She pulled away and gazed up at him, a hand softly up to his cheek. ‘You look tired, Graham. They didn’t hurt you down there, did they?’
‘It wasn’t even a day, Mom. In and out.’
‘We would have come to see you – to the jail, I mean – but we didn’t know how you… we thought your lawyer would tell us something, but we never heard from him at all. I don’t think we know him, Dismas Hardy, do we? What kind of name is that, Dismas? But it was a mistake, after all, wasn’t it?’
He leaned over and kissed her. ‘It was all a mistake,’ he said. He met her eyes. ‘All of it, Mom. Every bit. I didn’t kill Sal. I didn’t help him die.’
A brief flash of perfect teeth. She took his arm and started steering him up the walkway. ‘Of course you didn’t. Now come on up. The family needs to talk about this. I’m so glad you could come right over.’
After Hardy had dropped Graham back at his apartment, he’d played back his mother’s message. It was the last of a half dozen on his answering machine – she’d called after his release had made the news. He’d taken a quick shower to wash away the jail. Within twenty minutes he’d been on his way to the Manor.
But the message had given him the impression only that his mother had been worried about him. She wanted to see him to make sure he was all right. Apparently, though, this was a misreading. ‘The whole family’s here?’
So his mother’s real purpose in running out to greet him, he realized, was to warn him what to expect when he entered the house, calm him down if he exploded. This was how it had always worked. He was the hothead, the emotional one. Most of the time Mom could neutralize him before he raised his voice or caused anyone to feel any embarrassment, the two cardinal sins in Leland Taylor’s home.
‘We decided earlier today to get together, Graham, after they’d arrested you.’ Holding his arm – protectively? to restrain him? – she stopped walking and looked up at him. ‘We thought we needed a strategy on how to deal with this, this whole situation.’
Graham recognized his stepfather’s involvement in this move. Leland Taylor probably strategized before he washed his hands.
‘Present a united front, you know.’
‘To who?’
But his mother continued, ignoring the question. ‘And then when you got out-’
‘You were all naturally so relieved…’
‘Graham. Of course we were. Don’t be like that.’
‘I hope Leland didn’t lose any business over the scandal. But, oh, that’s right then, why would he? My last name’s different. Nobody would have to know. That’s what this meeting’s about, isn’t it? Keeping a lid on it.’
‘No.’ His mother had been given her marching orders and she was a soldier. No wavering. ‘Emphatically not, Graham. We were worried about you.’
‘Which explains why everybody rushed on down to jail to see how they could help.’
Exasperated, his mother shook his head. ‘I’ve already explained that.’ She stopped one last time at the foot of the stairs that led up to the grand double-doored entrance. ‘Please don’t be difficult, Graham. Try to understand.’
He looked down at his mother’s face. Was it ravished or ravishing beauty? He could no longer tell. Of course, there were no worry lines. Lasers had erased them. He did think – hope? – he read some concern in her eyes, but he couldn’t tell for sure if it was for him or the mission upon which she had been dispatched, and which seemed now to be tottering on the brink of failure.
Helen Taylor’s husband’s family money came from banking. Roland Taylor had founded Baywest Bank in the late forties. Leland senior carried the torch for three decades through the late fifties and had passed it to his only son by the early eighties. Over the years the bank had merged and gobbled and steadily grown.
For a San Francisco entity it was remarkably conservative. The bank did not prefer to lend money to new or small businesses. It did not have a woman or person of color beyond middle management. It did not run touchy-feely ads on the television and had an all but open disdain for, as George called it, the ‘passbook crowd.’
No, Baywest was most comfortable with institutional lending, financing deals cut by men who wore suits at all times during the business day, belonged to exclusive country clubs, traded secrets behind closed doors. The bank knew a lot of secrets. And now Leland junior was at the helm. His stepson, George Russo, though only twenty-seven years old, was a first vice-president.
Through French doors, the formal dining room at the Manor was a couple of elegant steps down from the music room. Neither Leland nor Helen played, but this hadn’t stopped them from purchasing the nine-foot Steinway grand and customizing it with a digital box that played classical music at the flip of a switch. After it had been installed, the couple had discovered that the natural sound of the piano was a little loud for dinner music, so they’d added the French doors to muffle it somewhat.
Now the piano was silent, but the doors were closed anyway. Leland Taylor did not want any staff to be privy to family discussions. Knowledge might be power, he’d often say, but secrecy thrills the soul.
The dining room was round as a plate, the cherry table within it an elongated oval that easily seated eighteen. Tonight, with the unusually beautiful weather, Leland ordered the drapes pulled back. Through the wraparound windows this afforded a view that extended from the Farallon Islands, clearly visible twenty-seven nautical miles off the Golden Gate, all the way around the city to the Bay Bridge and the coast range beyond. Only a few degrees to the right of due north, the spires of the Golden Gate Bridge seemed to float over the headland.
But no one in the room showed any interest in the view. At the end of the table closest to the music room, Leland Taylor sat next to his wife. They weren’t, after all, having dinner, although coffee had been set out, some cookies. Leland was dressed in a dark charcoal suit, a red-and-blue rep tie. He always wore a plain white dress shirt. (‘A white shirt says you’re the boss.’) Graham thought of him as six generations of British inbreeding, and this wasn’t too inaccurate. He was tall and lean, with watery blue eyes, a thickish upper lip, skin reminiscent of pink crepe.
A couple of chairs down to Leland’s right – not, God forbid, directly next to anyone – Graham’s sister, Debra, and her husband, Brendan McCoury, tried and pretty much failed to act nonchalant in the face of all this opulence. Debra had grown up here, but her life situation had changed. This was nothing like home anymore. Brendan had what a portion of the world – although not Leland’s – would call a good job as an electrical contractor. Debra was a veterinarian’s assistant. Because she was a woman – not a particularly stunning or charismatic one at that – to Leland she essentially did not exist. Her presence, and especially Brendan’s, was suffered because in Leland’s view this qualified as family business and Debra technically belonged.
George, like his older brother, Graham, was a big man, well put together. In his three-piece gabardine he commanded the far end of the table, drinking Heineken from a chilled Pilsner glass. Two more bottles were on ice in a small designer cooler on the table next to him.
The entire left-hand side of the table was Graham’s. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he was answering Leland’s opening question, ‘it must be pretty obvious that I didn’t know this arrest was coming. Otherwise, I would have called you all and set up something like this to go over the estate.’
‘Yes, the estate.’ Leland kept a sneer off his face, but Graham heard it. ‘We were surprised to learn of the fifty thousand dollars, Graham. How did Sal get that kind of money? Surely not selling fish. That’s what I’d be interested to know.’
‘It’s not coming to any of us, so what difference does it make?’
‘What are you talking about, not coming to us?’ This was George. He spoke quietly, but nobody was fooled. ‘It gets divided three ways if there’s no will. I looked it up. And there wasn’t a will, was there?’
Graham had resolved to stay calm. He picked up one of the c
ookies and took a bite to slow himself down. ‘Not as such, but there-’
‘Excuse me,’ Leland interrupted mildly, ‘but if there was no will, Graham, how is it that you are the executor?’
Debra interrupted him. ‘I read it was wrapped.’ Debra was holding her husband’s hand out on the table. Living in the shadow of her stunning, social-climbing mother, she had long ago decided not to compete and now, at twenty-nine, was not so much unattractive as unadorned. She wore no makeup of any kind. Her hair had once shone like Helen’s, but she’d elected not to dye it, and now it was a drab strawberry-blond. She was also five months pregnant and her face had broken out. ‘What does that mean, wrapped? Where did Sal get wrapped bills? And what were you planning to do with the baseball cards? Steal them too?’
Graham nodded across the table at his sister. ‘Yeah, Deb. I was going to steal them. I was trying to screw everybody.’
‘Just like usual,’ George said.
Graham turned down the table, a dangerous smile in place. ‘Fuck you.’
Leland tapped the table for order. ‘Now, now. Let’s keep it civil, can we?’
‘Sure,’ Graham said. His hand was shaking and the coffee threatened to overspill the rim of his cup. He carefully put it down in the saucer. ‘You know, guys, I haven’t had my all-time best day, spending it as I did in jail accused of murdering my father. Then I come here and we play dump on Graham. But I’ll tell you what. You can all go to hell. I don’t need this abuse.’
From the time he’d been a child, when Graham got angry enough, tears came to his eyes. He wasn’t going to have that happen now, or at least he wasn’t going to let his siblings see it. Trying to maintain some dignity, though, he wasn’t about to bolt from the table either. Focusing on the ceiling, he was blinking hard, pushing back his chair, when his mother suddenly spoke sharply, stopping him.
‘For God’s sake. Children, stop. Sit down, Graham! Please. Sit down. You’re right. We’re all just a little overwrought. You know that. It’s been a very emotional time.’
An uneasy silence.
Leland took over again, the voice of reason. ‘Your mother’s right, all of you. It’s been a difficult week all around.’ He cast harsh glances at Debra and George, shutting them up. ‘No one means to accuse you of anything, Graham. But we have some questions and I’m sure that you have answers. We don’t mean to grill you, but they do seem important, don’t they?’
Graham had moved back up to the table. He’d folded his hands in front of him. He was unaware of it, but his knuckles burned white from the pressure. ‘You know, Leland, frankly, they don’t. Frankly,’ he repeated, ‘I can’t understand why Georgie here-’
‘George,’ his younger brother corrected him.
‘Sure,’ Graham said. ‘George. Why George here cares at all about fifty thousand dollars, or even a third of it, which he’s not going to get anyway because Dad wanted it to go to someone else.’
‘Well, that’s one of the questions,’ Leland retorted. ‘Who did your father want this money to go to?’
Down at his end George did his Leland impression, slapping the table three times. ‘First, I think I’d rather talk about why I shouldn’t care about seventeen thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money.’
Graham threw him a withering look. ‘What do you make a year, George – one thirty, one fifty?’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘It makes a difference how much you need seventeen thousand dollars.’
‘Yeah, that’s the way you think, all right, but it’s not a question of how much I need it. That’s completely irrelevant. The issue is that it’s mine, whether I need it or not.’
Graham had that dangerous smile again. ‘You know, Georgie, you’re turning into a fine banker. And it’s not yours anyway.’
Petulantly, his sister spoke up again. ‘Well, regardless of George, we need it. It’s a lot of money to us.’
Next to Debra, Brendan stiffened. If there was one thing Graham knew about Debra’s husband – and he knew more than he wanted to – it was that Brendan didn’t want or need anybody’s help, financial or otherwise, ever. He was a man and he did it his way, on his own, no matter what. ‘We’re doing all right,’ he insisted. ‘We don’t need it.’
‘We do too, Bren!’
‘Don’t argue with me,’ McCoury said. He appeared to be fighting the urge to strike her.
But Leland wasn’t going to referee marital disputes. He tapped the table again. ‘Excuse me, Debra. I don’t think Graham has given us Sal’s intentions here regarding this money.’
‘Excuse me, Leland’ – George again, the mimic – ‘but Sal’s intentions don’t matter. If he didn’t write a will, Graham can do whatever he wants with his third, but Debra and I get ours. That’s the law and he knows it.’
Outside, the sun had gone down and a mother-of-pearl sky was fast going dark. Graham’s patience – not his strong suit to begin with – was at an end. He couldn’t imagine that his father’s money would make even the slightest difference to George’s life. Debra’s, perhaps, for a short time.
His eyes swept the table quickly. This was his nuclear family. More, after Sal’s death, it was every relative he knew on earth, and he felt no connection to any of them.
How had they all come to this? he wondered. What had made the family go so wrong?
Maybe there had never been any hope for them, he thought. Maybe the incompatibility ran so deep, it was structural.
For as long as he could remember, the conflict between Sal and Helen had been apparent. When he’d been very young, Graham hadn’t been able to understand the causes of it, but even to the young boy there had been an obvious discrepancy simply in the way his mother and father were - in their very natures, it seemed – fundamental problems that went deeper than mere differences in the way they did things.
Sal was a second-generation Italian who grew up speaking the language in his home. He loved working with his hands, painting, fixing things, drinking, fishing, being with the guys, telling dirty jokes, and laughing out loud. He played party songs on his accordion. Darkly handsome with a wicked smile, Sal exuded physical confidence. He hugged even his male friends, kissed his wife in public, pinched her ass from time to time.
He was also a talented athlete. Like his son Graham after him, he had been signed to play baseball out of college; the Baltimore Orioles had given him a signing bonus of $35,000. Like his son – as with the great majority of players he never made the big leagues. At Helen’s urging, though, he’d saved his bonus, and had used it to buy his boat.
Helen had been raised on a different cultural plane. Her parents, Richard and Elizabeth (emphatically not Dick and Betsy) Raessler, were well-known jewelers. Helen had gone to Town School, the most prestigious private school in the city. She grew up in fine restaurants, at the opera, theater, symphonies, museums. She was a fine equestrienne – British style – and an outstanding cook.
By the time she was eighteen, she’d been to Europe with her parents five times, to the Far East twice. She met Leland Taylor while they both were in high school, and her parents considered him the perfect match for her, although believing they both should wait until a more seemly age.
Richard and Elizabeth had been torn by Helen’s desire to attend Lone Mountain College, an independent institution but, informally, the women’s adjunct to the University of San Francisco. They would have much preferred one of the eastern women’s colleges – Vassar, Brown – for cultural as well as protective reasons. Lone Mountain was run by nuns and, the Raesslers suspected, those crafty Jesuits.
Plus, Catholics were a much more rowdy group than Helen was used to.
On the other hand, Lone Mountain was close by. Their girl would be at hand and they could keep an eye on her. They would just have to keep her insulated from the riffraff, some of the working-class young men from across the street at USF.
And of course Helen went and fell in love with one of them.
It
was 1965 and Helen was a freshman. Sal was finishing his senior year after a hitch in Vietnam, so to Helen he also possessed that indefinable cachet of the ‘older man’ – she was eighteen to his twenty-five.
To say that Richard and Elizabeth were not pleased would be a considerable understatement. When she became pregnant at the end of that first summer, before she and Sal were even officially engaged, they counseled their daughter to get an abortion.
But Helen and Sal wouldn’t have that. They were in love, they would get married and raise their family. When she eloped with the jock fisherman, the Raesslers cut their daughter off.
The slow thaw in relations between the families began at the birth of Graham, a name that, like George and Debra, did not exactly sing with Sal’s Italian heritage. It had been Richard’s father’s name, and Helen persuaded Sal that they should present it – their first child’s name – to her parents as a type of peace offering. Reluctantly, he’d agreed, although the peace never really extended to Sal.
A creeping bribery began. Elizabeth would buy nice clothes for the children and deliver them during the day, when she wouldn’t have to see their father.
Clothes, shoes, Christmas gifts, bicycles. Finally, Richard and Elizabeth wanted their grandchildren to grow up in a safe neighborhood, with the right kind of playmates. They weren’t trying to influence their daughter against her husband. No, it wasn’t anything like that. Sal would grow to be comfortable in Seacliff. They would put the down payment on a suitable place and Sal and Helen would make the monthly payments. It wasn’t a loan or charity. They were sharing equity, that was all. It was a partnership.
Sal hated all of this, but he told himself he couldn’t blame Helen if her parents remained important to her. He let it go on, thinking it a compromise. He was being reasonable, forgiving. It wasn’t so divisive.
Sal was wrong.
By the time Graham was old enough to notice, the difference in his parents was pronounced. Six days a week, before the sun was up, Sal was off fishing in the Signing Bonus. On Sundays he’d play some kind of sports with Graham and Georgie, except when the weather was prohibitive. On those days he’d go out to the garage and paint or drink or both.
The Mercy Rule Page 10