E. Godz (2 page)

Now, settled into comfortable middle age, a rich and respectable businesswoman,
Edwina looked back over her wild, freewheeling youth without so much as a blush. And
why should she be embarrassed to recall her counterculture odyssey and the many lovers
she'd enjoyed en route to Enlightenment? She'd hurt no one by her amorous escapades,
and even in the pre-AIDS era she'd had the foresight to take certain precautions that had
preserved the robust health of her girlhood from pesky STDs.

Besides, it was thanks to the Summer of Love—which had somehow slipped into the
Autumn of Eros and the Winter of Whoopee—that Edwina had obtained not only her
darling children, but a method of earning more money than her dear, departed Daddy had
ever imagined, even had he lived long enough to invest in Microsoft.

Her darling children ...

Edwina turned her back on the family portraits above the fireplace and returned her
full attention to the framed photograph in her hands. She shook her head sadly. The
smiles frozen in the instant of a camera's shutter click meant nothing. A photograph was a
moment's illusion artificially preserved. The reality of the situation concerning her
precious offspring had nothing at all to do with smiles.

"Why can't the two of you just get along?" she inquired peevishly of the glossy faces.
"I'm not asking you to adore one another. I'm not even asking you to remember each
other's birthdays. All I want is just one itsy-bitsy little indication that you can work
together. And I don't mean simultaneously plotting each other's professional destruction.
Good gods, I hope it would be limited to professional destruction only, but the way you
two have been going for each other's throats lately, who knows? A little cooperation for
your mutual benefit, to say nothing of cooperation for the benefit of the company: Is that
so much to ask?"

Something behind one of the parlor walls went *ding!* This was followed by the
sound rather like a passel of cats scratching madly in their litterboxes, but when Edwina
went to the wall whence issued these noises and touched the spring catch that opened the
desired panel, she revealed their true source, a flock of fountain pens rapidly scribbling
away as if guided by unseen hands. There were twelve of them in all, though only two of
them were working at the moment, transcribing a telephone conversation between Dov
Godz and his older sister, Peez. Each one of the dozen pens was linked by suitably arcane
spells to a piece of office equipment—be it telephone, fax machine, or any item of
computer wizardry from desktop to day planner—in either the Miami or New York City
offices of E. Godz, Inc.

Which was to say that the items themselves—all gifts from Edwina to her offspring—
were enspelled eavesdropping devices, clandestine portals that permitted her to keep
constant, magically enabled tabs on the children's every move.

Wouldn't it be silly to own and run America's only family-operated clearinghouse for
magical power and not put some of that power to work spying on your kids?

For that, in a nutshell, was E. Godz, Inc.'s stock-in-trade: magic.

It was not a career path that Edwina had consciously sought out, at first. Rather, it
was a by-product of all those years back in the '60s that she'd spent crisscrossing the
country in flower-splashed vans, salvaged schoolbuses, or, in a pinch, VW Bugs painted
to look like Peter Max's worst nightmare. Like so many of her hippie brethren, Edwina
discovered that life on the nation's back roads and byways led a person to consider
whether there were also spiritual roads-less-traveled that might bear exploration. The
faith of her forebears wasn't a good fit for her new lifestyle: Peyote and Presbyterians
didn't mix worth a damn.

She was not alone in this quest for new ways of getting in touch with her mystic side.
The '60s were famous for having driven hordes of young people out of their families'
churches and into the arms of the "earthy" religions out there. Chanting mantras was in,
catechisms were out, and the incessant beating of drums was much more desirable than
any silly old Bach mass for organ. It was part of the whole tribal-is-cooler/ethnic-is-in
package. And in some cases it was a pretty good excuse to get high, in the name of
seeking the One True Path, though heaven help anyone uncool enough to mention that
the end-justifies-the-means trip had its roots in the writings of Saint Jerome.

It was here that Edwina's One True Path took a sharp right off the spiritual interstate
and left the rest of her contemporaries far behind. Whereas they only nosed around the
borderline belief systems, she jumped in feet first, with eyes and mind wide open. While
her tribemates picked up this or that back-to-the-Earth faith, only to put it down again
when the glitter of the new toy wore off (or when it failed to piss off their parents
sufficiently), Edwina actually spent serious study time on every non-suburbia-standard
religion she encountered.

And when Moonbeam Suntoucher (nee Greta Bradford-Smythe) announced that she
was a shaman because she had bought a genuine dreamcatcher and a boatload of dried
sage, or when Frodo Freelove (Mr. and Mrs. Kaplan's firstborn son, Sammy) insisted he'd
achieved samsara because the check he'd written out to the Happy Times Ashram and
Salad Bar had finally cleared, Edwina calmly went about the business of improving her
grasp on the true powers that underlie the more Gaia-centric beliefs, if you sought them
out with enough application and sincerity.

Either that or she just got lucky. But whatever the case, the fact remained that Edwina
Godz came away from all of her spiritual quests with a command of magic and
something more: the realization that the people who were following the many separate
paths of some really Old Time Religions didn't have the business sense of bread mold.

It was sad. There they sat—be they tribe or coven or council or conglomeration of
congregants—able to raise the might of the great earth-powers but helpless to do more
than take it in the unmentionables every year when Income Tax Day rolled around.

Edwina had fixed all that. Edwina was good at fixing things. Perhaps it was her
personal muse at work, perhaps it was thanks to her father's legal-eagle spirit, raised
during one of the many assorted ceremonies in which Edwina had participated over the
years, perhaps it was simply out-of-the-blue inspiration, but whatever the source, the
result was the same: Edwina Godz saw a way to help both the old earth-religion
followers, by whatever name they chose to call themselves, and herself. Retracing the
steps of her spiritual journey, she approached them one by one with her modest proposal:
that she show them the ropes of fund-raising, the benefits of obtaining tax-exempt status
as registered, organized religions, and the basics of bookkeeping to safeguard their
continued economic health.

Could she help it if the best, most efficient way for them to do this was by her
founding her own corporation and taking all of them on board as her subsidiaries? Was
she to blame if they were so grateful to lay hold of the advantages she offered that they
never uttered so much as a whisper of objection when she collected a nice, fat piece of
the action in exchange for services rendered? Did anyone protest when she used the
magic powers she'd mastered during her years of Searching to help run E. Godz, Inc. so
smoothly?

Of course not. There was more than enough butter to go around so that everyone's
bread was fully covered. The boat wasn't rocking, nothing was broken, and all was roses.

Except for a couple of thorns named Dov and Peez. In a perfect world, Edwina's
children would have appreciated the goldmine that their mother had created for them.
Instead they seemed to spend their free time trying to give each other the shaft. Didn't
they understand that if their bickering over personal differences got out of control it could
adversely affect E. Godz, Inc.? And then where would they be? Were they even fit for
any other sort of employment?

That annoying *ding!* sounded again, signaling the end of a transmission. The pair
of pens softly laid themselves down, their jobs done. Still clutching the family photo in
her left hand, Edwina reached in with her right to remove the sheets bearing the
transcribed conversation. It was a miracle that the papers didn't spontaneously combust in
her hand, given the level of volcanic vituperation zipping back and forth between the
siblings. As with every intercepted communication Edwina had ever seen, Dov and Peez
each managed to let the other know that:

A. He/she did not like her/him.

B. He/she did not trust her/him.

C. He/she knew how to run the family business far better than her/him.

D. If there were any justice in the universe, the day would come when
he/she would have the power to push her/him the hell out of her/his cushy,
undeserved position and then all would be right with the world.

E. So there.

"I blame myself," Edwina muttered, crumpling up the papers and tossing them away.
The parlor wastebasket sprouted cherub wings and zoomed in to catch the discarded
transcriptions before they hit the floor, then fluttered back to its place, only pausing long
enough to trade high-fives with the fireplace-ash broom. "A little. On second thought, no,
I don't blame myself at all. Why should I? I always did what was best for them. I sent
them away from home as soon as I could manage it, legally and financially. So I'm the
Great Earth Manager, not the Great Earth Mother: So sue me. Which is worse, raising
your kids yourself, come hell or high water, when you darn well know that it's not your
scene, or sending them to the finest daycare centers and boarding schools and colleges
that money can buy? Money which, might I add, we never would have had in the first
place if I'd been tied down wiping runny noses and kissing boo-boos and baking
cupcakes instead of being free to build up the business. I think I did damn well by those
kids. If it's anyone's fault that they can't get along, it's theirs."

She put the family photo back on the table and made herself a fresh pot of tea, but
despite a brew containing enough St. John's wort to turn Attila the Hun into a tree sloth,
Edwina found herself unable to release her troubles and go with the cosmic flow.

The cosmic flow didn't have children.

She made an impatient sound with her tongue and sat up straight on the sofa. She had
reached a decision:

"It may not be my problem if Dov and Peez want to wear each other's guts for garters,
but if I don't want E. Godz, Inc. to go down the corporate tubes, I'd better be the one to
fix it," she said. "The question is—how?"

She settled back among the cushions, took a deep draught of tea, and closed her eyes
while she brought all the powers of a mind Machiavelli might envy to bear upon the
present sticky wicket. Music from an unseen source wafted gently through the parlor, a
medley of New Age hits that she had conjured up to help her think. At last, when it
seemed as though she would burst out of her house stark naked and foaming at the mouth
if she had to listen to one more meandering flute trill, Edwina's eyes popped open, the
light of inspiration shining bright within.

"Of course," she said aloud. "It's the perfect plan: simple, elegant and practical.
Excellent." A sharklike grin—her father's corporate lawyer heritage at work—spread
itself across her face as she told the air: "Take a letter."

Three more ensorcelled fountain pens floated up from the green baize-lined leather
box atop Edwina's desk. The left-hand top drawer opened of its own accord and three
sheets of blank paper like three white miniature flying carpets arose to take their places
beneath the waiting nibs. The top right-hand drawer opened and two envelopes slithered
out to await developments. A ghostly file cabinet hovered on the edge of materialization,
pending the completion of the letter under composition. Ever the consummate
businesswoman, Edwina never failed to make a copy of all correspondence for her
personal records.

"My dearest children," she began her dictation, to the accompanying scritch-scritch-
scratch of the three animate pens. "It is with a heavy heart that I write this from what will
be, in the inevitable course of time, my death bed. There is no cure for the ailment that
has so suddenly come over me and my doctor tells me that I have, at most, a few months
more to live. I admit that I've been toying with the idea of retirement for a while now, but
this news has forced my hand.

"Thus I find myself compelled to make a decision which I have been putting off,
namely determining who shall succeed me as the new chairperson of E. Godz, Inc. My
deepest desire has always been to be able to turn over cooperative control of the business
to the two of you, but I realize that this is impossible. You two couldn't find cooperative
in the dictionary even if I cast a spell on it and had it bite you in the butt. How to describe
your relationship? Cats versus dogs? Hatfields versus McCoys? Pepsi versus Coke?
Trekkies versus Trekkers?

"If I gave you joint control of E. Godz, Inc., it would only be a matter of time before
your bickering, sniping, and outright attacks on one another distracted you from the
business of running my company well and profitably. I didn't work so hard all these years
to have my creation torn to shreds after I'm gone.

"Therefore I am resolved: Only one of you will inherit control of the company,
together with the bulk of my estate. Which one? I'm still thinking it over. To be frank,
though I love you both for the totality of your personhoods and embrace your unique
younesses with the wholehearted, nonjudgmental attitude of our Mother Earth, as far as
your business smarts go, neither of you has impressed me worth a dog fart. As for
leadership ability, if either one of you encountered a horde of midair lemmings who had
already gone headfirst over the cliff's edge, I sincerely doubt whether you could persuade
them to complete the plunge.