The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up Page 4

  “Oh, the aquarium,” said Judith. “I don’t know. Uncle Arnold has to apologize first.”

  “When will that be?”

  Judith turned to Arnold. “When will that be?”

  “Never,” said Arnold. “Let’s drop it.”

  “Then I guess we’re never going to the aquarium,” countered Judith. “I guess we’ll stay prisoners in this house forever.”

  Ray grimaced. “Can I ask another question, Aunt Judith?”

  “Sure, honey,” she said.

  “What does nigger mean?”

  “Nigger,” repeated Judith. She lashed Arnold with eyes as sharp as whips—or maybe she was just asking him for help; he couldn’t tell. “Well,” she said. “Well.”

  “The baseball game was your idea,” said Arnold.

  “How was I supposed to know that you couldn’t handle it? Fifty thousand other people managed to make it through the game without causing an international incident.”

  And then—as Arnold’s temper approached the snapping point—the phone rang.

  “Don’t answer it,” warned Judith. “The machine will pick up.”

  “I’ll answer it, all right,” said Arnold. He nearly wrenched the receiver off the wall. “What do you want?” he demanded.

  “Arnold? Arnold Brinkman? It’s Celeste.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Celeste. I thought you were somebody else.”

  “I’m not,” his sister-in-law answered. “Is everything okay?”

  “Couldn’t be better. One of these days, I might just drop dead from pure joy. Any minute now.”

  “I’m glad—that things are going well, I mean. How’s my Raymond?”

  “Having the time of his life. I even took him to a baseball game.”

  “Did he use sun block? You have no idea how that child burns.”

  “Sure, sure,” lied Arnold. “And today, we’re off to the aquarium. In fact, Celeste, you caught us on the way out the door….”

  Arnold rolled his eyes at Judith. His sister-in-law, rather than taking a hint, had commenced relating her own adventures. She and her new husband, Walter The Republican Chiropractor, had island-hopped across the Dodecanese from American hotel to American hotel. They’d “discovered” a McDonalds with clean bathrooms in Rhodes; Mykonos offered the best Jacuzzi. The one disappointment has been Kos, the birthplace of Hippocrates, where Walter had gotten into a heated dispute with a British cardiologist over the merits of non-traditional healing. Celeste presented the altercation—which ultimately had to be settled by what she called “the gendarmes”—as though reading a trial transcript. Several times, Arnold attempted to interrupt. Finally, Judith took the telephone from him and told Celeste that she’d called at an inopportune moment. “I’m having a difficult time hearing you, dear,” said Judith. “No, it’s not the line. There’s some kind of rally going on across the street. About the war, probably. You know how the Village is.” Ray was standing at his aunt’s elbow, but Judith hung up the phone.

  “You’ll talk to Mommy later,” said Judith. “After Arnold quiets the masses.” She turned to Arnold, arms akimbo: “What is wrong with you? Tell them you’re sorry and they’ll go home.”

  “Dammit, Judith. That’s like pouring gasoline on a fire. If I humiliate myself a little, they’ll want me to humiliate myself a lot.”

  “Please, Arnold. Nobody ever died of humiliation.”

  He recalled what Bonnie Card had said: You’ll offer some lukewarm apology, something about stress or nerves or whatnot, and you’ll go about your business.

  “I love you, Judith. But I can’t do this for you.”

  The child started to sob. He ran into the living room and buried his face in the sofa pillows. Judith followed and cradled his head to her chest.

  “You have to do something,” she said. Her expression remained placid, but he could hear the tension rising in her voice. “If you don’t do something, I will.”

  “Fine, I’ll do something,” he said. “But not what you want.”

  Arnold walked to the front door. He glanced at himself in the hall mirror—he was poorly shaven and his overalls were caked in loam—but it was too late to do anything about that. “I’ll be back,” he said. “Wish me luck.”

  Judith said nothing. The boy whimpered. Arnold opened the front door.

  When he stepped out onto the stoop, a gust of hot air slapped against his face. Cameras flashed rapidly. Reporters peppered him with unintelligible questions. Yet miraculously, when he held up his hand, the crowd grew silent.

  “This is not a news story,” he said decisively. “There are children starving in Africa. That is a news story.” Arnold paused—and it struck him that a provocateur like Spitford might distort this remark into something racially inflammatory. “There are children starving all over Asia and Latin America,” he added quickly. “That is where you should be focusing your attention. Get your priorities straight.”

  A reporter called out: “Does that mean you refuse to apologize?”

  “I have nothing to apologize for,” said Arnold. He glared at the obese minister, but the sunglasses deflected his gaze. “Therefore, obviously, I won’t apologize.”

  More cameras snapped. Another reporter asked him a question about terrorism.

  “I would appreciate it if you all got the hell away from my house,” Arnold added. “You’re scaring off the bees. The forsythia won’t pollinate.”

  Then he stepped back into the dim foyer and slammed the door.

  Judith was still sitting in the darkened living room. She was clutching one of the sofa pillows to her chest like teddy bear.

  “Did you apologize?” she asked. “Please tell me you apologized.”

  “I told them to get their priorities straight.”

  Judith squeezed the pillow tighter. “I’m fifty-one years old, Arnold. I can’t handle this.”

  “I’m not going to apologize for something I didn’t do.”

  “But you did do it, Arnold. That’s the point.”

  “Well I didn’t do it the way they say I did it.”

  Arnold shook his head in the hope of clearing his thoughts; his brain remained murky. He sat down beside Judith on the edge of the couch and rubbed her shoulder.

  “Don’t touch me right now,” she snapped. Then she added: “Change your clothes. You’re trailing mud.”

  Arnold examined his path. Crumbs of caked earth speckled the tile in the foyer.

  “Dammit,” said Arnold. He walked toward the kitchen door. “I’ll be outside if you need me. If you want to talk.”

  In the garden, the sun had burnt off the last of the haze. Brown creepers and nuthatches worked their way down the tree trunks. Wasps buzzed among the hollyhocks. A chipmunk darted across the stone wall beneath the linden. Only the oppressive din from the sidewalk distinguished this morning from any other—from a moment that might otherwise have belonged to a previous age.

  Much to Arnold’s consternation, the girl had left her ladder behind the hedges. He’d have no choice but to return it as soon as the crisis blew over. He was about to remove it—no need to invite in a real burglar—when a shadow darkened the flagstones behind him. It was the girl.

  “Looks like your first run-in with the media was a real hit,” she said. “You had them eating out of your hand.”

  “What the hell are you still doing here?”

  “I can hear them packing up their gear and running off to Africa this very minute. Who can blame them? They might miss breaking the next case of dysentery.”

  “I thought I ordered you to leave.”

  “I disobeyed.”

  “You have to leave. I need time to think.” Under different circumstances, he would have kept his cool. He’d even have invited the girl in for a cold drink before expelling her. But when he wasn’t getting along with Judith, everything in Arnold’s life stopped working. “I’m not joking anymore. I’ll call the goddam police.”

  “We’re you joking before?” asked the girl.


  “Fine, stay,” he snapped. “I’ll leave.”

  That’s when the idea struck him. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Do you still have that other ladder?”

  “It’s lying against the fence.”

  “So I could leave without going through the front door.”

  The girl smirked. “If I let you.”

  She stood between him and the ladders. He considered attempting to get past her—to use force, if necessary—but he didn’t like the idea of wrestling with a girl in her twenties. Besides, she might scream. The last thing he wanted was Spitford & Company coming around the back of the house.

  “You give me an interview,” offered the girl, “and I’ll lend you my ladders.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “That’s my best offer. Only offer, really. Take it or leave it.”

  Arnold remembered why he’d left academics. Too much negotiating. In business, ironically, nobody ever haggled. It just wasn’t worth it.

  “You drive a damn hard bargain,” said Arnold.

  She grinned and stuck out her tongue.

  “Deal?” she asked.

  “Deal. Now let’s get out of here.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Blue Rose Plant & Garden Centre occupied an entire city block on the far side of Seventh Avenue in a gap between two historical preservation districts. Until the late-1960s, the site had been home to Baumgarten’s Poultry Yard, the last glatt kosher slaughterer south of 14th Street. One of Arnold’s first memories was of his father’s grandmother, whom everybody called the Baroness, taking him to Baumgarten’s to pick out chickens for the Passover seder. He’d never overcome his fear of the old widow. Her hands had been mangled in a childhood carriage accident, and she spoke only Yiddish and Dutch, not English, so she communicated with her great-grandchildren by gesticulating with the stump of what had once been her index finger. Arnold had watched in a combination of fascination and horror, but mostly horror, as she’d used the same disfigured digit to pass judgment on three caged hens. In the seconds that followed, the butcher—a cheerful and robust young chasid—roped the birds around the legs, as though wrapping a pastry box, and severed their heads on the wooden chopping block. The Baroness had made Arnold hold the carcasses in his lap on the subway ride home.

  It was easy, maybe too easy, to trace a line between that visit to Baumgarten’s and the botanist’s subsequent life choices: abandoning Judaism for secular agnosticism, giving up red meat and poultry for edible flowers, marrying the blue-eyed daughter of a Norwegian laundress, herself the collateral descendant of baronesses, or their Scandinavian equivalent, although this connection came with neither fortune nor privilege. If the Baroness had known that her own great-grandson would wed a lapsed Lutheran, an artist who brewed tea from dandelion stalks, and a poor girl at that, the old refugee would have dropped stone cold dead on the sidewalk—which was what she did anyway, that same Passover, from a blood clot to her brain. What amazed Arnold wasn’t that he’d forsaken his heritage—Judith joked that the only roots they had were carrots and sugar beets—but that he’d ended up in business. That seemed implausible. As his father had always said, they were descended from an ancient and venerable line of hourly employees: bricklayers, pieceworkers, clerks. Arnold’s first foray into capitalism, a sixth-grade carwash, had run two hundred dollars in the red—not including the restitution his father kicked in when he forgot to seal the roof of a convertible. From that point forward, the Brinkman’s only son had seemed destined for university life. In the academy, it didn’t matter how peculiar or incompetent you were, whether you couldn’t tie your own shoe laces or believed the earth was flat—provided you contributed to the intellectual advancement of your field. Arnold knew of one prominent botanist, for instance, who also published self-help books on the therapeutic benefits of drinking one’s own urine. But in Arnold’s case, his scientific articles hadn’t proven terribly valuable. In the words of his tenure committee, they were “perfectly competent, but uninspired.” He couldn’t have agreed more. Who in their right mind would be inspired by the crosspollination genetics of winter wheat? What he’d wanted to do was to study edible flowers—but that wasn’t considered serious research.

  While Arnold had searched for another teaching post, a senior colleague of his, Hans Overmeyer, probably because the middle-aged professor had an unspoken crush on Arnold, had suggested they purchase the foreclosed poultry yard from the city and use the space for experimental botany. Overmeyer was interested in transplanting animal DNA into plants. He dreamed he might someday be able to produce blue roses from dolphin genes, or pink rice from flamingo feathers, but his first project—breeding glow-in-the-dark crocuses with the help of firefly chromosomes—struck pay-dirt in the mid-70s. For several months, while the rest of the nation grappled with stagflation and gasoline lines, it seemed everyone within walking distance of Sheridan Square had a crocus nightlight in their bedrooms. Arnold owned fifty percent of the proceeds. The following autumn, when Overmeyer’s second ex-wife gunned down the older botanist in his Barnard office, a shocked Arnold inherited the entire operation. To that point, he’d done nothing to contribute to the nursery; he hadn’t even cleaned out the rusted chicken cages from his designated office. The entire summer had been spent house-hunting with Judith and searching for specimens in Central Park. Yet somehow the glow-in-the-dark crocuses had led to an organic flower market, and then a catalogue bulb-and-seed business, and eventually a multimillion dollar enterprise—albeit one where, for many years, elderly out-of-towners continued to come seeking live ducks and guinea fowl. On the lecture circuit, young horticulturists frequently examined Arnold’s curriculum vitae and noted how well all the strands of his life had come together. That was because they possessed the power of hindsight, he warned. A man doesn’t list his setbacks on his résumé.

  Arnold had always prided himself on taking an interest in the community—not just writing annual checks to City Harvest and the West Village Green Thumb Society, but setting aside time to get to know his neighbours, even though his neighbours changed frequently and his own time grew increasingly precious. Usually, nothing pleased him more than exchanging early-morning greetings and chitchat with his fellow merchants: the chain-smoking Israeli locksmith, the Ethiopian restaurateur who always addressed him as my cousin, the elderly transvestites who ran a combination costume shop and internet café. He had even befriended the lizard-tongued kid who pierced nipples and genitals on 13th Street. Arnold called the young man “The Specialist.” But that morning, after his confrontation with the media, Arnold dreaded the prospect of running into anyone he knew. He walked rapidly, steering a broad rectangular course that avoided his usual morning route, so that he approached the nursery from the opposite direction. The girl struggled to keep pace. Several passers-by appeared to recognize him—either from television or the newspapers—but he ignored their stares.

  “Can you slow the fuck down?” Cassandra pleaded. “Wouldn’t it be easier if we got you a paper bag to put over your head?”

  “This is how I normally walk,” said Arnold. “If you can’t keep up, we can always do the interview another day.”

  “I think you’d look awesome in a paper bag,” continued the girl. She had the habit of following her own train of thought, independent of his interruptions. “We’ll cut you some eyeholes and draw you a moustache.”

  Arnold picked up his pace. He wasn’t in the best physical shape—he’d given up jogging years earlier when he’d ruptured his Achilles’—but he was still surprised to discover how easily he winded. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck and under his collar. Somehow, he blamed this flagging breath on the girl. “Did anybody ever tell you that you’re a pain in the ass?” he demanded.

  “All the time,” retorted the girl. “Some guys like that.”

  Her tone was overtly playful—possibly flirtatious. Even racing down Sixth Avenue in a condition approaching panic, Arnold couldn’t help noticing. But how was he supposed to resp
ond? Ordering the girl to “stop flirting” was somewhat presumptuous. It might even come across as coy encouragement. On the other hand, engaging her in a battle of teasing repartee might give her ideas. So Arnold said nothing. He let her fire off her barbs, but refused to shoot back. Besides, he was out of practice. He hadn’t flirted with anyone in thirty years. He hadn’t wanted to flirt with anyone. Even before that, verbal jousting hadn’t been his strong suit.

  They crossed the park, cut along the new jogging trail where the city’s gardeners had recently set down a bed of asters and heliotrope. “Where the hell are you taking me?” demanded the girl. “We’re spinning in goddam circles.”

  “Squares,” retorted Arnold.

  Soon they emerged opposite the Plant Centre. Arnold was relieved to see that Guillermo had the place up-and-running in his absence: Display trays of African violets and New Guinea impatiens lined the sidewalk; the heavy iron gates had been drawn open and festooned with wandering jews. Arnold also noticed several unfamiliar decorations: an American flag taped under the “Summer Sale” sign and two dozen plywood boards leaning against the brickwork. Inside, the air smelled pungently of pine sap and pollen. There were only a handful of customers: an old man with a beagle, an unkempt girl walking her bicycle through the aisles. The nursery generally did very little business before noon in the warmer months. What surprised Arnold was that there didn’t appear to be any staff on duty. Where were all those muscular, interchangeable youths—Ecuadorians, Peruvians—whom Guillermo hired “to do the heavy work”? And where were the salesgirls? He finally spotted Maria reading a tabloid behind the last checkout counter. Soap Digest. At least he wouldn’t be in that.

  “Morning, Mr. Brinkman,” said the saleswoman.

  “Where is everybody today?”

  “They’re in back, Mr. Brinkman. They’re watching television in Mr. Zambrano’s office.”

  “Are they?” Arnold muttered.

  Cassandra smirked. “You run a tight ship, don’t you?”