Descent from Xanadu (6 page)

Judd looked at her. “Strange. I always thought you did.”

“Everybody did,” she said. “But your father had his own ideas. He never mixed business with personal emotions.”

“He was a fool.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But it’s over now. Somehow it doesn’t matter anymore.”

He was silent for a moment. “How are you feeling?”

“All right,” she said. “But now that it’s happened, numb.”

“It’s going to be a circus,” he said. “The whole fucking world is going to be there. Except Kennedy. The President never liked him. Maybe he didn’t like the idea that Father had more money than his own father. Anyway he’s sending Vice President Johnson to the funeral. Johnson liked Father. He always likes people with money and power.”

Barbara smiled wanly. “Your father didn’t care then, and I’m sure he doesn’t care now.”

Judd nodded. “In a sort of way that’s what I want to talk to you about. I know that after the services at St. Thomas’s his body is being taken to a crematorium.”

“That was his wish,” Barbara said. “He never liked the idea of being buried in a cemetery.”

“I have another idea,” Judd said. “I don’t want his body cremated. I want it sent to the research hospital in Boca Raton.”

“What good would that do?” she asked. “They must have already prepared his body at the mortuary.”

“No they haven’t,” he said. “Less than five minutes after he died I arranged to have him frozen cryogenically.”

“You don’t believe that bullshit,” she said. “That he could be revived in another year when that disease is curable and that he can be brought back?”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do.” He took a deep breath. “We have the technology now that allows us to examine cells in his body genetically and with DNA methodology discover the causes of his disease.”

“That sounds ghoulish,” she said.

“It’s not,” he said earnestly.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Your father’s wishes were explicit.”

“His wishes are no longer binding. Dead, he doesn’t own his own corpse. His corpse is your property and you can do with it whatever you wish. That’s the law.”

Barbara looked at him. “Is that why you asked me?”

He nodded. “As his wife you have the legal right. I do not.”

“What right do you have?”

“None. Unless you predeceased him and I’d been the next blood survivor.”

She sat silent for a moment. “I think I need a drink.”

He crossed the room and filled two glasses with Scotch on the rocks. Silently they sipped their drinks. After a moment she looked at him. “Do you think it might do some good?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But we’re trying to learn more about living longer. That’s why I built the research center in Boca Raton. Maybe if we’d started years before we could have prolonged his life.”

“And you, Judd,” she asked softly, “what do you want?”

“I want to live forever.”

She stared at him, then finished her drink. “Okay, I’ll go for it.”

He took a folded document from his jacket pocket. “You’ll have to sign this.”

She looked down at the paper. “You knew I would agree, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know?”

“Because we all loved each other,” he said, kissing her cheek.

She looked up at him. “You’re very like your father, but very different from him too. You haven’t the acquisitive desires that he had. He wanted to grab every business he could own. You’re content just to hold the line.”

“Father did it all,” he said. “There was nothing more in that area I could do. He’s built a machine that takes care of itself. If all of us were gone the business would remain on its own. In a way it’s a kind of a perpetual motion machine.”

“Is that why you did what you did three years ago?” she asked. “As a kind of experiment?”

He nodded.

“Your father was upset at first. Then I think he began to understand.”

“I hope so,” he said. “I remember the day he turned his office over to me. It was the week I graduated from M.I.T. and the first time I told him I would begin the research facility at Boca Raton.”

“He couldn’t see that at all,” she said. “It wouldn’t make any money.”

“He was right,” Judd said. “But he didn’t stop me.”

“He kept his word,” she said. “He said it would be your business and that’s what he meant.”

***

He had walked into the office that day in June. His father was at his desk. For a moment he felt shock at how thin his father appeared, then he looked into his eyes and the brightness was still there. He kissed his father, then Barbara, and shook hands with Judge Gitlin and the three assistant attorneys and accountants seated across the conference table behind a pile of documents.

A screen was standing against the far wall. The first picture projected was a company chart showing the Crane companies and their interlocking lines. Under each company was the managing director’s name and his first assistant.

There were two chairs at the head of the conference table. His father rose and with the help of a cane walked to one chair and gestured Judd to the other. Barbara sat in the chair at his father’s left; Judge Gitlin joined them at the table to Judd’s right.

There was a silence around the table. They looked at his father solemnly. His father took a deep breath. “The king is not dead,” he said quietly. “He has abdicated.”

The room was still silent.

“All of you knew what I had planned,” he continued. “Maybe you believed I would not really carry out that plan. I don’t know. Now you know that I meant it to be true.”

The people at the conference table were still silent.

“Judd kept his word to me also. He finished his last year at Harvard, completed his graduate studies at M.I.T., and in between his studies, he traveled and visited every company and factory we control around the world.”

He paused a moment and sipped from a glass of water in front of him. “The transfer of power is always difficult. In companies as much as in governments.

“My father’s ambition was to build the most effective and diversified company in the world. A company that encompassed all the strata of the American economy. That was my father’s ambition.

“That was not mine. My ambition was to expand that business into a multinational corporation that would encompass the world. With the power and wealth that affect its influence throughout the governments of the world—in truth, the number one company in the Fortune 500.

“But my vision is not necessarily my son’s. His vision will be his own. And all the wisdom I bequeath can be summed up in these words.”

He sipped again from the glass of water. “Power is both evil and good. I have always been conscious of this. For myself, I like to think that I have tipped the scale toward good. But I admit that occasionally evil has held some sway. I hope that in the end good has prevailed.”

Again he sipped from his glass. “I will not bore you with all the technical details involved in the transfer of power that will take place here. The foundations, all the measures necessary because of laws that protect inheritance, that’s all been taken care of, but in the end, it will all be the same. My son will have the responsibility and the power and the wealth that was once mine, and my father’s before me.” He turned to Judge Gitlin. “It’s up to you now, Paul.”

Judge Gitlin rose from his chair. “I’ve simplified the agreements the best that I could, but there are still twenty documents to sign in sextuplicate. You, Barbara, and Judd have to sign them and they have to be notarized. It could take several hours. Samuel, do you feel up to it?”

“I can manage,” Samuel said. “Let’s begin.”

Judd interfered. “Father, maybe you’d better listen to what I plan to propose.”

His father looked at him. “I don’t even want to hear it. I said it would be your baby. You take care of it.”

“Okay, Father.” Judd looked at Judge Gitlin. “I’m ready.”

The lawyer began to place the documents in front of them. The signing took almost three hours. The old man was gray and tired at the end.

He looked at Judd as the last paper was turned over. Judd was silent. His father leaned over to him and kissed his cheek. “May God be with you, son.”

Barbara came around the table and kissed Judd on the other cheek. And at the same time Judge Gitlin and the others met him with a chorus of congratulations.

Judd didn’t speak until they had all finished. Then he stood at his chair. “Many of you will not like what I plan to do, but as my father said, it’s now mine to do with as I please.

“I plan to retire the present managing director of every one of our companies and replace him with his successor in line. That’s because I want the heads of all the companies loyal to me alone, and to no one else.”

Judge Gitlin nodded. “That’s good thinking, Judd.”

Judd looked at him with a faint smile. “I’m glad you approve, Uncle Paul,” he said, “because yours is the first name I placed on the list.”

8

“One million dollars a year,” Judd said.

“What for?” Barbara asked. “I don’t need it. Your father took care of everything with the trust fund he set up for me. I’m a rich woman. Besides, I have the apartment here, the homes in Connecticut and Palm Beach.”

“Pin money,” he said. “Your life will change now that you’re a widow. All your social life was built around my father. People are shit. The moment they discover you cannot do anything for them they’ll disappear.”

“I don’t need them,” she said. “I’m used to living alone.”

He looked at her. “You were nineteen when you went to work for Crane Industries, twenty-three when you became his personal assistant. Once you had that job you moved into another world. His. That was long before you married him.”

“I still went home after work.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Judd said. “You were close to the center of action. Now—zero.”

She was quiet for a moment. “What do you suggest I do?”

“Build a life of your own,” he answered.

She stared into his cobalt-blue eyes. “I don’t know how.” She looked down at her hands. “From the very beginning I made my life for his convenience. When we were married I thought it would change. But it didn’t really. The only change was that I moved into his home with another title. His wife, not his assistant. The duties were the same.”

“But you loved him?”

“Yes,” she said. “And I believe he loved me too. But nothing could be, then. He was sick and it was all over. There was no sex, no children, no fun times. Only plans for a future that did not include the two of us, because he was going to die.”

Judd sat down across from her on the couch. “You’re still a young woman,” he said. “There is much happiness you can find.”

“I’m forty-eight,” she said wryly. “Look at me. The only attraction I can offer is my money. I’d run last against the competition of younger women and girls.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “Physically your face and body are still good. In two months we can turn back the clock fifteen years as if you were thirty again.”

She laughed. “Cosmetic surgery?”

“Don’t knock it,” he said. “The techniques today are unbelievable.”

“And even suppose I do it,” she said. “What could I do with it? I know nothing of life. I think I’ve only had sex once in my life. As a girl in the backseat of a car, and I hated it.”

“That too can be corrected,” he said.

She shook her head. “Judd, Judd. You really don’t understand, do you?”

“Maybe it’s you who do not understand,” he said.

“You sound like your father,” she said. “That’s what he used to say.”

He smiled. “Do you remember when I was twelve years old and I fell out of the willow tree onto the lawn of my home in Connecticut?”

She nodded. “Yes, I also remember your father was very angry because you would never explain why you had climbed the tree knowing the willow branches were very weak.”

“I couldn’t tell him,” Judd said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“I climbed that tree because I could look into your window and see you walking naked in the room. The minute I would see you I began to masturbate.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

“It’s true,” he replied. “And one time I orgasmed and took my hands off the branch. That was when I fell.”

She began to laugh. “Children.”

“I never forgot it,” he said. “I can still see it in my mind. Even now, sometimes between being awake and sleeping, I find myself stroking myself.”

“I never thought about it, never saw it,” she said.

“Too bad,” he said. “I used to think that if you could see me and watch me, it would be even more exciting.”

She was silent.

He looked at her. “Thinking about it even now makes me hard.”

She rose from the couch. “It’s been a long difficult day,” she said. “I think we’d better go to sleep. The plane is leaving in the morning.”

He grasped her arm and pressed her back to the couch opposite him. “Freud,” he said.

“What about Freud?” she asked.

“He said that frustrations make for insanity.”

“You made that up,” she said. “I never heard that.”

“I want you to sit there and watch me.”

“No,” she said. “That’s really insanity. You’re not the child you were then and I’m not the girl you were watching.”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand. Nothing has changed. You and I are still the same as we were.”

“In your mind,” she said.

“What else is there?” he asked. “Except what’s in the mind. You’re still beautiful.” He unzipped his trousers and held himself. His voice was husky. “You don’t have to do anything. Just watch me.”

She felt his fingers gripping into her arm and stared at his phallus growing larger in his hand. She felt the choking in her throat as if she couldn’t breathe. She saw the reddish purple glans pushing above his foreskin and his hand a blur holding himself. Then a growling sound came from his voice and semen began spurting crazily over his hands and trousers.

She turned away then to his face. The cloudiness of his eyes began turning to the usual cobalt blue. He watched her for a moment, then smiled slowly. “Fifteen years,” he said.

She didn’t answer.