Nothing Lost (8 page)

CHAPTER THREE

MAX

It seemed a kind of exorcism, a way to distance herself from her DNA. Her sense of privacy was so acute that I can't imagine that she ever planned for anyone to see it. Certainly not me, who professed to be her friend. I showed this bit to Stanley (remember Stanley Poindexter, M.D., my psychiatrist companion, partner, or what have you, each term worse than the next), and Stanley said it was a kind of computer therapy, a way to own up to one's life without having to face a therapist's questions. Like all shrinks, Stanley thinks he has an answer for every eventuality, which is horseshit, of course. Was there any more, he wanted to know, and I said no, although I don't think he believed me, rightly enough. What was there was not mine to share, and so I told him there was just the usual sediment one finds in every computer: a telephone directory, an appointment calendar, e-mails, search engines, news sites,
The New York Times,
Navigator, penal and civil codes in all fifty states, the judiciary and elected officials in those same fifty states, a militia website (interesting!), websites for the FBI, the CIA, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other agencies, the U.S. Constitution, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare (I would guess for a handy quote), a dozen daily newspapers, too many magazines, the Internet Movie Database, MovieLink—Search by Theater, music sites, shopping (the e-mail addresses and 800 numbers of the usual stores—Saks, Armani: You name it, she had it, including her personal shoppers), et cetera and so forth.

Her word processing files were not much more interesting. Speeches (a commencement address at Smith, a luncheon talk to the American Bar Association, essentially one canned talk configured to fit the audience at hand), case files, trial transcripts, a file (actually dossiers) on people she would guest with on talk shows, seminars, and panel discussions— their quirks, C.V.'s, legislation they had sponsored or supported, personal and political antipathies (her folder on Poppy McClure had the cream cheese story; she was Brian Lamb's guest the next night, it turned out, and the show staff whispered the details to her, or as much as they thought they knew or could make up, including the firing of the leggy P.A.), guest lists for parties and official events, travel plans, household repairs and renovations (including letters threatening contractors with legal action, scary and very well done, quoting the appropriate district statutes and clauses in the construction contracts), and recipes.

Recipes.

Nothing wrong with that. Except. The entrance to her RECIPES folder was blocked by a password. Nothing else on the computer was, not the e-mails, the case files, or her mini-dossiers. Why? She did not wish to share her recipes for navarin or albóndigas or chartreuse of pheasant?

I don't think so.

That was the old prosecutor in me. What could be blander than RECIPES? A folder one would normally slide right by.

Breaking the password was not especially difficult. It never is. I went to her entry in
Who's Who.
Lawyer. Advocate. Born Forest Hills, Queens, N.Y. (no DOB, I noticed); d. Brendan and Moira Kean (Twomey); B.A. Smith College, 1980; m. Roger Chipworth, May 25, 1980 (div.), m. Furlong B. Doheny, April 17, 1982 (dec.).

NORTHAMPTON did it.

Of course I already knew, by the time I got into Teresa's computer, most of the personal information buried in RECIPES. It had been massaged and distorted through the great American publicity machine, turning Teresa into what I knew was her worst nightmare, a fifteen-minute celebrity.

I think I knew her better than anyone (except perhaps Marty Buick), and I suppose I always loved her, not enough to make me go straight, but in the way a queer can love a woman, by understanding and appreciating without all the collateral damage of sex. What I didn't know, until I cracked the password into RECIPES, was how she felt about the step-by-step chain of events that led her inexorably into my life. So forgive me if I take the liberty of casting the links of that chain of events in Teresa's voice.

It begins at the White House.

CHAPTER FOUR

In Teresa's voice: I remember every moment of my time with Jack.

We met at the president's annual black-tie dinner for the justices of the Supreme Court. I was sitting at the attorney general's table. I can't say that Margaret Dudley and I were friends, but she was an imposing woman with whom, in my capacity as president of Justice for All, I had often appeared on the Sunday shows, and at her urging I had testified before both the House and the Senate judiciary committees on behalf of a victims' rights bill the administration was sponsoring, a bill that was constitutionally suspect but which, in an election year, of course passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed into law. White House dinners were usually a trial, with bad food geographically allocated and elaborately explained on individual menus written in a calligrapher's script—Chesapeake Bay Crab Mousse, Bow Tie Louisiana Gruyère Twists, Medallion of Veal in Napa Valley Champagne, Gnocchi à la Chicago, Turban of California Carrots with Oregon Yellow Squash, Pennsylvania Nasturtium Flower Salad, Ohio Brie Cheese with Mississippi Almonds, Vermont Caramel, Petits Fours Sec, a Washington State Merlot, a New York State Zinfandel, and an Arizona Grappa. The guest list was the usual assortment of campaign contributors and congressional pirates seeking favors and who, in turn, when said favors (a dam or a submarine base) were granted, would, as a quid pro quo, provide favors by way of votes or campaign contributions, or so the president hoped. At my table, besides the attorney general, there was the governor of Massachusetts, a pontificating CEO, an airhead from the Senate Judiciary Committee, assorted spouses and consorts, and John Broderick. He was seated across the table from me, and I overheard him tell the wife of a black appellate judge from Missouri that it was the first time he had been at the White House since his brother worked there as an advisor to former President Frederick Finn. I of course knew who he was. His late father was a famously blunt and famously randy billionaire with the manners, it was said, of a tire iron; his brother, the presidential advisor, a Benedictine priest who was assassinated by a crazed schizophrenic in San Francisco along with John Broderick's first wife, Leah, a noted radical criminal attorney. His second wife was an immensely rich collector of husbands, his third wife was killed in an automobile accident, he had written a number of movies and two books, and in spite of considerable pressure he had never revealed what he had learned about Blue Tyler and Jacob King. He had a disconcerting stare that I found focused on me whenever I looked up during dinner.

The evening wore on. The president toasted the honorable justices, the chief justice toasted President McCall, a soprano from the Metropolitan Opera sang a Massenet aria from
Cendrillon
followed by “He's Got the Whole World in His Hand,” and then the dancing began. Margaret Dudley rose and danced with John Broderick, and then brought him back to my seat.

“Thank you for letting me take you to my considerable bosom,” Margaret Dudley said to John Broderick.

“I wouldn't use the word ‘considerable,' General . . .”

“Jack, we've known each other much too long for you to call me ‘General.' Now. You know Teresa Kean?”

“Only by reputation.”

“Then go out on the dance floor and get to know each other better.”

The orchestra was attempting Gershwin's “Summertime.” He was not a good dancer and did not seem to care that he wasn't. He must have been in his early sixties, maybe sixty-five, trim, but too old for dancing to be an important part of his life, if it ever had been. Again I found myself the target of that disconcerting stare. He made no effort to speak. To make conversation, I said, “You really haven't been here since Fritz Finn was president?”

He nodded.

“You must have been asked.”

Another nod.

“Then why come tonight?”

“Duncan Dudley asked if I would be available.” Margaret Dudley's husband. “We knew each other at Princeton.”

“So that's the reason.”

“No.”

His rudeness was like a baffle, useful in deflecting inquiry. I had the sense that he wanted to see if I would persist. Okay. His way then. “Do you ever give anything beside name, rank, and serial number?”

“Usually, not even that.” He looked at me directly for the first time and half smiled. “Actually I don't like Duncan. Never did. He's a burr of public life. Always attaching himself to someone who might do him some good. Dix McCall now, Margaret at the get-go. When she was young and fat. But he was smart enough to know she was very, very, very smart. Which is three verys smarter than he is. He'd fuck a pencil sharpener. And has. I never understood what Margaret saw in him. She's all right.”

It was not the sort of measured conversation one usually hears at a White House dinner. I knew it was his way of not answering my question, but I was too good a lawyer not to continue my cross-examination, whatever his rudeness. “Why then?”

He pretended to listen to the music. “I hate Gershwin.”

He was dodging. I bored in. “Why?”

“Lush and sentimental. ‘Old Man River' crap. ‘Tote dat barge, lift dat bale.' ”

“Forget Gershwin. Why did you come tonight?”

“ ‘I got plenty of nothin', and nothin' is plenty for me.' ”

Again. “Why?”

A pause. “You don't give up, do you?” Another pause. “Duncan mentioned that you'd be here.”

I felt a chill. I knew what was coming.

“I knew your mother.”

“Why did she do it?”

We were in the bedroom in the carriage house just off Capitol Hill where I lived, the dinner for the Supreme Court justices already forgotten. He had told me in exact detail about my mother's thirty-five-year odyssey as an itinerant bag lady, one with a small anonymous annuity from those who had been charged to protect her when she was young, famous, and solvent, one whose truest love in those halcyon years was a killer unimpressed by her fame and wealth and whose daughter she had borne and given up for adoption after he was murdered, one who as a woman in her increasingly unstable later years had married and discarded nine, ten, or eleven husbands. “I mean, why did she choose to live the way she did?”

“I don't do why.”

I was startled. “What?”

“Motivation is a very poor explanation of character.” His tone was brusque, peremptory. “People behave the way they do because that's the way they are. Change their circumstances and their behavior won't change for the better or the worse. Put Jesse James on Molokai, he's not going to turn into Father Damien.” He paused, as if considering whether he should continue. “Like your mother.” He propped himself up on his elbow. “Did you ever suspect?”

“A little,” I said after a moment. “When the story first began to come out. I really didn't follow it that closely, but people wouldn't let it go, and you wouldn't talk. I was impressed by that. It was like something my father would do. Daddy—I'm a woman who has not led a sheltered life, but I still call him Daddy. I knew he was well regarded in the legal community—Pat Moynihan came to his rosary, and the mayor and Jack Javits to the funeral. Oh, God, I hate people who drop names. Forgive me for doing that.”

He shrugged.

“He would never talk once he made up his mind not to. I never gave who I was much thought, but I knew he knew. He'd defended Jacob King right after the war—it was mentioned in all his obituaries—and so I found the trial transcript and I found the billing receipts and as the executor of his estate I had access to all his financial records and saw that there was a blind trust set up about the time I was adopted, one where I was the ultimate beneficiary. It was something I just didn't want to investigate, and when I finally got interested, my mother couldn't tell me anything—she has trouble remembering my name. Because of you, or not you, really, because you never said a word, but what others made of what you weren't saying, I knew more or less when Blue Tyler's daughter was born, I knew when I was adopted, I knew when the trust went into effect. As a lawyer you make inductive leaps, you're taught to use the facts to present a credible story to the jury. That we were the same person was a story that seemed . . .” I looked for the proper word. “Tenable.” Then I added, “Possible.”

“You never tried to contact me.”

“You wouldn't have told me.”

“Right.”

I traced the vertical foot-long white scar on his sternum that indicated open-heart surgery, then ran my hand over the hairs on his lower stomach. “Why now?”

“I'm sixty-two,” he said, tapping the scar on his chest. “I have a prosthetic aortic valve, a plastic St. Jude model—the only reason I tell you that is because I suspect you have a lawyer's passion for specificity. Anyway. I had the copyright to your mother's life, and I wanted to pass it on to the one person to whom it could possibly matter.” His dinner jacket and pleated shirt were thrown over a chair, and his studs and cuff links littered the floor. A small smile. “Before . . .”

I knew where “before” led, and I did not want to go there.

He waited for a moment, then rolled over and ran his finger over the aureole of my right breast. “Well . . .”

“Yes.”

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and walked to the chair over which his tuxedo jacket was hung. From an inside pocket he removed what seemed to be a small sewing kit, and then sat on the edge of the bed. “I suppose I should have told you this before,” he said after a moment. There was a thin hypodermic needle, a small medical bottle, and some alcohol wipes inside the kit. “At a certain age, one becomes close in the most unseemly way with one's urologist. He becomes like”— he hesitated—“a penile priest.”

Sex was suddenly on hold.

“Mine is a Bengali Sikh. Dr. Singh. Dinakar Singh.” It was if he was in a confessional, explaining some form of aberrant behavior to a priest. As I had done too often when I still believed, after a fashion, in God and Holy Mother the Church. “Actually I'm not sure I could have talked about this to someone not from the third world. Jerry Caplan at Beverly Hills Medical, say. Leonard Lewis at UCLA. Bucky Kantor at Cedars. Phyllis Haney at St. John's.” He was talking too fast. “A Haitian would have been fine. A Samoan. An Eskimo. The best goddamn man in Sri Lanka. But not someone I might see at Spago. Dr. Singh wanted me to have a penile implant.”

“I'm not sure I want to hear this.”

“Then you don't have a passion for specificity?”

Was there any way to end this conversation in a lighthearted manner? No. Just go with it. As far as it goes.

“My . . .” He pointed to his flaccid equipment. “What word are you comfortable with? Penis? Dick? Prick? Cock? Johnson?”

“Johnson,” I said too quickly. I had a very extensive lexicon on this subject, largely but not wholly learned while engaged in bedroom acrobatics with Budd Doheny, but this was one I'd never used before.

“Then johnson it is. And you might have noticed, Mr. Johnson here is shaped like a T square.”

I had noticed that.

“A condition called Peyronie's disease.” He saw my blank look. “Do you floss regularly? Morning and evening and after meals?”

Where was this going? How do you answer? “When I think of it.”

“Why?”

“Because the hygienist says I should.”

“To get rid of what?”

A Budd Doheny photo session with umbrellas and reflectors was never as strange as this. “Plaque.”

“Right. Plaque. That's what Peyronie's disease is. Plaque. But instead of in your teeth or your gums, it's in your johnson. And you don't go to a periodontist for it, you go to a urologist. When I was a kid, I was told hair would grow on my hands if I masturbated too much. Forget the hair on your hands. It's plaque in your johnson. From overuse, I hope. And the plaque makes it difficult to . . .” A deep breath. “. . . get it up.”

I confess he had my attention. In a criminal courtroom, a lawyer sops up information. About calibers and the particularity of exit wounds and DNA. This was my learning curve on Peyronie's plaque.

“So Dr. Singh's solution was a penile implant. A reservoir under your abdominal muscles, a pump in your scrotum, and two cylinders surgically implanted in Mr. Johnson. ‘Squeeze that pump,' Dr. Singh said, ‘and you will be hard as a rock.' ” He mimicked a subcontinent accent. “ ‘Hard as a rock, Mr. Broderick.' No, thank you, I said, I already have one prosthetic device . . .” He pointed to the foot-long scar on his chest. “. . . my St. Jude valve, and two would be pressing my luck. And anyway, the only person I ever heard of who had a tube in his johnson was Paul Castellano, and he ended up getting shot in front of Spark's Steak House by John Gotti's guys. He was seventy-five years old, and he had the tube so he could screw his Puerto Rican maid; she looked like a sumo wrestler from her pictures. He deserved what happened outside Spark's for that alone. So what's your backup? I asked Dr. Singh.” He removed the needle from its kit and inserted it through the rubber stopper on the medical vial. “Penile injections.”

I was furious. I sat bolt upright, and tried to cover my nakedness with a pillow. “You brought that with you tonight? You thought you were going to score? At the White House? With me?”

He smiled reasonably. “When you go out at night, you don't slip a package of condoms in your purse. Or your diaphragm? Or an RU-486 pill?”

How did he know? Because he had spent a lifetime in the trenches of the sexual battlefield, of course. Not unlike me. “It's not the same.”

He brushed away my answer. “I could do it in the bathroom, I could do it here, or I could leave. Your call.”

I waited for a moment. “I'm not sure I could watch.” Which meant that leaving was not the call.