Ghosts & Shadows Pt. 03

Peter asked me, "Is there anybody special in your life, Dad?"

"No, I've got a decent social life. There are ladies who are good friends. They make me laugh."

"Getting any action?"

"Enough.'

"Details?"

"Pervert."

"He is one, isn't he?" said Marlena with a smile as she came up behind Peter and rested her head against his chest. Then she grinned and said, "Thank God."

I just looked at my son and he looked back at me as he kissed the top of his wife's head and I felt better about the two of them. I thought he had gotten past the wound of his mother's infidelity and I was glad somebody had.

Nicole asked me the same question, more genteelly.

"Are you happy Dad? Is there anybody, special?"

"Yes and no. I have friends, I go out. I'm not alone. I've got my work, the people at the bank, a job that takes up about 60 hours of my week. It's not a bad life.

"Honestly?"

"Honestly. It's not as good as the life I had with your mother, but it's as good as a life can be without her. Really, I'm looking at 60, I'm not going to remarry, not raise any more kids. The real part of my life -- you guys -- is behind me. I'm ready to be a doting grandpa. Don't worry about me, Nicole. I'm alright."

She didn't say anything, but I could tell she wanted me to ask.

"How is your mother?"

"Not good."

"Physically?"

"Partly, she's lost weight. She looks older. She's never looked her age. She's starting to look her age."

"She's had a rough couple of years, baby."

"Rougher than you?"

"Maybe! Remember, I was the innocent party. Breaking somebody's heart, cheating on them, leading two lives, it can't be easy. Then we broke up. Then she broke up with her new guy and, has she had anybody in the year since then?"'

"She's gone on dates, I know that, but nobody serious."

There was a part of me that was happy hearing that. I wanted her to hurt but I put myself in her shoes. If it had been me ten years ago and I had been the one who'd cheated on her for nearly a year, and I'd had to face her and confess what I'd done, it probably would have killed me.

It's easy to be the innocent party. If all the blame and guilt and shame had been mine, especially if I still had any feeling for her, it would have torn me up. If she was human, she had to have guilt over what she had done to a man that loved her.

"I don't know what I can do, baby. I sent her an email awhile back, letting her know that I still considered us friends and that she could always talk to me. I never heard back from her."

"Is that true, Dad? Do you still think of her as a friend, after everything that's happened?"

"Yeah, we were always friends as well as lovers. There was never anybody else I could talk over anything with as easily as I could with her. I valued her advice, her intelligence. She could always make me laugh, no matter how bad the day had been. If we hadn't been married, hadn't been lovers, I think we would have been good friends. There was just something - we clicked. I don't know how to describe it better than that."

"Could you be her friend again, Dad?"

"She doesn't want my friendship, baby, or my love. It can't get any clearer than that."

"She needs a friend, Dad, she needs you. She will never tell you or let you know, but she's dying, dying inside. She's not the woman we've always known. Could you try to contact her, for me and Peter. I know it will be hard for you but, you can do anything.

You remember when I was little? You told me there would never be anything I could ask that you wouldn't do, and there was never anything I asked that you didn't do. I really thought that if I asked you to grab the moon and bring it to me, somehow you'd do it."

"...and I would have, but this..."

I looked into her eyes and saw her mother and knew that I'd never be able to deny her anything, even when I knew it was impossible.

"I'll try to talk to her, Baby. I'll do my best."

I emailed her the next week and found that she'd changed her email address. It came back no such email address on her server. I got the number of the McDaniels' San Francisco office and called and asked to speak to Ms. Mary Meadows.

"Can I tell her who's calling, sir?"

"Hugh Davidson."

"Please hold."

After a LONG hold, the pleasant voice came back on the phone and said, "I'm sorry, Ms. Meadows is out of the office."

"Well, could I leave a message on her voice mail?"

Another long silence.

"I'm sorry sir, but her voice mail box is completely full."

"Well, could I leave a message with you?"

"I'm very sorry, but I have four calls holding. Could you call again later?"

She was unavailable 10 minutes after her office opened, 10 minutes before lunch, 30 minutes after lunch and a half hour before the close of business. Repeat this Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Add to that her voice mail box was always full or on the fritz. Naturally they couldn't release her email address as it was contrary to company policy.

I tried for two weeks before, finally, a frazzled, once friendly, voice said, "I'm sorry you're having so many problems sir, but this is a business office. I hate to be rude so please excuse me, but your calling has become somewhat of a problem. We have people calling on business matters and we really can't afford to be besieged by personal calls for our staff."

"How do you know it's personal? I've never told you why I'm calling. It could be business."

After another long silence, "I'm so sorry, sir, but you're putting me in a very...awkward...position. Please?"

I knew I was. She was just a secretary/receptionist, following her boss' orders, which were to shut me out completely. Mary wouldn't give an inch, wouldn't even let me explain why I was calling. I remembered what she had told Matt Henry, no contact, no messages. She didn't even want to breath the same air that I was breathing. She didn't want to be in the same city.

I could have flown to San Francisco and walked into the front door of the main McDaniels office, but I knew I'd never get past the phalanx of secretaries, staffers and security she would throw up to ward me off. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. It took a day to reach critical mass.

It wasn't enough that she had destroyed my world, broken my heart, left me alone in the moonlight with ghosts and shadows while she first fucked Richard Kelly and then her unknown boyfriends. She couldn't even show the common decency to acknowledge my existence. It was as if, for her, I had already died.

So the next day, amidst my anger and distress, for just a few minutes I let out the demons. I emailed a message to the general communications URL for the McDaniels San Francisco office. Right then I didn't care how many secretaries, flunkies or co-workers saw it.

"Ms. Meadows -- Mary, or, should I say, You Bitch! This is your ex-husband, the man who loved and cherished you for 36 years before you decided to turn into a slut and fuck some younger man. In case you've forgotten, I am the man who never cheated on you.

I apologize for trying to call and talk to you. Obviously the thought of hearing my voice is so distasteful that you bullied a receptionist to lie to me repeatedly. You didn't have the simple decency to come on the phone yourself and tell me you didn't want to talk to me.

Why am I surprised? That you have no decency should not have come as a surprise. I made myself believe that you were a decent woman for 36 years, but that was always a lie, wasn't it? A lie because you have always been a cheating slut. I just never let myself see it.

I was too blinded by love, which I'm sure you don't understand because I am certain that you have never had a moment's love for me in all our years together.

I look back and remember that you belonged to another man when you sucked my dick and let me fuck you. You were cheating on a man you had planned to marry. Because you were cheating with me, I made myself believe it was simply an overwhelming passion that led you to my bed, but our marriage started with an act of betrayal on your part.

I assume, am fairly certain, being the cold blooded bitch that you are that you made a conscious decision that you'd have a better, more profitable life with me than your former fiancé. You knew I came from money and you made a bet that riding my coattails would lead you to a comfortable life, which it did, for more than 30 years. There was never anything you wanted that I didn't give you willingly. I gave you two children you loved, unless you were lying about that too.

Looking back, I can't help but wonder if Richard Kelly was the first man you sucked and fucked while pretending to be my loving wife. I was such an idiot. I knew you were gone so much of the time, that you were a sexual dynamo, and I really believed that you were celibate all those long nights you spent away from me.

Now I really do believe, and this isn't just anger and spite, that you were cheating on me for so many years. I think your story of resisting Richard for months was bullshit. I think that very first night you sucked his dick and let him have what you had promised to me alone.

I think you are a liar and a cheat. I think you are a selfish, cold-hearted bitch, in every sense of that word. Looking back, even if it had cost me Peter and Nicole, I wish that you had decided that your Harvard fiancée was a better long term bet than me. I wish you had never pretended to fall in love with me. I wish that I had had the chance to meet a loving, kind and true woman to make my wife. I wish I had not wasted the larger portion of my life being devoted to a woman who existed only in my imagination.

Now it is too late. I am nearly 60. There will be no opportunity to relive my life and find a better wife, or possibly just an honest whore that I could have fucked and known what the bargain was going in.

When I left you, the day you finally were honest with me, I thanked you for the years you had given to me and wished you well. You have to know I was lying. I am happy only that your boyfriend finally got tired of you, kicked your aging ass out, and went back to his wife. I've heard your story, but I am sure mine is the more reliable.

You are an aging, fading stupid beauty. You are getting old, your looks are going, and you really believed a 45-year-old man wanted to start a new life with you? You believed his bullshit and left a faithful husband for a few months of good fucking.

You are still an attractive woman, in a certain light, so I think you can keep whoring yourself out, although your Johns will be getting older and more desperate as time goes on. I can only hope that your desperate search for new sex leads you to contract one of the uglier, more painful, or possibly fatal sexual diseases going around.

When you are gone, I want you to know that I will come to your graveside. I will come, not to your bedside to forgive you while you are still alive, but to your grave to piss on the soil lying above the decaying body of the worst woman that it has ever been my misfortune to know.

You will never know the depths of the hatred I feel for you, and that is the chief regret that I live with daily.

Hugh."

I wrote it in the white heat of passion and hit the send key without a thought. A storm of emotions swept through me, but chief among them was - release and relief. I had previously been noble and loving and forgave a woman who tore my heart out, but what I really felt was contained in the words I pounded out in just a few minutes. I hoped to God that she was still capable of being hurt by me because I wanted to hurt her.

I thought, just for a moment, of destroying Richard Kelly. I could do it, no matter his political connections or his family's power. I had been the hatchet man, the destroyer of lives and careers and communities for all these years, my own native intelligence backed by the power of the hundreds of millions of dollars the Hunt family controlled.

I could have him killed, could destroy his marriage if he really had gone back to his wife. I could leave him bankrupt and on the street, or in a cell somewhere being fucked up the ass by the largest, meanest concentration of human monsters I could round up.

I toyed with the idea for a few hours. Gail would back me up and it could be done without leaving fingerprints. Then, reluctantly, I dismissed the fantasies. I wasn't that kind of man. I didn't want to become the kind of man who could do that for personal revenge. The terrible things I'd done, I'd done dispassionately. The people whose lives I'd ruined or hurt, I'd damaged only as part of my job.

There was a line I wasn't willing to cross, not now, hopefully never.

Then I had time to regret the words I'd sent to Mary. I felt better than I had in more than a year. They were the words in my heart from the moment she'd told me about Richard Kelly. I felt the way you feel when you're totally nauseous; then you manage to vomit and the nausea wanes.

No, I felt bad because I imagined what Peter and Nicole would think if they saw that e-mail. It would hurt them as well as their mother but, it was too late, the message was gone. I somehow doubted that was the help Nicole had hoped I'd give her mother but sometimes - even the greatest miracle worker fails - and I had tried to reestablish contact with Mary. The blame was on her.

I never heard back from the email. Peter and Nicole never indicated they were aware of it, and neither one of them is that good an actor, so she never told them, although I imagine she must have known of it. It was like dropping a pebble into a well and having it vanish without a sound, a ripple, as if it had never been dropped. It was clear one more time that I simply didn't exist for Mary any longer.

Life went on. The housing, banking and economic crises that shook the nation became real. Most banks around the country quivered and trembled and bank directors resigned or were approached by feds wanting to know if they had played a part in bringing the crisis on.

The feds came sniffing around us, but not because we were in trouble.

We were one of the only major banks in the nation that stood like a rock. Our books were good, our loans were solid and our customers were protected. Gail Hunt and her Board of Directors did not want, would not accept, any federal aid, loans, guarantees -- nor any hint of federal control through federal strings tied to money that was going to prop up other banks.

That brought a lot of interest in certain quarters and we had visits from nameless, but very powerful individuals, wanting -- in very simple terms -- a finger in our very prosperous financial pie.

I attended one meeting with Gail, Percy, Bobby, two other directors, a man from an unnamed important federal agency and two highly placed FBI officials. The meeting began low key, then rather quickly deteriorated into thinly veiled threats from the feds. The Hunt Bank was a financial powerhouse, but it wasn't the sovereign government of the United States. It would be best for everyone concerned if the Bank could work in harmony with the policies and aims of the federal government. In the interest of harmony, the Bank would have to accept federal funding and federal oversight of its operations.

Gail indicated that would not happen. The federal official looked at her like she had lost her mind and said that she was a beautiful woman and that beautiful women did not do well in federal prisons, due to attentions from male and female guards and inmates.

"I would hate to see that happen to a vibrant person like you," the fed said, "but policy differences between private businesses and the government inevitably come down to a moment of choice. Will you do what we ask, or will you violate the law and give up your freedom and the future growth of this bank that your grandfather devoted his life to?"

She just looked at him for a moment, then stood up. The fed looked at her curiously.

"I have a private office in the other room," she said calmly. "Would you please come with me. I have something I'd like to show you and we can discuss this matter further."

They walked out together and ten minutes later they walked back in. The fed never said a word, just gestured to the FBI guys and they walked out. We never heard back from him.

We continued to have visitors but they were low level and very polite.

I never found out what Gail said or showed to the unnamed fed, but back in the 80s when first Mafia and then South American criminal elements tried to move into the banking business, Old Man Hunt had simply made phone calls and suddenly they went away.

I knew he had been a smart man. He liked to find out secrets and keep them tucked away for future use. I had never had any curiosity about what secrets he kept. I thought it was healthier to pretend I knew nothing about them.

We approached the summer of 2009 and I got a call from Nicole telling me that Brandy Summers, her best friend and our almost-adopted daughter, was getting married in New York City. Brandy was a lithe redhead who had been Nicole's best friend before her parents had suffered an acrimonious divorce in the summer of 1994.

In the middle of the divorce, her mother had been diagnosed with a particularly malignant form of breast cancer, while her father had moved to Brazil after falling in love with a 24-year-old graduate student he'd met while teaching a course at the University of North Florida.

Brandy had no other close kin and with the approval of her mother, the benign neglect of her father, and an okay from distant maternal grandparents, the 15-year-old moved in with us and lived with us for three years until she went off to college with Nicole. She was as close as you can get to being a daughter without having blood ties.

"She's met this great guy from Boston. He's a college professor, teaches English. He actually lived and taught in Jacksonville for a while. He's divorced and she met him when he came on the staff at the private school where she's been teaching for the last five years. She put up a fight. After all the assholes she's been involved with over the years, she was very gun shy, but she's head over heels. Anyway, she wants a June wedding. She's going to have it at the home of the Dean of the school where she's teaching and she wants you to be there, to give her away, as her father."

After a moment, I had to ask, "I'm honored, but what about her father?"

"She hasn't heard from him in five years. That was when he emailed her that his new bride had just had twins and that between those and his job in Sao Paulo, he just wouldn't have time to keep up the connections with her. As if the son of a bitch had stayed in contact since he left the country. No, you're the closest thing she has to a father. She wants you."

"Of course. I'll be glad to give her away. Let me know the time and I'll be there with bells on and a very nice wedding gift."

Three days later I got another call from Nicole and I knew it was bad news before she said more than a few words.

"Dad, I don't know how to ask this, but.."

"What?"

"Brandy wanted both of you at the wedding. You know how close she was to mom."

I knew. As much as I think she loved me as a surrogate father, Mary had been her mother in everything but blood. Brandy had needed a woman during that period in her life as she became a young woman, and Mary had been there for her.

"I think I know what you're going to say. Tell me."

"Brandy didn't -- I didn't -- I couldn't believe that Mom wouldn't...she wouldn't be able to put the past aside. But.."

"She won't come if I'm there."

"I'm so sorry, Dad."

I thought about it for only a moment. It was Brandy's day, the most important of her life, and she needed Mary more than she needed me.