Empty ever after

CHAPTER NINE

Although Aaron lived there and our biggest moneymaker was on Long Island, the place still gave me the chills. When I was growing up and kids from the neighborhood would vanish over summer vacation, there would be whispers about their families having fled to far off places with idyllic names like Valley Stream, Stony Brook, and Amityville or to places with unpronounceable names like Ronkonkoma, Massapequa, and Patchogue. It was all Siberia to me. I lived in secret dread that one of my dad’s business ventures would finally succeed and that he’d move Mom, Aaron, Miriam, and me to one of those awful places where people lived in big houses on quiet streets. My fears might have been allayed had I bothered looking at a map to see that Brooklyn and Queens were actually part of Long Island. I needn’t have worried in any case. My dad’s bad fortune would tie me to Brooklyn forever.

Elmont was a faceless town that was close enough to the city line to blow kisses at New York across the Queens border. It was the home of Belmont Park racetrack where the third leg of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes, was held every June. If not for the track, Elmont would be notable for being on the glide path to Kennedy Airport and for its cemeteries. My parents were buried in Elmont. In the end, I guess, they had moved to Long Island, but, as yet, without Aaron, Miriam, and me. I had come to see a man in Elmont about an empty grave.

I have heard it said that concentration camp survivors sometimes pass on their torments to their children, that the victims become the victimizers. I don’t know if it’s true or not. People say a lot of things. What I do know is that Mr. Roth had been my friend, a second father to me, and a surrogate grandfather to Sarah. He was affectionate, warm, funny, and philosophical in spite of what he had endured, maybe because of it. Yet he, by his own admission, had been an unfaithful husband and a negligent father. I knew about some of his failings, but had come by the knowledge indirectly.

Steven Roth, on the other hand, was so utterly familiar with his dad’s failings that escaping their reach seemed beyond his ability or desire. Steven was a bitter, angry man, so full of rage there wasn’t room in him for anything else but alcohol. That toxic mix of bitterness, rage, and alcohol had caused his father and himself nothing but grief. He had done a long bid in prison for manslaughter-a bar fight, of course-and a second stretch for DWI. He had been in and out of marriage, jail, and rehab so frequently by the time his father passed away, it was difficult to keep count.

We’d met a few times over the years and it was never pleasant. My relationship with his dad was a constant source of irritation, an allergen from which he could not find relief. Once, a few months before he died, Mr. Roth hired me to get his son out of some trouble, big trouble. But when that trouble went away, Steven Roth treated me not with respect or gratitude, but with contempt. It all came to a very ugly head at the memorial service for his dad. Steven was lit like a roman candle and in a particularly foul mood, spouting off about how his dad should have been buried, not cremated and how he should have been the one to see to his dad’s remains. When he shouted at Sarah that he would see to burying her father, I punched his lights out. Aaron tells me, I was still swinging when they pulled me off him. All I remember was that he was smiling at me. Even though I’d broken his nose and split both his lips, he was smiling.

Walking up the few steps to the front door of the neat little saltbox Cape, I had second thoughts about not bringing Carmella along. If things got ugly this time, there might not be anyone around to pull me off. I held my finger a few inches away from the bell and rechecked the address. Well-kept houses on twisty quiet streets were not usually Steven Roth’s style. Not unlike my late friend Rico Tripoli, Steven Roth’s taste ran to the darker edges of town, to places where the blackness of their souls blended in with the scenery. I couldn’t speak to his resources or to his abilities as a schemer, but there was no doubt he hated me enough to hurt my family anyway he could. I pressed the bell and listened to the muted chimes ring inside the house.

When the door pulled back, I stood facing a very attractive woman in her mid-forties. Beyond her broad smile and positively sparkling blue-gray eyes, it was difficult to say what was so attractive about her. Her face, in fact, was rather plain and round and her hair was a mousy brown. She was thin, I guess, but her generic jeans and sweatshirt did nothing to highlight her shape. Yet there was something undeniably appealing about her.

“Good morning,” she said without a hint of guile or wariness.

“Hi, my name’s Moe Prager. I was wondering if Steven-”

“Moe Prager! Moe Prager. Steven will be thrilled you’re here.” She beamed and shouted over her shoulder, “Honey, come here, there’s someone to see you.”

I was sure I wasn’t dreaming it, but not of much else. I was having a full out Twilight Zone moment. Then, when Steven Roth appeared with his right hand extended and a wide peaceful smile on his face, I thought to look for the hidden camera. When he took my hand, shook it, embraced me, I was still in shock.

“Praise Jesus, my prayers have been answered.”

“Praise Jesus,” the woman repeated.

“Moe, this is my wife Evelyn. Evelyn… Moe Prager.”

We shook hands.

“Come on in, Moses. That is what Steven’s father called you, right?” she asked, folding her arm in the crook of my elbow. “Come have some coffee with us.”

“Yes, he called me that and Mr. Moe most of the time.”

“Steven has told me a lot about you and his father. I want to hear it from you.”

The three of us sat around the kitchen table and shared coffee in a sort of stunned silence. Then Steven, who still bore the bend in his nose from when I broke it, spoke up.

“I’m sorry, Moe, for treating you the way I did in the past. I was such an angry and empty man until I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my savior. When Evelyn and I found each other and God in AA, I just knew this day would come. I should’ve sought you out, but I was weak and afraid. Even with the Lord, I have my weaknesses and my bad days. Jesus has forgiven me, but I have prayed for the strength to come speak to you and ask your forgiveness. I can only pray for my father’s forgiveness, but I can ask for yours.”

“Sure, Steven, I forgive you.” Then I put his alleged faith to the test. “It’s what your dad would want me to do.” If anything would set him off and cut through his “The New Me” veneer, it was those words.

He smiled. “You always were a clever man, Moe, but you can’t rattle my cage. The pain and rage are gone. I don’t blame you for not believing me. I was a pretty awful human being for a very long time. I think my dad loved how sharp you were. You were clever and quick like him. I am glad he had you to comfort him in his later years. Lord knows, I was no comfort.”

“No,” I said, “you weren’t, but he always loved you. Your dad told me he wasn’t a very good father or husband. In some ways, I think Izzy felt he deserved what you put him through.”

“No one deserves what I put him through or what happened to him in the camps, but growing up, it was so hard for me to have perspective. My life was one long terrible journey of understanding, a long lonely time with a cold heart in a barren desert. Then I was saved.”

Tears were pouring down Steven Roth’s face. Evelyn reached across the table and clutched her husband’s hand. They bowed their heads in silent prayer. After a few seconds and almost simultaneously, they looked up and said, “Amen.”

I stayed for about another half hour. Steven showed Evelyn and me some old family pictures. It was good to see Israel Roth’s face again. In some of the photos, he was a young man. I had never before seen him as a young man. The emotional scars from the camps were more evident, the pain much closer to the surface in those days. I told some stories about Mr. Roth and me and how well he treated us over the years. Still, Steven showed no signs of resentment whatsoever.

“I’m glad that my dad could open his heart to someone and that all the love he had to give did not die locked up inside him.”

Evelyn and I said our goodbyes in the kitchen. I thanked her for her hospitality and wished her well. She assured me that as long as she followed the path that the Lord Jesus Christ had laid out for her and Steven, they would be well. Steven Roth walked me to the door.

“Thank you, Moses,” he said before once again embracing me. “You’ve helped lift a terrible weight off my shoulders.”

“Steven, I can’t explain it, but seeing you and Evelyn like this… Well, it’s done the same for me.”

“I know you don’t believe, but I also know that the Lord Jesus Christ has a place in his heart for you and can show you the way if you just look.”

“I’ve always been good at finding things by myself,” I said.

“Sometimes, it’s not the finding so much as being prepared to accept what you find.”

I drove around the corner and parked. My car was still, but my mind was all over the place. Hypocritical, intolerant, money-grubbing TV preachers made it kind of easy for the rest of us to turn devout Christians into cartoonish caricatures, but there was nothing remotely cartoonish about the time I’d just spent with Steven Roth and his wife. I hadn’t known Evelyn before she found God. I had, however, known Steven and he truly was a changed man. He was right, I didn’t believe and I was unlikely to ever believe, yet who was I to argue that Jesus Christ hadn’t saved him?

Sitting there, I realized that neither Steven nor Evelyn had once asked me why I’d come. When God answers your prayers with something other than a resounding no, you don’t question it. For them, my appearance on their doorstep was as much an act of God as the sun showing through the clouds or a landslide or hurricane. The appeal of turning yourself over to that kind of faith was not lost on me nor was the danger of it. The dangers of it certainly weren’t lost on Israel Roth.

I thought a lot about Mr. Roth that day. I knew he would have been pleased that his son had found peace, however he’d come to it, and a woman to love who loved him back. He would also have been very pleased over his son’s forgiveness. Of all the pain he took to his grave, the rift with his son troubled him most. I thought back to that long-ago day in the cemetery and his talk of spreading the ashes of the dead on the walkways at Auschwitz so the Nazis wouldn’t slip on the snow and ice.

“But I’ve never stopped spreading the ashes,” he had said.

Maybe now he could stop.

“Rest in peace, Mr. Roth,” I said, the shadow of a passing 747 darkening the sky overhead. I waited for the sun to return before putting my car in drive.

When I first met Nancy Lustig, I didn’t know or like Old Brookville or the surrounding towns very well, but for the past decade Aaron and I owned a store right on the cusp of Long Island’s legendary Gold Coast. Now that I knew the area, I liked it even less than I had all those years ago. People with money, especially newfound money, have a bizarre sense of entitlement that was hard for me to take. So in spite of the fact that Red, White and You was our most profitable location, it was my least favorite. During its inaugural year, when I managed the store, I used to imagine Nancy Lustig wandering into the shop someday. I would imagine the surprise on her face and the conversations we might have. She never appeared, not while I was there.

Nancy Lustig had dated Patrick Maloney when they were at Hofstra together. She was from a rich family that owned a house-a mansion, really-less than a mile from our store. Nancy was a squatty girl back then and to have called her plain looking would’ve been giving her way more than the benefit of the doubt. She was an ugly girl, but so brutally honest with herself that I was awed by it. I think that’s why she had always stayed with me. There’s all kinds of brave. Sometimes, honesty is the hardest kind.

Frankly, I’d gotten so caught up in finding Patrick and with falling in love with his sister, that I completely lost track of Nancy. The last I recall, she had moved out west-Northern California, I think-shortly after the debacle with Patrick, but I can’t even remember if that was something I actually heard or some invention of my own that I had simply come to accept as fact. It’s a funny thing about getting older. You lose a sense of how much of your past is real and how much of it is self-fabrication and filler your mind spins out in order to let you sleep nights. I’m not certain if the ratio of real to imagined was knowable, that I’ d want to know it. How many of us would, I wonder?

It took me a few seconds to be certain that the woman who answered the door was Nancy Lustig. Obviously, she was older now, but that wasn’t what threw me. While I wouldn’t have called her a knockout, the woman in the doorway was…I don’t know… attractive, I guess. Not from the inside out, the way that Evelyn Roth was attractive. It was more in the way the woman before me was put together. The thick, unflattering glasses were gone in favor of blue contacts. Her hair fell a few inches over her shoulders and was now a sort of dark blond with expertly blended highlights. The longish, lighter hair was a nice compliment to the new shape of her face. Nancy had lost at least thirty pounds, but more than diet had gone into resculpting her face. There were cheekbones, high ones, an angular jawline, fuller lips and a pert, provocative nose. Her makeup was flawless and her tennis outfit showed off a tanned, well-muscled body. The tight red polo shirt accented the shape of her new, gravity-defying breasts. Nancy crossed one leg in front of the other, tapping the floor impatiently with the tip her court shoe.

“Can I help you?”

“Moe Prager. We met back in the late ’70s.”

She squinted, as if she hoped squeezing her eyes together might help her see into the past. Apparently, squinting was no help with time travel.

“Sorry,” she said, “I got nothing.”

“Patrick Maloney.”

That did the trick. She screwed up her new face as if she’d just caught a whiff of steaming hot dog shit. I didn’t blame her. It hadn’t exactly been a storybook romance between Patrick and Nancy. In a desperate attempt to deny his homosexuality and cope with his burgeoning OCD, Patrick engaged in a series of doomed relationships with women. With Nancy Lustig, the inevitable bad ending was particularly ugly. There was a visit to a sex club, an aborted pregnancy, and violence. He dislocated her shoulder and might’ve done much worse had other students not pulled him off her.

“The detective. Yes, I remember.” She didn’t ask me in.

“That’s right. How have you been?”

“Look, what’s this about, Mr. Prager?”

“Moe, please.”

“Let’s stay on point. What’s this about?”

“Patrick.”

“Sorry, not interested,” she said. “What, he woke up from a coma and wants to apologize or something? He develop a conscience after twenty years?”

“Nothing like that. Patrick’s dead.”

“Did he remember me in his will?”

“It happens that he was murdered shortly after he disappeared.”

If I thought that would shake her up, I thought wrong. She yawned. I might have told her I stepped on an ant.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Prager, but I’m leaving to play tennis in a little while, so if there’s nothing-”

“You sure have changed,” I said, trying a new tack.

She wasn’t sure how to take that. “Thank you…I think.”

“Oh, no, I meant it as a compliment,” I lied. “You’re quite lovely.”

“Thank you,” she said, flashing a satisfied smile. “It was a lot of hard work to bury dumpy old Nancy.”

“I don’t know, there were parts of her I kinda admired.”

Nancy scowled at me like Father Blaney. I looked for clouds to move in overhead.

“Admired! What did you admire, my desperation? My willingness to take crumbs and castoffs? My-”

“Your honesty.”

“Oh, that. Honesty’s easy when it’s all you have.”

“I’m not sure it’s ever easy.”

“Why admire someone for something when they have nothing else? It’s like admiring an amputee for still having the other leg. These,” she said, running her hands over her now exquisite breasts, “are something to admire. On the whole, Mr. Prager, you can keep honesty. I’ll take these. No one desires you for your honesty.” She dropped her hands back to her sides.

“Why is it one or the other?”

Just then, as if on cue, a Land Rover pulled into the long driveway and beeped its horn.

“I prefer tennis to questions of metaphysics. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

“Sorry to have bothered you,” I said, and walked back to my car. I rolled out of the driveway onto Route 107 and parked. A few minutes later, the green Land Rover pulled onto the road and disappeared, heading north. I had to go north too, but I needed some time to mourn the old Nancy Lustig.

So I went from money to more money, from new money to old.

In the early’80s, Constance Geary worked for Aaron and me at City On The Vine for about six months while she finished up at Juilliard. She was pleasant enough, a hard worker, good with the clientele, but we never fooled ourselves she would stay on. I had the impression she got her hands dirty with the common folk as if she were fulfilling a missionary obligation. You know, like teaching Third World children how to read. Or maybe it was just so she could say, “Hey, I had a job once.” It wasn’t Constance I was interested in, but her father.

It was Thomas Geary who’d hired me in 1983 to find out what had happened to Moira Heaton and to resuscitate State Senator Steven Brightman’s political career. I’m not certain to this day if Geary cared for Brightman in the least or if he simply fancied himself a kingmaker. After all, what else was there for him to do besides being wealthy and playing golf? Geary was one of those men who saw golf as universal allegory. If you understood the intricacies of the game, you’d see that life and golf were just the same. Yeah, right! Maybe Steven Roth should have taken up golf instead of God. I mean, who needs the New Testament when you’ve got a copy of the USGA Rule Book.

Crocus Valley was at the WASPy heart of the Gold Coast, a place where plaid pants and Episcopal priests never went out of fashion. Don’t get me wrong, the residents of Crocus Valley had made concessions to the new millennium. Some even painted the faces of their lawn jockeys white! Behind the artifice of taste and restraint, the residents of CV were as screwed up as any other bunch of rich fuckers. I would know. I was privy to their liquor bills. If they ever considered changing the town’s name, Single Maltville would have been perfectly appropriate.

The Geary place was on a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound and bordered on the east by The Lonesome Piper Country Club. It was at the Lonesome Piper, during Connie’s wedding reception, that I first met Thomas Geary. He took me for a stroll along the driving range. During our short walk, he managed to lecture, threaten, and bribe me. All of it done with a calm voice and unwavering smile. He was a reflection of the town in which he lived. On the outside he was all class: well-bred, well-mannered, a perfect gentleman. But beneath his well-tanned skin, Geary was as much a thug and bully as Francis Maloney ever was, only less honest about it.

The corral-type fencing that once surrounded the white country manor had been replaced by a contiguous stone wall. There was an ominous black steel gate now as well. No longer could you simply turn off the road and into the estate. Anchored by massive stone pillars, the gate was a good twelve feet high, double the height of the wall. On one pillar was a security camera, on the other a call button and speaker. Childishly, I waved hello at the camera, then pressed the call button.

“Yes, who is it?” A woman’s voice asked.

“My name’s Moe Prager. I was wondering if-”

“Moe! This is Connie. Come on, drive up to the house. I’ll meet you out front.”

The gate swung open even before I made it back to my car. Connie met me under the front portico just as her father had seventeen years before on my first and only visit to the ten-acre estate. She was very much the same as I remembered: more handsome than pretty. Looking at her now, I realized Constance was naturally what Nancy Lustig had had tried to make herself into.

“Moe, my God, look at you!” Connie grabbed both my hands and kissed me on the cheek. “You look great. How are you? Come inside.”

I followed her into the house. It too was as I remembered it, at least the decor hadn’t much changed. There was, however, an unmistakable medicinal tang in the air and a metal walker in the foyer next to an incongruous pair of hockey skates. Connie noticed me notice.

“The walker’s Dad’s. The skates are Craig Jr.’s.”

“A son, mazel tov. Any other kids?”

“No. Craig’s my pride and joy,” she said.

“How’s Craig’s dad?”

“Fine. We’re divorced almost ten years now.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was all very amicable. We’re all better off this way. You were at the wedding, weren’t you? I remember you being there. You and Katy, Aaron and Cindy, right?”

Just ask your dad. “We were indeed.”

“How is Aaron? I always had a kind of crush on him, you know?”

Of course I didn’t. I loved my big brother and he was a good looking man, but it was hard for me to imagine Connie falling for him.

“He’ll be quite honored to hear it.”

“Oh, God, please don’t tell him.” She turned bright red. “I’m so embarrassed.”

“Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.” I’m certain she had no idea how safe. “Aaron’s great. You know, we own a store not too far from here?”

“Red, White and You. Yes, I’ve been there a few times, but no one I remember was around.”

“Klaus and Kosta are still with us. They even own a part of the business now.”

“Are they both still crazy?”

“As crazy as ever.” I changed subjects. “The walker, you said it was for your dad.”

“Used to be. He’s pretty much bedridden these days. Alzheimer’s,” she said, as if that explained everything. I guess maybe it did. I watched Alzheimer’s rob my friend and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Yancy Whittle Fenn, of everything he ever had. First it erased his memory, then it erased him.

“Sorry.”

“That sorry I’ll accept.”

“Your mom?”

“She’s summering out West with some friends.”

“You take care of your dad?”

“We have round the clock nursing, but I see him a lot. We can afford to keep him close to the things he loved. I’m not sure how much of him is left. We take him down to the stables when we can. He seems to still enjoy that.”

“I remember he liked horses. Do you ride anymore?”

“Some.”

“The piano?”

“The great love of my life, Moe. Yes, I still play. Come on, I’ll get us a drink and I’ll play for you.”

“I could use a drink and I’d love to hear you play.”

“Scotch with ice, right?”

“Good memory,” I said. “Do you think I could go see your dad while you get the drinks?”

“Sure, but I don’t think he’ll remember you.”

“That’s okay, I’ll remember for the both of us.”

“Is that why you came, to see my dad?”

“It was, but no biggie. It wasn’t that important,” I lied. There was no need to add to anyone’s pain. I had my answer. If he was in as bad a shape as Connie said, Thomas Geary wasn’t involved in Patrick’s resurrection. “Listen, Connie, does your dad ever hear from Steven Brightman?”

“Steven Brightman, now there’s a name I haven’t heard for a long time.”

“That’s a ‘no’ then?”

“Absolutely. Once Steven resigned, I think my dad lost interest. Until then, he was one of Dad’s pet projects. He is-was a very project-oriented man, my dad. But if it’s really important for you to know, I can ask Mom.”

“No need. I’ll just run up and see your dad and then I’ll be down so I can listen to you play.”

The medicinal smell was strong in Thomas Geary’s room. His TV was on. He paid it as little heed as it paid him. Geary may once have been a bastard, but I could feel only pity for him now. His eyes were vacant, his mouth was twisted up into a confused smile. It was a clown smile absent the makeup and the humor. He looked so very lost, seeming to have forgotten not only who he was but what he was. I recognized the expression. Wit-Y.W. Fenn-wore it for the last year of his life.

I opened my mouth to speak to Thomas Geary, but closed it before any words came out. I might just as well have spoken to the TV. I left him as I found him.

Back downstairs, Connie handed me a glass of single malt-what a surprise-and had one herself. I expected her to play something dark and moody, but got Gershwin and show tunes instead. This way we could talk a little while she played. I told her about Sarah, about my own divorce. I didn’t go into details. Connie said all the right things, cooed and sighed in the proper places in my stories, but I could tell she had built some walls of her own. The divorce, her dad’s Alzheimer’s were tough on her. I remembered something Mr. Roth had once said to me, “Money is a retreat not a fortress.” Looking at the pain behind Connie’s eyes and listening to it behind her pleasant chatter, I knew Israel Roth was right.

When I said my goodbyes, Connie held onto my hand a little longer than I would have expected and asked me if we might not go to dinner sometime. To talk about old times… as friends, of course… Of course! I thought about what had become of Nancy Lustig, how the brutal honesty had remained, but her humanity seemed to have vanished. I told Connie that I’d love to go to dinner. Who was I not to throw her a rope?

Time travel, I thought as I rode through the center of Crocus Valley, was not for the faint of heart. I had supposed, foolishly perhaps, that after my father-in-law’s passing and the fallout from our shared secrets had taken its toll, that I could put the past behind me. However, the past, it seemed, was not set in granite, but rather as fluid as the future. I was as incapable of shaping one as the other. The past, my past, sang a siren’s song to me that was beyond my ability to resist and I was forced to reach deeper and deeper into my pockets to pay the price each time I succumbed. By any measure, it had been a weird fucking day and I was off balance, way off.

Driving did nothing to restore my equilibrium. I just kept rehashing the events of the day. No one was who they used to be. They had all changed, some for better, some for worse, with no regard for my expectations. Steven Roth, Nancy Lustig, Connie and Thomas Geary, had had time to evolve, time to ease into their new skins, but for me it was disorienting. From where I stood- Presto change-o! — they had morphed almost before my eyes. That was wrong, of course. It had happened during the long overnight between last meetings.

I flipped the visor down, not only to block out the sun. I pulled open the lighted mirror on the back of the visor and stared at myself. How much, I wondered, peering at my tired-looking reflection, had I changed without noticing? I thought back to philosophy class at Brooklyn College.

Essay #1: If you own a car for a number of years and over the course of those many years you replace part after part, at what point does that car cease being the original car? Does that car ever cease being what it once was? If you were to replace every part, would it cease being the old car?

I can’t remember what I wrote exactly. Probably something about the essence of the car remaining unchanged. I think I argued that proximity of time and of old parts to new kept the original essence of the car intact in spite of all other factors. In conclusion, I think I wrote, unless you were to change all parts all at once, the original car remains. I wasn’t so sure I believed that anymore. I wasn’t sure I believed it then. What did I know in college, anyway?

If I thought today’s disorientation or looking in the mirror would lead me to any brilliant new insights or deeper truths, the blare of horns, the rapid tha-dump tha-dump tha-dump tha-dump of my tires against the grooves at the road’s edge, and the pinging of gravel in my car’s wheel wells dissuaded me from that notion. I jerked the wheel left and got the car back on the road. I flipped up the visor and tried as hard as I could not to use my rearview mirror. I had enough looking back for one day, thank you very much.

My cell phone buzzed. It was Sarah. Yes, it had been a weird fucking day and it was about to get weirder.