Crossroads (14 page)

“He has plenty of ambition in his own way, and more than enough strength to challenge your hold on Gwen. That’s what disturbs you so.”

“I do not have ‘a hold’ on Gwen! I want her to be her own woman and to make her own way.”

“Someday. But perhaps . . . not just yet?”

She bit her lip. “No. I don’t think she’s ready.”

“Clearly, she does.” He got up and came over to stroke her cheek. “Cassie, my darling, you can’t undo the marriage. So try to give it a chance. That’s all anybody can do. If it’s going to fall apart, it will do so without anybody’s help.”

Chapter Eighteen

P
atsy Allen had proved to be a far better businesswoman than Jewel had given her credit for. It had been two years since Gwen Wright’s birthday party, when Patsy had embarrassed Jewel by handing out her business cards and turning herself into a walking advertisement for Times Past. Jewel had to admit that the ploy—embarrassing as it had been—had worked. Several of the women Patsy had approached that night had checked out the store and found that Patsy did indeed have a great eye for the kind of classic couture they couldn’t find anywhere else. More important, they had mentioned the store to their daughters—at a time when the girls were watching popular movie stars wear vintage gowns on the red carpet at various awards ceremonies. Times Past had become a fad with the well-heeled youngsters who had an endless supply of credit cards, and doting parents who cheerfully paid them off. The shop had done so well that Patsy was ready to expand her operation.

“We’re going to move to the Algonquin Mall,” she told Jewel excitedly. It was early morning, and the store was still empty, so Jewel and Patsy were in the back drinking the coffee Jewel brought in every morning. “We’ll be doubling our space, and hiring two more salesgirls,” Patsy went on. “And here’s the best part: I’ll be traveling more on buying trips, so I’m going to promote you. You’re my new manager, Jewel! Can you believe how far we’ve come? And it’s only been two years!” If she could have produced a trumpet fanfare to go along with her announcement she would have done it. Instead she stared expectantly at Jewel waiting for squeals of delight—or possibly tears of joy.

Jewel wanted to weep, but not from happiness. She’d never felt so frustrated and trapped in her life. The big promotion Patsy was promising her would mean a raise, but it wouldn’t be big enough to get Jewel out of her little apartment over the deli or to buy her a car that actually ran.

Two years,
she thought hopelessly.
I thought I’d be on my way
by now. I thought something would have happened.
But nothing had. She was still working for Patsy, and she was still barely getting by. Nothing had changed except she had gotten a lot better at selling dusty old clothes to spoiled brats.

Patsy was looking disappointed at her lack of enthusiasm. And even though Patsy always said she and Jewel were friends, the truth was, Patsy was Jewel’s boss. And you didn’t disappoint the boss. Jewel forced herself to smile and she threw her arms around the woman who wrote out her paycheck. “Oh, Patsy!”she managed to squeal, “This is fabulous! I’m so happy, I don’t know how to thank you.”

Fortunately, at that moment three customers walked in and she didn’t have to keep on pretending to be thrilled. Patsy gulped down the rest of her coffee, whispered “Show time!” and headed for the front of the store, expecting Jewel to follow.

But Jewel knew if she had to wait on a trio of overindulged rich kids this morning she was going to do something disastrous—like tell the fat one that there wasn’t a dress in the store that would hide her stomach. So she said, “You go on. I want to check the invoices.” As Patsy hustled out to greet the girls, Jewel took a drink of her coffee and tried to make her mind a blank. But of course the human mind never will cooperate when you ask it to do that. As the warm, bitter liquid eased its way down Jewel’s throat, the thought that popped into her head was of Gwen Wright.

Surprising as it might seem, Jewel often thought about Gwen. During the past two years of stagnation and frustration the only thought which had been comforting to Jewel was the reflection that no matter what kind of mess she’d made of her life, Gwen had done worse. Jewel could still remember the morning when she’d opened the
Wrightstown Gazette
and read that Gwendolyn Wright had gotten herself married. Not to an eligible young scion of a wealthy and privileged family, no, dull Gwen had found a plumber. Or he was maybe an electrician, Jewel had been too stunned to pay attention. She just knew that the man was a nobody who worked with his hands, as her pop used to say.

I wish I’d been a fly on the wall when Queen Cassie heard that!
Jewel thought now. She closed her eyes, and tried to picture the fit the woman must have thrown. But on this morning, trying to imagine Cassie Wright’s reaction to Gwen’s terrible marriage didn’t make Jewel feel any better. She was too miserable about her own life and her own predicament.

She was in her mid-twenties; before she knew it, she’d be closing in on thirty. True, she was still beautiful enough to attract the attention of most of the men in a room when she entered it, but that wasn’t going to last forever. And her friendly, high-energy warmth that had always been such an asset with the opposite sex was beginning to wear thin. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried to find the right man—she wasn’t like Gwen Wright who had thrown herself away on Mr. No One. Jewel had screened her potential suitors carefully—so carefully, in fact, that there had only been two of them in the past two years. But in spite of her best efforts, one turned out to be married and the other was a doctor who was so deeply in debt after his divorce that he might as well have been unemployed. Fortunately, she hadn’t made the mistake of going to bed with either of them. She’d never been to bed with any man. She intended to wait until she had a ring on her finger—one with a nice big diamond on it—and a lifestyle to match the gem. But she was no closer to the ring, the lifestyle, or the Prince Charming who would accompany them than she had been on that rainy day so long ago when she’d taken the train to the country and seen Paradise in Cassandra Wright’s gleaming white house. The only difference was, now there were a couple of lines on Jewel’s forehead that no amount of face cream could erase, and she knew that the clock was ticking. She just didn’t know what to do about it.

She put down her coffee cup, and made her way to the front of the shop where Patsy was trying to convince the fat girl that the size six skirt she’d chosen wouldn’t fit. The fat girl was the kind of customer who treated a salesgirl like dirt. Where, oh where, was Prince Charming when you needed him?

*                  *                  *

“Jeff Henry,” said Patsy. “Isn’t he that man you talked to at Gwen Wright’s birthday party?” She and Jewel had taken time off that afternoon so Patsy could sign the paperwork for the loan she needed to build her new store. “Come with me, I need moral support,” she’d said to Jewel. “I’ve never borrowed this much money in my life and I’m scared to death!” Now they were in the lobby of The Amber, the glitzy new office building that housed all the major businesses in Wrights town except the glassworks. Patsy had been scanning the directory in the lobby to find the loan offices of the Penobscot National Bank, and she was pointing to an entire column of the directory which indicated that the two top floors of The Amber were occupied by a company called JeffSon. A high-tech logo that looked like the tail of a rocket streaking through space accompanied the company’s name. The owner of the company was listed as Jeff Henry. Although Jewel hadn’t learned the name of the man in the navy blue blazer when she’d met him, she’d caught an interview he’d given on a Sunday morning television show and she had recognized him.

“Yes,” she said. “Jeff Henry is the man I talked to.”

“Didn’t you tell me he could be a big success someday if he put his mind to it?”

“Actually I said he could be a success if he didn’t think too much.”

“Well, he must have heard you,” Patsy said. “Rents in The Amber don’t come cheap and I don’t even like to think what the two top floors must be costing him. It’s obvious that your Mr. Henry is doing very well for himself.”

“He’s not my Mr. Henry,” Jewel said automatically. But when she thought about it . . . he
had
been attracted to her that night two years ago. And it hadn’t been a surface-y flirtation; he’d told her things about himself. Personal things. She had a feeling he didn’t do that with everyone. On the other hand, he hadn’t bothered to get her name and he certainly hadn’t made any attempt to find her since that initial meeting. Still . . . Jewel looked at the sleek logo on the directory. He hadn’t been married two years ago. Of course, everything can change in that amount of time—especially for a rich bachelor. But what if it hadn’t? What if there still was no Mrs. Jeff Henry? It would be easy to find out if he was in the building today; she’d just run out to the parking garage where she’d noticed that the premium spaces had names on them and see if there was a car in his. What did she have to lose? She opened her purse and started fishing around.

“Oh, no,” she moaned. “I can’t find my credit card case. Patsy, I’ve got to go back to the car and see if I left it there. I’ll catch up with you.”

*                  *                  *                  

According to the extremely helpful parking attendant, Jeff Henry did have one of the VIP parking slots, and his car had been there, but he’d driven it out earlier. He often did that on Wednesdays, said the attendant, and he would probably be back in three hours. The attendant was willing to make that prediction because whenever Mr. Henry took off on a Wednesday his car was always back in that amount of time. It was a sports car, one with a foreign name that the attendant couldn’t remember. Italian, he thought it might be, and it began with an L. Whatever it was, the car had cost enough to pay for a house for most people. Jewel gave the attendant her most dazzling smile when she thanked him.

It was just as well that Jeff Henry wasn’t in the building, she thought as she hurried off to join the waiting Patsy. Jewel needed time to think through her strategy. She didn’t want to make any mistakes with Jeff Henry.

Chapter Nineteen

H
oraceville was only twenty miles north of Wrightstown, and it was built on the banks of the same river, but the two cities couldn’t have been more different. For one thing, Horaceville was much smaller, and unlike bustling, busy Wrights town, it seemed to be preserved in a time gone by. The original streetlights still illuminated Main Street, which ran through the heart of Horaceville. Oak and chestnut trees shaded the town hall. The police and fire departments were brick with white trim, in pseudocolonial style. Not far from them were the movie theater and the shops. At Christmastime, bright lights adorned the streets; on the Fourth of July, flags waved. People lived on the cross streets, which, after a few miles, petered out into roads where the suburbs were spreading.

Jeff pulled his Lamborghini into a driveway next to a modest frame house in an area which had been recently rezoned as both commercial and residential—a big change from the days when Jeff had grown up here. Back then this street—his street—had been lined with the homes of families who considered themselves upper-middle-class. It was the kind of neighborhood where two salaries were not desperately needed and most of the mothers stayed home to take care of the children—at least until they were in school full time.

Now there was a bar and grill in the middle of the block, and a dry cleaner’s shop on the corner. Several of the houses had two or more mailboxes on the front porch suggesting that whoever owned them was renting out unused rooms to bring in extra income. To put it simply, the area was going downhill—an argument Jeff was going to try to make. Once again. He turned off the purring automobile that was the latest of his toys, and sat for a few seconds trying to put together his thoughts before he went into the house. He would need to be at his most forceful, he knew.

*                  *                  *                  

“Jeffie, I don’t know how many different ways I have to find to tell you that I don’t want to leave my home,” said Jeff ’s father. “Besides, where would you have me go? That ‘assisted-living facility’ into which you are trying to push me would not allow me to take Sammy. I would be allotted one room with no space for my library!” Sammy was Dad’s cat. Dad’s “library” consisted of the books that filled the shelves on two walls of the room he called his den. They were in that room right now. Jeff looked around. When the house had been built in 1910, this room had been a second parlor meant to be used by the lady of the house for reading and paying bills. It was the smallest room in the house—which was already quite small—and it faced the street so the windows were usually kept closed against the traffic noise. As a result the air was stale. When Jeff ’s mother had decorated the home some forty years ago, she’d had the room paneled with a dark wainscoting and it had been painted a dark green. Dad’s desk was also dark—and immense. The sofa and wing chairs, now cracked with age, were upholstered in oxblood leather. The effect Mother had been trying to create was that of the study of an English country don. What she’d achieved was a stuffy little space crowded with furniture that was way too big. The rest of the house was furnished in the same way, with dark antiques, some of which were quite valuable, all of which required much larger rooms. Mother and Dad had adored every cramped inch of their home.

“We are simple academics,” his father liked to say as he sipped what he referred to as his postprandial brandy. “We don’t need the trappings of success, just a few old treasures—our books, our antiques, our prints, and of course our music.” And Mother, who was not sipping brandy, because that was a masculine prerogative, and besides, she still had to wash the dishes, would nod and smile. His parents were so proud of their status as intellectuals—a self-proclaimed status, but never mind, it was more than enough to impress the neighbors. Dad was a professor of art history at Wrightstown College. One of his prouder accomplishments was the fact that one of his prize students, a man named Edward Lawrence, had become the curator of the Wright Glass Museum. Edward still held the position after twenty years.

Mother had been a high-school English teacher, and she, too, worked in Wrightstown, although the family lived twenty minutes away in Horaceville. “Wrightstown is not for us,” she would say with her kindest—and most condescending—smile. “I’m afraid it’s a little too . . . well, commercial. Horaceville is much more charming.” What Mother did not say was that there would have been no way for Father to be a big fish in a small pond in Wrightstown—that position was already filled by the Wright family—but to Horaceville he was impressive. So Mother and Dad had lived happily in their ugly little house surrounded by neighbors who were awed by Dad’s doctorate, his vocabulary, and his successful student, Edward Lawrence the curator—although few of them could have told you what a museum curator did.

Then four years ago Mother had become ill and Dad had taken early retirement to stay home and care for her until she died two years later. Since that time Dad and Sammy had continued living in the house Dad could no longer maintain, in the neighborhood that was quietly slipping. Dad was quietly slipping too—his meals seemed to consist of potato chips and packaged cookies, and Jeff suspected that his brandy sipping was now starting at noon.

Jeff sniffed the air. There had been a leak in the roof which Dad hadn’t gotten around to repairing, and now a faint smell of mold permeated the whole house. Meanwhile the old man turned away from his shelves full of books to glare at Jeff. “Well, son?” he demanded. “Could I take all my treasures with me to that warehouse for the ancient you selected for me?”

“Dad, I’ve already told you, if you don’t like the idea of Shady Manor, you can build a house near me.”

“In Wrightstown.”

“The outskirts. There’s a new development going up outside of town.”

“Thank you, I’ve seen those new developments. Raping the land of trees to put up huge ostentatious mansions that have neither artistic merit nor architectural interest.”

At least they’re not shabby and pretentious,
Jeff thought, but he tried to be patient. “Yours will not be ostentatious. You can work with an architect and design it yourself. It can be an exact replica of this place if that’s what you want.” He hadn’t been able to keep the disdain out of his voice when he’d said that last sentence and his father instantly picked up on it.

“This ‘place’ as you call it was a good home to you for your formative years, and don’t you forget it.”

Jeff bit his tongue; these belligerent moods were coming more frequently than they used to. He wondered if the brandy bottle had been in use before noon.

“And how will I pay for this brand-new house that is going to be built to my specifications?” Dad went on. “Tell me that, if you please.”

“As I’ve said, I’ll pay for it. God knows I don’t expect you to do it!” But then Jeff looked at the man. And Jeff saw how alone, and how frightened he was. “Dad, please,” he said more gently. “Let me do this for you. I can afford it and it would make me very happy.”

His father sat wearily in one of the crumbling wing chairs. Sammy, who had been waiting for just such a moment, leapt into his lap and Dad began absently petting the old cat. “Tell me again what this business of yours is, Jeffie,” he said. “I never seem to be able to understand it.”

Jeff sat across from him. “JeffSon is one of the major distributors of electricity and natural gas in the United States. We’re involved in the development, as well as the building and the daily running, of power plants and pipelines.”

“And how did my son, the philosophy major, get into such a business?”

“Dad, you know I dropped my philosophy major in my sophomore year and went into business administration.”

“Yes. More’s the pity.”

“I’m very happy with my choice. I’m sorry if you’re not.”

His father sighed and looked down at the purring cat in his lap. “I would never dream of trying to impose my will on you.

Please continue, Jeffie. I would like to know how a man working for a small brokerage house in Wrightstown becomes the owner of a multimillion-dollar corporation that sells natural gas and electricity.”

Not for the first time in his life, Jeff realized that he should never underestimate his father. Dad liked to say that he was a man of the mind with no interest in worldly affairs, but the question he’d just asked was astute. And the answer was that there had been a series of mergers, some of which were frankly questionable, followed by takeovers of small companies by larger holding companies that had skated perilously close to violating several FTC regulations, although the deals had not been investigated, thanks to some good friends in high places. And when all the smoke cleared, Jeff had emerged as the CEO of the newly formed and branded company called JeffSon. He had offices in New York and Texas, as well as the glossy two floors he and his company occupied in The Amber. He kept his base in Wrightstown mostly for sentimental reasons. And because being in such an out-of-the-way place, and forcing other businessmen to come to his turf, was a demonstration of his power.

“The ways in which companies acquire assets are very complicated, Dad. I started with a small natural gas company in the Midwest and merged it with a similar one in Texas. We used the collateral from that new entity to leverage the acquisition of other similar assets in the natural gas industry, and eventually we branched out into the area of electricity.”

“And what do you know about these commodities you sell?”

“I don’t sell them, exactly; I distribute them. And I don’t have to know the details about the power plants or the gas companies. I hire people for that.”

“Then what do you do?”

“I oversee the financial end, as well as the marketing and the legal issues, and of course I decide where and how we should expand next.”

“Expand? Aren’t you big enough, Jeffie?”

That was another good question; one that both scared and excited Jeff. Because while it sounded fine to say that he didn’t need to know the details of the businesses he was managing, the truth was, when you were flying blind you could make mistakes. But it was Jeff ’s belief that you had to fly blind at times in order to grow, and you had to grow in order to survive. If you lost your nerve and stopped growing, the sharks in the water around you would smell blood and you would find yourself the target of the same kind of financial attacks that you yourself had launched when you were on your way up. Besides, Jeff wanted his company to grow; he wanted to be the CEO of the biggest and the best. People admired him and he liked it. When you came from a home where the standards for excellence were Plato, Shakespeare, and Mozart it was a heady feeling to find yourself hailed as a wunderkind. So it was worth it to fly blind and risk falling.

“There’s no such thing as being too big,” he told his father cheerfully. “But I came here to talk about you. Now, since Shady Manor is out, I’m assuming you’ll move to Wrights town. We can probably get rid of this house in a couple of months if we price it right, and you and Sammy can stay with me until I have your new place built.”

“You know, son, I think I’d rather stay put” was the infuriating reply.

“Why, for Chrissakes?” Jeff exploded. “Why do you want to live in an old dump with a leaking roof in a lousy neighborhood when you could have the best of everything?” But even as he said the words he knew what his father’s mawkish answer would be.
I have the best of everything right here.
And then he’d go on with some kind of garbage about materialism and how it corroded the mind. But his father surprised him.

“I’m afraid I don’t trust the business you’re in, Jeffie,” he said briskly. “I know I’m not an expert in such things, but it all sounds a little too much like an old-fashioned Ponzi scheme for my taste.” He looked around his den. “I’ve paid off the mortgage on this place, and the taxes are low. I can manage here on my pension. I’d rather not take any chances.”

And that was that. Jeff argued that his father’s lack of faith in him was insulting; he pointed out that JeffSon was being hailed in financial circles as one of the most exciting new companies of the year; and he said that his father was just being stubborn. Nothing moved the old man.

“At least let me pay to get your damn roof fixed!” Jeff finally said. “And I’m going to hire a housekeeper to cook for you and to clean up after you.”

His father bowed his head and thanked him. Then he said, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Jeffie. I know you meant well. But I’m too old to gamble.”

*                  *                  *

His father walked him to his car. When Jeff had bought the Lamborghini he’d debated between red and a neon yellow and finally settled on the yellow, which now looked garish in this drab neighborhood. “Oh, my,” said his father when he caught sight of the car. “Is that yours?”

“Yes.” Even to his own ears, Jeff sounded like a sulky child.

“It certainly is . . . splashy,” said his father. Then instead of his usual handshake, he enveloped his son in an awkward hug. “Beware of Faustian bargains, Jeffie,” he said.