The Golden Boy, page 6
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel could not be built over the bones of the dead, no matter how ancient or forgotten, not without dire consequences, and this unwanted harvest presented a terrible dilemma for the developers, who were disinclined to abandon the project. After much consultation and delay, a compromise was reached among the archaeologists, historians, authorities, and spiritual advisers. The graves, which dated between AD 610 and the early 1800s, could not be moved; nor could they be left unprotected. The massive hotel project could only continue by redesigning the entire site and building the hotel at the top of the hill.
The bones were reburied, and the hillside surrounding them—renamed the Honokahua Burial Site—was planted with green grass, bordered by the naupaka bushes native to the area. Visitors were not permitted to walk across these graves on their way to and from the beach but only near them, and some would pause and whisper prayers for themselves and perhaps for the dead.
It was here, then, next to these ancient bones, that Stafford and Agnes stood on the verge of a squabble in the heat of a windless day.
“Well,” Stafford finally said. “Up or down, baby?”
“Oh, go ahead,” she said. “Walk as fast as you want. I’ll follow.”
The rest of the morning unfolded without any further disagreement, and her manicure was followed by lunch on the terrace of the hotel, where they sat quietly, neither of them talking or wanting to until they had finished eating. The stillness of the day created an atmosphere of languid stupidity, and even in a place as fine and beautiful as the Ritz-Carlton, resistance seemed futile. The sleepy-eyed busboys began to let dishes pile up on the tables. The young parents stopped fussing over their flushed and restless children. The waiters and waitresses stood at their stations, politely unresponsive to the needs of their customers. And even the carefully dressed trophy wives sat quietly for once, like obedient schoolgirls, wiping their lip-lined mouths on the linen napkins, trying not to play with their jewelry, the heavy rings and the bracelets and watches that were beginning to itch. And the others, the physicians and real estate lawyers, the philosopher kings and the wealthy merchants, the honeymooners, the gamblers and the risk-takers, all of them began to lose their energy and direction, as if the windless inertia of the day had eased them into the hillside next to the cool graves of the others and the long sleep of an endless afternoon had arrived.
Stafford fed much of his lunch to the small birds that flew in and out between the tables, knowing, as they did, that a hot day was no reason to starve. But he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, his body damp with the sweat and perspiration of sitting, and he wished he could take the jug of ice water from the table and pour it over his head and around the back of his neck and down his shirt the way he remembered felt so good on hot days. There was another couple sitting nearby—overdressed and too old for Maui—and they took a very long time to order their lunch. When it arrived, the old woman began to carefully divide up the contents of both plates until they each had exactly half of what the other had ordered. They ate slowly and, Stafford thought, with resolve, as if duty-bound to finish what they had started.
“You’re staring.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re looking really closely at two strangers, Stafford, and they might not like it. It’s called staring.”
“He looks like my uncle Frank.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you remember my uncle Frank?”
“Was he the one with all the kids?”
“No. That was Christy, the youngest. Uncle Frank didn’t have any kids.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. My mother said his wife was too jumpy.”
“Jumpy?”
“Mother had ideas.”
“Hmm.”
“He never left the house half dressed.”
“Good for him.”
“Just like that old guy. Tweed jacket, shoes and socks, the works. Summer, winter, fall. It was all the same to Uncle Frank.”
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I didn’t say there was. Did I say that?”
“I didn’t say you said anything.”
“You implied.”
“Forgive me, Stafford. Dig deep.”
“He didn’t get the farm. He got cheated.”
“Your farm?”
“No, no, not our farm. The first farm. My great-great-grandfather’s farm. The farm at Tweed.”
“Don’t snap at me, Stafford. This farm, that farm. How am I supposed to remember these things? I wasn’t exactly embraced by the Kingston community if you recall.”
“It took my family four generations to get from the Canadian Shield to the lake. Four generations from Tweed to Napanee.”
“Hmm.”
“The farm at Tweed was promised to Uncle Frank by my great-grandfather. He went to work the Tweed farm with the understanding it would go to him when the old man died. That’s how things were done. That’s how you got a farm when there were too many of you. He was twelve.”
“And he didn’t get it?”
“He didn’t get the farm.”
“Because?”
“Because? There is no because. They cheated him, that’s all. They changed their minds and left the farm to one of their daughter’s sons who married someone important in the area, and Uncle Frank went home with nothing after ten years’ work.”
“Was he bitter?” she asked, but Stafford was no longer listening, and she waited a moment, silent, while he sat there, staring again at the old man.
Stafford was, she knew, a private man, and he rarely shared the stories from his past with her or anyone else. They were impediments, he once said, to the essence of change, and it was the duty of all free men to change, whatever that meant.
“What did you say?”
“I asked if he was bitter. Are you okay, Stafford?”
“I feel fine. I was thinking, that’s all. Sorry.”
“Well, stop thinking immediately. There will be no more thinking.”
“Yes, he was bitter.”
“Hmm.”
“He worked at a jail in Kingston for a while. He was a prison guard.”
“Nice job.”
“They had a farm too.”
“Who did?”
“The prison did. Disneyland.”
“What?”
“Collins Bay.”
“Stafford, please. A whole sentence would help.”
“There was a prison farm in Kingston at the Collins Bay Penitentiary, but the locals called it Disneyland. Don’t you remember? We used to drive by it. It was on Bath.”
“Bath?”
“Bath Road. It was the big stone building with the red roof and the turrets on the corners. From a distance it looked like an old castle—like Disneyland. You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“How can you not remember?”
“It’s a talent, I know.”
“He married a Protestant.”
“How very sad.”
“They moved to Toronto after my father died.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I used to see him now and then. He worked at a bakery in Toronto, but he had a bad heart too. Like my father’s.”
“Did you like him?”
“What?”
“Your uncle Frank. Did you like him? Was he a nice guy, Stafford?”
“His wife liked me, but Mother hated her.”
“Because she was a jumpy Protestant?”
“They both drank.”
“Well, no wonder.”
CHAPTER 7
Shame
But shame may be said to be conditionally a good thing.
—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
TWO DAYS BEFORE STAFFORD and his wife sat down to lunch on the terrace of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, there was a storm at sea, four hundred miles northwest of Maui. This disturbance, while minor, created a moderate swell that was duly noted by the National Weather Service in Honolulu, which predicted the short-lived swell train would likely miss the Kapalua coastline due to angular dispersion, delivering, at best, a few spectacular waves at some of the northern beaches. But a large ocean swell, generated by even the smallest of storms elsewhere, will travel across the ocean for days if there is nothing to obstruct or divert it, and since there is little between the islands of Hawaii and the great landmasses of the Earth, the real guess lies not so much in what is coming as when.
“Could we have the bill, please?” Stafford said to the waitress, who passed by their table without stopping.
“Are you feeling all right?” Agnes said. “Your face is really red.”
“I’m just hot.”
“Have some water,” she answered, and she poured more into his glass and gave it to him. “I don’t think I’ll golf this afternoon,” she added. “It’s too hot for golf. And my shoulder hurts.”
“You’d better call and cancel.”
“I know what to do, Stafford.”
“Check, please,” he said again, and she could see that he was becoming irritable.
“Why do you call it the check?” she asked. “Why is it the bill one minute and the check the next?”
“They’re the same thing.”
“No,” she said, “they’re not. A check is money for you and a bill is money you owe.”
“It’s a Canadian thing,” he said. “We ask for the check. You ask for the bill.”
“Why not the tab?” she said, persisting. “Tab, please.”
“The Brits call it a tab.”
“No, they don’t. They call it a chit.”
“They don’t call it a chit.”
“All right, all right. Don’t get excited. Why don’t you take the shuttle down and get the car and I’ll pay the bill, tab—thing—and you can pick me up outside. We can go back to the house. You can have a nap, okay? Stafford?”
“What?”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“They don’t call it a chit.”
“Right.”
She looked closely at him, wondering again if he was feeling all right. His face was too red, she thought, even for such a hot day, and while his irritability with her was routine, his lack of concentration was not. He had rarely been sick at any point during their marriage, but on the few occasions he was, he had been truly and terribly ill, hospitalized twice with pneumonia and once with a kidney infection. Each time, he had spiked fevers that landed him in critical care, accompanied by infections that proved resistant to antibiotics. His doctors joked about his shameless determination to challenge medical boundaries. Generally, though, he was a healthy man who took care of himself, jelly donuts notwithstanding, and for good reason.
His father and many of the men in his father’s family had died in their fifties, their hearts failing at unexpected moments. She had met the widows of some of these men at funerals and wakes in the early days of her marriage when they lived in the basement suite on Alfred Street, and these women had frightened her with their gray eyes and folded hands. Some of them sold their farms and moved to local towns, where they became card-players and gossips. A few stayed on, but they were the ones with grown-up sons and daughters-in-law from local farms who could take over the running of a large dairy farm. None of these women remarried, and any talk about doing so was met with disapproval and even some element of disgust. Stafford’s wife had often wished him dead—but only in moments of emotional rage that came and went quickly. In truth, she could not imagine life without him.
“Stafford, my darling, why don’t we go home now?” she said, and he turned and looked directly into her eyes.
For a moment, neither one of them said anything. It had been a long time since they had allowed themselves this type of intimacy and it came as a surprise, the way intimacy always did.
“You called me your darling,” he finally said. “I love it when you do that.”
“I know you do.”
“I’ll go down and get the car,” he said, as if the idea had just occurred to him.
“What a good idea,” she said. “Why don’t I wait here and pay the bill, chit, the tab-thing?”
“Don’t forget to cancel your golf game.”
“Thank you for reminding me.”
There were times, she thought, when she behaved impeccably, a study in marital patience, notably uncritical and kind. These moments were few and far between, but it had been her experience that few of them were needed. She had disliked life on Maui intensely that long first year of their exile, and this had culminated in a terrible fight between them that was so deep and so bitter that it continued, even now, to upset her. She had made a conscious decision in the months that followed that she would not abandon this marriage and would learn to love the man who had rescued her for reasons entirely his own. It would, however, demand a final break with their daughter, because the fight that precipitated their separation on Maui was, like most of their fights, all about Callie.
They had been buying and selling properties for years, climbing the real estate ladder with Stafford’s money and investment savvy, from entry-level condos to the high-end homes she loved in LA, Malibu, Aspen, and New York where they had friends, activities, and other interests. But Hawaii was strictly a holiday destination, generally involving a luxurious corporate retreat of some kind at one of the better hotels, so when Stafford announced they were building an extravagant house on Maui a year before he left the network, she had her suspicions, and when he pulled out all the stops and had the house finished in record time, she realized he had something more permanent in mind.
They took possession in August 2001, joined the golf club, hired staff, and made plans for their regular fall trips to New York and Aspen. But on the morning of September 11, they woke up to a different world. Travel plans were canceled, and they hunkered down in paradise, waiting for better days, thankful that the people they knew and cared about were safe if not thriving. But she missed LA, missed being part of something, missed the open roads of California that didn’t circle back to the place you just left. And while she didn’t miss Callie and all the fights with Stafford about a daughter in her twenties unable to function in the real world, she missed hope.
The assignment of blame for Callie’s failings was burdened by quantity. As parents, they were indulgent and divided people who could not agree on how to raise a child in a culture of excess, and they alternated between blaming themselves and blaming each other for many years, too many years to matter anymore. Callie was a sweet baby, despite the early months of colic and vomiting, and if they made a mess of her upbringing later, they were not alone in doing so, for many of their friends had similar problems with their own children. The reality was that she and Stafford had barely survived their own childhoods, and it was incomprehensible to them that a child with no obvious problems could have so many. To compound matters, Stafford showed little practical interest in the raising of their daughter and left too many of the important decisions to her.
But how was I to know, she thought, how easy it is to ruin a life?
Her own mother, doomed at every turn, had shared no knowledge, no maternal wisdom with the daughter she failed to protect. And her grandmother, her mother’s mother, that matriarch of social misery? She was a harsh woman with a keen eye for shame, and the years spent in her presence were lonely ones, best forgotten. Choosing between that world, the one she had known as a child, and the world Stafford made possible for her as an adult had not been difficult. Waking up in California, she thought, was like waking up in heaven.
Los Angeles was blue skies and sunshine and wide streets with palm trees and flowering plants in hanging baskets with scented flowers that made her cry sometimes when she was alone and not likely to be laughed at. Even before he could afford it, Stafford bought them a beautiful car with a wonderful stereo in it and heavy doors that opened and closed with the muted precision of superior engineering. On weekends, they would drive up into the hills overlooking the city and then through the deep canyons and into the desert beyond. They would drive north and up the coastal road to Malibu and San Simeon. They would drive south to La Jolla and San Diego and the border with Mexico. They would drive, she once said, uphill and backward if they had enough time and enough gas because they both loved to drive and they felt free on those driving days, as if forever looking for the walls of an ancient city with no real hope of finding them. Two years later, when Callie arrived, they abandoned their driving excursions, but by then there was little left to see that they had not seen many times before.
Callie was spoiled, of course, but how could it have been otherwise? It was not practical for parents to live in one world and their children in another. How could they have denied her access to the best schools with the best teachers when Stafford made enough money in one day to pay an entire year’s tuition? How could they have restricted her birthday parties to small groups of close friends when they regularly hosted lavish events for people they barely knew? How could they have asked their daughter to travel economy when they were sitting in first class? How could they have explained to her that there really was a difference between getting braces and getting breast implants when she and Stafford had both had, in the parlance of their social set, a little work done on themselves? She took comfort only in knowing that Stafford, despite all his cryptic little sermons on excess and deficiency, had no more answers to these questions than she did.
As for excess, well, in that at least their daughter excelled. There were no signs of deficiency in that department—but there was nothing like a phone call on Christmas Eve to confirm it.
It was 2002, their second Christmas on Maui, and they were supposed to go to Aspen but Stafford backed out at the last minute, leaving them stuck on Maui with no company, no plans, and no interruptions to the solitude he craved and she did not—until Callie called on Christmas Eve and almost succeeded in ending her parents’ fragile marriage once and for all.
