“I was only going to say that she seems old enough to think for herself, make sound choices.”
“And you, Mr. Bryant, are one of her sound choices?”
Adam said nothing.
“I think not,” Ingram said. “I’ll try not to insult you, Mr. Bryant. As I told you last night, I’ve seen a variety of men trying to get near my daughter. And they all want only one thing.”
“You know nothing about me,” Adam said.
“I haven’t gotten where I am by not being a good judge of character, Mr. Bryant. I’ve found if you want to know a man, all you need to know is what he wants. I know that you work for a newspaper so I can guess you make perhaps two thousand dollars per year.” His eyes swept over Adam’s damp suit. “Can you look me in the eye, Mr. Bryant, and tell me you aren’t interested in my daughter’s money?”
Adam stared at him.
“You may very well be a man of character,” Ingram said. “But I can’t take a chance. I have a fortune to protect, a daughter to protect. You have nothing to offer a girl like Elizabeth.” He paused. “She’s very impressionable, given to romantic whims. I must therefore count on you to behave as a gentleman and make no further attempts to see her.”
Inside, Adam was raging with anger, but he kept his composure. “I won’t be brushed off like this,” he said.
Ingram sighed and went to his desk. He pulled out a leather book and flipped it open. “How much will it take, Mr. Bryant?” he said, picking up a pen.
Adam’s face began to burn with humiliation. “I don’t want your money,” he said.
Ingram gave him a final look then closed the checkbook. “In that case, we have nothing else to say.” He pushed a table buzzer. The maid appeared at the door. “Charlotte, would you show Mr. Bryant out, please?”
Adam paused then picked up his hat. Without looking at Ingram he went swiftly out into the foyer. The heavy front door closed behind him with a soft finality. Adam stood on the porch for a moment, his face still burning. He put on his hat, turned up the collar of his coat, and stepped out into the street. He paused for a moment to look up at the upstairs windows of the mansion then started back down the hill in the light rain.
CHAPTER SIX
For the next two weeks, Adam tried to get through to Elizabeth with no success. His phone calls to the house were intercepted, his letters returned unopened. When he went to the mansion he was turned away by servants. Finally, he learned that the Ingrams had returned to Atlanta.
He thought of Elizabeth constantly, his attraction to her inseparable from the embarrassment and anger he felt over her father’s words. He knew he had to forget her but he grew obsessed with seeing her one more time.
He asked for some time off from work and went to Atlanta. He located the Ingram home, a red brick fortress in the countryside surrounded by an iron fence. Again, he tried to call Elizabeth but was rebuffed by Ingram. He resorted to staying outside the gate, waiting for Elizabeth to leave. Finally, the police arrived and told him that Ingram would have him arrested unless Adam agreed to leave Atlanta.
Adam returned to San Francisco, mentally and physically exhausted. In the city room, he sat slumped at his desk, drawing the stares of the other men. A secretary told him that he was to report to Bickford’s office. Adam pulled himself out of the chair and took the elevator upstairs.
Bickford looked up from his paper. “Have a seat, Adam,” he said.
Adam sat down, straightening his tie. He had not changed his clothes after he had gotten off the train that morning.
“I got a phone call from Atlanta this morning,” Bickford said, “from a Mr. Charles Ingram.”
Adam closed his eyes.
Bickford’s face reddened slightly. “I had a hard time believing what he told me, Adam. The man told me you were harassing his sixteen-year-old daughter.”
Adam looked at him. “I went to Atlanta to --”
Bickford held up a hand. “Look, Adam. I can’t tell you how to run your life. But when it starts affecting your work, well, that’s something else.” He paused. “You’ve been acting odd for a couple of weeks now. Does this girl have anything to do with it?”
“My work comes first with me, Bick. You know that.”
“Yeah, well...maybe.” Bickford’s look was softening. “You know that promotion is yours, if you want it, Adam. But when you move up into management you must watch your conduct. I don’t like my top men’s names showing up on police blotters.” He paused. “Lilith doesn’t know about this and I won’t tell her.”
Adam stared at Bickford, almost dwarfed by the large mahogany desk.
Bickford leaned back in his chair, apparently content his chastising of Adam was over. “This Ingram fellow, you should have heard him,” he said. “After he called, I had the morgue check him out. Big name in the South, I guess. One of those moldy old families that’s been hanging around since before the Civil War.”
Adam remained silent.
“I can understand you wanting to sow some wild oats before you settle down,” Bickford said. “But what in the world were you doing chasing his daughter?”
“It was just one night, Bick,” Adam said absently.
Bickford’s mouth compressed into a grim line. “A man should never try to play above himself, son. If you reach too high, you set yourself up for a fall. Just be cautious, work hard, make a good marriage, that’s how you get ahead.”
Adam didn’t look up.
“You have a great future here, Adam,” Bickford said. “This promotion is just the first step. You’re young. You’ve got so much ahead of you. But me...I’m not so young.”
There was a different tone in Bickford’s voice that made Adam look up.
“I always wanted a son,” Bickford said, “someone to carry on after me. What do daughters bring you? Just heartaches. I love Lilith but she certainly couldn’t run this newspaper after me. ” He paused again. “But you could. I’ve known that from the first day I met you. Your future is here, Adam, with the Times. If you want it.”
“I know, Bick. And I do want it.”
The secretary knocked and leaned in to announce that Bickford had someone waiting outside. Adam got up to leave.
“You look terrible,” Bickford said. “Take the rest of the day off. You can start fresh tomorrow, as city editor.”
Adam hid his surprise. “Thanks, Bick,” he said finally. “You won’t regret it. I’ll work hard.”
“I know you will,” Bickford said.
Down in the lobby Adam pick up a copy of that afternoon’s Times. Outside, he paused. It was a chilly but sunny day, and Union Square was filled with people —- shoppers taking advantage of the post-Christmas sales, men filing in and out of the office buildings. He stood there, not knowing where he wanted to go. He didn’t want to go back to the boarding house, and he felt no compulsion to linger over a drink in some speakeasy.
He folded the Times under his arm and set off to catch a trolley. He rode it down across town to the marina and then walked over to the Palace of Fine Arts. He found a bench near the duck pond and sat down, watching the children play under the watchful gazes of mothers and nannies. He glanced down to the Times in his lap.
He unfolded it and idly scanned the headlines and then noticed the date. December 31, 1926. He hadn’t even realized it was New Year’s Eve.
Tomorrow, he would go into the office and begin his new job as city editor. A new year would begin. His future would begin. He folded the paper and set it aside, fighting the urge to look up at the statues.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Adam sat at the dining room table, staring out the window. From the vantage point in his Pacific Heights home, the bay was blue and the sky cloudless. A beautiful morning, filled with promise.
He picked up the newspaper spread before him and began to read. The Depression was deepening, the city’s neighborhoods were deteriorating, and out in the farming areas homeless migrants congregated in shanty towns called “Hoovervilles.”
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br /> No promise in the pages of the Times.
Adam glanced at the date at the top of the page. January 1, 1930. A new decade had begun. A time to look ahead and hope for better things. Not a time to look back.
He looked at his watch. He felt sluggish, even though he had not had much to drink at the New Year’s party last night. He glanced at the other end of the mahogany table where the breakfast setting sat untouched. The maid came in and refilled his cup.
“Leave the pot, please,” Adam said.
She nodded and slipped out.
Adam set the newspaper aside. It was too damn depressing to read it, too hard to think about the disparity between the despondent life reflected on its pages and that of his own. He was now editor in chief of the Times. He was a success. And he was a man of some means now, with a large home on Vallejo Street and a bright future.
“What time is it?”
Lilith stood by the door. She was wearing a violet silk robe but her face had a gray pallor.
“Just after seven,” Adam said.
“I couldn’t sleep.” Lilith sat down at the table.
“You have a hangover,” Adam said. “You shouldn’t have drunk so much last night. You can’t handle it.”
Lilith sighed. “If you’re going to start lecturing me again, can’t you have the decency to wait until after I’ve had some coffee?”
Adam reached for the carafe, poured out a cup of coffee and slid it across the table. He retreated behind the newspaper. For a long time, the room was silent. Then he folded the paper and rose.
“Where are you going?” Lilith asked.
“I have to go out.”
“It’s seven in the morning on New Year’s Day. Where in the hell are you —-” She paused. “Oh, God, not that stupid club thing again, Adam.”
“I have to go. I’m picking up your father on the way.”
Lilith laughed. “But Adam, it’s so ridiculous! Every year, grown men getting together to act like children. You and my father, you’d think this was some big family tradition or something.”
Adam paused, an idea forming in his head. Family tradition. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He called for the maid.
“Jenny,” he said when the girl appeared. “Get the baby ready. I’m taking him out.”
Lilith almost dropped her coffee cup. “What?”
“You’re right,” he said. “It is a family tradition, and Ian is going to become a part of it.”
Lilith shot to her feet. “You’re not taking that baby to this idiotic ritual! I won’t allow it!”
“He’s my son,” Adam said.
Jenny returned holding a wicker carrier. Adam took it and started toward the door. Lilith ran after him. “For God’s sake, Adam,” she said. “He’s only two months old!”
Adam smiled. “I’ll take care of him.”
He hurried down to the car, ignoring Lilith as he put the basket in the backseat. As he drove off, he watched Lilith in the rearview mirror, standing on the porch. God, drinking always left her so foul tempered. Thankfully, she didn’t drink often. In the two and a half years they had been married, in fact, he seldom had found her truly disagreeable to live with. Her moods and her social climbing schemes sometimes irritated him, but living with Lilith was generally an untroubled existence. He had his work. She had her home and clubs. Now there was the baby. It was a comfortable life.
Robert Bickford was waiting outside his own home when Adam pulled up. Bickford jumped into the car with an eagerness that belied his age and weight.
"Ready for the old Hike ’n’ Dip?” Bickford asked. He was smiling. The man truly savored this annual event, even more so in recent years when Adam had joined him.
Adam glanced at Bickford. A heart attack last year had left him in weakened health. “You sure you’re feeling up to this, Bick?”
“Sure. Haven’t missed one in thirty-one years!”
“We’ve got a new member to initiate today,” Adam said with a smile, and cocked his head toward the basket in the back.
Bickford’s face lit up when he saw the baby. “What a grand idea, Adam. Three generations sharing the tradition!” Bickford was beaming. He loved having a grandson. “You know,” he said, “with you running the paper now it’s almost like you’re my son, Adam.”
Over the years, Adam’s feelings toward Bick had softened. It wasn’t affection he felt toward him so much as charity. Bickford had struggled all his life in the shadow of his brilliant father and he had been unable to move the Times ahead. Bickford’s wife Catherine had died last year, ending their joyless marriage. His health was failing him. He had no sons. He was living out the remainder of his life finding little comforts wherever he could. And if Adam —- and now Ian —- were his comforts, who was Adam to take that away?
“I’m a happy man, Adam,” Bickford said softly.
“Me, too, Bick,” Adam said.
Adam steered the car down the coast road toward the country club, thinking about Lilith. Thinking, too, of Elizabeth.
It was almost impossible to think of one without the other, to think about what his life could have been with Elizabeth. He tried not to give in to such things. But something would inevitably remind him. A silver flash of a window reflecting the sun. The clanking rumble of cable cars, a carved jade cat in a window in Chinatown. Someone laughing. Someone singing. Anyone with red hair.
At first, it had made him sick, this constant, desperate longing. He saw her face everywhere he went. And at night, when he craved the black relief of sleep, she would appear to torture him in his dreams. Then, slowly, the obsession hardened into a dull ache that occasionally, when he was absorbed in work, subsided but never totally went away.
It was about a year and a half after he had last seen Elizabeth, while he was routinely reading the Times, when he saw the announcement of her marriage. It was just a small story, buried in the society pages. Elizabeth Ingram, heiress to the Ingram fortune, had married Willis Foster Reed, a millionaire real estate developer and oil entrepreneur. The bride was eighteen. The groom was fifty-one. The story detailed the lavish wedding and told how Reed had given his bride a block of oil stock, a certified check for $1 million, a $10,000 diamond necklace, and had built her an Italianate mansion on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River.
Adam read the story several times. He hadn't realized until that moment that deep inside him, a heartbeat of his fantasies about Elizabeth had endured. But with the announcement, any dreams he had harbored about her dissipated, like a final sad sigh. Soon after, he had married Lilith.
He drove on, watching a gull hover over the ocean in the overwhelming empty expanse of blue sky.
“I saw the new circulation figures yesterday,” Bickford said, interrupting Adam’s thoughts. “The country’s going to hell in a hand basket but we’re doing okay thanks to you.”
“We’re in this together, Bick.”
Adam was thankful to focus his thoughts on the newspaper. He thought with satisfaction about how much progress he had been able to make in the last three years. During the flush years just before the crash he had improved the Times’ finances, and the newspaper had even begun to prosper. Adam convinced Bickford to pour most of the capital right back into the paper for badly needed improvements. Lilith had protested, saying they should be able to enjoy their newfound fortunes. But Bickford, well aware of his daughter’s spendthrift tendencies, backed Adam. Bickford bought new presses for the photographs and rotogravure color Adam planned to use, and he authorized modest salary increases.
Then, two months ago, the crash had come, and overnight everything changed. The bottom fell out of advertising, with revenue dropping forty-five percent. But circulation remained steady. Even in the worst of times, people still needed newspapers.
While Bickford and Lilith fretted constantly about the Depression, Adam kept a cool head. His plan was to keep the Times on a steady keel during the financial storm, poised for new growth when recovery began. He worked long hours, often
not even returning home. Across the country, weak newspapers watched their small-profit margins evaporate, and some important newspapers perished. But the Times held steady.
So did Adam’s own finances. His natural frugality had given them a small cushion, and he forced Lilith to pare down. He had never invested in the stock market, so the crash left him almost untouched. For the last four years, he had been pouring every extra dollar into land in Napa Valley. Ten years of Prohibition had killed the wine industry, and the fallow vineyards were ridiculously cheap. Adam knew Prohibition would someday end, so he kept buying, slowly, acre by acre. When opportunity came, he would be ready.
Adam steered the car around a curve. The sun glinted off the water in silver shards.
Elizabeth. She was suddenly there again.
“Adam, are you all right?” Bickford asked.
Adam glanced at him. “I’m fine, Bick.”
“Well, pay attention, I have something to tell you.” Bickford paused. “I’ve had a new will made up —-”
“Hey, no talk about that today.”
“We have to. It’s important.” Bickford turned to Adam. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about the newspaper. I want it to go on, Adam, after I’m gone.”
“Bick —-”
“Let me finish. You know what I think of you and what you’ve done with the paper. Well, I know that you’d make sure it doesn’t die. What I’m saying is that I’ve decided to leave you a majority share of the newspaper.”
Adam was so surprised he nearly drove off the road.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Bickford went on. “What about Lilith? Well, I love my daughter, but frankly she hasn’t got a brain in her head when it comes to money. I can’t trust her with the Times. She’d milk it to death. So I’m leaving her a forty-nine percent interest and you a fifty-one percent interest.”
“I don’t know what to say, Bick,” Adam said. “It’s truly generous. Thank you.”
Bickford smiled. “Well, it’s not entirely unselfish. This way you get control of the Times but it still stays in the family. You and Lilith, running things together.”
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