For the first two years, he watched, listened and learned, always more comfortable with the adults in the school constellation than with boys of his own age. His speech had always been correct, taught, as he had been all his life, by nuns, and fortunately, the school required a uniform so that all the boys dressed alike. He learned that his black hair had always been cut too short, that his aggressiveness on the football field and the baseball diamond was acceptable, and as much as he relished the exercise of his brain, it was preferable to save demonstrations of intelligence for exams and term papers rather than display it in the classroom.
By junior year he was ready to emerge from the unobtrusive place he had taken everywhere except in sports. Pat Shannon had carefully marked out the boys he wanted to become friends with, singling out from the herd of his classmates the half dozen who displayed excellence, not merely in their achievements but in their character. By the end of his four years at St. Anthony’s, he had made six friends he would never lose. Loyalty was his religion. If any of his friends had asked Pat to meet him in Singapore by noon on the day after tomorrow, with no explanation given, he would have been there. And they would have been there for him. Lacking a family of his own, he had created a family from strangers. The flavor of his soul had always been tough but loving. However, his strength concealed that love from all but a few.
He was a tall boy, big boned, and fast as a leopard. His coloring left no question about his ethnic origins: it was classically Black Irish, blue black hair, dark blue eyes and white skin that flushed easily. His forehead was broad, his eyes set wide apart under heavy brows, and his open smile was so winning that it was easy—though dangerous—to forget how bright he was.
By senior year he was president of the class, captain of the football team and first in all his classes. He won a full scholarship to Tulane from which he graduated in three years by taking an extra class load, going to summer school every summer, and restricting his sports activity to football. At twenty-three, Patrick Shannon was a graduate of the Harvard Business School and ready to conquer the world.
A week before graduation he had been hired by Nat Temple, the man who had founded Supracorp many decades before. Shannon gave himself ten years to make it to a position close to the top in the corporate structure. He allotted the first three years to absolutely unrelenting work. Pat Shannon was perfectly aware, from visiting his friends, that living well took time and money and he would have neither to spare, by his calculations, until he was twenty-six. Although he felt an impatience to enjoy the good things in life, his self-discipline and bred-in-the-bone motivation were strong enough to make him keep to his plan. He never considered marrying money—he had met many of his classmates’ sisters who would have provided it—but everything about the idea displeased him. He had to do it on his own—that need to prove himself was stronger than any other he had ever experienced, and each victory only led to new challenges which had to be met. In Shannon’s life there were no plateaus, no resting places from which to look back and contentedly relish the victory gained, the game won, the achievement completed.
Now, at thirty-eight, he was saturated with success. Nat Temple, the man who had first seen his potential, had retired as president of Supracorp three years before, retaining the title of chairman of the board, leaving Shannon to run a conglomerate that, from the time he was put in charge, started the expansion that had recently doubled its earning per share. His own salary and bonuses were in excess of three quarters of a million dollars a year.
A fair number of the powerful and conservative men among the major Supracorp stockholders were still not at all sure they approved of him. He had his enemies, watchful ones, who resented the firmness with which Nat Temple had backed Shannon and given him his head, who envied him his youth and his achievements, men who didn’t like to take chances of any sort. These enemies were quiet for the moment but they were waiting and watching, ready to push Shannon out if he ever gave them the opportunity.
Shannon had acquired all the material things that go with this sort of success: an apartment high up in the United Nations Plaza, decorated by John Saladino in what he told Shannon was a style of “elegant alienation,” a style that Shannon found out—too late—that he didn’t enjoy although he admired it in the abstract; memberships in the Century, River and University clubs; the house in East Hampton which he almost never had time to use; and the inevitable divorce from a woman he should have known better than to marry: a socialite and beauty who had one of those dark, sensuous, syrupy, knowing voices which other women dislike and mistrust instantly and for good reason.
There had been no children. If there had been, perhaps there would have been no divorce, for Shannon, although not a religious man, never forgot the loneliness of being brought up without parents. After his brief marriage was over, he permitted himself only a series of second-string girls whom he took with such intense, entire, purely physical thoroughness that it was as if they had been consumed by a brush fire set by a carelessly flung match in late autumn. The finality of falling truly in love, the possible pain of it, was something he avoided with ease. Love, he sensed, was a greater risk than even he cared to take.
Supracorp, with its web of companies—cosmetics, perfumes, foods, magazines, liquors, television stations and real estate—was his baby. His children were the boys of the Police Athletic League, with whom, unknown to anyone in his world, he spent as much of every weekend as he could. With these boys, an observer would have seen uncritical, undemanding, extravagant love pouring from him. To his boys, being with him was like being in a brisk sea breeze on a day of blue sky. He made them aware of life’s possibilities, and he tried to give them as much as he could of any knowledge he possessed, whether it was how to hit a ball, how to fly a kite, or how to do long division. The years had not changed his smile; it was still open, still winning, and his eyes were still of that blue which proclaims a victory, but now he had deep vertical lines on either side of his mouth and deep horizontal lines on his broad forehead over which his dark hair always fell no matter how often he pushed it back.
Patrick Shannon had propelled himself right past and through his youth, and he would never be able to recapture a time—not even in memory—that simply hadn’t existed for him. He had never been really young. He had never played. He had never had time for irresponsibility or carefree freedom. It was quite enough, he told himself, that he had accumulated success, power, money, information and a small group of friends, without also having reaped a harvest of nostalgia for fun and games.
And what’s more, now he could—more or less—ride a goddamned fucking horse.
When Hamilton Short, a shrewd, tough real-estate manipulator, made his first, second and third million he put them in treasury bonds and forgot about them. At forty-two, already paunchy and bald, his tenth million safely behind him, he had little trouble in convincing Topsy Mullins, a timidly luscious eighteen-year-old from an ancient but impoverished Virginia family, to marry him. During the next eight years, as business took the Shorts to Dallas, Miami and Chicago to live, Topsy produced three children, all girls, and Ham produced more millions; by his estimate he was worth twenty-five million, and the real-estate business had never been better.
Topsy had gone to a famous horsy finishing school on the last remnants of her family’s money, and there she had met many New York and Long Island girls from rich, social families. She had followed their careers in fashion magazines and society columns with biting envy. She had married for money and all it had brought her was three pregnancies and fleeting acquaintances in three, to her, provincial cities. The only way to really be a part of the fashionable world was to be considered fashionable in New York City—other places didn’t exist on Topsy’s narrow horizon.
However, she had a clear-eyed idea of just how difficult it was for strangers to be launched in New York life, particularly a stranger who could claim only a few schoolgirl friendships, long faded, and whose husband was hardly an asset to a dinn
er party. She resolved to make her assault on New York from her home territory, from Virginia where her family was known and respected. She decided that an estate in the heart of the thousand square miles that make up Northern Virginia’s Hunt Country was the answer; it would take the curse off new money. When Ham was informed by Topsy that it was time for them to buy a place in Middleburg, a town of 833 people, lop-sidedly, if conveniently, divided into two groups, millionaires and servants, there was more than restlessness in her words. He heard the unmistakable indication that only a considerable, a very considerable establishment in Middleburg, would guarantee that Ham Short’s marriage would continue to run in the comfortable, well-ordered and convenient way he had learned to take for granted.
At twenty-five, Topsy’s early promise had ripened into decided beauty. Seven years of marriage, with only the birth of children to disturb her concentration on herself, had polished her chestnut-haired, hazel-eyed prettiness until it gleamed. The large breasts, wide hips, and tiny waist that had first caught Ham Short’s eyes were as appealing as ever. Even if he rarely bothered to appreciate them now, he certainly didn’t want any domestic problems. He was not a sensual man, a quick fuck every week or two was all he asked, but he insisted on peace and quiet at home while he worked on more millions. Middleburg or Miami, it made no difference to him, as long as Topsy would stop complaining about their lack of social life.
Fortunately Ham Short continued to increase his millions in the next two years, because the restoration of Fairfax Plantation consumed money as greedily as if it had been a whale swallowing plankton.
Fairfax, a late Colonial mansion, had been built in the 1750s by master craftsmen brought over from England by the first Oliver Fairfax who, like other wealthy Virginians of the time, had a fine taste for architecture and enough knowledge to realize that only in England could he find the workmanship he demanded. Unfortunately, the last Oliver Fairfax had long outlived his family’s fortune and when the Shorts bought Fairfax Plantation, it was close to a ruin. But nothing, short of fire, could disguise the glorious wood carving throughout the house, which the legendary William Buckland had fashioned out of clear, mellow white pine and perfectly seasoned walnut and poplar, all of which came from the plantation’s own forests, as did the bricks which were baked from clay dug from the broad fields. Buckland’s Palladian woodwork, equal to that of any great home in England, had been set off by a collection of Chinese Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Sheraton furniture, covered in reproductions of the richest fabrics of the late Colonial period. The marvels of the interior—Topsy Short’s decorator specialized in Instant Museum Quality—were quite overshadowed by the gardens which no amount of neglect could affect, depending as they did on a severely classic plan of slow growing boxwood hedges which had taken a full two hundred and twenty years to reach their current majestic proportions. Topsy Short had to be content with letting her horses graze in the great fields behind the house although she would have preferred to be able to see them from the front rooms of the mansion—as did many of her neighbors.
“Lordy,” she would say enviously. “That old Liz Whitney Tippett’s horses can just about poke their noses into her drawing room.”
“Well, dig up the boxwood,” Ham suggested absently.
“What? My landscape architect would kill me. They’re historic. There’s nothing like them, not even in Upperville or Warrenton or Leesburg. He told me that even Bunny Mellon doesn’t have older boxwood,” she said, invoking the name of the largely invisible queen of the Hunt Country.
“Then don’t dig up the goddamned boxwood.”
Ham Short, master of all he surveyed, had more on his mind than hedges. The offer from Supracorp was interesting, highly interesting. If he consented to the marriage of his healthy real-estate company to Supracorp’s even healthier two-billion-dollar operation, the stock he would receive would rise to a point where, instead of working on his thirtieth million, he could start thinking in terms of his sixtieth. Not only that, it would get him out from under the day-to-day operation of what was essentially a one-man show. His children were all girls, he had no one to bring into a family business, and it would give him the time to start living the life of the gentleman Topsy had always tried to pretend he was. But on the other hand, did he want to give up control? Wasn’t it more satisfying to have his own company and be free to run it as he chose? Why become another acquisition of Supracorp, why become another division head under Patrick Shannon? Did he really want to live like a gentleman and take an interest in the Middleburg Hunt and give an honest damn about horses? Perhaps the coming weekend, with the chance to see Shannon as his guest, would provide the answers to some of the questions he asked himself, as he wavered between selling and not selling. He’d asked Topsy to keep the guest list small for exactly that reason.
“Who’s coming this weekend?” Ham asked abruptly.
“The Hemmings and the Stantons from Charlottesville, the Dempseys from Keeneland and Princess Daisy Valensky, to do a sketch of Cindy. That Shannon of yours, of course, and … some people from New York.” Ham Short knew the first three couples, Horse People all. “What people from New York?” he asked idly.
Eyes wide with a mixture of terrified anticipation and excitement, Topsy answered, “Robin and Vanessa Valarian.”
“The dressmaker? Now what the hell do you want with them?” Ham asked the question casually, not noticing his wife’s flustered air.
“Oh, Ham, I don’t know how I stand it,” Topsy wailed plaintively. “You’re a disgrace. The Valarians are—oh, how can I make you understand—they’re the chicest people in New York! They go absolutely everywhere and know absolutely everybody. I knew Vanessa Valarian a little at school—she was three years ahead of me—I bumped into her last time I went to New York for shopping, and we had a drink together, but I wasn’t sure they’d come when I asked them.”
“Why not, aren’t we good enough for a dressmaker and his wife?” Ham demanded.
“We’re not chic, Ham, we’re just rich, and not as rich as really rich people either!” she said with an accusing note in her voice. “No use your snorting like that … you have to be worth over two hundred million to be really rich—I read all the lists—and you know as well as I do that we’re just small potatoes compared to—oh, never mind!” She flounced off the chair in which she’d been sitting and started to finger a Chinese Export bowl her decorator had insisted she buy—a steal at twenty-eight hundred dollars.
“Not chic? Well, who the hell said we had to be chic? Who the hell gives a shit? What the hell does it mean anyway—who elected the Valarians to decide?” Now Ham was injured. He was proud of his money and he didn’t like being reminded of the fact that, rich as he was, he still couldn’t play with the big boys.
“Oh, Ham, honestly! It merely means that they’re in—in, damn it, the way we’ll never be! They’re invited to every good party, and they get pages and pages in Vogue and House and Garden and Architectural Digest on their apartment and their table settings—oh, and they fly all over the world to be with people like Cristina Brandolini and Helene Rochas and André Oliver and Fleur Cowles Meyer and Jacqueline Machado-Macedo—people you wouldn’t ever know! Unless the Valarians are there a party doesn’t have cachet!”
“Cachet? Christ, Topsy, you’ve got another bug up your ass, that’s all it is. First we had to have this museum and enough horses for the Charge of the Light Brigade. Now you’ve finally become best buddies with our neighbors and you still need a stamp of approval from a dressmaker? I don’t understand you.”
If Ham Short hadn’t been so offended he might have realized that there was something a little overdone in Topsy’s insistence on the chic of the Valarians … something a little overdone in her display of pique.
“Robin Valarian is one of the most famous dress designers in the country,” Topsy answered loftily, “and, as for Vanessa, she happens to be considered the most elegant woman in New York.”
“I’ve seen his picture en
ough to know what he does—if you ask me, he looks like a fruit—full-blown.”
“Don’t be disgusting, Ham! They’ve been married almost as long as we have. Men like you always think other men, who don’t happen to be interested in merely making money, have to be gay.”
“Oh, so now it’s ‘gay’—I suppose that’s the only possible word to use?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, it is,” Topsy retorted, in a voice she decided to make conciliating. This argument was driving her wild with nerves.
As Ham Short’s irritation cooled, Topsy found herself replaying, for the thousandth time, the scene in the Valarians’ library a few weeks ago in New York. Vanessa had poured her a Dubonnet and flattered Topsy with questions.
“Tell me about your life,” she’d asked with unmistakable interest. “What’s it like living in Middleburg most of the year? Divine or drear?”
“If I couldn’t get up to New York every few weeks I don’t think I could stand it,” Topsy had admitted. “I’m Virginia born but I think I have New York soul. It’s simply too quiet … but Ham loves it.”
“And what Ham loves, Ham gets?”
“More or less.”
Vanessa got up and closed the door of the library. “I think it’s a crime that anyone as deliciously pretty as you is wasted in Horse Country,” she told Topsy, coming to sit next to her on the loveseat. Topsy blushed in embarrassment and surprise. In school Vanessa had been the leader on whom half the girls in Topsy’s class had had a crush—Vanessa, even then, had been sophisticated beyond their teenage dreams.
“Thank you,” she murmured, sipping her Dubonnet.
“It’s the simple truth. Do you know that way back at school I noticed you? I’ll never forget how you looked with all that wonderful red brown hair—it’s only a little darker now—and even those frightful uniforms we had to wear couldn’t hide the fact that you were going to have a perfect figure. I envy you—I’m so damn skinny—I’d give anything for a few curves. Didn’t you ever notice me watching you, young Topsy?”
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