The Family Tabor Read online

  He had stared out at the admirable view he would be leaving behind, postcard-perfect amidst the swirling storm that was gathering power, would become a blizzard, would drop eighteen inches by morning. Then he wrote out his resignation letter, packed up his office, and drove home to Connecticut.

  As he inched the car up the snowy drive, windshield wipers on triple time, his house came into view, lit windows spreading buttery golden light into the storming night, and he thought how he would miss the great old place, its untamed and rambling grounds. It was the kind of place a Mayflower scion might have inherited, but he’d acquired it for a song out of the bankruptcy of perhaps one of those old Mayflower families, whose providential fortune had finally trickled to nothing. But so things went, things were given and things were taken away, and he straightened his shoulders and walked through his front door.

  Roma was in the living room, and Harry heard their daughters playing a game upstairs, Phoebe’s six-year-old voice commanding, Camille, at four, heeding.

  He mixed a pitcher of martinis, and when he handed his wife a glass and said, “Drink,” Roma raised her lovely dark brows at him and stared into his eyes as she took a first sip. He drank, too, quickly draining his glass and refilling, then topping hers off and taking a seat on the couch. Roma sat down next to him, her thigh taut against his. Then she turned to him and said, “Tell me.”

  He told her everything: his misappropriation of material, nonpublic information not passed to him specifically but overheard, and although he had violated at least an imputed duty of trust, he had not otherwise been foolhardy, he had confirmed the ferreted information before deploying it, but with confirmation came deployment, serious deployment, all the arbitrage plays he had made, the unbelievable balance that was piled up in a pseudonymously named bank account in the Cayman Islands.

  In the movie the dry voice is showing him, he watches Roma tilting her head, sees himself bowing his own, hears himself saying, “I did it because I wanted to be one of those to whom the rules don’t apply. The big guns, the men I manage who live on the interest their trust funds throw off, who have freedom because of their unlimited resources, they treat the stock market like sport. To them, it’s the field, the diamond, the pitch, the slope. It’s competition, a scoreboard, runs at bat, a shimmying ball through the hoop. It’s not mortgage payments and college funds, but a black-diamond ski run, and I wanted to ski that hard and that fast, as if I, too, was born possessing all that natural ability, all that they have. I wanted a little of that freedom, or rather I wanted to feel, for a little while, what that kind of freedom felt like. Would food taste differently? Would I walk with an altered stride? Move faster, stand taller? I thought of my father’s stride, how it slowed over the years, how he grew stooped from the weight of watching his nickels and dimes. I was stupid and reckless. I forgot my parents’ sacrifices, ignored the danger I was putting us in, lost my gratitude for this life we have, a life others would wish for.”

  How could he not have remembered any of this?

  Stay focused, Harry. Watch.

  And he watches himself looking into his wife’s eyes, seeing her rapidly absorbing this untenable information, this confession of his. Her thoughts are hidden from him, but when it seems she might speak, she hesitates, takes a very deep breath, then a very deep sip of the icy martini, then another very deep breath, and finally says, “I assume you have a viable plan to get yourself and us out of this mess.”

  And he remembers his heart unclenching when her words did not end on an uptick, when there was no question mark finishing her sentence. His single nod was heavy and certain, because he did have a viable plan.

  The plan that had come to mind as he steered his way out of snow-covered Manhattan that night: Palm Springs. Not long before, he’d read an article about how that movie stars’ retreat, so fashionable in the fifties, was no longer fashionable, was instead scuffed at the heels, was a city that had lost its imagination, its pulse, its way. And he’d thought that such a place could hinder his imagination, rein in his unforeseen larcenous impulses, eliminate his unanticipated smashing of the rules.

  And he remembers saying to his wife, “Yes. I’ll divest myself of all the money and we’ll move to the desert.”

  That’s right, Harry. But what you can’t recall because it’s locked away in your unconscious is this:

  That you thought it would be better to live on flat, scorched, dusty land that unconsciously reminded you of a place secreted away in your genetic code, a place where you had never been, nor given any thought to going.

  He can’t process what the voice is telling him, because he is staring at Roma, who is saying, “Only if you get rid of every corrupt dollar, Harry.”

  And he had agreed.

  But then?

  But then what?

  Come on, Harry.

  Oh my god.

  Right.

  The very next day, I revised that promise. I knew I needed to keep a small amount as our setting-up funds—for the purchase of a house, for the daily needs of our family, for her practice, for whatever I might choose to do out there—just enough to see us through. And I didn’t tell her.

  Your first lie by omission to Roma. Keep going, Harry.

  Then I tried to donate all the rest of the money, the bulk of the money. But it was impossible. Absolutely impossible. Every 501(c) organization had complex paperwork I couldn’t outsmart. I couldn’t provide a paper trail proving where the money had come from and not a single charity would accept even a dollar.

  And so?

  I can’t.

  You have to.

  I kept everything I’d illicitly made, along with the ever-aggregating interest. And hid that fact, too, from my wife.

  Yep. Your second lie by omission. What were you thinking then?

  That I had to do something to make everything all right. If I couldn’t get rid of the money, I would use it to do good. And I made a vow to myself that I would execute this new strategy with the noblest of intentions.

  And that noble intention became—

  That noble intention became CST.

  He wants to cry, to sob, to curl up on the court and die in the sun.

  I can’t continue. I cannot continue.

  Fine, Harry. I’ll tell it.

  A week later, you listed your gracious manse with a real estate broker.

  A week after that, you and Roma held a yard sale, selling everything off. You kept only the photograph albums of your wedding, of your honeymoon in Spain, of your trip to Greece, where Phoebe was conceived, of your trip to France, where Camille was conceived, and of the passing of quick years marking the growth of your family, the artwork made by your daughters, clothes appropriate for blazing desert days, cold desert nights.

  A week after that, you sold your cars. You made a tidy profit on your Jaguar XJ, selling it for three thousand more than you paid, that two-year-old silver paint job worth every cent, the way the car’s mercury curves morphed into the missile dimensions of a rocket or a bullet. The fake-wood-sided family station wagon in which Roma ferried Phoebe to kindergarten and Camille to nursery school and herself to her office in a quaint old building in your smallish town you sold to the first poor schlub who came around, handing over the title and keys for the proffered hundred dollars. You didn’t even balk when you stood in the car lot and selected a new white Dodge Caravan, which you thought appropriately named given the circumstances, and for which you paid cash.

  In the first month of nineteen eighty-seven, when everything was done and dried, and the girls and the suitcases, one for each family member, and the four boxes of keepsakes were inside the minivan, nestled and warm, with snow drifts piled high and the sky threatening again, you drove your family away to the new life you were envisioning amidst the rocks and the sand and the snakes and the salamanders and the hard saguaros blasted in the sun.

  Although only four weeks had passed since you ground your blue-suited knees into the office carpet, that some other fo
rce had provided you with an answer to your prayers was something you would have scoffed at, had you thought about it. But you never once thought about it. You never once gave credence to the idea that your words had been heard, and that every action you had taken since that stormy afternoon was because your prayers had been answered. Instead, you were certain that what was seeing you through to the other side, where life again would be honorable and worthwhile, had only to do with your inherent and inherited will to survive, your courage and strength to make the tough decisions to save your family, and even, you thought, perhaps wrongly, yourself and your soul.

  All of that was thirty-one years ago, and buried so deep inside of you, Harry, that your memories of that time have long been erased; it is a point of fact that you erased those memories intentionally and deliberately. You commanded yourself to forget, and forget you did. You bifurcated your life, cut all ties, jettisoned the creeping fear of doom, the claustral notion of a fateful fall, cast away friends, colleagues, colleagues who had become friends, every totem of your prior identity and stockbrokerage success—the handmade suits, the collection of silk ties, the fancy car. You left behind the market, the market makers, the increasing infractions gaining public attention. You canceled your subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, to Barron’s, never again read the financial pages, automatically turned the radio dial when marketplace reports came on, turned off the news before you heard any announcer say, “Today on Wall Street.” The move from East Coast to West, a thorough contextual change, was the final piece that completed your intentional forgetting. Gone were the dark crowded streets you once walked, the autumn rain and winter snow you were used to. Instead, you were in an unknown place where the foreign light was unique, and the vistas, fresh to your eyes, held only the present and the future in vivid sunshine. You brought nothing with you from that abnormal year when you took actions at odds with your character, and the warped philosophy you had temporarily embraced fell permanently away. The eradication of those particular memories was easier than one might expect: you had spoken of what you had done only once, to Roma, and then never again, and there was no informational rush, no overload, no load at all, to remind you of your past: the world was not yet wired, it would be another decade before barely twelve percent of Americans were using the World Wide Web, and you yourself would remain unwired for much longer than that. If a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine existed back then, the limbic system in your brain would have reflected the magnitude of the neural changes in all that gray and white matter—proof of your total inability to recall that particular shameful time. When you began life anew in the desert, the future became everything, the only thing, and since then you have believed you have always lived an endless sequence of perfect days. You don’t think in these terms, Harry, but if you did, you would say that all of your years, all of your family’s years, thus far, have been enormously blessed.

  These are your obliterated memories, Harry.

  My obliterated memories. Dear god.

  On Monday, I couldn’t remember why I started CST, and now you’re telling me that my calling, what I’ve done for the last thirty years, was my solution when I couldn’t donate the money.

  Yes, Harry.

  All this time, I thought we made a considered decision to change our lives, to find a place that was hot and sunny and different from where we’d grown up. But there was no thoughtful decision, was there?

  No, Harry.

  I was fleeing, and Roma and the girls came with me.

  Yes, Harry. You’re lucky Roma loved you enough to not abandon you, but her decision, made neither lightly nor easily, was predicated upon what you promised to do.

  And I didn’t fulfill my promise.

  That’s between you and Roma, Harry. And I’m sorry to say, but there is more for you to remember. Tough stuff, too. And when you do remember, when you reach deeper into that secret vault you hid from yourself, you’re going to have to decide whether you’re entitled to any Man of the Decade award, and you’re going to have to figure out how to atone, truly atone, this time.

  Truly atone? How is he to atone for the fact that the life he thought he himself created, that he has been living all of this time, is based on heinous actions he took and carried through? How is he to atone for the fact that he has lied to Roma for most of their marriage, and that he has lied to Phoebe and Camille for most of their lives, and to Simon for all of his life, even though he had been unaware he was lying at all?

  What else is there for him to remember?

  Isn’t this enough? It is already more than he can possibly handle.

  I promise you this, the rest will come to you. Finish your match, Harry, which you ought not to be playing today anyway, considering it’s Shabbos.

  He cannot finish this match. The weight of his newly recalled treachery is twisting his guts, bearing down on his shoulders, and the exhaustion that overwhelms him is so complete that holding his racquet in one hand, the tennis ball in the other, is too much. Much too much. He drops his racquet, hears it rattle and settle, drops the ball, watches it roll to the net.

  Levitt rises from his crouch, hurries across the length of the court, to Harry’s side, says, “You’re ghostly pale.”

  As ghostly as Harry’s forgotten past, as his ancestral cantor beckoning him into that forgotten past.

  “I don’t have anything left in me.”

  “We’ll call it a heat break,” Levitt says. “Pick up where we’re leaving off next week.”

  Moving his feet is nearly impossible, his body as heavy as if encased in concrete. What else can there be for him to remember? What other wrong has he done in his life and conveniently forgotten about? The dry voice had said, I promise you this, the rest will come to you, and he hears it now for what it is: a threat in his ears, a noose around his neck.

  SIXTEEN

  DURING THE FIFTEEN MINUTES Simon has allotted, the Tabor siblings wander and find themselves laughing a lot. In the parking lot, the laughter bubbles up again when they discover they have chosen spots near to one another, and grows louder when Elena waves and calls out, “I was about to unbuckle the kids and go searching for all of you.”

  “Sorry, we were looking for a gift for Harry,” Simon says, which makes Phoebe start laughing, and that makes Camille start laughing, and then Simon is laughing again, too. And then Elena starts laughing because they are all laughing and she manages to say, “I don’t understand what’s so funny,” and Simon says, “Because we didn’t look very hard,” and Camille says, “We didn’t look at all,” and then Lucy is yelling from inside the SUV, “Let us out, let us out,” and Elena pulls open the back door, and out pops Lucy, who runs to her aunts, calling in a high-pitched voice, “Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hugs and kisses, hugs and kisses, hugs and kisses,” and then Isabel is yowling even though Elena is already releasing her from the restraints of her car seat. Hanging on tight to the purple tutu, limp in the hot, still air, Isabel ricochets between her daddy and Phoebe, before shyly approaching Camille, whom she hasn’t seen since May, at Harry’s seventieth birthday party. She holds out the tutu to Camille, who lifts the girl up, presses her close, showers her small face with kisses, saying, “I’ve missed you so much.” Isabel nuzzles close to Camille and then says, “Down, down.”

  Elena embraces her sisters-in-law. “Camille, you look great. Phoebe, where’s Aaron?” and Phoebe’s gaiety drains away, her heart snagging on itself, and in that split second, as she’s readying her now-standard response, her siblings say in their own ways, “He couldn’t make it because of work,” and Elena says, “Oh, too bad. Next time.”

  “Absolutely,” Phoebe says, and when Elena doesn’t inquire further, she feels her jumpy blood calming, knows then that once she clears the hurdle of Roma, the weekend is going to be fine.

  “Are we ready to go?” Simon says, and Lucy whoops and yells, and Isabel, watching her big sister, mirrors her actions, and Simon and Elena both say, “Enoug
h,” and then they are shepherding the girls back up into the SUV, back into their car seats, saying, “We’ll be at Savah and Sabba’s really soon.”

  “I’ll text Mom,” Camille says, and as she extracts her phone from her pocket, she, like her older sister, feels her jumpy blood calming. Typing, The Tabor children and the two who are third generation, we’re all on our way, she is aware of an abnormal, unpredicted tranquility. Perhaps because they first met here at the mall, perhaps because she has engaged in uninhibited laughter, in short supply these days, but whatever is responsible, she’ll take it willingly. How strange to have driven all these hours in a suspended state of confusion and fear, and now, at the beginning of this family gathering, to find herself happy. On so many visits home, she has functioned as the anthropologist, the participant-observer of the coalescing Tabors, applying Malinowski’s cardinal rule of fieldwork—to see reality only from the natives’ point of view—but now she wants only to immediately reintegrate into her animated family, to take her place as an integral member, for their realities to mesh. Have these last months of ministering to the dying freed her from the restraint she usually exercises with her family? Her need for a requisite period of reentry is entirely gone, and the sensation is a wonder, a restorative, a nearly euphoric pleasure to experience these new feelings of hers, to sense that they will last, that the weekend is going to be fine.