Making Waves

by Catherine Todd

  Intrigued, I flipped through the rest of the pile. There were two more bills. Beneath them was a written report of Barclay’s financial activities around the time he had separated from Eleanor. These were heavily edited by Eleanor’s red pencil. July 26 (“Six days before he left me!” Eleanor had written next to the date), Mr. Hampton wired $300,000 to his brother, Mr. Thomas Hampton. June 5, Mr. Hampton withdrew $170,000 from a business account. August 10, Mr. Hampton made an unsecured loan of $500,000 to his brother, Mr. Thomas Hampton. Mr. Thomas Hampton is believed to have deposited these sums in an account in the Cayman Islands, where access to further information is currently impossible. Eleanor had scrawled across the page in very large, angry red letters, “None of this money—my money, too—was mentioned in the financial statement he submitted to the court!”

  No wonder Eleanor was monumentally pissed off. I remembered her saying, “I just don’t want to get screwed anymore.” I remembered my condescending reaction and how I’d both pitied and been revolted by her paranoia.

  There was one more letter under the clip.

  Dear Mrs. Hampton, it read, The material you sent from Eastman, Bartels, and Steed was most helpful, but I am afraid that at this time we are unable to support the conclusion that Mr. Hampton’s bonus was more than the $4,500 he indicates. The law firm is a partnership of professional corporations, and it is very easy for any one partner to hide his assets. Your lawyer can obtain a court order to copy the firm’s documents, but by that time, frankly, it is likely that such an action would be useless. A careful and confidential examination of all your husband’s financial records and transactions may provide what you desire, but before we proceed with such an investigation we would need to have an additional payment from you of…

  The year in which Barclay Hampton had claimed that his bonus was $4,500, I knew that my husband Steve’s bonus had been over $50,000. Given that Barclay was already moving up to firm superstar status by that time, the discrepancy seemed unlikely. I saw what Eleanor had been trying to explain at the makeover: Barclay had manipulated his finances to avoid giving her her rightful share. If she could prove that he had done it, it seemed very likely that he was guilty of willful fraud. I was outraged on her behalf, and the fact that she was dead did nothing to assuage my anger. She had overreacted, certainly, and the venomous, aggressive pose she adopted had scared off anyone who might have sympathized or helped her. But damn it, she had had a case.

  The phone rang.

  “Susan said you wanted to talk to me,” my husband said in the succinct tone he used for most of our conversations these days. It found the golden mean between chilly and cordial.

  Still lost in my contemplation of Barclay’s perfidy, I forced myself to concentrate. “I wondered if you were going to Eleanor Hampton’s funeral,” I asked him.

  “Of course I’m going. The whole firm is going.” He sounded annoyed.

  “I’m going,” I told him.

  “Ah. Well, I can’t take you, Caroline, because I have to work tomorrow. As it is, I’ll probably be late.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll go with Susan.” Rob had developed a real estate commitment and canceled our “date.” Some brewery barons from St. Louis were shopping for a summer place in the Muirlands, and if he didn’t take them immediately he was afraid they’d go to Rancho Santa Fe instead.

  “I could meet you there,” he said grudgingly.

  “All right.”

  “You sound angry,” he added.

  “Not at you.”

  “Then what, for God’s sake?” He sounded exasperated.

  “It’s just…Eleanor,” I said slowly. “I saw her a few weeks ago, and she sent me some papers to look at. I was just going through them. I think Barclay—”

  “Listen, Caroline, I’d love to hear about, it but I have to go now. We’ll talk tomorrow. There are some things I’d like to discuss with you anyway. And please, don’t waste a lot of sympathy on Eleanor. We need to put on a decent show of mourning tomorrow for Barclay and the children’s sake, but believe me, the world is a happier place without her.”

  “But—”

  “Gotta go. Bye.”

  Eleanor’s words sounded in my head like some persistent and unwelcome ghost. Wake up and smell the coffee before it’s too late. Don’t you realize they’re all in this together? They’re out to screw every one of us! I shook my head to clear it. Steve wouldn’t do that, I told myself. Not Steve…

  The Hamptons’ church owed much more to New England than San Diego, favoring deep wood paneling and the most tasteful and restrained of crosses instead of Latin excess. There was no planted courtyard to hint at an embarrassing fertility, no gaudy messiness of votive candles. An affluent lobster fisherman would have felt quite at home. Well, make that a very affluent lobster fisherman.

  The minister had a full head of white hair, like a television preacher, but he seemed a lot more sincere. His voice was plummy, with just a hint of a British accent—a West Coast Alistair Cooke. “Eleanor Mary,” he said, gesturing toward the coffin that was sleek, dark, and costly, like his robe, “has found peace at last, the eternal peace and rest of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He cleared his throat, which the perfect acoustics of the sanctuary carried all the way to the back pews, where I was sitting. “In recent months,” he said, almost apologetically, “some of us who knew her could see that she was troubled and unhappy.”

  To put it mildly. The minister looked pained, and I had visions of Eleanor filling his ears for all that time with the Sins of Barclay. I tried to catch a glimpse of how Barclay was taking this, but he was up front, in a sea of suits.

  It was just as well. After my immersion in his letters to Eleanor and my discovery of the way he had cheated her, I doubted if I could have witnessed any ostentatious outpouring of grief with equanimity or self-control.

  The minister shook his head sadly. “Perhaps we could have done more to help her in her time of need. Sometimes we are so busy, so committed to our own schedules, that we do not have time for another person’s pain. Perhaps, if we had been more attentive, this tragic loss—to her family, to her friends, to her community—might have been prevented.”

  My attention, which had wandered off to inspect the Victorian-style stained glass representation of, if I am not mistaken, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, suddenly jerked back to my pew. I tapped Susan on the arm.

  She leaned over inquiringly.

  “They’re making it sound like a suicide,” I hissed, sotto voce.

  She shrugged slightly, looked into my face, and put an admonitory finger to her lips. Arguing with the minister was not the most tactful of funereal demeanors.

  “But Eleanor would not want us to dwell on the things in her life that made her unhappy,” he intoned. “She was a loving mother who wanted the best for her children. Randy, Barry, Jennifer, above all she would not want to cause you any grief.”

  There was a short, stifled sob from the front row. “That will be Jennifer,” the woman in front of me proclaimed knowledgeably to her companion.

  Jennifer was a sophomore at UCSD. She was blond and pale, with a perpetually exhausted expression. Perhaps her parents’ fighting had wrung all the spirit out of her. Next to her, her brothers, twins, appeared to be pummeling each other, although in fairness I couldn’t really see them all that well. Randy and Barry were, I regret to say, monumentally unlikable children. Every time I ever saw them, mostly at firm functions, they were executing some sly prank (like putting butter on the chairs) designed to get some other luckless child into trouble. They were younger than Megan, a fact for which she and I were both profoundly grateful, as by no stretch of the imagination could they be deemed suitable playmates. I thought that now they would be living with Barclay, and I wondered how Tricia would like having her stepsons in the house.

  “And Barclay,” the minister intoned, in a sort of cheery, Norman Vincent Peale-ish manner, “what would Eleanor say to you, if she were here with us today?” He paused dramat
ically.

  I smiled, imagining what Eleanor really would say.

  “That she wants him to come home?” whispered Susan.

  I shook my head. “Only if he arrived in a hearse.”

  We looked at each other and laughed. “Right,” Susan said.

  “And dripped embalming fluid on the carpets.”

  From behind me, I could feel Steve glaring at my back. You develop a sixth sense about those things when you have been married for a long time. At first it is charming: You can always find each other in department-store crowds, and you can read the other person’s mood just by a glimpse of his body. Now I felt his disapproval, and it made me uncomfortable. I fought the urge to turn around and look at him, which I knew he was willing me to do.

  I got so wrapped up in contemplating marital ESP that I forgot to listen to what Eleanor would be saying to Barclay, if she were here.

  “…forgiveness,” the minister was saying. “That despite your new family and responsibilities,”—I could imagine Barclay giving Tricia’s hand a proprietary squeeze—“she was aware of your concern for her well-being, even of your abiding love for her as the mother of your children and someone who had traveled with you along life’s road.”

  Right.

  He spread his hands in a benevolent gesture that encompassed the entire congregation. “‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down.’” He paused. “Now Eleanor’s worldly journey has ended. Let us remember her with love and gladness. Let us be happy that she has laid down her burden and left behind her pain. Let us take away with us today a renewed determination to attend to the ties that bind us together, to take time to show that we care. If we can do that, then Eleanor’s death will not be in vain. And I think she would have liked that very much.”

  Suicide, definitely.

  I wondered why, when I had first heard the news, I had not considered it. I lit on the image of Eleanor washing down pill after pill with sips of 100-plus-dollars-a-bottle wine and, literally, going gentle into that good night. A second later I knew why it seemed wrong, why Dylan Thomas had popped into my head. It was the rage; that was it. Depression might lead you to end it all, but rage, the kind Eleanor had seemed to harbor, led you into action. Eleanor had wanted revenge, not peace.

  Besides, parading in the nude, uncaring, before the domestics was one thing, but knowing that your friends and half the fire department would get an eyeful of your sandbag ass and cottage cheese (large curd, definitely) thighs was something else. If I were going to off myself, I’d do it in my best Noel Coward-style lounging outfit and wear my most expensive and tasteful underwear to boot. It’s definitely your last chance to make a good impression, and why go out like a slob?

  On the other hand, there was that Bâtard-Montrachet. I had been to a few dinner parties where the hosts offered, or the guests brought, wine that expensive, but when they did, it was always served with the requisite amount of cork sniffing and swirling around the glass and slurping noises that are supposed to signify urbane enjoyment and appreciation. I didn’t know anyone who sipped it for routine hot-tub refreshment. So maybe it was the Last Tipple, Eleanor’s farewell gift to her palate, after all.

  “Caroline.”

  I turned to find not Steve but Henry Eastman, of Eastman, Bartels, and Steed, who had possessed himself of my elbow with as much reverence as if it were a holy relic. I smiled. Henry’s manners were courtly, and he had the charm of an old-world gentleman. “Hello, Henry.”

  “You look wonderful, Caroline. Beautiful, in fact,” he said in his soft Southern voice. He had not seen me since Signor Eduardo had wrought his magic on my person. “You’ve done something to your hair, haven’t you?”

  I could have gratified him by giving all the credit to Naturcare, but I didn’t feel like it, even though I was genuinely fond of him. He was one of “them,” and I was an outsider now. Besides, he spoke to me with that false heartiness with which people address the newly diagnosed. Henry did not feel comfortable with marital rifts. He had been married to the same woman, a slender socialite blonde, for thirty-five apparently blissful years.

  “Thank you, Henry. I’m a redhead now,” I informed him, in case he couldn’t put his finger on it. “Pamela couldn’t make it today?”

  He shook his head sadly. “She’s on the committee for the Onyx Ball, and she just couldn’t miss the meeting this afternoon.” The Onyx Ball was the county bar association’s annual formal. I realized with surprise that this would be the first year in ten that I wouldn’t be attending.

  “Pamela’s the chairperson,” Susan supplied helpfully.

  Henry shrugged modestly, as if not quite able to believe his good fortune in being allied to a woman of such accomplishment. I began to see why Susan was so good at her job. I glanced at her; she looked amused.

  “Of course,” I mumbled. “She must be very busy.”

  “Caroline,” breathed Steve solicitously in my other ear, “I’m so sorry we couldn’t sit together. Hello, Henry. Susan.” He reached for my hand, and Henry obligingly relinquished my elbow.

  I couldn’t decide whether to be diverted or annoyed by this unexpected display of spousal attention, clearly designed to show the senior partner that all the appropriate husbandly attributes were still intact, notwithstanding a mere inconvenience like our separation. “Hello, darling,” I said cheerfully.

  I had my reward. He had to struggle to keep from wincing and ruining the whole effect. “You look great,” I added with what I hoped sounded like a note of adoration.

  As a matter of fact, he did. Steve reminded me of the title character of Richard Cory: “clean shaven, and imperially slim.” His blond hair had just the right amount of gray for distinction, with a kind of controlled dishevelment that made him look younger than his age, which was forty-two. His eyes were hazel and intelligent, and their expression used to be warm. Now it was coolly assessing. “Thank you,” he said, but his eyes flashed me a warning.

  “I haven’t spoken to Barclay yet,” said Susan equably. “Shall I see you later?”

  “I’ll take you home, Caroline,” Steve interjected.

  Henry smiled.

  “I’ll call you tonight,” I told Susan, giving in.

  “Poor Eleanor,” said Henry, when Susan had gone to join the mourners surrounding the grieving ex-husband and his new wife. “It isn’t nice to say so, but it will be so peaceful now that she is gone. I must confess I won’t miss her little visits to the office.”

  “Did she come to the office?” I asked him, surprised.

  “Jesus, Caroline, she was there two or three times a week,” Steve told me. “The crazy bitch was always on about something.”

  I ignored him and looked inquiringly at Henry.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, nodding gently. “I’m afraid that in Eleanor’s mind her personal problems and our legal affairs were one and the same. She was rather, ah, insistent that we become involved in certain matters that were much better resolved between herself and Barclay.” I remembered that Eleanor had alleged that he must have colluded in Barclay’s hiding his bonus, if, as seemed likely, he had hidden it. Henry, however, seemed genuinely sorrowful. Besides, he was one of the most honorable people I had ever met, and it was much more likely that Barclay had engineered his financial arrangements on his own.

  “Insistent!” said Steve, the edge of his mouth twisting up in disdain. “She had full-fledged tantrums. She was sure we were all out to screw her personally, and she wanted everyone between here and Palm Beach to know about it.”

  “Still,” said Henry sadly, “I regret the pills. I can’t help feeling a little bit responsible.”

  “Don’t be silly, Henry,” said Steve adamantly. “What could you have done to stop her? Besides, the real truth is that she did us all a favor.”

  “The children,” murmured Henry.

  “Well, we all know what kind of a mother she was.”

 
Did we? I wondered. “Why is everyone assuming it wasn’t an accident?” I asked aloud.

  The two of them looked at me as if a potted plant had spoken. “What do you mean?” Steve asked with a frown.

  “I mean, why would she want to kill herself?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Apparently not to me.”

  Henry did not like the way the conversation was going. “My dear, you know she was very unhappy,” he said in a soft voice. “Maybe she just didn’t like her life very much anymore.”

  “Wasn’t that what she was trying to do at your office? Change her life?” I asked him. “Why would she want to give up now?”

  Henry gave a small shrug, and my husband glared at me. “She was crazy, I told you,” Steve said. “Caroline, we should go say something to Barclay before we leave. I have to go back to the office this afternoon.”

  Whether that was true or merely meant to impress Henry, who was the head of the compensation committee, I couldn’t tell. In any case, it reminded me of all those weekends—years and years of them—that Steve had spent at the office while the children and I entertained ourselves at home. Weekdays were even worse, because there isn’t a significant law firm in the country that shuts down before six, and most of the partners and associates stay long after that, acolytes in the religion of Billable Hours. When Steve did get home, he washed down dinner with half of an expensive bottle of wine, retired to his study to read the paper or prepare for the next day’s exertions, and then fell exhausted into bed. Lawyers don’t sleep well, either. There is always something that can go wrong, some lurking variable that tugs hard enough at the subconscious to trouble it into wakefulness. Once a problem gets its hook into you at three A.M., you can kiss the rest of the night good-bye.