“When did you move here?” I asked.
Mary Catharine explained what I already knew, about Stick’s move from Flashworks in Massachusetts to Minotaur in Westchester. The furniture looked coordinated, as if bought in a single spree, probably by a decorator. She confirmed my assumption while we climbed to the second floor. “I threw out everything five years ago and started fresh,” she said.
That would have been around the time of the death of their second born, Michael. The rooms were tasteful but impersonal, color drained from the objects, beige or black furniture, white drapes, a few books, and abstract paintings that appeared to have been selected to fit the wall space and not intrude on the eye. There were no personal things until we reached the master bedroom. On the right side of the bed, near the wall, was a long built-in dresser for her clothes, its surface covered by photos in silver frames. A similar dresser on the other side of the room for Stick was free of objects. “My family,” she explained, when I bent over to inspect the people in the pictures. I asked after each of them. She interrupted twice to say, “This has gotta be boring,” but was easily encouraged to continue.
“They remind me of my father’s family,” I said about the faded pictures of her grandparents and their siblings when they were young: dressed up in their Sunday best, the ladies in big hats, men standing stiff, eyes wary, mouths shut tight. Mary Catharine told me their stories, especially proud of one great-aunt, the family black sheep. Great-Aunt Gina had walked out on her husband and three sons to live out west with a strange woman. Their ultimate fate was unknown. “Mama never admitted she was a lesbian. She’d say they were radicals. She said this woman turned Aunt Gina into an anarchist, a bomb-throwing anarchist. I asked her what this other woman did. You know, like how they met and stuff. Who were they throwing bombs at? I expected to hear something about Sacco and Vanzetti. Mama said, ‘She was the local librarian.’” Mary Catharine flopped onto the king-size bed and laughed. Her eyes watered. She took a gulp of her drink. The glass was nearly empty. “You know those wild librarians. Always throwing bombs and corrupting the local mothers. Finally, one day, when I was all grown up, she was visiting me … I think.” She took another gulp. “Yeah, that’s right. Mama was a guest in my own house. I said to her, ‘Mama, Aunt Gina was a dyke.’ You know what? She slapped me. I couldn’t believe it. I was a mother myself. She slapped me like I was a kid. I expected—” she belched loudly. She didn’t excuse herself; indeed, she didn’t seem aware of her eruption. She sipped the last of her drink and continued. “I was waiting for her to bring out a bar of soap.”
“Your mother used to wash your mouth out with soap?”
“Oh, yeah. All the Italian mothers did. Especially if you cursed Jesus. You’d get half a bar of soap for that. Enough to do the laundry for a week. I was a bad girl. I was a lot of trouble.” She tried her drink again; only ice was left.
“Who’s this?” I lifted a small framed photograph of a ten-year-old boy in a blue blazer, a white shirt, and a red tie. There were others, with an older Michael, that I could have chosen, but they weren’t solo portraits.
Mary Catharine smiled at the picture and gestured for it with her free hand. I brought it over, sitting next to her on the bed. She looked wistful. “My son, Michael. When he was little.”
“Is he married?” I asked.
She shook her head. “He’s dead,” she said without a quaver.
“I’m sorry. When did that happen?”
“Stupid,” she said quietly to herself.
“Excuse me?”
“Nineteen eighty-six. In Aspen. He died skiing …” She tried once again to drink from her glass. She frowned at its emptiness: there was nothing left to wash out her mouth. “Avalanche,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“Stick never brings it up. I tell him. It’s embarrassing for people to just, you know …” She waved at the photo.
“Put their foot in their mouths?”
“Well, that’s the thing. It’s not their fault, they don’t know. Everybody asks those kind of, you know, chitchat questions—’How many children do you have?’” She laughed bitterly. “What do you say? I had two. Now I’m down to one. Half of one. Halley used to be my best girl, but you know what happens once they have hormones.” She belched again. This time she noticed. “Jesus. I’m sorry. It’s those burgers, they give me gas. I tell Stick, you know, bring these things up ahead of time, so people don’t feel they hurt your feelings. But you know what? I hate that too. Everybody walking on egg shells. Nothing works.” She nodded at the window. “All those men and their … what do you call them? Wives!” She laughed. “That’s right, wives. They … I don’t know. They never talk about anything. You know? Hours and hours and hours, chitchat, this and that, but later you think, what did anybody say? I swear to God, I don’t know the first thing about these people. In my old neighborhood, you knew everything. Or a lot anyway. We didn’t know about lesbians though,” she said and laughed. She stood up with a groan.
I rose, moving ahead of her to be in front of the dresser. Michael’s school picture hovered between us. Very quietly, but insistently, I asked, “Why was it stupid?”
“What?” She looked up at me, eyes unfocused.
I nodded at the boy in the blazer. “You said it was stupid. You mean, how he died?”
She nodded and swallowed hard. “He’d been warned. He knew it was dangerous. You weren’t supposed to ski that trail, that slope … I don’t know what you call it. I don’t ski. I never did. It’s Stick’s thing.” She returned the photo to the dresser. She ran a finger across the top of the frame and backed off, squinting at the window. “He knew he wasn’t supposed to.”
I waited for her to add more. She continued to squint out the window. There was another belch. She suppressed this one; only her shoulders heaved, the sound muffled. “We’d better go back to the party,” she said.
As we moved to the door, I commented, “It was something Stick had done? Skiing in an avalanche zone?”
She nodded, hardly interested in my inquiry and not at all concerned about the intimacy. “Stupid,” she commented and then asked brightly, “You want another drink?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Smart cookie,” she commented.
“Did Michael always try to keep up with his father?” I asked as we descended the stairs.
“Of course. They both do. But Halley’s a girl, so it’s different. It was hard on Stick. He was really close to Mikey. Mikey was his little twin.” We reached the bottom of the stairs and silently walked through the living room, the dining room and onto the glassed-in porch. When she arrived at the bar, she turned to me with a triumphant smile, “Good shrink stuff, huh?”
“Good shrink stuff?” I repeated quizzically.
She laughed at me. “Gin and tonic?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“You see, I’m a good host. I give my guests everything they want,” she commented, turning her back on me and reaching into the ice bucket.
“No, you didn’t,” I said.
She paused, a hand full of cubes. For a moment, I wasn’t sure she was going to acknowledge my comment. She dropped the ice, leaned on the bar, and twisted to look at me. “What did you say?”
“You didn’t tell me what I want to know.”
“What do you want to know?” she said. For the first time the words were slurred.
“Just how hard did he push?”
“Who?” Her eyes closed halfway.
“Stick. How hard did he push? How hard did Michael have to work for Stick to respect him?”
She shut her eyes and seemed to taste something, her lips moving. She took in a lot of air, opened her eyes wide and sighed. “Stick went down it the day before.”
“He skied the dangerous slope the day before?”
“Yep. You want to let me make you this drink?”
“I don’t want the drink.”
“I do.” She faced the bar and reached for t
he gin. “Yeah, he tried to get Mikey to go with him. Mikey said he didn’t want to. So Stick went on his own. Afterwards, he bugged Mikey, telling him he was too cautious. All night Stick bragged about the virgin snow. The fucking virgin snow. ‘Should’ve been out there,’ he kept saying.”
“You were there?”
“Sure. Halley was there, too. It was a family trip.” Her drink was fixed. She sipped it and turned to me.
“And Halley teased him also, of course,” I commented. “Big sister and all.”
Mary Catharine waved her hand dismissively, swallowing hard. “She didn’t mean anything. Mikey didn’t care what she said. Yep,” she sipped again. “All night we all sat around the condo listening to Stick talk about pushing the limit or testing the envelope … I can’t remember the goddamn cliché.”
“So he went to prove himself to his father?”
“It’s not Stick’s fault. Mikey knew better. He wasn’t a baby. I told him, ‘Don’t let your father get your goat.’ I was drinking hot toddies. That’s a wicked drink. Gives you a bitch of a hangover. In the morning Mikey was gone.” She pointed toward the patio doors. “I’m going back to the chitchat. You coming?”
“Sure,” I said, walking with her.
“So what do you think?” she asked as the sun shone directly on our faces and the charcoal smoke filled our nostrils. Stick was about three feet to our right, bent over the grill to turn a second round of burgers. “You’re an expert,” she raised her voice a little. “You think maybe I’m a lesbian like my Aunt Gina?” Stick straightened, stepped back from the barbecue, and stared at us. The spatula was poised in midair, a greasy sword. “Just kidding, honey,” she said and laughed. She called to one of the guests, “Jeff, I forgot your drink! Wait there. Don’t move.” She returned to the glassed-in porch.
A couple of Copley’s regional sales managers were beside him at the barbecue grill. Stick moved away from them, stepping over to me, still armed with a spatula, and said quietly, “She’s uncomfortable at parties and drinks too much.”
“She drinks too much all the time,” I said with no energy to the contradiction, as if I were talking about someone he didn’t know.
His stone face didn’t react. He said, “I’ve tried to get her into treatment.”
“Probably better if it comes from someone else. She’s rebelling against you and there are early symptoms of paranoia about you as well.” I leaned closer to his ear. “By the way, I pretended to be ignorant about Gene with Jack Truman. There are wild rumors circulating. Are they deliberate? Did you float the one about Gene destroying a Centaur prototype?”
Stick gave me one of his hard looks, a scrutiny I had become used to during the six meetings we’d had so far about Andy and his team. No matter how many times I showed no disapproval or judgment of his management, he continued to check my reaction, as if he couldn’t believe his good luck. I returned the stare of his dark eyes calmly and added, “It was a clever stroke.” I nodded at the pair of sales directors; they were pretending not to strain to hear our conversation. “Provides a comforting explanation. I didn’t contradict it.”
Stick nodded, eyes still brilliant and unblinking. He asked, “We have a Wednesday meeting, right?” I nodded. “I’d better turn the burgers,” he said, returning to the grill.
I stayed for another hour and a half, long enough to be confident that Mary Catharine’s drinking meant she would remember little of our conversation and to reassure Stick that nothing I had seen or heard altered my loyalty. I evaded Halley, always flirtatious and friendly when I couldn’t avoid contact, but quick to move on pointedly, paying court to the other women. She talked to the men while I gossiped with their wives. I noticed she kept her eye on me, obviously puzzled that I found these suburban women and their ratings of schools, nannies and malls, as well as their worries about aging parents, overworked husbands and fading beauty to be more fascinating than the male talk: golf, off-color jokes, how to make better use of focus groups, and which frequent flyer program is superior. What I hoped she would conclude is that I found the other women more interesting than she, in particular her mother.
When I announced my departure at four-thirty, explaining I wanted to leave early because I was worried about traffic heading into Manhattan to see the fireworks display, it was obvious I had succeeded. Halley said, “Could I get a ride with you?”
“You’re not staying?” her mother asked. “I thought you were sleeping over, honey.”
“I forgot, Mom. I’ve got to write an evaluation of Wales & Simpson’s print campaign.” She looked at me. “I came on the train. Do you mind? I’d like to avoid Grand Central on July 4th. It’s probably a nightmare.”
I frowned, but said, “Not at all.”
“Bet he doesn’t mind,” Jack Truman said and cackled. His wife made a face. I had listened sympathetically to her concern about her eight-year-old son’s reading problems. I urged her not to take the advice of the pediatrician who was pushing Ritalin to treat her boy. He had diagnosed the sort of biochemical attention deficit disorder that afflicted her son only when it came to homework, not when he read hint books on how to improve his score at video games. Before departing, in view of Halley and Jack, I kissed Amy Truman on the lips. Then I hugged Mary Catharine close, whispering, “Thank you for the tour of the house.” She goggled at me. The gin had already erased our talk. All that remained for her was an impression of my friendliness.
“Everybody likes you so much,” Halley said, once we were swaying back and forth on the Saw Mill’s curves, heading for Manhattan.
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“Oh, I don’t blame them. I mean, you made a great impression. It was sweet of you to talk to my mother and the other ladies.” Halley said “the other ladies” with a trace of sarcasm.
“Tell me something. How come there was no help?”
“Help?”
“Well, your father did the barbecuing and your mother tended bar.”
“It’s what they’re both good at.” Halley laughed to herself. “Dad likes to fry meat and Mom likes to drink.”
I said nothing.
She laughed again, this time self-consciously. “That was mean,” she said. “No, it’s a tradition. When Daddy started with Flashworks and we didn’t have much money to entertain, he’d throw a July 4th party. He could keep it informal. You know, not spend too much money and still have the businesspeople over. A cheap way to network.”
“But today was a small select group, right? Nowhere near all the business executives of the company.”
“Right,” Halley agreed. “Now he only invites his favorites. Getting an invitation is virtually like getting a promotion. That’s why the ladies were all gussied up.”
Halley was dressed for an informal afternoon: white shorts, pale pink polo shirt, and black penny loafers. Of course, she wore makeup and time had been spent to give her long shimmering black hair its elegant shape. Her bare arms and legs were tan. Her narrow feet were pale. Once in my car, she slipped them out of her shoes and raised them to the edge of the seat, hugging her knees.
“They’re so retro,” she said, meaning the wives. “I feel sorry for them.”
“Why?”
“Why? You know. Stuck out there in suburbs, raising kids.”
“They seem quite happy to me.”
“They do? Probably you’re right. Actually, the truth is, I don’t feel sorry for them. I mean, they took the easy way out. It’s not like it was for my mother—she didn’t have much choice. If they were guys, you’d call them wimps.”
“A couple of them work.” I named two women who had jobs.
“Oh, yeah?” Halley said. “Good for them. I didn’t know.”
“Actually, I thought the women were first-rate. It’s the old story. You get a group of men and women together and my sex always runs a distant second. I guess your father’s saved all the talent for the technical side.”
“Oh, I don’t agree. They’re first-rate guys.
Jack Truman’s a great salesman. He came up with the direct mail idea that made us a major player in PCs. We’re really starting to hurt IBM now. Going direct’s allowed us to undersell them by thirty percent. It’s gonna help us on Centaur too. I think we can price Centaur at fifty percent of Toshiba’s laptops.”
“I didn’t know,” I said sheepishly. “I assumed the direct sales idea came from your father.”
“Well, he approved it. But it was Jack Truman’s idea. Dad was going crazy trying to raise capital to go the Radio Shack route, or fighting IBM in the retail stores, which is their turf. I mean, how could Jack hope to compete with a tenth of Big Blue’s sales force and one one thousandth of their budget? He saw that a lot of computer buyers were reading magazines to get tips on how the hell the machines work and he figured, hey, these people are sophisticated, they know we’re all using the same chips, we run the same software. So we started selling peripherals through the mags and it wasn’t that big a leap to selling whole machines. We’re really gonna test it with Centaur. No retail at all, except maybe for a discounter.”
“Are people going to feel comfortable spending a few thousand dollars on something they’ve never held in their own hands?”
“Well, that’s the challenge with this campaign. I think the way to go is not to reassure them.”
“Not to reassure them?”
“Right. Make it seem snobby. You know, hip. We’ll sell them self-esteem. Like, ‘I’m not an unsophisticated jerk who needs to spend twice as much for some salesman in an overpriced retail store to hold my hand.’ I mean, realistically, at first we have to aim at second- or third-generation buyers, people who already feel savvy. Then let them promote the machine for us. I mean, if the one guy in your office who knows portables and laptops has a Centaur, then you’ll feel safe buying one. Eventually, you’re gonna feel stupid not calling our 800 number and ordering.”
“Very clever. Psychologically very subtle.”
“Marketing is all psychology.” She leaned toward me and teased, “That’s why Daddy should have you working with us, not in Geek Heaven.”
Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil Page 68