The Family Hightower (9 page)

“Protect me from what?” Peter says.

“Rufus really didn't say anything about us, did he?”

“No.”

“Peter, you may be in a lot of trouble,” Henry says.

“Why?”

“Because, Peter, the grandfather you were named after was a criminal. Oh, he made plenty of legitimate money. But at the beginning, it wasn't legitimate at all, and, well, what can I say? He never quite escaped.”

“Did you?” Peter says.

You got some balls, kid,
Henry thinks.
Good for you.
“Financially? Legally?” he says. “Yes. But the same thing isn't true of everyone. And now Petey, your cousin, is a criminal too. I don't know what kind—he's not nearly as smart or as careful as your grandfather was. I don't know how bad it is with him, either. Sounds like pretty bad, though. He was pretty bad already when you visited last, though you probably figured that one out even then. Who goes to summer school, right?” Henry smiles. Peter doesn't, and Henry feels a little chastened. Peter doesn't have the luxury of seeing the humor in it. Would Rufus see it? He thinks so. If Peter weren't caught up in it. If Rufus knew how bad it was getting, the things he would say.
This is why I left. This is why I didn't want to see any of you ever again.

“Do you know where Petey is now?” Peter says.

“No. He's involved in something I can't see from where I'm standing. Maybe Sylvie can see it, but I can't. I haven't talked to him in years, Peter. Haven't even talked to Muriel about him.”

Henry doesn't want to get into it, the last few years between him and his sister. It's
1987
. Henry sees Petey at a family reunion for Easter, thinks he looks like a little thug and tells him so, before he gives it the kind of thought he should have. Petey just stands there, doesn't say a word, and Henry regrets opening his mouth. But he can't take it back now. Muriel screams and screams at him.
How dare you say that.
And then later on the phone, when Henry gets back to Connecticut, she connects everything to everything else.
Just because you have a shitty home life, it doesn't mean you have to make our home life shitty too.
Henry listens, winces, sorry all over again he said anything, but hopes to salvage some good from his mistake. He doesn't bring up the selling drugs, the sentencing, the mild incarceration.
I'm trying to help. Petey's going in the wrong direction, you have to see that.
Muriel does see it, Henry knows that, but she's not going to admit it. Henry hasn't given her a way to do it without implicating herself, and she'll be damned if she's going to admit to her brother, under these circumstances, that she made a mistake.

We're lousy parents,
Henry thinks to himself—even then, back in
1987
—both he and his sister. They had every chance with Petey, they had him right where he should have been, and they let him get away. And Henry knows he can't take credit for how good his own kid is, except as a foil; Alex is good, always has been, always will be, even growing up around people as toxic as her parents, and even if she is, almost without a doubt, going to watch her father and mother say some terrible things to each other before they call it all off at last.

He gets all his information about the family from Sylvie after that. How Petey's moved out of the house, gone who knows where, though it seems to be somewhere in Cleveland. Petey shows up at Muriel's house, at Sylvie's house, a couple times a year. At first, to ask for money, but soon enough, that stops, as soon as it looks like he's come into money of his own, though it's clear it's not from working in a bank.
The young man's got a strut about him,
Sylvie says,
like he's gone a little feral.
Though to Sylvie, it's as much an act as a real transformation.
There's a part of him that's still that boy at my wedding in a little blue suit,
Sylvie tells Henry.
And I think that boy is scared to death of what the rest of him has become.
A bit of Sylvie's toughness showing, just enough that Henry realizes that if it had been Sylvie instead of Muriel raising that boy, Petey would be the straightest arrow of them all.

Peter stares at him from across the coffee table, and for Henry, it's as though the entire family is in the room with them now. His brother and sisters; their spouses, whom he has never gotten to know; all their children, some of whom he wouldn't recognize now. His own parents: his mother in the chair in the corner, knitting and humming, his father near the window, smoking in the house when no one smokes in the house. His father's brother, Stefan, who had the kindest face Henry can remember seeing in his life. He looks again at Peter and glimpses a bit of Stefan in him, the one who, if he had been the patriarch instead of his brother, would never have taken the family so far, or let them drop from so high.

Henry's earned enough of his own wealth that he doesn't think he has to justify it to anyone he sees. He hasn't let it turn him into a child or a crank, either, a man who confuses money with wisdom. He doesn't glorify poverty. He's not sentimental or stupid. But sometimes he wonders if they wouldn't have been happier with less. This thing of having too much, of not having enough; it makes people insane, he thinks, makes them do insane things. They scramble and scream, they fight and scheme. They set traps and swindle. They bring each other down, then pile up the bodies to ascend even farther, even faster. Somehow there has to be some balance, doesn't there? Of having just enough? But where is it? And why is it so hard to find?

“I think you need to go to Cleveland,” Henry says at last. “You need to keep moving. And you need to talk to Sylvie.” He gets up and leaves the room while Holly smiles at Peter and refills his wineglass. Then Henry comes back with a roll of bills folded in his hand.
That old habit from Dad,
he thinks,
having all this cash lying around. Have any of us broken it?

“I want to help you get out of this,” he says. “How much do you think you need?”

“I can't take your money now,” Peter says.

Henry smiles. “Peter. Just take it. And get in the car and let me give you a ride to the airport. And let me pay for the ticket.”

Peter stands there, just looking at him.
So smart, and so much pride,
Henry thinks.
He looks just like his father right now.

“Are you sure?” Peter says.

“I wouldn't offer if I wasn't.”

“Okay, then.”

“Good. It's settled. I'll call Sylvie and tell her to tell Muriel you're coming.”

“Okay.”

“Call me if you need anything.”

“I still don't have your phone number.”

“Of course.” He smiles again. Takes out a business card from his pocket and a pen from the table, scrawls the number on the back. Calls the airlines to book a flight, then drives Peter back to the airport himself.

All the way down, from the Merritt across the Whitestone Bridge to the Grand Central Parkway to LaGuardia, Henry wants to tell him the rest of it, about why nobody talks to each other anymore. His and Muriel's fight over Petey. The fight over what to do with Jackie. The big one, in August
1966
, when the patriarch died and the smoke still seemed to be rising from Hough after the riots. The Cuyahoga County grand jury was pinning everything on the Communists, Henry remembers.
That would have made Dad laugh. It's always the fucking Communists with them, he would have said.
But for his family, it was something else. That there was so much—so much and not enough—to squabble over. That they all were who they were, Rufus in particular. And then the split the paterfamilias had driven into the family before they were ever born. It's not that Henry blames him for the way the family is now; he's nobody's victim, and they've all held up their ends pretty good since their father died. But when he takes in the whole of the life of his father, the first Peter Henry Hightower, from his first days in Tremont to his last days in Bratenahl, he can see how they've come to this. The family breaking apart, over him and everything he left behind. His grand and ruinous legacy. And Henry looks over at the young man in the passenger seat, thinks about the thug with the same name. Thinks of everything that both the cousins carry of the men and women who came before them. They're all caught up in their crooked family history. Maybe the two Peters together will straighten it all out, drag everything into the light, and all that's toxic will wither and die, and the things that are strong will grow. But where they'll all be by then, he has no idea.

The flight is in the evening, and it's dark by the time Henry gets back to his house. Holly's asleep on the couch, sitting up, her head back, mouth open. A book splayed on the floor near her feet. She was trying to wait up for him. He marks the page with a scrap of paper from his wallet, puts the book back on the coffee table, then goes to the study and calls Alex. It's too late to call most people, but he knows his daughter will be up, and working.

“Hello?” Sure enough.

“Alex. It's me.”

“Hi, Dad. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, everything's fine. Why?”

“You don't usually call this late.”

“No, no, everything's fine.”

“So what are you calling about?”

“I'm planning a surprise party for Holly's birthday,” he says. “I had to wait until she was asleep to invite you.”

“That's in, like, two months, right?”

“Well, yes, but I have a lot of calls to make. You're the first person I'm inviting.”

“I'd love to come,” Alex says, “if I can get out of work in time.”

“That'd be great. It'd mean a lot to her.”

“Happy to do it, Dad. Is that all?”

Henry feels like a child. Something is rising in him, overwhelming him, and it takes away his voice, makes him helpless. He wants to tell his daughter how much he loves her, how proud he is of everything she's done, of the kind of woman she's turned out to be. But there's too much between them now. The frayed wires at the end of the divorce are still sparking a little; maybe they'll never stop. The plain fact that he's never said anything like it before.
I love you so much. I'm so proud.
He's tried to show it, a hundred thousand times, it seems, but he's never sure the message gets through. Never sure that Alex isn't doing the same thing, struggling to say something neither of them has the words for, at least not for each other. Alex doesn't hate him; he knows that much. There was a time, right after Henry divorced Alex's mother, that Alex was always out of the house when he called, always away from her desk. She's around more often now, almost every time Henry tries to reach him, and it's enough, at least for now.

“Yeah, that's it, Alex,” he says. “It's good to talk to you.”

“Good to talk to you, too, Dad. See you soon.”

“All right. Bye-bye.”

My daughter is so much better than me,
Henry thinks.
So much better.

He's still standing there with the phone in his hand, the phone having cycled through the silence at the end of the call, the dial tone, the buzzing off-the-hook signal, the silence after that. Holly's still asleep on the couch. He puts the phone back in its cradle, walks over and gets his wife on her feet. Leads her to the bed without her waking all the way up, and tucks her in. Then goes to his closet, where there's a long, tall safe installed in the back. Peeks over his shoulder to make sure Holly isn't stirring, then does the combination fast. Opens it up and takes out a shotgun. He loads it there, looking at Holly the whole time; he doesn't want her to see any of this. Then moves across the carpet without a sound, goes outside to the end of his driveway. There are three men out there, guys he hired from a security agency; he called them before he left for the airport. They're big, half again as big as he is, but their guns are smaller. None of them has much to say to each other. Two of the guys are talking about sports. They wait in the dark, bored and tense.

At last, a car pulls up, going slow, and Henry knows it's not any of his neighbors, anybody just passing through the area. Nobody does that around here, not down this part of the road. They only come if they have business to attend to. It's why Henry bought the house in the first place. Even then, he was done with seeing people unless there was a reason.

“What's the move?” one of the men says.

“I'll talk,” Henry says. “Do what I do.”

The hired guns nod, and they all get out their weapons so whoever's driving the car can see them in the headlights. The car stops, and for one second, Henry prays. It's what his grandmother would have done, his father's mother, and what his uncle Stefan would do. Stefan taught him the Our Father, which everyone knows. Taught him how to pray the rosary. Henry stumbled over the Hail Mary as a child, blurred the words together, but it comes to him clear and strong now.
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

The man on the passenger side of the car opens the door and the light in the car goes on. Two young men are in there, looking at them, and Henry breathes again. It's just two local guys. Subcontractors. Someone made a call to someone else, who then made a call. Some small favors exchanged. Enough to make these two drive over from Danbury, or somewhere in upstate New York, maybe up from the city. But they're not getting paid enough to take a bullet. They just need to say they showed up. Henry takes one hand off his shotgun, makes a gesture in the air.
Turn off your engine.
The driver does, and the light goes out. They keep the headlights on.

“He's not here,” Henry says.

“He got in a taxi that headed up here.” The voice is from the passenger side, even and deadpan.