“You must excuse me, Lieutenant, but I believe you did not answer my question.”
Radczyk’s happy mug took on an oafish expression. Caught, he looked both ways and weighed something, probably an impulse to try another feint: What question? He did not do that.
“Yea, verily,” said Radczyk at last. “I did not.”
“What was this test for?”
“Oh,” said Radczyk. He pushed the few clumped strands of hair over his red scalp. “That’s what the doctor should be telling you, Sandy. I’d rather not.”
“I see. Are you refusing?”
The policeman looked around, big and unhappy.
“No, I ain’t refusin’ you, Sandy. You ask, I’ll tell ya the truth.”
“Well, then?”
Radczyk’s old face was soft and drained.
“Herpes,” Radczyk said.
“Herpes?”
“I asked the lady. That’s what she told me. Herpes.” Radczyk passed his hand over his mouth, wiping it in a fashion, and said, “Genital herpes.”
Stern found himself pondering the dirty river, the flecks of wood pulp, disintegrating cardboard, whitish foam that floated by. He had felt just this way recently, he thought with idle precision. When was it? Then he remembered opening the door to the garage. Peering down, he noticed that one of his hands was gripping the dirty gray table by the edge.
“The test was positive?” he asked. Of course, he knew what the paper had said.
“Sandy, you’re askin a guy who don’t know a thing. I’m repeating what the lady told me. Who knows? Who knows what we’re talkin about? I’m goin right back there. I’m gonna get this doc’s name, I’ll have it for you in no time flat.”
“Please do not bother, Lieutenant.”
“No bother.”
“You have done enough.” Of course, it came out the wrong way. Stern stood there, reeling, suffering, unable just now to do anything to make amends.
My God, Clara, he thought.
Stern insisted on paying the check. He grabbed the old policeman’s rough hand and shook it solemnly, and Radczyk, in some kind of conciliatory gesture, took the copied page and placed it in the pocket of Stern’s suit. Then Mr. Alejandro Stern, with his empty cases, turned to go, wondering where so early in the day he could find a place to be alone.
PART TWO
13
Clara Mittler was already too old when she met him. It was 1956.
Their acquaintance was first struck in the auspicious climate of her father’s law office, where Stern had let one room in Henry Mittler’s suite. In those years Stern revered Henry; by the end, he saw his father-in-law as a man with too little justice in him to be admired. But in 1956, with his large and sometimes volcanic personality, and, more pertinently, his influence and wealth, Henry Mittler loomed before Stern, fresh from Easton Law School, like some diorama giant, a majestic emblem of the attainments possible in a life at the bar. He was a sizable fellow, with a formidable belly and whitish hair pushed straight back from a widow’s peak, distinct as an arrow, and his manner was, by turns, shrewd and scholarly and ruthless. In many ways, Henry was the most refined of gentlemen; he collected stamps, and for many years thereafter Stern would watch with amazement as Henry, with his jeweler’s glass and tweezers, studied, stored, and filed. In other moods, he was a person of gutter commonness. Whatever his temper, he projected the imposing aura of an orchestral maestro.
This impressive congregation of qualities—and, as Stern learned later, a fortunate marriage to a woman of significant standing—had made him a business counselor whose insight and discretion were prized throughout the city’s small but wealthy German Jewish community. Two of the larger independent banks downtown were his clients; so were the Hartzog and Bergstein families, only then conquering the first terrains in their future kingdoms in air travel and hostelry. Henry had come of age in an era when those he served stood for sweatshops and union busting and heartless home foreclosures—the entire pristine empire of wealth, accepted as being in the Order of Things. It was a different world now; Capital no longer equaled Power in America in the same brute fashion. But Henry, no less than anyone else, was the image of his times, when it was expected that a business lawyer of his eminence be a gentleman to his clients and a son of a bitch to everyone else.
Seven young attorneys worked for Henry in paneled suites in the old LeSueur building, with its Art Deco features of heavy turned brass. Graduating from law school, Stern had responded to an ad in one of the lawyers’ gazettes and rented a single room. It was a promising arrangement. Henry did not go to court himself. There would be occasional matters of small consequence that he might refer to Stern. Collections, liens, attachments. Small divorces, perhaps. Minor personal-injury matters, or traffic tickets. It made little difference. If the flow was steady enough, Stern could satisfy his rent of $35 a month.
For this sum, Stern acquired use of Mittler’s law library—which had seemed an impressive concession, although the gilt-trimmed treatises on commercial matters contributed nothing to the criminal practice that Stern wished to establish—and Mittler’s secretary took his phone messages. In those first months, he could not afford a telephone of his own. Stern’s calls were received on Mittler’s general number and returned, a dime apiece, from a wooden phone booth in the lobby thirty-two floors below.
This arrangement, comfortable to Stern, was soon unacceptable to Henry. He had no complaints with Stern’s handling of the matters he referred. But he did not care for the clientele that Stern brought back from police court, where once or twice a week he would stand in the corridors in the hopes of drumming up some kind of a practice. After two or three barren attempts, he had attracted the attention of a police sergeant named Blonder, and for a fee of $5 for each success, Blonder had begun carrying on in lyrical fashion about Stern’s many triumphs and passing out his card to the detainees being ferried in the police paddy wagon. These clients—gypsies, shoplifters, drinkers who had become embroiled in barroom disputes—would come to the oak-wainscoted offices of Henry Mittler to wait for Mr. Stern, beside Henry’s client, Buckner Levy, in pince-nez and fedora, the president of the Cleveland Street Commercial Bank. There were no incidents, but the sight of these toughs, who sat in their undervests smoking cigarettes and, on one or two occasions, mistaking the ashtrays for spittoons, drove Henry wild. By the time Stern happened to meet Clara, his clients had been relegated to a bench in the hallway, while Henry contemplated a more complete eviction for Stern himself. In fact, in his initial rage, Henry had directed Stern to initiate the search for new quarters, although afterwards no more was said of that.
As for Clara, she was employed in her father’s office two or three days a week. Stern’s first sight of her was from the hallway as he was passing. She was a slender young woman of erect carriage who sat before Henry Mittler with a green stenographic pad in hand. Stern paused; something was not in place. She had a finished look, expensively dressed in a silk blouse and a brown skirt of fine wool; she wore pearls. Then he noticed that she was seated not on a chair but on the footstool of Mittler’s easy chair.
“Yes, Stern.” Henry had caught sight of him in the doorway. Stern, who had not meant to stop, said he would come back later, but Mittler was in an expansive mood and more or less ordered him into the office. “My daughter,” he said, with his hand raised, while he looked across his desk for something else.
Her hair, a muted reddish shade like finished cherrywood, was cut unfashionably short; her complexion, flawed by one or two livid marks near one cheekbone, was generally pallid; and Stern on first impression could not tell if she was pretty or plain. Her expression certainly seemed deadened. She nodded to Stern with no more interest than she would have to a stick of furniture.
It was his pipe Henry had been searching for.
“I suppose you’ve made other arrangements by now,” he said as he shot fire into the meerschaum bowl.
“Not just yet,” said Stern.
Years later, Stern could still remember the shocking speed with which he had calculated the advantages of winning this young woman’s attention. It was Henry, however, not Stern, who had gotten them started.
“Stern is from Argentina,” said her father.
She brightened. “From?” she asked.
In 1956 most Americans regarded foreigners of all kinds with apprehension; about Argentina they wished to learn no more than the tango. Stern was grateful for her interest.
“B.A., principally. We lived in different parts. My father was able to turn the practice of medicine into an itinerant trade.”
“Your father was a doctor?” asked Henry. “You’ve always made out like you were some impoverished son of a bitch. Pardon, Clara.”
“Regrettably true,” said Stern.
“This is the one who goes down to the lobby to use the telephone,” said Henry.
“Ah,” said Clara.
The heat of shame rushed up on poor Stern. Clara seized his arm.
“Daddy, you’re embarrassing Mr. Stern.”
Henry made a face. It was no matter to him.
From these first instants some elements seemed incomprehensible. She was too sophisticated—too rich—a young woman to be a stenographer, but she appeared two or three times a week, typing and answering the phone. When Stern happened by, she would smile idly, a self-contained human being, hard to decipher beyond a heavyhearted stoical exterior.
“You are a student?” he asked her one day, impulsively, when he was in the hallway near the small interior office that she shared with two other women.
“Me? No. I finished college three years ago. Four. Why would you ask?”
“I imagined—” said Stern. He was lost, as usual, for the proper word.
“That I was younger,” she said.
“Oh, no.” This truly had not entered his mind, but the young woman seemed to shrink from him. She had embarrassed herself by exposing this vulnerability. “I wondered simply how you were otherwise engaged, when you were not here.”
“You think I have something better to do than my father’s typing?”
“Miss,” said Stern, but he saw then that she was attempting to be coquettish and was, simply, awkward at it. “I am certain you are capable of many things.”
She did not answer. He turned away, morose. Truly, he was doomed with this family. A few days later, however, as he was passing in the hall, she called.
“Mr. Stern?” He looked in, not certain that it was her voice he’d heard. Her eyes were down as she pecked at the typewriter, a substantial mass of black cast iron. Eventually, she spoke, though it seemed to require considerable deliberation. “Tell me, Mr. Stern, what did you suppose I studied?”
Oh, dear. Now what? He seized on something likely to be inoffensive.
“My estimate, I suppose, is that you were a musician.”
Her immediate look of pleasure was incandescent.
“My father told you.”
“No,” said Stern, enormously relieved.
“You enjoy music?”
“Very much.” This was not really a lie. Who did not like music? She had studied the piano for many years, she said. She mentioned composers whom Stern knew merely by name. Vaguely, they agreed to enjoy music together on some future occasion. Yet, as Stern came away from the conversation, he was struck again by how peculiar this young woman seemed. College educated and half-idle, full of such taut sensitivity. How old was she? Twenty-four or twenty-five, Stern calculated, a year or two older than he. Old for a girl not to be married, even in the States.
The next week, Henry called him to his office. On his way, Stern feared that his eviction was about to be consummated, but he could tell at once, from the way Henry groused and pawed about, that he had something else on his mind. If Henry were revoking a license at will, he would do it without hesitation.
“We can’t use these,” Mittler said. “Pauline and I.” Symphony tickets. He held them forth. “I’m sure Clara would like to go.” Stern was too dumbfounded for Mittler to take any chances. “You know,” he said, “Clara put me up to this. She was too bashful to ask herself.”
“This is very kind, Mr. Mittler. I am most pleased.”
“Sure you are,” said Henry. “Look, I have no goddamned judgment about my daughter, Stern. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do or not. You may think she’s bright, but she has no idea of what she’s up to half the time. Believe me. I assured her mother there would be no problem here. I told her you were harmless.” Mittler’s eyes had a yellowish cast and he fixed Stern directly.
Should he have turned away? Decades later, in the depths of grief, he could pose the question, but he would never damn them both with an affirmative response. He had taken the two tickets from Henry’s hand, while answering the assessment of his harmlessness in a murmur. Anyone listening would have thought he had agreed.
14
AS SOON AS PETER laid eyes on him, Stern could tell that his son was unsettled. It was a familiar look, something not too far from panic, which, in a blinking, was put aside by the work of adult will. Peter glanced about his reception room, seeking to determine who else was present, and then asked quietly, “What’s wrong?”
Stern had never been to his son’s office. While Peter was a resident, Clara and Stern had met him for dinner once or twice in the university hospital cafeteria. In his green togs, with his stethoscope lumped into a pocket, he seemed vital, smart, remarkably at ease. Peter’s mastery of his place had touched Stern; he was happy for his son, who was so often overwrought. But apparently the meetings had not been as comfortable for Peter. In the year and a half he had been in private practice, he had never invited his father to come by. Clara, certainly, had been here for lunch. But Stern had wandered around the suburban office center today for some time looking for the place, a smaller HMO, feeling various qualms, certain that at any instant impatience and anxiety would lead him to turn around. They had not. Unfortunately, there were real needs here, a genuine quandary.
“I require your advice on a matter,” Stern told his son. “Something somewhat delicate.”
At a loss, Peter took him back through a warren of garishly painted corridors to a small office, not much bigger than a cubicle. In these surroundings, Peter had largely surrendered to the mundane. His desk was clean, dustless, occupied by only a few odds and ends supplied by the drug companies: an onyx pen set, an octagonal plastic thing which turned out to be a calendar. There was some grass cloth on one wall, an unimpressive silkscreen; his diplomas were lined up typically along one plaster column. On the top bookshelf, Stern saw the only photograph in the office, a small oval-framed picture of Clara taken a few years ago. A recent addition, probably. Grown men of Peter’s generation did not display their mothers’ photos, even that discreetly, while they lived.
“So what is this?” Peter asked. “Are you all right?”
“Generally,” said Stern.
“Kate said Claudia told her that you don’t show up some mornings.”
Stern had no idea his daughter and his secretary spoke. It was touching that they took it upon themselves to communicate about his well-being—and typical of Peter that their secret would be casually betrayed. Stern had missed the remainder of the day after seeing Radczyk, and yesterday, Monday, as well. Even today, he had not been certain he could rouse himself. But he had not come here seeking sympathy. He said simply that he was as well as could be expected, and Peter nodded. Amenities passed, his son was not obliged to inquire further.
And would he have answered if Peter had? Stern, pointed by his son to a small upholstered chair, settled in it with a certain morose heaviness. No, he would not have. Somewhere in Stern’s heart there was a perfect Peter, the son whom every man wanted, full of ready unspeaking sympathies, and inclinations in all matters of consequence exactly like his father’s. But this figure was no more than a shadow, so removed from every day that he did not even have an imagined form. Stern dealt with the rea
l man as best he could. He respected Peter’s abilities; he was bright—always the star student—and meanly clever. Like the women, Stern was willing to call on Peter when he was in need. But he was unwilling—unable—to yield something in return. That was the truth. Have it. Peter reacted; Stern sat like a stone. It was all as it would ever be.
“Is it something else with Mom’s will?”
“No,” said Stern. He could hear the impatience in his voice, but Peter virtually demanded that his father state his business. Here, the dispenser of treatment and knowledge, his son was sovereign. This was clearly an unwelcome intrusion.
“There are questions, Peter, which I need to put to someone. I trust your discretion.”
“Medical questions, you mean?” As he asked, Peter moved behind his desk, the dashing young doctor, with his center-parted hair and long white coat. Even considering Kate, it was possible that Peter was the best-looking of the children. He appeared to be in peak physical condition, razor-thin and athletic.
“Yes. Medical questions. Technical questions.”
“What happened to Nate?”
A reasonable inquiry. Stern himself had spent the weekend phoning Nate, who remained the first choice as medical adviser. But Dr. Cawley’s personal life appeared to have rendered him as unreliable as a teenager, and Stern had tired of leaving messages.
“This is a matter with a contemporary flavor, Peter. I presumed that I could bother you. If another time would be preferable—”
Peter waved off the suggestion. “I was just wondering. So what is it?”
Stern felt his mouth drawing, preconsciously. Various cycles of discomfort started up in different regions of his body. Yet he was determined to proceed. The fact was he required information, not just to feed a grisly appetite for knowledge, but also because it had dawned on him over the weekend that his own well-being might be in doubt. There were other physicians he knew. But it was hard to single out just anyone for questions of this nature. And in the end the most villainous side of his character was awakened by his son, especially in regard to his relations with his mother. Rationally, Stern could not brook any real suspicions. Never mind Clara Stern. He had lost, sometime last Friday, any authority to predict her behavior. But no woman of Clara’s social class, of her experience or temperamental reserve, no mother could have turned to her son for treatment of a problem of this nature. But here Stern sat, nonetheless, eager, among other things, to dash any final doubts.