Alexander lay on a multicolored beach towel, smoking. As she emerged from the glass elevator he stubbed the cigarette on a stone, tossing the butt into a hibiscus bush.
In light of their precarious situation, the openness of his misconduct seemed foolhardy, maybe dangerous.
Sitting on a chaise near him, she said, “You shouldn’t be smoking.”
“What else is there to do in this Italian jail?” The mirrored ovals of his sunglasses reflected the sun, dazzling her.
She wanted it clear that she did not condone Gideon’s fuddy-duddy regulations, yet with this new anxiety ruling her mind she also wanted to warn her son that he must tread carefully. “Alexander,” she said, “it doesn’t mean a thing to me. When I was fourteen I’d puff away whenever I could get my hands on a ciggie.” She traced a paving stone with the cork sole of her sandal. “But Dad’s home now.”
“Screw him and his brilliant punishments.” Alexander spoke slowly: his fine mouth had a flaccid quality.
“Haven’t you been in enough trouble lately?”
“What else can Gideon the Terr-ible do to Al-ex-an-der the Great? Stret-ch him on the rack or hang him by the thumbs or disembowel him without bene-fit of clergy?”
“There’s no point upsetting him.”
Alexander’s face looked younger in its sullenness. “How sick to death I am of this whole hip-oh-crit-ical char-ade.”
“He’s a bit old to have boys your age. He means well.”
“More bull-shee-it.”
“Why are you talking like that?”
“The four-letter words are part of a nor-mal youth-ful vo-cab-u-lar-ee.”
“Slowly, I meant. Stringing out your words.”
He sat up so their faces were close, and she could smell the sweetish smoke on his breath.
“You real-ly are out of it, Mother. Your beam-ish boy is ston-ed.”
“Oh, Alexander . . . .” Her stomach was a chill, hard ball. She was old enough to find drugs terrifying, lively enough to understand their fascination—and far too straight to risk using the hash or cocaine that Imogene pressed on her.
“Ahh, shee-it.” In one smooth, clean motion, Alexander was on his slim, tanned feet and scaling the ladder to the high diving board.
The life-endangering foolhardiness of kids under the influence of drugs flashed warning lights through Crystal. “Alexander!” she shrieked. “Get back down!”
But he ran along the board and performed a perfect jackknife, his slim, immature body hanging in the brightness, then entering the water with barely a splash. He churned in a butterfly back and forth before hauling himself out.
“Clears the head,” he said, toweling his face dry, fingering back his long wet hair, replacing his glasses. “I didn’t mean to shake you to your roots, Mom, but it’s not the end of Western civilization, smoking a little pot.”
She said anxiously, “You must promise me never to again.”
“Everybody does grass, Mom. I’ll let you in on a secret. Even virtuous Gid indulges now and then.”
“He does?” In her surprise, Crystal blurted out, “It’s different for him, different entirely.”
“Why? The heir apparent can do no wrong?”
“I’m serious, Alexander,” she said in a hushed voice. “You are not the same as Gid.”
“I was wondering if you’d ever notice,” he said lightly. But the impenetrable sunglasses were fixed on her and his mouth was drawn down in a calculating, assessing line. After a moment he said, “You’re frightened.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
Now what? How was she going to communicate her fears without revealing the truth? That would be preposterous. Not only would she tarnish her image, but she would wreak havoc with her beloved son’s emotions, doubtless set off a massive identity crisis in him.
The mirrored sunglasses were trained on her. “So,” he said slowly. “I’m a sin of your youth.”
She had underestimated the quickness of his mind. Her mouth and throat were sandpaper dry. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then explain how I differ from Gid? Why is it fine for him to bogey a joint and not me?”
The explanations she came up with were so preposterous that they remained trapped in a vacuum behind her tongue. She sought for help in the sea. A long oil freighter lay becalmed on a distant striation of purple.
“I always suspected that my lack of the true blue Talbott righteousness proved something or other,” he said. He took off his glasses, and she looked into the pinpoint irises. In this moment his eyes—Curt Ivory’s eyes—seemed inimical, ruthless, commanding. If Alexander were thrown into internal confusion, he gave no sign of it in voice or expression.
After a moment she faltered, “I don’t want him to have any reason to . . .”
“Disown me?”
“Yes.”
“Mom, rest your mind. He doesn’t suspect a thing. His wrath and vengeance fall indiscriminately on me and Gid. You’re a smart lady, think it through and you’ll see I’m right.”
All at once the weight fell from her. She said, “He really was furious about poor Gid not finishing his essay, wasn’t he?”
“In a hot swivet,” Alexander said, imitating Gideon’s frown.
Crystal’s laughter rang, a high, happy trill of relief.
“So tell me,” he asked. “Whose little boy am I?”
Crystal’s mind fled back to those wild, alive seconds of lust and hatred on the damp grass while Chinamen chattered behind glass doors a few feet away. “Somebody you don’t know,” she said.
He replaced the inscrutable glasses. “Well, un bel dì you’ll tell me. In the meantime we each have our other secrets to share. So quit brooding. From this day forth, I’ll be the most virtuous lad the world has ever known.” He leaned forward to kiss her forehead, his lips cool on her burning, blushing flesh.
36
Gideon ordered lunch sent up to his room, remaining incommunicado the entire afternoon.
At eight twenty, when Crystal was changed for dinner, she knocked on his door to tell him it was time to go down.
“I have work to finish,” he said in a rough tone.
Poised there with the Venetian chandelier casting its soft light on her lovely, worried face, Crystal thought: He sounds ill. Although her alarm seemed paradoxical after a morning of biting her nails in anxiety over Gideon’s (imaginary) suspicions, the truth was that she brooded heavily about the spells of ill health that her aging husband attempted to hide from her. Gideon was her mentor, her guide, the elderly spouse who cosseted her and showered her with gifts, who thought the sun rose and set above her blond head. Though she might not love him, she was committed heart and mind to their marriage, and dreaded the inevitable day when death would them part.
“Shall I have something brought up?”
“I can buzz for myself. Now will you let me go over these numbers?”
She went slowly down the curving tiled steps to the terrace where the family congregated before dinner.
Padraic Mitchell rose from the low, uneven brick wall, setting down his drink.
Tall, with a cadaverously hollow-cheeked face and a front tooth that jutted out when he smiled, Mitchell was that freakishly rare creature, the perfect employee. At thirty-five, without wife or children, deeply intelligent yet lacking personal ambitions, he served Gideon in much the same way a courtly esquire might once have dedicated himself to his liege lord. Mitchell’s goals were whatever advanced the boss’s best interests. He composed Gideon’s extensive correspondence, fielded important phone calls, played exacting taskmaster to the three lesser secretaries, hopped on planes at no notice, worked weekends and nights. He earned a top-notch salary. The relationship, though, could not be measured by cash on either side. Gideon, for the first time since Curt Ivory, had placed his complete trust in an underling. Consequently Mitchell possessed a comprehensive overview of the diverse and far-flung goings-on within each of the divisions; he knew more about Talbott’s than an
y single member of the board.
Mitchell poured Crystal her usual Campari, and she rewarded him with a careless dimple. He was her slave and she knew it. What she did not know was that the vision of her naked, voluptuous blond self—as glimpsed through a crack of the inadvertently left open door to her San Francisco bedroom—was the Venus who presided eternally over his solo amatory rites.
Sipping the bitter aperitif, she said, “Mr. Talbott’s too busy for dinner. Wasn’t he working all afternoon with you?”
“Just the first thing this morning, Mrs. Talbott. I must have left the room around ten fifteen. He hasn’t called me in since.”
“I saw him this morning, too. He looked very tired. Tonight he sounded ill. How was he in Egypt?”
“He had a terrible case of indigestion one night in Mitwan, but then Egypt’s famous for stomach disturbances. After that he said he was fine—but he certainly didn’t look it. Still, he went out on the inspections, he attended the meetings with the client, and I’m sure he told you about the reception given for him by President and Mrs. Nasser.”
“He overdoes it when he travels,” Crystal sighed.
They drank in silence until Alexander and Gid came onto the terrace. Both wore navy blazers and pale gray slacks, but Alexander’s outfit draped elegantly around his slight body while Gid looked as if his burly torso would burst the seams in the jacket.
“Victory!” Gid raised his arms as if announcing a winning touchdown. “The masterpiece is typed and finished! Hey, where’s Dad?”
“He’s working,” Crystal said.
“But man, it’s eight thirty,” Alexander said. “And tonight we celebrate Gid’s paper.”
“I’ll see if he’ll come down for five minutes,” Gid said, going back into the house.
Alexander lined up Baccarat flutes, pouring chablis into three, glancing at Crystal as he opened a bottle of 7-Up for the other two.
Gid charged back onto the terrace, his heavy features pulled downward in a worried frown. “Mom, Dad’s acting really strange. He didn’t let me in, so I shouted about the essay being typed. He barked at me to let him work. But there was no light around the door—and his voice was weird, I mean really weird.”
Gid’s report fused with Crystal’s own anxiety. “I better go talk to him,” she said.
This time she didn’t knock at Gideon’s door, but opened it. A sourish odor clung to the blackness.
“Have to finish this by tomorrow,” muttered a voice she scarcely recognized.
She pressed the wall switch and couldn’t control her breathy gasp.
Gideon lay on the couch as if a giant’s foot had squashed him into the crimson cushions. Globules of sweat dripped down his livid face, sweat showed in deep crescents under the armholes of his white-on-white shirt. His tie was pulled open and one hand jerkily massaged at his thick, heaving chest.
“Indigestion,” he muttered. “That supper last night. Spicy Italian food . . . .”
She darted to his desk, fumbling with the phone book for the number of the local doctor they used.
That night Mitchell stayed by the downstairs phone, arguing in his strenuously accented Italian with Sicilian operators about putting him through to Rome, to Jidda (he canceled the Saudi weekend), to New York, San Francisco. Before six the following morning, a helicopter carried the patient with his family to Catania Airport, where a private ambulance jet with an American cardiologist aboard was waiting.
* * *
When they landed in San Francisco, Gideon was a trace less haggard. He refused to go to St. Mary’s.
“The hospital’s more convenient for you doctors, that’s all,” he argued. “I’ll be better off in my own home.”
Crystal, hearing her husband’s more vigorous tone, grew strong with relief. Stationing herself next to the stretcher, she gripped the lax, meaty hand. “You’re absolutely right, dear. It’s New Year’s Eve. Only an idiot goes to the hospital over a holiday—and there’s no need for it. Let the hospital come to you.”
* * *
Gideon’s spacious room on Clay Street was transformed with medical equipment. Nurses and technicians moved efficiently through the halls, specialists consulted in the downstairs rooms.
The flowery offerings from all over the world were not yet withered by the time Gideon was sitting up. After a battle with the medical team, he ordered that Mitchell and the lesser secretaries be installed in the guest room across the hall. Gideon Talbott, in his elaborately wired hospital bed, was once again supervising his empire.
He accepted Crystal’s offer to be his eyes and voice and legs. She flew in the corporate plane for a quick, unannounced visit to the Colorado mining project for Anaconda Copper, she read his instructive speech at the January 29 meeting of the Talbott’s board, she showed up on his behalf at the Anchorage meeting of the consortium investigating the possibility of an Alaska pipeline.
The frantic rush from airport to meeting, the weighty masculine voices adjudicating the lives of thousands of employees, the vastness of the projects, the fortunes asked and spent, made the rest of her days appear to have been wasted on meaningless and trivial games.
She adored every minute of her new life.
If forced to pick the sweetest fruit of those busy weeks, though, she would select the times when Gideon asked her advice.
Perching on his bed, bending her bright head next to his, she surveyed diagrams of a future airport.
“Where do you see the shops?” he asked.
“Lining the corridor after the check-in area.” She rested a long nail enameled with stylish silver polish on the thin paper. “Here. And a cluster more here. See? It’s where the corridors diverge for the international gates. Then of course you’ll have the usual row of duty-frees.”
“I asked you which shopping area would do best,” Gideon asked impatiently.
“All of them, dear. You need all three.”
“There’s space for one.”
“Gideon, this is an international airport. People will be stuck here with hours to kill and their foreign currency. Everybody, given the chance, splurges on last-minute souvenirs and gifts. You’ve told me yourself over and over how profitable these concessions are.”
Gideon’s lips puffed out contemplatively.
Her finger moved. “Dear, look at all this lounge space. Think how easily you could design a smaller waiting area with shops surrounding it. Believe me, the airport commission will sing Talbott’s praises.”
He gave her that stern smile. “If only one of my hundred-thousand-a-year division heads had your common sense,” he said.
* * *
During that cold January and February, Crystal’s crowd clucked that their superlatively lovely friend must be worn out and depressed by her sickroom chores—imagine Gideon getting her to work at such a time! They attempted to inveigle her to luncheons and dinners and cocktail parties. She refused all invitations.
Every weekend the boys came home from Menlo. Alexander, who had been conspicuously free of scrapes since Gideon’s coronary, spent hours in the sickroom, reading quietly.
At the end of February, Gideon was recovered enough to be driven for a few hours to the offices on Maiden Lane, whose exterior had been refurbished two years ago under Crystal’s supervision. The medical staff and paraphernalia departed, a Talbott’s truck came for the secretarial equipment belonging to Mitchell’s staff.
Gideon acquired an emerald and diamond necklace that had belonged to Empress Eugenie. “It’s nothing compared to what you deserve,” he said in his awkward way, fastening the cold weight around her creamy throat. The setting was magnificently crafted, the fiery stones flawless, yet she could summon none of the delight that his previous gifts had evoked.
Her days passed as they had prior to Gideon’s illness, when she had considered herself happy and lucky. Now, though, she chafed at the sprawl of aimless golf games, shopping with “her” salespeople, luncheons, teas, those endlessly long and unrewarding telephone conver
sations.
Gid stayed at school because he was goalie on the hockey team. Alexander continued to come home every weekend.
Her son perked her up. They took in movies together or jumped their thoroughbreds in Golden Gate Park. She bought a pair of tickets for a matinee of A.C.T.’s Little Foxes, and they lunched first at the nearby Redwood Room in the Clift.
“You really got with that Talbott’s crap, didn’t you?” he said over the shrimp cocktails.
“It’s not crap, Alexander. Your father”—since that morning in Taormina she couldn’t prevent an infinitesimal hesitation as she said the word—“is one of the movers and shakers of the earth.”
“I wasn’t putting Dad down. I’m into Talbott’s, too. At least I will be when I leave school.” Alexander crushed a few oyster crackers into his leftover red sauce. “Tell me something, Mom. At one time or another Dad’s formed consortiums with all of his other major rivals. How come not Ivory?”
Crystal’s fingers clamped the small fork and she selected her words carefully. “You have to understand how fond he once was of Curt Ivory. He helped him through school, he gave him a job and promoted him constantly, he invited him to the house with his own friends, he trusted him completely.” After the breakup, Gideon refused to discuss Curt, therefore her knowledge of her husband’s generosity to his former protégé was limited by the little he had told her and what she had personally witnessed. “And Curt repaid him in the most vicious way possible. We were all living under his roof, his wards more or less, and he seduced your Aunt Honora, then treated her miserably. It’s Curt Ivory’s fault our family’s split apart—before him we were happy and very loving. Your father’s right to avoid all contact with him, Alexander. The man’s as rotten as they come. Oh, don’t get me started on him.” Crystal adamantly changed the subject. “I read in the Chron that Lillian Hellman says this revival is better than the original.”
The performances were indeed superlative and they talked about the play over dinner and until Gideon retired at nine. Then Alexander led the way to the music room. The boy had catholic musical tastes, his record collection ranging from classical, which Crystal found a snore, to rock, which she suffered because of him.
Too Much Too Soon Page 27
