Wherever There Is Light (41 page)

“Daddy, Risk is another game. This is Monopoly.”

Julian decided to try again in six months, and for now he was proud that Holly examined the deeds for the rental returns and building costs before buying a property.

In the midst of this familial comfort, Julian held on to his sadness about Kendall. It was his last remaining attachment to her, and to relinquish it would be to lose her forever, which he doubted that he could bear. Clare's kindness assuaged these feelings, but it was Holly who helped most of all by making the future more important to him than the past. Still, Julian suffered whenever he was reminded of Kendall. Her pictures in
Life
of the writer Vladimir Nabokov with his butterfly net in Italy. A new book on the counter at the South Orange Library,
All God's Children
, photographs of the tenant-farmer families of Lovewood with a dedication to the memory of her mother. A profile in the Sunday
Times
before a retrospective of her work opened at the Léo Sapir Gallery. The piece had been written by the author James Baldwin, a friend of Kendall's from Paris who was no stranger to converting racial turmoil into art. Baldwin asked her if she could identify a moment when she realized that she was destined to become an artist.

“The afternoon they lynched my boyfriend,” Kendall said.

Julian wanted to drive to the gallery and talk to her. Instead, he phoned Eddie and ran the proposed trip by him.

“It'll be fun seeing Holly every other weekend, won't it?” Eddie said, which brought Julian to his senses.

From the mid-1950s on, Julian's biggest worry was Abe. His blood pressure was high, he had chest pains, and the government was hounding him about his tax returns, predictably because they were about as realistic as Holly's favorite novel,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
. Abe was charged with tax evasion, but the trial ended in a hung jury. One afternoon he came to Julian's office and, out of nowhere, said, “Ya know bribery's been a New Jersey tradition for almost three hundred years. Lord Cornbury, the first royal governor, muscled into land disputes so he could take bribes from both sides. There'd be a statue of Cornbury in Trenton if he hadn't been a transvestite.”

Abe was a history buff, so Julian didn't give his mentioning Cornbury any thought until one evening—Wednesday, February 25, 1959, to be exact—when Abe stopped by his house and asked him to come outside, his usual request whenever he wanted to talk business, since you never knew where the FBI had installed its bugs.

“The feds think I bribed a juror or two,” he said.

In the light of the pendant lamp above the door, Julian saw Abe shivering in his fedora and topcoat. Julian felt sick but tried to sound optimistic. “You'll beat it. Anything I can do?”

“So you listened to me. When I said you gotta find a way to live.”

“I did.”

Abe was studying Julian as if trying to memorize his face.

Julian said, “Let's go in for a drink.”

“I gotta get home, boychick.”

More often than not, Abe kissed him on the cheek when he said good-bye. Now he turned and walked to his car. In the morning, Eddie called. “Cop I know in West Orange got in touch. Abe hung himself.”

Julian's feeling of betrayal was overpowering, and it stayed with him at Apter's funeral home in Newark and graveside at the B'nai Abraham cemetery out on Route 22. He watched Abe's wife, stepson, and daughter crying, and Julian became so furious that he imagined popping the lid on Abe's casket and shooting him.

Why didn't you say something?

Reporters showed up to talk off the record, asking if Longy's death had been a hit. Julian felt like coldcocking them. There was no percentage in pissing off journalists, so he politely said no, it wasn't a hit, fifty-four-year-olds sometimes get depressed. What infuriated Julian was the root of Abe's depression, which could have been avoided if he'd taken Julian's advice and renounced his underworld perquisites. But Abe liked that edge. And he was greedy: he also wanted to be admired by that faceless mass of Americans who haunt anyone pursuing, overtly or covertly, adoration, the seductive warmth of distant stars. During the Kefauver hearings, Mr. and Mrs. America met Longy Zwillman, the repentant ex-bootlegger, astute businessman, philanthropist, suburban dad, and husband. Yes, Abe was all those things, but once the government tossed him in prison for bribery, he'd be nothing but a common hood.

During that year, among the most anguished in Julian's life, he mourned for Abe and felt exposed, endangered, as if some protective shell had been peeled away from him. More than ever, he longed to talk with Kendall, to be in her presence, to feel safe again, and in retrospect the only good thing Julian could say about the year was that he remained blissfully unaware that soon enough it would all get much worse.

SOUTH ORANGE, NEW JERSEY

S
EPTEMBER
7, 1964

O
n Labor Day, Julian made Holly and Clare pancakes and bacon for breakfast, and they swam and splashed in the pool until noon. After lunch, Julian and Holly began playing Monopoly. The game was still in progress at five o'clock when Holly asked if they could get pizza burgers and onion rings from Don's Drive-In. Julian was beat, but Don's was only a ten-minute ride. As he stood, Clare said, “You rest, sweetheart. Holly and I'll get takeout.”

Before leaving, Holly looked at Julian's hotels on pricey Boardwalk and Park Place and frowned. “Daddy, you're lucky.”

He knelt down to hug her, smelling the chlorine in her hair and the Coppertone suntan lotion that Clare had rubbed on her face.

“Luckiest man in the world.”

Julian was napping on the couch in the great room when the doorbell woke him up. Officer Nelligan, a husky, moonfaced South Orange cop, was outside. Julian had met him once. He was Fiona's third or fourth cousin, and seeing him, Julian figured Eddie was in a jam.

“What's cooking, Nellie?”

“Hello, Mr. Rose. Your wife . . . your wife was turning on South Orange Avenue and this drunk sonovabitch, he ran the light . . .”

“And?” Julian knew the answer, but asking it provided him with a few precious seconds of hope.

“The drunk was dead at the scene. The Rescue Squad got Mrs. Rose and your daughter into the ambulances, but . . . I'm real sorry, Mr. Rose . . . They didn't make it.”

Nellie drove Julian to East Orange General. In the emergency room, a nurse led Julian to an alcove, screened off from the ER by a curtain, and left him alone. Clare and Holly were on gurneys with sheets pulled up to their chins. Julian felt as if he were gazing down at them from the top of a hill. Clare must have been thrown against the windshield. Her face, bruised and caked with blood, looked as though someone had smashed her reflection in a mirror. She would have been appalled by her appearance. Julian kissed her and covered her face with the sheet.

Holly's face was unmarked, except for the purplish blotch along her eyebrows, but her head lolled to the side like one of her rag dolls. Julian was dizzy. A pink butterfly barrette held his daughter's long, brown sun-streaked hair behind her left ear. The other barrette was missing, giving her that peekaboo look from the 1940s. Holly hated her hair falling in her eyes. Julian combed his fingers through his daughter's heavy, silky hair, searching for the barrette. It was under her head. Julian slid it in place. He couldn't close the clasp under the plastic butterfly. The clasp was bent. He tried to straighten it. His hands were shaking.

Officer Nelligan drew back the curtain.

“What's wrong?” Julian asked.

“You were yelling, Mr. Rose.”

Julian hadn't heard a sound. “I can't fix this thing.”

The policeman unbent the clasp, gave the barrette to Julian, walked out, and closed the curtain. Julian clipped the butterfly in his daughter's hair, then pressed his face to Holly's cheek and inhaled the fragrance of pool water and suntan lotion. He was only able to leave the hospital by telling himself that he would see Clare and Holly again at the funeral home.

Nellie must have contacted Eddie and Fiona, because when he brought Julian to his house, they were waiting for him. Julian drank a fifth of Jameson with them, but the whiskey didn't numb his astonishment that emptiness could come packaged with such pain; or stop him from thinking that if he'd gone to Don's, his wife and daughter would be alive; or prevent him from lying on the carpeting in Holly's room and sobbing into her pillow until, toward dawn, he fell asleep.

The service at Apter's was a dim patch in Julian's memory, but he never forgot the ride to the B'nai Abraham cemetery—the two hearses getting stuck for twenty minutes on Route 22 behind a truck from Channel Lumber, and the cloudless blue sky glossy with sunlight, as if the universe was unaware that Julian was burying his wife and daughter. He had arranged for them to be buried in a granite mausoleum not far from Abe's grave. He liked that Abe was nearby to keep an eye on them, and Julian couldn't stand the notion of dropping Clare and Holly into the ground. He didn't want them to be cold in winter.

During the shiva, visitors streamed through Julian's house, offering condolences and eating and drinking. Clare's parents were gone, and her sister in Seattle, whom Julian hadn't seen since their wedding, sent flowers because she couldn't get there for the funeral. The great room smelled of smoked meats and fish and sour pickles. Julian handled the crowd well and didn't fall apart until the second evening, when Holly's friends from Newstead School brought him pictures they had done with colored pencils of themselves with his daughter. Julian smiled at the girls and complimented their drawings. Once they were gone, he locked himself in the master bath, crying and kneeling over his toilet until nothing was left in his stomach to come up.

Then Julian was alone with his guilt, and he could feel it devouring his heart like termites. Had someone suggested to him that the crash had been a tragic coincidence, he would have shaken his head at such stupidity and replied, “A coincidence is just a situation you don't understand yet.”

Julian did understand this situation: it was punishment. He could tell himself any story he pleased about how he'd tried to talk Abe into going straight, it didn't alter the fact that the seeds of his wealth had come from the same illegal liquor as Abe's. Now God had handed him the bill for the bootlegging, the deals with crooked pols and cops, the handiwork that went with persuading uncooperative buyers and subduing competitors, and last but not least, for shooting Willy in the Ardennes.

Julian wasn't one to sit by and do nothing, yet that was his most hellish discovery about grief: it wasn't the twin of sorrow but an acidic brew of fear and helplessness. Being an organized man, he battled back by adhering to a schedule, visiting Clare and Holly in their mausoleum on weekdays and then going to Gruning's for ice cream and to watch the schoolkids and allow himself to dream that Holly was alive.

He had been at the cemetery on that snowy December afternoon he'd met Kendall's son, Bobby, outside Gruning's. Clare was interred in the top right corner, and Julian stared at the brass marker on the crypt below her.

HOLLY ALICE ROSE

ANGEL IN ETERNITY

JULY 2, 1954–SEPTEMBER 7, 1964

Glancing heavenward, Julian hoped to hear any word that would alleviate his grief or lessen his guilt, but the sky was silent, and the snowflakes melted on this face.

He returned to the cemetery less frequently once Bobby began living with him. The boy's appearance was another coincidence. Not that it healed him, but it made his days bearable again, and he remembered that wintry afternoon when it occurred to him that somehow Clare and Holly and Kendall must have interceded on his behalf, and Julian pressed his lips to the icy marker and thanked them, and God, for another chance.

SOUTH ORANGE, NEW JERSEY

D
ECEMBER
15, 1965

M
iss Kozlowski, the vice principal of South Orange Junior High, was a short-haired bottle blonde in her forties with all the charm of a prison guard. Bobby and Julian were seated on the other side of her desk as she scoured Bobby's records. “His birthday puts him in seventh grade. But public education in the South—we may have to start him in grammar school.”

Julian, his anger bubbling up, doubted that she would've made the same observation about a white child. He said, “Isn't it best to keep Bobby with kids his own age?”

“Not if he's too far behind. Fortunately, we don't begin foreign language until eighth grade.”

“Pardon me, ma'am,” Bobby said. “I speak French. I can read and write it too. And I learned algebra at my last school.”

Her look of skepticism deepened the meshwork of creases across her cheeks. Controlling himself, Julian said, “You got some tests you can give him?”