The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  “I miss our little talks, Luke,” Parker said.

  “Still fishing for souls?” Luke asked. He pulled himself together. And even though his face was stricken, his voice was level, even a little teasing.

  “Naturally.”

  “Then I guess I’m the one that got away.”

  “Not really, Luke. I haven’t given up hope.”

  “I took the bait but I broke free of the hook.”

  “Maybe. But why do I still feel the tug on the line?”

  Luke tried to smile. He put his hand on Parker’s shoulder, and then Parker put both of his arms around my father and seized him in a mighty embrace. Luke closed his eyes, and for a moment, I think, he might have imagined that he had found his match in that ovoid man of God.

  The casket was in the ground now, and some of us lined up to throw thundering handfuls of cold, damp dirt onto the box. It was like a twenty-one-gunshot salute, with the rifles fired one at a time. Then there were goodbyes, murmured expressions of regret, delivered and received with a certain uneasiness, as if we were all suddenly embarrassed to still be living while one so beautiful and blameless was dead. Irv held on to my arm, his fingers like talons. The burial was draining the life out of him, and as soon as I could I walked him back to one of the waiting cars, which in turn would drive him back to Little Neck, where he would again be warehoused with the other old men and women whose bodies had outlived their lives, and where he would stay until, with Luke’s financial assistance, I was able to move into an apartment large enough to have my grandfather live with me.

  A wrenching, somehow hurtful sob burst like a glass bubble in my throat as I watched the long black limousine pull away with Irv. I stood there at the curbside, trying to collect myself. The roadway through the cemetery was gray and winding, like those little streets built in suburban housing developments. We were in Deathdale. A low-flying jet roared overhead, on its final approach to Kennedy Airport, the red lights on the wings flashing in the heavy rainy air. By the time I got back to my mother’s grave, all the mourners had gone back to the rushing waters of their own private lives and the cemetery crew was just leaving, probably off to gouge out another casket-sized wedge of earth. For a moment, I felt a surge of panic; I didn’t see Luke and I thought he might have somehow contrived a way of leaving there without me.

  But then I saw him, leaning on a tall headstone a few feet away from our family plot. He was talking to two women. It wasn’t until I was within ten paces of them that I saw it was Rosa and her mother, Maya.

  “There you are,” I said to Luke.

  “Hi, Billy,” said Rosa. She took my hand and I kissed her on the cheek. Her skin was scalding.

  “These two have come down from upstate,” Luke said. “And the people they came with left without them.”

  “We told them to,” said Maya. “We just weren’t ready to leave.”

  “You were such a good friend to my mother,” I said. “Both of you.”

  “Your mother was a beautiful woman and you’re her beautiful, beautiful son,” said Maya.

  Maybe I cast my eyes down, or maybe I did nothing to acknowledge her kind words. But I felt Rosa’s eyes on me, and when I looked at her, she smiled and said, “It’s true, you know. You are. And you made her very proud and happy.”

  And for that glance and those words I wish to acknowledge Rosa Trotman. It was a moment, just a moment, and in the deluge of all the moments that preceded it and all the moments that came after, it could not attain any real centrality in my life. I could not, as I would have liked to, hold on to it firmly and lift it above the torrent of time and all its contradictory lessons and say: This. Now. Here. Forever. This is my truth.

  Luke suggested Rosa and Maya ride with us on our way up to my mother’s house. We had the last limo take us back to Manhattan, where Luke had a car waiting for him at his hotel. Maya, raised poor in the Bronx, and Rosa, raised in Woodstock, seemed fascinated by the limo, and by Luke’s posh hotel, and the liveried footmen who scurried around when we arrived. We drove Luke’s car north, with me at the wheel, and Rosa sitting up front with me. Luke stretched out in the back and soon fell asleep with his feet on Maya’s lap. By the time we were on the Taconic Parkway, Maya, too, was sleeping, and Rosa’s eyes were closed. Her hands were folded in her lap and a tiny, childlike snore buzzed through her parted lips. I felt awfully happy, not because my life was good, but because it was my life and I was in it. It was like the one time I’d gone trout fishing and I stood in the middle of a rushing stream and I felt the powerful, unstoppable water humming on every side of me, from my feet to my knees, and my thighs and belly, and all the way up to my chest, and it didn’t matter in the least whether I caught a fish or not, it just felt so good to be there. I reached over and touched Rosa’s hair, softly, so as not to awaken her. We were by now thirty or forty miles into the journey, and the sun, as it set, struggled to make its first appearance of the day. There were too many clouds for it to burn through, but it sent its dying light down anyway, and for a few moments the car sped along with the fleet trembling shadow of itself.

  Author’s Acknowledgments

  WHILE writing a novel is a solitary experience, there were, nevertheless, several hands to help me set The Rich Man’s Table.

  First of all, I want to thank my editor, Victoria Wilson, with whom I have had the great pleasure of working since 1976. In a business in which stability has become almost as antiquated as carbon paper, I am extraordinarily fortunate to have been able to work for twenty-two continuous years with an editor of such truthfulness, patience, sympathy, and skill.

  I want to thank Dana Reinhardt, with whom one stormy evening I took refuge in a church near Times Square, where I was given the title of this novel; upon reading my first draft, she was kind enough to mention that the sequence of events was nearly impossible to follow. I also want to express my appreciation to Anne Lamott for her indispensable encouragement and insight. My great friend John Eskow’s extensive library of American music histories and his instinctive feel for what I was trying to create were crucial to my gathering some important information.

  Finally, thank you to Bob Dylan, whose records kept me company through the thousands of hours I worked on this book.

  A Biography of Scott Spencer

  Scott Spencer is the New York Times—bestselling and award-winning author of ten novels, including the National Book Award finalists Endless Love (1979) and A Ship Made of Paper (2003).

  Born in 1945 in Washington, D.C., Spencer moved with his family to the South Side of Chicago at age two. His father, Charles, had been in the army before beginning work in a hot and noisy Chicago steel mill. Charles later wrote and self-published a book titled Blue Collar (1978) about the experience. Spencer remembers his childhood as peaceful despite his family’s tight finances and his parents’ concern over the political climate during the McCarthy Era, both of which were kept secret from Spencer at the time. Charles was a dissident in his union and, Spencer remembers, “sometimes feared for his safety and even his life. There were mornings when he checked under the hood of his car for a bomb before igniting the engine.” The far South Side of Chicago was at the time the set of atrocious racial violence, which Spencer’s parents steadfastly resisted, adding to the home’s sense of peril and purpose.

  Spencer was an avid reader from an early age, a passion that his parents encouraged. At age sixteen, he discovered the beatnik subculture and was very much influenced by that literary movement. Though he studied at the University of Illinois and Chicago’s Roosevelt University before earning his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin, Spencer considers himself above all to be “an alumnus of the Chicago public library system.”

  All of Spencer’s novels are intimately related to his life. He wrote his first novel, Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball (1975), during and directly following his college years. The novel centers on a control-hungry experimental psychologist and his dangerous experiments, which reflected Spence
r’s own experimentation with mind-altering drugs and his studies in behavioral psychology at the time. His second novel, Preservation Hall (1976), is about an ambitious man’s fateful encounter with his ex-convict step-brother while the two are snowed in together in an isolated rural house, not unlike the one Spencer would move to later in life in Rhinebeck, New York. His next novel, Endless Love, explores the obsessive and all-consuming relationship between a young couple and was his first major success, selling more than two million copies worldwide. Endless Love was universally hailed by critics, establishing Spencer as a leading American author, and inspiring the film directed by Franco Zeffirelli.

  In 1986, Spencer published Waking the Dead, the story of the tragic love between a career politician and a progressive activist living in Chicago. The book was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and later became a film produced by Jodi Foster and starring Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly. Spencer followed the success of Waking the Dead with Secret Anniversaries (1990), a coming-of-age story of a young woman in mid-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., and Men in Black (1995), a comedic novel about a struggling author’s unexpected success after penning a book about UFOs. Secret Anniversaries and Men in Black is set partly in the fictional town of Leyden, New York, a town that Spencer revisits in many of his novels. Leyden and many of its residents are modeled after Rhinebeck, and Spencer says that, though he doesn’t directly base his characters on real people, he does draw from them and join different people’s traits together, “giving a red head a limp, a lawyer a dog.”

  After Men in Black, Spencer published The Rich Man’s Table (1998), about the strained relationship between a Bob Dylan—like American music icon and his unacknowledged son. Most recently, Spencer has published the novels A Ship Made of Paper (2003), Willing (2008), and Man in the Woods (2010). Spencer’s nonfiction journalism has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and GQ. He has also taught fiction writing at Columbia University and at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  This photo, taken around 1945, features four of the people who most influenced Spencer’s life. His father, Charles, is seen in his military uniform (second from the right), with Spencer’s aunt Elfride and uncle Harold to Charles’s right and his mother, Jean, to Charles’s left. Elfride and Harold both moved to Cuba after the 1960 Cuban Revolution.

  Spencer’s fourth grade class at Burnham Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. Spencer is in the second row, fifth from the left.

  Scott and Charles on vacation in Arizona around 1958.

  Spencer with Victoria Wilson, his editor at Knopf. Wilson edited many of his books, including Endless Love, Waking the Dead, and Preservation Hall. The two have remained friends.

  An exhausted Spencer holding his newborn daughter, Celeste, at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City in 1979. Celeste is now a painter living in Brooklyn.

  Celeste in 1984, standing in front of the Spencer house on the South Side of Chicago. Spencer remembers Celeste as being determinedly artistic throughout her childhood.

  Spencer and his son, Asher, in New Orleans, Asher’s mother’s hometown, in 1987. Asher now lives in Brooklyn and is working toward his PhD in economics from CUNY.

  Asher on vacation he took with his father to St. Petersburg, Russia, in front of a restored war ship that the Bolsheviks used to fire upon the Winter Palace during the Russian Revolution.

  Celeste with her dog, Oliver, in Rhinebeck, New York, taken while she was studying at Bard College.

  Charles Spencer, Scott’s father, reading a selection from his second book, Left, Two Three (1986), in a Chicago bookstore, with Scott’s children Celeste and Asher listening on.

  Nominees at the PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony in 1995. Among those present are Spencer (front row, second from left), George Plimpton (back row, center), Francine Prose (back row, second from left), and Mary Lee Settle (front row, fourth from right).

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1998 by Scott Spencer

  cover design by Joanna Rieke

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-0540-2

  This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

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  SCOTT SPENCER

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