“Bridey, honey, here’s the deal. Black street culture is the dominant culture of the country right now. Go to the Americana mall on Long Island and every rich poser in the place is talking like he’s street. Therefore the expression ‘to carry,’ meaning, ‘You got a gun, white boy?’ is understood from L.A. to NYC.”
“In other words, you can speak street.”
“Can. Won’t. It’s so lame. Look at me. I am what I am. It’s insulting for me to talk to these people that way. Look at how Tequila won’t even let her daughter speak that way in her home. She treats street slang like it’s obscene. It’s doubly obscene for some white kid like me to pretend it’s my first language. It’s like Americans in Europe, when they act as though if they speak English really, really loud, Czech people, or Spaniards, or Greeks will be able to understand them. There was this asshole—”
“Hey!”
“—okay, moron in my class at Biltmore who was a white rapper? He’d be wearing big pants, his Ralph Lauren boxers hanging out, a baseball cap on backward. He’d be going, ‘The law of the gun, the law of the street/Life sucks the big one, when you ain’t got enough to eat.’ The guy had a screening room in his apartment!”
“And he’s at?”
“Duke. Official home of the white homeboy with his own investment adviser.”
“Yeah, but you had that friend, what was his name, Landon? He was a rapper. Alleged.”
Leo began to thump in some complicated rhythm on the hard plastic subway seat, then chanted. “I’m curious, but you can call me inquisitive/If complacency’s a function, I take the derivative.”
“Wow. Algebra rap.”
“Calculus, actually. It’s not my thing, but he had a really good one about the First Amendment, too, and a great line about Tiananmen Square.”
“Intelligentsia rap.”
“Just poetry with some beats.”
“You’re smart.”
The truth was that Leo had always had both smarts and sense, with sensitivity thrown in to boot. It was hard to say how this had come to pass. I think Meghan had been disconcerted by Leo’s character. She liked a project. I know; I had been one of her favorites for many years. But I was pliant and tractable and, for a time, rather lost, whereas Leo was one of those children who seems a finished product almost from the beginning. It was all there at three: the honesty, the staunchness, a bit of a predilection for girl companions over boys, a contemplative streak that led him to wander away during parties and disappear into someone’s den with The New Yorker to read the cartoons. There wasn’t a whole lot of shaping required. He had most of his mother’s steel and no need for all her striving. He had nothing to prove.
After the first week, all the women and children who stayed at the shelter and lived in the transitional housing loved him. He kept a basket of Tootsie Pops on the dashboard, and he gave one to each passenger, including the mothers, who were perpetually pissed off about the fact that, to the extent the bureaucracies cared about anything, they cared about their kids. They were treated as the unfortunate appendages; if “children are our future,” as every dope running for office says every time he comes to a neighborhood in which the future is more of the same, then mothers are the past.
Leo didn’t treat them that way. He slid open the side-panel door with a slight flourish, albeit the always annoying sound of worn and rusting tracks, and held out his arm as though he was inviting them to enter. “Good morning,” he said. “I’m Leo Grater.” One bad-tempered woman from the transitional building, who had been rude to so many landlords that we despaired of ever finding a place for her and her three timid children, sneered, “I know who you are. You get this job through, you know what. Connections.”
“She’s right, you know,” Leo said to her kids, leaning down so his face was on a level with theirs. “Your mother is right. I got this job because my aunt works here. Do you want a Tootsie Pop?” Three heads bobbing like back-dash dolls. “That’s bad for their teeth,” the mother said. “Tomorrow I will bring carrot sticks,” Leo said. Over two unseasonably warm days, the cup of carrot sticks on the dash curled and grew pale around the edges. “Throw that mess away,” the mom said on day three as she took an orange pop.
Sometimes Leo had a lag at midday, when all the kids were at school and the mothers doing laundry or sneaking a smoke out in back of the shelter. Even the ones who had no money and had been burned out of their apartments couldn’t seem to give up cigarettes.
“There’s a police officer here to see you ladies,” Leo came into our office and announced.
“Irving?”
“A real police officer, Bridey. In a uniform. Wearing a badge.”
Tequila went out into the waiting room. There was the sound of mumbling, then the sound of Tequila’s voice raised loud. “I never heard such foolishness!” she yelled.
Leo had always had good instincts, too. We were practically moving in tandem as we went to the door. Tequila had her finger right in the policeman’s face. He was on the short side for a cop, had probably just squeaked by on the height requirement, which experience told me would make him irascible for life. Irving insisted that short cops were twice as likely to unholster their weapons, but I think he just made that up. He was over six feet tall, after all.
“I’m not here to argue, ma’am,” the cop said. A young man in a cheap bomber jacket and a fraying tie stood behind him. He had “child services caseworker” written all over him. They lasted a year, maybe two, before the misery caught up with them and they decided that telemarketing was a more honorable profession.
“That’s right, because that lady is a good lady and a good mother and she didn’t hurt that child and I will tell you that right here right now and get no argument from anyone. From anyone!” Tequila has a tendency to come up on the balls of her feet when she’s angry, perhaps the legacy of years of leaning over counters and desks and arguing with middle-level managers whose favorite sentence is “It’s against our policy.”
“I was just asked to check on the child. If you want me to come back with another officer, I can do that.”
“Huh!” Tequila sounded as though she had just huffed and puffed and blown our house down.
“Can I help, Officer?” I asked. I had servility down to an art form. Meghan said that sometimes listening to me made her sick.
“He’s saying Annette been beating on Delon, I say uh-uh, no way. And I bet I know which sorry bitch told them that because she’s not getting all the attention anymore, now that she’s back in Rikers where she belongs.”
“I just need to take a look at the child, ma’am.” I could tell the cop was not long out of the academy, that he still hadn’t shaken the just-following-orders routine and learned to trust his instincts about the people he met and the stories they told him. Someone at the precinct had told him he had to take a good look at this kid at a homeless shelter, whose mom had no job, whose father was unknown, and he was bound and determined to do so.
“Officer, I appreciate that you’ve got a job to do, but this mother is really traumatized. She’s been moving from place to place for months, and she’s part of a group here who were displaced by that building collapse last month. She’s going to be really distraught if she gets called in here with a uniformed officer. I don’t know why the caseworker had to get all of you involved.”
“The last time I came she threatened me,” the caseworker said, pointing with his city-issued mechanical pencil at Tequila.
“You think that’s threatening, you never been threatened,” Tequila said. Tequila tends to be combative with caseworkers and cops. They are, after all, the people who had once taken her own kids to a foster home.
Leo had disappeared, and suddenly, incongruously, we heard him singing loudly, a nursery rhyme that began “Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross,” which our aunt Maureen had sung whenever anyone placed a baby in her outstretched arms and which both Meghan and I had sung, in our course, to Leo. When he was a toddler he would hug us around
our knees as though we were tree trunks, strong and stalwart, and trill “Ride!” in a high, sweet voice until we lifted him on our shoulders, his hair a bright flag atop his round, freckled face. “Ride, Mama! Ride, Bridey!”
And now he himself was the tree, the horse, as he ducked through the doorway to the waiting room, Delon on his shoulders, his fat fingers entwined in Leo’s overlong hair. Delon was wearing nothing but Spider-Man underpants, the action figures on them as wavy and indistinct as a mirage after many washings. His skin was smooth and brown, not a mark on it anywhere, and his mouth was open in an unabashed baby laugh, an intake of breath on the gallop, a hiccup on the dip, a smile so broad that you could see all his little pearl teeth.
“Hey, Delon,” Leo said. “Can I put you down and catch my breath?” Leo lifted the child over his head and put his feet on the ground, where he stood sturdily, then took his small hands in his own big, bony ones and did a twisty dance and a hopping step, both of which Delon imitated carefully. “Up!” Delon demanded. “Pick me up!”
“You have lunch, Delon?” Leo asked.
“Baloney!” Delon yelled.
“You have breakfast?”
“Krispies! Rice Krispies!”
“You stand on your head?”
With a cry of triumph, Delon bent at the waist and put his palms on the floor. His butt faced us, displaying Spider-Man with his fists on his hips. It was the most complete demonstration of a child’s physical well-being, and perhaps his mental one as well, that I had ever seen. “Ride!” he cried again and was carried off on Leo’s shoulders.
After the police officer and the caseworker had retreated, Tequila sat down heavily at her desk. She took two Tylenol from her desk drawer, drank half a can of Coke without speaking, and tried to bring her breathing under control. Sometimes I thought working for us, where she had to relive the worst parts of her past, was too hard for her. Sometimes I thought it was an exorcism, other times a stroke of luck for the women we served. They had a virago on their side. Now it seemed they had an angel driving the van.
“I take back every bad thing I said about that boy getting the job,” she said.
“You haven’t said a thing.”
“Not to you,” she said, patting her neck with a tissue.
Fifteen minutes later, as I was finishing some paperwork in triplicate, Tequila rang through. “That nice man with the foolish name is wanting to speak to you,” she said. I waited for the breathy voice of the overeducated executive assistant, but instead it was Edward Prevaricator himself on the phone.
“Ms. Fitzmaurice, I wonder if you’ve considered spending a week in Jamaica,” he said in his courtly fashion.
“It’s funny you should ask,” I said. “I was thinking that very thing. But why are you thinking it?”
“I’ve found in business that timing is an important element of success. It seems to me the right time. Or at least that’s what I gather from talking to your sister, and from the people who work for me down there. It’s very beautiful there. Relaxing as well. I think you’d enjoy yourself.”
“I’m sure I would. My only hesitation is that I got the impression my sister didn’t want visitors.”
“My experience is that want and need are often two different things,” he replied. “Although my experience is also that strong-minded people often have an inability to discern the difference. May I offer the plane?”
“I like a man with a plane,” said Tequila, who naturally had been listening in on the extension.
“I like a man who likes my sister. I just wonder how much he likes her.”
“Too much is never enough,” Tequila said. “That’s a spy movie I saw on television.”
“I think you’re wrong about that,” I said.
THE RITUALS SURROUNDING vacations among Manhattan’s wealthiest and best-connected citizens are strange and specific. By vacations I don’t mean country houses, which are part of the regular ebb and flow of life and which are frequently subjects for complaint—The kids never want to go! The caretaker missed the roof leak! The pipes froze!—as though having a six-thousand-square-foot, cedar-shingled cottage on five acres overlooking the ocean is nothing more or less than a constant test of character.
Just as most of the East Side of Manhattan gets away from town by taking up residence in places in Connecticut where they will repeatedly run into people from town, often the very same people with whom they attend parties and play the occasional game of tennis in town, the paths through foreign destinations are well-worn and familiar. In First Class airport lounges all over the world, you can see this played out as Investment Banker A steps to the bar for a vodka tonic and encounters Lawyer B, and both are overwhelmed by the sheer coincidence of being in Athens/ Fiji/New Zealand/Beijing at the same moment in time, when only a week ago they, and both of their wives, now chatting in the deep leather chairs about their respective children, who may or may not be careening around the lounge tripping over and ripping out the cords of laptops belonging to business travelers, were in Manhattan.
“Quelle surprise!” as one of Evan’s partners’ wives once had said to Meghan in the First Class lounge in Nice, having landed in the copter from Monte Carlo. Meghan said she had replied, “Quelle throw-up!” but she hadn’t really, she was just showing off.
But whereas once the parents and grandparents of some of these people (the ones with old money; the parents and grandparents of the others were working automobile assembly lines or driving city buses) encountered one another in Palm Beach or Paris, now the destinations are more remote. It has become axiomatic in New York City that the only place worth going to is one that is nearly impossible to reach. So no one with any real money goes to St. Thomas. Instead, you fly to St. Thomas, then take a small plane to a small island (unspoiled, everyone says), and then a water taxi to an even smaller one, an island that has virtually nothing on it except for several herds of goats and a four-star resort with a Pilates studio, a world-famous facialist, and a restaurant that can accommodate a wedding for a hundred in a pinch.
I am proud to say that my sister never saw the point of all this. Why go to a drafty castle at the ass-end of Scotland when you can go to a small hotel in Mayfair? Why take a train to some medieval village in northern Italy when there’s the Hassler in Rome? And why take a chance on a puddle jumper to some off island in the Grenadines when Jamaica is a direct flight from New York?
“I just don’t believe the ocean is that much better in Fiji than it is at Grosvenor’s Cove,” she’d once said.
“Same with Atlantic City,” Irving had replied.
“Let’s not get ridiculous,” Meghan had said.
Of course, Meghan was interested neither in roughing it on vacation nor in going down-market. Grosvenor’s Cove is a resort that had been founded by a British couple two marriages removed from the royal family sometime after the stock market crash of 1929, and it has that appealing air of colonialism that the old rich take for granted and the new find so bracing. It is still a kiss-kiss-what-are-YOU-doing-here place, but those who find themselves meeting friends at Grosvenor’s Cove have a sense of confidence, are people who don’t care when someone who has just come back from that little village an hour by camel from Morocco raises an eyebrow and says, “Jamaica?” In New York the climbers have outnumbered the confident, so there are now many guests at the Cove who are from Kansas City or New Orleans, but as Evan likes to say, it is good to have new blood, and if they try to take pictures of Meghan, she smiles and poses and then the manager asks them privately to stop. Like expensive resorts worldwide, it is utterly not of its place. In other words, if you turned down the reggae music and shut off the supply of ganja the staff discreetly provide to the more adventuresome or younger guests, it could be in Miami or Sardinia or Nice, any of those places that are warm and on the sea and are off-limits unless you have a staff badge or a platinum Amex.
But we were a world away from Grosvenor’s Cove as the man Edward Prevaricator sent to meet me at the air
port followed the steep S curves into and over the mountains that make up the undulating spine of the island. The cheesy American imports in Montego Bay, the Holiday Inns painted Caribbean pink, and the McDonald’s with sunburned tourists shuffling through its air-conditioned interior gave way to some large, white villas at the ends of gated driveways and then to a ramshackle assemblage of lean-tos along the mountain road. Little girls in dresses held out mangoes and lobsters for sale as the car passed, and musky smoke rose from an old drum sawed in half that a man in a Georgetown T-shirt had turned into a barbecue for jerk chicken and beef. I admit, I had expected some variation on a black car, but the driver, a thin man named Derek with an impossibly long neck, was driving an electric blue GTO with the words “Big Boy” emblazoned in silver decal letters across the top of the windshield. On the twisting rutted roads we had passed “Slo Mon,” “Love Mobile,” and a red Hyundai with “Jesus Ride With Me” in gold script. Twice we stopped for livestock, once a befuddled goat, then a herd of bulky oxen with enormous horns.
We passed through one small town, and along the road single file were women and children in dress clothes: lavender skirts, enormous straw hats, flowered pillboxes, starched collars. They picked their way carefully among the stones on the shoulder, and occasionally one of the women would give a child a thump atop the head with a clutch purse.
“Is there some kind of festival?” I said to Derek, who had insisted I sit in the back.
“It is Sunday. They are going to church.” He had a quiet voice that somehow sounded as though he didn’t use it often, as though it was kept folded in a drawer and brought out for special occasions.
“And you don’t go?” I said, trying to be friendly.
“I am a Seventh-Day Adventist. Our Sabbath is on the Saturday,” he said in a stiff way that made me realize I had taken the wrong tack.
I remembered staying at Grosvenor’s Cove with Evan, Meghan, and Leo for Meghan’s forty-third birthday, and how we had remarked on how warm and friendly the staff had been, how one of the men taught Leo about windsurfing, how another took him to meet a boat delivering the lobsters to the disgruntled chef, a Paris expat. One of the hostesses in the restaurant sang lilting folk songs during the dinner sitting, and one of the waiters did little dance steps when he delivered our meals. There had undeniably been a falseness about the entire performance, particularly following the afternoon I got lost on my way back from the tennis court and came upon the staff quarters, a long barracks of cinder block outside of which those men and women we’d seen in white shirts and floral dresses sat on upturned crates in worn everyday clothes, their eyes unfriendly as I came around the corner of the dirt path.