E. Godz

On a lovely spring morning in the hyperborean wilderness of Poughkeepsie, New
York, Edwina Godz decided that she had better die. She did not make that decision
lightly, but in exactly the manner that such a (literally) life-altering choice should, ought,
and must be made. That is to say, after a nice cup of tea.

It wasn't as if she was about to kill herself. Just die.

She reached the aforementioned decision almost by accident, while pondering the
sorry state of her domestic situation and seeking a cure for the combination of headache,
tummy trouble, and spiritual upheaval she always experienced every time she thought
about her family. Under similar circumstances, most women would head right for the
medicine cabinet, but Edwina Godz was a firm believer in the healing power of herbs.
Better living through chemistry was all very well and good, yet when it came down to
cases that involved the aches, pains, and collywobbles of day-to-day living, you couldn't
beat natural remedies with a stick.

Especially if the stick in question was a willow branch. Surprising how few people
realized that good old reliable aspirin was derived from willow bark.

Edwina realized this, all right. In fact, she was a walking encyclopedia of herbal
therapy lore. It was partly a hobby, partly a survival mechanism. You didn't get to be the
head of a multicultural conglomerate like E. Godz, Inc. without making a few very ...
creative enemies. When you grew your own medicines, you didn't have to worry about
the FDA falling down on the job when it came to safeguarding the purity of whatever
remedy the ailment of the moment demanded. Perhaps it was a holdover from her chosen
self-reliant life-style all the way back in the dinosaur days of the '60s, but Edwina Godz
was willing to live by the wisdom that if you wanted to live life to the fullest, without the
pesky interference of the Man, you should definitely grow your own.

No question about it, Edwina had grown her own, and it didn't stop at herbs for all
occasions. However, at the moment, herbs were the subject under consideration.

Specifically: which one to take to fix Edwina's present malaise? It wasn't going to be
an easy choice, not by a long shot. Peppermint tea was good for an upset tummy, though
ginger was better, but valerian was calming and chamomile was the ticket if you were
having trouble getting to sleep. Then again, green tea was rich in antioxidants, which
were simply unsurpassed when it came to maintaining one's overall health, and ginseng
was a marvelous source of all sorts of energy, while gingko biloba—

Edwina sighed and stared at the multicolored array of boxes in the little closet sacred
to her tea things. It was built into the wall beside the fireplace in her office, though
"office" wasn't quite the right word to describe the room Edwina used for transacting
most of her business. "Office" conjured up visions of sleek, sterile twenty-first century
furnishings, pricey pieces with surfaces made of wood, stainless steel, brushed aluminum,
and name-brand plastics, garnished with a liberal sprinkling of high-tech trappings.

While Edwina did command enough bells-and-whistles machinery to satisfy even the
nerdiest of technogeeks, she chose not to show them off. Discretion was her watchword,
in both her personal life and her business dealings. It was enough for her to rejoice
privately in the fact that she owned a very special kind of fax machine (to put it mildly);
she didn't need to put it out on a marble pedestal so that visitors might ooh and ah over it
in green-eyed envy.

Like so much else in her life—from technotoys to tea—the fax machine was tucked
away, out of sight but never out of mind, in one of the many hidey-holes that riddled her
office: either behind the dark wood paneling that flanked the fireplace, the faux-Oriental
papered walls, or within one of the many unique items of furniture so tastefully taking up
floor space. Let others more insecure than she flaunt their desktops, laptops, and
palmtops: Edwina Godz's office looked like nothing more than the plush, snug, and
inviting parlor of a Victorian mansion.

Which it was.

None of which self-congratulatory knowledge did a thing to help her in the matter of
deciding which herbal tea to take right now.

If she brewed herself a cup of comfort incorporating every last one of the herbal
essences she needed to cure everything that ailed her, there wouldn't be any room left in
the teapot for the boiling water. She shrugged and closed the tea-closet door, and instead
ambled over to the other side of the fireplace where the liquor cabinet reposed. Gingko
biloba was all very well and good when you were confronting the ordinary headaches of
day-to-day life, but when it came to dealing with one's children there was no substitute
for single malt scotch.

Grain was an herb, when you got down to it, and so was malt, she told herself. As for
the peat that was involved somewhere in the manufacturing process of a decent single
malt, well, you couldn't get any more back-to-Mother-Earth than that unless you got
down on all fours and sucked topsoil. Edwina was still rationalizing in top form as she
downed the first shot and poured the second, all while standing in front of the liquor
cabinet with a grim expression on her face that would have stopped a charging
wildebeest.

Not that there were many wildebeest running loose in the greater Poughkeepsie area
(unless you went by appearances alone, in which case some of the individuals to be found
roaming the vast bureaucratic savannahs of nearby Vassar College might be considered
as—ah, but that was strictly a matter of personal opinion). Edwina Godz's palatial home
stood in splendid semi-isolation on the banks of the mighty Hudson River with a
breathtaking view of some of the loveliest countryside on the whole Eastern Seaboard.
Her back yard was refuge to vast nations of squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, opossums,
deer, and the occasional fox. A fabulous assortment of birds also called Edwina's estate
home, but the only winged wildlife that made it through the great oak and Tiffany-
stained-glass front doors was the dusty bottle of Wild Turkey shoved into the rear right
corner of the liquor cabinet.

Edwina polished off the second shot and considered taking a third. She was not a hard
drinker, as a rule, but there were some situations that drove her to it and kept the motor
running.

"Bah," said Edwina, gazing at the empty shot glass in her hand. "Who's to be master
here?" She knew the answer to that one well enough, and slammed down the glass to
prove it. Shoulders squared, she closed the liquor cabinet, returned to the tea things, and
brewed herself up a steaming pot full of the ginseng-ginger blend. The present situation
had given her a bellyache that screamed for ginger, but it would take the energizing
powers of ginseng to give her the mental and physical oomph she'd need to deal with the
cause of it all.

The causes. Plural.

Edwina settled herself on the sofa, sipped her tea, and stared stonily at the framed
family photograph on the small marble-topped table at her elbow. Of all her attempts to
evoke the American ideal of domestic harmony, this photo was the best and only thing
she had to show for her efforts.

"Smiling," she said, regarding the three faces in the picture. "We were all smiling. I
know that I meant it, but how on earth did I ever manage to persuade Peez and Dov to do
it? Was it bribery or just good old-fashioned threats?"

She set down her teacup and picked up the framed photo for closer study. It had been
taken some ten years ago, maybe a little farther back than that, certainly long before Dov
and Peez had left the nest to pursue their own fortunes.

"And mine," Edwina muttered.

Her children had gone through the usual period of adolescent rebellion, loudly
declaring that no one understood them and that they would show Edwina how things
ought to be done as soon as they were out of the house and running their lives their way.
They didn't need her to tell them what to do, or to do anything for them. By heaven, they
didn't need anybody, if it came to that! Just let them hit the legal age of adulthood and
then, look out! They'd make their own marks in the world, and they'd do it widescreen,
big time, and Broadway style.

So what had happened when that day of dear-won independence finally dawned?

They went to work in the family business. Dov manned the Miami office, Peez held
down the fort in New York City, and both of them still looked to Edwina to handle all the
really big management decisions for E. Godz, Inc. Not since they'd nursed at Edwina's
ample bosom had her two children been so dependent on her for their daily sustenance.
She called the shots and they hastened to implement every word of her orders. They
trusted her business sense implicitly, and so far, that trust had paid off for all concerned.
Edwina couldn't have asked for more attentive corporate lieutenants, to say nothing of
more biddable children, even if solely in this aspect of their lives together. It was all so
very sweet, so drenched in the heady musk of family traditions, solidarity, and mutual
support that they might as well have belonged to the Mafia.

"Ha!" Edwina remarked to the air. "At least a Mafia family knows enough to fight its
real enemies."

As embittered as she felt at the moment, she couldn't help but smile when she
regarded the image of herself in the family photo. It was, of course, the likeness of a
much younger Edwina Godz, made back in the days before all of her hair had gone from
a rich auburn to a sparkling silver-gray. There were plenty of white streaks lacing the
younger Edwina's tawny mane, but the effect was both charming and attractive.

"You had it then, woman, and you've still got it now," Edwina told herself
complacently. She looked up from the photo in her hands to a trio of larger pictures
hanging on the wall just above the parlor fireplace. The one in the middle was the largest
of the three: an old-fashioned, sepia-toned example of turn-of-the-century photographic
art. A walrus-mustached man in what was clearly a very uncomfortable suit stood behind
a seated lady with her hair done up in the fashion popularized by the Gibson Girl. She
wore a high-necked lace dress with a small cameo brooch at her throat and she held a
large bouquet of orange blossoms on her lap. She wasn't a beauty, by common cultural
standards, but despite her wedding-day air of socially acceptable unease she still
managed to project confidence and self-possession that was somehow ... sexy.

There was an unmistakable resemblance between Edwina and the woman in the sepia
picture. "I'll bet if you'd been the one who came through Ellis Island instead of him"—her
eyes flicked to the walrus-moustached gentleman in the photo—"you'd never have stood
for it when the Customs officer got your name wrong. What's so hard about spelling
'Goetz' anyway? You'd have made him change it back in short order, and no arguments
about it! On the other hand, I suppose I ought to be grateful that Grandpapa was such a
don't-make-waves wuss about how the Customs man changed his family name. Having a
name like 'Godz' is so much more effective in this business, from a marketing
standpoint."

Edwina gazed fondly at this relic of her ancestors' wedding day. Marriage was such a
quaint, dated concept. Still, some of the attendant trappings were alluring—on a purely
aesthetic level—even for a product of the '60s like Edwina, who had come of age in the
full flowering of the Sexual Revolution. She then let her eyes drift from the big photo
above the mantelpiece to the pair of smaller ones flanking it. They too were framed with
gold-leafed wood, but color photos and streamlined, minimalist frames alike spoke of
more modern provenance than the sepia centerpiece.

The resemblance between Edwina and the people in the two companion photos was
even more pronounced. The man in the photo on the left had supplied most of the genetic
input evident in Edwina's appearance, while the woman in the photo on the right had
provided a good deal of much-appreciated editorial tweaking. Thus the keen, gung-ho go-
getter looks of Edwina's father were nicely softened by her mother's influence, leaving
their daughter looking less like a hawk and more like a lamb. For this, Edwina was
thankful.

"Not that I'm not deeply grateful to you, Daddy," Edwina told the photo. "After all,
looks aren't everything. Especially at the bank."

You know it, kiddo, the photograph seemed to reply, and Edwina liked to believe she
could see the long-gone yet still beloved twinkle in her father's eye when he said that.

It was the same sort of twinkle that had lit up his face when he was about to make a
fresh "kill" in his ongoing role as a highly paid, extremely effective corporate lawyer.
Litigation was his lifeblood, but investment savvy was his vocation. He took his income
and sank it into a portfolio that fairly gushed profits. His dream had been to make enough
money to buy one of the smaller Hawaiian islands and set himself up as an independently
wealthy writer of science fiction, his first true love.

Alas, the dream was not to be. (And a good thing, too. Edwina had found some of her
father's old notebooks with ideas for his Great American Sci-Fi novel. Nothing good
could come of a book that began "Captain Studs Poleworthy arose from the bed of the
sated Bazinga slave-girl, dabbed lime-flavored eroto-gel from his magnificent chest, and
said, 'Sorry to come and go, my dear, but the starfields beckon.' ") While visiting Hawaii
to scope out potential real estate buys, both of Edwina's parents had died in a tragic
accident. They were touring a poi factory when one of the holding tanks broke and they
drowned in the glutinous flood.

Their untimely deaths came just at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, when their
daughter was first beginning to scent the cultural changes in the air, to hear the distant
beat of a different drum, and to inhale ... her destiny. An only child with no living close
relatives, Edwina had mourned the loss of her small family—for family had always been
important to her—but then had dealt with her grief in what seemed to be the best
available manner, at the time. Having been rendered an orphan, she performed a series of
reverse adoptions, for want of a better way to describe matters. Independently wealthy,
thanks to her late father's savvy for high finance, and just plain independent on account of
the Great Poi Flood of '64, Edwina Godz set out to replace the family she had lost by
making herself a part of every ragtag tribe, clan, commune or gaggle of rock band
groupies that took her fancy.