THE MAX GROVER FOUNDATION FOR RECLAIMING LIVES.
“Sounds great. What is it?”
He dropped the pad to the table and ran both hands through his hair, pressing down as though he was trying to keep the top of his head from floating away. “It’s what I’m going to do. For Max, for everybody. You were dead right, you know. I haven’t done anything that was really mine. I’ve sort of floated along behind other people, like, do you know what slipstreaming is?”
“Getting behind a truck or something,” I said, “using its drag to pull you along. It’s always sounded like a dangerous way to save gas.”
“Well, that’s what I’ve been doing. Telling myself I didn’t have any gas, poor deprived little me, shortchanged at God’s filling station. Get into someone’s orbit, Max’s for example-I’m mixing metaphors-and use their velocity, their life force to sort of slip through the world. Trailing behind them like icebreakers.”
“Reflecting their light,” I said, “as long as we’re mixing metaphors.”
“Sit down,” he said, clearing papers from the couch. One of them was a stapled bundle on white bond covered from edge to edge with angular black handwriting. He laid it on the table and dropped the others to the floor with a thwack.
“Here’s the idea,” he said, plopping back down as I sat. “We’ll institutionalize what Max did, but on a bigger scale. We’ll get kids off the street, gay, straight, I don’t care, and we’ll put them up in apartments and fill their refrigerators with food, on one condition: They go to school. It can be college or night school or vocational school, whatever they want, but they have to keep going. If they drop out once, we arrange counseling. If they drop out twice, they get a warning. Third time, boot ’em, use the money on someone else.”
“This is your idea?” I asked, sipping Robert’s coffee.
“Of course not,” he said. “It’s Max’s idea. Oh, I mean, the details are mine, and I thought of the name-do you like the name?” He looked away, suddenly uncertain.
“I think it’s a great name.”
“ Isn’t it?” He balled his hand into a fist and slugged me on the thigh, hard enough to leave a dent. “Old Max. All his life he did this, one kid at a time. Now we’re going to be able to open it up. Ten, fifteen at a time. Get them warm, get them clean, get them educated, get them jobs. Then they become our… our examples. They can come in and talk to kids who think they’re staring at a wall, they can show them there’s a ladder over the wall. Maybe, as they begin to make money, they’ll even kick some in, do you think they might?”
“You’re giving back,” I said. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“I am, aren’t I?” Christy’s color was high. “ Goddamn, I feel good.”
“You look good, too.”
His eyes went down to his shirt, and he straightened a button that was already straight. “So Alan says. Did you know that Alan’s been HIV positive for eight years? He says it makes him use every minute like it’s precious. Did you guys talk?”
“About you? No.”
“He sounds like you, I thought maybe-’Do something for somebody,’ he said, ‘and you’ll do something for yourself.’ You know, I could just kick myself black and blue. I had Max right there, right in front of me, all that time, and I never figured it out. Max was the best-looking, happiest old man in the world. It wasn’t anything magical, nothing he brought back from India or anything like that. He was just-he just knew why he was doing what he was doing. He knew it every minute of the day, and there I was, with not too much time left, just stumbling my way through it, furious half the time and fretting about poor little Christy and actually getting jealous whenever Max gave somebody a hand. What a wuss. All that time, I could have been helping him, I could have been-”
“You could have been Mother Teresa, too,” I said. “You’re not. Most of us aren’t. Most of us are just like you. Or a lot worse.”
“Well,” he said, taking one of my sugar cookies, “you’re not.”
“Christy. I go to bed so I can get up. I get up so I can get tired enough to go to bed again. I drink too much so I can stop wondering what the hell I’m supposed to be doing between the times I’m in bed. You met me in detective mode, which is the only mode I’m even remotely effective in. If you followed me around in my private life, you’d be deeply disillusioned.”
“You don’t know yourself,” he said.
I changed the subject. “Is Max’s house worth enough to pay for all this?” I waved a hand over the table full of pads.
“Oh, my God,” he said. The cookie snapped in half in his hand, sending up a sparkling geyser of sugar. “I haven’t told you, have I?”
“You haven’t.”
“And they didn’t? Of course they didn’t. You wouldn’t be asking if they had, would you, Max put money in the bank all the time he was in that show. When he quit, he had more than three hundred thousand dollars. He just left it there. From 1959 until now. It’s more than two and a half million, now, and it’s all mine. Add the three hundred fifty thousand dollars Alan says the house is worth, and even after taxes-’
“Hold it. How do you know all this?”
“The will,” he said, blinking. “We got the will. That’s why we were at the bank today.”
“You went into the safe-deposit box.”
“Sure. That’s what I’m telling you. Alan did his lawyer thing-”
“Was anything else in it?”
“Nothing that matters. A bequest to his sister and some little stuff, family pictures and some old contracts from the show. If there’d been anything important, anything that might have told you anything, I would have called you. In fact, I did call you, twice, but you weren’t-
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t. May I see it?”
“Sure.” He reached over and picked up the stapled document he’d taken from the couch. “Here.”
I looked it over, feeling something heavy and hard growing in my gut. It was written with a calligraphy pen with bold, disciplined vertical strokes, semi-Spencerian, like an invitation to a White House dinner. The old-fashioned approach extended to the numbers; Max had crossed his sevens and supplied little horizontal bases for his ones to stand on.
“Is this his handwriting?”
“He was proud of it,” Christy said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“What?” I hadn’t heard a word.
“I said it’s beautiful.” He was looking at me as though I had a smear of jam on my face.
“It’s gorgeous,” I said, getting up.
“Where are you going? Are you okay?”
“I’m peachy,” I said. “Keep working on the foundation, Christy. Max would have loved it.”
He nodded and put out a hand for the will, still peering at me. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Too much coffee. I’ll see you tonight.” I stood there, irresolute, looking down at the will. “That’s really great.”
On the way out, I saw Alan and Robert sitting on the living-room couch. Alan was icing his lip. I waved to them and went outside and stood on the doorstep, wondering where to go. For the first time, I didn’t think the Farm Boy would be at the wake.
23 ~ Paragon
It was, in a sense, my party, but I felt like an outsider, the stranger at the christening, the bee at the picnic. For one thing, I was virtually the only one there who was alone. Spurrier and I, the stags at the wake.
The parking lot behind the Paragon Ballroom was half full even before the sun dropped below the low flat roofs to the west. The temperature had not dropped with it. At 6:50 it was almost ninety degrees, and the parking attendants were running themselves ragged as car after car disgorged its overheated cargo of perspiring nuns, super-macho cowboys, Latino vaqueros, conquistadors, geishas, languid vampires, underdressed Aztecs, Chinese Mandarins, African tribesmen, sailors, hanging victims, motorcycle cops, wizards, mermaids, mustachioed men
