Galilee (15 page)

Rachel doesn't regret leaving Dansky. It was a claustrophobic life she lived here: dull and repetitive. And the future had looked grim. Single women in Dansky didn't break their hearts trying for very much. Marriage was what they wanted, and if their husbands were reasonably sober two or three nights a week and their children were born with all their limbs, then they counted themselves lucky, and dug in for a long decline.

That was not what Rachel had in mind for herself. She'd left Dansky two days after her seventeenth birthday without giving it so much as a backward glance. There was another life out there, which she'd seen in magazines and on the television screen: a life of possibilities, a movie-star life, a life she was determined to have for herself. She wasn't the only seventeen-year-old girl in America who nurtures such hopes, of course. Nor am I the first person to be recounting in print how she made that dream a reality. I have here beside me four books and a stack of magazines—the contents of most of which don't merit the word reportage—all of which talk in often unruly metaphor about the rise and rise of Rachel Pallenberg. I will do my best here to avoid the excess and stick to the facts, but the story—which is so very much like a fairy tale—would tempt a literary ascetic, as you'll see. The beautiful, dark-eyed girl from Dansky, with nothing to distinguish her from
the common herd but her dazzling smile and her easy charm, finds herself, by chance, in the company of the most eligible bachelor in America, and catches his eye. The rest is not yet history; history requires a certain closure, and this story's still in motion. But it is certainly something remarkable.

How did it come about? That part, at least, is very simple to tell.

Rachel left Dansky planning to begin her new life in Cincinnati, where her mother's sister lived. There she went, and there, for about two years, she stayed. She had a brief but inglorious stint training to be a dental technician, then spent several months working as a waitress. She was liked, though not loved. Some of her fellow workers apparently considered her a little too ambitious for her own good; she was one of those people who didn't mind voicing their aspirations, and that irritated those who were too afraid to do so for themselves, or simply had none. The manager of the restaurant, a fellow called Herbert Finney, remembers her differently from one interview to the next. Was she “a hardworking, rather quiet girl”? as he says to one interviewer, or “a bit of a troublemaker, flirting with the male customers, always looking to get something for herself”? as he tells another. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between. Certainly waitressing didn't suit her for very
long; nor did Cincinnati. Twenty-one months after arriving there, in late August, she took a train east, to Boston. When she was later asked by some idiot magazine why she'd chosen that city, she'd replied that she'd heard the autumn months were pretty there. She found another waitressing job, and shared an apartment with two girls who were, like her, new to the city. After two weeks she was taken on by an upscale jewelry store on Newbury Street, and there she worked through the fall—which was indeed beautiful, crisp and clean—until, on December 23rd, late in the afternoon, Christmas came visiting in the form of Mitchell Geary.

It began to snow that afternoon, somewhere around two, the first flurry coming as Rachel returned from lunch. The prediction for the rest of the day, and into the night, was worsening by the hour: a blizzard was on its way.

Business was slow; people were getting out of the city early, despite the fact that they could calculate the shopping hours left to Christmas morning on their fingers and toes. The manager of the store, a Mr. Erickson (a forty-year-old with the wan, weary elegance of a man half his age again), was on the phone in the back office discussing with his boss the idea of closing up early, when a limo drew up outside and a young dark-haired man in a heavy coat, his collar pulled up, his eyes downcast as though he feared being recognized in the ten-yard journey from limo to store, strode to the door, stamped off the snow on the threshold and came in. Erickson was still in the back office, negotiating closing times. The other assistant, Noelle, was out fetching coffee. It fell to Rachel to serve the customer in the coat.

She knew who he was, of course. Who didn't? The classically handsome features—the chiseled cheekbones, the soulful eyes, the strong, sensual mouth, the unruly hair—appeared on some magazine or other every month: Mitchell Monroe Geary was one of the most watched, debated, swooned-over men in America. And here he was, standing in front of Rachel with flakes of snow melting on his dark eyelashes.

What had happened then? Well, it had been a simple enough exchange. He'd come in, he explained, to look for a Christmas gift for his grandfather's wife, Loretta. Something with diamonds, he'd said. Then, with a little shake of his head: “She loves diamonds.” Rachel showed him a selection of diamond pin brooches, hoping to God Erickson didn't come off the phone too soon, and that the line at the coffee shop was long enough to delay Noelle's return for a few minutes longer. Just to have the Geary prince to herself for a little while was all she asked.

He declared that he liked both the butterfly and the star. She took them from their black velvet pillows for him to examine more closely. What was her opinion, he asked. Mine? she said. Yes, yours. Well, she said, surprised at how easy she found it to talk to him: if it's for your grandmother, then I think the butterfly's probably too romantic.

He'd looked straight at her, with a mischievous glint in his eyes. “How do you know I'm not passionately in love with my grandmother?” he'd said.

“If you were you wouldn't still be looking for someone,” she'd replied, quick as silver.

“And what makes you think I am?”

Now it was she who smiled. “I read the magazines,” she said.

“They never tell the truth,” he replied. “I live the life of a monk. I swear.” She said nothing to this, thinking she'd probably said far too much already: lost the sale, lost her job too, if Erickson had overheard the exchange. “I'll take the star,” he said. “Thank you for the advice.”

He made the purchase and left, taking his charm, his presence, and the glint in his eye away with him. She'd felt strangely cheated when he'd gone, as though he'd also taken something that belonged to her, absurd though that was. As he strode away from the store Noelle came in with the coffees.

“Was that who I think it was?' she said, her eyes wide.

Rachel nodded.

“He's even more gorgeous in the flesh, isn't he?” Noelle remarked. Rachel nodded. “You're drooling.”

Rachel laughed. “He is handsome.”

“Was he on his own?” Noelle said. She looked back out into the street as the limo was pulling away. “Was she with him?”

“Who's she?”

“Natasha Morley. The model. The anorexic one.”

“They're all anorexic.”

“They're not happy,” Noelle remarked with unperturbable certainty. “You can't be that thin and be happy.”

“She wasn't with him. He was buying something for his grandmother.”

“Oh that bitch,” Noelle sniped. “The one who always dresses in white.”

“Loretta.”

“That's right. Loretta. She's his grandfather's second wife.”

Noelle was chatting as though the Geary family were next door neighbors. “I read something in
People
where they said she basically runs the family. Controls everybody.”

“I can't imagine anybody controlling him,” Rachel said, still staring out into the street.

“But wouldn't you
love
the opportunity?” Noelle replied.

Erickson appeared from the back office at this juncture, in a foul temper. Despite the rapidly worsening storm they had been instructed to keep the store open until eight-thirty. This was a minor reprieve: two days before Christmas they were usually open till ten at night, to catch what Erickson called “guilty spouse business.” The more expensive the present, Erickson always said, the more acts of adultery the customer had committed during the preceding year. When in a particularly waspish mood, he wasn't above quoting a number as the door slammed.

So they dutifully stayed in the store, and the snow, as predicted, got worse. There was a smattering of business, but nothing substantial.

And then, just as Erickson was starting to take the displays out of the window for the night, a man came in with an envelope for Rachel.

“Mr. Geary says he's sorry, he didn't get your name,” the messenger told her.

“My name's Rachel.”

“I'll tell him. I'm his driver and his bodyguard, by the way. I'm Ralph.”

“Hello, Ralph.”

Ralph—who was six-foot-six if he was an inch, and looked as though he'd had a distinguished career as a punching bag—grinned. “Hello, Rachel,” he said. “I'm pleased to meet you.” He pulled off his leather glove and shook Rachel's hand. “Well, good-night folks.” He trudged back to the door. “Avoid the Tobin Bridge, by the way. There was a wreck and it's all snarled up.”

Rachel had no wish to open the envelope in front of Noelle or Erickson, but nor could she stand the idea of waiting another nineteen minutes until the store was closed, and she was out on the street alone. So she opened it. Inside was a short, scrawled note from Mitchell Geary, inviting her to the Algonquin Club for drinks the following evening, which was Christmas Eve.

Three and a half weeks later, in a restaurant in New York, he gave her the diamond butterfly brooch, and told her he was falling in love.

T
his is as good a place as any to attempt a brief sketch of the Geary family. It's a long, long drop from the topmost branch, where Rachel Pallenberg was poised the moment she became the wife of Mitchell Geary, to the roots of the family; and those roots are buried so deep into the earth I'm not sure I'm quite ready to disinter them. So instead allow me to concern myself—at least for now—with that part of the family tree that's readily visible: the part that appears in the books about the rise and influence of the Geary engine.

It quickly becomes apparent, even in a casual skimming of these volumes, that for several generations the Gearys have behaved (and have been treated) like a form of American royalty. Like royalty, they've always acted as though they were above the common law; this in both their private and their corporate dealings. Over the years several members of the dynasty have behaved in ways that would have guaranteed incarceration if they hadn't been who they were: everything from driving in a highly intoxicated state to wife-beating. Like royalty, there has often been a grandeur to both their passions and to their failures which galvanized the rest of us, whose lives are by necessity confined. Even the people that they'd abused over the years—either in their personal lives or in their corporate machinations—were entranced by them; ready to forgive and forget if the gaze of the Gearys would only be turned their way again.

And, like royalty, they had their feet in blood. No throne was ever won or held without violence; and though the Gearys were not blessed by the same king-making gods who'd crowned the royal heads of Europe, or the emperors of China or Japan, there was a dark, bloody spirit in their collective soul, a Geary demon if you will, who invested them with an authority out of all proportion to their secular rights. It made them fierce in love, and fierce still in hatred, it made them iron-willed and long-lived; it made them casually cruel and just as casually charismatic.

Most of the time, it was as though they didn't even know what they were doing, good, bad or indifferent. They lived in a kind of trance of self-absorption, as though the rest of the world was simply a mirror held up to their faces, and they passed through life seeing only themselves.

In some ways love was the ultimate manifestation of the Geary demon; because love was the way that the family increased itself, enriched itself.

For the males it was almost a point of pride that they be adulterous, and that the world know it, even if the subject wasn't talked about above a whisper. This dubious tradition had been initiated by Mitch's great-grandfather, Laurence Grainger Geary, who'd been a cocksman of legendary stamina, and had fathered, according to one estimate, at least two dozen bastards. His taste in mistresses had been broad. Upon his death two black women in Kentucky, sisters no less, claimed to have his children; a very well-respected Jewish philanthropist in upstate New York who had served with old man Geary on a committee for the Rehabilitation of Public Morals, had attempted suicide, and revealed in her farewell letter the true paternity of her three daughters, while the madam of a bordello in New Mexico had showed her son to the local press, pointing out how very like a Geary child he looked.

Laurence's wife Verna had made no public response to these claims. But they took their toll on the unhappy woman. A year later she was committed to the same institution that had housed Mary Lincoln in her last years. There Verna Geary survived for a little over a decade, before making a pitiful exit from the world.

Only one of her four children (she'd lost another three in their infancy) was at all attentive to her in her failing years: her eldest daughter, Eleanor. The old woman did not care for Eleanor's constant kindness, however. She loved only one of her children enough to beg his presence, in letter after letter, through the period of her incarceration: that was her beloved son Cadmus. The object of her affections was unresponsive. He visited her once, and never came again. Arguably Verna was the author of her own son's cruelty. She'd taught him from his earliest childhood that he was an exceptional soul, and one of the manifestations of this specialness was the fact that he never had to set eyes on any sight that didn't please him. So now, when he was faced with such a sight—his mother in a state of mental disarray—he simply averted his eyes.