Adam's Daughter (8 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Adam sat at the dining room table, staring out the window. From the vantage point in his Pacific Heights home, the bay was blue and the sky cloudless. A beautiful morning, filled with promise.

He picked up the
newspaper spread before him and began to read. The Depression was deepening, the city’s neighborhoods were deteriorating, and out in the farming areas homeless migrants congregated in shanty towns called “Hoovervilles.”

No promise in the pages of the
Times.

Adam glanced at the date at the top of the page. January 1, 1930. A new decade had begun. A time to look ahead and hope for better things. Not a time to look back.

He looked at his watch. He felt sluggish, even though he had not had much to drink at the New Year’s party last night. He glanced at the other end of the mahogany table where the breakfast setting sat untouched. The maid came in and refilled his cup.

“Leave the pot, please,” Adam said.

She nodded and slipped out.

Adam set the newspaper aside. It was too damn depressing to read it, too hard to think about
the disparity between the despondent life reflected on its pages and that of his own. He was now editor in chief of the
Times.
He was a success. And he was a man of some means now, with a large home on Vallejo Street and a bright future.

“What time is it?”

Lilith stood by the door. She was wearing a violet silk robe but her face had a gray pallor.

“Just after seven,” Adam
said.

“I couldn’t sleep.” Lilith sat down at the table.

“You have a hangover,” Adam said. “You shouldn’t have drunk so much last night. You can’t handle it.”

Lilith sighed. “If you’re going to start lecturing me again, can’t you have the decency to wait until after I’ve had some coffee?”

Adam reached for the carafe, poured out a cup of coffee and slid it across the table. He retreated behind the newspaper. For a long time, the room was silent. Then he folded the paper and rose.

“Where are you going?” Lilith
asked.

“I have to go out.”

“It’s seven in the morning on New Year’s Day. Where in the hell are you —-” She paused. “Oh, God, not that stupid club thing again, Adam.”

“I have to go. I’m picking up your father on the way.”

Lilith laughed. “But Adam, it’s so ridiculous! Every year, grown men getting together to act like children. You and my father, you’d think this was some big family tradition or something.”

Adam paused, an idea forming in his head. Family tradition
. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He called for the maid.

“
Jenny,” he said when the girl appeared. “Get the baby ready. I’m taking him out.”

Lilith almost dropped her coffee cup. “What
?”

“You’re right,” he said
. “It is a family tradition, and Ian is going to become a part of it.”

Lilith shot to her feet. “You’re not taking that baby to this idiotic ritual! I won’t allow it!”

“He’s my son,” Adam said.

Jenny
returned holding a wicker carrier. Adam took it and started toward the door. Lilith ran after him. “For God’s sake, Adam,” she said. “He’s only two months old!”

Adam smiled. “I’ll take care of him.”

He hurried down to the car, ignoring Lilith as he put the basket in the backseat. As he drove off, he watched Lilith in the rearview mirror, standing on the porch. God, drinking always left her so foul tempered. Thankfully, she didn’t drink often. In the two and a half years they had been married, in fact, he seldom had found her truly disagreeable to live with. Her moods and her social climbing schemes sometimes irritated him, but living with Lilith was generally an untroubled existence. He had his work. She had her home and clubs. Now there was the baby. It was a comfortable life.

Robert Bickford was waiting outside his own home when Adam pulled up. Bickford jumped into the car with an eagerness that belied his age and weight.

"Ready for the old Hike ’n’ Dip?” Bickford asked. He was smiling. The man truly savored this annual event, even more so in recent years when Adam had joined him.

Adam glanced at Bickford. A heart attack last year had left him in weakened health. “You
sure you’re feeling up to this, Bick?”

“Sure. Haven’t missed one in thirty-one years!”

“We’ve got a new member to initiate today,” Adam said with a smile, and cocked his head toward the basket in the back.

Bickford’s face lit up when he saw the baby. “What a grand idea, Adam
. Three generations sharing the tradition!” Bickford was beaming. He loved having a grandson. “You know,” he said, “with you running the paper now it’s almost like you’re my son, Adam.”

Over the years,
Adam’s feelings toward Bick had softened. It wasn’t affection he felt toward him so much as charity. Bickford had struggled all his life in the shadow of his brilliant father and he had been unable to move the
Times
ahead. Bickford’s wife Catherine had died last year, ending their joyless marriage. His health was failing him. He had no sons. He was living out the remainder of his life finding little comforts wherever he could. And if Adam —- and now Ian —- were his comforts, who was Adam to take that away?

“I’m a happy man, Adam,” Bick
ford said softly.

“Me, too, Bick,” Adam said.

Adam steered the car down the coast road toward the country club, thinking about Lilith. Thinking, too, of Elizabeth.

It was almost impossible to think of one without the other, to think about what his life could have been with Elizabeth. He tried not to give in to such things. But something would inevitably remind him. A
silver flash of a window reflecting the sun. The clanking rumble of cable cars, a carved jade cat in a window in Chinatown. Someone laughing. Someone singing. Anyone with red hair.

At first, it had made him sick, this constant, desperate longing. He saw her face everywhere he went. And at night, when he craved the black relief of sleep, she would appear to torture him in his dreams. Then, slowly, the obsession hardened into a dull ache that occasionally, when he was absorbed in work, subsided but never totally went away.

It was about a year and a half after he had last seen Elizabeth, while he was routinely reading the
Times
, when he saw the announcement of her marriage. It was just a small story, buried in the society pages. Elizabeth Ingram, heiress to the Ingram fortune, had married Willis Foster Reed, a millionaire real estate developer and oil entrepreneur. The bride was eighteen. The groom was fifty-one. The story detailed the lavish wedding and told how Reed had given his bride a block of oil stock, a certified check for $1 million, a $10,000 diamond necklace, and had built her an Italianate mansion on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River.

Adam read the story several times. He hadn't realized until that moment that deep inside him, a heartbeat of his fantasies about Elizabeth had endured.
But with the announcement, any dreams he had harbored about her dissipated, like a final sad sigh. Soon after, he had married Lilith.

He drove on, watching a gull hover over the ocean in the overwhelming empty expanse of blue sky.

“I saw the new circulation figures yesterday,” Bickford said, interrupting Adam’s thoughts. “The country’s going to hell in a hand basket but we’re doing okay thanks to you.”

“We’re in this together, Bick.”

Adam was thankful to focus his thoughts on the newspaper. He thought with satisfaction about how much progress he had been able to make in the last three years. During the flush years just before the crash he had improved the
Times
’ finances, and the newspaper had even begun to prosper. Adam convinced Bickford to pour most of the capital right back into the paper for badly needed improvements. Lilith had protested, saying they should be able to enjoy their newfound fortunes. But Bickford, well aware of his daughter’s spendthrift tendencies, backed Adam. Bickford bought new presses for the photographs and rotogravure color Adam planned to use, and he authorized modest salary increases.

Then, two months ago, the crash had come, and overnight everything changed. The bottom fell out of advertising, with revenue dropping
forty-five percent. But circulation remained steady. Even in the worst of times, people still needed newspapers.

While Bickford and Lilith fretted constantly about the Depression, Adam kept a cool head. His plan was to keep the
Times
on a steady keel during the financial storm, poised for new growth when recovery began. He worked long hours, often not even returning home. Across the country, weak newspapers watched their small-profit margins evaporate, and some important newspapers perished. But the
Times
held steady.

So did Adam’s own finances. His natural frugality had given them a small cushion, and he forced Lilith to pare down. He had never invested in the stock market, so the crash left him almost untouched. For the last four years, he had been pouring every extra dollar into land in Napa Valley. Ten years of Prohibition had killed the wine industry, and the fallow vineyards were ridiculously cheap. Adam knew Prohibition would someday end, so he kept buying, slowly, acre by acre. When opportunity came, he would be ready.

Adam steered the car around a curve. The sun glinted off the water in silver shards.

Elizabeth. She was suddenly there again
.

“Adam, are you all right?” Bickford asked.

Adam glanced at him. “I’m fine, Bick.”

“Well, pay attention, I have something to tell you.” Bick
ford paused. “I’ve had a new will made up —-”

“Hey, no talk about that today
.”

“We have to. It’s important.” Bick
ford turned to Adam. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about the newspaper. I want it to go on, Adam, after I’m gone.”

“Bick
—-”

“Let me finish. You know what I think of you and what you’ve done with the paper. Well, I know that you’d make sure it doesn’t die
. What I’m saying is that I’ve decided to leave you a majority share of the newspaper.”

Adam was so surprised he nearly drove off the road.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Bickford went on. “What about Lilith? Well, I love my daughter, but frankly she hasn’t got a brain in her head when it comes to money. I can’t trust her with the
Times
. She’d milk it to death. So I’m leaving her a forty-nine percent interest and you a fifty-one percent interest.”

“I don’t know what to say, Bick,”
Adam said. “It’s truly generous. Thank you.”

Bick
ford smiled. “Well, it’s not entirely unselfish. This way you get control of the
Times
but it still stays in the family. You and Lilith, running things together.”

Adam drove on, gripping the steering wheel. He hadn’t realized until then that he had been harboring a secret dream
-—divorcing Lilith. Now, with stunning clarity he recognized it for the fantasy it was. As much as he often regretted his marriage he knew divorce was not workable. Lilith would never consent to it. Besides, in some ways, his marriage was liberating. It provided a convenient framework for his life, freeing him to funnel his passion into his work. Divorce was just not feasible, especially now, in light of Bickford’s bequest.

At the country club,
Adam let himself be pulled into the socializing to take his mind off his dispirited thoughts. The presence of Ian, now lying awake but quiet in the basket, lent him a special cachet with the other men. Bringing a son into the Olympic Club was an exceptional event.

When Bick
ford had proposed two years ago that Adam join the exclusive men’s club, Adam had declined. He had always thought such clubs were for old men, those somber three-piece-suited souls he saw trudging up the steps of the Pacific Union Club on Nob Hill. But after he joined he quickly grew to love the club’s masculine elegance. The mahogany-paneled rooms filled with hunting prints and the chandeliered dining room. The dark bar where deals were quietly closed over surreptitious scotch. He especially liked the swimming pool, where he would do laps to work out the day’s tensions, beneath a beautiful stained-glass dome.

The club was the only thing that forced him to occasionally emerge from the
cocoon into which he had been retreating lately.

No, not the only thing. Now there was his son.

Adam took the baby out of the basket, holding him tenderly for the other men to admire.

“
A fine boy, Adam,” someone said. “A future Olympian, of course.”

Adam smiled. “That’s why he’s here today.”

The thirty-seventh annual Hike ’n’ Dip, at the club’s oceanside annex, was about to begin. It was a sunny unseasonably warm day, and everyone was standing outside wearing bathing suits, laughing and kidding. A dog barked and jumped with excitement. The tradition called for a sprint across the dunes to the ocean and a plunge into the water to wash away the old year and begin the new.