In His Father's Footsteps

by Danielle Steel

  When the time came, they gave her an epidural which slowed things down for a while, but at seven in the morning, they told her they were going to do the C-section, they couldn’t wait. The baby was in distress, and so was she. She was waiting for them to roll her away, when the door to her room opened and Max walked in, looking harried and exhausted, and enormously relieved when he saw her in the bed. Her enormous belly was still in evidence, with monitors recording the contractions. She smiled the minute she saw him.

  “You made it! How did you get here in time, all the way from Texas?”

  “I think I just bought a plane. A crop duster or something. We landed at Teterboro. I love you, baby. I came as fast as I could.” She nodded with tears in her eyes, and they came to take her away at that moment. The doctor told him what was happening, and said they’d be back in a few minutes once the baby was born. Julie was going to be awake for this one, since she already had an epidural in place, and then her doctor asked Max if he wanted to come with them and he said he did. They threw him a set of surgical pajamas, a mask, a cap, and paper booties for his shoes. He dressed in the bathroom of her room, and walked beside her as they wheeled her into surgery, he was holding her hand and she was squeezing his. She couldn’t feel the contractions with the epidural, but the monitor showed that they were huge.

  They put a drape up so she and Max couldn’t see the surgery and told him to stand at her head. Everything moved quickly after that, two pediatricians from the nursery showed up, the labor and surgical nurses were there. They started the surgery without telling her, and she could feel them pulling at her but nothing more, and while Max was talking to her to distract her, they heard a cry, and their baby had been born.

  “Is it a boy?” Max called over the drape and the doctor laughed.

  “No, it’s a lovely little girl. Congratulations, Mom and Dad.” Max tried not to look disappointed and there were tears rolling down Julie’s cheeks, and she wasn’t even sure why. She didn’t know if she was happy or sad, or what she felt. She had three daughters now, just like her own mother. But she had been such a good mother, and Julie had no idea how to be that. She felt overwhelmed as Max bent to kiss her and told her he didn’t care if it was a girl. He was just happy it was a healthy baby.

  They gave her something to make her sleepy after the surgery. They sewed her up, and she woke up in her room, with Max sitting by her bed. He was looking at her intensely and holding her hand. And he could see how sad she was, but he had no idea how overwhelmed she felt.

  “I know I cut it too close this time, and I’ve been a shit husband. I’m trying to build something, Julie, for all of us, for our children and their children, so we never have to worry.” He tried to explain it to her.

  “You already did,” she said in a whisper. “Don’t we have enough?” But in his mind they never would. He wanted them to be secure forever, and he wasn’t there yet. He had given himself until fifty to make all the money he could, and then he would slow down. He was forty-two years old, and had seven or eight years of intense work ahead of him. He couldn’t stop now.

  “I promise I’ll be better, and I’ll try to be home more. I mean it, Julie.” She knew he did, but it was a promise he was never going to keep. He didn’t know how, any more than she knew how to be a mother. “I want to spend more time with you and our kids.” She nodded and went back to sleep.

  They named the baby Daisy, and when they took her home five days later, the nannies and Hélène and Kendra had made signs and put up streamers and balloons to welcome their mother and baby sister. They were excited to see them both. Julie had the nannies take the baby to the nursery, and she went to bed. She felt depressed and overwhelmed. Max had been planning to be at home with them, but he had left for Houston the day before. They’d had a fire on an oil rig, and he had to be there. And there was a crisis in Wichita. Nothing had changed, and she knew it never would. The only thing different was that she had one more daughter now. She took a pill and went to sleep. She could hear children laughing in the hall as she drifted off, and wondered whose children they were.

  Chapter 14

  Daisy’s birth was different from that of her two older sisters. Julie took a long time to recover from her second Caesarean, and she appeared to be suffering from some form of postpartum depression for the first three months. Whenever Emmanuelle visited the children, Julie was locked up in her bedroom, either with a “headache” or supposedly asleep. And it worried her mother-in-law. But once she finally recovered, she was off and running again. Emmanuelle hadn’t laid eyes on her daughter-in-law in months, and Max was traveling constantly. Julie had been in the social columns without him a few times, at big charity events. Emmanuelle wasn’t sure if there were problems in their marriage or not. But whatever was happening, her son was not being attentive to his family, and his wife was spending no time with her children, even less so since Daisy was born. She was a sunny, happy baby, and squealed with delight every time her grandmother came to visit.

  After talking to Jakob about it at length, she finally convinced him to have lunch with Max and give him some fatherly advice. Daisy was six months old by then, and Emmanuelle saw the four nannies when she visited the children far more frequently than she glimpsed their mother. Their home was like a rudderless ship without the visible presence of parents with the three children. And Jakob didn’t disagree with her. He called Max when he knew he was back in town, and invited him to lunch at the Four Seasons. He thought he might relax and open up more in a nice restaurant.

  Max was looking tired and stressed and had lost weight. And the first thing he did when he sat down was order a martini. His father had noticed that he was drinking more the last few times he’d seen him, and he was concerned about that too. Max had never been a heavy drinker. But he did a lot of business deals over lunch, and most likely the men he did business with liked to have a drink or two. But Jakob didn’t think it was a good sign that he ordered one while having lunch with his father. Max was clearly under a lot of pressure to keep all the balls in the air. He had created an empire.

  While they waited to order lunch, Max said that he had a big oil deal in Texas that had just gone sour, and he’d lost some money on a bad land buy in Oklahoma. Someone had beat them to the punch and opened a bigger, better mall too close to the one they were building. Their market research had been inadequate. They’d scrapped the deal and he was trying to sell the land now.

  “You probably can afford the loss,” Jakob said quietly. “Is it all worth it, Max? No one needs that much money.”

  “Maybe I do,” he said after they ordered, and he asked for a second martini, which didn’t please his father either. “Isn’t that what you taught me, Dad?” Max asked with an edge to his voice that had never been there before. “Didn’t you and Mom teach me that there’s never enough money, and you have to keep putting it away for a rainy day, or a war, or a Holocaust, or whatever comes?”

  “It didn’t rain that much for Noah’s ark, if what I read about you in Fortune is true. You must have enough now to feel safe, and to keep your family secure.”

  “When did you ever feel safe?” Max asked him, and Jakob hesitated.

  “That’s different. We lived through a war. We lost everything. That’s never going to happen to you. There’s no war coming, Max. Your family needs you. You have a beautiful young wife who must be lonely without you. And your children will grow up faster than you think. Don’t miss that. You’ll regret it later.” Max looked pensive, and his father didn’t comment when he finished his second drink. His son was a forty-three-year-old man, and had a right to live the way he wanted, he just didn’t want something bad to happen to him.

  “I’m going to lose a fair amount of money on those two deals in Texas and Oklahoma,” and whenever that happened, which wasn’t often, it always scared him. What if everything started sliding? He remembered his mother’s warnings when he was you
ng. His parents had always been worried about money.

  “You’ll weather it,” his father said quietly. “You need to slow down a little, son, before you lose something more important.”

  “I just want to shore up these two deals, or compensate for them.” He was like a gambler at the gaming table, unable to tear himself away. “I’ve given myself till I’m fifty, Dad. After that I’ll slow down.” He had said the same thing to Julie when Daisy was born.

  “You’ll miss a lot of time with Julie and the kids in the meantime,” Jakob said seriously. “That’s seven years away.”

  “She’s got the home base covered,” Max said confidently, and Jakob realized that Max had no idea that wasn’t true. Julie had nothing covered, except her lunches with other women, and the charity events she organized. She spent as little time at home with their children as he did. Max just didn’t know it. He wondered how you could live in the same house with a woman and know so little about her. She’d begun to look unhappy to Max’s parents over the last few years. But Max was so busy flying around, he hadn’t seen it.

  They talked about other things then, some investments Jakob had made, a trip he and Emmanuelle were planning to take. Jakob was turning seventy and they were talking about taking part of a cruise around the world. It was hard to believe he’d been retired for fifteen years. Time went by so quickly. And Emmanuelle didn’t want to be away from her granddaughters for too long, she was enjoying them immensely.

  Max thought his father looked tired too. The travel they did frequently now was fun for them, but he’d gotten sick on the last trip. For the first time, the cruise had worn him out more than energized him. His time in the camp had taxed his health, and recently, Max thought Jakob looked older than his years. There was no telling what five years of starvation and beatings would do to you long term. He worried about both of them, although his mother seemed sturdier again. They took good care of each other, and always had. He was well aware that his parents were extraordinary people. He would have liked to have a relationship with Julie more like theirs, but he suspected that that kind of bond only came out of adversity, and not normal times. He couldn’t envision Julie being able to survive what they had been through, or himself for that matter. He didn’t have their fortitude either. He had creativity and ingenuity and courage in the business world, but that was far different from what they’d experienced. He had great respect for them because of it, no matter what quirks and fears it had left them with. In spite of their history, they were sane, strong, rational, honorable, kind people, and had always been a good role model for him. And nothing in their life had made them bitter, despite the war.

  At the end of lunch, Max looked more relaxed and smiled at his father across the table. “Thanks, Dad, for the good advice. Did Mom put you up to this?”

  “Not really. She worries about you, but I wanted to talk to you too. Life goes by so fast. I don’t want you to miss any of the good parts, like with Julie and your kids. In the end, that’s all that matters. The rest is nice, but it’s less important.” Max nodded, listening to him, and knew he was right, but he still wanted to give himself until he was fifty to continue building his fortune. He’d had a meteoric rise so far, and he knew he could spend more time with Julie and the girls, and should, but not yet.

  “I’ll try to ease up on the drinking too.” His father hadn’t mentioned it, but Max had seen his eyes when he ordered the second martini.

  “Don’t live by what we were afraid of, Max. There were reasons for our fears. You have to lead your own life. Just don’t lose sight of what’s important. Life can change in an instant. You never want to have regrets about what you didn’t do.”

  “Do you have regrets?” Max had never asked him that before, and his father thought about it for a moment.

  “Not really. I should have forced your mother to have more fun. But she was afraid to. We’ve made up for it in the last few years, she loves our cruises. And we probably should have had another child so everything wasn’t focused on you. That can’t have been easy for you.”

  “Sometimes it wasn’t,” he said honestly. “But you came out of what you lived through remarkably. I don’t know how you did it.”

  “Neither do I,” Jakob said quietly, “but we were lucky, we had each other. I’m not sure I would have survived it without her.” They were both quiet for a moment, and then Max looked at his watch. He had a meeting in his office in twenty minutes, but he’d enjoyed the time with his father.

  “We should do this more often, Dad,” he said, smiling, as they left the restaurant. And his father had insisted on paying for lunch. It had been a special moment, and Max thought about what his father had said in the cab on the way back to his office. He wanted to go home and spend time with Julie that night, and put his arms around her. But at five o’clock he got a call. There was a deal he’d been trying to make in Chicago, and they wanted to see him that night. He hesitated for a moment, and then decided to do it. He called Julie and told her, left for the airport straight from work, and caught a seven o’clock flight to O’Hare. It wasn’t what his father would have wanted him to do. But he had to do it. One more time. He could spend time with Julie and the girls that weekend.

  Max flew from Chicago to LA, and was back in New York three days later, in time for the weekend. He had just walked in the door when Julie turned to him with a strange expression. He hadn’t even had time to kiss her.

  “Your mother just called,” she said seriously, “your father’s in the hospital. Something happened this afternoon. They think he had a heart attack. He’s at NYU hospital.” He went straight to the phone and called the emergency room, and they said his father was in cardiac ICU. He tried to speak to his mother, but she was with him and couldn’t come to the phone. He looked at Julie in a panic.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be back.” He was already halfway to the door.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” she called after him, and he hesitated for a moment and shook his head. He really didn’t. He wanted to be alone with his parents. Julie had never been close to them, even after ten years of marriage to their son.

  “Stay here with the girls. I’ll call you,” and then he was gone again and drove to the city as quickly as he could. He thought about his last lunch with his father on his way into town and everything he’d said. When he got to the hospital, he rushed to cardiac ICU. His father was hooked up to monitors, his eyes were closed and he looked gray, and Emmanuelle was standing beside him, holding his hand. Jakob didn’t look like he was conscious, but he opened his eyes when Max walked into the room and nodded. He smiled almost imperceptibly and then closed his eyes again.

  They tiptoed out of the room then so they could talk for a few minutes, a nurse was with him.

  “What happened?” Max asked her.

  “I don’t know. We went to buy groceries, we were talking, and suddenly he just stopped and fell to the ground, unconscious. The paramedics came, and they put him in the ambulance. They said it was his heart, it stopped twice on the way to the hospital and they defibrillated him,” she said, she was out of breath and looked deathly pale herself. She was sixty-eight years old, but she was a strong woman, and Max had always admired her for it. “His heart stopped again after we got here.” He’d had heart problems before, not severe ones and not recently, but his health had suffered from years of hardship and malnutrition, just as hers had. But they’d always gotten through whatever happened to them, and he had thought they always would. It had never occurred to him that one of them might die, or get sick. He had expected them to be there forever. He counted on them.

  They went back to Jakob’s room then, and stood next to him. He opened his eyes and looked at his wife, she bent down and kissed him, and he smiled, and then he looked at Max again, closed his eyes, and sighed. He looked strangely peaceful, and as they watched him, Max suddenly realized he had stopped breathin
g. An alarm sounded and a team of doctors and nurses rushed in to defibrillate him again. They pounded on his chest, massaged his heart, gave him a shot, and performed CPR. Nothing happened. His time had come. It was over. Somewhere it was written how long his life would be, and he had reached it. He was too young to die, but apparently not after all he’d been through.

  Emmanuelle stood silently by, holding her son’s hand as they worked on Jakob, but she knew. She could see it. She had seen death so many times before, although not recently. His spirit had flown. Emmanuelle looked devastated when the team stopped working on him. She bent and tenderly kissed her husband, and she and Max quietly left the room. Max put an arm around her shoulders to support her, but he found himself sobbing in her arms, like the child he had once been. It was she who supported him now, just as she had his father. They had been married for forty-five years, and hardly separated for a moment. They had shared every possible experience with each other, and had given each other strength and hope and the will to live in a death camp. They had the kind of love few people ever know.

  “It was his time,” she said gently as she and Max held each other. She didn’t argue with it or fight or rail against it. She understood it, and he had gone peacefully. They went back into the room when the doctors had left, and stood on either side of Jakob’s bed. But he was gone now. He looked as if he were sleeping. She bent to kiss him for a last time, and then she left the room, her back straight, her head high, and Max walked beside her. Somehow she knew that this was right and meant to be. It was Max who couldn’t accept it, who didn’t want to lose the father he had loved so much. They went back to his parents’ apartment, and neither of them slept that night. And in the morning, Max called the funeral parlor to make the arrangements. And then he remembered to call Julie and told her what had happened. She told him how sorry she was. She had lost her own father and knew what it felt like. He had died quickly of cancer a few years before and Max had been there for her. She wanted to do the same for him now, but he wasn’t reaching out to her. She said she’d tell the girls when they got up, and then Max went back to his mother. She was sitting at Jakob’s desk, and had pulled out a photograph of them on the day they were married, before they sailed for the States. They both looked like skeletons, and their heads were still shorn, but they looked so happy. They were smiling and their eyes were vibrant and full of joy. She was carrying a tiny nosegay of white flowers, and they were holding hands standing beside the Army chaplain who had just married them.