The Company You Keep (12 page)

“Watch your tongue.”

“Hi, Grandma. See, my hands are clean,” Tommy called out from the open door. He held up his hands. Water blotches dotted the front of his striped T-shirt.

Vic’s mother waved. “I’ll be right with you, sweetheart. We’ll change that shirt before you catch a cold.” She pushed her large bag up to her elbow. “I have to go. But before I do, a friend of mine from Zumba class mentioned to me that she saw you talking to a woman the other day on the street.” She raised an eyebrow.

“Now it’s a crime to talk to women?” Vic asked. He didn’t really want to get into a long-winded discussion, but he knew his mother wouldn’t let up until she got details. “It was Mimi Lodge. You know, the TV reporter? She’s back in town for Reunions.”

His mother narrowed her eyes. “Since when are you so buddy-buddy with this Lodge woman?”

“She’s not ‘this Lodge woman.’” He was starting to feel as protective of Mimi as his sister. “Mimi was a classmate of mine at Grantham.”

His mother stared at him.

He knew she was itching to say something more. “What?” he asked.

“Don’t mess with those Lodges,” his mother warned.

“Why? They’re good for business. Joe’s working on a major contract with her father’s company now. If that comes through, you’ll be swimming in Coach bags.” That wasn’t particularly nice, but so what. He couldn’t be nice all the time.

“Grandma-a,” Tommy wailed. “Can I have some string cheese?”

“That boy. Snacking all the time. Whatever happened to three square meals a day?” she muttered. Then she raised her voice. “Don’t eat anything until I get there.” She started to cross the neatly clipped grass.

“Bye, Mom.” Vic headed up his front path. Just another day with the family.

“Witek, they’re not our kind.” His mother’s voice boomed.

Vic bent down to pat Roxie, then looked across the lawn. “Don’t tell me you still buy into the class difference thing?” Pretty soon his mother’s thinking would regress to Victorian times.

She walked back across the lawn to him and pointed an accusing finger. “Pooh, pooh all you want. It still exists. Besides, that girl’s mother? The reporter’s mother?” She lowered her head and looked over her very expensive, ultra-lightweight French glasses. Vic knew because he’d bought them for her.

“What about Mimi’s mother?” he asked.

“She’s dead.”

“That’s too bad. But a lot of people lose family members.”

His mother emitted a shocked breath. “As I know only too well.” She raised her chin like a warrior ready to do battle. “But her mother?”

Vic nodded.

She struck her blow. “They say the father killed her.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CONRAD STOOD ON THE platform at Grantham Junction waiting for the 8:05 Amtrak. Gone were the days of the private bar car attached to the front of the train, and the assurance that you’d be traveling with a certain type of people—fellow investment bankers, partners in major law firms. Even the occasional advertising executive had been allowed into the mix just to keep things lively.

Of course, all that was history, dating to the time before women had been allowed to join the upper echelons of the workforce—not that Conrad would have ever voiced that sentiment out loud. Noreen would have forcefully taken him to task at even the faintest whiff of misogynist leanings. Still, Conrad was not one to believe in coincidences.

He flicked his left wrist up, and the sleeve of his Burberry raincoat slipped back. The starched cuffs of his monogrammed dress shirt stuck out the requisite half-inch from the sleeve of his pinstripe suit. He always wore French cuffs, and his gold cufflinks with the crest of Grantham University gleamed. Conrad enjoyed putting them on each morning. He found them reassuring, a symbol that certain traditions would never cease to exist despite the ever-changing world.

He checked his Rolex. The train was now three minutes late. He had a meeting at ten o’clock, but it wasn’t as if he was worried about being late. After all, given his position in life people waited for him.

Frankly, if he still had a driver take him into the City as he’d done every morning during the years he was married to Press’s mother, he wouldn’t have been forced to wait around on a concrete platform, buffeted by flying grit every time the Acela train whisked through without stopping on its way to Washington, D.C.

Alas, the chauffeured car service had come to an end when he married Noreen. She had convinced him that it was every good citizen’s duty to take public transportation whenever possible—good for the environment, she said. He hadn’t needed much convincing. He would have even taken the bus for her. No…maybe not the bus.

So as he waited on the platform, Conrad eyed the young man standing next to him—tight jeans, black leather jacket, a tattoo crawling up the back of his neck. Conrad looked down. The man’s black boots needed polishing. That may have offended him the most.

“The 8:05 Amtrak train will be arriving on the northbound track in one minute,” a crackly voice announced over the loud speakers.

Conrad moved along the platform next to the third billboard down from the stairway. When the train stopped, he would be directly in front of a door.

The train approached the station from Trenton and ground to a noisy halt. The metal doors slipped open. The leather jacket young man tried to nudge his way in first, but Conrad placed his polished brogue just so, blocking his path. In getting on the train, like all things, he liked to come in first.

Shifting today’s copy of the
Wall Street Journal
to the same hand as his briefcase, he stepped inside and opened the inner door to the carriage on the right. Conrad always went to the right.

Then he found his favorite row—fifth on the left—and took the seat next to the window. Before sitting down, he unbuckled and unbuttoned his tan raincoat and the top button of his suit jacket, then slipped his BlackBerry out of his pocket. He placed his leather briefcase on his lap, the newspaper on top so as not to get ink on his clothes, and settled in for the hour ride.

He nodded curtly at another similarly dressed middle-aged man who sat next to him. Like Conrad, he immediately pulled out his phone, and the two sat in silence as the train pulled away from the station, speeding along until its next stop in New Brunswick. From there, it would travel express to Newark before terminating at Penn Station in Manhattan. On days when the weather was pleasant—like today—Conrad liked to walk across town to the office. He might be sixty-two, but he was a fit sixty-two, with his twice-weekly squash games at the Grantham Club of New York.

As the train jostled slightly on the tracks, Conrad scrolled through his messages. He liked to get an early start on things since the Asian markets had already opened, and he frequently had communications from Shanghai and Tokyo.

Otherwise, it was a good time to delete the flood of unsolicited résumés from job seekers or answer more personal items—updates from fellow members of the Reunions committee or invitations for lunch with friends and colleagues. His assistant Jeremy would follow up on the details of these meetings. Like all good assistants, Jeremy had an unerring ability to fob off people Conrad wasn’t interested in seeing, or pin down those who he did.

Speaking of Jeremy, Conrad noted there was a message from him marked CONFIDENTIAL AND URGENT.

It wasn’t like Jeremy to use capital letters—his solid education at St. Paul’s and Haverford had instilled in him the gaucheness of overkill.

Conrad clicked on the email and the text popped open.

Mr. Lodge:

As you know, the decision to promote several members of the firm to partner has increased the fully vested members to a record number.

Which is precisely why Conrad had voiced his objections when the motion had come to a vote several weeks ago. But the resolution had passed anyway, much to Conrad’s chagrin. He anticipated a splintering into factions, a development that he would have to crush sooner rather than later.

He read on:

In view of the unwieldy nature of this top-heavy structure, one which will undoubtedly make major decisions more difficult…

Didn’t I say those exact same words at the meeting?
Conrad thought with amusement. So now they were coming around to his way of thinking, after all.

As your former assistant, I have therefore been directed by the other partners of the firm to inform you that your position at Pilgrim Investors is no longer required.

Conrad stopped reading. He blinked, then reread what he’d just read.

This decision is effective immediately. Since you are no longer an employee of PI, you will need to report to Security upon entering the building. From there, you will be escorted directly to Human Resources, where you will find personal items from your former office.

“Former assistant? Former office?” Conrad said out loud, enraged. The man next to him slanted him a skeptical glance before going back to his own messages. Conrad had personally selected the wood paneling and eighteenth-century French antiques for that office.

Since you initially instituted the policy, you are no doubt aware that PI’s protocol requires immediate lockdown of a former employee’s computer and business items, thereby ensuring the propriety of the firm’s business. Human Resources will also be happy to discuss with you the terms of your retirement and benefits package.

In closing, let me say how much I learned under your guidance and that I wish you well in your future endeavors.

It was signed by one of the new partners.

Conrad put his hand to his heart—or what eldest daughter, Mimi, always ready with the snide comment, called his “blood-pumping muscle.” Indeed, he could feel it beating rapidly, painfully. He might not have a heart, but whatever it was, it was breaking.

He stared blindly out the grimy window at the passing blur of scenery. A coup. An office coup, clearly led by this…this snot-nosed partner who Conrad had personally mentored. A Harvard man. He should have known. Conrad rubbed his forehead. It was clammy.

Could this really have happened? To him? The founder of the company? Surely he had enough support from the old guard on the board, Conrad reminded himself. Or did he? He
was
the only founding member still active, the others having retired to charitable work or a life divided between homes in Aspen and St. John. And the number of new partners could have formed a voting block by peeling off a few of the older ones who had been chafing at the bit to change the strategic direction of the company.
Yes,
he supposed,
it was possible.

Conrad looked up and noticed that the train had stopped. New Brunswick, he realized. He saw the towers of Rutgers over the elevated train platform. People clambered on board. A conductor shouted. Then the train took off with a lurch.

Conrad lowered the phone to the newspaper on his lap. He looked down at the screen. It had already turned black. The front page of the Journal jiggled up and down with the swaying of the train, the words unreadable. He wondered…

Wondered how was he going to tell Noreen.

And then almost immediately, he wondered how he was going to face his fellow classmates at Reunions this coming weekend.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE CHLORINATED WATER sluiced over her body as Mimi performed a perfect flip turn at Delaney Pool on the university campus. It was the homestretch of her 2500-yard workout, a modified version of the program from her water polo days. She wasn’t back to the 5000-yard program, which would have taken roughly two hours, but she still did the mix of sprints, distance swimming and water polo-type strokes. The latter included heads-up freestyle without using the wall to turn around, backstroke with a breaststroke kick, as well as heads-up butterfly with a breaststroke kick. The combination was exhausting. The result was improved stamina, but also an inability to think of anything, which was better than just about any therapy that she’d tried.

There was something about water, she noted. She remembered the first time she’d jumped into the small, overly chlorinated pool in the sports club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It dulled the mind to the outside world, but heightened the senses, and not just the pain in her muscles and her lungs, but the sensations of touch and smell. If someone was wearing perfume or a strong deodorant, the odor penetrated. It was as if all her pores were open and inviting to the world around her—that she was one with her surroundings instead of feeling like a skittish outsider. In a word, it made her joyous.

Which was pretty ironic when you considered how many people, including Mimi in her youth, had found swimming laps tedious beyond despair. But now, with a final sprint to the wall, Mimi felt nothing but exhilaration—and complete exhaustion as she held on to the tiled gunwale and sucked air into her oxygen-deprived lungs.