by Peter Israel
From Crandall Thompson Fly Jr.: “Dad tells me Corky Stark’s been making the same speech every year for as long as he can remember. He says that as far as Corky’s concerned, we’re going to have to carry him out feet first.”
From Crandall Thompson Fly Sr.: “Corky’s been making that same speech every year for about as long as I can remember, Tommy. But I don’t want you to worry. We’ll have to keep the pressure on him. He’ll come around in time. It’s just that nobody had the heart to push him today.”
From Corcoran Stark: “I think it’s time you and I got to know each other … It’s Tommy, isn’t it?… Yes. Well, I’m going to phone you, Tommy. I’d like you to come up here, if it’s no great hardship. There are any number of things you need to know. For all I know, you may not even want the damn job once you’ve heard me out.”
There was more, too, from my Cousin Corky.
When the luncheon was over—a rather bland and even skimpy buffet composed mostly of salads and fruit, though with a well-stocked bar complete with uniformed bartender—I bided my time, not wanting to be the first to leave but watchful for the first opportunity. Then I saw the Flys, Sr. and Jr., making their way through the group, shaking hands. Apparently they had shared a limousine up from the city. I gave them a head start, then circulated through the group behind them, pleading a business appointment and noticing how, as often happened, there was a sudden stirring throughout, as though suddenly it had become important not to be left behind.
But as we made our way back through the house and out the main entrance to the wide gravel driveway where my Mercedes looked suddenly humdrum in the collection (there was, I remember, an elderly but gleaming Bentley of stately and understated elegance), Corky took my arm and insistently held me behind the others.
“Well, young man,” he said. “Like I say, you may not even want the damn job once you’ve heard me out. But I’m going to call you.”
I made some noncommittal reply and, assuming I was now free, started to thank him for his hospitality.
“Never mind that,” he said, pulling me back toward him. “I understand congratulations are in order, is that so?”
“Congratulations for what?” I answered.
“Well, you just got married, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did. Thank you very much.”
“Not one of us, is she?”
The remark, needless to say, disconcerted me. I looked toward the others, the last of them now several yards in front of us on the gravel.
“Never mind them,” Corky Stark said confidentially, squeezing my arm. “The Jews are all right, no matter what anyone says.”
Fortunately for me, for I’d have had no idea how to answer, he started to laugh, and then the laughter turned into a cough, and, relinquishing my arm, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his mouth, meanwhile staying me with his free hand.
“Sorry about that,” he said, recovering. “When you’re my age, everything breaks down. Turns out I knew her first husband, did you know that?”
“Who?”
“Your wife’s. Sprague? Gar Sprague? Good family. They say he was crazy about her. Drank too much, though. Poor bastard drove himself off a cliff.”
I’d started to say something. I stopped short.
“He … what?”
“I said he drove himself off a cliff,” Corky repeated.
“But I’d always heard he drank himself to death.”
“And so he did,” Corky said. “No contradiction there. He was drunk as a lord when he did it, poor bastard.” Then, squeezing my arm before letting me go: “Let it be a lesson to you, eh, Tommy? Don’t drink too much!”
Dazed by what I’d heard, I headed across the driveway. I think some of the cars had already gone. I was suddenly anxious to get out of there myself. Is it possible to feel claustrophobic in the open air?
I was at the Mercedes when I heard him calling behind me.
He was standing in front of his open front door, stooped, his hand raised in a half salute and grinning crookedly at me, shouting the while.
“Don’t forget to read the bylaws!” was what I heard.
Yes, read the bylaws.
But something funny happened to me on my way south from Corky Stark’s. I’d left there, as I said, in a daze, shocked by what he’d said so casually. It had to be true, and I knew that, but believing it was like the shattering of crystal, the explosion of atoms, the breakup of all my assumptions.
Yo, Tommy, who said the world had to be round?
Somewhere on that parkway south, though, I had to stop. It was a matter of necessity: I’d become giddy with fear. I remember pulling off onto the shoulder, stopping, turning off the ignition, getting out. Striving for deep breaths. There was little traffic, yet the new Mercedes itself had become a trap, a potential tomb.
For there was the truth of it, wasn’t it?… Crazy about her … Drank too much … Drove himself off a cliff. It had suddenly, indelibly, become clear to me: Robert Thorne hadn’t been her first; Gar Sprague, drunk or sober, had died in a car crash, too! The coincidence was simply too great. Sprague, like Thorne, had to have been an accident waiting for her to make happen.
(Did you have help then, too, Kitten? Someone to put Sprague’s car into drive for you? And did you murder him beforehand too, throwing up—how decorous—after the deed? Or were these later refinements, for Thorne only?)
And who was there to say Sprague himself had been the first? Or that Robert Thorne would be the last?
And where precisely, dear Kitten, did I fit into your master plan?
And what to do? What should I do?
I can tell you what I did do.
I started to laugh.
Call it my Wasp sense of humor, if you will, gallows corner, what a Wasp will do when the fear wears off a little and he discovers, hyperventilating, that he is at least still breathing, and that the air is redolent with the fresh smells of late spring, and he asks himself finally: What, after all, is so new about what you just found out?
Only that the murderess I had married a couple of weeks before was more experienced at her secret craft than I’d thought.
But beyond that?
Only that I craved her still. Or even, so help me, craved her more. I remember leaning against my car, sucking on a long blade of grass, breathing deeply now, laughing aloud at the images that rose in my mind in spite of everything: smells of Kitty, teasing tastes of Kitty, curves and curls and whirls of Kitty rising, rearing finally against the prancing stallion that I had become.
I didn’t drive into the office that afternoon. I went directly home instead, and it was there, that same afternoon, that I put the first elements of this account on paper.
Some hours later—it was near dusk, on one of the longest days of the year—Kitty’s chauffeured car, a sedate Cadillac Seville, pulled slowly in front of our Georgian columns. By then I was standing some twenty, thirty paces away, in a pair of shorts, sneakers, a T-shirt. A drink in one hand, a hose in the other. I’d been watering some rosebushes. Somewhere I’d read that it was impossible to kill rosebushes by drowning, and I think I’d set out to test the theory.
Kitty was wearing a light-colored suit, linen, without lapels—the Chanel look—with a ruffled white blouse underneath. High heels. I remember the high heels on our gravel, and the wraparound full-tint sunglasses she always wore in summer.
“Tommy!” she said, startled. “For God’s sake, what are you doing there?”
“Just what it looks like I’m doing,” I replied. “I’m the perfect country gentleman.”
I watched her turn, stooping to talk through the window to the driver, the movement causing her skirt to tighten around her hips, her ass. Probably she was telling him what time she wanted him in the morning. Then he backed the Cadillac around neatly in the driveway and drove off.
“Come on, Tommy,” she called to me. “Stop what you’re doing and come in the house.”
“You take one more step, K
itty, and I’ll have to douse you from head to foot. Come over here.”
I remember testing the hose, holding one thumb across the nozzle and shooting an experimental jet across her port bow.
She dropped whatever she was carrying.
“For God’s sake,” she called, annoyed, “watch what you’re doing. What’s wrong, are you drunk?”
Was I drunk? Drunk on Kitty, at least.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I answered. “But I’ve got something to tell you. A certain number to whisper in your ear.”
“Oh, the Funds!” she exclaimed. “I all but forgot! Did you get it?”
“We’ll see,” I said. “But come here now, Kitten.”
I must have dropped the hose.
(I’ve no recollection of turning the water off, but the roses didn’t drown.)
I watched her make her way toward me, heels unsteady in the grass, arms reaching out for balance, and the mere sight of her, her sunglasses now perched in her thick hair, followed by the heavy, engulfing smell of her as she took my hands and I pulled her to me, brought back the erection which had been how long—some six hours?—abuilding?
“Tommy!” she exclaimed, laughing and trying to push me away. “At least let’s go inside. The help’ll see us!”
We had, through Kitty’s business, hired an Irish couple, who took care of everything from gardening to a generally acceptable cuisine.
“No they won’t,” I answered. “I gave them the night off.”
“You what?”
“Just what I said. I even gave them the money to have dinner out. On us. I told them I wanted the evening alone with my wife.”
“You—”
“Listen, Mrs. Thompson,” I said, gripping her firmly, her eyes now caught between protest and curiosity, “once upon a time you told me you found money sexy. Now I’ve taken you at your word. I bring to you one of the great American fortunes, not yours to keep, alas, but yours to manipulate, play with, throw in the air and try to catch before it hits the ground. All those zeros. Do you want the number? Come here, let me give you the number.”
I whispered it into her ear. She started to giggle and twist away.
“What …? What did you say?”
“You heard me. Now I want to fuck your brains out.”
“Tommy! For God’s—”
In some kind of parabola, whether awkward or graceful I couldn’t say, we tumbled into the grass, husband and wife, accomplice and murderess. Protest she might, and protest she did, but there was no one to hear her and no way for her to blunt my lust.
Then later, yes, I read the bylaws.
18
“It’s a unique set of documents, wouldn’t you say?” Corcoran Stark asked.
This was at breakfast, his choice, in fact his insistence. We sat at a long glass and wrought iron table beside his outdoor pool, shaded by two tall umbrellas and served from an adjacent table by a young black manservant in white ducks and sneakers. Although the sun had begun its lazy summer climb, the air was still cool from the night, but Cousin Corky, his body creased and creviced from age, sat only in his bathing trunks and sandals. He’d been up even before me, he announced, had had his regular morning swim, which he did the year round (though indoors come October), had had his coffee, had read all the papers, had even had time for a couple of phone calls.
Although I agreed out loud with his observation, I had no way of telling if “unique” was accurate. Maybe there had been other brothers, or families, in the nineteenth century who had decided to make their own reach for immortality through such a legal instrument, or series of instruments. But curious, certainly, if not unique. Two brothers from Pennsylvania who had apparently made some money in the canal business (something called the Thompson Tow Company in New Hope, Pennsylvania) had wanted to set aside a (now indeterminate) sum for the benefit not of their grandchildren but their “grandchildren’s grandchildren and the further generations,” only to discover that such a scheme ran counter to the law.
As we all learned in law school, the only legally permissible perpetual trust is one established for charity. Otherwise, there prevails a so-called rule against perpetuities. Under the old English common law (which, after a series of statutory changes in the nineteenth century, has once again, quite recently, become American law), no form of trust could endure longer than a reasonable number of “lives in being” plus twenty-one years. What “lives in being” meant practically was that a man, if he wished to, could establish a trust that would survive the death of his wife, his children, and his already-born grandchildren by twenty-one years, at which time the trust would have to be distributed to the surviving beneficiaries. In fact, at the time of the original Thompson brothers, American law had substantially reduced the duration of lives-in-being plus twenty-one years by the “two-lives rule,” meaning that no trust could, for example, survive a man’s wife and one of his children.
What the brothers had done instead was to establish not one but a series of trusts in the names of their generation (Stark, it appeared, was the married name of the brothers’ sister), also, in due course, in the names of their children, so setting into motion a complicated series of leapfrogging and proliferating legacies which were accompanied by a most curious document—an “open letter” of instructions to their heirs and descendants. It was there that the phrase “grandchildren’s grandchildren and the further generations” was to be found. The trusts, the brothers ordained, were to be reconstituted upon their expiration, in accordance with the prevailing laws of the day, and the Funds, in principal and interest, reinvested at the prudent and best discretion of the succeeding generations. Control of the Funds was vested by the letter in the oldest males of the family’s branches, generation unto generation. In time, changed and amended through the years, this “open letter” had evolved into what we called the bylaws, and early in the twentieth century, the idea of the Council, an outgrowth of the “oldest males” of the letter, had been codified along with the role of the single Trustee as manager of the Funds.
The whole edifice was, as far as I could tell, perfectly legal. The assets of all the trusts had simply been commingled for investment purposes, through the administration of a single trustee. What surprised me was not that it hadn’t been challenged in the courts, but that no one, in the succeeding generations, had tried to tear it down. For whose benefit was it? Hadn’t anybody ever asked that question to which there was but one answer? To no one’s benefit. The era of the “grandchildren’s grandchildren” had in fact already arrived—I myself was one of them, I’d calculated—yet the Funds went on, accumulating and multiplying, and one of the first questions I had for Corcoran Stark that morning was why nobody had even challenged its very existence.
“The answer is that they have,” he replied. “Many years ago there were even defections—not many—beneficiaries of this or that trust who refused to go along with reconstitution. Of course, they and their branch were immediately ostracized—we have a mechanism for that, perfectly legal. But the truth is that no one individual could cause much harm to the whole.”
“But a group certainly could,” I said. “And a generation could create havoc.”
“Yes,” he said. “We almost had that happen, too.”
The last time it had come up seriously, Corky said, was before the war (by which he meant World War II). Apparently certain branches of the family had barely managed to scrape through the Depression, and it was these who’d turned to the Council, first for relief, then with the aim of toppling the Funds entirely.
“Of course, the Council fought them, but it set off quite a crisis in the ranks. It was at that time that somebody on the Council invented the loan system. Also the Council members’ stipend was introduced and a special dividend declared. This bought the rebels off temporarily, and then the war came along, for better or worse, and the whole thing blew over.
“Probably there have been naysayers since the very beginning,” he went on, “but you have to remember
that for a very long time the Funds didn’t amount to all that much. Look back at the records of the first fifty years—longer, say, the first eighty—and you’ll see what I mean. The clan grew a lot faster than the Funds at first. It’s only since the war that we’ve really taken off.”
“Thanks in large part to you,” I said.
“A graceful compliment,” he answered with a nod at my flattery.
“Forgive me please for belaboring the point,” I said, “but I still don’t really understand. If the Funds was broken up today, we would all be millionaires many times over. We, the grandchildren’s grandchildren. Yet we voluntarily let it go on. Is it out of altruism? The goodness of our hearts? Or the family’s powers of persuasion?”
He smiled at me and shrugged.
“Some of us already are millionaires,” he said matter-of-factly. “And some not, it’s true. But the fact is, we’ve been advised we couldn’t go out of business even if we wanted to. Not without inviting one lawsuit after another, which would tie up the Funds till your grandchildren’s grandchildren.”
“Why would there have to be lawsuits,” I said, “if it were done equitably?”
“Equitably,” he repeated with a creased smile. “Now there’s the key word. Look, young man, maybe you’re smarter than the people we’ve had in to look at it, but there are a few things you ought to take into consideration. The Council, big as it is, still doesn’t represent all the branches of the family. Far from it. We’re not a democratic body. We rule with a certain secrecy, always have. Second, do you realize how many of us there must be by now? Starks and Thompsons? First cousins, second cousins, third, fourth, fifth? We’ve made efforts to keep track, but it’s hopeless. And then there’s the question, Who’s entitled and who isn’t? Should there be full shares, half shares, quarter shares? Well, somebody will say, the beneficiaries named in the trusts, that’s perfectly clear. But is it so clear? Of course not. The beneficiaries are a vehicle, in the founders’ intent, and with few exceptions that’s the way it’s always worked.