Staying True (3 page)

As the sun rose, I soaked in the magical beauty of Coosaw, a large tract along a tidal basin just past the mouth of the Combahee River. The sparkling waters of the river served as a backdrop for palmettos and large live oak trees draped with clumps of gently swinging Spanish moss that surrounded us. This was a place outside of time, a world that filled me with peace. But I was seduced by more than the natural beauty of the landscape. I could see that this was where Mark’s heart resided, and as it became clear what the place had meant to him over the years, I began to see it in the same way.

Mark was a junior in high school when his father was diagnosed with ALS and the family—Mark, his two brothers, sister, and their mother—moved from Florida to their summer home on Coosaw, the place they thought he’d be happiest in his final days. Although the doctors had given his father only six months to live, his dad died almost six years later when Mark was finishing his undergraduate degree. The eldest of his siblings, Mark went to great effort to save this family home. As his father declined, his focus on spending all his time with the family kept him from preparing financially for what would happen after he died. When his father passed, Mark discovered how expensive it was to maintain the farm and understood that he needed to raise money immediately to pay ongoing farm expenses and the inheritance taxes.

The estate advisers told him he would have to sell the farm to meet the family’s obligations, but Mark refused. Although he was only a young man, Mark stepped into the role of head of the family and made some difficult decisions to save the farm. He sold the herd of cattle that had grazed the land for years, and reluctantly let the seven full-time employees go. Much of the maintenance of the farm had to be deferred, unless Mark and his siblings could do it themselves. This was a painful time for the family, a time of stress and hardship when every day Mark feared that he might make a choice that would result in them losing this precious homestead. Yet he kept his vision clearly focused on what mattered to him and the family and, through his discipline and their collective effort, they managed to keep Coosaw.

When the sun was higher on the horizon, I walked with Mark back to the main house, a lovely but worn old brick structure. Though technically a plantation, in the light of day I could see why Mark and his siblings referred to Coosaw as a farm. To me the word “plantation” conjures an image of a grand old antebellum home with servants bringing trays of mint juleps to the veranda for men dressed in seersucker and women in cotton dresses. Coosaw certainly wasn’t that. But it also didn’t fit my Midwestern idea of a farm with rows of corn and barns and cows and chickens.

Scattered around the main house were several falling-down red-roofed barns with faded and chipped white paint. Old tractors and farm equipment in various states of disrepair dotted the landscape, along with a few small hunting cabins. The Sanfords had a homemade fix for everything. They had replaced the rusted-out floor of a jeep with a sheet of plywood. Sure, Coosaw was tumbledown, but I was completely charmed.

We entered the incredibly comfortable and lived-in main house. The décor was tired, the upholstery faded and tattered, and generally the place was a mess, with dirty boots and shotguns heaped in the entryway and clothes drying by the fire. Mark’s family and a few friends had congregated in the kitchen. Everyone was pitching in to prepare a big breakfast, swapping stories of hunts from the weekend, or catching up on each other’s lives. When the meal was set out, we all paused, holding hands in a circle for the blessing. As soon as the meal was done, everyone was up, cleaning the kitchen or setting off to tackle one of the many chores that had been discussed over breakfast: tending the dikes, grading the dirt road, moving the tractor, fixing the dirt bike, or cleaning the guns.

I was put on the kitchen crew. While tidying the kitchen, surrounded by family photos of Sanfords at Coosaw or at the old home in Florida, I got the chance to chat at length with Mark’s mother, Peg. She spoke of how delighted she was to have all of her children home. I was flooded with a sense of Mark, of his tight-knit family, of
Sanfordness
. Even though we came from very different backgrounds and parts of the country, it became clear to me there that we had a great number of things in common.

My big Catholic Midwestern family was, in its way, as close knit and fiercely loyal as Mark’s Southern Protestant clan. I was raised in Winnetka, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago. Both my parents grew up there as well, and my siblings and I all attended the same grade school, Saints Faith, Hope & Charity. I was the second child of five and the oldest of three girls in a row. It sure seemed that the girls dominated the Sullivan household, despite the presence of our brothers Bolton and John. (Perhaps that is just how I wistfully see it now, looking back from this world of mine that is so completely populated by men and boys.)

Our childhood was a happy one, safe and secure. We walked or rode our bikes to school, came home for lunch daily, and even in the dead of the winter, Mom routinely sent us out to play, warning us not to come in until dinner. There were always kids everywhere. In addition to my siblings, within just a few blocks we had
two
sets of nine first cousins. Our family gatherings never had fewer than twenty people and frequently as many as fifty. While I was studious and a bit shy, I was never lonely. The family just opposite our home had ten children, including the youngest one, who had bells attached to his shoes so his family could find him when he wandered away, often ending up lost in our house. I now can see this setting as wonderfully old-fashioned and simple; it was in many ways idyllic. I considered us blessed.

We Sullivans were certainly comfortable, but I never thought of us as wealthy. My great grandfather had founded the Skil Corporation, which manufactured the world’s first portable circular saw, a Skilsaw. He started from nothing, raising enough money to make one Skilsaw, selling it, and raising enough to make another. Great Grandpa wasn’t the one with business sense. That was my Gramps, who, as a very young man, took over the management of the company from his dad and made it into a national brand and a real business. My father’s goal when he assumed a leadership role was to make the company international, which he did in the early 1960s; he then managed the company right through the tough business cycle in the late 1970s, when the company was eventually sold. Our family never wanted for anything, but Mom taught us to hunt for bargains. If we found something we liked, she often told us not to mention it to our father so he wouldn’t worry about the cost, leading us to believe we had real financial concerns. (Her code to us, “DTF,” meant “Don’t Tell Father!”) In fact, that may have been the case. Or it might have been part of Mom’s strategy to raise appreciative and thrifty children.

We spent summers at the local country club or away at summer camp, and we vacationed yearly in Florida, visiting our grandparents. These were surely luxuries, but we otherwise lived modestly. Our house was not air-conditioned (not a big hardship in Chicago except for a couple of weeks in the summer). During heat waves, we would all sleep together in the screened porch. Once my little brother tried to cool down by dunking his head in the toilet!

Dad traveled often for business and usually played golf while home weekends spring through fall. He had then and still has a gentle spirit, a steady, diligent work ethic, and an excellent head for business, all qualities I now saw I used every day in my banking job. I consider my dad a man of great integrity. These were the same qualities I saw in Mark and his family throughout the weekend at Coosaw. Certainly no family is perfect—I had had many epiphanies about my own family’s imperfections over the years, as surely most teenagers and young adults do, but I think I understood even then that looking for perfection in a partner was folly. Still, what I saw in the Sanfords that first weekend at Coosaw made me think that his family was close to perfection and a lot of that impression had to do with Mark and the courageous way he worked to save the family farm.

The gentle and thoughtful nature that had first drawn me to Mark seemed even more precious to me at Coosaw. The men I knew in finance bragged about the smallest triumphs. Here was a man who had, after the debilitating death of his father, done some of the hardest work of his life to save this beautiful land, yet had hardly mentioned a word of this to me during all the months I’d known him. For the first time, I started to think very seriously about this man: so different, sweet, and yet a challenge in so many ways.

TWO

S
OON AFTER I RETURNED FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, MARK VISITED New York for a job interview and left flowers with my apartment doorman with a cute note asking me out for dinner that evening. Surprises can backfire! I already had dinner plans with another man that night, so Mark and I didn’t connect on that visit. Thereafter, Mark became more focused in his efforts to woo me, sending regular notes and calling to pin my schedule down before he arrived in the city.

As we grew closer, I started visiting him on weekends at the University of Virginia, where he was finishing his MBA. I was touched when he asked me to be among his family when he graduated in May. As his graduation approached, we began to speak about the future. By the fall of 1988, Mark had moved to New York to work full-time in commercial real estate. The night he proposed the following spring, he made me a candlelight dinner and placed a beautiful family heirloom ring on my finger. We planned the wedding for November at my parents’ place in Florida.

Although I had just been named a vice president at Lazard, a rarity for a woman in her twenties, I knew I could walk away without regret if we decided to move to South Carolina. I had pursued a job in investment banking but my long-term ambition had always been business in general. In my senior undergraduate year at Georgetown, one of my professors suggested I send a resume to Lazard, a top-drawer firm with no female partners and a notorious “sink-or-swim” mentality. I didn’t think I had a chance, but I dutifully sent it off. As luck would have it, I was one of four analysts hired that year, and the only female. Shortly after graduation, I moved to New York to begin the job. I hoped to learn a great deal from it, but planned to eventually return to the Midwest for a less crazed corporate position.

Every day I walked down Fifth Avenue past the huge gleaming gold statute of Prometheus in front of 1 Rockefeller Center on my way to work. When the elevator doors opened on Lazard’s headquarters, however, the atmosphere was surprisingly shabby. The carpet was soiled, and the desks were old and mismatched. These tattered conditions were part of the company’s philosophy. The partners prided themselves on producing the most reliable advice, rewarding themselves handsomely with the profits and leaving little left over for decorations or the latest technology. My first office was in a small room I shared with two associates and three bulky computers. Yet despite the threadbare infrastructure, the atmosphere was electric.

I started there in the “greed is good” era of the 1980s, when huge corporations were taking over smaller companies, splitting off deadwood business interests and turning around to combine forces again and again. Lazard was in the thick of everything. My job in mergers and acquisitions was to help with the process of valuing the companies to be acquired, merged, or sold. I worked with an intensity that amazes me now.

As a deal was coming together, the partner in charge had his team of associates scrambling. Though market conditions seemed favorable at that moment, we all knew that opportunities could disappear in a flash, taking fortunes with them. We had to get our part exactly right. If just one number was off, millions could be lost. Partners shared in the enormous profits of the firm, an incredible motivation for them and all the ambitious young people, like me, who crunched numbers long into the night and through most every weekend. Too many mornings I went home only to shower and change my clothes before heading back.

One winter afternoon in the early months of my time at Lazard, I was in the company library searching for documents. I heard a loud whoosh and jerked my head up from the files to see a dark blur streak past the library window. I pressed my face to the window to see what had just fallen and trembled when I saw a figure imprinted on the roof of a car. Later I found out that this was a stock trader who had jumped out the window of the floor directly above me. I cried and shook again when I learned he had left behind a wife and young family.

Often in the years that followed while I worked at Lazard, I would think of that dark imprint far below and speculate about what had driven the man to jump. Was it some personal demon? Or was it this life all of us were leading? This work demanded everything you had. We lived on a scale and at a pace where few could survive for long. Looking at some of the partners, I could see how the endless pursuit of today’s opportunity throws life off balance. In time, the same thing began to happen to me. I was burning out.

It wasn’t a straight line from seeing that suicide to changing the pace of my own life, but a few years after the death of that trader, despite promotions and solidly increasing pay for my work, I asked to be reassigned to a job with steadier hours for a year. The powers that be agreed it was time for me to broaden my knowledge of the business, so they moved me to the bond desk in capital markets. The new assignment was dull by comparison and didn’t use the best of my skills, but I was happy because the new schedule was predictable. I could make plans—and keep them! I could see more of my friends and have good visits with my family. And it was during this time that I met Mark.

There is a chance that if he had crossed my path a few months earlier, I wouldn’t have noticed the charm of that soft-spoken Southerner. The fact that I was not driving myself so hard gave me the biggest luxury of all: time. With more time on my hands, I was noticing different things, or at least I had more time to consider what I was really seeing. I looked up from my frenzy and there was Mark, humble, hardworking, whip smart, stunningly handsome, with a clever but subtle sense of humor.

Before we were engaged, I returned to the banking side of things. One night while eating take-out food over work at the office, a manila envelope arrived at my desk via courier. I opened it to find a formal legal document with a handwritten note from Mark attached by a paper clip. “Dearest Jenny, I know we haven’t discussed this so why don’t you just sign the attached and return to me and we can move quietly on from here.”

The document looked legitimate; I began to fume as I read:

“This
PRENUPTIAL AGREEMENT
is made this      day of May, 1989, between the undersigned parties, Jennifer C. Sullivan (hereinafter referred to as “Wife”), of New York, New York, and Marshall C. Sanford, Jr. (hereinafter referred to as “Husband”) of Dale, South Carolina.

WHEREAS
, both parties are above the age of eighteen (18) years and, notwithstanding the sagacious counsel of their parents, peers and true inner selves, wish to become husband and wife; and

WHEREAS
, both parties wish to establish an efficient mechanism for resolving the innumerable differences which they anticipate will arise throughout their married lives; and

WHEREAS
, the parties desire to set forth their agreements and understandings herein;

NOW, THEREFORE
, in consideration of the foregoing, of the mutual promises herein set forth, of the invaluable loss of personal freedom and dignity, and of other good and sufficient consideration, the receipt of which is hereby acknowledged, the parties agree as follows:

   1.
Purposes
. The purpose of this marriage are manifolded to provide companionship during two drab and uneventful lives; to pool resources in order to forestall the inevitable effects of an erratic and ruinous economy; to provide a convenient source of blame for whatever tragedies, short of nuclear attack, befall the parties together or individually; and not incidentally, to vent either party’s wanton, shameful and animalistic desires.

2.
Term
. The marriage shall be solemnified on November 4, 1989, and shall seem to last a lifetime whether it does or not.

In skimming those first clauses it dawned on me that this must be a joke. But as I read on, I wasn’t so sure because there were shades of the Mark I knew in the demands he was making. Still, I hoped he was poking fun at himself.

3.
Expenses
. Wife agrees to share equally the expenses of maintaining the household. Additionally, Wife agrees to limit her expenditures for all her personal items and usages (including but not limited to, clothes, panty hose, make-up, jewelry, perfume, automobiles, entertainment, medical bills and medicines) to ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS ($100) per month, which amount may be increased only by the written agreement of parties. Any amount not spent in any given month shall lapse.

4.
Decisions
. The parties recognize that numerous decisions must be made each day which affect the parties together or individually, and recognize, too, the necessity for a decisionmaker in the event of their inability to agree on the proper solution to any particular problem. In deference to Husband’s gender-related superior intellect and judgment, Wife hereby agrees that Husband will be the final arbiter in all matters….

“Gender-related superior intellect” must have been the tip-off for me. I was laughing out loud when I called Mark to “thank” him for the thoughtful “delivery.” I was impressed with the time and creativity he had put into this hoax. He had pulled a fast one on me, a hard person to fool. This fake prenup was filled with outlandish things a chauvinistic, selfish, and single-minded husband might desire of a wife and Mark was none of those things. Today I do wonder at some of the clauses that have proven true over time, despite the fact that we never signed the silly thing. Mark is notoriously frugal so his fake demands about spending and accountability foreshadowed one aspect of our life together. But it is Clause 9, having to do with children, that I find most prescient: “In the event of pregnancy, Wife hereby agrees to make male children.” I couldn’t have known then that I would have only sons, even if I did learn that it was one of Mark’s dearest wishes that he have them.

Every individual within a couple brings differences of perspective and experience to a marriage, and Mark and I were no different in that regard. Whereas I tend to trust in what the future will bring and live very much in the here and now, Mark needs goals to focus his future and by which he can assess his progress. Once during our engagement he asked me to meet him at a restaurant for dinner and told me to bring a list of my lifetime goals for us to discuss. I chuckled when I saw he had brought a notepad with pages of goals, dreams, and hoped-for adventures. I carried a blank piece of paper. He was astonished at what he took to be my lack of ambitions, but I explained that my goals were pretty straightforward and writing them down wouldn’t clarify them for me. I had thought long and hard about his request. In the end, I really only wanted to be remembered as a good mother and grandmother; a life well-lived by me would leave behind generations of well-adjusted and happy children, each productive in their own way.

Needless to say our conversation continued for a very long while that evening and, in fact, it was a conversation we revisited almost annually for many years to come. Once encouraged to put pencil to paper, my list grew and included becoming involved in something I considered a worthy cause (as opposed to making money just for the sake of it), running my own business one day, and being a good wife to Mark. Also, because I was determined to get good enough to keep up with Mark and the other Sanfords, I added that I wanted to learn to hunt and be able to shoot just one quail in my lifetime.

To be fair, I admired that Mark had thought so seriously and carefully about the benchmarks of his success, but I can see now that this was an early inkling of an aspect of his character that was just under his gentle, thoughtful manner: his profound restlessness.

Mark’s goals were divided into several categories including physical, career, financial, mental, spiritual, family, and values. On his “physical” list were the goals to climb Mt. Rainier, bike across America, and consistently beat his brothers in tennis. He also wanted to take an “adventure” trip annually. For his career and financial goals, he set the bar high as well: He wanted to be an articulate spokesman and motivator of men, make a good deal of money, and own his own company by the time he was 30, and he aspired to one day be a U.S. Senator. I couldn’t argue with his ambition and I loved his many ideas for adventure travel. Later Mark would keep an adventure resume in addition to a work resume; seeing the exotic and far-flung corners of the world has provided us both with many wonderful memories and experiences, though because of our children, it was often Mark who traveled on these adventures alone.