The Last of the Savages (27 page)

It took more than an hour to get a connection; after being disconnected once and auditioned by three successive secretaries, I was about to hang up when a piercing squawk came over the wire. It wasn’t until I heard Cordell’s voice that I recognized the duck call. “Is this Patrick Keane, Bachelor of Arts, Member of the Bar, late of New Haven and Cambridge?”

I told him I hadn’t actually passed the bar yet. When he heard I was leaving London the next day he chastised me for not calling earlier and insisted I come for dinner that night.

Arriving in Eaton Square promptly at seven-thirty, I was greeted by a butler who led me to a room which exactly answered my notion of a grand London townhouse library, except for the tattered Confederate flag over the mantel where one would have expected the Gainsborough portrait. Cordell appeared as I was examining the volumes in the shelves. Still daunting, he hadn’t aged since that Thanksgiving almost eight
years before. I had almost forgotten how aggressive his casual scrutiny seemed, though he shook my hand warmly.

“I read your thesis,” he said, after the butler had brought us our drinks and I had capsulized my own recent history.

I was shocked. I certainly hadn’t sent him a copy. “What did you think?” I managed to mutter, running my fingers nervously over the etched ridges of the crystal tumbler.

“Crock of shit,” he said cheerfully. “I think maybe you should have been a novelist instead of a lawyer. Basing everything on the scribblings of old Binnie Pilcher and Dr. Freud. I knew Binnie. She was crackers, completely out of her tree. One story crazier than the next.”

“She would’ve been ancient by then.”

“Older than the flood.” Then, after we had complained about English food, and the weather: “Have you seen Will?”

“I see him from time to time.”

“And?”

“He’s doing well,” I ventured. “He’s got a new distribution deal for his record—”

“I know all about his career,” he snapped. “I’m not without my sources, and any idiot can hire a clipping service. I’m asking you about his soul.”

This was not a word you expected to hear on Cordell Savage’s lips, and I almost said so. I was inclined to the belief that he’d relinquished his claim to this kind of intimacy when he left Memphis with his eldest son’s fiancée. But I’d made my pact with Cordell many years before.

“His vices and virtues are almost indistinguishable,” I offered. “The qualities that have made him so successful will probably kill him.” I was deliberately striving for effect. “He’s driven in every sense of the word.”

“And you blame me,” he said without inflection.

I shrugged and took a sip of my scotch. I didn’t particularly like scotch, which was one of the reasons I drank it—this practice keeping me temperate. “You have more in common than he’d care to admit.”

“Let me tell you something. My eldest, whom you met—I guess I favored him. I don’t say I was right. But there you have it. He was everybody’s golden boy. I’m afraid I placed too many of my hopes on his
shoulders. I expected him to carry on the family. You never expect you’ll have to bury your own children. I hope you’ll never know that pain, Patrick.” He took a deep breath.

“The youngest—well, I was all wrapped up in business when A.J. came along, and his mother raised and spoiled him and turned him away from me. I don’t know that the genes were at their strongest proof in his case. But Will …” He paused and sipped his drink. “I knew Will was bright. Real bright. And he had that orneriness you often see in second sons, the irritation at finding that someone else had come down the road before him, having to compete for the love of parents that a first child takes for granted.”

He emptied his drink and pulled on a cord which summoned the butler. Once the servant had replenished his glass and left us alone, he resumed. “I wanted him to be his own man. And to do that he had to overthrow me. That’s the way it’s always been with fathers and sons, even before all this youth revolution stuff, before we’d ever heard of a generation gap. Isn’t that right? Can you tell me honestly that that’s not part of your story—of who you are now? Didn’t you sit down one day when you were a boy and disown your father in your heart?”

I drained my own drink to cover the rising blush.

“But you didn’t have to pull very hard against your old man,” he continued. “You’re not really angry with him anymore. He’s not as big a tyrant as me and that will limit how hard you push yourself and how far you go. I made it easy for Will by making it hard on him. Made it easy for him to hate me. Will’s a champion, a producer. It’s the same as with bird dogs. You got your spaniels, your setters and your pointers. Your spaniel works close, you keep him within ten, twenty yards. He’s a good, hardworking dog. He’ll find anything in that range and point it or flush it, depending on how he’s trained. A spaniel will make a pet, you can let him indoors, let the women and children fuss over him and not ruin him for birds necessarily. He wants to please you; he finds the birds for you. Then you’ve got your setter, who likes to work farther out, range around the countryside a little, cover some ground. Some people keep setters in the house, some kennel ’em.”

The butler returned with fresh drinks, spiriting our old glasses away on his silver tray.

“Then you got your pointer. You don’t want to coddle him and he doesn’t want to be coddled. You don’t bring him in the house. He’s a working dog. He lives to hunt. You need a horse to keep up with a pointer. Your pointer’s a wide ranger, works way out there, sometimes that dog is working half an hour’s ride ahead of you. But he finds twice the birds the other dogs will, and he’ll hold a point all day if he has to. But, make no mistake, he’s doing it for himself. He doesn’t give a shit what you want. He’s working, buddy. And Will’s like that. A.J, I knew he’d stay close to home. And Elbridge could do it all, he was an all-purpose champion. Or at least we thought he was. But Will’s got that restless drive. Will, you wouldn’t want him sleeping in the bed with you. I was tough as hell on the little bastard and it worked. I gave him that drive.”

I looked up at him, amazed at this rationalization.

“You think I’m bullshitting you?”

“You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t have some doubts yourself,” I finally answered.

“You’ll make a fine fucking little lawyer,” he said, smiling.

It was too easy, his little retrospective, and I was not about to absolve him on Will’s behalf. “I don’t think you need to explain yourself to me.”

“What about his love life,” Cordell asked. “I suppose he’s just fucking like a tomcat, now that he’s free of that …” In deference to my sensibilities, I think, he left the sentence dangling. “Free love and all that? Or will he settle down someday?”

“I doubt his views on marriage are very favorable.” I hadn’t exactly intended to sass him—as Cordell might have put it—but we both realized this was exactly what I’d done.

“I’m afraid his mother and I were ill suited from the start,” he said. “Could be I cared too much about her family—what she represented to me was somehow more real than she was. When we finally got to know each other …” He paused and looked into his ice cubes. “But if Will were to ask me now I’d tell him that marital bliss is an attainable state.”

It occurred to me that in his present bliss Cordell might be indebted to Will and his kind for unlocking the shackles of social convention; that he was, in a way, the surreptitious beneficiary of a revolt which he stridently opposed. But before I could pose the question he said, “Well,
I don’t suppose you have to be married these days to have children.” So, he was thinking dynastically. Breach or no breach, he wanted to continue his line, and Will was his only chance. He was afraid that Will would be the last of the Savages. I wondered if Will might deliberately hold the bloodline hostage so long as his father was alive.

I was not courageous enough to tell Cordell that I thought Will was still in love with Taleesha, that he would always be in love with Taleesha, and at that moment, fortunately, the first of the guests was announced. We went out to greet them. As I was introduced to the marquis and his wife, Cheryl appeared at the top of the curving staircase, arresting the conversation.

“Hello, darling,” Cordell called. She started down the stairs, watching the hem of her long dress and stepping tentatively from one high platform heel to the next, like a country girl not quite used to shoes. If she intended a glamorous Hollywood entrance, she didn’t pull it off—but she was more beautiful than ever. She greeted me shyly and looked down at the carpet when Cordell reminded her that we had met. I wondered if she remembered our morbid little grope in Memphis. In addition to my chagrin, I was prepared to feel disdain, but instead I felt sorry for her. She did not belong there, in that mansion or on that continent, and she seemed to know it even if her husband did not.

At dinner Cheryl was cautious and polite. As if nervous of making some faux pas, she spoke little, mainly answering queries lobbed her way by her husband. “I was just telling Bartholomew how much you love to ride. Isn’t that right, honey?”

Certainly the company was daunting to me, as it must have been to her—an expatriate American merchant banker, a Conservative MP, a playwright, their bejeweled and entitled wives. A pretty, irreverent blonde from Tennessee studying at the London School of Economics was provided as my dinner partner, and in attending to her I nearly forgot about my hostess until dessert, when Cordell tapped a glass with his fork and announced that his wife would perform for the company.

“No way,” I murmured.

“Oh, yes,” said my amused companion. “It’s a regular little feature of dining chez Savage.”

Cheryl withdrew, emerging several minutes later from behind a gold-leaf
screen in what looked like the same outfit I’d seen in Memphis, twirling a baton which was on fire, flaming at either end. Cordell’s recorded voice boomed forth over hidden speakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, Cheryl Savage, former runner-up Miss Kentucky, performs with the fire baton.”

A burst of music followed, a familiar patriotic march—Sousa, perhaps—which only increased my sudden discomfort at being an American. Cheryl’s diffidence and nervousness were gone. She circled the table, high stepping in her spangled boots and twirling the baton with supreme confidence, occasionally flinging it to within inches of the frescoed ceiling and then gracefully snatching it out of midair. Cordell nodded along to the thumping beat, smiling slyly. It was impossible for me to tell whether he was truly proud of her or whether he was having a laugh at her expense and ours. The other guests watched with frightened, rigid smiles.

When the performance was finally over, a faint sprinkle of applause soon gave way to an awful silence. “That was just wonderful, darling,” said Cordell, raising a glass of champagne to his child bride. Suddenly self-conscious again, she curtsied and disappeared behind the screen.

“Well,” said the marchioness to my left, who could think of nothing more to add.

“Indeed,” said the MP. “Quite remarkable.”

I took my dinner companion back to her flat in Kensington, and to my astonishment she invited me to stay. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, it was the seventies after all, and love was still rumored to be free. Or so I’d heard. For me the carnal arena was anything but carefree.

She didn’t give up easily, but like her forebears she was gracious in defeat. Such was her southern grace she nearly had me convinced that failure was the norm rather than the exception, that in fact it was pretty unusual, practically unheard of, for a man to achieve and sustain an erection which culminated in an ejaculation inside an actual living woman.

Lying in bed beside me as the rain fell in the garden behind her flat,
she steered conversation to our real point of contact, asking me about Will. She’d known the family all her life, and when she arrived in London Cordell had taken her under his wing, inviting her to dinners and the theater. When I asked if his attentions were entirely innocent, she laughed.

“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s a southern thing. He’s just taking care of me. Besides, he’s madly in love with Cheryl.”

The exhibition I had seen again tonight, she claimed, was also uncalculated. He was actually inordinately proud of her baton-twirling abilities. His friends and business associates indulged it as one of his milder eccentricities; still, I was inclined to the theory that he staged Cheryl’s performances as an elaborate way of pulling their legs, as a way of asserting control by throwing everyone off balance. As for Cheryl, I was told, she tried hard to fit in but was happiest in the company of her hairdresser, who traveled everywhere with her.

“He’s not a bad man,” my companion said. “Look at what he had to live down.” When I asked what that might be, she picked up the story that I’d first heard in the lobby of the Peabody one New Year’s Eve.

When Cordell was twelve, his mother had been charged with killing her husband, Will’s grandfather, who was found dead in his bedroom with a chest full of birdshot. According to this version she was acquitted on grounds of self-defense, her husband being a notorious alcoholic and bully. In Memphis and up and down the Delta, however, it was whispered that the son, rather than the mother, had pulled the trigger. She said, as if in partial explanation, “Delta people are kind of … extreme.”

Lying awake beside her that night, worried about making my flight the next day, I kept thinking about that long-ago morning in the duck blind, Will Savage silhouetted against a dawning pink sky, holding a shotgun aimed at his father’s head. And that is the image that sprung to mind when the police arrived at my office to question me about Felson. I was afraid that Will had finally pulled the trigger.

T
he shabby glamour of New York seemed all the more poignant to me as the city shambled toward bankruptcy. Having at last arrived in the capital of fresh starts, I worried that I might be too late. And yet I was reassured whenever I walked into the marble lobby of my downtown office, when I looked out from the thirty-second floor at the massed Constructivist mountains of the cityscape. On those rare weekends when I was not in the office, while others were strolling in Central Park, I walked up the limestone canyon of Park Avenue, peering into the emerald-canopied portals of metropolitan wealth, imagining my future. It was comforting to think that the city, like the edifice of the law, would survive me and all of its puny tenants. Perhaps this is why Will never liked New York—because he couldn’t dominate it. In any event I was only fitfully aware of my surroundings, regularly billing fourteen and sixteen hours a day. I gained a certain renown in the downtown legal community for once billing twenty-five hours in a single day: I had woken up in New York and flown to California, thereby adding three hours to the working day. Almost by accident, I found myself on the way to being a corporate lawyer. And while it had always been a lucrative field—more akin to investment banking than to the drama of litigation—it
became absurdly rewarding in the eighties, the wave of mergers and acquisitions showering us with fees and, eventually, with percentages of billion-dollar deals. But that was later.