My Father's Wives (10 page)

Mother stared harder over her glasses. “What I think you need to decide for yourself, Johnny, is who you are trying to figure out. Your wife? Your father? Or yourself? You cannot live your whole life pretending your father didn’t exist
and
be obsessed with him at the same time. You need to move past him in your own mind so you can begin to deal with what
really
matters in your life, which is your marriage.”

Before I could respond the buzzer sounded. Mother rose and pressed the button on the intercom. “That’ll be the cleaning lady,” she said.

She went to the door and I remained at the table, finishing my croissant. She was right. I needed to figure myself out before I could confront Claire; perhaps that was why I hadn’t been able to do it already. But to figure myself out I first needed to come to terms with my father. The trouble was, I had no idea how to do that. He was gone
and he wasn’t coming back. I felt hopeless and crestfallen as I finished the last of my latte, and received little comfort from the sounds of the locks being opened, the familiar clicks and clacks of my childhood.

BASKETBALL THAT DAY WAS
no different than any other.

I had just sent an e-mail to Claire explaining that I had slept soundly and felt markedly better when Bruce ducked his head into my office. We met on the court as we always did, we played hard, he won. Nothing out of the ordinary. When we were finished we sat on the bench, drank water. I had almost forgotten the previous evening entirely until Bruce slapped me on the thigh with a sweaty palm. “You have a good time last night?”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks for everything.”

He waved away the gratitude. “We’ll do it again.”

“Hope so.” I took a long sip of the water. “You leaving town today?”

“Going to see Helen’s family in North Carolina, her parents’ fiftieth anniversary.”

“Nice.”

He wiped his forehead with a towel. “Yeah, it is.”

I started toward the shower. “Have a good time.”

“I will,” Bruce said, sounding in every way as though he meant it.

Then I was back in my office, drumming my fingers on the desk, staring at the pictures of my children. Phoebe age two, in a bathing suit on a sunny day, eating a chocolate Popsicle that had melted all over her face. Drew age eleven months, first swimming lesson, on his back in the pool at the YMCA, kicking his feet while I held him. Phoebe on a pony, Drew in a magician’s hat, the four of us at Disney World, Claire holding Phoebe in a tiny bundle the day we brought her home from the hospital. On the floor in the corner of the office was a plastic garbage bag with my wet clothes. I thought I would drop them off at a dry cleaner in the city rather than the one in Connecticut where Claire brings everything. I would pay in cash so there would be nothing
to trace to me. Or should I risk even that? Perhaps the best course was to throw the whole bundle in the trash after cutting off the monogrammed sleeves.

I shook my head, angry with myself for behaving as though I had committed the crime of the century. I hadn’t even done anything. Rather, I had done something but I hadn’t done everything, and when everything is offered and you don’t take it that feels much the same as having done nothing. So I was racked with guilt over an act I had turned down. It was like Claire always says about French fries: she loves them but doesn’t indulge, because while she is eating them all she is thinking is that she shouldn’t, and as a consequence she is disregarding her diet and not even enjoying it. That was how I felt, only in the reverse: I hadn’t allowed myself to take what was offered, presumably because I was concerned over feeling guilty, but now I was feeling guilty anyway. So what was the point of passing up the naked woman in the bathtub?

What I really should have been thinking about was my wife, and I knew it. I took my phone from the breast pocket of my jacket. The text Claire had sent the night before popped onto the screen.

I scratched my chin. I had gone through every e-mail in my inbox that morning, as I did every morning. There had been no pictures from Claire. I opened my inbox again and scrolled quickly through everything I had received, everything I had deleted. None of it had been from Claire, no pictures, nothing. As I clicked out of the inbox I leaned back in my seat and shut my eyes.

I knew I should have been wondering exactly where Claire was right then. But I wasn’t. Instead I was thinking of the only time I was ever in Washington with my father. I was eight years old. Mother
dressed me in a blue suit. Percy tied a tie around his own neck, loosened it, slipped it over my head, and pulled the knot to just beneath my chin. His hands were smooth and smelled of lime aftershave. We sat together in the back of a limousine, his hand on my knee. The radio played the news headlines of the day. We made two stops. The first was at my father’s office on Capitol Hill, where he introduced me to his secretary, Christine. She told me I was a handsome young man. Percy asked her: “Are we confirmed with POTUS?” She said we were. Then we were in the car again, driving across the city. We had to pass multiple layers of security to enter the White House. The guards all looked very serious until they saw my father. Outside the Oval Office a red-haired woman was talking softly on the phone. She smiled as we approached, held up a finger, and mouthed the words “Is that your son?” When she hung up the phone she pressed a button on her desk. A uniformed military man appeared from behind an open door. The red-haired woman asked him to show my father and me in, and she ruffled my hair as I passed by. I took a picture with President Carter. He and my father laughed easily together. When we left, the driver was waiting with the engine running. He drove us back to the apartment where my father lived when he wasn’t in New York. Mother was waiting and we went for dinner in a fancy restaurant. I was still in my suit. Percy ordered steak, so I did too. It had begun to rain when we left the restaurant but Percy said no one ever died from a little rain so we walked back to the apartment. By the time we arrived my suit was soaked, and so was Percy’s. But he didn’t seem to mind and I didn’t either. It was the last time I remember having dinner with my father.

I opened my eyes, and then my browser to Google. Slowly, I typed in two words.
Sweetwater personal
. I had read it a million times before. It had always seemed like all I needed to know. Now I wasn’t so sure.

There was a time the Sweetwaters were among the wealthiest families in upstate New York. The family ancestry could be traced
to Jacques Claude Laidet, a French physiocrat, who emigrated to the United States during the French Revolution. He settled outside New York, where he married the scion of a wealthy manufacturing family, Edith Waters. The family assumed the name of Sweetwater and settled in Rochester, where they made an even greater fortune in agriculture. Percival Sweetwater I, the grandson of Jacques and Edith, moved his family to Manhattan during the Second Industrial Revolution and founded a financial firm that grew into one of the most successful in early Wall Street history. By the time of his grandson’s birth, the Sweetwater fortune was valued at over forty million dollars. The Great Depression staggered the Sweetwater family, but still, Percy inherited a sizable fortune and never wanted for money
.

He began his career in politics while still in his twenties and was fond of saying: “It’s a good thing I was born rich, because I’ve never worked a day in my life.” Upon his death, Percy’s estate was valued at fifty million dollars, of which he left most to his favorite charities. The remainder was distributed among his six wives, though details were never made public. He also left an unknown sum to his only son, Jonathan, who refused to attend the reading of the will and asked that his inheritance be donated to various charities of his mother’s choosing
.

That was, in brief, the story of my father’s life and, in some ways, of mine as well. Now I was thinking perhaps I needed to know more. About both of us.

Back to Google, I again typed in two words.
Sweetwater decisions
. I knew what would come up. Everyone knows the quote. But I wanted to make sure I had it exactly right.

“A nation,” said the majority leader, “is not a living being, nor is it a collection of beings. Rather, it is a collection of the billions of decisions that have been made in our history and all those
decisions that are to come. We, as a people, will leave only one mark on this planet long after our time, and that mark will be the sum total of all the decisions we make.”

My father spoke those words while touting his voting record as a member of Congress, and that phrase
The sum total of the decisions we make
became his political calling card; his autobiography was titled
Percival Sweetwater III: The Decisions We Make
.

I opened the speaker on my phone and punched in my mother’s number.

“Hello?”

“Mother, it’s me.”

“Good grief, Johnny, what is it now? Yvette vacuumed up all my incense again and I’m late for my shrink.”

“Of all the books written about Percy,” I asked, twirling a pencil between my forefinger and thumb, “which is the best?”

There was a long pause; if not for the vacuum I would have thought we’d been disconnected. Then she sighed. “Sweetheart, you aren’t going to find your father in any of those books.” There was melancholy in her tone. “They write about his career, the brilliant politician he was, his ability to make people comfortable in his presence. All of that is accurate but he was a good deal more complicated than he wanted the world to know. I’m afraid the time to know Percy has come and gone. You need to accept that and worry about the people who are still here.”

“Did they interview you for the books?”

“One of them did, but I didn’t tell him anything. Like I said, your father was too complicated for that. You can learn what the man did from books, but you can’t learn who he was.”

The next question was one we had assiduously avoided my entire life. “How about the others?”

“No,” she said, “as far as I know they didn’t interview any of them either. Most of those books are old; I think he was still only on the doctor at that point. Long before the model for sure.”

My father’s wives. Much like the man himself, I knew what they did but I didn’t know who they were.

“Maybe I should talk to them,” I said.

“Good luck with that, sweetheart. I don’t even know where they are.”

I let the pencil fall to the desk. “I think I know someone who can help with that.”

I hung up the phone and took a long look at the photos of my family on the desk. When you spend your entire life running away from something it may not matter where you go, but even so you eventually get there. Right then, right there, I arrived. I dialed another number, heard it answered on the first ring. “Cranston and Associates, this is Lowell.”

“Lowell, it’s Jonathan Sweetwater. I know you told me not to reach out but this is not related to the matter we discussed in your office; this is different. I would still like you to continue with the previous matter, but now I have something else entirely to discuss, a little bit more complicated, but I believe it will be right up your alley.”

There was a lengthy pause. I couldn’t even hear him breathing. “Hello?” I said.

“Yes, I’m here.” His voice was curt, dismissive. “I’m sorry, whom did you say this is again?”

“It’s Jonathan Sweetwater.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know anyone by that name. I would appreciate if you do not call this office again. Thank you very much.”

And he hung up.

FORTY MINUTES LATER, WITH
a light sweat dampening my shirt collar, I was staking out a detective in the lobby of his own building. I couldn’t stand outside for the pouring rain so I pretended to use my mobile, pacing in circles inside the revolving door while rain-soaked businessmen shook out umbrellas on the clean white floors, leaving damp footprints and streaks of black and gray.

My thoughts were jumbled and mostly incoherent, but the one I
kept coming back to was that now I had literally lost my mind. I should have been on the train back to Connecticut, to figure out my marriage and everything I truly valued. Instead, I was standing in the lobby of an office building hoping for a freak of happenstance.

A woman was smoking a cigarette directly outside, and every time the door revolved the whiff of smoke enveloped me. It was a filthy smell, made my aching head feel worse. I could see her lips moving between drags; she was talking to herself or to someone else in her mind. People who talk to themselves are either angry or crazy and she had to be angry; she was dressed too well to be crazy. Her fingers shook as they lifted the cigarette to her lips, and her entire life flashed before my eyes. Ditched by a man she loved deeply, perhaps this very day, and now she was rehearsing what she would say when she saw him. And I realized, as her trembling fingers went to her mouth again, that my father was right. This woman, like all of us, was the sum total of the decisions she had made. And what she was saying, in a voice so low even she could not hear, was all the things she wished she had said before. When people speak to themselves what they are really talking about is all the decisions they wish they could make over again. But they can’t, of course. And neither can I. We are all the sum total of our decisions, and when we have chosen poorly there isn’t anything more we can do about it than stand alone in the rain and complain.

“Mr. Sweetwater.” I spun around. It was Cranston, in a tan raincoat over a dark suit, close enough I could shake his hand without extending my arm. “I thought it was you,” he said softly. “I was trying to catch your attention from across the way. You seemed preoccupied.”

“I was,” I said. Finding Cranston had been my intention, yet the sight of him added to my anxiety. “I tried to call you.”

“I told you not to,” he said. “I did suspect it was you but I cannot be too careful. I promised you complete discretion and that is my personal guarantee. What can I do for you?”