Famous Builder (11 page)

Two weeks later we’re driving down Bay Avenue in Ocean City. Pointing to a dull Colonial under construction, Bobby says, “yuck.” To which Mrs. Dasher, who’s driving, wrenches back her head and says, “Robert Lisicky, I’d like to see the kind of house
you
live in someday.” It goes without saying Bobby is appalled. The Dashers accuse him of being competitive, stuck-up, but within months they sell their Anchorage Point house and move into a two-story contemporary in Seaview Harbor, the more expensive lagoon development down Longport Boulevard, which my father had turned his back on sixteen years before.

***

We’re the last of the old guard in Anchorage Point. All the others—the Foxes, the Fortes, the Caceeses, the Muscufos, the Sendrows—have either moved south to Delray Beach or simply died. With the passage of casino gambling in Atlantic City, a half hour away, the houses are occupied year-round now. Newer residents, mostly casino executives and their families, are drawn to the waterfront property, now in high demand because of EPA rulings restricting the dredging of wetlands. Many of the original California ranchers are all but unrecognizable. Second stories are thrown up overnight; huge landscaped pool decks extend toward the water. Some houses are entirely torn down, replaced with floodlit bunkers. Ronald Reagan is president, and size seems to be more significant than modesty or understatement. One teardown is reportedly on sale for $325,000. The strangest thing about these developments is that we’re virtual strangers in our old neighborhood. The DePalmas or the Denelsbecks don’t appear to care that we’ve been here since the early 1960s, that we’ve stuck it out through tropical storms, water problems, difficult days when the post office refused to deliver our mail.

Still, Mrs. Fox isn’t quite forgotten. As late as 1986, a dozen years after her departure, we hear an anecdote from Joan Britt, who happens to run into us at the Acme. Joan is the kind of senior citizen we’d all want to be: attractive, alert, and perky, all undercut with a pleasing subversiveness. She’s one of those people who makes you feel grateful that she likes you, because you know that she just doesn’t give it away.

My mother and I draw closer once Jane starts in on her story. 1961, and Mr. and Mrs. Britt are dining with Astrid and Warren at the Sandpiper Pub, a once-exclusive oceanfront restaurant that has since become a nightclub with an ominous reputation. (Two years ago a college kid was stabbed repeatedly behind a Dumpster.) As Mr. Fox leaves for the bathroom, Mrs. Fox places both hands on the table and leans forward.

“I hate my life,” she whispers.

The Britts smile uneasily. After all, the couples aren’t close. Isn’t this just one more instance in which Mrs. Fox is dramatizing her circumstances? They don’t know what to believe. They ask themselves,
Has she been drinking?

“I hate my life. Are you listening to me?”

“Astrid,
no
—” says Mrs. Britt.

“Some days I just want to throw myself into the lagoon.”

Then Mr. Fox returns to the table, and she’s once again talking in a cheery voice about replacing the carpet with Karastan rugs.

This tale, which we repeat over and over in the subsequent days, examining every detail for meaning, doesn’t bring us any closer to her, or shed any light on the utter mystery of Mrs. Fox. We can’t place ourselves at a safe distance from it, though, and we feel guilty when we chuckle. After all, didn’t Mrs. Fox instinctively know that the sanest way to make it through a life is to attend to the particulars? She found a method to transform her sadness, funneled all her energy, chaos, and anger into form. She knew the sheer pleasure of revision. She stamped her prints into materiality and tried as hard as she could to get things right. Wasn’t that enough?

And there he is, pacing the terminal of the airport in Brookhaven, Long Island, in a marine blue sport coat, light slacks, and fawn-colored oxfords. He taps out another cigarette before he’s finished the one already in his mouth, its smoke curling up into his face. He pats down his lapels, smoothing back his gelled, wavy hair, but the truth is, he’s a wreck. He looks as if he’s lived into every one of his seventy-six years. The San Juan casinos, the Scotch, the sparring with his brother Alfred, the lenders, the wives—all of it has marked his face like a plat map of his nearby Strathmore at Stony Brook development. Even his oxfords, once impeccably buffed and shined, now look like they could have been bought off the rack at the Huntington Goodwill.

So there’s no reason that the boy, his ardent admirer, should be hiding behind a column, five feet from his idol, so burdened with intense feeling that he thinks he might need to be rushed to Dr. Boguslaw. That’s the least of his problems. Why does he still have the body of a twelve-year-old when the calendar above the rent-a-car desk says 1986? How did he get here from there? And why is he still wearing that same awful pair of dungarees from E.J. Korvette that scratch in the crotch, that ride too high in the waist? It occurs to him that he might be dead, struck by a car on one of his determined bike rides to Point of Woods or Cambridge Park, developments five or six miles from his house. Once he shakes out his arm, though, he can tell he’s as alive as the rest of the people fidgeting about the tiny airport. Certainly his mother must be in the car outside the terminal, where she waits for him to walk out the door with maps and brochures, the beautiful news of how streets get their names.

But enough dawdling. He sniffs, stiffens his neck and walks forward, extending his hand to Bill Levitt. Instantly the famous builder claims every inch of his six foot frame.

“If it was for a penny less than $92 million, I’d walk out right now.”

The boy is too scared to blush, whimper, or hyperventilate.

“One more stunt like this,” Bill Levitt says, “and I won’t do business with you again.”

The boy steps backward. He thinks of running out to his mother—of course this was a mistake; of course he should have stayed safely back in 1972. But as he’s about to give up, he tells Bill Levitt that he was the one who wrote the fan letter, the boy who saw his first model homes at nine and hasn’t stopped talking about them ever since.

“Ah,” he says. “I thought you were a little young to be in S&L.” He sits down with a sigh, patting the seat on the bench next to him. “Cigarette?”

The boy shakes his head no.

He squints, draws in some smoke until the tip flares orange. “Paul Lipstick?”

“Lisicky.”

Gratitude and awe flash through the boy’s cheeks. Bill Levitt
remembered.
In the distance, a bulldozer pushes a bank of torn-up potato vines into an enormous mound. Beyond that, workmen hammer up two prefab walls.

“So what makes you want to be a builder, honey?” Bill Levitt says.

He shifts back and forth on the bench. His eyes burn and tear from the smoke.
Honey?
Impossible to answer such a thing. Could Bill Levitt? Even if the boy said, “I want to build the kinds of developments that make people happy to be alive,” he wouldn’t exactly be telling the whole truth. His feelings run deeper and colder than Long Island Sound. They mean more than any single component: an imaginative street name, the pleasure of redesigning a Colonial as a Contemporary, the swirl of feeder roads, color codes, and cul-de-sacs on a master plan.

“I want to do what you do,” he says finally.

Bill Levitt’s smile is tinged with remorse. His eyelids look heavy. “Here’s my only advice.” He leans in close until his mouth brushes the boy’s ear. “Beg, borrow, or steal the money, then build, build, build.”

And then he spills every drama from the start of the year. The sums borrowed from family charities, the down payments spent from Florida’s Poinciana Park development—how was he to know that a single stake hadn’t yet been driven into the sand? Or that his third wife would have such expensive tastes, expecting a present every month on the date of their anniversary? All the failed ventures—Nigeria, Venezuela, Iran (Levittshar!)—all the money lost, and now he can’t even afford to pay for treatment at North Shore Hospital, the hospital he paid millions of dollars to build decades ago. He’s sold his chateau in Mill Neck, the Rolls Royce, the 237-foot yacht once docked beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. He doesn’t even have a dime to call a cab. And if those bastards from Old Court Savings and Loan don’t show up in five minutes—he taps the face of his Cartier with an elegant forefinger—there’s going to be hell to pay.

“Miniature Lane,” the boy says, his eyes welling. “I hope you’re going to have a Miniature Lane in Poinciana Park.”

Bill Levitt stubs out a half-smoked cigarette in an ashtray. His eyes fix on the carpenters in the potato field.

“Tardy Lane, Italic Pass,” the boy says. “You took the time to be inventive, original.”

“Those workers?” he says, pointing in the distance. “They’re Union. But we couldn’t have built Levittown with Union. Those assholes tried to shut us down.”

“The altered setbacks,” the boy continues. “The see-through fireplaces, the village greens.”

“We kept our profit margin low. 17,447 houses in 5 years. Our own lumberyard, our own roofers. And that’s how we slaughtered the competition.”

“You gave style to the masses, things only rich people could have afforded before.”

“And blacks,” Bill Levitt says. “The minute you let the blacks in, the property values dive. I mean I have nothing at all against the blacks; some of my best workers have been blacks, but look what’s happened to Willingboro. Or Belair at Bowie or Winslow Crossing. I had every right to keep the blacks out, but you couldn’t do that after 1964. And look who suffers but the homebuyer.”

A calm in the terminal. The air tastes grittier, more troubling on the boy’s tongue—is that sawdust blowing through the open doors? No, something else: he feels it in his eyes, tastes it high in his throat. He knows things he’d rather not about Levitt. Not just that he restricted Jews from the high-end Strathmore-Vanderbilt or black people from the three Levittowns, but sins of a lesser sort. Flooded conversation pits in Monmouth Heights’ Contempra; “streamfront” lots in Cambridge Park that bordered a concrete culvert. And, then, of course, his ties to Joe McCarthy or any corrupt individual he thought could be of use to him. “How can I be racist,” he replied years later, “if I’m Jewish?” The boy can’t begin to understand such things. Nor why Bill Levitt is not the least bit interested in the poetry of building rather than the making of money, which doesn’t matter to the boy at all. Here they are, seated side by side on a bench, a cornucopia of detail waiting to be exchanged between them, but right now he feels vague and unsatisfied: Massasoit trying to hold a conversation with Miles Standish.

“The masses are asses,” Bill Levitt murmurs to himself.

The boy gazes out at the development burgeoning in the potato field. Hammers swing, nails pierce. Piece by piece the neighborhood comes into being. Nothing that Bill Levitt says is going to sour his morning. He thinks about what’s sure to come a few months in the future: the signs in refined script posted outside the exhibit homes, the copper beeches leafing out along the strip of grass between sidewalk and street. Inside “The Ardsley,” the Luganos stand in the foyer, looking up the staircase at the light fixture overhead, before Richard, Lori, and Kate rush forward, imagining themselves into the next ten years. There they are with their cousins, tangling their arms and legs together on the Twister mat on the dining-room carpet. There they are, just the five of them, trimming the arbutus, planting pink geraniums around the patio in grateful, pained silence, taking in the news that Mrs. Lugano’s treatment has been successful, her illness in remission. And yet as much as the boy tries to hold onto his vision of a kind, perfected future, in which no one is hurt or stunted and all longings are satisfied, he can’t stop seeing an overlay. 1996, and the children have moved away, resentful, bored, though not quite knowing why. Mr. and Mrs. Lugano stay put, wary of strangeness, difference, suspicious of the two black men who come to deliver the new sofa one day. A tree hasn’t been planted in years. Unclipped limbs rub and shadow the bay window, and no one on Hornblende Lane gestures when Mr. Radwin, a neighbor, walks past. The traffic crawls. The sprawl takes over Middle Country Road, and …

“Look what I’ve done.” Bill Levitt’s voice is full of forced authority, as if he’s talking to an S&L guy again. He pulls out at least a dozen clippings from his pocket, all taped at the seams, and presents them with quivering hands to the boy.

Nothing new here: the 1950
Time
magazine cover story; later articles announcing ventures in Paris, Puerto Rico, Madrid, Frankfurt. The boy pores over the stories and pretends he hasn’t memorized them in a carrel of the Cherry Hill Library. And for some reason he knows that Poinciana Park will essentially remain a tree farm during his lifetime. Although he hasn’t nearly fallen out of love yet—that takes longer to acknowledge than a fizzy, unsettled feeling inside the body—he can already sense that his own future will be more complicated and alive than he ever could have imagined.

How to live without the dream of making, building?

“My mom’s in the car,” the boy says, in distress. He stands up, and pats the shoulder of Bill Levitt’s marine blue sport coat.

“Listen,” Bill says, tapping out another cigarette. “One thing you’ll promise me.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Don’t call your first Lisickytown.”

The boy is silent. Not that he ever had such an idea, but didn’t Bill Levitt get to rename his first huge development in honor of his family? Would Island Trees have ever gotten the publicity of Levittown?