Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  She slipped out of her bed and walked nude to her closet, threw open the door, revealing a rarefied fashion warehouse full of dresses and sportswear and suits. Hanging in the center was the giant plastic Baggie that held her wedding gown.

  She took down her extravagant dress and held it up to her neck, studying herself from all angles in her three-way mirror.

  She swayed her torso left and right, the elegant wedding dress flowing with her. Perhaps one hundred yards of silk, tulle, and taffeta, gathered and draped, puffed into a fantasy, crowned with a few dozen yards of lace to be swept back over her head and shoulders. Her blond hair folded itself neatly around her head now, snipped into a debutante’s understated haircut.

  She hung up the dress. She would adhere strictly to schedule. Madame timed this day as precisely as boiling an egg.

  Cornelia pulled a terry cloth bathrobe tight around her and headed out to the corridor.

  She passed the sconces that her father told her were from Napoleon’s castle at Waterloo. Ironic that he should be so proud of them, since it was hardly a lucky castle. As she crossed the foyer, she glanced at the miniaturized portraits of the Lord men.

  She paused before the picture of her great-great-grandfather, Chester I, who had founded the Lord & Company investment bank that supported them all. His eyes sunk far back under the ridge of his forehead, unreadable, hinting of villainy. But she supposed it took a bit of the robber baron to succeed in his day.

  Capitalism in the rough, her father had called it.

  She started away from Chester I, then felt suddenly weak and anxious. She looked back at the painting. Were his eyes following her? No, but something about him fascinated her, and not in a nice way.

  She separated herself from her forebear’s small head and drifted across the foyer to the living room. Every inch of the apartment seemed choked with flowers, their scents overpowering. White silk swept the living room from the floor to the high ceilings. She felt immersed, no, almost mummified in Madame’s silky gauze. She swept the fabric that hung like flypaper with her arm and made it billow as she passed. At the far end of the room, just before the French doors leading out to the terrace, the Wedding Bower stood twined with roses. In this delicate gazebo, she and Tucker would vow to love each other to the end of their lives.

  She turned into the round alcove where she and her parents used to eat breakfast together. The table shone with bright yellow linens and gleaming silver. O’Connell removed the shiny cover from a platter of warm scones. Her father turned to her, stood up, and smiled in his rather sad fashion. He dressed casually, for him, in an old blue blazer and flannel slacks. His eyes looked red, as though he hadn’t slept well.

  “Happy birthday, darling.” He pecked her on the forehead. “Let’s have our last breakfast alone together, shall we?”

  “Yeeooow,” Kevin yelped, clutching his jaw.

  The two aides pried his arm away to grip him, one on each arm, as they prepared to escort him off the unit. The bigger aide used his key ring to unravel the maze of deadbolts on the metal door of South One.

  “Right to the dentist, no stops,” the charge nurse instructed them. “Stand right by him while Dr. Brooks does the examination. It’s probably just an abscess.”

  Kevin began counting when they hit the Yellow Brick Road. He counted the tiles, 136 to the first right turn, then 182 to the doorway, then up the staircase that would take him outside. There would be twenty feet of outdoors between the door to his building and the door leading to the dental clinic.

  Both South One aides were built like wide receivers. Between them, he felt about as big and strong as a prepubescent girl. The key aide opened the door. The other kept a firm grip on Kevin’s arm.

  Showtime.

  Kevin raised his foot as high as he could, slamming it down on the aide’s shoe. The aide screamed and bent over double, releasing Kevin’s arm.

  “Sorry,” Kevin yelled.

  He didn’t look back as he sprinted. He could use his arms to pump ahead, since they hadn’t restrained him. The aides shouted and cursed. But following hospital policy, they didn’t chase him. That would be a job for the security guards.

  Kevin bolted for the trees surrounding the Big Circle, the path that he and Corny ran down that last night together. The thought of her jolted his heart alive and propelled him. His stiff muscles shrieked. Pain tore at his lungs as his feet pounded on the frozen ground.

  In his peripheral vision, he caught a flash of sun glistening off metal. He turned to see a white Jeep Cherokee with blue stripes and a bar of orange lights flashing on the roof. That would be the first wave of security guards. He had expected one of their golf cars, not a sport utility vehicle.

  Fear pumped through him.

  They wouldn’t hurt him too badly so long as he had his Platinum Health Plan. Worst case, they would capture him with handcuffs of the plastic-Ziploc variety. He had seen them used on patients here. And maybe treat him to the zap of a stun gun to lay him flat, twitching like a chicken, and take the heart out of his resistance. He had heard that they’d just gotten the new-technology foam to spray around a patient’s legs that he’d seen used on Cops. It would quickly harden and turned to glue, so the quarry would collapse on the ground in a sticky, humiliated pile of defeat.

  He used the fear to squeeze his adrenaline, force more juice into his unused muscles.

  He gauged the distance to the trees, then beyond the trees to the perimeter of the Sanctuary grounds where the electric fence stood waiting. Its slack wires strung at the top between the posts seemed to smile, “C’mere, we’re ready for you.”

  He suddenly veered right and the Jeep zigged right along with him. Then he straightened out for the hundred-yard dash. Hey, they only had a couple hundred horsepower under the hood, and none of his motivation. If they failed, they’d catch hell from their boss. If Kevin failed, his whole future, and maybe his life, would end in the Sanctuary.

  Seventy yards away now. His nerves leapt to see that the Jeep Cherokee had gained on him.

  Fifty yards and the Jeep made a long lazy curve around him. It was over. They were just playing with him now. He plowed ahead, his breaths nothing but loud, ragged grunts.

  Thirty yards. He saw them smiling through the window, taunting him. What does a cornered animal do?

  He threw both arms to the side and howled like a werewolf, suddenly racing not toward the trees anymore, but directly at the Jeep. The guard on the passenger side changed his expression from playful to uncertain. The driver sped up so that Kevin wouldn’t slam into the side of the Jeep and hurt himself.

  He had found his edge.

  “Hey, guys? You can’t hurt me,” Kevin taunted them. “I still got a year left on my health plan.”

  The driver jerked the Cherokee to a stop. The guard in the passenger seat opened the door and jumped out, hunkering down like a Dallas Cowboys defensive end.

  “C’mon, man,” the chunky guard with no chin yelled at him. “No problem, we’re just gonna take you back.”

  Kevin feinted left, confusing the guard. But a second white Jeep with orange lights on the roof suddenly came rumbling over the Big Circle. They’d catch him now, no question.

  Twenty yards to go.

  He crashed through the underbrush around the line of trees. The brush clung too thick for their vehicles to penetrate. Now the guards would have to get out and follow him on foot.

  Ten yards.

  The eight-foot electrical fence, that malevolent wire grid with its red “DANGER” sign punched up with illustrations of lightning bolts, loomed dead ahead.

  Well, he’d just have to trust her on this one. And if she was wrong, what had she said the day they made snow angels in front of St. Agnes Church? Nothing hurts as much as you think it will.

  Please be right about the current, Corny.

  As he flung himself up against the side of the fence, a force like a vibrating power drill tore through his body tissue. He barely smelled the burning, dimly
saw the flames.

  He only saw, in the periphery of his vision, a tickle of blue fire dancing on his shoulders. His hair must be on fire. His mouth filled with the noxious taste of metal, like eating aluminum foil. His dental fillings, he guessed, conducting the electricity.

  That was his final thought. He used his body’s last adrenaline spurt to pull himself over the top wire.

  Kevin fell like a crash-test dummy over the top of the Sanctuary fence. He landed with a nasty thud on the freedom side.

  His eyes twitched once toward heaven. Then he lay as motionless as an empty sack.

  Chester watched his daughter’s hand slip on the glass she held. He thought she had a small seizure.

  “Is everything all right?” Chester rose from the chair, his voice shaky.

  “I just felt… nothing. I’m fine.”

  They sat over the English silver coffee service, the warm scones covered with Devonshire cream and plump strawberries. Chester tried to clear his mind, to savor their last moment of peace before the stress of the wedding.

  “It’s all a bit of a stressfest, isn’t it, Daddy?”

  “Well, yes,” he had to agree.

  Cornelia wore her black terry cloth robe, as she had two months before to interrupt his co-op board meeting. On that day, her gray eyes filled with sharp pinpoints of pink and amber, her skin flushed with indignation as she snapped at him because he had locked her closet.

  This morning, she hunched in her robe, withdrawn. Her hair now lay demurely to the side of her head instead of falling over her forehead like an unruly hayloft. Her eyes revealed no luster, just a cloudy gray.

  She set the glass down on the linen of their breakfast table and looked out onto the terrace.

  Chester followed her eyes. Around the perimeter of their wide, ninety-foot terrace was a profusion of life in white, red, yellow, and lavender. He imagined the floral waves as the Elysian Fields, re-created by Madame Marie-Claude. The old tyrant had done an inspired job.

  He cleared his throat. “Well, this is our big day, isn’t it?”

  His daughter sipped fresh-squeezed orange juice from the crystal glass, and ran her tongue over her lips. They always looked dry now, pale and slightly cracked. Dehydration, Loblitz had warned him. Yet another side effect of the ECT.

  “Daddy, do you think Tucker’s nice?” she suddenly asked him.

  The question disturbed him—both the fact that she would feel the need to ask it now and the realization that he stumbled for an answer.

  “How do you mean? Tucker certainly has loyalty and stick-to-it-iveness, as my sixth-grade teacher used to call it.” His laugh sounded hollow. “He’s a gentleman.”

  “Do you mean socially correct?” Cornelia’s voice sounded crisper. “Or a gentle man?”

  Tucker and gentle. Chester pondered those two concepts.

  “Well, compared to whom? He treats you very respectfully. He has been patient with you during your recovery, hasn’t he?”

  “In his way. Compared to you, Daddy, is he nice?”

  “I guess I don’t know how I’d score myself on that issue.”

  “You don’t?” She sounded dumbfounded.

  “I try to do the right thing, certainly. Your mother, well, she never doubted herself. I’m afraid I can’t claim her moral certainty. Life can be something of a maze, darling. I spend a lot of my time just trying to feel my way through. What you’re about to do, Cornelia, it takes courage to… to…”

  “To get married?”

  “Well, no, to do what’s necessary.”

  “Necessary?” Her eyes grew more muddied. “For who?”

  “Well, for you and Tucker and… all of us.” His voice became stern and his face had turned red and blotchy.

  She lifted her coffee cup hesitantly, unsure what had fanned her father into this rather frightening display of tics and bluster.

  “Cornelia. What I’m trying to point out is that life can be terribly complicated and sometimes you need to take a plunge.”

  “Plunging into marriage.” She made an odd shape with her mouth. “I would think people could walk around and stick a toe in first, to make sure.”

  “Well, of course you already did that.” He felt desperate. “Unfortunately, your therapy made you forget all the walking around part, and now here we are, you and I, at the plunge, aren’t we?”

  He realized that he half-stood now, hunched over toward her, and had raised his voice.

  “Calm down, Daddy, please. I’ll get you through this.”

  My God, had he allowed their world to turn so upside down that he needed his poor, beleaguered daughter to take charge of him on her wedding day? She took his hand across the table and held it protectively.

  Chester’s heart felt the dreaded anvil again, sinking deeper into his chest and soul.

  Kevin lay like a snow angel without wings.

  “No, he’s not moving,” a guard explained through his radio. “The last thing we saw, he was vibrating like a fork with his clothes on fire.”

  The Emergency Medical Services ambulance, a square van, squealed up in less than five minutes. It arrived slightly before the carload of medical staff from the Sanctuary.

  Dr. Loblitz hopped out of the Sanctuary car. He ran to where an EMS team squatted in orange suits, juggling their lifesaving gear. Loblitz could see, before he even reached the group, the bare foot that stuck out from the emergency technicians’ huddle. Shouting at each other, the EMS techs used shears to snip off Kevin Doyle’s shirt.

  The woman tech holding the paddles suddenly yelled, “Clear.”

  They lurched back and Loblitz saw the body hop up off the ground and fall back.

  “Again. Clear,” the EMS tech shouted.

  Loblitz heard another ker-chunk from the electrical paddles. So much like his own specialty. But he felt a shocking sense of dread when the charge brought no response at all from the patient.

  His patient.

  Loblitz felt sickened. He would not announce himself as Kevin’s doctor now. All his instincts told him to retreat, write a memo. It would be better to keep a low profile and explore his legal position.

  He slunk back toward the staff sedan, wondering whether the family of Kevin Doyle would sic some mad-dog personal injury lawyer on him. The unfairness made him tremble. He had shaved a few therapeutic corners before like anyone else, but he never kept a patient he knew to be normal in the hospital for his personal gain. But the nearly $250,000 honorarium from Tucker Fisk would give him away.

  How could he have been so stupid?

  He wondered how much of that money he would need to spend in legal fees to save his license.

  He watched the Emergency Medical Services team slow their efforts down around the fallen man and finally halt. Then they began packing up their gear before placing the limp body on the gurney, sliding it into its track inside the ambulance. No technician stayed in back with his patient to administer life support.

  That eliminated his last flicker of doubt. Now Dr. Kenneth Loblitz braced himself to go to Administration. He wondered how he would report this final discharge status of his patient Kevin Doyle to Dr. Burns.

  He didn’t believe the Sanctuary even had a form to fill out for anything this horrible.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Eight-forty Fifth Avenue, that sooty dowager, rustled its awning petticoat as guests began arriving for the afternoon Lord-Fisk wedding.

  Andrew and Vlad, both with a bounce to their steps and a special snap to their white-gloved salutes, greeted the First Families of Manhattan. The blinding gold Rolls-Royce which Old Han Koi had shipped from Hong Kong to Manhattan jolted to a halt in front of the building.

  “The Kois,” Andrew sniffed to Vlad. “Man, no taste at all.”

  Other Rollers and Mercedes and Aston Martins formed a cavalcade of imported luxury cars that snaked around the block. The trendier women arrived draped by Marc Bower and Vera Wang, leaving Chanel for the starchy doyennes. The men wore tailored dark su
its with white shirts but not morning coats and striped trousers. Madame had harangued Chester to enforce that formality, but Tucker Fisk had scrawled her a terse note that cowed her into silence, “No monkey suits or you’re fired.”

  The lobby staff funneled the guests through the building’s narrow foyer and packed them into the two creeping passenger elevators bound for Penthouse A.

  In his ancestral co-op, Chester Lord assumed the mantle of Father of the Bride with less inner gaiety than his guests imagined.

  He held court standing in his big living room, wearing a midnight-blue suit and an expression of bland geniality. The stew of old friends, socialites, and businesspeople gushed and brayed. He could, if he chose to, overhear whispers about Cornelia.

  Even as Chester mumbled through the motions, he was stricken by how his “set,” as they called it in his father’s time, had grown profoundly tiresome over the years. That included even the new members, youngsters like Cornelia’s school friends Tina and the two Roberts who stood in a fierce little huddle pointing and giggling at the other guests. Watching them, Chester realized that freedom from financial worry had only doomed this aging posse to a life lived with a casual malice toward others.

  “Look what the woman’s wearing,” one of the two boys called Robert snickered at Lily Stern’s dress. “Valentino meets Norma Desmond.”

  Then the Amazing Stone Heads of Fifth Avenue appeared. He braced as the three members-for-life of the 840 Fifth co-op board, Lily Stern, Chip Lindsay, and Tom van Adder approached.

  Old Chip Lindsay, dressed in the same musty pin-striped suit from the 1950s he had worn to the board meeting in December, led the phalanx. Their expressions looked dour even on his daughter’s wedding day.

  “We have some new business,” Chip said taking Chester by the sleeve.

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “No,” Lily Stern barked, reminding him of Madame Marie-Claude’s foghorn voice. The old crone was in Cornelia’s room dressing her now.

  “What is it?” Chester snapped.

  “We thought you’d want to know, before you read about it on the New York Times society page,” Tom van Adder’s eyes twinkled in merriment, “that we’ve approved Cornelia and Tucker Fisk for 20B.”