Bitter Business Page 6

  Daniel’s face was lit up by an enormous grin. “I told you she’s as tough as her old man.”

  “Philip came to see me this morning.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t think he likes me.”

  “Don’t take it personally. Philip doesn’t like anybody. You impressed the hell out of Jack, though. He said that you drank bourbon with him in the middle of the day. He said it showed that you had balls.”

  “Just what I’ve always wanted.”

  “So what did you make of Peaches?”

  “I’m not sure. I only spoke to her for a minute. But I guess I expected Jack to be married to someone closer to his own age. What do his children think of her?”

  “They hate her, naturally.”

  “Why naturally?”

  “Don’t be naive, Kate. Second wives are like dynamite—an inherently explosive commodity. None of the Cavanaugh children can stand her. Philip thinks that she’s a gold digger and is terrified that Jack’s going to die and leave her all his money.”

  “Is he?”

  “No. Peaches comes from a very wealthy family herself. I don’t think Jack feels any pressure to provide for her after he’s gone. Besides, he’s obsessed with the idea of his children running the company together after he dies. I can’t imagine him not leaving them at least the Superior Plating shares.” _

  “Doesn’t Philip realize that?”

  “He should. It’s obvious to a boob. But not to be too hard on Philip, I don’t think that Jack’s ever been explicit ! about his testamentary plans. Every couple of years ' Philip manages to get up the nerve to ask his father about it and Jack always tells him the same thing: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything.’ ”

  “What about Dagny? Does she hate Peaches, too?”

  “Not exactly. She just dismisses her as a frivolous 1 twit—which really is not the case.”

  “And Eugene? What does he think of his stepmother?”

  “First of all, he’d be furious to hear you call Peaches his stepmother. All the Cavanaugh children are very careful to refer to her as their father’s wife. And to answer your question, Eugene in particular doesn’t approve of Peaches. He and his wife are part of a very conservative, almost fundamentalist movement in the Catholic church. Eugene believes that the Bible is explicit in spelling out women’s proper role in the world. Suffice it to say, Peaches doesn’t exactly fit in with that.”

  “He and the dead secretary didn’t get along, I’ll tell you that,” I said, describing the scene between them by the plating tanks. “In the back of my mind I guess I thought there might have been something extracurricular going on between them.”

  “Not likely,” Babbage replied with a shake of his head. “Believe me, Eugene is as straight as they come.”

  “And Lydia?” I asked, steering the conversation back on track. “How does she feel about her father’s wife?”

  “You can imagine that Lydia isn’t thrilled about having a stepmother who’s three years younger than she is and twice as good-looking.”

  “There aren’t many daughters that would be,” I countered. Having not yet met Lydia, I was probably more likely to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “True. But in this case it’s more complicated than that. Lydia feels very threatened by Peaches, sure, but she’s also fascinated by her.”

  “What do you mean, fascinated?”

  “Fascinated, filled with an unhealthy interest, obsessed.... About a month after Jack and Peaches were married, they started getting crank calls. Someone was calling in the middle of the night and then hanging up the phone. Jack was rattled, but Peaches knew exactly what to do. She’d had trouble of this nature before, you see. Back when she worked for Channel Seven she was stalked by some weirdo who’d seen her on TV and become obsessed with her. You might have heard about it. It caused quite a stir at the time and Peaches was instrumental in getting the state to pass anti-stalking legislation. So when she started getting these hang-up calls, Peaches wasted no time in calling the police. Normally these kinds of cases are a nightmare, but Jack has some pull downtown and Peaches is still considered something of a celebrity, so they were able to cut through all the bureaucratic red tape and get the calls traced. You’ll never guess who was making them.”

  “Who?”

  “Lydia.”

  “I bet Sunday dinners were a little awkward after that.”

  “You could say that.”

  “The whole situation just strikes me as creepy.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s creepy. Lydia’s been gradually changing her appearance.”

  “Changing her appearance? In what way?”

  “Slowly, over the course of the last year, she’s been doing things—growing her hair long like Peaches, having it lightened to the same color. Peaches buys a dress and a week later Lydia shows up at a family function wearing the same one. When you meet Lydia I guarantee you’ll be struck by the resemblance.”

  “I look forward to it,” I said as Davis, Babbage’s favorite waiter, arrived with our entrées. I eyed my veal cutlet suspiciously. I ventured a cautious bite—tasteless but otherwise unobjectionable.

  “Peaches has actually shown a lot of backbone through all of this,” continued Daniel, cutting into his steak, “but about a month ago she reached the point where even she’d had enough.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Like so many family crises, the whole thing started out as what should have been a happy occasion. When Jack and Peaches got married they did it very quietly— just the family down at Tall Pines—that’s their place down in Georgia. So this past February, when their first anniversary rolled around, Dagny decided to throw them a party. She invited everybody—friends, customers,

  Peaches’s family even came in from Atlanta. There were well in excess of a hundred guests.

  “Dagny is the sort of person who does everything well and that night was no exception. It should have been a wonderful evening—especially for Jack. His favorite daughter had gone out of her way to do something special for him and his beautiful wife. Despite what happened, you could tell he was really touched.”

  “So what happened?”

  “For their anniversary Jack gave Peaches a diamond necklace that he’d given to Eleanor, his first wife, on their first anniversary. Naturally, Peaches wore it to the party.”

  “And when Lydia saw it she went ballistic.”

  “You could say that. I honestly thought there would be murder done. Lydia arrived late to the party, as usual. Arthur was out of town and I gather there was some sort of problem with the twins—with Lydia there’s always something. Anyway, the party was in full swing by the time she got there and the first thing she did was go off in search of her father to give him her best wishes. I’ll tell you, Kate, when she laid eyes on that necklace around her stepmother’s neck, her hostility was like an electrical current running across the room.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She made the biggest, loudest, ugliest scene I have ever witnessed, and I have witnessed some doozies. Fortunately, Dagny had the presence of mind to collar her brothers, and between the three of them they managed to get Lydia out of there before the evening was totally ruined. As it was, everyone was shaken up. Lydia’s behavior was frightening. She was so completely out of control it was almost like she was having a seizure. She was literally foaming at the mouth as Philip and Eugen bundled her out the door.”

  “Wow.”

  “So now you understand why Jack thinks that Lydia started this business about selling her shares in order to get attention.”

  “More like revenge, I’d say.”

  Daniel sighed and laid down his knife and fork, shaking his head slowly in some unshared recollection.

  “None of this would have happened if Jimmy had lived,” he whispered.

  “Who’s Jimmy?” I asked.

  “Jack and Eleanor’s oldest son.”

  “I thought Philip was the
oldest. You mean there was another brother? What happened to him?”

  “He died. Afterward it changed everything for the Cavanaughs.” Daniel touched his napkin to his lips and then replaced it in his lap, smoothing it carefully before picking up the story.

  “Jack has a plantation down in Georgia—the story is that his father won the land in a poker game, but who knows? It doesn’t matter. When Superior started making! a little bit of money, Jack built a house on it for Eleanor.! She was a Georgia girl who missed the South, and besides, he loves to hunt. They named it Tall Pines.”

  “What was she like? Eleanor, I mean.”

  “She was a beautiful, old-fashioned woman and Jack just worshiped her. She ran the house, raised the children, gave her time to the church, and instead of complaining that he was never there, counted herself lucky to have a husband who worked hard to make a success of his business. When he came home she treated him like a king. He was obviously devastated when she died. I think he stayed drunk for an entire year.”

  “And Jimmy was their oldest?” I prompted.

  “Yes. He had just turned thirteen when his mother died. Philip was twelve, Dagny ten, and Eugene nine. Lydia, of course, was just a few days old. A nice, big, Catholic family. Eleanor is buried down at Tall Pines. So is Jimmy.”

  “How old was he when he died?”

  “Seventeen. It is such a shame. He was a wonderful young man. Smart, athletic, a natural leader...”

  “How did he die?”

  “He drowned.” Daniel paused, his eyes clouded over by remembrance. “Jack and the children were down at Tall Pines for Christmas—they went down every year. Jimmy and Philip decided to do some hunting, so they built a blind on the edge of the big pond that sits in the middle of the property and settled down to wait for something to come by to shoot. They hadn’t been there very long when they noticed a local girl walking by herself down toward the water. She caught their eye. It’s private property, after all, and quite an out-of-the-way spot, but at first they didn’t do anything. Truth be told, they’d probably brought a couple of six-packs along to ward off chill, and as long as she didn’t scare off the birds, they were happy to mind their own business. It wasn’t until she’d walked quite a way out into the water that they realized what she was trying to do.

  “Both boys dove in after her, but Jimmy, being older and a stronger swimmer, got to her first. By the time Philip reached them, both young people had gone under. The pond is very deep. It’s fed by a spring; so it’s almost as if there’s a current. Later, of course, they found out that she’d filled her pockets with stones. Nobody knows exactly what happened—whether Jimmy got tangled up f in her dress while he was trying to save her or whether 1 in her panic she just dragged him down. Philip dove for them until he had to give up from exhaustion. Finally he dragged himself out of the water and trudged the -six miles back to the house to tell his father what had happened.”

  “And after that, like you said, everything changed.”

  “Everything. For seventeen years Jack had been talking about the day when he would retire and Jimmy would take his place running the company. Philip, who to this day blames himself for not having been able to save his brother, felt he had to step up and try to fill Jimmy’s shoes. The other children were crushed.

  “In a motherless family, the oldest child becomes a sort of surrogate parent and they had all relied on Jimmy, especially with Jack working all the time. Eugene, especially, was just devastated. He’d worshiped his eldest brother, followed him everywhere. After Jimmy died, Eugene started acting out—running wild and getting into trouble. It took the Marine Corps to straighten him out. While I’ll grant you that neither of Jack Cavanaugh’s boys is perfect, both Philip and Eugene have spent their entire adult lives feeling as though they don’t measure up to their father’s expectations. That’s not an exactly unique scenario in my experience—hard-driving, successful fathers are often disappointed by the real or imagined shortcomings of their sons. But the Cavanaugh boys are stuck in an especially insidious situation: they don’t stand a chance against the ghost of their sainted brother.”

  “For crying out loud, Daniel,” I exclaimed. “These people don’t need a lawyer, they need a therapist.”

  Daniel gave a dry lawyer’s laugh.

  “I’ve always worried that one of these days the AMA was going to come after me for practicing psychiatry without a license. That’s what makes working with family businesses different. When you get right down to it, business is always about people, but in a family business those people are all related. They share a history. They don’t just work together. They eat Thanksgiving dinner together and remember that you used to wet the bed. In a family business, when you get down to the bone in any business crisis, it’s almost never about business. It’s about the interpersonal relationships in the family.”

  “Well,” I said after the waiter had cleared our plates, “what I want to know is, while the family is working through their interpersonal relationships by fighting over the business, how does the business survive? I mean, when you come right down to it, it’s not Jack Cavanaugh who’s the client, but Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals.”

  “That’s right,” Babbage replied. “And it’s your job to safeguard the company, from Jack Cavanaugh himself, if necessary.”

  Back at the office I phoned Dagny Cavanaugh while my work beckoned, unheeded. Since the first morning that Babbage had called me into his office, I’d felt tragedy gathering around me like a fog. Though I knew they were unrelated, Cecilia’s death, Daniel’s illness, even the story about what had happened to Jimmy Cavanaugh seemed to cast a sort of pall.

  Dagny Cavanaugh, with no secretary to answer her Phone, picked up herself after a half-dozen rings.

  “I just wanted to see how things are going,” I said after we’d exchanged pleasantries. “I saw your brother Philip this morning, and he said you were still pretty upset.”

  “It’s not just me. It’s everybody. The police were back again this morning. They finally managed to track down Cecilia’s family. It turns out she had a son. A little boy who’s four years old and lives with her mother.”

  “How awful. And she never talked about him?”

  “She never saw him,” replied Dagny, her voice trembling with indignation. “I just got off the phone with her mother. She belongs to some sort of fundamentalist Christian church. She told me that when Cecilia became pregnant the family gave her the choice of accepting Jesus as her savior or giving up all rights to the baby. I guess Cecilia refused to be saved. Now the little boy is being raised in this cult.”

  “So how did they take it when they found out what happened?” I asked.

  “Her mother just kept on telling me over and over again that she wasn’t going to pay for the funeral.”

  “Maybe they really can’t afford it?”

  “No. That’s not it. I got her to give me the name of her minister. I wanted to call him and see if he would reason with her. He explained to me, as cold as ice, that in their church, when a child refuses to be saved, that child is declared dead to the family and the congregation. They buy a casket, hold a funeral, the whole thing. The Dobsons won’t pay for a funeral for their daughter because in their minds they’ve already buried her.”

  I hated leaving the office in the middle of the afternoon to drive to my parents’ house. Even before I’d picked up the Superior Plating file, I was in danger of being dragged down by the undertow of too much work.

  The absolute last thing I needed was to bum a couple of hours dragging myself to Lake Forest for some pointless meeting. I was so aggravated at my errand that I completely forgot that they were doing construction on the Kennedy Expressway, which gave me an extra half an hour to contemplate the sorry state of road construction and family dynamics in the city of Chicago.

  By the time I arrived at my mother’s door, I was twenty minutes late and in an evil mood. A maid I’d never laid eyes on answered the door, but that didn’t s
urprise me; in domestic-employment circles, having once worked for my mother is akin to having been wounded in combat. Rocket, our ancient and arthritic black Lab, skittered across the polished marble of the foyer to greet me. He was an old, fat dog that wheezed like a freight train and hobbled like an old man. I dropped down on one knee and scratched his head.

  I introduced myself to the maid, who, unimpressed, took my coat and disappeared with it. I stood beneath the graceful curve of the staircase and checked my reflection in the large gold mirror that has always hung there. Growing up in that house, I distinctly recall catching glimpses of myself in that mirror and for a fraction of a second seeing my mother’s face looking back at me. But when I’d stop and really look, I would see what was actually there reflected in the glass.

  My mother is a great beauty. Even closing in on sixty, she possesses the miraculous alchemy of skin and bone that is a magnet to the eye. I have her eyes, her skin, her hair, the same expression of irritated petulance when someone crosses me, but somehow when it was all put together and passed along to me, the magic got left out. Today the face I saw in the mirror was tired. My hair was working itself loose from its customary French twist. I pushed the hairpins back into place; then I walked the hallways of my childhood home to find my mother.

  7

  I followed the sound of voices into the music room, so named because Vladimir Horowitz had once played there for Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat. I vaguely remember meeting them—a dark little man who I told my nanny looked like a monkey and his sour-faced wife, so sad and thin. The room, like all of the places in my mother’s house, was beautiful. The walls were covered in yellow silk the color of dull gold and the cabbage-rose chintz of the sofas was offset by the blue-and-white-striped damask of the side chairs. There was an antique Steinway baby grand piano at one end of the room, and beyond that, French doors that opened out onto the lawn, rolling out into a bluff that dropped precipitously at the edge of Lake Michigan.