Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  Over the sound system, a scratchy old record played on a turntable. His mother and father had actually danced to the same record album, South Pacific, about twenty years ago. It had brought out his parents’ sappy, romantic side that, in hindsight, was pretty nice.

  He maneuvered in front of Cornelia and she slowly turned, first looking up to the top of his hair.

  “Is it just me, or is this a good song?” he asked her.

  “It’s called ‘Bali Ha’i.’ Someone’s idea of paradise.” She smiled and patted the seat for him to sit down. “You’re not looking much like Saint Sebastian tonight.”

  “I’d strip down to my loincloth, but I’m afraid they’d take me off socials.”

  “It’s a fine line,” she agreed slowly.

  His anger kicked up at how heavily they had medicated her.

  “Now tell me from the beginning,” folded hands in her lap, “how did you ever get in here?”

  “I did my homework, used a couple of connections.”

  No physical contact, Dr. Lester said. He kept physically apart from her but left his pinkie close, a half-inch away from hers.

  “Corny,” he said, “I have to ask you something before I get too comfortable. Do you really love Tucker?”

  Her mouth turned down. “It’s messy.”

  “Does he love you?”

  “He’s undoubtedly in love with the prospect of marrying Cornelia Lord. You have to know my family.” She stopped and Kevin waited for her. “When my mother died, Chester fell apart. Worse than I did. He was running Lord & Company very badly.”

  “So he hired Tucker?”

  “My father hates confrontation. Tucker loves it. He fired all the troublemakers and terrorized the rest. Tucker saved Lord & Company once, and now it’s in trouble again. A business partner of my father’s named Koi is plotting a hostile takeover. Tucker told me my father needs my help. I own shares of voting stock. He wants to make sure we keep it all in the family.”

  “By getting married?”

  She slowly smoothed the wrinkles from the lap of her cocktail dress. “By showing the world the Lords and Tucker are all sticking together.”

  Kevin pushed on. “So Tucker wants you to settle for a…”

  “I guess you’d call it a marriage of convenience.”

  “It’s not so convenient for you,” he pointed out, “marrying a guy you don’t love.”

  “Tucker had his plan, but I had mine, too. We were going to announce that we were getting married, to discourage the Kois. I never intended to marry him, Kevin. Not even when he promised to show me a Tesla Tower. I just wanted to help my father.”

  “A Tesla Tower?”

  “Yes. Like the one I showed you at the museum, but bigger of course. Tucker swore on his mother’s life that he’d take me to South America. He knew that would really get to me, and I’d have to believe him.”

  “Well maybe Tucker and his mom made a pact,” Kevin said. “They could swear on each other’s lives.”

  “Perhaps. She’s an attorney. Anyway, we were going to announce our engagement at the office Christmas party. I assumed I could go through with it. But two things threw me off a bit. I saw that he lied to me about the trip to South America…”

  She hesitated.

  Kevin wondered how she knew, but he didn’t want to stop her now.

  “And?” He waited.

  “And I thought I saw a corona between Tucker and Han Koi.” “A corona?”

  “A very bad corona.”

  Kevin thought hard about whether he should bring up what Mike the driver told him. Neither of them were in a position to do much now, unless he came up with something more concrete. She needed his support, not more things to worry about. So he changed the subject. “You know, the first time I saw you was a picture in the Globe.”

  She closed her eyes and flushed slightly. “I bet I was standing in a fountain at the time.”

  “Yeah, but I could see you were trying to escape. How come you always run away?”

  “Maybe I don’t like confrontation either.”

  “I don’t know about that.” He gestured with his hands, making emphatic shapes in the air. “You believe in things.”

  “I owe Tesla, personally.” She seemed to withdraw from him slightly. Deep concern had clouded her lovely face, tightening her mouth, causing little white lines around her eyes.

  “Okay. He was a genius. But he’s everybody’s genius, Corny. Why do you owe him personally?”

  She folded her arms. “It’s a family business thing.”

  Our business, not yours, she seemed to be saying. “I’d say your family’s business could use some minding, the way they treat you. Corny, talk to me. I’ve been reading about Tesla. I saw things.”

  “Kevin, you can’t just take a broom and drive all the bats from the Lord family belfry. We have rather long-term issues. One hundred years, to be exact.”

  He held up his arm and looked studiously at his wrist where a watch should be. “I’ve got at least thirty days.”

  She curled up on the couch, tucking both her legs under her body. It amazed Kevin the positions women could work themselves into to sit comfortably, especially if they had incredibly sculpted legs and perfect feet.

  “Okay,” she drew a deep breath. “One hundred years ago, my great-great-grandfather Chester Lord founded Lord & Company. One of his big investments was the Edison Electric Company.”

  Kevin helped her. “Nikola Tesla invented AC electricity. But Edison got the credit for Tesla’s invention and made a fortune out of it. Tesla just wanted to broadcast free electricity. He built his Tesla Tower on Long Island after he got J.P. Morgan to finance it. Until a guy I figure as a relative of yours sent a letter to Morgan.”

  Kevin reached into his jacket and unfolded the page he had ripped out of the Tesla book. It was a reproduction of a letter written in 1903, with all the formality of that day. He handed it to Cornelia, who took it and, with a flash of recognition, read it over very slowly:

  To the Immediate Attention of J. Pierpont Morgan

  My Dear Friend:

  I am astounded to learn that you have backed the inventor Nikola Tesla in his endeavor to create a Tower of Free Electricity, which he is now constructing at Wardenclyffe on Long Island.

  I do not join those naysayers who scoff behind your back that the invention may fail. To the contrary, I am deeply troubled that the experiment should succeed. My God, man, consider the economics.

  If everyone on Earth will be able to receive electricity through the atmosphere, where will you hang the meters?

  Let us meet at The Player’s Club to discuss this soon.

  Your Servant,

  (Which you know damn well I am not!)

  Chester B. Lord

  “You found this?” Her voice was high and reedy, as though strained through something that hurt.

  “In a book. I couldn’t help notice that line, Corny. That’s what J. P. Morgan told Tesla. If everybody can get electricity through the air, where do we put the meters?”

  “Yes,” she nodded once, numbly. “That’s how my great-greatgrandfather ruined Tesla. He did it to protect his own investment in Edison.”

  He moved to take her hand, but she pulled it away.

  “No physical contact, remember? Afterward, nobody took Tesla seriously. He was so far ahead of his time, not even other scientists would support him.”

  And now he’d seen her fly.

  He nodded. “So you come along a whole century later, trying to right the wrong.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “Well, I’m glad you told me, Corny. I was worried, maybe it was irrational.”

  She couldn’t seem to speak, but rubbed her eyes with the back of her fingers.

  “I don’t think I can talk any more now.”

  Something had gone wrong in his plan to swat her fly. She looked more miserable than before, sniffling, tears running down both cheeks. He longed to touch her and set
tled for holding her finger, but she took it away again.

  “Okay,” he said. “Are you free tomorrow?”

  She rubbed her nose, composed herself. “Well, maybe I could make time between All My Children and my Magic of Watercolors class.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  They trusted accomplices now, other patients on Kevin’s wing and hers. Their allies passed their notes back and forth. And they created a diversion when needed.

  On the Monday after their Saturday social, Cornelia’s friend Creamcheese distracted the aides. Kevin’s group passed hers on a Yellow Brick Road, both being herded to activities. Creamcheese screamed uncontrollably with no warning. She raised such a fuss that aides from both wings had to gang up to surround and quiet her.

  In the confusion, Kevin scooped Corny up in a bundle for a sprint up the stairs, closing the door behind her.

  They had a good ten minutes of stolen Sanctuary time before sneaking back.

  She settled on a landing and Kevin kissed her. He took the nape of her slender neck in his hand, and they touched lips as gently as butterflies. Her lips tasted of sweet Necco Wafers and trembled slightly. She put her arms around him and kissed back. Her tongue darted furtively, circling his teeth, a sweet invasion that made his nerves skate on dangerously thin ice.

  But he had promised himself to be extra scrupulous about not getting into the lust part, however much his body ached, before he could have his talk with her.

  He had to sneak up on her passion for Tesla, which sent her skipping off into the ozone. She took on the dead inventor’s cause too zealously, like trying to use her fingernails to tear down a brick wall. He understood why she’d have a bad aftertaste from what her great-greatgrandfather had done to Tesla. But it didn’t explain why she made Tesla her whole life.

  He pulled back from her kiss.

  “Don’t stop.”

  “Corny, who told you about Tesla?”

  Her eyelids, lazily drooped, snapped open. “Pardon?”

  “I think you heard me.”

  “My mother.”

  “And she died.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me how she died?”

  “She was killed.”

  “Killed.”

  “In a helicopter accident. A system failure.”

  She licked her dry lips, becoming quiet. Her fingers found a strand of hair that clung to her neck and twisted it.

  He kissed her forehead again. “What kind of a system?”

  “An electrical system.”

  “Do you, uh…”

  “Think it’s a conspiracy or something? Of course not.”

  Good.

  “Corny, isn’t it possible you think it’s like some kind of… karmic boomerang? Your ancestor, this Chester I, screws Tesla out of his tower. Nobody gets free electricity. A century later, your perfectly innocent mother dies because of an electrical system failure.”

  “I think that’s rather far-fetched.” Her fingers felt stiff in his hands. “I mean, that I’d try to—”

  She stopped.

  “Make it right and bring her back somehow?” Kevin finished for her very slowly, looking into her eyes, searching her soul. The points of violet in them had turned hazy. “Remember what you told me about getting nuts over Saint Sebastian? You said, ‘You won’t do anything else until you’ve made things right for her—my mother.’ Think about it. It’s not really Tesla you want to save, is it?”

  She looked away from him.

  He tried to lighten things a little. “Corny, in a few years, nobody’s really going to need Tesla Towers anymore. We’ll all have freestanding fiber optics.”

  She twisted her hair with her fingers and started to say something. She shut her eyes, pulling her hands from his and crossing her arms.

  “It’s cold. I’d like to go back now.”

  On Saturday evening, they planned to meet for the social. But an aide tugged Kevin out of line by the sleeve of his Sanctuary blazer.

  In the visitors room, Philip Grace lounged with his feet up on the coffee table. The sole of one loafer had a hole. His beat-up camera bag sat on the couch beside him.

  “How you doin’?”

  “Pretty good, Philip. How’d you get in here?”

  “Told ’em I was your brother-in-law Harold. They asked me for ID, I said, ‘Shit, you wouldn’t ask me if I was white,’ so they backed off.”

  Grace frowned at Kevin’s outfit.

  Kevin sat across from him and crossed his leg, getting comfortable. He had worked to adopt the casually disciplined way he’d seen the nonpsychotic men on his wing sit. They were the ones who’d come for rehab. Good posture was buried so permanently in the WASP genes that those people whose faces had been collapsed into bulbous veins and creases by booze or worse still managed to sit like they owned the world.

  “Man, what are you wearin’?” Grace shook his head, looking at Kevin’s paisley tie like it was a platter of worms. “Who still makes ties with them little amoebas?”

  “I think the label said Brooks Brothers.”

  Grace sniffed. “Ain’t a brother in the whole world who’d wear that.”

  Kevin noticed Grace resting his hand on his camera case. Getting him used to the camera. It reminded him of the way the salesman at NYIAT laid his pen on the contract the day he signed up for school, trying to get Kevin comfortable with the idea of having it around.

  “I was thinkin’ I’d check up on you,” Philip said, “see what kind of progress you’re makin’ in your treatment’n all.”

  “Pretty steady, Philip.”

  “You seen my missin’ deb?” Grace tried to sound offhand.

  “Yeah. Thanks again. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “That’s why I’m gonna ask you to tell me where to find her, get a candid shot.”

  “I thought we agreed, no story at all until we’re both out of here.”

  Grace shrugged helplessly. “Truth is, it’s been a slow news year since she’s been up here. Didn’t know the worth of the girl till she was gone, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “So you’re thinking, quid pro quo again?”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay.” Kevin nodded. “Tell me what thirty by thirty means.”

  “Huh?”

  “Let’s say I heard Tucker Fisk tell a guy he was going to be ‘thirty by thirty’ if something happened.”

  Philip Grace gave a laugh so cold and bitter it sounded like it came from a dead person. “Wall Street guys say that. Means they expect to make thirty million before they turn thirty years old.”

  “Oh, yeah?” A concept from another planet.

  “You and me, we gonna be lucky to make one million by ninety between the two of us, the rate you helpin’ me out here,” Philip grumbled. “Gimme some Corny dish, I’ll get you some cash for the commissary, whatever they call it here.”

  “No,” Kevin said.

  “I could tell Chester Lord.”

  “Take your best shot, I don’t care.” Kevin leaned over, resting his arms on his knees and his palms up. “Something’s going on with Tucker. Give me a little time, that’s all I’m asking. Please.”

  “Man, I’m dyin’ out there on the street.”

  Grace stretched out his hands, his forehead knotting. Kevin felt ambivalent about the guy who’d lost his meal ticket, Cornelia Lord. Philip looked more frazzled and needy than Kevin had ever seen him.

  “Look,” Kevin told him sincerely, “I’m working on a plan right now.”

  Kevin thought that sounded better than just admitting that he badly needed a plan, and soon.

  She was still on intravenous meds, a handicap, but Kevin was not. He got his orally, tongued them, and spit them out when nobody was looking. So they divided up tasks.

  Today his friend Richard helped them sneak away by dropping his plastic Maalox bottle and shaking himself into a phony seizure on the Yellow Brick Road. Cornelia clutched a pink tablecloth wrapped up and tied like a ho
bo’s bundle under her top. She had slipped it off her table in Astor II’s dining room, then filled it with stolen bread and cheese.

  They had ten minutes today. In delicious Sanctuary time, that could be a picnic. They stormed up the staircase they called their “Stairway to Heaven,” because they could never stay longer than the length of the song.

  “Do you think we’re using people like Creamcheese and Richard, getting them in trouble?” he asked.

  “Not on my wing. We’re their Designated Couple.”

  On the upstairs landing, Kevin slammed his elbow against a window frame at the top of the stairs and it sprung open easily. He helped her through the opening.

  They settled down on a five-foot slab outside the window, hidden from the view of guards patrolling the grounds. She pulled the hobo bag apart, taking out bread and two types of cheese and spreading it neatly on their slab.

  “We’re like bandits,” she said, “hiding in the rooftops of Notre Dame.”

  She watched him break off a piece of yellow cheese for her, then stop. “No. You like the white one, don’t you?” he said.

  She felt gratitude swelling up through her whole body, just because he knew those tiniest factoids about her. He fed her a gooey morsel of Camembert.

  “You see everything.” She kissed him, a tear on her cheek.

  He smiled, not quite understanding, but put his arm around her and squeezed.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “How are we ever going to get ourselves out of the hospital?”

  “You mean go AWOL?” He looked worried.

  “Our checkout time seems up in the air, Kevin.”

  “You could do it the old-fashioned way. Just show everybody you’re okay.” He looked serious. “I’ve been thinking about your family business thing. How old is Tucker Fisk?”

  “Twenty-eight.” She moved to tickle him.

  He held her fingers back. “Is he going to make thirty million dollars as soon as he saves your father’s company?”

  She sounded surprised. “How could he? He doesn’t even make a million dollars a year, I know that much.”

  “How about if your father gave him a bonus.”