Family Trust

by Amanda Brown

  “It can’t be true,” she replied. “Not Eddie. He’s not the marrying type.” She laughed.

  “I’m afraid he is, Becca,” Dick replied. His voice was kind, but serious; he could see the matter cut straight to Becca’s heart. He approached her with the newspaper in his hand. In a minute she was reading the copy of Edward’s wedding announcement.

  Becca could feel her cheeks flush red with humiliation. She swallowed hard and stared ahead of her intensely. She had been betrayed.

  She sat down to catch her breath, a fire roaring in her eyes. Her mind raced over the last few days: This had just happened, she realized, and who would have guessed it from Edward’s behavior? He had been so withdrawn, so inaccessible all of a sudden. He was usually so busy at night, but he had been holing up in his room, reading, he said, or answering his mail. He was acting more like a fugitive than a fiancé.

  He had told her he had a lot of cancellations. Now she understood why.

  Dick broke the silence with a question that went straight to her heart.

  “What are you going to do about Emily?”

  “Emily!” Becca gasped. Dick was right. This changed everything.

  “I want to help you,” Dick said, sitting down next to her. “Becca, since Emily’s been in your life, you’ve seemed to me to be better balanced—more fulfilled.”

  Becca sunk her head into her hands. “Yeah, I know,” she remembered. “You told me all about it. The zeitgeist.”

  Dick nodded. “More creative too. Kid, it’s been all good for you. You’ve been great here, you know, even a day a week. Less demanding, better with the analysts. You’re a better manager. They are responding great to your new approach.”

  Becca looked up without understanding. “I have a new approach?”

  He smiled. “I wish I could tell you how much better you are at your job, but I don’t want you to get mad at me. You were a sort of freak of nature; a star. You don’t know it, but you’ve changed.”

  She nodded, but his kindness did not penetrate—she was a slow fire growing frantic. “Dick,” she began, and faltered. “I’m not sure what to do.”

  “Becca, I’m telling you this for a reason. I want you to know my motives. I want to help you keep that kid, and I want you to understand why. I think Emily’s been good for you personally, but you’re the best judge of that. Anyway I know your last month has been good for Davis Capital. The best long-term thing I ever did for this place is make sure you took a little time off with that kid. You’re a leader now, Becca.”

  She nodded, slowly, but her mind was not on analysts. It was on Emily.

  “Dick,” she said, raising her eyes to meet his, “he’ll get custody.”

  “That’s why I wanted to talk to you, Becca. I know a thing or two about custody,” he said, making the rare reference to his first wife, who had taken their son after the divorce and immediately remarried the club’s golf pro. “His marriage will give him a solid claim for sole custody, no visitation.”

  Becca was silent, rubbing her head with her hands as her mind raced over what he was saying. Dick was right. Edward would take Emily, and she’d be—an ex-guardian? What was that? She would have no rights, no chance. Forget visitation—she had no blood relationship with Emily. She breathed quickly, realizing that once Edward married, it was possible she would never see Emily again. Not that Edward would ever be that cruel—but that woman…

  “What can I do?” she asked him.

  He smiled. “There’s only one thing, Becca. You need to get married.”

  She laughed out loud.

  “You’re crazy!” But the joke, so familiar between them, suddenly took on a new light.

  He nodded, holding his ground.

  She raised her hands like a shield, but her eyes were lit again and dancing. “Not your nephew again!” she pleaded. But her mind had picked up on this possibility. She began to pace, thinking.

  Dick grinned, noticing that her whole demeanor had changed. She was circling around the office, thinking as she walked, putting things together, connecting the dots. Becca was confident. She had a job to do.

  “Married,” she said, pausing to look out Dick’s plate glass window at the bustling street below. “All right. That makes sense.” She wheeled around with a victorious smile. “So how hard can it be?”

  Dick was so glad to see Becca come back to herself that he almost hugged her. But she was staring ahead, tapping her hands against her thighs, thinking of a plan.

  “Well, kid,” he said, delivering the blow of blows to a control freak: “It takes two.”

  She shrugged, uninterrupted in her plotting.

  “What doesn’t?” She was thinking out loud, and grabbed a pen and pad of note paper from Dick’s desk to capture her thoughts.

  “Getting the Go-Forward Agreement—that’s the hurdle, you’re right. Not insurmountable,” she said, scribbling a bullet point. Her glance at Dick was thoughtful as she paused to think it through. Then she made another note with enthusiasm.

  “We’ve solicited bids for acquisitions plenty of times,” she said to him. “I’ve just got to get an offering circular out there. Dick, get up on the block. I’ll bring in the bids, I know I will,” she announced, tossing her hair with a confident smile. She dropped her pen to the notebook with a flourish. “So that’s it. I merge, consolidate, and move forward.”

  Dick laughed out loud. “People don’t release an offering circular, Becca.”

  But she was already rushing out of his office.

  She called Edward, before Emily was asleep, when she knew he would not be busy carrying on a background conversation with the irrepressible four-year-old. She told him simply that she was “buried” and would have to work all night. Some matters needed personal attention, she added, some things she couldn’t delegate.

  He expressed his understanding, knowing that she had found out.

  She needed to stop by her apartment, she mentioned, to check on some things. Would he be able to manage Emily alone for a day or so?

  He would, he assured her, reminding her of all his sudden cancellations.

  Becca paused, gathering the words to congratulate Edward on his wonderful news. There was an etiquette to that, she thought to herself. Congratulations was outdated, she remembered, offensive to the modern ear. Best wishes was what you said to the groom, wasn’t that right? Or to the bride?

  Letting her mind become occupied by this little formality, Becca waited, and waited, until Edward finally ended the pause.

  “Don’t be a stranger, Becca,” he said to her.

  She caught her breath.

  The other line rang, and she said good-bye to Edward. He hung up before her. She listened to the quiet for a minute, with the uncanny feeling that her mind had gone empty.

  Philippe was working late for her. He had paged through the archives of While You Were Out notepads that Davis used for phone messages before the system went digital. He had pulled all the messages from Becca’s personal calls. He brought them in for her to review.

  She was surprised at how scant the pile of messages was. He had checked two years of time: She had thousands of incoming calls, but the calls marked “personal” were few, and when she paged through them she found that they were dominated by calls from her mother. The electronic messages were easy to search, but this exploration yielded only a scarce few marriage prospects. Becca knew she had to try another way.

  Her next call was to the Jewish matchmaker.

  CHAPTER 23

  Blintzkrieg

  “Jeannette Werman & Associates. Please hold!”

  Becca bit her lip. If she had to hold more than a minute, she would give this up. Jeannette’s advertisement in the classified section of the Wall Street Journal had always intrigued her. In more confident times, she had looked at the matchmaker with curiosity from a business perspective, wondering what her margins might be. She had considered calling before, wondering if the matchmaker marketed people any differently than she
marketed companies. Like any outsider, she had at one time experienced the devilish impulse to know what kind of people used these degrading services.

  Now the degraded one was Becca, and she tapped her fingers as if she could hurry the call. She wanted swift, untraceable action.

  Jeannette promised “exclusive introductions to attractive, educated, accomplished Jewish professionals seeking life partners.” Becca knew from vetting her own companies for acquisitions that the best deals united compatible corporate cultures of firms with more synergy than duplication in their core businesses. So she had made the decision to go Jewish, but thought it best to avoid venture capitalists and bankers.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” a pleasant female voice said.

  “Thanks,” Becca said, and while she was about to deliver her story, she realized she was speaking to a recording.

  The recorded female voice continued. “If you are a woman, please press one on your touch-tone phone. If you are a man, please press number two.”

  Becca pressed one and clenched her teeth.

  “If you are divorced, please call (212)555-1234 for a second chance with our excellent subsidiary designed for women in your less-than-desirable dating position. If you have never been married, please remain on the line.”

  Becca perked up as she waited.

  “Thank you. If you are under thirty, press one. If you are over thirty, press two.”

  Becca hung her head and pressed two.

  “Thank you. If you are calling to meet a nice Jewish doctor, press one. If you are calling to meet an intense Jewish lawyer, press two. If you are calling to meet a successful Jewish banker, press three. If you have no specific profession in mind, please press four.”

  Becca pressed four and rubbed her temples where she was getting a headache. She was feeling more humiliated by the second. She knew that this service was a two-way street. Somewhere a pathetic soul was poking his telephone, and the powers behind Jeannette’s advertised smile would match his data to hers and stick them in a room together. She felt like a dog waiting for stud service, and the thought reminded her, suddenly, of Edward. She swallowed hard, fighting the swell of conflicting emotions that rose within her when she let her thoughts turn to him. He was a gentleman, anyway, she thought, rubbing her forehead wearily. She could bet he treated his dogs better than this service was designed to treat people.

  After a pause, the recording continued.

  “If you are calling for Orthodox, press one. If you are calling for Reform, press two. If you are interested in meeting or becoming a Bu-Jew, press three.”

  More afraid than interested to find out what a Bu-Jew was, Becca pressed two and finally a woman picked up the phone.

  “Okay, sweetheart, what’s your name?”

  “Becca Reinhart. Is this Jeanette?” She heard the operator’s gum smacking in her mouth as she talked. This couldn’t be the elegant dating guru with her picture, all confidence and repose, emblazoned across the classifieds.

  “No, sweetheart, Jeannette doesn’t handle the low rungs.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Becca said sarcastically. She sighed into the phone, plunking her chin on her hands.

  “Let me ask you a few specifics, honey,” the woman went on. “You’re over thirty, Jewish, and never married?”

  “Right.”

  “And you live in Manhattan?”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh my God! What does your mother think?”

  Becca’s cheeks burned with frustration. “What’s the difference?” she retorted. “Listen, I’ve got a kid who needs a father quick. Like in two weeks. I’ve got to go before a judge to keep custody—”

  “Honey, honey, honey,” the woman was interrupting her. “Cut it right there. You’re barking up the wrong tree, sweetheart. We don’t take divorcées. Can’t deal with the kids—too messy. It’s right up front on the recorded message.”

  “I’m not divorced,” Becca corrected her.

  The lady let out a long whistle. “Oh, baby, you’re wrong for us. Single mother? That’s a tough street to walk. My heart goes out to you.”

  “Thanks for your sympathy,” was Becca’s dry reply.

  “Really, really, hon, I mean it,” the dating operator went on. “What you need is somebody quick, huh?”

  “Like yesterday,” Becca responded, more hopefully.

  “Right, hon, sure. And Jewish? You still want a Jew?”

  Becca felt like she was picking out a tie. “Yeah, a Jew would be nice.”

  “Call Blintzkrieg,” the operator said.

  “What?” Becca heard herself laughing out loud at this “Yinglish” combination of Jewish pancake and war effort.

  “Blintzkrieg, sweetheart, that’s what you need. Jewish speed dating. It’s in the book. New introductions every seven minutes: It’s the fastest dating around.” She paused, then added: “But don’t tell Jeannette I told you.”

  Becca nodded, scribbling the name on her open desk calendar. “Thanks,” she said, obliged to this anonymous woman.

  “Sure, honey, no problem,” she said. “And Becca?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t lead with your heart. Be tough out there. Check ’em out solid for yourself. You should see some of the schmoes we call ‘quality,’” she added ominously.

  “Thanks,” Becca said, hanging up the phone. Overcome with pressure, bewilderment, and diminishing hope, she called for the Blintzkrieg listing. She couldn’t let any setback throw her off course. Eddie might be married before she had a chance to say her first “Shalom.”

  Becca got the details quickly, and due to the net annual income she estimated to the operator over the phone, was able to get a standby seat for that very evening’s Blintzkrieg dating event.

  “Think of it as like flying Southwest,” he added hastily. The phones were ringing behind him constantly, creating a nerve-racking, emergency atmosphere.

  Becca wrote down the directions and buzzed Philippe to call her a car. Then she flew through the Internet on a research mission, collecting, from sources ranging from the American Academy of Pediatrics to Concerned Citizens for Wooden Toys, a makeshift guide to the best practices of fatherhood. With only seven minutes in which to evaluate each of her potential husbands, she wanted to dive right into the important stuff.

  Would he be a good father to Emily? In the end, that was the only criterion she really cared about.

  The event was an early one—cocktails before dinner, with the idea that any matches made in the speedy table-swapping event could, like Clara and her nutcracker prince, be swept away in the taxi equivalent of a chariot to whatever delights they desired in enchanted Manhattan.

  CHAPTER 24

  Visiting Dinosaurs

  While Becca analyzed fatherhood to pieces, Edward was operating beneath the cloud of melancholy that her sudden departure had caused. He knew that Becca had plausible reasons to be in the office—he knew she hosted a busy little beehive up at the top of West Fifty-seventh. He knew it was only reasonable to accept her need to take off a day or two, but he did so sullenly, with resistance.

  Edward and Emily decided they would visit the Museum of Natural History. He called to see what time it would open. Then he put the Nutcracker Suite on the CD player so she could twirl in her nightgown like Clara while he took a shower.

  He had been concerned that the museum would not be open by the time they finished the doughnuts he had promised to take her for—until he saw what Emily had chosen to wear. “The Old-Fashioned Lady Dress!” she announced excitedly, pirouetting around her room with the high-necked, long-sleeved linen dress.

  Eighty buttons stood between Emily’s fumbling fingers and the donut shop. Edward made an effort to smile encouragement and caught her beautiful, willful eyes with their fire of determination. She tossed her curls back with a swagger and started, as Becca had taught her, from the bottom, concentrating intensely to show Eddie what a grown-up girl she was. She had been practicing, she told him. Edward watche
d the child fondly, ignoring the growling of his stomach as he sat down to wait.

  They ended up delaying the museum until the afternoon. Right after doughnuts Edward had to take Emily to Tiffany’s Tiny Table Manners, a class at which four- to six-year-old girls learned the essentials of social climbing. Emily was delighted at the day’s Table Task: She was instructed in the art of holding fresh strawberries by the hulls before dipping them into whipped cream or sugar. This she did admirably well, understanding that if she dropped the berry, the sugar too would be lost. She was less successful using her spoon to lift berries in juice. But the strawberry juice only complemented the chocolate from her doughnuts, Edward told her, promising to show her a Jackson Pollock at the Met done exactly in the same style.

  In the afternoon they had an extraordinary time at the Museum of Natural History. Edward forgot his concerns in the thrill of watching Emily’s first sight of a dinosaur skeleton, remembering his own excitement at first encountering the great mysteries of the world. Emily developed her own theory of the dinosaur extinction as they walked together through Central Park. She was certain that the dinos had just become very small one day, tired of being too big to fit through all the doors of the buildings.

  According to her theory, the beasts were still alive, so she and Edward looked under clovers and behind bushes for their footprints. Emily found definite evidence of the great T. rex in the tiny hole of a tree, and hurried to protect the baby T. rex from the approaching ducks and geese. Edward realized they had drawn close to the pond. They were right across the street from Becca’s office.

  Edward mentioned their location to Emily, and she squealed with excitement, forming a plan for a surprise visit that involved each of them covering their eyes and then uncovering them to say boo! He wished he was Emily’s age, when to cover one’s own eyes was to shield oneself from the world. He agreed on the plan of surprise, glad he could say it was Emily’s idea.

  Becca looked over the familiar, ever-stirring view of the pond with a different attitude. Tonight, she thought with anticipation, I’ll get this situation back on my terms. If I can marry before the hearing, then we’ll both be hitched, and when things are equal, the judge always goes with the mother. She smiled, her confidence buoyed, rather than challenged, by the immediacy of her speed dating event. There was ordinary time, and New York time, and then there was Becca’s time, in a category all its own. Perfect, she thought. She liked the idea so much, she wondered why she had never tried it before. Why waste a whole evening on a date with one person when she could cram in seven? Why go to the trouble of meeting and making small talk when a third party could get them all seated at once, ambitions transparent, resumes in hand?