Crazy for Cornelia (2 page)

“Hell no. The owners don’t tell us shit. Maids, butlers, that’s who we hear all the information from.” Andrew chortled. “They’re
happy to tell you anything makes their bosses look like fools.”

Andrew removed the fat manila file from the doorman shelf and handed it to Kevin.

“So here’s all the building rules. No smoking. No drinking. No fraternizing with the owners.”

“Uh-huh,” Kevin said, flipping through the stack of papers. One fell open to reveal twenty-five neat rows of blocks with handprinted
names and apartment numbers. Small head shots of people cut out of newspapers and magazines were pasted in the boxes.

“That’s a visual aid for you.” Andrew tapped his finger on his collage. “Job one for a doorman is security. That’s what we
do, keep the building secure. Anybody you don’t know shows up, you got to find out
politely who they are. That’s why you got to know your owners. We got one hundred and twelve people living in forty apartments.
This here gives you all their names and apartment numbers so you can memorize ’em. I put in their kids, dogs, servants, everybody
they allow in the apartment. Some photos, too, whatever I could find. Hang on, here comes 11B.”

Andrew nodded toward the street. Kevin saw a very old man with a skeletal face and wisps of white hair fluttering in the wind.
He held his thin, gnarled hands in front of him like a dinosaur’s claws, helped along by a young, heart-faced blonde wearing
a shiny black fur coat.

“Got ’em. Count Dracula and Courtney Love,” Kevin whispered to Andrew as he swung open the door.

Andrew ignored him. “Good afternoon, Mr. Geddy, Mrs. Geddy. This is Kevin Doyle, new man on the job.”

Kevin practiced touching the brim of his hat like Andrew, working to keep his smile hoisted up even though his real emotions
were scraping bottom and his jaw ached.

Mr. Geddy nodded his skull and exposed his gums in greeting. The woman flickered an interested glance at her new doorman before
she turned her eyes back to her husband. Kevin watched her walk hubby to the elevator, expensive haircut bouncing on her fur
collar. He wondered what she allowed her husband to do with his claws for the privilege of living in 11B.

“So what’d you do before this?” Andrew asked him.

“Three years, I worked Bellevue, nights,” Kevin said, leaving out his art for the time being. “I was a physical aide, no medical
training or anything. Mostly I kept the patients company. Or restrained them.”

Andrew seemed interested. “Mental patients?”

“Most of them. Some of them were faking it to stay out of jail. ‘Had a delusional belief I was Jesse James, made me rob the
convenience store,’ that kind of stuff. Thirty-days observation in Bellevue buys them a ‘get out of jail free’ defense.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“I snuck a patient out to see her kids one weekend. The tough part of security at Bellevue was sneaking back in. She got caught,
I lost my job. It was just a night job to get by. I was studying—”

They both heard a high-pitched scream from outside.

“Incoming,” Andrew said.

They opened both doors for a triple-wide wicker stroller pushed by a stressed-out nanny in a white uniform. Two of the three
bundles inside, a baby boy and girl, were asleep, their blond heads slack. The third screamed in a wavy, high-pitched yowl.
The parents walked behind them, a fine-featured couple in their thirties, their faces screwed up painfully at the sound.

Kevin bent down and put his face in front of the shrieking baby.

“Hey, gorgeous,” he said, wiggling his ears. Gotcha. The little girl stopped bawling in mid-cry, her mouth hanging open in
the goofy, wondrous way of all kids, even rich ones.

Kevin used his taxi whistle to chirp for her. She smiled like a burst of sun.

“Mr. and Mrs. Eames, this is Kevin Doyle,” Andrew said.

The father smiled at Kevin and pressed a five-dollar bill into his hand.

He waved it away. “That’s okay,” Kevin told him brusquely. These people probably saw doormen as mutants bred to push doors
and perform courtesies, if you kept feeding them treats of currency.

While the Eames family arranged itself in the elevator, Kevin peered at the photos in Andrew’s file, memorizing the children’s
names. Even in the semidarkness, Kevin felt a shadow falling over his shoulders and the little hairs stirred on the back of
his neck.

“Hey, Dumbo…
ping!
”

The familiar voice growled behind him as he felt a sharp burning in both ears. He turned around to see his Uncle Eddie’s round,
ruddy face with its heavily ridged forehead set in permanent irritation. His hair was buzz cut with open spaces, like a lawn
that needed reseeding. Eddie kept his fingers poised to snap against Kevin’s ears again. He wore civilian clothes today, not
his doorman uniform. His thick, pub-brawler arms stuck out of rolled-up jacket sleeves with a N.Y. Knicks logo on his pocket.

Kevin knew from experience it would take a moment to hear past the painful ringing. And he’d have to swallow his bile at Eddie.
His uncle was the closest thing west of India to a sacred cow, at least to the Doyles. He was the only family member who could
provide union jobs, which had kept the other men in the family from decking him for fifteen years.

“You still got big ears, kid.” Eddie turned to Andrew. “When he was little, he had ears like Dumbo. I used to sneak up and
ping him. We had ourselves a little fun.”

“Turned my life around, Uncle Eddie.”

“Tell you what, just call me Eddie. We don’t want to give hiring relatives a bad name. Did I just see you turn down a tip?”

“I guess.”

Eddie shook his head sadly at Andrew. “He’s a mutt, but he’s my late sister’s kid. Kevin, tips are life’s blood. Tips are
mother’s milk. You’re a doorman now. You see a resident standing in front of you, that’s not a person, okay? That’s a bag
of groceries.”

Eddie handed Kevin a plastic card. “Your union card. Welcome to Local 32A. International Brotherhood of Portal Operators.
I’m your delegate now. Your employer is the building manager of this property. But you got a grievance, you come to me.”

Eddie handed Kevin a second card.

“This is your Platinum Health Plan card from the union. It gives you the same health care as anybody living in this building.
Maybe even better. Choose your own doctor, best hospitals, get your meds, you don’t pay squat.”

Eddie handed him a piece of paper and a pen. “Sign there, says you got your health plan. I got you a sweet deal, kid. Nobody
gets a doorman job two weeks before Christmas.”

“Yeah,” Andrew agreed. “Just standing there, you get maybe two thousand for Christmas. If you always grab their bags before
they ask, always know the right time, weather, you get maybe four, five thousand bucks.”

“You owe me, kid,” Eddie said. “I’ll be around. Take care, Andrew.”

Eddie lumbered out the front door, a potbellied fireplug in a team jacket, disappearing just as a gray limousine pulled directly
in front of the awning.

“Heads up.” Andrew nudged Kevin. “Here comes Chester Lord. He’s chairman of the co-op board for the building, makes the rules
around here.”

Kevin watched a clean-featured man in his early fifties climb out of the back seat of a limo that looked smaller than life,
like it was built
in the Black Forest by elves. Chester Lord glided into the building. His medium frame, in a striped tie and blue blazer,
could have lost ten pounds. Though his sandy hair had thinned a lot, he combed it straight back with no effort to hide the
bald spots. A WASP thing, Kevin realized. They never combed their last few strands of hair all the way over their heads or
wore hairpieces. A guy like Chester Lord let his dome get shiny and didn’t care what anybody thought.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Lord,” Andrew said.

“Hello, Andrew.” The crisp voice was soft, hard to hear. He arched one eyebrow at Kevin. “Are you the new doorman?”

“Kevin Doyle.”

The man squeezed his hand and let it go. In the awkward pause, Kevin sensed a shyness.

“Well, good luck to you.”

“Thanks.”

Andrew waited until Chester Lord was whooshed up in the elevator. “Something you got to know about the Lords.”

He took the folded copy of the day’s
New York Daily Globe
off the shelf and handed it to him. Kevin peered at the newspaper, opened to the fifth page, barely able to decipher the
print in the lobby’s gloom. He held it close to the weak light to get a better look.

There was a column titled
Debwatch
. The script typeface looked like a wedding invitation. It was written by somebody named Philip Grace. Under a bold black
headline, “Corny’s Social Swim,” Kevin studied a grainy picture taken at night. A girl of maybe twenty in a soaking-wet dress
stood in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. The column called her a “wilding deb” and “party girl.” The girl seemed
wired enough. Still, her eyes didn’t look to Kevin like she was having any party.

She looked pretty, like his younger sister, Marne, but with finer features. Deb features. Delicate even in the muddy pixels
of the newspaper photo. His sister Marne was the anti-deb. A firefighter, she’d had to fight the guys in her Brooklyn squadron
for acceptance. She became one of the guys when another firefighter tried to stick his hand down her shirt, and instead of
getting huffy like they would have expected and filing a sexual harassment claim, she broke his fingers.

But this girl in the photograph never had to fight for anything in
her life. She just slid down a lucky birth canal and popped out an heiress. He tried to wrap his mind around what it would
be like to go through life without a financial worry.

“The girl who’ll always have everything.” Kevin shook his head. “Look what she does with it.”

“Maybe.” Andrew’s forehead twitched. “Son, it’s going to be hard on you here if you don’t cut the residents a little slack.
They got problems, too.”

“Sure.” Problems like having the chauffeur blow-dry you after a cold swim in front of the Plaza Hotel.

“Anyhow, this young woman is Chester Lord’s daughter. Chester, he’s a pleasant man, usually. But young Cornelia has got some
impulse-control issues. You know what I’m saying?”

“No problem.”

“The other thing,” Andrew went on, pointing to Philip Grace’s byline. “This here’s a sneaky reporter. He’ll try to get you
to tell him when Cornelia might be on her way in or out. He makes a living taking nasty photos. Sticks to this building like
a roach on cheesecake, figures Cornelia’s always good for some kind of show. He’ll offer you money. You take it and anybody
finds out, it’ll get you fired like you been vaporized. Get me in trouble, too, not training you right.”

Kevin stared at the girl in the picture. In his neighborhood, nobody would even notice that kind of behavior. Unless maybe
she puked on your new shoes. But the tawdry photo of the debutante both irritated and fascinated him.

His dad would call it another eccentricity, winding up drunk in a public fountain and not even enjoying it. Maybe it was a
bored-party-girl thing. Or maybe she was just crazy as a bedbug, and everybody covered up for her.

Either way, he wondered what his mother would think of him now, having to tip his hat to a girl like that, staggering by him
giggling, smelling of stale champagne.

Tomorrow, no matter how long he worked, he would need to check on the neon saint he’d dedicated to his mother.

I
n Penthouse A, Chester Lord IV leaned over and lightly kissed his sleeping daughter’s forehead.

It felt warm and moist, covered with wisps of her straw-blond hair. He tried to imagine Cornelia’s face lighting up the way
it had before her childhood slipped away. Before this odd young woman who drank too much and danced in public fountains moved
in.

Chester sat by her bed and wished he could invite her to dinner, just the two of them in the apartment, to talk things out.
Instead, he would have to explain to her why she would be grounded until he talked to her psychiatrist and Tucker Fisk, to
come up with some sort of a plan.

He sighed heavily. He had allowed so many opportunities to reach his daughter get away. Perhaps irretrievably. Lately, that
thought felt like an anvil in his stomach. She never actually rebuffed him, only seemed to live her life dancing to music
he couldn’t hear. To put it mildly. He had clung to the notion that they would one day share a cleansing effort to talk out
their differences. Now all they shared was grief frozen in time. He worried whether Cornelia had finally lost any desire to
cut through the silence that had hardened between them over the past ten years.

Chester fought to ignore the color scheme of his daughter’s bedroom.
One side of the room was all red, the other side all black. It bore little resemblance to the sweet sanctuary that once housed
precious antiques, a collection of crystal, and her own gleeful artwork and school projects. In one mad week, she stripped
the room of all personal things, as if to deny him any clue to her personality, and installed stark utilitarian furnishings.
All that she kept from her childhood was her giant fish tank full of colorful creatures, which, to her credit, she tended
carefully.

Now she slept doped up on medications that the unctuous psychiatrist Dr. Bushberg had prescribed. The sight of her blond head
on the pillow pained him. Her mother’s Devonshire-cream skin and delicate features still made her look so innocent and vulnerable.
Chester squeezed her hand and left the room, forcing himself to keep the slump out of his walk.

Other duties called.

“Just don’t come to the board meeting,” he muttered to Cornelia.

He crossed the long, dark second story, passing the gym. When Elizabeth was alive, that room had hammered with the clang of
free weights and the hiss of the hydraulic workout machine. Chester used the machine only as a coat rack.

He passed sconces that once hung in Napoleon’s castle at Waterloo, and glanced in the gilt-etched mirror between them. Though
he was hardly trim, Chester looked presentable. Wall-to-wall anxiety kept a sparkle in his eyes. And he had not yet suffered
the Dorian Gray effect that strikes WASPs suddenly in middle age, collapsing a youthful face overnight into cracks and folds.