White Man's Problems (14 page)

***

As the elevator transported me to my floor, I saw the alternatives, clear and unconfused. You may share an office, a bed, or a dorm room, but you don't share a coffin. I had done my time sheets for March, and I knew where Pasadena was. My hangover was gone, and I was ready for a beer. Amy and Andy were out, Joyce's clerkship would end, and no longer would I wonder if Connie had really spoken to me. I was safe, and if I wanted to, I could be safe for the next forty years. More than one door was open, and I could be as sincere or as sentimental as I wanted to be. Life would be good here in LA, far away from the East, New York, and Rothbart.

I walked back into our office. Rothbart looked up, dying for the news.

I stared at him. “You know, Oscar, I always wanted to ask you something.”

“Yeah? What?”

“What was it
like
for you at Yale, you pussy?”

Miracle Worker

I.

E
liot Stevens started each day with the obituaries. As his sixties took hold, he came to understand that his preferred sections of the
New York Times
changed with the stages of his life: he had jumped straight to the sports pages as a boy, grew into the headlines at Colgate, fought with the op-eds during law school at Columbia, and settled into the adult life of a New Yorker with the “Business Day” section every Monday through Thursday and “Weekend” on Fridays. Saturdays the paper was of very little import—it was leaner, and there were errands to run. Sundays were an altogether different business, a block of work that could not be knocked out in one sitting. Now, though, he was firmly in a new part of life. He went right for the daily bios of the freshly dead, which could be found behind the stocks, near the crossword—on Tuesdays with the chess. The obituaries were his quotidian launchpad, a strange kind of comfort food he took in from the breakfast table in his townhouse on Eighty-Fourth Street just off of West End.

The stories were a part of life hidden in plain sight. It was as though Stevens, after years of walking past Mexican restaurants, found tacos a revelation. He had never paid proper attention to the spice and flavors of the obituaries. He became a connoisseur of their specialty composition with all its moving parts. He savored the blunt headlines: “Dick Clark, American Entertainment Entrepreneur, dead at 82” and “Sumner LaPlante, Invented Corrugated Insulation.” He evaluated the choice of photograph—whether the still of a soldier posed in silhouette in uniform or the publicity shot of a long-forgotten TV actor with a fedora and a .38 from a lesser police procedural of the 1960s.

Stevens analyzed the tactics the writers used to make each article seem original regardless of formula. He took a special pleasure in the longer pieces by master craftsmen like Albin Krebs, who would tease out the lead highlights and a quote or two and then smoothly double back to the obituaries' beginnings. This device was especially fun when the subject was an immigrant who had adopted an Americanized name. Krebs would announce the sad passing of, for instance, ventriloquist Willie Friedman, who was famous throughout the Poconos in the fifties and sixties, and then detail the showman's impressive longevity, making special mention of the delight audiences took in the dummies. With readers hooked and settled in with coffee and bran muffins, Krebs would take a storyteller's pause before continuing like so: “Walter Meryce Ferndhayl was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1921…”

Stevens knew, of course, that his increased attention to obituaries meant that part of him was dealing with big issues. But he was confident he was maintaining an objective sense—it wasn't all introspection and mortality. The paper seemed to be telling him to think about the brevity and arbitrariness of life and about change and loss. In an era when most news was consumed online, the quirkily styled signature pieces spread before him in newsprint represented a time when tastes were our own. The people who were dying off—the inventors of saran wrap and the Barbie doll and the apparently endless number of marines who had shot dozens of Japanese on Guadalcanal—were hardening day by day into symbols of what America used to be. In death they became objects, their earnest lives now complete, leaving the world that much less substantial.

He saw the obituaries as a victory lap for the subjects—their last bit of ticker tape—and as fundamentally
good
things, especially when regarded alongside their journalistic shadow, the death notices. Like the side of the graveyard reserved for prostitutes and gangsters, the death notices were relegated to the lower half of the facing page and had a want-ad type size and font. The citizens of the death-notice ghetto—even the nonagenarians whose families could afford the eulogies of five hundred words with their recitations of every prep school and homeowners' board and not-so-veiled anger that the subject had been denied a proper journalistic send-off—had been adjudicated to have not accomplished enough, at least as far as the coldhearted
Times
' obit editor was concerned, to make the grade. No matter whom you were, you could not manufacture a life in reverse that deserved to be obituarized. Something
special
, almost miraculous, had to have happened in your life.

There was no definition and no clear guidelines. The specialness could have come in an instant, like it did for Bobby Thompson, when he hit a home run against the Dodgers in 1954, or it might have developed over seven decades, like Daniel Bell's intellectual engagement. Whether one rated an obituary was an easy call for Stevens once he became an
aficionado
. The qualification process reminded him of Justice Potter Stewart's famous take on pornography: “I know it when I see it.” The chosen were of a class.

The only corruption Stevens could find concerned the city's oldest families. Every so often, a Whitney or Astor or Blaine descendant of no particular note would sneak in. Staying vigilant for this subspecies was like bird watching for Stevens. High-end sightings were delicious—they combined sober respect for the family's part in building Gotham with grisly details of falsified estate plans forced upon fading dowagers. Stevens would catch these gems and say to Maribeth, “Have to hand it to them,” in reference to the dolts who had never worked a day in their lives. “They have something.” Invariably, he received no response—Maribeth tried not to buy into what she considered a grim and melancholy hobby.

Like anybody, Stevens sometimes thought about whether the
Times
would print an obituary about him. He doubted he would make it much further than the
Carlton Tribune
, the local paper of the northern Pennsylvania town where he had grown up. He imagined the piece would mention that his father was a once-prominent doctor without, hopefully, intimating that the family hit upon hard times when the fortunes of the town declined. Any piece on Stevens would certainly mention his scholarship to Colgate, where he was a member of the eight-man sculls for three campaigns and graduated with honors in rhetoric, and that he became a lawyer, joining Mason Tate & Gathers in 1979. The ideal obituary would skip over the fact that he was rejected for partnership and instead would laud him for starting his own solo practice and maintaining it out of the same office on the twenty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building from 1985 until he died. Perhaps he would draw a compliment—maybe even a friendly quote from another attorney—about his tireless work as one of the legion of hardworking lawyers who had disentangled the mess around ground zero after 9/11.

As predictable as the form of a sales agreement, any story of Stevens' life would recite that he would be survived by his lovely wife, Maribeth; their son, Alex, a doctor (the medicine-man gene, like baldness, had skipped a generation); Alex's wife, Jennifer, also a doctor; and their little boy, Nicholas. And that was about it. He had done nothing notable to justify inclusion in the record as a standout. Stevens told himself that was just as well—that it didn't mean much to have been the author of cola jingles or a member of Meyer Lansky's crew. He imagined Maribeth would take out a small remembrance for him in the notices, maybe even mentioning his fondness for an orderly desk, collar pins, and—this would be her sense of humor—reading aloud the names and ages of the newly deceased from the paper in the morning.

As he looked out at the rain over Riverside Park on a gray day at his breakfast table, a death notice, lengthy even by the indulgent standards of the wealthy, jumped out at him:

BROWNING—Sr. Robert Joseph, 92, Wall Street legend, retired partner of Allderdyce & Allen & Co., World War II veteran, leading philanthropist, humanitarian, mentor, cancer survivor, heart attack survivor, miracle worker, longest-living member of his generation, devoted husband of the late Mary Browning, beloved father, grandfather, great-grandfather, brother, and uncle, of Greenwich, CT, and Palm Beach, FL, died peacefully at home surrounded by his family on April 24, 2012. He was an inspiration to all who knew him. Born in Manhattan, Robert was the fourth of six children of Franklin E. Browning and Lillian Gertrude (English). He graduated from Trinity School in 1934 and received a BS in theology from Harvard University in 1938 and an MS in economics from Yale University in 1939. He joined the venerable investment bank Allderdyce & Allen before enlisting in the navy in 1942. Upon his return from the war, he rejoined the firm. He became a senior partner in 1964. He had an extraordinary professional career filled with accomplishment, but he was most proud of his philanthropy. He served as a trustee of Harvard University from 1971 to 1978. He was the president of the Collegiate School Board of Trustees from 1972 to 1977. He served as governor of the Society of Mayflower Descendants in the state of New York and as president of the Sons of the Revolution in the state of New York (1967–1969). He will be best remembered for his sixty-three-year marriage to Mary, who died in 2008. He is survived by his adoring children, Marie (C. Ferguson) Paine of Fairfield, CT; Virginia Doherty of NYC; Robert (Minnie Van der Veldt) Browning Jr. of NYC; and Gregory (Jane Timmings) Browning of Harrison, NY; sixteen grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren, with another due in July. A Mass of Christian Burial will be offered at the First Presbyterian Church, 55 Stockbridge Street, Rye, NY, on Sunday, March 15 at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, friends are strongly encouraged to make donations in his memory to Presbyterian Family Services, 1011 First Ave., New York, NY 10022.

II.

C
arole Lee Bingham had the job the moment she walked in—strode in, really—to Stevens' office in the late nineties, announcing herself with her hand out firmly for a shake. For seven years thereafter, she was a crack-bang worker, starting out as his secretary and rising to the position of office manager, though her duties only changed insofar as there was an expansion in the range of small tasks the ever-fastidious, self-reliant, and grindingly precise Stevens would allow her to do. The Binghams were a prominent Georgia family, which, while thoroughly proud, did not appear, from the mosaic pieces thrown out in conversation over years of office proximity, to remain thoroughly rich. Like most Southern girls, Carole Lee's deferential and capable manner made her more attractive than other women. She was curvy with pretty, long brown hair—about 75 percent of a knockout.

Sexual attraction to women in the office place was never an issue for Stevens, who was as straight about straying as he was about punctuation in correspondence, but he wasn't so buttoned down that he didn't recognize Carole Lee's gifts from front to back. He found something about her a bit jaggy—there were little glimpses of craziness—but he cast off these things as imperfections rather than flaws, chipped paint rather than cracks in the foundation. Her frantic phone calls with her mother were about ten yards past the flag, and it seemed bad taste in men had been passed down through the Bingham women to Carole Lee. But she was devoted to Stevens, and he knew she admired him and respected his practice. He was disappointed when, standing where she had stood so many times to ask him how many copies of a lease he needed or to tell him who was on the phone, she revealed she was taking another job involving a vague opportunity for promotion at an investment bank. He was sanguine about it, though; secretaries came and went, like sport coats and golden retrievers. A few would stand out, but all would inevitably go away. They both moved on.

So it was a surprise when she called on a Monday morning three years later and asked if she could stop by.

“Eliot, I am so sorry to bother you…” she said at his doorway.

“Don't be silly,” he said, motioning to the chair in front of his desk. “Come in, come in.”

Once seated, she smiled and looked around the office. “How's Maribeth? And Alex?”

“Great,” he said. “We have a little grandson, you know.” He showed her a picture. “He is six months today.”

“Oh my God, Eliot, that's wonderful. Congratulations. How precious.”

“Yes, it's great, I have to say. Amazing, the simple things. How about you? What's up?”

“Well,” she said and let out a big breath. “Speaking of babies…” She gave her lip a little bite. “I'm pregnant.”

“That's fabulous,” he said. “I didn't know you were—”

“I'm not.” She set her hands out in warning. “This will take a minute to explain.”

Stevens had not known much about the job Carole Lee had left him for, but it turned out that she had joined Allderdyce and that, by virtue of moving to a big company, her life had become much more social. She moved into an apartment in the West Village and commuted downtown. She filled her time out of the office with trips to the gym and happy hours of margaritas and chips at bars with names like Carramba. “Flirting with all those bankers and lawyers in their yellow ties,” she said, and then she wound her way to the present. “His name is Tim. He's married. Very hooked in—his father and uncles and cousins all worked at Allderdyce. His grandfather is, like, a legend there.” Stevens noted she had picked up on the mythologizing so prevalent at major companies. It fit her loyal nature. “Tim's office was kitty-corner from me. Over time, well, you know how it goes. He would come and talk to me at my desk nearly every day. Then we got to e-mailing. Flirting, really, is what it was, truth be told. We ended up having an emotional affair for months and months. But eventually he left the bank, and we lost touch.”

“An emotional affair?”

“Yes, that's what they call it.” She showed an endearing quality at moments like this, down in the nuance.

“Go on.”

“He asked me for a drink out of the blue three months ago. He said he'd reached the end with his wife. She is a shrew—we all worked together at the bank. She's, like, this international finance whiz. Her parents brought her here from Russia when she was—I don't know—twelve.”