Folly Beach

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  Every now and then I would moan a little with him in private, that I’d surely prefer a simpler life, one that (until I found Albertina, that is) was not so burdened with bickering staff who chipped your crystal, cleaned your silver with steel wool, and used Shout! on your vegetable-dyed antique rugs from Agra. Never mind the unending stream of workmen that came with the constant repairs and upkeep a large home required. Too often my days were defined by waiting for someone to show up to do something the right way, because Addison held me responsible for every last detail of our life outside of his business. Sometimes, no, a lot of the time, I felt more like a building superintendent than the beloved wife of a successful man. There were times—often, in fact—when I was merely the director and producer for the domestic theater of his life, and I knew it with certainty when he would rate my performance after a holiday or a dinner party for clients.

  “The centerpieces looked cheap, Cate,” he might say. Or, “The meat was overcooked. Shoe leather.” Or, “Your staff didn’t show well tonight, Cate. Service stunk. I thought you knew how important this dinner was to me.”

  It was never, “Gosh, honey, you went to so much trouble! I’m a lucky man! Thanks so much!”

  He was so self-absorbed and pressured with work that days would pass without him saying anything particularly personal or pleasant to me, or without even making eye contact. I knew he was preoccupied because he was extremely worried about his investments, but still, his freezing-cold attitude chipped away at whatever affection I felt for him and I felt more and more detached from him. But I was grateful to God to have my children and I gave them everything there was in my heart. I had Patti. And Mark.

  It didn’t pay to moan about life in the gilded cage. Not a single member of the human race would have felt sorry for me for one second. Especially Addison. His familiar bark went like this: “Look, Cate. I work like an eff-ing animal, putting in crazy hours, dealing with more stress than the GD eff-ing president himself. So? When I come home I want to look around and believe, somehow believe, even if it’s just for five minutes, that it was all worth the sacrifice! Why is that so eff-ing hard for you to understand?”

  Nice, right? My neck got hot even then, remembering how terrible he made me feel. How low. How insignificant. The belittling, the judging, and then the terrible silences that followed.

  Addison became possessed by the decadent spirits of his own desire. If he wanted to get in his Lamborghini and run it, he did. If he wanted to open a five-hundred-dollar bottle of wine and drink it with microwave popcorn, he did. Many afternoons I would find him downing an old Bordeaux while he watched the Golf Channel ad nauseam on our home theater screen that rivaled an IMAX. Once he paid to play with Tiger Woods to raise money for some charitable cause he could not have cared less about just so he could tell that story over and over as though he was Tiger’s best friend. He stored a set of custom Majestic golf clubs in ten different locations from St. Andrews to Pebble Beach so he didn’t have to say, “Gee, I wish I’d brought my clubs.” He kept his G 550 at the ready, in case he wanted to fly to Vegas with a few of his partners or friends and hear Barry Manilow sing or watch Siegfried and Roy play with their big cats. Sick.

  I hated all his toys because they represented just how horribly shallow he could be. We could’ve done so much good with all that money. If I wanted to support something like the library or the children’s schools, he refused, saying he only wanted to give money to things that would thrill him. And he also never missed an opportunity to remind me that he earned the money, not me. He could and would do as he wanted.

  He wanted, he wanted, he wanted . . . well, the wanting was at an end because the greedy, covetous, acquisitive son of a bitch was dead. Did he run around? Probably, but I never really knew for sure. That didn’t mean I didn’t have some very real suspicions.

  In the last few years, it came to a point where Addison barely resembled the wonderful extraordinary man I had married. How, I wondered, had I managed all those years to keep my mountain of frustrations and deep disappointments out of the conversation with my children? It was either a miraculous accomplishment of mine or massive denial on their part that they merely viewed him as a well-meaning, very distracted man who was sometimes a difficult and demanding grump. I mean, they had their criticisms of him. When Russ was a teenager, he thought he worked way too much and would shrug his shoulders in disappointment when his father missed a basketball game. Russ was the captain of his team and had gone to the College of Charleston on a full ride, which was a point of pride for him to say he didn’t owe that part of his education to his father. And Sara? She didn’t fare as well. Sara suffered horribly from Addison’s lack of attention and spent her high school years dating the wrong boys, getting her heart broken all the time. College had not been a lot better for her socially and so she turned to acting in theater, where she could express herself.

  But when they heard the news about their father’s death, they both swore that they adored him and they were honestly devastated to learn that he was dead.

  The only person who knew the truth about how I really felt about my marriage was Patti, and she would never betray my confidence. Never in a million years. We both figured we may as well bury the old bastard on a high note.

  In some bizarre way, I still cared about Addison and always would. He had given me two wonderful children, a luxurious life, and a long list of things for which I would always be in his debt. After all, we had traveled the world as a family, the children had been sent to good schools, and he gave them incredible opportunities to learn, see, go, and do. If I had ever really felt our lifestyle was that unacceptably vulgar or that his cruelty was too much, could I have left? Of course I could have but we were a family, with all the good and bad, and I wasn’t tearing my family apart over something so stupid as Addison’s conspicuous consumption or because he became more unsatisfied with his entire personal life when the markets declined. It would only have made a bad situation worse. And living with Addison was generally a tolerable situation. Not a joyous one, but tolerable. But let me tell you, markets may rebound but chasing great wealth is a delusional trap.

  Two years ago, Patti and Mark began to notice a marked difference in Addison, too, as he slid even further into a new hell. Mark would offer to talk to him all the time but I knew that would probably complicate things so we just held our breath and hoped that whatever problems he was dealing with would be resolved and the old Addison would soon reappear. He never did. And besides, Addison held Mark at a polite arm’s length, because in his mind, he had no peer. He had liked Mark well enough but he probably believed his issues with declining global markets, international currencies, and what other troubles a Jedi like him had to endure and solve were far too complicated for someone like Mark, a mere podiatrist, to comprehend.

  It was after Russ married Alice and Sara moved to Los Angeles that the most dangerous aspects of Addison’s transformation began to materialize. He stopped sleeping regular hours and his normal voracious appetite seemed to disappear. He lost a staggering amount of weight. And he was frequently out of the house until late at night. And the outbursts began. I heard him raging for hours on the telephone with his partners. Like a lot of men, Addison didn’t hesitate to raise his voice if he felt like it, especially in business, but this rage was something different, frightening. It was as though he had developed some kind of an evil personality disorder. I began to suspect he was using cocaine or something like cocaine. He had to have been. Or some kind of pills? But when he left for the office and I searched his office at home, his bathroom, and his drawers, I could find nothing. I looked under the mattress, in the toes of his shoes, and behind the books in his study. I read the labels of everything in his medicine cabinet and looked them up on the Internet. Not a speck of anything untoward. If he was abusing drugs, I couldn’t prove it.

  So what then was the source? I had seen him pitch tirades before but they had always blown over pretty quickly. Not lately. This anger
was smoldering, always right under the surface, ready to explode. Anger became his new way of dealing with his life. Sure the economy was terrible, but the recession couldn’t last forever, could it? I worried deeply and constantly. Sure he had always had a quick temper but never like this. I was afraid he was going to have a stroke or a heart attack.

  As fate would have it, about a year ago, he became fanatical about his health, complaining of every ailment in the Merck manual. Good, I thought, now he’ll get some help. And he did. Not a week went by that he didn’t visit a doctor of one sort or another to medicate everything from his ears (tinnitus) to his big toe on his right foot (gout). He swore he’d clean up his diet but Addison following any of these doctors’ orders didn’t last long. The gastrointestinal specialist told him to give up lunchtime martinis and hard liquor of every kind, that his liver and esophagus were turning on him. For a short period he was sober but then I heard him say to someone laughingly that he didn’t give a rip—not exactly the language he used—that he would send someone over to a Chinese prison and just buy a liver from some coolie on death row if he needed it. He thought it was a riot to look upon the horrified faces of his politically correct listeners. He bellowed with laughter, recounting his outrageous conversation with his doctor. I was mortified over and over again by his behavior and even his partners’ wives, some of the most calcified, impervious women on earth, even they began to regard me with sympathy. I was so glad our children were out of the house by then so they didn’t have to witness their father’s slide into madness.

  It just went on and on. His pulmonary physician told him he had to give up cigars, that his blood pressure was dangerously high, and I wouldn’t even want to tell you what he said about that. Addison’s humidors were bulging with imported Cohibas that he fully intended to smoke. Needless to say, his cholesterol was out of control, too, just like every other aspect of his life. Addison continued to drink what he wanted, eat what he wanted, and to smoke whenever the mood struck. No one could make Addison listen. No one could tell him what to do. In the end, still in charge, he died on a day of his own choosing. Ironically, all of these terrible habits had not killed him. Addison had the final word. He always did. If he had listened to his doctors’ advice, maybe he could have dealt with his stress in a healthy way and he’d still be alive.

  I looked around at the small crowd of people, shivering from the cold. Suddenly, it seemed that their jaws were tight and their faces unsympathetic. Was I imagining this? No. If that’s how they felt, why had they come?

  Amen.

  The service was abruptly over, Pastor Anderson stepped over and shook my hand, and everyone stared at me. I had my arm around Sara then. My poor daughter had wept an ocean of tears. Look what you’ve done, Addison. Look what you’ve done. I just wanted to scream. I invited Pastor Anderson back to the house but he begged off. The weather, he said. I knew he was rushing back to that hot young thing he had married recently. Judi was her name and there wasn’t a woman in our church who didn’t want to be her. I thanked him for everything and thought, Gosh, everyone has a purpose in their life except me.

  As Pastor Anderson turned and walked away, Addison’s blond twenty-two-year-old secretary was the first one to approach us.

  “Lauren, thank you for coming,” I said. “You’ve met our daughter, Sara?”

  “Yeah. I can’t believe he’s dead, and what he did, you know? I mean, he was so great back when we were together . . .”

  “When who was together?” I said.

  “Uh, you know,” Lauren said and then paused, her eyes growing wide. “You mean, you didn’t know?”

  “Know what?” I said, the sordid truth dawning.

  “Jesus, Mrs. Cooper, don’t look at me like that! I thought everybody in New Jersey knew it! It was all over Twitter last year! He hooked up with like every girl who ever worked in the office!”

  “What?” I felt all the air rush out of my chest and I thought I was going to faint. Did she mean that Addison had sex with all of them? Little Lauren read my mind.

  “Like we had a choice? If Addison Cooper wanted something, he got it and you know it! A bunch of us were gonna file suit for sexual harassment but now that he’s gone . . .”

  “Mom!” Sara said. “Do something!”

  “Lauren?” I was at a loss for words. “I think it’s time for you to leave. Now.” It was all I knew to say. If I had been in possession of my mind, I might have given her the back of my hand right across her face. Who was this horrible young woman? The Lauren I had known over the phone was polite and kind. True or not, how mean and unforgivably rude to say such a thing at Addison’s funeral.

  I turned away from her and nearly knocked down Shirley Hackett, the wife of Addison’s most senior partner.

  “I just wanted to say that, well, I feel for you, Cate.”

  “Thanks, Shirley. This was such a terrible shock.”

  “I’m sure. Between you and me, there are probably more shocks to come.”

  “What do you mean? And where’s Alan?”

  “Humph. Cate? I mean this in the nicest possible way, but if Addison had not died, Alan would’ve killed him. I came out of respect for you and the children but believe me, there’s no love lost with Alan.”

  “Why? What in the world are you talking about? We’ve been friends for years!”

  Shirley stood there and stared at me for what seemed like an eternity until finally she spoke again.

  “We’re broke, Cate. Addison lost all our money and most of the firm’s clients. It’s going down the tubes. Chapter Eleven.”

  “You’ve got to be wrong. You’re exaggerating.”

  “Oh, my God,” Sara said.

  “No, I’m not. Remember that gorgeous house we had in Upper Saddle River? Well, now instead of taking a Citation X to San Francisco for dinner I’m driving a used Kia. I’m shopping at the Pathmark and cooking ramen in a studio apartment in Tenafly.”

  “What on earth are you talking about? When did all this happen?”

  “Am I to believe that you don’t know anything about this?”

  “Absolutely! I mean, I heard Addison wasn’t himself for the last year or so, and I knew things weren’t great at the firm but I had no idea!”

  “Well, then, darling? You’d better brace yourself.”

  She couldn’t have been more like the Oracle of Delphi if she’d shown up in robes and looked into a pool of water. As I turned to see who was tapping me on the shoulder, I got another slap in the face from my new reality.

  “You’re Ms. Cooper, right?”

  “Yes. Did you know my husband?”

  “I sure did but believe me, I didn’t know he had a wife. Good thing I read the obituaries.” She reached in her purse and pulled out a small album of photographs. “Have a look.”

  I flipped through them and there was Addison, with the woman before me and a baby boy of about two years old. The boy was the spitting image of Addison.

  “Mom! What is this?” Sara said. “I’m gonna throw up!”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. My head began to spin. How could all of this be happening?

  “So, what I’m wondering is who has the mortgage on my condo? And who has the lease on my BMW? I mean, I’m sure he provided for us in his will . . .”

  Sara, who had stood by completely dumbfounded, doubled over and began gagging. That was the last thing I remembered before the ground came up to get me.

  Chapter Three

  Setting: The Porgy House downstairs drawing room. There is a bar cart, a penguin cocktail shaker, cocktail glasses, assorted liquors, and an ice bucket. In the corner stands an upright piano made by Cunningham Piano Co. and two comfortable armchairs.

  Director’s Note: When DuBose speaks, a head shot of him should cover the downstage scrim and a man’s voice is heard from offstage. Use a shot of the downstairs drawing room. Dorothy is now wearing a pretty silk dress.

  Act I

  Scene 2

  Dorothy: At five in t
he afternoon, in perfect synchronicity, we would meet in the downstairs drawing room. Out came our silver-toned penguin martini shaker and our cut-glass ice bucket. And, as this was our greatest daily indulgence in the name of pleasure (at least one that may be spoken of in polite company), the time was reserved for reminiscing and grandiose daydreams. Dreams didn’t cost you a dime and what would life be without them?

  The year was 1934 or 1935. It had been about ten years since DuBose left his insurance business and yes, I was the one who made him give it up. Our Jenifer was just a little girl then, I know that much. It doesn’t matter which year but I remember clearly it was one particularly bone-chilling February evening. Lord! It got cold on that beach! We were downstairs and DuBose was shaking the penguin like mad. He was mixing up Albert Farmer’s special recipe for mint juleps to cheer me up. I was feeling a little out of sorts. (Don’t worry; the recipe is in the back of your program.)

  Where was I? Oh, yes. Mint juleps coming up! To be completely honest, I knew a good drink would also ease the pain of his arthritis. His arthritis was so terrible and had twisted the bones of his hands so badly that on the worst days they resembled claws. Please don’t say I told you—I wouldn’t offend DuBose for the world! To be honest, neither of us was blessed with the best of health but we were so attuned to each other that we practically felt each other’s aches and that seemed to help us endure.

  I was usually a chipper soul, sometimes a little too chatty but almost always good-natured. But not that night. The combination of freezing damp weather and the dreary gloom of the fog, which blanketed the island? Well, it was as though the whole mess had leaked through the rattling old window frames and crept in under the uneven doorjambs like tear gas. I felt like indulging in a good cry. I sat at the piano and pushed back the cover over the keyboard.