Sleeping Beauty (23 page)

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Vince liked being a senator. He liked the beginning of the day when he walked into his reception room and was greeted with deference by his staff; he liked the end of the day when he paused on his way out to look through the noble windows at the smooth lawns and government buildings that were the hub of power, the center of the world. Senators who had been there for years tended to downplay their power and say they were just doing a job, working for the people of their states, but Vince never took any of that seriously. He knew that the Senate's reach extended to everyone in the world, from ignorant villagers to kings, presidents, and rock stars; and that the one hundred of them who were its members were the most envied people in the world.

Charles envied him. “My God, what a feeling, to be part of all this,” he said on his first visit to Washington after Vince's election. “Like sitting at the center of the world.” He was helping Vince hang paintings in his new apartment, and he stopped beside the window as he carried a large oil landscape across the room. The apartment was in a glittering new complex on the Potomac, its curved window walls overlooking the esplanade along the waterfront and the Watergate apartments and the Kennedy Center. In the other direction was the Key Bridge, spanning the river to Alexandria. Charles fixed his gaze on Roosevelt Island and the still water of the Potomac, turning bronze beneath the last rays of the sun. The center of the world, he thought with a
sudden ache of melancholy. I'm sixty-two years old and I'll never be any closer to it than here, on the edge of Vince's life. But whose fault is that? When have I ever taken a risk? “You belong here, you know,” he said, bringing the painting to Vince. “I wish I did, but I'd never get nominated, much less elected. I guess it's a good thing; somebody has to stay home and get out the vote.”

“And raise money,” said Vince, taking the painting from him. “You and William did a hell of a job.”

Charles felt a rush of gratitude for Vince's praise. “I surprised myself. But I don't think I could do it for anyone else. It's too exposed, asking people for money; it's like asking them to perform a sex act in public.”

Vince roared with laughter. “I won't ask you to do that. Just concentrate on money, Charles; you've got five years to get clear on the difference between it and sex before my next campaign.”

Angered and embarrassed, Charles turned to the stack of paintings. “I don't understand why you chose the committees you did,” he said.

“Because they're not popular.” Vince joined Charles and took a painting from the stack. “Jasper Johns; we'll put it over the bed. A good place for it; all that nervous energy. It's not complicated, you know: I didn't want strong committees with strong chairmen; I wanted committees I could control. Nobody's passionate about Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; nobody's building a campaign around Environment and Public Works.”

“For a reason,” Charles said. “The voters aren't interested in them.”

“Not yet. So the chairmen will be out playing golf and angling for other committees, and they'll be glad to let me do most of their work. I'll be the one to schedule hearings, and control the questioning of witnesses, and prepare the final report. And help write the legislation that comes from it. That's where the favors are, and the reputations.”

“But agriculture and nutrition . . .”

“It could be sewers and warthogs; what the hell do I care.
But don't underestimate agriculture; there's a lot of ammunition there. The farmers are going to have their subsidies pulled out from under them in a few years, and the ones who come out heroes on that will be senators from the West who try to help, but get run over by senators from the East.” He grinned. “You heard it here first.”

“And public works?”

“Forget public works. It's the environment that's the sexy one. So far nobody knows how to use it without it backfiring somewhere, but one of these days we'll work it out; it's so fucked up it's a time bomb, and whoever figures out how to pitch it in a campaign can do just about anything he wants. Get elected to anything he wants.”

“You didn't say it was fucked up in your campaign.”

“And I won't, until I figure out how to handle it. The committee's a start. One of the wonders of life in Congress is that committee hearings replace thought and action. You don't have to have any beliefs at all. You just keep scheduling witnesses and asking sharp questions, and everyone thinks you're concerned and working hard at your job. You can go on a long time that way, and now and then get your thirty seconds on the evening news and a few paragraphs in the morning paper, and use some of the testimony in your campaigns. Your opponent hasn't been holding hearings, after all; he has to have real ideas, and since most candidates don't have any, you've got a nice head start. And if you're any good at all, you never lose it.”

Charles was silent, repelled and fascinated and filled with envy. And when had he been any different with Vince? he thought. Younger and shorter, Vince had always dominated Charles, and the whole family. Of course Ethan had forced him out, but in the long run what good had that done? Chatham Development Corporation had gone downhill, Vince was far richer than before and a United States senator, and Ethan had left them all, for his damned mountain. Charles had less than ever: one of his daughters vanished, the other cool to him and living in Tamarack, his father gone, a company that was weaker because of him, his
other brothers and sisters going their separate ways. All Charles had was a brother who had everything.

So he visited Washington as often as he could. The fascination was double: not only Vince, but the Senate as well, where Charles breathed the atmosphere of important men and felt himself as close to great events as he could hope to be. It was harder than ever to stay in Chicago; he wanted to be with Vince, who moved through Washington and its intricacies of power easily and assuredly, drawing attention wherever he went. And he took Charles with him: to parties where foreign leaders talked of events known to most of the world only through headlines, to small lunches where senators discussed the administration in scatological terms that would cause a scandal if they became public, to dinners with party leaders who talked of future elections, campaign strategy, polls, and above all, money. Charles tagged along, feeling younger than Vince, less experienced, an outsider in the heady whirl of politics, networking, policy-making, and women.

Vince always had women. He'd been bored with Maisie, he told an astonished Charles; he didn't know if he'd ever marry again. But meanwhile, Washington was full of single women, and unerringly, they found Vince.

In Chicago, Charles felt alone, sitting in his father's chair, trying to make money for his father's company, searching for ways to prove himself his father's worthy successor. It didn't matter that Ethan was gone; his presence hovered over everything; it all still seemed to belong to him. And Charles had no one to tell him what he longed to hear: that he was better and more dynamic than Ethan, more a master of Chatham Development than Ethan had ever been. Charles had no one to tell him anything. Over the years he had thought of marrying again, but somehow the image of his father, noble in widowed singleness, held him back. He saw little of William and Nina and Marian, mainly at family affairs on holidays. He always felt they were weighing his behavior against their father's, worried that he might destroy the company that enriched them all.

Instead, he went to Washington. He stayed in Vince's apartment and clung to Vince, and often Vince would find a woman for him and the four of them would go to dinner or to the theater. And each time, before he returned to Chicago, Charles would dream of selling Chatham Development and retiring.

Of course he couldn't do that; Ethan had entrusted him with the company. More than that, Ethan was still taking part in some of the company's ventures, and demanding financial statements and regular progress reports. And Charles was in the midst of an enormous project, the largest he had ever handled.

It was called Deerstream Village and he had begun designing it five years earlier, after an architectural critic said that Chatham Development could no longer be taken seriously; it had fallen from Ethan Chatham's brilliant and innovative leadership to the safety of small projects and timid designs. Stung, Charles had looked for a project massive and daring enough to bring praise from everyone. He chose as his site five hundred acres of cornfields northwest of Chicago with a small hamlet in their midst called Deerstream. The price had tripled since the federal government announced plans for construction of a highway linking Deerstream and Chicago, and other developers were hesitating, but Charles plunged in.

Fred Jax worked with him on Deerstream. Charles got along with Fred, though he knew others in the family didn't like him and hadn't, from the time Marian brought him home and Ethan disapproved of their marriage because of what he called Fred's cruel streak. Charles saw it, too, and did not admire it, but he could deal with it; occasionally it was useful.

Fred shared his vision for Deerstream, to make it the biggest of the western suburbs, with the largest enclosed shopping mall in the world, fronting on the new highway. It would take all the financial and manpower resources of Chatham Development, but it would be the greatest project Chicago had ever seen. It would give Charles a name even
bigger than his father's. And then he would hand over the presidency to Fred Jax and walk away from the company with dignity.

Vince asked about Deerstream whenever Charles came to Washington. He showed more interest in it than in anything else Charles had done, as the land was surveyed, as plans were drawn and ground broken for the first mall, as blueprints were drawn and bids let for the first filing of single-family homes.

“And the highway?” he asked Charles on a warm night in September. They were taking a walk on the way back to his apartment from dinner at the Sequoia, ties loosened, jackets slung over one shoulder. A stranger might have taken them for relatives because of an elusive resemblance, though one was shorter by four inches, blond, and remarkably handsome, with an almost cocky stride, and the other, with gray hair and rounded shoulders, was handsome in a diminished way, because of an indecisive mouth and a scowl of worry between his eyes. “What about the highway?” Vince asked. “You were worried about it when we were in Maine in July.”

Charles shrugged. “Still the same. Three years and they're still talking about where to put it. The bastards; it's not their worry, so they don't push it.”

“But why would you worry? The funds have been appropriated.”

“You know damn well why I'm worried. It isn't being built. You said, last time we talked, you'd look into it.”

“I didn't get to it; I will, this week.”

“You could put on some pressure, Vince; you know how much is riding on this. If we don't have a highway to the city, we've got nothing to sell. Who'd want to live in the middle of nowhere with no train and no road?”

Vince shot him a look. “Your holdings could absorb the loss; you haven't put everything into it.”

“Damn near. We're not where we were a while back. You know what Dad did, and Leo, that son of a bitch, forcing Chatham Development to borrow that money—
seventy-five million dollars,
for Christ's sake—all of it for Tamarack, none for us. If anything happens to Deerstream, we've got
nowhere to go. We can't borrow on our Tamarack holdings; they were our collateral when we borrowed the seventy-five million. We'd have to sell other properties.”

Vince was silent. He knew all that; he made it his business to know everything about Chatham Development. But Charles had never before acknowledged the precipice they faced. He turned to walk along the C&O Canal, striding faster, hearing Charles behind him, scurrying to catch up. He tried to slow down for Charles, but something propelled him; an excitement that made him want to move, and exult.

More than twenty years before, Vince had vowed to make his family pay for forcing him out. Now the time had come. And Charles was making it easy for him by putting everything into Deerstream, betting the whole company on a highway that hadn't even been begun. He had weakened the company, put the family at risk, left them exposed. All Vince had to do was blow at them as he would a thistle in the desert, and they would go down. It would kill Ethan; it would destroy Charles. How could Charles live with the knowledge that he had undone in five years what Ethan had built up in a lifetime?

Vince smiled in the darkness. Wait long enough, he thought, and everything you want comes to pass.

“Mister,” said a young voice, “gimme five dollars; I got a sick little baby in my family.”

Charles stopped. “What?” he asked. He had been trying to keep up with Vince, and it took him a minute to realize what the boy was saying. He was small and very young—about ten, Charles thought—and he seemed to blend into the trees that bordered the path along the canal. Charles saw movement behind him and imagined other boys, waiting to pounce. Suddenly he was aware of how empty the path was.

“A sick little baby,” the young boy said, his voice rising. “She needs medicine. Pills. Ten dollars.”

“You just said five.”

“She got sicker.”

Charles saw the movement in the shadows and reached for his back pocket. The rule was never fight muggers. His life was worth more than ten dollars.

But before he could pull out his wallet, Vince stepped up and slammed his fist into the boy's face. The boy fell, his head tilted, his eyes closed.

“Vince, for Christ's sake—!” Charles cried, and dropped to his knees beside the boy as Vince turned to the shadows behind them.

Another young boy stood there. “Don't,” he whimpered. He was standing on one foot and then the other, torn between helping his friend and fleeing. “We weren't gonna . . . we didn't hurt nobody!”