The Brooklyn Follies

  In the spring of 1986, Valerie Smith sold her house in Oaxaca and moved back to the States with her three children. In spite of her tempestuous, often violent marriage to the philandering Smith, she had always been a staunch defender of his work, and she was familiar with every picture he had painted from his early twenties until his death in 1984. Following the initial show at Dunkel Frères, she and her husband had become friendly with a plastic surgeon named Andrew Levitt, a well-heeled collector who had bought two paintings from Harry in 1976 and had amassed a total of fourteen Smiths by the time Valerie went to dinner at his house in Highland Park ten years later. How could Harry have known that she would move back to Chicago? How could he have known that Levitt would invite her to his house – the same Levitt to whom he had sold a magnificent fake-Smith just three months earlier? Needless to say, the rich doctor proudly pointed to his new purchase on the living room wall, and needless to say, the perceptive widow instantly saw the work for what it was. She had never liked Harry, but she had always given him the benefit of the doubt for Alec’s sake, knowing that the director of Dunkel Frères was the man most responsible for turning her husband’s career around. But now her husband was dead, and Harry was up to no good, and the enraged Valerie Denton Smith was out to destroy him.

  Harry denied everything. With seven of the sham works still locked in the storeroom of the gallery, however, it wasn’t difficult for the police to mount a case against him. He continued to profess ignorance, but then Gordon skipped town, and in the aftermath of that betrayal, Harry lost all courage. In a moment of despair and self-pity, he finally broke down and told Bette the truth. Another mistake, another wrong move in a long line of stumbles and erroneous judgments. For the first time in all the years he had known her, she lashed out at him in anger – a tirade of invective that included such words as sick, greedy, disgusting, and perverted. Bette quickly apologized, but the damage had already been done, and even though she went out and hired one of the best lawyers in the city to defend him, Harry understood that his life was in ruins. The investigation dragged on for ten months, a slow gathering of evidence culled from such far-flung places as New York and Seattle, Amsterdam and Tokyo, London and Buenos Aires, and then the Cook County district attorney indicted Harry on thirty-nine counts of fraud. The press announced the news in bold front-page headlines. Harry was looking at a ten- to fifteen-year sentence if he lost his case in court. On the advice of his lawyer, he opted to plead guilty, and then, to reduce his sentence still further, implicated Gordon Dryer in the hoax, contending that the swindle had been his idea from the start and that he (Harry) had been coerced into acting as his accomplice when Dryer vowed to expose their affair. The reward for this cooperation was a maximum term of five years, with the guarantee of substantial time off for good behavior. Detectives followed Dryer’s trail to New York and arrested him at a New Year’s Eve party in a Christopher Street saloon, just minutes after 1988 began. He pleaded guilty as well, but with no names to give and no bargains to offer, Harry’s ex-lover was sent away for seven years.

  But worse was still to come. Just as Harry was preparing to go to prison, old man Dombrowski finally prevailed upon Bette to file for divorce. He employed the same intimidation tactics he had used in the past – threatening to cut her out of his will, threatening to stop her allowance – but this time he meant it. Bette was no longer in love with Harry, but neither had she been planning to desert him. In spite of the scandal, in spite of the disgrace he’d brought down on himself, it hadn’t once crossed her mind to end their marriage. The problem was Flora. On the verge of nineteen now, she had already been in and out of two private mental hospitals, and her prospects for even a partial recovery were nil. Care at that level entailed staggering expenses, sums in excess of a hundred thousand dollars for each stay, and if Bette lost her father’s monthly check, she would have no alternative but to send her daughter to a state institution the next time she broke down – an idea she simply refused to accept. Harry understood her dilemma, and because he had no solution to offer of his own, he reluctantly gave his blessing to the divorce, all the while swearing to kill her father the moment he was released from prison.

  He had been turned into a pauper, a penniless convict without a single resource or plan, and once he had served his time in Joliet, he would be cast to the four winds like a fistful of confetti. Oddly enough, it was his much-despised father-in-law who stepped in and saved him – but at a price, at such a ruthless, exacting price that Harry never recovered from the shame and revulsion he felt when he accepted the old man’s proposition. But he did it. He was too weak not to, too terrified about his future not to accept, but the moment he put his signature on the contract, he knew that he had signed away his soul and would be damned forever.

  He had been in prison for almost two years at that point, and Dombrowski’s terms couldn’t have been simpler. Harry would move to another part of the country, and in exchange for a sufficient amount of money to set himself up in a new business, he would agree never to return to Chicago and never contact Bette or Flora again. Dombrowski considered Harry a moral degenerate, an example of some debased sub-species of organism that did not fully qualify as human, and he held him personally accountable for Flora’s illness. She was crazy because Harry had impregnated Bette with his sickly, mutant sperm, and now that he had proven himself to be a fraud and a criminal as well, he would be condemned to a post-prison life of poverty and suffering unless he renounced all claims to his fatherhood. Harry renounced. He caved in to Dombrowski’s ugly demands, and from that capitulation a new life became possible for him. He chose Brooklyn because it was New York and yet not New York, and the chances of running into any of his old art world colleagues were slim. There was a bookstore for sale on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, and even though Harry knew nothing about the book business, the shop appealed to his taste for bric-a-brac and antiquarian clutter. Dombrowski bought the entire four-story building for him, and in June of 1991 Brightman’s Attic was born.

  Harry was crying by then, Tom said, and for the rest of the dinner he talked about Flora, remembering the last tormented day he’d spent with her before going off to prison. She was in the middle of another crack-up, spinning into the mania that would eventually land her in the hospital for the third time, but she was still lucid enough to recognize Harry as her father and talk to him in cogent sentences. Somewhere or other, she had come across a set of statistics that calculated how many people in the world were born and died each second on a given day. The numbers were stupendous, but Flora had always been good at math, and she quickly extrapolated the totals into groups of ten: ten births every forty-one seconds, ten deaths every fifty-eight seconds (or whatever the figures happened to be). This was the truth of the world, she told her father at breakfast that morning, and in order to get a grip on that truth, she had decided to spend the day sitting in the rocking chair in her room, shouting out the word rejoice every forty-one seconds and the word grieve every fifty-eight seconds to mark the passing of the ten departed souls and celebrate the arrival of the ten newly born.

  Harry’s heart had been broken many times, but now it was no more than a pile of ashes clogging up a hole in his chest. On the final day of his freedom, he spent twelve hours sitting on his daughter’s bed watching her rock back and forth in the chair and alternately shout the words rejoice and grieve as she followed the arc of the second hand that moved steadily around the dial of the alarm clock on her bedside table. “Rejoice!” she cried out. “Rejoice for the ten who are born, who will be born, who have been born every forty-one seconds. Rejoice for them and do not stop. Rejoice unceasingly, for this much is certain, this much is true, and this much is beyond doubt: ten people live who did not live before. Rejoice!”

  And then, gripping the arms of the chair tightly as she accelerated the pace of her rocking, she looked into her father’s eyes and shouted, “Grieve! Grieve for the ten who have vanished. Grieve for the ten whose lives are no more, who begin thei
r journey into the vast unknown. Grieve endlessly for the dead. Grieve for the men and women who were good. Grieve for the men and women who were bad. Grieve for the old whose bodies failed them. Grieve for the young who died before their time. Grieve for a world that allows death to take us from the world. Grieve!”

  ON RASCALS

  Until I ran into Tom at Brightman’s Attic, I don’t think I had talked to Harry more than two or three times – and then only in passing, the shortest of short, perfunctory exchanges. After listening to Tom’s tale of his boss’s past, I found myself curious to learn more about this singular character, to meet the scoundrel face to face and observe him in action with my own eyes. Tom said he would be happy to introduce him to me, and so once our two-hour meal at the Cosmic Diner came to an end, I decided to accompany my nephew back to the store and fulfill my wish that very afternoon. I paid the check at the front register, then returned to our table and left a twenty-dollar tip for Marina. It was an absurdly excessive amount – nearly double the cost of the lunch itself – but I didn’t care. My heart-throb beamed forth a resplendent smile of thanks, and the vision of her happiness put me in such excellent spirits that I instantly made up my mind to call Rachel that evening with the news that her long-lost cousin had been found. After her dreary, disputatious visit to my apartment in early April, I was still on my daughter’s shit list, but now that I had reconnected with Tom, and now that the smiling Marina Gonzalez had just blown me a kiss as I made my way out of the restaurant, I wanted everything to be right with the world again. I had already called Rachel once to apologize for having spoken so harshly to her, but she had hung up on me after thirty seconds. Now I would call again, and this time I wouldn’t stop groveling until the air had finally been cleared between us.

  The bookstore was five and a half blocks from the restaurant, and as Tom and I strolled along Seventh Avenue in the softness of the May afternoon, we continued to talk about Harry, the erstwhile Dunkel of Dunkel Frères, who had fled the dark wood of his former self to emerge as a bright sun in the firmament of duplicity.

  “I’ve always had a soft spot for rascals,” I said. “They might not make the most reliable friends, but think how drab life would be without them.”

  “I’m not sure Harry’s a rascal anymore,” Tom answered. “He’s too full of regret.”

  “Once a rascal, always a rascal. People never change.”

  “A matter of opinion. I say they can.”

  “You never worked in the insurance business. The passion for deceit is universal, my boy, and once a man acquires a taste for it, he can never be cured. Easy money – there’s no greater temptation than that. Think of all the wise guys with their staged car accidents and personal injury scams, the merchants who burn down their own stores and warehouses, the people who fake their own deaths. I watched this stuff for thirty years, and I never got tired of it. The great spectacle of human crookedness. It keeps coming at you from all sides, and whether you like it or not, it’s the most interesting show in town.”

  Tom emitted a brief noise, an outrush of air that fell midway between a snicker and a guffaw. “I love hearing you spout your bullshit, Nathan. I hadn’t realized it until now, but I’ve missed it. I’ve missed it a lot.”

  “You think I’m joking,” I said, “but I’m giving it to you straight. The pearls of my wisdom. A few pointers after a lifetime of toiling in the trenches of experience. Con men and tricksters run the world. Rascals rule. And do you know why?”

  “Tell me, Master. I’m all ears.”

  “Because they’re hungrier than we are. Because they know what they want. Because they believe in life more than we do.”

  “Speak for yourself, Socrates. If I wasn’t so hungry all the time, I wouldn’t be carrying around this giant gut.”

  “You love life, Tom, but you don’t believe in it. And neither do I.”

  “You’re beginning to lose me.”

  “Think of Jacob and Esau. Remember them?”

  “Ah. Okay. Now you’re making sense.”

  “It’s an awful story, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, truly awful. It gave me no end of trouble when I was a kid. I was such a moral, upright little person back then. I never lied, never stole, never cheated, never said a cruel word to anyone. And there’s Esau, a galumphing simpleton just like me. By all rights, Isaac’s blessing should be his. But Jacob tricks him out of it – with his mother’s help, no less.”

  “Even worse, God seems to approve of the arrangement. The dishonest, double-crossing Jacob goes on to become the leader of the Jews, and Esau is left out in the cold, a forgotten man, a worthless nobody.”

  “My mother always taught me to be good. ‘God wants you to be good,’ she’d say to me, and since I was still young enough to believe in God, I believed what she said. Then I came across that story in the Bible, and I didn’t understand a thing. The bad guy wins, and God doesn’t punish him. It didn’t seem right. It still doesn’t seem right.”

  “Of course it does. Jacob had the spark of life in him, and Esau was a dumbbell. Good-hearted, yes, but a dumbbell. If you’re going to choose one of them to lead your people, you’ll want the fighter, the one with cunning and wit, the one with the energy to beat the odds and come out on top. You choose the strong and clever over the weak and kind.”

  “That’s pretty brutal stuff, Nathan. Take your argument one step further, and the next thing you’ll be telling me is that Stalin should be revered as a great man.”

  “Stalin was a thug, a psychotic murderer. I’m talking about the instinct for survival, Tom, the will to live. Give me a wily rascal over a pious sap any day of the week. He might not always play by the rules, but he’s got spirit. And when you find a man with spirit, there’s still some hope for the world.”

  IN THE FLESH

  When we were within a block of the store, it suddenly occurred to me that Flora’s visit to Brooklyn meant that Harry was still in touch with his ex-wife and daughter – a clear violation of the contract he’d signed with Dombrowski. If so, why hadn’t the old man swooped down on him and reclaimed the deed to the building on Seventh Avenue? According to my understanding of their bargain, that would have been grounds for Bette’s father to have taken control of Brightman’s Attic and for Harry to have been tossed out on his ear. Had I missed something, I asked Tom, or was there another wrinkle to the story he’d forgotten to tell me?

  No, Tom hadn’t left anything out. The contract was no longer valid for the simple reason that Dombrowski was dead.

  “Did he die of natural causes,” I asked, “or did Harry kill him?”

  “Very funny,” Tom said.

  “You’re the one who brought it up, not me. Remember? You said Harry swore he was going to kill Dombrowski the day he got out of prison.”

  “People say lots of things, but that doesn’t mean they have any intention of doing them. Dombrowski kicked the bucket three years ago. He was ninety-one, and he died of a stroke.”

  “According to Harry.”

  Tom laughed at the remark, but at the same time I sensed that he was becoming a little annoyed by my jesting, sarcastic tone. “Stop it, Nathan. Yes, according to Harry. Everything is according to Harry. You know that as well as I do.”

  “Don’t feel guilty, Tom. I’m not going to betray you.”

  “Betray me? What are you talking about?”

  “You’re having second thoughts about letting me in on Harry’s secrets. He told you his story in confidence, and now you’ve broken that confidence by telling the story to me. Don’t worry, chum. I might act like an ass sometimes, but my lips are sealed. Got it? I don’t know a goddamned thing about Harry Dunkel. The only person I’m going to shake hands with today is Harry Brightman.”

  We found him in his office on the second floor, sitting behind a large mahogany desk and talking to someone on the phone. He was wearing a purple velour jacket, I remember, with a multicolored silk handkerchief sprouting from the left front pocket. The hanky resemb
led some rare tropical flower, an efflorescence that immediately caught one’s eye in the brownish, grayish environment of the book-lined room. Other sartorial particulars escape me now, but I wasn’t interested in Harry’s clothes so much as in examining his broad, jowly face, his exceedingly round, somewhat bulging blue eyes, and the curious configuration of his upper teeth – which fanned out in a way that suggested a jack-o’-lantern, with small gaps between them. He was a strange little pumpkinhead of a man, I decided, a popinjay with utterly hairless hands and fingers, and only his voice, a smooth and resonant baritone, undercut the overall foppishness of his manner.

  As I listened to that voice talk into the phone, Harry waved a greeting to Tom, then lifted an index finger into the air, silently telling him that he’d be with us in a minute. The subject of the conversation eluded me, since Brightman did less talking than his invisible interlocutor, but I gathered that he was discussing the sale of a nineteenth-century first edition with a customer or fellow book dealer. The title of the work wasn’t mentioned, however, and my thoughts soon began to wander. To keep myself occupied, I walked around the room inspecting the books on the shelves. By my rough count, there must have been seven or eight hundred volumes in that neatly organized space, with works ranging from the quite old (Dickens and Thackeray) to the relatively new (Faulkner and Gaddis). The older books were mostly leatherbound, whereas the contemporary ones all had transparent protective covers wrapped around their dust jackets. Compared to the jumble and chaos of the shop downstairs, the second floor was a paradise of tranquility and order, and the total value of the collection must have run well into the fat six figures. For a man who hadn’t had a pot to piss in less than a decade earlier, the former Mr. Dunkel had done rather nicely for himself, rather nicely indeed.