Free An Unfinished Season by Ward Just Page A

holy writ, and maritime lawyers the crème de la crème. He let you know it was lucrative, too. And he had the little Hinckley sloop to prove it.
    He called the sloop
Marine Tort.
    An awful snob, my father said.
    Ravan? Where does that name come from?
    Hungary, I said, choosing the first nation that came to mind.
    It doesn’t sound Hungarian, Squire said.
    Maybe Swiss, I said. I’ll ask my uncle Laszlo.
    And he thought I was an Indian from the West, some Potawatomi come to seize his daughter by force and take her back to the tepee. But he couldn’t ignore what was in front of his eyes so he suggested instead that we settle in Westport or Cos Cob, one of those places, so we’d be nearby and come to lunch every Sunday, deviled eggs and cold roast beef after a pitcher of martinis. But I could never live in Connecticut, my father said, or any place near Connecticut, and I have to say Jo saw the logic to that. She saw the logic and at the same time she saw the hilarity, her husband-to-be and her father at daggers drawn—her phrase, daggers drawn. She and her mother laughed about it but they didn’t give up. Jo never gives up easily. Can’t you give way just a little? Would it cost you so much? She wondered if we couldn’t compromise on New Jersey or Westchester County or some place near Boston, and I said I didn’t think so; we needed a thousand miles between us, her father and me. I think it was perversity that caused me to join up with Butch Greenslat and his nephew because I knew what he’d say when I called to give him the good news, an associate in the law offices of Greenslat & Greenslat.
    Jew firm, isn’t it?
    They do political work, I said.
    Of course they would, Squire said.
    It’s big business in Chicago, I said.
    Dirty business, he said.
    Everyone has the right to counsel, I said with the gravity of an attorney from the ACLU.
    Mixed up with Capone’s people, are they?
    They’re fixers, I said. They can fix anything. Elections, grand jury indictments, traffic tickets, probate irregularities, municipal taxes, a construction contract. They’re Chicagoans through and through. Chicagoland thrives on the broad backs of Greenslat & Greenslat and now I’ll be thriving with them and before too long it’ll be Greenslat, Greenslat & Ravan, and on that day I’ll be buying Jo a powder-blue Cadillac, a mink coat, and an apartment in Miami Beach. And then I sat back and listened to him go on the boil.
    Squire? I said when he finished his Jew rant. We can throw some business your way. Does the law of the sea extend as far as the inland lakes—Michigan, for example? Because if it does, we’ve had some suspicious yacht fires...
    Jo was their only child, my father said. The Wilsons were a close family and there were a hell of a lot of them, aunts and uncles, cousins, stepcousins. I think there was even a stepgrandmother somewhere. I could never keep them straight, scattered all over the country but mostly in New York and New England. So when your mother insisted on naming you Wilson, I was in no position to object. Do you like the sound, Wilson Ravan?
    I haven’t thought much about it, I lied. The truth was, I tried out new names all the time. At the jazz club, I sometimes introduced myself as Bill. Another time I tried Eddie, but Eddie didn’t fit.
    I said, Where does the name Ravan come from?
    Damned if I know, my father said. I was never much for family trees. Middle Europe somewhere, I suppose.
    By then we had finished dinner and retreated to the den, where I was shuffling the cards for pinochle. My father was content to listen to the fall of the cards while he pulled on his cigar and leafed through phonograph records, discarding Duchin in favor of his favorites: Sidney Bechet, Fred Astaire singing George Gershwin, Art Hodes at the Blue Note, and Georg Brums. We played cards for an hour or more, not talking much, a companionable game with