Be the Best

By Ken Kaye

Paul Best is the youngest son in a third-generation Chicago real estate and finance empire. Approaching 30, depressed by a breakup, failing in his ambitions as an artist and struggling to beat drug addiction, he agrees to try working with his father and brother in the family's group of businesses, whose secrets lead him to even more disappointments, and a path to maturity through new roles as detective, rebel, and lover.

Ken Kaye's fifth novel captures the gritty reality of interpersonal conflicts in a megamillion dollar family business as well as each of its members' conflicting drives for public admiration, sex, family approval, and self respect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Kaye
• Release date: Feb 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310946219

Ken Kaye

Ken Kaye's fiction, available from online booksellers, includes the collection of short stories "Birds of Evanston" and five novels: "Eve" (Adam's memoir, a novella), "The Net", "Eye of the Storm", "Survivors", and "Be the Best".Kaye lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he has worked as a college professor, a family therapist, and a consultant to family-owned businesses. (His nonfiction books are in the field of psychology.) Thirty-five years after his Ph.D., he earned an MFA in creative fiction from Bennington College.email: [e-mail] (and please remember to leave a review of my book at your favorite online retailer)

Book preview

Be the Best. – Arthur Best

Grandpa Arthur said it like a benediction. To everybody: employees, customers, his lawyer, his accountant, his doctor. To friends when he loaned them money to start neighborhood businesses of their own (on condition that they rent space from him).

Did he say it to his children—Dad and my aunts? Without a doubt. He’d have said it to tenants too, meaning: May you prosper. Whatever you do, do it better than anyone else. He lived and breathed the Arthur Best philosophy in that trite play on his own name.

How Grandpa would have loved to see his words today, those nine letters that are engraved on plaques in every one of the Best companies’ conference rooms and reception areas, putting the spurs to associates and visitors alike. The corporate slogan adorns every letterhead, every brochure, every page of their websites. Thaddeus Best made Arthur’s cliché his silent creed. If Dad seldom speaks it aloud it’s because he doesn’t have to. He wove it into the fabric of Best Holdings LLC, Best Property Management Corp, Maxwell Capital, Friendly Loans, Reliable Motors, Art’s Vintage Jewelry, Handy Currency Exchanges, all the family’s alphabetic real estate partnerships and half a dozen unrelated companies acquired by Best Holdings. They don’t need Best in their names to have Arthur’s mantra on their walls and letterheads. The managers’ employment contracts don’t have to spell out those three words for them to know how their performance will be judged.

The benediction works. The managers take it seriously, investment partners like it, customers may even believe it. I must be the only one who finds it embarrassing. And a curse: Be the Best.

January, 2008

Pays Record Price

It starts to get complicated when his sister comes charging into their father’s office all red in the face and slaps the Tribune onto The Mogul’s desk. Jeanne’s never at her best, Paul thinks, when she’s upset with Dad. He probably knows his sister as well as anyone does, but he’s not always sure if she’s really losing it or just playing to the audience—which in this case includes him, sitting here waiting for The Mogul to wind up a phone call.

The page one headline reads ‘Thaddeus Best Pays Record Price for Postwar Paintings,’ but the way she shakes it in Dad’s face you’d think it said he’d been indicted for bribery or for dumping toxic waste in the Chicago River, running a smuggling ring or some such evil. Which is exactly the point, Paul knows: She wants Dad to know she isn’t impressed and he shouldn’t be proud of himself. It doesn’t hurt that she happens to have burst in when he is on the phone. It actually enhances the effect as she slaps the paper down. Or it would have, if he didn’t already have three copies on his desk from the newsstand downstairs.

She yells, ‘Does this satisfy your narcissistic grandiosity?’ loud enough to be heard by the friend he is talking to as well as practically the whole floor, the way sound carries out of his corner office. They’ve told Jeanne before, Paul and his brother have, if you want Dad to listen to you, yelling is exactly the wrong way to approach him because he’ll just blow you off as a hysterical woman—but that’s what she is like when she gets furious with anybody, most of all their father. ‘Are you happy now that you’ve plundered my money and Walter’s and Paul’s? Or do you plan to gamble Mom’s house away too?’

Plundered our money. Paul tries to picture Thaddeus Best, affectionately known to his kids as The Mogul, with a patch over one eye and one of those flat curving swords all the best pirates use when they go out plundering. Dad pats the air with his free hand to say Hold on a minute, and like the respectful daughter Jeannie is, she does. He doesn’t look up to meet her glare; he is talking to his friend Larry, trying to suggest Larry shouldn’t take some ultimatum from his wife too seriously. Which naturally ratchets Jeanne’s irritation up a notch. ‘Dad!’ she says. ‘I think we have more important matters to discuss than Larry Friedman’s bitchy trophy wife.’ He fends her off again with his palm in the air as if to say down, girl. So she gets louder: ‘I’m not leaving and I’m not shutting up,’ her pitch rising by a couple of octaves. Paul starts to leave, but she says ‘Stay!’

Finally, Dad ends the call: ‘Lar, Jeannie’s just come in. She’s excited about the piece in the Trib.’ As he puts the phone down, he faces her, totally calm: ‘Larry says hello.’ She just glares at him. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I like the way you kept your hair natural.’ Trying to disarm her, no doubt, but that’s the kind of thing he might say under any circumstances just to be charming. Then he adds, ‘Aggressiveness becomes you. It puts more of a flash in your blue eyes.’

‘Will you cut the crap?’ Jeannie says, ‘You owe us nine million dollars.’

So stuff is getting a little more interesting than what Paul expected months ago when he came to work for the business. Nearly twenty-nine years old, he’d had many brief jobs, but this was the first eight to five, Monday to Friday deal. For the first six months’ rotation they had him doing commercial leasing out of the Loop office on Franklin. After they moved him to maintenance—assistant to the maintenance manager for all the company’s North Side office buildings and acting property manager of the Best Building—he got a desk here on the fifth floor, closer to the action. Not that there have been any days as eventful as this one. Although this art deal actually has nothing to do with the business, he has to admit to himself that he likes being right here with the big boys when this shit is going down, not just hearing about it second hand from Jeanne or Mom.

‘Try it for a couple years,’ his father said last spring. Paul had stayed overnight at Mom and Dad’s house in Highland Park. The three of them were breakfasting out on the terrace beside a crabapple tree in full bloom, with the panoramic view of Lake Michigan. The property is on a bluff with no beach, only twenty yards from the neighbors, but from where they sat it looked like a secluded island in the Bahamas. A flock of finches were twittering in and out of the serviceberry trees. His mother, who had been gardening before Paul woke up, wore a pair of blue jeans with mud on the knees; Dad was in khaki shorts and his Exmoor Club golf shirt. They could have posed for a Viagra ad. ‘You’ve got nothing to lose,’ Thaddeus said. ‘Try working in the business for two years. Either you’ll like it and want to make a career out of it or you’ll go back to painting or do something else.’

‘How do you know two years?’

‘Nobody’s forcing you, Paul. Make it one year, five years—just so you know you gave it a chance.’

‘We don’t want you to have regrets later,’ Mom said, ‘to look back and say I wish I would have had a business career.’ His mother is not a stupid woman, but that was dumb. Even with the hangover he had, he knew that was a dumb reason.

‘Or I might look back and say I blew the most creative years of my life moving up the corporate ladder, trying to be like Walter when I should have been giving full time to my career as a painter.’ He definitely knew that he would never want a business career. His life would be about enriching the world with a little more beauty and joy; not about adding to his family’s riches.

They were being careful not to say what he knew they thought: You have no career as a painter. Barbara repeated what had been the party line for the past year: ‘Dad and I think it’s time you seriously think about how you’re going to support yourself—and a family someday. You can’t live off dividends all your life.’

‘Actually I think I could,’ he said.

‘We’re not that wealthy,’ Dad lied, on principle. Paul didn’t know the numbers, but he had heard that stock market indices had more than recovered in the six years since the 9/11 shock, rents were at all-time highs and the family’s real estate empire was expanding from metropolitan Chicago to St. Louis and Wisconsin.

‘Even if you did have enough to never have to work,’ Mom said, ‘that isn’t how you were raised.’

She must have been living in a different family from the one that reared him. In fact she had been out of it for some of those child-rearing years. ‘Suppose we agree that I don’t have what it takes to succeed as a painter,’ he said. ‘Why …’

‘No one’s saying that,’ she cut him off. In the bright sunlight, with no makeup, her cosmetically polished face looked like porcelain. Old porcelain. Dad looked aggravated with her; he’d already made his point and if Paul was too stubborn to take it, too bad. ‘You’re a wonderful painter,’ she went on. ‘We’re not saying stop painting.’ Although she’d always encouraged Paul and even had a couple of his canvasses nicely framed and hanging at the house (in a hallway), her faith in his talent had been hard pressed lately, with no prizes to boast of, no gallery shows since the one they subsidized five or six years ago.

‘Why assume,’ he argued, ‘that my second choice would be working in the family business? What happened to doctor lawyer Indian chief? I’m just saying. You always claimed you wanted me to do what would make me happy. None of your children have to work in the business if they’re not interested—except it turns out if I’m going to depend on the family money I do have to work for the business. Whether it interests me or not.’

‘Wrong!’ Dad said. ‘Stop putting words in our mouth. Nobody gets a free ride, we expect you and Walter both to support yourselves and your families—but you can do whatever work makes you happy. I don’t care if it’s a gallery or a museum or a hot dog cart. Shit, you could paint all day and live modestly off your trust, no one’s saying you can’t—I’m saying try working with me and Walter just so you can say, I gave it my best shot for a couple of years and I hated it as much as I knew I would.’

Mom piled on, ‘You can always go back to painting full time if you want.’

So this is what Paul wonders now, all these months later: Do they really want him to pull his weight in the business or is the job just a cover? A way for him to be a trust baby while pretending not to be one—while no one actually believes he’ll be earning his salary? A way to keep him on a leash.

As soon as he left the house that Sunday he phoned his sister. They talked the whole forty-five minute drive back into the city. He told her they were twisting his arm. ‘Don’t do it, Paul. Regret? Not putting everything into your painting is what you’d regret. You’re an artist.’ Jeannie was the only one who encouraged him to stick with his dream. She’s still his big supporter as a painter, more than Thaddeus and Barbara ever were.

Even his best friend Nan chimed in on their side, when he told her about the pressure they were putting on him. Jeanne is the only one who saw how it killed him, a month later, when he gave in.

He didn’t cave to the parents’ argument. That wasn’t why he agreed to give it a try. Nor was it fear of having to work part-time jobs to pay the rent while living out his days as a wannabe painter, which he considered to be a perfectly good life.

He had his own reason for caving. He did it to get off drugs.

Around the end of May, two weeks before that morning when the parents put the full-court press on him, he had blacked out. He woke up in a strange apartment, covered in puke and bloody snot with only vague memories of the shit he’d consumed for the preceding week. He was supposed to be working on a mural, a commission, a whole wall of a new restaurant. The owners loved his design imitating seventeenth or eighteenth century still lifes, done in trompe l’oeuil—‘fucking awesome’ was their evaluation—but he hadn’t been able to get anything done for about a month, which stressed him out, and then he’d been high for a week, so they fired him. He made a firm decision: quit doing drugs before I become an addict. He suddenly saw value in the discipline of eight to five and an office where he’d have to show up clean and sober, with responsibility, and where his brother and father and assorted managers would be on his case. That was why he agreed to give the Best companies a try. Only a try. He said he would give it twelve months no matter how much he hated it.

On the day the news from Sotheby’s has hit Jeannie’s fan, they are seven and a half months into the experiment.

He knew he would definitely do a good job despite having no intention of staying. The Paul Best philosophy is a little different from Arthur and Thaddeus’s Be the Best philosophies. He believes that no matter how boring a job is, it’s even more boring if you do it half-assed. Besides, by showing everyone including himself that he is capable of contributing to the care and nurturance of the Best fortune he’ll have nothing to be ashamed of when he announces at the end of a year, or any time thereafter, ‘I’m out of here. I’m a painter, not a capitalist.’ Then he can resume painting, clean and sober, which the kind of work he does demands: highly detailed, finely drawn and precisely painted.

Is he clean and sober after seven and a half months? No. Not if you consider pot an addiction. He has cut way down, though. He doesn’t even drink every day. He’s closer to drug free than when he came in for his first day of work at eight o’clock sharp on Monday morning, June first, after six days of groggy sobriety and five AA meetings, ready to make his mark. Nervous as hell, at lunchtime he went down to his car and smoked the emergency blunt he had saved, and that night he went out drinking with friends and got plastered.

Paul would not try to explain or excuse how that happened. Believe it or not, he is basically a disciplined person. He was a competitive college tennis player, and had ambitions as an artist for a while, but he lost them somewhere. Temporarily. He hopes.

When Jeanne says, ‘Will you cut the crap? You owe us nine million dollars,’ Thaddeus rises from his throne and comes around the desk. He closes the door, gestures for Jeanne to take the armchair, and he drops onto the couch beside Paul. This big, ruddy father of theirs: Jeanne always says Paul should give thanks to Our Lady of Inaccurate Conception that he got their mother’s genes. (She got more of Dad’s.) No one would call Thaddeus handsome. They might grant him rugged or robust. His nose looks like someone flattened it. A boy in fourth grade asked Paul if his father was a boxer. He said yes, then went home and asked Dad, who joked, ‘Only with Mom. My nose has the shape God gave it—as far as we know.’

Jeannie waits, now, for their father to say something. Through the partly open window behind his desk, the Michigan Avenue traffic rumbles and honks, five stories below. Paul has no idea whether his sister’s accusation is true. He heard about these paintings for the first time an hour ago. She seems to be pretty sure that Dad used their family partnership money to buy them, instead of his own account. Nine million bucks, they’re talking serious money. But she hasn’t necessarily made sure of her facts, as Walter would have done, before asserting herself.

Thaddeus looks perfectly comfortable lounging on his suede couch, surrounded by all his mementos and pictures where he’s being courted by movers and shakers and written up as this big real estate mogul and financial genius. He looks her over. Finally he says, ‘Nice pearls.’ She touches them reflexively, and her cheeks go pink. The pearls must have been a gift from him. Advantage: Dad.

He is right, though, the necklace looks good with her black pants suit, the silver earrings inlaid with mother of pearl, and her hair, too, not dyed or streaked like most dishwater blondes but pulled back from her face by a silver clip. Jeannie’s face has too wide a nose to be pretty, but she knows how to use her soft complexion and good taste to advantage. At the moment, she doesn’t care what Dad thinks of her hair or her jewelry. If he is thinking to soothe her, she isn’t having it.

Sitting beside him, Paul notices how that once powerful build has settled down from Thaddeus’s chest to his girth. Take off fifty pounds and fifty-plus years, you could see him playing guard for St. Ignatius’s championship football team. Not that Paul and Jeannie couldn’t stand to lose a few pounds themselves, but Thaddeus’s belly pooches out over his belt enough to slow his walk and the way he lowered himself onto the couch like a pregnant woman past her due date. Dad knows people don’t like him for his figure. They like him for his money or his influence, maybe his charm or his knowledge. And if they don’t like him at all, he has been heard to say, fuck ‘em.

He answers Jeanne: ‘The truth is, you now owe me nine million dollars.’

She scoffs. ‘If I owed you nine dollars, you couldn’t collect.’

‘I’ll collect, with interest. But don’t worry, nine million is a bargain price.’

She jumps out of the chair. ‘Is that the headline in the Tribune, Dad? Let’s see. I guess they left that word bargain out. Oh, so it should have been Thaddeus Best Pays Record Bargain Price for Postwar Paintings?’ He smiles at her sarcasm, but she doesn’t mean it in a good humored way.

‘Trust me,’ he says, ‘it’s a steal. Do you remember who Alden Murray was?’

‘Dead male twentieth century American. I wouldn’t recognize anything he did if I saw it.’

Dad says, ‘Oh yes you would, but these particular paintings have never been exhibited. They are his best work and they’ve hung in a private home for forty-some years.’

The pictures in the paper are lousy photos, but Paul can see it’s a triptych, like a camera panning around to shoot three views of the same room, each one a perfect composition on its own. He can hardly wait to see them. Dad says, ‘Jeannie, wait till you see them. Mom wants to have a family party. I wish you’d stop standing there with your hand on your hip like Sister Bernarda.’

‘Who the hell is Sister Bernarda?’

‘My third grade teacher,’ he says. ‘You look like you caught me tracking mud in from the playground.’

‘That’s unfortunately the case, Dad. But I don’t question that they might be nice paintings. Worth every penny of my money, Paul’s, and Walter’s.’

He merely smiles knowingly. ‘What you need to understand, Jeannie, before you bust your brassiere, is why the news-making price we paid is actually a bargain.’ She grimaces and sits back down. They both know she does want to understand. He says, ‘I’m sure Paul is familiar with Murray’s work’—which is true, but it annoys him that Dad is trying to set him up as his ally, with father and son sitting together on the couch opposite her.

Sure, he is familiar with Alden Murray’s work. Murray used to be one of the most underrated painters of the middle of the century. Before he died in the 1960s, it’s said, he never sold a thing for over a thousand dollars. Then critics started writing about him and well-known collectors started buying his work—they discovered there’s not much of it, only eleven or twelve oil paintings and a few dozen watercolors. But he was a genius, two generations ahead of his time. Abstract was just coming in and Murray was already post-abstract, using broad fields of color with subtle gradations. It couldn’t be further from realism, yet when you look at a Murray painting, you see real people in real settings. You see the detail he left out. Your mind fills it in. The critic Harold Rosenberg called Murray’s pictures of interiors so evocative that when they hung on the wall in a home they would be the real space and everything outside the frame would be decoration.

‘You know, I tried to be a painter myself once,’ Thaddeus says.

Jeanne says, ‘We know.’

Before they were born, before he met their mother, way back before he was an Air Force pilot, their father studied painting in New York. He has said he was no good, he just needed to ‘get it out of his system’—those being Grandpa Arthur’s words, which Dad has quoted a million times. Now comes something Paul didn’t know until this moment: ‘I studied with Alden Murray among others at the Art Students League in 1956 and ’57. A very quiet, modest man who told me I should paint for pleasure because I wasn’t good enough to do it for money.

‘Over the last fifteen years,’ he says, ‘Murray’s work took off. These paintings that Mrs. Blasingame—a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art—commissioned from him in 1955, paying four grand for all three, by the time the Blasingame family are ready to cash in, a single Alden Murray painting went for two and a half million bucks.

‘Her children grew up seeing these on three adjacent walls in their house. They know if they sell the trio for anything less than three times what each one might bring, someone would buy the lot and split them up. The family could do that themselves, they aren’t about to leave that money on the table. So they put a reserve on—eight point five million—and Sotheby’s announces this. When bidding starts, turns out there are two bidders. The night before, I sent in a bid for the minimum but someone else—I’m pretty sure I know who—bids eight mill five fifty. That’s where the bidding opened, so I jump immediately to eight point eight, and the other bidder, who is on the phone, drops out. There were about a hundred people who came just to watch, to be there—none of them were about to bid that kind of money for an artist who didn’t fetch one million a canvas, four or five years ago.

‘But that won’t be true for long,’ he says. ‘The whole market’s blown wide open and what no one thought of yesterday is, is that just paying a record price for these makes them more valuable. We could turn around and sell them for more today, separately or together.’ He exults, ‘I made them famous.’

Paul can’t help laughing. ‘You always go about things in such a modest way, Dad.’

‘Hey, it’s business—but they’re gorgeous paintings, wait till you see them.’

Paul says, ‘I’m sure they are.’ Jeannie gives him a look: Don’t cut Dad any slack.

‘Chicago real estate mogul Thaddeus Best bet nine million bucks that the art market is going to continue sky-rocketing,’ she says. ‘Only the papers don’t mention he bet with his kids’ money!’

‘Would you like me to send a letter to the editor, clarifying that it was the family partnership, not me personally?’

‘You’re purposely missing the point,’ she says. ‘We all know it isn’t really about how much the paintings of Alden Murray are worth. It’s about what Thaddeus Best is worth. He’s worth so much that he can spend more than anyone ever spent on modern art. Only he’s not, is he? You used our dough because you don’t have nine million in spare change, and if you had it, you wouldn’t risk it on art, you’d invest in more apartment buildings or a shopping center. When it’s a matter of throwing money around that might never come back, that’s when you use our money.’

This is interesting. Paul wants to hear more, but it bothers him being in the middle. His sister looks equally angry at both of them, yet at the same time saying ‘our’ money, like she’s speaking for him and Walter, too—against Dad.

‘How is it your money?’ Dad challenges her.

‘How is it our money!?!’

‘Keep your voice down, please. There are people outside the door.’

‘How is it our money? Let’s see, uh, Grandpa died and left it to us? I wouldn’t think there’s much ambiguity about that.’

‘Then you would be wrong,’ he says. ‘I was the one who decided to put those assets in trust for the three of you instead of in my own name. I set up the trusts for my three kids with about twenty thousand dollars that your grandparents had already given to each of you and another hundred eighty thousand that they meant to leave to me. It’s only your money because I made it your money.’ Hard to argue with that, Paul thinks. Thaddeus grew that quarter of a million into about ten million, after taxes, through a chain of restaurants he invested the trusts in, which wound up being sold to Taco Bell for Pepsi stock—which then tripled by the time he sold it.

‘Thank you very much,’ Jeanne says. ‘Doesn’t change the fact that if you wanted the art so much, you should have just bought it yourself!’

‘I did, in fact, use my own cash. I loaned you the cash to buy it with. And you now own nine million dollars’ worth of extraordinary pictures.’

‘You can have the extraordinary pictures, we want the extraordinary dough.’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I don’t have an MBA from Harvard, I only know buying and selling.’ What he means is, as they well know, his street smarts are worth ten MBA degrees.

Jeanne goes on about how he bought the art for his own ego. ‘Or because it’s beautiful, okay, whatever reason you had, but it isn’t in the fiduciary interest of the partners.’

‘Well you happen to be wrong about that. I did it in the best interests of the family.’

Jeanne cuts him off. ‘Paul, I don’t remember a family meeting about it, do you?’ He puts up his hands to say Don’t pull me into this.

Dad says, ‘You should give Len Porter a call and get him to explain it to you. We were damned clever to figure out how to use my personal line of credit to acquire an asset for you outside Mom’s and my estate.’

So Jeanne says, ‘Whichever one of them is mine, tell Sotheby’s not to bother crating it, it’s going in their next auction.’

‘Your mother already has an architect designing the room for them.’

‘She’ll get over it. It would be a relief to her if we send you to Betty Ford for treatment of your Sotheby’s addiction. Do you think they have a twelve step program for that, Paul?’

Thaddeus smiles, the patient father. ‘Are you finished blowing off steam?’

‘Not by a long shot.’ She purses her lips to not return Dad’s smile. She wants him to see unyielding determination in her eyes, but Paul knows that all The Mogul sees is a mirror of the affection they see in his.

‘When I was a boy,’ he says, ‘my mother had a pressure cooker. The microwave of the 1950s. I don’t suppose you kids ever saw one. Used to scare the bejeezus out of me. It forced heat into vegetables without boiling away the goodness. I haven’t seen a pressure cooker in forty years, but the words blowing off steam still call to mind the picture of my father, on your Grandma’s orders, carrying that heavy cooker from stove to sink with a potholder on each handle.’ He illustrates, turning his face to the side and wincing as if expecting an explosion. ‘It never failed: Before Dad made it to the sink it blew like a locomotive—there was a sort of steam valve on top, you know? My sisters and I would scream while your grandfather added to our terror by swearing and turning red. Then he’d open it up—the top fastened like a submarine hatch—and there would be a plate of cooked spinach or corn on the cob, peaceful as could be. Like you now, Jeannie. Your steam released, none of your goodness boiled away. You’re like a nice plate of spinach.’

‘Thank you Dad. You say the nicest things.’

Paul has to laugh. ‘Would you care to elaborate on that, Dad?’

‘No need. It’s a compliment though. All those vitamins?’

‘If you’re trying to compliment your way out of the hole you’re in,’ she says, ‘spinach isn’t going to do it. I hate spinach.’

‘I wish you and your mother could have seen them on the stage in New York yesterday. You’d have told me to keep bidding whatever it cost to get them. You’ll see. Make sure you’re in town the week of Mom’s uncrating party. Don’t you remember when we took you to MOMA when you were about ten or eleven, Jeannie? Remember seeing a picture of a woman in a bedroom and you said, It’s an Alice picture’?’

‘I know, I know,’ she says, ‘It makes me want to go through the looking glass. You’ve only told that story five thousand times.’

‘Well I’m glad you remember, so you can tell me who the painter is.’

‘Who made that picture? I have no idea—not—this Murray guy?’

He nods his head, smiling triumphantly.

‘That was Alden Murray?’

‘You now own three Alice pictures. Even more magical than that one.’

‘Come on, Paul, I’ll buy you lunch.’

He follows her out. She doesn’t see The Mogul roll his eyes at him as they go. Their father won’t hold it against him for leaving with Jeannie at this point, but Paul expects to have to sit through a lecture later. Although Thaddeus wouldn’t change his mind if the whole family agreed with her, he will feel it necessary to educate Paul at length about how wrong she is.

He has no idea where Walter will stand. Should they be pleased? Does it make a difference to Jeanne that the risky investment Thaddeus has somehow involved them in is not just any painter, but the one who enchanted her as a child? No, it makes no difference. ‘Dad had no right to do it.’ She is mad as hell. And he guesses she has a point, if they are the ones taking the risk instead of himself. Like breaking his children’s piggy bank to go to the race track.

On the other hand, it was The Mogul who gave them those nickels and dimes in the first place. On the third hand, a gift is a gift, supposedly, isn’t it?

His Sister’s Pup

Jeanne gives the cab driver the parents’ Lake Shore Drive address. So it turns out that her idea of buying him lunch is lunching at Mom’s apartment. He says, ‘Still a cheapskate.’ Jeannie used to be tight with her money, when she was in high school with a good allowance and he was in second grade making twenty-five cents a week. That was a long time ago, but he still gives her a hard time. ‘I hope you don’t expect me to pay for the cab.’

‘It would be the least you could do,’ she says.

‘I would have been happy to walk the eight blocks.’ It is a perfect January day. In the forties, bright sun, hardly any wind. He could have used the exercise.

‘Not in these heels,’ she says.

In the taxi, she checks her voicemail. She doesn’t have any messages, but feels the need to call her husband at their house in Florida. What the fuck? Paul thinks. She could have waited an hour. It’s a little annoying when people take a call on their cell phone in the middle of a conversation with you, but it’s worse when they suddenly decide to make a call, like the conversation you’re having with them isn’t interesting enough. He waits patiently while she recounts the confrontation with Dad. She says, ‘Because it’s just not smart, Carl, to tie up such a large investment in one asset. It’s stupid. He’s speculating on work by a single artist who can be down-valued by the market as whimsically as it over-valued him. Dad claims he didn’t sell our portfolio to do the deal, he’s loaning us the money, but that only means he’s got some even shadier angle than I thought. I’ll guarantee you.’

Paul is starting to get a stomach cramp already. He usually tightens up when someone in his family starts ragging on one of the others, especially if they’re trying to get him on their side. Jeanne is looking for agreement from both him and Carl. She gives him a look, like Can you believe what Dad did?—while expostulating to Carl, ‘Nine million bucks is a lot of money. And a third of that is mine. Thirty per cent, to be exact. Two point seven mil. I told him to give me one of the paintings and I’ll sell it.’

Then, as they’re getting out of the cab she says, ‘Has he? Aww, my poor sweetie.’ Aside to Paul: ‘Boris has been asking about me.’ Boris is her dog. Paul has nothing against dogs, but in the middle of this conversation Carl tells her the dog’s been asking about her, and she has to pass that news along? Then she keeps him standing there on the curb while she and Carl go on about the dog. She actually stands on the corner of McClurg and Erie, forcing an old couple with shopping bags to step around her: ‘My puppy’s wondering where his mommy went? Of course, he didn’t get his long walkie this morning, did he? Put him on.’ The open water sailor and tournament polo player isn’t too important to hold the receiver to Boris’s furry little ear, and Jeanne—Paul can’t believe this—holds her phone over for him to hear Boris, too. Only it isn’t Boris, it’s Carl’s imitation of a Westy, snuffling.

Don’t get him wrong, he loves his sister, but she’s from another planet. Straight A’s at Georgetown, then she worked her way up in the family business, took two years off to go to Harvard Business School, worked for Citibank for a few years. She married a guy who’s probably got more dough himself than their whole family, she has two houses (one in Florida that could be in Architecture Digest) besides her Gold Coast apartment and a social life in three states. His sister inhabits a world he can’t imagine himself in. He wouldn’t want those fancy homes and possessions, he thinks. They’d be nothing but a burden.

He has already spent enough of the morning sitting around and standing around while his family talked to a friend and a husband and a dog. Finally, Jeanne hangs up. She immediately starts in on him, trying to get him to agree with her position vis a vis Dad. ‘So, Paul, pretty good guess on my part? That he used the partnership’s dough? I didn’t even ask him, did I? I just said I knew where he got the money, and he didn’t deny it. The partnership took out a loan from him personally, did you catch that?—which probably has about five angles to it. I must say he isn’t showing any remorse. Quite pleased with himself, isn’t he?’

They are in the elevator by the time she gets around to asking him what he thinks. He says irritably, ‘It’s great. If more people bought pictures instead of investing in the stock market, I could paint for a living. Why is it such a terrible thing if the partnership bought three paintings? Dad says it’s a great investment.’

‘Ooh,’ she says, mocking him: ‘Dad says it’s a great investment.’

He will try to ignore her ridicule. ‘Even if it doesn’t turn out a brilliant investment, why is it riskier than if he has our trust buy a building or Pepsi stock or whatever. He’s the managing partner, right?’

She mutters something he doesn’t hear.

‘So you’re here to lobby Mom?’

‘I’d like to know whether she agrees with what he did.’

‘Maybe it was her idea.’

‘No, you heard Dad say this Alden Murray is some guy he knew in the Fifties.’

‘Some guy!? Jeannie, Alden Murray is not some guy. He was a great painter. Brilliant. It’s awesome that Dad knew him. The Art Students League was big back then. And studied with him. That’s incredible.’

That sets her off: ‘I can’t believe you’re so naïve, kissing up to The Mogul. Wait’ll you’ve worked for him eight years like I did.’ She mentions her MBA too, and some other things the gist of which is that he is an idiot if he doesn’t see it’s a rotten deal and Thaddeus isn’t telling them the whole story.

He watches ten floor numbers go by, without responding. The mirrored walls and doors of this elevator always make him feel like a monkey in a psychology experiment—in fact, there is a surveillance camera with an observer somewhere, watching. Finally she says, ‘What?’

‘Even if you’re right,’ he says, ‘I’m not an idiot.’

Jeanne apologizes. He can tell she is embarrassed. She wants him on her side and realizes that calling him stupid probably isn’t the best approach. But she is still hot under the collar. Mad at everybody: furious at Dad; gearing up for an argument with Mom (whom, she must know, she won’t persuade); mad at him for being so blasé as to suggest it might not be that big of a deal.

He can hardly wait for this lunch with Mom.

Loretta opens the door. ‘Is Mom home?’ Jeanne says. ‘What’s for lunch?’ So she wasn’t expected, just popping over on an impulse, with him in tow. Loretta says there is plenty of soup and she’ll make some sandwiches. She pretends to be put out, but she lives for their visits to the condo, probably more than Barbara does.

Loretta loves to be reminded that twenty years ago, when they lived in the townhouse on Webster, she would see Paul off in the mornings with a hot breakfast and greet him after school with milk and cookies. Now, after years with Barbara in Highland Park, she is back in the city, living with her son and working here five days a week to get out of her daughter-in-law’s house, she says.

Their mother’s voice comes down the hall, calling, ‘What a treat!’

‘We’re not going to give her a hard time,’ Paul says. ‘Right?’

‘I never give anyone a hard time,’ Jeanne says, punching him in the chest. Then she sees Barbara and smiles, gives her an air kiss and says, ‘Why do you enable Dad’s addiction to art?’

‘Hello, Mom!’ Paul intercedes. ‘Jeanne says she’ll buy me lunch and then she brings me here.’

‘Very frugal of you, Jeannie dear.’

‘You should charge her for the lunch,’ he says.

‘Good idea!’ She sounds manic—no more so, he hopes, than anyone would be whose husband paid a possibly crazy price for those long hidden paintings yesterday. ‘Dad and I will need all the subsidies we can get now, don’t you think?’

Jeanne says, ‘That’s no joke, Mom. Did you know about it beforehand?’

She says she did. ‘Of course. We talked about it before the auction. Your father made me keep the secret so word wouldn’t get out to other bidders.’

Jeanne presses her, ‘We were wondering if it was just his thing, or both of you.’

‘Oh, you know, sort of thing I wouldn’t even think of,’ she says. ‘Why? Are you thinking of having us both committed to a lunatic asylum?’

Jeannie changes the subject: ‘What’ve you been up to this morning?’ as she fingers Barbara’s linen jacket and gold earrings like the discriminating shopper she is.

‘A meeting,’ she says. A word rich in possible meanings. Her book club, a committee of some kind? Mom wouldn’t wear a designer suit to an AA meeting. If it was something to do with the museum, she would have said so. Or raising money for Hillary Clinton’s nomination; but she’d have said that, too, since Jeanne and she are both in that camp.

‘Are you losing some of that weight?’ she asks Paul.

‘I don’t think I’ve lost,’ he says. ‘I’m trying not to put any …’

‘Keep exercising.’ He stopped working out months ago. ‘You’re at that age where if you get a belly it’s harder and harder to get rid of it.’ There is never any connection