Too Much Too Soon (53 page)

After a long pause, Gid said, “You can’t be talking about the whole shooting match.”

“Who else can step in for Ramsay?”

“This weather’s gotten to you, Mom. It’s called jungle fever.”

“I didn’t fly across the Pacific to make jokes.”

“There’s maybe a thousand people in Talbott’s better equipped than I am.”

“Dear, must you always underestimate yourself? You’re a natural-born engineer. And the clients”—a Taiwanese company that had been formed with enormous capital of shadowy
sources—“insist on you.”

“They know I got my degree a year and a half ago?”

“You’re a Talbott. For Orientals the important thing is family. With Ramsay gone they’re
insisting
on one of the family.”

Gid went to the window. She could not see his face, but his shoulders were hunched. “How long into the project do they demand kinfolk?” he asked.

“They didn’t mention a date.”

“I was counting on getting home.”

“I’d never ask this of you, Gid, but I’m in no position to argue. You know they were ready to give Ivory the job until we agreed to take a three million cut in our management fee.”

Gid touched the silver identification bracelet with his fingertip, sighing.

“We’ve never attempted anything this large on our own,” Crystal added with a break in her voice.

Resolutely Gid turned to face her. “I’ll give it my all,” he said.

Crystal dabbed at her eyes. “I knew I could count on you, dear,” she said, embracing him.

*   *   *

One evening the following week she was in her sunken tub when the bathroom phone buzzed. It was Gid. “Anne and I’re in Port Moresby,” he said.

“Anne?” The line was a bad one and her falsetto squeak bounced back at her.

“Congratulations, Mom. You’ve been a mother-in-law for nearly ten minutes.”

She looked down at the still perfect white body. How calm she was. Alexander had spoken the truth. Time does blur emotional responses. When the lively voice of the new Mrs. Gideon Talbot III came through the receiver, Crystal welcomed her into the family with a trill of pretty, echoed laughter.

Alexander had strolled the length of his mother’s impressive new office to set the green-paper-covered government publication on her desk. Sunlight gleamed on his bright hair as he turned at the windows. The plate glass was streaked, partially obscuring the brilliance of the view of San Francisco and the Bay, but at this height window washing couldn’t be at her whim. When the new Talbott Group World Headquarters building in the Financial District was being planned, Crystal had chosen the southeast
corner of the thirty-second floor as her own, designing her bailiwick so that visitors walked forty feet to her desk, behind which—like a stern reminder of God—hung the larger than life, chiaroscuro portrait of Gideon.

Frowning, Crystal ruffled the thin, cheap pages with her thumb, and saw that there were over four hundred of them filled with testimony about monies paid out as bribes in foreign countries.

“This kind of garbage makes me ill,” she said. She was not using a figure of speech. A queasy sensation shifted through her stomach whenever she read denunciations of overseas payoffs in the newspapers or saw the chastened company officials on the News. “I never heard of anything so insane as this persecution, this witch-hunt. Congress knows how business is done in this country, they come to us for campaign contributions, so hearing that we have to pay through the nose in other places can’t be any great shock.”

“It’s necessary for Congresspersons to revirginate themselves each election year.”

“Hypocrites! On one hand they talk about the country needing a good balance of trade, and on the other they talk ethics. Do they think we love paying out
mordida, dash, baksheesh?
”

“Don’t get so worked up, Mom. Politicians live on the perfume of sanctity, not the reality of it.” He lifted his eyebrows expressively.

Alexander knew about politicians, both American and otherwise. In the two years since that evening in Tokyo he had wooed large, juicy
government contracts adeptly as a juggler, smoothly as a magician, setting up an invisible web of intermediaries to distribute a staggering annual $20,000,000 from three Zurich banks. Talbott’s earnings this year, 1976, would be close to a hundred million. The company had climbed far, far from the slump caused by Gideon’s death.

Suddenly she clutched the book. “Alexander,” she asked breathily, “you aren’t trying to tell me they can trace the Swiss accounts to us?”

“No way,” he said. “Our connections are all safe in countries where Congress can’t subpoena them.”

“Then what’s the point of this?” Crystal’s diamond flashed blue fire as she tapped the drab, cheap binding.

“I was thinking about the press coverage if there were an investigation of the grease in the Mideast.”

The second button on her telephone lit up, but the phone didn’t ring: Alexander must have arranged with her secretaries, as he often did, that this conference remain inviolate. Trapped between love of her son and exasperation at his maneuvers, she said, “Alexander, if you’re talking about Ivory, just say so.”

Hands in his trouser pockets, he strolled back to the desk and took a peppermint from the Ming bowl. “I’m simply pointing out that with the gas prices and the lines outside service stations, the country’s not exactly in love with Arabs. The media’ll pounce on startling revelations
about hanky-panky with them.”

“
I
’ve never heard of Curt using anything more than grease.” In numerous countries unless underpaid civil servants were remunerated with small sums—the so-called grease—documents remained unfiled, telephone calls weren’t put through, minor but problematical sabotage plagued jobs.

“I happen to know otherwise. There’s some Ivory papers ripe to fall into the proper Congressional hands.”

“How will
his
being investigated help us?”

The smell of mint spread as Alexander unwrapped the cellophane. “For you Talbott versus Ivory has set rules,” he said. “You throw the dice and hope you land on a good space. When Ivory throws his dice, you hope he lands badly.”

“Alexander, we aren’t talking about Snakes and Ladders.”

“No, we aren’t.” Alexander popped the candy in his mouth. “I want him gone.”

“Gone?”

“No longer a player. Out of the game.”

She glanced at the window and saw a child’s red balloon drift upward and out of sight. Alexander was asking her permission to ruin Curt Ivory, her enemy, her rival. His father. Surely her own goal. So why should her eyes suddenly itch, as if with tears?

Her expression must have showed something of this outrageously misplaced sense of loyalty to the man she hated.

Alexander slumped in one of the Queen Anne
corner chairs opposite her. “Forget it,” he muttered. “Just forget it.”

There was no manipulative artifice in his resentment, only a boyish bitterness. Unwanted came the memory of a foggy night, a pine-odored hill and Alexander’s hard hand gripping her arm. She, dressed in teenager’s thrift-shop motley and stoned out of her skull, had said aloud what should have remained forever sacrosanct. She told herself that his vindictive tangle lay at her door.

She mustered an unarguable point: “An investigation could easily rebound on us,” she said. “You know how the press loves to dig.”

He got to his feet, no longer sullen but debonair. “All they’ll find in our backyard is the skeleton of a very small mouse.”

“And Ivory?”

“What’s disinterred will surprise everyone, including the playboy of the Western world.”

“Curt? Are you saying he doesn’t know what’s going on in his own company?”

“He soon will.” Alexander came around the desk to kiss her on the forehead. “He soon will.”

After he left the office, Crystal pressed a button in the paneling and went into her small sitting room. Her sanctum sanctorum. She stretched on the swan-necked daybed that had graced Empress Josephine’s boudoir at Malmaison, pressing icy fingertips to her forehead.

But why should she assume Alexander’s plan would boomerang? Hadn’t his ideas proved invincible? Hadn’t he always anticipated her
own goals, and then led her toward them? Witness l’affaire Gid. Gid was doing a bang-up job at the Tasi and Anne was pregnant. Though Crystal dreaded the elevation to grandmotherhood, her raging antipathy to her lively, freckled daughter-in-law had long ago evaporated. She proudly displayed copies of
Ambilineal Descent
by Anne Hunnicutt-Talbott, PhD, on her office desk and in all her homes. When the younger couple came home on leave, she entertained for them, she laughed at their affectionate bantering—indeed, she enjoyed Gid’s company far more than she had in his single days.

Why should I be so worried? We have every sort of connection in Congress. President Ford and two of his cabinet are personal friends. And as for Curt, he deserves what he gets, saying that monstrous thing about Alexander, never once approaching him, running around the world with every cheap starlet. God, how he’s humiliating poor Honora.

Behind her closed eyelids, she saw her sister’s long, tenderly pretty face, her lovely dark eyes.

As Crystal went into the bathroom for a Tylenol, she said aloud, “It might make no sense to me now, but Alexander’s a genius at this kind of thing.”

Honora circled both hands about the bulb’s intricate root network as she set the tulip in the ground. Careful of the pointed foliage, she
patted the moist, richly mulched earth back into position, then shifted on her damp, mud-encrusted jeans a few inches to her left to measure the length of her trowel and plant the next flower. These black tulips, shipped this morning from Amsterdam by the Jan van der Helst Nursery, weren’t black at all of course, but a deep, reddish purple which blended artlessly with the soft blue of ruffled forget-me-nots and the more intense azure of
Iris reticulata
being set in place around the bare-branched wisteria by the two gnarled old gardeners. The small Belgravia garden was romantically informal—or would be when it was completed.

Tentacles of pain rippled from the base of Honora’s spine, but she scarcely noticed. When she was doing an installation she was possessed—there was no other word for it—by the necessity of placing each plant in the exact right spot of earth. This wasn’t labor but—like singing or dancing—a joy that obliterated all else. Her medium of creation. Though the physical touch of the soil was part of it, she did not normally put in this much stoop labor. One of the workers, a Pakistani, had called in sick—“Drunk, more like it,” was Vi’s opinion. Honora didn’t really mind doing the work. And she would save the Pakistani’s pay.

She always needed a bit extra.

In the two years since she had taken over from Mavis, the referrals had flourished gratifyingly, yet the financial inefficiencies of her youth plagued her still. She never could get the
hang of adhering to penny and pounds, she never had a clue to the mechanics of budgeting. What were you meant to do when a necessity cropped up? For example, she would set aside a sum for Lissie’s clothes: the school had no uniform, so they shopped for hand-knit Irish and Norwegian sweaters, the practical kind that last forever, to wear with warm trousers. Then, sure enough, Lissie would receive a rash of brightly printed invitations, which meant nice gifts and another party frock—the elaborate, fragile garments Curt bought her in California were almost pointedly useless in this colder climate. And how could she mention to Joscelyn the small checks she wrote to Langley’s nurses for overtime when her sister was already paying Lissie’s walloping school fees? (Honora, who scrimped to pay her half of her father’s expenses, guessed that Crystal, too, contributed: Langley, as ever, refused to discuss finances.)

A branch of the Victoria line lay underneath and the ground shuddered as the train went by. Honora didn’t falter in her measuring and planting, but her expressive dark eyes saddened.

She was thinking of Curt.

Misty, hazy thoughts. Anguish and ecstasy are equally unrecollectable. In the four years of their separation she had lost exact memory of the mental and physical torment of that final scene at the Mamounia. Neither could she recollect the languorous fever when they made love. The coloration of his voice and expression had faded like the soft Liberty print blouse she wore under her fisherman’s sweater. She was
left not with a man but with an emotional texture. The shiver of happiness on her skin when they embraced, the protected safety she felt with him, the purpose his energy imparted to her, the warmth she felt during those shared evenings while he worked and she read—ahh, the shared warmth of those evenings.