The Hazards of Good Fortune Read online

  Witness:

  The summer Louis Armstrong’s horn sounded its last blue note and the south tower of the World Trade Center pierced the clouds above Manhattan to become the tallest building on the planet, sixteen-year-old Harold Jay Gladstone got dunked on at a basketball camp in the Catskill Mountains. It was 1971 and to the greater world what happened on that sweltering afternoon had no larger meaning, but Jay learned a painful lesson that remained with him for the rest of his life: However much an individual might believe himself to be at the zenith of his power, capability, and influence, he is always one small slip away from ruin.

  A skinny white kid from the broad-lawned New York suburbs, land of golf and tennis, dry martinis, private swimming pools, European vacations, elite colleges, and psychoanalysis, Jay was devoted to all things “Negro,” a label still acceptable then. Understand: He wasn’t a clown about it. He had too much deeply held respect to approach the subject from that angle. Jay didn’t dress black and didn’t make the embarrassing mistake of so many white boys that tried to mimic the speech, the walk, the innumerable signifiers of blackness, but was entranced by the remarkable culture conjured by African-Americans in all its rowdy proliferation.

  On a typical Saturday, he rode his ten-speed bicycle from his home in Scarsdale—a town where the minority population consisted of a three-foot-tall ceramic lawn jockey standing sentinel in front of a neighbor’s center hall Colonial—to the nearby and far more diverse city of White Plains where he bought a ticket at the Palace Theater on Main Street to absorb the lessons of Shaft, get a slice and a soda at Nicky’s Pizzeria, purchase the Black Panther Party newspaper from an intimidating street vendor, and then pedal back to his family’s five-bedroom house, where he slouched on his bed beneath a five-foot-high poster of Jimi Hendrix immolating a Fender Stratocaster, and eagerly devoured the fevered accounts of violent inner city life. Three years earlier he’d been the only kid in his eighth-grade class to read Eldridge Cleaver’s memoir.

  “You should look at this,” Jay said to Claudie one day after school, offering her his worn copy of Soul On Ice. They were standing outside his bedroom door and he had to raise his voice to be heard over the whirr of the Electrolux vacuum cleaner. A black woman from Georgia, Claudie had been working for the Gladstones for as long as Jay could remember. Ancient and blue haired, she fixed him with a quizzical stare. Jay offered her the book but she shook her head. The boy was puzzled. The possibility that the housekeeper might be perplexed by the son of her wealthy employers purveying the literature of revolution while she tried to clean the upstairs hallway eluded him completely.

  The stultifying traditions that surrounded him, the world of his parents and grandparents, the round of brain-numbing Seders, High Holy Days services that droned on for hours, and bar mitzvahs where his schoolmates in madras jackets, pressed slacks, and loafers (boys), paisley or polka dot dresses and Courreges boots (girls), awkwardly Watusied around the dance floor to anemic bands that played deracinated versions of current AM radio hits, held none of the outlaw brio he craved. That resided in Harlem, a place known to Jay only through the finger-snapping novels of Chester Himes, an author to whom he had been alerted by a sympathetic librarian.

  What Jay lived for—more than his tattered Chester Himes paperbacks, Soul Train, and seeing the Supremes in the flesh on a family trip to Expo 67 in Montreal—was basketball, specifically the New York Knicks. A year earlier they had won their first NBA title and the liquid way the team played the game, the seamless passing, cutting, and shooting in which they engaged with the heedless swing of the jazz cats his father savored, was the Platonic ideal of what sport was meant to represent. It would not be an exaggeration to say Jay Gladstone worshipped them. On winter nights, he reverently listened to Marv Albert’s Brighton Beach boom on WNBC emanating from the transistor radio nestled next to his pillow intoning names of deities like Frazier, Bradley, and Reed, and he would envision himself on the court at Madison Square Garden running with his heroes. “Gladstone from the corner . . . ” he imagined the famous sportscaster declaim. Then: “Yes!”

  The previous April he had taken the Metro-North train into the city, devoured a sub at Blimpie for dinner, and furtively purchased a ticket from a scalper outside the Garden, where he attended game seven of the Eastern Conference semifinal playoff series when the Knicks squared off against Earl Monroe and the Baltimore Bullets. From his perch in the nosebleed seats young Jay hollered himself hoarse, throat in tatters as he willed the Knicks to victory and a place in the NBA Finals. The transformation he underwent that night, the sense of abandonment, of release, of beatitude was no less profound for him than what the Baal Shem Tov, about whom he had learned in Sunday school, experienced during his mystic visions three centuries earlier in the forests of Poland.

  A shard of history and it belonged to him.

  And Jay played the game, oh, how he played the game. It wasn’t that he was particularly talented, although he harbored a fantasy that he could achieve a certain level of competence, but his devotion to improvement knew no bounds. There was a backboard mounted on the garage, and it was there that Jay worked on his skills in the morning, after school, and on weekends. His sister rebounded the ball and passed it to him so he could shoot without breaking his rhythm. Days were measured in jump shots, layups, and free throws, dribbling drills where the ball went behind his back and through his legs, all of which were put to use in an endless round of playground pickup games.

  Jay started playing organized ball in the fourth grade, played on the freshman team, and then on the junior varsity. In the autumn of 1971 the varsity squad loomed. While not quite elite, he was talented, and scrappy enough to play at the next level so his ascension to the empyrean realm—letter jackets, cheerleaders, and the approbation of the entire community that crammed into the gym on game days (his adolescent mind swam at the richness of this vision)—was a near given.

  For a year, desperate to improve his jumping ability, Jay had been plodding around with weights laced to his ankles.

  “Watch this,” Jay commanded his sister one humid afternoon when the two of them were in the driveway of their large, Tudor-style home. They were playing with a basketball made from rubber. Gym shorts and gray T-shirts soaked with perspiration. The gardener had been there in the morning and the air was awash with the sweet smell of freshly cut grass. Jay turned on a nearby hose and wet the ball. Then he stretched his fingers over the rubber surface and palmed it. Bebe’s eyes widened. She asked how he did it. This was not a skill typically found in the repertoire of an average-sized suburban teenager. To his sibling it seemed like magic. Jay couldn’t palm a regulation leather ball, but if the ball was rubber, and it was wet, he could now get it to stay on his hand—secret knowledge gleaned after a recent rainfall when he astonished himself by picking it up off the ground without putting his hand under it. It felt supernatural.

  Humid air filled his lungs as he inhaled deeply and focused his eyes on the rim looming ten feet over the asphalt. Five running steps and he leapt toward the basket, elevated, and—was his entire wrist over the rim?—threw down a one-handed dunk. Bebe screamed. They slapped moist palms.

  Jay grinned and with practiced aplomb said, “Damn right.”

  Bebe asked if that was the first time he had ever dunked it.

  “Been practicing. Last week I did it with a baseball. Then yesterday I dunked a cantaloupe.”

  She wondered, “Does Mom know you were playing with fruit?”

  Their mother, raised by European immigrants, had a phobia about wasting food.

  “I ate it.”

  Jay Gladstone was still fifteen (his birthday was in early August). A scrawny kid, short for a basketball player, and he had dunked. It didn’t matter that the ball was rubber, not the regulation leather, or that he had slicked it down so the surface would stick to his hand. He dunked the ball. The long months of tramping around with weights strapped to his lower
extremities had worked. Jay had transformed himself into that most lofty category of basketball players, a category rarely breached by white people—he was a leaper. There were stories he heard of New York City playground legends like Herman “The Helicopter” Knowings and Earl Manigault, men that could pluck a silver dollar from the top of a backboard. He did not expect to achieve those dizzying heights, had no hope that he would ever tomahawk (two-handed) dunk, the ultimate agreed-upon sign of basketball machismo. But he swelled with a pride he had not felt since he flawlessly read from the Torah on the day of his bar mitzvah.

  When it was time to get a summer job after his sophomore year in high school, Jay was adamant that he didn’t want to commute into the city to work at Gladstone Properties. His father, to his surprise, took this in stride. “As long as you earn some money,” he said, “you can dig ditches.” Bingo Gladstone was gregarious, the kind of man who would strike up conversations with strangers, and one morning when he and Jay stood in line at Bagel Haven to pick up lox and a dozen onion bialys for Sunday brunch he said to the owner, “Hey, my number one needs a summer job. You think he’d be a good bagel maker?” For three dollars and twenty-five cents an hour Jay was enlisted to show up at Bagel Haven before dawn five days a week and assist in baking the cornucopia of bagels, bialys, and twists offered at the shop. He didn’t mind the work. After studying as hard as he did during the school year it was a welcome relief to do something less intellectually taxing, even if he had to be awake before the birds began to chirp. And he earned enough money that by the end of August he was able to pay his own way to Walt Frazier’s basketball camp. Jay esteemed the entire New York Knicks roster but Walt “Clyde” Frazier was his personal idol. Consummate smooth operator, sine qua non of gliding, sliding precision, a sinuous and mellow tenor saxophone solo sprung to vivid life, Clyde Frazier was the athletic godhead to which Jay prostrated.

  It was there at the camp that he found himself on an outdoor court surrounded by over a hundred teenaged boys (and Clyde, for god sakes! Clyde was watching!), crouched at the top of the key, guarding the best player on the opposing squad, with five seconds left in the championship game and his team up by one point.

  Dave Bailey was a seventeen-year-old black kid, six foot three and explosive. He was a star at Mount Vernon High School, and the buzz in the camp was that at least three Division I college programs were recruiting him. Jay had switched on to Bailey because the teammate who was guarding him had been flattened by a pick. Dave Bailey sized Jay up as if he were eyeing a succulent morsel and faked left. When Jay didn’t go for it, Bailey drove right with Jay stuck to his hip. Then the taller player bounded toward the basket. As he reared his arm to dunk, Jay, suffused with pride in having altered the ability of his body to perform feats heretofore impossible, secure in the belief that he could against all expectations stymie his high-flying opponent, and pulsing with adrenaline, leaped and extended his arm to block the shot. He met the ball five inches over the rim—higher than he had ever jumped, he was airborne!—where the force of Bailey’s arm rocketed Jay’s hand into the iron. The ball went through the rim and the screams emitted by the crowd, the festive sideline dancing to celebrate the burn inflicted, the mayhem unleashed by Bailey’s ability to rule, all combined to make Jay ignore the throbbing in his hand where X-rays would later reveal a hairline fracture.

  Dave Bailey? That kid looked as if he had dropped a quarter in the soda machine and a can of Coke appeared. What were you expecting? his eyes seemed to say. The impassive reaction to his splendid feat reflected a self-assurance the white suburban victim could only begin to imagine.

  When Jay retreated to the nearby woods to escape the consoling words of his teammates, all of whom secretly thrilled it hadn’t happened to them, he tried to believe the tears he could no longer hold back were from the pain he felt and not the humiliation.

  “Good try, son,” Clyde had said to him.

  Clyde had said! In a voice like velvet! To him!

  But despite this personal interaction with his hero, the hidden meaning of Good try’s pat on the back was the inescapable punch in the nose of You failed.

  Jay was devastated. He managed to choke out a response but the scrambled manner in which the words tumbled off his tongue led the Knick divinity to nod and smile sympathetically before turning his attention to another camper. Jay never forgot that when he tried to talk to Clyde Frazier he had sounded like an idiot. That night he lay awake in his bunk endlessly replaying what had happened and concluded consciously what he had been unwilling to admit. He had no business being on the court with a player as talented as Dave Bailey, and his entire infatuation with black culture struck him for the first time as a little silly. Black culture had dunked on him and Jay realized he would have to evolve into a better version of what he already was, and not try to be something else.

  When he climbed off the elliptical machine after forty-five minutes, twilight inked Manhattan and Bebe was riding a stationary bicycle. He hadn’t noticed her arrival. They greeted each other and Jay asked if she had plans this evening.

  “Big date,” she said. “It’s why I’m in the gym.”

  “Who with?”

  She told Jay that it was someone she met at a benefit, the first deputy director of the International Monetary Fund. As it happened, Jay was acquainted with him.

  “We had an interesting conversation about Africa,” he said. “Don’t embarrass the family.”

  Bebe smiled and increased the resistance on the bike. She had been married and divorced twice—once to a bankruptcy lawyer and once to a political consultant active in Democratic politics—and had no children. Her marriages had foundered because Bebe Gladstone was accustomed to getting her way. The only man she would defer to was her brother. Being single did not concern her, and she viewed dating like a sport, something to do in order to keep in shape.

  “Did you talk to Franklin?”

  “I did,” Jay said.

  “And?”

  He paused before answering and Bebe’s expression darkened. “He was puffing on one of his cigars and he blew a lot of smoke.”

  “Franklin’s the king of the metaphor,” Bebe said, pumping away on the stationary bike.

  “All I can say is I hope there’s nothing to it.”

  “But you think there might be.”

  “He’s complicated. I’ll leave it at that.”

  “Unsatisfying.”

  “All will be revealed.”

  In the locker room Jay grabbed a clean towel from a freshly laundered and folded stack. The thought loop in his head rewound and he wondered whether he should have told the Dave Bailey story to Dag. It would have been a sign of humility. Boris was changing into workout clothes and they coordinated a time for the drive back to Westchester. While he was showering, it occurred to him that if he told Dag what had happened in the summer of 1971, the player might think that everything Jay had done in the world of basketball since then was built on revenge. You never knew how someone would react. Better to not have mentioned it.

  Traffic was light when Boris steered the Mercedes over the Third Avenue Bridge and on to the Major Deegan Expressway. Jay had been looking for ways to further empower his young cousin—he had begun to view Boris as something of a surrogate son—and on the ride back to Bedford considered sharing his concerns about Franklin. But to communicate his suspicions might poison Boris’s opinion and Jay, being a fair-minded man, did not want to risk that in the event they proved unfounded. He still wanted to believe that Franklin, while problematic, was not that devious.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In the six months since they had entered the socially sanctioned, sadomasochistic rite known as marriage counseling, Christine Lupo and her husband Dominic had gone on over ten “dates” with each other. It was their therapist’s idea and intended to reignite the absent spark in their nearly twenty-year relationship. These evenings invariably be
gan in fragile stasis, as if both wife and husband were wary of doing or saying the wrong thing, but by the time they had consumed cocktails and a bottle of Pino Grigio, embers flickered, and they usually managed a moment or two of intimacy. This had not happened tonight.

  They were at Castaldi’s, a red sauce Italian restaurant in Harrison. Christine ordered the veal marsala. She consumed her usual vodka martini with an olive and a twist and was nursing a second glass of wine. The place was half full, local couples, soft conversations. The Lupos had been there for over an hour, and the district attorney had not yet broached the subject of her husband’s transgressions. It would be easy to describe this behavior as sadistic, but sadism was not her motivation. As he droned on about his week, what was new at the office, an upcoming business trip to Europe intended to explore the possibility of importing a particular cheese he had recently discovered at a food convention he had allegedly attended the previous week, she tried to observe him with the objectivity of an anthropologist.

  In his late forties with a lean face, Dominic Lupo’s features had improved with age. His long nose was straight, and his lips curled slightly upward, so his resting expression appeared to be a smile. His hair was streaked with gray and had begun to recede, but that only seemed to heighten the acuity in his dark, lying eyes, the ones that concealed a sordid, hidden life that was about to be his undoing. Thrice weekly workouts at a Manhattan gym—she wondered if that was where he met the whore with whom he was betraying their marital vows—enabled him to retain his youthful physique. The tailored jacket he wore hung loosely over an open-collared oxford shirt that left the soft declivity in his neck just above his breastbone exposed. He gestured with his fingers as he spoke, pianist’s fingers. That Dominic played some piano and could sing a little—Did he sing to the tramp? Lying in bed after the two of them had sex, did the cheating sonofabitch sing?—were qualities that Christine was drawn to when they first met. She remembered the long-ago night when, after several glasses of wine, he had sung an Abba song to her, “Dancing Queen,” made up lyrics for the one he wanted to impress—See that girl, watch that scene, her name’s Christine, she’s my dancing queen. The thought that her husband might have been serenading another woman was making Christine nauseous.