SHE WOULD HAVE HAD more fun if she’d gone to the funeral.
Not, of course, that the funeral wouldn’t have been gruesome enough. God knew the other ones had. Weeping mothers. And fathers. Regina had been shocked and disappointed in herself to discover that a weeping man upset her much more than a weeping woman. A minister of God telling the mourners, as if he thought they didn’t already know, what a tragedy it was for a life to be snuffed out so young, with so much ahead of it. Back in May, the minister at the service for Keith Smith had told everyone to take comfort in the knowledge that God knows what he’s doing but that it is not always given to man to understand. He also assured them that God Never Tries Us Beyond Our Strength, and that Faith Would See Us Through. The priest at the services for Lou Symczyk had been much simpler about it—Lou was in heaven, and for that we should be happy.
Maybe so, Regina thought. It was hard, though, to be happy for someone whose head had been crushed by a ’77 Firebird slipping off a jack onto his head. Heaven had also been problematical, considering the number of speeding tickets and public scalps Lou had managed to accumulate with a succession of faster and faster cars in the three years between his reaching driving age and his death. He had even had the nerve to ask Regina to “go for a ride” with him once. She had, of course, refused. It would have been ridiculous. Regina was aware, though, that if she had been Lou’s age or younger, instead of four and a half years older, she might have been tempted.
Regina had spent an August morning sweltering in black at the side of Lou’s soon-to-be grave, hating every minute of it, as she had hated the glorious late-spring day she’d spent with the box containing little Keith Smith. She’d gone because, as her mother said, the Hudson Group was more than just a publishing concern. To the millions of people its two-hundred-odd local newspapers, radio and TV stations and cable systems reached, it was a spokesman, a teacher, and a goad. It informed them, spoke up for them, challenged them. To the readers of Worldwatch it was a fresh and different look at each week’s national and international news.
To the people of Kirkester, especially to those who had given up Manhattan or Chicago to come work here in the boonies at the home office, the Hudson Group was family.
Regina grinned. Speaking about the billion-dollar business Father and she (mostly she) had built, Mother had a tendency to sound like a rough draft of the introduction to the annual report.
But she meant every word of it, including the business about family. When tragedy struck, the Hudsons had to be there. It made no difference if the employee involved was top management, like Fred Smith, or a janitor, like Kasimir Symczyk. Duty called; Regina went.
But not today. Today they were burying a baby.
Clara Bloyd, age nine months, daughter of Tina Bloyd, typesetter. Sudden infant death syndrome. Crib death. Parents awoke to find perfectly healthy infants dead. Regina remembered it had been one of the first Worldwatch cover stories.
Regina had decided enough was enough. Yes, a journalist should be inured to all sorts of suffering and tragedy, and yes, Regina was going to be a first-rate journalist in spite of her name and connections. But she was damned if she was going to spend a beautiful, cool, October Thursday, with the sky bright blue and the trees trying to make up in a week for a year of single-color drabness, listening to sermons and lamentations over a small white wooden box. She’d stay in the office instead. Go over circulation reports. Relay her mother’s instructions to writers and artists and researchers. Wait for late-breaking stories.
Feel guilty.
And petty, and cowardly, and like a phony. Mother was at the funeral. Jimmy was at the funeral. Regina’s brother seemed to like nothing about the family business except the people who worked for it. He probably thought of, supervised and carried out more community and charity work than any nineteen-year-old in the world, with the possible exception of European royalty. Regina loved him, but she didn’t understand him very well.
She did understand that her mother and Jimmy were right about noblesse oblige. The way Old Man Symczyk had carried on, you might have thought it was a privilege for him to have his grandson die, if only as an occasion of proof of the respect in which he and his were held by the first family of the community.
Regina felt guilty about that, too, and guilty at the thought that at the age of twenty-four, when most of her friends were already disillusioned or divorced, she was still worried about her right to avoid an unpleasant experience versus her obligation to help other people get over theirs. Maybe she should suggest a Lifestyles piece on it—the Me Decade Meets the Old Guilt.
She was about half ready to start taking herself seriously when the phone on her mother’s desk buzzed.
And kept buzzing. Her mother’s secretary should have picked up, but he was probably in the bathroom or something. Regina sighed, punched a button, and picked up the phone.
“Petra Hudson’s office,” she said. She had always loved the idea of somebody’s office answering the phone. One of Regina’s small triumphs at the Kirkester Chronicle, the hometown paper her mother had given her to run the way other mothers give their children the wooden spoon to lick, was to forbid the practice of sending memos attributed to your desk. Some of the old-liners, the I-was-working-here-before-anybody’d-ever-heard-of-your-father crowd, had grown very protective of the authority of their desks, but Regina was in charge, Regina had made a decision and Regina had made it stick. Desks did not send memos, people did. If a newspaper couldn’t say what it meant, what good was it?
Regina’s mother had watched the memo war with a sort of absent amusement. Petra Hudson could have settled the matter by fiat at any time, but Regina would be damned if she was going to ask, and Mother, to her credit, did not volunteer. It was one of the things Regina admired about her mother—she didn’t meddle.
Regina admired a lot of things about her mother, and respected her, and even loved her, but it was a distant kind of love, communicated through the media of nannies’ reports and letters to and from boarding schools here and abroad, while Mother fought the good fight to keep the Hudson Group in Hudson hands after the death of James Hudson, Sr.
Sometimes it seemed to Regina that she was not so much a daughter as she was a Chosen Successor. The feeling had been stronger over the last few years, since it had become obvious that Jimmy had no interest in the family business, but it had always been there. Why else had they named her Regina, for God’s sake, if they didn’t expect that someday she would reign?
Thank God she loved the business.
Now Regina sat (temporarily) on her mother’s throne, holding her mother’s electronic scepter to her ear.
“Western Union calling,” a voice of indeterminate sex announced.
Regina smiled. It was appropriate that somebody’s office should pick up the phone to find an entire corporation on the other end of the line.
“We have a message for Ms. Hudson.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Ms. Hudson?”
Regina wondered when Western Union had gotten so picky. “I’m Ms. Hudson,” she said truthfully. Her mother was going to be in no mood to chase down messages after she got home.
“Deepest condolences for your loss,” the voice began.
“What?” It took a split second for Regina to realize this was the beginning of the message, rather than some kind of gentle insult, but it was still bewildering. Petra Hudson hadn’t suffered any loss her daughter knew about.
“Deepest condolences on your loss,” the voice said again. “It is well known how you feel about your family. Tragedy can strike at any time, but strength and wisdom can see us through. Best personal regards.”
There was a silence. Regina doubted it was a pause for effect, since the whole thing had been read in the mechanical singsong of a court stenographer.
“Is that it?” she asked.
“There is a signature.”
“Okay,” Regina said. “Whose?”
“It’s signed, Cronus.”
There’d been some expression in the voice that time, and there could be no doubt that the pause had been intentional. Regina was losing her patience.
“Cronus,” she said.
“You heard me correctly,” the voice said. It was less Western Union-like all the time.
“And who the hell,” she said, “is Cronus?”
But even if she’d been expecting an answer, she wasn’t going to get one. The owner of the voice had hung up before she’d even gotten to “hell.”