The Last of the Wise Lovers (27 page)

"She saw everything differently.  She
didn't really have a choice, you see.  Harry was her chance for the
life...” he searched for the proper word, "that I couldn't give her."

   "I'm not so sure about
that," I said.

   He took this to mean that I doubted
whether life with him was so awful, and smiled gratefully.

"I agree with you.  All in all, she
lived quite comfortably and...”

   "That's not what I meant,"
I tried to ignore the look of disappointment that crept over his face.
 "I'm not sure Mom thought that Harry would take off and leave her
here.  I'm also not sure whether she believed that the opposite would
happen, that is, that he'd take her with him.  It seems from her first
letter that she knew the separation was inevitable.  But in the second
letter...”

   "That's how she is," Dad
said harshly, "always flip-flopping between reality and fantasy.  In
this case fantasy won out, and when Harry began making plans for his
retirement, she began her own preparations - which made it abundantly clear
that she had no intention of staying here without him.  She undoubtedly
did it with her - how did you put it? - characteristic `style'.  She
didn't make demands, she didn't argue, she simply went along according to
her
plan of action, as if it were the most natural and reasonable thing to do.
 She secretly bought clothes that would suit the Florida climate, she
started talking about going on a diet so she wouldn't look fat in a bathing
suit - and Harry?  He began to get nervous.  I don't think he ever
really
wanted to live with her, and even if he
had
ever considered it, he'd
almost certainly changed his mind by this point.  In any case, he couldn't
have supported her on retirement wages in Miami Beach with the kind of
lifestyle that -" a dry cackle escaped his throat, but there was a note of
sadness behind his malicious glee.  

"Just picture it!  After years of
activity and a pretty steady cash flow, the guy was going to turn into
something more boring than
me
...” he paused and looked at me, perhaps waiting
to hear me deny it.

  
I
said nothing.  What could I say?  Mom was right about one thing: what
did I
really
know about how each of them had lived, together and apart?

   "... So, like I was saying, I
don't think your mother really threatened Harry, but after all, he was a smart
guy and he'd had enough experience with women to know that you don't have to
wait for the first raindrops to know it's going to pour.  Meanwhile, time
was getting short.  He had to vacate his apartment, sign over all his
business holdings, and move south by the end of September.  He
had
to get her off his back.  How do you shake a woman you're afraid to make
angry, a woman who knows too much?"  He drummed his fingers on the
night table.  

"He had a very clever plan - simply brilliant
- and all he needed to put it into action was someone who knew Hebrew, who had
experience tailing people.  That was no problem.  This city is
crawling with private detectives, former Israelis, who'd be more than happy to
follow Mom for $25 an hour, then back her into a quiet corner and tell her, in
Hebrew, that the Mossad was on her tail and was going to wipe out Harry.
 Do you realize how brilliant that is?  Harry knew all too well that
Mom was afraid of the emptiness she'd feel after he'd left and you'd been
drafted.  He was afraid threatening her with a death would induce Mom to
sacrifice everything in one grand act of despair, so he told his detective to
divide the threat in two: things would get "unpleasant" for Mom if
she kept seeing Harry; and as for him - he'd be dead.  He had a double
hold on her: fear
and
emotional blackmail. If the threat to her own
safety didn't scare her, he could count on the threat to
his
life
doing the trick."  He sneered bitterly.  

"I bet Harry even told him when he'd find her
alone - on her way to one of their `meetings'.  But two things went wrong.
 First of all, who could have imagined that you'd do something crazy like
dress up as Mom and drive off in her car?  And second of all," he
sighed, "Mom's character.  I've been thinking about this since the
minute I stopped reading.  Harry was so clever, so experienced - how is it
that he didn't figure she'd completely ignore reality when it didn't suit her
expectations, and continue living according to her own plan of action...?"

The alarm on his wristwatch went off.  He got
up and went to the window, pushed the curtain aside and looked out.  Then
he looked at his watch and asked, "Are you ready?"

   I nodded.

   "If there's anything you need to
do, do it now; the guys'll be here any minute and we won't be able to wait...”

   At that moment he didn't seem any
more realistic than Mom: Even after reading all those notebooks, he was
still
talking to me like I was a little kid who had to be told to take a piss before
a long trip.

   "What's so funny?" he
asked.

   "Nothing.  I want to hear
the rest of your explanation."

   He glanced at his watch.

"We haven't much time, and you already know
everything...” he cautioned, nevertheless sitting down next to me on the edge
of the bed.  "So, when Harry realized that his threats weren't
working, he changed to a less ambitious plan and decided to neutralize Mom for
a few weeks, by which time he'd be on his way to Florida, out of sight and --
who knows -- maybe out of mind... At first it didn't seem too difficult.
 Mom had a free subscription to all the products of that Society for
Proper Nutrition etc., which he ran, and it was no trouble for him to arrange
that she win a free cruise.  But then you intervened and started causing
trouble - showing up at their offices in Nyack, asking questions - and when
Harry came to our house, you told him things that got him worried.  Then
things started to go wrong with Mom, too.  He tried to avoid her - he
didn't return her phone calls, he cancelled their meetings - but she, as we've
said, refused to get the message.  When she couldn't get him on the
telephone she started writing letters; one night she even photographed some
material he hadn't asked for and told his men to come pick it up from the usual
place, the notch in the tree...”  He got up and looked outside again.

   "What about searching the
house...?"  I pulled at his shirttail.

   He sat down again.

"Harry was worried.  He knew all too
well that there were copies and traces of the letters and slides, and he told
his detective to break into the house and get rid of the camera, the film, and
every letter or slide he could find.  But you - as usual - interrupted.
 Harry decided to try
again
to put Mom out of commission, this time
with the blue pills, which were meant to make her weak and fuzzy-headed for
several weeks.  Again you ruined things by finding the pills; and,
indirectly, your investigating them in the bathroom when Aunt Ida wandered in
caused
her
to swallow them instead of your mother.  Suddenly, the
focus shifted.  The attention and seriousness with which you took the
threats made you more dangerous than Mom.  Keeping her quiet had a high
price, but not an insufferable one.  You, on the other hand, were a
foreign and completely uncontrollable influence.  That's why the pressure
turned on you, with the guy from the Lincoln Tunnel serving as Harry's eyes and
ears.  He followed us when you came with me to Kennedy - on the off chance
that we were plotting something together.  When you were home alone with
Mom he hid in the garden, and the night she arranged their last meeting he was
ordered to follow her from the minute she left the house - not to harm her, as
you assumed, but to make sure that it was just a romantic rendezvous, and not
some trap that
you
had laid.

   "Me?"

   "He was afraid of you.
 Not, actually, because of what you knew - after all, you'd told him part
of that when you went to see him, and you'd even mentioned that you suspected
me...”

   "Shouldn't that have put him at
ease?"

   "Maybe, if it hadn't been for
his fear that, in a moment of despair or weakness, Mom would tell you some part
of the truth - a part that might do him harm.  That's why when you and Mom
went your separate ways he ordered his detective to follow
you
and keep
him apprised of your every move, over the car phone.  After all, he knew
she was on her way to see him."  

He smiled at me kindly.  "It was
touching when you asked to sleep at his place, not knowing that she was there
and that they were working out their separation...”

   I didn't want to think about that.
 "How do you know they agreed on the separation?"

   "The envelope that you saw at
Temple... don't forget, I've known her for 20 years - and we've come close to
separating more than once.  Each time she made the same demand: that all
the letters she'd written be returned to her.  A few times I refused
because I felt they belonged to me - one of the few things I'd have to prove
she'd loved me.  But she never gave in.  Something in the thought
that her declarations of love might find their way into the hands of someone
else bothered her.  That was one of her idiosyncrasies.  Harry
undoubtedly found this a small price to pay for his freedom, and promised to
bring them to Temple the following day.  Mom may have hoped he would give
them to her himself; that's probably why she asked you not to come.  But
Harry had more important things to do - or else he was afraid something would
go wrong - so he asked his detective to do it as a final service.  Of
course he didn't have the faintest idea that you'd show up again and complicate
matters...” he shifted restlessly, "and now he's probably eating himself
alive for not letting them arrest you."

   "Why did he arrange house arrest
for me?"

   "Who knows?" he shrugged
his shoulders.  "Maybe because he loves you and really wanted to
help; maybe because he wanted to be the first to know what you had to say that,
for whatever reason, you hadn't said when you'd gone to see him...”

   "And that's why he asked that I
write down everything I knew...”

   Dad nodded.

   A lot of things were much clearer
now.

"That is, if I hadn't have shown up at Temple
uninvited and caused all that fuss, everything would have ended quietly and
uneventfully exactly on the 7th of September, as promised...”

   Again Dad went to the window and
peered out.  There was still one more thing left unsaid between us.
 I tried to read it in his face, in his gestures, in the way he pressed
himself against the glass.  Finally, I couldn't hold back any longer.
 I went up to him and grabbed his arm. "Are you sorry about what
happened?"

   He didn't answer.

   "Maybe you would have preferred
it if I hadn't complicated things, if I hadn't stuck my nose in.  Harry
would've gone off to Florida, I would've started my last year at school, Mom
would've gotten over it...”

   "She wouldn't have gotten over
it.  This was her last chance."

   "
What would you have
preferred
?"

   He took a deep breath.

"Me?  What would
I
have
preferred?"  He turned his head and looked outside at a commercial
van that had just entered the parking lot, driven up to the door of our room,
and stopped.  Suddenly, the usual expression returned to his face.

"That's it," he said.  “Let's
move."

It's been a while since then, a while since we
talked about those things - since we've talked at all.  The whole matter's
been forgotten; only a few people know about it.  Dad's friends were a bit
pissed off, but they decided among themselves that Mom was to blame for
everything; they even helped Dad get a job at the Israeli branch of a large
international art auction house.  I think he's happy.

   I'm ok, too, more or less, despite
the fact that there's not even one baseball team here and that everything looks
like a copy of something grander and more impressive that I've seen somewhere
else.  Mom lives about an hour's drive away from us, in an apartment that
belonged to her parents.  She also got off scot free.  Maybe because
no one wanted to open the case; and maybe because those responsible for bringing
people to justice realized that to be a tired and disappointed woman at 40+,
living alone and getting by with temporary work and government benefits, is
punishment enough for someone who spent her life acting as if she was
wonderful.

   I go to see her once a week,
always with the same mixed feelings: I despise her so, yet I fear losing her.
 When I return from these visits I'm always filled with pain, aggravation,
and, mostly, longing.  But longing for what?  I can't define it.  For
Mom?  But I just came back from there; and besides, she'll never say
anything but what
she
wants to hear.  The house in East Neck? 
I was never really attached to it.  Debbie?  She wasn't important.
 Miss Doherty?  How can I possibly miss someone I hardly knew?
 K.?  He's long since dead.

   So that leaves you.  I
suppose I ought to hate you, or at least be angry with you - but I'm not.
 Maybe because, unlike Mom, you never put yourself in an ideal light and
you never pretended the world was wonderful.  Maybe because the part you
played in all of it only proves what you always said: that things are never
what they seem.  And maybe it's because I understand so, so well that need
you spoke of, to love, that only you could define so precisely.  I feel it
more and more all the time, that need; lately I've been trying to fill it
through a million different failed attempts with girls, with women (even with a
guy I met - believe it or not - at the draft board).   I expected too
much, too fast, from all of them - and got nothing.