White Man's Problems (16 page)

“Have you ever had your wife tell you she was pregnant with another man's child, Mr. Stevens?”

“No, and I can't imagine how bad you feel. I know it must be difficult. No one is saying it isn't a hard…Well, you know, this is really a strange conversation to be hav—”

“
How much
?” she screamed. “Tell me how much! Don't try to pretend you're my friend. Don't try to pretend you are doing something right. She has been after money all along—even as a little secretary, she was walking around the office and looking at the married men. You don't know about this bitch. And now you are the man with a hatchet. So again, I say, spare me, Mr. Stevens. You—
you
—need to tell her to do the obvious thing. There is one plain and simple and proper thing to do here, and we all know what it is. This little…
bitch
…is now going to change the life of a family. A big and proud family of many good men. Do you have any idea? I have a five-year-old child. What do I say to her?” She shifted from anger to exasperation. “This is where, honestly, Americans prove what they say in Russia. It is true. Everything done by lawyers.” She made a disgusted noise. “You know, you
could
help here. George says you are a good lawyer. You could fix this. This girl—she has no man. She has no father—no one to tell her what to do. You should be that person.”

“You're wrong.”

“But no, you won't do it. You want the money. You want the money from the family and from the businesses and from me and my husband—and the whole world. So fucking spare me. Tell me how much that piece of shit wants.”

Stevens hung up.

III.

D
uring idle lunch hours or when his meetings took him uptown, Stevens liked to wander in the fifties and sixties, just east of the park, looking at buildings. Reliably, he passed by the exclusive social clubs of the City—the Union Club, the Links Club, the Leash Club. When he was starting out at the firm, he thought he might join the Century Club once he made partner. But he gave up the idea when the elevation did not happen. He and Maribeth instead bought a cottage in Columbia County, and he devoted his weekends and the energy he had planned to use in life as a Master of the Universe to the Tennannah Lake Golf and Tennis Club and the Ancramdale Presbyterian Church.

After his call with Vera Browning, Stevens decided to take one of his walks. He took a cab to the park and drifted over to Madison and Park and then Lexington. He went by the Metropolitan with its flags and courtyard manned by a doorman in full battle regalia, a dark blue uniform and hat, maroon capulets, and other fringes. He floated into the midsixties, eventually meandering down Sixty-Sixth Street toward York. It had been a good life, this course he'd pursued. Certainly his mother and father would be proud of him, and he was reasonably sure Alex was as well. The City struck him now as a big grid, the Bronx uptown and the Battery down, two hundred streets divided longways by ten avenues, with tiny parks all around and a big one occupying the middle. There were stories everywhere—in every Korean grocery and Senegalese cardboard rip-off, around every Pakistani cabby and Queens housewife—but in the end each place and each person was a pin on the grid. Obituaries ran every day, on Tuesdays next to the chess; a few of the dead would be there, and everybody else would not.

His cell phone rang. He didn't recognize the number, but as a man trained once and always for the service business, he answered. “Eliot Stevens.” There was silence on the other end. “Hello?”

“This is Vera.” She was woozy—maybe even drunk. She spoke as though their conversation were just continuing, as though time had stood still while he wandered, as though they were in one of those movie scenes edited to show things happening simultaneously and in gaps, in the streets and in the bars, at intermittent spots throughout the grid.

“Look,” he said, “this isn't a good idea. We shouldn't deal directly.” He tried to be kind. “It's not…” He heard a sob. A trash truck went by, and he covered the phone. When the noise subsided, she was still crying. “Call George. It's not going to work this way…”

“All I called to say to you, Mr. Stevens…Eliot…whatever,” she said, pulling herself together, “is that you can tell your client that I will not bother her again. I'm sorry. Good-bye.”

***

With no other responsible course of action in sight, Stevens turned up the pressure on the Browning family over the next several weeks. He compelled Dandridge to provide a detailed list of all communications with Carole Lee and all test results and medical charges. He also negotiated for Carole Lee a temporary weekly stipend from Tim and procured a written guarantee that all her medical expenses through the birth would be covered. As the process between the lawyers ground on, the fourth and fifth months of Carole Lee's pregnancy passed, and Mother Nature,
Roe v. Wade
, and a vague sort of morality, which grew stronger with time, caused certain options to fall away.

Carole Lee showed up at Stevens' office unannounced on a Tuesday. She brought chocolate-chip cookies, a sign of domesticity Stevens did not remember in the years she had worked for him. As much as he wished she would unburden herself with her mother or her girlfriends, he showed only that he was happy to console her. He did not have his usual clarity on the relationship between his motives and his actions. While she ate one of her own cookies, he realized he had not told Maribeth about Carole Lee's mess because he could not articulate how he was approaching the matter—whether it was as a friend or father or dutifully or responsibly or just because, at bottom, it was a real juicy case against an exposed set of sons of bitches.

“You're not going to believe the latest,” Carole Lee said, rolling her eyes. “He called me last night to tell me he's had a change of heart and wants to be with me and raise the baby. He said he just can't take it from Vera anymore. She's torturing him day and night—insulting him in front of the kids and stuff like that.”

“What did you say?”

“I tried to be calm about it. I told him he needs to be absolutely certain. I can't go through this again—this seesawing up and down and never knowing.”

“Carole Lee, this is not a guy who seems to be in control of his own life. You need to be careful.”

“I know.” She fingered the sleeve of her sweater. “We sure as hell have learned that, haven't we?” She looked down at the carpet. “The only thing he said that makes me hopeful is he is going to dinner with his grandfather tomorrow night. I swear to God, I think that man is the most important thing in the world to Tim. He admires him so much. You know, he does seem like such an amazing guy. I wish I could just meet him. Just get a chance to talk to him is all. I mean, good lord, I
am
going to have his great-grandson.”

Stevens' eyes widened. “You found out?”

“Oh god, I forgot to tell you,” she said. She was smiling now—beaming. She moved toward him with her arms outstretched. “Eliot, it's a
boy
.”

What Stevens didn't have the heart to tell Carole Lee in his office on chocolate-chip day was that it would be a miracle if Tim did not let her down again before the weekend. And he did so like clockwork, via an email in which he reversed course. Carole Lee let Stevens know with a quick, embarrassed e-mail of her own. Stevens urged her not to get down and to that she was going to be a wonderful mother.

With the clock ticking increasingly loudly, the Brownings' firm relieved Dandridge and brought in its litigators. The tone of the e-mails and communications directed at Stevens became tauter and more threatening. The presence of the court lawyers on the file meant that Stevens really should turn the case over to a litigation firm for Carole Lee, but he dragged his feet because he knew she could not afford it. On the day he decided he could not put it off any longer, he returned from one of his walks uptown to a message: “Robert Browning Sr.'s office called. Wants to have lunch at the Knickerbocker Club tomorrow.”

IV.

G
eorge Dandridge tells me you don't usually deal with things like this,” the old man said as they sat. Browning was taller than Stevens had expected and wore gray slacks, a blue blazer, and deep-brown wing tips. His collar and the skin around his neck were looser than they might once have been, but otherwise he was dapper—well appointed, like a ship in a bottle on the desk of a seasoned man.

“He's right,” said Stevens. “Forgive me, but I want to be sure: are you ok with the two of us speaking directly? Without George here?”

Browning waved him off. “Of course, of course.” He handed the menu to Stevens, not needing one for himself. “We're the only club in New York still making an oyster stew, I believe.”

“Yes, I've been here a few times,” Stevens said. They were in the men's dining room on the second floor overlooking the east side of the park from Sixty-Second Street.

“At eighty-nine, Mr. Stevens, I am granting myself the liberty to speak without my lawyers. No offense, but it is faster this way.”

Stevens nodded. “None taken.”

The waiter appeared with glasses of water and bread and butter. In his white jacket and black bowtie, the short man had obviously been at the club for many years. Browning said, “How is it today, O'Hara? Are we keeping this place straight?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Browning,” he said.

The old man ordered the dover sole, peas, and shoestring potatoes. Stevens said he would have the same.

Browning got right to the point. “How long have you known the woman?”

“Quite some time,” said Stevens. “She was my secretary for seven years, actually.”

“You have your own shop?” Browning asked. His eyes were full of fluid and sharp like the blue yolks of runny eggs. “You worked with George?”

“Yes. But I left the firm twenty years ago.”

“This sort of case is not really up your alley, is it? You usually handle commercial matters, I suspect?”

“Well, that's right. But I do a lot of things. Corporate and real estate, mostly. George and I run into each other quite often.”

“Yes, he's told me all about you. I take it, then, you are handling this as a favor?”

“Are you asking me whether Carole Lee is paying me, Mr. Browning?”

“Certainly not.” The old man spread his napkin, elegantly refusing to be gainsaid. “I am asking you if you are representing this girl—who is claiming to be pregnant with my grandson's child—as a personal friend.” He paused. “And, I suppose, I am asking if the letters you've sent George Dandridge regarding the pregnancy were sent as a favor for a friend or whether they have been sent at an arm's length. I'd like to know this, Stevens—that's all. I wouldn't expect it to be a controversial question.”

“Mr. Browning, with all due respect, your grandson is the father of the child. George Dandridge is a very good lawyer, and he and—by extension—your family have put my client through quite a bit of strife. She has taken blood tests and ultrasounds. Carole Lee gave a sworn statement and produced hotel receipts. She had complied with everything—done
everything
your people asked—
before
she even contacted me.” He looked at Browning and, like a doctor bearing bad news, said, “There is no question of paternity, Mr. Browning, and I think you know that.”

“What do you want?” asked the old man.

“What are you offering?”

“No, I asked you what
you
want.”

“Sir?”

“Stevens,” said Browning, “don't toy with me and don't threaten me. You are not in a position to threaten me.”

“You have that wrong, Mr. Browning. You're not in a position to tell me not to threaten you.”

Browning stared back at him for a long moment as though he were thinking through an equation. Then he relaxed his face. O'Hara interrupted with their food, and they did not speak until he had gone away. “Eliot…” he said and then stopped. “May I call you Eliot?”

“Of course.”

“Eliot, I have a question for you: did you take this situation on for some kind of reason? Something inside of you?”

Stevens kept his hands folded on the table. “I don't follow.”

“Listen,” said Browning, “I don't know what you know about me, but I assume you have done your research. You should consider that I've done mine as well.”

“I think you are missing the point, Mr. Browning.”

“Oh no, I don't think I am at all.” The old man sat back but at the same time reached for his water glass, which he continued to hold throughout the conversation without drinking, as though he needed it to anchor him. His voice turned fatherly. “Look, I know what happened with you at the Mason firm, not making partner. Do you carry that around? All that weight of expectation for years and then all of a sudden having to grab your boots and set your sights more realistically? To move on from it to earn a living for your family? It is a hell of a thing to carry, you know. I admire a man who can do that.”

“That was a long time ago,” said Stevens. “I hardly think about it.”

“That's not what I see.” Browning hunched in. “Listen, are we talking like grown men? If your experience in life has been marked with a disappointment like that, take an old man's word for it that it's better to look at the other side. If not making partner at the firm is even partly responsible for your success, well, you should be grateful to it.”

“I don't know how we got off on this. This is not about me. This is about your son's obliga—”

Browning made a dismissive sound. “Please stop it, Eliot. This girl worked for you for seven years. You did not get to where you are by not being able to recognize a goldiggger when you see one.”