The Family Hightower (3 page)

“Why are the people on this book white?” she says.

“I don't know,” Peter says. It hasn't occurred to him until now that the cover is all that weird. “I think it's from the early sixties.”

“Stock photos,” Alex says, and chuckles. She spends an hour thumbing through the pages, reading passages aloud to amuse herself. “Chapter One,” she says. “How a Brother Planned to Kill a Brother and Plunge Him into Financial Distress, God, what amazing phrasing. Chapter Four. When Do We Know Our Real Brother? Ha.”

There's a faint whiff of mockery underneath Alex's glee, and Peter doesn't like it.
Why is she being so condescending?
he thinks. But then he looks at the covers of the other books in the place and realizes his paperback is cheap there, cheap and bizarre. When Henry is around on the weekend, he also asks Peter about Africa. The questions aren't like Alex's, though. They're firm, incisive, a quiet grilling. Sometimes it seems like Henry is asking about Rufus, about Peter's upbringing; he wants to know how they're doing without just saying so. Other times it seems like Henry's pumping him for information about possible investment opportunities. And Pamela—Henry's wife, his aunt—is almost never there at all. She's on the boards of multiple charities and community organizations and is always going to meetings; when she's at home, she's on the phone, speaking in a friendly and practiced singsong while her fingers snarl themselves in the telephone cord.
These people tolerate each other enough,
Peter thinks, but it's hard to tell. The entire family is encased in a shell with a gleaming surface that hides the clouds inside. Peter likes them, even trusts them, but can't believe he's related to them. He catches, then, a glimpse of the depths of his father's rebellion, though he can't see how, in the extremity of his reaction, Rufus is so much like the rest of them.

Peter stays with Henry and his family for three weeks, then flies to Cleveland. Muriel is waiting for him at the baggage claim in Hopkins, a huge smile on her face. She lets out a high squeal when she sees him and runs and throws her arms around him; and he feels small, though the top of her head is well below his chin.

“Peter!”

“How did you know it was me?”

“I'd recognize those eyes anywhere,” she says. She doesn't mention the hundred other clues that give him away: the new hairdo, the borrowed clothes that say Henry, but despite them, the manner, the expression on his face, showing just how much Peter isn't from Ohio.

Muriel's house on Edgewater Drive is one of the smaller places on the block, a big colonial tucked between mansions. Muriel explains that they needed the house because they used to have five people in their family, but are down to four—her Petey is away at boarding school, she says, with a hitch in her voice; she realizes as soon as Peter does that it's a bad lie. Everyone knows it's summertime. Her other two children, Andrew and Julia, are even around, though they're out of the house all day, playing sports, riding horses, going to camps, being as overenrolled in the summer as they are during the school year. Muriel's just gotten used to saying Petey's in school now because she's tired of talking about her screwup son, and she hopes that Henry's been discreet and that Peter hasn't been following the news in Cleveland. Peter doesn't push it. He wanders through the house with his bag still hanging from his shoulder. A living room with a long, curving couch, three chairs. Nobody sits in any of them. A wide dining room table, a huge kitchen. Nobody eats there. Five empty bedrooms. Muriel shows him to the smallest one, the guest room, and as he unpacks his things, he thinks about how the house would be populated if it were in Ghana. Maybe twenty people could live here, he thinks, an extended family. The grandparents would have their own rooms, which they'd sometimes share with the smallest children. The nuclear families would be crowded into the others. The downstairs would be packed with rowdy children, the kitchen noisy with the sound of women boiling plantains and cassava, then pounding them together to make fufu. There'd be a radio playing highlife.

Muriel takes Peter to the parks in the Emerald Necklace on the weekend with Andrew and Julia; she thinks he'll have something in common with them, being almost the same age, though Peter feels more like one of their parents. To him, they seem whiny and weak, though they're just American children. They go boating on Lake Erie with Harold Anderson, his great-uncle William's nephew; Harold spent some time in the family business, only to retire at forty to devote his time to sailing. He has a forty-five-foot yacht called
Bad Break,
and he's taken it out of the Great Lakes, along the Saint Lawrence River, all the way down the East Coast to the Caribbean.
I'm not sure I ever need to be on land again,
he says. He's been to Accra, too, to Cape Town, through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea to Port Sudan, through the Suez Canal to Cairo. So many cities in common with Peter, though when they try to talk about them, it's like they've been living on different planets, and Harold gets a little quieter. He knows what that disconnect means, doesn't want to make the young man uncomfortable, and is also a little worried about him. At the end of the day there's a cold breeze across the water, and Muriel and her husband go below for gin and tonics. Andrew and Julia are already asleep in the wide bed lodged in the bow. Peter stays on deck, watches the sun slink between strips of cloud and into the water, below the horizon. Turns to watch how the darkness crawls across the lake, over the Five Mile Crib, up the buildings of Cleveland's skyline, chasing the pink light away. Harold watches him watching, waits until he hears the conversation below in full swing.

“You want something to drink?” he says.

“No thanks,” Peter says.

“Soda? How old are you? I could get you a cocktail.”

“I'm all right,” Peter says.

Harold hesitates. He's not sure how to start. Then: “You know, I used to be pretty close with your dad,” he says. “I think that's really why Meer had me take you guys out today. We were kind of in the same boat, so to speak, moneywise. I don't mean amountwise, exactly. But we had the same awkward feelings about it, about having so much, especially in a city like this. The same questions about what to do about it.”

Peter doesn't say anything. This man is talking to him like he's fifteen years older than he is, and he's not quite ready for it.

“I know your uncle Henry and Muriel don't talk about Rufus very much, but we all miss him, you know.”

Rufus,
he said. Turning Peter's dad into someone other than just his dad. There's a question that's been burning a hole in Peter's head since Henry picked him up at the airport, from the inside of his car to the inside of his house, from the tilt of Muriel's accent when she speaks, to the simple fact that they're here now with a man who hasn't worked in over a decade and wants for nothing.

“How much money does my family have?”

Harold laughs. “Complicated question. Which means that they have more than most people will ever see. You must know this already, but whenever someone's cagey about how much they have, it almost always means they're rich. They've stopped counting the pennies a long time ago, maybe stopped counting the hundreds or even the thousands—and almost nobody stops counting thousands. You understand what I'm saying. Almost everyone knows how much they have because they have to. If they don't keep track of it, they might run out. But a few people don't have that problem. They might not even be sure how to count up everything they have.” He takes a sip of his drink. “It makes you into a child if you let it.”

“So . . . how much?”

He laughs again. “I don't know. But I can tell you this: Someone could write a book about your grandfather—the one you're named after—if anyone in the family would be willing to talk about him. The city made him, and he returned the favor in spades. He could have been a Rockefeller or a Carnegie. Instead he was like a Van Sweringen.”

“I don't know who that is.”

“That's what I mean. They were two brothers, and almost nobody knows about them anymore, but they pretty much built this place. They say your grandfather even had a deal of some kind worked out with them, or maybe they were just his role models. They say he had deals worked out with a lot of people. He had to have, to go from Tremont to that house in Bratenahl. I know by the time he died, he had money everywhere. Stocks, bonds, real estate, a lot of other investments. Some of it, um, maybe not as legitimate as it should have been, if you know what I'm saying. But I don't think we'll ever know for sure. All we know is that he must have made his nut. His nut and then some. He was a shrewd businessman, maybe the shrewdest I'll ever see. He had to be, to do what he did in this town. You're going to Sylvie's house, the place in Bratenahl, right?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Then you'll see what I mean,” Harold says. “Tell your dad I said hello, okay?”

He's right about Sylvie's house. They take the highway along the waterfront, get off in Bratenahl to cruise along Lake Shore Boulevard. Walls and gates rise on either side of the road, the houses sprawling into estates that get bigger and bigger, until they're driving along a row of places the likes of which Peter has never seen. They should be boarding schools, he thinks; they should be hotels, hospitals, government institutions. At last, they reach a low granite wall, a huge wrought-iron gate. The long branches of old trees hang over the road. The driveway meanders through a stand of enormous white oaks and a garden of flowers so bright it almost looks like it's on fire. It's in a state of controlled riot, the work of someone who knows how to manage things and when to let go. A short, neat outbuilding—a guest house, a carriage house—hides on the side of the lot. The masonry on it is too rich for its size. Not too rich for the main house, though, which Peter at first can only catch glimpses of through the trees, until the branches part at the edge of a patio of mossy bricks and the house spreads its stone, gabled wings. The place is a castle of granite and leaded glass, crawling with ivy. Sylvie is waiting on the steps, standing with her hands clasped in front of her, a small smile on her face. She gives each of them a short, soft hug.

“Look at you,” she says to Peter. “I see so much of your father in you.” She gazes at him with an intensity that turns Peter to glass. His past opens up to her, the present boy on the verge of shattering under the strain, though she won't let that happen. Then she blinks, and there's only kindness.

“Come in, come in,” she says.

Peter's here, at last, in the place where his father grew up. The ornate woodwork, the wide floorboards. A staircase that belongs on the
Titanic
. The side of the house facing the shore is all glass, an unbroken, sweeping view of the lake and the long slope of the hill from the house down to the water. It jogs Peter's memory of Sylvie's wedding. He can still see the huge tent, the lanterns, the stage, the dance floor; the tables with white tablecloths he hid under and climbed on. The house was brighter then, in better shape, but he realizes that he never went inside, and neither, to his knowledge, did his father. They're all standing in the kitchen now, drinking lemonade. Muriel uncorks a litany of irrelevant family news. One of the Andersons was promoted to a managerial position in an insurance company. Another went to Buenos Aires last month. Her drink warming in the glass while her free hand waves in the air. Sylvie punctuates Muriel's speech with just the right interjections—
how nice, I see, that's wonderful
—then gives Peter a sideways glance. She knows he can't wait for it to be over. He's grateful to her for not calling attention to it. But she gets Muriel to wrap up the visit fast, follows them out with a large bag of gardening tools slung across her back, a lopper in one hand, a pole pruner in the other.

“You still do all that yourself?” Muriel says.

“Of course,” Sylvie says.

“You know, you can get someone to help you. It's so much to maintain.”

Peter is angry on Sylvie's behalf. Muriel has started to annoy him. But Sylvie smiles instead, that same small, unreadable gesture.

“I love it,” she says. “I really do.” And then, when Muriel's already in the car, to Peter: “Come back sometime and visit, whenever you want.” She drops her guard all the way down for a second, not a trace of deception, of politicking. So unlike the rest of the family for a second, and Peter feels a little guilty for not wanting to be there. He doesn't quite see that Sylvie's way ahead of him, as she always will be. She knows he's not ready to grasp all their family history. It's a rocket that curves high in the air, then explodes into a million pieces. He's not ready to see everything he's involved in, by association, either. But that will change, she knows, and if she lives to see it, she might just tell him whatever he needs to know.

“Well?” Rufus says, when Peter comes back. “How'd it go? How'd you like the family?” He feels bad for not being able to keep the sarcasm out of his voice when he knows his boy so well, knows when there's too much kicking around in his son's head to let him speak. They never get around to talking about it.

Four times between
1986
and
1994
, Peter leaves and comes back to his father. He stays away for longer and longer every time. First he just goes somewhere else in West Africa; that's where he picks up his French. Then across Central Asia to China. To Indonesia. To Central America by ship; he disembarks in Colón, Panama, works his way across the isthmus. He hears the stories of the revolutions, the things people did to survive them, the things people are still doing to carry them out, even if they lost.
Teaching math to kids in my village,
a Guatemalan man with a quiet voice and hair slicked back beneath his hat says to him,
this is my revolution.
He writes a story about this man that ends up in a local activist English-language paper. Another story he writes, about a dispute on a finca in which unpaid workers take over a plantation and end up under siege from police, even as they win a court case, appears in a left-wing magazine in the United States. He meets other journalists working in the country, who see something in him and pass his name along; he's the guy who'll get the stories other people won't get. That's when he gets his first wire service pieces. He also gets a bit of the leftist politics that it's hard to leave Latin America without. He feels an urge to do something, anything, to not walk through his entire life looking the other way. He's tempted to stay; in a weird way, the tin shacks, the roads covered in mud and paper, the loud, rattling buses, are as close to home, to belonging somewhere, as he's ever felt. But then he starts to worry about his father. He's always worried about him, though Rufus never says anything to make him think anything's wrong.
I'm in Cairo now,
Rufus says.
What a marvelous place.
But Peter doesn't believe it, feels all the more right for not believing when it's
1994
, he's gone back to his father, and they're leaving again, only four months into their stay, in a car Peter still isn't sure they own.