Greedy Heart, page 6
“Is that Dee-Dee Mulcahy?”
I couldn’t see the speaker because she was shorter than the surrounding population. But I could think of only one person who would use my childhood nickname. My “best friend” (quotes stet) Angela Conti forcibly parted a curtain of long-legged women.
“Oh my God!” Angela exclaimed. She stretched out her arms.
“Oh my God back!” I rose in response and embraced a pair of straight shoulders with palpable biceps. I stood back to take her all in. Or rather to take in what was left of her. Her triple-D breasts were missing. As was her former nose. She turned to show off a fabulously fit figure displayed to full effect in a Nanette Lepore lace-over-taffeta cocktail dress. Her hair, long since grown out of its eighties perm, was swinging glossily at her collarbone. A ten-thousand-dollar poker-playing badge hung from her neck.
“Pardon me.” A woman adjusting her hair extensions was jostled by Angela’s pirouette.
“Never mind.” Angela waved a dismissing hand, sat down on the ottoman, and patted for me to do the same.
“Wow. Angela! Look at you!” I was surprisingly glad to see her.
“Like it?” Angela modeled her profile.
“You look like a million bucks.”
“Oh, it didn’t cost that much.” Her eyes twinkled. “Almost. Nose job, breast reduction, and Pilates four times a week. It’s so good to see you, Dee!” She reached over and squeezed my forearm. “I’ve googled you every now and then. But you’re not on Facebook, or LinkedIn or anywhere.”
She was right. If anyone asked about my lack of social networking, I would say, “I don’t like people.” They would think I was joking.
“You searched for me?” I asked.
“I tried everything. Dee-Dee Mulcahy. Delia Mulcahy. Even Brigid.” This was my name, though virtually no one knew it. Aunt Kathleen, my godmother, chose it. In the insanity of Irish nomenclature, one nickname for Brigid is Delia.
There was a pause while I didn’t explain to Angela why I’d never looked for her, so Angela continued, “It’s like some kind of karma we’d run into each other here of all places.” She put her hand over mine on the ottoman. “I can’t believe you’re back in New York. What are you doing here?”
“Odyssey Capital. I’m interviewing for a job with them, and they gave me an invitation to this shindig.”
“You were always so smart!” She nearly squealed. No one knew my academic history better than Angela. She and I were double classmates. We first became “friends” at Rosemont, the Catholic grammar school around the corner from the mansion where we now sat. Then, when Sorrows was selected as my high school, Angela followed me there. Her father insisted. “Interviewing for Odyssey! That’s a really big deal.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m on the board.”
“Of what?”
“Everything!” Angela’s laughter pealed. “Like a dozen nonprofits. It keeps me busy. The best part is I can get any invitation I want. But this event isn’t a party women go to, unless they’re…you know.” She raised her eyebrows at our ladies’ room companions.
“So why are you here? The killer venue?” My house was once Angela’s favorite place on earth.
“How could I resist?” She squeezed my forearm. It was like we were back on our side-by-side boarding-school beds. “Have you seen the men?”
“Uh-huh. You single?”
“Divorced. I have a little girl. She’s five. You?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Angela tossed her head with another laugh. “Same old Dee. Such a loner. We’ll have to fix that.” Angela took a lipstick out of her bag, snapped open its mirrored case, and applied a swipe. “To be honest, I’m not interested in the men for anything romantic right now either. I’m here looking for a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“An investment deal. Get in on the ground floor of something. I don’t know what. Just something. I want my own money.”
Sing it, sister.
“But you have a ton of money. Has anything happened?” A row of rings was stacked on Angela’s hand: emerald, sapphire and diamond. Two-carat diamond earrings studded her little lobes.
“Dad still controls everything.”
“You’re kidding. Still? We’re like thirty-f—”
“Shhh. Don’t publish our age.” Angela held up a hand. “That’s the way it works with a trust fund these days. They don’t give you access to it. So nobody blows it all.” Angela paused while we both thought of my family who blew it all. “Dad appoints the trustee. They have to approve everything—the apartment, car, school for Madeline. I get zero say. Not even when Dad dies.”
I remembered Papa Conti from childhood. He gave Angela everything—except her independence. The girls in school gossiped he was in the mob, and Angela never corrected them. When she was in first grade, the short, wealthy Sicilian decided Angela would achieve a social class he never had. He took her out of her parochial school in East Orange, New Jersey, and had her chauffeured daily to Rosemont on 81st Street. There, all the girls instantly hated her. Angela learned to be ashamed of her roots and longed to escape from her father.
“Dad doesn’t take me seriously. He says if I want to make my own decisions, I should make money of my own. But how am I going to do that? Get a job?” Angela paused to let the ridiculousness of that sink in. “He says maybe if I find some good investment, he’ll approve using money from my trust.”
“Where are you living?”
“You’ll never believe it. I’m across the street!”
Coulda predicted that one.
Angela always coveted my life. I had what she wanted: wealth and class and a society family in a Fifth Avenue mansion. Even as a little girl, Angela maneuvered for playdates and tried to ingratiate herself with my mother. She loved playing silverware games in the butler’s pantry. She said when we were both grown up, she’d live next door and we’d give soirees. Evidently, she’d achieved the part about living next door.
“I have an apartment at the Grandhope,” Angela continued. “It went co-op ten years ago.”
“I remember reading about that in the Times. They auctioned off all the hotel paraphernalia like teapots and towels. The sale was mobbed.”
“We don’t like to remind people it was a hotel,” she said.
“I’ll watch my mouth, Sister Scholastica.” For a moment, it didn’t look like Angela would laugh. Then she guffawed at the mention of our long-ago nun nemesis from Sorrows.
Sorrows, our alma mater, was a rural Virginia anachronism, caught in the bend of the Rappahannock River, where the nuns wore full habits, and we girls studied elocution, archery, and horseback riding. Scholastica was the thin, humorless, former-friend-of-Aunt-Kathleen headmistress who watched the two of us as if we were her special project.
“Oh, Dee. It’s like old times. What about you? With this fancy new job, you must be looking for a place to live.”
Maybe it was because Angela was one of the few people who’d ever seen me cry. I found myself telling her all about my shabby life in Florida, the job hunt, the incredible Odyssey offer out of the blue, Priest’s interest in my thesis, my dream of having a home again in New York, and finally the impossibility of that dream coming true, at least for a very long time.
Angela listened, nodding sympathetically, as she used to do. “I wasn’t the best friend to you.” She looked down at her ringed hands.
“You were great, Angela,” I corrected, feeling slightly guilty. After all, I was the one using the quotation marks on her. This was because of the way our friendship started—with Aunt Kathleen insisting I invite the unpopular new girl over. Just one playdate—that was the deal. But Angela stuck like glue, wheedling more invitations, saying I was the only one who was nice to her. Papa Conti was so thankful to Mom and Aunt Kathleen there was no way to stop. With all the playdates, everyone assumed we were friends. In my head, I always inserted quotes around the word. A forced-to-be-friend wasn’t a real friend.
“I wasn’t great,” Angela continued. “That time in Ohio. I upset you, and you never called after that.”
“Never mind,” I said.
“Now I have the chance to make it up to you.” I thought for a moment she might approach her father on my behalf. Then I realized how nutty it was to think Mr. Conti might lend four million dollars to a person he hadn’t seen in over a decade. Besides, it would be an impossible situation, since he wouldn’t give Angela a dime. “There’s an apartment about to come available in my building,” Angela said.
“Angela, I just finished telling you, I don’t have the financial qualifications or the down payment.” Sometimes Angela wasn’t such a great listener.
“Remember I said I’m on a lot of boards? That includes my co-op board.”
“I can’t believe you could get them to waive their requirements completely. I have zero.”
“Just come see the apartment tomorrow.”
“Fine.” For all the good it would do me. But as long as Angela was in the mood to dole out favors… “Listen, do you remember that trick of yours with the dormitory doors?”
Chapter Seven
Τὸ μὲλλον ἅδηλον πᾶσιν ἀνθρὼποιϛ, καὶ μικροὶ καιροὶ μεγὰλων πραγμὰτων αἴτιοι γὶγνονται.
(No man can tell what the future may bring forth, and small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.)
—Demosthenes
“It must be killing you not being able to see the place,” Angela said, an unbent paperclip in her hand, jiggling a lock. At Sorrows, she could get into her enemies’ dorm rooms at will.
I kept my eyes down the hall, feeling like I was fifteen and Sister Scholastica was just around the corner. The door sprung open, Angela waved me inside and hightailed it the other way.
I stopped to let my eyes adjust to the dim light of the servants’ stairwell and took off my shoes, anticipating the squeaky boards. I switchbacked up the steps and popped out a side door onto the spacious second-floor landing. To my right, the main staircase spiraled upward like the inside of a giant seashell, winding through the center of the house, growing ever more tightly coiled.
I caught myself in a gilt mirror. God, I was the image of Mom, standing here, in a dress she’d worn at soirees like this one. Well—I considered the poker tables and call girls—maybe not exactly like this one.
I gently pushed open a door. It was like a portal back to the life I might have lived.
The Portrait Room ambled away in front of me, a wide boulevard of a gallery connecting the north wing with the south. Guests used to traverse this arcade after dessert, strolling from the dining room across to the music room where coffee was served.
The first portrait, of my great-grandfather, was truly awful. It was the work of some Edwardian hack who slapped together a blurry likeness complete with a gloppy mustache. It was what John Singer Sargent would have done—if he were drunk. Shame that such a man should be immortalized this way when he was the one responsible for illuminating New York City.
Little known fact: Edison invented the light bulb, but my great-grandfather was the one who made it work.
The incandescent light by itself was no better than a circus trick. For electrical inventions like the light bulb, oven, or radio to be useful, the world needed the mass distribution of electricity itself. My great-grandfather, Thomas E. Mulcahy, did that part. He invented the entire infrastructure of commercial electricity: the first mass AC power stations, the transformers, junction boxes, fuses, domestic circuit breakers and even the light switch necessary to turn the light bulb off and on. His inventions connected the city like a giant central nervous system. He cofounded Consolidated Edison and started a company, the first of its kind, to manufacture electrical apparatuses for home and commercial use. It made him rich.
Next to my great-grandfather hung my grandfather and then my father. The portrait quality showed successive improvement, but the strength of chin was in clear decline. This aligned with family history. The men went from inventive to professorial; from bold to cautious; from self-reliant to dependent. They produced limited offspring and died young. Dad, as Grandmother discovered a few months after he passed, had been trusting his business manager, a college pal with reckless tendencies. That fellow plunged the family money into risky investments that failed.
Finally, there was me. The end of the line. I was meant to take over the family company, but Dad died before I was old enough. In the portrait, my chin was clear-cut with a determined upward tilt. The picture was appropriately museum-quality, painted by a Russian woman known for her presidents, monarchs, and heads of state. She was halfway through a picture of FDR when he died. This famous portraitist was Mom’s pick, naturally.
The Russian required my mother to convene a collection of candidate frocks, hauled in by the armload from Saks and which Aunt Kathleen tugged one after another over my sweaty little body. She rejected a dozen until I appeared in the green. At which point she said, “Now we paint.”
The painter had fierce talent. She wielded a brush with only two hairs to create the velvet luster of my dress and to execute each of my golden-red eyelashes.
In the picture, my eyes had the kind of optimistic sparkle that makes you want to say, “Poor little fool.”
“What an adorable girl.”
I was jolted from my reverie by a male voice behind my left ear.
“Can you imagine what her life was like?”
I spun around, still clutching my shoes in my hand. I had not heard a single footstep or board creak. The man behind me was tall and tuxedoed. He had that medium-brown color of hair, which, post summer, seems to be every shade from blond to chestnut. He grinned. The chipped tooth immediately gave him away from his magazine picture. It was Peter Priest’s competitor, Robert Goodman.
I froze, caught in the confusion of my multiple identities toward this man. I was a badge-less, possible call girl, wandering around the secure rooms of a foreign embassy. I was the new employee of his archrival. I was the daughter of his rent-controlled tenant. I was the girl in the portrait in front of us.
“Another world. Completely gone,” he said, shaking his head at Portrait Me. He paused. “I’m sorry.”
Yeah, me too, I thought. Sympathy, no matter how well intentioned, stung.
“Don’t be,” I said, an edge to my voice.
He looked confused for a moment, then squared his shoulders. “Maybe I need to start again. Hi, I’m Rob Goodman. I was just talking to an acquaintance, Angela Price. She said there was a woman up here I needed to meet.”
New identity: Angela’s ex-roommate and current matchmaking target. This was to be Angela’s solution to my money problems.
“Oh, I…Angela must have given you the wrong impression.” I primly put on my shoes.
Goodman watched for a moment. “This isn’t going very well.” He put one hand over another, cracked his knuckles, and stopped. “I’m not trying to pick you up…” He halted. “But I’m beginning to wish I were now that I see you.”
“I think I’d better go.” My shoes on, I started to make my exit.
“I want to offer you a job,” he blurted out.
“Oh!”
“Not the line most men use?”
“First time, actually.”
“You’re so gorgeous, my best chance is probably the job offer.”
I laughed. I liked self-effacing men—especially of the handsome and rich variety. I decided to be honest since he seemed to be a friend of Angela’s. “Listen, I appreciate your coming to find me. I really do. But I already have an offer from Odyssey Capital.”
He threw his head back with a big, “Ah!” He adjusted his stance. “Angela didn’t say which firm. I bet Priest locked you in with his usual ploy. Twenty percent over any other offer, right?”
His lack of reverence toward the intimidating and enigmatic Priest made me like him more. “A bird in the hand,” I said.
“At least allow me to try to persuade you to come to Hermes?”
“Well…” If he did make me an offer, I really would get more money out of Priest.
“Seriously. Visit me at my office on Monday?”
“Sure, but I’m being honest. If you make me an offer, I’ll go to Priest for more.”
“It’s a date for Monday, or I’m not leaving.”
“Okay. Yes.”
“Good,” he said. “I have to say, you don’t look like Priest’s typical hire.”
“What’s his typical hire look like?”
“Less…I mean more…”
“Male?”
Goodman laughed again. “Goes for all of us, I suppose.” Goodman turned back to the portrait. “You know, I remember that family.”
“You do?” I asked, amused he wasn’t making the connection between me and the image in front of us. All grown up and all dolled up—with jewels, smoky eye makeup and vivid lipstick—maybe I did look like a totally unrelated person. For sure, on the inside, I turned out completely different from that hopeful little girl.
“My dad owned the building next door,” Goodman went on. “Now it’s mine. I remember that family moved out of the neighborhood. Late eighties I think. Not sure what happened.”
“How about that.”
“Can you imagine having parents who adore you so much? To have your portrait painted?”
Sure, I could. But then Mom shut me out, retreating into her own pain. These days she never thought about the portrait’s subject (me), only its value and the fact that she couldn’t get her paws on it.
“It is hard to find that kind of love anymore,” I said truthfully.
“Tell you one thing, my father sure wouldn’t have had a picture painted of me.” Goodman gave a rueful chuckle and looked at me with intense blue eyes. “Had to do everything on my own from the time I was a teenager.”
Such candor from this stranger was surprisingly moving. “Actually, me too.”
Goodman pursed his lips and gave a quick nod of mutual understanding. “Well, I’m sure that girl also had her share of troubles, like any of us. I wonder where she ended up.”
I couldn’t see the speaker because she was shorter than the surrounding population. But I could think of only one person who would use my childhood nickname. My “best friend” (quotes stet) Angela Conti forcibly parted a curtain of long-legged women.
“Oh my God!” Angela exclaimed. She stretched out her arms.
“Oh my God back!” I rose in response and embraced a pair of straight shoulders with palpable biceps. I stood back to take her all in. Or rather to take in what was left of her. Her triple-D breasts were missing. As was her former nose. She turned to show off a fabulously fit figure displayed to full effect in a Nanette Lepore lace-over-taffeta cocktail dress. Her hair, long since grown out of its eighties perm, was swinging glossily at her collarbone. A ten-thousand-dollar poker-playing badge hung from her neck.
“Pardon me.” A woman adjusting her hair extensions was jostled by Angela’s pirouette.
“Never mind.” Angela waved a dismissing hand, sat down on the ottoman, and patted for me to do the same.
“Wow. Angela! Look at you!” I was surprisingly glad to see her.
“Like it?” Angela modeled her profile.
“You look like a million bucks.”
“Oh, it didn’t cost that much.” Her eyes twinkled. “Almost. Nose job, breast reduction, and Pilates four times a week. It’s so good to see you, Dee!” She reached over and squeezed my forearm. “I’ve googled you every now and then. But you’re not on Facebook, or LinkedIn or anywhere.”
She was right. If anyone asked about my lack of social networking, I would say, “I don’t like people.” They would think I was joking.
“You searched for me?” I asked.
“I tried everything. Dee-Dee Mulcahy. Delia Mulcahy. Even Brigid.” This was my name, though virtually no one knew it. Aunt Kathleen, my godmother, chose it. In the insanity of Irish nomenclature, one nickname for Brigid is Delia.
There was a pause while I didn’t explain to Angela why I’d never looked for her, so Angela continued, “It’s like some kind of karma we’d run into each other here of all places.” She put her hand over mine on the ottoman. “I can’t believe you’re back in New York. What are you doing here?”
“Odyssey Capital. I’m interviewing for a job with them, and they gave me an invitation to this shindig.”
“You were always so smart!” She nearly squealed. No one knew my academic history better than Angela. She and I were double classmates. We first became “friends” at Rosemont, the Catholic grammar school around the corner from the mansion where we now sat. Then, when Sorrows was selected as my high school, Angela followed me there. Her father insisted. “Interviewing for Odyssey! That’s a really big deal.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m on the board.”
“Of what?”
“Everything!” Angela’s laughter pealed. “Like a dozen nonprofits. It keeps me busy. The best part is I can get any invitation I want. But this event isn’t a party women go to, unless they’re…you know.” She raised her eyebrows at our ladies’ room companions.
“So why are you here? The killer venue?” My house was once Angela’s favorite place on earth.
“How could I resist?” She squeezed my forearm. It was like we were back on our side-by-side boarding-school beds. “Have you seen the men?”
“Uh-huh. You single?”
“Divorced. I have a little girl. She’s five. You?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Angela tossed her head with another laugh. “Same old Dee. Such a loner. We’ll have to fix that.” Angela took a lipstick out of her bag, snapped open its mirrored case, and applied a swipe. “To be honest, I’m not interested in the men for anything romantic right now either. I’m here looking for a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“An investment deal. Get in on the ground floor of something. I don’t know what. Just something. I want my own money.”
Sing it, sister.
“But you have a ton of money. Has anything happened?” A row of rings was stacked on Angela’s hand: emerald, sapphire and diamond. Two-carat diamond earrings studded her little lobes.
“Dad still controls everything.”
“You’re kidding. Still? We’re like thirty-f—”
“Shhh. Don’t publish our age.” Angela held up a hand. “That’s the way it works with a trust fund these days. They don’t give you access to it. So nobody blows it all.” Angela paused while we both thought of my family who blew it all. “Dad appoints the trustee. They have to approve everything—the apartment, car, school for Madeline. I get zero say. Not even when Dad dies.”
I remembered Papa Conti from childhood. He gave Angela everything—except her independence. The girls in school gossiped he was in the mob, and Angela never corrected them. When she was in first grade, the short, wealthy Sicilian decided Angela would achieve a social class he never had. He took her out of her parochial school in East Orange, New Jersey, and had her chauffeured daily to Rosemont on 81st Street. There, all the girls instantly hated her. Angela learned to be ashamed of her roots and longed to escape from her father.
“Dad doesn’t take me seriously. He says if I want to make my own decisions, I should make money of my own. But how am I going to do that? Get a job?” Angela paused to let the ridiculousness of that sink in. “He says maybe if I find some good investment, he’ll approve using money from my trust.”
“Where are you living?”
“You’ll never believe it. I’m across the street!”
Coulda predicted that one.
Angela always coveted my life. I had what she wanted: wealth and class and a society family in a Fifth Avenue mansion. Even as a little girl, Angela maneuvered for playdates and tried to ingratiate herself with my mother. She loved playing silverware games in the butler’s pantry. She said when we were both grown up, she’d live next door and we’d give soirees. Evidently, she’d achieved the part about living next door.
“I have an apartment at the Grandhope,” Angela continued. “It went co-op ten years ago.”
“I remember reading about that in the Times. They auctioned off all the hotel paraphernalia like teapots and towels. The sale was mobbed.”
“We don’t like to remind people it was a hotel,” she said.
“I’ll watch my mouth, Sister Scholastica.” For a moment, it didn’t look like Angela would laugh. Then she guffawed at the mention of our long-ago nun nemesis from Sorrows.
Sorrows, our alma mater, was a rural Virginia anachronism, caught in the bend of the Rappahannock River, where the nuns wore full habits, and we girls studied elocution, archery, and horseback riding. Scholastica was the thin, humorless, former-friend-of-Aunt-Kathleen headmistress who watched the two of us as if we were her special project.
“Oh, Dee. It’s like old times. What about you? With this fancy new job, you must be looking for a place to live.”
Maybe it was because Angela was one of the few people who’d ever seen me cry. I found myself telling her all about my shabby life in Florida, the job hunt, the incredible Odyssey offer out of the blue, Priest’s interest in my thesis, my dream of having a home again in New York, and finally the impossibility of that dream coming true, at least for a very long time.
Angela listened, nodding sympathetically, as she used to do. “I wasn’t the best friend to you.” She looked down at her ringed hands.
“You were great, Angela,” I corrected, feeling slightly guilty. After all, I was the one using the quotation marks on her. This was because of the way our friendship started—with Aunt Kathleen insisting I invite the unpopular new girl over. Just one playdate—that was the deal. But Angela stuck like glue, wheedling more invitations, saying I was the only one who was nice to her. Papa Conti was so thankful to Mom and Aunt Kathleen there was no way to stop. With all the playdates, everyone assumed we were friends. In my head, I always inserted quotes around the word. A forced-to-be-friend wasn’t a real friend.
“I wasn’t great,” Angela continued. “That time in Ohio. I upset you, and you never called after that.”
“Never mind,” I said.
“Now I have the chance to make it up to you.” I thought for a moment she might approach her father on my behalf. Then I realized how nutty it was to think Mr. Conti might lend four million dollars to a person he hadn’t seen in over a decade. Besides, it would be an impossible situation, since he wouldn’t give Angela a dime. “There’s an apartment about to come available in my building,” Angela said.
“Angela, I just finished telling you, I don’t have the financial qualifications or the down payment.” Sometimes Angela wasn’t such a great listener.
“Remember I said I’m on a lot of boards? That includes my co-op board.”
“I can’t believe you could get them to waive their requirements completely. I have zero.”
“Just come see the apartment tomorrow.”
“Fine.” For all the good it would do me. But as long as Angela was in the mood to dole out favors… “Listen, do you remember that trick of yours with the dormitory doors?”
Chapter Seven
Τὸ μὲλλον ἅδηλον πᾶσιν ἀνθρὼποιϛ, καὶ μικροὶ καιροὶ μεγὰλων πραγμὰτων αἴτιοι γὶγνονται.
(No man can tell what the future may bring forth, and small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.)
—Demosthenes
“It must be killing you not being able to see the place,” Angela said, an unbent paperclip in her hand, jiggling a lock. At Sorrows, she could get into her enemies’ dorm rooms at will.
I kept my eyes down the hall, feeling like I was fifteen and Sister Scholastica was just around the corner. The door sprung open, Angela waved me inside and hightailed it the other way.
I stopped to let my eyes adjust to the dim light of the servants’ stairwell and took off my shoes, anticipating the squeaky boards. I switchbacked up the steps and popped out a side door onto the spacious second-floor landing. To my right, the main staircase spiraled upward like the inside of a giant seashell, winding through the center of the house, growing ever more tightly coiled.
I caught myself in a gilt mirror. God, I was the image of Mom, standing here, in a dress she’d worn at soirees like this one. Well—I considered the poker tables and call girls—maybe not exactly like this one.
I gently pushed open a door. It was like a portal back to the life I might have lived.
The Portrait Room ambled away in front of me, a wide boulevard of a gallery connecting the north wing with the south. Guests used to traverse this arcade after dessert, strolling from the dining room across to the music room where coffee was served.
The first portrait, of my great-grandfather, was truly awful. It was the work of some Edwardian hack who slapped together a blurry likeness complete with a gloppy mustache. It was what John Singer Sargent would have done—if he were drunk. Shame that such a man should be immortalized this way when he was the one responsible for illuminating New York City.
Little known fact: Edison invented the light bulb, but my great-grandfather was the one who made it work.
The incandescent light by itself was no better than a circus trick. For electrical inventions like the light bulb, oven, or radio to be useful, the world needed the mass distribution of electricity itself. My great-grandfather, Thomas E. Mulcahy, did that part. He invented the entire infrastructure of commercial electricity: the first mass AC power stations, the transformers, junction boxes, fuses, domestic circuit breakers and even the light switch necessary to turn the light bulb off and on. His inventions connected the city like a giant central nervous system. He cofounded Consolidated Edison and started a company, the first of its kind, to manufacture electrical apparatuses for home and commercial use. It made him rich.
Next to my great-grandfather hung my grandfather and then my father. The portrait quality showed successive improvement, but the strength of chin was in clear decline. This aligned with family history. The men went from inventive to professorial; from bold to cautious; from self-reliant to dependent. They produced limited offspring and died young. Dad, as Grandmother discovered a few months after he passed, had been trusting his business manager, a college pal with reckless tendencies. That fellow plunged the family money into risky investments that failed.
Finally, there was me. The end of the line. I was meant to take over the family company, but Dad died before I was old enough. In the portrait, my chin was clear-cut with a determined upward tilt. The picture was appropriately museum-quality, painted by a Russian woman known for her presidents, monarchs, and heads of state. She was halfway through a picture of FDR when he died. This famous portraitist was Mom’s pick, naturally.
The Russian required my mother to convene a collection of candidate frocks, hauled in by the armload from Saks and which Aunt Kathleen tugged one after another over my sweaty little body. She rejected a dozen until I appeared in the green. At which point she said, “Now we paint.”
The painter had fierce talent. She wielded a brush with only two hairs to create the velvet luster of my dress and to execute each of my golden-red eyelashes.
In the picture, my eyes had the kind of optimistic sparkle that makes you want to say, “Poor little fool.”
“What an adorable girl.”
I was jolted from my reverie by a male voice behind my left ear.
“Can you imagine what her life was like?”
I spun around, still clutching my shoes in my hand. I had not heard a single footstep or board creak. The man behind me was tall and tuxedoed. He had that medium-brown color of hair, which, post summer, seems to be every shade from blond to chestnut. He grinned. The chipped tooth immediately gave him away from his magazine picture. It was Peter Priest’s competitor, Robert Goodman.
I froze, caught in the confusion of my multiple identities toward this man. I was a badge-less, possible call girl, wandering around the secure rooms of a foreign embassy. I was the new employee of his archrival. I was the daughter of his rent-controlled tenant. I was the girl in the portrait in front of us.
“Another world. Completely gone,” he said, shaking his head at Portrait Me. He paused. “I’m sorry.”
Yeah, me too, I thought. Sympathy, no matter how well intentioned, stung.
“Don’t be,” I said, an edge to my voice.
He looked confused for a moment, then squared his shoulders. “Maybe I need to start again. Hi, I’m Rob Goodman. I was just talking to an acquaintance, Angela Price. She said there was a woman up here I needed to meet.”
New identity: Angela’s ex-roommate and current matchmaking target. This was to be Angela’s solution to my money problems.
“Oh, I…Angela must have given you the wrong impression.” I primly put on my shoes.
Goodman watched for a moment. “This isn’t going very well.” He put one hand over another, cracked his knuckles, and stopped. “I’m not trying to pick you up…” He halted. “But I’m beginning to wish I were now that I see you.”
“I think I’d better go.” My shoes on, I started to make my exit.
“I want to offer you a job,” he blurted out.
“Oh!”
“Not the line most men use?”
“First time, actually.”
“You’re so gorgeous, my best chance is probably the job offer.”
I laughed. I liked self-effacing men—especially of the handsome and rich variety. I decided to be honest since he seemed to be a friend of Angela’s. “Listen, I appreciate your coming to find me. I really do. But I already have an offer from Odyssey Capital.”
He threw his head back with a big, “Ah!” He adjusted his stance. “Angela didn’t say which firm. I bet Priest locked you in with his usual ploy. Twenty percent over any other offer, right?”
His lack of reverence toward the intimidating and enigmatic Priest made me like him more. “A bird in the hand,” I said.
“At least allow me to try to persuade you to come to Hermes?”
“Well…” If he did make me an offer, I really would get more money out of Priest.
“Seriously. Visit me at my office on Monday?”
“Sure, but I’m being honest. If you make me an offer, I’ll go to Priest for more.”
“It’s a date for Monday, or I’m not leaving.”
“Okay. Yes.”
“Good,” he said. “I have to say, you don’t look like Priest’s typical hire.”
“What’s his typical hire look like?”
“Less…I mean more…”
“Male?”
Goodman laughed again. “Goes for all of us, I suppose.” Goodman turned back to the portrait. “You know, I remember that family.”
“You do?” I asked, amused he wasn’t making the connection between me and the image in front of us. All grown up and all dolled up—with jewels, smoky eye makeup and vivid lipstick—maybe I did look like a totally unrelated person. For sure, on the inside, I turned out completely different from that hopeful little girl.
“My dad owned the building next door,” Goodman went on. “Now it’s mine. I remember that family moved out of the neighborhood. Late eighties I think. Not sure what happened.”
“How about that.”
“Can you imagine having parents who adore you so much? To have your portrait painted?”
Sure, I could. But then Mom shut me out, retreating into her own pain. These days she never thought about the portrait’s subject (me), only its value and the fact that she couldn’t get her paws on it.
“It is hard to find that kind of love anymore,” I said truthfully.
“Tell you one thing, my father sure wouldn’t have had a picture painted of me.” Goodman gave a rueful chuckle and looked at me with intense blue eyes. “Had to do everything on my own from the time I was a teenager.”
Such candor from this stranger was surprisingly moving. “Actually, me too.”
Goodman pursed his lips and gave a quick nod of mutual understanding. “Well, I’m sure that girl also had her share of troubles, like any of us. I wonder where she ended up.”
