“Who would listen to such an embittered old maid?”
Mr. Morrie chalked up his cue again and sank a red ball in a side pocket. “Moses Berger, maybe.”
Harvey began to pace. Should he ask Morrie about the harpoon, the raven? Naw, Morrie was teetering on the cliff edge of senility. Popsicles. Nearest-to-the-wall. Imagine. “There was no envelope.” Harvey’s eyes filled with tears. “But maybe I should find an envelope and fill it with plenty.”
“You’re such a clever fellow, Harvey. You think of everything.”
The next morning Harvey asked his secretary to find out where that flunk Moses Berger was hiding out these days. There was no answer in his cabin in the Townships. Harvey supplied his secretary with a list of bars.
“But it’s not even noon yet,” she protested.
“Late in the day for that one.”
Next Harvey told his secretary to try a salmon-fishing camp on the Restigouche.
“They’re expecting him on Tuesday.”
There were no further incidents at the graveside, but a week after Mr. Bernard died Harvey was called upon to deal with yet another conundrum. The Monday following Mr. Bernard’s death, his children had studied the newsweeklies for comment on their father’s passing and then conferred together, uniformly outraged. Lionel phoned Harvey from his perch high in the Gursky building on Fifth Avenue. “I need you here,” he said.
Harvey hastened to the airport and boarded one of the Gursky jets, a Lear. His lunch, ordered in advance and consumed at 28,000 feet, consisted of cottage cheese salad, a bowl of bran, and a sherbet of stewed prunes washed down with a bottle of Vichy water. Even as he flossed his teeth, Harvey pondered financial reports, but his mind was elsewhere. He knew that Lionel was giving a dinner party for Jackie Onassis that night. Harvey had packed his magenta velvet dinner jacket just in case. He no sooner landed at LaGuardia than a helicopter settled alongside, swallowing him, ascending again, and easing him on to the pad on the roof of the Gursky building, Harvey hurrying to Lionel’s office. Lionel thrust a copy of a newsweekly at him, open at the offending page. “Do you have a ball-park figure for our annual ad budget with Time and Newsweek?”
Reconciled, Harvey placed a call to the publisher while Lionel listened on the extension on his side of the desk.
“Mr. Bernard died last Monday after a long illness.”
“Yes. We know that. Please convey our condolences to Lionel.”
“He was a great human being. I say that not because of my continuing unique relationship to the family, but from the heart.”
“Nobody doubts that.”
“During his lifetime, you know, I had many offers to go elsewhere for more money. But as he was loyal to me, I was loyal to him. His children appreciate that.”
The publisher didn’t know what to say.
“From nothing he built one of the world’s largest liquor businesses. Wasn’t that truly remarkable?”
“Certainly it was.”
“Then why does his unfortunate passing rate no more than five lines in ‘Milestones’?”
As the publisher explained to Harvey that there had been a big break in the continuing Watergate story during the week and, consequently, the back of the magazine had been contracted to accommodate it, Lionel flipped the magazine open to another page, scribbled a note, and passed both to Harvey. The note read: “Ask him about the nigger.”
“Oh, I can understand that,” Harvey said to the publisher. “Only how come an Afro-American dies and he gets a full page?”
“Louis Armstrong was famous,” the publisher said.
Lapsing into pleasantries, Harvey continued to chat as Lionel hastily scribbled another note. Taking it, Harvey swallowed hard and interrupted the publisher. “But thinking aloud, if I may, why don’t you make up for overlooking Mr. Bernard’s death by doing a story on Lionel taking over, which is absolutely wonderful. I love him. I love him like a brother. I’m not ashamed to say that. But I think a lot of people are eager to know more about him, like what makes him tick and what are his future plans for McTavish.”
The deal made, or so he hoped, Harvey hung up; and then he raised his enormous expressionless brown eyes to Lionel, searching.
Lionel, his grin boyish, responded with a clap on the back. Harvey had seen him do that to manicurists and parking-lot attendants, just before fishing into his pocket for a tip.
“Join me in a drink?” Lionel asked.
“You go ahead. I’ll have a Vichy, please.”
Harvey subsided into a leather chair, spent, as an ebullient Lionel took to the telephone, calling one friend after another, letting it drop that over his objections the newsweekly was doing an in-depth story on him. “They’ll be calling all my friends, you know how they operate. Hey, you won’t tell them about Rumania, right?”
Rumania, Harvey remembered, sighing.
A year earlier Lionel had been included in a chartered jet laden with fifty corporate leaders who were flown to eastern Europe by the newsweekly to meet with Communist leaders. Afloat on champagne and caviar, Lionel and a couple of the other middle-aged magnates had started in goosing the stewardesses as soon as the seat-belt-sign blinked off. If some of the girls had been compliant, the long-legged straw-haired one Lionel fancied had clearly taken umbrage. She spurned his red roses and champagne in Warsaw. She slapped his face in the lobby of the Hotel Metropole in Moscow. And come Bucharest there was an embarrassing incident. A drunken Lionel, the stewardess claimed, had forced his way into her room, attempting indecent assault. Not so, Lionel protested, he had been invited. Once back in New York, however, the girl had consulted a lawyer, Harvey had been sent for, and the out-of-court settlement had not come cheap, all things considered.
Girls recalcitrant or unresponsive, but consumed by avarice, had been Lionel’s problem even at McGill. A terrified Harvey had unfortunately been present the first time a financial settlement had been demanded and Mr. Bernard had flown into one of his legendary rages, spewing obscenities.
Mr. Bernard, in his forties then, rocking on his tiny heels before the towering marble fireplace, seething. Young Lionel seated on the sofa, unperturbed, riding it out with a supercilious smile. When without warning an exasperated Mr. Bernard strode toward him, unzipped his fly, yanked out his penis, and shook it in his son’s face. “I want you to know, you whore-master, that in all my years this has only been into your mother, God bless her,” and, zipping up again, tearful, adding “and to this day she has the only cunt still good enough for Bernard Gursky. Respect. Dignity. That you still have to learn. Animal.”
Coming off another telephone call, Lionel looked up, surprised, “I didn’t realize that you were still here, Harvey.”
“Yeah, well, I was wondering if you needed me for anything else.”
“Nope.”
“Hey,” Harvey said, brightening, “would you like to join me for dinner tonight?”