Lehman was the man whose portrait had several times been on the cover of Time magazine, whose photo had hundreds of times been on the front pages of newspapers. He was the man who had gotten Alfred Stone out of jail.
Stone remembered the first time he had met Winthrop Lehman.
It was 1962, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, air-raid shelters, and duck-and-cover. Most of the fourth-graders, marching silently through the halls of the elementary school with the terrifying air-raid-drill siren whooping, believed the bomb might drop at any minute, without warning. Anticommunism was rampant: the sort of grave, vacuous politics at which nine-year-olds excel. Charlie’s mother had just died, a few days earlier; he had suffered the funeral, and the burial at Mount Auburn Cemetery, in silence.
A kid named Jerry Delgado had grabbed him in the cloakroom outside of Mrs. Allman’s chalk-dusty classroom and whispered for the hundredth time a quick, biting insult about Charlie’s father being a commie spy, and Charlie, unable to hold it back any longer, took off after the boy with a brute force he didn’t know he had. A gaggle of nine-year-olds watched, thrilled and fascinated, as Charlie knocked Jerry Delgado to the floor and pummeled him with tightly clenched fists. When Mrs. Allman broke it up, punishing both parties equally by sending them to the principal’s office, Charlie felt a warm, pleasurable glow: being strong was after all so much more effective than being smart.
After school, Charlie returned home to find, parked in the driveway, a long black Chrysler limousine. His first, scared thought was that it was someone official, the police or the FBI, come to tell his father about Jerry Delgado, or maybe it was even Jerry Delgado’s parents.
But it was Winthrop Lehman, the famous Winthrop Lehman, about whom his parents had spoken so often. He and Alfred Stone were in the study talking, and Lehman came out in a dark-blue suit to say hello. The great man shook Charlie’s hand with rapt concentration, as if Charlie were some world leader. Lehman was in town for the day – something to do with giving his collection of Impressionist paintings to the Fogg Art Museum – and after he and Alfred were finished talking, Lehman asked Charlie if he wanted to go for a walk. Charlie shrugged and said sure.
They walked into the square, had ice cream at Bailey’s, and then walked around the Fogg. Charlie had never been inside, wasn’t much interested in painting, but Lehman pointed his favorites out, telling him about van Gogh and Monet. Lehman noticed a scrape down Charlie’s face, and he asked what had happened. Charlie told him, not without pride. Finally, Charlie brought himself to ask Lehman: “If my dad didn’t give documents to the Russian government, why did they put him in jail?”
Lehman stopped in the echoey stone courtyard of the museum, leaned over slightly as he placed a large hand on Charlie’s shoulder, and replied: “Your father is a terribly brave man.” He did not explain what that was supposed to mean, and Charlie didn’t pursue it.
Later, intrigued by his godfather, Charlie went to the library and looked up everything he could find on Winthrop Lehman. He learned that Lehman was an heir to a railroad fortune; that he’d survived two wives and had no heirs; that in the early 1920s he had lived in Moscow for several years, doing business with the Russians, as had Armand Hammer and Averell Harriman; that Franklin Roosevelt had asked him to come to Washington and help guide the country through the New Deal and later to arrange Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union during the war; that Harry Truman had asked him to stay on as a national-security adviser. A cover story in Time in 1950 estimated his wealth at over a hundred million dollars; a picture caption described him as “America’s pre-eminent statesman.”
Knowing he was connected, even in a small way, with such a famous and powerful man gave Charlie something certain to cling to, at a time when he didn’t have a whole lot else.
By the time Stone arrived, Lehman’s party was in full swing, if ever a party at Winthrop Lehman’s august townhouse could be said to swing.
A servant took his coat; Charlie stood for a moment before the mirror in the foyer, smoothing the lapels of his charcoal-gray business suit, straightening his tie, running his hand quickly through his hair.
From the other rooms, he could hear the energized babble of cocktail-party conversation, the laughter and the clinking of glasses. A black-and-white-liveried waiter went by, carrying a tray of caviar canapes. Stone smiled: Winthrop Lehman did not skimp. As he entered the main room, he passed a table on which were displayed several copies of Lehman’s memoirs, A Lifetime.
The interior of Lehman’s endless apartment had been built, in the nineteenth century, to resemble an eighteenth-century French château: deep-brown mahogany paneling with elaborately carved pilasters, mammoth fireplaces of black marble, Venetian crystal chandeliers, gold fixtures, sconces, and escutcheons. Empire furniture upholstered in the original beige silk, several large Aubusson rugs. Portraits by Sargent hung on the walls; porcelain Oriental vases mounted in centuries-old ormolu adorned the Baroque giltwood side tables.
The room in which the party seemed to be centered – where Winthrop Lehman sat holding court, in an overstuffed gold-striped wing chair, surrounded by admirers – was the immense library: high cathedral ceilings, oak wainscoting, floors of rich green marble partly covered by sumptuous Kirman rugs; great swags of heavy pale-green silk drapery dominating the tall windows.
Stone spotted a few faces he knew and quite a few more he recognized. The senators from New York and Connecticut were speaking with an elfin real-estate mogul; the Vice-President seemed to be deep in colloquy with the Speaker of the House and the anchorman of a national evening news program.
The crowd was glittery, old New York society consorting with investment bankers, a handful of fashion designers, the heads of Citibank, ITT, and General Motors, a sprinkling of university presidents, the directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cooper-Hewitt (both of which had benefited handsomely from Lehman’s contributions over the years). There were a number of very thin-armed, very rich dowagers, including one society matron who had brought her two miniature Chinese dogs, which snarled and snapped at anyone unfortunate enough to brush by.
“Charlie Stone!”
Stone winced inwardly at the approach of someone he didn’t particularly like, a terminally dull and self-important investment banker he had met once, a few years earlier.
The investment banker, who was holding aloft a glass of wine as if he were Madame Curie displaying her first test tube of curium, clasped Stone’s hand heartily, and began to say something tedious about the International Monetary Fund.
“How’s tricks, Charlie?” he asked solicitously. “Pensions, is that right?”
Very few people even had an inkling of what Stone did for a living. He told anyone who asked that he was a private consultant. No one knows exactly what a consultant does, and most. Stone found, ask no further. He learned, too, that when he gave the plausible-sounding lie, “pension-fund actuarial analyst,” he could see, with great satisfaction, eyes begin to glaze over. At parties, anyone who asked him out of politeness to explain would receive a stultifying explanation that dampened any curiosity, provoked quick desperate smiles and the sudden urge to excuse oneself and get a refill.