The Wrong Kind of Money (15 page)

And these expenses he has just listed in his mind are only the fixed, immutable expenses which must be met each month before the members of his little family have even begun to live and feed and clothe themselves, to pay the doctor, the dentist, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, Rigaud candles. Sixty bucks a pop.

But would more money make all these worries disappear? Or is it power that he wants—the kind of power over his company that his father once had, and that his mother now has, the power of a clearly defined majority stockholder? He used to think that that was it, but now he is not so sure. And of course Carol was right, the power would come someday, it was only a matter of time, a question of patience. And patience, after all, is a virtue in itself.

And yet, you see, all that is not enough. There is something more that is just beyond his grasp. And yet, he thinks (and he is thinking all these things as he thinks of most things, while waiting for sleep to overcome him, to fell him with its golden bullet), there is still something restless and thirsty inside him that nothing—not the comfortable and safe apartment, not money, not power, not his job, his wife, his friends—is quite able to satisfy. It is as though there is a volcano that seems to be bubbling now inside him, on the verge of eruption, and what Noah wants is neither definable as love, or money, or knowledge, or a certainty of the future, but is a thing that cannot be expressed in any concrete terms, a thing with feathers. I have no offering, no grail, he thinks. But no, that is not it, either, for offerings or grails are not hard to come by if you want one. It is simply this: For the past two, or maybe three, years he has been unable to look forward to next week. So many next weeks have been the same as last weeks, and there is very little hope now that anything of importance or great joy will ever happen in any of them. Next week is sales conference. That is supposed to be important, and in one sense it is. Noah has an important presentation to make at this particular sales conference. A lot of the company's future hangs on it. A big investment is at stake.

Okay, but next week is also home again when sales conference is over, no different. Next week is also next year, and again no different, except for another birthday. And on and on the years arise and speed, over the past. You got out of the taxi, paid the driver, crossed the sidewalk to the gracious canopy that announced your building, crossed that stark marble foyer to the elevator, smiled at the elevator man who knew your floor, and returned to the apartment where you lived and slept, sometimes, with your wife, especially in the summer when it was warm outside and cool in the house.… And there she is, her breathing soft and regular now, in the other bed. And yet he is thinking of the scent of a young girl's dark hair, and the taste of her hair when he brushed his lips against it. “That wasn't meant to be funny,” she said.

He reaches his hand under the covers of his twin bed, and begins the gentle, loving process of his hand on himself that will ease the path to sleep.

On his bike, defying death without goggles or a helmet, he had charged, at full speed, up a mountainside, jumping rocks and outcroppings, to the top, where he had stopped, suspended, left foot on a rock, in neutral but gunning the engine at full throttle to survey all the Berkshire foothills that lay in the distance and were waiting to be conquered. On his bike he had felt free.

And yet, still glimmering in his mind, is Aesop. Every Aesop fable had a moral at its ending.

Like most married couples who have been together as long as Noah and Carol, they do not always tell each other the truth. This is not to say that they lie to one another. Outright lies are too dangerous. It's just that they don't always tell each other the full truth about certain matters. After all, there are times when the full truth just complicates things. The full truth can be time-consuming, leading to unnecessary arguments and mindless tautology. Noah, for example, did not tell his wife the whole truth about his meeting with his mother that evening in the library. There seemed to be no point in telling everything that was said, especially since tonight's meeting was not much different from a similar meeting a year ago, or a year before that. What happened tonight was this:

They sat in the pair of wing chairs facing each other, and his mother said, “I'm ready to turn the business over to you, Noah. I'm even readier than I was last year when we talked about it. The time has come.”

“I see,” he said guardedly, because he was pretty sure he knew what was coming next.

“I'm going to be eighty-three,” she said with a sigh. “I'm too old for this stuff. An old woman shouldn't be running a business like this. A woman shouldn't be running a business like this to begin with. This is a man's business, your father always said so. I want to put you in the driver's seat, Noah, where your father wanted you to be when you were ready for it. You're ready for it, and everybody knows it. My presidency was only meant to be an interim thing, and that interim's gone on long enough. I'm ready to turn over my shares to you, according to the terms of Pop's will. The lawyers have drawn all the papers up. Everything is ready for my signature.”

“I see,” he said.

“However—”

“There is a condition,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Same as last year's? And the year before that?”

She nodded.

“Sorry, Mom, but your terms are unacceptable,” he said, and started to stand up, “Your terms have always been unacceptable. As far as I'm concerned, this meeting is over.”

“Now, wait a minute,” she said, holding out her hand. “Sit down, Noah. I intend to get to the bottom of this once and for all. Just what have you got against your aunt Bathy?”

“I won't have your sister working for this company. That's it. There's nothing more to say.”

“Why
not?
She did wonderful things for this company over the years she worked for us. She can still do wonderful things. You're letting a valuable talent go to waste, Noah, by not finding something for Bathy to do. She could be a brand manager. She could be a regional sales rep—”

“Sorry, Mom. The answer is no.”

“But what's your
reason,
Noah? Is it stubbornness, or is it—”

“For one thing, she's too old. She's past retirement age by now.”

“Old?
If
she's
too old, what does that make
me
?”

He said nothing, merely gave her a sideways look.

“People don't have to retire just because they reach retirement age. Look at your own father. He didn't retire when he reached retirement age. He retired by dying.”

“Then let's just say I don't believe in nepotism,” he said.

“Nepotism
! You're the personification of nepotism! Where would
you
be if you weren't Jules Liebling's son?”

“Unemployable? Is that what you're saying, Mom? I don't happen to agree.”

“Then
why?
Why won't you find a position in the company for her?”

“Let's just say I don't like Aunt Bathy, Mom.”

“That's ridiculous! You used to be crazy about her when you were growing up! And she's always adored you!”

“It's a long time since I was growing up. My opinion of the lady has changed.”

“But why?
Why?”

“Look,” he said. “Let me put it this way. If I'm going to run this company, I'm going to
run
this company, and I'm going to run it my way, without a lot of my relatives hanging around.”

“Bathy wouldn't be just hanging around. She'd be working hard, contributing a lot. And it's not a lot of relatives. It's just one woman—my baby sister.”

“One relative is too many. Sorry.”

“Or is it just because this is something
I
happen to want you to do?”

“Yes,” he said, “that's part of it, I suppose. Because it will look as though you're still running things from behind the scenes. Think of what the press will say—‘Mother Resigns Presidency in Favor of Son. Mother's Sister Named to Important Post.' That will get a lot of laughs in the trade, won't it?”

“Who the hell cares what the press says? Who the hell cares what the trade says? If we'd cared about things like that, we'd have gone belly-up years ago! We've always done exactly what we damn well wanted, and to hell with what people say!”

“Well, I care about what people say,” he said.

“We wouldn't have to announce my resignation, your appointment, and Bathy's appointment all in the same
breath,
Noah. We could wait a few months—six months, perhaps, and then—”

“No. Because Bathy isn't going to be appointed—now or ever. Not while I'm around, at least.”

“It's because she's a woman, isn't it.”

“Yes,” he said, “Perhaps it is. Perhaps that has a lot to do with it. Perhaps I've become a little gun-shy about working with women after all these years.”

“That's supposed to be a slap at me, isn't it. But I've never ordered you around, have I, Noah? I've always let you do pretty much everything you wanted, haven't I? This new label you're launching, for instance. That's been your baby right from the beginning. I was against it, as you know. I was against taking that kind of a financial risk. But when I saw how much you wanted to do it, I gave you my go-ahead. Didn't I do that?”

“Yes, but it was an uphill battle to get that go-ahead,” he said.

“I could have vetoed it outright! I had that power. But I didn't do that, did I?”

“No, Mom, you're a dream to work with. A real dream.”

“Don't be sarcastic!” Now her eyes began to wander around the room, and he watched her as they settled on a single shelf of books. “Those books,” she said, pointing. “All those books about education. Motivation. Human development. Boundaries of learning. All those books by authors with Jewish-sounding names—Seligman, Maser, Garber, Rosenhan—all with Ph.D.'s after them. Do you actually read those books?”

“They happen to be books on topics that interest me.”

“It's not for that silly Aesop business, is it? Is it?”

“I said those're books that interest me.”

“I don't want to hear any more about that Aesop nonsense, do you hear? You're in the liquor business, Noah. If you work for me, you're in
booze,
not crazy pipe dreams.”

“You're changing the subject, Mom. We were talking about Bathy—remember? Not my reading habits.”

Now she shifted slightly in her chair, and Noah knew his mother's body language well enough to know that this meant she was about to try a different tactic. “Suppose I told you,” she began. “Suppose I told you that this was what your father wanted. Suppose I told you that your father wanted Bathy reinstated in the company. Suppose I told you that this was his deathbed wish. Suppose I told you that this was what he made me promise him with his dying breath.”

“If you told me that, I'd know you were lying,” he said. “If Pop had wanted that, he'd have said so in his will. His will was very specific about what he wanted for this company. No mention of dear old Bathy.”

“Look at it this way, dear,” she said—still another tactic, he knew, was coming when she began to call him “dear.” “Think of it this way. It's all so unfair. We all have so much—you, I, Ruthie, and Cyril. We all have so much. But poor Bathy, who worked so hard for this company for so many years—she's wound up with nothing at all!”

“Then why don't
you
help her out, Mom? After all, she's your sister. It seems to me that you've got plenty to spread around.”

“I've tried. I've tried again and again. I've begged her to let me help her out. But she's too proud. She'd never accept anything from me. But you, on the other hand—that would be a different story, dear. If you offered her a job, she'd be so thrilled!”

“Look,” he said, “when Pop first asked me to come into the business with him, right after college, I said to him, ‘Okay, but on one condition. Bathsheba Sachs has got to go.' He said okay, and that was that. He let her go. He knew how I felt about your sister.”

“But why, dear—
why?
Why do you feel this way about her?”

He stared at the square of carpet between his feet. “Personal reasons,” he said. “Private reasons.”

“But don't I have a right to know what those reasons are?”

“Why don't you ask her? She knows how I feel about her—and why.”

“I swear to you she doesn't, Noah! She's at a loss! She has no idea why you seem to hate her so, and it hurts her terribly! She only knows that something she may have done—she has no idea what it might have been—turned you against her years ago. She loves you, Noah. Can't you imagine what it's like for her, knowing that you hate her but not knowing why? She loves you almost as if—”

“If she knows how I feel about her, why would she want to come back into the company?”

“Oh, Noah, don't you understand? Don't you understand
anything?
It's not that she wants to come back into the company. She's never asked for that. She's never asked for anything, in fact. But whatever it was, whatever it was that happened between the two of you, it was all so long ago. Now you have the power, with one forgiving gesture, offering her a job, to erase all that, all the hate, all the old bitterness over—whatever it was. Don't you see? Don't you see that I want to see all the old wounds that have divided this family healed before I die?”

He looked at her, and she briefly averted her eyes; and for a moment he wondered whether his mother did, in fact, know exactly why he felt the way he did about her baby sister. Was it possible she had always known? In some ways, he'd never known her.

She dabbed her eyes now. “I don't want to die with my boots on,” she said. “I want to die knowing that you're running the company, and that Bathy has been taken care of. I want to get out of my girdle and relax, and travel, and go to my quiet grave from some glamorous place—climbing the Spanish Steps in Rome, or in the lighthouse overlooking the harbor at St. Jean de Luz … St. Mark's in Venice … on the Charles Bridge in Prague. I'd like to die in the Juderia in Seville, or in the mosque at Cordoba, or at the Ritz in Paris, where I spent my honeymoon with your father. I want to die knowing that everything is in place, Noah. Is this too much for a mother to ask?”