Life Among Giants (32 page)

I hadn't thought of that, but certainly pondered it then, the power of words, Katy pulling an old silk ascot around my neck and tying it, little kids again, playing aristocrats.

“It's Perdhomme,” I said firmly. We'd had a battle over dessert. Like me, Grandpa thought the killer an associate of Dad's, someone who wanted to shut him up.
Th
e FBI thought so, too, and he was never going to budge from an opinion so well grounded.

“No, it was me,” Kate said. “Really. It's my fault. I was in such a hurry to get to my tournament. And even after I heard, I didn't want to leave—I wanted to beat that bitch from Penn so bad. Have you ever heard anything so selfish?”

“You wanted to do it for Mom.”

“No, for
me.
Oh, David. If I'd only stayed at the restaurant!”

“But, Kate. We had no way of knowing.”

“
Th
ere's a way, all right. At the cemetery today I figured it all out. It's
Linsey.
He's the center of everything, David. Does Mr. Perdhomme know Linsey? No. Does the FBI know Linsey? No. It was that day. Sophomore year. No one picked Linsey up at school. So I took him home on the bus. Dabney answered the door, very simple. He was still holding his Strat, David, and him with his impossibly skinny chest all bare.
Th
e staff had all gone off with Sylphide and no one had thought of Linsey. Whose fault is that? It was not my fault. I mean, it was Dabney
Stryker
-
Stewart standing there, David. Do you know how
lonely
he was?”

She went on in a rush, I in my top hat trying to slow her down, trying to quiz her, trying to get her to make sense, but she didn't make sense, and she wouldn't slow down, Linsey at the center of it, Dad always hanging out trying to sell investments, Dabney's brother, Brady, egging Dad on, her story quite confused, a lot of vague male pronouns, Brady Rattner flirting with her when Dabney was on the road, Brady sleeping with her or not—unclear—something about Freddy kicking Brady's ass, breaking Brady's arm or leg or jaw, and then it was Sylphide. Sylphide was behind it all, Linsey at the center of it her dupe, Dad hanging around, Brady warning her about Sylphide, Dabney's crash no accident, Freddy again, Freddy throwing Dad down the High Side stairs, Kate and Dabney alone for a month in France, Linsey at the center of that, too, somehow. Dabney wanting to marry her, make it all correct, buying paintings at Sotheby's to fund their elopement on the day she'd turn eighteen, Brady actually very nice, not like Sylphide thought: that was a trick to keep Dabney close.

“But you were sleeping with Brady, too?”

“I don't know, David. I'm not like that. No. I loved Dabney, David. Dabney of course. And when Sylphide found out she ruined him.”

“But how did she find out?”

“Brady, of course.”

“Did Dad know? Did Dad know about you and Dabney? And Brady?”

“You already asked me that.”

“Just did he know?”

“Not till Dabney was dead.
Th
en everyone knew.”

“And you feel Sylphide was involved in all this?”

“I feel? You fucker. She hated having them around, hated it.”

“Hated having whom around?”

“Dad. And Brady. And all those other idiots and all their girls.”

“But why would Sylphide want to hurt Dad?”

“It's Linsey. David, I'm telling you. Don't be so fucking stupid. It's Linsey, Linsey. He's at the center of it. And all you want to talk about is Mr. Perdhomme, who's just, like, Dad's nice old
boss.
And meanwhile, I see Sylphide owns Emily, now. You'd better think about that, bro. Perdhomme was just Dad's
boss.
While Sylphide owns your girlfriend! And we're fucking
orphans.
And what about
Brady
?”

“Kate, this makes no sense.”

“Why does it have to make sense, David? Who is sense going to serve? I'll tell you who—Sylphide. And maybe some of your sick-fuck football friends, and Mommy!”

I let it out then, all the tears I'd been withholding, totally confused, great-grandfather's top hat on my head, Kate patting my back profoundly, a river of tears, an ocean, couldn't stop, couldn't stem the thing, not for Kate, who hadn't yet shed a tear, snot in my ascot.
Th
e worst thing was that in a way, despite her incoherence, my sister was right, perfectly right: nothing made sense. Nothing made sense at all and there was no sense in trying to think anything through, and there was no one who could help, no right question to ask.

J
ACK COLLECTED
K
ATE
the next afternoon. I waited a decent time, three-handed hearts with Grandpa and Mrs. Paum, the full hundred points, then the minute they left to go to her house, trotted out the kitchen doors.

At the High Side, Desmond answered my knock. “Devastated,” he said, and pulled me to him, brief hug, his face pressed to my solar plexus, welcome warmth.

I said, “She's here?”

“Whichever you mean, both here,” said Desmond. “
Th
e lady is sleeping—she's exhausted. All these goings on. Your parents! It's incomprehensible.”

“I just want to see Emily.”

“She's exhausted, too, dancing with Vlad all day. She made a point of telling me she wanted to see you, however. I'm to show you upstairs.”

On the narrow back steps, he just kept talking: “
Th
e police do nothing, and we're left to connect the increasingly obvious dots between your household and ours. While meanwhile it's Freddy who's on the trail of that maniac. Madame's shoulder, David! It's a crime against the
world
! And this boy, this friend of Emily's! Both his hands crushed, his face smashed, a miracle he's survived.”

“Mark
Nussbaum
?”

“I believe that's the name, yes. Pulled out of his car after school and stomped, if I may use Emily's word. She was interviewed by the school authorities today.”

“Whoa.”

“She says he is something of a blackguard. Any number of enemies, that young man. But never mind.” We continued up the stairs, another winding flight even narrower than the first.

I couldn't quite formulate the question I wanted to ask, tried anyway. “Desmond,” I said, “you were on duty all the time. You live upstairs. Would you say my dad was over here a lot?”

No hesitation: “Too often for Mr. Stryker-Stewart. And the butt of many a drunken joke, if I may say so. But I, I liked Nicholas. He always had a kind word. He spoke to me of my financial investments as an equal, and I appreciated that. His hair was always so well combed. A handsome, charming, agreeable man. With a prize of a perfect daughter, I might add, or Mr. Stryker-Stewart would never have put up with him, all that talk about investments!”

“Does the name Perdhomme mean anything to you?”

“
Th
e head of Dolus?”

“My father's boss.”

“Ah. Of course. I have a small account with Dolus. Small but thriving.
Th
anks to Nicholas. Something else to remember him for.”

“Does Brady Rattner still come around?”

“Brady? No sir. Of course not, sir. No, no. Brady was banned long ago, Lizard. Brady is a pariah.”

“Along with my dad.”

“On a different plane altogether, sir,” he said crisply. “
Th
ough Brady did seem to have an influence on Nicholas. And they did spend an inordinate amount of time together. Out in the poolhouse, thank goodness. I seldom saw them. I mean, thank goodness as regards Brady, not your father, who was a fine man indeed.”

We climbed yet another narrow flight to a corridor of tidy guest rooms in the eaves of the enormous house, one of them painted pink and white, purple woodwork: Emily's suite.
Th
e girl was asleep, fast asleep, curled at the furthest precipice of the high, overstuffed bed. Desmond seemed to have instructions, never did anything without instructions, folded down the covers for me. I stripped to underpants and T-shirt. After folding my shirt and pants and depositing them on the seat of a waiting Queen Anne chair, he turned on heel and left with a crisp good night. I slipped in behind the girl, lay there in a torment, watched her naked shoulder blades flex and fall, flex and fall, put my ear to her back, listened to her fickle heart.

16

More and more, looking back, I admire the way Sylphide handled
Children of War,
the benefit that had been Dabney's great dream. She wasn't able to dance at the Shoebox
Th
eatre with her new troupe—that destroyed shoulder—but she made the show happen, made it happen for Dabney, made it happen for the actual children, too.
Th
e original run of three weeks sold out a month in advance, 48,000 tickets at an average of about ten 1970 bucks each (something like a hundred bucks now), and so the engagement was extended to five weeks. And after a mere month and a half of rehearsals,
Children of War
took the stage, Christmas Day, 1970, no night quite like the next, every night screamingly great, the biggest names in rock and roll, the biggest names in dance (Rudolf Nureyev, for example, hobbling after a foot operation but dancing two nights anyway, one of his
Le
Corsaire
solos without music, a brilliant squeaking of bare feet in the dead-silent theater), all of it pulling in the precise youthful audience Sylphide had envisioned. Her choreography retained the respect of the dance community, it seemed; anyway, the critics were kind. As for the music,
Children of War
remains a hallmark, of course, up there along with the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Bill Graham's New Year's Eve concerts at the Fillmore, maybe even Woodstock.
Th
e blazing variety, the unplanned jams, the overflow of choreography and dancers, the dynamic happenstance of the music, the accidents of timing, of personality, of recombinant collaboration, all of it rotated through the weeks of the show, improvisation on top of careful preparation on top of plain luck.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono provided the music for Emily's debut, just the one night, her first in the vine-and-pillar dance, which had evolved pretty thoroughly since I'd taken part, had come to be called
Angkor Wat.
Th
e music was all the way weird, in my first opinion, Yoko Ono singing in a high wail over John's slow-chugging guitar, tabla drums in the background. But somehow it sparked and then combusted, Emily and Vlad effortlessly complementary, needing only a rhythm to make things work, and in wonder you saw the elastic and capacious genius of the thing Sylphide had made.

Emily, everyone remembers, was tremendous, her energy furious, her stage presence electric, every move extravagantly lauded by crowd and critic alike (“Black Panther meets Viet Cong in the form of Rare Beauty,” went one typically backhanded effusion,
Detroit Free Press
). Gradually she became the focal point of the show, her various pieces rotating evening by evening, became in fact the one consistent star, something Sylphide must have known would happen, something Sylphide had no doubt engineered: her own replacement. First there was the gushing two-page review by Arlene Croce in
Th
e New Yorker.
Next day, the famous photos of Emily wrapped around Vlad Markusak in the
Times
and then in every other newspaper around the country and around the world, then every magazine, dazzling photographs. Oh, and of course the famous Emily poster in every little girl's and every college boy's room across the nation, different reasons. Sylphide kept herself far in the background, never took the stage but never missed a minute, watched from a side box, flanked nightly by new guests.

I forget how many millions of 1970 dollars went to Dabney's Children of War charities from the Shoebox shows. But that success set off a decades-long avalanche of giving, and the foundation was able to build a solid endowment, all the while taking care of kids in Vietnam, Congo, Bangladesh, Honduras, Argentina, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, and just about every other country in the world. Dabney's vision; Sylphide's brilliant execution.

I wished Kate could have enjoyed it. But she saw it a different way: Dabney being exploited for the furtherance of his ungrateful widow's career.

W
HEN
I
GOT
to Princeton the next summer—no longer living life for my father—Keshevsky put me under strict discipline, took me out of scrimmages if I didn't do exactly as he said, gave me written quizzes on the playbook, put me in charge of team laundry my entire freshman year, convinced me to join his Episcopalian church (not that he could make me attend), escorted me to the barbershop (not a buzz cut, but a capitulation nevertheless), assigned me cleanup duties at all the team meals and picnics. He forbade me any personal travel during the season, even to go see Emily (who kept nothing more than a home base in New York, but remained my girl, more or less, and then just less), made me a team player again, made himself the man in my life, pure generosity. As a team the Princeton Tigers did pretty well during my tenure, four winning seasons, good enough for three league championships, the last of the great football years for the Ivy League.

I was a top-end student, too, but amid all those valedictorians with clear life plans I wasn't one of the very best. I had a tendency to moon, always thinking about my mother, whom I missed more terribly as the months and years progressed. I majored in art history, of all things, wrote an honors thesis on Kandinsky, whom Mom had loved, something very academic concerning his connection to contemporary dance, about which I affected to know a few things. Another favorite course was archeology, all that digging in the past, but again for Mom, who'd majored in it, not that it got her anywhere but Westport. I liked psychology, too, for its application to my father's life, my sister's, my own. In the dry tones of the case studies I heard my mother's voice, sure, practical, more than a little judgmental, though trying not. Working against her striver's snobbery, I eschewed the secret societies and the eating clubs. I avoided dates, as well, caressed the speckled heart in my pocket, always feeling the heart: maybe I'd gone a little crazy. Maybe someone would write a case study about me.

As for Sylphide, I knew only what everyone knew. I searched the libraries and bookstores for images, for news of her travels, stared at her many spreads in
Dance
magazine, in
Vogue,
in
Paris Match,
scoffed at the articles, all of them full of mistakes and mythology and plain misinformation, proud that in her face I saw things no one else in the world could see, proud that I'd made the connection that Mom had so wanted for herself.