by Robyn Sisman
Because it was a Sunday, and still early in the evening, the paneled room was sparsely populated. Even if it had been packed to bursting, Jack could have located his father simply by searching for the figure of a waiter deferentially bowed over one of the tables. At every establishment he patronized, Jack’s father quickly appropriated a crony among the staff, whom he would introduce as “my old friend Alphonse” or “Eddie, best barman this side of the Mason-Dixon line,” before dispatching them to perform some extracurricular service. Sure enough, there in the far corner, his father was comfortably ensconced at the best table in the place, shooting the breeze with some butler-type in white gloves. Jack could guess with near-certainty the topic of their one-sided conversation: either “Bourbons I Have Known” or “New York: Hell-hole of the Universe.”
Candace grabbed his arm. “Is that him?” she whispered.
“Yep.” All day she’d been pestering him for details, until he’d finally snapped, “He’s just my dad. You’ll see.”
Now she gave an approving murmur. “Isn’t he handsome? He looks just like you.”
“Well, he’s not.”
As he approached the table Jack experienced a confusion of filial emotions—defiance, resentment, guilt, and a kind of familiarity that approximated to affection, though he told himself it was probably no more than a crude genetic tug. Right now defiance was uppermost. He was not returning home to work in the family business, even if his father begged. He was going to ask for an increase in his paltry allowance—nothing excessive, just a reasonable increase in line with his age and lifestyle.
His father rose from his chair, as tall and as broad as Jack, looking pleased to see them. His mustache had been newly clipped; his thick white hair was scrupulously parted and combed: a handsome man, indeed, though he had turned sixty-five last birthday.
“Jack, my boy. Good to see you.” He clasped Jack’s hand warmly, raising his other arm to clap Jack on the shoulder in a gesture that was part whack, part manly hug.
“And you.” Just in time, Jack bit back the sir that had been drummed into him from an early age. “This is Candace,” he said, presenting her like a trophy—or a shield.
His father’s face intensified with interest. Dad liked women, and they liked him. Jack had protested that there was no need for Candace to get all dressed up just to meet his father, for godsakes, but he couldn’t help feeling gratified by her glossy appearance in the subtly sexy black dress.
There was the bustle of seating themselves and deciding what to drink. Jack’s father suggested a glass of pink champagne to Candace; both became positively rapturous about the fact that she’d never tasted it before—how thrilled she would be to try it, how honored he was to give her the opportunity, blah blah. Just to be annoying Jack ordered a beer. In the course of this farcical rigmarole he and Candace were introduced to “my good friend, George,” the still-hovering waiter.
“Any time you’all want to drop by here, George will take real good care of you. Won’t you, George?”
“It would be my pleasure, Mr. Madison.”
“Why, thank you, George.” Suddenly Candace was acting like the Queen of England. “Isn’t that nice, Jack?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t get uptown much.”
He knew that he sounded graceless, but couldn’t help it. There had been a time, in his teens, when he’d reveled in his position as “the Madison boy.” Everywhere he went there had been a special golf caddy, a favored barber, even a friendly police officer to smooth his path or turn a blind eye. His father had taken pleasure in initiating him into the rites of manhood—more specifically, into being a Madison. Ever since Jack had been returned by his mother to his father, like a reclaimed parcel, there had been ritual visits to the paper mills that were the foundation of the family fortune. Jack remembered feeling excited yet overwhelmed by the towering skips full of old rags, the great rolling machinery leaking oil into factory rooms cavernous as cathedrals, the heat and the noise and the foul stench, like a dead beast rotting, that flowed out across the countryside and made Minnie the housekeeper insist, when he got home, that he take off his clothes right this minute so they could be laundered. If his father had never uttered the exact words, “One day, son, all this will be yours,” they were implicit in the pride he expressed when Jack made the football team or dated the prom queen or caught his first fish—even when he got drunk on hooch and threw up all over the front porch. He was “Little Jack,” who would one day grow up to be “Big Jack,” just as his father had stepped into the shoes of “Big Daddy Jack.” Except that he wasn’t, and he didn’t, and he wouldn’t.
His father was telling Candace about the hotel, how it had been built for John Jacob Astor at the turn of the century, with crystal from Waterford and marble from France, in response to his demand for the finest hotel in the world. “And in my opinion, it still is,” he said, “even with all the new gadgets they put in during the renovation. I’ll get George to show you around in a little bit, while Jack and I have a private talk. Would you like that?”
Candace wriggled her shoulders and said that she would love it. “And is Mrs. Madison here with you?” she inquired.
Jack’s father looked surprised; then his eyes crinkled into laughter, and he went through an absurd pantomime of patting his pockets. “Nope. Don’t believe I’ve got one with me today.” He winked at Candace and smoothed his mustache. “Already got four wives scattered across the country—and that’s four too many. Cost more’n a decent fishing boat these days.”
Candace gave him a look Jack could only describe as saucy. “You’re not telling me you prefer fish to women, are you, Mr. Madison?”
He patted her knee delightedly. “Well, now. That depends on how much of a fight they put up.”
Jack twisted his glass around and around, his face stony. He was long used to his father’s high-flown gallantries, but that Candace should flirt back seemed a betrayal. He wondered exactly why he persisted with Candace—apart from the obvious. In the South there was a clear distinction between “nice” girls and “trashy” girls, though nice girls could be very trashy indeed, and trashy girls nice—but you never married them. Which was Candace, he wondered?
He listened to her prattle on about her life, glowing under the attention.
“I don’t know how you all survive up here,” marveled his father, “with the noise and the dirt, living in those little bitty cells you call apartments.”
“I know what you mean.” Candace sighed wistfully, as if her true spiritual home were a country mansion patrolled by servants.
“Everybody looks so tired and frazzled—except you, my dear. Work, work, work, that’s all these Yankees seem to think about, even on a Sunday.” He gestured across the room at a huddle of men in suits poring over conference folders.
“Dad, those are Japanese businessmen.”
“So you say. Seems to me anyone can be a Yankee these days. You don’t even have speak English.”
“I’d love to visit the South one day.” Candace leaned forward confidingly. “You have so much history—and all those beautiful trees!”
“You’ll have to get Jack to bring you down for a visit.”
“Oh, would you, Jack?” Candace turned to him in a swirl of perfume. “It sounds like such a beautiful state.”
Jack took another sip of his beer. “We’ll see.”
North Carolina was a beautiful state. The place was in his blood, and he loved it, but he couldn’t live there. Even now, when he visited, he chafed at the seductive pull of history, the oppressive weight of family. To live in a town where everyone knew you, where your last name was a passport to privilege or a brand against you, where you were never free of the danger of running into someone who had dandled you on their knee, or danced with your mother at a cotillion, or who knew your crazy Aunt Milly who heard voices, or whose great-great-granddaddy had fought with your great-great-granddaddy at the Battle of Wherever-it-was: for Jack, once he grew up, it was like livi
ng in a very luxurious padded cell, with a straitjacket on his imagination. He didn’t feel real.
They made small talk while Candace sipped her champagne. When her glass was empty, Jack’s father summoned the obliging George to take her on a private tour of the hotel.
“Man’s talk,” he explained to Candace with a wink. “You understand?”
“Of course.”
“Good girl. Now take good care of her, George, you hear?”
He withdrew his eyes with difficulty from her sashaying back view.
“Pretty girl.”
Jack nodded his agreement.
“Not one of those ball-breaking career women you get up here.”
“No.”
“Seems to me she’s not the same woman I talked to when I called your apartment last week—someone with a British accent?” He shot Jack a sly look.
“That was Freya. She’s staying in my apartment.”
“Oh ho.”
“She’s just a friend, Dad.”
“Hmm.” His father winked, and rattled the ice in his drink. “So tell me, son, how is everything?”
“Pretty good.”
“Finished that book yet?”
“Almost. I’ve been sidetracked by a lot of journalism recently. That’s the only stuff that pays.”
“Miss Holly still looks out for your articles, you know.” Miss Holly was Jack’s fourth-grade teacher, now semiretired, who helped out in the archives of the Oaksboro Public Library. “I hear she’s got quite a collection. ‘Course she’s pretty well senile now.”
Jack grunted, and waved a hand as if it were of no importance to him what Miss Holly did. He was well aware of local reaction to the news that he had “gone North” to be—wait for it—a writer! New York was a den of iniquity where people went “hog wild.” Writing was eccentric at best, sissy at worst. A state that had suffered a painful defeat in war—and for Southerners the Civil War was still a raw wound—could not afford to breed sissies. Jack felt that they were all waiting for him to come home with his tail between his legs, admit that he’d finally got that funny ol’ literary bug out of his system, and settle down like a normal person. Not one of them had any idea of how difficult it was to write a novel.
His father waved over one of the underwaiters to bring more drinks. This time Jack ordered bourbon. Mentally he rehearsed his speech: the cost of living in New York, the incompatibility of writing fiction and journalism, his certainty that he was on the brink of a major success, if only he could buy himself a little more time. But before he could find an opening, his father leaned easily back in his seat, spread his manicured hands on the table, and began to speak.
“I’m glad we have this chance to talk, son. There’ve been some changes at Madison Paper, and I think it’s only right to let you know what’s going on in the business, even if you’ve never shown much interest.”
“It’s not that I’m not interested, Dad. It’s only—”
“I know. You’ve chosen to do things differently. That’s why I want to talk to you, bring you up to date.”
His father began to drone on about foreign competition and new markets; labor laws and tax breaks; new technologies expensively implemented and takeover threats successfully routed. One member of the Board had died, and another was retiring . . . Jack stopped listening to the words. He thought he knew where this was leading. Sure enough, his father began a long ramble about their search for a new Board member—someone with a connection with the business, someone he could trust—
“Dad, stop right there.” Jack raised his palm. He smiled at his father, to show that what he was about to say was not meant to offend. “I know I’m the eldest son, and I know you’re thinking of my own good, but I have to tell you that I can’t come home to help run the business.”
His father looked so shocked that he added, “I’m sorry, Dad.”
His father burst into a loud guffaw. “You!” he exclaimed. “Run the business!”
Now it was Jack’s turn to be shocked. “Well . . . isn’t that what you’re asking?”
His father brought his laughter under control. “Jack, you’ve been up here in New York ten years. What could you possibly know about running a paper business?”
Jack stared at him, feeling utterly stupid. He was aware of the fuddled look on his face, and the dead weight of his hands in his lap.
“Of course, if you wanted to come home, I’d try to find you a position of some kind.” His father frowned dubiously. “But it wouldn’t be very well paid. You don’t have any of the appropriate skills.”
“Well, maybe not. But—” Jack broke off, confused. “Why are you telling me all this stuff about the business, then?” he asked belligerently.
“Because I wanted you to know that, as of next month, we’ll be inviting your brother Lane to join the Board.”
“Lane?” For some reason, Jack pictured his brother in his high-school football outfit, with massive padded shoulders and a helmet masking his features.
“I know he never got the grades you did, but he understands paper.”
Lane? As far as Jack remembered, Lane never understood anything.
“There was a time when I hoped and prayed you’d come home to Madison Paper, but you haven’t, and it’s too late now. Business is business. I have responsibilities—to my employees and to the community. I need someone who is committed.”
Jack nodded, his mind in a whirl. Lane had a stuffed boar’s head on his wall. He subscribed to car magazines. Lane had gotten one of the Danforth girls pregnant when he was eighteen, and she’d been sent away for a hush-hush abortion.
“Up to now, I’ve given both you boys allowances to help you get on your feet. Lane’s been learning the paper business, and you—well, I guess you’ve been learning your ‘business,’ too.” His father chuckled at this quaint notion. “Of course, Lane is younger than you, but he’ll be getting his Board stipend now, so it all balances out.”
“What do you mean?” Jack was floundering again. “What balances out?”
“I mean that I’ll be terminating his allowance at the same time I terminate yours.”
Terminating! Jack stared at him, speechless.
“You’ll always be my eldest son, and of course there will be an inheritance for you when I’m gone, but the time has come for you to stand on your own two feet. Hell, by the time I was your age, I had a wife and a down payment on my own house!”
Jack tried to get a grip. “When were you thinking—?”
“Next month is the last payment.”
“Next month?”
His father gave a shark-tooth smile that Jack knew and disliked. “Why wait? You tell me you’re doing well with the writing, and I’m sure you are. Madison Paper is a business, not a gravy train. We can’t carry passengers.”
Jack took a deep slug of bourbon. Terminate: the word crashed and echoed around his head. Resentment burned in his throat. His father spent more on quail-shooting than he did on Jack. Why should Lane get this so-called “stipend,” just because he’d been too unadventurous to forge his own career? His eyes skittered over his father’s immaculate cream suit and dandyish tie, taking in the powerful shoulders and commanding tilt of his chin. Jack swallowed his panic and clamped his own jaw tight. He wasn’t going to beg.
But his turmoil must have shown in his face. His father frowned. “You’re not in any kind of trouble, are you, son?”
Jack looked him in the eye. “No.”
His father’s expression relaxed into a bantering grin. “You mean you always dress like a bum? I guess that’s what’s called a ‘fashion statement’ nowadays. Beats me. New Yorkers used to have such style . . . Like her,” he added, his eyes lighting up.
Jack turned around to see Candace approaching them at her new, queenly gait. He stood up at once, rocking the table. “We have to go now.”
“Aw, so soon?” His father rose courteously and took Candace’s hand, smiling down at her. “Maybe you’ll both join me for din
ner tomorrow night?”
“I don’t think . . .” Jack began.
“That would be lovely,” Candace said simultaneously.
Jack seized her elbow and propelled her forward, out of the claustrophobic gloom of the bar. They skirted the Astor Lounge, with its palms and marble and cocktail couples, past glass cases displaying handmade shirts and designer ties. Jack wanted to smash one with his bare fist. He made himself focus straight ahead, on a gilt-framed painting hanging at the end of the corridor. It was the portrait of a man not much older than himself—elegant, mustachioed, confident, surrounded by the symbols of his success. Jack made out the name as he approached: JOHN JACOB ASTOR III (1822–90). And here he was, Jack Madison III—penniless, ousted, disenfranchised.