When death was imminent, the family gathered in his room. For two days he had not spoken, and he had refused all food and drink. It was hard to believe he was still alive. But suddenly, his eyes opened and he looked fully alert and ready to say something important.
“What is it, Dad?” Estella asked, leaning closer from where she sat at the side of his bed.
He said one word, and then he closed his eyes, and within the hour he was dead.
Salina.
That was what he’d said.
“Who the hell is Salina?” Mathew asked, and instead of telling her brothers who she was, Estella convinced them they’d misheard, and that their father’s last thoughts had been of their mother.
The night of the funeral—at which Theo had eloquently delivered the eulogy and the story of Oliver’s last word, Beatrice—Estella had a change of heart about Salina. She was finally alone in the house, and she looked at the teapot and decided she did not want to live the rest of her life being the only one in the family who knew Oliver had been married twice. Her brothers and their wives were coming to dinner the following day to help her put a dent in the fridge full of casseroles and desserts from friends and neighbours. When they were all seated at the table she would tell them what she knew, leaving out only Salina’s name. They didn’t need to know that.
The next day the women arrived at the door after lunch to help her with Oliver’s things and sort through the flowers and sympathy cards. The men would come by later for supper. Estella was so tired that she told her sisters-in-law to knock themselves out when they suggested it might be easier for them rather than her to go through Oliver’s closet. They could take his clothes home to her brothers or donate them to charity; it didn’t matter to her.
“He always had good shoes,” she said. “Someone should take his shoes. And his cufflinks and tie clips. Take them all to the boys. They can decide what they’d like to keep.”
While her sisters-in-law went to work upstairs, Estella sat in the yard and thought about what was next now that she was on her own. She wondered whether Theo would be willing to find a job for her at the plant so she could learn the business. She assumed nothing had been decided about who would manage Diamond and Sons in the future when Theo decided to retire, but since the five siblings were now equal owners, it was something to be discussed. She was pretty sure neither Jack nor Andrew would want the responsibility of running the business, and Mathew was not far behind Theo in age. Her father had believed her to be naive at seventeen, but she wasn’t naive now, and a high school mathematics teacher knew a few things about accounting and microeconomics.
She came to no conclusion about when to approach Theo, other than not yet.
She began to feel guilty that she wasn’t helping the other women so she went inside to make coffee for everyone. When she had the perk bubbling on the stove, Gladys came into the kitchen with a piece of paper in her hand and a puzzled look on her face, and said to Estella, “Did you know your father was married to someone else before Beatrice?”
Estella almost dropped the tray of cups she was about to carry to the dining room.
Gladys had found a marriage certificate in the bottom of the drawer with the cufflinks. Estella had not known a marriage certificate even existed.
“Did you find anything else?” she asked.
“No,” Gladys said. “Just that.”
When the brothers joined them for supper, the certificate was passed around. It was clear that none of them had known about Oliver’s first wife. They noted that the date of marriage was less than two years before the date of his marriage to Beatrice.
No one brought up Oliver’s last word, and Estella was certainly not going to.
“She must have died,” Gladys said.
Jack said, “Wasn’t there an aunt with a name like that? The one who made that teapot?”
They all stared at the white pot on the corner shelf.
“I don’t see how she could have been an aunt,” Harmony said.
Then Theo said, “Those people in the motorhome. I wonder.”
He got up and took the lake photograph from the wall and they all had a look at it.
“They claimed to be related through a first wife,” Theo said. “I suppose it was her.”
No one knew how to get in touch with them, or could remember where they lived other than Ontario.
Over the next few days, they looked everywhere they could think of for more information, through Oliver’s drawers and his desk and his file cabinets, in the cupboard where Beatrice had kept the household receipts and her own files, but they found nothing that told them more about a first wife. Estella decided her brothers now knew what they needed to, and she didn’t tell them about the letters. She wondered whether they might come across them in all their searching, but they didn’t, and this confirmed that Beatrice must have thrown them out. After looking everywhere they could think of, they gave up and concluded that they knew as much as they ever would about Oliver’s first marriage.
After most of her father’s clothes had gone to charity and her brothers had taken what they wanted, Estella was left with the odds and ends. She considered moving into her parents’ bedroom, which was bigger than her own, but she decided against it. In the days that followed, she would sometimes go into the room just to open the closet door and look at her mother’s favourite white leather purse on the top shelf, or the pair of cowboy boots that remained on the shoe rack, an occasional habit in footwear her father had adopted during his partnership with the Texan, Nathaniel Thick. The purse, the boots, a man’s leather travelling bag, Beatrice’s silk housecoat—there was something physical about these things that reminded her of her parents more than anything else in the house.
She thought about trying to contact the Kingwells to let them know they’d figured out the connection, but in the end she couldn’t be bothered. What was there to be gained, she thought, other than a correspondence with people who were not even blood relatives?
The marriage certificate went home with Theo, and Estella did not know what became of it after that.
* * *
IN 1968, THE YEAR Theo turned sixty, Estella decided it was time to talk to him about his retirement plan. She made an official appointment and bought a new plaid pantsuit, hoping it would make her look young enough to be his successor but professional enough to run a business. She drove out to the plant and walked across the yard with grasshoppers flying up at her from all directions. As she climbed the stairs to the office, she loosed a puff of clay dust with each step. Machinery droned beneath the treads.
She pulled a leather chair up close to Theo’s desk and sat.
“Theo,” she said, “I want to be considered for a position at the plant with an eye to me being your successor when you decide to retire. I think I’ve earned a place here. I don’t need to point out that I put my life on hold three different times for this family.”
Theo looked as though she had just asked him to send her to the moon on a rocket ship.
“You don’t want to go back to teaching?” he asked her. “Ever?”
“No,” she said. “I’d have thought that was clear.”
“Huh,” he said, and in that huh she could hear what was coming. Theo shifted his gaze to a spot on the wall, and she knew he was trying to find words that would have come easily if it had not been her asking for a job.
“We’re all getting older, Estella,” he finally said.
“You might be,” she said. “I’m forty-four. Plenty of time to begin again.”
What he said next was a surprise to her, even though it probably shouldn’t have been: he had plans to bring his son Harold into the business to assume eventually the role of plant manager. Harold had been working in a bank and had become an expert on business finances. Theo would stay on for several more years, probably until he was sixty-five, and by the time he retired Harold would be ready to take over.
She wanted to ask, Shouldn’t that have been somethi
ng we all got to decide? but she knew she had to be careful with Theo, so she said, perhaps a bit too glibly, “So train both of us and we’ll see what happens. An heir and a spare, as they say. Anyway, I could work with Harold.”
Theo said, a little too quickly, “You might be able to work with Harold, but I doubt that you could work for him.”
The meaning was clear: Harold had already won the competition, if there had been one to begin with.
She said, “I think we should call a family meeting to talk about this, a shareholders’ meeting or whatever it’s called. I want to know what the others have to say. It’s the company succession plan we’re talking about, and I think I have a right to at least be considered for your job when the time comes. It’s unfair to me that I shouldn’t get some training along with Harold in the meantime. It puts me at a disadvantage.”
Theo studied her, and when he spoke she learned what had gone on without her knowledge.
“I know what the others think, Estella,” he said. “I did not make this decision on my own. We’re all in agreement that Harold is the right choice, or at least Mathew and Andrew are. Jack says he doesn’t have an opinion, one way or the other, but he voted with us. Has he told you he and Rose are making plans to move to Calgary?”
No. Jack had not told her that.
She said, “What do mean by voting? How could you vote on anything without me?”
He didn’t answer the question and instead said, “It wouldn’t work to have you and Harold at the plant together. You wouldn’t be satisfied keeping the books, and you wouldn’t let Harold tell you what to do. You must know this is true. You’re like Father, Estella. You have to be the one in charge. Can’t you see that?”
In charge? Really? When had she ever been in charge?
Theo said again, as though he’d found the decisive argument, “You wouldn’t be happy with Harold making decisions. It wouldn’t work.”
She said, “I guess I should have just made everyone happy and married Clarence Angell. After I was done looking after half the damn family, that is.”
Theo said, “Now you’re just feeling sorry for yourself. We all appreciated what you did, and you know it. We thought you were Mother Teresa.”
Everything he said was making it worse.
“I’m an owner of this company, the same as you,” she said.
“I know,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean you get to run the plant. That decision isn’t yours to make.”
“Whose is it, then?” she asked.
“All of us,” he said. “We all decided.”
“Not quite all,” she said. She stood from her chair then, knowing she wasn’t going to get anywhere, at least not with Theo. “And just for the record, I didn’t want to be goddamned Mother Teresa.”
Theo gave her a look of disgust. “Mother is turning in her grave,” he said.
“Bullshit,” Estella said. “She’s cheering me on. And I bet Mother Teresa wishes every day she was someone else.”
On her way out of the office she said, “I don’t care that you think it’s settled. It’s not.”
She drove home in a rage, and when she had calmed down she phoned her brothers. They all said the same thing: that Theo knew what he was doing, and that training someone from the next generation of Diamonds made sense. The most she got was when Andrew agreed she should probably have been there when they discussed Theo’s retirement plan, but it wouldn’t have made any difference.
She called Jack last.
“You’re set for life,” Jack said. “Why are you even thinking about this?”
When she asked him if it was true he was moving to Calgary, he said that he was, and he was glad to be leaving the brick business behind.
“Think about it,” he said. “Who’s going to buy bricks in a few years’ time? No one. That progress Father used to talk about? It means something other than bricks now. Be thankful it’ll be Harold and not you who has to shut the plant down.”
She had not thought of that possibility, that there would come a day when no one wanted bricks. But what did Jack know? She remembered hearing her father tell Allen Foster he suspected Jack had enlisted in the army to escape the family business.
“So you’re moving to Calgary, then, and leaving me to sort this out,” she said. She knew she sounded childish but she didn’t care.
“There’s nothing to sort out,” Jack said. “It’s sorted.”
When she hung up the phone, she supposed that was it. Jack had been her last hope for an ally. She had gotten no farther than she had with her father when she was a teenager, even though she was now supposedly an equal owner of the company. Theo had said she was just like Oliver, but if that was true, why had she failed once again to get what she wanted? She thought of her father contriving to get Nathaniel Thick’s share of the business, and remembered what Betty Ellen Thick had written in her letter: “I’ll say right here, Mr. Diamond, that I believe it was a dirty trick you pulled up there in Canada.”
She needed a dirty trick of her own, she thought. She wondered if she could sue Theo, or maybe all of them.
At first, she wasn’t really serious, but the more she thought about it, the more a lawsuit seemed like the answer. An important decision had been made without her. There had to be a legal recourse. She found her own lawyer and explained the situation, and he talked about technical breaches and the obligation of shareholders to be reasonable.
“Your brothers, collectively, have an 80 percent majority,” he said, “but we could argue that it’s not being exercised in a reasonable way.” Then he said, “I could go through the bylaws and look for breaches, but is that really what you want?”
She said that it was.
He clearly thought it was the wrong decision.
“This is a family business,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you what the repercusssions will be. My advice is mediation, not a lawsuit. There’s not much to be gained by legal action, and there’s a lot to lose.”
Mediation, Estella said, implied that there were two sides to the story. There was only one. She was a part owner of Diamond and Sons, and she had not been consulted over a decision that concerned the future of the plant. That was it.
“I advise against it,” her lawyer said, “but in the end, I work for you.”
When Theo learned she was talking to a lawyer, he said, “Really, Estella? Now you have both of them rolling in the grave.” He could not believe she would do such a thing as sue her own family. In fact, all of her brothers had a hard time believing it. They ignored the threat and treated her as though she were the sibling they had to put up with, like Iris and her accordion.
When summer came, they all went to Lake Claire as usual, with the exception of Jack, who cancelled his cottage reservation and moved to Calgary. Estella stayed by herself in Emily Carr and felt as if she were being blamed for the strangers now settled smack in the middle of the row of Diamonds. Heavy clouds hung over the lake and by noon every day it was raining. The picnic tables had been pulled together but they dripped with rainwater. The photo on the paddlewheeler, she thought, had been a prescient farewell to the good times. When Peter Boone asked her what was going on with her normally boisterous family, she didn’t tell him about her fight with her brothers, and said only that the rain had them all wondering what to do with themselves.
When she got home, she asked her lawyer what was taking so long. She suspected he was stalling to give her time to come to her senses. She told him to hurry things up or she was finding another lawyer, and he filed the suit.
Then came the news that Harold had no wish to be part of a family dispute, and he’d accepted a job with an oil company in Calgary. Estella assumed then that Theo would change his mind and nullify her need to sue, but before she could ask him, he had a heart attack while climbing the stairs to his office. He survived, but his doctor’s advice was to retire and find a way to enjoy the rest of his life. The company was now in a crisis with no succession plan.
Theo called a meeting, and this time Estella was included. Jack refused to come from Calagry but said he would join them on the phone if he had to. Estella was ready with her proposal, but when her brothers arrived at the meeting they had a proposal for her: buy their shares and become the sole owner. Otherwise, they were putting the plant up for sale.
At first she thought it was a ruse, to get her to walk away from the lawsuit and let some other nephew take over the plant’s management. But they were serious. Unless Estella saw it otherwise, the best decision was to sell the factory. Jack was in agreement; she could call him if she wanted. It occurred to her that they were doing more or less the same thing their father had done with Nathaniel Thick, only backwards. They were forcing her to buy, not sell.
“It’s a solution, Estella,” her lawyer told her. “If you really believe you can manage the business, go to the bank and see if you can make it work. Either that, or agree to a sale outside of the family.”
She didn’t need to go to the bank. She knew that, between her own savings and her inheritance, she had enough money. She could not see the Diamond business being sold to someone who was not a Diamond, so she accepted her brothers’ offer and bought them out, knowing that Andrew and Mathew would retire rather than work for her, even though they were still in their fifties.
And there was something else she knew: she was being blamed for Theo’s heart attack. Gladys said as much, and when Estella talked to Jack on the phone after they’d all signed the agreement, he asked her, “Do you think it was worth it?”
The Diamond House Page 22