Fallen Idols (26 page)
“Did you sleep well?” she asked Tom with a bland pleasantness. She poured coffee into his cup, then looked him full in the face. Her eyes were guileless, betraying, nothing. “You don't look very good, but it could have I been worse.”
“Thanks to you.” He stared back at her, forcing himself to hold her gaze.
She smiled. “You're leaving shortly?”
Tom picked up his mug. “Right after this.”
“I'm sorry your trip didn't work out.”
There was a delicate vein running down the side of her throat. Tom watched it pulsating. He could feel an electric curtain of tension between them. “It wasn't a complete bust, as you know,” he told her. “I learned some things I needed to know.”
Their conversation came to an abrupt halt as Walt came into the kitchen. “How's everybody this morning—” He stopped as he saw Tom's swollen face. “My God! What happened to you?”
“Ran into a buzzsaw.”
“Are you all right?” Walt asked with concern. “Did you see a doctor?”
Tom shook his head. He glanced quickly at Emma. “I had it taken care of. It looks worse than it is.”
“Jesus,” Walt exclaimed. “That's awful.”
“It doesn't feel that bad,” Tom assured him. “Really.”
“Good,” Walt answered. He sat down and poured himself a cup of coffee. Then he looked at Tom again. “Emma gave me a hell of a tongue-lashing after you left last night.”
A stinging retort popped into Tom's head, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Walt…” Emma stood with her back against the stove.
“Which I deserved. I don't know what got into me, Tom. I just …” He shook his head. “I want so much for you, for all of you. But I'm so inept at expressing it. I really apologize Tom.” He blew on his coffee. “We have to bury the hatchet. You can't go home with things as they are.”
Tom was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. Bracing himself, he walked over and sat down opposite walt.
“I’ ll see you before you leave,” Emma said to Tom. “okay,” Tom said. “Thanks for everything.”
“it was my pleasure.”
She left the room. He watched her go.
“What time's your flight?” Walt asked, oblivious to the electric storm raging above his head.
“Ten thirty.”
“You'll have to leave soon, then. Security at LAX is a hear. My last flight, it took over two hours to clear.” Walt shifted in his seat. “Listen, Tom …”
Here it comes, Tom thought. The opening of the vein.
I don't care what you do,” Walt said earnestly. “Drive a dump truck, play in a rock band, win the Nobel Prize, it does’t matter to me, it really doesn't. I only want you thing, and I mean this straight from the heart. I want you to be happy I want you to find love.”
You sure have a piss-poor way of expressing it, Tom thought. “That's what parents are supposed to want for their children, isn't it?”
His father's eyes flickered a moment. “Yes. But too often, as I did earlier, you forget that. It's so simple and basic you take it for granted. You get hung up in careers and goals and all the crap that in the long run doesn't mean a damn thing.” He paused for a moment. “Like I did.”
“You were happy. You found love.”
Walt nodded. “Yes, I did. I was amazingly lucky. They go together, happiness and love, because when you have love, you are happy. The rest, as the old rabbis are supposed to have said, is commentary. The trick, and this is the hard part, is to remember it, to not forget, to not take it for granted.”
He slumped back. ‘Too often I took your mother for granted. Everyone takes things for granted, but that's no excuse.” He pounded his open fist on the table. “You have to keep remembering it, remembering it, remembering it.”
The vehemence of Walt's expression and feeling knocked Tom off-stride. “Mom loved you, dad.” The words sounded trite in his ear, but he couldn't think of anything better to say.
“I know,” Walt said, almost in irritation, as if he needed to get this sentiment out as fast as he could, without interruption, or it would vanish. “That's not the point The same thing applies to you, how I feel toward you Getting your doctorate will be a great accomplishment but that's a thing, a credential, a compilation of knowledge. All admirable, yes. But that's not love.”
He helped himself to some more coffee. “You and your brothers are all I have left. Emma, too, now, thank God, but it's not the same. You're my blood, and I have to pour as much of my love into you as I humanly can” He sagged back. “Or I'll never be happy, and neither will a big part of you.”
Walt got up and came over to Tom, as Tom was afraid he would. It was a sloppy hug, and the kiss on the cheek was even sloppier
“I love you, son.”
Tom was supposed to reply “I love you, too, dad,” but he didn't have it in him.
After Welt went into his study Emma came back into the kitchen. She closed the door behind her. “How did it go?” she asked.
“It could have been worse,” Tom answered flatly, “Are you going to come back?” she asked nervously, as if fearful of the answer. Not about her, about Walt, “I don't know.”
she reached over and lightly touched the back of his hand “I hope you do.”
Her touch fluttered like a bird's heartbeat—his entire body ached with desire. What was she doing to him, he wondered? Had it been a mercy fuck, a show of defiance of anger toward his father? Or even—he was afraid to allow himself to consider this possibility—that it was simple attraction, that she was the kind of free woman who went after whatever she wanted, regardless of consequences?
He wanted to take her in his arms, right here, right now. But he couldn't. She had made that clear, last night,
“I'd want to know beforehand that he isn't spoiling for a fight,” he told her. “Of course, his actions could belie his words. Saying and doing … very different.”
She nodded in understanding. “I honestly believe he can't help himself, because I know he was looking forward in seeing you. If it makes you feel any better, he was like this with Clancy, too. Although not as vicious,” she admitted. “For some reason you brothers bring out a dark side in him. It's tragic.”
He lashes out at us from guilt, Tom wanted to tell her. About being with you. “So everything's fine until we show up. Super.”
“I didn't mean it like that. My God, this turned out so badly!”
“It's okay,” he told her. “I'm leaving.”
And as he said this a sense of calmness came over him that he hadn't possessed since he'd gotten on the airplane to come here. He
was
leaving, returning to his own world. Messed up it might be, but it was is, and he owned it.
“This is not about you, Emma.” He looked over at the closed kitchen door. “But I'm coming around to believing his instincts were right about not wanting to be with us. If he wants to be left alone, we should honor that. We're his sons, but we're not his keepers.”
“Except he doesn't,” she said passionately. “When you're not here, he talks about you ceaselessly. He has a real hunger for his family.”
“Until he bites in, and then he gets indigestion.”
She smiled. “A biteful of you wouldn't make anyone sick.”
Care to find out again? he thought. But even as he did, he knew he had to give that up, unless she decided other wise. And he knew, with yet another ache, that she wouldn't.
“Will you stay in touch?” she asked him.
“He knows how to reach me.” He paused. “So do you.”
Walt and Tom stood at the curb by Tom's rental.
“I hope you'll give me another chance,” Walt said.
“It's up to you, dad,” Tom replied bluntly. He felt good.
better than good—liberated. He wasn't in thrall to the great god anymore. If they ever did reconcile, it would be a balanced relationship.
“I swear to God I'll make it up to you.”
“That would be great, dad.”
But I'm not holding my breath
Wall wrapped his arms around Tom, who stood and book it.
Tom got into his car and began driving away. Looking In the. Mirror, he could see Walt waving him good-bye, opposite of the way it used to be when he was a little kid and his father would drive off to work in the morning. And farther behind, in the half-shadow of the front door arch, there was Emma, watching.
Just before he reached the comer she turned and went back inside.
W
ill moved to Chicago the weekend after Tom returned from his trip to Los Angeles. Merrill Lynch transferred him there, at his request. It wasn't New York, but it was a big step up. He'd be running his own section with more autonomy, and they were giving him a large raise.
The firm had rented a beautiful apartment for him in a six-story pre-war brownstone in Lincoln Park. The new digs were on the top floor of the building. The front door opened onto a small foyer, which spread out into a thirty foot-long living/dining room, with built-in Art Deco cabinets, that ran the length of the building, front to back. There was a full-size, well-equipped kitchen, two large bedrooms each with its own private bath, an additional guest half-bath off the foyer, twelve-foot-high ceilings with elaborately carved crown moldings, and sweeping bay windows that looked down onto the street, which was shaded by a high arching canopy of birches, aspens, and elms.
“The baby mogul's moved up to the high-rent district,” Callie quipped, as she walked from room to room, checking it out. She dodged the delivery men who were bringing in some of the new furniture Will had ordered. “There's going to be a conga line out the door once the babe hot line gets the word out that Will Gaines has moved to town.”
“I wish,” he said with a grin.
Callie ran her finger along the burnished cherrywood wainscoting in the dining room. “What're you going to do with all this space?”
Will, his arms laden with hanging clothes he'd carried up from the U-Haul he had driven from Minneapolis, grinned good-naturedly. “Throw wild, debauched parties, of course.”
It was a fabulous apartment, but he could well afford it. His company was paying part of the rent, they had paid for his moving expenses, and had given him a furniture allowance. What he hadn't told his brother and sister-in-law, because he didn't like to blow his own horn, was that one of the big New York bond firms had tried to steal him away and he had used their offer as a bargaining chip. He also didn't tell Clancy that he'd insisted on being sent to the Chicago office, which was bigger than the Minneapolis one–their second-largest. He could have gone to the home office in New York, which would have accelerated his climb up the ranks, but he specifically wanted Chicago. The enormity and intensity of New York was off-putting to him– he wasn't ready for that radical a change yet. He young, he had time. Unless he completely screwed up he”d still be a partner by the time he was thirty-five. New York could wait a few years.
The main reason he had wanted to come here, though, rather than remain in Minneapolis or move to New York, was family He would be living in the same city as his oldest brother and sister-in-law, and Tom was a three-and-a-half hour drive away, less than an hour on the Detroit-Chicago shuttle. It was important now for the brothers to be close, not only emotionally, but in actual physical proximity.
He and Clancy had talked to Tom, after Tom had returned from Los Angeles. The old man's behavior had been ugly and selfish, but it was in character with the way he'd been acting for the past year, so that information, although it pissed them off, wasn't a surprise. What had really scared them was Tom's discovery regarding Walt's nonstatus at UCLA, and the phantom job offers. Either their father had gone round-the-bend delusional, or he was weaving a dense web of lies about his life.
And it had gotten worse. During the past few days Will and Clancy had contacted the archaeology programs at every major college and university in California that had one. The information they had uncovered was uniformly bleak. None of the name schools—Stanford Berkeley, USC, the other UC schools that had tendered ogy departments, the Claremont Colleges—had tendered faculty positions to Walt. Most of the departments they'd gotten in touch with had not been in contact with him at all. No lectures, no symposiums, nothing. They knew Walt had left Wisconsin but none of them had any knowledge of his whereabouts, particularly that he was living right under their noses. There were a few allusions to the circumstances that had driven Walt from Madison, and one cryptic comment about La Chimenea, but otherwise it was a blank slate.
The brothers hadn't wanted to dig deeper into the life of Walt Gaines. Now, with these new and stunning revelations added to the information Tom had discovred they felt they had no choice.
Though the bay windows, the sun could be seen going down over the darkening treetops. The guys opened folding chairs around Will's new dining table while Callie spread out paper plates, plastic utensils, and cup –– the regular stuff was somewhere in the stacks of unopened packing boxes that were strewn about the floor in the midst of the rest of the furniture, which hadn't been arranged yet.
Tomorrow, Will would start putting things in order. He had time to shape the place up, he was taking a week off before starting in at the new office. Tonight was for kicking back. And after dinner, serious talk.
But first, a toast. Callie poured from the bottle of Taittinger she had brought to memorialize the occasion and held her own glass aloft.
“To Jocelyn Murphy Gaines,” she said in a clarion voice “We will never forget you.”
The brothers nodded gravely and drank. Then Clancy stood and raised his glass. “And to Walt Gaines. We'll never forget you, either, dad, no matter how hard you try to make us.”
The Chinese food they'd ordered in was good but the meal wasn't festive, not the carefree celebration they had planned for when Will had told them he was moving to town. There was unfinished business hanging over their heads now a cloud that was following them wherever they went. While they ate, they talked about everything except Walt. How it had gone at Finnegan's today, what kind of crowd to expect tomorrow—a larger-than-usual one, since the were on the road for a critical game against the Redskins. Clancy had ordered four extra kegs, and he'd need them They talked about today's game, a cliffhanger that Northwestern had won at the final gun on a blocked field attempt from point-blank range. They talked about Will's new neighborhood, where the good restaurants were, the good bookstores, clothing stores, coffeehouses.