“Jack, I’m sorry,” he said, holding his arm out for him to stay back, “there’s nothing we can do.”
She was dead.
Barbara was dead. Just like that. Gone.
Jackson had pushed Hugh out of the way and was trying to give Barbara mouth-to-mouth and everyone was screaming and Hugh was saying to him, “It’s her neck, Jack, it’s broken, she’s dead, she’s gone, you can’t—” and he heard him but he couldn’t give up. Oh, God, Barbara, oh, God, Barbara, you can’t do this, honey, you can’t die, oh, God, Barbara, honey, you have to wake up now, you have to sit up and wave to the kids so they know it’s okay, that you’re okay, but you gotta do it now, honey, please, honey, oh, God, oh God, You can’t do this. Come back, honey, oh, God help her to come back because the kids—because the kids… and he had started to sob, curling up next to her, clinging to her shoulder, screaming in his head, Barbara, Barbara, Barbara, please, come back…
Just one of those freak pool accidents, he was told. She had gone out too far, to where the pool bottom started climbing toward the swimming lanes. She thought she had deeper water, had let her arms fall back as she streaked down through the water. Cracked her head on the bottom, snapping her neck. Her death was instant, painless. Perhaps better this way, Jack. Would have been paralyzed for sure. Brain damage. You know. And you know how Barbara was.
Yeah. He knew how Barbara was.
He buried his wife in Richmond, of course. And every day for three weeks after the funeral he went to the cemetery and stared at the first two lines on the headstone:
Barbara Hale Bennett Darenbrook
1943—1981
and he would wonder what was going on, when this awful dream would stop. He didn’t understand what had happened, why the whole world had suddenly stopped. He didn’t know why everyone was so sad and why the dog was acting funny and the kids were having nightmares and why… why…
One night, when everything was beginning to sink in, Jackson slumped over the kitchen table, sobbing, asking Barbara over and over again what he was supposed to do. And then it was very strange, because it was about two in the morning and the phone rang. And it was Laurie, Barbara’s sister, who said she had awakened suddenly and had been scared that something had happened—was Jackson all right?
Laurie and her husband, Hal, came over that night and Jackson had sat there, sobbing so uncontrollably that the children woke up and were frightened, and so Hal took them over to his house. And then Langley and Belinda were there with Laurie, and still he was sobbing, holding his face in his hands, telling them he couldn’t stand being in this house, that he couldn’t—he couldn’t bear looking at the kids. He didn’t know what to say to them, he didn’t know how to make it better, how to make all the pain go away for them, because they missed their mother and they wanted their mother but she was gone forever. And then he fell into Belinda’s lap, begging her to tell him how to make the pain go away—she knew, didn’t she? Didn’t she remember when Mama died, how awful it was? Couldn’t she tell him what he was supposed to do?
“I want to die too,” he cried as his sister rocked him, holding his head against her, crying too, “I want to go with her. I want to take her to see Mama so she has someone to talk to. Belinda, help me, help me—oh, God, let me die so I can go with her. I don’t want her to be alone.”
He had gone home to the Mendolyn Street house in Hilleanderville. He moved into his old bedroom he had as a kid, up on the third floor, next to Beau’s old room, and stayed there for almost a year with Cordelia watching over him—making him get up, exercise, eat, go down to the Atlanta Parader and do some work—while Laurie and Hal took care of Lydia and Kevin, and Langley took care of Darenbrook Communications. Jackson never went back to the house in Richmond. He sold it and, as it turned out, Lydia and Kevin never lived with him again—not that Jackson ever bought another house, or even an apartment, for them to live with him in.
Jackson could not even pretend he wanted to try a home life again. He just couldn’t. And so Laurie and Hal raised his children. As for him, his only hope, he thought, was noise. Distraction. Color. Lights. Action, travel, noise—oh, God, more than anything, he needed noise to drown out the echo of yesterday’s satisfactions, of yesterday’s contentment. Anything to get rid of that horrible ache, that longing, those dreams of Barbara coming back.
So Jackson had taken to women. Women in the sense that one might view a painkilling drug, which did not actually get rid of the pain but could prevent the body from registering it. And he bought a new company jet and used it at the slightest excuse, flying to business meetings, flying to pro football games, flying to go out on dates, or flying to play shortstop on one of the newspaper’s softball teams. He was always on the move, always with a different woman, and somehow, between the women and the constant travel, life became bearable to him again—very different, hardly full, but bearable.
Moving the corporate headquarters seemed like a great idea to Jackson then, a great way to stir up a little excitement, and building a TV network was even better. What could have more noise, distraction, color, lights, action and new women than New York City and television?
Enter Alexandra.
Alexandra Waring was the first woman in six and a half years who genuinely interested him personally in ways other than lust. He had to be careful, though, both for himself and for her. She was young and supposedly attached to Gordon Strenn, and Jackson had no desire to scare her at this early date into rejecting either him or Strenn outright. He wished only to get closer to her, to know her well, to let her know him well, and if she was really all that he thought she was, then he would move to take her away from Strenn. And if he chose to do that, he would do so to marry her.
Why not? Thirty wasn’t so young. Forty-seven wasn’t so…
But Strenn was a pain in the ass and Strenn was back from England. Jackson had been overseeing Alexandra’s new apartment on Central Park West—with her assistant, Kate, so it wasn’t as if they had been alone or anything—when Strenn walked in. They had been standing just inside the doorway of the bedroom and Jackson—eyes on the queen-size bed—had been a million miles in pleasant fantasy when Strenn came up behind him and said, “Hi, Jackson.”
He definitely jumped. “Hey,” he said, recovering and turning to shake his hand, “how are you doing, movie man? How’s the Queen?”
“Great. And Lord Hargrave is too,” Gordon said, shaking his hand. Then he walked over to Alexandra, murmured a “Hi,” and kissed her on the temple. It was a perfectly rendered, polite reminder that Jackson was but a visitor on private property.
And then—now how the heck the Inquiring Eye found out that he had visited Alexandra’s apartment Jackson had no idea, but the next thing he knew, Langley was flying into his office to announce that his visit had flung him and Alexandra onto the front page. “ALEXANDRA’S HOMEWORK” the headline read over a picture of Jackson climbing into his limo. (The picture was at least eight months old.) Next to it was a picture of Alexandra looking wistfully across the page at him—rather, it looked as though she were looking at his rear end.
“And did they say that Alexandra’s assistant, Kate, and Strenn were there too?” Jackson had said, flinging the stupid thing back at Langley.
“No,” Langley said.
“What are you looking at me like that for?” he demanded.
“If you’d stop following her around, Jack,” Langley said, “the stories would stop. If you don’t, they’re only going to get worse.”
“You mean, stop the stories before they’re true?”
“I just want you to remember that this concerns not one key employee but two. And I don’t have to remind you that the miniseries—”
“What are you telling me, Lang?”
“Nothing,” Langley said, walking to the door. “Do whatever you want. You always do.” He turned around. “It’s just not very smart. Not with Darenbrook employees. No matter what she says.”
Langley was such a jerk som
etimes. Who could not like Alexandra, except Langley? Mr. Paranoia. Langley seemed to think that Alexandra was out to take over the company. And if there was anyone out to overthrow the company, it was Langley’s pal, Cassy Cochran. Even from WST, where she was still wrapping things up in her old job, Cassy Cochran was either crash-training Langley or negotiating with affiliate stations herself, because all of a sudden there were all these contracts flying through Jackson’s office and they were signing affiliates for the news group right and left. They were up to thirty-nine already and no one except Cassy Cochran seemed to know a whole lot about them. Or at least Langley said she knew a lot about them.
But what annoyed Jackson about Mrs. Cochran was that she wasn’t even here yet and he was already hitting heads with her over Alexandra. And this lady named Chi Chi or Cha Cha or something—Mrs. Cochran’s assistant, for Pete’s sake—felt free to tell him, Jackson Darenbrook, what he could and could not do, according to Her Highness, La Presidenta in absentia, still over at WST.
“I’m sorry,” Chi Chi or Cha Cha or whatever her name was said, blocking the doorway of Cassy Cochran’s office one afternoon, “but Alexandra’s reviewing some paperwork for Mrs. Cochran and Mrs. Cochran said that I was not to let any calls or people through until she’s finished.”
“What?” Jackson said. And then he smiled, drawing himself up to his full six-three height. “Now, ma’am, I don’t think you know who I am.”
“Yes, I do, Mr. Darenbrook, because Mrs. Cochran warned me that you’d do exactly what you’re doing,” she said, offering a very cheerful smile but not wavering a bit. She was not very tall, this Chi Chi or Cha Cha or whatever her name was, but she did look pretty feisty.
“Well, now, ma’am,” Jackson said, “just what is it you think I’m doing?”
“Trying to b.s. your way past me, just like Mrs. Cochran said you would—so you might as well forget it,” she said.
She was right, because even when he did get past her (and no, he didn’t push her—not exactly) he found the door locked. And even with all the noise—”That’s it! I warned you,” Chi Chi or Cha Cha said, grabbing the phone off her desk, “I’m calling Mrs. Cochran”—Alexandra didn’t, as Jackson thought she would, open the door to see what was going on (although everyone else on the floor did).
“Cassy Cochran’s holding on five,” Ethel told him when he returned to his office.
Uh-oh, he thought, but decided that offense would be the best defense and picked up the phone. “So who declared war around here? Some lady who says she works for you nearly punched me out.”
“Her name is Chi Chi Santiago,” Cassy said.
“Yeah, well, Chi Chi needs to be tied up. She’s a mean one.”
“Hardly,” Cassy said. “She was only doing what I asked her to do.”
“Well what the hell’s going on in your office that the chairman of Darenbrook Communications can’t know about?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Alexandra just needs a quiet place to work for an hour or two and I told her that if she used my office I would see to it that no one disturbed her. That’s all.”
“Well, I wouldn’t disturb her.”
“No, I’m sure you wouldn’t,” she said, her voice turning surprisingly gentle. “But a promise is a promise and I promised there would be no exceptions—that she would have complete quiet. Please understand—Alexandra’s under an enormous strain and there are some things she has to work on by herself, and I don’t want her to feel as though she has to leave West End to work on them. I’d like her to know she can always find a quiet spot there. And right now, until I get over there, my office is it. Do you understand? It’s very important that she feels completely safe there—that she can be alone for a little while if she needs to be.”
Yeah, well, Jackson did understand, but he sure didn’t like Mrs. Cochran’s idea that “no exceptions” applied to him too. He started to tell Alexandra that, later, when he finally found her down in the newsroom, but quickly stopped himself. Because if there was one thing he had learned about Alexandra, messing around with her work was not the way to her heart, and it was becoming clear to him that she thought the world of her pain-in-the-ass executive producer.
So instead Jackson said, “Smart lady, that Cassy Cochran. I should have thought of finding you a peaceful place myself.” And then Alexandra smiled and Jackson, for the umpteenth time, thought she had eyes to die for.
7
The Ball Starts Rolling
On the second Monday of April, Darenbrook Communications invited several members of the print media over for an informal breakfast at West End as a kind of warm-up for the official DBS News press conference scheduled for late May. Ten journalists came over and ate breakfast in the Darenbrook cafeteria with the new DBS public relations director, Derek Deitz; Darenbrook Communications Chairman Jackson Darenbrook; DBS President Langley Peterson; President and Executive Producer, DBS News, Catherine Cochran; Vice-President and Senior Producer, DBS News, Kyle McFarland; and—on her first day of liberation from her sling—Managing Editor and Anchorwoman, DBS News, Alexandra Waring.
Jackson briefly reviewed the Darenbrook Communications sixty-year history of news gathering and communications in America and how the September debut of DBS News would follow family tradition; Langley outlined the technology that made DBS News possible; Cassy explained how their emphasis would be on domestic news, and profiled the kind of affiliate newsrooms they were recruiting; Kyle talked about how a production team, under Will Rafferty, was already on the road, traveling from affiliate to affiliate, demonstrating the DBS News style as depicted in the DBS News Practices and Standards workbook.
“The what?” someone asked.
“DBS News Practices and Standards,” Kyle said. “Our bible of how we do things, from A to Z, Advertisers to Freebies to Offerings to Reporters to Zone-Codes-of-Coverage.”
Alexandra cited a few examples of prize-winning local indie reporters whose work would go national with DBS; said her shoulder was fine, thank you, and that, no, they hadn’t finalized the format yet for the hour-long newscast, “DBS News America Tonight with Alexandra Waring,” but they could expect at least four stories a night to be covered in greater depth than they were used to seeing on commercial broadcast television.
“What’s the overhead on an operation like this?” asked a reporter from one of the big financial papers.
“Not too bad,” Cassy said. “While most news networks have to carry the salaries and overhead of their bureau desks, at DBS we only pay the salaries and overhead of our operation here at West End—plus our transmission costs. I can’t give you the exact figures,” she said, glancing at Jackson, “since we are part of a private corporation—”
“Not fair,” someone said.
“But I will tell you that DBS News will operate on roughly twenty percent of the budget of CBS News, and, since you all know that CBS was up to around three hundred million last year”—she paused, smiling as everyone started to laugh—”I am confident that some of you may be able to work out the difficult math on that. Uh…” She waited for everyone to quiet down again. “One of the nice things about being able to operate in a sophisticated way on a fraction of a traditional network budget is that, going in, we know that we can survive—perhaps even flourish—on a fraction of the traditional network audience. And that, as you know, can bode well for things like more in-depth domestic story coverage—which just happens to be what we hope will be our specialty.”
“So how does it work? With the affiliates?” a reporter asked.
“Although we don’t pay their overhead,” Cassy continued, “our affiliate newsrooms do act as our bureau desks—meaning whatever news coverage they have is at our disposal. So, for example, if there was—God forbid—an airplane crash here in New York, we’d have all of WST’s local coverage to choose from to use in our national news. Or use a WST local reporter as a live national correspondent for DBS.”
“WST has signed as the New York affilia
te then?” someone asked.
“Yesterday,” Cassy said, smiling.
“DBS will act as a kind of clearinghouse,” Langley interjected. “Each affiliate will transmit to West End their stories and film of the day, which DBS is then free to use that day or any other day in the future.”
“What do the affiliates get?” another reporter asked.
“Right now, we’re offering the one news hour,” Cassy said, “and part of the package is a certain allotment of ad time within it for them to sell locally. They keep a hundred percent of that ad money, of course, while we retain a certain allotment of time to sell to national advertisers. “
“The affiliate newsrooms also get access to any coverage we have on hand from other affiliates,” Alexandra said. “That’s what Langley meant when he described DBS News as clearinghouse. So, for example, in Phoenix, our affiliate KZA might see on the daily DBS roster that we have in a report from our L.A. affiliate concerning the Colorado River that we’re not using on the network newscast. Since the Colorado is a big concern in Phoenix, they can call for the report, we’ll transmit it to them and, if it’s appropriate for them, they are free to use it in their local newscast.”
“We’ll also be offering affiliates a film library,” Cassy said, “so that if an affiliate in Florida, for example, wanted to do a documentary on water use in their state and wanted to use the Colorado River as an example of how other states have approached the subject, they could get file footage of the Colorado River from us.”
“From the reports filed from other affiliates,” a reporter said.
“Or just raw footage we’ve stored,” Cassy said. She glanced at Langley and then leaned forward to say in a loud whisper, “Don’t tell anyone, but DBS News has almost fifty million dollars’ worth of electronic storage at its disposal here at West End.”
“What do the reporters get out of this arrangement?” someone said.
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