Nobody was talking to him. They said their hellos when they passed in the hall and they stopped in, even sat down, to ask him the inevitable questions relating to business, and when they were chatting and he happened by, they went on with a nod to include him, but it wasn’t the same. It was nothing he’d ever imagined he’d miss. In fact, he’d already thought, for a long time, that nobody really talked to him anyway, so to learn what it was to be truly shunned came as something of a revelation. Melissa he missed most of all, especially now that he’d come to understand what she’d stolen of his life, however unwittingly. Now that he couldn’t believe that he knew more about what she was doing than she did. By the time he’d heard she was selling her house, she had sold it. The house didn’t matter. He’d never cared for it, and at one time, when their father had first bought it and installed her in it and, worse yet, she’d let him, he’d actually despised it with a strength of feeling rarely leveled at a building, except perhaps for the house in which he’d grown up, and that was where she’d taken up residence with her strange ensemble. So it wasn’t the house; what rankled him was how the news was already old news before it was news to him, and so clearly that his surprise caused unmistakable amusement in his slow-moving source.
She and Jesse were living on the family estate with Abel and Mrs. Carpenter and “Little” Joe Martin, who was convalescing, and, to his complete bemusement, Sue, the place taking on the character of a wartime haven for women and children and blasted men, including Alice, wounded and woman and child all at once, who wouldn’t take his calls or accept his visits or even speak to him when he took the last drastic measure of intercepting her on the grounds. On spotting him, she turned and made her way back to the house, leaving him no option but to jog after her and, when that didn’t work, to sneak up on her. This revealed to him the truth about his own foolishness, that he could only guess at the depths it might reach. Surprised when he spoke her name from behind, Alice screamed, summoning Little, who rocketed in his wheelchair right onto the lawn, where he sank, struggling toward them in the lush grass.
“Alice,” he said, following her as she made her way to Little in his predicament, “I know what sort of impression you got from that scene at the brewery, and I know it was wrong—the impression—that’s what I wanted to tell you. At least let me tell you, whatever Cole said, that business about a ‘deal,’ there wasn’t any, no deal, nothing I knew of or would ever have condoned, never, if it meant hurting you in any way let alone—” And here he could say no more, not just because of horror at what had happened but because of the personal nature of it: in a strange way, her rape was like a pure instance of his own desire. As tormented as he was by the images of submission she’d granted him, the taunting arousal whenever they came back unbidden at a mere glimpse of her, he found it more frustrating by far to be denied her simple attention.
He could not even tell if she’d heard what he’d said. He was staring at the French braid that swung between her shoulder blades like a pendulum as she strode away, and instead of the usual pictures her reluctant presence evoked, there was visited upon him a fantastic image, bizarre in its very mundaneness, of this woman and his sister sitting crosslegged, one in front of the other, braiding each other’s hair. The suspicion that he had been supplanted by an adopted “sister” was surpassed in its power to disturb him only by his sudden understanding that Alice had supplanted his sister as well.
It was not just the braid. It was not just her newfound ability to shun him without effort or insult. The woman was no longer wearing the showy blue makeup. She was not wearing makeup at all, as far as he could tell, stupid as he was on the subject unless it was obvious, and she was wearing Melissa’s clothes. Because he’d never seen her in anything except her uniform, and because he was as indifferent to commonplace clothing as he was to makeup, it took him a few sightings to see this—but Melissa did have a certain style that had subtly registered on him over the years, as had specific garments that he’d never been aware of noticing but which he recognized when he saw them on Alice, whose sultry appearance assumed a peculiar innocence outfitted thus, in light cotton things a little too big. The effect, it occurred to him with a flicker of guilt, was like that of her uniform: a child enveloped and all unaware her body had grown up.
She had almost reached the wheelchair and he’d almost reached her when Jesse came bounding around the corner of the house and, willingly or unwittingly, straight toward him. Alice spoke his name—just that—in a cool clear voice hardly raised, and Jesse stopped dead, then, seemingly unbidden, met her at the wheelchair and helped turn it around. He was very businesslike, upright as a little cadet, and only when Alice put a hand on his shoulder did he cut a quick giddy look back at his uncle.
For the first time since the incident, Frank went home secure in the sense that he was on his own, which, with no regard to the facts of the situation, let alone his own version of the events, suited everyone fine—and that, at the very least and at last, was something familiar. In a way, it was like being rid of a handicap. He was not one of their lot. He was different, of a different order, and he was unhappy. It was as if every shaft from his father’s outsize quiver had been given to Melissa—or, God help him, to Alice—or Alice was his substitute for Melissa, and he’d traded his whole identity and the family honor for a worshipful look from an over-made-up sister he could licitly screw.
The time was propitious for him to get hold of himself. His ads—or, granted, the beer itself—had done too well, almost ruined them, and that was before the abortive lawsuit rained publicity on them. The rape had finished them. Never had Gutenbier received so much public notice, virtually all of it bad, and never had the orders been so good. It couldn’t be said that he’d been wrong about the impact of women on their market. If women had stopped buying the beer in protest, nobody knew it. And he hadn’t been wrong about Beeksma, who, at the least little flap, wanted out. So where had he miscalculated so badly? In not anticipating the magnitude of the new beer’s success? It flattered him to think so, but didn’t quite convince him. That was what had pushed the value of their stock to an unreachable height just when their resources were utterly depleted and, with the bad news and bad deal with Beeksma to consider, no bank would help them at a reasonable rate. His mistake was in not seeing where the flap would lead—who could have?—or how fast. What it came down to, ultimately, was timing.
It was in the midst of these reflections that Mike Drury of Miller, whose calls had become as regular as taxes, called again. Because of their mutual interest in Gutenbier and their mutual inability to take command of it, but most of all because he was the courted party and, short of selling out, could count on the man’s deference, Frank had a certain fondness for him. He would have poured out the whole story of his plight, the peculiar bind in which he found himself and his company, if Mike Drury hadn’t already known plenty about it. It was a hard thing, Mike agreed, when doing well undid you, and he recalled a story about an advertisement Rolls-Royce had run in The New Yorker with similar near-disastrous results, orders out of all proportion to what the company, with its painstaking approach to assembly, could fill. There was of course a parallel. Then Mike pointed out a key difference: Gutenbier had mixed up its finances with what he referred to as businessmen of principle, always a mistake, since business itself was without principles other than survival and profit. A virtuous approach to business was fine and necessary—but only with those at your mercy, not those at whose whim you might find yourself bowing and bending. “But I spoke to you back then,” Mike said, somewhat hurt. “I stood ready as a fair representative of business as business to arrange just the infusion of cool cash that would see you through this, and I mean cool cash, not warm cash, sentimental or squeamish or what-have-you cash—good, clean, amoral money, and more of it where that came from, I might add, to keep those Rolls-Royces of the beer world rolling along, even in the face of devastating success.”
All right, then, Frank said to him. This was clearly an opening, and what would it take to get Miller to buy Beeksma’s shares—a purchase, he didn’t have to add, that would immediately make them more valuable?
Go public, Mike said, and Frank laughed politely. “Make them participating,” Mike suggested next, and Frank, having anticipated this, gave it a moment before he sadly concluded that this, aside from requiring the agreement of the other stockholders, who would never agree, would hopelessly skew the balance between them. But what if, and here he was ready, what if he sweetened the offer with a package of voting stock? He believed he could part with a small percentage of his own—nothing that would change the allotment of power one jot—and he might be able to pry some out of other hands, especially in view of its present value and where—he could make a convincing case that he himself didn’t believe for a minute—it might be going. Would, say, 5 percent do?
He believed he had thought out every angle, every direction the talk could take, but Mike Drury surprised him, discomfited him somewhat, by readily agreeing. Immediately he looked for the variable he might have missed—and when, after long and painstaking scrutiny, none presented itself, he called his cousins, Francis and Ernest.
The next board meeting was only a few days away, and as long as everyone persisted in not talking to him, it would cost him no effort at all to keep his counsel until then.