Famous money. Money gouged out of the Sierra Nevadas by the tens of thousands of picks that laid out the route of the transcontinental railroad. Ruthless money. Money acquired at the expense of thousands of small farmers forced from their farms by the insatiable appetite of Grover Linden’s land companies.
Corrupt money. Money paid in subsidies to Grover Linden’s railroad from the Congress in an era when the prevailing definition of an honest politician was one who, when bought, stayed bought.
Endless money. Money flowing so ceaselessly that during a financial crisis in the 1890 ’s, Grover Linden essentially guaranteed the national debt out of his own fortune and the government averted bankruptcy.
Robert Paris was steward to that fortune and only I, and perhaps one or two others, knew at what cost he had acquired his stewardship. I watched them carry him across the courtyard, and I was thinking not of the family of a nineteenth-century American railroad baron but of the Caesars, the Borgias, the Romanovs. Only on that dynastic scale could I begin to comprehend how a man might kill his wife, his child, his grandchild to satisfy an appetite for power.
I remembered a painting by Goya that I’d seen, years earlier, in the Prado called Saturn Devouring His Children. Saturn consumed his sons and daughters to avoid the prophecy that one son would reach manhood and depose his father. The mother of Zeus substituted for the infant Zeus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which Saturn ate. Hidden away, Zeus grew and ultimately fulfilled the prophecy. Had Robert Paris feared the same end from his male descendants? Or was he simply mad? Or had that family of farmers in San Joaquin been poorer than anyone could imagine?
Meanwhile, the funeral had become a party for the rich. The crowd spilled out from the church, sweeping across the courtyard of the Old Quad to the driveway where I had earlier observed a fleet of limousines lined up behind a silver hearse. So loud and jovial were the mourners that I expected, at any moment, to be offered a cocktail or a canape from a roving waiter. There were no signs of real grief; only, now and then, a ceremonial tear dabbed at with an elegant, monogrammed handkerchief. The rich are different, I thought: condemned to live their lives in public, they go through their paces at the edge of hysteria like show dogs from which every trait has been bred but anxiety. The body was to be interred in the Linden mausoleum, a quarter-mile distant, fudging from the snarl of cars in the driveway, I’d be able to walk there before the internment began.
The heat was slow and intense, a pounding, relentless, unseasonable heat. I set off down the road sweating beneath my fine clothes like any animal. In a way it was pointless for me to have come to the funeral. Lord knows there was nothing more to be done about Robert Paris except, perhaps, drive a stake through his heart.
I beat everyone to the mausoleum but the press. This was a historic event. No one had been laid to rest in Grover Linden’s tomb since the death of his son-in-law, Jeremiah Smith, first president of the university, fifty years earlier. The lesser members of the Linden-Smith-Paris clan, including the judge’s wife and eldest son, were buried in a small graveyard two hundred feet away. Hugh, however, was not there. I had never learned what became of his ashes.
I removed my jacket, positioned myself in the shade of an oak tree and studied Grover Linden’s resting place. The legend was that Linden wanted his tomb patterned after the temple of the Acropolis. What he got was a much smaller building constructed from massive blocks of polished gray granite adorned on three sides with Ionic columns. At the entrance there were two steps which led to a bronze screen and beneath it two stone doors. On each side, the entrance was flanked by a marble sphinx.
In front of the tomb was an oval of grass bounded by a circular pathway, a tributary of the footpaths that crisscrossed the surrounding wood. That wood was a popular trysting place, and it was not unusual to find the grounds near the tomb littered with beer cans, wine bottles, marijuana roaches, and used condoms. Today, however, the grounds keepers had been thorough.
I heard cars pulling up and then the cracking of wood as people surged forward from the road trampling the dry grass and fallen twigs; the more-or-less orderly procession across the Old Quad had become a curiosity-seeking mob, red-faced and sweaty, converging from all directions as the university security guards fought to keep open a corridor from the road to the steps of the tomb. I watched a photographer shimmy up one of the venerable oaks and stake out her position among its branches.
Finally the pallbearers appeared, walking slowly and stumblingly across the uneven dirt path. They were preceded by the school’s president, who climbed the steps of the tomb and opened the doors. As he fiddled with the locks, one of the pallbearers, an old man, started to sink beneath the weight of his burden. Two security guards hurried to his side and propped him up. His mouth hung open and a vein beat furiously at his temple.
“Welcome to necropolis,” a voice beside me murmured. I turned to find Grant Hancock standing beside me, cool and handsome in a light gray suit. “Do you see that gentleman there?”
I followed his gaze to a shadowy corner at the far edge of the crowd from where a tall thin old man surveyed the chaos from behind a pair of dark glasses.
“John Smith,” I said. “I hadn’t noticed him at the church.”
“He wasn’t in attendance,” Grant said. The old man slipped away. “One titan buries another,” Grant remarked.
“Cut from the same cloth?”
“God, no,” Grant said. “Robert Paris was so vulgar he had buildings named in his honor while he was still alive. The only thing for which Smith has permitted use of his name is a rose.”
“A rose?”
“He’s an amateur horticulturist,” Grant said. “Incidentally, what are you doing here?”
“I wanted to make sure he was dead.”
He picked a fragment of bark from my shoulder and said, “It was open casket. He’s dead.”
“Open casket? That was vulgar.”
“Robert Paris never did anything tastefully except die in his sleep. As for me, when I die I’ll direct my family to bury me without fanfare.”
I smiled. “When you die, Grant, the tailors and barbers will declare a day of national mourning.”
“And when you die,” he said, not quite as lightly, “I’ll miss you.” We began walking. “In fact, I’ve missed you the past four years.”
I said nothing, feeling the sun on my neck, thinking of the funeral, thinking of Hugh, thinking as usual of too many things.
Grant said, “I’ve changed.”
“Only very young people believe that change is always for the better,” I said. “I’m mostly interested in holding the line, which is, I guess, the difference between thirty and thirty-four.”
“Am I being rejected? Again?”
“No.”
We had reached his car. He leaned against it and we looked at each other.
“I feel very old today,” I said, “as though I’ve dissipated my promise and my capacity to love. I’ve felt that way since Hugh died. I don’t know what there is left of me to offer.”
“Let me decide that.”
I nodded. “I’ll drive up this weekend.”
“Good, I’ll see you then.”
I walked back to my car and got in. I loosened my tie and rolled up my sleeves, tossing my jacket into the back seat. On the front seat was a book I’d bought that morning, The Poems of C.P. Cavafy, the poet Hugh had mentioned to me that distant summer evening in San Francisco. I glanced at my watch. It was almost one, time to drive to the restaurant where I was meeting Terry Ormes for lunch. I picked up the book. Flipping through it at the bookstore I’d marked a page with the little poem that I now read aloud: