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A Novel
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Book Reviewed by:
A Dybbuk in the Works
Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?
On Wednesday, March 12, 1980, Carl Fletcher, one of the richest men in the Long Island suburb where we grew up, was kidnapped from his driveway on his way to work. It had been an unremarkable morning. Carl had awoken and showered and dressed and gone downstairs to kiss his wife, Ruth, goodbye, same as always. Ruth had already presented their two sons, Nathan and Bernard, with their bowls of Product 19 when Carl patted them on the head and left the kitchen and headed out the door into the bright sunlight. The weather was still generally straightforward back then, and spring peeked through the slush of a latest-winter storm that was taking its time to melt. The reflection blinded him a little; his vision was still pocked with dark spots when he inserted the keys into the door of the Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham he'd purchased the previous year.
His brain hadn't yet registered the sound of someone else's footsteps through the slush before a man leapt from behind onto Carl's back and hooded him in one fast, balletic move, turning Carl's world instantly to black. Inside the hood were the amplified sounds of Carl's own suddenly fast breathing and grunting. Someone else—there were two men—pulled the keys from the lock and settled himself into the driver's seat while the first man struggled with Carl. Now, Carl was a tall man. The two men seemed significantly smaller. It was only the shock of the attack that allowed them to successfully wrest Carl into the footwell of his car.
The Brougham drove away, down and out the C-shaped driveway, away from the giant waterfront Tudor on St. James Drive where the Fletchers lived. It drove through the township of Middle Rock, making a right onto Ocean Vista Road, passing the Fletchers' neighbors' own colossal homes, then over the bridge, then gliding right by, at the 1.8-mile mark, the sixteen-acre estate where Carl had grown up and where his mother was sitting at a Queen Anne desk right at that very moment, writing checks to the electric company and to the synagogue. Then, past the library, past the butcher, past Duplo's Ski and Skate Shop, where Carl's mother had bought him roller skates as a child and where he himself had just recently bought a first tennis racquet for his older son; past the turnoff to the synagogue where Carl had been bar mitzvahed; past the reception hall where he'd gotten married; past the two-block ghetto of auto repair shops, making a right turn onto Shore Turnpike and out of Middle Rock, which, until that moment, was most famous for being the setting of a famous novel from the 1920s (and its author's residence there) and, since, for being the first American suburb to arrive at a Jewish population of fifty percent.
The kidnappers drove for about an hour until they stopped, pulled Carl out of the footwell, and dragged him up a few steps, into somewhere cavernous (the echo of the footsteps told Carl the place was cavernous), then dragged him down two flights of what felt like the same kind of serrated steel-tread stairs they had at the factory that Carl owned, Consolidated Packing Solutions, Ltd. From the steps he was pushed into a small space that he surmised was a closet. The dark became darkest. The Brougham was never found.
Carl was not suspected to be missing until around three o'clock that afternoon. An hour before that, Ruth had looked at the clock and realized that it was time to pick up Nathan from school. She was in the early stages of her third pregnancy and her morning sickness hadn't abated by the afternoon and she was concerned it wasn't actually morning sickness but a virus that had sent her to the couch that morning and kept her there for most of the afternoon, letting Bernard, who was four, watch three reruns of Gilligan's Island in a row. She considered calling her friend Linda Messinger and asking her to pick Nathan up, but she'd already asked Linda to take him to school in the morning in the first place with her own six-year-old, Jared. Linda did not yet know that Ruth was pregnant, and so Ruth didn't want to ask her—a two-way favor would have sold Ruth and her condition out, and Ruth didn't want anyone to know this early, not even Linda Messinger, who she wasn't always so sure was rooting for her. She instead called her mother-in-law, Phyllis. Phyllis was a widow with a driver and lived just up the road, a spry fifty-five or fifty (she had destroyed all records of her birth when she turned thirty-six or thirty-one—nobody knew for sure).
Excerpted from Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Copyright © 2024 by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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