The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  We walked into the living room. The remains of the fire that Rosa and I had made glowed like slag. A note was tacked to the pine mantel: “Was that You, Was that Me?? Call and discuss. R.” I tore it down and impulsively tossed it into the fire.

  Irv sat near the hearth and held his hands up to the flame, turning them this way and that, and I ducked into Esther’s room. I sniffed to see if the scent of sex was in the air; the fact that I could not detect a thing gave me scant comfort. I plumped the pillows, opened the window an inch or two. I looked out into the darkness. It seemed that no matter what the circumstance, there was something I was trying to cover up, always rearranging the furniture of my life to hide threadbare spots on the carpet.

  “You can sleep in Mom’s room and I’ll take the sofa,” I said, rejoining Irv in the living room. He had slipped off his shoes and, with stiffened legs, held his feet up to the fire. They looked like tough, skinny, city squirrels in those gray ribbed socks.

  “You aren’t going to bed right now, are you, Billy?”

  “I just thought you might be tired.”

  “I could eat.”

  We went into the kitchen. I warmed the last of the lasagna and poured him a glass of dark, cloudy apple juice, which, though it was an unfamiliar brand, I managed to assure him made no claims to be a curative or elixir of any kind. I poured a glass for myself and sat at the uncovered pine table with him and watched as he ate.

  “Are they doing the right things?” I asked.

  He shook his head—but not emphatically, he didn’t want to completely terrify me. “We should get her out of there tomorrow. I know they want to send her up to Albany Medical Center, but I want her in the city. The name Dr. Rothschild still means a lot in New York City. We’ll send her to Roosevelt Hospital and get this done right.”

  I nodded, and then took a long drink of apple juice, which tasted like some magical distillation of sunlight and decay. I had been trying to ask this question since her crash, but it kept eluding me, like an object in a dream. It was beyond my saying. “What are the chances of her dying?” I finally said. “I heard she might get an embolism or something from bone marrow in her blood.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “A nurse.”

  “A nurse? She has no business playing doctor.” As egalitarian as his politics might have been, Grandpa was rigidly hierarchical about medicine.

  “But what about what she said?”

  “Don’t you worry about that, Billy. Okay?”

  “It’s too late for that, Grandpa. I already am worried. Just answer me, okay?”

  “Telling you not to worry is an answer.”

  “No It’s not, It’s advice. What are her chances?”

  “They’re good.”

  “Good?”

  “Good to excellent.”

  “But not excellent.”

  “What’s wrong with you? She’s had a terrible accident. She’s in a coma. Do you know what that means, to be in a coma?”

  “I’m really frightened.”

  “I know you are, Billy. But you know, you’ve always been frightened, you’ve been frightened your whole life. You were afraid of the dark, you were afraid of snakes. Grandma and I took you to Coney Island to see the fireworks one Fourth of July. Everyone was cheering, but you just pressed your face into me, closed your eyes, and covered your ears. And then after you got sick, you were even more frightened. You didn’t want to play with your friends. You started wondering how much time alive you had left, and then if a ballgame was rained out or if you were sick on your birthday—”

  “I don’t think being frightened for my mother right now is an irrational fear. Do you?”

  “Irrational? No. But not useful, either. Is there any more of this lasagna?”

  After, we went back to the living room and Grandpa asked me to put another log on the fire and I walked out to the porch, where there were split logs stacked beneath a green tarp. I pulled out a couple that felt light, remembering that Esther had said these were the ones that burned most quickly, and then stood there for a moment watching the vapors of my breath race upward toward the full moon. I was sending smoke signals up to the gods: Save her, save us. No dying, no pain; no more pain.

  I threw the logs onto the fire, igniting an explosion of orange sparks. Grandpa went back to warming his hands and feet—I wasn’t sure if this was really necessary or just his idea of what one did in the country—and I sat behind him in Mother’s antique armchair, with its creamy satin cover and its needlepoint roses.

  “Do you remember Little Joe Washington?” I said.

  “Of course I do,” said Grandpa. “Mr. Washington and Esther became very good friends.”

  “He came to the hospital today.”

  “Your mother has always inspired such loyalty—with the exception of You Know Who.”

  “Then Joe and I went to a diner in town and I had the strangest feeling that Sergei Karpanov was sitting up front.”

  Grandpa turned around and at the same time the fire began to rage, silhouetting him as he put his hands on his hips. “You saw Karpanov?”

  “No, it wasn’t him. But the guy looked a lot like him.”

  “Did you ever see him, the murderer?”

  “Just pictures. Did you?”

  “No.” He pursed his lips and shook his head, regretfully. “But you know of course that his poor wife was a guest in my home. When she came to New York as part of the East-West Medical Friendship Committee. I was on the committee that helped organize the whole thing. Karpanov. I wish it had been him. I’d gladly kill him. Joyfully. I would whistle the ‘Ode to Joy’ and cut him to pieces.”

  He turned back toward the fire and held his palms up to the flames. And I sat there, overwhelmed by a memory that, while I ransacked others for their stories of Luke, I had, until this very moment, somehow lost track of.

  Of course Sergei’s wife had been to Grandpa’s house. I knew that. My mother had been to the welcoming party, and I had been there, too. This simple fact had been obscured by my sudden accumulation of stories about my father, and I was amazed at this: how much more was hiding behind the warehouse of junk I had in my head?

  Mother and I had taken the D train from West Fourth Street and twenty-five minutes later we were in another world, Brooklyn, specifically Ditmas Park, Taft-era bourgeois houses with their wide porches and leaded glass windows, their self- satisfied, almost fierce stolidity, with menorahs in some of the windows and Christmas trees in the others. We trudged through a light, stinging snowfall. It was Sunday, about noon; there wasn’t another soul on the streets. The sky looked like a reflection of the pavement. This was far from unfamiliar territory for me, but Esther nevertheless pointed out her childhood landmarks: the Tudor house with the dead juniper bushes in front where her first boyfriend, Gary Cohen, lived; the synagogue that had invited Truman Capote to speak at their cultural program and where Capote arrived insanely drunk, in a dirty suit, by turns weepy and insulting; Mr. Michael of Brooklyn, where she had her hair shorn like Joan of Arc—s; the candy store run by concentration camp survivors, who were so suspicious, so fearful of having so much as a Mary Jane pilfered from their shop that they glowered at every kid who shopped there and who were, in turn, hated and taunted, even by kids from devoutly Jewish households. “I feel so terrible when I think of how we treated them,” she had said, holding her lamb’s wool coat closed at the throat and linking her arm through mine. I was in college, home for the holidays, feeling at once superior to my old life as Esther’s little boy and desperate to soak up every ounce of the love she gave me. I had snorted a couple small lines of coke that morning upon waking, and I had more in my pocket, stored in one of Esther’s empty Midol bottles.

  My grandparents’ house was getting that run-down feel to it. The plants were drooping, the once crisp white walls were gray, the smudgy windows were like eyes full of tears. Every room seemed to be worried sick over Grandma, convalescing now and getting worse, her body a forest in w
hich fires of errant white cells spontaneously burst into flames, burning bushes of cancer, blazing to proclaim the power not of God but of Death. In the past year, confined to the house, she had taken up painting, and her cubist canvases hung on every wall, paintings of graves, and headstones, and empty beds, and stars of David—Grandma was an atheist, but not in the foxhole of her own imminent demise. She was asleep when we arrived, and Irv was busy in the kitchen, instructing the caterers—whereas once he seemed barely to notice his surroundings, wanting only an easy chair, an unread paper, and a hot meal, old age had made him fussy about domestic matters, and he was upset that the caterers had brought coffee mugs and not proper cups with matching saucers. Esther slowly made her way through the rooms, dazed with the sadness of anticipating—she knew soon she would be losing her mother, with whom she had quarreled so regularly, who instinctively stiffened when Esther embraced her, who made cutting remarks about Esther’s sexual adventurism, and whose criticisms of Luke had been so insulting, so irritating, and, in many ways, so on the mark.

  An hour later, the house was filled with the progressive doctors who had ministered to Esther her entire life: walruslike Benjamin Goldfarb, her first gynecologist; mousy Ida Edelman, from whom she received allergy treatments; and there in the corner, with a dark blue overcoat draped over his shoulders, his hair turned silver, a shy, regretful smile on his shy, regretful face, was Peter Carbone, who twenty-five years ago had gently removed her wisdom teeth with no more effort, it seemed, than plucking a Chiclet out of a pudding. Under the tongue-loosening spell of the sodium pentothal, Mom had confessed her torrid teenage crush on Dr. Carbone and then she grabbed for his large amber ears so she might pull his face close and French him.

  Soon, the Russians arrived in a caravan of Checker cabs. Under Irv’s watchful glare, the waiters circulated glasses of Champagne. Even Grandma appeared, looking quite mad, dressed in a navy blue artist’s smock, holding a bouquet of paint brushes, her dark eyes pinned from the tincture of morphine Irv gave her for pain. Toasts were offered, first by Grandpa in his ultra-folksy mode, as if Jimmy Stewart were playing the role of a progressive Brooklyn doc, then by Eleanor Chumley, the white-haired, icy-eyed chairwoman of the East-West Medical Friendship Committee, and then the Russians had their turn. First to speak was a massive young doctor with a kind of Beatles hairdo, who said, “I bring you greetings from your comrades and colleagues in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” to which the Americans applauded and shouted “Bravo!”

  Then, Katarina Gorky spoke. “We want to thank Dr. Rothschild for opening his home to us,” she said. “Many of us were very frightened to come to the United States. But being in this home, and seeing such friendly faces …” She touched her fingers to her heart. She was a nervous, narrow-faced woman, with dark pixie-cut hair, inky eyebrows, dominating brown eyes. Katarina wore a blue suit, with a short skirt, high heels, dark stockings. Her voice was pure and strong, as if she had once studied to be a singer. But she had not studied voice, nor did she play the piano, paint, hike, camp, or ski, or sew, or enjoy the movies. Science and medicine were her great passions, all that she knew and all that she had ever cared about—until falling in love with Sergei, which she already recognized as a fantastic mistake. From now on, she must have thought, she would stick to what she knew.

  “She was a lovely woman and a fine doctor,” Grandpa said, turning away from the fire for good this time and sitting in a rocking chair. He rocked back and forth, back and forth, with the same this-is-what-you-do-in-the-country diligence with which he warmed himself at the hearth.

  “Tell me what Luke was like when you first met him,” I said, trying to be casual about it. I hoped Esther hadn’t told him I was compiling information for a book or voiced her objections to my project.

  “What for—that meshuga book of yours?”

  “Because you’re my grandfather and this is a part of your job.”

  “Really? Is that so.”

  “Absolutely. It’s right there in The Grandfather Handbook.”

  Irv smiled and opened his arms, beckoning me to his side. I came to him on bending knees and wrapped my arms around his meager torso, put my head to his chest, and listened to the reassuringly powerful beating of his heart, while he lay his hands on my back and rubbed me up and down. It had always always always been this way.

  “He looked like a little wet rat the first time your mother brought him home to us. He was already getting to be a big deal, but he looked like he’d been sleeping in doorways and only washed when it rained. He stunk, if you really want to know. And he had acute halitosis, like someone who is so hungry he’s starting to digest his own organs. Plus, it seemed as if he and a toothbrush rarely crossed paths.

  “You know, one day, when you have children of your own—I’m not pressuring you, but you know, in the course of human events—then you will know what it feels like to meet the man who your daughter tells you is the greatest thing on earth, Prince Charming and Eugene Victor Debs and Robin Hood all wrapped into one prize package. No matter how wonderful he actually turns out to be, you’re going to be looking at him very carefully, because you, like me, will feel there is no one worthy of all that praise, and no one really worthy when you come right down to it, no one worthy of your daughter.

  “But with this one, with this one it wasn’t nitpicking, you didn’t need to dissect the situation to find that little bit of rot—with this one you needed surgery to find the good.”

  “But you liked him,” I said, getting up—my legs were going numb.

  “Liked him? Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

  “But you already have said it. Many times.”

  “When did I say that?”

  “I don’t know. Ten years ago.”

  “When I was young and foolish.” He laughed and then was suddenly silent. He brought his hands together as if in prayer and closed his eyes. “But It’s true. He did manage to charm me—but charm is a terrible thing, when you think about it. It’s a trick, It’s the way of the snake. Charm is salesmanship. Time and again, I’d see him at my bookshelves, running his dirty finger with its obscene long fingernail over the spines of my books, or else sitting like a yogi on the rug, reading.”

  “And you liked it.”

  “Who wouldn—t? You know, your mother has the heart of a true progressive—the struggles of real people touched her so deeply. But she didn’t like to read Marx or Lenin. Theories and her just never got along, and frankly not even history. Economics? I’d say it was Greek to her, but she learned Greek very easily. But Luke was interested in everything. I’d send him home with an A&S shopping bag full of books and next Sunday he and Esther would come to the house—ach! his table manners! the way he shoveled the food in and protected his plate with his arm like a jailbird—and he’d have them all read, every book, and understood, too, brilliantly, I mean like a born theoretician. But what was so goddamned refreshing about him is he didn’t even like to show it off. He put himself below me, like my student. He wanted to know about everything I knew—and those days, before my mind started going soft, believe me, Billy, I knew a lot. I understood, for instance, Marx’s theory of surplus value, and I could explain it better than Paul Sweezy or any economist. I’m not boasting. I don’t know the first thing about the theory of surplus value now—I don’t know if I forgot it or if I don’t even believe in it anymore. It’s just gone. The folder is still in the file, It’s labeled ‘The Theory of Surplus Value,’ but all the papers inside are missing.

  “Naturally, your grandmother had a different take on it. ‘Of course he lets you do all the talking,’ she used to say. ‘Otherwise he’d have to stop feeding his face for half a minute.’ But be that as it may, the fact is Luke—or Stuart, or whoever he was—he was a quick learner, and somewhere beneath that whole name-changing nonsense and the greasy blue jeans and the ridiculous hats and the ambition he wore like a sword in his belt—whatever!—you know you didn’t have to be a Ph.D. in human nature to spot from the ver
y first that this was a boy with big plans and no intention of ever, ever letting anybody or anything get in his way. I don’t deny him his genius.

  “He was an eager beaver, that was the thing about Mr. Luke Fairchild. If you knew something, he wanted to know it, too. So he falls in love with Esther, just naturally accepts her ways of thinking, maybe because he didn’t have very many ideas himself, so there was no conflict, nothing to get in the way. And then she brings him to the house, and you know how it was—dinner conversation going from history to economics, Negroes, sit-ins, peace demonstrations, Bread and Wine, Waiting for Lefty—everywhere and anywhere and sometimes all at once. And there’s the former Stuart Kramer from somewhere out there in the Midwest sitting and not saying anything, just playing with his food, but taking it all in, looking so intent, like we were a heartbeat and he was a GP listening through a stethoscope. He wanted to know what we knew.”

  “That’s exactly how he is, though, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know how exactly he is. And I don’t think anyone else does.”

  “I think I have some idea,” I said.

  “I’m not here to argue with you,” Grandpa said, stifling a yawn. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed his eyes vigorously with the heels of his hands. When he finished, his eyes were pink, opaque. Another impulse to yawn—this time he didn’t suppress it. He opened his mouth wide; trembling strands of saliva connected his top and bottom teeth, shimmering like a spider’s web. “It takes more than an ejaculation to make a father, Billy.”

  “I know that. But he is my father. He haunts me.”

  “He’s a drug addict. He abandoned your mother. He abandoned you.”

  “Still. He is my father.”

  “But what do you want from him? That’s what I want to know.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “There’s nothing he can give you, Billy. Nothing.”

  “There has to be.”

  “What could he give you?”

  “He could get off my back.”