Читать книгу Riverside Park - Laura Wormer Van - Страница 24

Sam Wyatt

“WHERE DOES SHE find these guys, in a catalog of the weird and the strange?” Sam Wyatt asked his wife.

“I think she met him through work somehow,” Harriet said quietly, putting the finishing touches on a second platter of hors d’oeuvres. They were on a second round because their youngest was two hours late and they were starving. They also had to entertain the latest boyfriend their older daughter had brought home to share their Thanksgiving meal.

Sam Wyatt’s eldest daughter, Althea, was thirty-one, black, Methodist and worked on Wall Street. The guy in the living room had gray hair, was white, and with a name like Donnelly was probably Catholic and had some kook job on Seventh Avenue. Sam always knew they would regret having sent Althea to that Muffy-Buffy school on the East Side for rich girls. Althea had grown up with so few black friends it was no wonder she dated white guys.

Admittedly, Sam and Harriet revolved in a somewhat rarified circle of New York. He may have started life as the youngest of six dirt-poor kids of an army sergeant who died young, but Sam had earned a college degree and today, at sixty-one, was a senior vice president of Electronika International, the second largest manufacturer of electronic office equipment in America. Harriet, whose skin was much lighter than Sam’s, began in the training program at Gardiner & Grayson book publishers and today was Vice President of Publicity, Marketing & Advertising.

“Be polite, Sam, that’s all I ask,” Harriet murmured, picking up the tray of hors d’oeuvres.

“Yeah, yeah.” He finished pouring the old white Catholic guy a second glass of wine. Sam hadn’t had a drink in over twenty-one years, which was a good thing since it had been under only that one condition that Harriet had allowed him back into her and Althea’s life. That was why there was an eleven year age difference between their daughters. Althea was from Round 1 of their marriage while Samantha was their AA baby, the child from Round 2 who benefitted most from her parents being in Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon.

Where the heck was Samantha? he wondered, looking at his watch. Traffic, he supposed. Harriet said after the scolding they gave Samantha about her last cell phone bill she would probably claim it had been “uneconomical” to call them from the road.

“Cliff was just remarking on the boat,” Harriet said when Sam came in, nodding in the direction of the framed picture of their sailboat.

Sam handed the old white guy his glass of wine.

“Thanks, Mr. Wyatt. Althea says you moor it in Manhattan for part of the year.”

“At the Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin,” he confirmed. He sat down and took a sip of Crystal Lite. (It wasn’t half-bad compared to the other low-calorie crap Harriet was always trying to get him to drink.) “This time of year we keep it at our place in South Carolina.” One of the reasons they had been anxious to get the girls together was to tell them he had finally worked out early retirement with Electronika; he and Harriet could afford to stop working in the spring. They were planning to downsize from this apartment (thank God they had made the stretch to buy it) to a two bedroom and spend half the year in South Carolina and half up here in Manhattan.

Althea would be fine with not having them around half the year. After breezing through Columbia at their expense, Althea had gone off to Berkeley with her boyfriend at the time to get an MBA. With the degree (and without the boyfriend) Althea came back to New York and took a job on Wall Street, something she said she would do until she paid off her student loans from graduate school. She became an investment analyst, one of those brainy people who researched companies to see if the firm should underwrite a bond issue for them. If the analyst’s recommendations were correct, the firm often made a ton of money; if the analyst was wrong, though, the firm might still make some money up front but its reputation could take a hit which ended in long-term loss. The analyst responsible tended to vanish.

When Althea had told Sam she wished to stake her career on specializing in alternative energy, Sam’s heart had filled with dread. Leave it to whacked-out Berkeley to prepare his daughter to be the only person on Wall Street who would never make any money. But then, of course, the oil crunch came and a drawing of Althea’s face appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal as the high scorer in a suddenly enticing field. Her recommendation to underwrite a bond issue for a small company holding a patent that promised to revolutionize the production of hybrid engines was a grand slam, while earlier bond issues—in wind turbos, micro-turbines, corn refineries and municipal thermal-dynamic energy plants—were sent flying around the bases. Her latest venture was underwriting an outfit reopening abandoned sugar factories.

Althea was going to make partner in January. Last year Sam and Harriet had been agog to learn Althea’s salary was ninety thousand dollars—supplemented by a $650,000 bonus. To his daughter’s credit Althea gave over seventy-five thousand dollars a year away, paid something like three hundred thousand dollars in taxes (three hundred thousand dollars in taxes!) and moved into a two million dollar loft in SoHo.

This kind of money seemed insane to Sam and Harriet. And yet their own apartment, overlooking Riverside Park, had been appraised at over a million five. (They had bought it for two hundred and fifty thousand!)

But that was the nature of the great have and have-not divide of the new America, wasn’t it? The whole country seemed morally out of whack. You had everything or you had very little.

However lucrative Althea’s career might be, she was paying for it in other ways. Her work was wildly intense and geographically complicated. When she was in New York she worked a minimum of twelve hours a day and otherwise was on the road for the better part of each month. It was not fun travel, either, or even sequential. It was “go to Sacramento to pitch a bond issue to the California state pension fund, then get back in time for the meeting with the partners and then get down to Knoxville to scout that company before anyone else gets there and don’t forget next Monday is the public hearing on the Nova Scotia wind project, and Thursday is the Westminster Bank summit in London, and the following week you must get in to see that nutcase in Venezuela” kind of travel.

The Wyatts were also particularly proud of Althea’s personal agenda in her work, to generate jobs, products and energy options in places where there were few. Why not use the earth’s earliest and most bountiful foods like corn and sugar to stretch our oil reserves? Why not harness desert winds to make electricity? Or turn the endless summer sunshine of Alaska into the electricity needed to run air conditioners in the continental United States?

Now as for Samantha, the Wyatts’ nineteen-year-old, she was a very different matter. Frankly speaking she was a little spoiled and being that much farther away from them for six months of the year made both Harriet and Sam a little nervous.

“How much longer do we have to wait for Sammy?” Althea wanted to know, reaching for a piece of celery. She crunched down on it, showing the beautiful teeth from childhood orthodontics. Althea was a good-looking woman, tall, slim, with great cheekbones Sam recognized as his own. But it was Samantha who was the beauty of the family. Samantha looked like her mother.

“We’ll give her another ten minutes,” Harriet said.

Althea sighed, grabbed a piece of cheese and sank back into the cushions.

“So what exactly do you do on Seventh Avenue?” Sam asked the guy. (He wished Harriet would go into the kitchen to check on something so he could eat some cheese, too.)

“I’m a textile designer.”

“Samantha will be so interested,” Harriet said. “She’s in a theater group at school and loves making costumes.”

What the hell kind of job was it for a man to be a textile designer? Sam wondered. “I guess you have to be, uh,” Sam said, “inclined toward that kind of work?”

Althea rolled her eyes.

“I’m afraid my husband gets slightly deranged when he’s not fed,” Harriet explained.

The white-haired guy was laughing. “It’s okay. My dad had the same reaction.”

“Your father’s still alive?” Sam blurted.

Althea picked up a carrot from the tray and gently threw it at her father. It bounced off Sam’s barrel chest to the carpet.

“It must be my hair,” the guy said to Althea. He looked at Sam. “It’s a family trait, Mr. Wyatt. A lot of us go silver before thirty-five.” He smiled, looking hopeful. “I’m only thirty-four, sir.”

“Don’t bother explaining anything to him,” Althea told her boyfriend, “because I won’t be speaking to him again as long as I live.” She glared at her father. “You got it now, Dad? Cliff is not gay, he is gainfully employed and he’s thirty-four, okay?”

Sam mumbled an apology and then looked at his watch. “Where is that girl?”

“I vote we go ahead and eat,” Althea said.

“Five more minutes,” Harriet said, “and if she isn’t here…”

“So, Cliff,” Sam said, sitting back in his chair, “why don’t you explain to me exactly what a textile designer does.”

“Well, I’m a chemical engineer by training, Mr. Wyatt.”

“Oh, a chemical engineer,” Harriet repeated approvingly, raising her eyebrows.

“He went to MIT,” Althea added.

“I work in a lab to create new fibers. For different manufacturers.”

“He just created something for Ralph Lauren,” Althea said.

“Good for you,” Sam said, although it still sounded a little poofy to him. He turned at the sound of the tumblers in the front door.

“That will be Samantha,” Harriet said, jumping up and going to the foyer.

“Hooray, food,” Althea said, standing up.

“Oh, hi, Rosanne,” Sam heard Harriet say in the hall.

“Rosanne?” Sam said, glancing at Althea. “What’s Rosanne doing here?”

“I think Mom invited her to dinner.” Althea balanced her empty glass on the hors d’oeuvres tray and picked it up. “But she was going with Jason and Mrs. Goldblum over to the Stewarts’.” Cliff stood to pick up the other glasses and soiled cocktail napkins. “Rosanne was my babysitter way back when, Cliff, so be warned, if you don’t mind your p’s and q’s at the dinner table she might pinch you.”

Harriet reappeared in the living room and by her expression Sam knew something was wrong. “What’s wrong? Where’s Samantha?”

“She went to her room. She’s not feeling very well.” She turned to Cliff. “I hate to do this to you,” she began.

“But it would be better if I left. Of course, I understand.”

“Fix Cliff a plate to take with him,” Harriet said.

“No way, I’m taking him to Captain Cook’s,” Althea said. “After making him sit here half the night the least I can do is give him dinner.”

“No, Althea.” The tone of Harriet’s voice got everyone’s attention. She added, in a quieter voice, “I wish you would stay. I think your sister would want you here.”

A feeling of foreboding flooded through Sam and wordlessly he headed for Samantha’s bedroom.

“Sam, wait—”

Rosanne was standing next to three suitcases outside Samantha’s room.

“A lot of baggage for three days,” Sam observed.

“Mr. W,” Rosanne said, “we need to talk for a sec.”

Sam went to the door and found it locked. He knocked. “Samantha? This is your father. Open this door.”

“If I could just talk to you for one minute,” Rosanne pleaded.

“Oh, Rosanne!” Sam heard his daughter wail from behind the door. “What’s the use?” The handle turned and the door swung open.

“Samantha, what is it?” Sam asked, wincing as he looked at his daughter’s tearstained face. And then he looked down, between the parted sides of her coat. When he brought his eyes back up his daughter’s expression confirmed it. Samantha was pregnant.