The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “Okay.”

  “Call me if you need anything.”

  “I still don’t have your phone number.”

  “Of course.” He smiles again. Takes out a business card from his pocket and a pen from the table, scrawls the number on the back. Calls the airlines to book a flight, then drives Peter back to the airport himself.

  All the way down, from the Merritt across the Whitestone Bridge to the Grand Central Parkway to LaGuardia, Henry wants to tell him the rest of it, about why nobody talks to each other anymore. His and Muriel’s fight over Petey. The fight over what to do with Jackie. The big one, in August 1966, when the patriarch died and the smoke still seemed to be rising from Hough after the riots. The Cuyahoga County grand jury was pinning everything on the Communists, Henry remembers. That would have made Dad laugh. It’s always the fucking Communists with them, he would have said. But for his family, it was something else. That there was so much—so much and not enough—to squabble over. That they all were who they were, Rufus in particular. And then the split the paterfamilias had driven into the family before they were ever born. It’s not that Henry blames him for the way the family is now; he’s nobody’s victim, and they’ve all held up their ends pretty good since their father died. But when he takes in the whole of the life of his father, the first Peter Henry Hightower, from his first days in Tremont to his last days in Bratenahl, he can see how they’ve come to this. The family breaking apart, over him and everything he left behind. His grand and ruinous legacy. And Henry looks over at the young man in the passenger seat, thinks about the thug with the same name. Thinks of everything that both the cousins carry of the men and women who came before them. They’re all caught up in their crooked family history. Maybe the two Peters together will straighten it all out, drag everything into the light, and all that’s toxic will wither and die, and the things that are strong will grow. But where they’ll all be by then, he has no idea.

  The flight is in the evening, and it’s dark by the time Henry gets back to his house. Holly’s asleep on the couch, sitting up, her head back, mouth open. A book splayed on the floor near her feet. She was trying to wait up for him. He marks the page with a scrap of paper from his wallet, puts the book back on the coffee table, then goes to the study and calls Alex. It’s too late to call most people, but he knows his daughter will be up, and working.

  “Hello?” Sure enough.

  “Alex. It’s me.”

  “Hi, Dad. Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, everything’s fine. Why?”

  “You don’t usually call this late.”

  “No, no, everything’s fine.”

  “So what are you calling about?”

  “I’m planning a surprise party for Holly’s birthday,” he says. “I had to wait until she was asleep to invite you.”

  “That’s in, like, two months, right?”

  “Well, yes, but I have a lot of calls to make. You’re the first person I’m inviting.”

  “I’d love to come,” Alex says, “if I can get out of work in time.”

  “That’d be great. It’d mean a lot to her.”

  “Happy to do it, Dad. Is that all?”

  Henry feels like a child. Something is rising in him, overwhelming him, and it takes away his voice, makes him helpless. He wants to tell his daughter how much he loves her, how proud he is of everything she’s done, of the kind of woman she’s turned out to be. But there’s too much between them now. The frayed wires at the end of the divorce are still sparking a little; maybe they’ll never stop. The plain fact that he’s never said anything like it before. I love you so much. I’m so proud. He’s tried to show it, a hundred thousand times, it seems, but he’s never sure the message gets through. Never sure that Alex isn’t doing the same thing, struggling to say something neither of them has the words for, at least not for each other. Alex doesn’t hate him; he knows that much. There was a time, right after Henry divorced Alex’s mother, that Alex was always out of the house when he called, always away from her desk. She’s around more often now, almost every time Henry tries to reach him, and it’s enough, at least for now.

  “Yeah, that’s it, Alex,” he says. “It’s good to talk to you.”

  “Good to talk to you, too, Dad. See you soon.”

  “All right. Bye-bye.”

  My daughter is so much better than me, Henry thinks. So much better.

  He’s still standing there with the phone in his hand, the phone having cycled through the silence at the end of the call, the dial tone, the buzzing off-the-hook signal, the silence after that. Holly’s still asleep on the couch. He puts the phone back in its cradle, walks over and gets his wife on her feet. Leads her to the bed without her waking all the way up, and tucks her in. Then goes to his closet, where there’s a long, tall safe installed in the back. Peeks over his shoulder to make sure Holly isn’t stirring, then does the combination fast. Opens it up and takes out a shotgun. He loads it there, looking at Holly the whole time; he doesn’t want her to see any of this. Then moves across the carpet without a sound, goes outside to the end of his driveway. There are three men out there, guys he hired from a security agency; he called them before he left for the airport. They’re big, half again as big as he is, but their guns are smaller. None of them has much to say to each other. Two of the guys are talking about sports. They wait in the dark, bored and tense.

  At last, a car pulls up, going slow, and Henry knows it’s not any of his neighbors, anybody just passing through the area. Nobody does that around here, not down this part of the road. They only come if they have business to attend to. It’s why Henry bought the house in the first place. Even then, he was done with seeing people unless there was a reason.

  “What’s the move?” one of the men says.

  “I’ll talk,” Henry says. “Do what I do.”

  The hired guns nod, and they all get out their weapons so whoever’s driving the car can see them in the headlights. The car stops, and for one second, Henry prays. It’s what his grandmother would have done, his father’s mother, and what his uncle Stefan would do. Stefan taught him the Our Father, which everyone knows. Taught him how to pray the rosary. Henry stumbled over the Hail Mary as a child, blurred the words together, but it comes to him clear and strong now. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

  The man on the passenger side of the car opens the door and the light in the car goes on. Two young men are in there, looking at them, and Henry breathes again. It’s just two local guys. Subcontractors. Someone made a call to someone else, who then made a call. Some small favors exchanged. Enough to make these two drive over from Danbury, or somewhere in upstate New York, maybe up from the city. But they’re not getting paid enough to take a bullet. They just need to say they showed up. Henry takes one hand off his shotgun, makes a gesture in the air. Turn off your engine. The driver does, and the light goes out. They keep the headlights on.

  “He’s not here,” Henry says.

  “He got in a taxi that headed up here.” The voice is from the passenger side, even and deadpan.

  “That’s true,” Henry says. “He was here. But he didn’t stay long.”

  “Any idea where he was going?”

  “Nope,” Henry says. In a narrow way, he’s not lying.

  There’s a half minute of silence from the car, and Henry’s fear returns. In the headlights, he makes a little show of tightening his grip on the shotgun, like he’s ready to point it at the car. The guys he’s hired do the same. They’re putting on a good act. If the men in the car want to fight, they can, but one of them won’t make it off this road. The engine coughs a few times, revs up. Then the car goes down the road in reverse, twenty yards, backs into Henry’s neighbor’s driveway, turns out, and leaves the way it came. They wait until they can’t hear the engine anymore.

  “All right,” Henry
says. “You can go.”

  “You bought us for the night,” one of them says.

  “Go home. I don’t want my wife to know this happened, understand?”

  One of the guys almost looks hurt, but the other two put their guns away, head for their cars. Henry takes the shells out of the shotgun, puts them in his pocket. Goes inside, back to his bedroom, nice and quiet, and puts gun and shells away in the safe. Closes it. Makes sure Holly’s still asleep. Then goes to the phone again.

  “Sylvie,” he says.

  “Yes, Henry?” She’s wide awake.

  “Muriel’s Petey’s in some real trouble.”

  “Yes?” she says. Her voice is soothing, almost sweet. She knows already, Henry thinks. How does she know?

  “It involves Peter, too. He just showed up on my doorstep.”

  “I think it would be safest if you send him to me,” Sylvie says.

  “I already did.”

  “Good.” She knew that already, too, Henry thinks. She wasn’t giving me a suggestion; she was giving me her blessing. Somehow, every time he talks to her, he has to learn all over again that Sylvie is way smarter than he is. Always at least four steps ahead.

  “He’ll be at the airport in an hour or so,” Henry says.

  “I’ll have Muriel pick him up. He can spend the night there. Then I’ll have her bring him over to me in the morning,” Sylvie says.

  “Good.” Still the businessman. Drop it, Henry says to himself. For God’s sake, drop the act for once in your sorry life. A few seconds go by. Sylvie’s still on the other end, waiting.

  “Sylvie?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s going on?”

  Now it’s Sylvie’s turn to pause. Henry can hear her let out a long sigh. Then: “I think there’s just been some amazing misunderstanding, Henry. But it’s okay. I think I know how to fix it.”

  “How are you going to do that?” Henry says.

  “Well, to begin, we’re going to make sure Rufus’s Peter doesn’t stay in the same place for long.” She doesn’t have to say why: If they catch him, they’ll kill him, Henry thinks. “There’s much more to it than that,” she says, “but do you really think you want to know what the rest of it is?”

  There were men with guns outside my house tonight, Sylvie, and they weren’t police, Henry wants to say. But he knows what Sylvie’s saying. The question’s personal, legal, familial, all at once. She’s trying to protect him.

  “You’re right,” he says. “I don’t need to know.”

  “Good. I might need you, Henry. If I do, I’ll call. But there’s a chance that, when I’ve fixed it, you’ll just know. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” He can hear her smile. “It’s good to hear your voice, big brother,” she says.

  “You, too, Sylvie.”

  “I know you’re always looking out for us,” she says.

  He doesn’t know what to say to that. He wants to say so much, but it won’t come out.

  “All right,” he says. “Take care of yourself.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He hangs up the phone, walks to his side of the bed. Strips to his underwear and gets under the covers. His wife turns toward him, puts a hand on his chest. She’s snoring. He can’t sleep. He’s thinking about the place he’s from, the people who raised him. The things he knows they did, that he did to get here, to this house. Its exquisite woodwork, in mahogany, cypress, the kind of wood you can’t get anymore because we’ve chopped it all down. When he’s at his most brutal and self-lacerating, it’s all exploitation to him, people selling out other people, using them up, until there’s nothing left of them. His father was so good at it. It’s easy for Henry to think sometimes that it was all the man did, the only way he saw other people—how they could be useful to him—and he took everything he could get, body and soul, and threw away the rest. He never seemed to show any remorse for it, either; didn’t seem to have the mind Henry has, that makes him feel guilty for his success even though it was all he craved.

  Maybe it was all a question of where his father came from, though. Because the factories killed his father’s father when the patriarch was a boy, and maybe his father thought he’d be damned if he let them get him, too. Maybe he thought he owed his own father that, to play the game as hard as he could. Like it was a kind of revenge to succeed as he did, and did he ever. But look at the cost. The hidden dead. The people killed inside but still walking. Henry’s sure he’s doing it to someone out there, somewhere in the world, every time he makes a buck. Every dollar he gets for playing with big numbers in an office in lower Manhattan is a dollar someone in a factory, in a field somewhere didn’t get, right? He’s selling them out until there’s nothing left. Just like I’m taking everyone in this book and selling them out to you, dear reader. Cracking open their heads to show you what’s inside. Telling you things about them they would never tell anyone, not their wives, or husbands, or best friends. We’ll get as much of them as either of us can stomach, and when we’re done with them, we’ll just leave behind what remains. I hope you’re satisfied.

  Chapter 5

  A few weeks before Peter catches his night flight to Cleveland, a farmer in Eastern Europe, out already from insomnia, finds Madalina. There’s a place on the map where Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova meet, and you might think that would mean something, that there’d be a monument there, like the Four Corners in the southwestern United States. You’ve seen the pictures, the postcards, of a girl lying spread-eagled across the spot where the borders cross, like she’s been cut into quarters, a limb in each state. Her head cut in half. Her brother stands over her with the camera and takes the picture, then looks down at her, frowning. Okay. My turn.

  In that corner of Eastern Europe, there’s no monument. Madalina’s lying on her back in the mud, five hundred and three meters on the Moldovan side. The mud’s thick here, like paste. Where people and livestock churn it, it whips itself into peaks. It’s hard to imagine it ever going away, drought or not; it’ll stay like that until winter comes and freezes it all in place. It’s deep enough to lose shoes in, to cake dirt on your pants up to your knees. The cars that race through here scream their way up the hill, spinning out, swinging side to side, throwing dirt everywhere. Which is why it’s a little hard to see Madalina at first. She was thrown from a backseat, landed hard in the mud, so one of her arms up to the shoulder and one of her legs up to the knees are covered. Her head’s thrown back and smeared with dirt, so at first it looks like her eyes are just closed and bruised, rather than gone altogether. The gunshot wound, behind her ear, is clogged with mud. But the rough stitching from clavicle to pubic symphysis is impossible to miss. Her clothes are off and the incision line is a rough, swollen ridge, meandering a bit down her body, as if whoever did it was quite skilled, but in a hurry. Since they shot her in the head afterward, why they stitched her up again is a mystery. Maybe it’s a mark of professionalism; they’re sending a signal to the authorities that this isn’t a simple murder or a serial killer; no, Madalina’s been involved in an operation. Maybe it’s a small nod to her family, a little shred of respect—or a mockery of respect—after the hours of brutality. What her parents were afraid of the most when she left them has happened, and if this were a different kind of story, they might have woken up in their beds at the moment of her death, or the second the stitches were done. Woken up and wandered around the house looking for their daughter, swearing they heard her come in. But this isn’t that kind of story. Her parents are just human beings and they sleep through all of it. In just a couple days, though, they’ll learn enough to know they’ll never see her again. They’ll see how her life can be described as a loop, first rising away from the border of Ukraine and Romania, pausing over Germany, then falling again, over Kiev, to come back to earth in Moldova. The farmer who finds her is terrified. He
doesn’t trust the police, doesn’t trust anyone except his brother with what he’s found. He runs to his brother’s house and wakes him; they get Madalina off the hill before the sun’s all the way up, bury her that night in the back of the farmer’s own field, with as much dignity as they can give her. He feels terrible for her, for what she must have gotten mixed up in. But he’ll never tell anyone what he’s done, or where she is.

  You need to know a few things now, dear reader, if you don’t already, about Romania, just like you needed to know a few things about Ukraine before. You need to know because it’s hard for us over here in the United States to see just how chaotic, how desperate sometimes, things get in Eastern Europe just after the Soviet Union collapses. We see them taking apart the Berlin Wall on TV, we see the big protests in the streets. But it’s a lot harder to see the lawlessness that comes with it. Harder to see what a few people with money and means and not much in the way of morals can get away with—and how—when the old order falls and the new one takes too long to build. For a while, the cages are open and things run wild. That’s what I’m trying to show you. I’m not trying to tell you what it means; I’m just trying to tell you what happened, and I’m trying to do it so you see for yourself, in the end, why you should know.

  Madalina is born in Negostina, just outside of Siret, near the border with Ukraine. It’s 1970. Siret’s down in the valley of a small river, a little pocket of the country far from the capital, but on some days it can feel like a snapshot of all Romania: the houses with chipping plaster walls, the crowded little market in a tight intersection. An old woman trying to sweep the sidewalk in front of her house, while the wind blows the dirt all around her. Then there’s the weight of the past. Siret has two Jewish cemeteries. One of them’s centuries old and looks it: It’s on a craggy hill so steep that some of the graves are almost horizontal. It’s all walled off. The house next to it raises chickens. The newer cemetery is bigger, a little tidier. The neighbor will give you a little tour, for a small fee, if you ask. She’ll show you the oldest graves, from a couple hundred years ago, the newest ones from a half century ago. The monument for the Holocaust at the gate; underneath it, they buried some of the soap they found in the camps when the war was over. You don’t always think of Romania and the Holocaust, but the Antonescu regime, which sided with Hitler during World War II until a coup took it out, killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. And that means that, in some towns—like Siret—there isn’t a single Jew left. The last ones died or left in the mid-1950s, though in the center of town, the synagogue is still there, chained shut for decades, to remind everyone else what happened.