by Peter Israel
I found her, as I’ve said, in that great garish tub, stretching back, a towel wrapped around her head like a turban, and resting against one of the steps just out of the water. Her eyes were half closed, and her pearly skin seemed to undulate gently under the water.
She opened her eyes briefly at my intrusion, then let the lids fall again.
“I’m just exhausted,” she murmured. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so exhausted.”
“I know,” I answered. “Who was it who said that all the great ceremonies of life—christenings, weddings, funerals—are really for the guests?”
“I don’t know,” she said languidly. “Just let me lie here a few more minutes, darling, and then I’ll be with you.”
For once, though, this wasn’t good enough.
“There are a few things we have to talk about first,” I said.
“Like what?” Vaguely, as though half hearing.
“Like what your brother said to you today that set you off.”
No answer at first. Then:
“I told you. It was family business. Stupid. I overreacted, that’s all. What exactly are you getting at?”
“I don’t know exactly what I’m getting at. All I know is that he acted today like he owned the place. He made you cry, and he patronized the hell out of me.”
“That’s Teddy, all right. That’s just the way he is.”
“Does he know you killed Thorne?”
Her eyes opened wide then, and the murmur was gone from her voice.
“Are you kidding?”
“I don’t think I am.” I couldn’t, in fact, quote Goldmark to her. It wasn’t what he’d said—Done is done—but the knowing manner in which he’d said it. The all-knowing manner. “I’ve got to tell you, Kitty, there’s something I’ve never understood. On the one hand, you always said there was no way anyone could touch us, over Safari or anything else, as long as I stonewalled. But on the other, you said we had to kill Thorne because he threatened to bring down the whole network, us included. Well, who runs the network? It’s your brother, isn’t it?”
“The network’s done, over.”
“All right. But who ran it? He did, didn’t he? It stands to reason, Kitty. With his position at Braxton’s, he had access to all the information, but he couldn’t use it himself, could he? So he decided to take a piece of other people’s action, people like Thorne, people like you and me and God knows who else. He was the one whom Thorne made vulnerable, not you and me. Did we kill Thorne for him, Kitty?” I held up a hand, stifling her retort momentarily. “Did he order you to do it?”
Evidently that was a mistake, saying it that way. She sat up abruptly in the tub, covering her breasts with an involuntary gesture. A gesture of vulnerability, I guessed, and it was true, although I’d never realized it before that minute, that as sensual and physical as our relationship was, Kitty clearly preferred to do her toilette alone. It was in fact rare that I’d witnessed her naked, in a bathtub.
“I think you’re being paranoid, Tommy,” she said angrily, “but there are two things you just said that drive me right up the wall. No,” she said, for I’d started to answer, “you listen to me. You keep saying we killed Thorne, when the truth is that I did. You helped me after the fact, which puts you on the hook too, and if you’re having second thoughts about that now, well, that’s too bad.” She interrupted herself, standing now in the tub and gesturing. “Hand me a towel, please.” Then: “But the second thing is this: nobody orders me to do anything. I don’t take orders. I don’t take them from Teddy, I don’t take them from you, I don’t take them from anyone.”
She stood there, her skin aglisten, chin raised in that characteristically defiant pose.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I put it the wrong way. Maybe I am being paranoid. But if I am, it’s your doing. You still, for instance, haven’t answered about your brother.”
“We had a business relationship,” she said coldly. “It’s over now. The sooner you and I forget about it, the better.”
“Funny. That’s what he said.”
“What did he say?”—unwinding the towel turban and shaking her hair free.
“He said better to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Well, that’s the smartest thing he’s said in a long time. Now will you please hand me my towel?”
Anchored in the floor near the tub was a heated metal rack with thick oversize towels adorned by Kitty’s new monogram. I pulled one free from the rack but held on to it.
“If that’s the case,” I said, “then why did you tell him about the Trusteeship?”
“Why did I what?”
“You heard what I said, Kitty. Why did you tell him about the Trusteeship?”
I expected her to deny it the way he had. Or try to.
“For God’s sake, will you give me the towel?” she said, reaching and shouting at once.
“Not till you answer the question!” I heard myself shout back.
“You bastard!” she said, incredulous and enraged. “You’re talking to me as if you owned me. Here I am, exhausted, trying to relax, and you come charging in here, accusing me of God knows what and acting like you own me!”
“I do own you,” I retorted. “A piece of you. What the hell else do you think marriage is about? I own a piece of you and you own a piece of me!”
She jutted her jaw toward me in angry attack.
“Well, if that’s what you really think, mister, then you and I have just made one major mistake.”
She reached awkwardly for the towel and missed.
“You still haven’t answered my question, Kitty.”
“What question?”
“Did you or did you not tell your brother about the Trusteeship?”
“Well, what if I did? Maybe I mentioned it to him. So what?”
“For one thing, it hasn’t even happened yet.”
“So what? It’s going to. I didn’t know it was such a deep dark secret anyway. What, I’d like to know, is so special and sacrosanct about your goddamn family?”
“And what,” I said back, “is so special and sacrosanct about yours?”
She glowered at me, her wet body ramrod stiff. She started to say something back, then stopped, and I could see her jaw move from the gritting of her teeth.
“My towel, please,” she said, chin lifted.
“Pick it up yourself,” I said, dropping it on the floor, and, turning, stormed from the room.
Before that night, I don’t think I’d had any real understanding of the role sex played in our life. Almost invariably, whenever we had reached the point of no return, with its attendant anger and recrimination, we had been able to get through it, exorcise it, by lovemaking. A reverse sort of sublimation, the analysts would probably have called it. Love in all its myriad forms—and I’ve refrained here from giving, as it were, our full catalogue—had always been our way out, our narcotic. I’d be tempted to say it was Kitty who’d taught me that, but I admit, judging from the comparatively pallid sex of my previous relationships, with their well-worn rituals of endearments and appropriate foreplay, that I’d at least been ready for it.
When I came back into the bedroom that night, Kitty was lying in our new bed, her head on her pillow, eyes open. She was wearing a nightgown for the occasion, a rarity for her, and looked straight ahead, as near as I could tell, at nothing. I went into the bathroom and took a shower in the large marble stall, and I remember hesitating, when I was finished, over whether to reappear wearing something myself or in my habitual nudity. I owned not a single set of pajamas. A terry cloth robe, the enormous white one Kitty had bought me? I opted for nudity.
She hadn’t moved from her position. I got into bed on the far side and, turning toward her, apologized. I said maybe I was as strung out as she was. The only point I’d really wanted to make, I said, was that I’d married her that day, not her brother. Beyond that, I felt bad about what I’d said. Maybe it was true, that weddings really were for the guests? Anyway, I
would take it back if I could—not the wedding but the bad words.
She listened, then turned sideways toward me, her eyes dark-rimmed with fatigue. She accepted my apology almost formally. She, too, was very sorry about what had happened. We should both try to forget it.
No kiss, however, no word of love. One of us may have said that he, or she, was too tired, we should get some sleep. Perhaps neither of us did.
Inevitably I dreamt the dream that night, my recurrent one, the one where I had to rescue Starkie. I awoke from it, sweating as usual and holding my breath to listen for the distant sounds of the frightened child. I got up and padded across the room in my bare feet and out into the upstairs hall.
I remember pouring myself a drink in the living room (yes, from the Laphroaig bottle), which I carried with me on my nude and random travel, but I’ve no recollection of what else I did or thought, only of the sense of impending trouble that the dream always inspired in me. When I got back upstairs, Kitty was still asleep, face down, left arm flung over her head in some possibly protective gesture. I lay down next to her, somehow afraid to go back to sleep, and listened to the quiet reassuring hum of the central air conditioning.
17
Shortly after the wedding, I was finally inducted into the Stark-Thompson Family Council. The meeting, originally scheduled for April, had been twice postponed because of Corcoran Stark’s indisposition. In between I’d met in New York with two of the members, one being the Chairman—a kind of pre-interview for the Trusteeship, they’d led me to believe. Although of course nothing would be decided without him, Corky, they’d said, was going to step down. Then Corky recovered, we were reconvened, and one fine day in late June, in the new Mercedes Kitty had given me for a wedding present, I drove up to the Stark estate, a Tudor mansion sitting on parklike acreage in Columbia County, not far from the Hudson.
The house, one could have said, that the Trusteeship had built.
I was one of three new members, two of us male, one female, and clearly the youngest. Crandall Thompson Fly Jr. was a prominent architect from New York in his late fifties who, like me, was taking over the seat his father had voluntarily relinquished. (Unlike mine, his was in attendance and in fact presided over the meeting as outgoing Chairman.) Mildred Thompson Walker, a jolly and fiftyish matron whose husband was a Philadelphia banker, had lost her father that winter, and, since the Council had resolved the previous year “to encourage vigorously, and insofar as possible, the future participation of women,” her presence was specially noted in the minutes.
The other members were all male, and for the most part septua- and octogenarian. A couple, as I said, I’d recently met; all of them I could more or less place on the family tree. They belonged, in dress, manner, speech, and attitude, to what most people would have called the privileged class, old Wasp America, and now that their lives were largely over, they seemed to look on everything, including the business before them, with a uniform and smug disinterest.
This wasn’t, needless to say, the sole, or even the main, reason for my sense of separateness. I had, after all, been raised and educated to be one of them, and with regard to their particular self-satisfied form of snobbery, I could pass. Nor was it the age factor, nor even my newness in their midst. But I felt it the minute I walked into that cavernous Tudor room with the thronelike chairs (actually my cousin Corky’s dining room), and the longer the meeting progressed, the more I realized how outraged they would be if they knew the truth about me.
(A felon, did you say? One of us? With appropriate adjustments of hearing aids.)
Our first business was quickly, even perfunctorily, dispensed with. We three new members were introduced, welcomed, and each of us presented with a set of the bylaws, a voluminous document bound in maroon leather, which we were urged to read attentively at our leisure. The minutes of the previous meeting, held in January, were read and approved. Then the Chair recognized the Trustee, Corcoran Stark, who presented and briefly summarized the combined balance sheet for the previous year, which on motion was approved and incorporated into the minutes.
While Cousin Corky spoke, I scanned the balance sheet. The assets were ranged in a neat listing with numbers beside them, the liabilities below. Certain of the captions I didn’t immediately understand, but when I came to the last one under liabilities—Stark-Thompson Funds Equity, it was called—I think I quite literally stopped breathing. I looked up, somehow convinced that one or more of my fellow members would be watching for my reaction. But none was, and Corky’s voice, dry and frail, continued to drone on. Then I looked down again, even traced the line across to the corresponding dollars with my forefinger because I was sure I’d misread.
I hadn’t.
If I don’t give the number here, it is not, Kitty to the contrary, because I feel bound by some kind of honor code to keep the secrets of the clan secret. It is, rather, because I don’t think anyone would believe me. And with good reason. In all the listings I’d ever seen of the Richest People in America, there’d never been any mention of us. This, as I would discover, was because the Funds actually consisted of separate and distinct trusts, a considerable number of them, leapfrogging the generations and ingeniously designed to circumvent two ancient and hoary principles of common law: the one against perpetuity, the other against unreasonable accumulation of wealth. While the combined balance sheet I mentioned was a document simply for the convenience of the Council, suffice it that the people sitting in that room, and all those they represented, had to constitute collectively one of the ten wealthiest families in the country.
I admit, too, to a shiver, a kind of rippling inner thrill which I had only experienced before, once or twice, in gambling situations when the stakes had suddenly become much higher than I could afford. But those stakes, of course, had been but pennies to the numbers now before me. I thought of Wanda Russell, probably the richest person I knew. But the interest alone on the Funds, I calculated, would have surpassed all Wanda’s assets combined.
I’d had no idea!
No wonder the Senator had come to me for his eighty thousand dollars!
Even Ted Goldmark and his paltry one hundred eighty million … But God Almighty, we had committed murder to protect that!
I literally had trouble breathing. What I was looking at made all of it—Goldmark and Kitty and Safari and Thorne—seem so petty, so penny-ante. (To which list, needless to say, I have to add Stark Thompson, P.C.!)
Strangest of all, though: of all of us seated around that table, was I the only one who noticed the number? I remember glancing surreptitiously at them, relatives all. They had the same papers before them, they were sitting on the same fortune …
But not a murmur, not so much as a cough.
Nothing, other than Corky Stark’s voice.
Corky finished his report. Crandall Thompson Fly Sr. reminding the Council that, by tradition, it was the prerogative of each outgoing member and officer to name his or (with a slight inclination toward Mildred Walker) her successor, then opened the subject of the new officers. He himself put forth his candidate for the new Chairman, another Thompson elder, who was approved, unopposed, by voice vote. The current Secretary was reconfirmed in his office. Then, with a nod to Corky, the outgoing Chairman raised the question of the new Trustee.
Corky Stark was, like many of us in the family, a tall and spare man, his figure somewhat stooped by age but still maintaining a kind of brittle and bony spryness. He stood again now, in a loosely fitting gray and white seersucker suit (which seemed to be the approved dress in the Council), and only the frailty of his voice, now and then interrupted by a hacking cough, revealed that he’d been ill. He’d had a stroke—a mild one, he assured us, and he claimed that he’d beaten it fair and square. Doctors or no, he’d already resumed his daily morning swim, before breakfast, thank you, half an hour’s worth, and they could keep their drugs and medicines.
“I’ve been doing this thankless job for almost thirty years now,” he said, coming to
the point. “Even though I’ve had some criticism and a lot of second-guessing lately, I think it safe to say that the people sitting on this Council thirty years ago, of whom Cranny and I are the only ones left, would never have dreamt in their wildest dreams that we’d be where we are today.”
He went on to describe the growth of the Funds during his dominion, saying we all should be proud of it, that he himself damn well was, even though the most recent exercises had been on the disappointing side. Then:
“I know there’s a lot of sentiment around this table that the time’s come for me to step down.”
He paused, as though waiting for demurrers. But there were none.
“Well, let me tell you this: I’d be the last one to disagree with you. I think it’s high time we had some new blood, and at the proper time I’ll be glad to hand over my responsibilities and be done with it. But I want to make damn sure we have an orderly transition, and that I’m satisfied with my successor, and that it’s all done as it should be. And that’s not something I’m ready to do today. Therefore I recommend that we table the subject until our September meeting. If anybody disagrees, then let’s have it out now.”
Several times while he spoke, Corky Stark glanced at me—without, however, any particular expression, positive or negative, that I could read. It struck me as odd that, if I was the candidate and he had by tradition some kind of veto power, we hadn’t yet sat down together. Yes, he’d been ill. But it could also have been that there were factions within the Council that had yet to surface.
On the spot, these were nowhere in evidence, and Corky’s recommendation was accepted without comment. But I had partial answers that same day, during the buffet lunch served on the terrace next to the outdoor pool.