FROM THE START, Darius was alert to Choate’s swank reputation. He had a nose for status. Oliver’s curtness on the phone impressed him. Clearly, his father outranked the third form dean. “Darius is going to be staying on a day or two longer. I’m keeping him down for a bit of family business. I’ll send him back up on Wednesday.”
Darius knew his father only wanted impersonal company for a few more days in New York. Even a child attendant would work. That didn’t keep the boy from imagining real “family business” might be in store. The hours sitting in the dim hotel room, until Oliver rose at ten, were made interesting, even suspenseful, by exercises of imagination. Darius had never spent time alone with his father. And observing Oliver closely really did absorb him. The way his father slept in the ashen light of the curtained hotel room, hands praying under his slumped cheek, hopeless and suppliant like one of those plaster Pompeiians, more model than man—was poignant to Darius and filled him with adult-like pity. Even his father’s ugliness was touching when he was asleep. Oliver wasn’t the type to snore aggressively, to fling out hairy legs and work-tanned forearms. It might have been nice to be adopted by that kind of a man, a yeomanly man, and Darius did grieve for that obvious missed chance sometimes, wishing he had a completely different life. But the imaginary father and the grief were both a little maudlin and erotic. When you’re ignored, almost anything can take on the semblance of love, even pity, so seeing Oliver’s pathetic side was incredibly sweet for Darius. Rather than a gruff, fly-fishing, tough guy of a father, his real one was a Rubik’s Cube, a seemingly trivial plastic puzzle with all the infinities of thought and mathematics swirling behind it.
Poised as he’d been with the powers at Choate, Oliver was stymied by a Broadway ticket broker. Their phone call devolved into lofty bickering. Going to the theater was cancelled when Oliver hung up and remarked, more bewildered than angry, “Well, we won’t do that.” He proved inept at arranging anything. The museum they wandered to at noon on Monday was closed. At loose ends, they dawdled in Central Park. A twitchy sneer directed at Darius was the only sign that Oliver was aware of a failure. And he soon reminisced contentedly to himself about who used to live in which buildings. Now and then he glanced blankly at Darius as if at a limb asleep, not a son. For his part, Darius was too uncertain of his father to make suggestions. Footsore and famished by dinnertime, they ended up at the over-familiar Veau d’Or again.
Nothing Darius watched his father do seemed quite right. It ran deeper than worldly incompetence, quirky facial expressions and the wrong tone of voice. After lunch at a midtown diner the next day Oliver stopped Darius from taking a pastel mint from a huge snifter by the cash register. He gave a warning jerk of his head. “Not a good idea.” The cashier was watching him and raised her threaded eyebrows indifferently. When they were on the sidewalk, Oliver explained, “Some sly customer could easily have dropped something in the bowl, laced it with something—people really do appalling things like that. Sadistic at a remove. And if I’m not mistaken some poisons look like chalk, so there’s no way to tell.” Evil dangled bizarrely over them in the sunshine, while Oliver fogged his glasses with breath and rubbed at them with a shirttail, then it was forgotten.
No family business came up. The aimless, indelible two days slipped away. On Wednesday morning, Oliver took Darius to Grand Central for the train back to Connecticut. He waved at the ceiling and droned with tour guide dullness, “These constellations are painted on backward.”
They’d come an hour too early for an express. At the ticket window Oliver discovered he had no money to buy Darius a ticket. Darius fished a crumpled twenty from his jeans. A sibilant order from his father made him stuff it back in. “Don’t flash your money!” Something somewhere in the room’s monumental dimness snagged Oliver’s attention. His head cocked like a dog’s. “And let’s not use credit,” he mused. Turning back to the clerk he said, “I’ll draw a bit of cash and be back in two shakes.”
Riding the escalator to the cash machine, Oliver imparted the following lesson. “Be tremendously careful, Darius, whom you give your credit cards to. I hardly use them. Emergency only. You can be followed. All sorts of information is transferred and stored. And we can’t have that.” As cheery as teaching this lesson seemed to make him, Oliver was irritable again as soon as he paid for the ticket. “I think that’s gone way up again.”
They sat on one of the great wooden benches in the waiting room, Oliver crossed his legs several ways. Full of filial discomfort, Darius studied the down-at-heels magnificence of Vanderbilt Hall. His head dropped back and he imagined this was his own private room. The quintuple-coffered ceiling, the obsessive acanthus leaves, the marble, the over-the-top imperial ornament—it was exactly his style. Dirty, prison-like grilles darkened the five huge windows. The immense space was almost as dim as a basement. Louche types, none with suitcases or even briefcases, idled in front of walls of yellowed tan marble, or shuttled in and out of the building under a shallow arch with the legend, 42ND STREET BUSES AND TAXIS. Something about the acoustics, the dim swimming pool murmur half-metamorphosed into choir, overwhelmed his puny fantasy of ownership, and Darius remembered—suddenly quite clearly—teenagers and a pool party and one of them dying and himself as lonely as a galaxy. This useless loneliness was his true inheritance, he supposed. Over them lapped the wobbly, aquatic clamor of voices: “…heat up that slice…for a copy of the Journal…run to the men’s room…”
Oliver gave every sign of his usual inattention, so Darius was surprised when his father said something that sounded like he’d been reading his mind. “I hate that I’m always drowning in feelings. Useless. I hope you’re not like that. Maybe it’s because travel always feels forlorn. People like us should probably call it forlorn-ing.” His nose hitched at his glasses when he tilted his head back to squint at the gloomy iron chandeliers. “If we happen to be at all alike, that is.” The older man heaved a summing-up sigh. “You do seem almost sad. Did you have a good time?”
“All right,” Darius said, cautiously mundane.
“Was there something you wanted to do that we didn’t get to?”
“No.”
“What did you enjoy best?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you like Cassie?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Just that?”
“No, I liked her.”
“Did you fall in love with her? Will we have to fight it out, you and me?”
Darius ignored the half-hearted provocation. Conversationally he said, “I wanted to talk more with her about—” He was unaccountably tremulous, liable to tears, even. He forced it out, “—you know—Colin, who used to own our house. Her brother. The artist guy.”
“Colin! Colin?” All bland surprise, Oliver looked down at Darius for the first time. “Huh. That’s interesting. He was nothing special, really. Not that—”
Darius nudged the dirty sleeve of a drinking straw on the marble floor with his sneaker toe. “I liked that thing of his.”
“Why on earth?”
But Darius only shrugged. He stretched to push the strip of paper even further out of reach, and his crotch rose from the bench.
“Do that and you’ll get all these men eyeing you,” Oliver commented. It wasn’t a complaint or a warning.
Darius settled back on the honeyed wood and looked around. An alert, pot-bellied man had paused by the passage to the men’s room, his eyes on Darius. Another man with an over-careful coif and a slippery gaze had been standing there for quite a while. They looked normal to Darius.
As always in those days, the homeless were everywhere as well—reclining on the other benches, dozing on the marble floors. Human heaps of rags from a differently colored universe, they didn’t seem to have bodies or heads, much less eyes. Was Oliver talking about them? Sometimes something glittered in the muddy folds. Were they watching?
Oliver’s chin did thoughtful calisthenics, rising, crumpling. “You know,” he said. “I could get that Battle of whatsit artwork. Hardly know what to call it. If it’s something you want.”
Darius opened his mouth in wild, orphan-boy gratitude, an expression which, though real, felt fake, so he was glad Oliver didn’t look at him. He suppressed the expression. “Yeah! Yes,” he was explicit.
“I could give it to you. Cassie has started to be a good friend.” The offer appeared to embarrass him. He hurried on, “Do you know what I’m doing right now?”
Darius shook his head. He said No when Oliver still wouldn’t look at him.
“I’m counting the money in my wallet. What I just got from the cash machine. You really have to be careful about flashing money.” He looked around the room to demonstrate alertness. “I have a very sensitive thumb. Maybe beading helps. Anyway, you can learn to do it like this with your hand in your pocket, without ever taking the wallet out or opening it. It’s a rough count, but still...” Soft, demented laughter bubbled from his chest. It sounded not unlike quiet sobs.
“What’s so funny?”
Oliver smiled mischievously to himself and squinched his eyes closed. “How much? How much? How much? I find I have—a lot,” he enunciated. “Rather a lot! Should I tell you?”
“I think so,” Darius smiled.
“Without being specific—” His usual glumness reasserted itself. “I have rather a lot of money.” He looked at Darius narrowly. “Not what I just took out, of course. I don’t mean that.”
“We’re rich?”
“That would be understating it,” Oliver murmured, hardly moving his lips. “If I wanted to, I could corner the market on—let’s see—teapots. Quite possibly, I could afford to buy every single teapot in the world. How’s that for a shocker? Including the gold and silver ones! But hear what I’m going to tell you, boy. This is a big secret. Got to be. Really, a total secret. Here—” He shifted on the bench, turning toward Darius like the most indulgent teacher. “Now. Let’s be very grown-up and serious. You know, naturally, between your mother and me—it’s become something of a disaster. That happens. Just so you know—because I suppose you’re old enough—the two of us, your mother and I, have a sort of a deal. According to this deal, she takes care of you financially—everything—school, whatever. In return, I give her—have already given her—a somewhat vast sum, and we’re quits. I let her and even that Stan creature of hers, camp out in the New Jersey house with me, even though it must make me look like a perfectly sad and indulgent cuckold and a sorry fool. In fact, I gave her the fucking house, too. But, fool or not, we must never care what other people think about us. So. So, anyway, your mother’s entirely responsible for you. She has a house and we’re square. But I’m telling you this secret. Tremendous secret. That I, Oliver, have rather more than everyone believes. It’s quite clever.” He cocked his head at the ceiling. “Secrets are like Midas and the reeds, aren’t they? Midas in more ways than one. Ha! I’m talking about teapot money! And one day—who knows?” He crossed his arms tightly. A gloomy expression tried to reassert itself.
Darius didn’t entirely understand what his father was saying. “Is teapot money billions?”
Oliver put a finger to his lip. “Zillions! But hush about it!”
If this was family business, and it was, it didn’t sound dramatically unlike Oliver’s usual raving. Darius wasn’t even sure he’d grasped the essential point, though he had. “You mean you have a lot more than you told mom?”
Oliver nodded.
“Is that allowed?”
“I’m letting them live together! In my own house with me! Ex-my house. But still.” Oliver savored the argument. “Seems to me they have nothing to complain of.”
“But now that you told me, what’s to keep me from telling them—her, I mean?”
“Even if you did, they have no argument. It’s all locked up in lawyer language, the hardest substance known to man.” Oliver winked. He looked drowsy with pleasure. His eyes fell closed. He was silent a long time before adding crisply, “But you won’t. Think about it, and you’ll realize why. You won’t say anything.”
Darius did think. The first reason that came to him was sentimental. He thought his father was saying, in a harsh way, “I know how much, in spite of yourself, you love me, and you would never do anything that went against my wishes. You’ve promised to keep my secret.” This reason had the ring of truth.
But Oliver meant nothing of the kind. For Oliver, conceiving himself the object of anyone’s love was as unlikely a mental experience as he could possibly have. He was making a threat. Or, since the whole delicious plot he’d concocted, while real—he was indeed cheating his wife in divorce—had a slight disjunct from reality, like a contact lens knocked afloat on an eye, it was as if he were merely playing when he made the awful threat of disinheritance. Perhaps, he was so rich whatever he played at shaded into truth. Darius would keep silent about Oliver’s hidden riches, because only if he did, would a fantastic windfall eventually come to him. In fact, given the familiar air of madman’s fantasy, the entire secret was soon discounted in Darius’s mind. He was much more excited about The Battle of Desires and Bitternesses.
Oliver thought he’d been brutally clear about the threat of disinheritance. So much so that he felt in his throat the faint pressure of a sob of a fossil emotion. He let his palms fall to his thighs and announced, “Enough of all this dirty talk about you-know-what. It’s good, though.” His smile was a little ghastly. His long-fingered hand rose, but at the last moment, he couldn’t bring himself to ruffle Darius’s hair. His hand plucked strangely
at the faded, curling collar of the boy’s polo shirt. “Good to chat away and—uh—confide. Whatever. I’ll be off. Your train’s in twenty minutes.”