Saving Grace (5 page)

“That was then,” Michael said morosely. He was a large man, a head taller than Jonathan and half again his weight. As a young man he’d been built like a moose; it was often said, unkindly, that Jonathan was the brain and Michael the brawn of their partnership. But over the years his muscle had turned to fat. He was fair in complexion, and as they climbed the hill, his face turned florid.

“You want to watch your health,” Jonathan said. “Don’t let the pricks get to you. It’ll blow over.”

“You really believe that?”

“Sure I do.”

“Tell it to the marines,” Michael said, puffing as they reached the top. It struck Jonathan that Michael’s father, who had died of a heart attack while they were in law school, couldn’t have been much older than they were today.

They’d been best friends since their undergraduate days at Columbia, but in those days there were three of them: Michael, Jonathan, and a black kid from Eastborough named Lucas Rayburn. People called them the Three Musketeers.

They shared a drafty prewar apartment on the Upper West Side, supplemented by a migrant population of girlfriends. Though Michael’s father was a minor clubhouse pol in his home borough of Queens, none of the three came to Columbia with any particular interest in public affairs. Jonathan planned to become a doctor, like his sister in Israel. Michael was going to join his father’s accounting firm, and Lucas, who got into Columbia on a basketball scholarship, hoped for a career with the pros. But they were thoroughly sidetracked by the civil-rights movement. Within a year of matriculation, all three had switched their majors to political science; by the time they were juniors, they’d decided on law as a precursor to political careers. The three went through Columbia Law School together. Immediately after passing the bar, Jonathan and Michael joined SNCC (still in its infancy, still welcoming whites) and traveled down south to join the black-voter-register drive; but Lucas, who had a younger sister starting college that fall, stayed behind to take a job as an assistant district attorney in Eastborough.

For five years Jonathan and Michael worked in tandem as roaming Have-case-will-travel lawyers, ranging from voter registration in the South to the struggle of migrant workers in the southwest, antiwar and black nationalist movements. Along the way they accrued wives and children, but precious little money with which to support them. In 1973 Jonathan and Michael returned to New York with the certainty of having done their bit and the intention of settling down at last.

Michael joined a Brooklyn law firm with close ties to the local Democratic Party. Jonathan opened a practice in Eastborough, where Lucas Rayburn, now chief assistant to the D.A., introduced him to powerful mainstream city and state Democrats.

Jonathan’s politics underwent a subtle shift. Not in principle, but in practice. The clients Lucas sent him were people who did business with the city, and the problems they presented—zoning variances, building permits, tax abatements—were more prone to resolution over dinner in a fine restaurant with a few influential people than in court. Jonathan learned the art of keeping his personal and professional lives separate. He guarded his opinions, observed the boundary of consensus, cultivated political friendships, learned golf over Lily’s objections (“the first downward step on the road to Republicanism,” she called it), and kept a strict account of favors disbursed and received. He and Lily bought their first house, a modest Colonial just slightly beyond their means in the middle- class township of Martindale.

When the Democratic borough leader of Eastborough and two of his aides were forced to resign after indictment on corruption charges, the party cast about for a new broom. Jonathan, the outsider with a national reputation as a reformer, was tapped for the job. He was meant to be a stopgap, to hold the spot until the dust settled enough for one of their own to take over. Young, attractive, and very clean, Fleishman was the perfect dark horse. Barnaby once wrote of him that he’d built his career of being a dark horse; by the time people figured out what Jonathan wanted, he generally had it.

They’d made their intentions clear enough ahead of time, and Jonathan had seemed amenable. Before the ink was dry on his appointment, however, he had grasped the reins of power, and within two weeks he’d won over some of his predecessor’s people, fired the rest, and replaced them with his own. The party leaders sat on their hands. They knew what was going on; they saw how Jonathan had finessed them. If you can’t stop it, they figured, lie back and enjoy it. By the time party elections came around, his power was consolidated.

Slowly but steadily, in a motion parallel to but always a little behind Jonathan’s, Michael Kavin too was rising in the ranks. With a little help from his friends, he was appointed associate counsel to the Board of Estimates. Later he became chairman of his home-district planning commission, with power over neighborhood zoning.

Thirty years of friendship. Outside of his family, no one meant more to Jonathan than Michael and Lucas; and this was due less, perhaps, to his affection for them (which nevertheless was very real) than to his need for an occasional glimpse of that self found only in the smoky mirror of long acquaintance. Michael in particular was a witness to the continuity of Jonathan’s life, an antidote to Gracie’s critical eyes, a reminder of where he had started and how far he had come. Because Michael knew him to his core, in his company Jonathan felt more himself than at any other time. With Michael by his side, he felt both younger and lighter, disencumbered of the weighty knowledge of
how things work.

Now his friend stood leaning on his club, huffing and puffing and sweating profusely.

“Are you okay?” Jonathan said. “Want to chuck the game and grab a beer?”

“We need to talk, and this is the only place I feel safe. Even here...” Michael looked around warily. “They’ve got these long-range directional mikes.”

“Christ, you’re paranoid.”

“The hell I am. You haven’t got a fucking clue. I haven’t taken a shit in the past two years that hasn’t been recorded.”

Jonathan had a vision, a mental snapshot of three stooges standing amidst the urinals in a dingy john, fumbling an envelope from hand to hand. He sighted along a club. “What are they looking at, specifically?”

“Everything. Think about the last two years. That’s how long they’ve been on my tail.”

“And by ‘they’ we mean specifically...
 
?”

Michael stared at him. “Come on.”

Jonathan smashed his club onto the ground. “I heard it. I just didn’t believe it. You’re not even in his goddamn jurisdiction. What, is he going out of his way to fuck a friend?”

The other said quietly, “It’s not me they’re after.”

A long look passed between the two men. Michael said in a conciliatory voice, “It’s not actually Lucas. It’s that bitch who runs the anticorruption unit, Jane Buscaglio.”

“She wouldn’t take a piss without his blessing. I still can’t believe it. We go back so fucking far. He wouldn’t be U.S. attorney now, if it wasn’t for me. Now he turns on us?”

“It’s the climate. He’s got to cover his ass. Especially in view of our history.”

Jonathan picked his club up off the ground and lined up his shot. “Did they offer you a deal?”

“Sure. My ass for yours.”

“Bastard,” he exploded softly.

“Aren’t you going to ask what I said?”

“Hell, no.” He tapped the ball. It disappeared into the hole.

Michael bent down, took it out, and tossed it to Jonathan. “I told her to stick it.”

“Did I ask?” he replied, offended. “I know you.”

They walked on, heads bent together. “You don’t know what it’s like, Jonathan. They’re into everything. I can’t tell you. They’re like roaches, like cancer.” Michael laughed shakily. “It’s affecting my marriage. I keep thinking that Buscaglio broad’s in bed with us. What a fucking turn-off.”

“How is Martha taking it?”

He grimaced. “You want the party line or the truth?”

“I’m sorry, man,” Jonathan said, and he meant it, despite the nasty little voice inside that said,
You married a bitch. Lily would never let me down like that.

“Don’t be sorry. Be careful.”

* * *

Lily closed her book and looked up, shading her eyes. “How was your game?”

“Lousy,” Jonathan said, sinking into a deck chair.

“How’s Michael?”

“Shaking in his goddamn boots. Paranoid as hell.” He’d decided, driving home, to say nothing about Michael’s warning. Why open that whole can of worms when most likely nothing would come out of it? He looked around. Paul was swimming laps in the pool. “Where’s Gracie?”

Lily pursed her lips. “City.”

“She spends more time there than she does out here. Is she still seeing that shmuck?”

“I presume so.”

“You presume so? Are you her mother or her goddamn maid? You presume so?”

“Jonathan, don’t you dare take it out on me.”

“I’m sorry.” Jonathan leaned back and surveyed his domain. His wife lay near him on a chaise lounge, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses, her body firm and tan in a white suit of exquisite simplicity. An elegant, sophisticated woman, nothing like the shy, pretty girl he had married. Her transformation was a mystery to Jonathan, who could not see his own, but it was also a source of great pride. He had done for his wife and children what his own father had so dismally failed to do for his. Watching his children grow up with everything was a deep solace to the boy inside who had grown up wanting, never having.

Paul waved from the pool. Across the lawn, the ketch’s mast bobbed up and down above the level of the dock. Bees droned, and water slapped rhythmically against the bulkheads. Lily’s roses filled the air with a briny sweetness.

“It’s a good life,” Jonathan said.

There was something in his voice. Lily propped herself up on her elbow and removed her dark glasses, but could not read his face.

* * *

Gracie leaned against a boulder by the lake in Central Park, reading a small leather-bound edition of
Pride and Prejudice.
She wanted Barnaby to find her lost in her book, careless of the time, but she was finding it hard to concentrate.

He was late again. Every time it happened, Gracie told herself she ought to be mad, she ought to leave. But then she would look up and see him flying toward her, with his jacket bellowing out like a sail and that wonderful crooked grin, and she was full of gratitude and wonder that he had come at all.

She applied herself to her book. “It was plain to them all that Colonel Fitzwilliam came because he had pleasure in their society.... But why Mr. Darcy came so often to the parsonage, it was more difficult to understand.” Difficult to Elizabeth, maybe; to Gracie it was obvious that Darcy, however unwillingly, was in love with her. His visits were not to satisfy a lover’s craving, but to seek out any flaws or vulgarity that he might use to extricate himself. To no avail, for like a man struggling in quicksand, Darcy sank deeper and deeper into the mire, until he succumbed through sheer exhaustion. “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must permit me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

The page blurred. Darcy’s face dissolved into Barnaby’s. She saw him sick with desire for her, struggling against feelings he could not contain. His honest, creased face bent close to hers; he murmured, “In vain have I struggled....”

A shadow fell over her book. Gracie looked up, blushing as if her thoughts were visible. The man looming over her was not Barnaby at all, but a seedy-looking stranger in filthy jeans and a torn sweatshirt. He leered. She gave him her fiercest look and he backed away.

Gracie stood and looked about. All around, people were strolling in pairs, playing Frisbee, sunbathing; there was no sign of Barnaby. A small boy pulled a sailboat on a string along the edge of the lake, beaded with sunlight and rippled by the breeze. Grace reached back to lift the hair off her neck, and a deep voice, cloying as caramel, said quietly: “Hey there, darlin’.”

She looked over her shoulder. The seedy man had returned.

“Go away,” she said, with a shooing motion.

He slid forward, hand brushing his crotch. “I’ve got something for you, baby doll.”

She wasn’t afraid. He was bigger than she was, but there were people all around and besides, she knew how to fight. Big brothers were good for that if nothing else. She faced the man head on, fists clenched. “I told you: get lost.”

“Don’t you want to see what I got? I guaranfuckingtee you’re gonna like it.” He reached for her—she drew back.
 

Then a voice behind her yelled, “Hey!” Gracie turned. Barnaby was scrambling up the rocks, moving faster than she’d ever seen him move. He blew straight by her, threw both arms around the stranger, and hurled him onto the boulders.
 

The seedy man found his feet and scuttled away. Barnaby turned to Gracie. “Are you okay?”

“Sure.”
 

“What did he say to you?”

“Nothing worth repeating.”
 

“I’m sorry, Gracie.”

“For what? Rescuing me?”