Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  The board members perched on fussy eighteenth-century chairs designed for people who wore powdered wigs and complained of gout. Chester nodded to his Scottish butler, O’Connell, a sturdy, inscrutable presence. O’Connell still wore a plaid kilt and long socks under his jacket and tie, and still rolled his r’s in a thick Highlander burr after thirty years in New York. His large red hands busied themselves with ice cubes and ashtrays.

  Chester sat at his living room desk.

  “All right”—he glanced around the room—“let’s get to new business. As you know, the Biddle apartment has been put up for sale by Eloise Biddle’s estate. We have twelve applicants who meet the financial criteria. We’ll vote today on which of them, if any, we should invite up for an interview.”

  Nobody objected. Thaddeus “Tad” Eames, a white-haired clubman who had never worked, licked his lips.

  Chester read the first name on the list.

  “Is he anyone?” asked Lily Stern, widow of the man who had inherited one of the world’s largest private banks. She scowled so easily, her face might have been made of aged parchment.

  “He was vice president, Lily.” Chester sighed as he added, “Of the United States.”

  Lily’s face hardened. “No.”

  “Well, we have to at least consider them, Lily,” Chester said.

  “What for?” barked Tom van Adder, retired custodian of his family’s philanthropic trust. “He’s a Democrat, isn’t he? Besides, there was a ridiculous picture of his wife in the newspaper—”

  He froze in mid-sentence and looked at Chester, his voice dribbling off. The board members smirked guiltily, each reminded of today’s picture of Cornelia in the Globe. Chester caught them in their dirty little moment: how they delighted in the misfortunes of others. What was the word for it? Schadenfreude. Such a remarkably German concept. Chester swallowed the acid swelling in his chest, the reflux of anger and shame, and pretended that the whole business wafted right by him.

  “I think we should invite him up,” Tad snarled. “Ask him what he thought he was doing taxing capital gains. We can send their rejection letter afterward.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, Tad,” Chester said. “If we’re going to reject them, let’s just do it. On approval of their application, yea or nay?”

  “Nay.”

  “Nay.”

  “Nay.”

  “Nay.”

  “Nay.”

  Chester began to argue, then thought better of it. He said nothing, and his silence made the room so packed with treasures feel barren and empty. The board members glanced at each other, obviously feeling cheated by his refusal to fight back.

  “Let’s move on,” Chester said. “We have a fellow who won the Nobel prize. Now he’s secretary general of the United Nations. His wife is a surgeon.”

  “Good Lord, no,” Tom van Adder sputtered. “He hails from one of the debtor nations.”

  “Tom’s right,” Chip Lindsay said, bristling. “Those foreign U.N. people have diplomatic immunity. They can get away with anything.” He shuddered. “The next thing you know, the city will come after us to pay his parking tickets.”

  Chip had been ambassador to Bermuda during the Eisenhower administration and thought he knew politics. Like Chester understood nuclear physics. Now, on top of it, Chip had memory lapses and had even worn pajamas once to a co-op board meeting. He noticed for the first time Chip’s unusually large teeth when he pulled his lips back over his gums.

  “I say nay.” Chip bobbed his head.

  “Nay.”

  “Nay.”

  “Nay.”

  “Nay.”

  “Agreed.” Chester nodded. “We’ll just send them a letter.”

  In the periphery of his vision, Chester saw Cornelia, who had shuffled into the living room wearing an oversized black terry cloth bathrobe that dragged on the floor.

  Corny, why now?

  His daughter’s blond hair hung in a tangle, half covering her eyes. She stood in the center of the room behind the Stone Heads, quietly observing them. He saw a hint of determination in her gray pupils, lit up with points of violet as though a furnace burned deep inside.

  The fire brought Chester back to the years when Cornelia was young, purposeful.

  Chester shut his eyes briefly. He saw his wife, Elizabeth, and their daughter sitting scrunched together in their favorite place. It was a little wicker love seat in the sunroom. Elizabeth would read to Corny from dog-eared books about the dead inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla Towers! Free electricity for everyone on earth! For a woman of her background, Elizabeth’s interest in the electrical wizard Tesla seemed as odd as Jackie Kennedy strapping a utility belt onto one of her Halston dresses and asking for a schematic of the White House. But Elizabeth had ferreted out the family’s ancient role in Tesla’s broken career, and the injustice of it inflamed her.

  Chester loved Elizabeth. He had swallowed his puzzlement and indulged her interest in Tesla, who had died penniless in 1943. But he had sulked about her passing the wild Tesla business onto Cornelia. His daughter had picked up the crazy inventor’s flame. Insisted that he listen to her little discoveries of Tesla’s inventions. She seemed as determined as his wife to romanticize the man, and Chester could only retreat into glum silences. Now he guiltily recalled mornings when Elizabeth and Corny would chat about Tesla at the breakfast table. He had fought back with foolish acts of feigned indifference. He was supposed to drop Corny off at the Gramercy School on the way to his office on Wall Street. Instead, he sat reading the Wall Street Journal ostentatiously past 8:30 until Elizabeth scolded him and Corny finally cried that she would be late for class.

  Childish of him in retrospect, but typical of their silent power struggles at chez Lord.

  Still, the Tesla business was a thin shadow across so many cherished times. Elizabeth had loved Cornelia with an almost wanton streak. Thanks to her, Corny earned straight A’s at school, threw herself into modern dance, and giggled with glee at every new challenge. Elizabeth had such strength. She had protected both of them. And he adored her.

  Exactly ten years ago, Elizabeth died in a helicopter accident by the East River. He had taken Cornelia ahead to the cottage in Southampton, where Elizabeth had planned to join them. They arrived to a halting phone message from O’Connell, and he called his office to hear his father’s gruff voice clinically explain the horror. The commuter helicopter had lost electrical power. It had swirled in the sky like an angry brick before crashing and bursting into a fireball. There were no survivors.

  Chester had become a basket case, distant and troubled. He took to locking himself in his study and drinking martinis with no vermouth. He couldn’t talk to his daughter, not that he didn’t try. But he bore a mighty responsibility to Lord & Company, and perhaps he had found that easier to cope with.

  He felt the weight of grief and remorse in his chest now, swelling like a hard medicine ball.

  “Hello, Cornelia,” Chester finally greeted her. “We’re having a co-op meeting now.”

  “Chester,” she said in her reasonable voice. “I have to go out, but somebody put a lock on my clothes closet.”

  She had stopped calling him Dad a couple of years ago, and he didn’t dare ask her to call him that again.

  “We’ll discuss it right after the meeting.” He tried not to dwell on what she must see as his betrayal of her. Actually, the idea of grounding her had been Tucker’s. He hadn’t resisted, not after the scene she’d created the night before.

  Cornelia beseeched Chester with her intelligent eyes. The look shot an arrow of shame and doubt through his stomach. His daughter stood just like Elizabeth, he thought, casually in control of her trim body. Her straw-blond hair sparkled, and he caught glints of the sun on her fine cheekbones. Her alert eyes fought against her medication. Her lips, full and pale, formed a brave line of resistance that broke his heart.

  His daughter’s eyes held his for another second, then turned to the board members, who squirmed and shi
fted in their chairs.

  “The issue on the table,” she announced, her voice raised like a clear chime despite her medication, “is should a girl be denied clothes? Yea or nay?”

  The board members coughed and looked away. Chester concentrated on his desktop, raising his voice only slightly. “Cornelia, please.”

  This would be not only a contest of wills between them, he knew, but another frustrating pas de deux, the two of them speaking but hardly on the same channel. He wished the board would disappear, beamed back to their own musty apartments. Yet, even if they disappeared and Chester and his daughter were left alone in the room to speak freely, somehow his plans for them always wound up in chaos. The simple act of talking to her had become as fraught with peril as setting himself on fire.

  “The next name,” he said, because he could think of nothing else to say, “is Chad Benson, chairman of Sweethold Financial.”

  While Chester spoke, his daughter floated in her bathrobe past the board members to the antique mahogany liquor cabinet. She opened it and began fishing around inside, pulling out a deck of playing cards. Shuffling them as she walked back to face the board, Cornelia stopped directly in front of Tad Eames.

  “All right,” Cornelia said. “I need clothes, so the game is strip poker. Jacks or better to open. Mr. Eames, are you in for that blazer?”

  “No, no,” Tad Eames stammered.

  “Was that a nay on Benson, Tad?” Chester felt stubbornly committed now. Besides, he realized with only a twinge of guilt, he secretly disliked Chad Benson, a loudmouthed Wall Street slice-and-dicer. Maybe he could ram a nay through in the confusion, and some good could come of this.

  The board members studied their shoelaces.

  “Ah, no, Chester…” Tad began.

  “Thank you. We have a nay from Tad. Have any others decided on this applicant?”

  “Mr. Van Adder,” Cornelia said, turning to the man, who now tensed in his chair like a schoolboy. “How about you? Can you afford to lose those slacks?”

  “No,” said Tom van Adder, his eyes following the trim golden leg that flashed very briefly under Cornelia’s robe.

  “No you haven’t or no you don’t like them, Tom?” Chester snapped. “If we can’t agree, then we’ll just send them a rejection letter. Now if you’ll excuse us for a moment. Cornelia, in my study.”

  He touched Cornelia’s drooping sleeve and they started out of the room.

  Lily Stern called after them, “We all hope you’re better soon, Cornelia.”

  Chester ground his teeth. The smug old battle-ax. However misguided her passions, Cornelia had more goodness in her than the entire board with their self-congratulatory charity balls, where the charity was lucky to squeeze out a few crumbs after they’d paid for the catering and entertainment.

  They hadn’t reached the den when his daughter shook off his hand, folded her arms, and glared at him.

  “Locking my closet? Stop her before she dresses again?”

  “We need to talk, Cornelia, but not now…” Chester fumbled. “If you’ll just go to your room and read or something, Tucker will be over this evening and we can all talk this out.”

  “Did you and Tucker Fisk decide to lock up my clothes?”

  “I’m… just concerned about you.”

  “Well, I hope you and Tucker have a good man-to-man talk, because I’ll be going out.”

  “Where?”

  “To South America.”

  “For God’s sake, why?” Chester yelped, trying to divine a purpose behind this shocking news.

  “Research,” she said. “Some historians believe that Nikola Tesla went to South America to build a third tower, or at least left plans for other people to build one. Anyway, I’m going to find out.”

  Chester felt his mouth open and close as he tried to respond. “Cornelia, I don’t resent your mother for having told you these old stories about our family.” He had slowly drifted toward this view, now blaming Great-Granddad, the pinched old Puritan, for starting this Tesla mess. “But it’s so… late to try to deal with it. There are other things you should be pursuing.”

  She cocked her head. “Like?”

  “Well, ah…” They could discuss the distance between them. Even if it meant admitting how he had failed her. But he felt too weary to open that can now, for what might spring out.

  She didn’t speak, worrying a thread that stuck out of the terry cloth of her bathrobe with her fingers. Her eyes seemed to scold him.

  He tried again. “Have you spoken to anyone else about South America? Dr. Bushberg? Tucker?”

  She seemed to consider this. “Nobody you know, Chester.”

  “Cornelia, whenever you start in with this Tesla business—”

  “I didn’t start it,” she snapped back.

  She sounded so matter-of-fact about an idea so, well, crazy. South America? She could be kidnapped. He saw a vision of his daughter surrounded in a dark jungle by dope smugglers or rebel insurgents, sinister men grinning, gold teeth flashing. She could even be murdered. He swallowed, felt his throat very dry. He must find a way to protect her at any cost.

  “Well, you’re a grown woman,” he said slowly.

  “And it’s my money,” she added.

  “Yes, it is,” he said agreeably. “I’m not necessarily opposed to this trip on principle. A change of scenery might be good. It’s just so sudden, you really have to give me a little warning about a decision like that. That’s not unfair, is it?”

  She chewed her lip. “No, I guess not.”

  “Then, please. Let me get through with the board. We’ll have dinner together.”

  His daughter brightened a little. “When?”

  “Uh, soon.” He lowered his eyes.

  At 4:00 P.M., Chester briskly ushered the board members out of his sitting room.

  Instantly, he retired to his mahogany-walled study. The old, familiar scent of leather and crackling logs in the fireplace soothed him slightly. Chester liked to sit among the first-edition books, dusted of their cobwebs, which he no longer read, and photographs of the sloop he kept in Southampton but no longer sailed. The thought that he could still share traditions he loved with his daughter seemed flimsy now. He settled into his most comfortable leather chair and rubbed his eyes, trying to force his mind to focus.

  For the first time, he had let the board have their way and reject all twelve applicants. He wondered who would sue. Oh, to hell with them. By the next meeting, the city’s elite Realtors would submit at least one hundred new names.

  Without being asked, O’Connell’s craggy, vaguely disapproving face had appeared. He carried a silver tray that contained a sterling shaker tinkling with ice, a huge martini glass, and a plate piled with small crescents of lemon peel. O’Connell poured the drink, but allowed Chester to pick up one of the lemon peels, twist it, and plop it into the glass.

  Chester nodded his thanks and let O’Connell disappear before drinking half the stiff martini in one gulp.

  Cornelia presented such a hornet’s nest, he could barely begin to think about what to do for her without feeling stung from all directions. Clearly she needed more professional help than she was now receiving, and immediately. The South American business numbed him with a radiating panic.

  Chester had to consider the practical. Thankfully, Cornelia’s share of the family’s money was substantially tied up in trust. She received only the whopping interest she earned on her interest, which she’d spent over the past years on God knows what. She would be twenty-one on February 14, Valentine’s Day, and he couldn’t, wouldn’t, snoop into her personal finances. A line had to be drawn. Fortunately, the trust was set up so she could not invade the principal. Nor did she show any interest in the block of voting stock in Lord & Company that she’d already inherited. It lay gathering dust in a vault on Wall Street.

  Chester let his lids droop and saw Cornelia as a child, smiling at him as she dragged out her school science projects to show him. Cornelia had always run full t
ilt into life, bright and determined. But her mother’s death had changed her, crushed her in peculiar ways. He held the icy glass and thought of the time she took his hand and urged him to share her newest interest. She led him to the utility room in their apartment, which he barely knew existed. There she focused his attention on the 252 different circuits that controlled their chandeliers and wall sconces and such. God, how she had grown into a cruel parody of that curious little girl, with her crazy Tesla obsession.

  Crazy.

  Twice now, that word had slipped in so easily. He had always managed to block it before.

  Cornelia had progressed so rapidly, in her willful way, from grief to obsession. All of his good intentions, the parade of therapists, the efforts to reach her, had come to nothing.

  She had been so young and fragile when Elizabeth died. Clearly, he should have put aside his business worries and protected her fragility. But he had felt torn. His own father, who had made little effort to hide his petulant dislike for Elizabeth, had chosen this time to rachet up Chester’s troubles at Lord & Company. God, what a year. The stock market had just collapsed like a palace built on toothpicks, although of course he was obliged to say with a straight face that the smoking rubble was a mere correction.

  Chester, you need to focus, his father had thundered at him through the chaos of the crash. He was expected to work eighteen-hour days at the firm. Scuttling back and forth between home and office, feeling an awful fire in his chest no matter what action he took, he had left a critical business plan in his kitchen freezer, more than once forgot to have his driver take Cornelia to see family and friends who might have comforted her.

  Goaded by his father, he reflected queasily, he had taken the easy way out. It was always simpler to tend to business issues, where things seemed to sort themselves out eventually, than to the murky, unchartered depths of emotions. And Cornelia had been so painfully needy. When he stayed late at the office, she would wake up at night, screaming for her mother. The Gramercy School called him about attention problems. Obviously it was his attention she ached to have. But in those early days after Elizabeth’s death, Chester could barely manage to heft himself up and shave in the morning. What all the so-called experts told him about handling grief made no dent. His brief foray into Zen, a measure of his desperation, proved as paper-thin as a Japanese party lantern. So he abandoned Cornelia, for a time, to a string of nannies and au pairs.