Saving Grace (25 page)

Several steps above and behind them stood their children. Paul, dressed in a suit more conservative than his father’s, clutched a briefcase in one hand; with the other he grasped his sister’s arm, a gesture that looked like solicitude but was actually restraint.

While Christopher Leeds spoke to the press, Gracie glared out at their tormentors. Like a lighthouse beacon, her anger swept in wide arcs, illuminating those it touched with its dark light. She sought one face in particular, and though the blinding klieg lights and flashbulbs made it hard to distinguish features, she knew him the moment she spotted him. Paul, following her eyes, gave her arm a warning squeeze; but Grace was going nowhere.

Uncharacteristically, Barnaby hung back on the fringes of the crowd. His place was up front, shouting questions and demanding answers, but he didn’t trust Gracie. She had spotted him and was staring so fixedly that his colleagues were beginning to notice.
 

Clara was not there. Up until that morning, she’d insisted on coming. They had all moved back into the Highview house to be closer to the courthouse. From six-thirty that morning Clara had kept coming into Jonathan and Lily’s room, asking, “Is this dress all right?”, “Which hat?”, and “Should I wear gloves?”, until Jonathan finally snapped, “Mother, wear what you want, just give us some peace.” Clara cried. Jonathan, whose women were all decidedly unweepy, had never seen so many tears in his life as during these past few weeks. “Excuse me,” his mother said. “I’ve never been to an arraignment before.”

Later he went to her room, and apologized. Then he said, “Mama, there’s one thing you can do for me.”

“Anything,
bubbele.”

“Don’t come to court. Stay home.”

“Jonathan, you’re my son. I have to be there.”

Despite everything, Jonathan had to smile. It was like going back thirty years to when he used to get in trouble at school. He took her hand. “Mama, this is the worst day of my life. Don’t add to my pain by making me witness yours.”

She pressed his hand to her lips, smearing it with bright red lipstick. “You want I should stay home, I’ll stay home. Whatever’s best for you.” When they left for court in a chauffeured Lincoln sent by Christopher Leeds, Clara saw them off, a stolid figure planted in the garden like an ungainly shrub in orthopedic shoes. No Orpheus, Jonathan kept his eyes on the road.

The others gazed out windows. “Your purpose is to support your father, your husband,” Christopher Leeds had told them the day before. “Stand close to him; touch him whenever possible. Look straight into the cameras. Don’t scowl,” he told Gracie; “Don’t pout,” he told Paul. He passed approval on their court clothes. Gracie had to change twice before he was satisfied, from jeans to a denim skirt to her one hated “good” dress. “You’re a nice family,” Leeds instructed them. “A close family. I want the cameras to see that closeness.”

They listened with astonishment but did as he bade them, and of course he was right, for of the millions of potential jurors who watched the news that night, many were moved by the spectacle of innocent suffering. In court, Lily, flanked by her two children, sat directly behind Jonathan. Paul and Gracie held her hands when Jonathan rose to speak the only words he would utter in public that day: “Not guilty.” After the proceedings were concluded, the three of them crowded round Jonathan and kissed him, even Gracie, who had not said an unnecessary word to him in weeks. Then Christopher Leeds led them out onto the steps, where they posed for the photographers like good little children who are seen but not heard.

The cameras loved them: such a handsome family, strong and graceful under pressure, like a sound ship in a storm. Except for Gracie’s scowl, they might have been posing for a picture at a wedding or bar mitzvah. Though they couldn’t hear Christopher Leeds’s remarks above the baying of the reporters, it didn’t matter: they had their orders.

They played their parts well. But when the charade was over, when the car door closed behind them and they were alone with no lights, no cameras, no hostile eyes, no witnesses save Leeds’s professionally discreet driver, the center did not hold. They fell apart, each into a silence separate from the others’.

At home, they parted. Lily went out to the garden, Clara to the kitchen, and Paul to his room, where he pored over out-of-state college catalogs. Gracie made a phone call, changed her clothes, and slipped out of the house. Jonathan closed himself in his study and began a task Christopher had assigned him, compiling a list of every business and political transaction he had ever had with Michael Kavin and Solly Lebenthal. But his pen shook so violently he had to lay it down.

During the arraignment, he had felt himself removed from the action, observing foggily from a distance as people went through motions and spoke words devoid of content. Suddenly, scenes from the courtroom replayed before his eyes, obliterating what lay about him; and as he relived those moments, the full force of the pain he’d blocked out at the time broke through.

He saw Buscaglio in her tight, camel-colored skirt and high heels, pacing from the witness stand to the jury box, pausing now and then to turn and point a red-tipped finger at him. “This is the man!” she declared dramatically, wagging a talon at his face as if accusing him of...
 
what? Murder, rape, mayhem? All eyes followed that accusing finger, fastening on Jonathan in harsh judgment. Pens scratched and the eyes of the artists shuttled from his face to their pads and back again. Was there enough innocence in the world to withstand such scrutiny, or was any man lost who received such a look, questioning all that he was?

Unprincipled, she called him. She called him worse things, invectives far more stringent than the relatively mild “unprincipled,” but none of them hurt as much. Jonathan prided himself on being a man of strict principle.

The interpretations of his principles had evolved over the years, as was only natural; but to the principles themselves he had steadfastly adhered, and at no small cost to himself. He was proud of the job he’d done, the balance he’d struck between public duty and private obligation. Of course, from time to time he’d been forced to compromise; that was the nature of politics. The important thing was that he had nothing to be ashamed of. Circumstances change, needs change. At twenty-five, Jonathan had needed nothing that could not be carried in a rucksack; now he needed rather more.

Did that justify Buscaglio’s calling him, as she did, “a greedy, luxurious man”? And looking at him with a contempt that reminded Jonathan of the looks on the faces of the whites who had lined the streets of Birmingham screaming, “Niggers! Coons! Commie kike bastards!” as the civil-rights demonstrators marched by.

That look cut through Jonathan’s fog like a bullhorn. The odd lethargy that had come over him the moment he entered the courtroom fell away, and he started to rise; but Christopher Leeds’s fingers tightened on his arm. He murmured, “Don’t let her get to you.”

Jonathan sat back and glowered at Buscaglio, who taunted him. “Venal,” she dared call him; but to accuse Jonathan Fleishman of venality was to rob the word of meaning. Buscaglio knew, they all knew, that what he earned in the public sector was a fraction of what he could have made in the private. Even in his present position, he could have grown rich ten times over if he’d made that his priority. Instead he’d turned down countless opportunities on ethical grounds. Jonathan knew, however, that this defense, the true one, was useless. Like his wife, the law gave no credit for temptations resisted.

He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Buscaglio’s ferret face, her red mouth and nails, faded from view. When he opened his eyes, he was back in his study. His glance fell upon the framed family photograph that stood on his desk. A beautiful portrait, marred by Gracie’s patented I-know-what-I-know look. Jonathan looked her in the eye. “I know who I am,” he said, and immediately felt stupid for talking to a picture; but who else was there to talk to? Michael was gone.

She answered back, perverse, unreasonable child:
You know who you
were.

He said: Do I have to give up everything? Does choosing public service mean taking a vow of poverty? I never said I was bucking for sainthood. All I wanted was to lead a decent life, do some good, and provide for my family. And haven’t I done it?

You went too far.

Yeah, well, let me tell you something, sweetheart. In the real world, money counts. It buys education. It buys opportunity; and if it doesn’t buy good health, it sure as hell buys good health care.

Money isn’t everything.

Try living without it. And why
should
I deny my talent for making money? I never sought it; it came to me. I happen to possess the ability to see clearly into the heart of a business, to gauge its soundness: financial dowsing, you might call it. I don’t need books, I don’t need accountants. I’m like one of those witch doctors who operate on the heart without opening the patient’s chest. And why not? In this world some men are born with money, others with good looks. I have a small gift; is it fair, is it reasonable to ask me to renounce it? Do we ask judges to put out their eyes, that justice may be blind? Do we demand that doctors catch their patients’ diseases?

It’s not the same.

It’s exactly the same. Go away, Gracie. Leave me alone.

* * *

When word got out that Roger Hasselforth was buying, Maxie’s was mobbed. Not only
Probe
staffers but also reporters from the
Voice
and the tabloids gathered to celebrate Barnaby’s coup by drinking Roger’s booze.

At the epicenter of the milling crowd stood Barnaby, pleasantly drunk, his arms around two nubile young (but not too young) copy-girls as he argued amicably with Jack Flora. Barnaby had no time to cultivate deep friendships, but he had plenty of the collegial variety, spiced by rivalry. Jack Flora, formerly of the
Probe
but now an editor at the
Post,
was his oldest and closest friend of that species. Flora, sucking on his pipe, was saying, “A week’s a lifetime, man. You try filing daily and see how much investigation you get done.”

“Excuses, excuses,” Barnaby said.

“Besides, far be it from me to denigrate your work, my friend, but it’s not like you carried the tablets down from Mount Sinai. For a long time everyone but you knew Fleishman was corrupt; the man left fucking dinosaur tracks.”

“So how come no one ever followed them?”

“Fleishman was mentioned in dozens of
Post
stories just this past year.”

“Mentioned.” Barnaby sneered. “Why didn’t you really go after him? Oh, excuse me; you were busy tracking down nasty restaurant inspectors who take fifty-dollar bribes.”

Flora’s reply was cut off by the rhythmic tapping of a spoon against a glass. Standing beside the bar (tended for the occasion by Max Horowitz himself), the
Probe’s
editor-in-chief raised his glass. “Ladies and gentlemen, I propose a toast to my respected colleague Barnaby, whose relentless quest to rid this city of its parasites has resulted in today’s arraignment of Jonathan Fleishman.”

“Hear, hear,” cried Ronnie Neidelman, plastered in a corner.

“Many of you know that Barnaby and I have had occasional little set-tos.” Roger paused for effect. “All right, occasional knockdown, drag-out brawls. This is due to no shortcoming on my part, but rather to the stubborn, intransigent, obsessive personality of my reporter.”

Laughter and catcalls rippled through the room. Barnaby bowed. Roger continued:

“Paradoxically, ladies, gentlemen, and members of the press, the very qualities that make Barnaby such a despicable human being also make him a superb reporter. This is a sobering thought, and I hope that those of you who are driving home will bear it in mind as you start your cars. Barnaby is the pit bull of reporters, a journalistic piranha, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor.” Barnaby raised his hands in modest protest, but Roger went on. “He is the last man I’d want on my trail if I had something to hide. Champion of the weak, defender of the oppressed, nemesis of the corrupt—”

“Hang on, Roger, wasn’t that supposed to be
bane
of the corrupt?”

“I think ‘nemesis’ is better. You see what I have to put up with, people? The man cannot take editing.” The room reverberated with lubricated laughter. “Let us raise our glasses,” Roger concluded, “and drink to the health of Brother Barnaby.”

They drank. Several people shouted, “Speech! Speech!” but they were outnumbered by others who yelled, “Forget the speech, bring on the booze!”

Barnaby raised his arms, and silence fell. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. We have gathered here, not to bury Fleishman, but to praise Barnaby. Before the revelries begin, however, let us take a moment to reflect. To quote the great American philosopher Pogo, ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’ If there is one lesson to be learned from this miserable Fleishman affair, it is that we can take no one and nothing for granted. We must scrutinize our friends with the same critical eye we turn on our enemies, ever alert for the telltale signs of hypocrisy.”

“How about scrutinizing yourself?” Ronnie heckled from her seat in the corner.

He raised his voice to drown her out. “Let us drink to the memory of a man once respected and loved by us all, a man, once, of valor and principle, King Arthur in the court of progressive politics. His prospects were bright and nearly unlimited. When a man falls from such a height into the pit of corruption, it is a tragedy in which we all share.”