Gods of Deception, page 99
“This sucks,” said Karen, pouting.
“Karen,” said the Judge, “it’s purely a practical matter, as I just explained. Max will be eligible for all scholarship help in terms of his educational aspirations, as will Nancy, and George’s and Cecily’s children one day. Why, Nancy has already expressed interest in Groton, and I’ve assured her that if she has good grades and can get in, all her tuition and expenses will be covered by the trust.”
“What?” Erich shook his head, looking at his daughter.
Nancy sat up straight and beamed. “I think it looks like a really cool place, Dad. Lots of my friends are now going away to boarding school.”
Martha raised her hand. “Teddy loved Groton and his friends there didn’t seem so bad when they came here over vacations. Remember, Alice—and at his funeral, ten of his classmates and the headmaster came, and each one was kinder than the next in offering their condolences.”
“Oh boy,” sang out Alice, “the trap was set and you gullible idiots walked right into it with eyes wide shut.”
Wendy pulled back her chair, shot a disappointed glance at George, and stood, causing the commotion to settle.
“I’d like to propose a toast.” She held her glass at her waist until she had everyone’s attention. “But before I do, I’d like to propose something to our host: Judge, Monet churned out hundreds of lily pad paintings, and the market, especially in terms of Japanese buyers, and even Chinese, is very strong right now. The Degas is much more important and rare and quite unique among the artist’s work on that subject. Hate to have that disappear into a private collection in Asia and never be seen again. Might I suggest you sell the Monet instead, which will do plenty well at Sotheby’s, and leave the Degas with the Yale Art Museum. And while doing so, change the gift dedication, something to this effect: ‘Given by Edward Dimock in memory of his loving wife, Annie Davenport, and in honor of his daughter Cordelia, a dancer with New York City Ballet.’”
The silence was such that the cracking flames of the fire sounded a conflagration.
Cordelia burst into tears. Alice rolled her eyes, her chin sinking to her chest.
The Judge, wiping at his eyes, tapped a soupspoon: “I leave it to the new board: I vote aye. What say you Erich, Cecily, and George?”
“Love it, sister Wendy,” proclaimed Cecily, while the others answered in the affirmative.
“Now,” continued Wendy, “as an interloper at this gathering”—she cast another bemused look across the table at George, who refused to meet her eye—“and, yes, this is still part of my toast, I want to make a presentation in honor of our host and my friend.” She went to the corner of the dining room where the mysterious brown paper package awaited, having been dropped off by an art-handling service the day before. She stripped the paper from the framed canvas and hefted it in two hands and turned it toward the diners, walking it slowly to the head of the table, where the Judge watched expectantly. “Judge, this is a gift from George and me, one of George Altmann’s most spectacular paintings of the Shawangunks, even though highly abstracted. This”—she lifted it higher for all to gaze upon—“was painted only a few miles as the crow flies from Hermitage, overlooking the route of the Delaware and Hudson Canal. There seems to be a perfect place to hang it by Annie’s Steinway in the great room, across from the Inness, under the ship’s keel ceiling. A painting—and we’ve got a letter from the artist to his wife telling how much he admired the portrait of Annie in Raphel Soyer’s studio and immediately went out and bought one of her recordings—that may well have been inspired by her playing. Imagine—imagine! If you spend a while studying the paint handling and colors and absorbing this wonderful depiction of the stratified rock layers, the clinging lichen, the filigree of cracks and fissures and fossils, the hints of plant life and erosion by wind and rain—well, you might get the feeling of all those millions of years passing, and the endurance of our world as we know it. That’s how it speaks to me anyway, to the infinite geometries and forces and energies of our splendid universe—right, George?” she said, casting another glance at George, who refused to weigh in—“captured by a master artist, whom I feel perfectly complements the lost painter or painters of your ship’s keel ceiling: a tiny fragment of our world created out of the infinitudes of the cosmos. Two artists, two visions of the terrestrial and cosmic, living hundreds of years apart but sharing the same soul of beauty—or what Emerson described as—right, Judge?—‘another world or nest of worlds: for the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop.’”
She went and leaned the painting in the window bay and walked back to her place to recover her wineglass, which she held at eye level, inspecting for a moment the glimmer of turbid damask and crimson, as might an alchemist of old.
“So, I want to propose a toast to the Judge, who, if he hadn’t preserved the Altmann sketches and had the courage to first try to return them to Jim Altmann”—she nodded at the perplexed, bewhiskered face next to her—“and then turn them over to Jim’s son, George, so that they might serve as evidence to at least one terrible crime—none of us would be here today, either. Those Altmann sketches now reside in the National Archives, a testament, a witness, to a time and place and a journey your family and other families—your children and their children and other children—and the country have endured and maybe even emerged into the light of justice a better people. Judge, thank you for your convictions and your dedication to see that justice is finally done.”
She raised her glass, and all around the table, even though slightly mystified by the whole thing, joined her.
“Judge, I love you.”
Alice looked around as if totally flummoxed.
“This is crazy, what a three-ring circus—what do these sketches have to do with anything?”
The Judge, wiping tears, said, “Thank you, dear. On behalf of the family and Hermitage, I accept your gift …” Slightly stupefied, he gazed over at the painting by the bay window. “I had no idea—I had only George’s splendid catalog—how beautiful in real life his work could be; it’s more spectacular than words can express. And yes, I think I catch your drift about the ship’s keel ceiling—the kindred spirits.”
Stan, intercepting his wife’s incredulous outburst, waved his glass high.
“I second the motion. And Judge, I admire your ruling for the ruling class, especially since there are so few WASPs left—a dying breed— don’t you agree, Theo? You know, it’s a real problem for casting these days for theater classics: How do you teach the notion of savoir faire, noblesse oblige in acting class, the nonchalance of a privileged class, when there are no good role models left—scattered like ashes to the wind? Where’s the next Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart, or even Gregory Peck, for that matter?”
“Would Bing Crosby make the cut, do you think?” asked the Judge. “Though, from a relatively humble background, I believe.”
“Der Bingle … well.”
“High Society.” The Judge cracked a sly grin. “Grace Kelly, wasn’t she a dream doll, like Annie, same cool, impossible beauty.”
“There is no society like high society,” echoed Theo with a touch of glee as he raised his glass in imitation of a swell. “I’m sure Veblen would agree with you wholeheartedly, especially this lovely display of conspicuous consumption.”
“Listen to you two.” Alice, clearly upset, took another sip of her wine. “This is the man who defended Alger Hiss—a Soviet spy, if your minions down the table are right—a man, a paragon of the Harvard establishment doing Stalin’s bidding. Teddy was ashamed—right, Martha?—that’s the bottom line.”
“I’m with you on this, Judge,” interjected Theodore, seated next to Alice, a hand going to pat her arm. “Stalin was a piece of shit; he killed my eldest brother at Katyn, a loyal Polish officer and a Jew.”
“But Theo,” pleaded Martha from across the table, “you were a member of the Communist Party in Kraków when I first met you; I thought that was terribly romantic at the time.”
Theodore scowled, chagrined. “Anybody who was anybody or who aspired to be somebody in those days had to be a member of the Party.”
The Judge, having been preoccupied with the dazzling blue tonalities in the painting, turned back to his eldest daughter. “Have you ever graced Harvard’s Memorial Hall with your presence, Alice, where your great-grandfather Richard Davenport is memorialized? The man”— the Judge tapped the rosewood table with his knuckles—“who put his feet under this very table. Believe it or not, he’d probably be proud of you and Cecily for fighting the good fight.”
“And you, instead of confronting the government, the system, Nixon and Hoover, you were obviously playing some elaborate con game, hedging your bets, playing up to the Truman administration while defending Hiss, keeping your options open on both the Left and Right to grab your brass ring whatever the outcome of the trial. A good defense lawyer would have decimated the system and so confounded the jury that they couldn’t convict.”
“Dear Alice,” the Judge replied, leaning forward, as if relieved that the battle had been properly joined, “may I remind you who wrote the majority opinion nullifying the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, which got off all your pals, including Kunstler and the Chicago Seven, or was it Eight? I ruled the Chicago judge had been biased on the jury selection. But there is no doubt that under the law they were guilty of crossing state lines with the intent of inciting a riot. That is the system at work, and I might suggest, bending over backward to preserve freedom of expression even when the violent overthrow of the government was exactly the intent of those people.”
“Don’t be so damned smug,” said Alice.
“Let’s lighten it up,” pleaded Erich.
“Well,” said Cecily, raising her glass, “this half-breed nigger is in on the Judge’s offer, especially since I just got into NYU medical school starting in January. And I’ll trade Claude over a student loan any day.”
Alice looked at her daughter, not a little pleased. “Third time lucky, well …”
Karen moaned. “Maybe I just wasn’t beautiful enough or smart enough like Cecily—maybe my table manners sucked.”
Martha reached a hand to her daughter. “Karen, you were a luminous and sensitive teenager—the best daughter a woman could want.”
“Oh Karen, stop feeling sorry for yourself,” said Cordelia, now beaming. “You’re still gorgeous, and Max is as handsome and smart as they come.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Martha. “And now you don’t have to take you know whose money for Max’s tuition—if he tries to break the custody agreement.”
“Why is this Hiss guy always coming up?” asked Nancy, obviously intrigued by all the delicious gossip flying around.
Alice smiled, enjoying the free-for-all, her métier. “Clue in your granddaughter, Martha, about Priscilla Hiss.”
“What the hell is this all about?” The Judge sat back, shaking his head. “What witches’ brew are you two concocting this time around?”
“You didn’t know Priscilla Hiss was a patient of Martha’s for years?”
“But Alice,” said Martha, “I can’t reveal anything Priscilla said in analysis; it’s privileged, just like with your clients.”
“You didn’t feel that way yesterday in the car,” said Karen.
“I had no idea,” murmured the Judge with a plaintive look.
“Oh, Priscilla, yes …” said Martha, smiling at the hum of attention. “I have this image of her lying there—must have been when I still had my couch—with her hair pulled tight behind her head, just a few wisps of gray sticking out. She had the most beautiful gray eyes, and that purring Bryn Mawr tone in her voice. I don’t think I’ve ever known a patient so tied up in knots. Poor thing, not a moment’s peace.”
“My God!” The Judge sighed. “What did she have to say?”
Wendy and George leaned forward.
“She was slowly losing her mind,” said Martha a tad vaguely. “She got things mixed up a lot, what with all the stress and anger … a heart condition.” Martha continued sipping her wine. “I think she always had something of a crush on you, Daddy. You know how it is: the life you might have had with another man—I hear it all the time.”
The Judge frowned, eyes drifting off, drained. “It’s all in my memoir. We were lovers in the twenties, before Harvard Law, long before I married your mother, long before her second marriage to Alger Hiss.”
“Who is Alger Hiss?” asked Nancy insistently, now a little annoyed at being ignored.
“Alger Hiss was a Russian spy,” said Erich to his daughter. “Remember, we talked about this in the car yesterday. Your great-grandfather defended Hiss in a famous trial.”
Martha’s head was shaking, as if something wasn’t quite clarifying and the wine not helping. “Priscilla always called you her ‘shining knight,’ the man her Quaker parents would have preferred for her to marry. I remember her laughing about it, saying how her parents looked down on Alger Hiss as coming from a second-rate family out of second-rate dowdy Baltimore.”
“Ah,” said Alice with a worldly toss of her head, “the kiss of death: the man your parents want you to marry. Not like you Stan, the Commie Jew they couldn’t abide—and I mean that as a compliment.”
Martha reached to her father’s arm with a gentle pat. “I remember Priscilla always telling me about your discretion, Daddy, about how much she appreciated that in you—that you never pushed her to disclose more than she was willing to tell.”
The Judge bent forward toward his daughter. “How was she, dear, in those last years? I never saw anything of her after … well …”
“A sick woman. She always told me”—Martha paused, as if to carefully measure her words—“she was convinced you knew all her secrets.”
“Secrets?” echoed the Judge with lowered eyes.
“She always kept coming back to 1953, something about 1953 and the New York Times.”
“Well,” offered the Judge, “Alger was still in jail; it had to be a hard time for her family.”
“Oh it had nothing to do with Alger, because whatever it was still weighed on her mind twenty years later—like yesterday. As if it had been a shock to her system, something she never got over.”
“In the New York Times?”
“Yes, 1953.”
Stan sighed and shook his head. “That was the year when Stalin died, when Khrushchev gave that damning speech before the Politburo condemning the terrible crimes of Stalin, chapter and verse. It utterly devastated any of us who had ever been in the Party or were still in it. Yes, a shock. How many I knew sneaked off into the shadows and never raised their heads again. A whole world, a way of life, a belief—a faith transformed into the stink of the slaughterhouse.”
“And good riddance,” added Theo.
“She just wanted to be free,” said Martha. “Poor lady.”
Theodore held up his wineglass to Martha and Stan and the Judge.
“The dead no longer have the convenience of confession, only those they leave behind.” He put a finger to the back of his neck, pointed at an upward angle. “And here’s where they placed the bullet for my brother.”
“Alger Hiss was a liar and murderer,” said Jim, his hoarse voice barely above a hush as he looked around the table, his lips pressed in a grimace.
“I had a patient once,” continued Martha with a vacant stare at the nearest candle flame, “a handsome lady, a great pal of Alger’s before he died. Twice a week she’d travel out to East Hampton or somewhere to read him the New York Times. You see, he suffered from macular degeneration and required readers. She said he was such a gentleman, such the perfect ladies’ man. You would’ve thought she was almost in love with him the way she went on about his excitement at a new book, his passion for events of the day.”
The Judge smiled gently at Nancy, who had been trying to follow the discussion. “We hoped he wasn’t capable of those things. In fact, a whole generation hoped he wasn’t. We wanted to believe that he couldn’t be.” For a moment, his voice caught in his throat at the sight of the bald eagle feather standing up bold as brass in Nancy’s chignon—a moment of doubt, of vague panic which then passed as quickly as it had come. “Well, it turned out he was lying to everyone. It was a very sad moment in American history when we woke up to the evil in our midst.”
Stan stared into his glass: “We wanted peace and justice and workers’ rights. Civil rights for blacks. We wanted an end to segregation in the South. To beat fascism. I think we just got hijacked by the wrong people along the way.”
“You old Reds,” slurred Alice, blowing a kiss to her husband across the table, “with all your secrecy and skullduggery—such pathetic losers, lovable in your earnest naïveté, but pathetic. When the real action was always in the streets.”
George held up his hand as if to bring the conversation to a halt or begin things anew.
“Seconds, white meat or dark matter?”
He sliced deep, expertly curling back the white flesh. He was saddened by the fact that he hadn’t the guts to keep up his end of things, when he knew the Judge expected him to take the lead (still the snotnosed kid). He’d been totally caught off guard by Wendy’s gift of the Altmann painting (not to mention the deal with the Monet), one of the two she’d bought on opening night, just as he was devastated by the e-mail from the Times reviewer of the night before, which enraged him, sending Wendy fleeing, for all he knew, into the arms of Cecily. He’d never screamed at anybody like that in his life. And he knew everybody knew (just like when he was a kid) that he couldn’t even look her in the eye to express the sense of betrayal he felt, the way she ran rings around him, like a chess master always three or four moves ahead. But how to hate such a dynamo of free energy (dealing with her own demons), much less love someone you could never truly trust because you couldn’t trust yourself?
