Agnes Mallory (18 page)

My father sighed, creaking like a hinge. ‘You gotta make compromises in this life,' he sighed. ‘You gotta make compromises.'

Naturally, this only fired me up more. That was his life – compromises, moral failure – which in his paternal largesse he wanted to be sure to hand down to me. But not this guy – not Harry – and I wanted Mom to know it. I said: ‘You know, the one possible bright spot is this woman Manero in the U.S. Attorney's office. Their anti-corruption unit. She's Republican, for one thing, which means she wants these guys but good. She also wants to be Governor, I think. And she's supposed to be honest on top of it all. Anyway, there's rumors she's dropped some baited hooks into the swamp. I hear there could be some big-time busts coming down soon. I've been seriously thinking of sending a resume over there.'

This was a lie, or at least an exaggeration. I hadn't, not seriously – and I felt like an idiot for saying it, for puffing myself up. And God knows, if I'd been trying to impress my mother … Well, I couldn't have been more surprised by her reaction.

‘Oh, these people!' she said suddenly, sniffing, working herself to her feet. She stood over Marianne and the baby – not looking at me, looking down at them still. ‘These humorless people. Like the Seaburys and the Deweys. With their agendas, with their ambitions. Never trust these humorless people.'

For a second, I wasn't even sure she was talking to me. I said, ‘You mean Hortense Manero?'

‘Yes. Yes!' Mom said fiercely to Marianne. ‘What's
her
racket? That's what I'd like to know? Who appointed her the guardian of public morality?'

‘Uh … the President, I think.'

‘Pah!' she said, or something like it; it took care of the President anyway. But she continued to look down at Marianne. And Marianne, her skirt fanned out around her, sat on the floor, cradling our son in her arms, and looked up at Mom blankly, bewildered. ‘They all put themselves forward like little angels,' Mom said. ‘Butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. You think they're not into somebody? You think they're not on the take? Seabury – he used to sit in that big Park Avenue office of his and the newsies on bicycles used to bring him his envelope wrapped in the
Tribune
.'

‘Seabury?' I said. ‘No!' I was shocked. He was one of my civic heroes – all the books described him as dead honest. I'd have thought she'd have loved the guy. This was a puzzlement, a disappointment. Even Marianne, who'd never heard of Seabury, blinked, and Charlie squirmed in her arms and he wasn't even two months old. ‘Not Seabury, Ma,' I said.

‘Yes,' she announced triumphantly. ‘Seabury! You don't know about these people. Oh, they're all …' But in her passion, she left the sentence unfinished. She gave another dismissive sniff and marched out of the room into the kitchen.

Of course, my father's whining self-justifications and his subterranean rage, my mother's conspiracy theories and her fearful watching for signs of treachery – these things drove me crazy, but I couldn't get enough of them. I sat there on the sofa for a moment after Mom walked out, shaking my head at her paranoid nonsense, and yet wishing she'd stayed, wanting to hear more. I heard her turn the water on in the kitchen sink – that's what she did when she wanted to get away: drowned us all out with the hiss of the water. And I thought: Seabury?
Seabury?
He really was one of my role models. I mean, I knew it was La Guardia who'd actually cleaned the city up in the Thirties, and I loved the guy, sure, but he was a sweaty Wop-slash-Jew, all energy and uncouth doings: my mother hated that type. Seabury – Seabury was like the marble statue of Anglican Virtue standing behind him, bestowing the blessing of the western pieties on the brash new boy. It was he who gave his name to the hearings that busted the corrupt worker bees of the Tammany machine. I'd have thought Mom would have adored him, really. But newsies? Newsies hiding bribes in the
Trib?
She couldn't have made that up, I thought. Because I didn't know then what had been going on in that mind of hers. The mental stretches she'd had to make, the elaborate ‘deductions' and workings-out – the fantasies, basically – she'd had to concoct in defense of her dead father. I didn't know anything about her life really. I thought she must just have gotten her facts confused.

I stood up and went into the kitchen to straighten her out – and also to bait her into some more of the familial craziness that was meat and drink to my lorn soul. She was vigorously working the brunch dishes under the faucet, her head bowed into the gray winter light that came through the casement window. The kitchen lights themselves were off, that was probably why she seemed so pale there and marbly. On the other hand, maybe she was shocked herself at having spoken her imagination like that, having slandered the good old judge with the secret glyphs and scenarios of this obsession I knew nothing of. In any case, the second I stepped onto the mock brickwork of the floor tiles, she raised that Litvak life mask to me and I spied such a hunted fear and so much sadness there that I clammed up and said nothing.

She went back to her dishes. ‘Your friend,' she said, above the gurgle and hiss. ‘What was her name, that little girl, that Agnes something?'

My lips parted stupidly. I was stunned. Here, I'd been snorkeling in sentiment about her for weeks and I was completely unprepared for the surge of feeling, the loss of equilibrium. First Seabury, now this; what a day. I could only murmur: ‘Agnes Sole?'

‘Agnes Sole,' she said into the sink, ‘that's right.'

‘You mean the one whose mother Dad was fucking?' No, I didn't say that, but the urge to tear the veil away was sudden, unexpected and powerful. Yet, again, Mom lifted her face to me – that face that had been imposed upon her and had then molded her into itself – and I hadn't the heart.

‘She called me up the other day.'

‘What?' More flutterings and pulsings, bewildering how strong. ‘Agnes called you? How is she? What did she say?'

Mom shrugged, sniffed, rubbed her nose with a soapy knuckle – all to play it down, as she always did with momentous things. And the suspense, meanwhile, riveted me.

‘Well, what did she …?'

‘We hardly talked at all,' Mom said. ‘She just called to get your address. She said she wanted to write to you. She said she's been wanting to write to you for years.'

The letter didn't come for weeks. It was a period of intense excitement for me. Before Christmas, the Plunkitt Towers affair had been settled and now, in the New Year, Buckaroo Umberman had begun to invite me places. First, I got a printed card inviting me to a fundraiser. Given his favor to me, I could hardly refuse. Then came phone calls and I went to lunches and to club meetings and was introduced around. I had a very serious conversation with Donald Leamer, the president of Queens, about the outlook for development there, and Stu Freeman, Cohen's law partner and the party leader in the Bronx, regaled me one evening with rough stories about his cabby father. Buckaroo even introduced me to the Mayor once at a charity function in the Sheraton ballroom. ‘Oh yes, Harry Bernard,' the Mayor enunciated in his precise way. ‘I have heard many, many things about you. All of them good,' and then he laughed and all the people around him laughed loudly.

Such occurrences struck me as glamorous and valuable. They were inside experiences in places most people didn't get to go. I had a great drive to see such things, to
see
things in general. I felt very competitive about it. Movies, plays, art shows that my friends might have missed – these were coin of the realm to me. And other things, chance realities, these were even more important. I would walk along Fifth Avenue or Columbus or anywhere, hoping to spot a movie star or a former President or a car jumping the sidewalk to smash into a store window or, if I was very lucky, a gunfight or someone falling dead. It was New York, I was a New Yorker, and you could make these events into exciting anecdotes and put yourself forward and other New Yorkers could only try to outdo them with what they'd seen in the past. Out-of-town friends and suburbanites had never seen anything like it except on TV or in the army, and you could hold center stage with them for half an hour at a time. But, again, these sights were right in the open and momentary. The places Buckaroo took me to: many of them were closed rooms where even reporters were not invited, where men I recognized from the papers and the evening news chatted amiably together and used obscenities and laughed with smoke and whiskey fumes coming out of their mouths. These experiences were very valuable indeed.

Still I knew, unless you stumbled upon such scenes, that you had to somehow get involved in order to see them and that that meant paying a price in time and sinfulness. I knew that people who were envious of my experiences – my father, for instance – would be quick to say I was being corrupted. My intention was to be very careful, to walk and witness and deal, yes, but with radiant probity. Like Myers did. This was no easy thing; the game was afoot. Because I knew too that Buckaroo Umberman was trying to corrupt me in fact.

He did it laughingly, as if for sport. He told me he was doing it, as if that somehow made it all right. But I wasn't fooled, I knew he was out for blood. He was, I felt, fascinated by my honesty. It challenged him, it challenged his view of life, his sense of self. And he had, what's more, an instinct for the Inner Man. It made him laugh to see what a jerry-rigged job this outer Harry was. I, on the other hand, was completely deluded. I felt very strong. I felt I understood my Buckaroo, I recognized my id when I saw him and had been proof against him for years and years. Buckaroo would say, ‘You sure you wanna be seen with me, Bernard? I'm drawing you into a life of corruption, ya know.' And I would wink at him arrogantly. I'd tell him, ‘The angels will protect me, Buckaroo.'

He made his play finally in March over supper. That Immortal Supper, that will forever shine upon the ‘inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.' We went to an Italian place on Mulberry Street. I do believe Umberman picked it because of its mob associations and its mob feeling – gaudily elegant blond wood walls; too many empty tables with white cloths marred by candle wax; abrupt waiters with meaningful glances who didn't depend on you for their jobs; quiet meetings, in the corners, of fat slobs in expensive suits: Buck was taunting me, see, with his sumptuous dishonesty. It was supposed to be dinner with Leamer, which already made it very important. But then, as we began dessert, Freeman dropped in too, and, seeing him, I took a strong gulp of my heavy wine. These three men – Leamer, Freeman, Umberman – they had enormous power here in the solar system's capital. Maybe most of the power, behind the scenes. I felt the great glamor of sitting with them in there, leaning into the candlelight to hear their lowered voices, with all the rest of the world excluded.

Leamer was a jovial, overweight man. He liked to refer to himself as the King of Queens. He kept saying, ‘No, I shouldn't, I can't do this, stop me,' as he hovered over his tiramisu, hoisting forkfuls with one hand, holding his tie out of the whipped cream with the other. Freeman was cool and devilish: he cultivated the look with a mephistophelean goatee. I'd heard he had a sign in his office that said ‘Crime doesn't pay – not like politics.' He sat back against the wall and eyed me shrewdly over a glass of red wine.

Fat as he was, Buckaroo had hardly touched his dinner and ordered no dessert. He reclined on his groaning chair with his hands folded on his huge belly, his chins on his chest, all the heavy pouches of his face folding into that sleepy serpent look he got.

‘Marsha Zimmerman. Very sick,' he said to no one. She was the city Tax Commission President.

‘Cancer. Dying. A shame,' Leamer said, attacking his sponge cake again.

Frowning, drawing a long breath into his big frame, Buckaroo let it out with, ‘Todd Winger: not up to the occasion.'

‘Who's Winger?' I asked.

‘Commission council,' said Freeman quietly. His witty gaze never left me.

Buckaroo again: ‘Need a council in there who can run the Commission. For – what?'

‘Year. Six months. How long can she last?' said Leamer.

‘Then they can move him up to President,' Umberman said.

‘Hizzoner can't sack Marsha when she's dying,' Freeman observed. ‘It looks bad. “Sorry you're dying, kid – you're fired.”'

Leamer laughed around a mouthful of cake.

‘He needs a new council,' said Umberman, lifting one thick shoulder. ‘He can run the Commission till Marsha goes, then they make him Commission President.'

‘Todd they can fire,' Leamer laughed. ‘Todd is screwed.'

Freeman shrugged, narrowing his eyes. ‘I'll give him something in General Services. He'll be okay.'

All this they said as if gossiping, as if in casual conversation among themselves. That was the technique, and I was so slow, it took several moments of silence before I realized what they were really offering. I looked up startled from my crème bûlée. I looked from one to the other of them.

‘Well, don't look at me, guys,' I said, smiling. ‘I'm an honest man.'

That got a big laugh. I was very proud of it. They all ha-ha'd loudly and exchanged glances and leaned back in their chairs with their teeth flashing bright. Umberman, his body quivering, reached over and gave my arm a paternal squeeze.

Freeman raised his wine glass to me as if in a toast. ‘That,' he said softly, ‘is exactly what we want.'

That was a Tuesday night, the Immortal Supper, March 13th. Two years exactly from the day, Leamer killed himself as his father had before him. After the scandals did finally break that winter and spring, he snatched a knife from the kitchen cutlery drawer and drove it into his chest, puncturing his heart. He was on the phone extension at the time, talking to his therapist. A year after that, Freeman was sentenced to twelve years in prison and led away in handcuffs. Umberman only got six months because his heart was failing, but a good chunk of his millions was eaten up in fines and legal fees. As I say, these were important men.