Authors: Barbara Rogan
“See,” Tortelli said, “I was up all night thinking it over, and I didn’t believe that Fleishman was really involved. I know Fleishman, see. He’s a decent guy. I figured these two bozos were using his name to shake me down, and I wasn’t about to go for it.
“So next thing you know, Kavin’s back, only this time he won’t sit in my office. He takes me out to a diner and we sit in a corner booth and he starts talking, and again he’s making with the doodling. So I says, ‘Mr. Kavin, you dragged me all the way out here, now talk straight to my face. What do you guys want from my life?’
“ This city’s been damn good to you,’ he goes. ‘We think it’s only fair you put something back in the pot.’
“ ‘Whose pot?’ I says. ‘Does Mr. Fleishman know what you’re doing?’
“Kavin laughs in my face. ‘So that’s your problem,’ he says. ‘Don’t you know that me and Jonathan are like this?’ And he holds up two fingers, like that.
“Well, the truth is, I did know they were close friends, but I never once heard that Fleishman was on the take, and I didn’t believe it. I’d been doing his printing for years, and he never asked me for nothing. So I told Kavin I want to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
“The very next day, Fleishman calls me. And he says he’s sorry about the misunderstanding with Mr. Lebenthal, and that actually it’s not just a Jewish cultural foundation but a whole bunch of different charities they support, and he hopes I’ll reconsider making a contribution.”
Tortelli stopped. By now Barnaby was having hot flashes. “Then what?” he demanded.
Tortelli snubbed out his cigar. “I wouldn’t have done it for the new business. If it was just Kavin, I’d have told him to shove his job up his ass. But I couldn’t afford to lose Eastborough.”
“So you paid.”
“Once,” Tortelli said softly. “Only once. And I wouldn’t give it to that slime-bucket Lebenthal. He tried to pressure me, but I told him, ‘Hey, if Fleishman and Kavin want the money so bad, let them take it from my hand.’ “Mr. Fleishman and Mr. Kavin are busy men,” he says, so I say, ‘If they’re too busy to pick up eight grand, then they don’t need it and I won’t pay.’ So he set it up.”
Barnaby gazed at the burly printer with a feeling as close to love as he ever came. “Sets what up?”
“The sitdown. Me, Fleishman, Kavin.”
“You paid them?”
“Didn’t I just say that?”
“Personally, I mean. You put the money in their hands?”
“Sure.”
“How’d you pay?”
“What do you think, MasterCard? Eighty C-notes in a fat manila envelope.”
“Where?”
“Right here. We went into the john and I handed Fleishman the envelope. Made them open it and count it in front of me. Kavin did the counting. All the time, I’m watching Fleishman’s face. He looks like he’s eating shit, but what the hell—it’s my fucking money.”
“You handed Kavin and Fleishman eight thousand in cash.”
“What are you, deaf or something?”
Barnaby rubbed his face. “What happened afterward?”
“I got the work that Kavin promised me. But after I refused to pay anymore, that went away, and then I lost Eastborough, and next thing you know, I’m out on the street.”
“Did you know that Kavin and Lebenthal are partners in a printing business? They bought into a small shop in Brooklyn just about two years ago. Doing quite well, I hear.”
Tortelli’s face went purple. “The fuck you say.”
“Why’d you stop paying?”
“It offended me.” Tortelli hit his head, still shaken by the news on Kavin. “See, I never heard a bad word about Fleishman, and if a guy’s dirty, you generally get to hear about it. I figured they were singling me out, see, and I resented it.”
“Why would they single you out, Mr. Tortelli?”
“I’m Italian, right? No secret about that, with a name like Vito Tortelli. A lotta people, they hear an Italian name and right away they think Mafia, they think crook. I’m no crook, godammit. I’m the son of immigrants and I built my business up from nothing, the old-fashioned way, with plenty of elbow grease. I started out running a press and now at sixty-two I’m back to doing it, but I’m not ashamed of that. I never paid a bribe in my life. So okay—it offended me, them figuring all they had to do was ask and I’d roll over.”
“Have you told anyone else?”
Tortelli gave him a look and tapped his temple. “What for? Whaddaya think, they’re gonna admit it? ‘Oh, yeah, Tortelli, we took eight grand off him once but then he quit paying, so we fucked his ass’? Fuck no! Of course they’ll deny it, and who’s gonna believe me? Who’s gonna take my word over Jonathan Fleishman’s?”
14
AFTER JONATHAN FINISHED, no one spoke. The dining room was so quiet they could hear the swaying of the cypresses, the restless lapping of waves against the bulwark at the foot of the lawn. Clara sighed deeply into her soup, and matzo balls skittered round the bowl like rudderless boats in a high wind.
At last Gracie said, “What are they indicting you for?”
Jonathan could not bring himself to repeat the charges Christopher Leeds had predicted, though they still echoed in his mind. “You read that article.”
“But that’s the
Probe.”
Barnaby’s name was no longer spoken in the house; it was “the
Probe”
or “that bastard.” “They distort everything, they publish lies. You told me.”
“They’re in it together; the
Probe’
s hand in glove with the U.S. attorney’s office.”
“But that’s impossible. They need evidence to indict.”
“Maybe they have evidence,” Paul said.
“You traitor!” Gracie cried.
“Look who’s talking! If you hadn’t shot off your mouth to that bastard, none of this would have happened.”
She lowered her head. Her brother was only saying what she herself believed.
“This has nothing to do with Gracie,” Jonathan said. “Lay off, Paul.”
“Lay off? That’s typical! That’s exactly the problem with this family. It’s poor Gracie this and poor Gracie that, as if she wasn’t the one to blame. You’re all so concerned about Gracie, you never think of what this will to me.”
“What will it do to you, Paul?”
His eyes watered. “It’ll ruin me at Columbia. I was doing so good there—I was making the right sort of friends. Now it’s all down the drain. I was supposed to head the pledge drive for my fraternity next year. Forget that. They’ll probably kick me out altogether.”
“Heavens,” Jonathan said.
Paul threw his napkin onto the table. “You think it’s trivial. All my problems are trivial to you. No one in this family gives a damn about me.” He ran out of the room.
Jonathan watched him go, then looked at Lily. She gave him a slit-eyed glare and followed Paul.
Only his mother and Gracie remained. Gracie leaned toward him, dry-eyed and focused, more like her child-self than she’d been in many years. “You have to tell me more. We have to plan our counterattack.”
“I don’t know any more.” It was not the first lie Jonathan had ever told his daughter, but the first he was conscious of.
“The charges have to be answered publicly. We can’t skulk around like Michael did—we’ve got to tackle them head-on.”
“No one,” he said slowly and precisely, “is to speak to the press. Not one word.”
Clara snorted.
“That goes for you too, Mother.”
“What am I, a dog you should muzzle me? I got plenty what to say.”
“I can’t stop you, Mother. Go ahead and talk, if you want to destroy me.”
“Dad’s right,” Gracie said. “He should be the spokesman, not us.”
“I’m not making any statement.”
“You have to!”
“I’ve been advised against it.”
“By who?”
“By my lawyer,” Jonathan said testily, “and considering what his advice costs, I’m damn well going to take it.”
“It’s bad advice. But if you won’t speak out for yourself, at least make the others do it. All those companies the
Probe
said paid you—they need to come out and say you never took a dime.”
“They’re not going to say a thing. No one sticks his neck out in a case like this.”
“You’re only asking them to tell the truth.”
He hesitated. Their eyes met and a spark of intelligence flew between. Then Jonathan turned away. “It’s out of my hands.”
Her eyes blinked rapidly. Twice her mouth opened and shut without utterance. At last she asked, “
Did
they pay you?”
“I’m a lawyer. I represent clients. It’s the custom in this country to get paid for work. It so happens that my legal work provides the bulk of this family’s income, which you would know if you’d ever taken an interest. I do not take bribes; I do not take kickbacks; and why the hell I should have to defend myself to you,” he shouted, “I will never understand!”
Jonathan’s voice echoed in the silent room. A Dylan Thomas verse came back to him, a favorite from his college days:
Do not go gentle into that good night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Gracie tottered out on legs gone stiff as stilts.
Hearing her brittle step in the hall, the firm, final closure of her bedroom door, Jonathan thought: I’ve lost both my children. He tugged at the lapels of his jacket in a vestigial gesture of mourning.
* * *
The next morning, Wednesday, Jonathan rose before six, dressed quickly and quietly, and left for the city. Lily woke to the sound of the closing door. She had taken two sleeping pills the night before and consequently her sleep had been unbroken, though troubled with elusive nightmares. For some time she lay back on the pillows, watching dappled sunlight play along the wall opposite the bay window. When she closed her eyes, the fresh salt breeze reminded her of the air in her canal city. It had been a long time between dreams, and there was no telling when she’d be allowed back.
Once she’d read of an isolated tribe that believed man’s highest task was learning to control his dreams. They practiced their belief by taking responsibility for their own dreams and teaching their children to do the same. If a boy dreamed of hitting another boy, for example, he would have to go to that boy the next day and atone for his dream aggression.
The idea had stayed with her, though Lily could no longer remember where she had read it or even whether it was fiction or nonfiction (a distinction that in her own life had lately grown less than distinct). Many times she tried to make herself dream of her canal city, and several times she actually succeeded in setting out on a dream voyage; but somehow she always got sidetracked. Like her mother’s voice, the
dream was a gift that could not be summoned, only received.
After some time, Lily got out of bed and went into the master suite’s bathroom. It was while she was lying in her bath, warm and fragrant with attar of roses, that the headache attacked.
It snuck up from behind and pounced without warning: one moment she was soaping her legs (thank God, Clara would say later, she wasn’t shaving them), the next she was sputtering with her face underwater and what felt like a python clamped around her skull.
Fighting panic, she turned onto her hands and knees and raised her head like a deadweight from the water. She slumped over the edge of the tub, and water streamed off her hair and shoulders onto the tiled floor. Black spots swarmed like flies before her eyes.
After a while she dragged herself out of the tub and lay on the cool tiles; eventually she made her way back into bed, where she sank exhausted against the pillows. The pain was something like the contractions of labor, though in a wholly different part of the body. While they continued, they seemed endless, out of time; yet there were respites in between the stretches of pain. Also like a contraction, this pain was modulated in the shape of a wave. It started with a slow constriction, tightened in agony, then slowly relaxed: throbbing on a grand scale.
She thought of getting up, but as one thinks of traveling to China: someday, perhaps. Time passed and she heard the family stirring, but no one disturbed her, until at last there came a knock on her door and Clara followed, carrying a cup of steaming tea.
“Lily, it’s past ten o’clock already. Your friend Margo called twice... ” Then, noticing Lily’s face: “What’s the matter?”
“Just a headache.” Lily tried to sit up, a mistake, since she failed. Clara set the cup on the nightstand and felt Lily’s forehead.
“No fever,” she muttered. Then she saw the bathroom, whose door was ajar: bathwater still in the tub, soaking-wet towels all over the floor. “Oy Gott. What happened, Lily?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s some nothing. What is it, you fainted, you fell? I’m calling the doctor.”
“No, don’t. I don’t need a doctor for a headache. I know what it is—it’s all the stress.”
“Last time sun, this time stress. If you won’t call the doctor, I’m calling Jonathan.”
“You’ll do neither,” Lily said, in a voice she had never before used toward her mother-in-law.