A Private Sorcery Read online

  “What?” Morton says. “The weapon was never employed.”

  “The pharmacist, Mrs. Kim Sun, miscarried from the shock of the experience.”

  Morton stands. The back of his neck is red. “What’s going on here?” “The miscarriage just took place this weekend. Mrs. Sun’s gynecologist is prepared to testify to this court that the pregnancy was well established prior to the burglary and that the trauma of the event was a precipitating factor.”

  The judge looks over at you. You are staring at the federal prosecutor. She beckons for the two lawyers to approach her. Afterwards, Morton goes to talk with you. The room is getting hotter and hotter, and I can hear the heat blasting in the radiators under windows the guards have pushed open. The judge bangs her gavel and Morton addresses her. “Your Honor, I would like, despite this new information which I do not believe further incriminates my client, to request that my client be released on his own recognizance. He is an employed physician. His wife, father and brother are also professionals. He has strong roots in the community and poses no risk to the court to fail to appear throughout these proceedings.”

  The judge writes some notes. Then she turns to the federal prosecutor. He twists in his seat to look at you as if to accentuate your utter depravity. “We are recommending no bail option. The defendant is an active substance abuser. As the court may recall, we have data showing the extremely high percentage of nonappearances by substance abusers. Moreover”—here, the federal prosecutor raises his hands, as though to ward off a pending attack—“the government believes that the defendant is at particularly high risk to flee the jurisdiction of this court. The individual suspected to be his coconspirator, Mr. Reed Michaelson, has, we believe, already fled to the Canary Islands. Mr.—excuse me, Dr. Dubinsky is undoubtedly aware that his career as a physician is severely threatened by these proceedings and may well be motivated to join Mr. Michaelson wherever he may be.”

  Morton bangs the table where the federal prosecutor has spread his papers. Coffee from a styrofoam cup sloshes onto the surface. “This is garbage. No one informed us of this information.”

  “Counselor,” the judge says. “I must request that you maintain decorum in my courtroom.”

  Morton leans over you. You shake your head, and then I see you starting to turn. I duck as though picking up a dropped piece of paper. The drone filters down to the floor. Crouched over, I make my way to the door.

  MORTON’S HANDS ARE frozen in fists, fighter’s fists with the thumb pressed on top of the forefinger. Rena sits motionless. She’s wearing pleated black pants with gold knots in her earlobes and a pale green jacket. Her face looks fragile and bony, all cheekbones and eye sockets. Her lips are parted as if she needs extra air.

  Morton has told us the bail decision. “Two hundred and fifty thousand, no noncash alternative.” He explains that this is because of Michaelson’s disappearance. He doesn’t say anything about the pharmacist having miscarried and the second-degree manslaughter charge, and I don’t know if this is because he doesn’t see this as the relevant factor or if this is so serious he doesn’t want to break it to us now.

  “What does that mean?” Rena asks.

  “Usually they accept ten percent cash and the rest of the bail as a note—a commitment from the bail bondsman to pay if your boy skips town. With no noncash alternative, it’s got to be all cash. That means you’re going to have to come up with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. No notes.”

  Rena looks at me. “How would we do that?”

  “Assuming you don’t keep that kind of dough sitting in the bank and you don’t have a cousin who’s a banker waiting to put that kind of loan through for you, the only way it can be done is with a bail bondsman who might take a risk on you for a hefty charge. I’ve got one guy in mind, Charlie Green, but he’s not someone I play games with. If I tell him he can put money on my man, he counts on me to mean that one hundred and fifty percent.”

  Morton squirms in his seat. He stretches a rubber band between his forefingers and snaps at it with his thumbs.

  “Fatso, the feds’ prosecutor, is right. Your boy’s a risk. He’s strung out. He’s got the means to get out of here. Sticking around is not going to look so good. When Green asks me what I think, I’m going to have to say so.”

  “That will nix it from the start, won’t it?” I say.

  Morton leans back in his chair. He looks over the door frame at a hoop mounted there. Your brother has the same thing in his office, this club of men for whom twelve was the apex of pleasure. When he loses a case, he can cover the floor with wads of paper tossed through the hoop. “These guys make money by purchasing risk. Green makes his own decisions. Sometimes he does these things as a gamble. Sometimes he’ll do it if he can structure the deal so he wins no matter what. Nothing lost by giving him a try.”

  CHARLIE GREEN MOVES his fingers in and out. He’s a tall man with thick black hair receding at the temples and a nose with a prominent bump. Last year’s calendar is taped to the wall, and there’s a stained coffeemaker on top of the file cabinet. In the background is the rumble of what sounds like a police radio. Rena has taken off her jacket, the curve of her breasts and her narrow waist now revealed through her blouse. She seems more alert, and I can’t help wondering if she’s taken off her jacket on purpose.

  “Do you own your apartment?” Green asks her.

  “No, we rent.”

  “Car, boat, stocks, bonds, artwork, jewelry, anything of significant value?”

  “We each have an IRA. Saul has his stereo and record collection. We have a few paintings, pieces we bought from a young artist, nothing that we could get any real money for.”

  “How about you, Pops?”

  I freeze. No one has ever called me Pops. An old, horrid feeling surfaces from when I was a kid and someone would yell Hey, Jewboy and I would die a thousand deaths, afraid to fight, humiliated to just walk by, praying they would think I hadn’t heard.

  “I own my house. An IRA. Some stocks and bonds.”

  “Car?”

  “A Honda Accord. My deceased father-in-law’s Mercedes-Benz.” “What’s the house valued at?”

  “I couldn’t say. We’ve never had it appraised.”

  “Three hundred grand?”

  “More. At least four.”

  “What year’s the Benz?”

  “1962.”

  Green jots numbers on his desk blotter pad. He rubs the bump on his nose, which looks from this angle like it’s been broken.

  “How much you got liquid?”

  I add in my head. Bank accounts. Credit lines. “Maybe thirty-seven thousand.”

  “You put the house up as collateral and the first twentyfive K, I’ll post the bond.”

  I think about it. So, if you skip town, I’ve sold my house for two hundred and twentyfive thousand dollars. No. Wrong. If you skip town, I’ve sold my house for zero dollars since there won’t be any money or any house.

  Rena touches my arm. “We should talk about this.” She looks at the clock on Green’s desk. It’s nearly four-thirty. “How late are you here?” she asks Green.

  “Sweetheart, this ain’t a nine-to-five business. I’m here when I’m here. Could be eleven tonight. Could be three in the morning.”

  “I’ll need to discuss this with my wife,” I say. “The house is in her name, too.”

  “You talk about it with whoever you want, Pops. You can talk about it with the mayor, as far as I’m concerned. Only, those are my conditions and you might as well know, I don’t negotiate. I go with my first instinct, and it’s a superstition of mine not to tamper with that.”

  RENA SUGGESTS I STAY over rather than drive back and forth again from New Jersey. I accept, letting myself entertain the idea that she’d prefer not to be alone, a delusion that fades in the face of her careful politeness beneath which I can see what a strain she finds even simple conversation, how inconceivable it is to her that I or, I suppose at this point, anyone, might be a comf
ort to her.

  We walk in silence. She pulls a beret out of her coat pocket and stuffs her hair inside. The sky is muddy, neither black nor blue, and there’s a messy half-moon hanging low. The temperature has risen as it does on those days when nightfall draws a curtain on the wind. When we get to Franklin Street, she says, “I guess we should get the subway here.” On the platform, a toothless woman in a flowered skirt is singing in Portuguese. During the chorus, she claps her hands and moves in small circles, first one direction, then the other. She shifts from side to side and I remember when you were first learning to walk how, when you heard music, a record I was playing or a phrase on television, you would stop and stare as if trying to find the instrument. Planting your feet wide apart, you’d sway back and forth.

  A young ponytailed man stops before the singer. He’s carrying yellow roses wrapped in white butcher’s paper. He hands her one. She makes an ironic little curtsy and sticks the stem through her matted hair. The words are close enough to Spanish that I can catch the gist: a mother lamenting her son’s death at war.

  Rena orders Chinese food, setting out place mats on your coffee table. I sit on the couch and she sits on the floor in gray sweatpants, burying her nose in a mug of the steamy soup. She barely touches anything else. Miserably, I eat too much, drugging myself with food. She puts down her mug and stretches her legs out under the coffee table. I cannot think of you. I cannot think of you and think about what to do for you at the same time.

  “I just want you to know that I don’t expect you to do it, to sign over your house. Morton’s right. He could run. He tried to run when the police came.”

  “I don’t think he would if he knew his mother and I would lose our house.”

  The words sound false before they finish on my lips. I feel terribly lonely, as though you have traveled to a place so foreign I can no longer even imagine you in your surrounds. “I can’t not do it. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.”

  Rena looks at me curiously and I think, well, she’s not a parent, she doesn’t know how it is with children, how, when you have children, there are no heroic acts. What’s hard are the small things, the things we excuse ourselves for overlooking or turning from. For years, I operated under a haze of guilt: the dozen little betrayals perpetrated toward you and your brother every day. Whereas at first I thought that my attention toward the two of you increased after your mother abdicated out of necessity—a sort of zero-sum game, if she wasn’t going to do it, I had to—it was such a relief to have the guilt of small neglects lifted that even had your mother recovered, I could not have returned to tuning you out. Like one of those feedback loops, Darwinian in its effects, the more I put your needs first, the happier and less demanding the two of you became, which then inspired more in kind on my part. I remember once foolishly trying to explain this cycle to your mother, but she was already too far gone, too lost in herself, to be able to think about anything she couldn’t touch with her hands. “Leonard,” she said in her high, tight voice, “surely even you can see that I have a headache?”

  I look at my watch. It’s nearly nine. Time for Klara’s tranquilizers. Now or never. “I guess I better call Klara.”

  I start clearing the dishes, but Rena waves a hand. “Go. I’ll do it. There’s a phone in there.” She points to the room with the futon. I pull the door shut behind me, embarrassed to have her hear the way I talk to your mother.

  Susan answers. She gives me the outlines of Klara’s arrival. How she was taken in a wheelchair off the plane because she’d told the stewardess she felt dizzy. How the stewardess whispered to Marc that Klara had fallen ill so suddenly; she’d chatted with the person next to her for the entire flight and eaten all of the lunch. “She perked up,” Susan says, “once she got to the house. I set her up on the chaise longue with a glass of lemonade and some pecan sandies. Marc grilled steaks for dinner and miraculously, she said, her appetite returned. She and Marc are sitting on the patio having their coffee.”

  Susan doesn’t ask about you. With your brother I would assume this to be deliberate, but with Susan it seems possible that it is genuinely oversight, that your mother’s arrival, has, in fact, occluded everything else. She brings the portable phone outside and I listen while your mother recounts the heart palpitations she felt during the landing, the near fainting as she tried to get out of the seat. “I sat there thinking, oh, my goodness, what am I going to do, I can’t even get off the plane. I was so upset, thinking about Marc standing there waiting, but luckily there was this nice stewardess, a black girl, who helped me. They had to call for a wheelchair, and I felt so badly holding her up like that …”

  I study my watch. After five minutes, I say, “Klara.” She halts, my interjection sharper than I’d intended. “I need to talk with you about Saul.” I imagine your mother shutting her eyes, remember reading back when Marc was a baby that shutting the eyes is the earliest of the defense mechanisms. He’d shut his eyes tight, screw up his face and scream.

  “Are you listening?”

  A long, languorous sigh followed by short, staccato gasps float over the line.

  “Rena and I went to see a bail bondsman. The only way we might get Saul out on bail is by putting up the house as collateral. I’ve thought about it. There’s obviously some risk, but I think we should do it.”

  “I can’t bear it,” your mother says. There’s sobbing and then a banging sound, the phone, it seems, dropped to the ground.

  “What did you say to her?” Marc asks. “Hold on.” I hear Marc yelling, “Susan, come here,” and then Susan’s voice rising over your mother’s cacophony: “Mother, Mother, calm down. Now, you have to stay calm.” The line goes static and then clear again, and I surmise that Marc has walked back into the house.

  I tell him Charlie Green’s proposal.

  “Look,” Marc says, “if the judge set the bail without a noncash alternative, that means she thinks there’s a good chance he’ll skip town. She has no other motivation for keeping him in jail. Take your lead from her. You don’t want to lose the house.”

  “Saul wouldn’t do that.”

  “Don’t be a fool. He’s a drug addict. It looks like he was an accomplice in an armed robbery. He’ll probably lose his medical license. You think he’s worrying about your house?”

  I want to chastise your brother for calling me a fool, but I force myself to stay focused. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to do it. But I can’t go forward without your mother’s agreement.”

  “Well, I can’t advise Mom to do that. I have to advise her against it.” We continue a few minutes longer under the guise of furious politeness. I tell Marc I’ll call tomorrow, first thing, to talk with your mother.

  Rena helps me unfold the futon in your study. She brings me sheets and towels and a pair of your pajamas. Your pajamas are too small. I lie on the futon in my underwear still fuming at your brother, imagining calling him back to say, I don’t give a goddamn what you think about this, I expect you to do as I say.

  I pull the shade up and stare out the window at the postage stamp garden. A trash can lid bangs. A cat darts toward the easement between the buildings. It occurs to me that maybe I’ve inadvertently set you up by sending your mother to Atlanta, where she can be pulled into Marc’s sphere of influence. I meditate on that word, inadvertently, and how the notion of the unconscious wipes out its meaning. Your mother’s not going to do it. And even if she were, your brother would do anything in his power to prevent it.

  AT EIGHT, A LOCKSMITH arrives to drill a hole in the metal door and install a new cylinder. It’s Ruth who has insisted this must be done, Maggie who has arranged for the man to come.

  Your mother calls while the locksmith is still at work. Her tone is firm but friendly. What a businesswoman she could have been had her feelings about her father not felled her so early on. A Leona Helmsley in a sharp red suit.

  She sighs. “I didn’t sleep a wink, up all night thinking about this.” For once, I believe her. “We
cannot risk our house, where would we live, and besides that would be unfair to Marc since the house is our largest asset and will someday be half his. But I’ll put up my jewelry. The pearls, the diamond earrings, the pieces I inherited from my mother. And there’s our silverware, too.”

  She’s a card player. She knows these items all together aren’t worth fifty grand. At Wellesley, there’d been a set of them who played poker with some dissolute Harvard boys. The loser supplied the next game’s bottle of bourbon. After we moved to New Jersey, she’d given it up because in our neighborhood men and women didn’t play together. The women played bridge in a way that lacked cunning. They drank coffee and ate pineapple upside-down cake.

  I don’t have the heart to dig at her. The locksmith is sweeping up. I follow Rena into the kitchen while she makes a pot of tea and cuts up fruit. I tell her your mother’s proposal. She responds with a series of quick, sharp chops.

  We reach Green late morning. First Rena, then I, try to get him to accept what we can come up with, but we both know that we’re just going through the motions: he’s not going to change his initial offer and we cannot meet it. At noon, Rena calls Morton to tell him we’ve reached an impasse with Green. I listen on the extension.

  “Sorry,” Morton says. “But it was a long shot. Look, he’s lucky these are federal charges. As I told you before, the MCC is a hell of a lot better than Rikers.”

  “Is there anyone else?”

  “If Green won’t do it, no one will.”

  Morton pauses to allow Rena a decent amount of time to take this in.