Ark (12 page)

“What about Doris?”

“What about her?”

“Talk to her for me, please.”

“What can she do? It's my father who's at the loft.”

Jerome began to plead. He needed to do this. It was so important, for his mourning.

At that, Rebecca smarted. She brought her hands up over her cheeks and said, “Drive me back to work. I don't want to talk about this anymore.”

Later that day, Rebecca began to think that she would talk to Doris after all. Not about Jerome, but about her father. It was difficult to know if he was in danger. She didn't consider herself a good judge. But she couldn't just let him waste away inside the loft. She had to do something.

After work, she grabbed a cab to her aunt's apartment. Doris lived on Fifty-Ninth Street, near the entrance to the Queensboro Bridge, an intersection as loud and frantic as any in the city. Upstairs, she found her aunt on a business call. A cigarette burned between Doris's lips, and she embraced her niece with one arm, saying into the phone, “No, because I need you to do it now! No, the order has to get out to the stores tomorrow morning. Yes. Yes!
Yes!
In the morning. No, I can't call and tell them they won't have it. So you figure it out. Get it done, Gordon. Bring in whoever you have to, and make it fucking happen. No, Gordon! No.”

Doris turned the phone at an angle from her ear, and said, “I'm sorry, but this idiot…” Then she disappeared down a hall into a bedroom. Two young interns sat at the back of the living room, nervous little things. They watched Rebecca move about the room, following her closely with deferential eyes. Rebecca didn't introduce herself, her attention taken in at once by a large white neon sign above Doris's desk:
Doris Arkin Shouts!
On the desk was a framed photo of Doris kissing her father on the cheek. Ben was making an expression of extreme irritation.

Doris emerged from the bedroom then, her long black hair disheveled and cigarette blooming smoke. She began to apologize. They said hello again, Doris bummed Rebecca a cigarette, and they went into the kitchen—a room of a thousand white tiles and brightly polished silver piping—and milled at a large window, smoking. The ashtray was a duck with a saucer between its wings. Doris emptied it into a trash can and replaced it on the granite counter. She said, “Rebecca, I've stopped sleeping. At all hours I'm at my desk, working. I try not to think about the fact that my parents are gone, or that the lawyers from the suit with Sondra are still owed so much money. Work is the best thing for me right now. I just work and work and work.”

Rebecca said, “I'm glad you have your work then, Doris. In times like these, work can be a welcome distraction.”

“Your father won't help me get our parents' estate in order. I can't even get him on the phone. I love him, but he's a mess.”

Something inside Rebecca's chest seemed to flip. She said, “He's not doing well.”

“Rebecca, he's always been this way. I mean, I ran
Shout!
I did everything for the company. I carried my brother and sister all those years.”

“Over the course of thirty-five years, I'm sure each of you had a chance to lead.”

“Yes. Maybe. Your father was once…good,” Doris said. “But then his heart went out of it back in the mid-eighties. As for Sondra, I don't know why she got involved in the business in the first place. She doesn't have a creative bone in her body. She has no business savvy. She didn't bring anything to
Shout!
but an inferiority complex.”

“Well, I don't know about Sondra,” Rebecca said. “But my father started that label. It was his idea, his interest in music that made it happen in the beginning, and over the first fifteen years he was as smart as anyone. His tastes, his instincts, they were spot on. But then my parents' divorce killed his spirit. He stopped caring about his work. It became just a job. He was miserable. In times of depression, some people shut down.”

“I don't,” she said.

“I know you don't, but my father does. Maybe you'll remember that at the time of his divorce, your parents were calling him every day and telling him to get it together. They harassed him. The people who should have been helping him most were making it harder and harder for him. Your sister, Sondra, did you know that she and her husband, Steven, threatened to have me taken away from my father? Taken where, I don't know…maybe to live with them. A truly frightening thought, considering that they're out of their fucking minds. But Sondra and her husband didn't think my father was fit to care for me.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “They came up to the apartment on Eightieth one night. I remember my father in his bedroom. They said they were going to take me. And whatever my dad could get his hands on, he was throwing…lamps and chairs, clothes. Eventually I was sent out with the babysitter to get ice cream. It was past my bedtime. A navy coat over my pajamas, I left the building, and went up the street to the deli. Returning to the apartment, I was stopped at the corner by the sitter. An ambulance was parked at the curb in front of the building. From fifty paces away, I saw my father was strapped down to a gurney, being wheeled into the ambulance. And I remember thinking, Don't let it be him. Please, God, don't let it be him. My dad spent three weeks at Bellevue, resting, seeing psychiatrists. I visited him there. My mother brought me. We were allowed to see him for a few minutes only. He couldn't even speak, he was so medicated.” Rebecca took another of her aunt's cigarettes and lit it at the stove. She said, “But my point is this: If my father's family were made up of the kind of people who said things like, ‘We're here for you. Whatever you need,' he would have stood up sooner in the aftermath of his divorce. Instead, Ben rang at 6 a.m. and screamed at him to get up, shower, brush it off, move on. He had a sister and brother-in-law who told him they would take his child from him. All while he needed people to treat him with love and to grant him the time away to recover.”

Doris said, “But even after all of that, your father just remained in bed, Rebecca. We had a company to run. You know, in the real world, a person can't simply drop out. No matter how troubled, a person has to show up and attend to responsibilities. That's the way life is.”

“You're right,” Rebecca replied. “You're right that in most cases a person can't just cut out because he's severely depressed. But when you own the company, and your sisters own the company, and your parents own the company, then you can take a minute to recover, because those people are loving enough to work a little harder and step up for you.”

Doris had nothing to say about this. She threw her hands in the air. “But why is he still at the loft?”

“I don't know,” Rebecca said.

“He can't be there.”

“I know.”

Doris exhaled deeply. Suddenly, a look of pleasure flashed across her face. She said, “That was some scene at the funeral, huh? They should have thrown Sondra in that cop car. I would have loved that.”

Rebecca said, “Yeah,” though her whole body seemed to rebel in doing so.

One of the interns came into the kitchen then. She said, “Sorry to interrupt. Margaret's on the line.”

“Can't you see I'm busy? Tell Margaret I'll call her back.” Doris shook her head at Rebecca. “I'm sorry. What were we talking about? Oh yes…your father.”

Doris said it was ignorant to assume that Oliver would just all of a sudden break out of his state. He was in a downfall, to be sure. Rebecca had to pull him out of it before he worsened.

“What do you suggest?”

Doris took her niece's hands. She said, “Go to the loft tomorrow, throw his clothes in a suitcase, and fly him home to L.A. yourself. I mean it, you'll have to get on that plane with him, Rebecca.”

“I should get on the plane with my dad?”

“Yes.”

“And fly with him?”

“That's right, Rebecca. If you want to get him back home and out of this rut, it's the only way.”

“You think so?”

“Get him home to his wife and let her help him take the next step.”

“What if he says no?”

“He won't. Not if you're firm with him.”

The next day, Rebecca returned to the loft. In fact, she had bought her father a plane ticket for 4 p.m. that afternoon. She wouldn't travel with him to Los Angeles. No—she would go to the airport, they would eat together in the terminal, she'd walk him up to security, tell him how brave he was and that she would come visit soon, and that she loved him. He'd have to get himself on the plane.

Fortunately, this morning, she found her father awake for the first time in a month. He was on the phone with Sheila. The television remained the only light in the room, and Rebecca switched on a lamp on the side table. She could hear Sheila screaming through the phone. Perhaps she was telling her husband to come home.

To give her father privacy, Rebecca went into her grandparents' walk-in closet. Nothing had been moved. Eliza's dresses hung on a rod, grouped by color. Her shoes, and shirts, and coats, and belts, and hats, great old stuff—Rebecca would like to take it all. Doris probably had everything inventoried. She would want to know why it had gone missing.

Rebecca returned from the closet into the bedroom. Oliver was still quietly listening to his wife, gazing out over large splayed feet. Then suddenly he was off. He began squinting in such a way, as if his facial muscles were working to wring out all the emotion inside him. Now he came up on his knees in the bed. His eyes were bloodshot. There was a cut on the palm of his hand, about three inches long. How had he done this? He could use a shave. Rebecca could smell his strong, musky odor. Oliver grabbed one of the used tissues in the bed—they were everywhere—and blew his nose, then threw the tissue on the floor. His arms were in motion, his head, too. He wanted to say something.

“Do you need water, Dad?”

“Yes,” he said.

Even in the pitch dark, Rebecca could find a glass in the kitchen cupboard, and she filled it at the sink. She shut off the water and thought,
I have to take control. He's losing his mind
.

Back in the bedroom, her father took the glass with two hands, as if he would drop it if he didn't use both, guzzled the water down, then used the covers to wipe his face. Rebecca asked him if he would like her to cook him dinner But then, all of a sudden, Oliver was saying how three nights ago he had been in Ben's office, looking through his father's things: journals, scraps, and other odd notes. There were so many papers in the room. Well, she knew how Ben was. Never threw away anything.

“Yes. Okay,” Rebecca said.

Oliver was scratching his face, grimacing. He said he had come across a small blue shoe box, opened it for no particular reason, and found inside it a note written in Doris's handwriting to the lawyers who'd represented the family in the suit against Sondra.

“Oh,” said Rebecca. “What was it?”

Again, Oliver went silent. His body shook. Such a big man, his trembling frightened Rebecca. She didn't know what to do. Get him more water, maybe? She held the glass in the air. But now she heard her father say how he had picked up this letter, and he had felt a shock. Yes, a shock, he said. And he had known at once that he'd been holding something terribly important in his hands.

“Rebecca, the paper said: ‘If you want to see the remaining seven hundred and forty thousand dollars you're owed, we have to restructure my parents' will. We'll fire Mary Goldstein,' my parents' estate lawyer forever, ‘and you'll take her place, and make a change whereby the house in Southampton will go, not to Oliver, but to me. I will sell the house and pay you with that money. My dad is on board. My mother needs work. We will make this happen.' Then there was a second note: ‘My mother is going to sign.' And then a third note thanking the lawyers for their work on the new wills, which are all there, signed by Eliza and Ben, as well as Violet and Jerome as their witnesses. There were additional documents, including multiple copies of the old will where the house in Southampton goes to me. There was nothing about Ben repaying the money I'd lent him. Not a single word!”

“Dad, how is this possible?”

“Because Doris is a sick fucking bitch!”

“She's not capable of this.”

“Yes!” Oliver screamed.

“I don't believe it.”

“Well, you can go into Ben's office. All of the papers are right there on his desk. Read it for yourself.”

But to go and look now was out of the question. Any show of doubt would wound her father. She said, “Dad, I don't know what to make of this, but I have to get you out of here. You have to leave this place. I bought you a ticket to L.A.”

“I'm going to sue the fucking shit out of her, Rebecca!”

“Dad!”

“I'm going to make sure she burns! Mark my words.”

“Dad, please. You have to calm down.”

But Oliver continued screaming about his sister. She was a con artist, a criminal. He had always known that she would one day stab him in the back. Because a person knows, he kept saying. A person knows and blinds himself all the while from the obvious. Doesn't want to see. Doesn't want to believe. But it didn't take much seeing or believing to identify this kind of evil. Except that she was his sister! he cried. His sister, who he loved, and had built a career beside, and had nurtured as a child. How could she have done this to him? How could she have betrayed him? How? Had it been easy for her? Had she even had to think before acting? Had she stopped for one moment and considered that she would be ending their relationship, permanently?

Oliver cupped his hands around his daughter's face. Their eyes met. He gave her a look of the utmost gravity. He said Doris would come after her. Just wait. She would try to pull her to her side. And Rebecca had to realize that every word Doris spoke, every smile, every laugh, every touch, every gift, every invitation to a drink, dinner—it would all be part of an act that aimed to turn Rebecca against her father.