“Tonight,” I said.
“I need to see you before you go,” he said in a strange voice.
“Sure. When?”
“I’ll meet you in an hour at Barney’s,” he said.
He was already at the bar when I got there, staring, a bit morosely over a tall drink with a lot of fruit jammed into the glass.
“You look like you’ve lost your best friend,” I said, sitting down. Touching his glass, I said, “What’s that you’re drinking? A Pink Lady?” He said nothing. I added, to provoke him, “Jews really don’t have the hang of ordering alcohol.’’
“You’re pretty chipper,” he said, sourly. The waitress came over and I ordered a Mexican beer.
“I’m happy, Aaron.”
“Hugh Paris?” he asked, with almost a sneer in his voice. “Tell me, what do you really know about him?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
He waited until I had my drink, then said, “You’ve heard of Grover Linden.”
“In this town,” I said, “you might as well ask me if I know who my father is.”
“Great-great-grandfather,” he said. “That’s his relation to Hugh Paris.”
“You’re not serious.”
Gold merely nodded.
The first time I heard Grover Linden’s name I was a fourth- grade student in Marysville. His picture appeared in my social studies book and the caption beneath it identified the broad-faced bearded man as the man who built the railroad. The railroad that connected the west and the east, I learned in high school, took ten years to construct and cost the lives of hundreds as an army of Chinese coolies worked feverishly to break through the Sierras during three of the coldest winters in the nineteenth-century. It was the railroad that raised San Francisco from a backwater village to an international city. It was the railroad from which Grover Linden, who began his adult life as a blacksmith in Utica, derived the wealth that made him the richest man in America.
Linden rose to become a United States senator and bought the Democratic nomination to the presidency. He lost that election, too opulent and corrupt even for that opulent and corrupt era, the Gilded Age. Popular opinion turned against him and he was forced to divest himself of his railroad in a decision by the Supreme Court that I read in my law school anti-trust course. He died in 1920, having nearly lived a century, leaving an immense personal fortune. Almost incidentally, he donated a vast tract of land on the San Francisco peninsula to found the university that bore his name. The first president of the school, Jeremiah Smith, Linden’s son-in-law, raided the Ivy League luring entire faculties to California with the promise of unlimited wealth to support their research. In less than a century, Linden University had acquired an international reputation as one of the country’s great private schools. The year Gold and I graduated from the law school, the commencement speaker, a United States Supreme Court justice, addressed a distinguished audience that included half the California Supreme Court as well as the sitting governors of three states, all of them alumns. And Linden, statues and paintings of whom were everywhere, lay entombed on the grounds of the school in a marble mausoleum along with his wife, daughter and son-in-law.
“Hugh hasn’t told you who his family is?” Gold asked.
“No, not really. I mean — he mentioned money, but I had no idea.”
“He didn’t tell you his grandfather was Judge Paris?”
“Robert Paris, you mean?”
Gold nodded.
“He told me that, but it’s a far cry from someone named Robert Paris to Grover Linden.”
“It’s complicated,” Aaron said. He pulled the slightly soggy cocktail napkin from beneath his drink and got out his pen. “Look,” he said. “This is Linden’s family tree.”
At the top of the tree were Linden and his wife, Sarah. The next generation consisted of their daughter, Allison, who married Jeremiah Smith.
“Then,” Gold said, “there were two kids, John Smith and Christina Smith, Linden’s grandchildren. Christina married Robert Paris.”
“John Smith never married?”
“No,” he shrugged. “Linden’s descendants aren’t prolific. Christina and Robert Paris had two sons, Jeremy and Nicholas.” He traced the tree down into that generation. “Nicholas married Katherine Seaton. Hugh is their son.”
He tucked his pen back into his coat pocket. I studied the napkin.
“Hugh’s the last living descendant of Grover Linden?”
“No, John Smith is very much alive. He controls the Linden Trust,” Gold said, referring to the megafund, the income of which supported the university’s research which ranged from cancer cures to bigger and deadlier nuclear bombs, with the emphasis on the latter.
“John Smith,” I repeated, and, suddenly, it came to me. “He bailed Hugh out of jail.”
Gold lifted an eyebrow but said nothing.
“Are there any other descendants?”
“Hugh’s father, Nicholas.” “Hugh told me his father was dead.”
“He might as well be,” Gold said. “Nicholas is locked up in an asylum. A basket case.”
“And Hugh’s mother, Katherine?”
“The parents divorced twenty years ago. I don’t know anything about her.”
“You seem to know a lot. Why?”
“Robert Paris is one of my firm’s clients,” he said glumly. “I’m telling you more than I should have as it is.”
“Why tell me this much?”
“For your own good. Hugh’s a black sheep.”
“Meaning?”
“He has a serious drug problem.” I nodded and sipped my beer. “And he’s been hospitalized for — I guess you’d call them emotional problems.” This I hadn’t known but, swallowing my surprise, I nodded again.
Gold looked annoyed, probably having expected shock from me.
“I know about those things.”
“And you still plan to see him?”
“I’m not an eighteen-year-old coed,” I said, to irritate him further. “What I want to know is your source of information. Robert Paris?”
“Don’t ask me to violate a client confidence.”
“A strategic attack of ethics, Aaron?”
“Look, Henry, I’m going out on a limb for you. The guy’s crazy. He’s been threatening his grandfather, calling day and night, writing nutty letters.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, not without a twinge of anxiety that the allegations were true.
Gold dug into his breast pocket and withdrew a wad of rubberbanded letters. He tossed them at me. “Read them,” he commanded.
I leafed through the envelopes. They were postmarked San Francisco, addressed to Robert Paris in Portola Valley but gave no return address. It occurred to me that I did not know what Hugh’s handwriting looked like. Clinging to that thread of doubt, I dropped the letters on the table.
“Where did you get these?”
“Afraid to read them?”
“Go to hell,” I said, rising, but Gold was on his feet first.
“Fine,” he said. “You can shut me out but you have your own doubts about the guy, don’t you?” It was a fair statement but I was not inclined to concede the point. “Keep these,” he said, indicating the letters. “They make enlightening reading.” He drew himself up and walked out. I saw him pass in the window, looking straight ahead. I resisted the impulse to go after him — since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say — and finished my drink. Then, I gathered up the letters and put them in my coat pocket as I rose to leave.
The letters were heavy in my pocket as I walked to my car. There had not been enough time to know Hugh well, particularly since I saw him through the haze of infatuation, but my mind hadn’t gone entirely out of commission. Hugh was a troubled man, troubled enough to make threats if not to carry them out. His hatred with his grandfather was fused with his sexual awakening, and his grandfather remained for him a figure who was frightening but seductive. Then, too, the years of drug addiction had taken their toll. Beneath the charm and humor, there was ruin. I saw all this and it made my feeling for him more intense and protective. The letters — and really, I had little doubt he’d written them — complicated matters. They were a sign that the sickness was deeper than I thought, but, even so, he deserved the chance to explain or deny them.