Bradstreet Gate: A Novel

by Robin Kirman

  The last thing Charlie wished, at any rate, was to have her learn about the storm he was facing now. Even before the accusations, even in the days when Triathlon was a media darling, he’d been disconcerted by the thought of his parents reading about his company, the sizes of the contracts that were mentioned, numbers sure to make his father fume. Possibly that was why his mother kept herself in ignorance, or maybe his professional life was simply not her great concern.

  “I know you’re working hard, but are you also having a good time out there?” she asked him. “Are you seeing anyone?”

  “Still Melissa.”

  His mother gave no sign of recognition.

  “Melissa. It’s been three years.”

  “Three years? With the same girl?”

  Was his mother’s memory starting to fail her? She was too young for that, but people with little to keep them occupied, people who found more use in shutting out thoughts than staying sharp, could deteriorate early. He ought to be keeping better track of her; he ought to dedicate more time.

  At least they might have this day together. He had the impulse to take his mother up to Harvard with him. “That restaurant we went to at graduation—you liked it, remember? When I’m through, we could have dinner there again.”

  But as soon as he’d asked, he knew that it would be impossible for her to agree. His father must be awaiting her at home; he probably had no idea she’d gone to meet her youngest son.

  For two years now, he and his father hadn’t been on speaking terms. That blowup Charlie had spent his youth avoiding had finally erupted, just after he’d received word from his mother that Luke was reenlisting. The next day, he’d given his brother a call and tried to convince him to back out. “Join me, help me instead. You’ll make more difference in this war and, really, I could use your input as someone who’s been there, on the ground.”

  Luke had promised to get back to him, but it was their father who dialed Charlie up instead.

  “Your brother won’t be bribed.”

  “Sorry, is this about you? You want to get yourself killed, I won’t try to stop you.”

  “You know what your trouble is, Charlie?” His father’s voice was thicker than he remembered it—from age and added pounds and pent-up bile. “You sit in your office and you think you’re better than a soldier, that you’re doing more for this country—Luke told me what you said. Well, let me tell you, courage and sacrifice don’t have a thing to do with it. I know it and Luke knows it, too. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out: want to know if you’re in it for yourself? Check your wallet.”

  Useless to even try, Charlie had realized: he had no say in family matters anymore, had been too distant for too long. For a decade he’d let his father poison Luke against him. By now, only his mother cared to sustain any relationship with him, and he’d just managed to make this harder for her: obliging her to take his calls on the sly, and to pretend the situation at home wasn’t as soured as it was.

  Brightly, his mother turned to him, shifting her weight on the sharp rocks: “I don’t think I can get away today. But you should come back soon, and bring her too, Melissa, you said?”

  “If it gets to that point.”

  “You mean to say it hasn’t already, in three years?”

  A legitimate objection: this was a long time to invest in anything, business or personal, without something to show for it.

  “How old is this girl?”

  “The same as me.” No longer a girl, in other words, just as he was no longer a boy. Thirty-one was an age, he could see his mother thinking, for a man and a woman to be raising boys or girls of their own.

  “Probably she’s waiting for you to bring up the future, family and so on; she’s just afraid to say.”

  He didn’t wish to contradict her, to explain that Melissa had ambitions greater than being knocked up by Charles Flournoy. Even if he could, possibly, bring Melissa home to meet his mother, it would not change how far apart they were.

  In that moment, he felt he understood what he was doing with Melissa, with her MBA from Wharton and her hectic schedule—Melissa who needed nothing from him, not his approval, not his support, who already owned her house without the assistance of any man, and wasn’t convinced yet what the presence of a man would add. He was with her precisely for her difference from this person—glancing at her watch, wondering if her husband would be enraged at her brief absence—he was seated next to now.

  —

  The boat was at the dock and the guardrails had been lowered; the first cars were driving up the ramp to take their places in the hull. Charlie stood and kissed his mother good-bye, glad to have his exit arranged for him and feeling, after just twenty-five minutes, that he had nothing left to say to her, and no desire to stay.

  He walked her to her van, that piece of shit she’d never allow him to replace.

  “I’ll call you, Mom. If you can, we’ll meet again on my way back.” With that he got into his own car and drove ahead to take his place among the other vehicles on board the ferry, lined up five across.

  A relief to be alone again inside his rental, with its reassuring strangeness and its new car smell. A relief to be moving again, to hear the engine of the boat humming below. He looked around him, at the expanse of gray water ahead, then at a blonde exiting the next car. A young girl, ponytail, pretty; two boys tagged along after her. His stomach lurched. He thought of Georgia, of the chance she might be waiting on the other shore.

  Not likely. Georgia wouldn’t be up for a memorial, not with Mark’s funeral only weeks behind her. And even if she were to be there, she would not be the girl he still stubbornly imagined: the blithe, blond co-ed, striding coolly in suede boots. That Georgia would not be appearing anywhere again.

  Still, whatever had become of Georgia Calvin—Georgia Reese, he must remember—the real change was in him. At nineteen, he could be brought into raptures just by picturing her sprawled, as she sometimes was, across his dorm-room bunk. Today, no woman had this effect. He’d been with too many, though probably fewer than most: some beautiful, some not, and the difference between them had practically collapsed. This was maturity, a process he ought to welcome, but it was also one to mourn. And maybe it was not maturity either, not progress, but a sign of his diminishment. Of something in him that had arrested, withered.

  What a passionless longing to long for passion. If he could write poetry, he would write a poem about this. He would write like Eliot or Larkin, a poetry of quiet loneliness—the sort of poetry he hadn’t begun to appreciate when he was just a kid first drawn to study by the words of wiser men.

  But for God’s sake, he wasn’t old yet; he was only thirty-one, and there were men of forty, fifty, and sixty who fell madly in love. Forty-five was the age that Storrow had been when he’d jeopardized so much—more than he ever could have realized, even—for a few stolen afternoons with Georgia.

  An attendant rapped on Charlie’s windshield. “Fare, please.”

  Charlie paid him and watched the attendant turn to the next car, to collect cash from the shy-looking boy left behind, by his friends, to pay.

  As soon as the attendant had moved on, Charlie followed the shy boy to the roof deck and watched him take his place with the blonde and other boys. All of them college age, probably heading back to campus after a weekend romp: the boys were rowdy, clowning for the blonde’s attention. One jumped up onto the ship’s rails, another made as if to push him; the girl let out a shout of alarm that trailed off into laughter.

  Charlie moved to the other side of the deck. The water that day was choppy; the boat rocked. Though sons from old fishing towns were meant to inherit sea legs, Charlie was prone to getting sick. Better to stay outside then, where the breeze was sharp, vitalizing.

  —

  Fresh air. Fresh scene. Maybe Roger was right; he needed to get out of Palo Alto to clear his head, take some distance from work. Soon, perhaps, he’d be in a better frame of mind to accept Roger’s decision; h
e’d given Charlie the news the week before, wanted him to be the first at Triathlon to know of his plans to resign.

  “You can’t possibly leave now,” Charlie had replied: the deal Roger had been working on all spring had just come through: a four-million-dollar contract with JP Morgan; others like it were bound to follow; Roger would be more essential to the company than ever.

  “Come on, man, a hundred guys could do my job.” He had no illusions, Roger said: Udi had only brought him in to begin with to satisfy Charlie, and McCraw and the board believed the company had since outgrown him (Charlie had no doubt they’d said the same things about himself). But if Charlie meant to cling to his position, Roger preferred to walk away. Nothing against Udi and the other programmers, but he wasn’t excited by the technical advances they were making and he wasn’t able to bracket the political context like they were; reports of warrantless wiretapping had headlined in all the major papers, the board was introducing larger numbers of agency people to ensure loyalty, and the more conscientious employees at Triathlon were leaving.

  Public sentiment had turned against them: Charlie knew this as well as Roger; he’d felt it firsthand. At his last campus appearance, student protesters had broken into the auditorium where he was speaking. McCraw had been advising him to bring a security detail to all such future events, but Charlie wasn’t afraid of his critics, he was afraid that they were right.

  Don’t concern yourself with the side of the story you don’t know. That had been McCraw’s advice: Charlie would never learn whether Triathlon software had been tampered with or if it had been put to illegitimate use; in a sense, such details hardly mattered. Theirs wasn’t the only data mining system on the market, as McCraw had pointed out; IBM or Lockheed would provide the same tools if he didn’t.

  How like McCraw: consolation that doubled as a threat.

  “So you think the best thing is to leave guys like McCraw in charge?” Charlie had chosen to make an ethical argument to Roger. “What do you imagine Triathlon will become then, without people like you looking out? It’s precisely because we’re in such morally complex territory, and because the stakes are so high, that we need to stay involved. It’s a matter of social responsibility: a company like ours needs men of conscience at the helm.”

  Roger hadn’t disagreed, but he wasn’t thinking about what was best for society right now: Jasmine had been terribly upset by all the news that spring and he didn’t like to see her under pressure, especially not when, as he’d recently learned, she was pregnant.

  “I have to think about my family,” Roger told him.

  “Well, that’s you. This company is what I have to look after.”

  “How about yourself for a change, buddy? Your happiness.”

  “I didn’t do this to be happy.” He’d wanted to be admirable. Plenty of people were happy, but who the hell was there out there to really admire? The last person he’d admired was Storrow, and he’d done about all he could to correct for that mistake.

  —

  Storrow’s deceits, his humiliations, his burdens: each carefully documented, cataloged, for Christ’s sake, as per Charlie’s request—all part of the twenty-page report that Flynn had insisted Charlie keep in his possession. Read it or not, it’s yours; you paid for it. As if shelling out ten thousand dollars gave him any true share in Storrow’s secrets.

  After his last meeting with Flynn, Charlie had tucked the report away in the top drawer of his bedroom desk; there it remained, untouched, until, in April, a call from a man claiming to be Storrow’s business partner provided an excuse to pull those pages out again.

  “I’m trying to contact Storrow’s associates in the U.S.,” the man explained. “Three weeks ago, we had an important meeting with a client. Storrow never showed; I’ve looked for him; I’ve called Mumbai police.”

  “I’m sorry, who are you?”

  “Raj Kadam. Storrow has done some work with me.”

  “What sort, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Legal consulting,” said the man, evasive. “I guess you have an idea about his business, since he had dealings with you, too.”

  Storrow had no business with him, Charlie had made clear, disentangling himself from Storrow’s issues—thorny and unpleasant ones, he sensed—with this cagey stranger. He didn’t have a clue about Storrow’s activities or whereabouts, he told Kadam, speaking almost honestly, as it so happened; even after reading Flynn’s report, he knew little that might be of help in tracking Storrow down.

  The twenty pages Flynn had left him were composed almost entirely of current records—travel, bank, and phone—that had led Flynn to draw the conclusions he’d shared with Charlie at their meeting. The only information that was new to Charlie was contained in transcripts of interviews that Flynn had conducted, the most revealing of them with a longtime friend of Storrow’s mother.

  This old Great Falls companion, Paula Moreaux was her name, was the one to provide stories of Storrow’s past, stories Flynn, justifiably, hadn’t found relevant to Charlie’s concerns, or fit to mention at their appointment.

  Paula Moreaux had known Mimi Storrow sixty years; she’d grown up alongside Mimi, née Warber, and run in the same circles—the Moreaux family of the same status as the Warbers—not that people besides Mimi concerned themselves with such things these days. The Warbers had less money than the Storrows, but Mimi could—and did—boast of the three generals in her family, which was more impressive, in her opinion, than the fortune made by her husband’s great-grandfather, culled from copper mines in Arizona.

  Rufus Storrow Sr. turned out to be less wealthy than Mimi must have expected; whatever he’d inherited he hadn’t increased, and his career proved modest. After failing to make partner at a prestigious Virginia law firm, he moved to a smaller firm; twice he ran for local office but lost by a wide margin each time. The opinion among those who knew Mimi was that she was disappointed in her marriage and sought distraction in frequent visits from her youngest and much-admired uncle, Thaddeus Warber, a decorated field marshal. Later, she found more steady consolation in the presence of her handsome only son, Rufus Jr., whose great promise she never tired of proclaiming. Moreaux remembered the young Storrow as very striking, with flaming hair and green eyes, a boy devoted to his mother, indifferent to his father, and severe with himself.

  When Rufus Jr. was fourteen, his father died of pneumonia. Mr. Storrow had been sick all winter, without, so it was said, once setting foot in a hospital. Possibly some suspected Mimi of negligence in her husband’s care, but the widow put on a dignified show of mourning and never remarried. Instead, she invited her uncle Thaddeus to live with her son and her—an arrangement no one could call improper, though in a town as quiet as Great Falls, there was bound to be some conjecture about the bachelor uncle’s secret interests in his attractive niece or—some did wonder—in her equally attractive son.

  Why, after all, did Thaddeus Warber never socialize with any of the local single women? And why were his hands always on his nephew: fixing his clothes or posture, giving teasing taps or sparring? They often practiced sports together—boxing, wrestling, football—and some people didn’t find it right: a grown man and a boy rolling around together on the grass. The chatter only increased when word got out that Rufus Jr., then fifteen, had cracked his uncle’s jaw one summer. A football accident, Mimi claimed, never once behaving as if she had something to hide. On the contrary, she’d bragged about the incident—the two men such avid sportsmen that they’d kept on playing while she phoned the ambulance.

  When it came to her family—Warber blood—Mimi never displayed any sentiment but pride. In this, Rufus Jr. soon came to resemble his mother: as a teen, he held himself above his classmates, who considered him arrogant and strange. Kids didn’t conceal their judgments, after all, said Ms. Moreaux, the way polite adults knew how to do.

  For her part, Paula Moreaux wouldn’t stoop to speculation. All she would tell Flynn definitively was what she’d observed of Rufu
s Jr.: that, in all the years he’d lived in Great Falls, and on all the occasions he came home to visit, he’d never seemed to have any friends, or girlfriends either, despite how good-looking he was. I almost doubted he had a romantic life, until it came out in the paper, the pictures of that pretty college girl.

  Georgia—again Charlie felt the sickening jolt of nerves. He leaned down, over the rails, letting the cool spray brush his face. He ought to have outgrown such symptoms, the butterflies of a love-struck boy—what could it mean to feel the same way now, and over a woman he hadn’t seen but once in a decade? It couldn’t be love—if he was moved, he reasoned, it wasn’t by Georgia, but by the reminder she offered of his younger self, who had been ardent, who still believed in great loves, great deeds, and great men.

  —

  The boat was halfway across the sound, the facing woods made lusher by the cloudy sky. A fresh shore ahead, another left behind: a symbol, if not of hope, then at least, of forgetting.

  Forget the boy he’d been when he made this crossing before, better not to be embarrassed by the faith he’d carried in the future and in others, not to recall feelings stronger than he could contain now. Forget Storrow as he’d first known him: handsome, eager, and punctilious, cheeks rosy, smile pristine, looking as he had the night he’d welcomed Charlie into his home.

  Better to have the past a blur so he could stand before a hundred people whose names he didn’t recall and read empty words that would vanish as soon as they were spoken. He’d delivered dozens of speeches, without one line that remained memorable, and why should they be memorable? What was worth memorizing but private scenes of love and, for those who didn’t have them, poetry?

  There, standing on the bow of the ferry, Charlie was reminded of a poem about the river Lethe, a poem he’d discovered as a boy—obscure, mostly forgotten—whose best lines he’d committed to memory once.