Chapter 4
The Christmas Eve dinner on the boat was one of the nicest Charlotte had ever had, except for the magical Christmases when Hugh was little and still believed in Santa Claus.
He had asked Santa Claus for a new daddy one year, which nearly broke her heart.
His father hadn’t seen him in nearly two years at the time.
He got slightly better as Hugh got older and he could meet him for lunch when he came to New York for business.
But he was never an attentive father, especially once he had three more children with his current wife.
Ben asked Charlotte about her son at dinner, and she smiled as they both ate fried chicken with their fingers. There were hot biscuits too, which melted in their mouths.
“He’s a great boy,” she said proudly. “He’s an engineer.
He went to MIT. He loves working in the Middle East, and the money is great.
I don’t think he’ll stay there forever, but he’s happy for now.
You don’t have any children?” she asked, as he helped her to more mashed potatoes, which were the best she’d ever tasted.
The stewards had discreetly left them alone while they ate.
“I never wanted kids,” Ben said seriously.
“I don’t think I’d be a good father, and the idea always scared me.
What if my son ran away, or I lost all my money and he wound up on the streets like me?
” Charlotte couldn’t conceive of how one could lose fifty billion dollars, but everyone had their demons, and that was apparently one of his.
“I was born in Oklahoma. My father worked in the oil fields, and then we moved to Texas. My sisters were really little. And then my mother died and everything went to shit. My father became an alcoholic and got into a bar fight. It broke his spine and he was in a wheelchair from then on. He tried to work in a factory and got fired for being drunk. I was fifteen. I dropped out of school and held down three jobs to support us. We went on welfare, and my sisters went into foster care. I lost track of them after that. I know one of them died, and I never found the other one, she probably died too or she would have turned up by now. My father and I drove all over the south. I took migrant jobs and he did whatever he could get. He was a mean old sonofabitch, even after he got sick. He died of cancer when I was sixteen, and something happened after he died. I found a computer in a garbage can. I had a gift for fixing things. I was thinking of becoming an electrician, and I fell in love with computers. I’d always been good at math, and I had something of a gift.
I understood computers, it was like they were part of me, and I started inventing things.
I stole a computer once so I’d have a better one.
I couldn’t afford an apartment then, so I lived on the streets.
Philadelphia, New York, Boston. I got taken in by a homeless program in Boston, and they got me trained to work on computers, and I worked on my inventions at night.
I met a man in Boston who understood my ideas.
They said I was a genius, but I’m not. I just have a gift for understanding what will take technology to the next step.
I imagine it in my head and then I do it, and it works.
When I was twenty-one, I got a real job working in a computer lab.
All the big things happened after that. I had made a million dollars by the time I was twenty-eight, and turned it into ten by the time I was thirty.
Everything kept skyrocketing after that.
But I never forgot what it was like not to have a home to go to, or a bed to sleep in, and how it felt to be hungry all the time.
I had no family and no role models, and I learned to live by my wits on the streets.
I learned some hard lessons. I got beaten up a lot at first, and then I learned to take care of myself and not trust anyone.
It stayed with me. It was a big jump from that to this,” he said, waving vaguely at his incredible boat.
“I never thought it would last, but it has. I never think people will last in my life either, and they haven’t.
That’s why I didn’t want kids. I knew I was meant to make my way alone in this world.
My marriages didn’t last either. I didn’t think they would.
Technology becomes obsolete in the blink of an eye,” he said matter-of-factly, “and so do people. They love you one minute, and then they’re gone.
I moved on pretty quickly from my relationships.
I never let myself get too attached. I loved my last wife.
She was a good woman, and when I moved on, she didn’t hold it against me.
She was ready to move on too when I left. ”
“Is that the one you left for the showgirl in Vegas?” Charlotte asked, fascinated by his story. He was like some being from another universe. He wasn’t hardwired for ordinary life and he knew it.
“Yeah,” he said with a grin. “The dancer in Vegas lasted for about five minutes but she was a lot of fun. I have a short attention span,” he said, as he poured the rest of the gravy on his meat loaf.
They had eaten like starving people, but the food was great.
His chef knew just what he liked, and Charlotte’s heart ached when she thought of him starving outside the diner as a kid, waiting for the old waitress to bring him scraps of food, or sleeping in doorways and railway stations at night.
He had managed never to get picked up by the police, and a life of crime had never appealed to him.
All he wanted was to get his hands on the next computer, and make miracles with it.
“I think I don’t get attached to people the way others do.
I don’t expect them to be around for long.
I miss them for a while, but I care more about technology than the humans who create it.
I’ve had some amazing women in my life, but they didn’t stick around and neither did I.
Your son is lucky to have a mother like you.
You’re a constant in his life, and even far away, you’re there for him, ready to pick him up if he falls, ready to embrace him if he comes home, yet willing to let him live his own life, even if it hurts you and you’re alone.
“I never had anyone like you in my life.
I had no role models, except in the high-tech world.
I had mentors, and people that taught me what I needed to know, and I used what they taught me to learn more until eventually I knew more than they did.
Each of them was like a stepping-stone in my life to get where I needed to go. I never had a place I felt was home.
“This boat is probably more my home than anywhere else. But how could I explain all that to you in the interview today? My life experience is so different from anyone else’s.
” She realized as she listened to him that he was a genius, or very close to it.
Originally without an education or any kind of emotional support, he had achieved heights that few people could.
The measure of it was the money he had earned, but it wasn’t the money that motivated him.
She could tell from listening to him. He was driven by his own inner voices and the technology he invented.
He was like a beautiful robot that looked like an ordinary man, but wasn’t.
“Did you ever have a long-term relationship with any of the women in your life?” she asked, fascinated by him. And he was being honest now, not like that morning.
“Not if I could help it.” He laughed. “But I didn’t seek out women like you.
I knew I couldn’t give them what they wanted and I would hurt them.
I was always attracted to the ones who were more like me and didn’t plan to stay around for long, even the ones I married.
They never expected me to stay forever. Maybe a year or two, a few years at most.”
“Two of your wives aren’t very flattering about you. Why, if they always knew you would move on?”
“I know which two you mean. This lifestyle,” he said with a wave, “makes people greedy. I gave them a lot, more than my lawyer said I should, but they wanted more. They were short-term marriages to young women with big ambitions. That’s why I like younger women.
Some of them are still na?ve and aren’t spoiled yet, and they’re not ready to settle down with babies.
They didn’t want babies with me, they wanted diamonds and jewelry, probably things they could sell later, and money.
If any of them had wanted to have children with me, I would have run like hell, even faster than I did.
” He was an interesting study in human psychology and the effects of early childhood, which never get erased.
It was amazing that he had turned out as well as he had, and had adapted to what appeared to be real life, by his own individual standards.
It sounded as though he had tried not to hurt anyone, and had selected his partners from among women who were similar to him.
Charlotte was sure that greed had entered into it more often than not in the past twenty years, and he didn’t mind paying them handsomely when he left.
He was generous with what he had, and said he had learned that on the streets too.
“The streets were the college I graduated from.”
“I’d say you graduated with honors,” Charlotte said, enjoying the time they spent together. They had apple pie with vanilla ice cream for dessert, which was the perfect end to a terrific meal. And Ben was right, it was comfort food.
“There’s somewhere I want to take you,” he said as they stood up from the table.