Christine

“I… I don’t know for sure,” I said slowly. Because, after all, what did I have? Vapours, that was all.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Not right now, Dad, if it’s okay.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “But if it… as you said on the phone, if it gets heavy, will you for God’s sake tell me what’s happening?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” I started for the Stairs and was almost there when he stopped me by saying, “I ran Will Darnell’s accounts and did his income-tax returns for almost fifteen years, you know.”

I turned back to him, really surprised.

“No. I didn’t know that.”

My father smiled. It was a smile I had never seen before, one I would guess my mother had seen only a few times, my sis maybe not at all. You might have thought it was a sleepy sort of smile at first, if you looked more closely you would have seen that it was not sleepy at all—it was cynical and hard and totally aware.

“Can you keep your mouth shut about something, Dennis?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

“Don’t just think so.”

“Yes. I can.”

“Better. I did his figures up until 1975, and then he got Bill Upshaw over in Monroeville.”

My father looked at me closely.

“I won’t say that Bill Upshaw is a crook, but I will say that his scruples are thin enough to read a newspaper through. And last year he bought himself a $300,000 English Tudor in Sewickley, Damn the interest rates, full speed ahead.”

He gestured at our own home with a small sweep of his right arm and then let it drop back into his own lap. He and my mother had bought it the year before I was born for $62,000—it was now worth maybe $150,000—and they had only recently gotten their paper back from the bank. We had a little party in the back yard late last summer; Dad lit the barbecue, put the pink slip on the long fork, and each of us got a chance at holding it over the coals until it was gone.

“No English Tudor here, huh, Denny?” he said.

“It’s fine,” I said. I came back and sat down on the couch.

“Darnell and I parted amicably enough,” my father went on, “not that I ever cared very much for him in a personal way. I thought he was a wretch.”

I nodded a little, because I liked that; it expressed my gut feelings about Will Darnell better than any profanity could.

“But there’s all the difference in the world between a personal relationship and a business relationship. You learn that very quickly in this business, or you give it up and start selling Fuller Brushes door-to-door. Our business relationship was good, as far as it went… but it didn’t go far enough. That was why I finally called it quits.”

“I don’t get you.”

“Cash kept showing up,” he said. “Large amounts of cash with no clear ancestry. At Darnell’s direction I invested in two corporations—Pennsylvania Solar Heating and New York Ticketing—that sounded like two of the dummiest dummy corporations I’ve ever heard of. Finally I went to see him, because I wanted all my cards on the table. I told him that my professional opinion was that, if he got audited either by the IRS or by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania tax boys, he was apt to have a great deal of explaining to do, and that before long I was going to know too much to be an asset to him.”

“What did he say?”

“He began to dance,” my father said, still wearing that sleepy, cynical smile. “In my business, you start to get familiar with the steps of the dance by the time you’re thirty-eight or so… if you’re good at your business, that is. And I’m not all that bad, The dance starts off with the guy asking you if you’re happy with your work, if it’s paying you enough. If you say you like the work but you sure could be doing better, the guy encourages you to talk about whatever you’re carrying on your back: your house, your car, your kids'college education—maybe you’ve got a wife with a taste for clothes a little fancier than she can by rights afford… see?”

“Sounding you out?”

“It’s more like feeling you up,” he said, and then laughed. “But yeah. The dance is every bit as mannered as a minuet. There are all sorts of phrases and pauses and steps. After the guy finds out what sort of financial burdens you’d like to get rid of, he starts asking you what sort of things you’d like to have. A Cadillac, a summer place in the Catskills or the Poconos, maybe a boat.

I gave a little start at that, because I knew my dad wanted a boat about as badly as he wanted anything these days; a couple of times I had gone with him on sunny summer afternoons to marinas along King George Lake and Lake Passeeonkee. He’d price out the smaller yachts and I’d see the wistful look in his eyes. Now I understood it. They were out of his reach. Maybe if his life had taken a different turn—if he didn’t have kids to think about putting through college, for instance—they wouldn’t have been.

“And you said no?” I asked him.