Breach of Trust

by D. W. Buffa

  She had not touched anything on her plate. She shoved it aside and picked up her glass.

  “And I think it was my fault: for not telling you how I felt; for just imagining that you must have understood that the reason I talked that way—about New York—was because I thought that if you loved it too, you’d come back and wouldn’t go somewhere I couldn’t be.”

  It is the habit of unhappiness to rewrite our lives and from a different beginning come to a different ending. We cling to the past and what it could have been: what we wanted, or thought we wanted, before we were taught by a broken heart that our own good intentions have little effect on the way things are.

  Joanna held up her head. Her eyes were bright, eager, wistful.

  “My father was devastated when we broke up. He…”

  “Your father: Is he… ?”

  “He died three years ago. My mother died a year before. He was fine for a while, not depressed. He put up a good front: He never showed his emotions—or almost never. His generation was like that. In my whole life I never once heard him raise his voice. If he disapproved of something you’d done, he would just look at you, not speaking a word; and you’d know how disappointed he was in you and you’d swear to yourself you’d never let that happen again.” Pausing, she looked away, shaking her head at the memory of what had happened. “I never saw him look more disappointed than the day I told him you were going back to Harvard and wouldn’t be coming back to New York. Unless it was the day I told him I was going to become Thomas Browning’s wife.”

  She had placed her hands on the table. She examined them with a strange, intense fascination.

  “I used to have lovely hands,” she said, spreading apart her fingers. With a scornful expression she pulled her hands off the table and buried them out of sight in her lap. Sitting at an angle, she stared quietly out the shuttered glass, thinking back.

  “My father was terribly disappointed,” she said presently. “He didn’t want me to marry Thomas; he wanted me to marry you.” A smile edged its way along the corner of her lower lip. “He told me about that conversation he had with you, that afternoon in the park. That wasn’t like him; that wasn’t like him at all—which made the fact that he did it make me love him even more. He thought the world of you: In his own way I think he loved you as much as I did. He did not love Thomas. He respected him, admired him in a way; but you were the one he could have thought of—did think of—as a son.”

  I could hear her father’s voice; I could see him sitting on the park bench next to me, telling me his fear.

  “He thought he might turn out too much like his grandfather—old Zachary Stern,” I said.

  Joanna’s eyes did not move from the window. She sat there with that look of rigid elegance, the smile that had crawled across her mouth now bitter, filled with unconcealed contempt.

  “My father was always a shrewd judge of men.” She kept staring out the window, lapsed into a silence that became drowsy and immense.

  “Thomas is using you. You know that, don’t you?” she asked presently, moving her head in a level arc until her eyes, inquisitive and relentless, met mine. “He didn’t ask you to come to New York for that dinner—he did not agree to speak at that dinner—for old times’ sake. He might have done it because he wanted to use you to make a point—I read what he said about you. He meant it, too. That is what he thinks about the lawyer—the kind of lawyer—you’ve become. But that wasn’t the reason. He brought you here, to Washington, and it wasn’t because he wanted you to have the chance to see me. I wanted to see you in New York. He had his office schedule me for some idiotic event somewhere else.”

  She laughed a little, a mild rebuke to her own intensity; an apology for appearing to act as if she could demand explanations, or anything else, from me.

  “Isn’t that a wonderfully convenient power to have? Anytime you don’t want your wife around, schedule her to go off somewhere and give a speech? I’m always being told what to do and where I have to be. Even today, instead of being able to take all the time I want, they’re whisking me off somewhere after lunch.”

  Joanna started to take a drink. Aware that I was watching her, she put down the glass. She seemed to watch herself with a kind of brooding irony as she pushed the tips of three fingers against the base of the glass, sliding it at least metaphorically beyond her reach.

  “It’s Annie, it’s always Annie,” she remarked with a tired, discouraged look in her eyes. She kept staring at the tips of her fingernails, stretched toward the glass. Her mouth twisted into a knot; her chin, rigid and tense, began to tremble. With a slight shudder, she took a long slow breath and then let it go.

  “She wasn’t what you thought she was,” said Joanna. She put her hand back in her lap and moved away from the window. She sat directly in front of me, her head slightly inclined, speaking calmly, quietly, completely self-assured. She told me things about herself, and about Thomas Browning, that changed what I remembered into something new and made me wonder how much of the rest of what I thought might also be wrong.

  “Thomas and I were more like brother and sister. We were children when we met. His mother—Penelope Stern—was beautiful, vapid and vain. His father, Warren Browning, was almost as bad: weak, vacillating, handsome as the devil and more charming than that.

  They used to remind me of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: polished, polite, all dressed up in their expensive clothes; people you could imagine complimenting each other on how they looked while they were stealing a sidelong glimpse of themselves in the nearest mirror. It was everything: the clothes, the jewelry, the perfect good manners; and between them, not a thought in their heads. They traveled everywhere; they knew everyone: They were too busy to worry about anything except the next party, the next place they had to go, and of course about themselves. They would have left Thomas in the care of a nanny while they traveled around the world; but they didn’t have to: Zachary Stern took care of all that.

  “I came from a wealthy, privileged background. I know that. But my parents wanted me to have a normal life, to be like other kids. I think they must have succeeded, because when I first met Thomas Browning I thought he was a freak. He was twelve years old, with a pudgy face and pudgy little hands, and he talked to me like I was the hired help, ordering me about, telling me what to do. I ignored him, and when he kept it up, I laughed at him; and when he still didn’t stop, I left him standing there while I walked into the room where my father was meeting with Zachary Stern and told him that if he left me in that room a minute longer I was going to slap that awful boy’s face.

  “We became friends, and the more I learned about the way he was treated, the way he was raised—the expectations, the demands, the way his whole life was being planned for him in advance—the more I tried to help, to show him that there was another world out there, that he didn’t have to become what his grandfather or anyone else thought he should be.”

  Joanna tossed her head and then, at the memory of something distasteful, wrinkled her nose. “It was already too late, of course.”

  “Too late? He was still just a boy!”

  “A boy shaped in the mold of Zachary Stern himself! He had not been to school; he had not made any friends—and he never would.”

  “Never would?”

  “How could he, after a private education provided by a dozen different experts paid small fortunes for their time. He had the mind of someone twice his age and the emotions of a spoiled, willful child. There was never anyone to resist, to fight back, to insist on getting their own way when the only way they could get it was if Thomas did not get his. All the rough edges that get knocked off on the playgrounds, that get smoothed away in the civilized competition of the classroom—he never had any of that.”

  “But he wasn’t like that when I knew him. There wasn’t any of that kind of arrogance, that kind of selfish attitude toward things. He was probably the least self-absorbed person I knew.”

  She gave me an odd look, but appear
ed to concede the point.

  “Yes, later… on the surface at least. But didn’t you notice how he always seemed to be looking at things from the outside? Sitting there with that amiable smile, talking quietly—or more likely just listening—and all the time watching, watching the way other people behaved, as if he were a stranger trying to learn the customs of a place he had never been.”

  Joanna shook her head, angry with herself that she was not getting it quite right. “It wasn’t arrogance; it was more than that. He did not go around bragging that he was one day going to run the world, or at least the ‘largest industrial organization’ the world had ever seen. That was just a fact, a terrific, overwhelming fact no one would let him ignore. And that is what Zachary Stern never understood: that what would have been the dream of any other man’s ambition—what had been the dream of his own ambition—was where his grandson’s ambition began.”

  Joanna looked at me with a kind of puzzled, questioning intensity, searching my eyes to see if she had explained it properly, to see if I understood.

  “It was like being born into a religion—being born Catholic, for instance. It’s who you are; it’s what you start with; it’s the way you look at the world. Thomas, Thomas Browning, grandson of Zachary Stern, was for all practical purposes born believing that the company —that astonishing industrial organization—was his. Don’t you see the incredible irony? Zachary Stern, a man my father truly hated, had spent his entire life building that company, destroying anything and anyone who got in his way, so he could leave it in the hands of someone whose only thought when he got it would be: ‘What next?’

  “They say that certain traits skip a generation. Thomas is every bit as ambitious as Zachary Stern ever was. Zachary Stern wanted to found an industrial empire; I think Thomas wanted to be president from the first day he realized it was the only way he could escape the shadow of his grandfather. That was one of the reasons why I tried to stop him from getting involved with that girl, Annie Malreaux.”

  Joanna repeated what she had said before, determined for some reason to convince me that I had been wrong, as if it still made some difference what anyone thought.

  “She wasn’t what you thought she was. She wasn’t what she seemed: all poetry and verse, different from the rest of us because she appeared to float on the surface of things, refusing to take seriously what others thought important. Thomas thought it was real, that the only thing she did not like about him was his position, his wealth; that she thought those things were obstacles to being who you really were and living free.” Joanna gave me a knowing, cynical look. “She said she came to Harvard because she thought it would be interesting to learn a little about the law. That was a matter of convenience, that dismissive attitude she had. It gave her a certain protection against having to face up to the fact that while she was good enough to get into Harvard, she might not be good enough to be among the very best. It’s what some people do, isn’t it? If you can’t win, disparage the game. So she lived this little lie of hers, playing the part of the ethereal free spirit floating above the common run of ambition, deriding with a superior smile the prevalent materialism, while the whole time what she really wanted was to marry Thomas Browning and find herself suddenly quite rich.”

  “Do you really think so?” I asked quickly, wondering if she could possibly be right. It was hard for me to think of Annie as anything like as calculating as Joanna had thought. “Perhaps you were just being protective, given the way you felt about him then,” I suggested.

  Joanna gave me a strange look, as if I had forgotten my place. Too late to hide the irritation, she tried to cover it with a thoughtful smile.

  “Perhaps I was. One thing I know for certain is that it would have been better if he had run off with her and found out for himself whether she was everything he thought she was.” With a bitter glance she shook her head. “More than anything, I wish she hadn’t died. What happened that day changed everything. It’s why I married Thomas; it’s why he married me: because she died that day. She was gone—so were you. He married me, but he’s never gotten over her. And now we get to live it all over again; and worse yet, so do you. It isn’t fair! It isn’t right! It was an accident, but there isn’t anything these people won’t do.” she looked at me with a kind of pleading intensity, as if she wanted me to understand something she did not quite understand herself. I thought that at any moment she might burst into tears.

  “I told him what these people—Walker and the rest of them—were like. I told him they only wanted to use him for the election and that after that it didn’t matter what they promised: They wouldn’t do anything they said. He could have stayed in the Senate, but he’s so mesmerized by the presidency he couldn’t stop himself. And now this! Someone is charged with murder, and he’s tricked you into taking the case.”

  “Tricked me? What do you mean?”

  “If you ever loved me, please—please promise me that you won’t do this, that you won’t be involved in this trial.”

  “But I am involved: I’m Jimmy Haviland’s lawyer.”

  “Find someone else to do it. Make some excuse. You don’t understand!”

  “What don’t I understand?” she did not answer; she kept staring at me, a frantic look in her eyes.

  “What don’t I understand?” I repeated, mystified by the sudden urgent sense that something terrible was about to happen and that I should have known what it was.

  The door suddenly swung open. The Secret Service agent let her know it was time to go. Quickly gathering herself, Joanna got to her feet. She stood next to me for a moment, saying nothing. Then she put her hand on the side of my face and forced a smile.

  “I would have married you, if you had asked, that summer in New York.”

  I started to say something. She put her hand on my lips.

  “No, don’t. I don’t want to change the way I remember it. I want to keep believing that you would have asked me to marry you if you had thought I’d ever leave New York.”

  Then she was gone.

  CHAPTER 13

  Why did Joanna want me off the case? Jimmy Haviland might think that Thomas Browning was responsible for the death of Annie Malreaux, but surely Joanna did not believe that. Or did she? It seemed impossible, but then, the more I learned about what had happened in the lives of these people with whom I had once been so close, the less I knew.

  Perhaps she was only trying to warn me about the people who were out to destroy her husband, the people around the president who were ready to convict an innocent man of murder because it would help them force out of office a vice president they did not want. If they were willing to do that, it was not likely they would hesitate to go after a defense attorney who got in their way.

  The more I thought about it, the more certain I was right: Joanna could not stop Thomas Browning from putting himself in danger’s way, but she could try to stop me. She must have known it was futile, that Browning had his part to play, but that so did I. Browning may have wanted me to take the case, defend whoever was charged in Annie’s death, but I was the one who had decided to do it. Jimmy Haviland was my responsibility.

  Even had I wanted to, I could not walk away from that.

  Bartholomew Caminetti did not have any regrets or reservations; he certainly was not wondering about what had happened to former friends of his, people he had not seen in years. He was getting ready to make the case for murder, and I had seen enough of him to know that there was not anything that would be left to chance. I was going to have to be as well prepared for this as for any case I had ever tried, and that meant that I had to know everything there was to know about the victim, about Annie Malreaux; not just how she died, but how she lived. Every way I turned, I was face-to-face with the past.

  I had known Annie Malreaux at Harvard for one short year, and I had known some of her friends; I did not know anything about what she had been like before she got there, and I did not know anything about what had happened to the people with
whom she had once been so close. I was looking for something—anything— that would teach me who she had really been and why her death had to have been the accident Thomas Browning had always said it had been. At least I knew where to start.

  I found her on her hands and knees pulling weeds out of a small garden behind a narrow gray stone house where she had lived since long before her daughter died. She knew I was coming, but she was a woman in her eighties, and I could not be sure she would remember the time. When no one answered the door, I opened the gate at the side and let myself into the backyard.

  “Mr. Antonelli!” She sat up on her knees and pushed a floppy hat back from her eyes. “Right on time.” She got to her feet, dusting the dirt from the long sleeves of her shirt. With a graceful movement, she swept the hat from her head and tossed it onto a wooden stake around which a tomato plant had begun to climb. Her fine brown hair had only the slightest tinge of gray. Her eyes were large, inquisitive and proud. She had high cheekbones, a long, straight nose and a large animated mouth. She had the look of a woman who would not hesitate to speak her mind.

  “Hot as hell, isn’t it, Mr. Antonelli,” she said in a voice that quavered, but only slightly and only at the end. With the back of her hand she wiped away the perspiration that had run from her high forehead into her eyes. Squinting into the sultry haze, she seemed to hesitate, uncertain of what she wanted to do next. She crooked her head and tried to think.

  “People used to come here,” she remarked with a generous, thoughtful smile as she walked toward me. “In the summer, to stay at the lake. Just a few blocks away,” she added, twisting her long and still-elegant neck, until her eyes, turned away from the sun, fell under the shadow of the eastern sky. “That’s why they built all the big hotels, the ones with closets as big as bedrooms—for the summer trade. No one had air-conditioning then, and as long as you had to be miserable anyway, why not come to the beach and enjoy the water.” she put a frail-looking hand on my sleeve and with unexpected strength held on to my arm as we made our way to the back door.