by Jill Barnett
Dane was the one who mourned deepest when he’d heard. He adored the old man in ways that baffled everyone. The mysteries of kinship could skip whole generations. Watching Dane struggle with his grief took Jud back years to an empty hospital room where Cale was crying uncontrollably over things Jud could only guess. Now Cale was composed and even, controlled, like Jud. They were men who stood on their own and didn’t show what they were feeling.
To the sound of a single trumpet and through church air pungent from the aromatic perfume of California wildflowers, they bore Victor outside, the Banning men, Harlan, and Victor’s longtime attorney. Jud passed faces, blurs of familiarity, until in a moment of clarity he spotted Kathryn Peyton sitting in the back of the church.
The grave site was for family only and Harlan, who chose to say good-bye and leave with the minister. Jud, Cale, Matthew, and Dane, all dressed in dark suits with simple boutonnieres on their lapels, stood in a silent line staring awkwardly down at the coffin inside an open grave. A ceremonial shovel with a brass handle was stuck in fresh brown soil piled next to them.
“Aren’t we supposed to throw some dirt on it?” Matthew asked finally.
“Flowers.” Jud unpinned the flower from his suit and tossed it in the grave.
“On the coffin, Jud.”
His boutonniere landed under the casket platform. “Too late. Throw yours.”
“The old man wasn’t a flower kind of guy,” Cale said. Matt picked up the shovel. “I think we should do the dirt thing. After all, he made his money from the ground.”
“Good one.” Jud had to laugh and noticed Cale shook his head, but he was smiling. There was something eminently freeing about laughing in the middle of all this odd seriousness, which felt wrong. Victor loved theater, but he preferred the dramatic moments he himself staged.
Matthew poured dirt from the shovel along the top of the coffin. “Good-bye, Victor. I forgive you for giving my little brother the motocross bike I wanted for Christmas in 1988.”
“I loved that bike,” Dane said, taking the shovel. “Best surprise I ever had.” He poured his offering of dirt. “Thanks, Gramps.”
“I had forgotten about that night,” Jud said.
“I haven’t. We left Victor’s and I dropped you kids off along with your mom, then Jud and I drove all over trying to find the same bike so you wouldn’t be disappointed.”
“I didn’t get the bike for a month.” From the tone in Matt’s voice, Jud doubted he had really forgiven the old man.
“I know I had to order one. Give me that shovel.” Cale dug into the dirt pile. A huge clump of dirt hit the casket with a loud thud.
“I wonder if he heard that.” Jud took the shovel.
“Wait a minute.” Dane raised a hand. “Don’t do anything.” He ran back to the limo and came back with a rare and hugely expensive bottle of single-malt scotch. “Gramps’s favorite.” He started to pour it on the coffin.
“Are you nuts?” Matthew snatched it out of his hand, holding it protectively to his chest. “Don’t waste it.”
“Give it to Jud,” Cale told him. “He’s the oldest. You start. Say something and take a drink.”
Jud loosened his tie and raised the scotch bottle. “To Victor. Who taught me all about competition.” He took a swig.
“The hard way.” Cale took the bottle, braced his feet, and said, “To Victor. Who treated me like a bastard son and made me think I was never good enough.”
“Did he do that, Pop?”
Cale lowered the scotch bottle and swallowed. “Ask Jud.”
“He was a tough old bird. Even when we were kids. Scared the hell out of me the first time I met him.”
Matt stared at the scotch with a bewildered look. “I don’t think I have anything horrible enough to say.”
“I’m not going to say awful stuff about him,” Dane said.
“You’ve always been a wuss.”
“Like hell, Matt. Victor just liked me best. You’ve known the man your whole life and can’t talk about anything but that bike?”
Matt took off his coat and hung it on the shovel handle. “Give me the bottle, Dad.” He stared down at the grave for a long time. They all looked at him, waiting. “Okay. To Victor, who—”
“—was an asshole.” Cale sat down on the grass. “Now take a drink, son, and pass along the bottle. I’ve got a list long enough for all of us. This might take a while.”
By the time the scotch was near empty, it was almost evening, and the limo driver had been asleep for an hour. They lounged on the ground in front of the grave in their shirtsleeves, their ties draping the casket.
“To Victor, who adored my wife.” Cale drank, set the bottle down, and leaned back on his elbows, feet crossed.
“He did love Mom.”
“She had a long talk with him after the bike fiasco. He never pulled a stunt like it again.”
Dane sat up with his arms resting on his bent knees. “Has anyone noticed we’re saying nice things about him?”
“Yeah. About half an hour ago,” Jud said. “After you lost the bet over the tie toss.”
Matt picked up the bottle and eyed the contents. “Looks like two more, which is good because I’m getting drunk. To Victor, my great-grandfather—not a great grandfather—who took me into the company the day I graduated.” He swallowed more scotch. “I’ve always felt good about that.”
“You should,” Jud told him. “Victor said you were the best thing to happen to BanCo. Said ‘that kid has the balls for business.’”
They laughed because the old man wasn’t one for long speeches and big words, but Jud would have bet that Matthew had forgotten and forgiven Victor for the bike, and anything else he had done wrong. Even Cale had mellowed and talked about him with humor instead of bitterness. The last rounds became more about memories and funny stories than purging dysfunction and motivated irreverence.
“This is it.” Dane stood up, holding the bottle in the air.
Once on their feet again, they were all back where they had been to begin with—a line of men in front of Victor’s grave.
“The last good-bye,” Jud said.
Bottle held high in a Eucharistic gesture, Dane said, “To Victor. A man larger than death.” He finished the scotch and christened the casket, glass shattering in a strange, final communion. No one said anything else. Instinctively, together, they observed a minute of silence as the sun set over the coffin, catching the fragmented glass of a family’s life, and Victor Gaylord Banning came to his end.
Turning away, each volleyed for the right jacket, and with their arms around each other, paired in brothers, the Bannings stumbled down the grassy hill of a quiet cemetery and piled into the limo.
36
Some time passed before Victor proved Dane right. Via his will, the old man came roaring back from the grave and into their lives. His attorney sent the documents to Jud’s office, where, as executor, he would take care of the necessaries. He’d been in Alaska, then New York, and flew back in time to take Laurel home from the hospital. So it was late afternoon the following day before he had waded through mail and messages, done urgent business, and finally had a moment to look at the will.
The document open on his desk, Jud read the words twice before he picked up the phone and called Victor’s attorney. “I’m reading the will, Tom. It says, ‘To my son, Cale Banning.’ Is this some typo?”
“Victor was specific in the wording, Jud. I asked, too.”
“What do you know?”
“Only that Rachel was Cale’s mother, too.”
Jesus . . . Jud took a second to garner this thoughts. “There’s something in here about art valued at over fifty million dollars. I’ve been in Victor’s home. That’s a hell of a lot of art, or at least a few single works so valuable I’d have known about them.”
“Much of that figure is for your mother’s paintings, Jud. He bought them all over the years. Along with the will is a set of envelopes with copies of deeds and keys for
all the properties. The art is stored in the warehouse with the City of Industry address. You want me to meet you over there?”
“Yeah.” Jud stood, grabbed his suit jacket, and thumbed through the envelopes. “I’m leaving now I should be there at four.”
At seven o’clock, Jud pulled out of his garage and headed for Laurel’s. He wasn’t certain what he was going to do—talk to her? But he couldn’t sit home rehashing this mess any longer. As he drove along Pacific Coast Highway, he tried to make sense of what he’d discovered today. Damn Victor for leaving him with this time bomb in his lap.
He could change the will and Cale would never know. That option came up with Tom, who said he would stand by his decision. Or he could tell his brother—shit! uncle and brother—the truth: that Victor had had an affair with their mother. But he would hate it if someone knew this kind of thing about him and never told him.
Traffic wasn’t the best, and he missed the colony entrance road and had to backtrack a mile. He knocked on her front door before he opened it. “Laurel?”
“In here.”
He found her in the kitchen cooking something that smelled like the best of Paris, and put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her neck. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”
“I slept most of the day and I’m starving. I can’t seem to get enough good food. Sit.” She pointed at a bar stool with a wooden spoon, then paused and studied him. “You look like the one who needs sleep. What’s wrong?”
My grandfather slept with my mother, and my brother doesn’t know he’s Victor’s son. He couldn’t say the words aloud and walked around the island to avoid any more questions. “Bad day. Long day. I’ll open a bottle of wine.” He didn’t want to tell her the truth, and had pretty much decided in the car he shouldn’t. Women weren’t big on lies and secrets. They always wanted to tell the whole truth, overdiscuss, and speculate on all the emotions and motives behind it. She would have no idea how to deal with this kind of thing. The moral dilemma he had to settle was his alone, and as easy as it would be to hide the truth, knew he couldn’t do that to Cale.
From the time their parents died, maybe earlier, Jud had tried to protect his brother, and he’d made a mess of it most of the time. Cale had the right to know the truth, so it was his brother’s decision alone to tell others or choose to never say a word.
The problem was, he was the one who had to tell Cale. So he needed to be with her, wanted to be there, even if she didn’t know why and never would.
After dinner, they sat on the sofa together, listening to music playing softly on the stereo and the occasional distant break of a wave. She tilted her head back against his shoulder and asked him if he wanted some coffee. “Hell, no . . . I feel like a fatted calf.”
“Ready for slaughter?”
“You slaughtered me a long time ago, sweetheart.” He looked down at her to see her smile. “You feel all right?”
She settled deeper into the sofa and his arms. “Wonderful. Tired, maybe a little sore. Taking deep breaths is tough. No long sighs for a while.”
“We’ve got plenty of time. I’m not letting you go anywhere.”
“I’m not leaving. You couldn’t throw me away. Besides, this is nice. Us together. Feels comfortable with you here.”
He waited awhile before he said what was on his mind. “Maybe we should make it permanent.”
She sat back and faced him. “What exactly are you saying?”
“Maybe we should get married.”
“Are you speculating, or asking?”
“Depends. Are you saying yes?”
“It would make my mother happy. She’s never forgiven me for getting married in a lavender field in Provence. She would finally get the wedding she wanted.”
“I was thinking we could get married quietly in Vegas, after you’re feeling better. Fly off right away on a honeymoon, then come back, throw a huge party, and tell everyone after the fact. Keeps the moment about us and no one else.”
“You’ve been thinking about this.”
“Eleven and a half hours of surgery is a long time.”
“Well, my mother’s going to be livid, but it sounds perfect to me. I adore the idea of sneaking off.” She started to laugh, then groaned. “That hurts.”
“You should be in bed.”
“Come with me.” She stood and held out her hand. “I know, I know. Just to sleep. For now.”
“I’ve got a big meeting tomorrow. I should go home.”
“I thought you were home,” she said softly.
“I guess I am.” He put his arm around her and they went upstairs, slowly, because she became winded. She sat on the bed and he reached over to turn on the table lamp. A volume of poetry was open on the table. He picked it up. “What’s this?”
“Poetry. I haven’t looked at that book in years, but I had the strangest thing happen right after the surgery. Must have been the medication, but I dreamed you were reciting John Donne.”
He laughed. “Me?”
“Yes, you.”
He set the book back on the nightstand and turned, aware he loved this woman more than life. He would live up to all those promises he made to God and heaven and fate and any other deity he’d sought in that waiting room. He took her hand in his. “Such wilt thou be to me, who must like th’ other foot, obliquely run; Thy firmness makes my circle just—”
She placed her finger to his lips. “And makes me end where I begun.”
His brother reacted to the news of his paternity without a show of pain or anger, just a few questions—most important, Did you know?—and long moments of silence. Someone else might have mistaken his silence for calmness, his control for quietude, but Jud knew whatever emotion was going on inside his brother was far from quiet.
Jud drove them to the warehouse and they stood inside the old building where noise from the Santa Ana Freeway hummed in the distance and millions of dollars’ worth of art was hidden away. Cale’s response was similar to Jud’s the day before—complete disbelief. Cale walked from room to room, then stopped, his eyes still taking it all in. “Funny, isn’t it? I spent so many years wanting to be like you. Victor saw you differently.”
“Now we know why. The immoral old bastard.”
“He treated me with failed expectations from the first day we came to Newport.”
“That day changed everything, didn’t it?”
“It did.” Hands in his pockets, Cale turned away, then said, “I want to hate him, and I can’t.”
“I know. I look at this, think about what he did, and it’s strange,” Jud admitted. “I spent so much of my life trying to live up to him.”
Cale laughed bitterly. “While I tried to live him down. Little did I know.”
“I think we can look in this place and see that Victor had more things to live down than either of us.” Jud saw an opening and took it. “No one ever has to know about anything. But it’s your decision if you want to tell anyone.”
“I wish Robyn were here,” Cale said honestly, looking for the first time as wounded as he must have been. “She’s the only person I would tell, and she’s gone. Victor’s gone.” He shook his head. “There’s no one left to know.”
“I hated that I had to tell you this. Damn him.”
“It’s just so strange. To find out your life is a lie.”
“It’s still your life, Cale. I’m still your brother. Matt and Dane are still your sons.” His brother looked so numb and lost, bewildered, like a bird that just flew into a plate glass window. Jud gave him all the time he needed in the room, and he would need more time, maybe the rest of his lifetime, to come to terms with what he’d learned today. If Jud could have borne his brother’s pain himself, he would have. “He left the art to us. What do you think we should do with it all?”
“Donate it to museums. Look at this. Her work is still spectacular. That it’s been locked away all these years is a crime. Just one of many.”
“I was thinking we should do the same with
Kathryn’s work. He must have bought it out of guilt. It we tell her, she’ll think he had a hand in her success.”
“It should be auctioned anonymously and donated, too. The money can go to MADD or to help single mothers, something appropriate.” Cale took one more long, pensive look around the room and headed for the door. “Let’s get out of here.”
They locked up and took the old elevator down to the street level, then walked out into the sunshine. Blinded for a second, they both stopped. Parked in front of them was the red car, the first in a long line of things Victor used to divide them. Jud pulled a set of keys from his pocket. “Here. Catch.”
“What are these?”
“The keys to the MG. It’s yours.”
“No. I can’t take these. Rudy was your father, not mine.”
Jud put his arm around his brother and spoke the truth. “He was more your father in those few years than Victor ever could have been.” He closed Cale’s hand around the keys and they stood together in silence and perhaps a final understanding. “It’s yours, buddy. You take the car.” Jud stepped away and opened the passenger door. “And I’ll take the girl.”
Three Months Later
The walls in the rooms of the small bungalow on Descanso Street were no longer blue. Kathryn and her granddaughter stood painting, while Laurel did the window trim. She stepped back and eyed her work, then faced Kathryn. “I love this caramel color against the white trim, Mother. It looks so warm. I never liked those blue rooms. They were always too cold for me.”