Hastings moved to the window and swept the horizon. Finally he said, “You’re dead right, of course.”
It brought a wide smile to Judd’s face. “You can’t know how happy it makes me to hear you say that. Because I’m offering it to you.”
Hastings’ mouth dropped open. He spun on his heel and stared.
“I need a man I trust to take it over,” Judd said. “To oversee the birth-control trusts and see to it this place is kept intact. Someone to live here, on this land, and watch over it. When I set it up, I had you in mind.”
Hastings was shaking his head. The old man murmured, “Don’t say anything yet. Think about it, that’s all I’m asking.”
He had forgotten what a straightforward affair supper was at Elliot Judd’s house. Judd had always been a meat-and-potatoes man. The old Indian woman rustled in and out of the dining room, serving; the conversation, with Lewis Downey at table, was light and inconsequential.
There were fourteen rooms in the house, most of them connected to one another only by the common porch-roofed walkway that ran around the patio. The front of the house contained three enormous rooms interconnected by wide double doorways.
The dining room contained Monets, and a Renoir worth close to a million dollars; the front room was hung with postimpressionists, Leger, and Lichtensteins; the office-library contained a hodgepodge of Wyeths and Sargents and a Remington cowboy in bronze. Judd was talking about his artwork: “I loathe museums. They’re as bad as zoos. Hang a picture in a museum, and it takes the life out of it-museums are for the dead. Paintings were made for the walls of houses, where people live.”
Downey said in his irritatingly impersonal voice, “Hadn’t you better take it easy on that Rothschild?”
The old man’s hand made a claw around the wineglass. “You’re an old woman, Lewis. We’re celebrating a homecoming.”
It made Hastings feel awkward. The meal concluded, Downey excused himself and left. Hastings sat back, finishing his wine, feeling logy and inert; the wine moved like a soft warm hand across his tired joints.
The old man sat slack and indifferent, like an animal going into hibernation; he was awake, but unmoving, his breathing hard to detect, his metabolism slow in the suspended animation of the very old. He stirred and said, “Do you ever see Diane? Or did I ask you that before? I apologize-sometimes memories get stuck together like pages in a book. But the strange thing is, even now when I look in the mirror I still expect to see a young face looking back at me… I was asking about Diane, wasn’t I?”
“We-don’t see each other.”
“Just as well, of course.”
There was another stretch of silence; finally Judd said, “When I sit here dozing I like to think it passes for deep thinking. Actually, I’m distantly aware of the beating of my old heart, but that’s about all. Oh, Christ, Russ, when you’re old it takes so damned much frustrating time to do even the simple things like getting to the bathroom, reading, getting in and out of chairs. You’ve noticed I’ve pared the staff here down to nearly nothing-the old Indian woman cooks and cleans, and Lewis pretends to nurse me, and there’s a fellow who comes up from the bunkhouse once or twice a week to make repairs and do the gardening. But I got rid of the rest of them-they all started treating me with humorous amicability, which I hated bitterly. I can’t stand being patronized. I envy my late wife, you know-she died within two days of falling ill with bulbar polio. No time for the kind people to come around and croon their sycophantic sympathy. You never knew her, did you-Diane’s mother? No, of course not, she died long before. On this last page of my life I tend to confuse things in time. But sometimes I wake up in the morning and twist my head around, and I’m surprised to discover I’ve slept alone.”
After a silent while, sipping wine, Hastings said in a soft voice, “Are you all right, Dad?”
“What do you mean? I’m old, Russ. Nobody gets out of this life alive.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
The old man stared at him, his lids beginning to droop as if to cover his soul. “I know,” he said at last. “Of course, you’re right-it would take a blind man not to know. This thing I’m in, this body, it ought to be in a hospital, but I’ll be damned if I’ll lie in a stinking hospital with plastic tubes rammed up my ass and prick and nose. Too many old ones have their lives stretched out by modern medicine-what good is it? Once I lose my ability to see with my mind and think with my soul, I want to get out of it fast.”
Hastings’ hand reached the table and gripped its edge.
The bony shoulders stirred. “It’s inoperable, of course. The first doctor told me it was a medical opinion, not a fact-not then, yet. I’d want to consult another doctor, he said. So I did. Naturally I hoped for a different opinion-I do not want to die. Who does? There were tests, X rays, a biopsy. It’s a malignant melanoma-bone cancer. No way to cut it back or stop it. Once it starts moving, it’s faster than the telegraph, all through the skeleton. I can live a month or two or three. That’s all. The pain’s already damned severe, as you can imagine, but I control it with drugs. A few more days, and I suppose I’ll have to confine myself to the house, because I’ll be too doped up to walk. I’ll regret that-walking around this place has been one of my greatest pleasures the past few months.”
The old man took a breath; miserably, Hastings did not speak, but Judd saw his eyes and nodded. “We all get uncomfortable in the presence of sickness and pain. Don’t search your mind for the right thing to say-your expressions of sympathy will only make you feel stupid, and they won’t do anything for me. I can see in your face the love between us, like son and father-let it go at that. I’ve learned to live with it, if that’s the word. There are times when I get touched with panic and dread-I’m no superman. Sometimes I sit alone in a room, and I try to sit absolutely quiet, waiting for the pain to touch me again. But there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Now, then-you did come out here on some sort of business. I suppose we’d better talk about it now, since I happen to be feeling up to it.”
“I don’t think it’s important enough to-”
“Nonsense. Let’s hear about it, and then we’ll decide whether it’s important.”
Feeling morose and reluctant, he turned the wineglass in his fingers by the stem and said, as briefly as he could, “For the past few weeks a large number of dummies have been buying up blocks of NCI shares. Up to this point they seem to have accumulated about a million shares. You’ve got something over eighty million outstanding. Either a raider is moving in from outside, or somebody’s moving up from inside.”
He wasn’t sure the old man had been listening, until Judd gave him a small smile. “Interesting,” he muttered. “All right, it’s not me, if that’s what had you worried, and it’s not anyone I know about.”
“Then it’s trouble.”
“I suppose it is. I suppose I ought to work up a great deal of indignation and rage. If it had happened a few months ago I might have enjoyed winning one last fight, but I’m afraid it’s too late now, Russ. Anyhow, I’m too well protected-I’m still the chairman of NCI, only because there hasn’t been a stockholders’ meeting yet this year. I’ve assigned almost all my personal holdings to the population and wilderness trusts-I haven’t got any NCI stock left in my own name. Of course, the trusts will be able to vote the stock when the time comes, but I’m pretty much out of it. And frankly, I don’t care that much about the corporation any more. I’d just as soon have all the corporations gutted by raiders. It might destroy our civilization, but if our damned production machinery came grinding to a halt, we might have a chance that at least a few human beings would survive.”
“I’m afraid I can’t look at it that way. Putting a company like NCI in the hands of a buccaneer could never possibly do anyone any good.”
“Except the buccaneer,” Judd said dryly.
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re loyal to your hire, which is an honorable thing-though I sometimes wonder if there’s any room left in this world for values like honor and loyalty. At any rate, you do what you see fit, in your little Wall Street battles. You have my authority to get in touch with the members of my board of directors and inform them of any suspicions you have, or any facts you dig up to support the suspicions. Let the directors handle it-I’m sure they’ll want to fight. Fighting the jackals is the oldest and most firmly established of all animal activities. They’ll enjoy the struggle. And maybe that’s all there is left, now. It’s possible to enjoy a good fight, you know, even when you’re losing it.” The old man grinned, sparkling.
Hastings began to speak; Lewis Downey appeared at the door. “Bedtime,” he announced without fuss. “And you haven’t taken your medicine. It was due an hour ago.”
“Nonsense,” the old man growled. “You know what that junk is as well as I do. I take it when I feel the need, not on any hidebound pharmacist’s schedule. God, Lewis, you’ll make a morphine addict of me yet.”
“Sorry, sir.”
