Wasn’t it strange that only yesterday he had thought she was fearless.
Wasn’t it strange that it had never really bothered him before about what shaky financial ground he had built DBS News on.
But then, none of it had seemed quite real, had it? It never was during the chase. Meeting Alexandra and launching the network a year early.
And…
And—
Jackson held his face in his hand a moment.
And wasn’t it true that, if Alexandra had slept with him in the beginning, he never would have gone to such lengths for her and DBS News? Isn’t that how his obsessions had always worked before? That they lasted as long as he was happily in pursuit, and he was only happy when obsessed?
No, no, he told himself, dropping his hand, you’re going overboard as usual, you wanted Alexandra as the anchor of DBS News.
But would he have ever gotten into this mess had the anchor been a man?
Would he have?
No, he wouldn’t have. He wouldn’t have launched it a year early and he wouldn’t have—
Oh, what did it matter? If DBS News could work—and it had every chance of working if the board didn’t interfere with it—Alexandra Waring was the one to make it fly. And he genuinely believed she could do it and that they could do it. And so what if Alexandra was mad at him? She’d get over it. Everybody was always mad at him, sooner or later, and they always got over it—so why did he feel so damned depressed now? What was so wrong now that wasn’t wrong before?
Because you know you’re not in love with Alexandra, he thought, looking out the window. You’d like to sleep with her, but you’re not in love with her and you don’t even really know her. It was just another one of your obsessions and so now you don’t have anything to do in your head, nothing to do but feel how goddam lonely this life is and how work is nothing but endless, unsolvable problems and disappointments and everybody complaining and now there’s not a goddam thing in this world to look forward to that means a goddam thing.
As the plane landed at Hartsfield, he felt more depressed than ever.
“Well, well, what a surprise,” Cordelia said, voice booming down the great hall of the Mendolyn Street house, “looky who’s here. Better let him in, Salissy, before he starts selling snake oil to the neighbors.”
The maid, Salissy, stepped back from the door, indicating that Jackson was now welcome in his family’s house. “Hi, Cordie,” he said, striding over the black and white tiles of the hall and—though at five-eleven she was no featherweight—picking fifty-year-old Cordelia up off the floor to hug her.
When he set her back down, Cordelia looked at her brother with more than a hint of skepticism on her face. But then she smiled, giving him a warm kiss on the cheek. “I don’t know what you’re selling, brother,” she said, “but I hope you’re genuinely glad to see me because I am glad to see you. And you just missed Belinda.”
“Belinda was still here?” he said, surprised, walking with Cordelia into the living room.
“Yes sir, she was. I wanted her to stay for a while longer, but she left as soon as her suitcase got here. No!” she said, making a face and swatting the air with her hand. “I will not talk about that case one more time! Just take it from me, she found it and she left.” She took his hand. (The living room was enormous and so one did have to stroll a bit to get across it.) “I don’t know what is going on up there in New York with Langley,” Cordelia said, stopping to face her brother, “but, Jackie, you’ve got to talk to him. Baby B’s just getting worse and worse, and she says Langley doesn’t care.”
“He cares,” Jackson said. “Believe me, Cordie, he cares. I was in Palm Beach with them—”
“Shhh,” Cordelia said, adding in a whisper, “we don’t have to let everybody know our problems.”
Somewhere in the house a telephone was ringing.
“I was just with them the other day,” Jackson whispered. “And I couldn’t put up with Belinda—I don’t know how Lang does it. One minute she tells him to go away, the next minute she’s screaming for him, then she packs her bags and leaves—”
“She says he won’t spend any time with her,” Cordelia said.
“That’s not true,” Jackson said. “I was sitting right there the other morning—Langley wanted to come down here with her for a few days and she told him she didn’t want him to come. She told him to go back to New York.”
Cordelia frowned and folded her arms. “I can’t believe he’s not part of the problem, Jackie. The only time he’s around is when she’s—well, when she’s not right. And the only time she seems to be right is when he’s not around—only now she never seems to be quite right. Noreen says she thinks, if this keeps up, she’s going to have to be put somewhere.”
“Oh, Cordie,” Jackson muttered, angry, “Noreen just says that to get attention. Belinda’s fine. She’s just got a few problems to work out.”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Paine?” Salissy said from across the living room.
“Yes, what is it, Salissy?”
“It’s the airline, ma’am, they want to make sure Mrs. Peterson got her suitcase.”
“That suitcase again!” Cordelia cried, clapping her hands over her ears. “I swear, if anyone brings it up again I’m gonna lose my mind!”
“Tell them she got it,” Jackson told Salissy. “Right?” he said, laughing, to Cordelia, pulling her arms down.
“And hallelujah,” Cordelia said. “Belinda went on and on about that accursed bag—that’s all she talked about from the minute she got here. ‘Where’s my bag, have they found my bag, did they call about my bag?’” she mimicked, gesturing wildly with her hands. Then she folded her arms again and looked at Jackie. “Somebody walked off with one of her bags at the airport and she got absolutely hysterical.”
“What was in it?” Jackson said.
“Oh, cosmetics and things. Have you ever? I don’t know, Jackie, I’m beginning to think the twins are right. Belinda must have sixty million of her own and there she was, carrying on about this stupid bag. And then—I haven’t even told you the rest of it, and you better be glad that I’ll spare you the repetition of it because it was enough to drive any sane person crazy—Belinda called up to New York and had her maid—her maid, Jackie, imagine—she had her maid fly all the way down here to bring her more cosmetics! I said, ‘Belinda, you’re not even forty years old, what do you need makeup for? You’ve been a beautiful girl all your life.’ But did she listen to me? Of course not.”
Jackson did not like the sound of this. It sounded like Noreen sending servants flying around the country for lipsticks—not Belinda.
They proceeded toward the back of the house, toward the sun room where Daddy would be, and on the way Cordelia gave him an update on the household: her husband, Kitty, was away on business (trying to put a syndicate together to buy the PTL Club); Cordie’s son, Eziekiel (Freaky Zekey), was on some kind of business in Las Vegas; Little El’s kids—Kirky and Bipper—and their spouses and children were supposed to come visit in June; Big El was being impossible as usual (Cordelia still did not know how all these liquor bottles kept finding their way into the house); and Cordelia herself did not know how she was, since it had been so long since anybody had bothered to ask, thank you.
“Why, Daddy, look who’s here,” Cordelia said, stepping into the sun room.
“Well I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Big El said in his wheelchair. “How are ya, Johnny Jim?”
“It’s Jackson, Daddy,” Cordelia said, marching over to swipe the mug out of her father’s hand and smell it. “I swear, that Lucille must be running moonshine,” she muttered, taking the mug with her. “Jackie, bring Daddy into the kitchen and I’ll fix you some coffee and muffins. I just made some blueberry this morning.”
“Hi, Daddy,” Jackson said, bending to kiss his father on the cheek.
Big El was about to turn eighty and no one could figure how he could still be alive and kicking after all the drinking he had done over the yea
rs, but there he was, looking a bit like an old crocodile with a big reddish-purple nose. “I knew it was you,” Big El said.
Jackson unlocked the brakes on the wheelchair and pushed his father out of the sun room, through the breezeway, through the hall, through the breakfast room and, finally, into the kitchen. This had always been Jackson’s favorite room because his mother, when he was young, had made it a kind of battalion headquarters, the one room big enough and indestructible enough to accommodate all her family’s yelling and fighting while she relaxed from a hard day at the office. Alice May had loved to cook and had loved this room, with its sixteen-foot ceilings and huge windows at one end, looking out at the hills. It still smelled wonderfully of old wood and good food and spices, and it had everything in the world, it seemed, hanging from the walls somewhere—copper pots, wire whisks, colanders—and had two six-burner stoves, three sinks, huge wooden counters and open shelves, and, by the windows, two large round wood tables.
Cordelia was a great cook also, although now she kept a part-time cook. The cook’s name was Lucille and was the same Lucille that Cordelia now suspected of running moonshine on the premises.
Jackson parked Big El at one of the tables and sat down next to him while Cordelia set about making coffee.
“How’s Barbara? Why doesn’t she come to see us anymore?” Big El said.
Jackson looked to Cordelia, whose expression was sympathetic. “Now, Daddy,” she said, looking at him, “you know Barbara’s been dead for going on seven years.” Her eyes shifted back to Jackson. “I’m sorry—that darn Lucille’s been here today.”
Big El looked at Cordelia and said, “I like Lucille. I wish Lucille lived here. Lucille loves me.”
“Ha!” Cordelia said. “And the South won the war.” She came over and plunked down a basket of warm muffins on the table, looked at her father and added, in a softer voice, “Unless you’re thinkin’ of my little friend Lucille from grade school, Daddy. She was always very sweet on you.”
“I shoulda killed that little Lucille with rat poison,” Big El growled. “Told your mother I goosed her in the pantry.”
“She did not, Daddy,” Cordelia said in her normal voice, moving back to the stove. “That was that girl Gitchy, from McCaysville, the girl who was supposed to wash the dishes and never did.”
“Well,” Big El announced, reaching for a muffin, “somebody did.”
Now that that was settled, Jackson plunged in with why he had come. He wanted to invite everybody up—the board and their families, the cousins, everybody—to New York for a weekend in July for a special tour of the DBS network facility at West End, and while Jackson would schedule fun things for the families to do around the city, the board would have a special meeting at West End, where Jackson and Langley would do a complete financial review of the network.
“I still want my audit,” Cordelia said, wiping her hands on her apron and picking up her cup of coffee off the counter. (Cordie was one of those women who, unless dining in the dining room, rarely ate sitting down.)
“If the presentation doesn’t answer all of your questions,” Jackson said, “I promise, I’ll make a motion for an audit myself.”
Cordelia swallowed some coffee, eyes on Jackson, and lowered her cup. “I don’t understand why you do this, Jackie Andy—how you can let Beau throw all your money away.”
“He didn’t throw it away—not on purpose. He’s got a problem, Cordie, he couldn’t help it.”
“And it’s not going to help things if you keep paying his debts!” Cordelia said, banging her cup down on the counter. “And I will not have Darenbrook Communications mixed up in it any longer. You know I love you, Brother, but I am warning you—if I find out you’ve been using the family company to pay Beau’s gambling debts, you are going to be in a lot of trouble. Now I mean it, Jackson Andrew Darenbrook,” she said, shaking her finger at him, “so don’t you go pretending you didn’t hear me.”
“I hear you, Cordie,” Jackson said.
Big El—who had been chewing on a muffin, staring at Jackson during all of this—stopped chewing and said, “I smell funny money, Cordie Lou.”
“I have from the beginning, Daddy, that’s why I wanted the audit,” Cordelia said, folding her arms and looking at Jackson. “July, you said?”
“July,” he said.
“July then,” Cordelia said, picking up her cup. “I will wait until July.”
Jackson went into town to spend the rest of the day at the Parader offices, and then, that night, took a drive out to the plant to watch the next morning’s edition come off the presses. He met the city editor for a late steak at Coach and Six, checked into the Buckhead Ritz-Carlton, tried to sleep, but couldn’t.
He kept thinking about Barbara.
About how much he missed her, about how much he needed her, still, and about how lost he felt in his life whenever he thought about her. And he thought about how he wished he did not think of her, but wondered who else he could think about when it seemed like he would never be able to fall in love again.
Obsessions, like the one with Alexandra, had their purpose.
Because thoughts of Barbara depressed him. And his family depressed him, his kids—what kids? Who was he kidding? How can one have kids if they didn’t want him?—depressed him, and he depressed himself. It was getting harder and harder to feel as though any of this was worth it—the business, the family—and the hope that maybe there would be something to look forward to seemed to grow fainter each year.
He could look forward to getting older. Alone. Sleeping with ditzy Miss Something-or-Others, playing big shot, trying to keep his messed up family together.
For crying out loud, you’d think one member of his family would be happy, be healthy! Did all of them have to be such losers at life, bumbling around, year after year, fighting and fussing and feuding for the lack of anything better to do, grasping for money and raising tormented kids who hated them but stuck around long enough to get some of their money so they could get away from them forever?
And what exactly was it that they had done that made them deserve so many tragedies in their family? Why them, why the Darenbrooks? Why did his brother have to be murdered, why did his mother have to be struck down by a car and his wife have to have her neck broken? Why did his kids have to avoid him, hate him; his siblings hate each other? Why did Belinda have to be losing her mind, the twins and Little El be so awful? Why did Daddy have to drink and Cordie have to stay with horrible Kitty and Beau have to gamble? And why did it have to go on forever?
Jackson got up, finally, and turned on the TV. Cable of course, CNN of course, this was Atlanta, wasn’t it? Sitting there, watching it, drinking two things of orange juice and one Clamato from the bar, Jackson wondered if maybe the answer lay in giving up and hoeing beets. Finally, around three, he started feeling sleepy (imagining all those acres of beets under the hot sun), and he tried bed again and this time it worked.
And then the phone rang. He sat bolt upright, his heart pounding. Oh, no—Lydia? Kevin? Daddy? Cordie? Who? What’s happened? He took a breath, turned on the light, and then snatched up the phone. Before he even got it to his ear, he heard a voice say, “Don’t be alarmed, everything’s okay.”
“Alexandra?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
Silence.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
He heard her sigh and then, her voice sounding funny, she said, “Nothing that can’t be fixed, thank God.”
He let out a breath and fell back against the pillows, relieved. “Where are you?”
“Jackson,” she said, “I’m wrong. I’ve been wrong about the format for the newscast. Cassy was right. Her format’s right and mine’s wrong. Even Jessica could see that mine was wrong. I think I’ve known it all along too, but I couldn’t—” Her voice broke.
Mrs. Cochran had once taken Jackson to task about Alexandra—one of many times—and it was funny, but what she had said this one particular time came
back to him now. That Alexandra was so driven that she was often unaware of her own needs; that she was young and had gaps in her experience and was very slow to accept the notion of either; and that Alexandra had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility that they had to be very careful about.
According to Mrs. Cochran (Grand Controlleress of West End, whom Jackson, until now, had not paid very much attention to in the matter of Alexandra), they had to teach Alexandra how to swing the double-edged sword of her nature without cutting her own head off in the process. They needed to support and encourage Alexandra, but to tell her no when they had to and mean it. They had to remind her to think of herself as part of a group, never as an individual, in order to wrest away some of that overdeveloped sense of responsibility from her—the same kind that had eaten alive so many news people before her. And Mrs. Cochran had said (shouted, actually, as Jackson recalled) that they had to show Alexandra that it was okay for her to make a mistake once in a while, that she did not have to be perfect, but that she did have to accept herself as occasionally vulnerable and always mortal, always human.
And now that Jackson’s obsession with her was coming to a crumbling end, he saw no reason why he shouldn’t think of Alexandra as mortal and human now too.
“Good, you were wrong,” Jackson said. “I’m glad to hear it, because now everybody can relate to you as a human being. Everyone except you has made mistakes thus far, so now you can be part of the group again.”
Pause. “What?”
“Listen, Alexandra,” Jackson said, “it’s okay. Really. It’s okay. We haven’t gone on the air yet, we have time to change over—absolutely no damage has been done. And you know, kid—listen to me—that by rehearsing your format you’ve improved the other format by making everybody reassess every single element of the newscast again and again. You know that’s true.”
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