“What the devil … ?” Pavka said, in a low voice, turning to Maxi. She shook her head, tightened her lips and glared at Cutter. What had induced her mother to ask him to address the board? Why wasn’t Lily speaking for herself, instead of this investment banker, this stranger to the group who had no right to be taking any part in the workings of Amberville Publications?
Cutter continued to sit calmly and speak in measured, authoritative tones.
“Mrs. Amberville has not, as you all know, made any changes in the structure of Amberville Publications in the last year since my brother’s unexpected and tragic death. But she has made a serious study of the future of this company, of its ten magazines and its real estate. Now, I think the time has come to face the fact that although six of the magazines are undisputed leaders in their field, four of them are in trouble.” He stopped to take a sip of water and Maxi’s heart beat even more rapidly. Her devious uncle was giving himself the aura of a general. “I think,” he had said, and all down the long table people were sitting without a sound, waiting for the announcement he had promised and had not yet made.
“We all know,” Cutter continued, his manner leisurely, “that my brother took more pleasure in creating a magazine than in enjoying its success; more interest in curing the problems of a sick magazine than in exploiting to the maximum the potential of a well one. That was his great strength, but now that he is gone it has become a weakness. Only another Zachary Amberville could have the necessary stubbornness, the willingness to sustain years of losses, and, particularly, the faith in his own creativity, that is necessary to continue to pour the profits of our six successful magazines into the hungry mouths of our weak ones.”
“Our,” Maxi thought in outrage. Since when, Cutter, have you had a part of Amberville Publications? Since when do you have the right to say “our”? But she sat in antagonistic, apprehensive silence, waiting, her stomach sinking at his ominously dominating manner.
“Three of our newest magazines, Wavelength, Garden, and Vacation, have been losing money at a rate that is simply unacceptable. Buttons and Bows has a value that, for years, has been purely sentimental.…”
“Just a minute, Mr. Amberville,” Pavka Mayer finally spoke, his voice slicing through Cutter’s composed urbane tones, “I hear a businessman talking, not a magazine man. I know every detail of Zachary’s future plans for Wavelength and Garden and Vacation and I can assure you that he didn’t expect them to be showing profits yet. However, it’s only a question of time before they do. As for Buttons and Bows, I feel …”
“Yes, what about Buttons and Bows, Cutter?” Maxi interrupted violently, suddenly finding herself on her feet. “You probably don’t know, innocent as you are of the business, but Father always called it his baby. Why, he founded this whole damn company on it!”
“A luxury, my dear,” Cutter answered, ignoring Pavka Mayer as if he hadn’t spoken. “It was a luxury to keep a magazine going because it had been lucky for him a long time ago, a luxury your father could well afford.”
“Then what the hell has changed?” Maxi cried. “If he could afford it, why can’t we afford it? Who are you to tell us all what we can and can’t afford?” She was shaking with pure, released anger.
“My dear Maxi, I’m speaking for your mother, not for myself. She controls Amberville—you seem to have forgotten that. Naturally it’s a shock to you to have the brutal facts of business expressed by someone who is on the outside.”
He looked at her expressionlessly yet he turned slightly toward her, focusing his words. “While your father was alive this corporation was a one-man show, as even you, my dear impetuous Maxi, would have to admit. But today Zachary Amberville isn’t here to make the difficult decisions. Only your mother has that right, only your mother has that power. She feels that it is her duty to engage in sound business practice since we don’t have the genius of your father to guide us. It’s her duty to look at the profit-and-loss statement, to look at the bottom line.”
“I look at the statement, Cutter. So do Toby and Justin. Last year our profits were many, many millions of dollars. You don’t deny that, do you?” Maxi asked defiantly.
“Certainly not. But you aren’t taking into account the fierce competition we face each month for our share of the magazine market. It’s a little frivolous to ignore the fact that with one difficult, painful decision … one necessary decision, Maxi, that your mother has decided to make, Amberville’s profits can be vastly increased.”
“Frivolous! Wait a minute, Cutter, I refuse to allow that kind of …”
“Maxi, the word was ill-chosen. I apologize. But you are aware, are you not, that your mother is accountable to no one, to no one whomsoever?”
“I know that, but I tell you that Amberville is not in financial trouble,” Maxi insisted, mutinously, stubbornly determined that nothing should change in the world her father had left.
Pavka Mayer, at her side, was gripped by an equally fierce resolution. As he had listened to Cutter Amberville’s words he had been seized by memories of Zachary leading the editorial group with unfaltering courage and imagination over so many difficult periods in the magazine business. Zachary, his friend, who had never attempted to conceal his real motives or emotions as did his subtle brother; Zachary who had plunged into each meeting with a gusto that had made all his colleagues feel as if they were his equals, his companions in the challenges of publishing. Pavka knew far better than Maxi that Amberville Publications was in no difficulty but, unlike her, he didn’t have the authority that stock ownership gave. He watched grimly as Cutter turned away from Maxi’s protests as if she had become invisible and looked around the table, meeting the eyes of each member of the group briefly.
“Amberville Publications,” he said, “is in a situation in which it is intolerable that certain, clearly predictable losses should be permitted to continue. Mrs. Amberville’s decision is to cease publication, as quickly as possible, of the four magazines that have been losing money. She regrets the necessity of this decision but it is not open to discussion.”
He leaned back easily, armored and impassive, knowing that the reaction to his words would, in spite of anything he had said, erupt in the room full of men and women, many of whom had just had their working lives demolished. Frightened and incredulous voices burst out all around him. Maxi had gone to Toby’s side, whispering fiercely to him. Suddenly the room grew still as Lily Amberville, astonished at the opposition that came from all sides and finding herself, for one of the rare, almost unthinkable times in her life, on the defensive, held up both of her lovely hands, palms forward.
“Please! Please, there is something I realize I must say after all. I see now that I’ve done a disservice to Mr. Amberville in asking him to tell you this difficult news. I didn’t anticipate … didn’t quite understand how unsettling it would be … a business decision merely … but I should have tried to talk to each one of you separately. However, I’m afraid that was quite beyond my powers. Please don’t blame Mr. Amberville for my decision and don’t feel that he had no right to announce it to this group. I haven’t even been able to tell my children the reason I asked him to speak for me until this minute … I …” Lily turned to Cutter imploringly and fell silent. He took her hand and again looked around the table with perfect self-possession, like a lion tamer in a cage establishing his supremacy.
Maxi watched them in a condition of incoherent insurrection. What possible excuse could Cutter have to speak for her mother? She remembered unwillingly, but unable to prevent the thought from surfacing, a night when she had been fifteen and Cutter had been on one of his rare visits to New York, staying in one of the guest rooms of her parents’ house. She had been in bed, studying for an exam, when he had come into her room in his bathrobe, looking for something to read. He had asked her what she was working on and had approached her bed to inspect the textbook. Suddenly she had felt his hand darting under her pajama top, grasping her bare breast, fingering her nipple. She had pul
led violently away, her mouth open in shock, ready to scream, and he had drawn back with a smiling, smooth, plausible apology. But Maxi had known, in that instant, what he had wanted, and he had known that she knew. The attempt had never been repeated, but she could never be with him in the same room without remembering that split second of evil contact. Why was Cutter holding her mother’s hand?
“Yesterday,” he announced, looking directly at Maxi, his triumph so certain, so absolute, that it seemed emotionless, “Mrs. Amberville and I were married.”
3
Zachary Anderson Amberville had never looked anything like an Anderson, his mother, Sarah Cutter Anderson, of Andover, Massachusetts, had been heard to remark plaintively. The boy was obviously a throwback to one of the French Huguenot Ambervilles who had come over to fight for American independence with Lafayette, in the regiment of the Marquis de Biron, and decided to settle in New England. Every generation or so, a dark-haired, dark-eyed Amberville boy or girl would be born who would grow to only medium height and who would have a lamentable tendency toward a certain plumpness in middle age, and her oldest son was one of them, she complained, to mask the pride she felt in him which it would have been unbecoming to express.
Her own Anderson ancestors were stern Swedes and the Cutters were … well, the Cutters were Andover. No money anymore, of course, in either of the two branches of her family, but the Ambervilles hadn’t done particularly well for themselves either, considering the head start they had had on the rest of the country. They might all have been considered a bit stick-in-the-mud, determinedly provincial, except that Zack had as much dynamism, as much ambition, as much get-up-and-go as you might hope to find in one entire large family of recent immigrants.
He was born in 1923, several years after Sarah Anderson’s marriage to Henry Dale Amberville, the young editor of a small country newspaper near Andover. By the time Zack was seven he had his own paper route, delivering his father’s paper every day at dawn. He tried valiantly to expand his sales to include the Saturday Evening Post but he had little luck, for the Depression had just started to settle over the United States and people were beginning to cut back on every unnecessary expense.
The Ambervilles’ second child was a daughter named Emily, who became known as Minnie Mouse and finally just Minnie. By the time their last child, Cutter, was born in 1934, the Depression had almost wiped out the small income of Henry Amberville’s newspaper. Zack went to the local public school instead of to Andover, which generations of Ambervilles had attended, and after school he always managed to hunt up some kind of paying job: jerking sodas, delivering groceries, chopping wood, running errands for the town’s shopkeepers. He didn’t care what he did as long as he could contribute to the family funds. His summers were spent working at the newspaper for his father, learning the business, trying to sell ads and taking over many of the tasks his father now had to do single-handedly, since Henry Amberville had eliminated his tiny staff as the Depression grew worse.
Zachary was a brilliant student who had skipped fifth and eighth grades and his sophomore year of high school. In the spring of his senior year of high school, when he was just barely fifteen, he applied for a scholarship to a number of colleges. His dream was to go to Harvard, for in Cambridge he could have stayed close to his family. His sense of responsibility toward his parents, toward Minnie, and particularly toward his four-year-old brother, Cutter, was so strong that he proposed to go to work after high school and forget about college, but the Ambervilles would not permit this. “We can manage, Zachary, so long as we don’t have to contribute to your tuition, but if you think that I’m going to see a son of mine do without a college education …” His father’s voice trailed off in horror at the enormity of such an idea.
The only university that offered Zachary Amberville a full scholarship, including books, room and board, was Columbia, in Morningside Heights. Ambervilles and Cutters and Andersons and Dales had visited Manhattan, of course, throughout the centuries, but never had one of them actually spent more than a night in the city that they found, unanimously, too loud, too crowded, too expensive, too full of foreigners, too commercial, in fact, as one of them finally put it to everyone’s satisfaction, “Not, in point of fact, really American at all.”
At fifteen, Zachary Amberville, strongly built but still growing, was a full two inches short of his final height of five-ten, and three years younger than most of his classmates, but he had the mind-set of someone not just bigger but also older. He had been independent for so many years, so driven by the need to take care of his family that he had an inner sense of authority that college freshmen almost never have. He inspired respect at first sight although he was, by nature, invariably rumpled, his black hair ruffled by his habit of running his hand through it and tugging on his white streak whenever he was temporarily puzzled by anything. He was carelessly dressed and obviously neither knew nor thought about how he looked. He was volatile, ready for any adventure, talkative, intensely curious about everyone and everything new, and had a belly laugh that could be heard from one end of the dorm to the other. He had never had a drink, never used profanity and never spent a night away from home, but there was a boldness and a largeness about this teenager that had nothing to do with the rules by which college boys usually judge each other. Zachary Amberville had a good, wide mouth and a pleasingly big, blunt nose and most lively, easily amused, animated green eyes under thick quirky eyebrows. He wasn’t handsome, this dark Amberville, but he had a quality that made others like him at first sight and follow him in his many enthusiasms.
Zachary Amberville fell in love with New York City at first sight. “ ‘I’ll take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too,’ ” he sang to himself as he studied in the stacks of the Low Library, the words of the immortal song that Rodgers and Hart had written in 1925, never far from his lips. I’ll take Manhattan, oh yes I will, I’ll take it and I’ll keep it! he vowed to himself as he grabbed a subway downtown whenever he had a few free hours. He knew the city on foot from the Battery to Harlem, from river to river, he knew the bridges and the parks, the avenues and the sidestreets, and except for the museums, he knew it all, from the outside only, for the price of a subway ride and, once in a while, the best hot dog in the world bought at a pushcart on Delancey Street. Money for the subway, the hot dogs and all his other small needs came from his part-time job waiting on tables at the Lion’s Den, the sandwich place on campus. Every extra penny he earned he sent back home, deciding that the luxury of abandoning the Lion’s Den job to try out for the Spectator, the Columbia daily paper, was something he couldn’t afford. In fact there was no element of reluctant choice in what he did. To assume responsibility for his family was a natural function of his personality.
Zachary Amberville had planned his future. When he graduated from Columbia he was going to get a job at the New York Times as a copyboy. Surely, he reasoned, as he spent his summers putting out a daily paper almost single-handedly, for his father’s health was steadily failing, he would be able to persuade them to give him a job … he knew every aspect of the business, from printing through delivery. The Columbia School of Journalism, he judged, would be a waste of precious time and he couldn’t afford it in any case.
He had taken the tour offered by the New York Times, managing to join groups of schoolchildren who were welcomed into the infernal lower depths of the Times building and given a glimpse of the great presses at work. From copyboy to reporter, from reporter to … there his imagination stopped, stunned by the richness and varieties of opportunity offered by the best newspaper ever published.
The world had other plans for the members of Columbia’s class of 1941. The day after war was declared, eighteen-year-old Zachary Amberville, a full-fledged senior, joined the Marines. He could have waited to be drafted and probably, almost certainly, he would have been allowed to graduate, but he was too impatient to get the war over with and get back to the New York Times. “Tell me what street compares to Mott Street in
July,” he sang, roaring out loud above the sound of the engines of his Marine Corsair fighter plane as he flew countless missions in the Pacific; a hero, a Major by his twenty-first birthday, a Lieutenant Colonel by V-J Day, and, six months later, in Hawaii, a violently angry full Colonel.
“What the fuck do you mean, I can’t go home yet? I should have been out on points months ago, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Colonel, I’m sorry, but the General needs you.”
“Damn it, sir, what about ‘first in, first out’? The General has dozens of other officers, what the hell does he need me for?”
“It seems you have unusual organizational abilities, Colonel.”
“I’m a fighter pilot, sir, not a pencil pusher. Sorry, sir.”
“I know how you feel, Colonel. I’ll talk to the General again about you, but it doesn’t look good. He said, ‘Tell Amberville that if he wanted out so badly he should have joined the Army Air Force.’ ”
“That’s a fucking insult, sir!”
“I know, Colonel, I know.”
World War II had been over for ten months when Colonel Zachary Amberville finally got back to New York City. His father had died in 1943 but Sarah Amberville was living in the family home near Andover. Her husband’s life insurance had been meager but her son’s flight pay, sent home regularly and saved carefully, was still helping to bring up the younger children.
J. Press was the new civilian’s first stop. He couldn’t show up at the Times in his uniform and medals. It would look ridiculous. Copyboys had to dress like copyboys, he reasoned as he knotted his first personally chosen tie in more than five years; a red one with white polka dots that expressed the jubilation that danced in his eyes. He didn’t want to look too Ivy League either, though God knows, the only suit J. Press offered that he could afford was a stiff and hairy tweed that would have been perfectly at home in the Harvard Yard if it had only fit him and been twenty years older. The only thing that looks good, brand new, Zachary Amberville reflected, studying his barely recognizable self in a full-length mirror, is a toothbrush.
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