Hunger of the Wolf (16 page)

T
he Wylie women died together in the winter of 1960. Danny Swift and Alfio Belpaese, snow removal men working for Champlain Township, noticed a drift curling up and spilling like an obscene white tongue through an open window on the first floor. To Alfio and Danny, trepidatiously investigating the freezing dark halls and then traumatically stumbling on the corpses, the women looked more still than dead—Marie posed palely on her red-satin covers in the bedroom, Kitty on the kitchen floor as if she had sat down one morning and simply forgotten to stand up. The whole town of Champlain whispered about suicide pacts, about murder followed by regret, about simultaneous accidental heart attacks. Champlain's coroner, questioned at the Rotary Club or the hockey rink or the waffle house, would say nothing. He told his wife, who told everybody else, that Kitty had probably collapsed from an aneurysm and Marie, immobile in bed, had starved to death.

One fact was not in dispute. The Wylie men were elsewhere. At the moment the coroner's
report was declaring pneumonia the official cause of death, Dale was forking steak into his mouth, mid-negotiation for a television station in the barroom of the Hotel Vancouver in Seattle, George was shading his eyes from the glare of the sliver of Atlantic visible from the Wylie offices on Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, Lee was unsheathing from a manila envelope the production schedule of a paper mill in Butte, Montana, and Jack was tossing down the iced dregs of a Pimm's with gin in a topless bar in New Orleans.

Dale rushed back to what he would have to call home and arrived just in time for the funeral. Graveside, the rest of the mourners were half-remembered boardinghouse women who had traveled from as far away as Texas and Maine and Florida, and who leaned in to articulate, with phrases borrowed from women's magazines, the angelic selflessness, the seasonless generosity, the womanly givingness of Kitty and Marie Wylie. Dale was surprised by the dark. His heart was surprised to find itself drowning on a moon-heavy tide at the fancified gravesite that his wife and mother had orchestrated on the most expensive patch of Tender Hill Cemetery. Their monument was ridiculous. Carved from Carrera marble by a Baltimore sculptor who wore a lace cravat and quoted Walt Whitman at every opportunity, the grave lifted itself in a sickening boney glow. Even in the rain, the other graves seemed rotten by comparison. Kitty and Marie had splurged on immemorial grandeur after a life of scrimping cheapness, of pennies wrung from stained laundry. They had economized on a joint funeral at least. Dale was the only man there other than George: Who were these women who had been his?

*  *  *

The mechanism of WylieCorp had been rolling for thirty years, the whirlwind of credit sweeping all before it as the fifties blossomed into
the sixties. Moths had fluttered from the closets. Children skipped down the thoroughfares where the Better Business Councils had paid for the planting of sugarplum pansies and buttery daffodils. The memory of the war was folded up like a wedding dress and tucked, with embarrassment and glee, in the darkest corner of the national basement. Tumescence was general. Women's dresses opened, fluffed, fuchsiaed, shortened, acclimatized to patterns, paisleys, checks, polka dots. The lawns went shaggy. Bellies grew in the widening of the world's prosperity.

Dale had widened, too. He weighed two hundred and forty pounds and was worth a hundred million dollars. He had hustled for forty years. Then the women died and he stopped. He returned to the house on Larchmount Crescent and couldn't figure out the purpose. Why had he run through the country buying up whatever he could on whatever he could borrow? For what? For whom? And why had he written his will so George would have to inherit this miniature empire of zeroes? What did it matter? The questions swarmed over him, like ants over a peony, and like ants over a peony they picked and scraped and chewed the truculent ball until the rest of his life and its vast fortune crashed open in splatters. The simplicity of money had opiated his soul for half a lifetime and now he was living the nightmare at the end of envy: What if money means nothing?

*  *  *

The major transformations within the Wylie business, the decisions that set the company's course for the next three decades and turned them from local American millionaires into global billionaires, emerged as a more or less random response to the aftermath of the women's deaths. Dale's move to England, Lee's rise to COO, George's never-ending tour of the companies—they all came out of grief. Business continues
no matter who decides that business doesn't matter. Business is synonymous with change itself.

The transition was brisk. In April of 1961, Dale declared George CEO of North American operations. The executive committee of WylieCorp swirled into a suite in the Algonquin Hotel in New York for an emergency meeting. They found George chatting cheerfully with Lee Taggart about Gordie Howe. The Wylie kid, seemingly unfazed by the death of his mother and grandmother, smiled at each member of this ingathering tribe, inquiring about various scrupulously recalled wives and children, commenting on the prospects of the Yankees, noting the loveliness of the early spring in Central Park, patting backs, shaking hands. Once everyone had settled around the boardroom table, George excused himself as if he had forgotten his briefcase in the hallway. Lee Taggart remained. The next-youngest man in the room was twenty-two years older.

“The news is this,” Lee said. “I'm COO. I'm the power.”

Jeff Turgeson, V.P. of ad sales development, northwest division, couldn't swallow a laugh completely enough.

“You're fired,” Lee said.

With the brevity and brutality that would become his trademark, Lee Taggart's era at WylieCorp had begun. In the decades that followed, his efforts would convert the Wylie business from an aggregation of American companies into a transnational corporate empire. Oil money flowing in from the Texas investments poured into the purchase of legal publications and pharmaceutical journals. He began to sell off some of the less profitable newspapers as well. Lee Taggart foresaw the death of print in 1960. He worried about the possibility that a device would be created which would permit the broadcast of a newspaper into the home by means of radio. This single insight, murky and imprecise as it was, served as the intellectual basis of the Wylies' later fortune.

*  *  *

With the spring, a torrent of hunger and disgust began to flow through Dale Wylie again. He couldn't just sit around waiting to die. He despised the stuff of Larchmount Crescent, the doilies spread over the armrests like the untearable webs of very proper spiders, the useless piano nobody ever played, and the vulgar just-wrongness of everything that takes its smack of despair from women straining to be the same as all other women. Dale longed for the self-reliant huff of his powerful armpit in some anonymous hotel. But he knew that he would never return to the road again. Dealsmanship was his lost religion.

The threat of irrelevance caused a decision as wild as Alberta. Dale decided to move to Abermarley in Scotland.

“Why Abermarley?” George asked when they met to discuss the proposal in the WylieCorp offices. His father pitching him was strange, but the pitch itself was stranger.

“Expansion,” Dale answered. “There's a little newspaper there that's up for sale.
The Abermarley Gazette.
”

George failed to understand. “There are newspapers all over.”

“Britain is the second-biggest newspaper market in the world, and it would be a toehold.”

The idea was so ridiculous that George wondered if it was some kind of test. Would it be proof of his poor judgment if he agreed? Then again, what was he going to do, deny his father his own company's cash reserves? The choice made as little sense to George as Alberta had made to Marie Wylie forty-odd years before, but he agreed.

Dale kept his explanations to himself. Sometimes he believed that the possibility of a home pulled him there, the possibility of a place that might mean more than money. At other times he believed that the memory of
his father was carrying him backward, a return to roots, or that he simply wanted not to be bored in his old age. The truth was that Dale had no idea why he moved to Scotland. Nobody can give a name to instinct; we can only pretend that we know why we do what we do after we've done it.

*  *  *

Abermarley itself was old-world, a Scottish coal mining town of ten thousand, black men against green hills. It was a mining town but not like American mining towns. The men of Abermarley were not men who believed they could get lucky. They trudged from the mine to the pub to their wives to the Abermarley football club and then back to the mine. They bought what they were expected to buy. They enjoyed what they were expected to enjoy. They discussed the weather or philosophy. The local points of pride included a thirteenth-century church of cut stone, a cast bronze statue of the unknown soldier raising his innocent eyes in the middle of the roundabout, and the first rural post office in Scotland, a single room of redbrick, duly commemorated with a grungy plaque.

The business of the
Gazette
was simple enough. Dale moved in and cut everything in half.

For Dale, there was another point of interest, a small low house on the outskirts of town. An ancient knobby walking stick of a man he met in the Five Bells pub, whose trade was knowing all local affairs of no particular interest, informed him that Dale's father had been born there. The same figure of limping wisdom, in an accent as thick as sea foam, noted that the Wylies had been gamekeepers for the ruling family for hundreds of years. The low stones of a handmade wall squatted next to the private forests of the local manor.

The neighboring property, tucked behind the welcoming green hills,
was the county seat of Lord Fallis. Formerly secretary of information during the Second World War, owner of
The Record of London
and a string of nearly two dozen small newspapers in Scotland and the northeast of England, along with the mine in Abermarley and interests in Sumatran rubber, Lord Fallis was a Great Man who needed to ensure the G and the M stayed capitalized. He had Great Problems:
The Record of London
, through which he waged a one-man war on the ninety-five-percent tax rates for high-income earners; the Conservative Party; his four idiot sons by his first wife (who had committed suicide in the proper English fashion by opening her bluehearted blood to the gilded porcelain of a Parisian hotel
salle de bain
); his new wife; his new mistress; and the family estate, which consumed vast sums on upkeep. He would not, of course, have wasted the time it took to micturate on a nobody like Dale Wylie.

One morning in November, among the detritus and the ashen odor of the morning after Guy Fawkes Day, Dale was waiting for the bus outside the offices of the
Gazette
when Lady Fallis, née Marguerite La Montée, emerged in the lovely gray air of the main street. Loveliness was her profession. Her gray tweed suit, her gray eyes, tender in an unspoken but evident distress, bloomed with luxurious melancholy and warm restraint. Every person on the Abermarley street, her subjects, acknowledged her by not looking; she passed through the crowd on the high street with a berth of honor. So when Dale introduced himself and inquired if she might need assistance, to the townsfolk he may as well have walked into a painting of fairies and spoken to the diaphanous changeling queen.

Lady Fallis, as it turned out, had left her money at home and could not send a parcel on account. Dale lent her five pounds, which was paid back the next day via a greasy messenger boy from the estate's stables, who approached Dale's suburban cottage with the greatest suspicion.
The loan to Lady Fallis, however, had paid interest, even in twenty-four hours. Along with a note of thanks, she invited “her generous savior” to a shooting party the Saturday following, called at seven for eight.

Dale walked up to save the expense of a hired car. The driveway looped through the shutter of birdsonged English forest. Arriving a little before seven, in his walking clothes, carrying a bottle of Krug as a hostess present, he found the front door closed and presented himself at the servants' entrance—he managed thereby to commit four social faux pas before opening his mouth. The servants had no idea what to do with him. The butler stewarded the strange American to the library, leaving a footman until he could assure himself by speaking to Lady Fallis that the man was not an impostor.

Dale had not realized that a shooting party called at seven for eight meant that one was expected to arrive not slightly before seven, but well after seven, expecting to shoot well after eight. One was expected to bring one's own riding reds. And if one did not ride, one might as well choose to wait until before noon, to coincide with the midday meal. He was alone in the library for a good hour as the hunting party, consisting of Lord Fallis's sons and their various society friends from London, descended. The local gentry arrived in their Rolls-Royces or rode over from the neighboring estates, and the servants roiled in hubbubs of liquor and boots and chaotically curious leashes of slobbering hounds. Dale introduced himself to people who could not have cared less about his existence and who lowered their voices, once he had moved on, to ask who had invited the clerk. At eight-thirty, Lady Fallis appeared like the long-suffering wife of the spendthrift drunk in a two-act melodrama to apologize for Lord Fallis's absence. He was in his study on matters of urgent business; he would join them for lunch. Lord Fallis's eldest son, Roger, led the party in his father's place. They
walked out in a daze of clomping and barking and yipping, while the servants scuttled back to prepare the luncheon. Dale, a merciful servant suggested, might care to look over the grounds.

They were fine grounds. The Fallis estate offered among the finest examples of French gardens in the whole of England. Elaborate geometries of boxwood spiraled with the effortless declension of a shell down a low hill, on the far side of which sat an infamously dangerous coal mine, and the town's oldest graveyard, old bones and old stones that sat stacked over each other like rotting books. The near side presented itself in perfected quartered gardens that opened onto a series of fountained terraces and spread down to a small lake beside the woods, where anxious families of deer drifted and scarpered. Dale, flummoxed by ignorance and contempt, wandered up to a fake ruined abbey which one of Lord Fallis's Romantic ancestors had conjured onto the crest of a hill, just visible from the pleasance on the west side of the castle. There, among stones deliberately constructed to imitate decayed civilization, Dale Wylie leaned his head back and howled at his own stupidity. What the hell was he doing there? Why on earth had he left America? Why would anyone abandon the community of free men?