all of them leaders in their field, were shocked to read the obituaries
of the Viennese philanthropist Jurgen Lenz, in the avalanche that buried
the Alpine Schloss he had inherited from his father.
Thirty-seven men and women, all of whom were in remarkable health.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE.
A gleaming throwback to a more elegant age, the Metropolis Club occupied
the corner of a handsome block on East Sixty-eighth Street in Manhattan.
It was a grand McKim, Mead & White building from the late nineteenth
century, adorned with limestone balustrades, trimmed with intricate
modillion courses. Inside, the curved wrought-iron railings of the
double staircase led past marble pilasters and plaster medallions to the
spacious Schuyler Hall. Three hundred chairs were now assembled on its
black-and-white harlequinade floor. Ben had to admit, for all his
misgivings, that it wasn’t an inappropriate venue for his father’s
memorial service: Marguerite, Max Hartman’s executive assistant for
twenty years, had insisted on organizing the event and her efforts were,
as always, beyond reproach. Now he blinked hard and looked at the faces
in front of him, until the collectivity came into focus as individuals.
Seated in all those chairs was a curious community of mourners. Ben saw
the careworn faces of older men from New York’s banking community,
grizzled, jowly, stoop-shouldered men who knew that banking, the
profession to which they had devoted their lives, was now changing in
ways that exalted technical competence over the cultivation of personal
relationships. These were bankers who had made their biggest deals on
the fairways–gentlemen of the green who glimpsed that the future of
their industry belonged to callow men with bad haircuts and doctorates
in electrical engineering, callow men who did not know a putter from a
nine iron.
Ben saw the elegantly attired leaders of major charitable causes. He
made fleeting eye contact with the executive director of the New-York
Historical Society, a woman who wore her abundant hair in a tight bun;
her face looked slightly stretched, in a diagonal that ran from each
corner of her mouth to an area behind each ear–the familiar sign of a
recent face-lift, marks of the surgeon’s crude craft. In the row behind
her, Ben recognized the white-haired, navy-suited head of the Grolier
Society. The
soigne president of the Metropolitan Museum. The neo-hippyish
chairwoman of the Coalition for the Homeless. Elsewhere were provosts
and deans of several major educational institutions, each keeping the
others at a careful distance, each regarding Ben somberly. In the first
row was the charismatic national director of the United Way charities,
slightly rumpled, his brown basset-hound eyes looking genuinely moved.
So many faces, dissolving briefly and then resolving into particularity
once more. Ben saw striving couples, tight-bodied wives and
soft-bellied men, who had helped secure their position in New York
society by enlisting Max Hartman’s support in their ceaseless
fund-raisers for literacy, AIDS, freedom of expression, wildlife
conservation. He saw neighbors from Bedford: the softball-playing
magazine mogul with his trademark bold-striped shirt; the slightly
tatty-looking, long-faced scion of a distinguished old family who once
directed an Egyptology program at an Ivy League university; the youngish
man who had launched, and sold to a conglomerate, a company that made
herbal teas with colorful New Age names and progressive box-top
homilies.
Worn faces, fresh faces, familiar ones and strange ones. There were the
people who worked for Hartman Capital Management. Prized clients, like
good old Fred McCall an who’d dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief
once or twice. Former colleagues of his from his days teaching in East
New York; newer colleagues of his from the job he’d just taken at an
equally poor high school in Mount Vernon. There were people who had
helped him and Anna in their time of need. Above all, there was Anna,
his francee, his friend, his lover.
Before all of these people, Ben stood before a rostrum at the raised
platform at the end of the hall and tried to say something about his
father. In the previous hour, a very fine string quartet one that Max
Hartman had helped sponsor had played an adagietto by Mahler, adapted
from his Fifth Symphony. Erstwhile business colleagues and
beneficiaries of Max had evoked the man they knew. And now Ben found
himself speaking, and wondering as he spoke, whether he was really
addressing the assembled or himself.
He had to speak of the Max Hartman he knew, even as he wondered how much
he ever did know or could know him. His only certainty was that it was
his task to do so. He swallowed hard and continued speaking: “A child
imagines that his father is all-powerful. We see the pride and the
broad shoulders and the sense of mastery and it’s impossible to think
that this strength has limits. Maybe maturity comes of recognizing our
error.” Ben’s throat constricted, and he had to wait a few moments
before resuming.
“My father was a strong man, the strongest man IVe ever known. But the
world is powerful, too, more powerful than any man, however bold and
determined he may be. Max Hartman lived through the darkest years of
the twentieth century. He lived through a time when mankind revealed
how very black its heart could be. In his mind, I think, the knowledge
defiled him. I know that he had to live with that knowledge, and make a
life and raise a family, and pray that his knowledge would not shadow
our lives as it did his own. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
Again Ben paused, took a deep breath, and pressed on.
“My father was a complicated man, the most complicated man I have ever
known. He lived through a history of astonishing complexity. A poet
wrote:
“Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities.
“My father liked to say that he only looked forward, never behind. That
was a lie, a brave, defiant lie. History was what my father was shaped
by, and what he would always struggle to overcome. A history that was
anything but black and white. The eyesight of children is very sharp.
It dims with age. And yet there is something that children really don’t
see too well: the intermediate tones. Shades of gray. Youth is pure of
heart, right? Youth is uncompromising, resolute, zealous. That is the
privilege of inexperience. That is the privilege of a moral cleanliness
untested and untroubled by the messiness of the real world.
“What if you have no choice but to deal with evil in order to fight
evil? Do you save those you love, those you can, or do keep yourself
pure and unsullied? I know I never had to make that call. And I know
something else. A hero’s hands are chapped, scuffed, chafed and
callused, and only rarely are they clean. My father’s were not. He
lived with the sense that, in fighting the enemy, he had also done work
that served their purposes. In the end, his broad shoulders would be
bowed with a sense of guilt that none of his good deeds could ever
erase. He could never forget that he had survived when so many he had
cherished did not. Again: After such knowledge what forgiveness? The
effect was that he redoubled his efforts to do what was right. Only
recently have I come to understand that I was never truer to him and his
own sense of mission than when I thought I was rebelling against him,
and his expectations for me. A father wants, above all, to keep his
children safe. But that is the one thing that no father can do.”
Ben’s eyes met Anna’s for a long, lingering moment, and he found solace
in the steady, answering gaze of her liquid brown eyes.
“One day, God willing, I will be a father, and no doubt I will forget
this lesson and have to relearn it. Max Hartman was a philanthropist in
the root sense of the word, he loved people and yet he was not an easy
man to love. Every day, his children would ask themselves whether they
made him proud or ashamed. Now I see that he was burdened by this
question, too: would he make us, his children, proud or ashamed!
“Peter, above all else, I wish you were here with me at this very
moment, to listen and to talk.” Now his eyes welled. “But, Peter, this
you’ve got to file under ‘strange but true,” as you used to say. Dad
lived in fear of our judgment.”
Ben bowed his head for a moment. “I say my father lived in fear that I
would judge him and yet it seems incredible. He feared that a child
bred of luxury and indolence would judge a man who had to endure the
annihilation of everything he held dear.”
Ben squared his shoulders, and, his voice hoarse and thickened with
sadness, spoke a little louder. “He lived in fear that I would judge