Eureka (21 page)

Only Pete Wetmore, the last of the eight to speak, told a real downer.

“On Christmas Eve when I was seven, my parents went down the street for a quick open house some neighbors were having. While they were gone, my little brother and I decided to scour the house for Santa Claus presents. We already knew there wasn’t a Santa Claus, but we had not let on to our folks. We were playing along with them. We found our presents in a closet in the basement, right where we thought they might be. There were a
lot of great things in the closet, including the Sandy Koufax baseball glove I wanted with all my heart, and the twenty-seven-soldier war set my brother had written to Santa for. When Mom and Dad came back, they sensed something from our looks or attitudes or giggles. They asked if we had been looking around the house for anything. We both lied. Dad, who’d had a little eggnog at the open house, went down to the basement and saw signs of our having been in the closet. He came back upstairs, knocked both of us down with his fists, and then went over to the Christmas tree, pulled it down, and said as far as he was concerned, there would be no Christmas in the house this year. He went into our guest bedroom and stayed there the rest of Christmas Eve and all day Christmas. My poor mother cried and cried, pleaded and pleaded with him to come to his senses. My brother and I shouted our apologies and vows of perfect future behavior through the bedroom door, but to no avail. My mother, brother, and I had a form of Christmas late in the morning, opening the few presents that were under the tree. We stood the tree back up, but most of the decorations had been broken or bent. We never were given the things that were in the closet, including my Koufax glove. That was my most memorable Christmas.”

There was absolute silence in the room when Pete finished.

It was Otis who finally broke that silence by saying, “Think of it as a learning experience, Pete.”

Think of it as a learning experience, Pete?

Recalling his words now as he looked up at what appeared to be some kind of Christmas decoration, Otis would have given anything, including possibly his own life, not to have said such an insensitive-shit thing to Pete Wetmore.

But that was only one of many, many shit things he had said and done to Pete. Intentionally keeping him out of meetings or business dinners he knew Pete wanted to attend. Not inviting
Pete and his family to various high-visibility social events, and never having them to the Halstead home. Cutting off Pete during meetings with cracks like “Boring us to a decision, Pete?” Keeping Pete out of membership in the most exclusive men’s club in Eureka. Even blackballing him from being on the board of their church.

Was it the bald thing? What if Otis had not lost his hair? What if he had not ruined his ankle and been a navy or marine officer? Would he have been different?

Would he still have treated Pete like shit?

Would he still need to be Buck?

VERYONE SEEMED TO
know about Otis and Pete Wetmore.

Mad Severy, the rehabilitation provocauteur, used it as a shock therapy tool. He said to Otis, “I’ve been told you pretty much caused a man named Pete Wetmore to kill himself. Some might say that was a form of murder. Isn’t that right, Otis?”

Otis shook his head to the left and then to the right.

It was a reflex response. A real one. If Otis had realized he could move his head, he might have decided to nod up and down, saying yes.

Whatever, it was considered another erectionlike breakthrough event in the coming back to life of Otis Halstead.

Otis, again, was alarmed a bit at the happiness over his response to something concerning the death of another man. On the other hand, he understood what was going on. Response was everything. Whatever shocks it took to get him to respond were part of the cure, part of bringing him back to life.

“Now you wish you’d said yes, don’t you, Otis?” asked Mad, who was clearly one astute man. “Say it. Say yes and nod.”

Otis nodded. He figured, why not? Give them another thrill.

“You can move your head,” said Mad Severy. “Add that to the list with erecting—if that’s the word—when properly stimulated by Jeannie, and we’ve got progress on our hands, Otis.”

“Sharon,” Otis blurted out. This time the shock had worked. “Sharon” was spoken in a full-throated voice like that of a normal human being.

He had talked out loud for the first time since falling into the Chanute.

“Hey, Otis! You did it!” said Mad Severy, a most happy man. “Go on. Tell me more. Sharon who? Sharon what, Otis?”

Sharon the nurse, you idiot. Sorry, you moron.

But those words were not spoken.

There had been enough dramatic progress, public and private, for one day—for a few moments of one day.

And when they were over, what lingered with Otis were thoughts about Pete Wetmore, not Sharon.

OTIS HAD MET
Pete the first time over dinner at the Oak Room, a famous and expensive restaurant at the Presidential Shore Hotel in Chicago. A headhunter firm had spit out five finalists for a new KCF&C executive vice president, one who had CEO potential and probabilities. Otis decided to go to each of the five by himself before involving board members and others in the company.

Otis was never quite at ease in elegant restaurants like the Oak Room. He always felt slightly like a Kansas farm boy, slightly out of place, slightly afraid he might do or ask for the wrong thing. But he loved the feeling of well-being, of success, of arrival that being in such places gave him.

In contrast, the initial thing Otis noticed about Pete Wetmore was how at home he appeared. Pete took a menu from
the waiter as if it were a natural act, something he did as regularly and as casually as opening a door or shaking a right hand.

Pete ordered asparagus tips with a light Belgian hollandaise sauce to start and, for the entree, beef Wellington—medium well—in a calvados sauce with skinless new potatoes seared in avocado butter.

“I’ll have the same,” Otis said as nonchalantly as he could manage. It annoyed him that he felt awkward in this situation. After all, he was a college graduate, and he had been in business for over thirty-five years, he had traveled, and
he
was the corporate CEO at this dinner table. But the feeling of country hick would not go away—not at this particular moment in the company of this particular young man.

The wine steward was at the table a few minutes later to make it worse. He was a man in his forties who could have passed for a corporate CEO in both appearance and speech. Otis said he was no wine expert and insisted that Pete choose a wine that fit their meal choices.

Yes, a red would be perfect, they agreed. Something light and five years old from Bordeaux.

As the staff of the Oak Room went off to prepare the wine and the asparagus, Otis immediately turned to the business at hand, to his turf, to his world, where he felt very much at ease and where he was in charge.

“Why are you interested in coming into the insurance business?” he asked Pete firmly.

“I need a new challenge,” said Pete. “Mortgage banking has its high moments, but I believe I have now experienced and learned most of what there was to learn from them.”

Otis already knew about Pete’s background from the search people. Pete was the product of an upper-middle-class life, having grown up in a nice Denver suburb, the son of a Chrysler
dealer and a garden-and-country-club-golfing activist. Mother and father had attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, where they had met, but they had higher and lawyer aspirations for their two sons, both of whom went to Ivy League schools. Pete’s was Harvard, where he graduated in the upper third of his class and went on immediately to Harvard Law School, where he did almost as well. He had practiced law for a couple of years and then gone into mortgage banking.

Otis asked about hobbies and outside interests.

“None, really,” said Pete.

“Do you follow sports?”

“Not much, except the Cubs sometimes.”

“In Eureka, you’d have to cheer for the Royals in baseball and the Chiefs in football, or you’d get run out of town.”

Pete smiled but said nothing. Otis couldn’t get a reading on what the smile meant.

“Family,” said Otis. “Tell me about your immediate family— wife and kids.”

Pete said his wife, June, whom he had met at Harvard, as his parents had done at Colorado, was not happy in Chicago. They had the kids and she had gotten caught up in the mommy-wife-homemaker trap. Her bright mind, talents, and energies were being consumed by preschool, school, after-school, playgroups, soccer, baseball, carpool, sleepovers, Cub Scouts, Sunday school, Junior League, grocery shopping, meals, homework, cleaning ladies, yardmen, babysitters, fistfights, pouts, sore throats, skinned knees, hundred-degree temperatures.

Otis considered telling Pete that Eureka, Kansas, had all of those things for bright wives and mothers, but he decided against it. That was about something very personal between this young man and his wife, and it had nothing to do with geography or place. Otis knew all about that kind of thing from his
own life with Sally, who had lived a similar life. But she didn’t consider it a trap.

Or at least Otis didn’t think she did. They had never really talked about it. They had never really talked about much of anything important. Their life had become one of mutual assumptions rather than of discussions. And it worked. Or at least it worked for Otis. And he assumed it did for Sally.

Pete passed on dessert. So did Otis. Both had a double decaf espresso.

“A brandy or another after-dinner drink?” asked the waiter.

“No,” said Otis first. Pete ordered a VSOP cognac just for “the sniff.” When it came, all he did was run it back and forth under his nose several times. Otis had never seen anybody doing such a thing—ordering a sixteen-dollar glass of cognac and not even taking a sip of it.

Over the next few weeks, Otis had similar dinners in Omaha, Boston, Hartford, and San Antonio with the other four executive vice president finalists, all of whom were already in the insurance industry. Then the more formal selection process began. Eventually, Pete and the others were viewed, interviewed, and assessed by a special committee of the board of directors and then individually by all twelve members of the board. A fairly solid consensus emerged for Clyde Oakley, a forty-three-year-old vice president of United Services Automobile Association, or USAA, as it was called, the high-quality multiline San Antonio company that began years ago as an auto insurance company for active-duty military officers. Oakley was a quick, trim, impressive Annapolis graduate who had served as a nuclear submarine officer for five years before leaving the navy and joining USAA.

Only Otis dissented on Oakley. He insisted on Pete Wetmore.

Why? Why, why, why? everyone asked. Wetmore was ranked fifth out of five by everyone else involved in the search. Why
Wetmore? He had no insurance experience, no outgoing command personality, no nothing except a couple of Harvard degrees.

Why Wetmore?

Thinking about it now as the man who had almost drowned in the Chanute River, Otis began to wonder if maybe he’d wanted Pete Wetmore as his number two so he could treat him like shit.

But before he could go any further toward a final answer, he had to deal with a woman who was here in his hospital room screaming at him.

“YOU LYING SHITHEAD!”

Sally’s face, breath, and smell were right down on him.

Where have you been, Sally? Annabel came. So did Josh Garnett, offering to help me be born again
.

“Who the hell is Sharon?”

Sally’s yell was loud and shrill.

He could see her features, but even if he couldn’t have, he would have known for sure it was Sally. He knew her aura and, most particularly, her breath as well as he did everything else about this woman he had made a life with. Her breath had a unique natural sweetness that beat anything Colgate or Crest could create. Not even raw onions on a cheeseburger or a plate of spaghetti covered with a garlic-saturated tomato sauce could cause him to turn away from her open mouth.