The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  A heavy realization—I’ve had way too much to drink—settles into Peter’s head. All of a sudden, he can’t remember his bed ever feeling so far away. He puts his hands in his pockets to steady himself, keeps his head down. Passes back through the Plaza de Gracia, weaves through the alleyways around the Cathedral, where three Romani women are laughing in a corner, all red scarves, flowing skirts, dangling bangles. He can almost hear it, the past roaring up around him, and he’s ashamed, ashamed and sorry for himself at the same time, as only drunk people can be.

  It’s a year ago, in 1994. Peter is in Cairo with Rufus, his father. His dad, as usual, has moved there for what he says is work, though also as usual, Peter can’t figure out what he does. He leaves the house at odd times, makes calls from Egypt’s industrial-strength pay phones. Comes home sometimes not with money, but things: a long piece of meat and a basket of vegetables, three pairs of new shoes, a bicycle. It seems good enough. But Peter can see in his father’s walk that he’s getting bored, nervous. We could go back to Nairobi, he keeps saying; he hasn’t been there since 1983, and even Peter knows—with all that Rufus has tried to protect him from—even Peter knows how unhappy he was there by the time he left. But he’s still talking like that: We could go to Bissau. At last, Peter comes home to find the bags packed in the hallway, his father spinning a key ring on his finger that Peter doesn’t recognize.

  “What are those for?”

  “A car. A Peugeot 405, to be exact. Egyptian model. They’re making them here now, you know.”

  “You bought a car?”

  “What do you think, I stole it? Don’t answer that.”

  “Where are we going?” Peter says.

  “Casablanca.”

  Peter just looks at him.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Peter,” Rufus says.

  “You always say that, Dad, and you never do,” Peter says. “You never know what I’m thinking.”

  “All right. What are you thinking?”

  “That you’re in trouble again. That your latest scheme, whatever it is, has fallen through, and now we have to skip town.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Then why are we leaving?”

  “Okay, okay. Part of what you say is true. Or what you’re saying is part of the truth.”

  “Dad, are you high?”

  “No. No. I’m saying you don’t know the whole story.”

  “Then tell me. Tell me already.”

  Rufus opens his arms. “Look at me. I’m most of the way to sixty. I don’t want to live like this anymore. I can’t afford Europe, but I can’t stay here, either.”

  “What do you mean by this, Dad? How is it we’ve been living?”

  “Please, Peter. This is the last trip. I promise you, when we get to Casablanca, I’ll stay there for good. You’ll have to go there to bury me.”

  They’ve been through this before, five times in the past nine years. The first time—in 1986—Peter’s only seventeen, but knows he could pass for what white people understand as twenty-two, maybe twenty-five. He’s already tall, with cold eyes; the circumstances of his life, the things he’s seen, make him carry himself like few kids in rich countries do. They’re living in Cape Town then, after having moved from Harare, from Lagos. He only sees his father leave the house, come back, always at different hours, wearing different clothes, holding bundles of cash. Their apartments, though, are almost always the same. Plaster walls, a cracked tile floor. The sun driving through thin windows. Never any curtains. Bare furnishings: A table, two chairs, a hot plate, sometimes a gas stove lying on a counter, the line coiling to a propane tank on the floor. By 1986, Peter’s been to thirteen schools, managed to learn to read, write, do math. He’s learned how to fit in, how to move around; he can do it with an ease that almost compensates for having no sense of who he is, or where he’s from. But one day in May, with the summer turning to fall, he decides he’s tired of it. At the time, he doesn’t quite understand what he wants—a home—so he just waits for his father to come back, and then tells him he wants to see his aunts and uncles, his cousins. It’s night. His father glances out the dark window and squints.

  “You really want to see them?” Rufus says.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  They don’t have anything you want, Rufus almost says, but stops himself. Realizes it’ll only make him seem small-minded, uncharitable, things he tries hard not to be, even though he wonders if it isn’t better sometimes, or at least useful, to be petty. His devotion to his son only makes it worse. Rufus wants to teach his son to open himself up to the world, to do what he can’t do himself, and he doesn’t know how to reconcile that with his conviction that he would destroy entire villages to protect his boy. He doesn’t say anything. He goes to the foot of his bed, bends down, and pulls out a metal box with a padlock on it. He unlocks it, pulls out a wrinkled brown folder, and hands it to Peter. Inside, there’s a spiral-bound stenographer’s notebook filled with addresses and phone numbers, and an envelope with several thousand U.S. dollars in it.

  “This is for you. You should start with my brother Henry.” He searches for the words. “He’ll understand you the best, I think.”

  Peter’s counting the money, his mouth open a little. It occurs to Rufus that his son has never seen that much cash in one place before. That’s one thing he’s kept him from.

  “This . . . this is a lot.” Peter says.

  “Not as much as you might think,” Rufus says.

  “If you had all this money, why have we been living like this?”

  “It’s not my money, Peter. It’s yours.”

  Peter doesn’t know what to say, and Rufus feels bad for him, wonders in that second if it was a mistake to raise him like he did. But it’s too late now.

  “Do you want to go or not?” Rufus says.

  Peter spends the summer of 1986 in shock. His uncle Henry’s place in New Canaan, Connecticut, is smaller than the palaces around it, more secluded, but finer, carrying the whiff of overdesign and expensive detail. The house of a man who’s had money for long enough that he knows what to do with it. But the man is almost never there, except on weekends. He gives Peter a set of clothes, a haircut, says he would give him a car, but Peter doesn’t have a license. During the week he drives north into Massachusetts with his cousin Alex; she’s a rising junior at Amherst, majoring in political science. They take the curves slow along Route 2, in the tall pines at the north end of the Pioneer Valley. I wanna be your sledgehammer, the radio says. It seems to be on every station; they can’t escape it. They’re there to visit four friends of Alex’s who are holed up in a house in Colrain for the summer; their plan is to smoke a lot of pot and play as much music as they can. Everyone’s up until five in the morning; the friends have a guitar, a mandolin, and a banjo, and they stumble and laugh their way through a pile of folk-rock songs. They talk about how they want to live like that, out of a car, moving all the time. They don’t have any idea what they’re wishing for. Alex, you played violin when you were a kid, right? they say. They can’t get any of the words out unless there are hard consonants in them. Play the fiddle with us. But Alex isn’t interested in her friends, wants to know all about Africa from Peter. She hangs on every detail. Peter tells her about Rufus and him trying to stave off dehydration once when their car breaks down in Chad. They were stranded for four days with a man and two women in the shade of a crumbling building that might have been a military checkpoint, or a tiny field office for a foreign oil company. He and his father had no language in common with the other three, but they shared what little water they had, until a gas truck rattled by and they all jumped up, got in the truck, waving their arms and yelling. Even at the time, Peter didn’t know how they all fit in the cab. He tells Alex about the market in Onitsha, Nigeria, too, the maze of stalls of cloth and clothes, raw and dried meat, chicken, engine parts. A market as big as the world
. Before the civil war, Peter tells her—and Alex nods, though she didn’t know until then that Nigeria had a civil war—the market even had publishers. They put out pulp fiction, tracts on morality. He shows Alex one of them when they get back to New Canaan: Learn to Speak 360 Interesting Proverbs and Know Your True Brother, by C. N. Eze. A brittle orange cover with a Xeroxed photograph of three upper-middle-class white people on it being friendly to each other. A white guy in a shirt, tie, and sweater vest smiling on the back cover. I enjoy myself with proverbs, the caption reads. Alex is fascinated.

  “Why are the people on this book white?” she says.

  “I don’t know,” Peter says. It hasn’t occurred to him until now that the cover is all that weird. “I think it’s from the early sixties.”

  “Stock photos,” Alex says, and chuckles. She spends an hour thumbing through the pages, reading passages aloud to amuse herself. “Chapter One,” she says. “How a Brother Planned to Kill a Brother and Plunge Him into Financial Distress, God, what amazing phrasing. Chapter Four. When Do We Know Our Real Brother? Ha.”

  There’s a faint whiff of mockery underneath Alex’s glee, and Peter doesn’t like it. Why is she being so condescending? he thinks. But then he looks at the covers of the other books in the place and realizes his paperback is cheap there, cheap and bizarre. When Henry is around on the weekend, he also asks Peter about Africa. The questions aren’t like Alex’s, though. They’re firm, incisive, a quiet grilling. Sometimes it seems like Henry is asking about Rufus, about Peter’s upbringing; he wants to know how they’re doing without just saying so. Other times it seems like Henry’s pumping him for information about possible investment opportunities. And Pamela—Henry’s wife, his aunt—is almost never there at all. She’s on the boards of multiple charities and community organizations and is always going to meetings; when she’s at home, she’s on the phone, speaking in a friendly and practiced singsong while her fingers snarl themselves in the telephone cord. These people tolerate each other enough, Peter thinks, but it’s hard to tell. The entire family is encased in a shell with a gleaming surface that hides the clouds inside. Peter likes them, even trusts them, but can’t believe he’s related to them. He catches, then, a glimpse of the depths of his father’s rebellion, though he can’t see how, in the extremity of his reaction, Rufus is so much like the rest of them.

  Peter stays with Henry and his family for three weeks, then flies to Cleveland. Muriel is waiting for him at the baggage claim in Hopkins, a huge smile on her face. She lets out a high squeal when she sees him and runs and throws her arms around him; and he feels small, though the top of her head is well below his chin.

  “Peter!”

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “I’d recognize those eyes anywhere,” she says. She doesn’t mention the hundred other clues that give him away: the new hairdo, the borrowed clothes that say Henry, but despite them, the manner, the expression on his face, showing just how much Peter isn’t from Ohio.

  Muriel’s house on Edgewater Drive is one of the smaller places on the block, a big colonial tucked between mansions. Muriel explains that they needed the house because they used to have five people in their family, but are down to four—her Petey is away at boarding school, she says, with a hitch in her voice; she realizes as soon as Peter does that it’s a bad lie. Everyone knows it’s summertime. Her other two children, Andrew and Julia, are even around, though they’re out of the house all day, playing sports, riding horses, going to camps, being as overenrolled in the summer as they are during the school year. Muriel’s just gotten used to saying Petey’s in school now because she’s tired of talking about her screwup son, and she hopes that Henry’s been discreet and that Peter hasn’t been following the news in Cleveland. Peter doesn’t push it. He wanders through the house with his bag still hanging from his shoulder. A living room with a long, curving couch, three chairs. Nobody sits in any of them. A wide dining room table, a huge kitchen. Nobody eats there. Five empty bedrooms. Muriel shows him to the smallest one, the guest room, and as he unpacks his things, he thinks about how the house would be populated if it were in Ghana. Maybe twenty people could live here, he thinks, an extended family. The grandparents would have their own rooms, which they’d sometimes share with the smallest children. The nuclear families would be crowded into the others. The downstairs would be packed with rowdy children, the kitchen noisy with the sound of women boiling plantains and cassava, then pounding them together to make fufu. There’d be a radio playing highlife.

  Muriel takes Peter to the parks in the Emerald Necklace on the weekend with Andrew and Julia; she thinks he’ll have something in common with them, being almost the same age, though Peter feels more like one of their parents. To him, they seem whiny and weak, though they’re just American children. They go boating on Lake Erie with Harold Anderson, his great-uncle William’s nephew; Harold spent some time in the family business, only to retire at forty to devote his time to sailing. He has a forty-five-foot yacht called Bad Break, and he’s taken it out of the Great Lakes, along the Saint Lawrence River, all the way down the East Coast to the Caribbean. I’m not sure I ever need to be on land again, he says. He’s been to Accra, too, to Cape Town, through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea to Port Sudan, through the Suez Canal to Cairo. So many cities in common with Peter, though when they try to talk about them, it’s like they’ve been living on different planets, and Harold gets a little quieter. He knows what that disconnect means, doesn’t want to make the young man uncomfortable, and is also a little worried about him. At the end of the day there’s a cold breeze across the water, and Muriel and her husband go below for gin and tonics. Andrew and Julia are already asleep in the wide bed lodged in the bow. Peter stays on deck, watches the sun slink between strips of cloud and into the water, below the horizon. Turns to watch how the darkness crawls across the lake, over the Five Mile Crib, up the buildings of Cleveland’s skyline, chasing the pink light away. Harold watches him watching, waits until he hears the conversation below in full swing.

  “You want something to drink?” he says.

  “No thanks,” Peter says.

  “Soda? How old are you? I could get you a cocktail.”

  “I’m all right,” Peter says.

  Harold hesitates. He’s not sure how to start. Then: “You know, I used to be pretty close with your dad,” he says. “I think that’s really why Meer had me take you guys out today. We were kind of in the same boat, so to speak, moneywise. I don’t mean amountwise, exactly. But we had the same awkward feelings about it, about having so much, especially in a city like this. The same questions about what to do about it.”

  Peter doesn’t say anything. This man is talking to him like he’s fifteen years older than he is, and he’s not quite ready for it.

  “I know your uncle Henry and Muriel don’t talk about Rufus very much, but we all miss him, you know.”

  Rufus, he said. Turning Peter’s dad into someone other than just his dad. There’s a question that’s been burning a hole in Peter’s head since Henry picked him up at the airport, from the inside of his car to the inside of his house, from the tilt of Muriel’s accent when she speaks, to the simple fact that they’re here now with a man who hasn’t worked in over a decade and wants for nothing.

  “How much money does my family have?”

  Harold laughs. “Complicated question. Which means that they have more than most people will ever see. You must know this already, but whenever someone’s cagey about how much they have, it almost always means they’re rich. They’ve stopped counting the pennies a long time ago, maybe stopped counting the hundreds or even the thousands—and almost nobody stops counting thousands. You understand what I’m saying. Almost everyone knows how much they have because they have to. If they don’t keep track of it, they might run out. But a few people don’t have that problem. They might not even be sure how to count up everything they have.” He takes a sip
of his drink. “It makes you into a child if you let it.”

  “So . . . how much?”

  He laughs again. “I don’t know. But I can tell you this: Someone could write a book about your grandfather—the one you’re named after—if anyone in the family would be willing to talk about him. The city made him, and he returned the favor in spades. He could have been a Rockefeller or a Carnegie. Instead he was like a Van Sweringen.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “That’s what I mean. They were two brothers, and almost nobody knows about them anymore, but they pretty much built this place. They say your grandfather even had a deal of some kind worked out with them, or maybe they were just his role models. They say he had deals worked out with a lot of people. He had to have, to go from Tremont to that house in Bratenahl. I know by the time he died, he had money everywhere. Stocks, bonds, real estate, a lot of other investments. Some of it, um, maybe not as legitimate as it should have been, if you know what I’m saying. But I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure. All we know is that he must have made his nut. His nut and then some. He was a shrewd businessman, maybe the shrewdest I’ll ever see. He had to be, to do what he did in this town. You’re going to Sylvie’s house, the place in Bratenahl, right?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Then you’ll see what I mean,” Harold says. “Tell your dad I said hello, okay?”

  He’s right about Sylvie’s house. They take the highway along the waterfront, get off in Bratenahl to cruise along Lake Shore Boulevard. Walls and gates rise on either side of the road, the houses sprawling into estates that get bigger and bigger, until they’re driving along a row of places the likes of which Peter has never seen. They should be boarding schools, he thinks; they should be hotels, hospitals, government institutions. At last, they reach a low granite wall, a huge wrought-iron gate. The long branches of old trees hang over the road. The driveway meanders through a stand of enormous white oaks and a garden of flowers so bright it almost looks like it’s on fire. It’s in a state of controlled riot, the work of someone who knows how to manage things and when to let go. A short, neat outbuilding—a guest house, a carriage house—hides on the side of the lot. The masonry on it is too rich for its size. Not too rich for the main house, though, which Peter at first can only catch glimpses of through the trees, until the branches part at the edge of a patio of mossy bricks and the house spreads its stone, gabled wings. The place is a castle of granite and leaded glass, crawling with ivy. Sylvie is waiting on the steps, standing with her hands clasped in front of her, a small smile on her face. She gives each of them a short, soft hug.