A Family Trust

by Ward Just

  “Much more,” Charles said. “Much more. Do you remember?” He reached over and tapped Tony’s knee, almost cheerful now. “Do you remember, the pills the old man was taking, at the end?” He smiled and shook his head. “Damn hospital room looked like a pharmacist’s, the blue pill, the green pill, the yellow pill, Anyway—”

  “They don’t work on me either,” Dana said.

  “You don’t take sleeping pills?” her father asked.

  “Once or twice,” she said.

  “You’re too young to take sleeping pills.”

  She smiled at him and touched his arm reassuringly. “I don’t take them very often. Hardly ever.”

  He said, “Good. That’s good.” Then, “Anyway. I could hear her go off down the hall and the corridor was silent. I could feel myself begin to relax, ohhhh I was tired. Tired everywhere. My bones were tired. But I got up and opened the door and looked out and there was no one in sight. The corridor was absolutely empty I felt like some criminal, skulking around without the authority to do so. I tiptoed into the hall and went next door to look in on Lee. I just wanted to make sure, you know. I just wanted to know.” He looked at them both in turn, to assure himself that they were listening and understanding. “—to know that she was really all right, not that I suspected anything. The nurse was nice as could be, and competent. But you know the way they sometimes are in hospitals, they don’t want you to know everything. I guess they think you aren’t capable of understanding it. All professional people are like that, doctors as well as lawyers. They think they’ve got some secret—”

  “And they don’t at all,” Dana said.

  “And they don’t at all. But the sheet was pulled up over her face and she was dead.”

  Dana groaned and put her hand over her eyes; a thickness settled on her chest and she felt the tears coming. Her chest began to heave and the bottom went out of her stomach and she put her head between her knees. Tears were coming from between her fingers. She felt arms go around her back and was grateful for them. In a moment she heard herself through the roaring in her ears, Hands were holding her shoulders together like bookends. She opened her eyes and took her hands away and her tears dropped to the carpet. She turned her cheek to touch the hand on her shoulder and saw a huge signet ring. Tony’s. It was Tony holding her. She looked to the other side and saw her father sitting as before, staring straight ahead, his fingers just touching his mouth. She began to count, one, two, three, four. She patted Tony’s hand and it went away, resting now on her back. He handed her a handkerchief and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Her father looked at her then and put his hand on her knee and gently squeezed it. His own eyes were glittering and his smile was cracked. She kissed his hand and looked at him. He moved closer to her then, and spoke into her ear, almost whispering.

  “The nurse didn’t know.”

  “No,” she said brokenly.

  “You see, if I’d been with her—”

  Dana said, “No, Dad.”

  “If I’d been with her. There.” He shrugged as if to say to all the world, Well, then, it would have been all right.

  She said, “Daddy.”

  He said, “She didn’t, know the family, you see.” He was still whispering and she had difficulty understanding him. Tony was standing in front of them and she looked at him for guidance. He made a motion with his hands, half helpless, half encouraging. She said, “Dad.”

  “I must’ve blanked out for a while. Something happened. I don’t know. I stayed with her as long as I could. I went back to the chair I was sitting in before. I stayed with her as long as I could stay awake, and then I went back to my own room. I didn’t think it was right—” It was as if he’d sustained a defeat. “I went back to my own room, I don’t know how late it was. I didn’t look at my watch.” He paused; this seemed to him an immensely important fact. “If was after midnight surely, but not yet dawn. Perhaps it was two o’clock in the morning.” He nodded, satisfied now that his time estimate was correct. “The drugs were taking hold of me then, to a fare-thee-well. And I climbed into bed and went to sleep, The next morning Doc Nelson woke me and told me the news. I didn’t let on that I knew already I didn’t see any point to that. That was Sunday morning, around nine o’clock.”

  “That was when you called me, Charlie.”

  “I called Tony then, and of course we phoned you. You were back from wherever you’d been because you answered the phone. No. We tried in the morning and couldn’t get you and then again an hour later. And of course we’d cabled. We finally got you about four o’clock, our time.”

  “We’d been—out,” Dana said.

  “Yes, that’s what we guessed. And there was no one else in your house.”

  “No, there wasn’t.”

  “Charlie,” Tony said softly “Dana didn’t know—”

  “I’m here now. Daddy,” she said.

  He said, “Thank God.” Then he turned away again, toward the fire. “Why didn’t they tell me at the time? She was dead in the next room and they didn’t tell me. The nurse must have told the doctor when she went down to telephone. She was already dead then, and I wasn’t told.”

  Tony and Dana were silent, looking at each other. Finally she said, “Just what you said before, Dad. They don’t understand about Risings. They just didn’t know.”

  Tony nodded. “They’re fools.”

  “I guess so,” Charles Rising said. He continued to stare at the fire.

  “Dana?” Tony said, “The funeral’s tomorrow. Privately, only the family.” She nodded. “Only a graveside service, nothing at the church.” She nodded again. “That was what your father wanted and he knew you’d agree.”

  “Yes, that’s what Mom would’ve wanted.”

  “It won’t be fancy,” he said. “That’s what your father thought, and agree.”

  She said, “Well,” looking down at her hands.

  Tony said, “It’ll be private.”

  Then her father stood, rising slowly. He stood blinking in the light. “The nurse didn’t understand that we take care of our own in this family, we always have since my father’s day. She didn’t understand that, that nurse. That’s all there is—” His voice trailed away and he began to move aimlessly around the room, touching things. “That’s all a life counts for, the connection to other lives.” Dana looked at him, nodding in agreement; encouraging him. “Your own,” he said. “Having your own, living with them, dying with them. Keeping what’s yours, knowing what it is and keeping it. What’s yours alone, your spirit and flesh and blood. That above all.” He was still in motion, now behind her, wondering to the window. “Keeping it and having the strength to keep it, until your strength gives out. Keeping love.” He looked at them both with his glittering eyes. “Until it gives out which it always does and then someone takes it away from you.”

  Tony shook his head. “You did everything you possibly could, Charlie.”

  “Nobody does,” he said.

  “It’s a changed world, it isn’t the same.” Tony went on in that vein for a moment but his brother wasn’t listening, and at the end he knew that.

  “It’s a rotten life,” Charles Rising said, walking stiffly across the carpet to the liquor cabinet. He stood fiddling with a bottle. “It’s the rottenest life that ever was.”

  “Oh, Dad,” Dana began,

  “But I will survive it,” he said.

  SHE FIXED bacon and eggs for him but he only picked at his plate. Everything was over now. He seemed to grow stronger after the funeral, which he had not permitted Cathy to attend. Too sad for children. he said; they’ll find out about all this soon enough. Besides, it would break his heart to see her there, next to the open grave. Dana resisted but finally gave in. She didn’t have the heart to argue with him, though for a moment she wanted to force it. He had been distant with her, not cold or unkind, simply distant. She wanted to believe they could speak openly with each other, but he was inhabiting another world altogether. It was a world that coul
d not be reached by normal means. So she waited in the overwhelmingly silent house, the house that she had known her entire life; the house whose every detail showed the hand of her mother. He looked like a stranger in it, traveling from room to room like someone lost or unfamiliar with its design. The night before they had stayed up late, reminiscing a little, then playing a game of backgammon—he’d found the backgammon board in a closet and suggested game. The last time he’d played was twenty years before when on a vacation with Your Mother somewhere. A cruise, he thought it was a cruise. They played two games and then he lost interest. She turned on the television set but that did not hold him either. At length he had gone to bed. abruptly rising and leaving the room until her voice brought him back. With an apologetic smile he returned and kissed her on both cheeks and wished her a pleasant night, then with the same vacant gait moved out of the room and up the stairs to bed. From the top step she heard him call her name and she went to the hallway to see what he wanted. “It was a nice service, wasn’t it?” His tone was that of a man asking a question to which he required a specific answer. He peered down at her from the second-floor balustrade. She replied, Yes it was; a beautiful service. He said that he thought so, too, but wanted to make sure. She said she agreed with him completely, it was very beautiful. He nodded and smiled at her and went off to bed. Now, the next morning, he was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at his cup of coffee, She had tried to make conversation, mentioning articles on the front page of the Tribune, But he was not interested in the scandal in Washington. One scandal was no different from another. Then, suddenly, he shook his head as if to clear it. He massaged his neck and opened his eyes wide and looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time. He poured fresh coffee in his cup and lit a cigarette and offered her one.

  “Dana?” He looked at her a long minute, carefully weighing his words. He fussed with his coffee cup a moment and then he said, “I’m going to sell the I.”

  His tone had changed then; he seemed crisp and decisive. But she could not tell if he were serious. She said, “Oh, Dad. It’s so soon—”

  “Meeting with the fella today”

  “Today?”

  “Talked to him Yesterday, he’ll be here today with his lawyer. Elliott has gone over the papers. I’m meeting him in my office at eleven o’clock this morning. You’re invited, if you want to come.”

  “Oh, Dad—”

  “I’ve been thinking about it for some time, before your mother—” He pursed his lips and turned away. “I’ve been thinking about it for a year or more. I remember, I once mentioned it to you; years ago. Remember?” He smiled. “No one thought I was serious. But I was serious. Then and now.”

  She leaned forward, her two hands touching his. “What was that,” she said quietly, “that you said the other night about keeping what was yours?” She felt that she had no right to ask him not to do it, or to plead with him in any way But she saw it as a last act. Without the I, the family would cease to exist. She said, “What will you do? I can’t imagine you without your office at the I, going to it every day. You, Tony. Mr. Townsend.”

  “They want me to stay on the board.”

  “But—” She paused to collect her thoughts. She saw he was smiling at her. “But you wouldn’t own it, it wouldn’t be yours anymore. How could you watch others, outsiders, run the I. They want you down there as window dressing, I remember once you told me—”

  “That’s why I’m not going to do it,” he said evenly.

  “Who are the—buyers?”

  “A, family from downstate, Dows. They already own two newspapers and a television and a radio station, and I think they’ve got the cable license in a couple of towns. Solid people, run a good outfit. There’s the old man, he’s a little older than I am; and his boy. His son runs it, a nice boy; you’d like him, maybe. He’s a regular genius with computers, he understands the business the way it is now. He”—her father laughed with genuine amusement—“kicked his old man upstairs. Old Harold was glad enough to go, too. Boy runs the paper more efficiently, more profitably, than he ever did. The boy’ll be the one negotiating, he and the accountant. Butler. Smart as a whip, a good team.”

  “The father isn’t active anymore?”

  “He lives in Florida and chases women half his age.”

  She smiled, imagining a squat man in huge bathing trunks chasing teenagers on the beach at Fort Lauderdale. “And his son is a computer man.”

  He nodded,. “computers.

  “I thought,” she said, “the I was a newspaper, not a calculating machine.”

  He smiled sardonically at her and she quickly looked away. He said, “That’s because you haven’t been around and don’t know. Maybe that’s not how they run the New York Times or—publications in Dublin, Ireland, if there are any. But what runs modern newspapers now are computers and you’d better know the language. You’ve got to know your apples and young Dows does.”

  The archaic phrase brought a smile to her lips. “Well, I don’t know what to say.”

  He shrugged. “No reason to say anything.”

  “I’m sorry about it.”

  “So’m I”

  “Tony’s in agreement?”

  “Not entirely” he said. “But Tony’s not in a position to do anything about it.”

  “It’s a shame. But I understand.” Then she remembered something, it was only half formed in her memory. “Wasn’t there a clause in Grandpa’s will, a committee of some sort—”

  He nodded. “Three people. Elliott, Marge Reilly and Mitch. When Mitch died, I replaced him. All I needed was Townsend and I’ve got him. Truth is, that codicil never would’ve stood up anyway...” As he talked she looked into the yard, where Cathy was playing. She saw her daughter standing alone under the big oaks at the edge of the lawn, watching something. Suddenly the little girl clapped her hands and a squirrel scampered up the tree, She saw the gardener raking leaves at the far end of the lawn. “... my hand was forced, really.” He said, “There isn’t anybody around to take over when I’m gone. I’m the last of the line, I have to see that the I survives, that’s my responsibility Always has been. Now with your mother gone, Frank gone, you in. New York or wherever you live now or in the future...” He pushed the coffee cup away, jostling it, and she noticed that his hand was shaking, though his voice was steady and definite. “Elliott wanted me to hand it to you, lock, stock and barrel. He said, ‘She’s got the blood.’ And I refused to do that, the I is no place for a caretaker, though I believe you’d’ve done well enough, maybe, if you’d stayed here. I didn’t think I’d be doing you any service, that’s the long and short of it.” He looked at her briefly “So I’m going to take the money and run. Part of it’ll be yours, in time you’ll be rich.”

  She made a gesture of dismissal with her hand. “Run where?”

  “Not sure yet. Florida maybe. I’ve got friends in every damn town on the west coast of Florida. Hell, maybe I’ll buy a condominium next to Harold Dows and chase women with him.”

  She rose and went to him. “Anything you want to do is all right with me. Anything at all. And I suppose you’re right about the caretaker. I’ve never been able to understand legacies. Maybe I’ve always felt that females were excused from those.” She spoke to him very softly now. “When a woman declares her independence it’s usually total.”

  He patted her hand, his fingers dry and warm. The vacant look had returned to his eyes. “A thing like the I, it’s either a curse or a salvation. Sometimes both at once.” The telephone rang and he rose to answer it. He seemed about to say something else, then turned away. “Maybe I’ll go to Tucson. Phoenix.”

  “Phoenix?”

  He answered the telephone and put his hand over the receiver. “Nice golf courses both places.” He listened for a moment, then handed the phone to her. “For you, overseas. It’s a call from Europe somewhere, it sounded like a man.” He handed her the telephone as if it were something diseased and went to the kitchen window, where he s
tood with his back to her, hands in his pockets.

  She took the telephone gingerly, watching her father at the window. Why now? she thought. Why did he have to call now? But when she heard Myles’s voice she was happy. He was calling from London; one day alone in the west of Ireland was more than enough. The house was very empty. He missed her terribly did she miss him? Yes, she said; very much. How was everything in Dement? It was all right, she said; every, very sad. But better now. She intended to stay for a while, a week; perhaps longer, depending... She wished he were there with her, she said in a low voice. Well, he replied, the job was still uncertain but he didn’t think he’d take it. The deal wasn’t what he thought it was, and London was a long way away He’d be back in New York by the end of next week, would she be back by then? She said she thought she would, depending. He said that everyone missed her in London. He named three friends with a brief account of their adventures. She said it was wonderful to hear his voice but it must be costing a fortune. Ha-ha, he said; he was calling from the newsroom of the BBC; their dime, not his. She laughed; it was characteristic Myles. All right then, he said, he’d meet her at the apartment at five the following Friday. He’d call next week to check. Oh Myles, she said; yes, absolutely And thank you for calling, lamb. There was dead air between them for a moment. Then he asked her how Cathy was and she said, Fine. He said. Did you mean what you said a moment ago? Of course, she said. I wish I was there, too, he said. But we’ll meet on Friday. Yes, she said, yes. It’s four in the afternoon here, he said, and I didn’t sleep last night because I’m under very considerable sexual tension ... She began to laugh... and it’s causing insomnia. What about you? he asked. Are you having pinsomnia? She glanced at her father. This was not the time for coocoo talk. She said yes, she was, but she had to go now. He said that talking to her made him feel better. Then he told her he adored her and hung up. She shook her head, staring at the buzzing receiver. When she turned around she saw her father was no longer at the window. She found him in the hallway in his hat and coat, his hand on the doorknob. He was ready if she was. She said, Fine, got her coat, and they walked silently to the car for the ten-minute drive to the newspaper building. She waved to Cathy, who was tagging along behind the gardener. Cathy ran to meet them. Where were they going? Dana said that Grandpa had a meeting and they’d be gone about one hour. Cathy wanted to come but Dana shook her head firmly, No. What was the meeting about, she asked. Charles said, “I’m going to sell the I, sweetheart.” The child looked blankly at Dana; she had no idea what her grandfather was talking about. Dana said, “We’ll be back in an hour,” and moved off with her father. Cathy called to her before she’d gone a dozen steps and she returned to the little girl. Dana bent her head so she could hear her daughter’s whispered question. “I don’t understand what Grandpa means. You can’t sell an eye.” Dana smiled sadly and kissed her on the cheek. Cathy Rising McGee did not know the name of the newspaper. Dana said, “I’ll tell you about it when we get back. Grandpa means he’s selling his newspaper.” The little girl laughed and said that in that case she was glad to stay home, with Bert the gardener. Dana kissed her again and rejoined her father.