by Chris Knopf
She gently commanded Belinda to bring us both coffee before I had a chance to apologize for bothering her again.
“Not at all. It’s nice to have a little company. The underlying purpose of which notwithstanding.”
“You look well, Appolonia,” said Gabe.
She nodded her thanks, but didn’t return the compliment.
“So, Sam, what are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Boston,” I said.
“My beloved city.”
“Brookline, technically.”
“Few realize it’s a separate city, even those who live there. It must have been grand to grow up in Southampton.”
“Grand wouldn’t exactly describe my part of town, but it wasn’t bad. Winters were kind of bleak, especially back when everything shut down after Labor Day and all the summer people went back to Manhattan. Half the lights went out and three-quarters of the stores disappeared. But we dug it anyway. Even the air changed. Like God had flicked a switch to send cool dry wind down from Canada.”
“I think Jonathan was too busy to notice things like wind and air.”
“Overachiever.”
“I suppose.”
“Married you. Some would call that a stretch.”
She finally seemed to notice the tea tray by her elbow. I waited while she squirted lemon into the cup and took a sip.
“That can’t be flattery, so you must have another point.”
“Just came from a chat with Joyce Whithers.”
I don’t know what kind of rise I was trying to get, but all it did was give Appolonia a little smile.
“The restaurateur.”
“And old family friend.”
“The Silver Spoon. Said to be quite good. My parents’ friend, not mine.”
“You knew I’d find out eventually. Would have been easier to just tell me.”
“Excuse me,” said the lawyer, smelling a threat, “somebody catch me up.”
“Later Gabe,” said Appolonia, “I want to get to the heart of Sam’s issue.”
“Not an issue, just a curiosity.”
“Everyone has parents, Sam.”
“Not like yours.”
“Jonathan took care of all the finances, and left me with much more than I originally entrusted him with. So, why does it matter how we started out? What’s the relevance to your,” she paused a moment, “enterprise?”
I fought an impulse to launch into a lecture on the importance of establishing every possible data point before attempting an analysis of a systems failure. Give her the same sensitivity training I gave recent chemical engineering graduates unlucky enough to be cast like frightened émigrés into my Technical Services and Support Division. Tell her about the catastrophic consequences that can accrue from the tiniest fractional quantities that go unnoticed in the statistical dust of an equation until suddenly complexity theory takes hold and before you know it there’s a hole the size of infinity blown in your calculations. Which could mean a hole blown in the side of a gigantic pressure vessel, thereby causing the molecules that comprise other engineering graduates of various vintage to be intermingled with a stream of super-heated, partially deconstructed hydrocarbons.
Instead I took a breath, tried to remember an appropriate verse from the I Ching and asked if Belinda could bring me some more coffee. The sudden tension had pushed Gabe out to the edge of his seat, but when I sat back he joined me, though still unsettled.
“You’re right,” I said to Appolonia. “None of my business.”
I was going to tell her about Joe Sullivan, but decided against it. I did bring up my chat with Ivor Fleming, but she said she’d never heard of him. Neither had Gabe.
“I also met Jonathan’s brother, Butch, and his wife.”
Appolonia covered her reaction by dropping her eyes to her lap.
“Ridiculous man, I’m sorry.”
“Not a lot in common, the two of them. Butch and Jonathan.”
“The closest I ever came to arguing with Jonathan was over Arthur. That’s his real name. I never understood why Jonathan was so protective when all he received in return was ridicule and neglect.”
“So not a lot of family get-togethers.”
“Jonathan wanted to have him here for dinner, but I discouraged it. Too much for me. Imagine being in the company of a man who built his entire life in diametric opposition to all that I loved in his brother.”
“Did as well though, financially. Tough to make it in the art game.”
“No lack of brilliance in the Eldridge family. Only a difference in application.”
Gabe had been listening attentively through all this, on the lookout for another sudden change in course. I asked him what he thought to get him back into the conversation.
“Never met the man. Jonathan retained me to help institutionalize their mother. That’s how I came to know Appolonia,” he added, looking over at her. She smiled a crooked little smile, but didn’t return his look. “But I hear he goes in for society parties. Sounds like fun.”
Appolonia gave a sound of contempt, subtle, but clear enough to make Gabe wish he’d kept his mouth shut.
“Artists and petty celebrities, people like Arthur, are kept around as court jesters,” she said. “Given all the trappings of acceptance, but in reality they’re little more than house pets. Jonathan could have steered him away from all that, but he couldn’t be bothered with brotherly advice.”
Growing up, all I had was an older sister who might have looked after me when I was little, I don’t remember. We got along okay. There was rarely conflict or competition. We operated in separate orbits, unified only—along with our mother—in the common determination to stay clear of my father’s random expulsions of noxious rage.
“The mother’s still around,” I said, as the recollection came to me. “In a home somewhere.”
“Somewhere being here,” said Appolonia. “The Sisters of Mercy home in Riverhead. But not terribly relevant to your inquiry, either, if you’ll forgive me, since she’s completely gone over to mental illness.”
I knew the place. It was where my own mother died from Alzheimer’s. Maybe they were roomies for a while. Mrs. Eldridge might have been the one who always stopped me in the hall to ask where she was and how she got there. Perplexed, but graciously polite every time. I would give her the best answer I could, which would satisfy her till the next time she saw me, when we’d do the whole thing all over again.
“It was always terrible for Jonathan to see her that way. I never met her, of course, but he’d try to give me an idea of what she used to be like. He said she often confused him with Arthur, which naturally irritated me no end. Arthur was his father’s name, too, which didn’t help. It’s too cruel.”
When I told her about my mother’s Alzheimer’s I wasn’t trying to make a sympathetic connection, but that was the effect.
“Then you understand,” she said softly.
Gabe spared us his own family history, thank God. My mood, always at risk around Appolonia, was sinking badly under the increasing heft of the conversation. I couldn’t take much more.
“I think we’ve bothered you enough for one day,” I told her, making a move to get out of my chair. Gabe looked at me as if to say, speak for yourself, pal.
“I said it wasn’t a bother,” said Appolonia, “but I won’t keep you.”
“I have a few things I should probably go over with you after Sam leaves,” said Gabe, with a touch more officiousness than probably intended.
“Of course. And I have something to add before you go, if it’s all right,” she said to me.
I was partway out of the living room by this time, and about to give everyone an inane little wave before bolting for the door.
“Sure.”
“I met Jonathan a year after my parents died. Were killed, actually, in a private plane en route to Martha’s Vineyard, just like the young Kennedy son years later. A socially adroit departure, don’t you think?”
I thought of my father in the men’s room at the back of the bar in the Bronx, dying on the floor while his killers brushed off their polyester slacks and straightened their ties in the grungy mirror.
“I don’t think they care on the other side.”
“I was never a particularly courageous person, protected as I was, but to all appearances normal enough. Out and around in the world. Took the Green Line to the market, skied, once even rode a Ferris wheel. My circle considered me vivacious.”
She pointed her index finger straight into the side of her head.
“Something switched off up here the instant I saw those two policemen at our front door, never to switch on again. If I find it hard to discuss my parents, I’m sorry. You seem to want to know everything, so there you have it. I’ll leave the determination of relevance to you.”
After the chilly atmosphere of Appolonia’s house the air outside felt luxuriously thick with heat and humidity. Eddie was glad to see me, and seemed no worse for the wait.
I decided to spend the rest of the day and evening sitting in the one Adirondack chair not stained with Sullivan’s blood, drinking vodka and letting Eddie retrieve tennis balls out of the bay. During that whole time nobody tried to punch me, lie to me, enthrall me or disrupt my powers of perception with clever illusions, so I guess I made the right decision.
SIXTEEN
AMANDA CALLED UP to me when I was just about to muscle a four-by-eight sheet of half-inch plywood up onto the rafters of the addition. All I could do was grunt back until the thing was laid down and tacked in place.
“Shouldn’t you get some help?” she yelled.
“And miss all the exercise?”
“Sometimes doing everything yourself isn’t manly, it’s pigheaded.”
The sun was almost directly overhead, so despite her sunglasses she had to shield her eyes when looking up. She wore a pair of denim shorts, a T-shirt and sneakers.
“So come on up and help.”
“Me? I’m not a carpenter.”
“Hands and back is all you need.”
She was right. There’s no simple way to handle a four-by-eight sheet of anything by yourself, especially plywood, especially suspended on ladders and scaffolding. Having her help made it possible to lay up one full side of subroof, from eave to ridge. The effort cost her a few splinters, while demonstrating the superior exercise value of genuine labor over the simulated health-club variety. As compensation I fed her beer from my dwindling stock of Burton’s fancy imports and let her back-nail the subroof with a power nailer.
“So, does this mean the end of the hammer?” she asked.
“Gone the way of Peter, Paul and Mary.”
“It’s fun.”
“Just don’t aim it at anything unless you intend to shoot.”
We worked until the daylight started to draw long hard shadows across the grass and the sun threatened the horizon with another evening of fireworks. I think she would have kept going despite her exhaustion—asserting her own version of manly pigheadedness—but quickly took my suggestion that we advance the construction schedule to the drinks-on-the-lawn phase.
We took what I guess you’d call an enhanced shower together in the outdoor stall. The experience was comparable to the other night, even stone sober in the full, though fading sunlight. I lent her a flannel shirt and pair of sweatpants to spare her the journey overland to retrieve clean clothes. I let her make a meal, enduring commentary on my kitchen organization, so we could eat something with our drinks out in the Adirondacks, which I’d bleached back to new, covered with cushions and dragged to the edge of the breakwater.
Amanda waited until the plates were empty and we were on our second round to broach the subject.
“We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want,” she said.
Of course there were any number of subjects that leaped to mind that I didn’t want to talk about, though asking her which she meant might have been more perilous than just saying, “I don’t mind.”
I braced myself and said, “I don’t mind.”
“So how is he? Joe Sullivan.”
“Awake, but not exactly alert. And like Markham said, doesn’t remember a thing past the night before when he ate a hundred pounds of pasta at La Maricanto. He woke up thinking he’d just had a wicked case of food poisoning. It’s a good thing they got him full of sedatives. Soon as he realizes somebody tried to whack him there’ll be hell to pay”
“If he discovers who.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea who, and unless he’s forgotten the last few weeks, he will, too. Proving it’ll be the problem, particularly for Sullivan, being sworn to uphold the law and all.”
“He’ll want to skip the due process part.”
“Though he won’t, no matter what. His cop head is hardwired. One of the things I like about him.”
“You never said you liked anything about him.”
This was exactly the kind of thing I was hoping we weren’t going to talk about. But it could have been worse.
“He cares what happens to the people he’s paid to look after. That’s good enough for me. How’re the hands?”
“Sore, but happy. So what are you going to do about it?”
“Band-Aids?”
“Joe Sullivan.”
“Consult your lawyer.”
“My lawyer?”
“Burton Lewis.”
“I’m sure there’s a connection.”
“Everything connects to Burton one way or the other.”
“And we’re doing this when?”
“As soon as you decide if you want to change your clothes or go as you are.”
“As if.”
“When you’re ready,” I said, working my way deeper into the chair so I could catch the last act of the sunset, when the crimson orb dips below the line of hills over on the North Shore and shoots a fan of pink and lavender light back up into the sky. “I’ll be waiting.”
—
I first met Burton Lewis when he hauled me up into the cockpit of his forty-foot sailboat, moored in the middle of the congested harbor off Marblehead, Massachusetts. He’d just thrashed the entire New England racing fleet in a boat with the hailing port of New York City NY, written across the transom. Whatever regional animosity this might have engendered, none was directed toward Burton, whose awkward good nature and unflagging civility made all forms of rancor seem ridiculous. In fact, Abby’s family, who would have achieved a heroic shallowness were it not for the depth of their self-importance, fairly fell over one another to offer him obsequious congratulations. Which was maybe why, as the last guy to clamor over the coaming, and the only one announcing his yacht club allegiance as Yankee Stadium, I hit it off with the lanky young billionaire.
At the time Burton had a criminal law practice run out of a storefront in the Alphabet District on the Lower East Side. Like other very rich people who were rich through inheritance, he could have easily devoted his life to philanthropic ventures with little notice, but instead found a way to put time in at a law firm his grandfather had founded that specialized in corporate tax law, which under his subsequent management had became one of the largest practices in the world.
“You get bored defending indigents day in and day out,” he’d tell me. “A. person needs a little something different once in a while to stimulate the mind, stir the juices. Dashing off Schedule M-3s, petitioning for changes in capital structure, tasty audit-driven litigation and compliance hearings, that sort of thing.”
Burton’s house was built on a foundation that had supported the two previous Lewis mansions, built by his grandfather and father respectively. When Burton downsized from forty-six to twenty-four rooms he retained the original footprint, so the building tended to flow across the grounds in a disorienting sprawl that made you grateful for the people assigned to guide your way.
Amanda and I drew Isabella, a Cuban refugee and Burton’s chief of staff, who’d been on the job since her husband dropped dead whi
le serving subpoenas on behalf of Burton’s criminal practice. Burton had only meant to help her over the initial stages of her loss, but somehow she’d managed to co-opt enough responsibility to make herself indispensable. Or at least provide that illusion.
“Be careful when you go into the room,” she told us. “He’s painting.”
The room was a long rectangle lined on three walls with tall arch-top mahogany doors. The floor was tiled with glossy red ceramic squares and the ceiling rose up into a series of vaulted domes, which Burton was in the act of painting a brilliant white. He stood on a rolling scaffold and was leaning backwards in what looked like a painfully contorted position.
“Missed a spot,” I called up.
“And to think what Michelangelo had to contend with.”
“Had a tough client.”
“Not an issue here. All I battle is sniffing from Isabella.”
“Doesn’t like white?”
“What is it with you men and scaffolding,” said Amanda.
“I think old Mick did it all from a recumbent position,” said Burton, wiping a glob of paint off his forehead.
“We should probably let you work,” Amanda said.
“Not offering to help?” I asked her.
“Not unless it involves a power nailer.”
“Stay put,” Burton called down. “I’ll order up refreshment.”
Before climbing down from the scaffold Burton called Isabella on his cell phone to ask for drinks and a side of soap and water. Then he led us out one of the big doors to a slate patio furnished in wrought iron and shaded by an enormous dark green market umbrella under which were suspended tiny electric globes. As we waited for a staffer to bring refreshments, Burton dragged a garden hose out from behind a Japanese andromeda to do some preliminary rinsing. The night air was soft, but cooled by a breeze coming from the ocean, which you could hear as a low rumble washing around the neighboring estate on the shoreline side of Gin Lane, and through the privet hedge at the distant edge of the yard.
I’d lost track of Burton for a few years after I’d screwed up my job and left Abby who’d been our common link. If you asked her, she’d say Burton belonged to her, declaring the supremacy of social parity, never noticing he actually preferred me to the empty-headed gentility that often gathered on his lawn to sip Campari and play one-upsmanship with each other. He was younger than me, now maybe forty-five or forty-six, but looked like a well-preserved older version of himself. Perpetually tan, his faced was creased and gaunt, offsetting a full head of light brown hair that fell in a French curve across his forehead.
