was here for three days?”
“She was afraid you were going to die. But you rode it out. Now move on. And stay off the fucking opiates. You want to wake up dead?”
It dawned on Stone that Pinky was not his friend at all, but rather his enemy, and he asked him, “Who told you to bring me to the bingo hall?”
“Say what?”
“You heard me. Who told you to bring me to the bingo hall?”
“You are fucking paranoid, you know that?” Pinky’s face showed no recognition he knew what Stone was talking about, and Stone worried he had imagined the whole conversation with Seligman, that his scrambled mind had met with him under the influence of morphine and not as he remembered, in Seligman’s SUV near Atlantic Avenue. But he had seen him; he knew he had seen him.
“Does the name Zalman Seligman mean anything to you?”
“Is that supposed to be a name? Because it doesn’t sound like a name to me.”
“You know who he is,” Stone said. “You are a terrible liar.”
“And you are the worst roommate I’ve ever had. Now, you can either shut up or get the fuck out of my place. I’m letting you stay here out of the goodness of my heart, and you are nothing but a pain in my ass.”
Stone went back to his room, locked the door, and draped himself in his father’s robe. Surrounded by his father’s books, he thought, the flesh dies, but the property lives on. That is our legacy. But this inheritance was not silent like an armchair or sideboard; these books continued to speak, all Stone had to do was listen. He pulled a book out of the pile. A yellowed, torn envelope with Israeli postage, addressed to Walter J. Stone, had been folded as a bookmark. The return address was from Abba Eban at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The envelope was empty.
Stone found a package of his father’s cigarettes, opened the flat cardboard pack, and placed a Nat Sherman between his lips. The smoke curled in the air and danced before him, spinning up into the light and dissipating. He picked up a copy of The Power Elite, written by one of the Judge’s professors at Columbia. It was inscribed in faded blue ink: “To Walter, Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Best of luck.”
The cigarette failed to calm his racing heart—he was still feverish, his nerves vibrating. The whispering got louder, sharper with each book he opened, and, like a lens coming into focus, Stone was viewing his father in a way he never had in life. He picked up Othello and turned to the pages his father had used to humiliate him all those years ago. He read: “Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost / my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of / myself, and what remains is bestial.”
His father was speaking to him through his books, and with each word Stone began to understand the enormity of his betrayal. He had been instrumental in destroying his father’s carefully constructed reputation. He was guilty, there was no doubt. Proof of Stone’s disgrace lay before him and condemned him. Stone determined to make good on his sins. He would read all his father’s books, piece him back together like a child’s jigsaw puzzle, and solve the mystery of the man he could never please.
Stone read for three days straight, not leaving his room to eat or shower. Reading his father’s books galvanized some triumphal life force within Stone, made him feel a small temporary victory over the ever-lurking Angel of Death. He pissed in the vomit bucket and dumped it out his window when it was full. He slept in twenty-minute snatches, just long enough to jumpstart his brain before returning to the books. Change a couple letters in Stone, he thought, you had alone; change another, you had atone; split that word, you had at one. When he was with the books, he was at one with them—alone, but not alone. His father’s handwritten marginal notes made it easy to focus his attention, the Judge’s script curling out with the same confident tone he had used when he spoke: “This is hypocrisy,” triple underlined; “Check your facts,” written in red; “Smilansky agrees,” appended with a furious exclamation point. His father, with his emphatic jottings, exercised more influence over Stone now than he had in life, his voice as clear as a bright spring day. Something was under the robe with him as he read, massaging his skin, soothing his muscles, the whispers like oxygen breathed into his lungs. Once or twice in the middle of the night, the street outside silent, it dawned on Stone that he might be losing his reason. He couldn’t go forever without sleeping, but an inner urgency drove him to read these books as quickly as possible. He didn’t need to eat; he devoured the words, and they filled him. He rationed water from a gallon jug and smoked cigarettes and refused to answer the door when Pinky knocked. Pinky slid periodic scrawled notes under the locked door telling him to stop feeling sorry for himself, he just needed to get laid, his mother had called twice and wanted to speak with him, and some giant, bearded man in a black suit and hat had been looking for him each of the last three mornings. Stone found a store-bought birthday card from his mother among the notes and lit it on fire, together with the notes, watching with fascination as they burned to nothing.
A leather-bound book by Henry Ward Beecher was of particular interest to Stone, considering he had studied at the school the preacher had founded near the end of his life. A quotation had been underlined by the Judge in reference to the Sharps repeater rifles abolitionists had shipped to Kansas in crates labeled BIBLES: “There is more moral power in one of these than in one hundred Bibles.”
Stone had spent six years at Beecher Academy in downtown Brooklyn, but he hardly recalled a single thing he had learned. The school was housed in an old Tudor Gothic structure, its brownstone facade covered in creeping ivy, the school’s maroon-and-white flag hanging limply on its pole beside a dispirited-looking Stars and Stripes. Beecher Academy had been established after the Civil War by Henry Ward Beecher as an institution of higher learning “founded upon the principles of abolitionism, liberalism, and faith,” but clearly the school’s mission had changed by the time Matthew arrived. Beecher Academy had been on the verge of going broke throughout the sixties and seventies, as enrollment dropped and drugs found their way into the classrooms. Students graduating with inflated grades and poor skills became known as Beecher bums, fit only to work in the service industry or, at best, to join the white-collar assembly line of corporate America. Infusions of private money, particularly from the Jews of Brooklyn Heights, turned Beecher around during the eighties, and by the end of the decade, it was one of the top-rated independent schools in the tristate area, boasting a 99 percent graduation rate and college acceptances at the top schools across the country. After Stone’s mother left, the Judge had chosen Beecher because of its proximity to the courthouse and its graduates’ high acceptance rate at Ivy League schools. Matthew had refused to go to an Ivy League school, but now, thinking back, he had no idea why.
There was one day at Beecher Academy that stood out from all the others, a day that would define his father, and Matthew’s broken relationship with him, forever. It was a Friday afternoon in early September of Matthew’s sophomore year. He had been dozing through math class when he heard sirens in the streets, filling the air, layer upon layer, in a rising pitch.
Matthew would soon learn that Menachem Wuensch, an Orthodox Jew driving a truck for Court Street Medical Supplies, had run over and killed a seven-year-old Arab boy as he sped down Atlantic Avenue. Wuensch, afraid to get out of his truck in the heart of Brooklyn’s Arab shopping district, rolled down his window, saw the boy’s broken body, and drove off. Within minutes, the store shutters all along Atlantic clanged shut and dozens of Arabs charged toward the medical supply shop shouting, “Kill Jews!” They threw rocks and bottles, smashed windows, pulled the teaching skeleton into the street, and burned it in effigy.
Court
