s strength, that the proposal Len Levy had just made was only the start, that Levy had leashed himself up until now, and that he had just slightly loosened his grip on the leash at that moment. He smiled.
“That I did,” he said. “But then, I always make it a habit to listen.” And he held out his hand.
If he heard the warning, Levy didn’t heed it. He was, Ogden saw, going to keep pushing, and without thinking, without really understanding why, Ogden stood, his hand out.
“We will talk again,” he promised, and caught the brief flicker of disappointment on the younger man’s face.
“Yes, sir. I hope so,” replied Len, shaking Ogden’s hand, and then turning to Jack Higginson, shaking his hand as well.
“Listen,” Ogden said.
Len paused and turned around.
“We’re glad to have you on board,” Ogden finished, though it hadn’t been what he meant to say.
“Thank you.” Len was serious. “I mean to contribute.”
“Good man.” Ogden nodded, an idea rising to mind.
“Put yourself on Mrs. Meecham’s docket in the next week, why don’t you? She can show you down to the file room. There’s a record of everything we’ve ever done, stuffed in boxes. Why don’t you get in there and dig around.” He leaned forward, smiling. “See if there are any likely candidates for your idea in the businesses we hold. Make me a list.”
There. He
had handed Levy something. He had shown the young man he had heard him.
Len’s face broke into a smile and he pulled open the door. “I will, sir. Thank you.”
Moss pushed himself up out of his chair. “I’ll walk out with you,” he said, and followed Len out the door.
“Good work in there,” he said.
Len glanced at him.
Moss nodded. “You’ve got the goods.”
Len grinned. “Thanks.”
The elevator door opened. Len put out his hand.
“I have people over every Friday night.” Moss shook it. “You should come by. Twenty-nine West Twelfth,” he said, stepping in. And the elevator door closed.
In Ogden’s office, the two older men remained sitting in quiet.
Jack whistled. “Cool customer.”
“I like him,” Ogden said, regarding Jack.
“But the man was proposing to send Milton Higginson into the public realm—”
“So it would seem.” Ogden was mild.
“That’s one step above hustling in my book.”
“Merrill Lynch works it.”
“We are not Merrill Lynch,” Jack asserted. “Thank God. Though a kike couldn’t be expected to see that we don’t advise employees.”
Stiffening, Ogden turned all his attention to the man in the blue blazer across from him.
“What was it you wanted to see me about, Jack?”
“Addie wanted to know whether you and Kitty might make nine and ten at the table at the club this Saturday?”
“I’ll see what Kitty’s got planned.”
“Right-o,” said Jack, and heaved himself up out of the chair.
“Looks like rain,” he noted, looking out the window behind Ogden. “Give us a break from this hellish heat.”
The door closed behind him and Ogden remained where he sat. Jack Higginson was a fool.
It had been more than twenty years since he’d hired Solly Weinberg, and Ogden had never regretted it. He’d hired what he saw as pure genius for investment. Not a Jew.
He leaned back in his chair. He believed in fairness. A good man could come from anywhere. Ogden had no illusions about birth. No matter how far back, no matter how much money, there had always been one man who made that move from stable to sitting room, men who were born seeing over the rim of their cradle. They were the hope of the world, and Ogden believed in a better world, built man by man.
And why should a Jew be any different? He shouldn’t. These young ones coming up through the Ivies were impressive as hell. They didn’t take no for an answer. They simply pushed past what was ordinary practice, asking questions like Why not? It was refreshing. The firm could use that.
He had spent the scant side of a half hour with this young man, and yet he wanted him around, still more, wanted Moss to work beside him. Levy could be a great influence on his son. Never mind who he was or where he was from.
If pressed, Ogden would have answered swiftly that he hadn’t fought the war to save the Jews. He’d gone to war to fight Hitler, to save England and France. What had happened to the Jews had happened inside a war already so full of slaughter and brutality, it had been hard to see it clearly. No matter what Dunc insisted, no matter what Dunc had said, what happened to the Jews at the time could not have been helped. One did the best one could with the information one had. And then one gave a leg up when one could. It was the right thing; it was the decent thing. The war was over, and now one’s duty was to help where help was needed. Though he was certain that the young man who had just walked through his door would despise that kind of attention. A leg up smacked of weakness. And this man, who appeared every inch Ogden Milton’s match, did not seem to need anything Ogden could give, except perhaps an open door.
Which is what I can give him. Ogden returned his attention to the papers on the desk before him. Which is why he’ll do fine.
* * *
UPTOWN, JOAN MILTON finished the letter she was typing and pulled it out of the roller. The afternoon sun had moved from the end of her desk to the middle of the office and made a hot patch in the old carpet there. Soon it would creep up the front of Whit Lord’s desk and into his eyes, and he’d reach for his sunglasses and put them on, still talking, or reading, or smoking, without a pause. Just past the doorway to this room was the hall and the closet office where Mr. Rosset’s desk was and where he spent the bulk of time, his feet crossed and up on his desk, leaning back in his chair. She could just see the tips of his shoes now.
The office had fallen into an eerie quiet waiting for the decision from the judge to come down. And though the press had other titles to attend to on its list, there was the sense in here of an army at ease, hats tossed off, belts loosened, guns and swords dropped by the boots. Any moment they would hear whether they’d been shut down, or had changed the game.
“Words are nothing but clothes,” Mr. Rosset had said to her early on in the job—“sewn in a specific time by a specific hand. We don’t, for instance, wear codpieces anymore, or bustles, or cinch tight our waists. Lawrence takes off the clothes. Lawrence shows us to see without veils. The body in love has always been clothed by words that try to conceal. You can’t suppress or conceal by concealing, he said. And if we win this, if we get the ban lifted, then we’ve shifted the lens, we’ve shown the lens for what it is: obscenity is the clothing, not the body.”
Joan had nodded and listened and did not ask the question his little treatise begged.
But he had tipped forward in his chair and chuckled. “You don’t agree, do you?”
She looked back at him and shook her head.
“Good,” he said. “Tell me why.”
“It seems to me we need clothing,” she’d retorted. “We can’t simply be naked.”
“Why not?” he’d returned.
She had yet to find an answer.
“I’m going,” she called out now to his shoes on the desk.
“Coming back?” Whit Lord drawled.
She paused and looked at him.
“Ouch.” He put his sunglasses on and dipped his head at her.
“Miss Milton?” Barney Rosset called.
“Yes, sir?”
There came the sound of two feet hitting the floor in the inner office.
“Miss Milton?”
“Yes.” She moved toward the closet, where Mr. Rosset appeared in the doorway. “I’m here.”
He looked at her. “Where is it you are going right now?”
She raised her chin. “My sister is—”
“Oh, right, right.” Her boss waved her off. “Dresses. Mothers—”
She hesitated.
“Go.” He turned back to his desk impatiently. “Go on. Very important stuff.”
She flushed and made for the door. He’d dismissed her like a child.
“For god’s sake, Milton,” Whit teased quietly as she passed his desk. “He’s kidding.”
She nodded tightly and didn’t answer.
It was going to pour, she saw as she made her way out the door, and she had forgotten her umbrella under her desk upstairs.
Never mind, she thought, pushing out into it.
* * *
AND INDEED, WITHIN minutes, the afternoon cascaded into a summer rain. The skies plummeted down from the tops of the gray buildings and the rain spattered on the pavement in castanets of water, snapping out a beat. And inside Mr. Bacharach’s photography studio, Kitty Milton was waiting for her daughters, worried they’d be caught in it.
At fifty-four, she had the lean, upright lines she’d always had, her lovely head now crowned with silver hair upon its long neck. She had aged like a dancer, graceful, elegant, altogether on point. If this was the woman she had grown into, she thought, well, all right.
She sank deeper into one of the cushioned chairs beneath the sound of the rain, glad of a little time before the girls came, unsettled by her lunch with Priss Houghton just now.
They had gone to the Colony Club as they often did, meeting in
the city for lunch. Priss was early, waiting for Kitty in one of the rose-colored club chairs perennially turned toward another, suggesting bent heads and whispers and smiles. During the day the front room filled with women, their packages and cigarettes, their hats and gloves. Coffee, lunch, tea, the club’s room was the place no one had to organize or pick up, no one had to decide on whether the chairs needed recovering; it simply continued in the manner it had since they had all been children there and first allowed at tea with their grannies. The room persevered with a profound, immutable calm made possible, Kitty had long ago decided, by the gold satin underlining of the curtains. On a sunny day, the light through the tall windows shimmered through that fabric, slanting its gold along the ivory walls and calling up the summer hours between meals, the gully of the afternoon when men took to hammocks and women to sitting in the shade.
Priss had risen as Kitty came into the room, and if one didn’t know her, one might take in the skirt and loafers on this sweet muffin of a woman and mistake the round edges for comfort, or ease. But Kitty could see that Priss was holding herself very carefully.
One’s fifties were cruel, Kitty thought as they were seated at the little round table, pulling her napkin onto her lap. Every sorrow holds lightly on, every regret. Right there for all to see. Poor Priss. It would have been better for her if Dunc had died in the war. Something had been taken from him then, some essential thing Kitty couldn’t ever put her finger on. He hadn’t failed on the money front—they were perfectly well-off, she was pretty sure of that—but he hadn’t held steady. He had returned without his pit, the stone at his center. And he’d never gotten it back.
“What is it?” she asked quietly.
Priss placed her hands on either side of the fork and knife, studying the cloth.“How is Ogden?” she asked.
Kitty looked at her. “Fine.”
“And Moss?”
“Well,” Kitty said.
“The girls?”
“Priss.” Kitty was soft. “What is it?”
Priss moved the knife along the cloth absentmindedly, opening wide the place setting. Kitty watched her friend’s face.
“Can one die from remembering?” Priss kept her eyes on the cloth. “Because I think Dunc is dying.”
