Tacit Agreements

By Timothy M. Zuverink

For Glenn Ruisdael, life isnt turning out quite the way he expected. At thirty-three, hes alone once more, living in the small town in Michigan where he was raised, chronically depressed and working a job thats below his abilities. He spends his days merely drifting along, drinking too much, and feeling like a failurebut things are about to change.

His grandmother, Sandra, has died, leaving him and his estranged brother, Martin, very wealthy. He has also inherited keys to two private rooms at the family mansionone, the sole domain of his grandfather, and the other, that of his grandmother. As he explores these rooms and discovers the truth, he is forced to admit that idols all have their feet of clay. But he also comes to realize that saints can be found in the most unlikely of places.

Checkered as his own past is, Glenn knows that the time has come to deal with his personal demons. He misses Gideon, his ex-lover in Minneapolis, an unconventionally spiritual man who challenged the core values by which hed been living. Glenn also realizes the time has come to try to reconnect with his
brother. Martin, after all, is the only family he has left.

Glenn knows he is at an important crossroads in life, and the path he chooses now will have repercussions reaching far into his future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462052288

Timothy M. Zuverink

Having spent twenty years living in Chicago, Timothy M. Zuverink is very familiar with the cosmopolitan setting of this novel. He is a former ESL instructor, an animal lover and advocate, and is the author of Tacit Agreements.

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Copyright © 2011 by Timothy M. Zuverink.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-5230-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5229-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5228-8 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011915956

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 09/20/2011

Contents

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part Two

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Part Three

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Epilogue

Part One

Chapter One

Sandra Yarbrough Ruisdael died last week Thursday. After eighty-five parasitic years on this planet she finally deigned to leave.

For a while I’d thought she was waiting for the new millennium. But the year 2000 came and went with no sign of her departure. As did 2001, 2002 and 2003. It’s now 2004, mid-June to be exact, and she’s made her final exit. If there’s any significance to the dates that bookend her life—1919 to 2004—I don’t see it. But then, Sandra always had a logic all her own that I’ve never claimed to understand.

It may sound odd to speak of her simply choosing to depart this life. But in her case that truly is how things appear. On Wednesday evening of last week she attended a concert of Mozart’s 40th Symphony put on at the local performing arts center. This was followed by a decaf cappuccino at Vermeer’s Retreat, our small town’s only true cafe. For both events she was accompanied by a select clique of other wealthy widows who strove to give the impression that they were intimate friends. Three of these four companions did, in fact, attend her memorial service the following Sunday afternoon. But I had the feeling they were there more out of a sense of obligation than from any true affection.

Sandra arrived home from the cafe a little after midnight, slipped into her embroidered jade silk sleep wear, and after reading a few poems by her beloved Walt Whitman, whose dog-eared book always rested on her night table, retired to her massive, empty, Louis Quatorze bed. Suzanne, her housekeeper, found her at ten the next morning reclining comfortably—swooning was the word Suzanne actually used—like a Cleopatra or a Guinevere in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. There was no sign of struggle. No sign of pain. It was as if her spirit—or whatever force had animated her during her lifetime—had decided at last that it was an auspicious moment to embark on a long overdue migration.

If she had been able to witness it, I know Sandra would have been pleased. Her death certificate officially lists the cause as an aneurism in her brain. But to Sandra that would have been a mere technicality. She had swooned. She had willfully embarked on a new journey of discovery. She had departed this life on her own terms and in her own way. And she had done it, as she’d done so many things in life, alone and unencumbered by people, yet with a certain theatrical flair. As always, she was playing to the unseen audience that existed only in her imagination and memories.

Sandra Yarbrough Ruisdael was, among other things, my father’s mother. In short, she was my paternal grandmother. And her sudden demise has caused a change in travel plans for my own life as well.

On the Sunday afternoon following Sandra’s passing we held a memorial service at the Women’s Literary Society, an attractive one-storied neo-Classical building near the college owned by a non-profit organization of the same name that Sandra generously endowed. She had been a member and a trustee for as many years as I could remember. It seemed the obvious choice and we never even considered any alternative locations. The chapel at the funeral home, while tasteful, lacked any sort of significance. And while the vast majority of families in our community choose one of the several churches that dot the landscape, for Sandra, who always prided herself on being a freethinker, affiliations with any organized religion, even nominally, were conspicuously lacking.

By we, I mean myself, of course, as well as Paul Hildebrand, the CEO of Ruisdael Packaging, the man hand-picked by my grandfather Blair as his successor to run our family-owned business, and Martin, my younger brother by three years, who flew in from New York.

There were about a dozen of us at the service. Since Sandra had long been enamored with the Transcendentalists we hired a theater student from the college with an exceptional speaking voice to read excerpts from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay The Over-Soul. The acoustics under the domed ceiling of that small marble-lined auditorium were excellent and the actor’s presentation was impeccable. Once or twice I felt my eyes well up with tears, though it was not Sandra on whom I was so intimately reflecting.

We hired another theater student with similar qualifications to read a few select poems by Walt Whitman. It was the least we could do to honor her memory. His poetry, after all, is undeniably moving and powerful.

Once the readings were finished it had been arranged that Allison Ten Haven, a gifted soloist, would sing a few Schubert pieces to a piano accompaniment—Sandra, I was informed, had greatly admired Schubert—and that, as they say, would be that. There was no formal agenda but we’d discussed matters over the phone and reached a basic agreement.

Which is why I was rather piqued when Martin suddenly rose to read a poem and say a few words before Allison began. It was not one of his own works, thank god, but something by Emily Dickinson entitled Much Madness. Everyone except me, it turns out, knew that Sandra had doted on Emily as much as she had Walt, so it seemed entirely in keeping with the spirit of the memorial. But still I took it as a barb aimed directly at me. It was a less-than-subtle gesture toward those present to notice that he was participating in the ceremony while I remained conspicuously silent.

It’s true that Martin had a much closer bond with Sandra than I did. It’s true that I’ve always identified myself solely with the Ruisdaels. Martin was free to express his grief and pay tribute in whatever manner he saw fit. Still, when publicly faced with the fact that Sandra and I were grandmother and grandson in name only, it didn’t sit well. When having to inwardly admit to myself how far Martin and I have drifted apart, I had to fight back a wave of despondency.

Since our parents’ deaths thirteen years ago Martin and I have more and more come to communicate by proxy. That is to say, we hardly communicate directly with each other at all. We rely on others to relate important news and information. Practically everything we know about each other in recent years we’ve discovered second-hand. We’ve learned how to express ourselves to one another through significant gestures, or a lack thereof. Which is why his reading of that short poem spoke volumes.

It also explains why I felt so out of the loop as Paul and Martin and I shared a quick cup of coffee at Vermeer’s Retreat before Martin had to rush off to the airport in Grand Rapids to catch his plane back home. Perhaps the two of them were in cahoots behind my back—I have no reason to think they weren’t—but they both seemed to be referring to the same script which somehow I didn’t possess. It was never clearly stated; it was all just simply assumed: Paul would remain as head of Ruisdael Packaging; Martin would be selling me his shares of stock in the company.

We both knew it wasn’t simply a business decision. Ruisdael Packaging had belonged to my family for generations. It represented, in a manner of speaking, our family history and shared identity. Selling his shares meant he was turning his back on all of that. Or so it felt. And the fact that I was learning of his decision only indirectly merely confirmed the fact that he had already deserted us. And in particular, me.

Until now the major shareholder had been Sandra, who had inherited her holdings from my grandfather Blair’s estate when he passed away five years ago. With Sandra now out of the picture, controlling interest passed to Martin and myself. And with Martin offering to let me buy out his portion of the inheritance in Ruisdael Packaging, I did in fact, or soon would, have the lion’s share of authority over the multinational company started so many years before by our great-great-grandfather Pieter.

The prospect was appealing, I’ll admit. But I wish Martin had found a way to inform me directly. Or at least to let me know before he confided in Paul.

What had started with a single paper mill producing cardboard boxes for local manufacturers now produced containers made of paper, plastic, metal, and glass for the general industrial market as well as a few comprised of patented top-secret alloys and derivatives for our clients who were defense contractors. What had started on the outskirts of a rural town in southwestern Michigan was now a part of the distribution of goods spanning the entire globe. What began basically on a shoestring was now a corporation able to rival some of the minor lights of Wall Street in terms of capital and assets. And it had all happened rather unobtrusively.

The general public has never heard of us, of course. We don’t sell anything to the average consumer and have no need of advertising in the standard mass media. We’re not listed on any of the stock exchanges, though we could be, and so even investment houses and fund managers barely know we exist. We’re a family-owned business. And we keep to ourselves.

We’ve maintained our headquarters in that same small town in Michigan, New Winschoten, and that hasn’t gained us any wide-ranging name recognition either. But neither do we necessarily want to be all that well-known. Appearances can be deceiving and we’ve often used our near incognito status to great advantage throughout the company’s mixed history. It’s nice to be able to so easily fly under the radar from time to time. It’s also proved to be highly profitable.

Pieter had four children, only one of whom, my great-grandfather Matthew, was actually interested in business. Pieter divided his estate equally among them but Matthew was able to purchase the inherited Ruisdael stocks from two of his siblings using his portion of the house as well as some major bank loans to do so. His older brother Jonah refused to sell, however. Jonah dreamed of being a concert violinist, and while he was very successful in music, didn’t want to have to rely on it as his only source of livelihood. His twenty-five percent interest in Ruisdael Packaging provided a very solid nest egg to fall back on when attempting to earn a living in the highly volatile world of the arts.

His shares have subsequently gone to his descendants, making the term family owned more and more diluted with each passing generation, though Matthew did manage to acquire an additional ten percent of the company from Jonah’s widow in later years.

Matthew had three children, the oldest of whom was my grandfather Blair. By the time Matthew died, a widower, he was most definitely wealthy, due not only to his stake in Ruisdael Packaging but to a handful of lucrative investments he’d made in other companies as well. He didn’t even attempt to split his part in the business three ways. Instead he left Blair sixty percent as well as the Ruisdael mansion since Blair was the only one still living in Michigan. He gave each of the younger siblings—twin girls—each twelve-and-a-half percent of the company and they got to divide everything else fifty-fifty. In hindsight it doesn’t seem very equitable, but I wasn’t around and I just don’t know. At that point both women had married very successfully and barely knew what to do with the millions they already had. As far as I can tell neither of them ever openly complained. Or hired a lawyer to contest matters.

My grandfather Blair didn’t want to wait until he was gone to distribute his shares, and I think he was also concerned about the increasing regulations concerning inheritance taxes. He put the majority of everything he owned into a complicated trust fund with Sandra as the beneficiary upon his death. He also put twenty percent of Ruisdael Packaging into a trust designated specifically for use by my father Andrew. It meant that Andrew didn’t have to wait to reap the benefits. It meant Andrew had a stable income as he stumbled through life. And stumble he did.

My father was a handsome and intelligent man. When it came to the field he loved, Renaissance History, he could be brilliant. In other areas of life, however, he could be sorely lacking, particularly when it came to people skills.

It was his drinking, of course. And his heavy reliance on painkillers for chronic migraines. I was a junior in college when he died—a mere twenty years old—and there was so much I never asked him. So much I never got to ask either of my parents. It’s been thirteen years and I like to believe that, had they survived, as adults we would have finally been able to relate to each other and communicate honestly. Another part of me sincerely doubts it, however. Old habits just die too hard. I feel as if I grew up never really knowing either of them. And most likely that’s the way they would have wanted it to remain.

My parents met in college at the University of Chicago. My father was there to begin the long hard process of earning his Ph.D. in history. My mother, Isabella—or Bella as my father called her—was an exchange student from Florence working on a degree in American Literature. She had a major thing for Steinbeck and her dream was to actually meet him someday and discuss his books in English having read and totally understood them entirely in English. Her dream never did become a reality. But by the time she’d realized it had faded away, she had lost so many illusions along the way that one more didn’t matter.

It took my father much longer than expected to get his degree. My mother went from being a student to being a translator and interpreter for various businesses in the Loop to being a work-from-home mother and housewife. Martin and I were both born in the Hyde Park neighborhood and spent the first few years of our lives there. I have vivid memories of our apartment and of the kindergarten I attended though I have only fleeting memories of the city itself. I do clearly remember an outing we made to the Lincoln Park Zoo when I was four or maybe five. And I remember a couple of visits to the Museum of Science and Industry.

Once my father graduated, the family moved to New Winschoten. He had landed a teaching position at Grace College, our local claim to fame in the world of higher learning. My mother even ended up teaching some classes in Italian. It wasn’t her first choice of a career by any means, but it gave her something to do in this town she referred to as provincial and bucolic when she was trying to put a good face on things. It wasn’t really first choice for either of them. But sometimes you’ve just got to play the hand you’ve been dealt.

I very rarely thought of Martin as my kid brother any more, but sitting there at Vermeer’s Retreat sipping Guatemalan coffee I noticed again how in spite of all our differences we’d both inherited so many of our mother’s dominant Mediterranean genes. Based solely on appearances, any stranger would have pegged us as siblings immediately. It was only when you got to know us each individually that you realized that was where all similarities ended. Martin was a poet and educator in New York. I was a businessman in Michigan. And regrettably, our worlds no longer intersected in any meaningful way.

We’d never been all that close when young but we’d always been able to tolerate each other. There was a point when we were teenagers that we’d even hung out together a couple of times. I’d always imagined that once we both got into college, once we were both independent, that somehow we might even manage in some fashion to become friends. Or at least to become what biologically we in fact already were: brothers.

But it wasn’t meant to be. Or at the least, it didn’t happen. A tragic car crash along the Amalfi Coast and our lives and our relationship would never be the same.

If my mother had been benumbed by the pace of life in New Winschoten, my father hadn’t been exactly thrilled by the dearth of cultural density either. To make up for it they had traveled. And with money in the bank due to a twenty-percent stake in Ruisdael Packaging, they’d been able to afford to travel a lot. Money had never been an object, even after they’d each quit their jobs at Grace College.

They’d been constantly on the move, constantly heading somewhere. It had started with places in America but had quickly become various spots in Europe. Then they had added South America. Then Asia. Then Africa. Then back to Europe once more.

It seems odd now that Martin and I hadn’t gone with them more often. But we hadn’t. I grew up with more temporary housekeepers and caretakers than I care to admit. We did go to Italy a handful of times, and though we’d definitely been underfoot, I think they thought they owed us the educational experience. And of course they’d wanted us to meet our relatives there. More than anything, however, they had simply wanted to be alone. It took me a long time to figure it out but I finally got an insight one day from a snippet of conversation I wasn’t meant to hear. My father drank a lot, I knew, but as long as he was in New Winschoten, as long as he was in the sphere of hometown friends and family, he kept it under control. Once he was on vacation, however, all pretense was dropped and all barriers were down. And even my mother, no light-weight herself when it came to alcohol, simply reveled in the all-night parties that only non-Americans seemed to know how to throw.

It was on a trip back to Florence and other cities along the peninsula, one of dozens they’d taken there over the years, that had become uneventful and almost routine. They’d been drinking, but everyone drank in Italy, and they’d been speeding, but then everyone sped down the stunningly gorgeous yet treacherous winding highway that followed the Amalfi Coast. They had gone to see friends in Salerno and then headed off to have dinner with other friends in Amalfi proper. There’d been a difference this time, however. They’d never arrived.

I was in my junior year at Northwestern University in Evanston and it was in the wee hours of a Wednesday morning when I got the phone call at my apartment near campus. It was Blair who broke the news to me. We were both shaken up, but I don’t think either of us actually cried. I just remember feeling so terribly, terribly sorry for him, however, having lost his only child.

If you want to sell, I’ll buy, I told Martin. Have your lawyer call my lawyer and we’ll see what sort of fair price we can arrange.

Thanks, he said with a sigh. I was hoping you’d understand.

What I understood was that I’d have to call my banker—my Los Angeles banker—ASAP. I already controlled ten percent of the company and I’d just inherited my own additional twenty percent from Sandra’s estate. But to raise the capital to buy out Martin’s current thirty percent would take a lot of major finagling, even given that I’d be putting up said thirty percent as collateral. The company had grown phenomenally under Blair’s, and later Paul’s, leadership. I’d never felt the need to put an exact dollar amount on the stock until now, but even I realized it was figuratively somewhere in the stratosphere. Not for the first time in my life I had the sinking feeling that I’d bitten off much more than I could chew.

Martin, I said, looking directly into his eyes, You knew Sandra much better than I did. Is that why you decided on the Dickinson poem?

I remember she read it to me once, he responded. And I could have sworn I saw his throat muscles constrict ever so slightly. She said she identified with the sentiment. So it seemed an appropriate thing to read at today’s service. Why do you ask?

Just wondering, I shrugged. I mean, it wasn’t on the list of things we’d mentioned before.

But that wasn’t why I’d asked. I’d asked because I’d wanted to get a reaction out of him. I’d expected him to be defensive. Or even possibly apologetic. What I hadn’t planned on was a straight-forward, honest answer. It left me unsure of how to proceed.

After our parents died we were both deeply impacted, of course, though Martin’s life was significantly more affected than my own. After the funeral I could return to Chicagoland, return to what I’d been doing, and try to carry on. Which is what I did. Martin, on the other hand, didn’t have that option. We’d long before become inured to having various surrogate parents for long stretches at a time, but this was no longer something temporary. He could have continued caring for himself the way he’d become accustomed to—with the help of paid assistants—but there was no way he could have suddenly taken on the responsibility of managing the upkeep of a sprawling two-story Prairie-style home situated on five acres of land. Besides, at seventeen he was still a minor and needed a legal guardian.

He’d had no choice but to move in with Blair and Sandra, our only living relatives in this country. And to be suddenly thrust headlong into the strained and Byzantine dynamic that existed between the two of them would have made even someone like Mother Theresa seriously contemplate a double murder quickly followed by a suicide.

By rights I could have invited Martin to move in with me, gotten us a huge apartment somewhere in Evanston, and enrolled him in a high school there. But he was in his senior year, he had a tight clique of friends, and he was a star on the track and cross country teams. I couldn’t have simply yanked all of that out from under him, compounding one tragedy by adding another life-changing disruption to his plate.

By rights I could have moved back to Michigan for a year, taken a couple semesters off from school, and waited until he was eighteen and setting out for college himself. But what would I have done all that time? Sat around and twiddled my thumbs? I had my own life and dreams and I didn’t want those suddenly put on hold, either. Besides, at twenty I was still more or less a kid myself. I certainly wasn’t capable of running an entire household by myself.

So instead I did neither. I let him move in with Blair and Sandra. With apples and oranges. Oil and water. Chalk and cheese.

A shared tragedy should have brought Martin and me closer together but in reality it had had the opposite effect. I blame myself and no one else. When faced with such adversity my instinctive reaction is to withdraw, to go underground. And once I got back to Evanston I found myself doing exactly that. It isn’t fair to say I deserted Martin, but I know I wasn’t always there for him when he needed me most.

When I finally resurfaced, he didn’t need me anymore. And he’s never really needed me since. No wonder he’s so eager to unload his shares of Ruisdael Packaging stock. He can finally sever all ties to Michigan—and to me—completely.

As I was walking him out to his rental car he suddenly stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to look directly at me. For a moment I’d thought I’d done something wrong.

This transition isn’t going to be easy, he said softly. I always knew this day would come, but now that it’s actually here… Well I find that I’m still not ready to deal with it.

Tell me about it, I shrugged.

I was thinking, he continued, I’d like to go see the Ruisdael House again. I don’t mean today. I mean in a week or so when I come back to sign a bunch of paperwork.

Hey, you don’t need my permission, I informed him. It may be hard to believe, but you’re actually the legal owner now. Well, half owner, anyway. You have every right to go there whenever you’d like.

That also meant, of course, that I was a legal owner, too. The grand Italian villa on the hill was suddenly half mine. The three-storied stucco structure that I’d always been enamored with now magically belonged partially to me as well.

He was about to get into his car when something on the far horizon seemed to suddenly hold Martin’s gaze. What I meant…  he began, and then started over. I was hoping the two of us could go see the old place together.

His remark caught me by surprise. My reaction was to let out a short, harsh cough.

Well, if you don’t want to, he shrugged. I just thought I’d ask.

Fortunately my next reaction was to be more civil. No, I told him, I’d like that very much.

Seriously?

Yeah, seriously.

Then let’s plan on it, he said with a smile.

Let’s plan on it, I heard myself methodically reply.

After he drove off I spotted an ornate wrought-iron and wooden-slat park bench nestled among a collection of massive potted greenery that suddenly looked very inviting. I was a little lightheaded and my knees felt somewhat weak.

Sandra had been a recluse. My grandfather Blair had been overly involved in business matters. My parents had lived in a fantasy world of