Crazy for Cornelia (3 page)

Chester had inherited the seat on the 840 Fifth Avenue co-op board from his father, and felt crushed by his duties as its
chairman. He had no question that the owners at large needed him to stand up to the reactionary owners who dominated the board.
He secretly thought of them as the Amazing Stone Heads of Fifth Avenue—blockheads stuck in the ground like the relics on Easter
Island. Nursing prejudices formed as spoiled children in Herbert Hoover’s time, they still tried to snub every applicant whose
surname ended in a vowel, inviting lawsuits. Chester knew that these geriatric brats would all cling to their seats until
death removed them.

At least Chester had prevented 840 Fifth from becoming a total
viper pit, tangled with bickering and litigation. He tried to keep the truly disagreeable applicants away from the board,
not even allowing them to go through screening. Then he dealt with the most irate and arrogant rejectees. When they bellowed
and stamped their tasseled feet, threatening to sue over some real or imagined slight, Chester’s pacific nature became an
asset and not the liability it tended to be in his business.

If he couldn’t understand the dizzying world of high tech that was changing his company, or even handle his own daughter’s
behavior, by God, he could still choose his neighbors.

He stepped heavily down the broad sweep of staircase. His ancestral co-op’s elliptical, marble-tiled foyer stood two stories
high, with a wraparound balcony. An oversized crystal chandelier dangled from the vaulted ceiling. It had flickered inside
the Palace of Versailles on the day an angry mob beheaded its former occupant.

Crossing the foyer, Chester Lord IV avoided the paintings of the three Chester Lords who had come before him.

Chester had already indulged a secret fantasy after his father died. Although he couldn’t bring himself to break tradition
by removing the faces of the Lord men from the great foyer, he did take the life-sized paintings of all three ancestors and
order them reproduced as shrunken eight-by-ten prints. It usually amused him to pass the tiny heads, which he’d cut down to
size as surely as a Borneo headhunter. But today they managed to burrow annoyingly into his thoughts.

In their line of one-child families that produced only sons, the Lords’ starter fortune came from Chester Lord I, who founded
the Lord & Company investment bank in 1900. That mother lode made it difficult for his son to fail. Yet Chester II seemed
bent on losing the money anyway, growing too fond of wintering in Palm Beach to shuttle back and forth to Wall Street and
then cashing out all of Lord & Company’s stock market holdings. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Chester II barely got
his hair mussed.

Lucky Granddad.

When Chester’s father, Chester Lord III, took over after World War II, he invested in the black arts of Madison Avenue—advertising
and network television—pumping Lord & Company into an even richer and fatter enterprise.

The tips of Chester’s ears burned whenever he thought about his father. Today had brought back his eleventh birthday party
at the Westchester Country Club. When Chester missed a putt, his dad hectored him to keep shooting until all his friends and
relatives drifted off. At twilight, forty-seven putts later, he finally sank the ball.

Chester glumly forced himself to study business at Yale, aching to change his major to social anthropology. He envied those
students with their beards, tangled hair, and sloppy jeans, who seemed to bear the real problems of the world. During his
college years, Chester would gaze out the window of Finance 101 and fantasize. He had read
Coming of Age in Samoa
by Margaret Mead. How he yearned to run off to study those gentle islanders who only made love, not war.

But, of course, Chester had to join Lord & Company.

None of the cunning, pin-striped men who reported to his father took young Chester seriously. Sometimes he imagined that they
snickered as they passed him. He knew that the top managers met after work at watering holes like “21” and never invited Chester
to join them. They dismissed him until his father got a snootful and said at the firm’s Christmas party, “A Lord will always
run Lord & Company, even if he runs it into the ground.”

How prophetic. In the 1970s, Chester tugged at the short leash his father allowed him by investing in John Delorean’s new
automobile. In the 1980s, he sought safe harbor in the savings and loan industry. But he was soon fleeced by its slickest
operators, who bankrupted their S&Ls while buying yachts with twenty-four-karat-gold faucets for themselves. He constantly
stood trembling before his father’s desk, explaining why money practically bled out of his business ventures.

The berating only stopped when his apoplectic, workaholic father finally blew an artery and was wheeled out of his office
on a gurney. Chester fearfully took over the presidency. He floundered while the crafty managers around him circled and snapped.
He knew they were lining up outside buyers to force him out.

Desperate to find a loyal right hand, he hired his old Yale roommate’s son as his protégé—a fierce blond Young Turk named
Tucker Fisk, a football star at Yale with a Wharton MBA who had already cut a blazing swath through Wall Street.

Tucker proved to be more protector than protégé. As much as Chester shrank from confrontation, Tucker roared with the joy
of it. On the day they called Bloody Tuesday, Tucker lined up and summarily fired the executives who wanted Chester out. Then
he terrified the loyal ones by demanding letters of resignation to keep in his desk in case they should even think about disobeying
him. On Bloody Tuesday, the halls of Lord & Company rang with trembling voices swearing lifelong allegiance to Chester Lord.
But Tucker fired most of them anyway. He replaced them with his own people, young zealots with laptops who looked sixteen
years old to Chester and leapt at Tucker’s orders.

Then Tucker forged a bold and profitable alliance between Lord & Company and Koi Industries of Hong Kong. Chester recoiled
from the Kois, father and son. They were no better than modern-day pirates. The Kois would somehow get ahold of plans for
competitive products, probably by industrial spying, and quickly build cheaper knockoffs. The Koi sedan they called the Panda
looked like a toy Honda. The Koi computer blatantly violated Compaq and Intel patents. Still, Tucker’s partnership with the
Kois coined money for Lord & Company. Secure in his role as president and chief executive officer, Chester practically sweated
gratitude. He couldn’t even complain when Tucker pressed him to move the firm from its fine old quarters on Wall Street to
the garish Koi Tower on Madison Avenue.

Chester stopped to stare at his dad’s shrunken image. He wondered what the old man would think of the brassy new Koi Tower.

By the time his right loafer left the staircase and landed on the marble floor, Chester passed the only life-sized paintings,
of Elizabeth and Cornelia. His daughter’s smirk mocked him.

How could he meet people today, after Cornelia’s latest humiliating appearance in the tabloids? His upper body slumped again.
Then he rasped to himself,
Good God, pull yourself together
. Whatever happened to the code of his class, “Never complain, never explain,” immortalized by one of the Fords when police
stopped him for drunken driving.

Chester squared his shoulders. Duty compelled him to greet his guests with head held high, despite the damnable article about
Cornelia. He crossed the black and white tiles of the smart foyer and
headed for the living room. The family co-op consisted of twelve rooms, fashionably crammed with the plunder of centuries.
A sweeping hundred-foot penthouse terrace, relandscaped each season, dwarfed the tallest trees of Central Park and the spired
gothic sky-scrapers of the West Side.

By all rights, Chester should feel like Captain Zeus on the bridge of a mighty Olympian ship. His view of Central Park and
the West Side was unbroken to the Hudson River and the Palisade cliffs of New Jersey. Instead, he longed to hide anywhere,
even in one of his bathrooms.

He felt his heart skipping wildly. But it was only anxiety, not a deadly heart attack. He felt like a man held together by
Brooks Brothers and Scotch tape. Perhaps he’d be better off with a massive coronary like Dad. At least it would all be over
soon, and he’d have quiet and tranquility, a nice long nap. He took a deep breath, wiped his palms on his pants.

So what if he didn’t show up for the board meeting? They would reject all the applicants anyway. If tomorrow he pulled the
covers over his head and stayed home from Lord & Company, Tucker Fisk would run the business without him. What difference
did Chester make to anyone? With all his means, his influence, he couldn’t even help his own daughter.

When Chester passed the bathroom and saw his slumping frame in the mirror, he seized up in fright. He quickly pulled himself
up straight and pressed on.

Promptly at 3:00
P.M.
, late enough to justify cocktails but early enough so they wouldn’t doze off, the members of the 840 Fifth Avenue co-op board
gathered in the Lords’ sitting room. They consisted of four WASP males and a German Jewish widow—375 years of experience snipping
coupon bonds with Tiffany scissors.

The board members perched on fussy eighteenth-century chairs designed for people who wore powdered wigs and complained of
gout. Chester nodded to his Scottish butler, O’Connell, a sturdy, inscrutable presence. O’Connell still wore a plaid kilt
and long socks under his jacket and tie, and still rolled his r’s in a thick Highlander burr after
thirty years in New York. His large red hands busied themselves with ice cubes and ashtrays.

Chester sat at his living room desk.

“All right”—he glanced around the room—“let’s get to new business. As you know, the Biddle apartment has been put up for sale
by Eloise Biddle’s estate. We have twelve applicants who meet the financial criteria. We’ll vote today on which of them, if
any, we should invite up for an interview.”

Nobody objected. Thaddeus “Tad” Eames, a white-haired clubman who had never worked, licked his lips.

Chester read the first name on the list.

“Is he anyone?” asked Lily Stern, widow of the man who had inherited one of the world’s largest private banks. She scowled
so easily, her face might have been made of aged parchment.

“He was vice president, Lily.” Chester sighed as he added, “Of the United States.”

Lily’s face hardened. “No.”

“Well, we have to at least consider them, Lily,” Chester said.

“What for?” barked Tom van Adder, retired custodian of his family’s philanthropic trust. “He’s a Democrat, isn’t he? Besides,
there was a ridiculous picture of his wife in the newspaper—”

He froze in mid-sentence and looked at Chester, his voice dribbling off. The board members smirked guiltily, each reminded
of today’s picture of Cornelia in the
Globe
. Chester caught them in their dirty little moment: how they delighted in the misfortunes of others. What was the word for
it?
Schadenfreude
. Such a remarkably German concept. Chester swallowed the acid swelling in his chest, the reflux of anger and shame, and pretended
that the whole business wafted right by him.

“I think we should invite him up,” Tad snarled. “Ask him what he thought he was doing taxing capital gains. We can send their
rejection letter afterward.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes, Tad,” Chester said. “If we’re going to reject them, let’s just do it. On approval of their application,
yea or nay?”

“Nay.”

“Nay.”

“Nay.”

“Nay.”

“Nay.”

Chester began to argue, then thought better of it. He said nothing, and his silence made the room so packed with treasures
feel barren and empty. The board members glanced at each other, obviously feeling cheated by his refusal to fight back.

“Let’s move on,” Chester said. “We have a fellow who won the Nobel prize. Now he’s secretary general of the United Nations.
His wife is a surgeon.”

“Good Lord, no,” Tom van Adder sputtered. “He hails from one of the
debtor
nations.”

“Tom’s right,” Chip Lindsay said, bristling. “Those foreign U.N. people have diplomatic immunity. They can get away with anything.”
He shuddered. “The next thing you know, the city will come after us to pay his parking tickets.”

Chip had been ambassador to Bermuda during the Eisenhower administration and thought he knew politics. Like Chester understood
nuclear physics. Now, on top of it, Chip had memory lapses and had even worn pajamas once to a co-op board meeting. He noticed
for the first time Chip’s unusually large teeth when he pulled his lips back over his gums.

“I say nay.” Chip bobbed his head.

“Nay.”

“Nay.”

“Nay.”

“Nay.”

“Agreed.” Chester nodded. “We’ll just send them a letter.”

In the periphery of his vision, Chester saw Cornelia, who had shuffled into the living room wearing an oversized black terry
cloth bathrobe that dragged on the floor.

Corny, why now?

His daughter’s blond hair hung in a tangle, half covering her eyes. She stood in the center of the room behind the Stone Heads,
quietly observing them. He saw a hint of determination in her gray pupils, lit up with points of violet as though a furnace
burned deep inside.

The fire brought Chester back to the years when Cornelia was young, purposeful.

Chester shut his eyes briefly. He saw his wife, Elizabeth, and their daughter sitting scrunched together in their favorite
place. It was a little wicker love seat in the sunroom. Elizabeth would read to Corny from dog-eared books about the dead
inventor Nikola Tesla.
Tesla Towers! Free electricity for everyone on earth!
For a woman of her background, Elizabeth’s interest in the electrical wizard Tesla seemed as odd as Jackie Kennedy strapping
a utility belt onto one of her Halston dresses and asking for a schematic of the White House. But Elizabeth had ferreted out
the family’s ancient role in Tesla’s broken career, and the injustice of it inflamed her.