The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Afterward, the children of Peter Henry Hightower assemble at the house in Bratenahl to read the will. Henry, Muriel, and Sylvie get there first. Sylvie’s bustling around the house, getting the dining room ready; she’s the only one who knows where anything is anymore. Muriel’s trying to be pleasant, but it’s too awkward to work. She keeps bringing up small topics that go nowhere. We’re thinking of moving to the West Coast, she says. Maybe San Diego. They say the weather is perfect there. Sylvie just wants to go to her, take her hand. Our father’s dead, dear, and now we have to carve up what’s left of him. It’s okay not to pretend it’s okay right now. Henry doesn’t have a problem with not pretending. He’s been living in New York for a few years, works in finance. He’s picked up a cigarette habit that’s inches from chain-smoking; he switches between pacing the parlor, shooting glances out the window—when is Jackie going to be here? Where’s Rufus?—and going out to the long porch overlooking the lake to light a cigarette, smoke it fast, and with one hand, flick the butt into the ashtray on the metal coffee table while the other goes for the rest of the cigarettes in his jacket pocket. Sylvie watches him smoke two cigarettes that way, then come back in again, stare out the window for the car that isn’t coming.

  “Where the fuck is Sonny Bono? Where the fuck is he?”

  “Remember where Rufus is coming from,” Sylvie says.

  “He missed his own father’s funeral, Sylvie. Of course he’ll show up to collect his cut of the winnings, but he doesn’t even have the decency to be on time for it.”

  “That’s a little harsh, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Is it?”

  “He’s not late yet.”

  “No, but he will be. And why do you have so much sympathy for him, anyway? I’ve never understood that.”

  “Henry,” Sylvie says, “maybe you should stop talking before I’m forced to say something uncharitable.”

  He turns to her, his eyes sharpen. Uncharitable? She can smell the cigarettes on him, read in the way he stands how much stress he’s under. A man who works eighteen hours a day, makes so much but has to spend so much too, it’s what the job demands, the English collars, the Italian shoes. Dad never had to do this, Henry can’t help thinking. He’s feeling a little sorry for himself, and it’s making him a little sloppy. He goes on. The money he made was his, not theirs—you know, them, the owners of this place—but we don’t live in days when quick fortunes can be made. That was their father’s life, he thinks, and maybe it will be the lives of their children, their grandchildren, but it won’t be theirs. That’s the price of affluence and stability now: You decide to make your money yourself instead of just living off what you already have, you try to do the honorable thing, but it’s so much harder than it was that you’ll never measure up to what your parents accomplished. And Henry resents it, resents how he feels like he has to apologize to his father, as if the reason they couldn’t see eye to eye was because the son didn’t make as much, couldn’t build the empire his father did. Henry never saw the respect behind his father’s abuse, the taunts, the goading; only felt the hurt. Peter Henry Hightower made his namesake the executor of his estate because he trusted his oldest son to do it right. But his son only feels the burden.

  Jackie arrives in Stefan’s care; he pulls the car up to the front door, lets the engine idle for a moment before turning it off. Opens the back door for her to get out, then takes her by the arm. She’s a little unsteady walking through the door; it’s her medication, Stefan says. It’s making her a little confused. He doesn’t say how confused she’d be without it. Sylvie takes her other arm and they lead her to the couch. Take off her shoes, put her feet up on a sun-bleached floral ottoman. Stefan still hasn’t lost his Ukrainian accent. Never will now.

  “I need something to drink,” Jackie says. “Water. Or juice.” Henry takes a look at her and goes outside on the porch, where he vanishes in the growing dark; then there’s just the spark from his lighter, the pulsing glow from the latest cigarette, being dragged to a column of ash before he drops it to the patio. His foot mashes it out while his fingers fumble for another one. It’s been dark and raining for an hour when Rufus arrives at last, his hair slicked onto his head, his shirt soaked enough to see the stained undershirt he’s wearing below it. A pair of pants so heavy with water they’re sliding off his narrow hips.

  “I’m so sorry,” Rufus says. “So sorry I missed everything.”

  He staggers a little and it occurs to Henry that he might be high. Then Henry sees how much Sylvie beams, so happy to see him, high or not, and all the old resentment, the jealousies of childhood, come back all over again. Henry, always the oldest and acting it. A little adult by the age of six, when the next one, Sylvie, came along. Rufus came less than two years later, Muriel a year and a half after that. Henry was thirteen by the time Jackie was born, his voice dropping already. He could see that Jackie wasn’t just eccentric. Everyone could. There was something in her, going on in her head; she walked like the ground was always moving under her, screamed for no reason they could see. She talked to people who weren’t there, and she wasn’t pretending. Her favorite doll went missing and she swore it was the birds who took it; they found her in the yard, angry, throwing rocks at them, yelling at them to give it back. I was too old to have another child, he remembers his mother saying afterward. Muriel screamed, too, but with her it was always something. A friend had said a mean thing, or a boy had done a mean thing. Henry can still remember her sharp voice in the hallway upstairs—I am never speaking to her again—and then her feet stomping down the hall, a door slamming shut. Then the crying, angry crying, though of a kind that burned fast and wiped her out. He can remember her bright blue coat against Joe Rizzi’s arm, there in the front yard. That night she slept for twelve hours, and his father’s rage was like a razor, quiet and precise. Someone was going to pay.

  But what Henry remembers most are Sylvie and Rufus out in the garden—it looked so different when their mother tended it, a little deeper, a little darker. The two children chasing each other around down the paths their mother had made, playing hide-and-seek, then stopping their running to just talk to each other. Rufus standing in the middle of the path, the sun in his dark hair. Sylvie leaning against a huge old tree. At first yelling to each other. Then Rufus would walk closer and their voices got quieter. In the end, they would be crouching in the myrtle, side by side, their hands in the dirt. Far away from the rest of them. Or they would go out of sight of the house altogether, and their worried mother would send Henry out to fetch them. He’d find them in the carriage house, or at the lakeshore. Always close together, talking in low voices. Stopping whatever they were doing as soon as they heard him; he never saw what they were up to. It was like that for years between them, and when they became teenagers—Sylvie stayed in more and more while they had trouble keeping Rufus from hopping buses to the next state—they had a connection no one else in the family had. As if they spent so little time together because they didn’t have to anymore, to be that close. Henry envied that bond so much, still envies it today, even as he winces with the memory of the rancid self-pity that made him think he didn’t have that with anyone because he was the oldest, always having to act even older than he was. He knows now that it’s not that simple, that maybe he’s not built to be so close to anyone. But it doesn’t take away the sting.

  They sit at the family table in the dining room, and except for Henry, they all take the chairs they had as children. Stefan takes the foot, where their mother used to be, next to Jackie. Henry takes the head. He looks them all over, all that’s left of this family. None of his siblings are married, maybe never will be. For Jackie, it’s almost certain, he thinks. Who would volunteer for that? Who will care for her if she goes last? Just the sort of thing that, if he said it out loud, Sylvie would shake her head over. It doesn’t matter. He looks down at the papers in front of him and begins.

  “Thank you all for comi
ng,” he starts, already wishes he hadn’t said that. You’re not at a goddamn board meeting. “It’s so good to see you all, even though it’s grief that brings us together.” His internal critic raging now, because he hates it when people talk like that to him, doesn’t understand why he’s doing it to them.

  “As you all know,” he says, “our father has left it to me to be the executor of his last will and testament, and I’ll try to carry out what I think he wanted to the best of my abilities.” He can see how Rufus is already looking him, a little concerned, a little amused. Like a boy watching a mouse try to sneak up on a trap. He thinks it before he can stop himself: Asshole. If he says a word. “In his final months, weeks, and days, Dad and I talked a lot about how this might go. About what he wanted for all of us. There was some discussion,” Henry says—and here he looks at Sylvie; please don’t contradict me now, his eyes say, we just need to get through this, and Sylvie nods—“some discussion, in his final weeks and days, about whether the assets remaining to him should be made, um, more liquid, so as to carry out his wishes with greater ease. But in the end it was determined that perhaps it was better to leave everything as it was, so that, once the monetary lots were established, those of us who were more interested in things other than strict money could perhaps put their, uh,” he looks for a better word, can’t find it, “allowance toward, say, one of Dad’s cars. Or his liquor collection.”

  He’s hoping to get a laugh from that. Nobody gives it to him.

  “How are these lots, as you call them, determined?” Rufus says.

  “I’m getting to that, I’m getting to that.” He’s thumbing through the papers, can’t find the one he wants. He’s more nervous now than he’s ever been at his job. The editor in him notes that, if he acted like this in front of one of his clients, his boss would fire him. At last, he finds the numbers he needs.

  “Considering how we all grew up, um, the opportunities available to us as children, it may surprise you how much is left. It’s a substantial amount, but not as much as you might expect.”

  “How much?” Rufus says.

  Henry’s eyes meet his brother’s; he puts everything he has into that look and says the number in a voice that makes his brother look away.

  “Is that all?” Muriel says.

  “The last decade was unkind to the estate,” Henry says. “As you know, so much of the money was tied up in the city. And look at the city right now.”

  “That’s not funny,” Muriel says.

  “I’m not laughing,” Henry says. With the numbers in front of him, his home turf, he’s on the offensive now. “And on top of a number of investments that could have performed better, there were the medical expenses to consider.” Nobody asks for clarification, whether he’s talking about their father’s illness or Jackie’s.

  But Jackie doesn’t understand how they’re trying to protect her. “I haven’t taken any family money since last year,” she says, “and that was just for—just for . . .” She’s lost the trail of her sentence, lost herself in the woods. Her uncle lays a hand on her shoulder. She’s been in and out of institutions since 1961. She hasn’t been put away for good yet, but she will be soon.

  “It’s okay, Jackie, nobody’s blaming you,” Muriel says.

  “Blaming me for what?” Jackie says.

  “Um.”

  “For what?”

  “Nothing, sweetie,” Sylvie says. “Your sister misspoke.”

  “No she didn’t,” Jackie says.

  “Yes, I did,” Muriel says. “I did.”

  “Who’s Miss Spoke?” Jackie says.

  “Can we continue?” Henry says.

  “Yes,” Sylvie says. “Let’s.”

  “Excellent,” Henry says. Turns to another sheet of paper. “The most important aspect of our father’s holdings is that, due to our decision to retain them in their current forms, the estate is quite illiquid.”

  “What does that mean, Henry?” Muriel says.

  “There isn’t a lot of cash involved, Muriel. It’s all tied up in things. Bonds. Cars. Art—that’s from Mom. Ahh. Real estate. And some of that is spoken for already. There’s a series of trust funds set up for our children and future children, which they’ll come into when they’re eighteen. There’s more in that pot than you might expect, and I’m assuming none of you would begrudge our father for that. But it makes dividing up our own share of the inheritance a little complicated. It doesn’t sound that way in the documentation, though, which reads, quote, I wish what remains of the estate to be distributed to my surviving children in as equitable a manner as possible, unquote.”

  He waits. Takes a breath. He’s feeling pretty good, like he has the room under control. Entertains the idea that maybe if he says what he needs to say in just the right way, they’ll have this wrapped up in less than an hour, and then they can all go home. He says: “Now, equitable is an interesting word, but I think it’s reasonable to say that, given the kind of man our father was, what he meant was equal. Such an interpretation would give each of us around one-fifth of the estate—after fees and taxes, of course, and depending on the market value of so many of the assets—which we would best arrive at by making the estate liquid and just dividing it by five.”

  “Again, Henry,” Muriel says.

  “He means sell everything and take the money,” Rufus says.

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Henry says.

  “I know. You didn’t.” Rufus says. You must love this, Henry thinks. So many opportunities to be clever.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” Rufus says.

  Yes, Henry thinks. I mind. I mind a lot. “Of course not,” he says.

  “Well, first of all, how much is this house worth now?” Rufus says.

  “Well,” Henry says, “we’ve done a few appraisals, and research into comparable properties, so how much the house is worth isn’t as clear as I’d like it to be.”

  “Ballpark,” Rufus says.

  Henry gives him the number.

  “That’s more than one-fifth of the part of the estate we’re dividing among us, right?” Rufus says.

  “Yes.”

  “So the first thing that happens under your equitable plan is that we—”

  “Yes. Lose this house,” Henry says. He won’t let Rufus say it, however he would have put it. Sell out our sister. Put Sylvie on the street. There’s still time to salvage this, he thinks. Still a chance to bring it around.

  “And the second thing is that this means you get as much as Jackie does,” Rufus says.

  Henry glares at his brother, hates him now like he did when they were kids. Hates how Jackie’s such a convenient proxy for himself. At least Jackie has an excuse for being so down-and-out, Henry wants to say. She’s insane. What’s your excuse, Rufus? It’s the same shit all over again, he thinks. Henry always has to carry the burden, and there’s Captain Kangaroo in his linen shirt, pointing and criticizing. Never bothering himself to help.

  “Well, yes. That’s what equitable means,” Henry says. “In this case.”

  Rufus looks around the room, and Henry, in his anger, could swear he sees his brother smile, though it’s not clear that’s what happens.

  “Raise your hand,” Rufus says, “if you think equitable doesn’t mean equal, but fair.”

  Muriel raises her hand. “I think we need to talk about this,” she says.

  Henry tries one last move. “What do we need to talk about, Muriel?” he says.

  “Why did you just say my name like that?”

  “I’m sorry. What do you want to say?”

  “That Rufus is right, it just doesn’t seem fair somehow to split everything even-steven.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of how things are,” Muriel says.

  “What do you mean?” Henry says.

 
“She means,” Rufus says, “that’s it’s very easy for you to say that everything should be even when you have so much more than everyone else. What’s wrong with you, Henry? Don’t you ever see regular people anymore?”

  In that next second, Henry would do anything to go back to the beginning. To have them all sitting at the table, and him walking into the room, the papers under his arms. He would start everything over. Say different things. Maybe offer a different deal. No: He wants to go back even farther, to the days when he first started making serious money—not serious money by his father’s standards, but by anyone else’s standards, very serious. He wants to take his younger self by the hand and force him to be more generous. To send money to Jackie. To at least call, call more often. To ask after Rufus, let his brother know that if there’s anything he ever needs, any way Henry can help, he’s there. He wants to tell them he’s sorry, he wants to try again, all of it, all over again. Because in the back of his head, he always knew this day was coming. That they would be at this table, slicing up what was left of their father’s body, and there was no way it wasn’t going to be bloody.

  By the end of the night, it’s all out. Things with Muriel and her boyfriend aren’t going so great. They need money. Neither of them can think straight anymore. Sylvie doesn’t say a word, but Rufus is doing all the arguing for her. How can you take this house away from her? Henry’s not about to put up with any of that. That’s funny, he says, you talking about responsibility. Look at you, Pancho Villa over there. You just traipse off to Africa, leave us all behind, without a shred of responsibility to anyone, and then come back here just in time to tell everyone else how wrong they are. Henry’s gagging on the superiority. How dare you come in here and talk to me about regular people. When’s the last time you even had a job?