Bitter Business Page 9

  “What’s that?”

  “My brother Jimmy’s death. Did Daniel tell you we had an older brother? He died when I was thirteen.”

  “Daniel told me about what happened.”

  “Losing Jimmy is the one thing that Dad can’t change or fix, and every time he looks at my brother Philip you can see the disappointment in his face.”

  “How sad for Philip.”

  “Yes. He’s spent his whole life being the good son who’s never been good enough. I’m the first one to admit that Philip is not an easy man to get along with. He’s petty and humorless and has a mean streak like the stripe down a skunk’s back. But I don’t think there’s been a day since the accident that Philip hasn’t wondered if he’d just been able to swim a little faster, if he’d just been a little stronger, tried a little harder, Jimmy would still be alive. The irony of it is that of all of us, Philip and my dad are the most alike. But Philip’s been in Dad’s shadow for so long it’s robbed him of his self-confidence. After more than twenty years of working together Philip is totally unable to communicate with Dad. He’s actually very accomplished. Did you know he has degrees in chemistry and mechanical engineering?”

  “I had no idea.”

  “He’s done incredible things with our specialty chemicals division over the last ten years. It’s been his baby. Last year specialty chemicals accounted for more than twenty percent of revenues.”

  “That should make your father happy.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it doesn’t. It makes him feel threatened. Plating is what he knows, and dammit, what’s good enough for him should be good enough for his son. It doesn’t help that Philip’s biggest successes have been new compounds that have nothing to do with plating—a solvent for industrial cleaning, a special lubricant for pumping equipment, and a new surfacing agent for a large specialty market.” She sighed. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but nobody ever said that families are logical.”

  “How does Eugene fit into all of this?”

  “Even though Dad feels that neither of his surviving sons measures up to Jimmy, he’s always been very protective of Eugene.”

  I thought about the ramrod of a man with the snake tattoo on his wrist. He hardly seemed in need of anyone’s protection, so I asked Dagny to explain.

  “It all goes back to when we were children. Eugene was nine when Mother died—she developed a blood clot after Lydia was born. One day she was fine, proudly showing off the new baby. The next day she was dead. Of all of us, Eugene was the most affected. As soon as she died he stopped speaking, literally—not one word came out of his mouth.

  “Dad took him to all kinds of doctors. They all agreed it was the shock—now they even have a name for it, post-traumatic stress syndrome—but none of them knew how to help him. Doctors, psychiatrists, priests, they all said he would get better eventually, but a year after Mother died, Eugene still hadn’t said a single word.

  “It was a terrible time in the family. Dad was spending all of his time at the plant, and when he wasn’t working he was drinking. We had one housekeeper after another— nobody could handle five kids including one who wouldn’t speak but woke shrieking from nightmares four or five times a night.”

  “So what happened? How did Eugene finally get better?”

  “It was Jimmy who did it,” recalled Dagny. “He decided that the psychiatrists were all wrong. They were saying that Eugene wouldn’t talk because he was so sad about Mother dying, but Jimmy decided that it wasn’t grief that had struck his little brother mute, it was fear. Confronted with the realization that someone you love can be taken away from you at any moment, Eugene was literally scared speechless.”

  “So what did Jimmy do about it?”

  “He never left Eugene alone, not for one single minute. It was summertime and we were all out of school. Jimmy stuck to Eugene like glue. They ate together, slept together, went to the bathroom together. By the time August rolled around, nobody could shut Eugene up.”

  “What an amazing story.”

  “Yes. But it just made it worse when Jimmy died. Naturally Eugene worshiped him. He followed his big brother around like a dog. We used to joke that Jimmy had a shadow.... After Jimmy died, it was like something broke loose inside of Eugene. He started to get into trouble. He was thrown out of four different schools in two years, including some military school in Virginia where they specialize in straightening out the incorrigible. I know that on more than one occasion he got into trouble with the police. Dad’ll never talk about it, and of course Eugene leads such an exemplary life now, what would be the point?”

  “So what straightened Eugene out?”

  “Believe it or not, it took a judge. He gave Eugene an ultimatum—enlist in the military or go to jail. Eugene signed up with the marines. The structure and discipline of military life agreed with him. While he was in the service he met Vy—her dad’s an artillery instructor so she was living on the base. Vy’s very religious and she got Eugene involved in the church. Mother was also a very devout Catholic, so it’s not surprising that one of us would have inherited her deep spirituality. But I guarantee you that there were quite a few years there when no one would have guessed that it would be Eugene.

  “It turns out that Eugene learned a lot about managing people in the marines. I can’t see Philip going to work on the plant floor every day and supervising a bunch of high-school dropouts, half of whom don’t speak English. But Eugene is good at it. He’s tough, but fair. The workers love him. We’ve cut turnover in half since he took over as plant manager.”

  “How do Philip and Eugene get along?”

  “They’re so different, which makes it hard. Philip looks down his nose at Eugene because he’s not educated. Eugene, on the other hand, has a kind of chip on his shoulder from being a marine. I mean, Philip’s been to graduate school, but Eugene’s parachuted out of an airplane at night. Philip thinks Eugene’s coarse. Eugene thinks Philip is weak. It’ll never change.”

  “So what does all this mean if we manage to get your father to agree to buy Lydia’s shares? Do you think we can at least count on Philip and Eugene to present a united front, to go along and not try to change his mind?”

  “I think so. What you have to understand is, the biggest obstacle to a buyback is not going to be my brothers. It’s going to be my father. It’s like the whole fight about giving Lydia a seat on the board. Did Daniel tell you about it?... No?

  “Well, seven years ago Lydia moved back to Chicago from California. Her marriage to her second husband, Rick, was breaking up—he was a plastic surgeon at Stanford; take a look at her nose sometime—she’s had her breasts done, too. She’d spent three years in California and she’d had the total California experience: flotation tanks, meditation training, religious reawakening by walking on hot coals, Tibetan gurus, bending spoons, channeling, crystals.... Lydia did it all—anyway, her marriage was over and she was completely adrift, so Dad told her she had to come home.”

  “Did she want to?”

  “Who knows? My little sister is a life member in the analyst-of-the-month club. She hasn’t the first idea what she wants, but Dad told her he’d cut off her checks from the company if she didn’t come back to Chicago, so she did. Dad had hatched this plan of putting her on the board and getting her more actively involved in the company.

  “Naturally, the rest of us were all against it. I remember telling him, ‘Lydia has failed at her life and made a mess of her two marriages. Now you are trying to wave a magic wand and make it all right. It’s fine to want to help her, but don’t use the company to show her your love. The company is what you love. She loves you. Talk to her, tell her you’re there for her, show her you love her that way—not by putting her in a business situation she knows nothing about.’ ”

  “What did your father say?”

  “He said, ‘I want Lydia on the board. I want Lydia working for the company.’ He told me that he wanted to do something to help Lydia mend her life si
nce she felt that so much of what was wrong was his fault.”

  “How was it his fault?”

  “It wasn’t his fault!” Dagny insisted. “It’s never been his fault. It’s never been anybody’s fault but Lydia’s. You can’t believe the stuff she’s put us through. Take our last board meeting as an example. Did Daniel tell you about what happened?”

  “No, he didn’t mention it.”

  “Well, it was originally scheduled for February eighth, which was a Wednesday. Dad, Philip, and I had kept our calendar clear six weeks ahead of time; Daniel, too. Eleven o’clock on Tuesday night Dad gets a call from Lydia. She’s still down at Tall Pines and she can’t make it back for the meeting and we’re going to have to reschedule.”

  “Was she in Georgia on vacation?”

  “Worse than that. Her therapist told her that women who have her kinds of emotional problems were very often molested as children, but have repressed the memory. The therapist told Lydia that she needed to dig into her past. I’ll never forget it. Lydia kept on trying to draw one or the other of us off into whispered interrogations about whether we’d seen anything happen to her when we were all children. I couldn’t believe it, but Dad lent her the plane so that she could visit Nursey. She’s the woman who took care of us after Mother died. It turns out Lydia wasn’t having any luck with Nursey, so she wanted to stay a couple more days to see if she could pry anything else out of her. The whole thing was deeply, deeply sick.”

  “And did Lydia ever discover any evidence that she’d been molested?”

  “No. Of course not. And that’s what’s so infuriating. Aren’t there enough real victims in the world without someone as privileged as Lydia going around trying to invent misfortune?”

  “So why didn’t you hold the meeting without her or even conference her in by phone?”

  “Dad wouldn’t hear of it. We’re a family company and he said we should be flexible. Yeah, right, we’re flexible. Let me tell you how flexible we are. Lydia deigned to return to Chicago that Friday evening, too late to hold a meeting. When she got home she informed us that she was leaving early Sunday morning for two weeks at Canyon Ranch—that’s a spa in Tucson—which meant that we had to hold the board meeting on Saturday. Normally that wouldn’t have been a big deal, but that Saturday was Dad and Peaches’s first wedding anniversary and I was having a hundred people to my house for dinner that night. Of all the days of the year that Saturday was absolutely the most inconvenient one possible for me, but as usual, Lydia got her way. And then, to top it all off, when we finally did hold the meeting, Lydia sat at the conference table and paid her bills. You had to have been there. Philip was doing this little show-and-tell on a new surfacting agent that the specialty chemicals division is going to start marketing and Lydia was busy writing out checks and licking stamps. We met for two hours and Lydia did not say one single word the entire time. I’ve got to tell you, Kate. I was so furious I could have strangled her with my bare hands.”

  By the time I left Dagny’s house, it had begun snowing in earnest, and I was grateful for the fact that once I got to Wacker Drive, there was hardly any traffic. To my left lay Lake Michigan, brooding and unseen in the darkness. To my right, the city was lit up and gloriously peaceful, like a fairy-tale town in one of those glass globes that you shake up. The Wrigley Building, like an enchanted wedding cake, glittered in the distance; the Art Institute with its juxtaposition of old and new buildings, and the Field Museum, solid and magnificent, stood sentinel to my passing.

  It had, I reflected, been a long day filled with Cavanaughs, but it had ended well. I’d enjoyed getting to know Dagny and I was beginning to understand what Daniel Babbage found so satisfying about representing family businesses. He built his relationships with his clients over decades, not deals. Unlike the constantly changing roster of lawyers and executives I usually worked with, Babbage and Jack Cavanaugh went back more than thirty years.

  I looked forward to developing that kind of relationship with Dagny. It was more than the fact that I felt an easy kinship with her. I also got a sense, looking at her, that I was seeing what I might become in ten years’ time. She had taken what life had dealt her—good and bad— and built something with it. She had chosen hard work and happiness as surely as her sister, Lydia, had chosen self-pity and neurosis. At a time when I was beginning to feel the need for my own forced march from the past, Dagny’s accomplishments stood out for me like a beacon.

  Parking my car in the alley behind my apartment, I was glad to see the light on in the kitchen, which meant that my roommate was home. Claudia was a surgical resident at the University of Chicago Hospitals. She worked long hours and spent every third night in the on-call room. In addition, she’d lately begun seeing someone, a dermatologist at the same hospital. While I didn’t keep track of her comings and goings, my sense was that recently she’d been out of the apartment more than one night in three.

  Claudia and I had met when we roomed together our freshman year at Bryn Mawr, thrust together by fate in the form of the housing office computer. We knew each other for all of fifteen minutes before we realized that we had absolutely nothing in common.

  Claudia was from New York City. Her parents, both professors at Columbia, had embraced radicalism in the sixties and never let go. Claudia had grown up boycotting grapes, picketing in sympathy with striking union workers, and marching against nuclear power. She didn’t care about being pretty, or popular, or what other people thought. Her entire approach to life seemed to be “who says I can’t?”

  Naturally, we became best friends.

  I let myself in the door and dust balls scattered in every direction. Petra, our Czech cleaning lady, had walked out right after Christmas. Indeed, the first indication I had that she spoke any English was when she told me that she was quitting.

  Claudia was sitting cross-legged on the floor dressed in hospital scrubs. Her long hair, which she invariably wore in one braid long enough to sit on, was casually thrown over her shoulder. She was drinking a beer.

  “Do you ever get the feeling that you just have to change your life?” she demanded without looking up.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, disconcerted by the question. Like most surgeons’, Claudia’s approach to life had always been straightforward and not particularly introspective. “Why do you ask?”

  “I just think all of it is starting to get to me.”

  “All of what?”

  “The work, the hours, being up to my elbows in blood all the time. I get to hospital in the morning before the sun comes up and I leave long after it’s gotten dark. I can’t remember the last time I saw the sun.”

  “It’s hard this time of year. It gets dark so early,” I offered lamely. I’d never known Claudia to be discouraged about her choice of professions, and frankly, I was alarmed.

  “It’s gotten so that the hospital is my whole world. I’m either in the OR, or in the clinic, or crashed in the on-call room.”

  “What about Geoff? Don’t you guys go out when you’re both off?”

  “Yeah, but when’s that? The last three months we’ve been on conflicting schedules—when I’m off he’s on and vice versa. And the few nights we’ve been able to spend together I’m so tired I don’t want him to touch me. Isn’t that terrible? I’ve reached the point where sleep is much more attractive than sex. It doesn’t help any that Geoff’s a dermatologist. Believe me, God never made a rash that couldn’t wait until tomorrow. And it’s not as though seeing patients in the derm clinic is what I’d call tough. Not like being on your feet for twelve hours in the OR. Last time we were together I think he was planning on telling me that he doesn’t want to see me anymore, but I fell asleep before he had a chance to get around to it.”

  “So what’s your alternative?” I asked. “You’ve got another year to go in your residency.”

  Claudia shook her head and drained her beer.

  “Do you know that I’ve lost my beeper, my lab coat, my stethoscope, and two pai
rs of glasses—all in the last week.”

  “That’s just a sign that you’re focused on what’s really important—your work,” I said. “Believe me, if I didn’t have Cheryl, I’d do the same thing. Actually, I have

  Cheryl keeping track of me and I still lose things and forget what day it is.”

  “It’s worse than that,” complained Claudia. “This afternoon I assisted on a bowel resection; it was my fifth or sixth case of the day, I can’t remember. The attending asked me to go out to the waiting room and talk to the family and let them know how everything went. So I take off my bloody scrubs and go out into the family waiting room and go up to a middle-aged woman and her two grown daughters. I tell them that the procedure went well, the resection was without complication, and their loved one was in post-op and doing just fine.”

  “So what happened?” I asked, dreading the answer. The currency of Claudia’s work—and her stories—was so often life and death.

  “Tonight, after evening rounds, I finally got off my rotation. I put my coat on to go home and I was walking through the lobby when the middle-aged woman I’d spoken to earlier walks up to me. ‘Doctor,’ she says kindly, ‘I just thought you’d like to know that our son was in surgery for a hip replacement operation, not a bowel resection.’ ”

  “You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. “I can’t believe she let you go on about the wrong surgery. Why didn’t she say anything when you were going on about the bowel resection?”

  “I asked her that,” Claudia replied with a weary shrug. “She told me she didn’t say anything because she felt sorry for me—I looked so tired.”

  10

  The phone woke me from the darkness. I blinked, struggling to focus on the glowing numbers on the clock radio. It was a quarter to six.