A Daughter's a Daughter

by Irene Vartanoff

  Oh, dear. Trust her mother to put her in an awkward spot.

  “I’m not sure. I’ll be busy starting the foundation.”

  “You’ll have weekends off,” Dorothy said in her usual magisterial manner. She launched into a lecture about how charities built slowly and weekend events rested on the shoulders of volunteers, which Pam did not yet have beyond Magda and Harper. It took time to build an organization. She concluded by pressing Pam to come out that weekend. “We can strategize together.”

  Pam didn’t see any way of refusing to see her mother, so she agreed and hung up. After all, Alexander had moved away. The rest of Dorothy’s children couldn’t ignore their mother. At least, she couldn’t. Even though at the moment she certainly did not want to encounter Bruce. Which would be inevitable if she went to the beach house.

  No time to fret over that. She should check her email for the info from Linley, and get started with more calls to set up appointments.

  #

  Knowing her brother Alexander spent his afternoons on the golf course, she waited until evening to call him. They had to talk about Dorothy’s future. Alexander raved over their new life in North Carolina, and all the new friends they had made. Turned out there were many transplants from the New York area.

  “You’ve moved to another version of New York South?”

  “Looks like it. Edie is thrilled.”

  After enough time had been spent on catching up, she had to ask her question. “Alexander, why haven’t we got a family plan for taking care of our mother as she gets older?”

  When he seemed to hem and haw, she pressed harder. “You lived nearest to her for years. You saw her more often than any of us.”

  He sighed. “Edie tells me we moved south because I didn’t want to see Mom decline.”

  “That’s why you left the state?” she asked, shocked.

  “Maybe.” He rushed to explain. “Pammy, Mom and I have been real close. It’s a struggle to be far from her now. But there’s a part of me that’s relieved not to be around to see her go downhill.”

  “How can you be relieved if you’ve left your elderly mother all alone way out on Long Island?”

  “She’s not alone. She’s got good friends.”

  “Her friends are old, too. They can’t look after her welfare.”

  “I did my share. It’s someone else’s turn. Probably yours.”

  “I live a hundred miles away, hardly next door.”

  “You could sell your house and move in with her.”

  “You’re kidding. She thinks I’m weak and stupid. Living with her would be hell.”

  He said nothing.

  “Alexander, we need a plan. You didn’t consult any of us. That’s not right.”

  “What’s wrong with moving in with her? You don’t have anything keeping you in Ardsley. You’re not working in the city anymore, either.”

  “How did you learn about that?”

  “I call Mom every day. She told me you got canned.”

  Ooh, she wanted to hit something. “Yet you didn’t even call me after the company collapsed to ask how I was doing. Thanks much, big brother.”

  “Look, quit whining. You’re not hurting for money. And Mom is fine. She’ll probably live to be a hundred.”

  “What’s our plan if she can’t handle her financial affairs? What if she gets dementia? What if she takes a fall and breaks her hip?”

  “Then you move in with her and take care of things.”

  She let out an exasperated breath. “Don’t think I am going to let you do this to me, Alexander. These aren’t Victorian times, when unmarried daughters had to sacrifice their lives to nurse their elderly parents.”

  “Okay, make a plan, but leave me out of it. It’s someone else’s turn.” His voice was determined. “There’s enough money to hire a nurse companion. The real issue is someone has to keep watch on the nurse companion. I can’t do it. I’ve had enough.”

  With that she had to be satisfied. Her phone calls to her two other siblings, Christine in Chicago and Neil in Santa Fe, were even less satisfactory. They were full of vague offers of help but no concrete ideas other than to hire a companion some day. That wasn’t a plan, even if it was one leg of a potential plan.

  She wasn’t even sure why she was getting worked up over this. She’d been angry with Bruce for suggesting Dorothy needed assistance. She’d been suspicious of him befriending her mother, too. Come to think of it, she still was. Oh, he wasn’t likely to be a con artist. She’d Googled him and found nothing negative. He was the real Bruce Wicklow, too. Google images had provided publicity photos from his book tour.

  Maybe it was because she sensed there was more going on out at the beach. She didn’t want to take on the additional work of finding out what it was. She had her hands full with the nonprofit. Although, since by maternal decree she was about to go out there for the weekend, she guessed she’d learn more despite herself.

  She’d have to call Alexander another time and apologize for whining to him and then accusing him of running away. The truth was he and his wife had carried all the responsibility for their mother for many years. He had provided companionship and a place for holiday gatherings so the work was taken off Dorothy’s shoulders. Of course, he and Dorothy got along well. Dorothy considered him a success. Whereas she thought Pam was an oversensitive weakling, and told her so far too often. Not as much lately, though.

  #

  Bruce paced his deck and thought up ways he might cajole Pam into talking to him when they met again this weekend. Or perhaps he should go on the offensive and insist she talk to him. She was a sensible woman. Once he explained more, he was sure she would get off her high horse and listen to reason. He doubted she would deny the evidence in front of her face, starting with those piles of unopened mail in Dorothy’s dining room.

  He tossed a toy for Yappie, who eagerly sprang to retrieve it. He was fun to have around, good company. Bruce was glad he had found Yappie, even if his main purpose in getting the dog was to cozy up to Dorothy. Aunt Nora had reminded him Dorothy was the one who had given him a puppy for his fourth birthday. Of course he had been too young for a puppy, but his mother hadn’t minded, according to Nora. Greta had wanted to give her little boy a companion. He had probably cried more over Puppy’s eventual death than he did over his parents’.

  Yappie had not returned the toy this time, his way of indicating he was tired of retrieving. Bruce sat on one of the deck chairs under the umbrella. Yappie came and nestled at his feet, resting his head on Bruce’s left shoe. Good dog.

  Strange how life was. He’d come full circle, depending on a dog for his companionship. Things could be worse, but he wanted more. Pam must be soothed, talked out of her snit, whatever it took. She was what he wanted. In bed and out.

  Chapter 22

  Pam sent Sarah a digital photo of the Chanel suit. Sarah called her up and raved.

  “I’ve got to come see it in person. I want to feel it.”

  “You can try it on, too,” she offered. “I suspect it’ll be too big for you. Back in the day, women were more rounded.”

  “Chanel, girl. It’s a classic. I’m coming right over.”

  Of course it took Sarah a couple hours since she lived in Manhattan. To Pam’s surprise, her friend arrived with a large piece of soft luggage. When she unzipped it, Pam saw it was an elaborate shoe carrier.

  “Christian Louboutin, Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik, Prada, take your pick. We’re still the same shoe size, just like we were in college. But first, let me see the Chanel.”

  Pam led the way to her bedroom closet and opened the garment bag.

  Sarah touched the pink suit with reverence. “Oh, this is beautiful. How marvelous. Look at the detail work. Look at the seaming. Exquisite bouclé. It’s in perfect condition.”

  “I didn’t realize you had an interest in vintage clothing,” Pam remarked.

  Sarah laughed. “I never thought there was any point in talking to you about clothes,
since you’re the girl who wore loafers and bargain store blouses to work on Wall Street.”

  “I guess I have to care now. My mother says it’s very important to dress rich when trying to extract money from rich men.”

  “She’s right. Look what I brought you. Shoes to go with. You have to wear good shoes. The secretaries always look at your shoes, and they’re the key to getting in to see the boss.”

  Sarah, bless her, had also brought a simple black dress with a boat neck, suitable for knocking on doors and setting up important appointments.

  “Wear this with gold or diamonds. Nothing else.”

  Pam was outfitted for the battles to come, with her mother and her best friend as her armorers. She hoped she could do them proud.

  #

  Expensive designer clothing truly made a difference when she was bearding the lions in their dens. She was treated with far more courtesy than her usual self-effacing personality merited. Which made her feed good. Which helped when she had to listen politely to the self-absorbed, self-satisfied men she was trying to flatter and guilt into donating large chunks of money.

  She tried hard to maintain her calm during her interview with Frank Cox, an appointment she’d managed to get very quickly, almost too quickly to suit her. She didn’t have her patter down yet. Perhaps he had agreed to see her immediately because he was so thoroughly hated these days no one else wanted to talk to him. She laughed inwardly at her cynical notion. How her interests were changing. Before, she’d never have bothered to consider what executives did with their time, or how they thought.

  He had a huge corner office in a posh executive suite, but she knew for a fact he did nothing all day. No one called him. His name was anathema in the banking community since he had single-handedly dragged his company into bankruptcy. The terms of his golden parachute gave him this office high in a building now two-thirds empty solely because of him.

  They were seated in a sitting room section of the vast office, drinking tea. Cox was in a club chair, she perched on the couch. She wore the pink Chanel suit.

  Cox had started with the moral hazard of giving unemployed people charity. Then he wandered into a rant about the cost of workers being very high.

  She paid respectful attention, allowing none of her distaste to show. She let him run on. Now, he was denying that displaced workers should rely on charity.

  “We have to cut operating costs to shore up the bottom line.”

  That didn’t apply to already laid-off workers, but it was probably taken verbatim from his last speech before he was ousted. He had fired twenty-five thousand low-paid workers, then awarded himself a thirty million dollar bonus. She struggled to keep her expression pleasant and blandly accepting. She knew she had to wait for him to give her an opening. Ah, there it was. He wanted to know why she planned to help workers.

  “The purpose of this charity is to help displaced workers before they get over their heads, Mr. Cox. Sometimes it only takes a little bit of cash to keep an entire lifestyle going until the worker finds another good job. This is short-term help, kind of like a bridge loan.”

  He nodded. He understood loans. He had leveraged his company with them until he’d destroyed it.

  “I wish you well, of course, but I don’t see where the valued added is in this for me,” he said.

  Now she had him.

  “Sir, the public wants heroes. You could be one.” She stared at him solemnly. “Your name could be a beacon of hope to the many people who are suffering economically in these tough times. By associating your name with this charity, by committing substantial funding to it, you will gain deserved prestige in the community. And you will do a world of good.”

  He visibly preened. She explained how his multimillion dollar ongoing commitment to the Bright Side Foundation would be picked up as news. The larger his gift was, the more news it would receive.

  The hook was set. Now all she had to do was reel him in, as she had seen her mother do many times. These self-important men lived on flattery.

  “People will praise your name for this,” she began, wondering why God didn’t strike her dead for her lies.

  Within a half an hour, he had authorized his secretary to transfer a half a million dollars to the Bright Side Foundation, with a promise for a half million more during the next year. Pam hid her shock over the realization he had so much cash readily available in a bank account. Now that he’d done his part to destabilize the stock market, maybe he was keeping all his wealth as cash.

  She kept her game face on, channeling Dorothy’s most patrician, self-assured style. “This is wonderful of you. I will make sure the world knows about your amazing generosity. Your name will go down in history as a great benefactor of humanity.”

  She made many more fulsome expressions of gratitude. In truth, she was sincerely thankful he had chosen to donate. Not only had he made her day, but she had made his. The publicity his donation would generate would do something to restore his tarnished reputation. She left him to his dreams of renewed glory and went with his secretary to arrange the fund transfer details.

  Pam could see the woman was eyeing her Chanel suit. She fought the urge to confess she was playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. Thank goodness Sarah had brought her the designer shoes as well. Ordinary shoes would have been a dead giveaway. As Dorothy always said, you had to have money to get money. Her mother was right as usual.

  Her second interview that week did not go as well. She was led to an executive suite in the same building in which she had worked for many years. The very same building she’d thought never to enter again. The executive was the former head of her own company, Charles Saunders, the man who had put her out on the street along with Magda and thousands more. He recognized her name, but not from her long employment at Menahl.

  “Are you related to Linley Ridgeway, the girl on that stock market show on cable, Hot Tracks?” he asked, with a frown.

  “She’s my daughter,” she replied proudly.

  “She ripped me a new one when they interviewed me two weeks ago. I’m not giving you a cent,” he said with vindictive pleasure.

  A nasty man. The former Pam would have apologetically skulked off at this point, but there was too much at stake. She dug in her heels and did her best to turn the tables on him.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, in as sincere a tone of voice as she could muster. “You’ll be missing a golden opportunity.” She widened her eyes and leaned forward confidingly. “In one simple step, you can fix your public image, take a tax deduction, and help thousands of your own former employees.”

  He didn’t react to that feeler, so she tried a slightly different tack. The employee gossip pipeline had claimed he desperately wanted to go into politics.

  “I suspect you know that influential politicians are careful not to associate with public figures who have tarnished reputations,” she offered.

  His smug hostility began to fade into a frown.

  “You’re proud of being a strong figure, a take-no-prisoners business leader, am I right?”

  He nodded his head impatiently. “Get to your point, girlie.”

  Girlie?

  “Politicians who might have major regulatory positions to award will be able to consider you for those spots only if you repair your image. They’ll get heat from their constituents otherwise. When you’re at your confirmation hearings, you can point to your efforts to help the workers who lost their jobs during your watch. Donating to the Bright Side Foundation is an opportunity for you to stop being vilified as a public bad guy. By openly associating yourself with a high-profile charity that will actively seek to aid displaced workers, you can navigate a serious political stumbling block. It’s a solid gold recommendation for your future. You can win the support you want.”

  Because she suspected there was no limit to his self-absorption, she tried a new line of flattery. “Your former employees still care about you. If you help them, they will bless your name and put you
in their prayers.”

  “Not likely,” he harrumphed, but she could sense he had softened.

  She wasted a lot of time with Saunders trying to get a sizeable donation. She had not left empty-handed, but Saunders had only given her a check in the five figures. He was mistaken if he thought she could restore his public reputation with such a small contribution.

  She wouldn’t give up. If she succeeded with more of his peers, Saunders’s competitive urges might take over. She’d keep him informed about her pledge drive. Maybe drop him a note about Mr. Cox’s contribution once it was in the foundation’s bank account.

  She was proud she had given as good as she got. There was still hope Saunders would come around to her point of view. Plus, she had learned so much. It was unlikely she would be talking to any man quite as personally hostile as this one had been. She had a feeling her suit of armor had kept at bay some of his worst qualities. Thank goodness.

  Her mother’s designer clothing had given her ironclad self-confidence when she’d needed it. She had felt invulnerable. No longer was she the simple backroom worker with a sweater on her chair because the office was often too cold. No longer was she the mindless cog in the machine. She had woken up. Although she did not respect Saunders, she supposed she owed him a debt of gratitude. She had finally been forced to act as a bigger version of herself. She liked that person. A lot.

  She hardly recognized herself in the mirrorlike glass walls of the building’s lobby. This soignée woman with the designer suit and shoes, the soft leather briefcase, the subtle makeup and jewelry, was an altogether much more polished package than the usual Pam Ridgeway. Her obscenely expensive designer shoes were remarkably comfortable. She glanced down at them. This new role wasn’t easy, but she could get used to some aspects.

  She must have absorbed a lot of her mother’s teachings over the years to be so effective and wily with these men. Her mother’s sharp eye for an opponent had translated into Pam feeling an intuitive sense of each man’s weakness. For the one man, it was his vanity. For the other, his greed. It helped to have done her homework, and to have had Linley’s notes on each man’s reputation. The Bright Side Foundation already had substantial cash to show for her efforts, with more promised. The promise alone would generate more donations from people who wanted to be allied with Mr. Cox, who wanted their names listed on the same page with his name as a contributor. Whether anyone wanted to be near Charles Saunders was still an open question. She intended that he pay heavily to sweeten his name.