The Wrong Kind of Money (59 page)

Charge up another condenser, called the
doubling still,
and repeat the process. Then repeat again, and keep repeating until your booze has reached the proof you want. Aging in barrels reduces bite. But a lot of people like their whiskey raw.

So there you have it, sonny
—
all the secrets and mysteries of our industry.

My greatest achievement in this business was getting John F. Kennedy elected president of the United States. I suppose you wonder how I accomplished that.

Well, it started back in '24 or '25, when old Joe Kennedy was just getting started in the business. He didn't have the experience that some of my other customers had, and he was always looking for shortcuts and trying to cut corners. Joe was a very impatient man. I've never known a man so impatient to make money, and that impatience of his made him a lot of enemies. He came to me one day complaining that a lot of my shipments weren't making it to his men who were stationed to receive them along the South Shore.

I said to him, “Joe, I've got a suggestion for you. Ever hear of a corduroy road?”

“No,” he said. “What's that?”

I explained to him that a corduroy road is a road made out of a bunch of logs lashed together with heavy rope or cable. It's a device used by the military to provide the wheels of heavy vehicles with traction when they need to get through muddy terrain.

You see, there were only so many places along the South Shore where you could back a truck down from the highway to the water's edge, and load up the shipments of cases that came across the lake by boat at night. What the revenuers and hijackers
—
and a lot of the revenuers were hijackers as well
—
had learned to look for was the marks of tire treads in the mud. They'd station themselves in these places and lie in wait at night, waiting for the trucks and boats to come in and transfer the shipments.

I said to Joe, “Make yourself a few corduroy roads, but make 'em
reversible.
Sod one side of your road with grass and weeds. By day, your road will look just like a grassy stretch. Then, at night, when a shipment's due in, flip your road over and back your trucks down from the highway. It'll make your transfers a lot faster, too, and easier.

Well, old Joe took my suggestion, and he had no more problems. The money started rolling in. So you see
—
if I hadn't helped old Joe Kennedy make his fortune, he wouldn't have been able to buy his son a seat in the House, then in the Senate, and finally the presidency of the United States. But did old Joe ever thank me for what I did for him and his family? Never! Your mother and I weren't even invited to the White House for his son's inauguration!

I'm only telling you all this because, if you decide to stay in this business
—
and I hope you will, because I want it to be all yours one day
—
I want you to do so with your eyes wide open, under no illusions that what you do will get you the Nobel prize. Just give Uncle Sam his share, and you'll stay out of jail. I did. That's the only piece of advice I have for you, after more than half a century in booze. Your loving old
—

Pop

P.S. Better burn this letter. If it fell into the wrong hands, I could be crucified. And I sometimes think I've been crucified in this life enough already.

But he didn't burn the letter. It was one of the few letters he had ever received from his father.

And now he sits in the visitor's chair in his mother's library at 1000 Park Avenue, waiting for her. It is after eleven o'clock at night, and the big apartment seems even bigger, and strangely empty and silent, with all the servants either in bed or gone for the night—too big for one old woman. He hears her slippered footsteps approaching down the long gallery, and her footsteps sound heavy and slow.

She comes into the room, wearing a pink wool dressing gown over a white nightie, her hair in rollers, and the rollers secured in a pink chiffon scarf tied in a big bow, the whole getup suggesting a large pink rabbit. He stands up. “I hope I didn't get you out of bed, Ma,” he says.

“No, no. I was watching Jay Leno. He isn't very funny, or maybe I'm missing something. I told your secretary to ask you to come by no matter how late it was. Sit down, Noah.”

He sits again in the visitor's chair, though she remains standing. “He was so unfunny that I was able to write an entire press release while he was doing his monologue.”

“Press release?”

“I'll get to that in a minute. Meanwhile, my spies tell me you did very well with your pitch for the Ballawhatchmacallit.”

“Spies? I didn't know you had spies, Ma.”

She winks at him. “Of course I have spies,” she says. “Did you think your old ma could run a business this size without spies? I have spies in every corner, spies at every meeting. Your father always had spies. You'll need spies, too, when you take over. I also heard you changed my president's message a little.”

“I did a little editing, yes.”

She waves her hand. “Doesn't matter. Nobody really listens to those damn things, anyway. They're just a formality. But I hear your Ballachulish pitch went really well. And it won the blind taste test, too.”

“You've finally got it right, Ma—Ballachulish. Yes, I think it went well.”

“Good. Get the salesmen excited. That's the first big step. Get the salesmen excited, and they'll get the wholesalers excited. Get the wholesalers excited, and they'll get the retailers excited. All this is important to do before you buy a line of advertising. But that's not what I really want to talk to you about, Noah.”

“Oh? And what's that?”

She sits down opposite him. “Bathy,” she says.

He sits back in his chair and crosses his legs. “I see,” he says. “Bathy again. I think we've been down this road once or twice before, Ma.”

She holds up her hand. “Not this road we haven't, Noah,” she says. “Not this particular road. To begin with, I know why you've always resented Bathy so.”

“Oh?” he says.

“To put it bluntly, you once walked into a bedroom at Grandmont unannounced, and found Bathy and your father in what is sometimes called a compromising position. Correct?”

“Hell, yes! You're damn right I did.”

She sighs. “You've always been so secretive, Noah,” she says. “You keep things to yourself too much. Why didn't you tell me about this a long time ago? I've given you every opportunity. Why didn't you share your feelings about this with me at the time? We could have discussed it, like the two grown-ups we're supposed to be.”

“Discussed
it? What the hell are you talking about?”

“I mean, you should have told me about it at the time. It wasn't my place to bring it up with you. But if you'd just told me what you saw, I could have given you a very simple explanation.”

He stares at her in disbelief. “Ma—are you and I talking about the same
event
? I'm talking about walking into the old man's bedroom and find him fucking your sister. That's what I'm talking about! And later he lied to me. He told me I hadn't seen what I thought I saw. But I know damn well what I saw. He was terrified that I'd tell you about it.”

“Was he? I doubt it. I'm sure he knew that I was well aware of what was going on, after all those years, though your father and I never discussed it. There was never really any need to. There are too many things to discuss in a marriage that are necessary. There just isn't time to discuss unnecessary things. But I suppose it might have been a little upsetting to you, finding out like that. I'll admit that.”

“Upsetting?
I was disgusted—disgusted with both of them. Just totally disgusted. Sick to my stomach. I ran back down the hall to my room and threw up.”

“Poor Bathy was terribly embarrassed by the incident. What woman wouldn't be? Barged in on like that!”

He shakes his head. “So you knew about this all along.”

“Of course. But you should never barge into a person's bedroom without knocking first. It's bad manners. A person who does that gets to see what he deserves to see. Besides, you were supposed to be away at college. I was in New York. Your father and Bathy thought they had the house to themselves. I often arranged that sort of thing for them. It was all part of the arrangement we had together.”

“An arrangement,” he says dully. “I knew ours was a screwed-up family, but I didn't know we were that screwed up. You
tolerated
that? You're pitiful, Ma. You're really pitiful.”

“Pitiful?” she says sharply. “I am
not
pitiful. Triumphant is more the word. I won the battle. Bathy was your father's mistress. I was fully aware of it. I approved of it. I endorsed it. It had been going on for a long time—since before you were born, in fact. It was an agreement we had, Bathy and I, and it worked out to the benefit of all concerned.
All.
Including you.”

“Endorsed it,” he says.

“All but put my John Hancock on it! It started out as a simple experiment at first. We didn't know whether it would work or not. But your father needed me for certain things, and he needed Bathy for certain other things. He needed us both, and we both needed him, and Bathy and I also needed each other. She and I said, very well, let's try it. Let's see if it works. And, as it turned out, it worked very well.”

“A ménage à trois,” he says.

“No, it wasn't that at all. A ménage à trois, as I understand it, is three people involved in a three-way sexual relationship. Ours wasn't that at all. It was more like a blueprint for living and working happily together. It was an arrangement that made your father happy, and made me happy, and made Bathy happy. I won't go so far as to say that Bathy saved my marriage. But she certainly helped make my marriage happier than it had ever been before, and happier than it ever could have been without her. If you'd understood this, you could have spared yourself a lot of anger, and tearing around the countryside on your motorcycle, mad at the world.”

He looks at her. “That wasn't why I tore around the countryside on my motorcycle,” he says. “It was because I enjoyed the feeling of power.”

“Well, anyway, now you know the story. And stop and think. If it hadn't been for Bathy, none of you children would have any of the things you have today. There would have been a divorce, and then what would have become of me? I had no one else besides your father—and Bathy. I can even say that if it hadn't been for Bathy, you probably wouldn't even be standing in this room today. We owe everything to Bathy. So you've no right to feel betrayed. Bathy is the one who was betrayed.”

“Betrayed? How?”

“I got to keep my husband. She didn't. I got to have his children. She didn't. I inherited this company. She got no Ingraham stock at all.”

“I guess the old man just got tired of her in the end,” he says.

“No! That's not true. You made him make a choice. You gave him an ultimatum. You said you'd never work for Ingraham as long as Bathy worked here, too. You cost Bathy her job, so you owe Bathy a lot, too. It was either you or her, you said, and he simply loved you more, needed you more, wanted a son to carry on the business more than he wanted anything else. When he explained this to Bathy, she understood because she loved him, and because she loved you, too. But even after she retired, and even after she no longer lived with us, she remained a powerful part of your father's life. In fact, a strange thing happened during those last years of his life. The three of us became even closer. The sexual attachment—well, that simmered down, of course, as those things always do, as the years went by. But something even more powerful appeared in its place—a love, an incredible sense of
closeness
that's hard to describe, except that it seemed as though the three of us had one
soul.
It was a wonderful free feeling, now that sex was no longer a part of it, and yet at the same time we seemed to have become almost unbearably dependent on one another. We were bound together by an invisible cord of love, and of memories, too, and of things there was no longer any need to talk about. Just things we
knew
and had shared in the past. Yes, I think he knew that I knew about him and Bathy. But there was no longer any need for blame, or forgiveness, or anything like that. It was peacefulness. It was understanding. It was happiness. And happiness—I'm convinced of it—is the bird in the hand.” She touches her eyelids, first one, then the other, with the sleeve of her pink dressing gown.

“And yet when he died, he left her without a penny.”

“He was always so obsessed with—appearances. Probity. Respectability. The things he was hoping to get, but didn't, by marrying me. ‘Ingraham—the label you can trust.' The Leaning Tower of Pisa. ‘You can trust the Leaning Tower of Pisa never to fall down.' Bathy and I always tried to help him project that image, for whatever it was worth, to try to make the public forget what everybody knew—that he was an ex-bartender with no education, who took over a Canadian gin mill when its owner couldn't pay his own bar bill, a man who helped Al Capone get his start and whom Mr. Capone wanted to reward by being Cyril's godfather. There was so much in your father's life that he wanted to hide, and Bathy was just part of it. To your father, leaving Bathy money in his will would have been like admitting publicly that he had another woman, and that the other woman was his own wife's—baby sister. When he was dying, at Grandmont, Dr. Arnstein was with him, and I was waiting in the music room, and Dr. Arnstein came downstairs and said to me, ‘I don't think he has much longer, Hannah,' and so I went up to be with him. And when I saw him, I said to the nurse, ‘Please send for Miss Sachs.'

“And when Bathy got there from the Tarrytown Inn, where she was staying, we both gestured to the nurse that we'd like to be alone with him for a little while. And we both sat, on either side of his bed, Bathy holding his left hand and I holding his right. I think we both felt that invisible cord of love I mentioned. And then, suddenly, in one of those lucid moments that often occur to a person just before he dies—and I know this because I've seen more people die than you have, Noah—he opened his eyes, and looked at me, and said, ‘I want you to go out and buy something pretty for yourself, Hannah. Something really pretty.' And then he turned to Bathy and said the same thing.