“It’s been eight months since the bubble burst, Jack. You’ve been through enough cycles to know how short institutional memories are. People are hungry for anything that looks promising. We may be one of the first in the queue.”
“There’s so much enthusiasm we’re upping the amount of the raise from four hundred to four fifty. We might get close to four seventy-five if the trend continues. Our loans will turn out to be enormously profitable.”
“Don’t jinx the karma, Jack. We’ve still got a lot of work to do and the planets need to align. I’m glad we went over there. It’s an exceptionally gracious family.”
The cleaning crew entered the plane. One lonely stewardess held her suitcase handle and waited as politely as she could for Kate to move, but she was doing a poor job of hiding her frustration with this lone stray passenger.
“Is that why you called? I have a number of messages from you and Clive.”
“Actually, no. Let me go inside. It will be quieter,” Jack said. Kate heard the voices of Jack’s grandchildren in the background and then a door sliding shut. She gathered her things and headed toward the terminal while Jack was relocating himself for the call. She apologized to the stewardess when the woman rushed past her.
Kate sat on one of the chairs at the gate while Jack continued. “That’s better. I called you a number of times because we need to talk about Mike’s tender offer. The board wants to talk to you, tomorrow morning if possible. I know it’s short notice, but we’re under tremendous time pressure. I hope you can accommodate them.”
Even if she hadn’t committed herself to spending the day and the next one and the next one after that with Sarah and Mack, Kate would have resisted the idea of spending Sunday morning in Drake’s office or even on a conference call discussing the game plan for Drake’s defense to the tender offer. “I’ve been too absorbed in Barcelona to put together a game plan, Jack. And frankly, I’ve been running on nothing but fumes to get through this last period. Peter’s leaving in two weeks. I need to disconnect for a few days to spend some time with my family. We have a whole new reality to contend with.”
Jack hesitated. “Actually, Kate, before they talk to you about leading the charge against Mike’s offer, a couple of them want to discuss why you felt compelled to look into Ed and Steve’s trades. I’m sorry to be so blunt about that. I tried to dissuade them. They both were quite adamant.”
Kate knew there was no point directing her anger at Jack. He hadn’t been the one to raise the topic. Jack even seemed a bit embarrassed to be delivering the message.
“Let me guess. Karl and Bud,” Kate said, naming the two directors who were closest to Ed. Ed bought Karl Stein a seat on the New York Stock Exchange when Karl married Bea Rose’s younger sister and then fed Drake’s trades through him for thirty-five years. Buddy Bender made millions when Ed suggested he franchise his bagel shop.
“You’d find out soon enough when the questioning started.”
At one point in her career, certainly at the beginning when she had to outwork and outsmart all the others in her entering class at Greene, Kate might have toadied to Jack and to the board. But not now.
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful to you, Jack, or even to the board as a whole, but I’m not going to subject myself to a public hanging by two guys who owe everything they have in life to Ed.” After months of being unable to do anything other than to capitulate whenever Ed or Clive or even Steve asked for still one more piece of her soul, it was elating to find her voice. “If they don’t trust my judgment to get us through the tender offer they should find another jockey before this race starts.”
Jack was silent.
“Or maybe Drake should find another board to shepherd it through what’s coming.”
Jack’s laugh was derisive. Kate presumed he was shaking his head at the audacity she was showing but knew he was stuck with her. “Marty Lipton told me the same thing,” he said. “Marty guessed you’d say pretty much what you just did. He was too polite to say the board is just a bunch of old men, so he told me we need a wartime consigliore.”
“We can learn a great deal from old men, Jack, so long as they possess wisdom and judgment.” She thought kindly of Michael Hirsch. “Ours just might not be the right group of old men. We need to be able to convince our shareholders and potential partners and investors to bet on our team instead of on Mike. It’s hard to generate much enthusiasm for a board that’s been Ed’s lap dog all these years.”
“That’s all well and good, Kate, but they’re still the only board we have. What about the meeting in the morning? May I ask you to reconsider?”
“No, Jack. No means no. If the board wants to look forward I’m it. If they want payback because I stumbled onto what Ed and Steve were up to, I’ll finish up the Majik road show, get the offering launched, and clean out my desk.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Sarah and Mack wouldn’t be home from school for two hours. Peter was at the computer in the kitchen, emailing his new Chinese warlords.
She put her arms around him from the back and touched her head to his. They didn’t kiss or even move for over a minute. She whispered, “I did it, Pete. It was glorious.”
Kate pulled back, but then touched Peter on his shoulder. “I’m going to take the kids to Spain in May. I’ll get you the details so you can arrange to meet us there.” She stopped. “If you want to...” The need to add the caveats was more than a frustration.
Peter rotated in his chair. He hesitated, as if he were as unsure as Kate was about how much of himself to offer. But after a moment, he put his arms around her waist.
She wriggled in his arms. “I’m hot and sticky. Rather than take a shower I may jump in the pool.”
Peter laughed. “Let me know if you want company. If so, I’ll be the guy standing next to you with an erection and a shit-eating grin on his face.”
She kissed him. “Thanks for letting me know. Now I’ll be able to recognize you. Give me twenty minutes alone, though. Bring towels.”
In time, Kate would let Peter join her in the pool, embrace her, and enter her, but before that she wanted the water to buoy her and to carry her along with the sense of weightless freedom Michael Hirsch said he drew from living near the sea.
She left her clothes dangling on one of the chairs on the patio. It felt oddly liberating to be naked and outdoors. She knelt on the coping and tested the water with her right hand. On the top step, she bent her knees and cupped some water. She trickled it down her arms, her breasts. When her feet finally touched the bottom of the pool, she plunged her head under the water in a rapid moment and then kicked off from the side and began a slow and steady underwater glide to the other end. Peter always began his time in the pool this way. Kate was at best the occasional swimmer.
The water around her was a turquoise blanket, colder below the surface than at the point where the sun baked it. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the sting of the chlorine. She was a quarter of the way to the other end by the time she needed to take a stroke, and then with one broad and sweeping arc, she brought her arms first together at the top of her head and then firmly to her sides. There was no sound except her heartbeat.
She felt a tightening in her chest as the air in her lungs became consumed near the middle of the pool, at the point where the bottom began to slope away toward the deepest portion.
Kate didn’t enjoy the pool as much as Peter did because she couldn’t remember a time in her life when she wasn’t afraid she would suddenly lose the ability to enjoy something as fundamental as breathing. Her father developed emphysema when he was forty. His hacking filled the house in the morning when he tried to spit out the phlegm that built up in his lungs while he slept. He woke at five because he would drown if he didn’t. Some days he would go into the office and sell advertisements. Others he was too weak to work. And then, when he was forty-two, he tried to take one last breath and died.
Kate’s lungs were empty now of their original air. She felt a knot in her forehead. She could rush to the surface for escape, but she wouldn’t let herself. Michael Hirsch hadn’t let the water defeat him or even touch the rubbing he had tucked into his notebook and then down the front of his pants when he was no bigger than Mack. But he escaped to manhood.
Fighting the tender offer would be difficult under any circumstances. It would be a gruesome public examination of all of her shortcomings, a battering of lies and ridiculous accusations spinning around the internet. And the claim behind the shareholder litigation that she put her interests above those of Ascalon would be repeated so many times it would become common wisdom among those who read no further than the headlines. And it would stay on the blogosphere forever. And then Sarah and Mack without Peter.
Kate took one more broad stroke of her arms and came even nearer to the edge of the pool. In the few times she’d tried to swim an entire length under the water, something always stopped her. Fear. Lack of tenacity. Disorientation.
But she would not let herself fail this time. She couldn’t. Who was there to bail her out if she did?
THIRTY-NINE
It was a little after eight thirty. Sarah was on her bed doing her homework.
Kate wasn’t one of those parents who complained about twelve-year-olds having to spend three hours a night plowing through everything from algebra to zoology. That kind of effort got Kate where she was today. Besides, there were kids in Hong Kong and Beijing spending eight hours a night doing the same thing and relatively few spots available each year at the Ivies. That was one of the reasons Kate was so thrilled Sarah embraced her music. It opened doors, even if at the moment Sarah feared those doors wouldn’t be at Carnegie Hall.
“Let me show you something cool,” Kate said, fidgeting with the mouse on Sarah’s computer. She found a picture of Montserrat, with the sharp teeth of the mountains above it. Kate then went into one of her photo albums and copied a picture of Sarah leaning over her cello, her hair spilling over the middle of its cello’s neck. She placed the picture in the middle of the field.
Sarah moved around on her bed so she could see what Kate had done. “What is that?”
“You at Montserrat. It’s in Spain. North of Barcelona. Look it up. I told Michael and Bibi Hirsch we’d meet them there in the spring.”
“I don’t know those people. And besides, putting me into that picture feels like you’re trying to manipulate me. Are you?”
Kate smiled. She loved both the clarity and the directness of Sarah’s mind. “Of course. And you’ll meet them soon enough. You’ll love them both. It would be so awesome if they could hear you play.”
There was a bit of silence before Sarah reached into her backpack. She put three books on her bed. They were littered with pink Post-it flags. She opened one and began reading in a dramatic voice. “Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?”
Kate tilted her head in surprise to the coarseness of the language.
“I’m not going to play for complete strangers or anyone else. I can’t be a concert cellist. You need to get that idea out of your head. Did you hear me? You need to get that idea out of your head. I’m not half as good as the kids at camp. And when I realized I couldn’t play at their level I tried writing some simple music and I’m a complete failure at it. I don’t know why I ever picked up the damned cello in the first place.”
So the teenage years had come to the Brewster household. A bit early, perhaps, but as jagged and ragged as they always are.
“No swearing, Sarah. What are you reading?” Kate asked. She hadn’t recognized the quote.
“Death of a Salesman. Biff is bursting the balloon of Willy’s illusions about him. Rather fitting, I’d say.”
On parents’ night, Kate was impressed by Sarah’s new English teacher. While a small knot of parents whispered why he might have dropped out of divinity school, Kate was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Who could challenge someone who said he’d introduce their children to Augie March and Gatsby as though they were his close friends and he wanted to expand their circle? To Willy Loman? Kate could no more blame him for putting those words in front of Sarah than she could criticize Arthur Miller for writing them. But Sarah’s blind devotion to those words lacked context.
“There’s a lot more going on in that story than is going on in this conversation, sweetie. You can’t take one line out of a play and hang it around your neck so you can’t lift up your head to see the future ahead of you.”
“There’s a lot of failure around here these days, Mom. Dad. Me. Maybe we’ve all got the Dortmund curse. Look at all that failure from Biff’s perspective. He wasn’t able to live up to his father’s expectations any more than I’m able to live up to your idea I can perform professionally.”
Kate had expected to spark Sarah into a few giggles and give her a pat on the behind, not to plunge into a conversation with someone who seized upon a few random words from something she’d just read as though they were the Holy Grail. She dreaded the idea her daughter might turn into Kate’s freshman roommate, a commodities trader’s daughter from Winnetka, Illinois, who’d tried every drug, every French film, and every boy on campus before the Thanksgiving break.
Kate moved to the edge of Sarah’s bed.
“You know what, Sarah, I respect your maturity enough that I’ll give you a strong dose of the truth. Your father’s leaving will be difficult for all of us. Terrible. And I’m being pulled in a million different directions. But I’m not throwing up my hands.”
“I hate the idea that he’s leaving.”
At least Sarah hadn’t asked this time whether her father ever would be coming back. Or whether Kate wanted him to. The answers were uncertain; the stakes enormous. “I hate the idea as much as you do, Sarah. And it’s going to be even worse for Mack. I’m going to need your help. A lot of help.”
Sarah nodded.
“But let’s not change the subject. Talk to me about your music. It sounds as though you’re afraid of something and someone that I don’t think you should be,” Kate said. She put her hand on Sarah’s knee. “Talk to me, Sarah.”