The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

  “No, you’re not. You’re a completely different person. You didn’t look like this in June. Mom’s birthday weekend.”

  “I didn’t come for Mom’s birthday.”

  “You didn’t? I would have sworn you were there.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I forgot, I’m sorry. But, Camille, come on. What aren’t you telling me? How did you get so slim? So in shape?”

  “Seriously, I’m the same as I’ve always been. Nothing’s changed.”

  Is it possible that Camille is the same as she’s always been? Is it possible that aside from longer hair and failing to hug the breath out of Phoebe, the only difference is Camille’s now showing skin, wearing clothing that fits her correctly?

  “You didn’t buy those jeans, or the tank, or the sandals, did you?”

  “No, Valentine did, why?”

  “Because you actually look so put-together. Fantastic, really. How did he convince you to wear those tight jeans?”

  “Are they tight?”

  “Yes. I mean, no, they’re just right. They look great on you. You look great.”

  “I swear, Phoebe, I didn’t even notice. Val was shopping for stuff for his trip, and when he came over to show me what he bought, he said, ‘Here you go,’ and handed me a bag, and all this was inside, and everything fit, and that was that.”

  That gives Phoebe a sense of rightness in the world, that it wasn’t Camille who selected these clothes she’s wearing. It would have been too much today to grapple with such a fundamental alteration in her sister.

  “Well, you should hire him as your personal shopper.”

  “He’s gone. Left last week for six months. Maybe he’ll come back madly in love with a paleontologist.”

  “Why would you say that? Is that what you want?” Phoebe’s never met Valentine, and the details she’s learned about him from Camille would barely fill a teaspoon. That’s a startling difference between them: if she were in love, she’d want to tell Camille everything, absolutely everything, until Camille cried for mercy. From their few calls and email exchanges, she thought that Camille might be in love, but who knows with Camille. She refuses to allow herself to be read.

  “Ignore me. I’ve been driving for hours. So is Aaron getting coffee?”

  To sell this, Phoebe must not look away from Camille, must not hesitate. Camille, who gives nothing away herself, is an expert at picking up false vibrations, anything atonal, nearly as perceptive as their mother.

  “He tried so hard, but he just couldn’t reschedule his meetings. Important out-of-town clients. But he says he can’t wait to meet everyone next time. And Simon and gang should be here any minute.”

  “Too bad. I was looking forward to meeting him,” Camille says, her face wide-open, not picking up any errant vibe, and Phoebe feels a zing of alleviation. If she’s passed the test with Camille, she might pass the test with her mother, make it unscathed through the rest of the Tabor gauntlet.

  “Hey, Simon’s here,” Camille says, and there is their brother heading toward them. The tallest of all the Tabors, his brown hair too long for the uptight firm he works at, looking fit and tanned and tired.

  “Where’s everyone?” Phoebe says.

  “Camille,” Simon says, hugging her, pulling Phoebe into the mix, until the three of them are clasped together.

  Camille pulls away first, as she always does. “Where are the little beauties?”

  “They’re in the car. Isabel’s still sleeping and Lucy said, ‘Bring my aunties to me.’”

  “That’s my girl,” Phoebe says. When Lucy was born, Phoebe worried her desire for a child would keep her at a distance, that she’d actually covet her brother’s children, but her love has been true since the start.

  “If you mean more demanding every day, then you’re right. We don’t know if we’re supposed to nip that sort of thing in the bud or let it go. I’m going to ask Mom about that and other stuff this weekend. Are we really here to buy something for Dad?”

  “Probably not,” Phoebe says. “I thought it would be fun if we all arrived home together.”

  “Why?” Simon asks.

  “Camille always wants to, and this time I remembered, so I called her and I called you.”

  “I called you,” Camille says.

  “Oh, right, you did. Okay, well, we’re all together now, so should we shop for Dad, or just head to Agapanthus?”

  “What would we get him?” Simon says.

  “Clothing maybe? A new watch?” Phoebe offers up.

  “Does he expect something from us?” Camille asks Phoebe.

  “I don’t know. It just seemed like we ought to show how proud we are of him.”

  “Elena suggested a gift and I said not necessary. But maybe we should. I can’t leave everyone in the car for too long. If we can find something in fifteen minutes that we all agree on, we’ll buy it. If not, we leave. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Phoebe says.

  “No?” Simon says, looking at Camille.

  “It’s got to be reasonable.”

  Phoebe looks at her sister. “You mean something he’d use all the time?’

  “No, something reasonably priced. I’m on a tight budget these days.”

  Simon nods. “This morning, I was worrying we might need a new roof on the house. So reasonable is fine with me.” He looks around. “Hey, Phoebe, where’s Aaron?”

  She’s made a mistake. She should have formulated a few different responses to explain the imaginary Aaron Green’s absence. If she responds to Simon exactly as she responded to Camille, her sister, who spends her life listening to what people say and searching out the anomalies, will know something is up.

  “He had clients already booked. So next time.”

  “Were you able to ship me a couple of cases from Napa when you guys were up there? Because nothing’s arrived.”

  Oh shit, Phoebe thinks, remembering sitting in her lovely suite at the Laguna Niguel Capri, trying to locate wineries in Napa, where she supposedly was with Aaron Green, trying to place a long-distance order on Simon’s behalf as if she were actually there, learning that no matter how she implored, the receipt was preprogrammed to state it was an internet order, would show it was not purchased in person at the winery, and because Simon would definitely notice that, instead of buying wine for her brother anyway, who cares for Benny so well during her long weekends away, she had gone out to the pool and met the heart surgeon and went with him to his room and had really great sex.

  “Don’t hate me,” she says to Simon. “But we were hitting so many wineries, and got more than a little tipsy, and I totally forgot. Next time, though. I promise. Aaron wants to go back up there again.”

  Why did she just say that? Why is she adding lies to the lies she’s already told, digging herself deeper into the hole rather than figuring a way to scramble out? She’s not a blusher at all, but she feels heat racing up her cheeks.

  “I remember how it was, all that new love, no room for anyone else, for thoughts about anything else,” Simon says, looking at her with happiness.

  “Exactly,” Phoebe says, thinking what a rotten person she is.

  “Should we get going?” she says, grabbing Simon’s hand, then Camille’s, prodding them down the wide avenue of the mall, the Tabor children finding their way back into step.

  “Being in love suits you, you’re all rosy,” Simon says, squeezing Phoebe’s left hand.

  “I agree,” Camille says, squeezing Phoebe’s right hand.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake, Phoebe thinks.

  FIFTEEN

  HARRY’S POCKETS ARE CRAMMED with tennis balls, and one is clutched in his hand, but he has lost sight of what he is doing out here on the court in this hundred-degree heat, feels only the internal vibrations of anxiety and unnerving tension, can only keep thinking how inconceivable it is that such an innocuous exchange would have opened a secret vault in his memory he didn’t know was there.

  He replays again the sequen
ce of events: he and Levitt taking a break at the bench, resting their rubbery legs, toweling off their sweaty faces and hands, Levitt saying, “I met PSS’s new cantor. He’s starting on Erev Rosh Hashanah. Coming in with a bang. You meet him yet? Nice guy. Young. For some reason, he reminded me of your son, Simon. I don’t know what, a shared something or other.”

  That was it, that was all, Levitt making conversation. And yet, instantly, Harry had seen himself on a commuter plane, strapped into a tiny seat, the cabin so compact his head was nearly touching the ceiling, flying over crystal-blue water. And it wasn’t a holiday he was on with Roma, for the seat next to him was empty when he looked out the window as the plane banked over the ocean and came in hard on a short runway. There had been a taxi, a driver saying, “Welcome to the Caymans.”

  He had been certain the recollection did not belong to him. Neither he nor he and Roma had ever been to the Caymans, but there he was, sitting in a banker’s office, being asked to select his private code.

  And he’d thought, his private code? For what?

  And that dry, unfamiliar voice had provided an answer: A code for that numbered account.

  There’s been a mistake, he had said to the voice in his head. He’d never needed a numbered account. Numbered accounts were secret, for deposits of large amounts of drug money, money hidden from the divorce lawyers and the forensic accountants of angry spouses, money from cash-only businesses to beat the taxing authorities, money made on illegal trades.

  Money made on illegal trades?

  His breath had come hard and fast. His head, perfectly still, seemed to be whipping around on his neck—money made on illegal trades?

  Had he made such trades?

  Impossible.

  But he saw then the traders at his old firm. Saw them talking out of turn among themselves, discussing information they shouldn’t have been discussing, that none of them was allowed to use, all that material, nonpublic information, all that insider information, floating into his ears. And he remembered overhearing them, listening hard.

  No. He hadn’t just heard, hadn’t just listened hard.

  He had considered.

  No.

  He had heard, considered, then checked things out.

  He had confirmed what he heard.

  Confirmed and used what he heard.

  What he had seen, had seemingly recalled, it had to be wrong, but the banker had said, “Sir, the code?” And he remembered wanting to choose something no one would be able to decipher and he’d penned in CST where required.

  And he had thought, This can’t be right, but the voice had said, It’s right.

  If it was right, that he, Harry Tabor, had used illegal information to make illicit trades, and traveled to an island where bank accounts were secret, and set up such an account, where had these memories been hiding? In his head, he’d been screaming.

  You obliterated them, the voice had said.

  He’d obliterated them?

  He hadn’t understood what that meant, only that it wasn’t his nature to obliterate anything. He wasn’t a man capable of expunging the truth.

  But he’d seen himself. In that banker’s office in the Caymans. Selecting CST as his code.

  And then there was a jump forward, into the desert, into the pool of their desert house, and he was telling Roma he liked the notion of carrying on the name of an illustrious ancestor, despite the sad irony that Simon meant one who has heard, and his ancestor, the profoundly deaf cantor, had never, not once in his life, heard a voice, a song, a single note, not even his own. Roma had resisted. She, who knew the myriad ways that the mind can work, how it can turn on its master and gobble him up, had put her palms on her stomach, their third child within, and said, “Are we sure about this? Do we want to name our final child, our only son, after a relative of yours who was deaf?” And he had said, “It’s not as if we’d be giving him a kenahora by passing on a worthwhile name. Maybe he’ll inherit a supreme talent, passed down from one generation to another.”

  Because Levitt innocently stirred together the words cantor and Simon, Harry, alarmingly, could now answer the question posed to him by young Owen Kaufmann last Monday: What does CST stand for? It stands for Cantor Simon Tabornikov. The man singing the gut-wrenching Kol Nidre on the Day of Atonement, risen from the dead, shown to Harry in a vision, a man after whom Simon is named, a man whose title and initials Harry used as his private code on a secret Cayman account, a man whose title and initials formed the name of Harry’s organization, whose sole and altruistic purpose is to provide futures of plenty to those who have nothing, to those staring into the abyss, to those who can’t conceive of futures at all.

  This couldn’t be his origin story. His origin story is simple: he is a man who walks the upstanding walk of the moral, the honorable, the good. But that doesn’t seem to be his story at all; his story horrifies him.

  THESE ARE THE THOUGHTS consuming him and then he hears that dry, unfamiliar voice once again, though it’s no longer as unfamiliar:

  What you’ve remembered is a start, Harry. But it’s not nearly enough. You need to see it all. Such tales as these always start the same way. In the beginning …

  The beginning? Wasn’t this enough? More than enough?

  Sorry, but no.

  And with that no, more than three decades collapse, and Harry is kneeling on the carpet in his office at the stockbrokerage firm.

  What was he doing down on his knees?

  Praying for guidance, Harry. All these years, you’ve been so certain you prayed only once in your life. For a kiss from Eve Flynn on your Bar Mitzvah. But there came a second time when you desperately needed to believe in something greater than yourself, and it was to the notion of prayer that you turned, hauling it up from the basement of your being.

  Close your eyes and you’ll see it all exactly as it happened.

  Harry closes his eyes and he’s in his old office at Carruthers Investments, standing at his window, looking out at the tall buildings lost in the low and dense cloud bank.

  It had been snowing all day—

  Yes, he remembers that. It had been snowing all day, for days actually, and … and … and?

  And the weight of the weather was just another thing pressing down upon you …

  Yes, that weight, that awful weight—

  Yes, he remembers that weight because happenings were occurring in his world of stock trading, a serious comeuppance was upon them, a coming-to-Jesus for those who subscribed to confession and resurrection, which included everyone at the firm other than himself and, by then, one other fellow Jew.

  He had watched the heavy flakes and recognized he had not been a sterling Jew, not even a fair-weather synagogue Jew, but somehow he needed to prove to God, Yahweh, the Almighty, Adonai, whatever, that he was serious about coming clean, about doing exactly what had to be done in the name of righteousness, and to stave off an ignominious firing, a public arrest, a jury trial or plea bargain, and inevitable jail time. The issue of whether he had thoroughly covered his tracks was not at all in his mind. The only question for which he required an answer was, what exactly did he need to do?

  Abject prayer then, down on his knees, not the way Jews prayed, but it hadn’t been enough to sit in his soft black leather chair; he had needed a physical act to put him in touch with something so foreign. And so he kneeled, and did what he had not done since his Bar Mitzvah: he seriously prayed. Five minutes passed. Five more. Then another ten. And he wasn’t aware of the passage of time as he stayed down, imploring, with his eyes shut tight, sure his ears were wide-open and that what he was hearing was nothing, or rather, was only and merely silence.

  It was only and merely silence. There wasn’t anything else.

  Harry, silence is rarely the complete absence of sound: there were pressure waves in the air surrounding you, individual air molecules bouncing around; your body, too, was quietly cacophonous—your heart was beating, your breath rising and falling, your blood pumping throug
h your veins and arteries, your stomach digesting the lunchtime hot dog you ate out in the frozen air at the stand, your joints were creaking, your ligaments were sliding, even your lashes were making a slight fluttering sound—and though you would have sworn your heard nothing at all, from on high came instructions you absorbed through your pores.

  This is what you were told:

  Sell your beautiful old house and your sports car and your ridiculous tchotchkes, donate all your dishonest gains to charities; then take your wife and daughters to a place where you will create a new life for your family, a life that will include atoning for your sins daily and giving thanks to me, for saving you.

  But I didn’t hear any of that. I didn’t absorb anything.

  Look at what happened next, Harry.

  He sees himself rising up from his knees, his navy suit bearing the imprint of the carpet’s faint pattern.

  What were you thinking right then?

  I was thinking that prayer was meaningless, and that if I did not do something immediately, resign from my position, walk away from my high-flying world, donate my filthy lucre to worthwhile charities, get my family out of Dodge, I would be going down, down, down, into a hell I could never crawl up from.

  The same instruction you’d just been given.

  And Harry presses his hands to heart and remembers his thoughts that day:

  The big guns wanted the world to believe they knew how to make real money in the stock market, when no one in the whole world knew how to do that without the sorcery of a secret alchemy, the transmutation of verboten insider information into gold. Which is how they did it, and how Harry had done it, too—transforming verboten information he overheard into his own privately minted treasure. But he wasn’t one of those whose history had always been paved with gold, regardless of the machinations by which that gold had been obtained. He had been reading about the Wall Street kings who, when caught manipulating their deep knowledge and contacts for personal gain, simply proffered lukewarm mea culpas, and sliced off a small piece of their fortunes and turned it and themselves over to the authorities for a slap on the hand, and he’d done the calculations—their fines were infinitesimal in comparison to the fortunes safely squirreled away. Once in a while, the government insisted on the proper optics, which required a few to briefly reside in low-security prisons, where they played pick-up basketball, golf, and tennis, and ate meals prepared by personal chefs. Small fish were not yet on the government’s radar, so there were no articles for him to read about how the small fish were being treated, but Harry knew he was a small fish, starred with euphemistic intangibles, and hadn’t history proved a million times over that it was always the small fish with those euphemistic intangibles that were yanked from the ocean and not thrown back, but gutted, broiled, and eaten? Which for him meant a cement cell in medium-security for years to come.