The Bill from My Father (13 page)

Richard “took to water,” as my mother liked to say. (High praise from a woman whose own swimming feat I'll get to later.) During the summer, he worked as a lifeguard at a public pool near Griffith Park. Perched in the crow's nest of a canvas chair, he peered through a pair of regulation sunglasses at the splashing pandemonium of swimmers doing laps and cannonballs while screaming kids in water wings bobbed across the chop.

By his freshman year in college, my brother had grown ruddy and muscular, sharp planes emerging from the baby fat of his face, the masculine angularity softened by long eyelashes. Wherever we
went, I saw women giving him second looks, or pretending not to. Because I first became aware of the ripple effect of adult desire in Richard's company, his body seemed to possess an elemental power that affected everything around it, like weather and light.

One summer, instead of working at the public pool, Richard placed an ad in the
Bel Air News
offering his services as a swimming instructor for children as young as three. My brother's middle name was Gary, and in a brilliant stroke of self-promotion, he billed himself as the Gary Cooper Swim School. The gangly, handsome actor of the same name had recently been nominated for an Academy Award for his role as a Quaker patriarch in the film
Friendly Persuasion
. My parents said that celebrities like Tony Curtis and Paul Newman contacted Richard under the assumption that the swimming school was sanctioned by the star, and when a tanned and enterprising young man arrived for an interview and instantly set the record straight, showing them his Red Cross water-safety certificate and a letter of recommendation from the Hollywood Department of Parks and Recreation, they introduced him to their sons and daughters and hired him anyway.

Everyone in the family began calling him Gary. My mother relished telling people her son had become the “swimming instructor to the stars.” Technically, he was the swimming instructor to the
children
of the stars, but I wasn't about to point this out and spoil her pleasure. I spent my Saturdays roaming over famous names engraved in the pink terrazzo of Hollywood Boulevard, and
stars
meant something entirely different to me than to my mother. Stars meant a walkable constellation strewn with crushed cigarette butts and wads of chewing gum. Stars were stepping-stones that led to the novelty shops where I spent my allowance on puddles of rubber vomit and sticks of trick gum that blackened the chewer's tongue and teeth. Stars decorated the pavement onto which lushes staggered from the Frolic Room, rumpled men and women disgusted by the sunlight. But if I took my mother to mean the lights pulsing in the night sky, if I convinced myself for even a second that my brother had instructed
those
stars to swim across the cosmos, then I understood
how splendid a claim she was able to make, and why she made it as often as she did.

In no time, Gary had earned enough money for a down payment on a Thunderbird convertible, shiny and green as a cocktail olive. The car made me and my other brothers jealous, and even our mother, who didn't drive, dreamily ran her hand along the dash. It took a lot to stir our father to a state of awe, but that summer, whenever he asked Gary, “How's Tony Curtis doing?” his voice betrayed such wonderment that he might as well have been asking if we'd landed on Mars. Mother never failed to add that Curtis's real name had been Bernie Schwartz—“changed by those movie moguls, just like at Ellis Island.”

“Was
our
name ever changed?” I asked.

“Of course,” said my father. “We're Americans, aren't we?”

And then he switched to another subject before I could ask him what the name had been. History moved forward in our house, rarely back, and making a point about Bernie Schwartz's origin didn't acknowledge a shared past so much as a shared future: Jews could be admired, Jews could be famous, Jews could be a force.

The few times Gary took me with him to Bel Air have blended together to form a single memory. I can plumb that memory for the faces and handshakes of the famous, but what is salient, what remains, is the narrow, winding hillside roads, the flawless box hedges and empyrean rows of cypress behind which stood houses whose grandeur, though hidden, was everywhere apparent. Sweet with the scent of jasmine, wind blew through our hair as the speeding T-Bird, low to the ground, took hairpin turns as easily as straightaways. Almost close enough to touch, the road glittered with bits of quartz as we sprinted from one address to the next. I was certain I'd entered the daydream my brothers had talked about when standing before the foggy bathroom mirror, but the sky above us was clear, the sky was glassy and factual. “I've made lots of important connections,” Gary shouted over the rushing air, “and after I graduate law school, I'm going to join Dad's practice. I've already got the clients, right?” What I said back is lost to me now, but this much I know: the flattery of being taken into his confidence, of being a peer in his sleek two-seater,
overshadowed any answer I gave. The drive couldn't have lasted long, yet we seemed to shoot through endless striations of sun and shade, sun and shade, every now and then the city flashing through a break in the foliage, a vista reaching beyond the Santa Monica shoreline and out to the curving rim of the Pacific before it was suddenly shuttered from view, lying in wait at another turn.

What satisfaction it must have given my father to know that he'd raised a commingler, savvy and charismatic. A born go-getter, Gary went and got. Gary was able to make the acquaintance of the famous with little of the self-consciousness about class and religion that haunted our father. My brother's self-assurance wasn't simply a matter of temperament, but a birthright of the indigenous
: I am here and always have been
.

If our father had undertaken a mission to recruit any of us into the legal profession in general, or into his practice in particular, this mission was unspoken. I never got the impression he cared one way or another what I did for a living; just about any profession was fine except for the pipe dreams of painting or writing. As far as I know, each of my brothers arrived at the decision to join the firm without being coaxed or pressured to do so. Our father wasn't the kind of man who easily expressed, or even recognized, his need for approval (need equaled weakness, and weakness undermined a man's authority), but he was pleased by his sons' wish to emulate him, and his pleasure, though fleeting, fed their devotion and encouraged them further. Because my brothers' desire to work alongside him predated me, I assumed the inclination was innate, a genetic tendency I didn't share. That is, I didn't share their calling to law, yet each of us was captivated by our father's mercurial moods and fluctuating sense of justice, and together we shared the apprehension that our future was somehow bound to his.

By 1961, all three of my brothers worked at the Spring Street office. The
Herald Examiner
's coverage of my father's cases had been a boon to his practice, and the waiting room teemed with people. Gary, then twenty-four, and Ron, twenty-six, had graduated from law school at the University of Southern California and, seemingly
overnight, took occupancy of two small offices in my father's newly renovated suite. Those offices may have looked small only because they were furnished with identical desks (graduation gifts from our father) massive enough to take up half the space and confer instant status on whoever sat behind them.

The roster stenciled on the office door—

Cooper, Cooper & Cooper, Attorneys at Law
& Cooper, Private Investigator

—announced a troop of Coopers who specialized in untying nuptial knots as fast as the marriage bureau could tie them. So quickly, in fact, that marriage seemed like a rocky prelude to the stable, enduring state of divorce. The 1960s would be the last decade in which the California legal system required attorneys to present evidence of marital misconduct, and with Dad as their guide, Ron and Gary were inducted into a fellowship of faultfinders as old as jurisprudence itself.

Despite Gary's social graces and Ron's meticulousness with detail, our father assumed they'd joined the practice not to contribute their skills, but solely for the benefit of his mentorship, a condition that went into effect the moment they sat at their desks. That the desks were too big for the rooms was a reminder of our father's expectations, the foremost being that his every expectation would be met. Having three grown sons as partners in his law firm served as an advertisement for his personal magnetism, a public endorsement for the Solomon-like wisdom with which he settled disputes, that is, with which he fought to divvy up community property and win visitation rights. As the senior partner and biological top brass, my father felt free—obliged, in fact—to admonish Ron and Gary for any strategic weakness they displayed in court, even when the cases were decided in their favor. This was especially true, Ron once grumbled, when there were other attorneys within earshot, my father stentorian while his peers were watching, then mute and brooding when the audience had gone. Ron and Gary were thought of, and began to think of themselves, as boys with briefcases, unable to voice an objection
unless they were prepared to suffer through a cold spell of our father's disfavor.

My brothers quietly complained to each other that, because they were thought of as novices, our father assigned them cases where little was at stake. They listened to the myopic squabbling of couples who didn't have “a pot to piss in,” as my father described certain clients' financial circumstances, and wasted days on claims so small that the spouses who made them seemed trivial too, misers dividing grains of sand.

The tensions of apprenticeship might have come with any new job, but there was more. No matter how scrupulously they tried to avoid the specifics while talking in my presence, I picked up hints that our father was guilty of some deceit, and that my brothers' revised vision of him threatened to obscure, perhaps forever, the man they thought they knew. Years later I'd learn that, one afternoon, Gary had walked in on our father just as one of the firm's ever-changing array of secretaries, who'd been kneeling between his legs, quickly drew back from his lap and ducked beneath his desk, thinking she hadn't been seen. This alone would have been awkward, but my father quickly rolled his chair to the desk's edge in a halfhearted effort to conceal her. He continued to talk with Gary as if nothing happened, his hands calmly folded atop an ink blotter. “Should I come back at a better time?” Gary stammered. “Now,” said my father, “is a better time,” meaning that successful indiscretion has neither a before nor after. The whole thing might have been comical had my father not locked Gary in an icy stare, daring him. Meanwhile, the temp huddling beneath the desk was afraid to breathe and give herself away, unaware that a split-second pact had been established and it hardly mattered now if she sneezed or giggled or typed a letter; her presence was not only known but forgotten.

My brothers joked about a number of such incidents with a bravado born of discomfort.
Dictation, pro bono
… one double entendre followed another. But humor couldn't ease the responsibility that came with the knowledge of our father's affairs and the
pressure to keep them secret from my mother and me. Dad was drawn to womankind, and also to a game of brinksmanship. He flashed his women like stolen jewels. He wanted his sons to be dazzled. He wanted to leave them speechless.

At the time, all three of my brothers were dating women they were crazy about, and it would have been in their best interest not to tell them about our father's infidelities, which might have caused their girlfriends to wonder if straying was a tendency passed from father to son. Had my brothers or their love interests been anything like the hippies who gathered on weekends at nearby Griffith Park to play guitars and dance half naked, infidelity wouldn't have been an issue; they'd have looked upon monogamy as a middle-class hang-up that kept my parents from … well, from doing pretty much what they already did: dad practicing “free love” with a kind of communal exuberance, mom transcending her helplessness through a strenuous meditation on housework, the immaculate bathrooms reeking of bleach, the bedsheets spitefully bright. As it was, my brothers and the women they were courting wanted a marriage similar to that of my parents', minus the problems, which wouldn't have left much but the license itself.

The nights my brothers brought girlfriends home to have dinner and meet the family were as nerve-wracking as test flights or dress rehearsals. The clatter of iron skillets and Pyrex casserole dishes, thudding oven and cupboard doors, announced the approaching hour. Judging from the sound alone, my mother could have been remodeling the room instead of cooking dinner in it. She believed that the success of the evening, and therefore the marriages of her sons to their prospective brides, and therefore the happiness of her nonexistent grandkids, hinged entirely on the tenderness of her beef brisket or the firmness of her Jell-O mold. Better to labor under the illusion that it was she who was responsible for the evening's repercussions than to acknowledge that the outcome lay mostly in my father's hands. Not that he made any special effort in the way of preparation—his primary role was to turn on the porch light so the date didn't “break her neck on the steps and slap me with a law-suit”—but
even after knowing how important a certain girl was to one of my brothers, Dad's reaction could go either way.

Despite the number of times he'd heard judges instruct jurors to base their verdict solely on the evidence presented, my father's judgment of the girlfriend in question snapped shut like a bear trap the second they met. When he'd made up his mind to dislike a girl, which happened all too often, given the pressure put on him to like her, he'd welcome her inside and then greet her every remark with a repertoire of gestures that were relatively benign to the uninitiated but signaled, to those in the know, impending rejection: