I expected fury. Instead, he slumped against the table as if socked in the stomach. He barely kept his feet. He pulled himself hand over hand along the table’s edge like a man at the rail of a tossing ship. When he came to the next chair, he collapsed in it. Without looking at me, he asked if the adoption could be voided.
“It’s signed and delivered. I wouldn’t want to anyway.”
“Your child. Your flesh and blood.”
“And yours.”
“Is it revenge against me? Is that what it is? My God, Philip, I’ve admitted I was wrong.”
“It’s for the baby’s sake. I’m not fit to be its father. We aren’t fit to be its family.”
“But to cast him aside!”
“He’s with his mother and her family, who love him. They’re quality. Well-to-do. And Jewish.”
“Am I supposed to see irony in that?”
“I do.”
“You are a chilly bastard.”
“Maybe it’s genetic.”
“No!” He slapped the table. “It can’t be true.” He raised his hand and pointed between my eyes. “You’ll regret it. You will die regretting it.”
“I believe you.”
The bridge between us burned. Father now possessed the supreme revelation men deserve at the end of their lives—the last piece of the puzzle, the nail in the coffin. I’d broken his heart after my breakdown had started to heal it. I truly believed he didn’t want it healed. I believed this because I thought I understood him, because I thought we were alike.
There was a very long silence. Sounds of office activity filtered through the closed door. The spinning space capsule of our tortured privacy landed and went still. Father wiped his eyes a last time, his voice as brittle as glass: “You will tell no one. You have no son. You never had a son. Your life before today is a legal issue, and once that’s settled, a dead issue.”
“That’s your style. Not mine.”
“Please. Have pity. You’ll be free of me soon enough.”
“I am sorry.”
He stared at me—aghast, amazed—then spit out a laugh that froze my bones. “I believe you think you are. Now,” he continued with a punctuating grunt, “you’ll start at $15,000 a year. For your office, there’s a storeroom we can convert …”
My head spun at the change of subject. Soon I matched his officiousness and proceeded with him, in the manner of gentlemen, to strangle all but the thinnest stream of communication between us. We’d shared deep truths of ourselves, the deepest being that we would share nothing in the future; the result was honest and rare, if bizarre. We sat at the table and plotted the rest of my professional life. Had we embraced and wept together we could not have been closer in spirit.
23
Of course, I hadn’t surrendered my son. Yet conceiving the lie had seemed inspired and fulfilling it imperative; a price was due in order to rectify Father’s retreat from the truth of himself. For the sake of honor, I told myself. His, not mine. My honor doesn’t concern me. It’s a dead man’s consolation.
I phoned my ex-lawyer Jeffrey Masters and told him I would yield to Susan all rights to our child. “Gershom, too?” he asked. “They’re back together.”
“Sure,” I said without hesitation.
Jeffrey explained that adoption takes time. My letter of renunciation of parental rights would begin the process. I told him to write it, I’d sign when I returned to vacate my apartment. My resolve never wavered. Susan’s insistence that I never see the baby had been wise. Women’s instincts are a marvel when it comes to cutting ties.
A week later I made the trip to Providence. I met Nick and Melina Bakes to complete the sale of my building. They’d buried Frank not long before. Our closing was civil and cold. The money they paid me went straight to the government. From there I went to Jeffrey’s to sign the renunciation papers. Waiting with him in his office was Gershom Graulig. He wore his yarmulke, work boots, and overalls, ever the Diaspora peasant. “I thought we should meet,” he said stiffly.
A typewritten document lay in triplicate on Jeffrey’s desk. Beside the papers was an uncapped pen. Without a word I signed.
“I want you to know,” Gershom said, “that your—that the baby—will have a good life.”
“That’s a big promise.”
“He’ll have every benefit, is what I mean.”
“So did I.” This came out more seriously than I’d intended it. I asked him, “What’s he look like, anyhow?”
Gershom glanced at the lawyer.
“Relax,” I said. “The paper’s signed. I’m not gonna renege.”
“At birth he looked like Menachem Begin. But already he’s favoring Susan.”
“And his name?”
Jeffrey cut in: “I think personal questions are a bad idea.”
“His name is Sholem,” Gershom said. “His middle name is Philip. He can go with either, later. As he wishes.”
I stammered, “I’m surprised you’d pick Philip. I don’t know why you would have.”
“It was Susan’s father’s name.”
“Now I know.”
“It’s also the baby’s father’s name.”
My chest hurt. The room began the spinning-capsule thing. I could stop it only one way. “The baby’s father’s name is Gershom.”
He stepped toward me, his voice quavering as he began his speech. “About before, when we first met that time? I’m sorry.”
“Ah. The ol’ spit-in-the-eye routine.”
“It was the worst thing I ever did. I apologize sincerely.”
I shook his extended hand. Then I got out of there fast.
Several years later I tried, through Jeffrey, to set up a trust fund for Sholem. Susan and Gershom answered thanks but no thanks, I’m sure suspecting an attempt to worm in. But by then I’d accepted the loss of my son, was even rather proud of having given him up. I’d done the right thing for the wrong reasons. There are worse epitaphs.
24
My father went into a coma four months later. Gone for all intents and purposes, he lay quiet for weeks, barely breathing. Then in a macabre revival, he flailed his arms, kicked off the sheets, and gave occasional bone-chilling moans during his last few days alive. Mother and I took turns at his bedside. Father’s secretary, Doris Zuppa, who probably knew him as well as anyone did, sometimes relieved us for a spell. He died on Doris’s shift on a Tuesday afternoon.
The SEC hadn’t yet formally barred me from trading, so I was at Stalls Associates watching my stock in Alpha Partners plummet. (Tipped onto Alpha by Father’s oncologist, I’d bought the stock with money borrowed from Mother.) The company’s bankruptcy announcement and Doris’s phone call came minutes apart. “We’re done,” was how she broke the news to me. Her words seemed rather too casual, as if seeing a man die wasn’t new to her. It opened my eyes to the possibility that beneath this woman’s efficient reserve might lie a whole bunch of secrets.
Doris had begun working at Stalls Associates when I was thirteen and she was just out of secretarial school. She’d immediately got on my bad side by noting to Father my “kind of cute” habit of sending fan letters to TV meteorologists. Nor had she endeared herself to me during my wrangles with Stalls Associates in 1980, rebuffing my phone calls, deflecting my fury with insubordinate blather like “Philip, might it be just a phase?” Doris was a master of gracious expedience in cleaning Stalls messes wherever they happened, discreetly posting bail for relatives jailed for drunk driving, wiring money to casinos all over the world to cover someone’s gambling debts. Naturally, I’d wondered if Father was sleeping with her; during puberty I thought everyone was sleeping with everyone else, except me. But Doris and Father together? Unlikely, not least because it seemed to be something that would have done each of them good.
One of Doris’s specialities was planning funerals. Father’s was a substantial affair. Per his request, the readings were from the New Testament. Two eulogies were given. Stalls Rayburn spoke of Father’s love of his adoptive family and nati
on. The minister who’d baptized him in the hospital last year extolled Father’s love of Jesus.
There were men among the pallbearers whose names you’d recognize. Father’s ashes were placed in the Stalls family plot, an impressive parcel of monuments and greenery edged with a low granite wall. A stone obelisk dedicated to the patriarch, Samuel Stalls, stands in the center of the plot. “We’re the best,” is a popular toast at family gatherings. My younger cousins say it jokingly, thinking the idea passé and elitist. But they, like me, no doubt will clamor to be buried within this fancy enclosure when the time comes, for if it affords little else these days, our birthright entitles us not to lie in potter’s fields or anonymous pits, small comfort till you lose it. Reminding my cousins of exactly this fact would be part of my job as family liaison in the coming years. I would counsel conservatism, a defensive posture. I would preach the granite wall.
Looking back now, I believe I performed those duties with diligence but also with sensitivity. I know that youth must have its head at least to the precipice. I sought compromise with those cousins who itched for control of their money. I offered to work with them in their heartfelt projects—the movie they wanted to finance, the homeless shelter, the dreamhouse, the get-richer-quick scheme, the eradication of world hunger—gently steering them toward the awareness that such dreams are pitfalls, traps set by people with less.
As family liaison I was confessor to my young cousins, marriage and drug counselor, friend and bitter enemy. I put private investigators on their prospective spouses and business associates, even on my cousins themselves whom I suspected of gross immaturity. Ego was not involved. I was gratified to enlighten them about the duplicitous ways of the world; beyond that I took no pleasure. Indeed, I was left quite cold by it all, by the constant upwelling of hope and naiveté that I was obligated to squash. I often felt bored and depressed. Still, I strove to maintain the polished demeanor people had come to expect of me—come to expect especially since my father’s funeral, when I buried the esteemed gentleman in the afternoon and hosted a thousand mourners at a catered reception that evening. A standard was set that day, a sort of scepter passed.
At the reception many visitors complimented my staunch bearing. In truth I’d been inspired to it earlier that day. Mother and I had been standing at graveside, listening to the minister drone assuringly beneath a whispery rainfall. She held the urn containing Father’s ashes in two gloved hands. When she knelt to deposit the urn in the ground, I mumbled, to myself I thought, “Someone ought to say Kaddish.” At my ear, very softly, came this:
“Kaddish.”
I turned to discover Doris Zuppa standing close behind me, stretching to keep a black umbrella over my mother. “I meant the prayer,” I said, taken aback by her intrusion.
“Do you know the words?” she asked me, the inappropriately blithe tone of her voice an intimate, even naughty under-layer to the minister’s harrowing “dust to dust” speech, like silk sheets beneath a shroud.
“Not a chance.”
“Let’s see …” She raised her chin as if preparing to recite for the classroom. “‘Hallowed be His great name, in the world He has created …’ That’s how it starts, I think.” Her voice was hushed, confiding. “‘May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life for us and for all Israel. Let us say, Amen.’ That’s the refrain,” she explained. “‘Let us say, Amen.’”
“‘Let us say, Amen,’” I repeated, fascinated. At which Mother, straightening beside me, brushing crumbs of dirt from her glove tips, joined in with a brave smile:
“Amen.”
So Kaddish, or at least a fragment of the Jewish memorial prayer, was spoken at Father’s interment courtesy of his loyal secretary, who, it turned out, had learned it during the many funerals she’d attended recently. In the few months since I’d returned home, I’d encountered Doris only at the office. Our graveside exchange, aptly blending reverence and irreverence, marked our first natural contact.
Mother wept hard as she and I climbed into the limousine together. “He was a good man,” she said. “He tried to be good.”
“You loved him. He loved you.” My rote condolences shamed me.
“Did you love him?”
“Aw, Mother, you know the answer to that.” I felt trembly, as if about to cry over the fact that I couldn’t cry. A son ought to love his father—be a sap for him first and admirable second, to paraphrase Carrie Donley. Through the car window I observed black-clad relatives climb into their automobiles. I resented the unqualified sorrow in their faces. It made me think there was something wrong with me.
I saw Doris Zuppa heading to her car. At once I conjured a phantasmagoric impression of a woman half Susan, half Carrie, overlaying it like a double exposure on the image of Doris as she trotted quickly through the rain. A man came into the picture behind her, bearded, frail, laboring to keep up with her. The impression made a dazzling fit with my memory of those women as I guessed he was Doris’s husband.
After that, it was easy to be gracious for my relatives at the funeral reception. I marveled at Doris’s deft performance as both employee and de facto hostess, Mother being medicated past any good use. Doris and I mingled singly among the guests while connecting by eye contact or familiar smiles whenever our paths crossed. She was thirty-three at the time, and in her dress of mourning looked a luminous forty. Her hair is black and her eyes are gray. Her manner is of a stylish gym teacher; to my mind it’s a casing, like a bullet’s brass, in which Doris barely contains potential she’s not proud of. From that day through my subsequent tenure as Stalls Associates’ family liaison, she was my beacon in a sea of blood relations. She was married, of course, so it was strictly hands off. You thought I was slipping, I know.
25
My first three years at Stalls Assciates saw the stock market boom incredibly. The Dow-Jones Industrials broke two thousand. The financial pages brimmed with success stories and profiles of glamorous capitalists. The media backlash against them would soon come, a gleeful yuppie-bashing occasioned by a really very few bad apples. Trend and countertrend are such quicksand. I was glad to be out of fashion.
I cut a strange and forbidding figure in those days—priestly, rather, with slicked-back hair and an unchanging daily uniform of a white shirt, silver necktie, and black suit. Between 1984 and 1987 I didn’t have sex, keeping chaste mainly out of idealization of Doris. I was saving myself for her—in vain, I knew. Bothered by guilt, as vague and persistent as a fingertip papercut, I needed to perform a correspondingly vague and persistent penance. Deluded rapture would serve.
My cousins pestered me with introductions to their daughters and nieces to a point where I got annoyed. When Stalls Rayburn tried to fix me up with his grandniece, I impulsively blurted that I was homosexual. “Oh?” he gulped. “My mistake.” He gave me no trouble, so the old guy deserves credit. Homosexual to him was an unspeakable word, like menstruation and Roosevelt.
By then I was running Stalls Associates as much by default as by ambition. During my SEC probation I never traded a dime in my own name, though I was controlling the investment of millions of dollars by 1987, when I turned twenty-seven. In the dearth of business-minded family members, older trustees had stayed past their effectiveness. They were pleased to pass their duties to me and remain on ceremoniously. I dominated investment meetings to everyone’s profit, my voice ever for caution, even during the market boom. I wasn’t happy, however. Living like a monk is fine if you’re rewarded with heaven; it gets old if that’s all there is. And the prospect of Mother as my life mate seemed a lonesome road indeed. You can imagine my feelings on hearing that Doris’s husband was terminally ill.
I didn’t know the man. I presumed that Doris’s existence outside the office was as meaningless as my own. I presumed her marriage, her past, her whole private life, were intervals of dormancy between moments spent near me. She worked only part time during the last months of her husband’s illness. I looked forward to her return to the offi
ce—meaning, frankly, that I looked forward to his death. I intended to ask her to be my personal secretary. But Doris gave notice two weeks after she buried him. She would stay on to train her replacement, then leave my life forever. I was stunned. I’d sent expensive flowers to the funeral home and arranged a hefty donation from Stalls Associates to the charity named in her husband’s obituary. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’d considered them investments.
In the days before she was scheduled to quit, I totally lost focus on work. I resisted urges to follow her home after work, peeling off her trail only at the subway entrance. Often I then wandered to the Common to feed the ducks and swans on the water, a contemplative habit I’d adopted in recent years. Others share it. During work hours on business days, many young professionals come down from their offices to the pond and plain of the Common like cave dwellers down from surrounding mountains. A few smoke dope or meet somebody’s spouse. Most, like me, feed the filthy waterfowl and in the process are refreshed. A number of us go there regularly. Like patrons of a porno theater, we’re humbled by our waywardness and rarely speak to one another, rarely make eye contact. Our moments on the Common aren’t moments of real life. Real life is lived in the mountains, in the caves we’re bound to return to.
One afternoon, after lying in ambush for her in the elevator, I asked Doris what she’d be doing in the future. “I’ll be managing an AIDS hospice in Newton. The money’s not much, but that’s not the point.”
“An AIDS hospice? Wow,” I chirped as if she’d said she would be starring in a Hollywood movie. “Stalls Associates is always looking for worthy charities—”
“For tax purposes, I know. In fact, I want to thank you for arranging that donation from Stalls Associates after my husband died. It was very generous.”
“Oh, was what where it went? I just told the accountants to send the money where the obit specified.”
“That’s how it works, I know. I made similar payments for your father all the time. But it’s appreciated just the same.”
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