High

by Andrew Osmond

  Chapter One

  Garnet G. Wendelson was born on the 1st May 1931, the very same day that the Empire State Building was officially opened in his home city of New York. At the precise moment that President Herbert Hoover pressed the switch in Washington, D.C. which turned on the lights of the colossal new structure in its rival city, Lucille Wendelson was being delivered of her only son and child at the exclusive Carlisle Infirmary on 29th Street, a mere four blocks distant from the site of the epic inauguration. As fate would have it, though, she would never set foot inside the marble, Art Deco lobby of the new structure; would never ride one of the lifts to the 86th floor observatory, nor ever admire the sight of the streets of her great city from the 102nd floor viewing platform: Lucille Wendelson died of a major internal haemorrhage on 3rd May 1931, never having left hospital, and leaving behind her newly born son as her sole heir and beneficiary, and an estate valued at a conservative estimate of 35 million dollars.

  Lucille’s husband, Garnet’s father - there was never any doubt about that - had died three months earlier, as a result of a freak accident at one of his own sugar refining factories: the substance that had chiefly been responsible for the family’s wealth now indirectly becoming the agent for the new-born baby’s poverty of parental affection. The young Garnet’s over-riding impression of his father was based on a painting of the entrepreneurial man which hung above the fireplace in the family’s Park Avenue apartment: barrel-chested, his white Safari shirt hanging half open exposing a proud torso, bronzed and muscular; a large handle-bar moustache and bright, blue eyes, set wide apart, separated by a broad, uneven nose, crooked like a prize-fighter’s; standing in a pose of unashamed pugnacious superiority, one leg slightly raised, resting on a log, in imitation of a big game hunter proudly exhibiting his mastery over his kill, his gaze defiant, staring out from the canvas, mocking all critics, confident of rebuffing all challengers. That his father had been - what was described at the time as - an ‘outside’ type - if any further proof than the portrait was required - Garnet had later ascertained from reading his private journals and public press releases. That he had also been a cruel man and a megalomaniac, Garnet had only discovered from reading between the lines, and from conversation with his only surviving relative, his aunt Patricia.

  Garnet had not been fortunate to inherit any of his father’s physical attributes: the word most commonly associated with describing his childhood was ‘sickly’, although a succession of nannies would have probably have been able to come up with several more colourful adjectives: in a sensationalist tabloid feature about the Wendelson fortune, published in the early 1950s, when Garnet was then a young man, one of his very earliest nursemaids, the redoubtable Miss Emily Larchester, was persuaded to divulge - no doubt for an accommodating sum of money - that she had considered the orphaned infant ‘unloved, unlovely and unlovable’, adding that her predecessor had ‘only managed to stick the kid because the pay was good, but that a Larchester was above being bought’. History would reveal - if any payslips or similar documentation of her term of employment were still in existence - that Emily Larchester’s residence in the Park Avenue abode was to last a mere six weeks. Garnet Wendelson could not recall her at all, although this did not in any way deter him from attempting to sue both her and the newspaper which printed the article, for what he considered at the time ‘slanderous comments’. It was not to be the only slander that was associated with his name during the early years of that same decade.

  During the night of 24th June 1950, 135,000 troops of the North Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th parallel and a full-scale invasion of the neighbouring Republic of Korea was underway. The ill-equipped soldiers of the ROK were no match for the Soviet-made tanks and artillery of the NKPA and within four days the Communists captured Seoul; within a month the only territory still under South Korean control was a small region in the southeast of the peninsula surrounding the city of Pusan. The Korean War had begun. At the same time in New York, Garnet G. Wendelson was falling out of a window of his family home; the pavement of Park Avenue red with Wendelson blood. Draft dodging is an ugly phrase, but this did not prevent the Press from habitually including it in the large number of articles that appeared shortly after this incident, which both speculated about the nature of the accident and reported upon the slow recovery of the heir of the molasses millions, the slur tagged on to the end of the Wendelson name as though it were a graduation qualification to be proud of. Perhaps it is the curse of success that everyone wants an opportunity to shoot you down, and, during the previous two decades, it had to be said that the Wendelson empire had been nothing if not successful, and this despite - or perhaps because of - a largely absentee landlord. The young Garnet had never indicated any intention of showing the same hands-on enthusiasm towards the family business as his father had done before him, but thanks to the loyal service and guidance of an experienced general manager the firm had been able to ride the potential hazards of the Depression years, followed swiftly by the Second World War, with nothing more serious to show in the company books by the intervention of these major historical events than a rise in profits and a widening customer base: everyone wanted something sweet in a time of crisis to take away the bitter taste of reality.

  It was while he was in hospital that speculation as to the meaning of Garnet’s middle initial was raised. The question had been first brought up by an overly pedantic junior doctor, anxious to be seen to be correctly filling in the forms which were increasingly becoming the main activity of his profession, as though the way to medical recovery could be best attained through the employment of an efficient filing system rather than by the old-fashioned ideas of examination, diagnosis and treatment. Unconscious and unable to aid the adroit administrator, it would have come as a surprise to everyone - perhaps the patient most of all - to discover that Garnet would not have been able to clear up the mystery even if he had been capable of the powers of speech or description. His middle ‘G’ had followed Garnet around like a loyal but boring friend: he was content to tolerate its presence but was not prepared to waste a moment of time showing any interest towards it. The letter had appeared on his birth certificate, at the insistence of his mother or some other personage unknown, he knew not which, but it had never been elaborated upon and he had never felt the eligibility to expand upon the matter himself: a name was for giving not for choosing. There had been no clues in his family tree: his father was Jacob, as was his father before him, and on his mother’s side there were no names beginning with the letter ‘G’, unless you included one Gunthilda Aldberg, a distant cousin dating from the seventeenth century, and he could not believe that his mother had wished to maintain her memory for posterity. After a sleepless night, and for the sake of completeness, the doctor eventually returned his form with his patient registered as Garnet George Wendelson - George being the name of his own grandfather. On regaining consciousness Garnet retained the name: it was as good as any other.

  He was confined to a wheelchair - and would be for the rest of his adult life was the medical prognosis - two shattered vertebrae had left him paralysed from the waist downwards. A more optimistic man might have riled against the diagnosis, might have battled his way back to fitness, would have been found every day in physiotherapy attempting to strengthen his damaged limbs, would have tried to keep exercising in the hope that one day he would walk again: Garnet accepted the doctor’s statement passively and the following day an advertisement appeared in the New York Times looking for a live-in helper willing to push his chair.