Remember When

'Saturday then?' Gloria said hopefully.

'That's fine.'

Gloria's mental cheer was strangled by the secretary, who turned over the page in his desk calendar, pointed to something written on it, and said, 'I'm afraid Saturday's out of the question. You're to be in Houston that night.'

'Houston?' he demanded, sounding disgusted and irate at the prospect. 'For what?'

'For the White Orchid Ball. You donated a Klineman sculpture to the charity auction that precedes the ball, and you're to be honored for your generosity.'

'Send someone else.'

They all looked up in surprise as Gloria negated that suggestion. 'I put the Orchid thing together. The Klineman will be the most valuable item to be auctioned off—'

'It will also be the ugliest,' Cole interjected in such a mild, factual tone that Gloria choked back an inappropriate giggle.

'Why did you buy it?' she asked before she could stop herself.

'I was told it would be a good investment, and it's gone up substantially in value over the last five years. Unfortunately, I don't like it any better now than I did when I bought it. Let someone else go to Houston in the corporation's name and take the bow.'

'It has to be you,' Gloria stubbornly persisted. 'When public relations suggested you make a donation, you made a very generous one. The proceeds go to the American Cancer Society, and the ball is a major national media event. The timing is perfect for a little publicity there, followed by a press conference here next week.'

Cole stopped writing and stared hard at her, but he couldn't find an argument to outweigh her logic, and in a small way, he approved of her resolute determination to do the job the company was paying her to do, despite his personal opposition and lack of cooperation. 'Fine,' he said curtly.

Dismissed, she got up and started to leave. A few steps away, she turned around and found the two men watching her. 'The networks are going to play up the Cushman deal,' she said to Cole. 'If you have a chance to catch any of that on the news, I'd like to go over it with you and make some plans for countermeasures at your press conference.'

When he replied, he sounded as if she was in danger of exhausting his patience. 'I'll put the news on while I pack for Los Angeles.' Gloria began to retreat.

As she left, Cole leaned back in his chair and looked at the corporation's chief counsel, who, with an appreciative gleam in his eyes, was watching Gloria exit. 'Tenacious, isn't she,' John remarked when she was out of earshot.

'Very.'

'Great legs, too.' The door closed behind her, and John switched his attention to the matters at hand. 'These are the proxies your uncle needs to sign for the board meeting,' he said, sliding some papers across the clear glass desktop which rested on a random pattern of free-form chrome tubes that always reminded John of twisted chrome Tinker-toys. 'Cole, I hate to sound like a purveyor of gloom and doom, but your uncle really needs to sign over his shares in the corporation to you, instead of giving you his proxy each time. I know his will stipulates that you're the sole heir to his shares, but I lie awake at night in a cold sweat, thinking of the disaster we would have on our hands if he should get senile or something and decide to withhold his proxy.'

Cole flicked a wry glance in the attorney's direction as he slid the proxy forms into his briefcase. 'You've been losing sleep over nothing,' he said. He swiveled his chair around and began removing files from the credenza behind his desk. 'Cal's mind is as sharp as a razor blade.'

'Even so,' John persevered, addressing Cole's back, 'he's in his seventies, and elderly people can be tricked into doing some very peculiar and damaging things. Last year, for example, a group of small shareholders of an Indiana chemical company decided to oppose a merger its board was trying to push through. The shareholders located an elderly woman in California who owned a major block of shares she'd inherited from her husband, then convinced the old lady that the board's action would cause massive layoffs and vastly decrease the value of her shares. They then escorted her back to Indiana, where she personally voted her shares against the merger and got the damned thing blocked. A few weeks later, she wrote a letter to the board claiming she was forced to do what she did!'

Cole locked the credenza, turned back around in his chair, and regarded the worried attorney with unconcealed amusement while he put the files into his briefcase. Calvin Downing was his mother's uncle, and Cole was not only closer to him than he'd ever been to his real father, he also understood him well enough to know that the attorney's fears were ludicrous in Cal's case. 'To the best of my knowledge, no one, including me, has ever been able to convince, coerce, or force Calvin to do anything he didn't want to do—or prevent him from doing something he did.'

When the attorney continued to look dubious, Cole cited the first example that came to mind. 'For five years, I campaigned for him to leave the ranch and move to Dallas, but he wouldn't. I spent the next five years trying to convince him to build a nicer house at the ranch, but he argued that he didn't want a new house and it was a waste of money. By then he was worth at least fifty million dollars, and he was still living in the same two- bedroom, drafty old place he was born in. Finally, two years ago, he decided to take his first—and last—real vacation. While he was gone for six weeks, I hired a contractor who brought in an army of carpenters, and they built him a beautiful place on the west side of the ranch.' Cole closed the briefcase and stood up. 'Do you know where he lives today?'

John heard the ironic note in Cole's voice and made an accurate guess: 'In the same old house?'

'Exactly.'

'What does he do out there, all by himself in an old house?'

'He's not entirely alone. He's had the same housekeeper for decades, and he has a few ranch hands to help out on the place. He spends his time either interfering with them or else reading, which has always been his favorite pastime. He's a voracious reader.'

That last piece of information didn't fit at all into John's preconceived Yankee notion of an elderly, weathered Texas rancher. 'What does he read?'

'He reads everything he can get his hands on that pertains to whatever happens to fascinate him at a particular stage in his life. His 'stages' usually last three or four years, during which he devours dozens of tomes on his current subject. He went through a period where all he read were biographies about war heroes from the beginning of recorded history; then he switched to mythology for a while. After that came psychology, philosophy, history, and finally westerns and murder mysteries.' Cole paused to make an entry in his desk calendar before he added, 'A year ago, he developed an acute interest in popular magazines, and he's been reading everything from GQ to Playboy to Ladies' Home Journal and Cosmopolitan. He says popular magazines are the truest reflection of the state of a modern society's collective mind.'

'Really?' John said, carefully hiding his instinctive unease with the eccentricities and obsessions of a stubborn, elderly millionaire who happened to hold an enormous block of shares in Unified Industries—and who could, if he chose, wreak havoc on Unified's complex corporate structure of subsidiaries, divisions, joint ventures, and limited partnerships. 'Has he drawn any conclusions from his reading?'

'Yes.' Cole shot him an ironic smile, glanced at his watch, and stood up to leave. 'According to Cal, our generation has flagrantly violated the rules of morality, decency, ethics, and personal responsibility, and we are further guilty of breeding a new generation of children who don't even understand those concepts. In short, Cal has surmised from his reading that America is going down the toilet in the same way as ancient Greece and Rome and for the same reasons that caused their decline and collapse when they were world powers. That impossible metaphor, by the way, is Cal's not mine.'

John got up and walked toward the office door with him, but Cole paused with his hand on the knob and said, 'You're right about the need for Cal to transfer his shares over to me. That's a loose end that I should have tied up years ago, but for a variety of reasons I've postponed it. I'll work it out with Cal when I see him later this week.'

'Work it out?' John repeated worriedly. 'Is there some sort of problem?'

'No,' Cole said, somewhat disingenuously. The truth was that he had no desire to try to explain to a stranger the role that Cal had played in his life, or the gratitude Cole felt for him. or the love. Even if he had