Saving Grace (31 page)

Whose fault was it that the printer deliberately set out to embarrass them? Jonathan’s first instinct had been to refuse the meeting Tortelli demanded, but Solly insisted that the man was basically willing to do business, for Chrissake, he was just very paranoid that someone was scamming him. All Tortelli needed, Solly said, was reassurance that his money was going where he wanted it to go. Michael needed an infusion and was willing to play along, conditionally. “Just this once,” he said, “then Solly takes over.”

Jonathan should have stuck to his instincts; he knew that now. But the problem with Tortelli happened to arise at a sensitive moment. One week earlier, Jonathan had paid a fortune for Gracie’s sweet-sixteen party at the club—a surprise party, because if she’d known about it, his perverse daughter would have stayed away. (As it was, she walked around all night scowling at the guests.) Next month Paul’s tuition was due, and the
Water Lily
needed an overhaul. So he had let himself be persuaded. After all, it wasn’t the first time they’d asked for a donation, and nothing had ever gone wrong before. The suppliers might not have been delighted, but they were men of the world who knew without having to be told which side their bread was buttered on. Tortelli, too, would fall into line.

The printer chose the venue, some off-the-map bar and grill in south Eastborough. He was waiting when Jonathan and Michael arrived. They shook hands, sat down, ordered a beer each. But before the beer was served, Tortelli got up and with many winks and nods went into the men’s room. Jonathan and Michael exchanged a look: what’s with this jerk? They shrugged, and followed him in.

Tortelli locked the door. He reached under his shirt, pulled out a fat manila envelope stained with sweat, and thrust it into Jonathan’s hand. (No class, Michael said later; none at all, Jonathan agreed.) Jonathan bobbled the envelope to Michael, who shoved it into his briefcase.

“Open it,” Tortelli said. “Count it.”

They told him it wasn’t necessary, but Tortelli stood between them and the door and kept insisting. Finally, to shut him up, Michael opened the envelope and counted out eighty hundred-dollar bills.

It seemed to take forever. All the while, Tortelli stared at Jonathan, who glowered back. “Now split it,” the printer said when Michael finished counting.

“The hell with this.” Jonathan shouldered Tortelli aside. In the warped mirror that hung on the back of the door he glimpsed a familiar but distorted face; a moment later he recognized it as his own. He started, as one does when an acquaintance from one sphere turns up unexpectedly in another. Then he averted his gaze and hurried out.

In his piece-of-shit article, Barnaby had attributed Tortelli’s loss of his premises to his subsequent refusal to pay kickbacks. In fact (and Jonathan longed to explain this to Leeds, but how could he?), Tortelli had lost what he lost right there in that stinking john, among the urinals, when he humiliated Jonathan and showed him his face in a distorted mirror.

Tortelli knew it too. That, and not his outraged ethnic pride, was why he had quit paying.

None of this, however, was explainable to Christopher Leeds, who in any case turned out to be less concerned about the state of Jonathan’s soul than the state of his pocketbook. Leeds asked, as Jonathan prepared to take his leave, how he proposed to pay for his defense if the prosecution won its motion to freeze his assets.

Jonathan flushed, embarrassed not to have brought the matter up himself. He would pay up front, he said, before the motion could be heard. Had Christopher prepared an estimate?

Leeds named a figure. Jonathan turned gray. “You think I’ve got money like that lying around the house?”

With great reluctance, Leeds spoke tentatively of liquidating assets, mentioned the
Water Lily,
and suggested that Jonathan consult with his accountant.

“Just so I know,” Jonathan, “what if I can’t come up with all this cash on three days’ notice? Are you going to dump me?”

The lawyer wiped his glasses. His watery eyes, de-magnified, looked hurt. “I am not going to ‘dump’ you, Jonathan. You can be sure of that, just as I am sure that you don’t expect me to take
this case pro bono.”

Jonathan, who’d harbored hopes if not expectations, said, “Of course not.”

The problem occupied him on the long drive home to Highview. Selling the
Water Lily
was out of the question, even if he could on such short notice. She was his pride and joy, the tangible symbol of his ascension. It would have to be stocks and bonds, but if he sold those, what would they live on? Already he’d lost the income from his and Michael’s informal arrangements, and he didn’t know how much longer he could resist the mounting pressure to step down as party leader.

It was rush hour and the parkway was jammed. Jonathan arrived home with just time enough to change his shirt, pick up Lily, and drive back to the city, to Columbia Presbyterian, in time for their appointment with the neurologist Tamar had recommended.

The appointment had been hard to come by. Jonathan had had to beat a path through three layers of secretaries, wielding Tamar’s name like a club, to get through to Dr. Lawrence Barrows. Once he got him on the phone, though, Barrows proved both affable and accommodating. His office schedule was impossibly jammed, the doctor said apologetically, but if they would care to come into the hospital one evening that week, he would be happy to see them after rounds.

Barrows turned out to be a younger man than Jonathan had imagined, almost too young, in his
 
late thirties. He had a friendly, open face, a lanky body that looked like it would be efficient on a handball court, and shaggy brown hair. Altogether he looked more like an English professor at a small liberal-arts college than a topflight neurosurgeon. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Fleishman,” he said, shaking hands with such enthusiasm that Jonathan had him pegged as a political supporter, until Barrows’ next words dispelled the illusion. “Brilliant doctor, your sister. I had the pleasure of working under her my second year of residency. We’ve kept up ever since.” Then he greeted Lily, gazing with a physician’s unself-conscious interest deeply into her eyes. He ushered them into seats, settled himself behind his desk, and pulled a pad of paper toward him.

Jonathan said, “Good of you to make time for us—”

Barrows cut him off. “Anything for Tamar. Flattered she recommended me.” He turned to Lily with an air of instantly forgetting Jonathan. “Tell me everything. From the beginning, including all the little things that don’t tie in and don’t seem important, but are odd. How do you feel?”

“Different,” Lily said.

Barrows’ face changed: he withdrew behind his eyes. Jonathan distinctly saw it happen.

“In what way?” the doctor asked.

“It’s not just the headaches, or hearing my mother’s voice. It’s not the dreams either, though they’re bad enough. It’s just a feeling, an awareness, I don’t know how to explain it, that something is wrong. Something’s changed, but I can’t say what.”

To Jonathan it sounded like mumbo-jumbo, but the doctor nodded gravely. Barrows had about him an air of unlimited time, an affect Jonathan understood well, having seen it among certain high-ranking politicians. Their offices were hard to get into, but once inside, you felt no pressure to hurry. The layers of secretaries and aides acted as a kind of insulation that allowed their principals to inhabit a bubble of hastelessness, a temporal pocket.

Barrows asked many questions. How did the headaches and auditory occurrences—Jonathan noticed he didn’t call them hallucinations—begin? Was there ever a warning, a physical marker or premonition? When Lily heard her mother’s voice, was she hearing something she remembered, or remembering something she’d heard? Did she ever smell or taste or see anything unusual? Had she noticed any change in her vision? He scribbled notes without taking his eyes off her face.

Jonathan followed the progress of these questions and felt a chill that started in the pit of his stomach and radiated outward. He saw where Barrows was leading, and though he recognized the magical nature of the notion, nevertheless he could not help feeling the man was playing with fire, as if questions like his had the power to chisel an amorphous mass of symptoms into a coherent, devastating form.

Then the doctor turned his eyes on Jonathan, who felt the force of the man’s concentration. “Have you noticed any change in your wife over the past few months?”

“No,” he said. “Yes. I don’t know. Lily, please don’t misunderstand, but would you mind . . ?”

Lily went to sit the waiting room, shutting the door behind her.

Jonathan placed both hands on the doctor’s desk and leaned forward. “I know what you’re driving at, and I don’t like it.”

“I don’t suppose you would,” Barrows said. “I’m not crazy about it myself.
Have
you noticed any change?”

Jonathan swiveled his chair toward the window. They were in the heart of Spanish Harlem, and the street below was lively, lined with open-air markets and crowded with shoppers, strollers, stoop-sitters calling out to one another.

He looked at Barrows. “We’ve been married almost twenty-five years. You get to know a person, how they’ll react in a given situation. Lately I never know how Lily’s going to react, or what she’ll say. It’s like sometimes she’s very much there, and sometimes she’s nowhere to be found.”

The doctor nodded.

“The little conventions of a marriage, the things you say and don’t say—somehow they’ve lost their hold. When she’s not totally out of it, she’s more...
 
forthright. Uncomfortably so. As if she doesn’t have time to waste on nonsense.”
 

Barrows, his face a blank, scribbled a note.
 

 
Jonathan scowled. “Let’s have it, then. What are we dealing with?”

The doctor kept writing. “Too early to tell.”

“You have to take into account the stress of our situation, all the publicity, the filth that’s been written. It’s hard on her.” He felt as if he were plea-bargaining.

Barrows put down his pen and looked straight at Jonathan. “It’s not stress. Stress might have been the trigger, but it’s not the cause.”

“Those questions you asked—you’re thinking some kind of tumor, aren’t you?”

“With any sudden onset of seizure activity, we consider that possibility. But there could be other causes, or it may be something else entirely. We won’t know until we’ve done a CAT scan, which I will have my secretary schedule in the morning, and an MRI. I also want her to have a complete physical. There’s someone here I’d like you to use. We’ll make the appointment for you.”

Jonathan clenched his fists. “The hell my wife has been through these past few months is enough to make anyone sick, without conjuring up a goddamn brain tumor.”

“I’m not in the conjuring business,” Barrows said gently. “And we’re still a long way from a diagnosis. I’m just telling you that with your wife’s constellation of symptoms, stress alone is unlikely to be the underlying cause.”

“You’re not saying what is, though.” Jonathan walked to the window and gazed out. It was full dark now; his own reflection stared back at him. “Look, if we’re going to work together, I need more from you than final conclusions. You’re going to have to think out loud, take me with you every step of the way. I want you to talk to me as you would to Tamar. Can you do that, Dr. Barrows?”

Barrows met his eyes in the window. “I can if you can, Mr. Fleishman. The truth is, I don’t know what’s wrong with your wife; but you’re right in suspecting there’s a possibility of tumor. Mrs. Fleishman stated that she feels ‘different,’ that something indefinable is wrong. This vague feeling of something wrong, which the patient can’t pin down or even express clearly, is almost a signature of certain types of brain tumor. When I hear something like that, I take it very, very seriously.”

Jonathan, having demanded this disclosure, at once rejected it. “I want a second opinion.”

“You haven’t had a first one yet. So far, all of this goes under the heading of borrowing trouble. Let’s first do the tests, then see where we stand.”

As they walked toward the door, Jonathan brought up the matter of payment. Barrows waved him off.

“Whatever your insurance pays is fine. You’ll get no bill from me. We look after our own.”

Jonathan said, “Better watch out, Doc. An attitude like that could land you in prison.”

22

EVERY MORNING, GRACIE WAS AWAKENED at five o’clock by a knock on her door. She dressed and washed, and by five-thirty she was in the kibbutz dining room, eating bread and jam and drinking the thick, bitter coffee the Israelis called
botz,
mud. At five-forty-five, Ezra, the driver, came with the flatbed truck to take the volunteers and their Israeli overseers to the orchard.

She had arrived during late-summer harvest and was assigned to the orange orchards. It was expected that she would work— everybody did—but it was her own choice to live among the volunteers. Tamar and Yaacov both invited her to stay with them, but Gracie had not left one family to seek out another.

“Those rooms aren’t very comfortable,” Tamar had said doubtfully when” Gracie announced her decision. “They’re not air- conditioned; they’re the settlers’ first homes, from the earliest days of the kibbutz.”