A Family Trust

by Ward Just

  Dana walked down the hall to her own room and closed the door. The kitchen sounds were beginning sounds, not ending sounds; she knew her mother would be there for some time. She went to the window and opened it an inch, feeling the cold air. The light was failing. Past the wine lawn and the oaks that framed it was the prairie, extending as far as she could see. It was interrupted by a single stand of woods in the middle distance. Her room was stuffy and she waited a moment, considering. The faint drone of men’s voices disconcerted her. Abruptly she closed the window and went to her clothes closet and rummaged on the top shelf, where her stuffed animals and games and old magazine were kept. She fished until she found the thin silver case containing her Lucky Strikes. She put it in her shirt pocket and left the room, closing the door and hurrying down the stairs, taking the stairs two steps at a time. The men looked briefly at her but did not stop talking. Tony Rising gave her a small smile and a wave. She fetched her heavy coat and a long scarf from the closet and was almost out the door when she heard her father’s voice.

  “Sweetheart, where are you going?”

  “Out,” she said.

  “You mean to someone’s house?” The four men were looking at her with solemn faces.

  “Just for a walk, Daddy.”

  “Be careful,” he said.

  She nodded. “I will,”

  He said, “It’s dark out.”

  Her mother, from the kitchen: “Don’t forget your coat.”

  Her father said, “It’s cold out, don’t catch cold.”

  She said, “Yes,” and closed the door firmly and marched off down the lawn to the trees, the cigarette case friendly in her pocket. She pulled up the collar of her coat and did a little dance, the brittle dead grass crunching under her feet. She thought, I will be very careful. Very. It is cold and it is dangerous. Very, There is no telling what evil lurks upon the prairie. When the dapper man in the Jaguar draws near and asks me to go to West Egg with him, I’ll tell him no thank you. Dangerous. And when he asks me if I’d like to share his magnum of champagne and brings it dripping from the cooler in the backseat, I’ll tell him no thank you. Hazardous. And when he asks me to share his stateroom on the Ile de France, I’ll tell him no thank you. Perilous. Paris in the spring? No thank you. Dinner at the Ritz? No thank you. And when he suggests that I go to bed with him—that his crowded life will not be complete until that glorious event—I’ll tell him. She laughed out loud. Yes! But not right away, not until we get to know each other better, in the car and on the deck of the ocean liner and over cocktails in the hotel bar ... She flung her arms wide and did a reel down the lawn, dodging the birdbath and the cast-iron love seat. She played jazz music in her head, imagining that somewhere on that lawn Kid Ory was concealed, blowing his sweet trombone, and dancers whirled in the shadows. She wrapped the scarf around her neck and ran the final few yards to the woods at the end of the lawn. Out of breath, she crept around the largest of the trees and peeked back at the house. Her mother was at the kitchen window, her hands clasped in front of her, staring alone into the blackness. She waved and saluted, knowing her mother could see nothing. Then, as Dana watched, her mother’s hands went to her face and stayed there; then she turned and moved slowly away from the window.

  Dana opened the cigarette box and took out a Lucky Strike, tapping it against her thumb before she put it in her mouth. She brought out two kitchen matches, striking one against the other. The cigarette lit, she coughed once and leaned against the tree, letting the Lucky dangle from the corner of her mouth. She scuffed the earth happily caressing the worn silver case between her fingers, looking at the stars and humming to herself The blues repeated in her head, fragments of “Rampart Street Parade” and “Basin Street Blues” and “Milenberg Joys.” So happy so sad. The blues touched her soul, releasing emotions that burned and excited her and made her want to shout with the sheer power of what she felt. She wanted to talk about it, to explain what it was that she felt; but there was no one to tell. No girl she knew was interested. Only two boys she knew had any interest in the blues and they refused to talk about it with her. They were older boys, of course. Once or twice she had joined their conversations and they had changed the subject, uncomfortable at her intervention. It was as if she were intruding on them, discussing a subject that was theirs and theirs alone. They appeared to be offended that she’d put herself on an equal footing with them, competing in some unfair way; but it was not a matter of competition, no one was keeping score. What was so masculine, so exclusive, about jazz music? Other than the unfortunate truth that women were no musicians. There were no female sidemen, other than—she thought a moment—Lit Armstrong and Marian McPartland, and they were married to jazzmen so they didn’t count. She supposed that was why they didn’t. There were the singers, Bessie Smith and the others, but they were singers, not cornet players or drummers or clarinetists. Perhaps it was the passion of the blues, all energy and emotional three that women were not supposed to understand. Or acknowledge that they understood. It was all right if they understood it as a member of the audience. Idiotic, but perhaps true. She smiled then, thinking of herself as a vast undiscovered continent. Dana the dark continent. She was a native in her own country similar to an African savage. Livingstone would discover her someday and then Stanley would discover Livingstone and before long Dana the dark continent would be mapped, “discovered” and publicized. But until then she would have to keep her knowledge to herself, She thought that as a rule boys were less mysterious. Those two jazz connoisseurs, they had not been rude or insulting to her; they had been courteous in their own way. She was too good-looking for any boy to be rude to, or want to be rude to. So they listened to her politely and tolerantly and then they changed the subject.

  She blew a smoke ring and the wind took it away.

  Saturday morning, she thought. I cannot wait, I cannot wait to be on that airplane, Midway to Idlewild. I cannot wait to see New York from the air, and sally into the Biltmore lobby. That was truly an undiscovered country. She could not imagine herself living away from home, living with a strange girl in a dormitory filled with other strange girls. Except they did not call it a dormitory; they called it a “house.” “Nice girls,” her mother called them. She knew that her mother was worried; she suspected the smoking and was very critical of Bobby and her other friends. She had heard them talking, or rather heard her mother talking; her father said very litle. Her mother surprise her. She’d said, “Dana is a superior child...” Then their voices lowered and she knew they’d returned to poor Esther. Esther the scarlet woman, a genuine scandal. That had happened two years ago and everywhere in Dement there were discussions behind closed doors. These led to a reform of the school curriculum, specifically the teaching of biology. Poor Esther had become pregnant and her parents and the boy’s parents forced them to marry; it was a mutual embarrassment too profound to conceal. The embarrassment was greater because no one talked about it out loud. Esther and the boy disappeared in their senior year and were married out of state, with the families bravely in attendance. The boy went to work in his father’s hardware store, which suffered an immediate loss of business because the women customers could not bear, they said, to chat casually with Sonny at the cash register. It was mortifying. What was there to say to him? How’s Esther? How’s the baby? By their presence, the women thought, they were bearing witness and therefore approval. Neither Sonny nor Esther held up well. The father’s business faltered and he and the mother suffered for the sins of their son. The hardware store was now for sale, but it would be many years before the town forgot, if it ever did forget. In the event, Esther delivered twin boys; and of course that was regarded as a rebuke. Esther’s Revenge.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and began to stroll back to the house. Esther and her Sonny; the story was not unusual. At school they were very casual about it, after the first week of gossip and rumor. When they saw how upset the adults were, they became themselves studiously nonchalant. It was no big deal,
people had babies all the time. But the truth was, the ferocity of the adults frightened the children; it frightened them the more because none of it was in the open. No child would admit this; they kept their heads high. But they thought, One mistake and such terrible retribution; lives closed off and cursed before they had begun. They thought, There but for the grace of God ... She had written Frank a long letter describing the scandal, and the town’s reaction to it. He was then in Korea and his letter back began with a long description of the progress of the war, a strangely pessimistic account. Then he said she should not be surprised at the reaction of “the powers that be” to Esther’s “sin.” He’d known both Sonny and Esther and it was obvious from the beginning that they were headed for trouble of one sort or another, either separately or together. He wrote, “Live by the sword, die by the sword.” The letter ended with instructions for her own moral safekeeping. She’d cried when she finished the letter; it was the sort of message that she’d expect from the school principal or old Greismann. Its tone was harsh and supercilious and she found hints that Frank believed “rotten behavior” damaged the morale of the troops, fighting Communists a world away in Korea. Reading it again the day after the funeral she reached another conclusion. He was scared to death. Reading it a second time, it made no sense; Frank was simply repeating fragments of the various sermons he’d been read in his lifetime. Vicious, Dana concluded finally; Dement was more narrow and more vicious than anything conceived by Sinclair Lexis. But she understood it; she did understand it. She fingered the cigarette case in her pocket and thought she would understand it even better when she was eighteen, and went away to school.

  She approached the house, moving around it to the back door. She would slip in unnoticed, and return to her room and listen to Kid Ory and finish Lie Down in Darkness. She paused a moment, looking again at the stars against the night sky then eased the door open and stepped through it. She was assailed immediately by loud voices, and moved off into the shadows of the coatroom. The men all seemed to be talking at once. Then Elliott Townsend’s voice, droning heavily and finally overwhelming the others.

  ... times change. People change with them. Your father was adamant that nothing interfere with the distribution of control as he established it. Hence the committee, and the trust it supervises. Of course he had complete faith in you boys. Total and complete faith. But he was not certain about the next generation down the line. And there should be nothing surprising about that. No one is certain of the next generation. Generations differ, one from another. Codes of conduct change...”

  “A committee of outsiders,” Mitch said contemptuously.

  “I don’t look on myself as an outsider in this family,” Townsend said. “You shouldn’t either.”

  “But I do,” Mitch said. “No offense. This is not personal. Not personal with you or with Marge Reilly either. But the I is a Rising property. It’s Charles’s and Tony’s and mine. And our family’s. I just find it goddamned insulting to have a committee off ... non-family members ruling on what we can or cannot do with the stock. As if anyone intended to do anything with it—”

  Townsend. said, “Well, what do you intend?”

  “Nothing,” Mitch said. “Not a goddamned thing. But I don’t have to be advised of that fact by you or anyone else.”

  Townsend nodded slowly and looked again at the document before him. He waited a moment before resuming his lawyer’s explanation.

  “Your father desired harmony. And that of course is what we will have. There is no reason not to have it. We are all agreed here. Your father was insistent that you boys all remain at the newspaper to carry on its work. The codicil obviously has no implications for the present moment. Because you boys don’t intend any distribution. Transfer or sales or whatever. We are talking for the future only. A future that none of us can foresee.”

  “It’s not right,” Mitch said.

  “It’s apparently what Dad wanted,” Tony said in a low voice. “I think we ought to honor that. We ought to take him at face value. Dad always knew what he was doing. Elliott has a point, too, that this has nothing to do with the situation now. It is for the future only.”

  Mitch said, “Crap. Elliott, whose idea was it really?”

  Townsend looked at him steadily, eyes narrowing. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Your idea or Dad’s?”

  “Your father’s,” Townsend said coldly. “That is what I said in the first Place, and I’m not in a habit of lying to clients. Who also happen to be the sons of my oldest friend.”

  Charles said, “Mitch, you are a member of the committee.”

  “A minority of one,” Mitch said.

  Townsend said, “What makes you think that my interest is any different than yours? What possible reason can you have for that view? What the. hell is wrong with you anyway?”

  “What the hell,” Mitch said. “What the hell.” He reached for his glass and drained it. His face was flushed and his eyes red. “You,” he said to Charles. “You’re the one who’s got control. You don’t care, what difference does it make to you? The I, all of it that matters, is now in your hands.” Mitch made a show of cold anger, but it didn’t work. His voice was a whine now. “You’re running the outfit and Tony and me are the spear carriers. We’re locked in. We’re locked in in all ways.”

  “That was not what your father intended,” Townsend said smoothly “And I do not believe that Charles will operate in that way.”

  “What way?” Mitch demanded.

  “With a tone hand.”

  “Of course he will. He’s just like him. Just like the old man, he’s a replica of the old man, he’ll never—”

  “Mitch,” Charles began.

  “This is all fucked up,” Mitch said. He stood and lurched to the liquor cabinet, shouldering Tony aside. He muttered something, then began to pour Scotch into his glass. Charles nodded at Elliott Townsend, who shrugged. “It’s just the way it always ways,” Mitch said, his back to them. “Charles gets what he wants, always. Tony—hell, Tony never cared, Charles was always the right man in the right place. You never gave a damn, did you Tony?”

  Tony looked away, embarrassed at this.

  “Tony!” Mitch roared, turning suddenly and staring at all of them.

  Charles said, “Mitch, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I am satisfied with whatever it was Dad wanted,” Tony said slowly. He looked at his two brothers, knowing that of the three of them he knew his father best; loved him best, and was loved in return. He supposed he had paid a price but did not know or care whether it was high or low. He said, “I don’t care what it is, I intend to follow his instructions to the letter.”

  Mitch moved to the window and stood looking out. “Should’ve stayed in the goddamned army. Liked the army; army liked me, God-damnedest biggest mistake I ever made in my life. A lifetime of mistakes; that was the biggest.” He was silent a moment. Then, “What happens when I want to write a will. Leave my stock to—that whore who waits table at Mason’s. What happens then?”

  “All wills have to be cleared by the committee, so far is I stock is concerned,” Townsend said. “The assumption of course is that the stock will stay in the immediate family. Your father assumed it; I do. Won’t it?”

  “Shit,” Mitch said.

  Tony turned and looked at him through his wire-rimmed spectacles. His small hands had tightened into fists. “Don’t talk nonsense, Mitch.”

  “And what happens when I die? Or you do. Or Marge Reilly does. Who fills the vacancy on your ‘committee’? Who decides?”

  Townsend pursed his lips and glanced to one side. “Charles does,” he said softly. “One member of the committee will always be a member of the family. One of you three. The other two will always be outsiders. But in the event of death, Charles chooses the successor.”

  “Charles chooses the successor,” Mitch repeated, his voice old and worn-out.

  “That’s right.”

  “And if Charles is d
ead?” Mitch turned from the window and began to pace. “Our Charles is dead. What then?”

  “Charles’s heir decides,” Tony said.

  Mitch turned on him. “How the hell would you know?”

  “Because it’s logical,” Tony said. “And—” He was going to explain that their father had told him about this will, had described its various provisions and the codicil. But he looked at Mitch and concluded that that would be too cruel. What purpose would it serve? He said, “I understand what Dad was doing. And I don’t see what the problem is. Elliott, explain it again.”

  “Yes.” Mitch mimicked Tony’s soft voice. “Explain it again, Elliott.”

  “The point is—”

  “As if it made any damned difference,” Mitch went on. “Charles has got the controlling shares of the common. That’s what’s important. It doesn’t matter what Tony does or what I do. It’s what Charles does.”

  “Mitch,” Townsend said. He paused for emphasis. The conversetion was beginning to unravel and he didn’t like it. “Nothing has changed.”

  “Jesus, Elliott,” Charles said. He couldn’t let Townsend go down that road. He hated this; hated every part of it. He loathed disharmony. He had sat quietly by, permitting Mitch to have his say; but he couldn’t allow this. “Jesus Christ, everything has changed. Don’t do the nothing-has-changed routine. It has. We all know it has. Dad is dead. We all have to come to terms with the new ... situation. We’re not going to get anywhere by pretending everything is as it was. It isn’t.” He looked with kindness at the old lawyer. “It’s not, Elliott.”

  “In the essentials nothing has changed,” Townsend said stubbornly