Everything beyond was tundra. He might offer a tense, arm-crossed elevator greeting to a few members of the vertical brotherhood who occupied the apartment lines above and below him, but by and large he lived in a world of his own making, into which few were allowed to enter, and out of which he rarely ventured.
No doubt about it: He was nuts. But on the whole, no more nuts than, say, a woman who, upon finding herself in an empty elevator, seizes the opportunity to ball up her cardigan, jam her face into it, and scream all the way to the lobby. People do all sorts of things, and in his line of work, an overactive imagination was hardly a handicap.
My father sighed, gave the bag a twist, and made for the stairwell door.
14.
In the early days of the twentieth century, residents of the Apelles marked holiday celebrations with the defenestration of champagne flutes, dessert plates, hurricane glasses, whatever was lying around on the sideboard. Anything that made a satisfying pop on the cobblestones of the interior courtyard was fair game. What fun! Less festive, but worth noting: Twice, in episodes separated by twenty-five years, the industrialist Alexander Flagg played bombardier with dining room chairs, both times targeting men he suspected of staining his wife’s honor. Both times, building management levied heavy fines.
The first Christmas tree was jettisoned by a freshly discharged Army Air Corps lieutenant in the early hours of New Year’s 1946, and although the building’s management board frowned on what they wrote up as a dangerous act of impertinence, they assigned a token fine of only a halfpenny, as they, like the young pilot, were feeling buoyed at the time. Though the lieutenant was merely happy to have survived the shooting galleries of the Pacific theater, the board was, to a man, ecstatic over the recent atomic annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, which had set off a sustained market rally, which pleased the bankers among them, and had opened up new territory into which to expand American factories and export American goods, which pleased the industrialists among them.
Residents interpreted the halfpenny fine imposed on the lieutenant as an implicit blessing, and the next New Year’s Eve, as fireworks flowered over the Hudson River, a cascade of trees showered the courtyard. The residents, however, had been mistaken. The board, detecting folly, imposed a ten-dollar fine on each tree. They intended to shut this business down just as they’d have shut down a labor union or a socialist revolution.
The residents, who were themselves mostly bankers and industrialists, reacted as the wealthy always have. Their indignity stoked, they retrenched and carried on behaving just as they pleased. When New Year’s 1948 rolled around, even more residents took part in the tree toss. Alexander Flagg, an enemy of regulation in any form, purchased a second tree and had his butler affix a banner that read:
Duly provoked, the board announced new fines for the following year. One hundred dollars per tree (today about an even thousand, adjusted for inflation). For New Year’s 1949, Alexander Flagg tossed three.
Residents of the Apelles, riding the postwar wave of prosperity curling majestically down an infinite American shore, obviously enjoyed burning up their cash. They were aroused by the thought of being so careless with an instrument that so much of the world was dying for want of. Every year the fines increased, and every year the trees kept flying. But as much as they enjoyed throwing money out the window, they were not entirely without conscience, and in 1955 a proposal was brought before the board by Magda Brunn, Turk’s mother, to put the fines to good use for the poor of New York City. The board, its ranks of aged curmudgeons having been thinned somewhat by infirmity and death, had among its new members some more progressively minded men who managed to push the proposal through in 1956. By then it was part of the fun to affix embroidered identification banners to the trees, and the board’s Xmas fine slush fund was edging close to $100,000. Quite a tradition.
Magda Brunn was put in charge of establishing the charitable organization that would dispense funds to the indigent, and she did a fine job—so fine, in fact, that the organization, known as the Apelles Fund, branched out after only three years of existence and began taking donations from all over the city. On the way out of Bonwit’s or Macy’s with your Christmas gifts, you dropped a coin into a little plastic castle with red plastic flags flying from the turrets, and your donation sponsored after-school programs in the Bronx, soup kitchens in the Bowery, summer camps, single mothers.
Magda died on December 27, 1960, having spent every day post-Thanksgiving soliciting donations for the fund outside Barney’s. Pneumonia. Even though she wasn’t around to ring the little silver triangle anymore, the fund kept going strong.
Over the years, apartments changed hands and the tree-toss lost steam. By 1978, no one was throwing much of anything out the window due to liability concerns, but everyone in the building still made nice donations to the Apelles Fund.
For instance, the year of the blizzard party, Bo and Jane Vornado had donated ten thousand dollars. They were also cochairs of the fund, which is in part why they had such huge Rolodexes. Almost everyone at the party except for me, Vik, and Albert Caldwell had donated that year. Even Shahin and Nelofar Jahanbani had chipped in a thousand.
While I was in the bedroom with Albert Caldwell, my mother was chatting up the Jahanbanis. Sales were not her strong suit, but Neil Ford had been talking her up while she studied the backs of her hands and smiled sideways, and the Iranians were urbane and seemed interested, so she was doing her best to come off as cool but not too cool. She didn’t know that the Jahanbanis were looking to stash money anywhere they could before the U.S. government could get its greasy palms all over it, but to be fair, their motivations were not exclusively financial. Neither were Neil Ford’s. All four of them were, like most people, aswirl with contradiction, their shifting desires constantly reshuffling their intentions. They were, each one of them, cunning, benevolent, fighting back their kindest impulses with guns firing self-interest. They overruled their basest instincts for no reason other than human decency. They were angels, they were selfish pigs. They were just people trying to have a conversation. At the time, my mother’s overriding desire was to do something about the nagging feeling that she wasn’t a very good painter, which, unbeknownst to her, meshed nicely with Neil’s intention to get her into bed. He also intended to help his clients hide their money. He kept calling her a visionary. And he meant it. The Jahanbanis were as interested as people could be in art they’d never seen. They were all trying to do the right thing, up to a point. It was a Mexican standoff where everyone was trying to serve everyone else a cream pie.
When my mother died a few years ago, she and Neil had been living in Salerno, Italy, in a medieval house high on the side of a mountain. From inside she could see the bay and the shipping channels, the small cloister windows having been stretched to accommodate a more modern field of vision, and in every room the light was spectacular, but she had stopped painting, and those beautiful stone walls were not hung with her paintings, or anyone else’s. She had an herb garden, three orange trees. On the east side of the house were neat rows of olive trees. Goats roamed the slopes, their little neck bells clanking. She was bitter, ashamed of her work, unable to separate herself from her most famous painting. Publicly, she had chosen to avail herself of the artist’s credo, which states that once a work leaves the studio, the artist no longer has any claim to its interpretation or use. Thus, if Satellite, purchased by Shahin Jahanbani a week after they met at the party, was later gifted to his partner Salem bin Laden, and if Salem, in turn, made a gift of it to his brother, Osama, she could frown and say, It ceased to be mine long, long ago. But she didn’t believe that. In her estimation, she’d as good as killed her own son-in-law.