“Nobody ever died of a backache, Caroline.”
“Please,” she cried, “call her later. I tripped on the last step when I was running inside, Gary, it hurts—”
He turned his back on the kitchen. “Sorry, Mom.”
“What on earth is going on there?”
“Caroline hurt her back a little bit playing soccer.”
“You know, I hate to say this,” Enid said, “but aches and pains are a part of getting older. I could talk about pain all day long if I wanted to. My hip is always hurting. As you get older, though, hopefully you get a little more matoor.”
“Oh! Ahh! Ahh!” Caroline cried out voluptuously.
“Yeah, that’s the hope,” Gary said.
“Anyhow, what did you decide?”
“The jury’s still out on Christmas,” he said, “but maybe you should plan on stopping here—”
“Ow! Ow! Ow!”
“It’s getting awfully late to be making Christmas reservations,” Enid said severely. “You know, the Schumperts made their Hawaii reservations back in April, because last year, when they waited until September, they couldn’t get the seats they—”
Aaron came running from the kitchen. “Dad!”
“I’m on the phone, Aaron.”
“Dad!”
“I’m on the telephone, Aaron, as you can see.”
“Dave has a colostomy,” Enid said.
“You’ve got to do something right now,” Aaron said. “Mom is really hurting. She says you have to drive her to the hospital!”
“Actually, Dad,” said Caleb, sidling in with his catalogue, “there’s someplace you can drive me, too.”
“No, Caleb.”
“No, but there’s a store I really actually do need to get to?”
“The affordable seats fill up early,” Enid said.
“Aaron?” Caroline shouted from the kitchen. “Aaron! Where are you? Where’s your father? Where’s Caleb?”
“It certainly is noisy in here for a person trying to concentrate,” Jonah said.
“Mother, sorry,” Gary said, “I’m going someplace quieter.”
“It’s getting very late,” Enid said, in her voice the panic of a woman for whom each passing day, each hour, signified the booking of more seats on late-December flights and thus the particle-by-particle disintegration of any hope that Gary and Caroline would bring their boys to St. Jude for one last Christmas.
“Dad,” Aaron pleaded, following Gary up the stairs to the second floor, “what do I tell her?”
“Tell her to call 911. Use your cell phone, call an ambulance.” Gary raised his voice: “Caroline? Call 911!”
Nine years ago, after a midwestern trip whose particular torments had included ice storms in both Philly and St. Jude, a four-hour runway delay with a whining five-year-old and a screaming two-year-old, a night of wild vomiting by Caleb in reaction (according to Caroline) to the butter and bacon fat in Enid’s holiday cooking, and a nasty spill that Caroline took on her in-laws’ ice-covered driveway (her back trouble dated from her field-hockey days at Friends’ Central, but she now spoke of having “reactivated” the injury on that driveway), Gary had promised his wife that he would never again ask her to go to St. Jude for Christmas. But now his parents had come to Philly eight years in a row, and although he disapproved of his mother’s obsession with Christmas—it seemed to him a symptom of a larger malaise, a painful emptiness in Enid’s life—he could hardly blame his parents for wanting to stay home this year. Gary also calculated that Enid would be more willing to leave St. Jude and move east if she’d had her “one last Christmas.” Basically, he was prepared to make the trip, and he expected a modicum of cooperation from his wife: a mature willingness to consider the special circumstances.
He shut himself inside his study and locked the door against the shouts and whimpers of his family, the barrage of feet on stairs, the pseudo-emergency. He lifted the receiver of his study phone and turned off the cordless.
“This is ridiculous,” Enid said in a defeated voice. “Why don’t you call me back?”
“We haven’t quite decided about December,” he said, “but we may very well come to St. Jude. In which case, I think you should stop here after the cruise.”
Enid was breathing rather loudly. “We’re not making two trips to Philadelphia this fall,” she said. “And I want to see the boys at Christmas, and so as far as I’m concerned this means you’re coming to St. Jude.”
“No, Mother,” he said. “No, no, no. We haven’t decided anything.”
“I promised Jonah—”
“Jonah’s not buying the tickets. Jonah’s not in charge here. So you make your plans, we’ll make ours, and hopefully everything will work out.”
Gary could hear, with strange clarity, the rustle of dissatisfaction from Enid’s nostrils. He could hear the seashore of her respiration, and all at once he realized.
“Caroline?” he said. “Caroline, are you on the line?”
The breathing ceased.
“Caroline, are you eavesdropping? Are you on the line?”
He heard a faint electronic click, a spot of static.
“Mom, sorry—”
Enid: “What on earth?”
Unbelievable! Unfuckingbelievable! Gary dropped the receiver on his desk, unlocked the door, and ran down the hallway past a bedroom in which Aaron was standing at his mirror with his brow wrinkled and his head at the Flattering Angle, past the main staircase on which Caleb was clutching his catalogue like a Jehovah’s Witness with a pamphlet, to the master bedroom where Caroline was curled up fetally on a Persian rug, in her muddy clothes, a frosty gelpack pressed into her lower back.
“Are you eavesdropping on me?”
Caroline shook her head weakly, perhaps hoping to suggest that she was too infirm to have reached the phone by the bed.
“Is that a no? You’re saying no? You weren’t listening?”
“No, Gary,” she said in a tiny voice.
“I heard the click, I heard the breathing—”
“No.”
“Caroline, there are three phones on this line, I’ve got two of them in my study, and the third one’s right here. Hello?”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I just picked up the phone—” She inhaled through gritted teeth. “To see if the line was free. That’s all.”
“And sat and listened! You were eavesdropping! Like we’ve talked and talked and talked about not doing!”
“Gary,” she said in a piteous little voice, “I swear to you I wasn’t. My back is killing me. I couldn’t reach to put the phone back for a minute. I put it on the floor. I wasn’t eavesdropping. Please be nice to me.”
That her face was beautiful and that the agony in it was mistakable for ecstasy—that the sight of her doubled-over and mud-spattered and red-cheeked and vanquished and wild-haired on the Persian rug turned him on; that some part of him believed her denials and was full of tenderness for her—only deepened his feeling of betrayal. He stormed back up the hall to his study and slammed the door. “Mother, hello, I’m sorry.”
But the line was dead. He had to dial St. Jude now at his own expense. Through the window overlooking the back yard he could see sunlit, clamshell-purple rain clouds, steam rising off the monkey puzzle tree.
Because she wasn’t paying for the call, Enid sounded happier. She asked Gary if he’d heard of a company called Axon. “It’s in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania,” she said. “They want to buy Dad’s patent. Here, I’ll read you the letter. I’m a little upset about this.”
At CenTrust Bank, where Gary now ran the Equities Division, he’d long specialized in large-cap securities and never much concerned himself with small fry. The name Axon was not familiar to him. But as he listened to his mother read the letter from Mr. Joseph K. Prager at Bragg Knuter & Speigh, he felt he knew these people’s game. It was clear that the lawyer, in drafting a letter and sending it to an old man with a midwestern address, had offered Alfred no more than a tiny p
ercentage of the patent’s actual value. Gary knew the way these shysters worked. In Axon’s position he would have done the same.
“I’m thinking we should ask for ten thousand, not five thousand,” Enid said.
“When does that patent expire?” Gary said.
“In about six years.”
“They must be looking at big money. Otherwise they’d just go ahead and infringe.”
“The letter says it’s experimental and uncertain.”
“Mother, exactly. That’s exactly what they want you to think. But if it’s so experimental, why are they bothering with this at all? Why not just wait six years?”
“Oh, I see.”
“It’s very, very good that you told me about this, Mother. What you need to do now is write back to these guys and ask them for a $200,000 licensing fee up front.”
Enid gasped as she’d done long ago on family car trips, when Alfred swung into oncoming traffic to pass a truck. “Two hundred thousand! Oh, my, Gary—”
“And a one percent royalty on gross revenues from their process. Tell them you’re fully prepared to defend your legitimate claim in court.”
“But what if they say no?”
“Trust me, these guys have no desire to litigate. There’s no downside to being aggressive here.”
“Well, but it’s Dad’s patent, and you know how he thinks.”
“Put him on the phone,” Gary said.
His parents were cowed by authority of all kinds. When Gary wanted to reassure himself that he’d escaped their fate, when he needed to measure his distance from St. Jude, he considered his own fearlessness in the face of authority—including the authority of his father.
“Yes,” Alfred said.
“Dad,” he said, “I think you should go after these guys. They’re in a very weak position and you could make some real money.”
In St. Jude the old man said nothing.
“You’re not telling me you’re going to take that offer,” Gary said. “Because that’s not even an option. Dad. That’s not even on the menu.”
“I’ve made my decision,” Alfred said. “What I do is not your business.”
“Yes, it is, though. I have a legitimate interest in this.”
“Gary, you do not.”
“I have a legitimate interest,” Gary insisted. If Enid and Alfred ever ran out of money, it would fall to him and Caroline—not to his undercapitalized sister, not to his feckless brother—to pay for their care. But he had enough self-control not to spell this out for Alfred. “Will you at least tell me what you’re going to do? Will you pay me that courtesy?”
“You could pay me the courtesy of not asking,” Alfred said. “However, since you ask, I will tell you. I’m going to take what they offer and give half of the money to Orfic Midland.”
The universe was mechanistic: the father spoke, the son reacted.
“Well, now, Dad,” Gary said in the low, slow voice he reserved for situations in which he was very angry and very certain he was right. “You can’t do that.”
“I can and I will,” Alfred said.
“No, really, Dad, you have to listen to me. There is absolutely no legal or moral reason for you to split the money with Orfic Midland.”
“I was using the railroad’s materials and equipment,” Alfred said. “It was understood that I would share any income from the patents. And Mark Jamborets put me in touch with the patent lawyer. I suspect I was given a courtesy rate.”
“That was fifteen years ago! The company no longer exists. The people you had the understanding with are dead.”
“Not all of them are. Mark Jamborets is not.”
“Dad, it’s a nice sentiment. I understand the feeling, but—”
“I doubt you do.”
“That railroad was raped and eviscerated by the Wroth brothers.”
“I will not discuss it any further.”
“This is sick! This is sick!” Gary said. “You’re being loyal to a corporation that screwed you and the city of St. Jude in every conceivable way. It’s screwing you again, right now, with your health insurance.”
“You have your opinion, I have mine.”
“And I’m saying you’re being irresponsible. You’re being selfish. If you want to eat peanut butter and pinch pennies, that’s your business, but it’s not fair to Mom and it’s not fair to—”
“I don’t give a damn what you and your mother think.”
“It’s not fair to me! Who’s going to pay your bills if you get in trouble? Who’s your fallback?”
“I will endure what I have to endure,” Alfred said. “Yes, and I’ll eat peanut butter if I have to. I like peanut butter. It’s a good food.”
“And if that’s what Mom has to eat, she’ll eat it, too. Right? She can eat dog food if she has to! Who cares what she wants?”
“Gary, I know what the right thing to do is. I don’t expect you to understand—I don’t understand the decisions you make—but I know what’s fair. So let that be the end of it.”
“I mean, give Orfic Midland twenty-five hundred dollars if you absolutely have to,” Gary said. “But that patent is worth—”
“Let that be the end of it, I said. Your mother wants to talk to you again.”
“Gary,” Enid cried, “the St. Jude Symphony is doing The Nutcracker in December! They do a beautiful job with the regional ballet, and it sells out so fast, tell me, do you think I should get nine tickets for the day of Christmas Eve? They have a two o’clock matinee, or we can go on the night of the twenty-third, if you think that’s better. You decide.”
“Mother, listen to me. Do not let Dad accept that offer. Don’t let him do anything until I’ve seen the letter. I want you to put a copy of it in the mail to me tomorrow.”
“OK, I will, but I’m thinking the important thing right now is The Nutcracker, to get nine tickets all together, because it sells out so fast, Gary, you wouldn’t believe.”
When he finally got off the phone, Gary pressed his hands to his eyes and saw, engraved in false colors on the darkness of his mental movie screen, two images of golf: Enid improving her lie from the rough (cheating was the word for this) and Alfred making light of his badness at the game.
The old man had pulled the same kind of self-defeating stunt fourteen years ago, after the Wroth brothers bought the Midland Pacific. Alfred was a few months shy of his sixty-fifth birthday when Fenton Creel, the Midpac’s new president, took him to lunch at Morelli’s in St. Jude. The top echelon of Midpac executives had been purged by the Wroths for having resisted the takeover, but Alfred, as chief engineer, had not been a part of this palace guard. In the chaos of shutting down the St. Jude office and moving operations to Little Rock, the Wroths needed somebody to keep the railroad running while the new crew, headed by Creel, learned the ropes. Creel offered Alfred a fifty percent raise and a block of Orfic stock if he would stay on for two extra years, oversee the move to Little Rock, and provide continuity.
Alfred hated the Wroths and was inclined to say no, but that night, at home, Enid went to work on him. She pointed out that the Orfic stock alone was worth $78,000, that his pension would be based on his last three full years’ salary, and that here was a chance to increase their retirement income by fifty percent.
These irresistible arguments appeared to sway Alfred, but three nights later he came home and announced to Enid that he’d tendered his resignation that afternoon and that Creel had accepted it. Alfred was then seven weeks short of a full year at his last, largest salary; it made no sense at all to quit. But he gave no explanation, then or ever, to Enid or to anyone else, for his sudden turnabout. He simply said: I have made my decision.
At the Christmas table in St. Jude that year, moments after Enid had sneaked onto baby Aaron’s little plate a bite of hazelnut goose stuffing and Caroline had grabbed the stuffing from the plate and marched into the kitchen and flung it in the trash like a wad of goose crap, saying, “This is pure grease—yuck,” Gary lost his temper an
d shouted: You couldn’t wait seven weeks? You couldn’t wait till you were sixty-five?
Gary, I worked hard all my life. My retirement is my business, not yours.
And the man so keen to retire that he couldn’t wait those last seven weeks: what had he done with his retirement? He’d sat in his blue chair.
Gary knew nothing of Axon, but Orfic Midland was the sort of conglomerate whose holdings and management structure he was paid to stay abreast of. He happened to know that the Wroth brothers had sold their controlling stake to cover losses in a Canadian gold-mining venture. Orfic Midland had joined the ranks of the indistinguishable bland megafirms whose headquarters dotted the American exurbs; its executives had been replaced like the cells of a living organism or like the letters in a game of Substitution in which shit turned to shot and soot and foot and food, so that, by the time Gary had okayed the latest bulk purchase of OrficM for CenTrust’s portfolio, no blamable human trace remained of the company that had shut down St. Jude’s third-largest employer and eliminated train service to much of rural Kansas. Orfic Midland was out of the transportation business altogether now. What survived of the Midpac’s trunk lines had been sold off to enable the company to concentrate on prison-building, prison management, gourmet coffee, and financial services; a new 144– strand fiber-optic cable system lay buried in the railroad’s old right-of-way.
This was the company to which Alfred felt loyal?
The more Gary thought about it, the angrier he got. He sat by himself in his study, unable to stem his rising agitation or to slow the steam-locomotive pace at which his breaths were coming. He was blind to the pretty pumpkin-yellow sunset unfolding in the tulip trees beyond the commuter tracks. He saw nothing but the principles at stake.
He might have sat there obsessing indefinitely, marshaling evidence against his father, had he not heard a rustling outside the study door. He jumped to his feet and pulled the door open.
Caleb was cross-legged on the floor, studying his catalogue. “Can I talk to you now?”
“Were you sitting out here listening to me?”
“No,” Caleb said. “You said we could talk when you were done. I had a question. I was wondering what room I could put under surveillance.”