City on Fire (99 page)

“William, he was long gone by the time I even missed a period—”

“Oof, Regan. Phrase, please.”

“He doesn’t know a thing, I’m saying. And now, with Keith proposing, it has to be our secret.” She was silent a long time. “But there’s someone I worry does know. The person who introduced us.”

He saw it instantly. “Amory. God damn him. Only wait: Knows how much?”

“It’s hard to say. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I’ve been back. The way he keeps looking at me. What if he found out I was pregnant? And then not. Illegally not.” Another pause. “You don’t think he’d tell anyone, do you? Or try to use it somehow?”

“Well I sure as hell wouldn’t want him that close to my secrets. Ask yourself how he got that merger to go through. Not to mention the Daddy-Felicia merger, or that career mumbo-jumbo he tried to lay on your boyfriend. The man is a total manipulator.” Regan looked as if something new and uncomfortable were dawning on her. But he’d worked himself up to a fit of righteousness, and couldn’t stop to examine it. “Why do people like Amory hold on to secrets, if not to use them? He could be ratting you out to the guy right now, and together they make two seats on the Board. Think of what they’d have over Daddy. The only way to be sure it doesn’t get used sooner or later is, you tell first.”

“William, no! What would Keith think of me?” She pulled her hands out from under her, began to smooth her skirt. “Just give me a few minutes to collect myself.”

They were siblings, though—they’d practically gone to war together—and so his job once again was to protect her. “You wouldn’t be telling me all this if you weren’t planning to do something about it.”

“You promised,” she reminded him.

“But do you really want to spend your whole life hiding the truth?”

“I don’t know what I want anymore,” she said.

“The impulse to keep it from Keith, I understand, but if you think Amory has found out, you need to take it to Daddy. Regan, look at me. You can trust him, he’s our father. We should go to him.”

“I guess you’re right.” She wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “Okay. Okay. You’re right.”

GIVEN HOW STIFLING it had been earlier in the week, the day was incongruously beautiful, the sky high and mellow above the open top of Regan’s car. And something else had broken with the heat, some sealed order they’d been under. William felt almost manic, on the edge of vision. It was not too late. Things could still change. On the fortieth floor of the Hamilton-Sweeney Building, they flew past the secretary only to find Daddy alone in his office, as if this were any other day and not the eve of his remarriage. The oxygen mask he was dictating into dropped as soon as he saw them. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

“You have to call off the wedding.”

“William—,” Regan said. She hadn’t realized he would go so far so fast. Maybe he hadn’t either, completely. But no matter; it was all tumbling out of him, how they felt sure Amory had kept a damaging secret from Daddy, a potential scandal … except it wasn’t striking the note William wanted, because he couldn’t name the secret—could he?—and the one keeping mum about it now was his sister. Plus why in the first place hadn’t she at least told the guy who’d knocked her up? A phone call would have done. The boarding-school circuit was full of similar stories, always made to go away quietly. She really wasn’t helping explain this at all. “Come on, tell him what you told me, Regan. About Amory’s little understudy on the Board. About the pregnancy.”

When he turned, she was as red as he’d ever seen her—despite or because of which, his mind kept running back to lockerroom gossip about her lover. It was hard to recall, he was probably drunk when he heard it, but hadn’t there been something about a townie girl from Nantucket whose family got paid off after he … oh.

Oh, Regan.

Was it possible the damage she was hiding, the violation Amory might use, went deeper?

Then would the right thing be to press on? Or retreat?

“Daddy, you have to listen to me now. Amory set your daughter up—”

“You’ve said quite enough for the time being, William,” he said.

“The pregnancy thing, I’m sorry, you’ll both have to get over. But Amory. Goddamn Amory—”

And then, only marginally less sharply: “It seems your sister and I need to have a talk.” William tried to appeal to Regan, but when she looked at him he found he couldn’t hold her gaze. “Alone,” Daddy said. The next thing William knew, he was out in the waiting area.

What followed was the longest half-hour of his life. He sat there under the corrosive gaze of the secretary he’d blown past five minutes before. He tried to eavesdrop on what was being said behind the door, but could hear only the murmur of a Dictaphone playing back and the rapid chomp of typewriter keys, like a school of piranha skeletonizing a cow. On the far wall was the other Rothko: a giant field of color, rust brown and aortal red and the white of the white part of a candy cane. Its companion, blue on blue, had appeared on the wall of Felicia’s penthouse at the start of Christmas vacation, as more boxes from Sutton Place had been making their way over. William hadn’t understood why until they stepped off the elevator. Holy shit, he’d been powerless not to say. Then: What’s the catch? “What catch? Regan tells me you’re passionate about art, so I thought, something to make this feel more like a home when we move in. I got one for the office as well. Is this okay? I couldn’t bring myself to buy one of the drippy ones.” William wanted to say he hated it, but couldn’t, just as he couldn’t say now that he was backing out, that he’d been weak, that he’d never wanted to be Daddy’s best man. All of which was secondary, he reminded himself, to whatever she was revealing in there. The paint seemed to throb under the pressure of his gaze, the red weeping at the edges, pouring over itself like a fountain. Then the door opened. Regan walked carefully back toward the desk where Daddy still sat. William was four years old again, summoned to answer for something he’d broken, a vase, a mirror.

“Son.” What color there had been in Daddy’s face was gone. His voice was shaking. “I know you oppose this wedding. I have tried in a number of ways to reach you. And I see I’ve failed. But using your sister’s misfortune to try to smear Felicia’s brother is simply wrong.” The other part—that his mother would be ashamed—went unsaid, as it always did. Among all the many things William could no longer remember was why he’d ever wanted it that way.

Standing by the window, Regan couldn’t turn to look at him. Now she was the one being a coward, still holding something back … he knew it. He fucking knew it. “I gather she told you how the pregnancy ended, at least. And Daddy, the Goulds must have seen all along how upset she was and kept it from you, so as not to sink the merger—”

Regan jumped in. “William, I never said Felicia—”

“Do the specifics even matter? I’m trying to tell you your daughter is scared of them. You’re still pretending not to hear it. And she’ll go right along with you, if you let her. It’s what we Hamilton-Sweeneys always do.”

“This is between me and Regan,” his father told him.

“But I vouched for you. I thought you’d know how to set things right.”

“You’re obviously half-drunk, William, and in no position to tell me my business. And I’ve given up trying to tell you yours. You may come to the dinner tonight sober and presentable, or you can stay away. It’s your choice.”

“Regan?” If she had indeed held something in reserve, there was still a chance here for her to open up fully, to cast her lot with her family, and so to save them all. But Regan would be along later, Daddy said, with the car. They were not done talking.

AND THAT WAS THAT. By the time William saw her again, at the rehearsal dinner, the rival heir had been forced off the Board, and Regan asked to join in his place. Or so went the gossip at the restaurant they’d rented in Central Park, at which William would show up presentable, fine, but substantially less than sober, the flask nestled in his pocket. Weren’t rehearsal dinners restricted to family? Half of New York seemed to be here, stepping from the backseats of cars, clogging the entrance, as if it were one of Felicia’s awful beach retreats. He tried to spot Amory Gould, or to identify the protégé, but failed, and failed. He had no idea what he could do to either of them, anyway. And once his flask ran out, he sat at the bar, drunker and drunker, until the wrong they’d done his sister was a certainty. Unbelievable, that things were going to go on like this, just as before. Or not, because Regan had taken the payoff. Had become one of them.

When the meal started, he found he’d been seated in Siberia. He must have been stripped of his place in the wedding party. His sister, up at the head table, refused to turn his way. Her dumb, beautiful boyfriend kept rubbing her hands. But William was not about to be the one to go over there and apologize. If anyone had been betrayed, it now seemed to be him.

By the time dessert arrived, he felt doused in Burgundy, enclosed in a rubescent bubble. At least he’d decided what to do. Sounds seemed to swim all around, but he couldn’t reach them from where he was, and nothing could reach him either, except the ringing of his fork-tines against his latest glass. And here it came again, urgent, insistent, like money, until the whole room had gone quiet. Daddy looked over. Regan did not. A microphone had been set up near the head table, back when he’d been supposed to give a toast, but William could be plenty loud unamplified.

“It’s customary on these occasions to say a few words about the groom,” he heard himself announce, impressed by his own eloquence. “But now that the time comes, I’m kind of at loose ends. This whole best-man bit goes against the natural order. I mean, what really is a son allowed to say about his father?” There was nervous laughter. If he tried to find its source, all would be lost. “His old man. Pater. The patriarch without whom nothing’s possible.” William caught the bewildered eye of Keith Lamplighter. Next to him, Regan was staring at her hands. He tried to focus on the glass in his own, refracting the red glow of an exit sign beyond the bar. “You think that’s a figure of speech, but you wouldn’t if you’d been around when my mom died.” His arm, held a hundred-odd degrees from plumb, had started to burn. “You’d seen us then, you would have thought it would ruin us. Or at the very least that our sense of self-respect would demand we not try to plug the hole she left. But nothing is impossible for my dad. A father’s supposed to show his son what it means to be a man, and Daddy, whatever our differences, you’ve definitely done that.” William’s turn to laugh. His voice was slipping into an outsized sibilance he recalled from certain nights in the Village, his cocked wrist growing fluid. “I suppose that’s why I appear to have shied from manhood, as I’m sure you’ve all privately clucked over. I’d just warn you to remember that appearances aren’t everything. I’m not only what you think, okay? And there are deeper things at work in my dad, too, and the Company, and in Felicia and Amory Gould. The most truthful thing I guess can be said by me or anyone is, all you folks deserve one another. So ladies, germs, what Goulds have put together, let no man put asunder. Don’t be shy now. Bottoms up.” And with that, William III, the last of the Hamilton-Sweeneys, moved his glass to his lips, knowing that once this wine’s final swallow had vanished down his throat, he would break for the exits, and whatever might be waiting beyond.

88

MOM HAD BOLTED WITH THE YOGA INSTRUCTOR one bright Thursday morning in the spring of ’71, when Sam was with the nuns and Dad over in Queens for that week’s test firings, though the timing probably had more to do with opportunity than calculation. The documentary record either way was minimal. The note she’d left by the kitchen sink was only two lines long. Just enough so no one would think she’d been abducted, Dad said, when Sam asked what was in it. Later, checking the closets, she noticed Mom hadn’t even taken a change of clothes. Dad seemed to construe this as a sign she might return. But Sam, who’d been paying closer attention, saw it the opposite way. Mom obviously wanted as little as possible to tie her to Long Island, to this wrong turn her life had taken. Confirmation came that August, in the form of a letter with an Idaho postmark. Mom had used a loopy Palmer script to write Sam’s name on the envelope, so Dad wouldn’t know who it was from. The letter’s length was another surprise, but the gist was on the very first page. Knowing the pain she’d caused, Mom said, she had held off writing, but then she’d seen a Fourth of July spread in Life magazine, those happy crowds gaping at Dad’s masterpiece from up on the Brooklyn Bridge, and she felt she had to explain to Sam that everyone deserved happiness—not just people you didn’t know well enough to neglect. Cue the pianissimo: can’t tell you what to do … not saying you can’t come with me … And what? Hoe spuds in some field? Change her name to Saffron, get passed around like VD? It was no secret what went on at a commune. Even one that subscribed to Life magazine. What Sam never did find out was what pages two through five of the letter said, because before Dad could get home, she set the whole thing on fire. Gripped it with tongs from his workshop and turned it over a shallow metal bowl until the flames touched all edges, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to reach in and save it.

It isn’t quite so easy a thing to burn a mother out of your heart, but Sam eventually found the right equipment for that, too. Smokes, snaps, tunes. Mom had made her choice, had gone chasing after some frictionless ideal, and best of luck to her. Sam honestly felt by the time of the Bicentennial that she hardly thought about Mom one way or another.

But in the closing days of that year, she could suddenly think of little else. It was as if there were little else. As if the premise that any unit larger than the self could be held separate from any other—that the self itself wasn’t corruptible—had crumbled. Her island life, her city life: it was all compounded now, and everything her eyes hands or lips touched could explode at any moment into a reminder.

Nothing was more prone to trigger that detonation than Dad, which was weird, because he was so rarely around. The day after the big Willets Point breakin, he didn’t get home until nine at night. Then, over cold takeout, she was forced to listen to him seethe some more about the kilos of black powder, the phantom Ranger hustling toward Flushing. He’d convinced himself that this theft, like the one in November, was an act of industrial espionage. Yet remained dead-set against talking to the cops. “The sedatives they fed the dogs nearly killed one of them, Sammy,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what, I’ve still got a few tricks to show them.” She almost blurted out that them included herself, but he wouldn’t have been able to get his brain around it. So now she was the one changing into Mom. She used to wonder how someone so sentimental could have left her dad, but it turned out that truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.