Savages, Page 3

  “He knew you were coming.”

  Something about his ice-blue eyes told you that, just like his forebears, Arthur Nimrod Graham watched for the main chance. Although Nexus was no longer entirely a family owned business, Arthur merited his place as its president, because he was as shrewd, tough and implacable as his ancestors. Arthur’s suits may have been hand-tailored by Huntsman, the Royal tailor in London’s Savile Row, but the man who filled those suits was an old-fashioned Yankee entrepreneur, whose family motto was WHAT WE HAVE WE HOLD. Arthur believed that the best form of defense was to be the first to kick the other guy where it hurt, and everybody of any importance in Pittsburgh knew this. He was sixty-two years old, silver-haired and chunky, but still fighting fit as he walked into the library. He paused, beamed and held his arms wide to Lorenza.

  “How’s my girl? Not driving too fast, I hope. There’s my grandson to consider.” He chuckled. “How’s Andrew? Taking good care of my girl, I hope.”

  Arthur wasn’t aware of the sharp edge of his joviality, as his arms enfolded the only person in the world that he loved. He wasn’t saying she was perfect, in fact he knew she was a little scatterbrain, but his daughter was full of energy. He would agree that she wasn’t beautiful, but you had to admit that Lorenza had irresistible charm—the bright blue eyes and the little white teeth always seemed to be smiling with infectious delight, as if you were the only person in the world she wanted to see, as if she trusted you completely, as if you and she were conspirators in a secret world. Arthur didn’t realize that it was easier to have such magical charm if you were not distracted by life’s exasperating realities, such as waiting in the rain for a bus, carrying groceries, arguing with repair men or paying their bills with money you can’t afford.

  To date, nothing worse than a toothache had gone wrong in Lorenza’s life and Arthur was going to make damn certain that nothing ever did. As Lorenza in her Brussels lace wedding dress had waited with her father for the “Wedding March” to start, he had turned to her and said, “Don’t forget, my darling, that if you ever have any problems you don’t want to discuss with Andrew, you tell your papa! Andrew must see you’re not dependent on him.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be, Papa?”

  “Because dependency destroys self-confidence, my darling.”

  Charmingly, Lorenza had lifted her veil and kissed the tip of her father’s nose. “Darling Papa, you worry too much.”

  After the ceremony Arthur had taken his new son-in-law aside and said amiably, “Take care of my little girl, now.” His eyes had added, “Or I’ll break your neck.”

  “I love her as well, sir.” Andrew had smiled politely. “You can have her on alternate weekends,” he added softly to himself as Lorenza pulled him through a shower of rose petals toward the helipad at the side of the house, where the Nexus helicopter waited to sweep them to the airport, where the Nexus Lear waited to whisk them to Belle Rêve, the Nexus island in the Caribbean.

  As she waved at the helicopter growing smaller and smaller, Silvana had worn her indulgent-mother smile, but she had felt left out of life, forgotten.

  She still did.

  * * *

  “Where am I? Who is this person in bed beside me?” Annie’s heart was constricted, her forehead was sweating, she was breathing hard and she felt nauseous. Beside her, in the pearl-gray light of dawn, Annie’s husband mumbled in his sleep. She touched his warm back for comfort. Of course. She was in her own bed, in her own house, and Duke was lying beside her.

  So why had she woken in a panic?

  Then she remembered that tonight was Arthur’s birthday party. In the dim light she could just see the clock; the alarm wasn’t due to sound for another hour. Beside the glass of water and the copy of Time magazine (which she always read right through, to keep up), she could see the silver-framed color photograph of her family that had been taken at Lorenza’s wedding. Had the photographer taken two hours, instead of two minutes, he couldn’t have achieved a more perfect example of the all-American family. Annie, wearing blue silk, stood in the middle of the group, obscuring Silvana’s Corot seascape on the wall behind her. Annie’s left hand rested on the shoulder of fourteen-year-old Rob, the brightest and noisiest of her four sons, who looked ill at ease in his first adult suit. On Rob’s left—solid, rugged and reliable—stood Annie’s husband, Duke. She thought he looked like John Wayne in his prime, only not so tall and of course he carried a bit more weight. Annie would be lost without her husband, because Duke looked after everything. Annie didn’t even know where the insurance forms for their house were. (The gracious antebellum house with the pillared porch had been a wedding gift from Duke’s parents and was singularly inappropriate for the noisy, sporty lives led by its owners.) Annie didn’t want to know where the insurance forms were, she had had enough of filing documents when she was Duke’s secretary.

  In the photograph, next to Duke, grinned Fred, the eldest of their four sons; he never looked tidy in a suit, God bless him. Fred was a mathematician, doing graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and still, thank heaven, living at home. Annie dreaded the day when all her sons were gone from home and there would be nothing to do in her silent house except empty the ashtrays. To Annie’s right, in front of one of Silvana’s pianos, stood Bill, unsmiling, with his hands in his pockets. Bill, the Romeo of the family, was still at college. The girls couldn’t leave him alone—Annie and Duke had had to give him his own telephone when he was fourteen. Next to Bill was Dave, who, at nineteen, was the best-looking of the boys, although of course they were all attractive in their own ways. Gazing at her sons, Annie thought that at least she had done something right. Four sons was exactly what Duke had wanted—in fact they often behaved like five brothers together. That reminded her, she’d better get the banister fixed again….

  They were a football family, as the local glazier could testify. There was also a baseball diamond at the end of the yard, their pool had a proper diving board and they’d had a basketball hoop fixed in the ballroom, which was really only used for table tennis. When Annie’s sons weren’t horsing around or training or playing, they were watching other people play, as they cheered on the Pirates, rooted for the Steelers and howled at the ref on behalf of the Penguins. Dinner-table talk tended to center on what should have happened during the last game and what had better happen at the next one.

  Annie was going to feed them all earlier than usual tonight, because it was the maid’s night off and Annie hadn’t wanted to ask her to change nights. But it didn’t matter. Before she dressed, she would fix hot dogs and hamburgers. The boys wouldn’t mind a snack, just this once, instead of a meal.

  At the thought of the party, panic set in again. Annie’s head felt as if something was squeezing it, and she was short of breath. She hoped she wouldn’t drop anything this time. At Silvana’s last party, the one where poor Suzy had ruined her dress in the pool, a canapé had simply collapsed in Annie’s fingers and dripped cheese sauce down her white satin formal. She hoped she wouldn’t make a fool of herself tonight. But if she said nothing, then Duke would throw her one of his looks, and if, obediently, Annie jerked out a few words, then—in spite of Time magazine—people tended to look surprised by what she said. So the perspiration would start beneath her arms, her hairdo would sag and she would quickly disappear into the bathroom. However, there was a limit to the number of trips and the amount of time she could spend in the bathroom, or else Duke would growl on the way home, “For Chrissake, you’ve known all these people for years! You grew up here! You yak-yak for hours on the telephone, then you can’t open your mouth at a party, in front of all my colleagues.”

  She knew that Duke wished she were a better hostess and felt it would help his career if she were, but she was too timid even to try. She forgot or mixed up people’s names. She could never stand, calm and gracious, at the entrance to her ballroom saying one charming (and different) sentence to two hundred people in turn, as Silvana could.

  Silvana m
ade Annie feel dowdy and clumsy. She was always so elegant and remote, and her flower-filled house always looked as if she were expecting the House and Garden photographers any moment. Of course, Silvana had plenty of help—but then, so did Annie.

  Running her family seemed to take up all of Annie’s time. She didn’t know how other women found the hours for outside interests—proper intellectual interests, not stuff like fundraising or doing needlepoint covers for the dining chairs, anyone could do that sort of thing. Sadly Annie wondered if the Labrador pup had found her needlepoint, because it had disappeared again. That reminded her, she had to phone Father O’Leary before ten, about the kneeling pads she was working on. In turn, this reminded her that it was her responsibility to do the flowers this Sunday at St. Paul’s, in Oakland, where she’d worshipped all her life. Annie had once bought a selfhelp book called How to Make Time!, but after two months she still hadn’t found the time to read it, then the Labrador ate it.

  Unfortunately, needlepoint kneeling pads and church flower arrangements didn’t seem to interest Duke’s business associates. Sometimes, after an evening of business entertaining, Duke would simply sigh, and they would drive back to Fox Chapel in silence. Sometimes, Annie would timidly say she was sorry and Duke would yell, “For Chrissake, stop apologizing!” Whereupon Annie would sit there beside him, making herself as small as possible and wondering if she should take that course in dynamic self-projection that Duke had once suggested.

  She couldn’t help feeling apologetic toward Duke, because he’d never really chosen her, he’d been stuck with her. Annie’s dad had been the Company Coordination executive at Nexus, and after junior college he’d sent her to take a secretarial course at Mrs. Parker’s, then pulled strings to get her a job at Nexus, to give her something to do until she got married.

  Annie had been Duke’s temporary secretary for one whole summer. During the first few weeks she had regarded him with never-diminishing awe. She saw him through his own eyes, and with the same self-importance. Anxious to please him, she sprang to take his dictation, fill his water carafe, check the office bottle of Wild Turkey and anticipate all his other needs—so much so, that after they’d been working late one night Duke wasn’t surprised to find himself humping that pretty little red-headed temp on the office carpet. He’d had no idea that this was her first time until weeks later when, looking even whiter than usual, she had told him that they had a problem. Well, if you had that sort of problem in Pittsburgh in 1952, you got married, especially if the girl’s father was your boss.

  The warm mound next to Annie grunted in his sleep and turned over, causing the quilt to slip to the floor. Carefully Annie slipped out of bed, tiptoed around the four-poster, picked up the quilt and replaced it, covering Duke’s shoulders. She was so proud of him. If Duke were only ten years younger, he would be taking over from Arthur as president. There would be no question about it. But it was just as well that he wasn’t trying for the job.

  One thing Annie had to admit was that Duke was not a good loser—in fact it was one of the things that made Duke’s Irish temper blow like a volcano. Of course, he wasn’t physically violent, and he had never laid a finger on Annie in his life—well, hardly ever, if you didn’t count that time she’d forgotten to video the Pirates’ play-off, but then he didn’t realize what he was doing until he saw the bruises on her arm the next day. The boys always kept well out of sight when their father was in one of his moods; they could spot the buildup and take cover, and they knew that he was always sorry afterward. The entire family was aware that certain subjects, ranging from Commies to Gay Lib to bad school marks, were certain to cause a rage, and so Annie would try to watch for them in conversation and attempt to sidestep a whole stream of topics before they came up. If she failed to do so, she would placate her husband by agreeing with him.

  They always knew his mood as soon as he came in the house in the evening by the way he shut the front door—the degree of slam acted as a barometer. There had been a bad time, a few years after they were married, when Duke had been passed over for promotion. Every night before he came home Annie would find herself short of breath, then she’d get this feeling of panic. She’d hurry the kids to bed early and make sure that there were no skates or baseball bats around for Duke to fall over—because if there were, he would—and then she would just wait, heart thumping and stomach knotted, for the hurricane to hit. She always went to church the day afterward, because it calmed her agitation and helped her to stop feeling distressed and frustrated because she hadn’t been able to soothe his rage.

  The boys had never discussed their father’s temper with her. They’d grown up with it, so they accepted it as part of their lives, but they were all silently ashamed of his rages and simply disappeared if, when he came home, the door slammed fit to shake the house.

  Annie was also ashamed of it. She had never talked to anyone about Duke’s terrible temper, except for her mother, who sighed and said that lots of men didn’t realize that they were bullies, and women just had to put up with it … At least Duke was a good provider.

  That had certainly proved to be the case, because Duke was now VP Comco—and Vice President of Company Coordination Worldwide was a very great responsibility.

  In his sleep, Duke flung an arm up and again dislodged the quilt. Again Annie slid out of bed and replaced it, tucking it around his shoulders. Accidentally she backed into his bedside table and one of the silver picture frames fell on the rug. She picked it up and looked at the grinning redheaded skier in a pale blue suit, flicking through the slalom poles. Harry had taken that picture of her shortly after he’d joined Nexus, the year before she’d married Duke. She’d be seeing Harry again next week and she couldn’t help feeling nervous about it. Harry became more of a problem, not less, as the years went by.

  As Annie tiptoed around to her side of the bed, she caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror. In the ghost light of dawn, in her crumpled white nightgown, she looked pleasantly pale, rather than colorless and skinny. You couldn’t see the hollows in her collarbone; her white, freckled forearms were covered with fine, gold down, her once-red hair looked golden, instead of faded ginger. But as the sun rose and light flooded the room, Annie clearly saw her unprepossessing reflection and, for the first time, felt dubious about what she’d planned to do that day.

  Again Annie’s heart constricted with fear. She told herself not to be so gutless. She was determined to try—just for one night—to look as stunning as Suzy. Suzy was so full of life, she had such impact and if her clothes were a little flamboyant at times, well, Suzy was always a knockout.

  No, this evening, Annie wouldn’t have a thing to worry about. She had been planning her appearance for weeks, and Suzy had been helping her. Suzy had picked the outfit, Suzy had arranged for a professional makeup and this morning she was going to Suzy’s hairdresser.

  This evening, just for once, Annie was going to make Duke proud of her!

  * * *

  Two miles away, another woman also lay in bed, watching the hands of her bedside clock move toward six in the soft light. Thinking about Arthur’s party, Patty had bitten her thumbnail to the quick without realizing it.

  Patty slid out of bed, taking care not to wake her husband, Charley, who was vice president of the Legal Department and corporate counsel at Nexus. Quickly she wriggled into her navy jogging suit and crept quietly downstairs, because their son, Stephen, wasn’t supposed to wake for another hour.

  She let herself out of the massive oak front door, heavily embedded with knockers, studs and other bits of ironwork that looked as if they’d been made by the early settlers and contrasted oddly with the three, supposedly burglarproof, chrome locks.

  This was the only part of the day that belonged to Patty. She took her pulse, then started to warm up with slow stretches against the door for her hamstrings and calves, followed by toe rises on the doorstep. After that she did two splits on the lawn before setting off.

  Jogging slow
ly along the deserted streets, passing one neat grass patch after another beneath maples turning autumnal shades of russet, she wished that, after all, she’d bought a new dress for the party. But they needed every spare penny for the trust fund, and saving was like dieting—you couldn’t allow yourself “just one” anything. But of course the wife of the future president of Nexus would play the same sort of role as an ambassador’s wife, and being well dressed was part of that job. As she rounded the first corner, she wondered whether Silvana got an official dress allowance from the company to cover all those Valentino numbers.

  Patty quickened her stride. The first five minutes were usually the worst. After that she hit her rhythm and it got easier. She liked fartlek, running steadily but varying the pace—fast, slow, medium. It was a good technique for long-distance runners … Damn it, why hadn’t she bought a new dress—she should be doing everything possible to help Charley get the promotion. Everybody said that her husband was the best corporate counsel Nexus had ever had, and at fortyfive he was just the right age—he’d be forty-eight by the time Arthur had shepherded him into the job and retired. Charley would have fourteen good years ahead of him before it was his turn to pick his own successor.

  Of course, Arthur hated the thought of anyone taking over the helm, as he jovially put it, but everyone knew that he’d been pressed by the Board to make his final decision before the end of the year. Undoubtedly the Paui trip was going to be decisive, unless Arthur decided to bring in someone from outside. But Charley had told her this only happened when a company wasn’t doing well—which wasn’t the case. The Board wanted someone who’d been with Nexus a long time and who had worked with the top-level staff in the various Nexus-affiliated companies around the world.

  Maybe she should reconsider her clothes for the convention next week, Patty thought. Maybe a little spending at this stage was really an investment. Because the next president would undoubtedly be decided on this trip. Arthur was playing his cards close to his chest, but his successor had to be one of the guys on the Paui trip. The group was far smaller than usual this year. Why? So that Arthur could make a final selection, that was why. And the reason he was taking so long about it was because he wasn’t only handing over his job, he was also choosing the person who would be responsible for his family fortune, that large slice of Nexus Mining International which was still owned by the Grahams.