The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  That Richard, the youngest of my brothers, was closest to my age only accentuated the fifteen-year gulf between us. Like Ron and Bob, he was an altogether different species from me, a giant whose footsteps shook the floor. He could juggle three oranges at a time, which, from my grade school point of view, was a crucial rite of passage into manhood. While I inhabited the family’s sidelines, Richard counted himself among a shoving triumvirate of brothers who jockeyed for a spot before the bathroom mirror, each dousing his hair with Vitalis and sculpting it into the “fenders” and “flattops” he’d primp throughout the day. Nothing, absolutely nothing would muss it up except maybe the wind of a hurtling convertible or a woman running her fingers through his hair—or so they’d boast to one another as they wiped swaths of steam off the mirror, young men grooming themselves for a shared daydream of speed and release.

  Richard “took to water,” as my mother liked to say. (High praise from a woman whose own swimming feat I’ll get to later.) During the summer, he worked as a lifeguard at a public pool near Griffith Park. Perched in the crow’s nest of a canvas chair, he peered through a pair of regulation sunglasses at the splashing pandemonium of swimmers doing laps and cannonballs while screaming kids in water wings bobbed across the chop.

  By his freshman year in college, my brother had grown ruddy and muscular, sharp planes emerging from the baby fat of his face, the masculine angularity softened by long eyelashes. Wherever we went, I saw women giving him second looks, or pretending not to. Because I first became aware of the ripple effect of adult desire in Richard’s company, his body seemed to possess an elemental power that affected everything around it, like weather and light.

  One summer, instead of working at the public pool, Richard placed an ad in the Bel Air News offering his services as a swimming instructor for children as young as three. My brother’s middle name was Gary, and in a brilliant stroke of self-promotion, he billed himself as the Gary Cooper Swim School. The gangly, handsome actor of the same name had recently been nominated for an Academy Award for his role as a Quaker patriarch in the film Friendly Persuasion. My parents said that celebrities like Tony Curtis and Paul Newman contacted Richard under the assumption that the swimming school was sanctioned by the star, and when a tanned and enterprising young man arrived for an interview and instantly set the record straight, showing them his Red Cross water-safety certificate and a letter of recommendation from the Hollywood Department of Parks and Recreation, they introduced him to their sons and daughters and hired him anyway.

  Everyone in the family began calling him Gary. My mother relished telling people her son had become the “swimming instructor to the stars.” Technically, he was the swimming instructor to the children of the stars, but I wasn’t about to point this out and spoil her pleasure. I spent my Saturdays roaming over famous names engraved in the pink terrazzo of Hollywood Boulevard, and stars meant something entirely different to me than to my mother. Stars meant a walkable constellation strewn with crushed cigarette butts and wads of chewing gum. Stars were stepping-stones that led to the novelty shops where I spent my allowance on puddles of rubber vomit and sticks of trick gum that blackened the chewer’s tongue and teeth. Stars decorated the pavement onto which lushes staggered from the Frolic Room, rumpled men and women disgusted by the sunlight. But if I took my mother to mean the lights pulsing in the night sky, if I convinced myself for even a second that my brother had instructed those stars to swim across the cosmos, then I understood how splendid a claim she was able to make, and why she made it as often as she did.

  In no time, Gary had earned enough money for a down payment on a Thunderbird convertible, shiny and green as a cocktail olive. The car made me and my other brothers jealous, and even our mother, who didn’t drive, dreamily ran her hand along the dash. It took a lot to stir our father to a state of awe, but that summer, whenever he asked Gary, “How’s Tony Curtis doing?” his voice betrayed such wonderment that he might as well have been asking if we’d landed on Mars. Mother never failed to add that Curtis’s real name had been Bernie Schwartz—“changed by those movie moguls, just like at Ellis Island.”

  “Was our name ever changed?” I asked.

  “Of course,” said my father. “We’re Americans, aren’t we?”

  And then he switched to another subject before I could ask him what the name had been. History moved forward in our house, rarely back, and making a point about Bernie Schwartz’s origin didn’t acknowledge a shared past so much as a shared future: Jews could be admired, Jews could be famous, Jews could be a force.

  The few times Gary took me with him to Bel Air have blended together to form a single memory. I can plumb that memory for the faces and handshakes of the famous, but what is salient, what remains, is the narrow, winding hillside roads, the flawless box hedges and empyrean rows of cypress behind which stood houses whose grandeur, though hidden, was everywhere apparent. Sweet with the scent of jasmine, wind blew through our hair as the speeding T-Bird, low to the ground, took hairpin turns as easily as straightaways. Almost close enough to touch, the road glittered with bits of quartz as we sprinted from one address to the next. I was certain I’d entered the daydream my brothers had talked about when standing before the foggy bathroom mirror, but the sky above us was clear, the sky was glassy and factual. “I’ve made lots of important connections,” Gary shouted over the rushing air, “and after I graduate law school, I’m going to join Dad’s practice. I’ve already got the clients, right?” What I said back is lost to me now, but this much I know: the flattery of being taken into his confidence, of being a peer in his sleek two-seater, overshadowed any answer I gave. The drive couldn’t have lasted long, yet we seemed to shoot through endless striations of sun and shade, sun and shade, every now and then the city flashing through a break in the foliage, a vista reaching beyond the Santa Monica shoreline and out to the curving rim of the Pacific before it was suddenly shuttered from view, lying in wait at another turn.

  What satisfaction it must have given my father to know that he’d raised a commingler, savvy and charismatic. A born go-getter, Gary went and got. Gary was able to make the acquaintance of the famous with little of the self-consciousness about class and religion that haunted our father. My brother’s self-assurance wasn’t simply a matter of temperament, but a birthright of the indigenous : I am here and always have been.

  If our father had undertaken a mission to recruit any of us into the legal profession in general, or into his practice in particular, this mission was unspoken. I never got the impression he cared one way or another what I did for a living; just about any profession was fine except for the pipe dreams of painting or writing. As far as I know, each of my brothers arrived at the decision to join the firm without being coaxed or pressured to do so. Our father wasn’t the kind of man who easily expressed, or even recognized, his need for approval (need equaled weakness, and weakness undermined a man’s authority), but he was pleased by his sons’ wish to emulate him, and his pleasure, though fleeting, fed their devotion and encouraged them further. Because my brothers’ desire to work alongside him predated me, I assumed the inclination was innate, a genetic tendency I didn’t share. That is, I didn’t share their calling to law, yet each of us was captivated by our father’s mercurial moods and fluctuating sense of justice, and together we shared the apprehension that our future was somehow bound to his.

  By 1961, all three of my brothers worked at the Spring Street office. The Herald Examiner’s coverage of my father’s cases had been a boon to his practice, and the waiting room teemed with people. Gary, then twenty-four, and Ron, twenty-six, had graduated from law school at the University of Southern California and, seemingly overnight, took occupancy of two small offices in my father’s newly renovated suite. Those offices may have looked small only because they were furnished with identical desks (graduation gifts from our father) massive enough to take up half the space and confer instant status on whoever sat behind them.

  The roster stenciled on
the office door—

  Cooper, Cooper & Cooper, Attorneys at Law

  & Cooper, Private Investigator

  —announced a troop of Coopers who specialized in untying nuptial knots as fast as the marriage bureau could tie them. So quickly, in fact, that marriage seemed like a rocky prelude to the stable, enduring state of divorce. The 1960s would be the last decade in which the California legal system required attorneys to present evidence of marital misconduct, and with Dad as their guide, Ron and Gary were inducted into a fellowship of faultfinders as old as jurisprudence itself.

  Despite Gary’s social graces and Ron’s meticulousness with detail, our father assumed they’d joined the practice not to contribute their skills, but solely for the benefit of his mentorship, a condition that went into effect the moment they sat at their desks. That the desks were too big for the rooms was a reminder of our father’s expectations, the foremost being that his every expectation would be met. Having three grown sons as partners in his law firm served as an advertisement for his personal magnetism, a public endorsement for the Solomon-like wisdom with which he settled disputes, that is, with which he fought to divvy up community property and win visitation rights. As the senior partner and biological top brass, my father felt free—obliged, in fact—to admonish Ron and Gary for any strategic weakness they displayed in court, even when the cases were decided in their favor. This was especially true, Ron once grumbled, when there were other attorneys within earshot, my father stentorian while his peers were watching, then mute and brooding when the audience had gone. Ron and Gary were thought of, and began to think of themselves, as boys with briefcases, unable to voice an objection unless they were prepared to suffer through a cold spell of our father’s disfavor.

  My brothers quietly complained to each other that, because they were thought of as novices, our father assigned them cases where little was at stake. They listened to the myopic squabbling of couples who didn’t have “a pot to piss in,” as my father described certain clients’ financial circumstances, and wasted days on claims so small that the spouses who made them seemed trivial too, misers dividing grains of sand.

  The tensions of apprenticeship might have come with any new job, but there was more. No matter how scrupulously they tried to avoid the specifics while talking in my presence, I picked up hints that our father was guilty of some deceit, and that my brothers’ revised vision of him threatened to obscure, perhaps forever, the man they thought they knew. Years later I’d learn that, one afternoon, Gary had walked in on our father just as one of the firm’s ever-changing array of secretaries, who’d been kneeling between his legs, quickly drew back from his lap and ducked beneath his desk, thinking she hadn’t been seen. This alone would have been awkward, but my father quickly rolled his chair to the desk’s edge in a halfhearted effort to conceal her. He continued to talk with Gary as if nothing happened, his hands calmly folded atop an ink blotter. “Should I come back at a better time?” Gary stammered. “Now,” said my father, “is a better time,” meaning that successful indiscretion has neither a before nor after. The whole thing might have been comical had my father not locked Gary in an icy stare, daring him. Meanwhile, the temp huddling beneath the desk was afraid to breathe and give herself away, unaware that a split-second pact had been established and it hardly mattered now if she sneezed or giggled or typed a letter; her presence was not only known but forgotten.

  My brothers joked about a number of such incidents with a bravado born of discomfort. Dictation, pro bono … one double entendre followed another. But humor couldn’t ease the responsibility that came with the knowledge of our father’s affairs and the pressure to keep them secret from my mother and me. Dad was drawn to womankind, and also to a game of brinksmanship. He flashed his women like stolen jewels. He wanted his sons to be dazzled. He wanted to leave them speechless.

  At the time, all three of my brothers were dating women they were crazy about, and it would have been in their best interest not to tell them about our father’s infidelities, which might have caused their girlfriends to wonder if straying was a tendency passed from father to son. Had my brothers or their love interests been anything like the hippies who gathered on weekends at nearby Griffith Park to play guitars and dance half naked, infidelity wouldn’t have been an issue; they’d have looked upon monogamy as a middle-class hang-up that kept my parents from … well, from doing pretty much what they already did: dad practicing “free love” with a kind of communal exuberance, mom transcending her helplessness through a strenuous meditation on housework, the immaculate bathrooms reeking of bleach, the bedsheets spitefully bright. As it was, my brothers and the women they were courting wanted a marriage similar to that of my parents’, minus the problems, which wouldn’t have left much but the license itself.

  The nights my brothers brought girlfriends home to have dinner and meet the family were as nerve-wracking as test flights or dress rehearsals. The clatter of iron skillets and Pyrex casserole dishes, thudding oven and cupboard doors, announced the approaching hour. Judging from the sound alone, my mother could have been remodeling the room instead of cooking dinner in it. She believed that the success of the evening, and therefore the marriages of her sons to their prospective brides, and therefore the happiness of her nonexistent grandkids, hinged entirely on the tenderness of her beef brisket or the firmness of her Jell-O mold. Better to labor under the illusion that it was she who was responsible for the evening’s repercussions than to acknowledge that the outcome lay mostly in my father’s hands. Not that he made any special effort in the way of preparation—his primary role was to turn on the porch light so the date didn’t “break her neck on the steps and slap me with a law-suit”—but even after knowing how important a certain girl was to one of my brothers, Dad’s reaction could go either way.

  Despite the number of times he’d heard judges instruct jurors to base their verdict solely on the evidence presented, my father’s judgment of the girlfriend in question snapped shut like a bear trap the second they met. When he’d made up his mind to dislike a girl, which happened all too often, given the pressure put on him to like her, he’d welcome her inside and then greet her every remark with a repertoire of gestures that were relatively benign to the uninitiated but signaled, to those in the know, impending rejection:

  Rapid blinking = disbelief

  Sustained smile = waning patience

  Cleaning his nails with the tines of a fork = outright hostility

  Napkin origami = boredom

  Latinate discussions of the law = disregard

  As the evening wore on, he might decide to weigh the evidence—her manner, figure, intelligence, wit—then interpret each aspect of her character according to the opinion he’d formed when she’d first stepped through the door. In this way our father foresaw the future, then brought about the future he foresaw.

  However eagerly the rest of us had waited to lay eyes on the girl we’d been hearing so much about, to discover if she matched or contradicted the pictures in our minds, when the doorbell rang we’d dash into the entry hall and turn toward my father as he opened the door, holding our collective breath and assessing him as if he were the stranger who’d come to pay a call. How odd it must have been for the nervous girl standing outside, whose back was perhaps being stroked for reassurance by the brother who’d brought her, to look upon the photogenic cluster of us casting sidelong glances at Dad, unable to tear our eyes away till the last brassy notes of the doorbell faded. Of course we welcomed the girl, soaked her up, but all the while we noted every twitch and furrow, every shade of appraisal on Father’s face.

  Gary’s girlfriend, Sharleen, attended UCLA and came preapproved with what my father considered a stellar pedigree: her father directed movies starring the Three Stooges. Since Sharleen had grown up around movie folk, my father decided to show her his suave side. He poured her a glass of boysenberry Manischewitz (thick as pancake syrup) at just the right angle to let the full bouquet escape, all the while proclaim
ing her lovely and commending his son’s good taste, for which he was quick to take credit: “Where could my boy have got it from?” With her glossy blond hair, her green eyes outlined like Cleopatra’s, Sharleen was game for my father’s compliments and quick to return his banter. Versed in flirtation, leggy and bold in her miniskirt, she knew the precise amount of surprise with which to register his suggestive remarks—“They didn’t make young women like you in my day. It was probably against the law!”—both playful enough to scold him and stern enough to draw the line. In the meantime, Gary, knowing what he did about the goings-on at the office, must have detested every mock-coy minute, yet I saw him brighten and start to enjoy himself the moment dad had said “my boy.” The encounter with Sharleen left our father happily flushed, as if she’d raced him a couple of laps—and let him win.

  You can’t imagine our relief once those evenings got off to a good start. There existed a mysterious aspect of my father’s charm that was difficult for those affected by it to explain, for unlike charm in its common incarnations, my father’s didn’t promise you fondness so much as it promised to spare you from the trouble he’d cause if you dared to give him grief. He used his charm to protect you from himself, which was, in the end, an act of kindness.

  I’m sure Ron’s girlfriend, Nancy, was nervous on her first visit to our house, yet she seemed to take the evening in stride, relaxed while walking the get-to-know-you gauntlet. She assessed us while we assessed her. Nancy, it gradually became clear, could be quick with her laughter and opinions, but more often than not she listened intently and her face went still. She followed conversations without a lot of nods or “uh-huh’s,” those signposts that let the speaker know he’s in the lead and being agreed with. Her reserve bothered my father, and instead of taking it as patience, he took it as her groundless resistance to his hospitality. He liked ingratiation in his women, and it was clear that his usual means of making an impression—the dapper flirt, the attorney whose cases were covered in the Herald—were not about to work with Nancy. The last straw was her failure to sustain appreciative laughter at the jokes he told during dinner, and though she threw her head back and smiled, mere bemusement didn’t make the grade. Nancy possessed a student’s seriousness and curiosity; she was earning a degree in Jewish education. Her fluency in Hebrew and familiarity with Talmudic scholarship was a reminder of the Jewishness my father held on to with one hand and batted away with the other. This, along with her jet-black hair, her dark eyes gleaming with thoughts held back, must have intensified his impression of her supposed antipathy. Certain from the start that she’d judged him harshly, he never cared to draw her out.