Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  Kevin knew from experience it would take a moment to hear past the painful ringing. And he’d have to swallow his bile at Eddie. His uncle was the closest thing west of India to a sacred cow, at least to the Doyles. He was the only family member who could provide union jobs, which had kept the other men in the family from decking him for fifteen years.

  “You still got big ears, kid.” Eddie turned to Andrew. “When he was little, he had ears like Dumbo. I used to sneak up and ping him. We had ourselves a little fun.”

  “Turned my life around, Uncle Eddie.”

  “Tell you what, just call me Eddie. We don’t want to give hiring relatives a bad name. Did I just see you turn down a tip?”

  “I guess.”

  Eddie shook his head sadly at Andrew. “He’s a mutt, but he’s my late sister’s kid. Kevin, tips are life’s blood. Tips are mother’s milk. You’re a doorman now. You see a resident standing in front of you, that’s not a person, okay? That’s a bag of groceries.”

  Eddie handed Kevin a plastic card. “Your union card. Welcome to Local 32A. International Brotherhood of Portal Operators. I’m your delegate now. Your employer is the building manager of this property. But you got a grievance, you come to me.”

  Eddie handed Kevin a second card.

  “This is your Platinum Health Plan card from the union. It gives you the same health care as anybody living in this building. Maybe even better. Choose your own doctor, best hospitals, get your meds, you don’t pay squat.”

  Eddie handed him a piece of paper and a pen. “Sign there, says you got your health plan. I got you a sweet deal, kid. Nobody gets a doorman job two weeks before Christmas.”

  “Yeah,” Andrew agreed. “Just standing there, you get maybe two thousand for Christmas. If you always grab their bags before they ask, always know the right time, weather, you get maybe four, five thousand bucks.”

  “You owe me, kid,” Eddie said. “I’ll be around. Take care, Andrew.”

  Eddie lumbered out the front door, a potbellied fireplug in a team jacket, disappearing just as a gray limousine pulled directly in front of the awning.

  “Heads up.” Andrew nudged Kevin. “Here comes Chester Lord. He’s chairman of the co-op board for the building, makes the rules around here.”

  Kevin watched a clean-featured man in his early fifties climb out of the back seat of a limo that looked smaller than life, like it was built in the Black Forest by elves. Chester Lord glided into the building. His medium frame, in a striped tie and blue blazer, could have lost ten pounds. Though his sandy hair had thinned a lot, he combed it straight back with no effort to hide the bald spots. A WASP thing, Kevin realized. They never combed their last few strands of hair all the way over their heads or wore hairpieces. A guy like Chester Lord let his dome get shiny and didn’t care what anybody thought.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Lord,” Andrew said.

  “Hello, Andrew.” The crisp voice was soft, hard to hear. He arched one eyebrow at Kevin. “Are you the new doorman?”

  “Kevin Doyle.”

  The man squeezed his hand and let it go. In the awkward pause, Kevin sensed a shyness.

  “Well, good luck to you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Andrew waited until Chester Lord was whooshed up in the elevator. “Something you got to know about the Lords.”

  He took the folded copy of the day’s New York Daily Globe off the shelf and handed it to him. Kevin peered at the newspaper, opened to the fifth page, barely able to decipher the print in the lobby’s gloom. He held it close to the weak light to get a better look.

  There was a column titled Debwatch. The script typeface looked like a wedding invitation. It was written by somebody named Philip Grace. Under a bold black headline, “Corny’s Social Swim,” Kevin studied a grainy picture taken at night. A girl of maybe twenty in a soaking-wet dress stood in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. The column called her a “wilding deb” and “party girl.” The girl seemed wired enough. Still, her eyes didn’t look to Kevin like she was having any party.

  She looked pretty, like his younger sister, Marne, but with finer features. Deb features. Delicate even in the muddy pixels of the newspaper photo. His sister Marne was the anti-deb. A firefighter, she’d had to fight the guys in her Brooklyn squadron for acceptance. She became one of the guys when another firefighter tried to stick his hand down her shirt, and instead of getting huffy like they would have expected and filing a sexual harassment claim, she broke his fingers.

  But this girl in the photograph never had to fight for anything in her life. She just slid down a lucky birth canal and popped out an heiress. He tried to wrap his mind around what it would be like to go through life without a financial worry.

  “The girl who’ll always have everything.” Kevin shook his head. “Look what she does with it.”

  “Maybe.” Andrew’s forehead twitched. “Son, it’s going to be hard on you here if you don’t cut the residents a little slack. They got problems, too.”

  “Sure.” Problems like having the chauffeur blow-dry you after a cold swim in front of the Plaza Hotel.

  “Anyhow, this young woman is Chester Lord’s daughter. Chester, he’s a pleasant man, usually. But young Cornelia has got some impulse-control issues. You know what I’m saying?”

  “No problem.”

  “The other thing,” Andrew went on, pointing to Philip Grace’s byline. “This here’s a sneaky reporter. He’ll try to get you to tell him when Cornelia might be on her way in or out. He makes a living taking nasty photos. Sticks to this building like a roach on cheesecake, figures Cornelia’s always good for some kind of show. He’ll offer you money. You take it and anybody finds out, it’ll get you fired like you been vaporized. Get me in trouble, too, not training you right.”

  Kevin stared at the girl in the picture. In his neighborhood, nobody would even notice that kind of behavior. Unless maybe she puked on your new shoes. But the tawdry photo of the debutante both irritated and fascinated him.

  His dad would call it another eccentricity, winding up drunk in a public fountain and not even enjoying it. Maybe it was a bored-party-girl thing. Or maybe she was just crazy as a bedbug, and everybody covered up for her.

  Either way, he wondered what his mother would think of him now, having to tip his hat to a girl like that, staggering by him giggling, smelling of stale champagne.

  Tomorrow, no matter how long he worked, he would need to check on the neon saint he’d dedicated to his mother.

  Chapter Two

  In Penthouse A, Chester Lord IV leaned over and lightly kissed his sleeping daughter’s forehead.

  It felt warm and moist, covered with wisps of her straw-blond hair. He tried to imagine Cornelia’s face lighting up the way it had before her childhood slipped away. Before this odd young woman who drank too much and danced in public fountains moved in.

  Chester sat by her bed and wished he could invite her to dinner, just the two of them in the apartment, to talk things out. Instead, he would have to explain to her why she would be grounded until he talked to her psychiatrist and Tucker Fisk, to come up with some sort of a plan.

  He sighed heavily. He had allowed so many opportunities to reach his daughter get away. Perhaps irretrievably. Lately, that thought felt like an anvil in his stomach. She never actually rebuffed him, only seemed to live her life dancing to music he couldn’t hear. To put it mildly. He had clung to the notion that they would one day share a cleansing effort to talk out their differences. Now all they shared was grief frozen in time. He worried whether Cornelia had finally lost any desire to cut through the silence that had hardened between them over the past ten years.

  Chester fought to ignore the color scheme of his daughter’s bedroom. One side of the room was all red, the other side all black. It bore little resemblance to the sweet sanctuary that once housed precious antiques, a collection of crystal, and her own gleeful artwork and school projects. In one mad week, she stripped the room of all personal thin
gs, as if to deny him any clue to her personality, and installed stark utilitarian furnishings. All that she kept from her childhood was her giant fish tank full of colorful creatures, which, to her credit, she tended carefully.

  Now she slept doped up on medications that the unctuous psychiatrist Dr. Bushberg had prescribed. The sight of her blond head on the pillow pained him. Her mother’s Devonshire-cream skin and delicate features still made her look so innocent and vulnerable. Chester squeezed her hand and left the room, forcing himself to keep the slump out of his walk.

  Other duties called.

  “Just don’t come to the board meeting,” he muttered to Cornelia.

  He crossed the long, dark second story, passing the gym. When Elizabeth was alive, that room had hammered with the clang of free weights and the hiss of the hydraulic workout machine. Chester used the machine only as a coat rack.

  He passed sconces that once hung in Napoleon’s castle at Waterloo, and glanced in the gilt-etched mirror between them. Though he was hardly trim, Chester looked presentable. Wall-to-wall anxiety kept a sparkle in his eyes. And he had not yet suffered the Dorian Gray effect that strikes WASPs suddenly in middle age, collapsing a youthful face overnight into cracks and folds.

  Chester had inherited the seat on the 840 Fifth Avenue co-op board from his father, and felt crushed by his duties as its chairman. He had no question that the owners at large needed him to stand up to the reactionary owners who dominated the board. He secretly thought of them as the Amazing Stone Heads of Fifth Avenue—blockheads stuck in the ground like the relics on Easter Island. Nursing prejudices formed as spoiled children in Herbert Hoover’s time, they still tried to snub every applicant whose surname ended in a vowel, inviting lawsuits. Chester knew that these geriatric brats would all cling to their seats until death removed them.

  At least Chester had prevented 840 Fifth from becoming a total viper pit, tangled with bickering and litigation. He tried to keep the truly disagreeable applicants away from the board, not even allowing them to go through screening. Then he dealt with the most irate and arrogant rejectees. When they bellowed and stamped their tasseled feet, threatening to sue over some real or imagined slight, Chester’s pacific nature became an asset and not the liability it tended to be in his business.

  If he couldn’t understand the dizzying world of high tech that was changing his company, or even handle his own daughter’s behavior, by God, he could still choose his neighbors.

  He stepped heavily down the broad sweep of staircase. His ancestral co-op’s elliptical, marble-tiled foyer stood two stories high, with a wraparound balcony. An oversized crystal chandelier dangled from the vaulted ceiling. It had flickered inside the Palace of Versailles on the day an angry mob beheaded its former occupant.

  Crossing the foyer, Chester Lord IV avoided the paintings of the three Chester Lords who had come before him.

  Chester had already indulged a secret fantasy after his father died. Although he couldn’t bring himself to break tradition by removing the faces of the Lord men from the great foyer, he did take the life-sized paintings of all three ancestors and order them reproduced as shrunken eight-by-ten prints. It usually amused him to pass the tiny heads, which he’d cut down to size as surely as a Borneo headhunter. But today they managed to burrow annoyingly into his thoughts.

  In their line of one-child families that produced only sons, the Lords’ starter fortune came from Chester Lord I, who founded the Lord & Company investment bank in 1900. That mother lode made it difficult for his son to fail. Yet Chester II seemed bent on losing the money anyway, growing too fond of wintering in Palm Beach to shuttle back and forth to Wall Street and then cashing out all of Lord & Company’s stock market holdings. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Chester II barely got his hair mussed.

  Lucky Granddad.

  When Chester’s father, Chester Lord III, took over after World War II, he invested in the black arts of Madison Avenue—advertising and network television—pumping Lord & Company into an even richer and fatter enterprise.

  The tips of Chester’s ears burned whenever he thought about his father. Today had brought back his eleventh birthday party at the Westchester Country Club. When Chester missed a putt, his dad hectored him to keep shooting until all his friends and relatives drifted off. At twilight, forty-seven putts later, he finally sank the ball.

  Chester glumly forced himself to study business at Yale, aching to change his major to social anthropology. He envied those students with their beards, tangled hair, and sloppy jeans, who seemed to bear the real problems of the world. During his college years, Chester would gaze out the window of Finance 101 and fantasize. He had read Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead. How he yearned to run off to study those gentle islanders who only made love, not war.

  But, of course, Chester had to join Lord & Company.

  None of the cunning, pin-striped men who reported to his father took young Chester seriously. Sometimes he imagined that they snickered as they passed him. He knew that the top managers met after work at watering holes like “21” and never invited Chester to join them. They dismissed him until his father got a snootful and said at the firm’s Christmas party, “A Lord will always run Lord & Company, even if he runs it into the ground.”

  How prophetic. In the 1970s, Chester tugged at the short leash his father allowed him by investing in John Delorean’s new automobile. In the 1980s, he sought safe harbor in the savings and loan industry. But he was soon fleeced by its slickest operators, who bankrupted their S&Ls while buying yachts with twenty-four-karat-gold faucets for themselves. He constantly stood trembling before his father’s desk, explaining why money practically bled out of his business ventures.

  The berating only stopped when his apoplectic, workaholic father finally blew an artery and was wheeled out of his office on a gurney. Chester fearfully took over the presidency. He floundered while the crafty managers around him circled and snapped. He knew they were lining up outside buyers to force him out.

  Desperate to find a loyal right hand, he hired his old Yale roommate’s son as his protégé—a fierce blond Young Turk named Tucker Fisk, a football star at Yale with a Wharton MBA who had already cut a blazing swath through Wall Street.

  Tucker proved to be more protector than protégé. As much as Chester shrank from confrontation, Tucker roared with the joy of it. On the day they called Bloody Tuesday, Tucker lined up and summarily fired the executives who wanted Chester out. Then he terrified the loyal ones by demanding letters of resignation to keep in his desk in case they should even think about disobeying him. On Bloody Tuesday, the halls of Lord & Company rang with trembling voices swearing lifelong allegiance to Chester Lord. But Tucker fired most of them anyway. He replaced them with his own people, young zealots with laptops who looked sixteen years old to Chester and leapt at Tucker’s orders.

  Then Tucker forged a bold and profitable alliance between Lord & Company and Koi Industries of Hong Kong. Chester recoiled from the Kois, father and son. They were no better than modern-day pirates. The Kois would somehow get ahold of plans for competitive products, probably by industrial spying, and quickly build cheaper knockoffs. The Koi sedan they called the Panda looked like a toy Honda. The Koi computer blatantly violated Compaq and Intel patents. Still, Tucker’s partnership with the Kois coined money for Lord & Company. Secure in his role as president and chief executive officer, Chester practically sweated gratitude. He couldn’t even complain when Tucker pressed him to move the firm from its fine old quarters on Wall Street to the garish Koi Tower on Madison Avenue.

  Chester stopped to stare at his dad’s shrunken image. He wondered what the old man would think of the brassy new Koi Tower.

  By the time his right loafer left the staircase and landed on the marble floor, Chester passed the only life-sized paintings, of Elizabeth and Cornelia. His daughter’s smirk mocked him.

  How could he meet people today, after Cornelia’s latest humiliating appearance in the tabloids? H
is upper body slumped again. Then he rasped to himself, Good God, pull yourself together. Whatever happened to the code of his class, “Never complain, never explain,” immortalized by one of the Fords when police stopped him for drunken driving.

  Chester squared his shoulders. Duty compelled him to greet his guests with head held high, despite the damnable article about Cornelia. He crossed the black and white tiles of the smart foyer and headed for the living room. The family co-op consisted of twelve rooms, fashionably crammed with the plunder of centuries. A sweeping hundred-foot penthouse terrace, relandscaped each season, dwarfed the tallest trees of Central Park and the spired gothic sky-scrapers of the West Side.

  By all rights, Chester should feel like Captain Zeus on the bridge of a mighty Olympian ship. His view of Central Park and the West Side was unbroken to the Hudson River and the Palisade cliffs of New Jersey. Instead, he longed to hide anywhere, even in one of his bathrooms.

  He felt his heart skipping wildly. But it was only anxiety, not a deadly heart attack. He felt like a man held together by Brooks Brothers and Scotch tape. Perhaps he’d be better off with a massive coronary like Dad. At least it would all be over soon, and he’d have quiet and tranquility, a nice long nap. He took a deep breath, wiped his palms on his pants.

  So what if he didn’t show up for the board meeting? They would reject all the applicants anyway. If tomorrow he pulled the covers over his head and stayed home from Lord & Company, Tucker Fisk would run the business without him. What difference did Chester make to anyone? With all his means, his influence, he couldn’t even help his own daughter.

  When Chester passed the bathroom and saw his slumping frame in the mirror, he seized up in fright. He quickly pulled himself up straight and pressed on.

  Promptly at 3:00 P.M., late enough to justify cocktails but early enough so they wouldn’t doze off, the members of the 840 Fifth Avenue co-op board gathered in the Lords’ sitting room. They consisted of four WASP males and a German Jewish widow—375 years of experience snipping coupon bonds with Tiffany scissors.