All the Dead Yale Men (2 page)

“Something smells funny,” I said.

“A leak in the cellar,” said my father. “Faro and I were just talking about his thesis. The movement of Argentinean capital in crisis years . . . ”

“Oh,” I said. “I'll get a drink. You want me to call a plumber?”

“That's OK,” said my father. He closed the folder. “I'll do it.”

In the kitchen, the voices sounded like a fly buzzing against a window, or two flies, one bigger than another. What kind of answer was I going to get about the money, given the nature of the discussion in the other room? The truth? Was I such a child as to expect that?

In the living room, Faro and my father sat back now, business done, Faro telling a story about a woman who was “cutting a swath” through Buenos Aires.

“I'll catch you another time,” I said.

“It's best to call first,” said my father. “You know. We have a lot of students writing a thesis at this time of the year.”

“Sure, sure,” I said. “Good to see you, Faro.”

“It's always an honor, Frank,” said Faro. He stood up and bowed. Or did he click his heels?

This, of course, took place years ago, as I said, when my daughter, Pia, was just a kid, but my father kept at it right along. Now she is graduating from Yale, and she came in to see me recently with a thick letter from Harvard Law. This part of the family seems hardwired, although, to be honest, that was where my trouble started. I tried to keep the hardwired part of it going.

Still, years ago, I had heard this conversation about conditions in South America, and in the modern age, my father
thought it was a great idea to train and arm the Taliban to fight the Russians but couldn't see further down the road to what might happen after the Russians went home. Whenever my father and I talked about a politician in, say, Bolivia, who was causing trouble, my father always said, looking into the bottom of his Negroni, “You could always shoot him.” Then he rattled the ice. “I don't mean we'd do it ourselves. You know, just encourage the right people.”

“Right people?” I said.

“Well, Frank, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but ‘right' is one of those words like an eel.”

“It means something to me,” I said.

“No kidding?” he said. “Well, let's put the case, Frank, that you can save ten men by killing one. So, what's it going to be? Are you going to let ten men die for your sweet ideas about things? Isn't it time you grew up?”

“You mean growing up means killing people?”

“I wouldn't put it just like that,” he said. “Not exactly. I'd include a little wiggle room in there. You'd be surprised how important wiggle room is.”

“What if I'm not interested in something like that?”

He rattled his Negroni, as though it was a gourd in a primitive ceremony.

“When I was in prison camp, the best didn't make it. And you know what? They weren't interested in wiggle room, either.”

“I'd like to think I would have made it,” I said.

“Do you think so, Frank?” he said. “It comes at a price. And you pay interest on it. Every year.”

On the night before the high-speed chase, I called my father and said, “Look. I need some advice.”

“Jesus, Frank,” said my father. “You must be in deep shit if you are going to ask Chip Mackinnon for advice. Have you put the
Mackinnon rules to work? Number one: never put someone in a position where they can say no to you; number two: if you are applying for a job, don't ask what the employer can do for you. Explain what you can do for him.”

“It's more complicated than that,” I said.

“No shit,” he said. “Well, come on over tomorrow evening. My Latin American students are going to come over to my house for a piñata party.”

He gargled on the phone. I guess he was having a big drink of his Negroni.

“I'll give you a little word of advice, Frank,” he said. “It's Chip Mackinnon's third rule. I've never mentioned it before. But this is it: the truth is a dangerous substance.”

SOMETIMES IT IS
all a muddle. Or, maybe it is better to say that I have discovered some rules, too, and one of them is that events, particularly trouble, don't come with an even distribution, but in clumps, as though one large event has a gravity that attracts others. And so fifteen years ago, I didn't give up on how my father was cheating me. But this refusal to give up just proved out my own first law.

I am a lawyer, a prosecutor, and I used to think I was a good one. As I said, Harvard Law for me and my father, Chip Mackinnon, an apprenticeship in a law office in Michigan for my grandfather, Pop Mackinnon, which apprenticeship he never forgot and always wanted to disguise, as though his bourbon nose, his politics, his desperation to be loved, even when he was in his sixties, were signs of where he came from and how he was
never going to escape it. If only he could have remade his history after he had turned forty, although I hesitate to imagine what a gaudy story that would have been.

My grandfather practiced customs law, and my father didn't do much at all except fritter away the money my grandfather had managed to get his hands on. I didn't want to use the law to avoid responsibility, as my father believed, but to use it to make a sort of order, which I thought of as a variety of beauty, at least in the beginning.

“Prosecutor?” said my father. “I paid for Harvard Law and you're going to be a prosecutor? What kind of money is there in that?”

“I thought you wanted me to do the right thing,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “It sounded like a good idea at the time. That's why I gave you every conceivable advantage. And now the birds have come home to roost.”

Then he got tears in his eyes, told me he loved me, and began a story about the WWII prison camp he had been in: how he made liquor from Red Cross raisins.

So, fifteen years ago, I had started in. The first thing is that my grandfather, Pop Mackinnon, had a different idea of what a gentleman was. This, of course, just shows how antiquated he was and how much things have changed. Who, these days, talks about being a gentleman? Some of us don't use the word at all, and we try to do the right thing, but we keep our mouths shut.

My grandfather thought that a gentleman should have a farm, and so he bought a place on the Delaware River, about two hours from New York. The land was sixteen hundred acres with a farmhouse, two barns, a fish pond surrounded by a fieldstone edge in front of the house. My grandfather built a stone house there, too, down in the woods, and my father always sat in it, at the hunts he and I organized, with an expression that showed that the stone house had been built for my father's brother, a
man my grandfather loved more than him, who had been killed in the war. So my father had inherited the farm and this stone house for the sole reason that he had survived. And sometimes I think this sense of not being loved is the key to it all.

His land also had a small greenhouse where Alexandra and I had gone when we were first going out together. A stream with brook trout ran in a ravine not far from the house, and around it the land supported deer, a bear or two, foxes, bats, wild turkeys, ruffed grouse, and copperheads. All of these creatures had been written about by my grandmother, Mrs. Catherine Mackinnon, in a series of notebooks. Of course, when I knew my father was cheating me, I thought these notebooks might give me a clue, a hint, something useful to use against him.

Well, the first thing is that Mackinnon's third law is damn right. The truth is a dangerous substance.

There weren't sixteen hundred acres anymore. My father had sold a thousand acres to the Girls Club of America, although, my father being the lawyer he was, he retained the rights to hunt the Girls Club's land and to use the original farmhouse, the one his father had owned, to store things he had no place for. From time to time recently the Girls Club complained about precisely where the property lines were, and other things, too, like a bear who spent most of his time on my father's land but who also liked to get into the Girls Club's garbage and to scare those girls from New York City and Philadelphia, who had always thought bears existed only on the Nature Channel.

So, when I was an assistant district attorney and wanted to find out how I was being cheated, I drove from Cambridge, where I lived, to the farmhouse, where my grandfather's things were stored in the attic. My grandmother's notebooks were a good place to start, particularly because of all the Classical Mackinnon's Laws, the most intense was this. My grandmother may
have been secretive, but in her notebooks she never told a lie about anything. Ever.

At Hartford I got on 84 west and started the long drive to that piece of land that my grandfather had owned and left to my father, who more and more was oppressed by it, and even though he went there every year to hunt deer in the fall, and brought me along, and even though he felt it was his charge to hang on to the place, he was having trouble doing just that. The taxes were going up. People vandalized the buildings when he wasn't there. And so, I guess, that explained some of the motivation to keep money that should have been mine. As I say, it wasn't the three hundred dollars. It was the principal of something being violated between father and son, particularly when the cheating seems to be a sort of extension of some cheap CIA trick.

Close to Port Jervis, the Delaware Valley stretched out in a floodplain with five shades of green and that gunmetal mist beneath a sky that was a little pale, but still reassuring, as though all this was harsh but not unforgiving. Then the road went through Port Jervis, where the last business still thriving was a bathing suit factory. Even as you went by it you could feel the injustice, the wrongness of the fact that heavy, cold women sat in an enormous room to sew bathing suits all winter so that young, thin, and beautiful women could wear them to go to the beach.

The maples were in full leaf, full of moisture, shiny, the promise of them so keen as to make me think fall would never come. The lichen was copper-colored, green and flaky, on the stone walls that lined the fields. Here and there a deer flashed a white tail and disappeared, its coat that late spring gray. The turn to the gate was a hard left, and under the canopy of pines, the air smelled damp and ominous. The ponds came into view, and
then the house with white siding and black shutters, the pond in front, surrounded by a stone lip, the water as still as fate (at least while it was hidden), the surface marked here and there by an insect that hatched with an anxious rush.

The house itself was of medium size, with white siding and black shutters, and had a porch that went around three sides. It was here that my grandfather Pop liked to sit and drink a mint julep and tell jokes that even today I would hesitate to tell to someone at work. I stopped in front of the house.

My shadow on the porch of my grandfather's farmhouse looked as if it were cut from a silky fabric dragged up the steps. Of course, we had the right to use the attic for storage. But still, I had qualms. Fathers shouldn't cheat a good son, but because someone is dead didn't make me free to dig into her most private secrets.

The farmhouse door opened with that sigh of recognition, as though it had been waiting, or so it seemed, all along. What had taken me so long? Of course, if you are frightened enough everything seems to revolve around you and to make you feel important. I guess it is this that saves you from panic.

The stairs creaked, too, just the way they did when my grandfather and grandmother lived here and when my father had grown up here, at least when he was home from school, and the way it did when I was here for vacations, too. Then I emerged into the hall upstairs, and off of it, here and there, were the doors to the bedrooms, which the Girls Club had made sterile and sad: all single beds, as though this place, so dedicated to young women, was training them to be alone.

The bulb in the attic made a stale light. And there, among the old bureaus and rugs that smelled of dogs, in with the rack of suits, all good tweed from Scotland, next to those lamps made of bamboo and the chairs that had come from a furniture designer's
notion of what an Anglo-Indian outpost would look like (my grandfather loved this look: if he could have imported tigers for us to shoot instead of deer, he would have done it in a minute), was the chest. Made of canvas. Leather corners and straps. Old brass buckles, so tarnished as to look like time made visible. The top of the trunk had a little pouch for a card, and my grandmother had written on one that had been white but was the color of yellow teeth, “Catherine Mackinnon.”

She had kept notebooks all her life, mostly devoted to the animals she had seen around the farmhouse and on this land. Here, in those leather-bound notebooks, were her descriptions of animals, written at the depths of her loneliness and despair, animals she had described so accurately and with such love. Her books were written in an ungraceful hand, although a neater, crisper script was there, too, just a page, but my grandmother had kept it.

Her discipline was obvious, her refusal to give into her despair as she wrote these things: it was a tensile strength that hung there in the dust of the attic, or in that zone where I now existed, in the musty stale light between the living and the dead.