Bitter Business

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “I told you. It would be pointless to even try and discuss it with Daddy on the board,” Lydia continued, completely ignoring him. “He just pats me on the head and tells me to go out and play. Daddy’s behavior is all very preconscious. He has difficulty dealing with the conflict between his image of me as an idealized child and the reality of my being a grown woman capable of making decisions on her own. He’s blocked because he doesn’t want to face his own fears about aging and declining sexual potency. It’s obvious from his decision to marry Peaches. If he’s not willing to listen to his inner child, it’s futile to expect that he’ll be able to listen to his actual child.”

  “You still haven’t told me why you want to sell your shares,” I prodded.

  “I have a new therapist who has been helping me fight back against my father’s domination for the first time in my life. Finally I’m beginning to understand the systematic financial oppression that men like my father perpetrate. She’s made me realize the importance of severing the connection between financial and emotional control so that I can deal with each of them separately.”

  I stifled a giggle, but Lydia didn’t seem to notice. She just droned on about her inner child in a tone of great gravity. I looked at the other people in the room. Arthur Wallace watched his wife with the same rapt attention made famous by Nancy Reagan whenever she appeared at her husband’s side. In the meantime Lydia’s attorneys shifted restlessly in their seats.

  As she spewed out a steady stream of psychobabble about how her shares in Superior Plating represented the bonds of emotional slavery to her father, I began to make a mental list of other attorneys at the firm whom I might be able to convince to take on the company’s file. Any affection I might feel for Daniel Babbage aside, it should have been clear to everyone in that room that Lydia Cavanaugh Wallace was a very disturbed woman. This was clearly turning into the kind of case I’d gone into corporate work specifically to avoid—messy, personal, and offering no satisfactory conclusions.

  I looked across the conference table at Lydia, still engrossed in her rambling monologue about her inner self. Cecilia Dobson’s death was an omen, I decided. One that I was not about to ignore.

  8

  Once Lydia had run through her reasons for feeling oppressed, she signaled the end of the meeting and swept out of the room. Cliff Schaeffer, her lead lawyer, hung back for a quiet word with me. Besides having been at school with his wife, I’d been across the table from him on a couple of deals. In general I’d found him a snarling pit bull of an advocate, not to mention something of a jerk.

  “Since when did you start representing mental cases?” I asked with more truth than tact.

  “The shares belong to her,” he replied. “She has the right to sell them if she wants.”

  “I’m not disputing that. I’m just curious about how you bill her—is it only for a forty-five-minute hour?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is, how can you know whether she’s even really going to sell? She’s sat on the board of Superior Plating for the last seven years. She’s drawn a salary from them for the last fourteen and not once has she voiced a single concern about her shares or how the company is being run. Don’t you think that if she’s capable of making a snap decision to sell her shares, she’s just as likely to change her mind and decide to keep them? I understand that you’re going to get paid either way, but how can you expect me to negotiate in good faith with a nutcase?”

  “I’m not a nutcase,” Lydia’s attorney protested, “and neither is Mark Hoffenberg and the bankers at First Chicago. Now that I think of it, Lydia’s husband Arthur’s no slouch either. I’ll grant you that my client is a little... well, shall we say, emotional. But that doesn’t mean she’s not capable of making a good business decision.”

  “You mean, with you pushing and Hoffenberg pulling?”

  “Let me give you a little bit of advice, Kate. If you don’t want to see a big chunk of your client’s stock being sold to an outsider, I’d get busy and come back with a respectable offer—and pronto.”

  Once I make up my mind about something, I stick to it, and since I had definitely decided to end my brief tenure as counsel for Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals I wasted no time in going to Daniel Babbage’s office to tell him of my decision. I didn’t intend to go into my feelings about the Cavanaughs but would merely explain that my caseload was too heavy for me to give the file the attention and the hours that it was obviously going to require. I wanted, in all fairness, to tell him immediately, before events moved ahead and I billed any more hours to the file.

  But when I arrived at Daniel’s office, I found it empty. I went in search of Madeline, his secretary, and found her hunched over her desk weeping over a stack of unopened mail. Babbage, she explained in a halting whisper, had been rushed to the emergency room in the middle of the night. She wrote down the number of his room at Billings Hospital and I trudged back to my office filled with a sense of resignation mingled with dread. For some reason, instead of making it easier, news of Daniel’s illness made bowing out seem cowardly and impossible. From that point on there was no turning back.

  Dagny Cavanaugh came to the door of her lovingly restored brownstone dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. She looked about sixteen. After learning of Daniel’s relapse, I’d called her and asked for an urgent meeting and she’d agreed to see me that evening provided that I’d be willing to come to her house. She had, she explained, another commitment, but she thought there would still be time for us to talk. Besides, she’d added cryptically, there was a good chance I’d find it interesting.

  “Welcome to the Mount McKinley Expedition planning meeting,” she said with a smile as she swung the heavy oak door wide. From somewhere inside the house I heard the faint tinkle of laughter. “We’re just finishing up and then we’ll have dinner. I hope you haven’t eaten yet. Here, let me take your coat. Why don’t you take your shoes off, too? We’re very casual in this house.”

  “I didn’t realize that you live right across the street from your father,” I exclaimed, handing her my coat.

  “Oh, it’s even worse than that.” Dagny laughed. “It’s hard to see in the dark, but Philip and his wife, Sally, live in the brick house next door to Dad and Lydia lives right across the street. Eugene’s house is next to Dad’s on the other side. My grandfather may not have known how to run a company, but he knew a bargain when he saw one.

  He bought all the property at the end of the Depression for pennies on the dollar.”

  “When Daniel told me that you were a close-knit family he wasn’t kidding.”

  “After today it’s beginning to feel like a variation on a Sicilian knife fight. You know, where they take two guys who want to kill each other, tie them together by their left hands, and give them each a very long dagger for their right. We’re having some problems with one of our chrome plating lines. I spent the whole afternoon locked in the conference room with my father and brothers. Right now we’re very long on blame and very short on solutions. Anyway, enough about that. Come on in and meet the gang and I’ll get you a drink.”

  The house was very pretty, with floors of polished oak and beautiful woodwork that had been meticulously stripped and refinished. There was a gorgeous stained glass window that I glimpsed at the top of the stairs.

  “When I said Mount McKinley Expedition I wasn’t kidding,” Dagny declared as we came to the end of a long hall. “I don’t know how I got talked into taking a bunch of juvenile delinquents on a climbing trip this summer, but that’s what I’m going to do—provided the three of them can figure out how to read a topographical map between now and then.”

  In the large, open kitchen three teenagers pored over a set of maps that had been unfurled on a central island. An oval rack hung with gleaming copper pots was suspended above them.

  “Meet the next generation of Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals,” Dagny announced jovially.

  “Oh please, M
om,” complained a pretty girl of sixteen. “Kate Millholland, this is my daughter, Claire Gil-christ. I’d also like you to meet my niece, Mary Beth Cavanaugh—she’s the oldest of my brother Eugene’s brood. And this is Peter McCallister, my sister Lydia’s son.”

  I pronounced myself happy to meet them all. Claire and Mary Beth seemed to be about the same age, though Dagny’s daughter was obviously the livelier of the two. Peter was a good-looking, but sullen young man of fifteen.

  “We’re planning a technical ascent of Mount McKinley as soon as school’s over,” Claire explained while her mother went over to the stove to give something a stir. “We’ve been planning it for months. We even did some technical climbing in Arizona over Christmas break and we didn’t do too badly.”

  “If you don’t count the crevasse where Peter slipped, got tangled in the rope, and practically hanged himself,” teased Mary Beth, beginning to roll up the maps.

  “If you had been keeping your mind on the belay and not drooling over that French climber that passed us...” whined Peter, sharply reminding me of Lydia.

  “Come on, guys,” Dagny admonished. “We’re a team, remember? We all make mistakes. Remember all the equipment we had to leave on top of Flatiron because you insisted that you’d figured out a way down, Mary Beth? Or how about the time I made you all get cleaned up in that lake when we were in Quantico and it turned out that the water was full of leeches?”

  The Mount McKinley Expedition shuddered in unison at the recollection.

  “That smells very good,” I said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “No. It’s all done. It’s my home-cured corned beef. I make it from my grandmother’s recipe. I told you, I’m having my dad and Peaches for dinner tomorrow night, so I’m using you guys as guinea pigs. Kate, why don’t you just go ahead and have a seat over there?”

  I did as I was bidden, taking my place with the rest of them at a round table of well-worn oak.

  “If you’ll just hand me your plates, I’ll serve everyone. This platter is too heavy to pass,” said Dagny.

  “Aren’t we going to say grace, Aunt Dagny?” Mary Beth inquired reproachfully. I remembered what Babbage had said about Eugene and his wife being deeply religious.

  “Give me a break!” groaned Peter.

  “Why don’t you say the blessing, Mary Beth,” Dagny replied equably.

  “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” she said as Dagny and Claire bowed their heads and crossed themselves. Peter shot an angry look at Mary Beth, truculently bent his head, and began a minute examination of his fingernails.

  “Bless us, O Lord for these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ the Lord,” intoned Mary Beth. “And please speed the soul of Cecilia Dobson to thy safekeeping. Amen.”

  “Who the hell is Cecilia Datsun?” Peter demanded, reaching for the breadbasket.

  “It’s Dobson, you dope,” Claire replied. “A Datsun’s a car. For your information Cecilia Dobson was Mother’s secretary—the one who dropped dead at the office.”

  “My dad said she died of a drug overdose,” reported Mary Beth in an awed whisper.

  “That’s not the worst part,” Claire chimed in. “Her family won’t even pay for her funeral. Can you imagine?”

  “So what’s going to happen to her?” Mary Beth asked.

  “She is going to have a very nice funeral tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock at St. Bernadette’s Cemetery,” Dagny informed her. “We’ve even persuaded your grandfather to close the office early so that the people who worked with her can attend.” She handed me a plate of corned beef and cabbage. “I was wondering whether you might want to come, Kate.”

  “Of course,” I said, my good manners getting the better of me.

  “Is the company paying for it?” Peter demanded unpleasantly.

  “No. I’m paying for it myself, not that it’s anybody’s business,” Dagny replied tersely. I don’t think she was annoyed with her nephew. It was just that there was something in the way that Peter had asked the question that once again brought his mother very sharply to mind.

  “They seem like nice kids,” I said, once we’d taken our coffee cups into the living room. A fire burned merrily behind the grate, the flames reflected in the polished surface of the baby grand piano. On the low table in front of us was a spray of dendrobium orchids in a crystal vase and a plate of chocolates. I helped myself.

  “These are wonderful,” I said, taking a bite.

  “They’re from Belgium. I have a climbing friend who sends them to me.”

  “I can’t believe you’re really taking your nieces and nephew up Mount McKinley.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried about the kids. In some ways they’re better technical climbers than I am. They’re certainly in better shape. Of course, the sport’s changed so much since I was their age. Now they all go to the climbing gym and work out on the wall—they feel like they can climb anything. I’m just going along to slow them down.”

  “Claire seems like a neat kid. She looks like you.”

  “Do you really think so? I always imagine she looks like her dad.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “We’re not divorced. He died in a climbing accident before Claire was born.”

  “I’m surprised you still climb.”

  “I didn’t for a long time. When Claire was little I was afraid. But when she got older she got interested. She’s a lot like Jeremy, her dad, that way. I guess from time to time everybody has got to feed the rat.”

  “What’s feeding the rat?”

  “It’s a climbing expression. The rat is that voice inside your head that whispers, ‘Go for it. Take the risk.’ Claire hears the rat loud and clear, just like her dad. You know, there were times when we were climbing in Arizona this winter, when I’d look up the rope at her and swear I was seeing Jeremy. There’s something about their climbing styles that’s very similar.”

  “It must be nice to be able to remember him that way,” I said, feeling jealous.

  “Daniel told me that you’d lost your husband to cancer. Was it long ago?”

  “Four years this past November. We weren’t married very long.”

  “Any kids?”

  “No. There wasn’t any time. He got sick right after we were married. You know, when he was first diagnosed I ]0iew that it would be terrible—his illness, his death. In some ways these last years have been worse. At least during the crisis you have the crisis to deal with. I was completely unprepared for... the emptiness that followed.”

  “I understand completely. It was the same way after Jeremy died. A numbness sets in. I was five months pregnant when he died and everyone kept talking to me about the baby—telling me that that’s what I had to live for. They were right, of course. But at the time the baby was still an abstraction. Only my loss was real. I remember I used to go to the mailbox and there’d be mail for him— come-ons, solicitations, just junk. I’d stand there with grocery circulars in my hands and cry.”

  “I still wear Russell’s old shirts sometimes when I’m just bumming around at home. I know it’s crazy, but they’re all that’s left.”

  “Do you still keep in touch with his family?”

  “His mother and I go to the cemetery together every year. She’s this old Polish lady who doesn’t speak any English, but we go and lay flowers on his grave and cry together. I know it doesn’t do either of us any good, but we can’t stop going. Everybody tells me that I have to move on....”

  “You already are, you know. You don’t know it but you are. You take one breath and then another. You get up and you go to work. You eat and you sleep and you do what you have to do. It’s not the life you planned, but it’s a life. And in a while you’re going to look back and realize that it’s not so bad. It just takes time.”

  “And you never married again?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Ever tempted?”

  “Not really
. Well, maybe once—the Belgian who sends me the chocolates. We still climb together once or twice a year.”

  “But that’s it?”

  “I’ve gotten used to doing things my way, making my own decisions, having my freedom. I have my work, my house, my daughter.... I have enough family for four lifetimes. I couldn’t really see how I was going to be able to make a relationship work with a man who lives four thousand miles away in another country. In the end it turned out to be not as important as I thought.”

  “And are you happy?”

  Dagny thought a minute before answering.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “I am happy. And who’s to say what life would have been like with Jeremy? For all I know he might have turned out to be a womanizer or a drunk. Maybe I’d have come to resent having a globetrotting rock climber for a husband once I had a house full of kids. That’s the problem with being widowed young. You mourn not just the man, but the ideal of the life you were going to share together. You never had a chance to find out if your Polish mother-in-law would have driven you crazy or if you and your husband would have fought like cats and dogs. In the beginning everything is perfect. You look at your life and it seems complete... and then in an instant, it all gets taken away.”

  9

  The fire had died down. The bottle of wine and the plate of chocolates were empty. Mary Beth and Peter had been gotten home safely and Dagny’s daughter, Claire, had long since gone up to bed. Outside, it had started to snow.

  “What can I tell you about my family?” Dagny sighed. “They’re my family and I love them. But that doesn’t make me stupid. I think I can see them for what they are. My father is a stubborn son of a bitch who has been getting his way for so long that he’s come to believe that if he wants something to happen, it will. And you’ve got to hand it to him. The number of things he’s accomplished and overcome just by sheer force of will is staggering— his alcoholic father, a fire that leveled the plant the first year he turned a profit, an all-out war with the Teamsters—I’ll never forget it. I was still a teenager. They blew up Dad’s favorite Cadillac in front of our house but he still wouldn’t give in. In all those years there’s only one thing that’s ever defeated him.”