New York System
Upon reflection, it was an ingenious way to keep a bright six-year-old occupied and out of one’s hair, to set down The Wall Street Journal or the business section of The New York Times before him, select a crayon of the day with much pretended interest and debate as to the color’s importance, and task the child to circle each and every instance of his father’s name appearing in the pages. And won’t Daddy be proud when he gets home?
Roberto Costa, for uncounted hours, scanned the pages concerning foreign exchanges and dividend rollovers and pork-belly commodities in hopes that his father might be quoted—since his father knew everything, and American business could hardly function without him. There were datelines from Frankfurt and Strasbourg and Brussels and an array of less pronounceable locales from where his father, one minute in the door, suitcase in the foyer, would empty into the designated bowl his pocketful of foreign coins for his son’s collection. The unrivaled treasury of coins would make for a definitive show-and-tell at school. (One day, from a park bench in western Russia, Roberto would determine that his numismatic show-and-tell was the first in his series of ambitious international projects that would not be seen to completion.)
By his eighth birthday, the jig was up. Roberto had figured out that only the headlines featuring BONDS or MUNICIPALS led to the possibility of a paternal mention. Still, what joy to find Mr. Salvador Costa quoted and to take the crayon and fill in the circles of the a’s and o’s, create a halo around his own last name. Then how, lying in his bed, Roberto would fight to stay even half-conscious, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00 p.m., attuned to the percussion of the front door opening and gently closing. His pages had been placed specially on the foyer lamp table next to the outgoing mail so his mother wouldn’t forget to present his work … which she invariably failed to do. Gratification often waited until breakfast the next morning:
“You found me again, Bobby!” his dad would say, waving the illuminated manuscript, before reading the article, before grumbling, “I see they misquoted me as usual.”
“You gonna fix ’em, Dad?”
“You bet I’m gonna fix ’em.”
As an adult, Roberto Costa now understood that the name-finding exercise was emblematic of his mother’s approach to child-rearing, a chore usually delegated to house cleaners and nanny services, but when minions could not be found, when no one could be drafted, anyone, anyone at all, to give her children a hint of supervision, there was always the Wall Street Journal assignment.
He had never entirely given up the exercise. Throughout his twenties, in some European train station café, in a Florentine piazza or a Viennese coffeehouse, nursing a too-pricey miniature soda, he would check the financial part of the International Herald Tribune and fill in the o’s and a’s for a paragraph, hoping for a spark of childhood joy.
“I am also starting to have the thought,” Liesl said quietly in English, darting a glance to their fellow train passengers, “that you have not to have been so … so honest with your Liesl. I think…” She studied a sleeping businessman and then a stern, skeletal, middle-aged man reading a thick novel. “I think that you are a very rich boy.”
He said nothing.
Liesl tucked a strand of white-blond hair behind her ear, then tapped the Financial Times. “You fill in the circles on the name Salvador Costa—he is head of something enormous. Some bank, yes? It is your father?”
He nodded, shrugging. “My father is well-off, yes.”
“And you too? You never do talking about working. I never hear you to have a profession, hmm? And the hotel in Ettal we stayed in. You must, perhaps, a thousand euros there spent?”
“I have money now, but maybe not for much longer.”
It was August of 2008, and The Economist, the Financial Times, all were gathered in his lap, emblazoned with panicked headlines; even the unexcitable Frankfurter Allgemeine had been allowing the headlines to span five out of six columns. Only the end of the world would get all six, Liesl clarified, noting that it happened once, after 9/11.
“Hmm, yes, but it is a rareness,” mused Liesl, “for any rich person to become un-rich, I think. We live in a world that the centuries have organized around giving those with money the protection of the state, yes?”
Roberto wasn’t sure whether a Marxist tirade awaited from the gorgeous blond graduate student, but the train was applying its brakes and the diesel burnt-hair smell was faint in the cabin. They were in Frankfurt.
Roberto snapped a picture of the modern skyline as they decelerated; Frankfurt was one of the few European cities you might mistake for an American one.
Soon Roberto and Liesl were off the train, retrieving their backpacks, and standing in the busiest train station in Europe, the largest in Germany, with a football stadium’s worth of fast-walking commuters who would mow down all in their path to board a train that left precisely when announced. Roberto and Liesl looked up at the enclosed space, the hangar-huge steel arches and begrimed glass in the ceiling above, which prepared one for a rainy, gray German day even when, like today, it was sunny outside.
“Okay, Baron,” Liesl purred, “I go away so you don’t have to introduce me to your Vati and explain to your father who, who must be this mysterious girl…” With this line of dramatics failing to catch hold, she became more like herself again. “Oh, I do want to see your father, from a distance, though.”
“Twenty guesses, and you still wouldn’t select him from the crowd.”
“Please. I marry your father instead, ja? If he is the rich one.”
Roberto thought he saw the silver-steel coiffure of Mrs. Santos … Yes! His heart warmed to see her again, though she had been, historically, a source of terror. Talking into her phone, she marched through the crowds of German commuters, and sure enough, Roberto’s father was behind her. Where was Sam the Intern? Usually he scurried ahead in advance and prepared things for his father, like a cross between a harried high-society caterer and a Secret Service agent.
Salvador Costa and Mrs. Santos tarried at a newsstand in the heart of the station. Mrs. Santos was exasperated about something and had her finger raised, a sign of imminent wrath, but it wasn’t guessable who was the recipient … Maybe Sam the Intern was in trouble. Roberto would have liked that. Mrs. Santos now wagged a finger at Salvador, her boss of twenty years, and then strode toward a station exit, talking into her phone.
Liesl was saying, “—because older men love me, for some reason—”
“Meine Baronin,” he said, cutting short her ingratiation into the family fortune. “See if you can pick out my father. He’s among the businessmen by the newsstand there.”
“This will be easy…” She studied the men aswarm the newsstand. “He will be tall like you, maybe good-looking like you too—I hope more so since, yes, I am to be his next wife … I say the man in the brown. That is an American suit, I think.”
After four guesses, he put her out of her misery. “The man in the plaid coat, the magenta tie.”
“Mein Gott,” she marveled, swatting him on the arm. Was he a dwarf, Liesl asked before putting a hand to her mouth, astonished by her own rudeness.
“He’s a foot shorter,” Roberto laughed. “I took entirely after my mother’s side in looks, and my sister got the short, Portuguese genes. My father did give me his bad-heart issues,” Roberto added, pointing unnecessarily to his chest.
“Oh yes. The…”
Roberto smiled good-naturedly.
“He appears to be a kind man, but does he … does he not know how to dress?”
“Yes, look—you see—someone is stopping him—he has a TV program in the United States, and businessmen recognize him. He is famous for his tasteless sports coats and loud ties.”
Salvador Costa played to the ingrained caste system of Wall Street; he was the off-the-rack Men’s Wearhouse–wearing little guy, the bond trader in Short Hills, New Jersey, in the strip mall peddling unexciting municipals, five o’clock shadow by 11:00 a.m. He may have offered amusement to the WASP and Jewish swells in the glass boardrooms, but he was the hero of muni and commodity traders, hollering for a living in the Stygian world of the trading floor. Roberto Costa’s sister, Rachel Costa, would deny outright that she was related to the Sal Costa on CNBC’s Costa: Doing Business! Fortunately for her, every other Portuguese American was named Costa, so she had deniability.
Roberto claimed his father every chance he got! He would search the cable TV menus in hotel rooms with a hundred channels hoping the European cable systems ran his dad’s half-hour CNBC segment at 5:30 U.S. eastern standard time, the lead-up to Jim Cramer’s Mad Money. Cramer may have been playing up his antics for the camera, but Sal Costa, preaching the gospel of low-yield but dependable securities, dressed out of some 1980s thrift shop, was the real Sal Costa. No playacting involved. It was a pure delight to sit in a hotel room in Brussels or Warsaw or Stockholm and let the sound of his dad’s flat Rhode Island cadences comfort him, even if Roberto had no clue what his dad was talking about.
“When I am his wife, he will not wear that tie.” Liesl then gathered up her yellow canvas backpack. “Okay, okay, na ja, you have your wonderful family moment, und ich gehe nach Kaffee. Text mir wenn du am Ende bist. Tschüss.”
Roberto watched as she sauntered away unsteadily, the backpack swaying once in each compass direction before steadily settling onto her back.
Roberto steered his own backpack and suitcase-on-rollers toward the central Imbiβ, the German sausage, kraut, beer, and french fry stand. He got to see a caper in process: lurking from behind a kiosk, Sam the Intern now joined his father hurriedly, rattling two grocery bags. His father patted Sam on the shoulder, good man, attaboy, and began rummaging through the contraband. He removed a paper container …
“Hey, it’s Bobby!” Sam cried out, spotting him.
“Bobby!” his father cried out too, abandoning Sam’s purchases to come hug his son. They hugged strongly but quickly, his father’s head at his chest. They were always faintly aware of how comical they must look (Roberto was six foot five, Sal was five foot four). “I’m getting shorter or you’re getting taller—cut it out, whatever it is! Looking good, son.”
“You too, Dad. Hey, Sam. What have we here?”
Sam had been dispatched secretly to the Kleinmarkthalle, arguably the premier wurst emporium of the Hessians. Some ruse had been enacted to distract Mrs. Santos, Sal Costa’s personal cholesterol-policewoman.
Sal unwrapped some butcher paper around a paper plate and whispered confidentially, “The weiβwurst is a Munich thing but, lo and behold, you can get it at the place I sent Sam to … It’s almost noon, and you don’t eat one of these after twelve,” he said, pointing with his plastic knife to the spongy light gray sausage.
Roberto knew all about the weiβwurst, but he let his dad enjoy telling him something about Europe, as if Roberto hadn’t lived there for nearly a decade.
“Bobby, you go inside this establishment and get us some beer—you know what’s good over here. I don’t want ’em yelling at us for using their tables without buying something. Sam, you stand there, block me from view when Mrs. Santos comes back.”
The food stand had Darmstädter pilsner on draft; Liesl was from Darmstadt. He got that for his dad, and for himself ordered a bottle of bock to go with a Bockwurst and Rindswurst, the local fave sausages. Roberto’s passion for foreign languages (credentialed by his happily useless double-major bachelor’s degree, French and German, from Brown), as ever, swarmed his thoughts: Surely, there wasn’t goat meat in a Bockwurst, or anything goatlike about the bock beer. Der Bock could be a ram or a stag too, depending on where you were in Germany. Odd, the Chinese also had a ram / billy goat confusion, one word for both animals there too … We probably got the English word buck for male deer through the Saxon Bock. Buck was always feisty, for sure—bucking broncos and being buck naked, always something masculine, to buck up was to man up, the antiquated racist slang for an African American laborer, buckaroos, pirate jargon—aye, me buckos … or maybe that was just Hollywood pirates. He’d have to do an entry in his Notebook and consult with Liesl about which word she used for goat—
“Ohne Pommes frites?” the cook asked him.
He said yes to the fries, knowing his father would like to steal a few. Roberto, subtracting a year or two off both their lives, paused at the condiment table to pump a small hillock of mayonnaise on the plate beside the fries.
Sam was a twenty-three-year-old MBA from Sloan. Roberto had crossed paths with him many times before: boyish, slim, enjoying fashionable dark suits of European cut, spiky hair, big brown eyes, probably Jewish but maybe Middle Eastern (Sam for Samir, say), from New York … Roberto hadn’t inquired. Sam hung on his father’s every word and clearly had seen past the yuck-it-up CNBC Costa: Doing Business! routine to gauge that his father really was unusually intelligent about finance. Roberto tried to tamp down the jealousy.
“Oh, you got french fries with mayonnaise!” said Sal Costa, barely able to enunciate for the food in his mouth. “Now, first sign of Mrs. Santos—”
“I run for the trash can,” Roberto said, nodding. “Dad, we could relocate inside the Imbiβ. Standing out here, we’re sitting ducks.”
Copyright © 2023 by Wilton Barnhardt
