The Digger's Rest (7 page)

Jack’s own payoff came in a way he could
never have envisioned. His heart gave a muffled thump as he thought
of it. Eighteen months before when he was taking his usual five
mile run around Central Park, he got a sharp pain in his arm, then
another, and another. He couldn’t breathe. His chest exploded into
a raging fireball. His arm went completely numb and he was suddenly
engulfed in a darkness where he no longer existed.

The next time he opened his eyes, it was like
looking through frosted glass. He was being rushed on a stretcher
through a cold white corridor by men and women dressed in green
smocks and white coats, their heads and faces covered; tubes in his
nose and arms.

The last thing he felt before the drugs
overtook him completely had been a firm squeeze of his hand, the
last thing he saw being those feline green eyes filled with
childlike fear, the last voice he heard whispering to him, “I love
you, Jack.”

When he woke up what could have been days
later, groggy and otherworldly, the first thing he saw was a
large-breasted, middle-aged brunette nurse with gentle dark brown
eyes, a soothing voice and a name tag that read, “C. Lynne,
R.N.”

“
You’re a very lucky man, Dr.
Edgeworth, but don’t worry. The surgery went very well. You’ll be
back on your feet, or digging in the dirt, in no time,” she said
smiling at him sincerely. “And that son of yours is really
something else. You really must have done something right with that
one,” she said as she picked up his wrist to take his pulse. “He’s
been here since you were brought in, worrying and pacing like he’d
wear out the carpet. He didn’t leave you for a second, not even to
eat. The girls and I have been feeding him coffee, sandwiches and
doughnuts. He’s outside sleeping on a couch in the waiting room
now. We should all be so lucky. And he’s a handsome one, too, just
like his father,” she said and gave Jack’s hand a squeeze. “You
just rest now and let us take care of everything.” Then he floated
off to a safe comfortable place within himself, content in the
knowledge that he hadn’t been alone. Mitch had been with him the
whole time.

In the weeks of recovery that followed, he
clung to that thought and found the security in it that he needed
to heal. It was proof, not that he ever needed any. His investment
of himself in that sad, scared boy had been his salvation, and
strangely enough, he found that it didn’t matter a bit to him that
neither Annette nor either of his daughters had even bothered to
send a card. He had Mitch.

Then, just as he’d finished wiping his eyes
with his neatly folded and starched handkerchief, he was startled
out of the comfort of his nostalgic haze by the noise of the buzzer
on his intercom followed by Alida’s voice.

“
Dr. Edgeworth, there is a yentleman
here to see you.” A primal instinct shot up through him like a
lightning bolt, raising his hackles and making the hair on the back
of his neck stand up straight. Alida never says ‘yentleman,’ he
thought. It’s always, ‘There is someone here to see you. Dr.
Edgeworth.

“
Who is it, Alida?” Jack spoke back
suspiciously into the intercom. Alida’s voice came cautiously
through the box on his desk.

“
His card says his name is Mr. Yulian
Bramson, the tird, Boston, Massachusetts.”

Chapter V

JULIAN

When the moon is in the Seventh House And
Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love
will steer the stars This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius The
age of Aquarius Aquarius! Aquarius!

Age of Aquarius

……
.As performed by the Original
Broadway Cast of “HAIR”

Annabelle Bramson had raised her son like she
raised the flowers in her hot house, well-fed, well-trimmed and
firmly under her control every moment of their lives. From the time
he was old enough to talk, she’d sensed that he was a weak-willed
child, easily manipulated by material things and she used that to
her advantage.

She gave him everything he ever wanted, after
all he was her fair-haired boy, but the second he went against her
she took it away to prove her point. Whether it was a toy truck
when he was three or a Corvette convertible when he was seventeen,
she made sure he knew that his comforts came from her beneficence
and hers alone.

While he was alive his father was rarely at
home and never took an interest in his upbringing. That was his
mother’s job as far as Julian Bramson the Second was concerned, and
of course she was content with that, knowing that she held the heir
to New England’s second greatest family fortune firmly in her grip.
She even had dreams of the White House dancing in her head when he
was born. But that soon vanished when she discovered what an
unambitious, disinterested and not particularly intelligent child
she had borne.

For his part, he had everything he ever
wanted, and so he sought to achieve nothing. As a young man he was
tall, blonde and handsome in a hot-house flower sort of way, add
rich to that and he never had to lift a finger. Had he not been a
Bramson, Harvard would have never given his less than stellar
academic achieve-ments a second look, but that never really posed a
problem for Annabelle.

He lived a charmed life of privileged
inertia, floating along on a cloud of his family’s greenbacks. He
was so contented with his self-absorbed life that it never even
once occurred to him where all that money really came from. It
never even dawned on him that his grandfather, the original Julian
Bramson, was a shameless robber baron who not only raped the
environment, but also ravaged the region’s human resources, paying
pennies for wages, and creating dangerous and often deadly working
conditions. Worry about the health of the workers as if they might
actually be human beings? Perish the thought. They were there to be
exploited. It was their lot in life, lost limbs, lung disease,
cancer, and under-the-radar child labor.

The unmitigated greed of Julian Bramson the
First was so unrepentant, his disregard for anything living other
than his own small circle of family so undiluted, that he
practically had horns and a tail. The only thing that stopped him
in the end was the advent and growth of a little thing called
Workers’ Unions, and even then, more than a few limbs and lives
were lost through the use of nameless, faceless union busters with
Bramson dollars in their pockets.

When his father took over, he was a chip off
the old block, as they say. The only difference between the First
and the Second was that the Second knew enough to see that the good
old days of exploitation with reckless abandon were over, and was
smart enough to hire people to sanitize what they had done while he
continued to do it. He changed the company name to Bramsco and
hired a PR firm to put an all-American smile on the underlying
greed, but the horns and tail were still there.

The only difference was now they wore Brooks
Brothers suits, had Pepsodent smiles and developed slogans like,
“Bramsco, building America’s future with our own two hands,” and
“Bramsco, giving back is our middle name,” when in fact the only
thing he was giving back to Americans was the back of his hand;
ushering in the era of the unassailable, squeaky-clean modern image
of the corporate cannibal. But Julian the Third was either too
stupid to see it, too gullible to believe it, or simply too
comfortable to care one way or the other, unless his own boat of
dollars were to be somehow rocked. Then something unexpected
happened.

While he was in graduate school, he got in
with a bunch of young men who had inquiring minds and actually knew
how to think for themselves. He started taking weekend trips with
them into New York City, daring to disobey his mother’s orders to
keep aloof from those spawned from the working classes. He saw
“HAIR” on Broadway, smoked pot in Washington Square Park, went to
places where there were hippies and beatniks, listened to folk
music at the clubs on Bleeker Street…and met a pretty,
chestnut-haired girl singer from Ohio named Melanie Woodward and
actually felt something, or thought he did, as much as he could
feel anything that didn’t revolve around his own comforts.

She was everything he wasn’t: working class,
a free thinker who believed in change and dared to try and help
bring it about. He knew from their first conversation that if she
knew who he really was, who his family was, that she’d never have
anything to do with him. They were everything she was fighting
against and trying to change, so he lied to her in ever so many
more ways than one. He told her that he came from regular people
who’d done well for themselves, that he wanted to get a job after
he finished school and make a life with her and that he loved her,
which actually meant he loved her as much as he knew how.

After about a year, he couldn’t go on with
the charade any longer. He told her who he really was, but that he
would leave his family to be with her and live his life her way.
Whether she ever really believed him or not stayed in her heart and
went with her to the grave in the end, but by then it was too late
because she believed that she was in love with him too, and young
people who think they’re in love can convince themselves of almost
anything. So they ran off to Maryland and got married and within a
month of his weekend visits to her apartment on Grove Street, she
was pregnant.

Innocently, or stupidly, he made the mistake
of telling his mother about the marriage. The rest, as they say, is
history. The one honorable thing he did in the situation was that,
in a singular moment of clarity, he didn’t tell Annabelle that
Melanie was going to have his child. Annabelle didn’t find out
about that little fact until very much later when she saw the cover
of Time Magazine with the caption “Dr. Bramson’s Bayeux.”

She was sitting in her favorite chair that
day at her Marie Antoinette writing desk when the maid brought in
her mail. She’d always been an avid reader of all of the serious
national magazines, Life, Look, Newsweek and Time, and had them all
delivered to the house, of course.

When she opened the mail that day and saw the
cover of Time, that name, and that face, her mind scattered faster
than she could control it. He had that girl’s hair and her eyes,
but he had the Bramson chin and nose, just like her father-in-law,
her husband and…Julian. There was no denying it; the young man on
the cover of that magazine was Julian’s child.

Her mind flew into a schism of three parts;
he would come after his share of the Bramson Trust and take away
tens of millions from her ‘legitimate’ grandsons, Julian the Fourth
and Alexander; the fight he would put up to get it would create a
furor, damaging the family’s reputation beyond repair. It would all
come out, what she had done, how she had treated that girl and
worst of all…the bribe; then all of it would ruin everything she
had done to lay the groundwork for Julian the fourth’s political
career.

As Annabelle tried to grasp what she was
seeing on that cover, her thoughts rocketed through her mind like a
ricocheting bullet caught in a lead box. She felt the small
capillaries in her brain begin to constrict, then seize, one after
another until they joined into one last, great spasm. Annabelle
Bramson died at age eighty-three with the last face she would ever
see being the grandson she never knew and would have hated even if
she had.

After his mother’s funeral, Julian Bramson
the Third tried to go on with life as if nothing had happened. He
counted himself lucky at first that he was the one to find his
mother’s body, clutching Time Magazine in her frozen, claw-like
hand. So he took it. The last thing he needed was for that cover to
get into the hands of a servant who might get it into their greedy
little head to go to the cheap newspapers that specialized in
spreading scandal with what had happened. He could see it now.
“Boston Society Matron, Annabelle Bramson, Dies Clutching Photo of
Unknown Grandson. Shock of Discovery Causes Fatal Stroke.”

Beads of sweat broke out on his
forehead whenever he thought about it. But then something happened.
The night after his mother was buried, Julian Bramson the Third
went to bed as he would any other night, his wife in a separate bed
next to his, and tried to go to sleep. But every time he closed his
eyes, he didn’t see the usual darkness of his closed lids. Instead
he saw the twenty-three-year-old face of Melanie Woodward, the way
she looked the last time he saw her, broken and alone. He got up
every half hour that night to look at that magazine cover,
He has her hair and her eyes,
he
thought to himself every time he looked at it. That was the
beginning of the haunting of Julian Bramson the Third, one that
would last for seven years, until he couldn’t stand it any longer
and decided he had to meet their son after almost forty years of
abandonment.

During those seven years he tried to
rationalize it in his mind, what he’d done and why, but he still
couldn’t find his way around it. He could never have seen himself
giving up all that he had, and would have, to live in some cramped
apartment with some farm girl from Ohio, having to actually work
for a living and listening to a screaming baby.

Night after night he tried to convince
himself that he did the only thing he could have, and that was what
his mother told him to do. He married a girl she’d picked out for
him within a year and got her pregnant as soon as was humanly
possible to cover the guilt of what he had done in New York,
forgetting that he’d ever been there. But seeing Melanie’s face
night after night every time he closed his eyes would not let him
rest, so after almost seven years of sleepless nights following his
mother’s death, Julian Bramson the Third booked a flight to New
York to finally meet his past, face to face.