The Death of All Things Seen (15 page)

Elaine was asleep. Einhorn zoomed in further. He could see she was wearing her mouth guard. It upset him greatly, in the way Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane had chided Peter to stay awake and keep him company. She had benefitted from all that had been perpetrated.

He was tempted to wake and involve her in what was to come. He felt it would happen tonight. He was shaking. There would be no reprieve. He was still the outsider in the family nearly thirty years after marrying Elaine. It hurt, but this was what the great reach of men like his father-in-law Saul Herzog could exact in loyalty; how Saul had come to head the Chicago office of Goldman Sachs and head it early.

They would come for him here, Saul’s men, and whatever transpired, he understood Elaine would acquiesce. Einhorn was no match in the pitting of Elaine’s loyalty to him against her father.

In pajamas and bare feet, Einhorn was like a penitent on a long and difficult path. He had been called the previous late afternoon by law enforcement. At first hesitant, he had stepped out in the lobby away from Saul, who had looked up and seen him. They were in the endgame of a Ponzi scheme unraveling with the financial crisis. It was only a matter of time.

The call had turned out to be about the fraudulent Health Department Letter he had received months before. His tone registered the halting embarrassment of somebody caught out, but it was not something he could explain to Saul, not the essence of what was ostensibly a gay affair. He was caught in the sullen awareness that this was the end, or the beginning of the end. Saul had watched him throughout the call and at the end, he came forward, inquiring who had called. Under the pressure of deceit, Einhorn had named a client who would not and did not corroborate that there had been a call. It was in this way that Daniel Einhorn knew his life was over, and so suddenly, but it was not unexpected.

*

For the better part of a decade Einhorn had been watching his back, the secret trysts in hotels in the late afternoon, the complicated sequence of heading to the health club, changing for a leisurely run, and ending up literally running to a hotel room for hours lost here and there. It was a sexual awakening that might have been tolerated and managed under different circumstances. The world was an enlightened place. At issue was not Einhorn’s homosexuality, but Saul’s essential hold on him. Einhorn didn’t conceivably have a life without Saul Herzog. They were in too deep in a fraud that could not see any break in the ranks.

Einhorn knew in his heart that he was a hand-picked scapegoat from the very beginning, chosen purposely three decades ago for his loose-ended family, for his expendability when the time came. Though, at the time, Saul had lauded Einhorn and made an elaborate pretense that Einhorn held a great sway and power within the family, because it would be needed in whatever defense Saul eventually mounted. In this regard, Saul was the most charismatic, sinister and calculating of characters Einhorn would ever know, and yet he submitted to Saul’s overtures, when the end was always inevitable.

He imagined now the amalgam of details, how it would end – his disappearance. At first take, it would seem a good, stable life – Daniel Einhorn, married twenty-seven years, husband of Elaine Einhorn, father to four children – a grounding series of facts establishing a life and fidelity in marriage. He had a son with a Harvard MBA who had been on the fast track in New York with Lehman Brothers before its sudden collapse during the Financial Meltdown. There were three daughters married to doctors. He gave generously to worthy causes. His youngest daughter, Rachel, had a son, Noah, with Cystic Fibrosis. He had run a marathon to raise awareness and pushed Noah in a modified baby jogger. He had a picture of the finish line on his desk and in his wallet. This would undoubtedly be the shot against which the enigma of his disappearance would be cast, until the eventual disclosure of the fraud that had been perpetrated. It would be all Einhorn.

His relationship with Elaine dated to a 4th of July party at the Herzogs’ during the deregulatory zeal of the Reagan Administration and Trickle-down economics. He was interning at the time with Sachs. Elaine, a twenty-eight-year-old debutante, had studied psychology and was at a loose end. She was not unattractive, but she didn’t catch Einhorn’s eye in a way where something might blossom, and yet Saul insistently put them together.

Einhorn was no fool and understood that Elaine was part of the package being offered. If Elaine was mindful of it, she never let on. She had seemingly been set up with a series of love interests all aligned with Saul’s business partners. She discussed them openly, without indicating that Einhorn was any different. Her sisters had been married off, but to more connected families, life for the Herzogs tied to a series of mergers and acquisitions, so why should love fall so far outside the domain of practical interests?

It was never stated that way, but it was felt and lived by all the Herzogs and their ilk, and if the worst that could be said of them was that none of them fell head over heels in love, then so be it.

In swapping out one existence for another, Einhorn became part of family gatherings centered on tradition and ceremony. They had a rabbi on hand to bless each and every gathering for the equanimity of moral guidance, and their house was always filled with men of notable distinction in finance and industry, willing to invest, and if there were few among them who might have been considered good-looking, well, they were concerned with greater interests, like tradition and purity of stock.

Einhorn was the exception. He had rowed at Yale. He was athletically and academically distinguished, and yet he bore a family secret. His mother, a one-time beauty, didn’t know who Einhorn’s father was exactly, but she was sure he was one of any number of men, less than five, she assured him of it. She used to count them off on her hand, one at a time, with an apparent history that still tugged at her heart in the baited sense of how in demand she once was. She was defined by her looks. As Saul intuited, good looks could impede one’s interest.

Einhorn had advanced against all odds, but the prejudice was there. He was the tolerated guest at friends’ houses, regarded with quiet suspicion. He did nothing to incite this, but it was said of him, as he grew into manhood, that other men’s girlfriends and wives were always interested in him. Early on in high school he had aligned with how tragic heroes in the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies had irreconcilable flaws that were their undoing, and he had embraced this essential fatalism, not least after confiding in a drama teacher, who had set his hand on Einhorn’s knee and then eventually Einhorn’s cock, imparting that nothing was gained without courage and risk-taking. So Einhorn submitted, tragedy alive, his thick penis in the hand of his instructor, who explained how in ancient times wisdom was imparted between men and boys. It fucked Einhorn up.

*

Elaine Herzog was an answer to a question yet not fully answered in Einhorn’s heart, but what he had believed in more back then was the genius and prospect of what Saul Herzog was offering him, and so he became a fixture at the house at Saul’s behest. In late fall that same year after the 4th of July party, he asked for Elaine’s hand in marriage. Elaine deferred to her father. Einhorn should ask Saul. It was how it was done with the Herzogs.

He felt, in retrospect, in entering the pageant of their family, the stirring of a tragedy, and yet he willingly took his place with the understanding that this was the best he could have achieved under the circumstances, and that achieving anything short of this would have been a failed life. He knew the risks, and he had accepted them. It didn’t make it easier now, but there could be no denying it.

It surfaced, the wager of what he had agreed to so long ago, the halcyon days of that summer into early fall, the intoxication of luxury such a stark contrast to his growing up in a two-room apartment with his mother, the great ceremony of it, and how Saul had his secretary pre-order two kosher porterhouse steaks and a bottle of 1956 Bordeaux in the advent of Einhorn’s asking for Elaine’s hand. It was as Saul had planned it, but it seemed all down to Einhorn’s good fortune, his persuasion and charm, when it was otherwise.

It was a complicated association. As Saul put it, a hypnotist could not make a man do what he didn’t want to, but a hypnotist could call upon what was within a person. And Saul, a reader of the Old Testament, fell upon the story of Daniel and told it to Einhorn – how it was some trick, how the Daniel of the Bible put his head in the mouth of a lion, and that it required great faith, and that he, Saul, could tell Einhorn had come from a people who were used to putting their heads in the mouths of lions. It was decided then, not by Einhorn but by Saul, how the relationship would unfold.

*

On the appointed afternoon of the engagement offer, Saul was down in the baths at the Union League Club. He had insisted Einhorn join him before dinner, Saul, then, in the company of a gracious Czech named Pavel Mateˇjcˇek, a valet wearing a white smock. Since his arrival in America, Pavel had spent his days folding towels and robes and filling up plastic cups with mouthwash and setting out talcum powder and deodorant for the members of the Union League Club. He was a permanent fixture who affirmed certain truths for Saul, namely that the poor were necessarily dependent on the rich for their livelihood, and the best of them understood this.

It was perhaps Pavel’s greatest gift, and why he was still alive when others had been less fortunate under Soviet occupation, and yet, in America, for all his abiding belief in free markets, Pavel Mateˇjcˇek would eventually lose everything to Saul’s Ponzi scheme. In fact, it was partly Pavel’s money that was paying for dinners and expenses upon which he never would have dreamt of spending his money.

Pavel held a towel toward Saul, who, dripping wet, was pink as a lobster in a mill of men coming and going from the showers in a billow of steam; men of great means, like fat babies, cherubs just born into the world by some monstrous, smoking machinery.

Saul was in the process of a joke. He could and did tell the most subversive of jokes, usually about his own people, which made it all the more scandalous and unnerving.

Saul began again, for Einhorn’s sake, and for two other fat men who appeared and were given towels by Pavel.

‘Moscow, in deepest winter. A rumor spreads through the city that meat will be available the next day at a Butcher’s Shop. Hundreds arrive. They carry stools, vodka, and chessboards. There is great excitement. At 3 a.m., the butcher comes out and says, “Comrades, The Party Central Committee called. It turns out there won’t be meat for everyone. Jews go home.” The Jews leave. The rest continue to wait. At 8 a.m., the butcher comes out again: “Comrades, I’ve just had another call from Central Committee. It turns out there will be no meat at all. You should all go home.” The crowd disperses, grumbling all the while, “Those bloody Jews, they get all the luck!”’

*

At the time of the proposal, Einhorn was circulating an aggrandizing story about an alleged relationship with a Rockefeller heiress he had dated a year earlier while at Yale. Saul had the story vetted, he made it his business to investigate these sorts of claims in the cut-throat business of Finance. It was key to unraveling the psyche of potential clients. He discovered it was more Einhorn’s dumbstruck infatuation with a Rockefeller grand-niece he had met at a party on the Upper East Side.

Saul dropped the grand-niece’s name amidst the hum of dinner, while attempting to pour the last of a second bottle of Bordeaux. Einhorn put his hand over his glass with a decided temperance. The evening had gotten away from him, Saul’s eyes flashing anger as he continued pouring, the Bordeaux drenching Einhorn’s cuff-linked wrist, so it wasn’t altogether apparent whether Saul knew what he was doing or not, but of course he had.

According to Saul, there were only so many people of means in the world. Einhorn had to understand this, and there were even fewer Rockefellers, and they were a damnable breed of bluebloods and anti-Semites, and he knew every one of them by name, and it was his business to divest them of as much of their money as humanly possible.

He mentioned the Rockefeller grand-niece by name again. Einhorn said nothing. It was thus established that Einhorn was a liar, and it didn’t matter, just that it was understood between them that he was, in fact, a liar. He was thus chastened. As Saul put it, ‘One thing you can’t do is to pull the wool over Saul’s eyes.’

Saul and his people were old hands at history. They had survived the rise and fall of empires, the Roman, the Byzantine, the Ottoman and the scourge of countless pogroms. They had experienced the best and the worst of times. They had been roused, beaten and dragged from their homes, starved and kicked around Europe, and then they had found America and Wall Street.

*

Elaine was still asleep. Einhorn thought of speaking over the intercom for the revelation of his voice, but she wasn’t his preoccupation anymore. He left his office and stood in the kitchen along the annex to what had been his son’s and then his eldest daughter’s apartment. They had coveted privacy and independence long before they ever left home. He had been a good provider, but a lousy father. He would submit to this.

He used a pay-as-you-go cell phone to contact his lawyer. He called from inside a walk-in cedar closet with the mordant understanding that this was how it happened in horror movies, so the only option was the closet when the monster was in the house.

He shut the door behind him. He stood amidst his daughters’ clothes from years earlier, the rows of imported cashmere cardigans, the Izods in the pastel colors and pop-up collars that were no longer in fashion, along with the obscene number of dresses, shoes, boots, sneakers and sandals, many in their original boxes, never worn, or worn once. In their totality, they suggested a great fraud had been committed, in the way Imelda Marcos and her three thousand pairs of shoes had sparked true moral outrage in a world grown too accustomed to mass graves.

What Daniel Einhorn had to do was not to believe most things that were said about him and his kind and, furthermore, to protect his family by surrounding them with like-minded frauds, in a confederacy of entitlement, in a string of Day Schools where each measured what they had against those who had as much, if not more, so a child could say without reproach, ‘Why don’t we have what they have?’