The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “Oh, don’t say that. Killing a man isn’t nothing.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  “I do. You’re smarter than most of the guys I have, Pete. Way smarter. My mother used to say that if you can’t tell how smart someone is, then they’re probably smarter than you.”

  “That sounds about right,” Pete says.

  “It sure does. Which of us would you say is smarter, Pete?”

  Pete looks at his cards.

  “I can’t say,” he says.

  Rizzi laughs. “Me neither,” he says. “So. Tell me about this plan you got.”

  “Well, it’s more of a con.”

  “Who’s the mark?”

  Pete looks up.

  “All of them,” he says. The way he says them, Rizzi knows who he means. All those rich fucks they fleece every night. The Lonardo operation has gotten rich off of them. Lonardo himself is going to buy a nice place in Shaker Heights for his family. Not Millionaires’ Row nice, but nice. His wife’s got a fur coat, some pieces of fine jewelry. Rizzi’s got some fine suits. His kids’ll be able to go to college. They want for nothing in the material realm. But for Rizzi, it doesn’t take away the bitterness of knowing that he and everyone else he knows are still the puppets of the people who own this town, the people with real money, real connections. The ones politicians court. The thing that Rizzi depends on for his livelihood—the thing that his people shoot each other over—is only stuff for their amusement. His people live and die on their largesse. Maybe Rizzi’s got some power inside the Lonardo operation, and in the neighborhood, people cross the street to shake his hand. But the young men who drink his booze every night could turn him in and send him to prison for years if he ever crossed them. Or they could just ruin him in secret by deciding among themselves, one day, not to come anymore. The capriciousness is built right into the arrangement; it’s so obvious none of them have to talk about it. Maybe that’s what gets Lou Rizzi the most, that he can’t do anything about it. He has no way to hurt them that doesn’t make him ruin himself, too. It offends his sense of common decency. He doesn’t begrudge them screwing him. He does plenty of that himself, to other people, and he’s no hypocrite. But he believes people should be able to talk about it, to argue, to fight back. It’s the only dignity we get, he thinks.

  Now Rizzi looks at his cards.

  “Tell me more about this con,” he says to Pete.

  “Maybe I should just show you,” Pete says. He puts his cards down, leans back a little in his chair. And in a second he switches personalities; Petro and Pete are gone, and there’s Peter Henry Hightower in all his Protestant, patrician glory. Rizzi can see it before Peter says anything.

  “Because,” Peter says, “I can become one of them.”

  “You don’t have the history.”

  “That’s right. But I don’t need the history if I have the money.”

  “What’s the con?”

  “The con,” Peter says, “is that we get to enter legitimate business. We get to leave our little game and play their big one. I just need enough money to become an investor.”

  “In what?”

  “Construction.”

  “We’re already in construction.”

  “Only on the labor end,” Peter says. “Not the capital. I don’t want to build the building, Louis. I want to own the building. And then another. And another. Then to diversify,” his hands fan outward, in a gesture Pete the Uke would never make, “into railroads, the stock market.” He takes a breath. “Everything.”

  Rizzi believes Pete can do it. The ambition seems to warp the air around him. He’s a fire in a closed oven, and in that moment, the boss sees just how big it could get if he opens the door.

  “You know better than I do how huge the money is on the right side of the law,” Peter says. “A hundred times as much as what you can make now. A thousand times as much. And no more need to hide it, or launder it. No more pretending. Just money as far as we can see. And all we have to do is tell two little lies to get it. Two little lies that make one new man. In person and on paper.”

  He leans forward. “I’m the person.”

  Rizzi is smiling. “And we’re the paper.”

  “Right.”

  “So how much are you asking for?”

  Now Peter’s smiling, too. “How much do you have?”

  He lies low for another month, just to make sure that nobody in the speakeasy will remember him. Does a last liquor run across Lake Erie for the boss. The money’s in a satchel in his lap on the way over. The boat chews through the water. On the other side are four guys on a dark dock with cases of booze and their hands in their pockets. Nobody says much more than a couple words. They’ve done this all enough times by now that everyone knows what to expect; they only speak up if something goes wrong: a crate about to tip into the water, someone’s hand about to get mashed, the police coming. Peter gives them the money, tips his hat to them, and they’re off again, back over the water.

  They cut the engine when they get close to Cleveland. The Coast Guard’s been getting better at nabbing the runs, so they don’t go right into the port anymore; a half mile offshore they turn east, heading toward the edge of town, a waiting truck, and Peter gets a good long look at his city. It’s always harder to see at night than he expects. But he can see how the place is growing, the buildings climbing into the sky. They say the town’s booming, it’s the best it’s ever been, but Peter knows—he can hear it in the way the customers, the marks, at the speakeasy talk—that the city’s forces are still gathering. It’s all latent power, something about to be unleashed. Peter promises himself that when it crests, he’ll be at the top of it. Then for some reason he can’t explain, he thinks of his father. Petro Garko, five years old, is at the front window of the house, waving outside to his dad, who’s being silly, walking backward through the front gate on the way to the street so he can wave back to his son. It’s not that easy, kid, his father says. Peter tries to ignore it.

  Chapter 10

  Caroline Anderson is only fifteen in March 1922. She’s the youngest of three. Her sister Cecily is twenty-three, outspoken, progressive, a member of the League of Women Voters of Cleveland; is still, now and again, talking about the election of 1920. She voted for James M. Cox, newspaperman, Democrat, former governor of Ohio, and has decided she hates Warren G. Harding, even if he’s from Ohio too, and a newspaperman, and a very popular president who won in a mammoth landslide. There’s just something about him, she says. Too much of a man. A month later, when The Wall Street Journal breaks the story that one of Harding’s boys, Albert Fall, secretary of the interior, leased some land in Wyoming to another of Harding’s boys, Harry Sinclair, an oilman, Cecily smiles. See, I told you. Too much of a man. It’s a gutsy thing to say at the time. Nobody knows about the kickbacks yet, and nobody’s asking how Fall got so rich. Jess Smith is still alive—he’ll be found shot in the head eleven months from now, with people haggling over whether it’s a murder or a suicide—so there’s no talk about just how Smith’s boss, Harry Daugherty, Republican party hotshot made attorney general, is connected to bootlegging. Teapot Dome isn’t a household word yet, or the Little Green House on K Street. Smoke-filled room hasn’t become a cliché instead of just referring to the room in the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, where, they say, a bunch of senators got together to arrange Harding’s nomination. Even after all these things have happened, people won’t decide Harding was a lousy president for years. He’ll be long gone by then. His own sudden death in San Francisco—in mid-sentence while talking to his wife, some will say, though it seems nobody’s really sure what happened to him—is only seventeen months away. But when it all comes out, Cecily smiles, raises her eyebrows, shakes her head, a heady mix of disgust and smug satisfaction. I told you all he was like this, and you didn’t believe me. She doesn’t see through Peter Henry Hightower, though.

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nbsp; Their older brother, William, brings Peter to the family’s house for dinner in April 1923, after a few months of talking about him. This charming man, a little roguish, from Connecticut, William tells the family. Seems to have gotten through Yale without anyone knowing who he was, which is a little hard to square with his ambition, though not with his intelligence. A very intriguing man, savvy and wary, but willing to take some risks; also, he seems to be sitting on a rather large amount of capital, which, as William puts it, isn’t being exploited to its full potential.

  “I would very much like to go into business with him,” William says. He doesn’t say that he met Peter in a speakeasy.

  “You’re saying he’s your ticket,” Cecily says.

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “I know.”

  Cecily teases William because it’s so obvious how much he wants to be rich. It’s also obvious that he can’t do it by himself. He just doesn’t have enough: enough smarts, money, daring, intuition. The one thing he does have is connections, to people Peter has told him he would love to meet someday, his voice carrying the strong hint that wherever those introductions take him, he’ll let William follow.

  “So he’s using you,” Cecily says.

  “It’s not as cynical as that,” William says. He fumbles a few words before saying: “It’s more like we’re using each other.”

  “That sounds so much better.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, William. I don’t.”

  “Don’t hate the man before you’ve met him.”

  “It’s so hard not to, after everything you’ve said.”

  But Peter wins Cecily over on the first night. He’s charismatic and clever, like William said, but not in the way Cecily was expecting. She had already made him into just another of the guys his brother knows. They’re a little too confident and a little too loud about it when you see them in a speakeasy or on the street. There they pretend they’re the next Lorenzo Carter, the first white settler of Cleveland, who settled disputes with knives, guns, and sheer bravado; they pretend that those pioneer roots or some distant middle-class ancestry aren’t so distant. And then they’re a little too deferential when you see them at social engagements, weddings, the theater. Those times when they cover over the smallest hint of their individual personalities with a thick cake of breeding.

  Peter isn’t like that. He’s got the moves down, says all the right things, but in his hands the rules seem more like tools. He’s made them his servants. He’s not confident, he’s strong; not deferential, but disciplined. When he walks across the rug in their living room, it’s as though he’s cutting it in half. The kiss on her hand is firm, European, though somehow not an affect, either. His eyes close when he does it, then look straight at her, as if taking all of her in at once. Giving her his full attention. For the time when they talk, nothing can distract him.

  “It’s very good to meet you, Cecily. I hope you don’t mind me borrowing your brother so much these days.”

  “I think he’s happy to be borrowed.”

  “Not as happy as I am.”

  He says it like he’s flying a kite, but she can tell how serious he is about it. She’s never met anyone so forward, and yet so good at staying in the lines; it seems so natural, like he’s been doing it all his life. He’s got her fooled.

  Peter doesn’t fool Caroline. Part of him doesn’t want to. She sees that it’s an act because she does it herself. Caroline’s never been too comfortable being comfortable, and it’s not just because she’s a teenager. It’s what she is, it’s a sharp point in her personality. Her life in Cleveland is all oak woodwork and private schools, friends who take riding lessons, though they don’t have enough to keep horses themselves; just for a nice address in Cleveland Heights. Fashionable clothes every season. They can dabble, just a little, in politics and society. It’s easy for the rest of her family to look toward the center, at the inner rings of power in Cleveland, the families and the big money that make the city run, and feel how excluded they are. But Caroline’s looking outward, at everyone else. To her, it’s like they’re just inside the walls of a castle, and nobody else notices that the walls are made of glass. She’s always noticing the newspaper boys on the corners downtown, freezing in their shorts and cotton clothes in the winter. She’s always looking out, when they’re in the car, at the neighborhoods on the East Side where the houses are much closer together. She sees how many more people are out on the street, sharing their space with each other because the places where they live are small enough to feel like coffins. When she’s downtown, she looks over the river and sees how much smoke there is in the air; for the people living under it, she thinks, it must be like they’re living in a thunderstorm. If you were the sentimental type, you might say that Caroline Anderson and Galina Garko are mirror images of each other, the same kinds of women, just in different circumstances, sitting on opposite sides of the Cuyahoga. One in a smart dress she just bought for school, the other in clothes she’s been wearing for ten years. Each one seeing the other shore like a foreign country, a continent to explore. But this isn’t that kind of story.

  Let’s say it like this: When Caroline and Peter meet, they both can’t breathe, because for each of them, it’s like the other one split them open, and now they can see everything inside: the contents of their hearts, their lungs shaking in the open air. All the secrets they’ve ever kept, the doubts they’ve locked in cages in the backs of their heads, because they’d eat them alive if they got out. It’s carnage, terrifying and thrilling, and when Peter takes her hand, he can’t bring himself to kiss it. Cecily takes it for lack of interest—how could a man like that be interested in Caroline, still just a girl? She’s only sixteen. Cecily doesn’t know, as Caroline does, what he’s thinking.

  “Peter, right?” Caroline says.

  “Yes. And you’re Caroline?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How do you like school, Caroline?”

  “That’s a complicated question.”

  “I felt that way about school myself. I didn’t realize how much I would enjoy being done with it until I was.”

  “It’s good to hear an adult say that.”

  “It’s easy for me to do it. I don’t have any responsibility here. No need to make you think I have any authority over you.”

  “None of my brother’s friends has ever talked to me this way before.”

  “Have they ever talked to you at all?”

  “No. Not really.”

  She reminds him of some of those South Side girls, the ones forced to be adults before they hit puberty. They know how to start coal fires when they’re five, how to care for babies when they’re eight. They’ve got all of grandmother’s recipes memorized when they’re nine, the ways to cook meat when you don’t have much of it and there are a lot of people in the house, expecting to be fed. He’s caught himself thinking about what will happen to those girls. How many of them will stay in the neighborhood, have enough kids to be able to work a farm, though there’s no farm in sight? How many will speak more Ukrainian than English, talk about a fight with the Poles as though it were headline news, international affairs? How many will wander away from their history and become Americans instead? And then what does that mean? To be American? The people he thought were Americans on the South Side are always saying they’re something else. Irish. Italian. Methodist. Episcopalian. Anything but allegiance to the country they live in. To Peter, being American is an idea, not an identity. It means you’re rising, progressing, moving forward; but for all the talk of God and country, prosperity and destiny, there’s no destination Peter can see. Just movement. For some people, it’s a mad scramble. Others just go around and around. For a few, it’s all much more deliberate; they have a place in their head where they want to be, and they’re figuring out how to reach it before they die. And there’s a lot of
elevated language about that, words that approach the religious. It has the rhythms built into it that Peter heard Father Tarnawsky say in church on Sundays. But as far as he can tell, it’s really just about money. Money and fucking people. Maybe fucking people over. He thinks he understands it so well, and it gives him a dark confidence that he knows how to use it. Even as he can hear what his family would say. His brother, wondering why he can’t be nicer. His mother, telling him he’s getting too big for himself. She doesn’t begrudge him leaving the South Side, but does he have to go so far? One of those big houses along the lake he wants, their gardens, their driveways—it’s just more furniture to buy, more carpets, more trees to trim, more cracks to fix. People to hire, because it’s more than one family can manage, which should tell him something. Why does he need all that? Who is he trying to impress? What is it inside him that can’t be satisfied? And then there’s his father again, picking himself up off the tracks in the Flats, with his sooty clothes and blackened hands, to remind him that death comes when it comes. You think you’re going to live long enough to be a great-grandfather. You think that death will approach you from far away and take years to reach you, that the warning bells will sound one by one. That you’ll have time to prepare. You’ll go blind, you’ll go deaf. You won’t be able to taste the food in your mouth anymore, or feel your toes. Your bones’ll get so brittle that you’ll crack ribs when you roll over in your sleep. At last, the old heart’ll slow down, way down, until the last beat is like a surprise, because you’ll think it stopped already, a couple seconds ago. But it doesn’t always happen like that. You’ll spend so many years, his father says, amassing your empire, assuming that you’ll be alive to see the end of it. But you might not be. Then it’ll just be years of spreading misery, across the world and across your soul, until you’re cut off by a train, a speeding car, a piece of falling masonry, a spinning bullet, the sharp side of a knife, a burst artery. And then think of all the parties you didn’t go to, the girls you never danced with. The people who’ll never miss you because you never met them. What’ll all that you’ve done be worth then?