The Unfortunates (8 page)

And how John made his fortune! CeCe told George after he’d found himself confronting his great-grandfather’s name as a multiple-choice option (D, incorrect) to a question on industry barons of the nineteenth century during a middle-school history test. He was delighted when later that year his social studies class was asked to produce a paper entitled “My Family Story.” As his friends complained of awkward interviews with this or that grandparent, George lifted his essay from the public record and went to the movies. From the encyclopedia and
The New York Times
obituaries, with a smattering of quotation marks and a few changes for originality and sophistication, he transcribed:

John Stepney Somner was born to prosperous farmers in 1837 in New York. At the age of twenty-five he bought out of service in the Civil War. After losing a tavern bet over the material origin of the newly invented rubber stamp, he set out on an expedition to Brazil, where he joined the Amazonian rubber boom. He invested in plantations and harvested the white sap called LATEX.

By thirty-five, Somner returned to the US of A. Somner Rubber, a manufacturing company, and Somner Chemical, a “subsidiary producer of vulcanizing agents” and solvents. Such as sulfuric acid and AMMONIA. He lived in Stockport, Connecticut, “having, with diplomatic finesse, enlisted as overseas managers of production and transport those expatriates of the Confederacy who fled the newly United States for Brazil in 1867.” 1867 the year the Amazon opened to “international shipping.” Stockport is very conveniently located between New York City and Naugatuck, where he built his plants. It’s a nice drive.

“The Somners were Union folk but, as John put it, ‘not opposed to hiring these our honorable cousins of a different mind.’”

The plants were on a street known as Rubber Avenue. “John persuaded New Haven Railroad to add Stockport to its station line, tripling the value of John’s various real estate holdings and over the decades transformed the little hamlet to the bustling.”

His plants in Naugatuck produced boots and gloves. Specialty gloves for telegraph linemen and hospital workers. Until Somner rubber gloves, hospital workers tended their patients bare. They experienced burns from antiseptic fluids, carbolic acids and bichloride of mercury. “The benefit of gloves to sterility was only later discovered.” Also, CONDOMS.

John merged his company with six others to create American Rubber, a “monopolizing consortium.” Right before the 1896 creation of the Dow Industrial Average of twelve stocks, a coincidence, including American Rubber.

“He became John Stepney Somner of New York, serving one term in the state senate, twice mounting failed gubernatorial runs.” By the first year of the new century, he’d added to his homes in Washington Square and Stockport a gaming retreat in Virginia, just south of DC, and a “monolithic estate on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, used only six weeks out of the year, which, “for reasons lost to time,” he named Apollo Court.”

After the conference with his teacher, CeCe arranged for George to take his first private tour of the library, one evening it was closed; they ate a sandwich in the stern topiary garden at the side of the mansion, behind the ornate, black iron fence that separated them from the sidewalk. In the dim room of antique instruments, a docent unlocked the display cases. George was allowed to touch them all: the gittern and the sorna and the sitar. Sad, he thinks now, how his mother has always been immune to the pull of great music. Merely, unsentimentally, appreciative. But not George. George understands why it’s the highest of all arts, the only form that can set the soul free.

The car winds into the upswing glint of midtown east. It begins to rain, a hot-anyway city rain, under a bright sun. The dank concrete pavement and the yellow warp of the walk signs through the pebbles of rain rolling down the outside of his window and the black umbrellas snapping up to obscure the faces of those caught on the crosswalk all remind him that he’s tired, that it’s been a week of sleepless nights. Still, he’s in a good mood. The silence in the car, the muffled city sounds outside—a jackhammer, the grind of the taxi’s brakes. The thought of Iris at home—he’s happy to be a commuter, a man with a house in the shade of a great white ash. A man in a marriage sliding through the wet city, the city transformed into the back of a submarine just risen from the water. To be alone but not alone, what better? At a red light he taps the glass separating himself from the driver. The panel recedes and he sees which of the men who drive him is at the wheel. He knows most in the rotation assigned to him. His driver’s license has been suspended twenty years—cocaine, hurricane—a status he has no pressing desire to dispute. It’s the old guy. How are the granddaughters? Fifth grade, already? Easy, careless, not caring about the answer, the driver not caring either, unified in the pleasantness of not caring about each other.

At work, George ducks past the receptionist and heads down the narrow corridor toward Audrey, his assistant. She’s sitting in the tightest part of the U of her wraparound cubby, eating a pile of tuna out of wax paper and aluminum foil. The smell hangs in the hermetically vented hall. He shakes the rain from his long black umbrella and hands it to her. She’ll want to talk about the Cultural Initiative Grants. He doesn’t want to talk about the Cultural Initiative Grants. Just thinking about it kills his mood. He hopes she doesn’t ask him how his mother is. In the last six months he’s taken days off here and there, ostensibly to join CeCe at various medical appointments. At work he’s had to outbright everyone, dazzle them out of pity and out of the possibility they might strike up a meaningful conversation, so he smiles and says:

“Hello—tuna! It’s kind of early for tuna?”

Office jocularity affords few and simple topics, for which he is grateful. New hair. New outfit. Commuter pain. Computer pain. Sustenance. Wait—did he? He cups his chin. Yes, in his haste to leave the hotel, he forgot to shave.

“George, hi.” Audrey looks startled to see him. “No carbohydrates. Pretty rugged.”

“You, come on! Why would you do that? You look great. What have we got? Stacks to read, floor to ceiling?”

“I—” They pause to greet Stanton—Will, William—who’s wandered silently around the corner in his usual way, relaxed a blink shy of coma: already an ambler in his fifties, with the pink of a baby out of a bath. As always, his clothes appear just-bought—today, a navy cable-knit sweater, khakis, expensive gray running shoes. The unspoken rule that only the boss gets to wear sneakers, to bring his dog. George smoothes his rough chin, his tie. The massive golden retriever glitters at Stanton’s side.

“Betsy’s looking handsome,” George says.

“And how is—it has a strange name?”

“3D. He has
us
on a leash. Those two”—George leans down and touches Betsy with his index finger—“should have a playdate. We’d love to have you and Anita out for a visit.”

“Hmm.” Stanton sighs. “Glad we’re all with Liz on reviewing the Program Guidelines.” He must think George attended Friday’s meeting. He’s surprised Stanton attended. Stanton’s time is usually reserved for the board and the big donors, not the day-to-day. George agrees, Liz was right on. Says he can’t wait to take a look at her material. Stanton and the dog move down the hall.

As program director for the Arts and Culture Fund at the Hud-Stanton-Fox Foundation, George makes $75,000 a year. His mother supplements this income with what she calls “infrastructure” (subcategories: productive leisure, real estate tax, Iris), which is granted as a relatively modest disbursal once a year through CeCe’s lawyer so they may avoid speaking of it and he may avoid his shame in taking it.

“Trust him with a trust?” she’d said. “I trust it is only through work he will not descend into moral turpitude, and I trust he will only work if I provide him with the essentials and no more.” This to the lawyer—George at eighteen, sitting like a giant, disembodied pimple between them, the only time the three had met together until this year. Until her illness.

“I didn’t expect you in until tomorrow. Your mom’s called twice this morning. How’re you holding up?”

“I’m well. I’m great.”

Awkward. Audrey’s concern, draining as the fluorescents. She yanks her rubber band out of her jet curls and reknots the bun with a violence that still startles George, though he’s seen her do it a hundred times a day for two years. She forks a bite of the wet lump in the foil. In silence together they search and find Stress, the North Star of office camaraderie.

“Wow,” she maws, “it mushed be streshfu.”

“Stress can be a powerful and driving force.”

“Your mom calls me Ellen. Wasn’t your first assistant named Ellen?”

“No,” he lies.

Lying, lying, lying. To cheer himself up he pictures lying under Audrey in her starter-kit apartment. A plastic alarm clock on top of a plastic milk crate. The Official Audrey Fantasy does not have its usual soothing effect; in its place he imagines her the damp, gunmetal gray of a Pacific tuna.

“What’s first priority today? Cultural Initiative? City Hope Orchestra?”

“I got through those while you were gone.” She swallows. “I had some spare time Friday. Not that—I mean, you should double-check everything, right?”

Most workdays George sits in his well-appointed office in front of the computer and clicks through glossy, photo-filled presentations sent by organizations requesting grant money. Photos of, say, a child playing a violin next to a pie chart, above an investment report. He slices open the few applications that still come by hard mail with a letter knife shaped like the wing of a gull. The knife is a corporate gift he received his first year at Hud-Stanton. All the program directors got one, but George recognized it was modeled after Brancusi’s
Bird in Space
, with the addition of a serrated spine, and, having always admired the sculpture, felt it had been chosen particularly for him. Next, they batch potential grant recipients: Allocate Funds (suggested amount; timeline; rationale); No with a Note; Special Consideration; Friend of X; No. Worthy causes: endowing a symphony, or, say, last month’s project—a onetime grant to restore a collection of Revolutionary-era chairs for display at the New-York Historical Society.

At first, Audrey Singer wanted to open and print and arrange these grant requests for him; otherwise she had little to do. The previous year, Hud-Stanton had absorbed—merged with, officially—the Fox Foundation, several polite years after the death of its founder, Henry Fox. Fox and Hud-Stanton shared many board members and the endowment-doubling vote to merge was near unanimous. For reasons of diplomacy, working out the balance of responsibilities allotted to various duplicate programs is slow going. George knows Hud-Stanton is taking delicate care in folding the Fox programs, one by one, into their own. He began his libretto in the bounty of extra time brought by the merger. Audrey has as little to do as he; it doesn’t help that as a rule he won’t let her get him coffee.

“Never!” he shouted, the first time she tried, and as she shrank back, he felt a surge of benediction, the power of radical goodness coursing through him. She hid the cup behind her cubicle’s partition and cast down her eyes, no doubt moved by the luck of being assigned such a good boss. The downside is, without enough for her to do, their relationship has a vague, nervous quality as if they’d slept together a long time ago and are now forever running into each other: the only truth they share is the one they cannot speak. If they discuss work too long, they risk revealing that there isn’t enough work for both of them. Then he’d have to sack her. Then he’d be the guy without an assistant.

They both feel better when Audrey remembers to look busy: an occasional test-run of the mail-merge; an update to the Contact List when the phone number of a new Influential or Charity Minded Citizen or Corporation comes their way. Mostly, she IM’s with her boyfriend and reads magazines hidden in her lap while George works on his libretto. They get along best the four days out of the year Audrey has the real task of delivering the fiscal quarter’s stack of closed-grant files to the lonesome archivist down the hall. Once a month, she joins him in his office for a SUM, or Status Update Meeting. Together they type up descriptions of the causes in George’s Yes Pile and send these to the Board. The Board Yeses his Yes (except for one or two times a year when an MTR (Modification of Terms Request) or NCP (No on Conflicting Precedent) comes back so it looks as if everyone were paying attention. He attends a dinner and once in a while cuts a ribbon, as he had once at the New York Center for Egyptian Archaeology: cut the ribbon and sat at the linen-draped table closest to the mummy, between a curator and a former mayor, across from a donor. The donor, an airline executive, over chicken and vegetables julienned and fanned on the plate, recited to George what seemed the entirety of his new book,
Flying Strong: Ten First-Class Rules to Reenergize Your Yes
. Also verse from his self-published poetry collection,
Plumes of the Earth.

“Right!” George says, and enters his office and closes the door. He shuffles the pile.

His phone rings. “I’m forwarding the messages,” Audrey says, and hangs up. The voice-mail light clicks on. There are two recipient-foundation thank-yous followed by a Critical Mass call to a Union Square sit-in for the Sustainable Agro program officer, misdirected to George, typical, as that officer—a young guy from Fox whose rope-and-seashell bracelet irritates George—is also named George, not only George but George Stemmler, the name tripping the voice recognition on the automated switchboard and sometimes also jostling their e-mails. His mother’s calls. First asking where-has-he-gone-they’d-planned-breakfast-she’s-tried-his-cell-three-times; second, with a long exposition on her doubts in the doctor and her disappointment in George. Iris, from the previous Friday, trying to catch him and why is his cell off, reporting that she has an idea how to redecorate to make the house feel friendlier at night, love you, bye. He should call Iris and tell her he’s back. Confess his escape. But he hasn’t done anything wrong, has he? He’s only gone to work! As any responsible person would.