by Nancy Adams
“I deserve to know. I’m not deluded. My father has made no secret that he wasn’t always wholesome. He even talked about you. Told me that he’d done several bad deals with you that had hurt a lot of people.”
“I hope he didn’t go into too many details, otherwise he’d only have to include himself in it all.”
“No, not many details. Just that you were all immoral, vacant assholes with nothing more than your power and money to prop you up.” She made me laugh a little here. I’d never heard her curse before. “He told me that without your prestige, you’d all shrivel up and die.”
“Then you know why you must finish with my son,” he snapped back at her.
“You have no right to ask that of her,” I put to him, my hands still firmly planted to the table, standing completely upright and out of my chair now.
“I have every right,” he put back to me, his eyes still trained on Sarah, her own look not breaking from his for a second.
“Tell me what my father has done that’s so bad you have to be so cruel,” she demanded of him.
“You really want to know?” he asked her.
“You owe me that,” she rebuked.
“Then don’t say I didn’t warn you. Sarah, my dear, your father did the worst thing any man can do to a friend; he had an affair with my wife.”
“My gosh!” Sarah cried softly, her hand raised instantly to her mouth, tears dripping incessantly now.
I too felt the impact of this latest bullet of my father’s.
“Are you saying,” I began in an incredulous tone, my face contorted into a likewise expression, “that Mom had an affair?”
“Yes. For five years, she and Roy Dillinger had an affair. And for seven years after her death I knew nothing about it. The son of a bitch even put his arm around my shoulder and cried with me at her funeral. Stood by her grave and told me that if there was anything he could do, I only had to ask. I loved your father for that then, Sarah. But later—when I knew—I hated him for it more than any man should ever have to hate.”
“But what proof do you have?” I asked, Sarah too much in shock to make her own enquiries.
Not looking away from Sarah, he answered, “Moira, your mother, finally told me. Now whatever you may think, I always respected your mother. There was a goodness to her that is sadly lacking among our class. Anyway, it was she that told me. Hell! She told everyone, as a matter of fact. One night, not long before she died, your father was putting on a cocktail party for some of our closest friends, and she was in bed, her transplant having only come a month before. We were all enjoying the evening, your father as charming as usual, when she came out to the landing and shouted down at us from the banister. She was drunk, which many of us found absurd for someone in her condition, and told us that we were all vacuous fools. That we’d sacrificed eternity in paradise for a few fleeting seconds of it here on earth. She always loved a bit of Christian mysticism, your mother. Anyway, she said that we’d all be burning in the lava of our sins soon enough.”
Tears were now running down Sarah’s face, and I felt the need to ask my father to stop.
“It’s okay,” Sarah said, shining her melancholy eyes on me for a second and waving her hand. “Let him go on. I want—I need to know.”
“Well,” my father continued, my eyes now burning and pointed straight at him, Holman’s on me, “Roy rushed upstairs to put her back to bed, and we all expressed our sympathies to him and her as he scuttled off. But before he could reach the raving Moira, she pointed down at me and said, ‘You, Andrew Kelly, you who’ve tasted the blood of the Devil, sharing the cup with my husband, how well do you know your life? Because it’s not just Satan’s cup that you’ve been sharing with him.’ I had no idea what she meant, until she continued. ‘For five years till her death,’ your mother poured down on me, ‘you shared your wife. You shared Julia.’ I was shocked and didn’t know what to say. Then she went further and began telling other men in the room about Roy’s illicit affairs with their wives, even mentioning business associates of ours who weren’t with us that night, your father trying to drag her off to bed the whole time. We couldn’t believe it and dismissed her at first. That was until many of the men in that room with me began seeing the guilty looks in their wives’ eyes. Slowly it began to dawn on us that Roy Dillinger hadn’t just been making fools out of the law these past years; he’d been making them out of us as well.”
“Not Daddy,” Sarah muttered, holding her hands to her face, a cascade of tears dripping relentlessly from her emeralds.
“Dad, please, stop,” I pleaded in an angered tone.
“She wanted to hear why I can’t have her anywhere near me,” he said in a blank tone, gazing into her eyes. “You see, it’s the eyes, Sarah. Your eyes remind me of Moira’s. Remind me of her green eyes that night as they rained down on me while she opened up our lives with a knife.”
“But Dad’s better now, he’s changed,” Sarah mumbled in such a way that I got the impression she’d said this more for her own benefit than for anything else. “He’s changed.”
“Ah! of course, his big change,” my father cried out mirthfully. “Well, I’m afraid that’s just another piece of prime Roy Dillinger bullshit. Because, Sarah, your father didn’t make any kind of Christlike decision to give up all his property and evil ways after his poor wife died. The way he fucked about behind her back tells you all you need to know about his respect for your poor mother. No, this ‘change’ bull is a concoction he’s told you and your sisters in order to shelter you from the awful truth. The only reason your father gave up his supposed evil ways was because he was forced to. You see, after you’ve fucked so many powerful men’s wives behind their backs, there’s no amount of prestige in the world that can save you. He didn’t give it all up out of some redemption spurred on by the passing of his beloved. He did it because we took it all from him.”
“I have to leave,” Sarah cried out, and my heart wrenched for her.
She got up from her chair and looked about herself, her face giving me the impression that she’d suddenly forgotten where she was.
“That’s good,” my father put to her. “Save my son and leave this place, never to return. Your father will tell you what it’s like to one day lose everything because of a stupid mistake. Don’t make Josh lose the same because of a Dillinger.”
Having been on the crest of leaving, Sarah remained stock-still, her features still retaining that look of uncertainty. It was as if an inner curiosity impelled her to stay and subject her ears to more of my father’s scorn.
“We took everything from good old Roy,” he was ranting on, a terrible, wrathful vitality in him now. “He begged us not to, tried to apologize, tried to pacify us with lamentations, almost got on his fucking knees, pleaded for us not to ruin him. But men don’t take kindly to their wives being fucked by other men. Hell, he’s lucky that he still walks the streets. A lot of those men wanted him killed. But that would have been awkward and too dangerous. No. It was better to let him walk the earth with very little than not at all. I said at the time that death would be too good for him, better to let him suffer. And yes, he has his girls, his okay house in its okay suburb. He’s got his shitty little practice, and I guess he has a lot more than most. But, still, when you’ve tasted the very top and enjoyed it—and Roy was standing at the peak of a mountain and, yes, he very much enjoyed it—when that’s happened and you’re dropped back down on your ass, even a middle-income life in the suburbs must feel like living on a fucking trash heap.”
Throughout Dad’s toxic speech, my anger had boiled to unheard-of temperatures. The look of complete desolation that hung from Sarah’s face made me hate his own sneering look in comparison. Without knowing what I was doing, I rushed across the table and smashed him right across the cheek with my fist, knocking him back off his chair. As I pushed forward to get on top of him, wanting to rain more blows down upon him, I was stopped by the quick movements of Holman, who somehow had me twisted with
my arm behind my back before I ventured another foot after the initial knock. With an effortless zeal, he sent me sailing through the air and crashing against the wall, where I lay in a crumbled heap at its foot. I began to rustily get up.
“Stay down, kid,” Holman stated in a hushed tone, standing over me, his face stern except for his eyes, which held their usual secret benevolence. “I can see in your eyes you wanna. But, please, for your own sake, stay on the floor.”
Behind him, my father was getting up, wiping blood from a cut on the cheek that I’d inflicted.
“You take his fucking side,” I spat up at Holman.
“He’s the boss, kid. Always has been, always will be.”
I hated him then. He was just like Holmes, a robot slave obeying master’s commands. All the ice creams, all the fishing, all the talks, treehouses, museums, covenants, and secrets against my father dissolved in me. With the kick of this hate, I attempted to spring back to my feet, but a lightning punch from Holman instantly struck my ribs and I fell pitifully back to the floor, completely winded.
“You’d attack me—your own father—over her,” Dad cried as he retook his seat, his hand held to his bleeding cheek. “You’ve known her, what, not even two months?” He then swung his head around and vented his spleen back on Sarah, who was standing frozen, gazing down at me, her head obviously a complete mess. “Let us recap, Miss Dillinger,” he hurled at her. “Your father went through his ‘great change’ because we ran him out of town. We had all his accounts frozen and had Dillinger-Mitchell cancel his partnership, which was pretty easy when you consider that he was sleeping with the daughter of one of his senior partners. We even kept his name on the practice to remind him forever of what he once had. He didn’t leave of his own free will. He never even gave up the money to the IRS, which I suppose he told you—it’s what I hear he tells people. No, we reported him to some friends of ours in the IRS and had him forced into giving it all up. He traded the last of his millions so that he would be spared jail time and could keep his law license. Tell me, Sarah, when you look into your father’s eyes, does he look sad?”
She was practically paralyzed and said nothing. I was still breathless and couldn’t back her up. So my father had the stage all to himself.
“Did you foolishly think that it was your mother that he mourned in those sad eyes of his?” he went on. “Did you think that she was the source of his sadness? Well, I’m afraid you were wrong. It was his past life of luxury that he mourns. Roy Dillinger mourns money, prestige, and power. But he’ll never get it back. And that is what he mourns more than anything else.”
“I have to leave,” Sarah let out for a second time.
This time, however, her functions were restored and she ran from the room. When I could, I got up, Holman remaining between myself and my father.
“I choose her,” I said firmly into my father’s face.
He limply waved me away with his hand and didn’t give me a second look. Then I left, smacking away Holman’s hand as he went to lay it on my elbow to escort me out.
“You’ll fucking rot out there,” my father screamed after me once I was in the corridor heading for the elevator. “And I won’t be able to smell it from all the way up here. You’ll stink, but I won’t smell it.”
Holman walked me all the way to the elevator, where I was met by the two doormen.
“I’m afraid, Josh,” the first of the burly fellas said, “that we’re required to search you and remove all jewelry, cash, credit and bank cards, as well as anything else. Everything except clothing basically.”
I began removing first my Rolex, a present from father, an inscription from him on its back. The moment it was off my wrist, I threw it straight onto the floor as the guy reached his hand out for it, and stamped it into the carpet with my foot, crushing it completely.
“Behave, kid,” Holman growled.
Apart from a gold ring with a topaz in the center, I had no other jewelry. Then my wallet was taken, and they even removed the few dollars of change I had in my pocket. My phone and the keys to the Jag were also taken from me before I was patted down, in case I left the place with anything else. Once this piece of discourtesy was finished, the elevator doors opened their arms to me, the mirrored box embracing me into it for the start of the rest of my life, wherever that may lead. I knew nothing of what lay ahead in the next weeks, months, or years of my new existence, the future black and sightless. The only thing I knew now with any certainty was that my path would follow Sarah.
“Kid,” Holman said as I stepped into the elevator, “you’re making a huge mistake.”
Once I was inside, I turned around so that I faced him and, as the doors closed on us forever, I said, “Fuck off.”
SARAH
I spilled out onto the street and looked up and down, my head a mass of windswept debris, thoughts colliding into each other. Having been so very good these past days, my legs began to ache and I wished to sit down somewhere. Or better, to lie down. I wished to find some shaded spot, curl up like a slumbering dog, and sleep this whole mess away. My world had just been shattered—my entire existence since the age of ten, for that matter. What was I to think of it all? My father a serial cheat, a serial womanizer, a serial liar? Had everything been nothing but a dream? Andrew’s tales of my father’s infidelities, his doing so with the wives of friends and associates, so risky and so damaging in the end—none of it felt like my dad at all. These past years I’d never known him to be with a single woman, let alone the harem that his apparent former tastes required. In some ways, I still believed in his change; he went to church, he had raised myself and my sisters as good Christians, his charity work, his commitment to the poor, the sincerity in his voice when he spoke of his shame at his previous life. None of this could have simply been for the benefit of falsehood, could it? There had to have been a change, but obviously not for the same reasons as he’d always told us. And did he miss the power, as Andrew so assuredly put? All I knew for sure was that I had to get back to him. I needed answers.
Just as I’d made my decision on which direction down the sidewalk I would go before hailing a cab, I heard Josh cry out from behind me. I turned to him and saw him jogging his way down the street toward me.
“You should go back” was the first thing I said to him when he reached me.
“No way. I’ve chosen you.”
“But you’ll lose everything.”
“Not anything that matters,” he put back to me, taking my hands in his own and gazing deep into my melancholy eyes. “I’ll lose comfort, but if I go back in there, I’ll lose the only thing that truly matters to me: you.”
“Oh! Josh,” I exclaimed, lurching forward and taking him in my arms, crying into his shoulder.
We stayed like that for some time on the sidewalk, people wandering past, oblivious to the pain and love that held us in that moment as we held each other, strangers passing completely outside of our sphere of utter emotion. Gently parting, our hands retook their former positions, fingers entwined, eyes cast into the other’s, the space between us a part of us.
“You still have to go back,” I said half-heartedly.
“Never. What can he take from me that I’ll ever need except you?”
Through the curtain of my tears, a sunbeam appeared on the horizon of my lips.
“But you can’t give up everything for me. Your father’s right; we’ve known each other barely two months.”
“And never has two months felt so liberating.”
“What about my father? He had an affair with your mother.”
“I barely knew my mother, but I know my father. I’m sure she was unhappy with him, and if your father at least gave her some comfort in her life, then it matters very little what happened twenty-three years ago.”
“You’ve forgiven him?”
“I’m not my father. I can’t see how, knowing so little, I could accuse your father of anything more than making my own father look a fool. And in this momen
t—when I hate him so much—I’m glad that someone managed to do that to him at least once in his life.”
“Don’t hate your father, Josh,” I put to him. “He’s still your dad.”
“Do you hate yours?” he suddenly asked.
I had to think about this. I was confused by all the mixed emotions that ran through me at the moment. I have to admit that one of them was anger. But hate? No, I couldn’t hate my father. I simply wanted his side of things. I wanted him to come clean with me. It was clear that there was more to my father’s antagonism toward Josh; he hadn’t wanted any of this to reach my ears. Thinking this, I was suddenly drawn back to my flashback of my parents arguing in the wardrobe. That must have been why—because my father was cheating on my mother. I needed to know why he’d lived that way, and why now he’d stopped.
“No, I don't hate him,” I announced.
Josh looked deep into my eyes and grinned brightly.
“You’re not lying either,” he remarked.
“I can’t—apparently.”
He took me once again in his arms, and we held on, sinking together for a moment.
“So what now?” I whispered into his ear as we embraced.
“Well, what you see is what you have. Nothing but the clothes on my back, exactly how it had been stipulated to me so many times by Holman and Dad.”
“Could you perhaps stay at Charlie’s? Because I don’t think my dad’s gonna allow you to stay at ours.”
“No no, Charlie’s for sure. Back at your place would be way too awkward.”
“But what about the future, Josh?”
“I really don’t know. Charlie’s for now. I’m sure Mrs. H. will be cool with it. They’ve got a nice big couch. I’ll see if I can get my books from Dad’s. I’m sure he won’t give me any clothes or things like that, but he’ll surely let me have my books, and then I can study. College starts in less than two months, so I’ll try to get myself a job and rent a place. Maybe they’ll let me take a student loan, and I’ll live on that.”