“So when did Taverner show you what their laundry was?”
He cast me a sidelong glance, as if trying to decide what story I’d be most likely to believe.
I spoke before he chose a version. “This afternoon at your mother’s, you were implying that your father’s financial dealings were shaky. Did Taverner tell you that?”
“Not exactly.”
“So what exactly?”
“I found a letter in Calvin’s desk,” he blurted out. “From old Mrs. Drummond-Mrs. Graham’s mother.”
“She knew about your father’s financial situation?” I was incredulous. “Apparently, Calvin was stealing from the Drummonds, or maybe the Grahams. I can still recite that damned letter by heart:
Dear Calvin,
I am aware of the theft you are committing against my household. A streak of hypocrisy seems to grow deep within your family’s character; your mother had a similar tendency to parade the halls draped in righteousness while her conduct behind the scenes didn’t bear close scrutiny. I shall, of course, expect restitution, and you may be sure that I will take appropriate measures should your actions continue.
“She signed it with her full name, Laura Taverner Drummond, which is how I learned she was related to Olin. No one ever told me anything about all those people-I kept stumbling on bits of information like that and feeling goddamned blindsided”
The resentment from twentyfive years earlier still burned: his cheeks were red now, and his voice shaking with anger.
“So then did you take the letter to Taverner?”
“I was only sixteen, I went to Renee and demanded she tell me what the letter was about. She laughed-laughed, mind you, as if it were a joke,
not a character flaw. She said Calvin had been `a bit unscrupulous’ in borrowing from the neighbors, but that when she married him she put a stop to all that. But you know, word always seeps out in a small town, and people gossip endlessly. It’s one thing I owe Renee-growing up chiefly in Chicago instead of that dead-alive fishbowl on Coverdale Lane. Weekends there were bad enough.”
“Yes, indeed.” In any small community, including the urban neighborhood o? my own childhood, people gossip mercilessly about Mrs. This’s daughter’s pregnancy and how poor Mrs. That felt when her husband lost all the rent money at craps. I felt momentary compunction for Darraugh and for the angry man in front of me-both of them poor little rich boys in their way.
“I wonder why your father kept the letter? Anyone on your family’s staff might have found it and blackmailed him.”
“Calvin is-was-an incurable pack rat. His study out in New Solway is crammed with papers. I can’t imagine the Lantners being bothered to look through all that crap.”
“And why were you looking at it? A congenital weakness for poking through other people’s desks?” I spoke with deliberate roughness, hoping to goad a further response.
Deepening anger turned Bayard’s blue eyes black. “All that damned talk. We’d had a big house party-the fortieth anniversary of Calvin taking over Bayard Publishing, his pals from the left’s glory days came, even old Armand Pelletier-he stayed with us for three days, until he got into a huge shouting match with Calvin and stormed out. There was one of those daylong parties-people came to ride and have breakfast and stayed on all day until we had dinner for eighty-Renee loved showing off, not her possessions, her genius for organizing.
“All the neighbors from Coverdale Lane showed up, except Olin, of course. Old Mrs. Drummond creaked over in her diamonds. She was ninety-eight and forced everybody to drop anything they were doing if she had any kind of whim. Even Renee danced when Mrs. Drummond banged her drum. Geraldine Graham came, too, although she and Renee didn’t get along. And she didn’t get along that great with Mrs. Drummond, with her mother, come to think of it. And I heard some of the women talking in those delicious breathless voices, `Does he even suspect, do you think? After all, he looks just like his mother, so why would he?”’
His chin jutted out as if he dared me to mock him. “I do look like Renee, so if Calvin isn’t my father, I can’t tell by looking in the mirror. When I was little, I kept believing I’d grow up as tall as he was, and then I was sixteen and stuck at five foot eight. I look like Renee’s father, like his younger twin, there’s not a trace of Bayard in me!
“So while they were having the time of their lives at that party, I went through Calvin’s desk-I knew his study was the one room that people didn’t go to fuck in. Sacred ground, not like even my own bedroom where I found Armand with Peter Felitti’s wife! I was hoping there’d be one word in Calvin’s old diaries about me, one thought that he’d paid attention to my conception or my birth!”
Bayard was panting as though he’d been running hard. “When Trina was born, I made a conscious effort to write it up. It was a big moment in my life, I should think in any father’s life, his first child’s birth, seeing that perfect little creature you made happen. But not Calvin. And I never knew whether it was because he wasn’t my father, or because he was so damned wound up in his own importance that I didn’t count for crap. Everyone worshiped him-you yourself do. Well, I wanted a father, not a god who expected to be on that pedestal.”
My stomach tightened at the accusation, but I kept my voice steady. “Did your mother have affairs? It doesn’t seem in character, although I didn’t know her when she was twenty.”
“That’s what I would have thought, too,” he said savagely. “And of course it’s what she said when I put it to her.”
“So what did you tell Taverner when you met? Did you ask him who your father really was, or just about the letter from Ms. Drummond?”
He began picking at the rubber edge to one of my legal pads. “It-I decided to explore other viewpoints than Calvin and Renee’s and served as an intern in Senator Tower’s office. That was when I really met Olin, got to know him. He was astonished, of course, to see a Bayard in that office, but he and Tower were good friends. Olin was a different kind of person than Calvin, not as easygoing, not expecting people to fall down and worship him. I liked him, and we got to be friends.”
“And there was the added benefit that knowing him made your parents see red-so to speak.”
“As if that isn’t what they always saw.” He ripped a length of rubber from the pad. Now the pages would all fall off, but that was a small price for the information I was getting.
“So you came to tell him about the letter from Ms. Drummond. Did he know about it?”
“He said he was surprised old Mrs. Drummond cared, that her views on Negroes were as antiquated as she was-she hung on until 1984, you know, running Larchmont like it had been when she moved into it, except she installed electricity, talking about the coloreds knowing their place and hiring four Japanese gardeners to keep the pond and gardens in order. Mrs. Drummond was Olin’s aunt, but even though he made fun of her she intimidated him, too.”
“What did her views on blacks have to do with your father?” I tried staying on the main point, but I had trouble figuring out what it was. “Calvin had been stealing from Augustus Llewellyn, apparently. Olin never spelled it out, he said he wasn’t there to stir up old wounds, but as I’d seen his aunt’s letter, I should know that Calvin had been-“
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I interjected. “Your father lent Llewellyn the money to start T-Square.”
He stared at me. “Did Renee tell you that?”
“Yes. And they confirmed it over at Llewellyn enterprises.”
“Calvin did something with Llewellyn’s finances,” Bayard insisted. “Olin told me, and he wasn’t a liar.”
“So what else did he tell you?” I demanded. “Why did he hint around about your father’s financial deals but never spell them out?”
“Because he’d made a promise, and he kept his word.”
“Be your age, Bayard. Have you ever even read any of the transcripts of the hearings Taverner masterminded? He reveled in unveiling people’s secrets. He kept quiet because-“
“I know you share Calvin’s views,” he shouted me down. “You can’t believe Taverner had a sense of honor, because the Communists you admire so much didn’t believe in the concept.”
“You’ve said about twenty actionable things in the last five minutes,
Bayard.” My own temper was rising. “But let’s keep to the real questions here. Isn’t it more likely Taverner kept his secrets to himself because he didn’t want his own secrets coming out?”
“If you mean his homosexuality, he didn’t hide that from me. It didn’t affect my respect for him,” he said stiffly.
“It doesn’t matter now the way it did in the fifties,” I agreed. “So what secret of his own did Taverner care so much about that he kept one of your father’s for four decades?”
“You are completely wrong about Olin’s character because you only believe what you read in the liberal media.”
“This line about the liberal media is the same kind of garbage as `lies of the capitalist press’ that the old fellow travelers reiterated,” I snapped, exasperated. “Both of them are slogans to keep you from thinking about what you don’t want to know. But have it your way: Taverner pledged his life, his fortune and his sacred honor not to tell people your father had been stealing from Augustus Llewellyn. Now, tell me: How did you know Taverner had this secret file in his desk, the one you broke into his place to find?”
He scowled. “It was a desk that had belonged to one of the early Supreme Court justices, William Johnson, and it was Olin’s most prized possession. He had it in his Washington home, not his office, and he moved it back to Chicago with him. A couple of times when I was visiting him and we were talking about-about Calvin and Renee, he tapped the desktop and said, `It’s all in there, my boy, and when I’m gone you can learn the whole sorry story.”’
“So when you learned he was dead, you wanted to get to the whole sorry story before the lawyers did,” I suggested, “just in case Julius Arnoff thought the papers ought to go to your mother or even be suppressed, instead of including them with what he turned over to the heirs.”
“It would be like Julius,” he said bitterly. “Damned little busybody, trotting around like Calvin’s lapdog, wagging his tail anytime the big man threw him a biscuit.”
“And when you got there, and went to all that trouble busting open the patio door, what did you think when you saw the papers were already gone?” “I figured the Mexican who looked after him stole them to see what he could get for them.”
I thought of Domingo Rivas, with his quiet dignity in looking after his “gentlemen,” and felt another spurt of anger. “So did you talk to Mr. Rivas?” “I told him I’d pay him a thousand dollars for anything he removed from Olin’s desk, but he claimed he knew nothing about those papers.”
“He has his own code of honor, and I doubt it includes stealing from his patients. You know, of course, that if he’d wanted to take something of Taverner’s, he would have known where the keys were-he wouldn’t have had to follow your sterling example and break any locks.”
He flushed. “Who else could have them-unless that black reporter filched them. Because I sure as hell don’t have them.”
“Oh, it could be a black reporter or a Mexican orderly, but not a rich white guy?” I was thoroughly angry by now. “That’s the question, isn’t it: If you don’t have them, and Marcus Whitby didn’t take them, where are Olin Taverner’s secret documents?”