All the Lasting Things by David Hopson

Case of the Dented Bumper” and opened it to where he’d left off: Mr. Ramsay stalked across the lawn with the notion that a truly splendid mind could tackle the range of human thought, from A to Z, while his own mind, splendid enough but nevertheless limited, would never get farther than Q. Benji read,
     
    How many men in a thousand million . . . reach Z after all? Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer, without treachery to the expedition behind him, ‘One perhaps.’ One in a generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one? provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no more left to give? And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how man will speak of him hereafter.
     
    But reading, at least in front of the doily-collared Judge Sheindlin, was a losing battle. He watched two more cases with a vacant stare, as pleasantly glazed-eyed as fledgling sobriety allowed, and made it halfway through a third—inept wedding planner, deplorable bride—when the doorbell rang. From the kitchen, Evelyn called out that she’d get it, but Benji shouted back, thunking across the tasseled carpet as quickly as he could and throwing open the door. The man standing on the mat lunged forward without so much as a hello and took Benji into his arms.
    “Roger?” Benji croaked.
    Roger Fitch held on to his godson for a good minute, too grateful (to judge from the crush of his embrace) that Benji was actually there to hold on to. When the hug wound down, he stepped back, taking Benji by the shoulders, assessing him. “Benji, my boy,” he said brightly, “you look like I popped your balloon.”
    Roger was a small man, daintily built, with a pronounced gap between his front teeth and ears that stuck out from his immaculately shorn head with elfin prominence. Physically, he looked less suited to building the careers of literary giants than to cobbling their shoes or tinkering with their watches, but Henry (and, according to Henry’s math, at least five other decorated scribblers) would have been digging ditches without him. His writers called him Leo or, when they felt like driving the point home, Napoleon, for though he stood barely tall enough to ride most roller coasters, there was something undeniably magisterial about this son of a grocer from Canarsie, the product of public schools and city colleges, who, despite (or maybe because of) his humble origins, understood the appeal of world domination. To see Roger hammering out the details of a subrights contract or poaching an author from an agency twice the size of his own was to watch him grow a foot before your eyes.
    “You were expecting someone prettier,” Roger said, cutting off Benji’s apology with a solid, avuncular pat on the back. At least once a year, in the heyday of Henry Fisher’s career, Roger could be counted on to materialize at this very door, contracts for Henry in one hand, Zabars for the rest of the Fishers in the other. He made it known that it wasn’t a trip he enjoyed making—the few charms of upstate New York that he could name (camping, cow tipping) held no appeal for him—but Benji, who used to race to his car like a bounding dog, ranked high among its consolations. He dropped his bags at his feet and gave his godson another hug.
    Roger was, like many a well-heeled Manhattanite, hopelessly provincial; everything he could ever want ranged on an island thirteen miles long. Should he ever need a face-to-face with one of the few non–New York–based writers he represented, he insisted they bring their business to him, the indignities of traveling beyond Brooklyn being a form of penance for living in Eugene or Princeton or some other godforsaken land. To this rule, he made two exceptions. In 1965, at the age of thirty, Roger Fitch packed up his desk at one of the country’s leading literary agencies and took with him two young