The Light of Hidden Flowers (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

After the seminar, I packed up the laptop and projector and then walked to the office. Inside, I inhaled my earliest memories: mahogany, worn leather and musty files, a hint of my father’s Old Spice, and a touch of White Diamonds perfume courtesy of Jenny, his red-haired, red-fingernailed, red-lipsticked secretary.

At the sight of me, Jenny sang, “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!” She pulled a noisemaker from her desk drawer and tooted it ceremoniously while tossing into the air a handful of confetti.

“Thanks, Jenny,” I said, “but I’m not celebrating, remember?”

Jenny honked the horn again, but this time at a decibel barely audible. “I know, honey,” she whispered, sliding out of her chair, hugging me tightly and slipping into my hand a wrapped present with bow, anyway. Jewelry or makeup. Jenny always bought me jewelry or makeup, neither of which I had much talent for wearing. “Just in case you want to celebrate later.”

Jenny was a Christmas tree of a woman, sparkling and gleaming, wrapped decorously in red and gold silk scarves and elevated on shiny hot-tamale pumps, with enough jewelry hanging from her ears and neck and wrists to melt down and arm a small country.

It wasn’t until I was older that I figured out that Jenny had been angling all along for a different role than merely my father’s dutiful assistant. What she was really hoping to be was his wife, and my mother. And though Dad never hired Jenny for the position she hoped for, the three of us imitated a family pretty well. When I was young, Jenny planned my birthday parties. When I was older, she treated me to shows at the theater, lunch at a fancy restaurant afterward. And she helped Dad shop for suits and ties, expensive wing tips, a gleaming Rolex. Dad and I reciprocated, blanketing Jenny with flowers on her birthday and Tiffany jewelry at Christmas.

“Thank you,” I said, hugging her back. After all of these years, Jenny was still a wind chime, choked in necklaces and handcuffed in bracelets lining her arms.

“How was this morning?” she asked.

“The seminar went well, but . . .” I glanced down the hall to make sure Dad wasn’t listening. “Dad was a little off.”

“What do you mean, honey?”

I looked around again and then whispered, “He forgot what he was talking about.”

“Oh, honey, he’s seventy. What do you expect? We all have senior moments.”

“Seventy isn’t
that
old,” I said.

“Honey, it’s not young. I wouldn’t worry about it. Focus on your birthday. You never know what the day’ll bring!”

“That’s for sure,” I agreed, immediately thinking about my mother, who would have never predicted what the day brought her. She was just running an errand to the grocery store when an HVAC truck rammed into her car broadside, killing her instantly. I was four years old.

I breezed by Dad’s office, the same office he’d occupied thirty years ago. To stand in it, to smell the mahogany of his massive desk, to hear the Frank Sinatra from his CD player (having finally traded in his turntable a few years back), felt no different than when I was five years old. On those Saturday mornings, Dad stacked and sorted, humming along to “Fly Me to the Moon,” while I sat at Jenny’s desk and pounded on her typewriter. Then I’d fish through her drawers, pulling out the stamps and ink pads and covering the back side of my paper with authoritative marks:
FIRST CLASS. COPY. URGENT.
There was no end to the fun with carbon paper and tracing paper and Post-it notes at my disposal.

Only now, I wasn’t five, I was thirty-five years old—
exactly
thirty-five years old—and a partner in my father’s business. A business that now grossed $5 million a year. I leaned into Dad’s office. “Everything okay in here?” I asked, offering him a smile like a cube of sugar.

“There’s my birthday girl.” He looked fine, his usual, sunny self.

I put a finger to my lips and issued an exaggerated “Shh—remember, we’re not talking about it this year?” Then I slipped into my own office next door.

I hung my sweater on the hook, clicked on my computer with its three flat-screen monitors fanned out on my desk like a tri-fold picture frame, then emptied my messenger bag while the screens came to life. Once the computer was powered up, I opened my to-do list via spreadsheet. Color-coordinated columns and rows based on prioritization—Urgent, Important, Later—glowed back at me.

In the break room, I filled my mug with coffee, added cream and sugar, and a shot of vanilla flavoring. Jenny had brought in a box of doughnuts. I chose a cruller. It was my birthday, after all. I was tall and thin with a hamster-on-a-wheel metabolism. In high school I ran twenty miles a week for the cross-country team and played tennis in the spring. Though now I was far from what someone would describe as athletic, I still maintained the happy ability to burn calories.

Paul walked in and headed toward the coffeepot. “I forgot to wish you happy birthday this morning.”

“Forgetting would be good,” I said.

“At least you’re treating yourself to a doughnut,” he joked. Everyone knew I had a sick addiction to doughnuts.

“Just the doughnut,” I said. “I’m not celebrating this year.”

“I
like
celebrating my birthday,” Paul said.

Paul’s simple truths had a way of grounding me. He never knew his father, was neglected by his mother, and grew up in foster care. He was owed more than a few birthday celebrations, I guessed. Paul was Dad’s favorite kind of guy: a “bootstraps” kind of guy. A guy who made it because of hard work and tenacity. A guy with good character.

“Thanks for saving Dad this morning,” I said. “That was weird, wasn’t it?”

“He’s gotten a little forgetful, that’s all.”

Gotten,
I thought. As if Paul had noticed changes in Dad that I hadn’t.

Back in my office, I glanced again at my screens. The technical charts, the moving averages, and the volatility indexes. I reviewed the portfolios I ran for our firm, noting my positions that had outpaced their peers yesterday and those that had not. My key designation was a CFA, a chartered financial analyst, which meant that I managed money. It meant that I could extract meaning from numbers, turn data into evidence, parlay evidence into decisions for our clients’ assets.

I could write a stunning analysis, but dreaded picking up the phone. I could outline recommendations in tidy paragraphs and convincing bullet points, but couldn’t sit face-to-face with a retiree and tell him why he could live on only $8,000 a month, not $10,000. Thus my father’s and my working relationship: him, the strong topic sentence; me, the supporting data. Him, the hook that pulled the clients in with a great story, and me, the formatting of the margins.

My professional limitations extended to my personal life. I researched myself out of every big decision, charted my way out of meeting friends and going on dates, weighed the risk over my every opportunity, and if the possible outcome fell beyond two standard deviations, I ruled it out. I hadn’t been on a date in over a year, and before that, my love life was sketchy at best.

If I were a company, I wouldn’t buy my stock. Metaphorically speaking, I had failed to generate earnings, and could therefore go under at any time.

In Dad’s office, I sunk into his leather chair and squeezed his sofa pillow to my chest, letting the velvety fringes tickle my chin. Had he had moments of forgetfulness lately? Now that I really examined him, I considered that maybe he wasn’t his jovial self. When had a furrow etched itself between his brows?

“You feeling okay?” I asked.

“The old man’s better than ever.”

“How’d you sleep?”

“Like a dog. You?”

“The seminar went well,” I said. I looked at Dad expectantly.

“Been better, but it was great to see the clients.” He smiled.

But you lost your place, forgot what the heck you were talking about,
I wanted to say. I
should
have said. My heart sped up and my mouth dried to cotton. I lost my courage, like always. All these years later, and I still just wanted him to be happy with me.

“It’s your birthday,” Dad said. “You don’t have to be here today. I was hoping you’d take the day off—a spa day, a shopping spree with some girlfriends.”

“What’s on the schedule?” I asked, noting the irritation in my tone. Dad knew better. I didn’t do spa days, I loathed shopping, and I certainly didn’t have a gaggle of girlfriends to hang out with. If I had taken the day off, I would have stayed home and read a new book, drank a few glasses of Merlot, and rolled out homemade lemon-pepper fettuccini. Dad knew that. It bugged me that he pretended otherwise.

Dad issued a sigh of resignation. He looked down at his diary, a leather calendar that he still used, even though his computer was rigged with all the same information. “I love you, Missy, you know that,” he said. “I just want you to be happy.”

True enough. Dad did want only that.

Dad pulled a birthday present from his desk drawer. “Open it now, open it later. Whatever you want.”

I smiled my best daughter smile and blew him a kiss. I needed him to know that I was happy, as happy as one could be, I imagined. How could one measure happiness, anyway? Truly, I was contented. I was satisfied. I wasn’t a person who flew high on the fringes of life. I was the safety girl. The girl who stayed behind the line; I accepted the demarcation. I was happy, tucked securely in my groove. “I’ll open it tonight, I promise.”

I activated our firm’s calendar on my tablet, and Dad launched into our day. “We’ve got a new couple at ten. The Andersons are coming in at eleven. We need to review his buy/sell agreement. The Kayes are coming in at noon to update their estate planning. After that, I’m hitting the golf course with Jimmy Jorgensen. What about you? Maybe you’ll come along, hit a few balls, play some tennis? The club’s a great place to meet eligible bachelors, right?” Dad flashed me an encouraging smile. “We could eat dinner on the veranda—the nice crab cake you like? A few Arnold Palmers to cool us down? A glass of champagne? Let me at least toast you for your birthday?”

“I’ll stay at the office,” I said. “I want to work on the portfolios for a while. I have a couple companies reporting earnings this week.” In college, I majored in economics, and then pounded out an MBA. From there, I came to work for my father, learning the ropes and attaining licenses. By the time I was twenty-five, I had earned my Series 7 license for trading securities. The next year I became a certified financial planner. The Chartered Financial Analyst exam came next. I nailed each of these tests with nearly perfect scores.

“When are we going to celebrate your birthday, then?” Dad asked.

“We’re not,” I said. “Who are the new people coming in at ten?”

“A business owner and his wife,” Dad said. “The wife just inherited money from her mother.”

“They’re big shots!” Jenny—who was always listening to every conversation—bellowed from the reception area. “Most of their money is at Goldman, but the Mr. wants someone local.”

“Big shots, huh?” I said.

“No one’s a big shot for real,” Dad said. “People are people. They all put their pants on the same: one leg at a time.”

Such was Dad. His entire life boiled down to putting on pants one leg at a time.

CHAPTER THREE

When the prospects came in at 10:00 a.m. sharp, I stood with Jenny to greet them. The man introduced himself as Mr. Charles Longworth III, sporting a crisply starched shirt and a million-dollar suit, and his wife, head to toe in tweed Chanel, Mrs. Elizabeth Longworth. When my father came out of his office to meet them, I smiled because my dad always struck me as Superman, his thick silver hair, his gleaming smile, his handshake that could crush cans.

At the sight of Dad, the prospect stood taller, puffed out his chest. “I’m Charles Longworth the Third.”

Dad shook his hand. “Good to meet you. I know I’m going to end up calling you Charlie. One of my best friends growing up was a Charlie. Do you mind?”

“Well actually . . .”

Dad shrugged and smiled at him. “I’m apologizing ahead of time,
Charles
, in case I slip.” My dad meant no disrespect—my father never disrespected anyone—he was just familiar, it was his way.

Dad held Mrs. Longworth’s hand in his own, commented on her broach, and said it was as lovely as she was. “Charles, Elizabeth. This is my daughter, Missy.”

“Melissa,” I said, shaking their hands. “My father likes nicknames,” I felt compelled to add.

“Feel free to call me Liz,” Mrs. Longworth said. It appeared she was all for loosening up a bit.

“It’s Missy’s birthday today,” Dad said. “We’ve got computers all around this office. But we don’t need them. Not with Missy. A beautiful mind, this one has. Top of her class at the Wharton School, valedictorian in high school. Anyone who wonders how she ended up with a genius mind—well, they didn’t know her mother. My Charlene. May she rest in peace.”

I signaled toward the conference room. “Please, come in,” I said. Meanwhile, Dad was still beaming, presumably thinking about me winning the math award my senior year or perhaps Mom completing her
NY Times
crossword puzzles.

We organized ourselves around the shiny cherry table. Mr. and Mrs. Longworth sat primly with their legs crossed and hands folded. I assumed my position, fingers perched above the keyboard of my laptop, reading glasses balanced atop my head. And Dad, he reclined in the chair at the head of the table, his legs crossed casually in the shape of the numeral four, smiling at us all. Jenny brought in a tray of coffee.

“Best coffee ever!” my father exclaimed, pointing at the tray. “Jenny’s coffee.”

Mrs. Longworth bobbled her head up and down. “Oh, yes, lovely—”

“Let me cut to the chase,” Mr. Longworth said, opening his leather portfolio and turning the back of a Montblanc pen. “The bulk of my money is in New York at Goldman. I’m getting ready to retire and, thusly, there will be more money, from a buyout. My wife has recently come into some money, too, following the settling of her mother’s estate.”

Dad trained his eyes on Mrs. Longworth. “I’m sorry to hear of your mother’s passing.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Longworth said, disarmed. “Well, thank you. I do miss her.”

“I’m sure you do,” Dad said. “It’s never easy.”

“In any event,” Mr. Longworth piped back in. “I’m looking around for—”

“And what is your goal?” Dad asked, turning to Mr. Longworth.

“My goal?”

“All this money,” Dad went on. “What’s it for?”

Mr. Longworth twisted his face into a knot. “My goal is for the money to perform! Goldman has been a huge disappointment. When the market crashed in ’08, my portfolio dropped 20 percent.”

“Not bad,” Dad said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Not bad?” Mr. Longworth sputtered. “Do I need to tell you how much 20 percent is on a multimillion-dollar portfolio?”

“The S&P crashed 40 percent,” Dad said. “So yes, I’d say 20 percent isn’t bad.”

“And the more the market went down, the more Goldman wanted to buy,” Mr. Longworth said.

“Liz,” my father said. “Do you shop at Nordstrom?”

“I do,” she said.

“Twice a year, they have a sale, correct?”

“A lovely sale,” she agreed.

“If you went into Nordstrom during the half-yearly sale and picked out four or five outfits, would you tell the clerk to hold them for you until the sale was over?”

“Why would she do that?” Mr. Longworth bellowed, his fist coming down onto the table.

“I wouldn’t,” Mrs. Longworth said evenly, “because they were on sale. Just like stocks were on sale when the market was going down.”

“Exactly!” my father boomed.

Meanwhile, Mr. Longworth harrumphed, not pleased at all by being one-upped by his wife.

To my “think first, act second” brain, the financial crash of 2008 was a predictable snowball of a disaster that gathered speed thanks to too much power put in the hands of reckless risk takers. For many years, “more leverage” paid off, making heroes of the rainmakers of these Wall Street firms. Caution gave way to the wind. Anyone who cried foul—who tried to alert their top management to the impending danger of selling these highly leveraged goods—was turned away. For our firm’s portfolio, I began reducing equity exposure early, near the end of ’06, while the market was still flying high. I had no idea how bad it was going to get, and we still got hammered plenty, but I knew the stocks were overvalued, so scaling back helped. Dad never once flinched. “We have reason to believe it’s time to pull back.” When the market fell off the cliff and we only dangled from it, I was relieved beyond measure, and so was Dad, as if the statute of limitations on him believing in me was about to run out.

Mr. Longworth went on. “Morgan Stanley has assured me that their portfolios—”

“Charlie,” my dad said. “
Charles
, my apologies. You’re a smart, successful guy and I hate to keep harping on this, but what’s your goal? When all’s said and done, what’s the
value
of your money? Do you want to travel with your wife, spend time with your grandchildren, give back to the community? Let’s forget returns for now. Let’s talk about you and your wife. What do you enjoy?”

Mrs. Longworth’s plaintive face brightened to a rosy pink. It looked to me like Dad was asking the question that she herself had wanted to ask, probably for years. She leaned closer to her husband, awaiting his response.

“Mr. Fletcher, I need to be clear,” Mr. Longworth boomed. “You’re not the only firm we’re interviewing. We have a list of five firms; the four others are much larger than yours, but I agreed to meet with you because Jack Murphy recommended you so highly.”

“I love that guy,” Dad said, shaking his head. “You remember him, right, Missy? When you were little, we went boating with him and his daughter. Now there’s a guy who’s enjoying his retirement—a guy and his boat. Good times. Good guy, the Murph.”

“As I was saying, this is just an interview,” Mr. Longworth continued. “We plan to meet with each firm once, and then select two or three for a second round of proposals.”

My father stood up, smiling widely. “Good for you. I wish you all the best.” Dad extended his hand. “Liz, it was a pleasure meeting you. Take the time you need to grieve your mother. I know from experience that you can’t rush the process. Remember the good times.” Dad reached for her hand and cupped it between his. Mrs. Longworth shuddered as though she might cry.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Mr. Longworth, puzzled and confused, held up his piece of paper. “I’m not finished. I have a list of questions. We haven’t even talked about your qualifications. I haven’t seen your materials. Compared your returns.”

My father, the towering, friendly Superman. “Charles, my buddy, I’ve been doing this for forty years. My clients are my friends. I would do anything, anytime, for any of them. The other day, a widow client of mine called me because she had a flat tire. I got on the horn and got her fixed up. This business isn’t rocket science. It’s about
caring
. It’s about
trust
. You either trust me, or you don’t. If you’re a guy looking to compare returns, then we’re not your firm. Sometimes the market will go up; sometimes it will go down. I can’t predict the weather, but I can react to it.

“Missy here, sometimes
she
predicts the weather,” Dad chuckled. “She’s that good.” Dad never missed an opportunity to throw me a compliment. My heart gonged with pleasure.

“What matters,” Dad said, “is that my clients are living the lives they want to live. With all due respect, Charles, I don’t do interviews. I wish you all the best.”

Mrs. Longworth issued a little squeal, an indication she didn’t want to let my father go. A hint, I thought, that she wanted my father to rub off on her husband.

“That’s it?” Mr. Longworth said, his mouth setting into a thin line, gathering papers into his leather portfolio. “You’re saying I should take your firm off my list? Remove it from consideration?”

“If you want to talk about goals, give me a call. Your goal is your life raft. The farther you get away from it, the more likely you are to drown. Until you know what your goals are, I can’t help you.”

“I’m confused,” he said. “You’re saying you don’t
want
my business?”

“I’m saying that the fit might not be right.”

With that, my father left the room and returned to his office, clicked on his Frank Sinatra, and hummed along while he shuffled papers.

I prepared to see them out. “It was nice meeting you,” I said. “Let me give you our firm brochure.”

Ruffled, bewildered, and dismayed, Mr. and Mrs. Longworth stood and straightened their designer suits. Jenny showed them to the door.

As I watched them walk away, I wondered whether Mr. and Mrs. Longworth had ever been refused service in their lives. I wondered what their conversation would be like as they drove down King Street, whether Mrs. Longworth would need to fluff Mr. Longworth’s ego, whether my father had inflicted a bruise that would change colors for days.

I walked down the hallway and poked my head into Dad’s office. “That was a lot of money you let walk out the door.”

Dad leaned back, crossed his shiny wing tips across the corner of his desk. “I’m seventy years old. With every new person we take on, I need to ask myself: Would I be happy to hear they were coming in for a meeting? At this point in the game, it’s like dating. I need to be sure before I jump into a relationship.”

I slid into Dad’s office and closed the door. “True, but you were a little
harsh
with them,” I said. “You’re not usually harsh with anyone.” I took a tentative breath. “And at the seminar today. You kind of forgot what you were talking about, didn’t you?”

My heart thumped. I never initiated confrontation.

“Honey, sit down,” Dad said, rubbing at his eyes. “You know how long ago it was when I was in ’Nam? Fifty years.”

I slipped my feet out of my flats and pulled them onto the sofa. When Dad got going on Vietnam, it wasn’t an exercise in brevity.

Dad stared deep into his memory. “Missy, it seems like
yesterday
. I was just a kid, had barely heard of Southeast Asia. Then the next thing you know: jungle warfare, leeches, trench foot. Shooting at an enemy we couldn’t see. Marching every day. We didn’t know where we were going. We didn’t know why. Pure insanity.”

“I can’t even imagine,” I said. So young, and shipped off to war.

Dad shook his head. “Every day we were either bored out of our minds or scared out of our wits. At night, we’d peel off our gear: the flak jacket, the rucksack, the helmet, boots, and poncho. Some guys had their secret supply of cigarettes, their Bible, their favorite food. Me, I was all about my stash of jelly beans. My jelly beans and my joke book. My buddy Ralph and I would gather round with the group of guys, a two-man comedy show, we were.

“I’d open with ‘A guy walks into a bar . . .’ and then he’d follow with ‘A priest, a rabbi, and a minister are out on a boat . . .’ Back and forth, back and forth. Oh, Missy, the guys would howl, their heads jumping between me and Ralph like they were watching a tennis match. ‘What do you get when you mix a German shepherd with a wiener dog . . . ?’”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “You’ve always had a way of holding court.”

“Our buddy Timbo would always ask, ‘How do you remember so many goddamned jokes?’ Timbo was a laugher, a knee-slapper. He roared and roared and begged for more. What a guy, that Timbo. He was from Fairfax, I’ve told you about him, right, Miss?”

I nodded. “Yep, the one who played basketball for Thomas Jefferson.”

Dad beamed. “You do remember! We figured out he and I actually played against each other in the state championships in high school. Crazy thing to think that our paths had crossed and then, there we were, in that godforsaken jungle.”

I nodded eagerly as if this were new information, despite the fact that Dad had told me about Timbo before.

“‘Tell the one about the pope,’ Timbo would say. ‘Okay, Timbo,’ I’d say. ‘For you. A guy’s invited to the Vatican to visit with the pope . . .’” Dad shook his head. “Poor Timbo,” he said.

“He died in battle, right?” I said for Dad, so he wouldn’t have to say it himself.

Dad nodded.

“So sad,” I said.

Dad and I sat in silence for a moment. “Going to play some golf today, Dad?” I asked, attempting to hatchet him out of the murky trail.