Greenwich

by Howard Fast

  Frank Manelli did not find it irresistible. “I know, I know,” he said, “but I start my day with a program, Mrs. Castle. I try to give everyone a time. But it’s like when you go to the dentist. He tells you nine o’clock, and then he got a patient in his chair with twenty cavities. I never know what I’m gonna find, maybe easy, maybe two hours’ work.” He was a large, burly man in a stained T-shirt, and Sally would shudder a bit with the thought of anyone going to bed with that huge mass of bone and muscle.

  “But you are here, thank God,” Sally said.

  “Where is it?”

  “The powder room. That’s why I was so disturbed. My powder room. We have six guests coming to dinner tonight, and my powder room is an obscenity. I’m almost ashamed to show it to you.”

  Manelli hefted his bag of tools, stepped over to his truck, and reached in for a plunger. Then he followed Sally Castle to the front door and into the house. The entry was broad and spacious, the powder-room door to the left as one entered; a trickle of water coming through under the door.

  “Josie, Josie,” Sally wailed.

  Josie, a wan young black woman in a maid’s uniform, came running to her call.

  “Get some towels, please, Josie, and stop that dreadful stuff before it reaches the rug.” And to Manelli, “Can you just go in without me, Frank. I can’t stand the smell. It’s the toilet. I tell them not to use the powder room, but they do.”

  Manelli nodded, but waited a moment until Josie returned with an armful of towels. He took one from her and entered the powder room, closing the door behind him. His guess had been correct; the toilet had overflowed, and there were soft feces on the floor. He sighed, drove the plunger into the toilet several times, heard the suction break, and watched the water run down. He flushed the toilet, using the plunger as the water ran into the bowl. Then he used the towel to gather the mess. He flushed the toilet again to make certain that it was working properly. Then he stood in the powder room for a long moment, regarding his face in the mirror.

  “Shit,” he said softly. “Shit and more shit.”

  Josie was still mopping the floor when he emerged from the powder room, plunger in hand.

  “Did you fix it?” Sally pleaded.

  No, he thought, no, she didn’t do this to fuck you out of your mind. She’s got to be thirty-five or more, and she don’t know how a fuckin’ toilet works.

  “I fixed it,” he said. “Someone dropped a sanitary napkin or a paper diaper into the toilet. You can’t do that with this toilet.”

  “But, Frank, we have no infants here.”

  He shrugged and held up the plunger. “You know what this is?”

  She shook her head.

  “OK. I’ll show Josie how to use it. I’ll leave it in the kitchen. I’ll bring this towel in there.”

  She nodded. “Thank you, Frank, You saved my life.”

  He knew where the kitchen was. He knew everything in the house that had water running through it. What he didn’t expect to find in the kitchen was Abel Hunt, working at the huge eight-burner stove.

  “Fired?” he asked Abel. “Or did you switch to cooking for the rich?”

  “I always cook for the rich. The poor can’t afford decent food, much less cooks.”

  “I’m covered with shit,” Frank said sourly. “Where can I wash?”

  “Try that sink over there,” he said, pointing. “The club is having a ‘Japanese Night’ with a special chef doing the honors, so I pick up a few bucks off the books here and there.”

  Abel Hunt was a big man, six foot two inches and weighing in at two hundred and fifty pounds, a black man, dark as coal. The Hunts lived four houses away from the Manellis, in a section of Greenwich township called Chickahominy, a neighborhood that would have rated as decently lower middle anywhere else but in Greenwich, and where in the lunatic real-estate market of the nineties, a house could still be purchased for less than half a million dollars, and a black family or two could be found.

  Hunt had been born in South Carolina, which in his opinion, gastronomically speaking, was the first state in the Union. At Chapel Hill, he had refused a football scholarship, graduated among the top ten in his class, working his way through college as a short-order cook; and then, refusing an offer from General Motors to become what he called “a well-paid showcase nigger,” he had taken off for Paris via a thousand-dollar scholastic prize and enrolled himself at the Cordon Bleu. He supported himself with nightclub gigs, playing a tin whistle, and it was there that he met Delia, a lovely coffee-colored singer from New Orleans, whom he married.

  Offered a job as a pastry chef at the Hill Crest Club in Greenwich, he accepted it. Now, twenty years later, he was head chef at a salary of seventy thousand a year.

  Frank Manelli was drying his hands at the sink when Josie came into the kitchen wing with her mess of wet towels. Frank handed her the plunger, telling her to keep it handy. “You get a toilet won’t flush down, Josie, just drive this plunger into it, slow and firm. That’ll save me a trip out here to the Back Country.”

  Josie nodded. Both Abel Hunt and his assistant, Joseph, his nineteen-year-old son, who had just finished his first year as a pre-med student at Harvard, were smiling—slightly it must be said—and Frank said to them softly, “I don’t like these people no better than you, Abel, but Jesus, to just let that toilet flush the shit all over the floor—”

  “I’m a cook.” Abel shrugged. “Anyway, there isn’t a plunger in this whole stupid house. And I don’t use the powder room.”

  Frank nodded and sighed. He had been through a long, hard day, and by now, every muscle in his body ached. All he could think of was to get home, take a hot shower, and have dinner. He liked Abel, the only black man he had made a friend of since Vietnam, where you made friends of black men and sometimes died with them; and anyway, they were neighbors and went to church with their kids, and he was not going to be pissed off because Abel had not foreseen that he would be called to fix the goddamn toilet.

  “I’m sorry, Frank,” Abel said. “The truth is, I didn’t know about the powder room until after she called you, and she’s a nice lady but—you know.”

  “I know.” Frank picked up his bag of tools and went out through the kitchen door. As he opened the door of his truck, Richard Castle drove up in his two-seater Mercedes, and called out to him, “Hold on a moment, Frank.”

  Frank waited for Castle, anticipating that he would offer to pay in cash. Richard Castle always liked to do business with service in cash.

  “Nothing serious, I hope,” Castle said. It was Friday, and he always drove to New York on Friday. He was a slender, handsome man, wearing his sixties well, a good head of white hair and blue eyes that sent a false message of innocence.

  “No, not serious. A stuffed toilet in the powder room.”

  “Fixed, is it?”

  “Yes.” Frank had a problem with Castle. The man had always treated him decently, so Frank struggled with the stories he had heard, and none of them were good.

  Now Castle put his hand in his pocket, took out a money clip full of bills, and asked Frank, “What do I owe you?”

  “I haven’t made out a bill yet. No hurry.”

  “Money doesn’t wait, Frank. That’s the trouble with you guys. Trusting.” He grinned. “I wouldn’t trust my own mother. Come to think of it, I never did.” He peeled off two fifty-dollar bills from the wad in the money clip. “They look phony, but they’re real. Some jerk in Washington decided on the new design,” he said, handing the bills to Frank. “Does this cover it?”

  Frank shook his head. “Too much. Why don’t I send you a bill?” He was trying to recall what a plunger cost—five dollars perhaps, no more.

  “Because my time for writing out the check is worth more—Oh, the hell with it, Frank. Take the money and run.”

  Sally was calling him from the house. “The master calls,” Castle said, turning on his heel and striding toward the front door.

  Frank climbed into his truck. Swit
ching on the ignition, he looked at the two bills, still crushed in his hand. His hand was shaking with repressed anger, and at the same time he was telling himself that he had no reason to be angry. It was thirty minutes of driving back to Chickahominy, almost two hours if he counted the round-trip. Fuck Castle! He didn’t want to come home angry and face his wife angry. This kind of idiocy was worth a hundred dollars, and like Castle’s brain-damaged wife, Castle hadn’t pulled his small stunt to put Frank down. In Castle’s mind, it was a gift that Frank could stuff into his pocket and use as he pleased.

  Back in the huge white-enamel and stainless-steel kitchen, Abel Hunt was telling his son, “No, no, no. You do not make dressing in my kitchen with a Waring blender. You whip it by hand. Otherwise, mayonnaise is not mayonnaise. It’s inflated junk.”

  “Pop,” Joseph said, “why do you hate technology?”

  “I don’t hate technology. I love cooking. I love good food. Good food distinguishes us from the barbarians among whom we live. Technology has nothing to do with cooking. Technology, in its broadest sense, simply substitutes an Ml6 for the pilum.”

  “What on earth is a pilum?”

  “Oh, that’s beautiful!” Abel snorted. “Just beautiful! I spend my hard-earned money and lifelong skills to send my son to Harvard to prove that a dying, corroding mass of white Protestants can depend on us to take over and run things properly, and he asks me, What is a pilum?”

  “Is this what you want me to use on the mayonnaise?” asked Joseph, holding up a wire whip. “And by the way, I’m pre-med, and they feed it to you slowly. We’re not up to the pilum yet.”

  “Yes, and whip light and even. God help us, if that’s what education is today! The pilum was the Roman weapon that conquered the world, a javelin six-foot long—three feet of wood, very heavy, and then a soft iron shaft with a steel point. It was thrown at close range, cut through shield and armor and into the body, and then the weight of the wooden part bent the soft iron, so that even if the soldier was not killed, his shield was useless.”

  “I don’t believe this,” his son said.

  “Of course, you don’t. You want this old nigger to be just as ignorant as his great grandfather. Please watch what you’re doing—round strokes.”

  “Who was your great grandfather?” Joseph asked.

  “A field hand. You don’t want a froth. You want a dressing.”

  Three

  Ruth Ferguson Sellig, Harold Sellig’s wife, was Sally Castle’s close friend. Sally had few friends. She played neither tennis nor golf, had limited graces, and never knew what to say in terms of conversation. With a small vocabulary, she fell into gaffs, such as substituting unsuitable for unstable, and her obvious blond beauty was threatening to the Back Country club crowd. Ruth Sellig had encountered her at a charity affair at a time when Ruth was working on a Vanity Fair spread on Marilyn Monroe look-alikes. Ruth asked Sally whether she could photograph her, and Sally was delighted, although with the caveat that she had to ask permission from her husband, Richard.

  With such permission readily granted, she became a frequent model for Ruth Sellig, which not only earned her pocket money but found her someone she could talk to. Ruth, an easy mark for any stray, came to, like Sally; and although Sally was near forty, old enough to be Ruth’s sister, the relationship was curiously mother and daughter. Ruth became a sort of confessor. When, for example, Sally told her that she used to go to bed with men because she could think of no other reason for them to like her, Ruth neither snorted nor laughed, but instead managed to convince Sally of her beauty and desirability.

  It was through this relationship that Ruth and Harold Sellig came to know the Castles. They, the Selligs, lived in Riverside, a part of Greenwich that was a full five miles from the edge of the Back Country. Possibly no town in Connecticut was as sharply divided in attitude and political thinking as Greenwich, Connecticut. Nevertheless, Harold Sellig went willingly when invited to dinner at the Castles. As he put it, he knew only half a dozen millionaires, and since they had become a large and significant part of the American scene, they were worth observing.

  Sellig was ten years older than his wife’s forty-eight. But in mind and impulse, they were very much alike, perhaps as much alike as a Jew born in Brooklyn and a Presbyterian born in Greenwich could be. They had one son, Oscar, just turned eighteen, and now wandering around Europe before beginning his freshmen year at college.

  The day before, Ruth’s father, Dr. Seth Ferguson, a widower who was one of the few remaining independent family practitioners in Greenwich, had put himself into Greenwich Hospital with chest pains. Today, he was scheduled for a three-way bypass, and the morning of the dinner at the Castles’, Ruth informed her husband that she would spend most of the day and perhaps overnight as well with her father at the hospital.

  “So you’ll have to go it alone at the Castles’.”

  “I could get out of it and be with you at the hospital.”

  “No. Sally expects you, and they’ve invited Professor Greene because you always said you’d like to meet him—”

  “Of course! I feel rotten not being with you, but Greene. I always wanted to meet him, and you’re only a telephone call away. If you want me there, I’ll be there in a few minutes. Anyway, I sent Greene a copy of my manuscript. Maybe by now he’s read it.”

  She shook her head. “I have absolute confidence in the surgeon, and Pop says it’s a lark. I’d know if he were worried, and he’s not. It will be sitting there and waiting, and that can be a dreadful bore and worry, but I must be there.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have something for me to read?”

  “Yes, the manuscript! I think I finished it. I was working on it until midnight.”

  “Oh no.” Ruth sighed. “You mean ‘The Assassin.’ Hal, you’ve been manicuring that whatever-it-is for years. I’ve read it twice. It will never be published, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with Greenwich.”

  “I’ve had three best-sellers. They’ll publish the telephone directory with my name on it as long as they can charge enough. But it’s a hundred and twenty pages. It’s not a novel and it’s not an essay.”

  “Exactly. And it has nothing to do with Greenwich.”

  “But it has everything to do with Greenwich, with America—with where the hell we’ve been and where we’re going.”

  “If you think so. I’ll read it again.”

  “I made changes. Read it, please—if only as an assault on boredom. Do it for me. I ask a small favor.”

  “And see myself as that skinny demented Wasp in your book?”

  Harold had begun his opus with a title: “The Assassin.” He had a sort of theory, which he took from a slogan of the National Rifle Association, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” and enlarged it to include assassins—assassins and guns are not separable; the two are one.

  His theory was that the killers who carried out the endless round of assassinations and murders which had marked his adulthood years, murders of obscure people who never entered the public mind until they had been killed, as well as the murders of national and international luminaries, such as John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi, were not the basic cause of the action of assassination but the result of the desire of well-to-do and comfortable people who lived orderly and lawful lives—such as so many people in Greenwich did—to continue to live their lives in the manner they did. This raised a problem for Ruth, and they had discussed it to the point of Ruth’s utter boredom.

  But then, when he began to write, leaning on the proposition that Greenwich and similar places defined American society, Ruth pointed out to him that he had lost Greenwich. He was writing the story of an assassin.

  “That,” he said, “is precisely it.”

  “But decent people do not employ assassins.”

  “Who else does?”

  His wife, Ruth, had been privy to this meandering mental excursion he had embarked on,
and it was through her that he met not only some of the assortment of CEOs who had chosen Greenwich as their living space, but also a variety of Wall Street millionaires and even one or two billionaires, as well as politicians and highly placed United Nations officials, both American and foreign, Greenwich being a favorite spot for UN officials to settle their families while they did their work in New York.

  But while Ruth had been privy to all of this, and even aided it with her knowledge of Greenwich and her father’s connections, she by no means shared his theory. She rested secure in the belief that the manuscript would never see the light of print.

  Their relationship was one of mutual respect. She was a successful photographer, he was a successful writer, and they enjoyed each other, both body and mind. And the never-completed manuscript gave Harold a hobby, since he had absolutely no interest in golf or tennis or gardening or any other manner of physical exercise.

  Now, however, he was delighted that she would be taking the latest version of his manuscript with her to read during the hours she would have to spend at Greenwich Hospital.

  Harold was inordinately fond of Ruth’s father, Dr. Ferguson, who like himself, was a cigar smoker and beer drinker. “Good beer,” he had once explained to Harold, “is not an alcoholic beverage. It’s food as old as mankind. It’s mother’s milk for those poor bastards we call blue-collar workers, and it’s beneficial to the urinary system.”

  Harold was relieved to hear from Ruth that her father was not worried about the surgery, and he decided that the day after the operation, he would keep the older man company at the hospital.