The Long Fall

36

On the way to the car my lighter-skinned brother put his hand on my shoulder. I stopped walking and he took a step to the side.

“Keep on movin’,” his partner commanded.

“Let’s get this straight, friends,” I said. “I’m leavin’ just like you want me to. But you don’t put your hands on me, understand? If you want me arrested, then call the cops. If you wanna throw down we can do it here and now. I might not beat the both of you but I swear that you’ll feel it for months.”

Maybe I sounded a little crazy, but this was damage control. I didn’t want them to get pushy with me, forcing a fight. Because I would have fought them, but what I really wanted was to make a beeline for the person who could help me decipher the clue.

SHE WAS A septuagenarian named Poppy Pollis who had once been the head of the whole library system but who now volunteered her time going through rare volumes and collections that were inherited from or donated by wealthy patrons.

I didn’t know Poppy’s name when I drove away from the sanatorium but a quick call to the information line of the local public library was all I needed. I identified myself, with the deft elocution of¦€… a university professor, as Jonah Rhinehart of Manhattan, explaining that I needed to speak with someone who had worked for many years in the system and who knew its history. The helpful librarian I spoke with said that there were three such individuals, though my best chance was with Ms. Pollis, who was working at the main branch on Washington Avenue.

Librarians are wonderful people, partly because they are, on the whole, unaware of how dangerous knowledge is. Karl Marx upended the political landscape of the twentieth century sitting at a library table. Still, modern librarians are more afraid of ignorance than they are of the potential devastation that knowledge can bring.

I went to the information desk on the first floor of the downtown branch and came upon a young black man wearing big round-lensed glasses and reading a small blue-gray book entitled Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? written by someone named Leszek Kolakowski.

“Good book?” I asked.

“Very good,” the young man replied, nodding sagely. “Very good.”

“I’m looking for Poppy Pollis,” I said, now that the quality of the philosophical monograph had been decided.

“Third floor,” he said.

I thanked him and went to look for the stairs.

POPPY WAS SEATED at a huge table piled high with musty old books. She was thin, probably tall, sporting short silvery hair and wearing a blue sweater that was buttoned to the throat. The air-conditioning was up too high.

“Are you Ms. Pollis?” I asked.

“Yes I am, young man.”

“Hi,” I said, taking the seat across from her. “My name is Peter Lomax. I’m a graduate student from New York and I’m doing a project, a master’s thesis at Brooklyn College on philanthropy.”

“How very interesting.” She didn’t question the fact that I was rather long in the tooth to be a graduate student. In 2008 the baby boomers, both black and white, were looking for an edge.

“Thank you. I think so, too. You know, our cities’ most valuable institutions are so dependent upon donations and yet there is so little work done understanding this infrastructure, this very personal, what should I call it . . . webbing of relationships.”

“Exactly so,” the elder exclaimed in a soft voice modulated by decades spent in silent reflection and examination. “Without entrepreneurship the libraries and other cultural institutions, such as museums and opera houses, would be lost.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said, matching her enthusiasm with my own. “I know that every relationship developed in a system such as this one is personal, but I wanted to look at the different «€the diffkinds of giving.”

Poppy took off her glasses to underscore her interest.

“Like you, for example,” I said. “You must have had to develop all kinds of relationships in order to keep the doors of this system open.”

She nodded, maybe even misted up a little.

“It was hard work but I loved every moment of it.”

“Yes. I know it must have been both difficult and rewarding. I’m also aware that you can’t reduce a lifetime of experience into some equation to be passed on but . . . I was thinking of approaching the problem by looking at philanthropy and separating what they call old money from the nouveau riche.” I figured that my target was most likely the former.

“How interesting,” Poppy Pollis said. “That really is the major concern, you know. People just coming into their wealth are looking for a place among the wealthy, for recognition, whereas the old families have a traditional format that allows them to maintain their names, as it were . . .”

She went on to tell me that there were twelve important families in Albany’s history. Really there were only eleven but the society page had added the Sampson clan. Poppy considered the Sampsons a Johnny-come-lately bunch of car salesmen, but the newspaper people liked the idea of an even dozen so the Sampsons were included.

I had to sit through a lot of useless information, asking questions that I didn’t care about. I had my notebook, though, and took very complete notes. It was maybe forty minutes later when we came upon the Hull family.

According to Poppy, the Hull clan was, on the whole, a dynasty of debauchery. Maxim Hull was the great-grandfather. He helped to build the infrastructure of the modern Albany library system. It was said that he made his fortune as a bootlegger and smuggler along with Joe Kennedy back in the era of Prohibition. He also built the second-largest Protestant church in the city.

Maxim’s son, Roman, had always felt that he lived in the shadow of his father and tried to outdo him in every way that he could. At the age of fifty-eight he shot and killed an up-and-coming young race car driver, was deemed insane, spent four years at the Sunset Sanatorium, got out, and proceeded to marry the driver’s young widow. The marriage didn’t last but the memory of the scandal certainly did.

Bryant, Roman’s son by a previous marriage, was presented as the current head of the family. As far as anyone knew he was an upstanding citizen. He built the administration building at the Sunset Sanatorium, married an older woman named Axel or Jack-son or something, and had raised two beautiful children—Hannah and Fritz.

“Was the wife’s maiden name Paxton?” I asked, pretending to be looking up a note.

“I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I’m sure it wasn’t Paxton,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“Of course I knew about the Hull family,” I said. “I thought that Bryant had married a woman named Paxton. I guess I was mistaken.”

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