A Private Sorcery Page 3

  “A lawyer’s lawyer,” Ruth’s sister had said about Morton. “A former U.S. assistant attorney, street-smart and sharp as a tack. Don’t be put off by the shabby office, that’s just part of his demeanor—doing what’s practical, which for him is to be close to the courts. The courthouse locals call him Monk, for monkey, because he has this big forehead and long, thick arms. They tell this story about when he first came to the U.S. attorney’s office and how he was riding the B train late one night and some guy approached him from the rear with a knife, to mug him, and how he spun around and slammed the guy into the platform. The detectives like to tell it that the mugger was left brain-dead, but what happened was a broken pelvic bone. The Monk is also a kind of joke because all he does is work and spend Saturdays going up to Yonkers to see his kid and pine over his ex-wife, who left him because all he did was work.”

  At one-twenty, a man rounds the corner. He’s not wearing an overcoat and he’s running, his arms swinging loosely and the sides of his sport coat blown back so he looks half airborne. Reaching them, he dances around like a child who needs to pee. “Goddamn freezing,” he says, the comment addressed more to the street than to them. He extends a hand to Rena. “Mrs. Dubinsky?”

  “Rena Peretti. This is Saul’s father, Leonard Dubinsky.”

  Morton fumbles in his pockets for keys. They follow him through a tiled lobby to the freight elevator on the right. He blows on his hands and wiggles his fingers. On the fifth floor, he leads them down a dim corridor. He unlocks a door, flips a light switch, then turns toward them, offering a hand first to Rena and then to Leonard as if the greeting downstairs had not occurred.

  “Sorry I’m late. I wanted to see the client, and there were some things that had to be taken care of.”

  It’s the first time he’s looked straight at her and she’s startled by his eyes: a brilliant pale blue that unnerves her, suggesting, it seems, either utter sincerity or madness. They pass through a waiting area with a secretary’s cubicle and then into his office. She’d expected a room with dirty windows and overflowing trash cans, but it’s clean and orderly with large windows facing east. The Brooklyn Bridge looms so close and clear, it appears unreal. The opposite wall is covered with photographs: Morton with judges, Morton with a group of men in baseball uniforms, Morton with the Pope. On top of the desk, there’s a picture of a little boy, three or four, grinning beside a fishing pole with a silver bucket by his feet.

  Morton sits behind the desk and they sit in two chairs across from him. He takes a legal pad from a bottom drawer, pushes back his chair and swings his feet up onto the desk. “Okay, you tell me first what you know. Then I’ll tell you what I learned today and we’ll talk about where to go from here.”

  It takes Rena about ten minutes to tell Morton basically the same story she told Leonard. Morton takes copious notes, interjecting with questions of the when precisely was that and how do you spell that variety. When she gets to the arrest, he asks a lot of questions about what the police did and where they looked.

  “Anything else? Anything at all?”

  She catches Morton’s glance at Leonard, and it occurs to her that he’s thinking maybe she doesn’t want to talk in front of Saul’s father, an idea that hadn’t crossed her mind before but is, she realizes now, partly the case.

  “There’s something I thought of on the subway here.” She pauses, reluctant to open this door. “There’s someone I know, Reed—actually, he’s a lawyer, too—from a long time ago. We were roommates in San Francisco. He used to have a drug problem, before I met him, when he was a kid, really. Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, that sort of hippie experimental stuff. We lost touch for quite a while. Then Saul and I bumped into him. We were at the Whitney Museum and we ran into him in the stairwell. We went for lunch, the three of us, got together a couple more times after that. Saul and Reed started doing things, just the two of them, and I remember feeling pleased because there aren’t too many people Saul finds as interesting as a book.”

  Hearing herself, she feels embarrassed—the excess words, the apologetic tone that Saul, master of nuance, had taught her to notice in herself.

  “What would they do?”

  “Basketball games, mostly. Reed would get box seats at the Garden through clients and he’d take Saul.”

  Leonard looks at her, confused, she imagines, to hear about Saul, who’s always viewed his arms and legs as little more than vehicles to transport his mind, attending basketball games.

  “It didn’t last long. By the end of the year, Reed started flaking out. Once, we invited him for dinner and he showed up two hours late with some story about the subway. Another time, he and Saul were out somewhere and Reed went to the men’s room and never came back. Saul said Reed was edgy, like he was jumping out of his skin. It seemed clear to me he was using something.”

  Rena can feel Leonard staring at her, and she doesn’t know if it’s because he’s stunned that she’d introduced someone like Reed to Saul or because her face betrays how upset, in fact, she’d been to realize that Reed was using drugs again—Reed, who’d taught Gene, her halfbrother, how to throw a football, been her only friend when she’d first moved east.

  “I left a half-dozen messages on his home machine. Finally I called him at work, only to discover that he’d either been fired or quit. I guess it’s possible that Saul was in touch with him without my knowing it. I don’t know, it was just a thought I had.”

  Morton keeps his poker face, but it dawns on Rena from the way he doesn’t ask her for Reed’s last name that Saul has already told him about Reed, and then she wonders if Morton’s not asking is purposeful, that he can’t tell them what Saul has told him so he’s leaving them this clue.

  “Anybody else he’d see regularly?”

  “How about Santiago?” Leonard says. “Didn’t he read to him every week?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “He was a professor of Saul’s at Swarthmore,” Leonard says. “A political scientist from Cuba. He came here in the fifties to take a position at Temple University, then lost his visa during the McCarthy era and had to leave to teach in Mexico. When he came back, he and his wife settled here in New York and he did some visiting teaching jobs. He was in his seventies by then, but still a marvelous teacher.”

  Morton glances at Rena, checking her reaction.

  “Santiago had a big influence on Saul,” Leonard continues. “He introduced him to Marxist theory, really made it come alive for him. Then, the year after Saul met him, Santiago’s son disappeared in Guatemala. It was clearly a kidnapping, but unclear who had done it. Saul was convinced it was a paramilitary police faction and that the CIA had been involved. He organized a committee to help raise money for Santiago and his wife to carry on their search.”

  “Did they find him?”

  “No. Not even a trace. Then Santiago went blind. He was too old and dispirited to learn braille. When Saul came to New York for medical school, he became one of Santiago’s readers.”

  “How often would he see him?”

  “Every Tuesday,” Rena says. “Though this past year, I think it was pretty irregular.”

  “What’s your take on him?” Morton asks Rena.

  “I never met him. He and Saul had their routine, and …” She stops, reluctant to admit that she’d never wanted to meet Santiago, not because he didn’t sound interesting—she’d enjoyed hearing Saul’s stories about him—but rather because of a wariness about getting drawn into his life, into someone else’s grief.

  To Rena’s relief, Morton abruptly shifts gears, turning his inquiry to Leonard’s demographics: age, address, occupation, legal history. At occupation, he raises an eyebrow. “Two shrinks?”

  “Well, not really. I haven’t seen patients since 1955. I taught the history of psychiatry to medical students and residents. I retired two years ago.”

  “So let’s hear your two cents on what might have happened here.” Leonard adds very little to what Rena has already said: he k
new Saul had been having a hard time since the boy who threw himself in front of the train, they’d been less in touch this past year, he guesses he’d placed too much stock in the good cheer Saul had shown at his birthday party.

  Listening to Leonard, Rena’s fatigue surfaces—a dry burning around her eyes, her thoughts slow and muffled as though they’ve traveled down a long corridor to reach her mind. A sharp tone in Leonard’s voice jolts her back to alertness.

  “I’d been hoping this would be a two-way exchange, that you’d tell us how Saul is, what’s going to happen next, what we can do.”

  Morton lowers his feet. He folds his hands and leans forward, a sequence so often repeated, she can see, it’s no longer deliberate. “Look, this is a complicated thing and I’m going to talk to you two straight because you’re both educated people, not like some of the know-nothings I see in this office. The law says that what the client tells me belongs to the client and I can’t reveal that to anyone, not even our creator above. But you know and I know that that’s not how the clock ticks and I wouldn’t be able to get anything done for my clients if I couldn’t share any information with relevant parties like you folks. I’m going to tell you some of what Saul told me this morning, but it has to be with the understanding that, as far as you’re concerned, information has flowed in only one direction—from you to me. Whatever you know about Saul, you figured out yourselves. Agreed?”

  Rena nods.

  “Agreed,” Leonard says.

  “Okay. First of all, he’s strung out. Barbiturates and cocaine. He says he’s physically dependent on the barbiturates and if he doesn’t get some into his system by tomorrow, he could have a seizure.”

  Rena’s cheeks burn—not so much surprise at Morton’s confirmation that Saul has been using again as humiliated anger that Saul had again hidden it from her. A hundred lies. Twice as many times she’d let herself be fooled.

  “He’s right,” Leonard says. “Absolutely. Neuronal firing is slowed by barbiturates, and too rapid a withdrawal can lead to too rapid firing and a seizure.”

  “I’ve already called Medical. They’ll be on top of it because they’re all scared shitless about malpractice suits. So don’t sweat over that. Detox is their bread-and-butter. That’s the easy part.”

  “Where is he exactly?” Leonard asks.

  “He’s in a cell with three other guys at the MCC. It’s a federal holding facility. It ain’t the Plaza, but it’s not as bad as what you see on TV. He’s lucky this is a federal offense, because otherwise he’d be at Rikers and that can be ugly. Right now, though, the accommodations are irrelevant to him. His mind is on those pills.”

  Morton rotates a pencil between his fingers. “The biggest problem is his mea culpa syndrome. I’ve seen it before, especially with the white-collars. They just keep repeating, I deserve whatever I get. You’re the shrink,” he says, looking at Leonard. “You explain it to me. They want to plead guilty to everything. I had to struggle with Saul about entering an NG, a not-guilty plea. If I’d arrived fifteen minutes later, he would have already given them a signed confession. We don’t want that. We’ve got to start with an NG. Otherwise we’ve got nowhere to go.”

  Leonard closes his eyes, all of this, she realizes, even more of a shock to him than to her.

  “Can we see him?” she asks.

  “That’s the other thing. He doesn’t want to see anyone. It’s common, and in my experience you’re better off, for now, staying away. They get into these tearful reconciliations with the family and they lose their focus for the arraignment. The most important thing these next twentyfour hours is keeping him focused for that arraignment. We pass that hurdle and we could have him out on bail by tomorrow night.”

  “Tomorrow night?” Leonard repeats.

  “Unless there’s some bullshit I don’t know about, this should be a light lift. First offense. An accused with strong contacts in the community. Perfect bail-release candidate. So what you folks need to do is get yourselves organized to post bail. I’m guessing a hundred K, which means you need to put up ten. Is that going to be a problem?”

  “I can handle it,” Leonard says. “How about the arraignment? Can we come to that?”

  Morton drops the pencil. He turns his hands palms up like a judge’s balance. “I can’t tell you not to come, it’s open to the public. But the fewer distractions, the better, and you’re going to be a big distraction. We’re on the nine o’clock docket with Dunney, who’s a pretty straight shooter. She goes fast. Still, there will probably be eight, nine other cases up, it being a Monday morning. So let’s say two. I’ll meet you here then.”

  RENA AND LEONARD walk back together to the subway. She hugs her arms, unable to stay warm. She’s thinking about her discomfort with Leonard’s offer to pay the bail, about her account balances.

  “The bail,” she says. “I should be able to come up with most of it.” “Don’t worry about it. It’s just an escrow, to guarantee court appearance.”

  Leonard buries his face in his collar, not wanting, she thinks, for her to see the doubt etched in his brow. A year ago, anyone who knew Saul would have said he was incapable of deception. As a child, he’d told her, his mother had to teach him not to volunteer his misdemeanors. His first-grade teacher would come back after stepping out into the hall and she’d say, who was talking, I could hear talking, and Saul would raise his hand. But now, Rena thinks, in his condition, does anything still apply?

  She imagines Saul’s retort, soft-spoken, but quick and deft as his grandfather’s surgeon’s hands: There’s no such thing as a condition. That’s just an excuse, our contemporary way of evoking demons—the addiction made me do it.

  If I lie to you now, it’s because I’m a liar.

  3 Leonard

  It’s almost six by the time I walk up the driveway. The house is dark except for the third-floor bedroom. Through the window, I can see the glow of the television. I unlock the kitchen door and turn on the light. The note I left is crumpled in a ball. The coffeemaker is still on, and the room smells acrid with burnt coffee.

  People other than us—you, Marc, Susan, me—can’t understand the situation with your mother. Even Rena, I think, doesn’t get it. Or perhaps, unlike Susan, she has refused to involve herself enough to try and make sense of the contradictions: how someone can live like an invalid and then, in January and July, make her annual trips to Palm Beach and Lake Placid. By now, Stone no longer orders blood tests and CAT scans. Anyone who spends most days in bed, he tells me over the phone when I call to convey some new development, is going to get headaches and backaches and bowels that don’t do their job. Ten days in bed can be followed by a morning when I’ll bring your mother her eleven o’clock breakfast, always the same (a freezer croissant with hotel butter, two soft-boiled eggs in an egg cup with a dollop of strawberry jam, orange juice, coffee with three teaspoons of sugar and a good dousing of cream), and she’ll look up from the bed tray with a girlish smile. I was thinking, she’ll say, maybe I could manage the itsiest-bitsiest trip to the Short Hills Saks to get a new lipstick. An early dinner at Dantelli’s, the calamari with red sauce and a nice lamb chop. She’ll bathe and carry her Hermès bag. If the weather is nice, I might even take the 1962 Mercedes we inherited from her father out of the garage and drive it to the shopping mall.

  I turn off the coffeemaker and pour the burnt liquid down the drain. I run warm sudsy water in the pot, letting the bubbles overflow into the sink. I drink a glass of water and climb the stairs to the third floor.

  Klara ignores me and I think maybe she’s angry that I wasn’t there to make her breakfast. She’s dressed in a peach bed jacket, and her hair, last Friday’s outing, is newly permed. Next to her on the bed is the box of Perugina’s your brother sent for Valentine’s Day. She’s watching a French film with subtitles. She’s always had this odd combination of refined taste and an utterly banal sensibility. Impressed as I was at first by her background, it took me a while to be able to discern the latter, to recog
nize that when she reads the classics—Hardy, the Russians, Flaubert—it’s to find out what happens. In thirty-seven years of marriage, we’ve never discussed a book, a political event, a movie or even a piece of human interaction in anything other than a concrete way.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  She puts a forefinger to her mouth. “Shhh. There’s only fifteen minutes left.”

  I sit in the armchair by the window. Even after all these years, I can’t fully fathom how we got here, continue to live as though this is a temporary condition that at some point I’m going to rally myself to end. Your brother, I know, blames me for having let it happen: “She obviously went into a depression after Poppy died.” The obviously is obviously lobbed in my direction, since he was ten and you were eight at the time. Other times, I think your brother’s accusation is really a displacement (forgive me for being so technical, but you know I talk so little with colleagues, it being so unclear in what discipline I now belong, that it gives me pleasure to not have to translate into lay language), the accusation really about his conception, which anyone who can add and subtract can discern was three months before your mother and I married. Characteristically, your brother has never discussed it. You, however, childhood lover of lists—planetary distances and geological stages and Olympic long-distance gold medalists—placed before me, you were perhaps fourteen, a sheet of paper with two lines:

  May 17, 1955 Mom and Dad married

  December 12, 1955 Marc born

  Underneath, you’d written the following equation: 12⁄12 – 5⁄17 = 6.83 months. “What do you conclude?” I asked, and you said the expected.

  Your brother’s accusations aside, it was not, in fact, so obvious at first that your mother’s reactions after your grandfather died were more than grief. Yes, she was a wreck. She required tranquilizers. She tried to throw herself on top of the casket as it was lowered into the ground. The night after the funeral, she hurled Marc’s dinner plate onto the floor when he mumbled that the lima beans tasted like worms. But it was, after all, a shock. Your grandfather was in his early sixties. He’d performed three operations the morning he had the heart attack. A first heart attack and dead on the spot. And it was not a normal funeral, but rather a public spectacle what with all the pomp and circumstance of the medical school and the newspapers being there because he was a local celebrity and your mother’s two doctor brothers, including her eldest brother, my medical school classmate who’d not spoken with me in over ten years.