things got too frantic, George took refuge in a home life that was nearly idyllic. Deborah was a born nest-builder; she cared only to make a place where her husband and her children would be cared for and comfortable. Once the front door was closed, she would say, the rest of the world wasn’t allowed in unless it was invited; and that included any other member of the Geary clan. If George needed solitude—time to sit and listen to his jazz collection, time to play with the kids—she could be positively ferocious in her defense of her threshold. Even Richard, who had persuaded juries of the impossible in his time, couldn’t get past her when she was protecting George’s privacy.
For the four children of this comfortable marriage—Tyler, Karen, Mitchell, and Garrison—there was plenty of affection and plenty of pragmatism, but there was also a string of temptations that had not been available to the previous generation. They were the first Gearys who were regularly followed around by paparazzi during their adolescence; who were squealed on by classmates if they smoked dope or tried to get laid; who appeared on the cover of magazines when they went skinny-dipping. Despite Deborah’s best efforts, she could not protect her children from every sleazehound who came sniffing around. Nor, George pointed out, was it wise to try. The children would have to learn the pain of public humiliation the hard way, by being hurt. If they were smart, they’d modify their behavior. If not, they’d end up like his sister Norah, who’d had almost as many tabloid covers as she’d had analysts. It was a hard world, and love kept no one from harm. All it could do, sometimes, was speed the healing of the wounds.
i
So much for my promised brevity. I intended to write a short, snappy chapter giving you a quick glimpse of the Geary family tree, and I end up lost in its branches. It’s not that every twig is pertinent to the story at hand—if that were the case, I’d never have undertaken the task—but there are surprising connections between some of what I’ve told you and events to come. To give you an example: Rachel, when she smiles a certain way, has something of Louise Brooks’s wicked humor in her eyes; along with Louise’s dark, shiny hair, of course. It’s useful for you to know how devoted Cadmus was to Louise, if you’re to understand how the presence of Rachel will later affect him.
But even more important than such details, I suspect, is a general sense of the patterns these people made as they passed their behavior, good and bad, on to their children. How Laurence Grainger Geary (who died, by the way, in a prostitute’s bed in Havana) taught his son Cadmus by example to be both fearless and cruel. How Cadmus shaped a creature of pure self-destruction in Norah, and a man subtly committed to his own father’s undoing in George.
George: we may as well take a moment here to finish George’s story. It’s a sad end for such a good-natured man; a death over which countless questions still hang. On February 6th, 1981, instead of driving up to his beloved weekend house in Caleb’s Creek to join his family, he went out to Long Island. He drove himself, which was strange. He didn’t like to drive, especially when the weather was foul, as it was that night. He did call Deborah, to tell her that he’d be late home: he had an “annoying bit of business” he needed to attend to, he told her, but he promised to be back by the early hours of the morning. Deborah waited up for him. He didn’t come home. By three a.m. she had called the police; by dawn a full scale search was underway, a search which continued through a rainy Saturday and Sunday without a single lead being turned up. It wasn’t until seven-thirty or so on Monday morning that a man walking his dog along the shore at Smith Point Beach chanced to peer into a car that had been parked there he’d noticed, close to the sand, for three days. Inside was the body of a man. It was George. His neck had been broken. The murder had taken place on the shore itself—there was sand in George’s shoes, and in his hair and mouth—then the body had been carried back to the car and left there. His wallet was later found on the shore. The only item that had been taken from it was a picture of his wife.
The hunt for George’s killer went on for years (in a sense, I suppose, it still continues; the file was never closed) but despite a million-dollar reward offered by Cadmus for information leading to the arrest of the murderer, the felon was never found.
ii
The major effects of George’s demise—at least those relevant to this book—are threefold. First, there was Deborah, who found herself strangely alienated from her husband by the suspicious facts of his death. What had he hidden from her? Something vital; something lethal. For all the trust they’d had in one another, there had been one thing, one terrible thing he had not shared with her. She just didn’t know what it was. She did well enough for a few months, sustained by the need to be a good public widow, but once the cameras were turned in the direction of new scandals, new horrors, she quickly capitulated to the darkness of her doubts and her grief. She went away to Europe for several months, where she was joined by (of all people) her sister-in-law Norah, with whom until now she’d had nothing in common. Stateside, rumors began to fly again: they were living like two middle-aged divas, the gossip columnists pronounced, dredging the gutters of Rome and Paris for company. Certainly when the pair got back home in August 1981, Deborah had the look of a woman who’d seen more than the Vatican and the Eiffel Tower. She’d lost thirty pounds, was dressed in an outfit ten years too young for her, and kicked the first photographer at the airport who got in her way.
The second effect of George’s death was of course upon his children. Fourteen-year-old Mitchell had become a particular focus of public attention after his father’s demise: his looks were beginning to deliver on their promise (he would be, by general consensus, the handsomest Geary yet) and the way he dealt with the invasiveness of the press spoke of a maturity and a dignity beyond his years. He was a prince; everyone agreed; a prince.
Garrison, who was six years his senior, had always been far more retiring, and he did little to conceal his discomfort during this period. While Mitchell stayed close to his mother throughout the period of mourning, accompanying her to philanthropic galas and the like in his father’s stead, Garrison retreated from the limelight almost completely. And there he would remain. As for Tyler and Karen, both of whom were younger than Mitchell, their lives were left unexamined by the columnists, at least for a few years. Tyler was to die in 1987, along with his Uncle Todd, Norah’s fourth husband, when the light aircraft Todd was piloting came down during a sudden storm near Orlando, Florida. Karen—who in hindsight probably most closely resembled her father in the essential gentility of her nature—became an archeologist, and rapidly distinguished herself in that field.
The third consequence of George Geary’s sudden demise was the reascension of Cadmus Geary. He had weathered the physical and mental frailty that had been visited upon him just as he’d weathered so much else in his life, and now—when the Geary empire needed a leader, he was there to take charge. He was by now in his eighties, but he behaved as though his little sickness had been but a palate cleanser, a sour sorbet that had sharpened his appetite for the rare meat now set before him. In a decade of naked acquisitiveness, here was the triumphant return of the man who’d written the modern rules of combat. At times he seemed to be at pains to compensate for his late son’s humanity. Anyone who stood against him (usually for principles espoused by George) was summarily ousted; Cadmus didn’t have the time or the temper for persuasion.
Wall Street responded well to the change. Old Man Cadmus Back in Charge, ran the headline of The Wall Street Journal, and in a couple of months there were profiles running everywhere, plus the inevitable catalogues of Cadmus’s cruelties. He didn’t care. He never had and he never would. This was his style, and it suited the world into which he had resurrected himself more than a little well.
iii
There’ll be more about Old Man Geary later; a lot more. For now, let me leave him there, in triumph, and go back to the subject of mortality. I’ve already told you how Laurence Geary died (the whore’s bed, Havana) and Tyler (Uncle Todd’s plane, Florida) and of course George (in the driving seat of his Mercedes, Long Island) but there