by Terry Fallis
“Come on. Perhaps you weren’t fully planned. But you were loved and supported just as I was.”
“You cannot know that for sure. You weren’t there for most of it,” Sarah said. “One of my earliest memories is of the day you left home for college. It’s no wonder I have abandonment issues. I remember Mom holding my hand while Dad stood there in the street watching your car until it turned the corner and was gone. Then he walked right by me and back into the house, as if I wasn’t even there. For most of my life, when it came to Dad, I felt like I wasn’t really there. I know he loved me, but not like the first-born.”
I, too, could recall the day I finally left.
“I was eighteen, so you must have been five,” I said. “Sorry about bailing on you just when you were getting old enough to be interesting, but I had to get out of there. Until I escaped, every day was a chance for Dad to drill into me some other insight or bit of advice that would supposedly help me run the company. I was eighteen! I didn’t even know how to do my own laundry and he was schooling me on potential manufacturing productivity efficiencies on line number 1. I knew even then I wanted nothing to do with it, but he wasn’t listening.”
“So you fled,” she interjected. “You ran.”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
“And you’re still running from it more than twenty years later.”
“Well, let’s not get melodramatic about it,” I protested. “Is it such a crime to want to do something else with my life, other than running an underwear empire?”
“No, but ignoring it won’t make it disappear,” she replied.
We lapsed into silence again for a few moments until Sarah piped back up.
“So what now? What will you do with all the time you suddenly have on your hands?”
“Write.”
We went out for a walk through the village. The sun had started to break through the canopy of clouds and it was shirt-sleeves warm. By this time it was early afternoon and I was hungry. So was Sarah.
“Let’s try this place,” she proposed. “It looks nice.”
We had stopped on Bleecker about two blocks from my apartment, near West 11th. I’d walked by the still new bakery/restaurant a few times and had wanted to try it anyway. It was called Let Them Eat Cake! We entered. It was small, clean, brightly lit, and smelled heavenly, as most bakeries do. Even though it was still within what most would consider the lunch hour, it was not crowded. Sarah and I chose a table by the window, giving us a view of the streetscape. Two menus were already on the table. A few minutes later, an attractive woman, I’d guess mid-thirties, who carried herself as if she were completely at ease with everything in her universe, approached us. Her name tag said “Marie.”
“Welcome to Let Them Eat Cake!” She greeted us in a strong southern accent, smiling and spreading her arms wide as if to say “Ta-daaa.”
“Thanks. You haven’t been here that long, have you?” I asked.
“We’re in our second month. So far, so good.”
“Well, congratulations. This neighbourhood needs a nice restaurant,” I said.
“We call it a café-bakery, actually. But thank you. We’re very excited about it all.”
Her smile was infectious and seemed to warm the air around her.
“What can I get y’all?”
“I’m going to try to your Cobb salad with a Diet Coke, please,” Sarah said.
Marie turned to me. I was still looking at Sarah.
“You’re in a brand-new café-bakery that smells as good as this one does and you’re having a salad?” I asked.
“Look, you order what you want, and I’ll order what I want. That’s how restaurants work,” she replied with a forced smile.
I looked back at Marie and shook my head.
“Well, I’ve skipped right over the salads, sandwiches, and soups and gone straight for what you call Coronary Chocolate Cake. If that’s what’s on the counter over there, I want a slice.”
“That’s the one,” she said, pointing to the cake on the counter that I can only describe as magnificent. “Good choice. I made that this morning and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed if you’re a chocoholic like I am,” she drawled.
“I am. Oh, and a glass of milk, too. Thanks.”
“Done,” Marie replied.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” I asked.
“Has my liltin’ accent betrayed me?”
“Just a hunch on my part,” I replied.
“Born and raised in Louisiana, but I’m a Manhattan girl now,” Marie said as she turned and headed for the kitchen.
“Okay, so what did you want to talk to me about? Or have we already covered it?” I asked.
“I thought you might have figured it out by now,” she replied.
“Sarah, I can do many things, but reading your mind is not one of them. Just put it out there and then I’ll let you know if I’ve figured it out or not.”
“All right, all right. Here it is. It’s really quite simple. You and I have a shared interest. We have a common vision for the future of Hemmingwear. I just think we should work together so we both get what we want out of it.”
“What I want out of it is to be out of it. So maybe I haven’t yet figured out what you’re driving at,” I said. “What exactly is our shared interest, our common vision as you put it?”
“Well, you just said it. Neither one of us wants you to run the company,” she concluded. “Is that clear enough?”
“Sarah, not wanting to run the company hasn’t exactly cooled Dad’s jets on the topic. In his mind, it’s not whether I’ll come home to be CEO, it’s when.”
“But, by working together, there might be a way to take you off the hook and put me on it. A win-win. That’s a goal we can both get behind, isn’t it?”
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“Come home and talk to Dad. Make it crystal clear that you don’t want, and never will want, to take part in the management of Hemmingwear. Tell him that you think there’s another Hemmingway who could honour the family tradition. Tell him I can do it. Tell him I may not be ready quite yet, but I’m on the path and I want to do it. Tell him I’m smart. I’m tough. I have a plan to make the company better. And that he should start letting me get involved in more than just marketing. And tell him that all the parenting books say that fathers should actually talk to their daughters.”
“Sarah, doesn’t he know all of that? You’ve been working there for a couple of years now.”
“Hem, do you not remember our penis discussion? It was only half an hour ago.”
“Keep your voice down!” I hissed. “Do you want Marie to throw us out of her restaurant before the cake comes?”
“Café-bakery, actually, but who’s counting?” Sarah said. “Yes, I’ve worked there for a while now, but I never get any Dad time. He goes out of his way to keep me on the periphery. He avoids me. Keeps his door closed. I’m languishing in marketing and there’s so much more I want to get involved in.”
“But your MBA was focused in marketing, wasn’t it? Didn’t he put you there because he thought that’s where you wanted to be?”
“Don’t get me wrong. I love marketing, and it’s important. But it’s still one or two rungs removed from where the real action is. I want to do a stint in finance and work on corporate strategy. MaxWorldCorp is coming on strong, and we have no real response. If we’re not careful, they’re going to blow right by us.”
“From what Dad tells me in his interminable phone calls, MaxWorldCorp is in no position to threaten Hemmingwear’s market leadership. They just can’t touch us.”
“Yeah, well, Dad is out of the loop. They’ve made three new acquisitions in the last three months and have an aggressive expansion plan. MaxWorldCorp is poised to start cutting our grass big-time.”
Marie arrived with the salad and my cake. Oh my gosh, the cake. I had to concentrate very hard to keep my mind on Sarah’s voice when I was eating that cake. I think it was probab
ly the finest piece of chocolate cake I’ve ever eaten. It might have been the finest piece of anything I’ve ever eaten.
“This is unbelievable. This is sublime,” I moaned.
“Why don’t you and your cake get a room?” Sarah chided. “You’re making very strange sounds. Try to focus, Hem.”
“Sorry. This cake is from a different astral plane,” I explained, my eyes closed in ecstasy. “Okay, I’m back now. So, to summarize, you want me to start working the Sarah angle with Dad in the hope of getting us both what we want.”
“Precisely. I think you’ve got it now.”
It really wasn’t a bad idea. And what did I have to lose? Well, I guess I had my CEO job to lose, which was exactly what I was looking for. Why didn’t I think of this before?
“Okay, I’m in. But I don’t think Dad is just going to roll over and hand you the keys to the corner office. This is going to take some time.”
“I have faith in your powers of persuasion,” Sarah said as she patted my hand. “But when you talk to Dad, this has to be your idea. I don’t want him to think I’m a conniving Machiavellian manipulator.”
I raised an eyebrow. I must have raised it quite high.
“Okay, I may be a conniving Machiavellian manipulator. I just don’t want him to think that, yet,” she concluded.
We shook on it.
“So how is Dad these days? I’ve been avoiding his calls so I haven’t actually spoken to him for a while.”
“He’s getting worse. Ever since Mom died, he’s been even more obsessed with the company. It runs his life. It clearly means more to him than, well, than anything else,” she said.
“Is he still refusing to believe that the 1960s are actually over?”
“Well, his wardrobe, language, attitudes, and business perspective are certainly stuck in the sixties, if that’s what you mean,” she explained. “And I don’t think it’s helping that he’s spending such an inordinate amount of time with our jackass of a COO, Henderson Watt.”
“Henderson Watt? Isn’t that your boyfriend?”
“Bite your tongue,” she snapped. “We dated just long enough for me to get him into the company. Then he stopped courting me and started courting Dad. He’s ambitious to an entirely unhealthy degree. You think I’m ambitious? This guy is in a league of his own.”
“Doesn’t Dad see through him?”
“Dad is blinded by this guy’s bright light. No one has been promoted faster. He’s a charter member of the Executive Sycophants Hall of Fame. It would be embarrassing if it weren’t so dangerous.”
“Dangerous? What do you mean?” I asked.
“I don’t think he has an original, or even an informed, thought in his head, yet he’s the only one who’s in Dad’s head these days.”
“Okay, if I’m going to undertake Project Sell Sarah, I need to know who this guy is and where he came from. Just give me the pencil sketch,” I asked.
“I met Henderson at Dooley’s, where a few of us from marketing go for drinks most Thursday nights. I’d seen him there a few times before. When we finally met, we hit it off. By sheer coincidence, he’d worked overseas for a European skiwear manufacturer but had returned stateside after five years when it looked as if he’d topped out over there. He was looking for work in the rag trade to build on what he’d learned across the pond. I thought his experience in the EU might be useful as I know Dad was contemplating trying to break into the European market. We dated seriously for a few months and all was going well. Then I finally talked Dad into seeing him. They were locked in his office for three hours. The conversation just kept going.
When it ended, Dad hired him on the spot to work in corporate finance.”
“Wow. That was fast.”
“He ingratiated himself with Dad, buttering him up, and, well …”
“Being the first-born son he didn’t really have? Is that where you were going?” I filled in the blank.
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, that is precisely where I was going,” she replied. “That was just the start of the courtship. About seven months in, they even went on a weekend fishing trip together. Dad’s never even been fishing. Well, when they got back, Henderson was given the COO title. The next day, he dropped me like I had the bubonic plague.”
“What did he say when he broke up with you?”
“Not much beyond the need for him to focus exclusively on his new job. There wasn’t time or bandwidth for anything else, or anyone else,” she said. “I felt angry, betrayed, and more than a little suspicious. The first two don’t really matter, but I’m convinced he’s up to something. I just don’t know what.”
“What did Dad say?”
“Sweet diddly. Not a word. I don’t think he even knew we were seeing each other. And if he did, he didn’t care.” She sighed. “He’s blinded by the lustre of his golden boy. And I’m to blame for bringing them together.”
“He sounds like a real piece of work.”
“You’ll meet him when you come to see Dad, which you should do sooner rather than later.”
She changed the subject after that and forced me to recount, moment by moment, my ill-fated and broken-ass visit to the DMV. So I did. She called the YouTube video up on her iPhone to bring my words to life. Even though she’d already watched my performance several times, my colour commentary seemed to enhance the entertainment value. I don’t think I’d ever seen Sarah laugh so hard. She actually squeaks when her laughter crosses a certain threshold. I could hardly blame her. With twenty-four hours’ distance, the whole event now seemed almost as funny to me as it must have to the crowd of witnesses.
“Looks like you just lost it in a very big and a very embarrassing way,” Sarah concluded.
“Yeah, well, you have no idea what it’s like to carry around such a famous name.”
“Come on, Hem. Get over it. What’s the big deal? So you’ve got a famous name. So what. Who cares?”
“Spoken like a true ‘partial,’ ” I said.
“What the hell is a ‘partial’?” Sarah asked.
“It’s someone who only has half a famous name, like you. It’s one of the designations in the classification system I’ve been working on,” I replied. “I’m still noodling around with it.”
“I bet you are.”
Sarah caught a late afternoon flight back to O’Hare. She hugged me before she got into the cab. It was not the artificial squeeze I’d gotten when she arrived. There was more behind this one. That was a good sign. It had been a good day. I don’t think I’d spent that much concentrated time with Sarah, well, ever. I liked her more than I’d expected. She was growing on me. Bonding was easier when she wasn’t yelling at me.
I popped out again later in the afternoon and headed straight for my local florist. I sent a flower arrangement to arrive at Sarah’s office on Monday morning. Then I had them wrap up a bouquet of freshly cut flowers to take with me.
I grabbed the subway and was at my destination inside of fifteen minutes. I’d called earlier and lucked out. They were open a handful of Saturdays throughout the year to deal with the heavy demand rolling into the summer. This was one of those open Saturdays. My good fortune continued. She was there. The lineup wasn’t too bad for a Saturday afternoon. When it was my turn, I had to let two people behind me go ahead until she was available. There was a flash of recognition in her face when I approached Window 10. I pushed the flowers through the opening in the window and gave her my widest possible smile without looking crazed. I kept my hands high and visible at all times. She didn’t touch the flowers but just left them lying there on her side of the glass. She didn’t seem thrilled and looked at her phone to confirm it had not moved and was still within reach.
“Hi again,” I started. “We got off on the wrong foot yesterday and I wanted to come back to apologize and try again.”
She had folded her arms across her chest.
“I don’t remember many of my customers, but I sure remember you,” she said. “If you’re
gonna tell me the same story today, well, I don’t think we’re going to get along any better.”
I pushed my passport, my last two tax returns, and four pieces of official mail, all bearing my name and address, partway through the opening in the glass. For good measure, I also shoved through my Macdonald-Clark business card. She didn’t need to know that I’d just been turfed. She furrowed her brow but pulled the documents the rest of the way through the slot.
“I know it sounds far-fetched, but my name really is Earnest Hemmingway. I was named for my great-grandfather, who was born four years before the famous writer was,” I explained. “We’re not related in any way. Our names are even spelled differently.” I had one more card to play. “You’ve heard of The Hemmingwear Company?”
“What, the underwear people?”
“Right. Well, my family owns the company. I’m telling you the truth, I swear.”
She stopped looking at me and started examining what I’d passed through to her. Then she punched some buttons on her computer, typed in my name, and up popped my file, just like that.
“Why didn’t you bring these docs yesterday? It sure would have saved time and, you know, that little situation we had.”
I wanted to ask why she couldn’t have just typed in my name the day before, thus saving my tailbone from a very hard landing. I bit my tongue.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think to bring them yesterday. I honestly didn’t think I’d need them. I should have brought them. I know that now. It would have avoided so much unpleasantness.”
I hung my head in contrition, with my hands still up high where she could see them.
Fifteen minutes later, she’d taken my photo, processed the replacement request, handed back all my documents, and then slid my shiny new driver’s licence across the counter to me. She was the picture of public service efficiency.
“Thanks so much, and sorry about yesterday. I’d had a very bad day. I apologize for taking it out on you.”
