By contrast, George lived an almost dull life, despite the fact that he ruled most of the Geary fortunes. His voice was quiet, his manner subdued, his smile, when it came along, beguiling. Despite his skills with his employees, stepping into Cadmus’s shoes wasn’t always easy. For one thing, the old man had by no means given up attempting to influence the direction of his empire, and when his health crisis was over he assumed that he’d be returning to his position at the head of the boardroom table. It was Loretta, Cadmus’s second wife, who persuaded him that it would be wiser to leave George in charge, while Cadmus took up an advisory position. The old man accepted the solution, but with a bad grace: he became publicly critical of George when he disapproved of his son’s decisions, and on more than one occasion spoiled deals that George had spent months negotiating.
At the same time, while Cadmus was doing his best to tarnish his own son’s glories, other problems arose. First there were investigations on insider trading of Geary stocks, then the complete collapse of business in the Far East following the suicide of a man Cadmus had appointed, who was later discovered to have concealed the loss of billions; and, after half a century of successful secrecy, the revelation of Cadmus’s Prohibition activities, in a book that briefly made the bestseller list despite Richard’s legal manipulations to have it withdrawn as libelous.
When things got too frantic, George took refuge in a home life that was nearly idyllic. Deborah was a born nest-builder; she cared only to make a place where her husband and her children would be cared for and comfortable. Once the front door was closed, she would say, the rest of the world wasn’t allowed in unless it was invited; and that included any other member of the Geary clan, if George needed solitude—time to sit and listen to his jazz collection, time to play with the kids—she could be positively ferocious in her defense of her threshold. Even Richard, who had persuaded juries of the impossible in his time, couldn’t get past her when she was protecting George’s privacy.
For the four children of this comfortable marriage—Tyler, Karen, Mitchell, and Garrison—there was plenty of affection and plenty of pragmatism, but there was also a string of temptations that had not been available to the previous generation. They were the first Gearys who were regularly followed around by paparazzi during their adolescence; who were squealed on by classmates if they smoked dope or tried to get laid; who appeared on the cover of magazines when they went skinny-dipping. Despite Deborah’s best efforts, she could not protect her children from every sleazehound who came sniffing around. Nor, George pointed out, was it wise to try. The children would have to learn the pain of public humiliation the hard way, by being hurt. If they were smart, they’d modify their behavior, if not, they’d end up like his sister Norah, who’d had almost as many tabloid covers as she’d had analysts. It was a hard world, and love kept no one from harm. All it could do, sometimes, was speed the healing of the wounds.
III
i
So much for my promised brevity. I intended to write a short, snappy chapter giving you a quick glimpse of the Geary family tree, and I end up lost in its branches. It’s not that every twig is pertinent to the story at hand—if that were the case, I’d never have undertaken the task—but there are surprising connections between some of what I’ve told you and events to come. To give you an example: Rachel, when she smiles a certain way, has something of Louise Brooks’s wicked humor in her eyes; along with Louise’s dark, shiny hair, of course. It’s useful for you to know how devoted Cadmus was to Louise, if you’re to understand how the presence of Rachel will later affect him.
But even more important than such details, I suspect, is a general sense of the patterns these people made as they passed their behavior, good and bad, on to their children. How Laurence Grainger Geary (who died, by the way, in a prostitute’s bed in Havana) taught his son Cadmus by example to be both fearless and cruel. How Cadmus shaped a creature of pure self-destruction in Norah, and a man subtly committed to his own father’s undoing in George.
George: we may as well take a moment here to finish George’s story. It’s a sad end for such a good-natured man; a death over which countless questions still hang. On February 6th, 1981, instead of driving up to his beloved weekend house in Caleb’s Creek to join his family, he went out to Long Island. He drove himself, which was strange. He didn’t like to drive, especially when the weather was foul, as it was that night. He did call Deborah, to tell her that he’d be late home: he had an “annoying bit of business” he needed to attend to, he told her, but he promised to be back by the early hours of the morning. Deborah waited up for him. He didn’t come home. By three a.m. she had called the police; by dawn a full-scale search was underway, a search which continued through a rainy Saturday and Sunday without a single lead being turned up. It wasn’t until seven-thirty or so on Monday morning that a man walking his dog along the shore at Smith Point Beach chanced to peer into a car that had been parked there he’d noticed, close to the sand, for three days. Inside was the body of a man. It was George. His neck had been broken. The murder had taken place on the shore itself—there was sand in George’s shoes, and in his hair and mouth—then the body had been carried back to the car and left there. His wallet was later found on the shore. The only item that had been taken from it was a picture of his wife.
The hunt for George’s killer went on for years (in a sense, I suppose, it still continues; the file was never closed) but despite a million-dollar reward offered by Cadmus for information leading to the arrest of the murderer, the felon was never found.
ii
The major effects of George’s demise—at least those relevant to this book—are threefold. First, there was Deborah, who found herself strangely alienated from her husband by the suspicious facts of his death. What had he hidden from her? Something vital; something lethal. For all the trust they’d had in one another, there had been one thing, one terrible thing he had not shared with her. She just didn’t know what it was. She did well enough for a few months, sustained by the need to be a good public widow, but once the cameras were turned in the direction of new scandals, new horrors, she quickly capitulated to the darkness of her doubts and her grief. She went away to Europe for several months, where she was joined by (of all people) her sister-in-law Norah, with whom until now she’d had nothing in common. Stateside, rumors began to fly again: they were living like two middle-aged divas, the gossip columnists pronounced, dredging the gutters of Rome and Paris for company. Certainly when the pair got back home in August 1981, Deborah had the look of a woman who’d seen more than the Vatican and the Eiffel Tower. She’d lost thirty pounds, was dressed in an outfit ten years too young for her, and kicked the first photographer at the airport who got in her way.
The second effect of George’s death was of course upon his children. Fourteen-year-old Mitchell had become a particular focus of public attention after his father’s demise: his looks were beginning to deliver on their promise (he would be, by general consensus, the handsomest Geary yet) and the way he dealt with the invasiveness of the press spoke of a maturity and a dignity beyond his years. He was a prince; everyone agreed; a prince.
Garrison, who was six years his senior, had always been far more retiring, and he did little to conceal his discomfort during this period. While Mitchell stayed close to his mother throughout the period of mourning, accompanying her to philanthropic galas and the like in his father’s stead, Garrison retreated from the limelight almost completely. And there he would remain. As for Tyler and Karen, both of whom were younger than Mitchell, their lives were left unexamined by the columnists, at least for a few years. Tyler was to die in 1987, along with his Uncle Todd, Norah’s fourth husband, when the light aircraft Todd was piloting came down during a sudden storm near Orlando, Florida. Karen—who in hindsight probably most closely resembled her father in the essential gentility of her nature—became an archeologist, and rapidly distinguished herself in that field.
The third consequence of George Geary
’s sudden demise was the reascension of Cadmus Geary. He had weathered the physical and mental frailty that had been visited upon him just as he’d weathered so much else in his life, and now—when the Geary empire needed a leader, he was there to take charge. He was by now in his eighties, but he behaved as though his little sickness had been but a palate cleanser, a sour sorbet that had sharpened his appetite for the rare meat now set before him. In a decade of naked acquisitiveness, here was the triumphant return of the man who’d written the modern rules of combat. At times he seemed to be at pains to compensate for his late son’s humanity. Anyone who stood against him (usually for principles espoused by George) was summarily ousted; Cadmus didn’t have the time or the temper for persuasion.
Wall Street responded well to the change. Old Man Cadmus Back in Charge, ran the headline of The Wall Street Journal, and in a couple of months there were profiles running everywhere, plus the inevitable catalogues of Cadmus’s cruelties. He didn’t care. He never had and he never would. This was his style, and it suited the world into which he had resurrected himself more than a little well.
iii
There’ll be more about Old Man Geary later; a lot more. For now, let me leave him there, in triumph, and go back to the subject of mortality. I’ve already told you how Laurence Geary died (the whore’s bed, Havana) and Tyler (Uncle Todd’s plane, Florida) and of course George (in the driving seat of his Mercedes, Long Island) but there are other passages to the great beyond that should be noted here. Did I mention Cadmus’s mother, Verna? Yes, I did. She perished in a madhouse, you’ll remember. I didn’t however note that her passing was almost certainly also murder, probably at the hands of another inmate, one Dolores Cooke, who committed suicide (with a stolen toothpick, pricking herself so many times she bled to death) six days after Verna’s demise. Eleanor, her rejected daughter, died in hearty old age, as did Louise Brooks, who gave up her career in cinema in the early thirties, finding the whole endeavor too trivial to be endured.
Of the significant players here, that only leaves Kitty, who died of cancer of the esophagus in 1979, just as Cadmus was emerging from his own bout of frailty. She was two years younger than the century. The next year, Cadmus remarried: the recipient of the offer a woman almost twenty years his junior, Loretta Talley (another sometime actress, by the way: Loretta had played Broadway in her youth, but, like Louise, tired of her powerlessness).
As for Kitty, she has little or no part in what follows, which is a pity for me, because I have in my possession a copy of an extraordinary document she wrote in the last year of her life which would fuel countless interesting speculations. The text is utterly chaotic, but that’s not surprising given the strength of the medications she was on while she was writing it. Page after page of the testimony (all of which is handwritten) documents the yearnings she felt for some greater meaning than the duties of mother, wife, and public philanthropist, a profound and unanswered hunger for something poetic in her life. Sometimes the sense of the text falls apart entirely, and it becomes a series of disconnected images. But even these are potent. It seems to me she begins, at the end of her life, to live in a continuous present: a place where memory, experience and expectation are all folded together in one delirious stream of feeling. Sometimes she writes as though she were a child looking down at her own wasted body, fascinated by its mutinies and its grotesqueries.
She also talks about Galilee.
It wasn’t until I read the document for the third time (combing it for clues to her beliefs about George Geary’s murder) that I realized my half brother was present in the text. But he’s there. He enters and exits Kitty’s account like the breeze that’s presently ruffling the papers on my desk; visible only by its effect. But there’s no question that he somehow offered her a taste of all that she’d been denied; that he was, if not the love of her life, at least a tantalizing glimpse of what changes a love of real magnitude—reciprocated love, that is—might have wrought in her.
iv
Let me now give you a brief guided tour to the Geary residences, since so many of the exchanges I will be reporting occur there. Over the years the family has accrued large amounts of real estate and, because they never needed to realize the capital, seldom sold anything. Sometimes they renovated these properties, and occupied them. But just as often Geary houses have been kept for decades—regularly cleaned and redecorated—without any member of the family stepping over the threshold. As of this writing, I know of houses and apartments the family owns in Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, Montana, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Hawaii. In Europe they own properties in Vienna, Zurich, London, and Paris; and further afield, in Cairo, Bangkok, and Hong Kong.
For now, however, it’s the New York residences that I need to describe in a little detail. Mitchell has a pied a terre on the fringes of Soho, far more extravagantly appointed inside, and far more obsessively guarded, than its undistinguished exterior would suggest. Margie and Garrison occupy two floors close to the top of the Trump Tower, an apartment which commands extraordinary views in all directions. The purchase was Margie’s suggestion (at the time it was some of the most expensive space in the world, and she liked the idea of spending so much of Garrison’s money) but she never really warmed to the apartment, for all its glamour. The decorator she hired, a man called Jeffrey Penrose, died a month after finishing his transformation, and posthumous articles about him mentioned the Trump Tower apartment as his “last great creation; like the woman who employed him—kitschy, glitzy, and wild.” So it was; and so was Margie, back then. The years since haven’t been kind, however. The glitter looks tawdry now; and what seemed witty in the eighties has lost its edge.
The one truly great Geary residence in the city is what everyone in the family refers to as “the mansion”; a vast, late nineteenth century house on the Upper East Side. The area’s called Carnegie Hill, but it might just as well have been named for the Gearys; Laurence was in residence here twenty years before Andrew Carnegie built his own mansion at 5th and 91st. Many of the houses surrounding the Geary residence have been given over to embassies; they’re simply too large and too expensive for one family. But Cadmus was born and raised in the mansion, and never once contemplated the notion of selling it. For one thing, the sheer volume of possessions the house contains could not be transferred to a more modestly scaled space: the furniture, the carpets, the clocks, the objets d’art; there’s enough to found a sizable museum. And then there are the paintings, which unlike much of the other stuff were collected by Cadmus himself. Big canvases, all of them; and all by American painters. Magnificent works by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, and Frederick Church, enormous paintings of the American landscape at its most awe inspiring. To some, these works are regressive and rhetorical; the products of limited talents overreaching themselves in pursuit of a sublime vision. But hanging in the mansion, sometimes occupying entire walls, the paintings have an undeniable authority. In some ways they define the house. Yes, it’s dark and heavy in there; sometimes it seems hard to draw breath, the air is so dense, so stale. But that’s not what people remember about the mansion. They remember the paintings, which almost look like windows, letting onto great, untamed wildernesses.
The house is run by a staff of six, who work under Loretta’s ever judgmental eye. However hard they labor, however, the house is always bigger than they can manage. There’s always dust gathering somewhere; they could work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and still not tame the enormity of the place.
So: that’s the New York City residences. Actually, I haven’t told you everything. Garrison has a secret place that even Margie doesn’t know he owns, but I’ll describe that to you when he visits it, along with an explanation as to why he’s obliged to keep its existence to himself. There’s also a house upstate, near Rhinebeck, but that also has a significant place in the narrative ahead, so I’ll delay describing it until then.
The only other residence I want to make mention of here is a long way f
rom New York City, but should be mentioned here, I think, because in my imagination it forms a trinity with the mansion and L’Enfant. That house is a far more humble dwelling than the other two. In fact it’s probably the least impressive of any of the major residences in this story: But it stands a few yards from the blue Pacific, in a grove of palm trees, and for the lucky few who’ve spent a night or two beneath its roof, it evokes Edenic memories.
That house we’ll also come to later, and to the secrets it contains, which are sweatier than anything Garrison hides away in his little bolthole, and yet so vast in their significance that they would beggar the skills of the men who painted the wildernesses in the mansion. We are a while away from being there, but I want you to have the image of that paradisiacal spot somewhere in your head, like a bright piece of a jigsaw puzzle which doesn’t seem to fit in the scheme, but must be held on to, contemplated now and again, until its significance becomes apparent, and the picture is understood as it would not have been understood until that piece found its place.
IV
i
I must move on. Or rather back; back to the character with whom I opened this sequence, Rachel Pallenberg. The last two chapters were an attempt to offer some context for the romance between Rachel and Mitchell. And I hope as a consequence you’ll feel a little more sympathy for Mitchell than his subsequent actions might seem to deserve. He was not, at least at the beginning, a cruel or reprehensible man. But he had lived most of his life in the public eye, despite his mother’s best efforts. That kind of scrutiny creates an artificiality in a person’s behavior. Everything becomes a kind of performance.