Stealing Flowers (17 page)

We weren’t alone with Gayle until the next
morning. After Mary and Stan had left to work, she made us a
breakfast of cereal, fruit, toast and orange juice. She looked a
little better the next morning and seemed friendlier. When we were
done, she turned and said. “Go and brush your teeth, dears, then
run along and play.”

To a kid, the words ‘Run along and play,’
means, ‘Don’t bother me!’ To my ears, they were the sweetest words
I could imagine coming from Gayle. I knew there would be no trouble
between us. We stayed away the whole day, even for lunch, which we
had at Bert’s. She made us say prayers at night, grace at meals,
and talked about being a Catholic. I listened to her on this
matter, as I would have to any unhappy person, only
half-seriously.

In the whole week, only one event occurred
to alarm me. I couldn’t swear for sure, but I think that she caught
Sally and I kissing on the lips. Una came back after a week, and
the following day, we packed up and headed west, bound in the
direction of Cedar Heights where Una’s little pretty lake sat near
a wildlife reserve in a sparse cottage area know for its natural
unblemished habitat.

After we arrived, Una unpacked the Lincoln
and Sally and I paddled out in the canoe, hardly stopping to look
inside the cottage. This was our sixth time there. It was a small
lake with a tiny island in the center and thick woods all around
its edge. We hiked around the island on a familiar path and saw
beaver, muskrat, eagles, and other animals. The cottage had no
motor boats, but had a dock and a large raft. The next day, Sally
and I packed a picnic for the island. It promised to be an
extraordinary bright day. We spent the whole of it on the opposite
side, completely naked, sunning, swimming, eating, and cuddling.
Though we liberally applied tanning lotion several times, by four
o’clock, it was obvious that we’d made an enormous mistake. We
hurried back to the cottage.

“Una, we’ve burned ourselves,” I cried
running into the cottage. She rose and looked us over.

“You don’t look too bad,” she said. I showed
her my buttocks and she gasped. She then pulled down Sally’s
shorts. Both of our bums had second degree burns and were already
blistering. The rest of our body was pink.

“Take off your clothes,” Una said and
studied us naked more closely. “You need to go to the
hospital.”

“Mom and Dad would know we were sunbathing
in the nude,” I said, “they would realize . . .” I left the rest of
the thought linger.

“Come with me,” she ordered with a frown. We
dreaded to go back into the sun but we obeyed. From the porch she
pointed to a tree on the edge of the lake which drooped all the way
to the surface of the water on one side and to the ground on the
other. “See, under the willow, how shady it is?” The aged tree had
thick foliage and entirely blocked out the brilliant sun. I had
hardly even noticed it before. She got two large umbrellas with
dark blue and red mosaic patterns. “Take these and stand in the
cold water up to your waist. That’ll keep down the blistering. I’ll
be back in a half hour.”

When she came back we were both still out in
the lake under the enormous weeping willow, shivering. Certainly we
must have looked like two fools and Una couldn’t stop laughing.
That evening, and the whole night through, Una applied cream of
silver sulfadiazine on our burned areas using her gentle rub and
making us drink glass after glass of cold water. I applied cream to
my testicles and penis, they too were burned. I remember it as one
of the most painful nights of my life, and shameful, I apologized
to Una.

“My full grown child,” she said, “stop
apologizing.”

Sally cried through much of the night. We
stayed indoors for four days straight, fretting to sit and trying
hard not to lie down. The only comfortable position was standing,
but how long can any one person stand? By Friday, Una looked at us
naked again.

“Thank God that’s over,” she said, “I don’t
have to look at your bare behinds one more time. Now. No more nude
sunbathing. Next time you’ll be scarred for life. What if our
neighbors up here ever saw you? Word would get back to your parents
lickety-split.” We both nodded. “If your secret ever became public,
there would be a dear price to pay and believe me it would change
just about everything.”

How true those words would turn out to be.
The next summer, we again visited the cottage, but this time, for
two weeks in early July before our jobs at Tappets started.
Straight A’s may have prevented this, but we didn’t even try. We
were warned by Una before hand that all the A’s in the entire world
wouldn’t change it. We were both to work in the Hoboken offices
with Mary and Stan, or at least so I believed. The thing I remember
about the cottage that year was that Stan and Mary were away for
six days.

Sally and I slept together every one of
those nights. I couldn’t have been happier. In the morning we would
hike and in the afternoon we’d swim and laze around. We often
played board games with Una, Life, Monopoly, and Scrabble, or
cards, especially Crazy Eights. Una would cook, knit, and read
business books. In the evenings, she’d read aloud to us. She’d
brought a book with her that was frightening and depressing. It
made me an anticommunist for the rest of my days. Page by page,
volume by volume, The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexandr I.
Solzhenitsyn, unfolded, right hot off the press in 1974, read
expertly by Una.

Sally and I would stay up to eleven o’clock
listening intently to her dramatic Jamaican accent. How she took on
the voice of the narrator and made it her own resonant one, full of
emotion, telling of the pathetic lives of so many feckless
imprisoned people. She often stopped to explain a term or a deeper
meaning of the author’s intent or the players behind it. Marx,
Lenin, and Stalin became in my eyes, the most evil people the world
had ever seen.

The author’s sardonic wit against the
lugging inept bureaucratic system, often we would stop to laugh,
made the facts all the more appalling. The unrelenting horror of
belonging to such a senseless society, struck deep inside of me. It
couldn’t be true. Any American my age, even a orphan, would deny
such a horrible reality. Who wants to believe in such planned chaos
created solely for the benefit of an idea? How could people be so
stupid and slavish? This is exactly what would happen to Sally in
the years to come.

On July 16 at eight a. m., Sally and I
accompanied our parents to the Hoboken Head-Office to start our
lives in gainful summer employment. Although I thought I would be
sad, I wasn’t. Sally left with Mary and I never saw her for the
rest of the day. I sat in my dad’s office and Isaac brought me cold
apple juice and coffee for Dad, then left. I knew Stan had a
meeting at ten with the Stanroids, and we had come in early to
talk.

To me, ‘to talk,’ meant to negotiate, but
this year I’d very little with which to bargain. Straight B’s mean
nothing to the Tappets. Stan’s office was much the same as before,
except now, he’d a stereo system and the curtains were drawn so I
couldn’t see the buildings of the Manhattan skyline, although with
the smog that day, perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to see much
anyway. Stan shuffled through some paper until he found a lined
bright yellow one with his handwriting on it.

“On Monday and Fridays,” he said, “you’ll
come here to work with us.” He tossed me a large hard-covered book,
This is Tappet Industries. “Read this. It’s pretty current. We’ve
sold Arpedia Incorporated and gained no new holdings, so it’s
fairly accurate as well. Isaac is going to show you how we keep the
company-records, I’m going to teach you the history of the company,
and Mary is going to show you how we continue to make money on a
daily basis, you know, business-philosophy and such.

“On Tuesdays, you’ll join Lloyd Mills at
Modal Oil and he can show you the ins and outs of life in Ken
Roxton’s fiefdom. On Wednesday and Thursdays, you will meet Ralph
Peat from an industrial shop in East Orange who subcontracts for
Factory Bright, a genius of a maintenance/engineer-guy, and he’s
going to work with you so that you can learn to build a
refrigerator with spare parts, I mean, from the ground up. After
you’re done that, you will move on to stoves, micro-waves,
dish-washers, and other things we manufacture. Your work, I’m
afraid will be mostly in the guise of training. Can you handle
it?”

I nodded, and felt actually quite relieved.
It sounded rather exciting and a smile almost escaped my lips, but
I hid it with my hand and gave a short cough.

“Much due to Mary’s guidance,” he continued,
“Tappets practice diversification, a strategy of holding different
kinds of investing to reduce the risk of loss. To achieve this
we’ve followed a policy of purchasing things for which my friends
and I have a natural preference, such as household appliances,
electronic equipment, and machine tools. We produce precious metals
and oil as a matter of following the basic rules of in-house
discounting. Buying real estate also helps to attain
diversification, but most of our profit comes from Spectrum Sound,
Tappet-Tapes, Tonal-Flex, Factory-Bright, and Sursheita
Companies.”

“But you started with Thorp Tools?” I asked,
perplex. He nodded. “Why is it still called Thorp Tools and not
Tappet Tools?” I asked further.

His kind eyes focused on me. “Don’t ask Mary
that. She’s known as Queen Stringent in the American Manufacturing
circles. If no one ever heard the name Tappets that would be fine
with her. In 1953, when I patented the Tappet special adaptation to
the industrial lathe for machine tools, we started a revolution in
making precision tools. The new lathe allowed Thorp Tools to
manufacture standardized-precise instruments and to produce them
economically.

“Once industrial computers were introduced,
through Mary’s lead, we began to produce downright cheap precision
tools and became the largest manufacturer of them in the world. You
can get one of our portable circular hand-held power-saws with a
high-speed rotating blade for a hundred dollars. With the right
blade, it can cut through anything. As in regards to Thorp Tools,
even from the time of the original arrangement, Jim Thorp played
only a secondary role in the company. To entice me to set up shop,
he kept only the name and his pension fund. He was on the verge of
bankruptcy when we bought . . . he was a drunk, a philanderer. We
wanted his factories and employees so as to start-up and build
tools quickly. As you’ll read in This is Tappet Industries, Thorp’s
took off at once and Mary didn’t waste a single dime of its
profit.”

“Are you a genius?”

I could see his smile was gone and he looked
as though a debate took place in his head, but the humor stayed in
his eyes. “I’m a happy person, son, and I’m lucky to have Mary in
my life. Without her, I would have spent every red penny I earned
at Thorp Tools on inventions and have been no further ahead.”

“Why do people whisper that Una runs the
company?”

He grunted. “That’s a good question,
Christian. It’s part jealousy, part truth and part strategy, but
that is best left answered for another time. Perhaps Mary should
answer it. Essentially, there are twelve companies which make up
Tappets.”

“Ken Roxton is CEO of Modal Oil,” I said,
interrupting him and naming the Stanroids first. I’d come ready for
this part and listed them perfectly. I then named Mary’s close
allies, all five of them, which, as Una had explained, was why Mary
sometimes lost the votes, even though she held the power.
Ultimately, when the votes came, Stan had one more than her.

“Who has taught you all this?”

I saw he was impressed, even alarmed. “Una,”
I answered.

“We’re off to a flying start,” he said
happily. “After my meeting, I’ll take you out to lunch. Where
too?”

“McDonald’s,” I said in a rush.

He frowned and begrudgingly nodded. I was
happy. I loved Big Macs. We talked for sometime until he and Isaac
left for their meeting. I’d to deliver the office mail and this
took the rest of the morning. I tried to get a message through to
Sally to let her known that I’d scored a major lunch coup, but she
had been smuggled out of the building or something by Mary’s
forces.

At McDonald’s, I ordered a large coke, a
large fry, and a Big Mac. Stan shook his head and ordered a glass
of water. He read, The Wall Street Journal while I ate. The next
day, Larry drove me to Modal Oil’s offices, located in a low-rise
industrial complex which took up a whole block off Broad Street,
west of McCarter Highway and Harrison. Like in Hoboken, I saw no
logos, signs, fountains, flowers, or anything fancy. A small sign
on the front of the property, Clifton Park, 20 Edgeley Blvd.,
Office Space for Rent, and a phone number was all that identified
it. I said good-bye to Larry and reported to the receptionist area
staffed by a woman with brown bouncy hair who smiled
warm-heartedly.

“Take a seat, please, Mr. Tappet. I’ll get
Lloyd.”

This was not unusual, everywhere I’d go
inside Tappets, everyone knew me as Stan’s son. I had the feeling
that Stan wanted it that way, maybe he was even proud of me, but
this seemed like too much to expect.

“Ken is in Japan,” Lloyd said, coming in to
the reception area and shaking my hand. “He told me to look after
you.” Lloyd was seventeen now and as lean as ever. He’d somewhat
regained the look of a predator with his thin face and haunting
blue eyes, but this was still softened by long brownish-blond hair.
There now was also happiness in his eyes. They weren’t hidden
behind some murky memory as they had been in the past. I was upbeat
about this. It was his grimy grease-smeared work-clothes that
scared me. Lloyd looked down at them, following my line of
vision.