by Ward Just
Dana could not look at her father or the others. The room was quiet, the only sounds the rustle of paper; Butler was blindly leafing through the document in his lap. Charles Rising was staring at his desk top, his face flushed.
Dows broke the silence. “I think somebody should call a doctor. Medical attention—”
But Charles shook his head sadly, looking at Dana. He seemed to want guidance of some kind but there was nothing for Dana to say. He said finally, “I’ll stay if you want me to stay. But it won’t do any good. It won’t help, it’ll hurt. The Risings are no longer part of Dement, what it’s become. Bill Eurieh’ll do you more good than I will. But I’ll stay and we’ll say no more about any ‘voice’ for me in policy. You own it and you’ll run it and I’ll be here for cosmetic reasons only. Let’s be entirely clear about that. And I intend to stay on without salary of any kind.” Dows looked at him, incredulous. “You’ve just made yourself a hundred thousand dollars, young Harold. Tell that to your old man, he’ll love it. Now I’m going home.” He tossed the document across the desk and Butler caught it before it cascaded to the floor. Dana saw her father’s scrawled initials on the margins of each page. Before the younger men could collect themselves Charles was out of his chair and putting on his hat and coat and standing by the door. Dows and Butler made hasty good-byes, Dows carefully writing his own initials next to Charles’s on the pages and signing on the last page. Then he capped the pen and placed the letter of agreement on the desk. There were a few more words, pleasantries, and then they were gone.
She said, “Why?”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” he said.
“I know. That’s what I mean.”
“Tony wasn’t all wrong, you know.”
She said, “I know.”
“Well, it was partly a reaction to him.”
“And why no money?”
He smiled and leaned against the open door. “The last capricious act of a careful man. Maybe the only capricious thing I’ve ever done in my life. But it made it better for me. Easier somehow.”
“Sackcloth and ashes?”
“Maybe a little of that.”
“You did the right thing,” she lied.
“Do you really think so? Tell me honestly”
“I guess I don’t know,” she said finally
He smiled at that. “I don’t either.”
She said, “You can always quit.”
“Oh, Dana, no.” He began to laugh. “We never quit.”
“But Tony was completely right about one thing. Those two are assholes.”
Her father nodded soberly and closed his eyes. He said nothing for a moment, rubbing the palm of his hand over his chin. Then he made a fist and tapped the door tenderly. When he looked at her he had tears in his eyes. “Doesn’t Dows remind you a little of Frank?”
She waited a moment before replying. The evidence on Frank Rising was not in and would never be in. What evidence they had was contradictory. She believed in her heart that Frank Rising was exactly like Harold Dows. She put her arm around her father’s waist and kissed him on the cheek. “Yes.” she said softly, in reassurance.
SHE LEFT the following Thursday, with Cathy, in the rented car. It was a quiet week; they had gone out to dinner twice and once she’d taken Cathy to a movie. Friday night the telephone rang continually friends calling to comment on the sale of the newspaper. She took most of the calls, explaining that her father was out or asleep or unavailable, depending on the call. She reminded all of them that he would remain as a member of the board of directors and that seemed to give them comfort. There were very few calls from politicians. Once, she and her father went to her mother’s grave for a silent five minutes, Over the week he grew stronger but the vacant look never left him entirely and not once did he and Dana discuss the past. He seemed to want to know about her life and she told him as much as she could; but he didn’t understand it, and seemed to disapprove. She mentioned Myles just once more, then did not mention him again.
She promised to return for the Easter holiday and her father agreed that it was a good time, “but we’ll see.” She invited him to New York for Christmas and he said he might come, “depending.” He told her that he’d write her a long letter about the terms of the sale, but in any case she was a rich woman. She tried to be enthusiastic about it, believing that her enthusiasm would please him. But he seemed indifferent and at the end she had to admit that the money didn’t matter to her, one way or the other. When she said it out loud, he accepted it, nodding in understanding. They kissed at the door, the distance between them narrower than it had been ever. But then they had always looked out on the same gulf. He asked her one last favor, to drop by—“Just fifteen minutes, no longer”—to see Elliott Townsend. She said that she would. He leaned into the car on the passenger’s side and kissed his granddaughter. Then he stepped back, his shoes scraping the gravel. “So long,” he said.
She left Cathy in the car, under protest. But the visit would be short and she wanted to be alone with the old man. Mrs. Haines let her in and left her waiting in the hallway while she checked to see if Townsend was awake and prepared for visitors. She heard the rumble of their voices, then him calling for her to come in. She had not seen him in three years and was prepared for a wasted old man. But he had not changed; if anything he was stronger than three years before. Mars. Haines brought them both a cup of coffee, then left them alone. They looked at each other across a distance of sixty years, saying nothing for a moment. This last visit to Dement, she wanted to make it count.
She said, “Do you intend to live forever?”
He laughed, a dry chuckle like the crackle of a fire. “I might at that, Feel better today than yesterday Feel better this year than last,”
“You look—splendid.”
“I know,” he said. “Isn’t it the damnedest thing?”
She said, “I was with Dad when he had the final meeting with Dows. Did you know that he agreed to stay on for two years? As a member of the board. Chairman.”
“He did?”
She said, “Yeah,” with that lilt.
“It surprises me. I didn’t think he would.”
“He said he didn’t know why he did.”
The old man nodded. “Your father’s like that sometimes. He denpended on your mother—” She looked at him, her eyes narrowed. “Yes, that and the family. You. Your grandfather. Your brother, when he was alive. More than he thought, I think, and more than was good for him. Me, I haven’t had any family for almost fifty years.” He was silent and she rose and went to the window. Back of the cornfield she could see the concrete of the Interstate, She’d noticed the new supermarket on the corner and a gas station down the block. It occurred to her suddenly that he was surrounded, he and the five or six other families on the block, all of them old people. They were surrounded by commerce.
“Were you happy when he sold the I?”. She asked the question tentatively.
“He came here the night your mother died. Before she died, but that night. And we talked about it quite a little, I fought him, I didn’t want to see it happen. It seems that everything I have known has been surrendered, one way or another. Everything that Amos and I built, and it was quite a lot, has disappeared. Your father had different ideas, he was a man of his time. I thought Amos’s influence would last forever, but it hasn’t. It didn’t last five years and I can’t say whether we’re the better for it or not. I don’t get around the way I used to. I know the politics’ve changed. Everything’s changed. He and I, the only thing we wanted was to keep the violence away. Make the place safe, and I mean secure. Secure it against the aliens. Amos called them aliens, but he meant outsiders. I guess you’d say now that he wanted things to be predictable. So did I. You know the story about Capone’s people, that’s a Rising story that will never die. Well, it didn’t happen in quite the way we used to tell it. Funny thing, I can’t remember anymore what the truth was. So we’ll have to live with the yarn, won’t
we? We live with the stories we make up. Those are the real stories, more real than the originals. The way it really was, that died with Amos.” He stopped and looked away, breathing heavily “Hell yes, I think we were better. Amos and me. But it’s like that story. The way it was, that’s just my memory”
“Did you hear about Tony?” She watched him shake his head. “You’ll pardon my language but Tony called Dows an asshole and then he said the I should just die. Die with Risings, It should not, in any case, be sold. He seemed to think that selling it was like selling a nation.”
“Tony said that?” The old man was incredulous.
“He said it.”
“Tony was your grandfather’s favorite.”
“He was?”
“And it sounds to me like your grandfather’s voice.” He smiled then, lost in thought. “Nice to think so anyway. Well. What do you do now?”
“Go back to New York.”
“That little girl of yours. Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. I’ve got to get back to her now.” Dana stood up.
“And that ex-husband. Is he still around?”
“Still around,” Dana said. “But there’s a man I go out with—”
“Live with him?”
She laughed; it was an incongruous remark coming from this old man. She said, “Sometimes.”
He said grimly. “I thought that’s what everybody did.”
“Some do,” she said. “Some don’t.”
“Well,” he said. “Don’t cheat yourself.”
She said, “I don’t intend to.”
“Hang on to it,” he said.
“I intend to do that, too.”
“Men,” he said.
“But can you give me any advice about my dad?”
He said, “I have no advice.” He said slowly, “He sold the I. Your mother’s gone, nothing is as he knew it. All the familiar things are gone and the future is not as he believed it would be. Though I am not certain he thought much about the future. That may have been part of the trouble, because your father—and me, too—bears some responsibility” He paused then and looked up at her. “We took a lot of things for granted. And now we’re a colony with a proconsul like any colony. My God, in the Midwest we fought that from the time of the first railroads. Mr. Lincoln fought it. We’ve lost it for good now, it’s over and done with, and in a jiffy it’ll be forgotten. But if anyone ever asks you about the I, what it was and what it stood for—” He paused again and looked away, past the oak and the field and the highway beyond, a cluttered horizon. “You tell ’em it was the greatest force for reaction since the cold bath.”
She laughed out loud, laughed until the tears came. He sat looking at her, smiling a little, his eyes glittering. She leaned down and kissed him on his dry cheek. “Stay close to my father,” she said.
He said, “You stay in touch.”
“I’ll be back,” she said.
He nodded. “When?”
“Easter. Next summer for sure.”
“I’ll be here. He will, too.”
“I know you will,” she said. “I know it.” He closed his eyes, she noticed that she’d been with him fifteen minutes and the vitality had gone out of him as if drawn by a magnet. He said, “Good-bye, Dana.” She left the old man then, hurrying from the house to her car, thinking suddenly of Myles and his arrival from Europe. Perhaps she would meet his plane, greet him fresh from Europe and go straight to some familiar place, She fought to think of Myles but the memory of her father kept crowding her and pushing at her; her father kissing Cathy and stepping away from the car, smiling nicely and saying, So long. His sweet smile below the empty eyes; and so much still concealed. This presence in her heart, this hurt; it seemed as much consolation as rebuke. But she also knew that it was the essence of the region. It gave, and it never took away.
IN THE PARLOR of the house the old man had already forgotten her visit. He. was sitting with his eyes closed, dreaming of a warm day in January on the Nebraska plains, men working in shirtsleeves in the sun and his mother waving good-bye as she walked off down the road to town. The film always stopped there, a frozen frame of a pretty woman in a bonnet and a pleated skirt, her hand raised, standing in a halo of sunlight.
PUBLICAFFAIRS is a new publishing house and a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.
1. F. STONE, proprietor of I. F. Ston’s Weekly, combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history. At the age of eighty, Izzy the Trial of Socrates, which was a national bestseller. He wrote the book after he taught hun-self ancient Greek.
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Copyright © 1978 by Ward Just.
Publisher in the United States by PublicAffairs™,
a member of the Perseus Books Group.
All rights reserved.
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Originally published in 1978 by Atlantic-Little Brown Books,
Little, Brown and Company in association with the Atlantic Monthly Press.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Just, Ward S.
A family trust: a novel / Ward Just.
p. cm
eISBN : 978-1-586-48624-2
1. Korean War, 1950—1953—Middle West—Faction.
2. Family-owned business enterprises—Fiction.
3. Newspaper publishing—fiction.
4. Middle West—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3560.U75 F3 2001
813’.54—dc21 00—051788
