Misfortune

by Nancy Geary

  “Whatever. Just get something nice.”

  Belle nodded. “That’s quite an open-ended instruction.”

  “Within reason, then.”

  Belle smiled. Miles felt relieved.

  “I won’t be needing anything for the immediate future if you care to go now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned to leave.

  “Belle. Thank you.”

  Miles watched her shut the door behind her. He paced the length of his office in slow, deliberate strides as he listened for sounds of her activities. He heard nothing through the bunker-thick walls. He imagined that she was gathering her things, a purse from her desk drawer, a lightweight trench coat from the foyer closet, all the articles that she would need to venture forth on an errand. Perhaps she needed to use the rest room. He calculated the minutes, then carefully opened his office door. Belle had left.

  Miles had little time to spare.

  He removed the key to Richard’s office from where Belle kept it in the top drawer of her desk. He fitted it into the lock, heard the bolt give, turned the heavy brass knob, and opened the eight-foot mahogany doors into an expanse of space even more magnificent than his own. Situated on the southwest corner of the turn-of-the-century building, it had a panoramic view north of Central Park, west along Central Park South, and south down Fifth Avenue. Richard’s rosewood desk had to be nine feet long, the wood polished to a shiny glow. His chocolate leather chair was worn and crackled on the back, armrests, and seat, the mark of his ghost. Behind the desk was a leather-covered credenza with brass drawer pulls. Silver frames cluttered the top, the picture of Justin on Lake Agawam, a formal portrait of one daughter, it must be Blair, in what looked like a debutante dress with layers and layers of white tulle, another of Frances kneeling beside two dogs, and several of Clio, including a large wedding picture of Richard and his young bride. God, Clio really was beautiful. Her thick black hair cascaded over her smooth shoulders.

  To the left of the desk, against the far wall, two club chairs with ottomans and a butler’s table between them settled atop a plush Oriental carpet. The table held a silver monogrammed tray with a cut-crystal decanter partly filled with a light brown liquid and two matching glasses. This corner of the room was where the real work occurred, Richard Pratt at his best selling a deal. Men with small companies or brilliant but unfunded inventions had sat in these chairs, facing Richard, desperate for his money and willing to settle on any terms he pleased. Here was where Richard extracted what Pratt Capital needed, a controlling interest, the right to select the chief executive officer, indemnities and releases that would minimize risk. Then a celebratory drink was offered, a toast to the finalized terms, and a handshake given to the exhausted but relieved pigeon.

  Miles scanned the cozy opulence. Where would Richard keep his personal files? The only obvious place was the credenza, kept locked, but Miles easily found the key tucked away behind the wedding picture of Clio. How quaint, Miles let himself think for a moment. The wife holds the key.

  The lock popped, exposing drawers filled with files on Aba-core, Blast Off, CranWorks, Dectron, DxPlan, the alphabet of projects that had consumed the last year of Richard’s active working life. Stuffed inside were pages of financials, handwritten edits on legal documents, brochures, notes, insurance policies, lists of key players. Miles flipped faster, snapping at each of the plastic-covered typed labels. Nothing but work, work, and more work, the evidence of Richard’s detail-oriented brain lined up in alphabetical order.

  Given more time, Miles might well have perused the contents of these business folders. They interested him, as did the notes and types of information that apparently Richard found relevant enough to keep. Miles could always learn more from the Pratt master, could pick up tips from watching him operate. He made a mental note to do just that at a later date, when each minute was not so precious. Right now Miles feared discovery by Annabelle Cabot.

  Moments later he found what he was looking for. Three folders, each slightly more worn than the next, marked “re: Clio Henshaw.” Richard apparently used his wife’s maiden name. Miles noticed with some alarm that his fingers shook ever so slightly as he opened the first folder. Bank statements. Receipts. The financial file. Nothing out of the ordinary for an affluent man on his second wife. A similarly quick glance of the second folder revealed apparent medical information, doctors’ names, insurance receipts. It was the most well-worn folder, the only one in the whole drawer with a handwritten label, that caught Miles’s attention. He tucked it under his jacket, relocked the credenza, and replaced the key behind Clio’s photograph. He pulled the doors shut behind him, returned the office key to Belle’s desk, and retreated into his own sanctuary.

  Miles jumped when the telephone rang, the distinct trill of his private line. Only a handful of people knew the number, and of those who did, few used it, preferring instead to leave messages with the efficient and charming Belle, who, Miles now noticed, had still not returned.

  “Darling? It’s Penny.” He heard the soft voice of his wife. “Did I get you at a bad time?”

  As if caught by a ubiquitous spy, he instinctively covered the folder in front of him with an annual report from the pile on his desk. “No, it’s all right.”

  “I just found out about this lecture tonight up at Barnard. Sally and I want to go.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “You’ll have to order in. I’ll leave the menu from China Garden by the kitchen phone.”

  “Okay.”

  She paused. He heard her inhale. “Are you sure you don’t mind? Your voice sounds odd.”

  “I’m sure. Have a good time.”

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  Her questions irritated him. “Yes,” he said firmly.

  Miles heard the smacking sounds of a series of kisses being transmitted through the telephone, then the click of the receiver. He replaced his.

  He pushed aside the annual report and opened the folder he had removed from Richard’s office. He ran his fingers along the yellowed edge, then opened the folder. Printed prominently in block letters on the inside flap were the words KATHERINE HENSHAW. Trembling slightly, he began to read.

  Thursday, May 28

  Beverly Winters exhaled a plume of smoke and watched it float upward, dissipating in the thick air of Dr. Fritz Prescott’s office. She leaned back against the vinyl chair, uncrossed and recrossed her legs, and tipped her long ash into the ashtray by her right knee. She avoided Dr. Prescott’s focused stare by surveying her drab surroundings, a nondescript armchair, an oak end table big enough to hold the ashtray, a box of Kleenex, and a clock, a natural-wool area rug with tassels, a long armless couch for those most troubled patients who spent their time flat on their backs, free associating. Every shrink must use the same bad decorator or shop at the same discount furniture outlet, she thought. The clock arrangement especially irritated her. Positioned with its back to her so that only Dr. Prescott could monitor the time, she was left to wonder about the minutes remaining or to check her own wristwatch, a gesture that could not go by unnoticed.

  Along one wall, bookshelves held copies of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual volumes I through IV, back issues of disease-filled periodicals, Psychiatric Annals, Journal of American Psychiatry, New England Journal of Medicine, Psychopharmacology, and books on every emotional trauma a person could suffer, titles filled with words of loss, loneliness, dependency, and dysfunction. Beverly wondered whether Dr. Prescott actually read all this material or if it was carefully selected to give the appearance of wisdom. Behind his chair hung his diplomas, a bachelor of science from Bowdoin College and a doctorate of medicine from Columbia University, impressive but not too intimidating.

  Twice a week for the last five years, Beverly waited outside in the eight-by-ten-foot entranceway, sitting in a tan upholstered armchair and staring at the white walls and two color photographs of the Cape Cod seashore, images whose every detai
l she had studied. She listened to the blurring hum of the white noise machine and read outdated popular magazines. Dr. Prescott offered People, Newsweek, and The New Yorker, all from months earlier, with pages that were curled and dog-eared. Reading old information presented as current created in Beverly an odd emotional state, an unsettling feeling of being invisible, as if her life had stopped, combined with an empowering sense of security, as if she could foresee the future. It was often in the midst of experiencing just such emotions that Dr. Prescott would open the inner door and greet her with, “We’re ready.” These words uttered in his warm tone of voice evoked the perpetual hope that inside awaited, along with the doctor, the man of her dreams lying on the armless couch in satin boxer shorts.

  Beverly participated in this ritual week after week all for the dubious pleasure of sitting uncomfortably, talking to herself, and paying a $210 fee. Highway robbery, it was. She often wondered whether her mental state would benefit more from a massage, lunch out, and a new pair of cashmere socks, roughly the equivalent in value, but somehow her answer was always no. Perhaps Dr. Prescott’s subtle message that she would crumble into a million pieces without him had infiltrated her subconscious. In any event, although she couldn’t articulate exactly why, she felt compelled to return Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week, eleven months out of every year.

  August was the exception, her mandatory break. Dr. Prescott, like every other psychiatrist on the eastern seaboard, went to Truro, a small town near the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for the month. There must be discounts on summer rentals to shrinks there, or some such enticement, but the annual psychiatric vacation reminded her of humpbacked whales, swimming from halfway around the world to return year after year to the exact same place to spawn. She imagined what those beaches of Cape Cod must be like, a pod of pale men in bathing suits and ankle socks, asking each other over and over, “If I were to kick sand in your face, how would it make you feel?” She was glad she summered in the Hamptons. Even at $210 an hour, no psychiatrist could afford it out there.

  She looked up at Dr. Prescott. He appeared the exact same every time she saw him, clad in a plaid shirt buttoned to the top, gray vest, and pressed khaki trousers. He was actually a handsome man, although she had never told him that. That was one of those issues she was supposed to address, a latent attraction to her psychiatrist, but certain things seemed too embarrassing to admit, even to him. Time hadn’t thinned his thick brown hair, which he brushed away from his prominent forehead and over the back of his scalp, or wrinkled his slightly olive complexion. His earnest face and lithe body made him ageless, or rather without a precise age; he could have been anywhere between thirty-eight and sixty.

  Dr. Prescott remained perfectly still during her sessions, apparently oblivious of fanny fatigue, backache, or the host of ailments that kept her shifting constantly in her chair. His only movement came at the end of her hour, when he removed his tortoiseshell glasses and leaned forward to check his appointment book. “So, I’ll see you on Tuesday.” Tuesday and Thursday, Tuesday and Thursday, couldn’t he remember that after five years without looking at his calendar?

  Two hundred and ten dollars, more than $18,000 a year, for her hour-long meetings that were actually only fifty minutes. Only in the surreal world of psychiatry did fifty minutes constitute an hour. Promptly at ten of, she was supposed to shut off the tears, the anger, the despair, often midsentence, and save it for the next time, a bottled emotion with a resealable cap. Beverly would be sent back out into the world, and he would have his precious ten minutes to do whatever it was shrinks do with six-hundred seconds of down time.

  “Does my smoking bother you?” Beverly asked. She had never before inquired whether he minded her persistent stream of cigarettes.

  “Why do you ask?” Dr. Prescott’s long body seemed glued to his ergonomically designed chair with head- and footrests.

  “It just occurred to me you might be too polite to say it bothered you.”

  “And how would that make you feel?”

  There it was. The typical shrink answer. Never mind, she thought. She did not intend to let an issue of manners become a focus of analysis. She sat silent, realizing how tired she was. Whatever minuscule benefit of insight she might glean into her own psyche by answering his question didn’t seem worth the effort of trying to understand the varying degrees of her own emotional temperature.

  “Last time, we were discussing an experience you had over Memorial Day,” Dr. Prescott prompted.

  We weren’t discussing anything, Beverly thought, I was talking, and you were sitting there. She wondered whether, in fact, Dr. Prescott even listened to her or if he affected a pensive stare while he thought about whether his vest was too worn, whether he had consumed too many calories in his morning muffin, or whether he could afford a new Toyota Camry with leather interior. That was the thing about psychiatrists. They packaged a pretense of care in a posture of compassion. How could she ever know if it was sincere?

  Beverly checked herself. Hostility, the dragon of emotion spewing fire across the landscape of her conscience, she knew all too well.

  “I’m feeling irritated today.” She looked at Dr. Prescott. He didn’t move, only raised his eyebrows slightly, as passive a silent gesture as possible. This was the process. Under his guidance, she supposedly led herself into self-awareness. She closed her eyes. “Irritated’s the wrong word. I’m angry, still angry.” She took a long drag of her cigarette and felt the smoke burn in her lungs. Semantics in this therapy business seemed to make such a huge difference, but even that angered her. She didn’t feel like being so precise in the classification of her emotions. Frustration, irritation, humiliation, anger, and rage could all be muddled together in a general feeling of angst and displeasure, like undigested pizza crust balled in her stomach.

  “I haven’t done anything to Clio Pratt. I was perfectly pleasant at the Von Fursts’ cocktail party, and she went out of her way to be a bitch. Snide comments. I saw the way she looked at me, the conspiratorial smirk of disgust she shared with Jack. Does she think I’m too dumb, or too drunk, to notice?” Alcohol consumption during the cocktail party thrown by Jack and Constance Von Furst at their home in Southampton had not blurred Beverly’s memory of her encounter with Clio Pratt one week earlier. That Clio could circulate the rumor that Beverly drove her husband to suicide was ludicrous, worse than ludicrous, cruel, deliberately and unequivocally cruel, the worst kind of gossip because it hurt so much. Whom had Clio told? Clio and Valerie were little more than passing acquaintances. If Clio had actually told Valerie herself, Clio was on a mission to publicize her theory to a general audience.

  Beverly had tried not to let the evening get to her, but as the days passed, Clio’s comments festered. None of the insults, carefully disguised as sociable conversation, alone would matter much, but collectively the innuendos and pointed remarks were designed to make Beverly look as bad as possible in front of their gracious host. Beverly suspected that they succeeded. Although she’d been invited to the Von Fursts’ Memorial Day cocktail party, the engraved invitation came with no handwritten note such as she had received in the past, a Can’t wait to see you, or Won’t it be fun? tucked in the corner in Constance’s rounded script. No, this year Beverly had been just another of their guests, probably several hundred in all, who received the formal ivory card with navy blue inscription. Constance Von Furst had not called her in months and had barely acknowledged her presence last weekend.

  How did that make you feel? She could just hear Dr. Prescott’s words before he even opened his mouth. “It made me so mad,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “What does she know of what I’ve been through?” Beverly could feel tears well up in her eyes and reached for a tissue. “What does anyone really know about someone else’s marriage?” Her questions were rhetorical. She knew that Dr. Prescott would not respond.

  Beverly never doubted that she had once loved Dudley. She loved his slightly naughty sense of humor, his st
adium-size smile, and, more than anything, his gentleness, his gentle voice, gentle manner, gentle touch. During the early years of their more than twenty-five years as man and wife, she couldn’t have asked for more. He hadn’t been handsome, but his lean body and long arms held her safe. He hadn’t been wildly successful, but he earned a decent living, and so what if she drove a Ford Taurus instead of a Mercedes? She had never felt deprived. Dudley read the Sunday Times, could follow virtually any conversation, and managed to hold his own in a tough crowd by charm and a quick wit. So what if he wasn’t an intellectual? Neither was she.

  How that all changed, she had never figured out. His emphysema came later. The debilitation of their marriage was well under way by the time he got sick.

  Beverly traced the origins of their marital difficulties to Deirdre’s leaving home, but obviously something else had been going on, slowly rotting the fabric of their relationship, or their daughter’s departure would never have triggered the animosity it did. Dudley insisted that Deirdre go away to boarding school and gave her the limited choice of Miss Porter’s or Garrison Forest, both schools for girls and both too far away. For reasons Beverly never understood, Deirdre directed her rage at her mother, not her father, who had issued the mandate. She refused to speak to Beverly, except to chastise her for lacking maternal instinct and to accuse her of attempting to exterminate children from her household. When Deirdre returned home for school vacations, her animus was worse than ever, infecting the aura of the Winterses’ home. Defiant, hostile, Deirdre disobeyed her mother and ignored her father. Beverly, in turn, began to despise the man who had ruined their family.

  Of course, Dr. Prescott over the years had helped her to understand that this grossly simplified version of events was just that, a gross simplification. There had been problems. Beverly had been jealous of Dudley’s affection for his daughter. A part of Beverly had wanted Deirdre to leave them alone. At the same time, Beverly grew bored by the empty household and longed for her daughter’s return. Waiting for Dudley to come home each evening, study the mail as if it held the secret to the hydrogen bomb, and pour himself a Scotch on the rocks lost its appeal. The magic of folding Brooks Brothers boxer shorts, ironing linen handkerchiefs, and keeping up with their social correspondence wore thin. Even participation in the lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and weekly yoga classes weren’t enough to rejuvenate her interest in their life.