Mount Pleasant

by Don Gillmor

  Harry remembered Press from a party decades ago. A cocktail in his hand, flirting with someone’s wife. One of those silver-haired guys who look like they scored the winning touchdown.

  Their lunch arrived and they ate quietly for a few moments.

  “Sampson is the sharpest knife in the drawer,” Dick said. “Poor bastard has cancer. He might have two months.”

  “My father was essentially broke when he died, Dick.”

  Ebbetts stared upward into the soft gloom of the restaurant. “That I can’t imagine, Harry. I’d check those accounts. He might have been cleaned out, but you want to see the paper on that.”

  “How hard is it to manufacture that paper?”

  “People do it.”

  His father’s death hadn’t done any of the things Harry had hoped it would. It hadn’t given Harry a fresh lease, or delivered a mid-life epiphany. It hadn’t resulted in a meaningful inheritance. On almost every front, Dale’s death had been a disappointment. He pondered this as he was buzzed into his father’s apartment. Dixie was still living there and had asked him to come over and talk. Harry assumed she wanted a debriefing on Dale’s perverse will or wanted to offer him Dale’s clothes before they went to Goodwill.

  Dixie greeted him at the open door wearing a black skirt and a tailored white shirt and a bit too much gold jewellery. Her regular features, the residue of a tan.

  Dale’s apartment had a fabulous southern view, and Harry was always surprised that the city looked like a vast park from this vantage, acres of trees, thousands of them eclipsing the houses that ran down toward downtown. The light caught the first few yellowed poplar leaves in a comforting glow.

  “Harry,” Dixie said, coming to join him at the window to stare out at the city. “I feel like you’re the only one in the family I can talk to. I can understand that your mother hates me.” She cocked her head to emphasize the obviousness of this statement. “Maybe it isn’t even me. I mean she’s going to hate anyone who comes along …” Dixie moved her hand around in her ash blond hair. “But I always felt that you and I, we had some kind of connection. You’re probably the only one in the family who’s always known that what I wanted to do, what I did do, was make your father happy.”

  Actually, Harry didn’t know that. For one thing, it was hard to describe his father as happy, even during the happiest of times. He was a man whose joys were mysterious and internalized to the point where they may have been unknowable even to himself.

  He turned to gaze around the large, breezy space, which had last been decorated by a woman who ran with the modernist ball and put in a Le Corbusier sofa and a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair in calfskin that Dale had hated. Dixie had inherited the furniture, which his sister, Erin, had assumed would be going to her. As Erin had pointed out in a murderous tone after she heard this news, not only was the furniture the most valuable part of their father’s estate, but she, as a designer, appreciated and understood the furniture, while Dixie would sell it for far less than it was worth to some estate-buying creep who would flip it for a profit.

  Harry had carried that secret number in his head—the million he would inherit. What had been the number in Dixie’s head, he wondered, the number that had surely formed in the early months of her relationship with Dale and, once formed, become something like rosary beads that she could take out and play with absently when she was on the subway or getting her hair done. Harry guessed that her number was around $500,000.

  As his companion of almost fourteen months, a woman who had been his rod and his staff, who had discreetly disposed of unfortunately stained underwear, who had cooked for Dale from what Harry guessed was a limited repertoire, had picked up his dry cleaning and ordered from the takeout menus that had print too small for Dale to read, who had been his reluctant but inventive lover: for all this, she deserved more. Her bequest worked out to less than $2 an hour over fourteen months, a calculation she had no doubt made.

  They sat in the living room while Dixie made a dignified plea for Harry to make things right. The sums that Dale had left them were so Lilliputian they seemed ironic or whimsical or colossally mean-spirited. Dixie said she assumed there had been some kind of financial sleight of hand—Dale’s assets transferred to a family trust in the Cayman Islands or put in the name of a grandchild. As she skirted carefully around the issue, Harry realized she thought he knew where the secret fortune was stashed. She sat beside him, her mascara slightly blurred, her gaze expectant.

  Harry felt genuinely sorry for her. Here was a woman roughly his age who was beached by the same tides as Harry, and for some of the same reasons. She managed to convey, without using the word, that she was owed. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. “Dixie, I know you did the best you could for my father. And we all appreciated that. His last months would have been so … bereft.”

  “I knew you were the one I could talk to, Harry,” Dixie said, grabbing a tissue from a box on the end table. “I just knew of anyone in the family, you were the person who would understand. I mean, your mother probably hates me, and your sister …”

  “Hates everyone.”

  Dixie laughed a bit as she sniffled and dabbed at her nose.

  “My father, as you know, was a complicated man,” Harry said, repeating the first line of his eulogy. “He left you $7,200, which, I agree, is ridiculous.”

  “Well, I knew you’d see the—”

  “But it appears that’s all there is.”

  “There has to be more. I don’t understand, Harry.”

  “Neither do I, Dixie. I’d assumed he was in pretty good shape.”

  Dixie began to sob, making small heaving noises.

  “Dixie, I’m sorry. I really am.”

  She nestled against Harry then, and he held her, and when she looked up at him, he recognized her expression as the fulcrum of a particular moment, the point at which the future would either remain the same or be radically altered. It might have been better to sprint across the spacious living room, vault over the Barcelona chair and crash cinematically through the floor-to-ceiling window onto the sidewalk twenty storeys down. Instead, they kissed, and Dixie took his hand and said, “Come,” and he followed her like a golden retriever into his father’s bedroom.

  The novelty of touching someone, a new body after twenty-five years with the same person, was like walking into Oz. They kissed again, and Dixie unbuttoned his shirt and unzipped his pants, went down on him and engulfed him expertly. Harry was almost overcome. She gently massaged his testicles and her mouth took him with a hunger and purpose and depth that he had forgotten. She straddled him then, and soon several months of somewhat begrudged near-total celibacy led him to a roaring climax. As he came, the words that arrived immediately, that could have been yelled at the point of orgasm, were: This is how lives are ruined.

  Afterward, she laid her head on his chest and toyed softly with the greying hairs around his nipple as Harry looked around the vast bedroom in a flood of guilt. The walk-in closet was open and he could see the neat rows of his father’s handmade suits, greys and blues receding into the darkness, suits that had all been made by the same white-haired Italian tailor, who worked out of a tiny storefront on the fringe of the financial district, a man who gave Harry hard European candies when he went with his father to watch him be fitted. One day the tailor’s grandson was there, a small, dark boy roughly the same age as Harry, and the two of them sat in silence, eating their hard candy, as Dale stood like a statue and the tailor kneeled in front of him.

  “Dixie, when did you first notice the deterioration in my father’s mental abilities?”

  “You mean, when did he start forgetting things?”

  “Forgetting things, getting confused easily.”

  “Well, I mean, he was pretty forgetful at the beginning anyway.”

  “But it got much worse.”

  “There were a couple of pretty weird moments. The first one, I don’t know, maybe ten months ago. The neighbour from across th
e hall, something Stevenson. She knocked on the door and Dale answered and didn’t recognize her.”

  “He couldn’t remember her name?”

  “No, he didn’t know who she was. I think she’s lived there for like nine years or something. And one morning I was in the kitchen making coffee, and Dale didn’t come out and I went into the bedroom to see what was going on, and his clothes were on the bed where I’d laid them out and he was just standing there, staring at them, like he didn’t know where to start.”

  “You mean he couldn’t dress himself?”

  “Well, he did, eventually. But it was as if he’d forgotten the order everything went on. I told him to put on his socks and underwear, and that seemed to prime the pump. But it was kind of scary.”

  Harry wondered if Dale’s disease was complicated by dementia or if his confusion was simply part of the brain cancer. He’d had so little contact with his father, he had no idea what his baseline mental state had been. Did it make him a target? Had one of his colleagues seen a wounded animal and culled his money? Harry felt a pang of guilt about spending so little time with his father that his months of deterioration had gone unwitnessed.

  “You think maybe someone took advantage of him?” Dixie said. “Someone he works with saw he was losing it and somehow got his money? I mean, how would they do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Harry said, moving her gently aside so he could go clean himself up in his father’s bathroom.

  “But who would do that?” Dixie called after him.

  “Someone who wanted the money.”

  FIVE

  THE MORNING BROKE with that awful knowledge. Sex with his father’s nominal widow. It sat inside him, a monstrous growth. When he looked in the shaving mirror, he expected to see Richard III, hunchbacked, withered arm, spitting evil, his moral lapse translated into physical deformity. Dixie would assume they were partners now, both of them on the trail of Dale’s money. She had used sex as barter in the past, had used it with Dale, a diminishing commodity that she tracked daily, he guessed, gauging its worth the way investors checked their portfolios on their smartphones, conscious of each tiny dip.

  Outside, the late September weather was still golden, the glorious apex between the thick heat of summer and damp misery of winter. Through the window, Harry tasted the cold in the air. He dressed quickly and made coffee, and squirmed in the presence of his wife at the breakfast table. When he left, he leaned to kiss her, but she deflected it to her cheek with a brisk turn of her head. He drove to the BRG offices with his burden.

  Harry hadn’t been there since he was twelve, when Dale brought him to work and introduced him to Press and August and others long gone now, each of them, he remembered, rubbing his head, telling Dale his son would be joining them at BRG someday, cornering the goddamn market.

  Back then, the firm had seemed to Harry to be a powerful and exclusive club, a gentleman’s cabal that ran things. This was the hub, and around it were layers of money supplied by retail empires, pulp and paper concerns, developers. Some of the younger generation had decamped, looking for more aggressive approaches to money management. The city changed, and the shape of money shifted. The markets were filled with sharp operators and odd niches and incomprehensible products. Harry assumed that BRG had held on to its core clientele, but he knew it no longer had the kind of presence and influence it once did. BRG had become quaint, safely steering the money of old white people to safe harbours.

  Harry checked in with the receptionist, and a few minutes later Prescott strode into the tasteful lobby, glowing with false vigour, his tan impeccable, the whiteness of his shirt almost blinding. Press had expert facial expressions. He could convey all the key emotions: concern, empathy and, perhaps most critically, collusion. His great gift was to make you feel that you and he were part of something secret and successful. When he greeted you, he shook your hand and clasped your shoulder and said something enigmatic in your ear as he stared past you into the crowd. He spoke out of the side of his mouth sotto voce, and this manner drew you to him; it made you feel that the two of you were in something together. And this was the greeting Harry got.

  “It’s a great loss for everyone,” Press said, shaking Harry’s hand, the other tanned hand folding over top in a grip of condolence. “For you, for Felicia, for Erin, but for all of us here as well, Harry. We lost a good one.”

  Press led him to Dale’s office. “Take whatever you like, Harry,” he said, then shook his hand again and left him to it.

  His father’s office was spacious, a throwback. There was a large, solid desk and a leather couch. There were a few minor trophies—golf, tennis. No photographs of the family or of Dixie. A banker’s box filled with files had been placed on the desk for Harry. The cream-coloured folders were neatly labelled, the statements with the company letterhead arranged by year. He filled another with trophies, a crystal Scotch decanter and a leather shaving kit.

  Harry’s own investments were a vicious battleground, and each monthly statement brought fresh casualties. Ethical Trading stabbed in the back, Global Sustainability hospitalized with asthma, Japanese Growth burdened by its ancient, shrinking population, Global Bond sodomized by its 2.26 MER. Five-Year Reset Preferred Shares and Linked Barrier Notes lay dying as the smoke cleared in a blur of red.

  Harry did his own investing, tinkering online with the money he’d managed to put into his anemic, undercapitalized retirement fund. During those years when the market enjoyed one of its greatest historical runs and anyone with a pulse was making money, some small part of Harry believed the gains he made were the result of his foresight and market wisdom (oil would go up because the Saudis were overstating their reserves, and demand from China, India, and Brazil would drive up the price). When everything came crashing down, Harry, like so many, was hard hit and felt betrayed, not just by the market and the banks, but by himself. He estimated that he could finance a retirement of about three years.

  During the week, somewhere in the world, regardless of the time, money was flowing, threatening to engulf the London bond market, hitting the Nikkei like a tsunami, spilling onto the parched fields of Kansas and Saskatchewan and snuffing out the engineered promise of ethanol. Electronic fortunes rode on minor blips from the yen or the euro, distress signals that rose from Wall Street and zipped through ten million hard drives like tracer bullets and lit the battlefield as thieves crawled away with gold or growth or emerging markets. The binary commands sluiced through the world’s exchanges, and some of that money charging through the ether belonged to his father, belonged to Harry. He was sure of it.

  Harry went to Prescott’s office and poked his head in. “Do you have a few minutes, Press?”

  “Of course, Harry.” Press gestured to a leather club chair.

  Harry sat and observed Press’s perfect head, the Roman profile, sweeping silver hair that shone against the contrast of his olive skin. His handsomeness was reassuring rather than off-putting. Press pointed out the window to the buckling marble veneer of the bank tower across the street. Seventy-two storeys of scaffolding bracketed the building.

  “They’re taking off the whole facade,” Press said. “Forty-five thousand slabs, I don’t know how many tons. One hundred million it’s going to cost. Same marble Michelangelo used for David. It lasted five hundred years in Italy, thirty-five here. Fucking winter. Some genius picks Carrara marble but doesn’t consider the context.” He gestured around his large office. “Our world, context is everything. You don’t want anything sneaking up on you—hurricanes, banking regulations, new technologies. You invest in something, you consider the context or you leap out the window.” Press leaned back in his chair expectantly.

  “Press,” Harry said. “Look, I need your help with something.”

  One of Press’s hands performed an encompassing wave that meant, Anything, Harry. Anything I can do to help.

  “My father’s estate … it’s not what I had anticipated. I’m trying to make sense of it. He left thirte
en grand, Press.” Harry watched Press receive this news with appropriate solemnity.

  “I’d have to see the paper, Harry, but it doesn’t make sense.”

  “You worked with him. What kind of investor was he?”

  Press shrugged. “He did for himself what he did for his clients. Took a few more risks. Every once in a while took a shot. That’s the usual pattern.”

  “But conservative. He always told me to do my homework.”

  “Big on homework.” Press’s left hand was spread out on the polished wood of his desk, and he examined it.

  “Did you notice any change in his personality near the end?”

  Press looked up from his hand. “What do you mean, Harry?”

  “More forgetful. Or medicated.”

  “Everyone in this business is medicated,” Press said with a smile.

  “Would he be trading through some other account?”

  “The whole world’s online. Everyone’s secret vice.” Press picked up his phone with one hand and held his other palm out toward Harry. “Helen, can you round up Aug and bring him in here?” He hung up the phone and looked at Harry. “August might know something.”