The Family Hightower Read online

  The

  Family

  Hightower

  a novel

  Brian Francis Slattery

  Seven Stories Press

  New York / Oakland

  Copyright © 2014 by Brian Francis Slattery

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  College professors and high school and middle school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. To order, visit www.sevenstories.com/textbook or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Slattery, Brian Francis.

  The family hightower : a novel / Brian Francis Slattery.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-60980-563-0

  I. Title.

  PS3619.L375F36 2014

  813’.6--dc23

  2014005055

  Book Design by Jon Gilbert

  Printed in the United States

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1: 1995

  Part 2: 1896–1966

  Part 3: 1995

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  So listen: You have to accept the coincidence, because nothing is stranger than the truth. It’s March 10, 1968, or 10 Dhul Hijja 1388, in the late morning of the first day of Eid al-Kabir. A Russian woman is in labor in a village near Midelt, Morocco, in a house the color of burnt clay. Her husband, Rufus James Hightower, an American, helps her squat by the bed, says he’ll go get the midwife. How bad is the pain? How long has it been going on? Rufus says. Not bad, not long, she says. She’s lying. She’s been in labor for hours already, since just after midnight, but she doesn’t tell him that. He’s high, and since she hasn’t seen him since yesterday afternoon, she assumes he hasn’t slept, either. He’s just been smoking. But she still wants him here and knows how little it takes to scare him off, even when he’s straight. So she’s grateful that he doesn’t know her well enough to read the tension on her face. He thinks she’s telling the truth. They met each other less than a year ago, got married only after she knew she was pregnant. In the doorway, Rufus turns, holds up a hand—are you sure you’re okay?—and gets a glare.

  Outside, the narrow streets are filled with blood. The knife sharpeners have all gone home and there are bonfires on every corner. Two men, obvious friends, are walking down the middle of the street; there’s blood on their machetes, blood on their hands. Three girls play with a sheep’s head before giving it to their parents to roast; they ask it questions like it’s an oracle. When will I be married? Will I ever go to Paris? two of the girls ask. The third girl pretends to be the voice of the sheep, speaking in a bleating monotone. You will marry when you are seventy-six years old. You will go to Paris tomorrow. Then they put the head in the fire, laughing, while the people around them pray.

  Rufus finds the midwife behind her house, where she and her family are sacrificing a goat. Her husband has just slit the animal’s throat, and it lies on the stones of the small courtyard. There’s blood pouring out of it, and the midwife is sweeping it into a drain. Soon the butchery will start.

  “My wife is in labor now,” Rufus says, in Arabic.

  The midwife looks at him. He can tell she doesn’t have any patience for him today. It’s supposed to be her day off.

  “It’s her first?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  The midwife shakes her head, turns to her husband. There’s some bickering between them in Berber, which Rufus can’t understand. Then she turns back to him. “Give me twenty minutes.”

  Rufus helps her carry her things back to his house, a stack of towels, a bowl for fresh water, a long, sturdy pair of sharp scissors. But they’re too late. At the doorway, he hears a choking wail that doesn’t mingle with the children’s voices or the cries of the livestock dying outside.

  “What’s that?” he says.

  His wife’s voice from inside, in Russian-tainted Moroccan Arabic. “Your son.”

  Within the year, she’ll leave him, after one fight too many. This is not the life I want, she’ll say, then speak in a way she knows is too blunt, but her Arabic, her English, won’t let her do better. I don’t want you. I don’t even want the baby. And Rufus will look down at the child in his arms. I do, he’ll think. More than anything else in the world.

  Now it’s 2:47 in the morning on July 2, still 1968, in Cleveland, Ohio. Muriel Hightower, Rufus’s sister, is at the end of a long labor on the kitchen floor of an apartment near University Circle. She’s a stone hippie, and she’s still reeling a little from her father’s death two years before, and what it did to the family. She’s been living in what people will later call a commune, and the family doesn’t hide their condescension now, but they don’t know what it’s like: the Tiny Alice shows, the hang, the talk about how to make things better around here. When the Hessler Street Fair starts up, her lifestyle will get a little more respect, though that’s a year off, and the midwifery movement—Ina May Gaskin, and the Caravan, and the Farm—is still two years away. But the idea’s been catching on for a while. So the end of Muriel’s labor happens on an old school bus. The midwife has gotten some training from an obstetrician in town who figures she’s going to try to birth babies whether he helps her or not, so he might as well help. The labor’s hard but it’s not complicated. The midwife catches the baby, cuts and ties the umbilical, and puts the baby to Muriel’s chest. Then she delivers the placenta. The baby cries and pees all over his mother. Muriel doesn’t care; she’s so happy to see the boy.

  “What are you going to call him?” the midwife says.

  She takes a breath. I’m giving him my last name, not his, she thinks. The second male in that thought is the kid’s father, her ex-boyfriend, who split for the West Coast as soon as he learned she was pregnant. She turns her head to the nurse.

  “Peter Henry Hightower,” she says. “After his grandfather.”

  The family doesn’t find out about the coincidence you have to accept—that Muriel’s brother Rufus gave his son the very same name, for the very same reason—until 1974, when Rufus makes his first visit to the United States since the death of the original Peter Henry Hightower: the Ukrainian kid from Tremont, the self-made man, the patriarch, the charmer; the son of a bitch, the criminal, the sellout, and for the last thirty years of his life, one of the most powerful men in Cleveland.

  Rufus comes back to Cleveland in 1974 for the wedding of his and Muriel’s older sister, Sylvie, at the house in Bratenahl where they all grew up, and where Sylvie still lives. They’re on the back lawn that drops down to the lake, a long stretch of grass full of wildflowers, from the shoreline to the top of the rise, where the mansion runs from one wall of the estate to the other. All the windows are lit, and in the last light of the day—the sun went down a half an hour ago—the house looks like a distant city. Sylvie’s set up wide white tents, floors on low risers, gaslights on metal stands. A big band plays 1940s swing and the Motown of a few years ago, brings out the middle generation and their parents, the swarm of kids always. The oldest ones there, old enough to be grandparents—the ones who know all the stories now,
or at least think they do, and can’t be shocked by anything anyway—sit at the back tables with colorful cocktails. Sylvie’s dress is a light gray to match her husband’s hair. The husband, Michael Rizzi, is sixty-two years old, twenty-six years older than she is, and was a close associate, business and otherwise, of her father’s until the day he died. None of the siblings was aware that Michael and Sylvie even knew each other until they announced their engagement, and now all of Rufus’s brothers and sisters are bonded in polite confusion: Muriel, of course, with her husband—Terry, whom she met and married not long after Peter was born—and her three children, the youngest just a baby; Henry, the eldest son, and his wife with their only daughter, Alex; and Jackie, twitching, on the arm of uncle Stefan, their father’s brother. Rufus notices the siblings are all seated at different tables and smiles. That’s Sylvie all over. Understanding why they all might not want to talk to each other for long, even eight years after their father’s funeral; giving them the chance to avoid having to pretend that they get along.

  Rufus still has the thick mustache he had the last time they saw him, wears loose linen clothes, slicks his hair back with oil, but puts his son—a black-haired boy with bright hazel eyes like a German shepherd—in a shirt and shorts he bought in Higbee’s in downtown Cleveland the day before. Though nothing can hide that his boy isn’t from Ohio. His skin is far too tan for the sun Ohio gets, his haircut is all wrong. He’s an alien in this place.

  “Jesus Christ, Rufus, you look like Lawrence of Arabia,” Henry says. “Who’s the kid? Is he yours?”

  “Of course he’s mine,” Rufus says.

  Henry laughs. “Don’t act like you’re insulted. What’s his name?”

  “Peter. I named him after Dad.”

  Henry looks across the reception toward Muriel and her oldest boy, a dirty blond, clean and sharp in a powder-blue suit the same cut as his stepfather’s.

  “Same middle name, too?” he says.

  “Yep,” Rufus says.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” Rufus says.

  “Unbelievable.”

  “What?”

  “You really need to stay in touch more.”

  By the end of the reception, there have been at least a dozen conversations about how the two boys are almost opposites. Muriel’s boy moves from table to table asking everyone how their wedding is going. He dances with Sylvie, with his mother, with Jackie. A great-uncle gives him a bite of his cake, and the boy returns the favor. Here, have a bite, the kid says. I can’t eat all of this. Rufus’s boy, meanwhile, climbs on the tables, then hides under them. He runs off to the shore of the lake and someone has to drag him back. They find spoons in his pockets before he leaves, walking with his head down, clinging to his father’s leg. It’s no surprise, Muriel says, her baby on her hip, the way Rufus is raising him, dragging the boy halfway across Africa and back, no mother, no home to speak of. She’s a long way from her hippie days by then, but she’s not trying to be mean to her brother; she’s concerned about the boy and can’t help herself. Bet he’s slept outside more often than he’s slept in a bed. Yes, she says, one of these boys is going to be real trouble. She’s right about that, dear reader; she’s just pegged the wrong boy. And Rufus never comes back to America again.

  Okay so far? Because whenever trouble’s visited this family, it’s been big, and the kind that comes along in 1995—that snares first one boy, then the other, and then the rest of them, in some way or another—leaves a chain of corpses from Cleveland to Moldova. But it’s also conjuring some of the old Peter Henry Hightower’s dark magic, calling up his ghost to build empires again, hold together and destroy everyone around him. Looking back, it’s easy to see how it all fits together, to feel that stale air of inevitability, to forget that at the time it was all open promise—always was, still is now. Those two ideas, of infinite possibility and singular doom, held in direct tension: If America doesn’t have a lock on it, at least we’ve done it best in all the world so far, and it’s a small part of what makes us great and terrible, from the first days of religious and political radicals making profits and slaughtering the natives to our final days, whenever they may be, but which are always coming sooner than we think.

  Still with me? Good. Let’s go.

  Part 1

  1995

  Chapter 1

  Every story’s a kind of violence perpetrated on the facts. You cut off their arms and legs, stretch them out, break their ribs until they fit where you think they’re supposed to. All of it in search of meaning. Some stories, the job is so clean, everything’s arranged along an arc so bright that you can’t see the carnage that went into making it.

  But this story isn’t like that. There is blood everywhere, pieces all around us. There are so many people involved: the Hightower family and all the people they touched, all the people they hurt. People and politics and history, of the family and four countries. This means we have to move around a lot. If you’re looking for the kind of story where you follow one person from beginning to end, and the clock ticks forward, sentence after sentence—well, it’s not going to go like that around here. You won’t be confused at the end, you’ll know everything then, I promise. But where do we start?

  We could go to that strip of land that, in 1995, three countries claim but nobody’s governing, the triangle at the intersection of Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova. We could bend a hundred years of history into a perfect circle and call it whole. Would it satisfy you? Almost without a doubt. But it wouldn’t be true. We could start in Cleveland in 1966, give you the pinion of the drama. We could start with a single dollar bill, because this is all about money in the end. The things people do when they don’t have enough, or think they don’t. The impossibility of knowing when we have enough, because not one of us knows ourselves that well, and the man who says he does? Don’t trust him. All these things matter, all of them could force the story to mean something, to mean a lot of things. But that’s not what we’re here to see. We are here, you understand, to see the bodies and the blood. The muscles and the tendons. So maybe we should start with cords: a telephone line running unbroken from Cleveland across the Atlantic to Granada, Spain.

  It’s August 1995, and Curly Potapenko, in Cleveland, is doing the calling. He’s been trying to reach the younger Peter Henry Hightower—Muriel’s boy, whom everyone calls Petey—all day. He’s trying to warn him, but nobody’ll pick up the phone. Curly Potapenko is scared to death that this is because Petey’s dead already. It’s not a stupid thing to think: The only reason Curly has a phone number is because he paid a guy off to give it to him—a double cross—because he knows the people he’s been working for in Kiev have been tracking Petey down in the hopes of killing him. They have a couple guys out, one heading to the Romanian border, one heading east into Russia. Another one heading west, into the rest of Europe. They’re even talking about sending a guy somewhere in Africa. They’re following all the leads they have.

  Curly doesn’t know that nobody’s picking up the phone in Spain because the young man who lives in the apartment is out. That’s all. The bigger problem, though, is that Curly—and that means the people in Kiev, too—in this case, have the wrong Peter Henry Hightower. They’ve found Rufus’s son, not Muriel’s, the one who’s on the outs right now with his dad for what he thinks is for good, though it doesn’t stop him from feeling bad. Our man Peter, who’s about to get involved in a plot he doesn’t want any part of.

  It’s 9:06 p.m. in Granada, and Peter is leaving the Art Deco movie theater on the corner of the Plaza de Gracia. He’s been to that theater a lot, because he knows almost nobody in this town. He lives by himself in a studio apartment, makes a living from tutoring Spaniards in English: students, businesspeople, a pampered spouse who thinks of language acquisition as a quirky hobby. He sells freelance articles about Granada to magazines, too. The angles come to him without much work, a relic of his days as a m
ore serious journalist: the travel angle, the culinary angle. He’s a good investigative reporter, too, when the story grabs him. But often, the story doesn’t grab him. These days, no story seems to. Sometimes that Spain feels like a dream to him. For the first five seconds of every day, he has to remember where he is; he keeps expecting to wake up somewhere else. There’s the maze of the Moorish quarter. The Generalife, so complicated and peaceful at the same time. And then there’s the haze of the place during siesta. He has never adjusted to sleeping during it, or even resting, so he stays in his apartment, sweating in the heat, or goes for long walks. The city’s eeriest to him then; it’s as though everyone got a piece of news he missed and abandoned the place, and he’s the only one left behind. All of Spain seems strange to him that way, and it was like that the day he arrived, by plane into Madrid, and took the train south, riding in the beige smoking car, like living inside a cigarette, staring out at the blank landscape outside the city. It has all been believable as a hallucination.

  Peter’s thinking of that now, at 11:27, after a slow meal of North African tapas at a bar two blocks to the north of the theater, because, as the clock moves from noon to midnight, the Plaza de Gracia travels back in time. The tiny, buzzing cars, delivery trucks, and scooters of the afternoon give way to bicycles. The modern buildings near the theater, the bright magazine kiosk, get pale in the light of the lamps in the square. The cobblestones, the palm trees, the old buildings of wood and white plaster, come to life. Two Romanis play a tarnished violin and an accordion missing four keys. Their cases are out and already lined with pesetas. Beyond them, an acting troupe has set up a small stage, two floodlights, five rows of ten chairs each, which are one-third occupied. Three actors onstage, two women and a man, in peasant costumes, all scream at each other in Spanish, too fast and slangy for Peter to understand, though it’s holding the small audience. They gasp when one of the men attacks the woman, breathe hard when the second man stabs the first and red silk pours from the first man’s embroidered shirt. They’re quiet for the last minutes, then stand up, clapping, shouting bravos. Whether they’re just family and friends is irrelevant to the actors when they’re onstage, or maybe all the more meaningful. A man with a black jacket and white hair approaches the stage and waves down the victim of the murder, who’s up and bowing. They hug like an uncle and a nephew do, the older man patting the younger one on the back.