Chapter 1 #3
At fifty-four, Faye did nothing to hide her age.
She dressed in conservative business style.
She had sacrificed the frills of femininity in order to let the men she worked with know that she was one of them, and as powerful as any of them.
She exuded an aura of strength, intelligence, and seriousness.
She wore her blond hair short, used very little makeup, and seemed timeless, not of any particular era.
She had worn a plain black suit to the funeral, by no particular designer.
She had no interest in fashion. She had more important things to do.
She had gotten on well with her father-in-law, better than Charles ever had.
Her own parents had died years before, so Liam had just lost the only grandparent he had.
Patrick had liked him better than his own son.
Patrick had had a hard time warming up to anyone, even his own flesh and blood. It went against the grain.
Charlie, Faye, and Liam left for the cemetery as quickly as they could.
The hearse had just pulled away as they came down the steps of the church.
The pallbearers had been the men on the board.
With Patrick’s secretary, Faye had organized a reception for several hundred guests at his home in San Francisco.
Charlie was dreading it. It would be stifling, with the rooms full of all the social and banking people that he didn’t care about.
He had carved out a niche for himself in a very different world of modern, unorthodox, high-tech thinkers, people who had come up from nothing and made incredible fortunes with innovative ideas, not by following in their predecessors’ footsteps.
They were all the people Patrick disapproved of and didn’t understand, like his son.
In time, Charlie intended to step down from the board quietly, but he couldn’t do it yet.
He had to go through the motions for a year or so.
He was going to his father’s office the next day, to tie up some loose ends, and then flying to New York that night for meetings.
His company was opening twenty more healthy fast-food restaurants in the suburbs of New York, and in the days following, he had meetings planned in Boston, Atlanta, Miami, and Chicago.
He had a busy few weeks ahead. Liam was leaving for his trip to Europe to celebrate his recent graduation from Yale.
Faye had a new fund she was opening to her firm’s investors.
They each had their own plans and Liam, who was now twenty-two, would be starting his architectural studies back at Yale in the fall, building his future.
As Charlie left the church, a boyhood friend, Adam Stein, stopped him briefly with a smile. They still saw each other for lunch from time to time. He was the managing partner of the biggest law firm in the city, and Charlie’s lawyer.
“I’m sorry, Charlie,” he said respectfully, although he knew that Charlie was less so and his father’s death was a relief, a release from a relationship that had been painful all his life.
“You’re up, Mr. Chairman,” he said in an undertone, with a teasing glance, and Charlie winced.
“I’ll call you for a loan next week. Maggie wants me to build a new house in Belvedere.
I’m counting on you.” Charlie knew Adam wasn’t serious about the loan.
He was one of the most successful attorneys in the city.
“I can’t wait to turn you down,” Charlie quipped back. “And I’m not ‘up.’?” He and Adam used to play baseball together on their school team. “I’ll be out as fast as I can get away with it. I’ll be on the road for the next few weeks. They’ll do fine without me.”
“You’ll have to play ball with them at least for a while,” Adam reminded him, and Charlie looked pained.
Board meetings bored him intensely and never moved fast enough for him, which Adam knew.
Charlie thought fast, moved fast, acted decisively.
The bank moved with the speed of an iceberg and the members deliberated at length before making any significant decisions, and they were never exciting ones.
Acting as chairman, even for a year, was his father’s final punishment for him, after a lifetime of them.
Charlie had never won his father’s approval.
“See you at the house later,” Adam said, and patted his friend’s arm, as Charlie nodded and moved through the crowd to find Faye and Liam.
They were waiting at the car that would take them to the cemetery for the private burial, where it would all finally end, with a handful of earth thrown into the grave, after the minister’s last words.
Faye looked at him questioningly, to see if he was okay. Charlie looked as calm and in control as he always was. He had waited forty-nine years for this day, and it had finally come.
They drove to the cemetery without a word, each of them lost in their own thoughts, with nothing they wanted to say to each other.
Charlie remembered hazy moments of his mother’s funeral and felt a rush of sadness.
Faye remembered her own parents, and Liam thought of the grandfather who had always scared him a little but had been kind to him.
He would miss him, or miss just knowing he was there.
The silence was familiar to all three of them, and was easier than sharing what they felt—or admitting what they didn’t feel, in Charlie’s case. The silence was where they each felt safe. After a lifetime of distance between them, they knew there was nothing to say.
—
Devon Darcy woke up as she did every morning, with daylight streaming into the room, sometimes bright sunshine, and the light from the lamp she left on at night near her bed.
She liked knowing where she was immediately on waking.
In the darkness, she was haunted by ghosts of the past. She had learned to live with them.
There was a tree outside her window that she could see from her bed, and hear the birds perching on it.
They started chirping even before daylight.
She lived on the top two floors of a well-kept once-elegant townhouse in the West Village in downtown New York, on the West Side near the Hudson River.
It stood in a row of houses like it, and down the street there were shops and restaurants and people.
The street was quiet, and the neighborhood alive with old people, mothers and children, runners, dog walkers, and people laughing and talking to each other.
She liked that. They were there if she wanted to see them when she took a break from work and went for a walk.
Her cozy bedroom was on the top floor, and on the floor below, she had a large living room with a marble fireplace she never used, tall French windows with beautiful antique satin curtains with tassels, and a dining room she had turned into her studio, filled with blank canvases in a corner, others leaning against the wall, her brushes and paints spread out on a work table, a large comfortable chair for her subjects, her easel, and a number of small portraits hanging on the walls.
She was a portrait artist. The canvas she was currently working on was on her easel, with layers of paint on it.
She had only just begun to work on the underlayer, and sketched the shapes that would emerge as the subject came to life in her head and on the canvas.
When her subjects lived in New York, she met with them once a week for several months, sometimes less if she had a strong connection with them.
Those who lived far away spent a morning or afternoon in her studio with her, and she took videos and photographs of them making normal movements and expressions while they talked to her, and she would refer to the photographs later while she painted. They came to life on the canvas.
Between commissions, she painted people she didn’t know from drawings she sketched randomly from memory, or as she watched them in restaurants, or parks.
She had drawn people since she was a child.
It was a gift. She had dreamed of being a ballerina as a little girl, and had painted dancers in every position, like Degas.
Now she painted important people, and only accepted the commissions she wanted to, through a highly reputable gallery uptown.
She did portraits mostly of men, occasionally of women.
She saw into their souls and listened to them during sittings.
Though she’d been a shy child, she had painted the world she observed with startling maturity and insight, which had deepened over the years.
Destiny had dealt Devon a hard hand. Her parents had died in a fire when she was five.
She barely remembered them. They lived in New York in a small walk-up apartment in a poor unkempt neighborhood and were both teachers.
The building was run-down and caught fire.
Devon was saved by the firefighters right before the roof caved in, but they couldn’t get to her parents.
She still remembered them screaming as the firefighters rushed her away.
Her mother was French and her father American.
He had no living family. She was sent to Paris to live with her maternal grandmother, who had been a ballet teacher, became a seamstress, and made gowns for society ladies who came to the apartment for fittings.
Devon would sketch them while they weren’t watching.
She loved the way they looked and what they wore, the way they did their hair, and the gowns her grandmother made them.