Don't Forget To Say Grace

Don't Forget to Say Grace

by

Richard Russell

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Sangraal Books

on Smashwords

Don't Forget to Say Grace

Copyright © 2009 by Sangraal, Inc.

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The poundin’ of the drums, the pride and disgrace

You can bury your dead, but don’t leave a trace

Hate your next-door neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace

- P.F. Sloan – Barry McGuire The Eve of Destruction

Part One- Incursions

Chapter One

I’d spent most of the day cussing some molding into place. The period wainscoting I had bought for the dining room had about four sections of dry rot in the top molding and I was replacing them with new pieces I had a cabinet maker replicate for me. It was ticklish work with glue and a tack hammer and while I was down to the last piece without a single hammer scar, the almost stroke at a time sanding and meticulous attention the job required also seemed to require a few expletives.

Teaching Ray a new and colorful vocabulary? said Kat, who had snuck back into the loft, I assume to catch me.

Thought you went shopping.

This morning, Daddy. It’s four o’clock. Mommy said to remind you that we are due at Aunt Gwen’s at six.

In a few. Two more nails. I planned to finish them tomorrow anyway.

How many cusses you get per nail.

I think it’s averaged out about six. And if I scar this piece because you distracted me, you’ll hear a couple even you have never heard before.

She scurried down the spiral staircase just as her mother and her friend Deena walked in loaded down with packages. Ray kicked his feet and laughed at me. My son had a wicked sense of humor as a two year old.

I worried the last two brads in, set them and used a dab of putty. Then picked up Ray and carried him down to the main room of the loft. The three women were prostrate in the chairs around the center table under the skylight. All three had kicked their shoes off, and propped them on my antique eight-foot round carved mahogany coffee table.

You know, said Tori, my wife, one day he’ll finish the loft and watch sports like other men.

Mommy, said Kat, You know this is the neverending loft. Trust me, he’ll never finish. How many chandeliers did he put up before he found out what a bitch they were to keep clean?

I’m afraid you’re right. ‘Tis the abode of hydra, whatever is done requires some other new task.

There weren’t enough sales clerks to take all this out on?

One short, said Deena.

You going with us Topsy or are you bolting?

Deena, by virtue of her attachment to Beatrix Potter had acquired the nickname ‘Topsy.’

I got this great outfit at Liza Bruce. And Mommy will appreciate not having me underfoot in the last crucial moments of preparation, she answered.

So how about we share a bottle before trekking into the wilds of Manhattan.

I get to decant, said Kat.

Kat was fascinated by wine, everything about it. In the fall she was beginning a degree in Viniculture at Chico State. A pioneering program in the States modeled after some French programs. When she was thirteen, we bought a vineyard for her.

That probably requires a bit of explanation. Tori and I came from the California wine country, a small town and valley in the Coast Mountains between Napa and the Lakes called Annandale. Four years earlier some corporations, one who had bought my family vineyards, sold them back to my family, and the neighboring family, the Ericsons. Basically because the thin-skinned wine grapes, pinot noir were not really conducive to the slapdash farming they were used to. The middle vineyard was held in trust for Kat and her older brother Ted. Ted was actually my wife’s brother, but because she adopted him to keep him out of foster care when their parents were killed in an auto accident, he was also legally her son, and my stepson. Kat was also adopted, but in our family, the extended one, adoption was pretty common, we didn’t recognize it. Ted was merely Kat’s big brother.

Kat fell in love with the vineyard. Hal, who ran the Ericson interest as well as our family vineyards, had her plant a vine with her own hands. From about that moment on, wine was her foremost interest. She was a straight A student, number one in her class except her junior year when Deena beat her out.

My Dad ran the winery in Annandale, a sort of trade-off with Hal running the vineyards.

Deena was likewise adopted. With her it was easy to tell in that she was black and her parents were, respectively Irish and Greek. She’d kept up with Kat through three and a half years at St. Alben’s, a family institution supported by my employer, Harold Reilly.

I was the foreign affairs editor for Confidential News and World Report, basically a roving foreign correspondent. I spent one month every summer as the West Coast editor. Tori, who now carried the title Associate Editor on the masthead was my researcher. After a little more than four years we were a pretty accomplished team with a Pulitzer to prove it.

Our loft was on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn Heights. Fourth floor, the top floor, we had a nice view of both the Verrazano and Manhattan.

I was between assignments. Unless someplace in the world blew up, I would probably be off through June when the girls graduated St. Alben’s, maybe until August when I took over in San Francisco. Tori and I barely escaped Tehran two weeks earlier because that consummate ass Carter bungled an attempt at hostage rescue. The American election season was starting and I was more in demand to do T.V. interviews than to report anything. It would probably remain that way until the election season was over, although I had done a piece on Tito’s death that week.

Even Harold, who went beyond knee jerk to full body jerk liberal, was having trouble supporting Carter. Not that I helped him. After Tehran and my wife ducking machine gun fire, I wouldn’t have elected him dogcatcher. I knew Khomeini, interviewed him twice in Paris. Approached in the right manner, the hostages could have come home. What Carter did put them in jeopardy, along with Tori and me.

Harold was trying to push Ted Kennedy, but really his heart wasn’t in it. He’d slammed the Kennedy heir after Chappaquiddick, and, though the nation at the time seemed to have forgotten it, Harold hadn’t. It had offended his sense of class. He felt it defamed him and all wealthy New England liberals.

We finished the bottle. The girls drank a tad less in deference to being seventeen. Wine country families raise children on wine, wine isn’t really considered an alcoholic beverage in wine country.

We were dressing to go to Harold’s anniversary party. It was formal for men. That meant a tux, but I rather liked formal. I had a new dinner jacket and my black silk formal shirt with the ruffles and moonstone furnishings and white brocade tie and cummerbund went so well with it.

I had actually been waiting for the other shoe to drop for a week. On Saturday morning, on NBC, I’d pretty much roasted Carter. The fourth time I attacked the President on national television. I’d been critical before, but after Tehran I came off as an attack dog. Tori had also hit a morning talk show with some heavy vehemence and Harold would only allow us so much rope. Despite his distaste for the candidates on the Democratic side, Reagan was the devil incarnate, and Harold looked ahead well. At a certain point we would be hustled off the scene somehow.

The party was at the family brownstone in a quiet neighborhood in the twenties on the eastside. Harold’s grandfather had built it during the gilded age and modern improvements were carefully added without destroying any of the original detail. Gwen and George had the top two floors, and an architectural firm rented the basement. The parlor floor was used like a ballroom for magazine and some private functions, such as this, for magazine employees. Gwen and George were married in it. Gwen was Harold’s adopted daughter, and the associate publisher at Confidential. She was also the world’s best researcher, which even Tori admitted. I would have bet Gwen could’ve found pi, if anyone ever asked. George was the Captain of the seventy-second precinct, but rumor had it that a kick upstairs was in the works. He’d lowered the crime stats for two years in a row and such competence is not without penalty in the big apple.

Juanita, the baby sitter arrived just as we were all getting downstairs. Deena had chosen a pretty radical dress. Kat liked Liza Bruce but didn’t, apparently, need to nettle her parents as much as Dee. It was a tad over the top. Tori chose a Halston and Kat a fairly subdued Calvin Klein. Neither girl really rebelled. They’d tried it when they were younger and didn’t care for it apparently. But both did enjoy discomforting us from time to time.

We took Miguel’s the local car service for two reasons. One, they were a block away, and two, I liked to talk to the drivers. Cabs are for Manhattanites, in Brooklyn you took a car service to give you the feel of Brooklyn. I told Miguel I wanted an uptown car and we got a tricked out ten-year-old Caddy that looked like a refugee from the last Superfly movie.

You’re a hoot Uncle Nick, said Deena. They say this cat Nick is a bad Mother…

Shut your mouth, said Kat.

Well I’m talking ‘bout Nick.

Given we were in such an obvious pimp mobile even Tori had to laugh.

I tipped the driver my usual twenty and took his card. If you’re still on about one or two I’ll ask for you, I told him.

This Sunday night La Pot au Feu on the upper Eastside was closed because their staff was in the Brownstone. Their bartender was at the bar and their waiters took the trays as they came off the caterer’s truck. The choice was between steak au poivre or veal normandie. I chose the veal, which is scaloppini flamed with Calvados in a Calvados/cider glacé with seared apple slices.

I spoke to Harold on and off through the evening. I rather expected some sort of admonishment, or something, but I didn’t get one. Such a blast as I’d given Carter Saturday morning should have at least drawn a warning to control my childish piqué, but there wasn’t a hint of it.

The girls said their good nights early, about ten. They were due at St. Alben’s in the morning and Kat was staying over to go up in the magazine’s limo with Dee. Barring a complete collapse on the finals, Kat had the top spot in the class wrapped up, but not the senior year. The weekend had been an anomaly in that they stayed at the school studying the previous two, locked in their academic duel.

The party wound down starting at midnight. A lot of people were going to be doing a lot of dragging through Monday. Tori and I were so practiced at looking like we were drinking when we weren’t, we didn’t even get through a glass except the one at dinner. These kinds of parties were, in a way, our element. Although usually we were trying to find out what a bunch of people didn’t want us to know.

We ended up with the same car home, different driver. You just have to love a good Brooklyn car service.

We paid off the babysitter, who swore Ray hadn’t made a peep, which didn’t sound like Ray, so we checked and he was fine.

The bed dumped is in the center. Tori always loves to get home to our bed, which is a queen, but so old the mattress is like a vortex, rolling everything into the black hole in it’s middle.

She backed into me and I said, Whadya wanna bet tomorrow morning we get called into Harold’s office?

He had a Cheshire cat grin all evening about something. And he didn’t make some comment about how we acted like children because somebody shot at us, said Tori. I’d say it’s a pretty sure bet.

Chapter Two

We got to the office at eight-thirty. Ray went into the day care center. One thing about working for Harold, he practiced what he preached. Every single liberal cause, right up through the on premises day care center was the norm at Confidential. Sure enough in the center of our desks was the note: Coffee at nine, my office. – H.

I had three call backs, all T.V. or radio producers. The magazine had politely declined to send us to Belgrade to attend Tito’s funeral. I had never met him. When I got the job on the foreign affairs desk the importance of Eastern Europe had pretty much faded. The Soviets were tangled up in Afghanistan and pretty much in decline. The Leninist brand of Communism was slowly collapsing of it’s own weight. It was my personal belief that it wouldn’t survive an aggressive foreign policy in America.

Tori and I had been into Afghanistan once. A poor country, it tried to invite invaders to bring equipment and resources in for the citizens to steal. The Afghan leaders were called ‘warlords," but in actuality, bandit leaders was closer. They didn’t want the Soviets to leave, half their economy rested on stolen Soviet goods.

My own take was that the Middle East would be the flashpoint for the rest of the century, and probably further. Oil was king and the area of the world with the most of it would find ways to determine the course of international politics. By the time I was old and gray the emphasis would shift to the massive and untapped resources of Africa and South America. But that was years away.

Coffee with Harold was never a social event, however he insisted it have the appearance of one. A sliver Tiffany set on a tray with Royal Doulton Royal Gold cups and saucers that held a thimble full of coffee.

You are going to accuse me of manipulating you again, said Harold. "You, Nicholas have been doing this for almost a decade now. Of course I am and I always have been. It’s what I do for a living. So let’s leave the obvious out of it this time.

Both of you are going after Carter on the talk shows. Which, while I agree with you, might just get us a Reagan presidency, and that would be a disaster. I fear that this is an election that has to go to the lesser of two evils.

Pessimistic, I said, and when you vote that way all you end up with is an evil.

And you’d suggest?

"Neutrality. In foreign affairs I really believe Reagan is the better choice. None of the Democrats have enough Machiavelli in them to take advantage of the situation. Carter could crush the Soviets now with an aggressive foreign policy and ramping up defense. Their economy is stretched to the breaking point, and their satellites are restless. Will Kennedy do any better than Carter?

I can’t look at it the way you do Harold. Four more years of being a paper tiger and we run the risk of losing too much influence. Four years of ‘send the marines’ and our rivals will collapse.

FDR sent the marines Nicholas.

FDR wasn’t Jimmy Milquetoast or Teddy Tipsy. Look, I’ve always bought most of your liberalism. Look what I did in Southeast Asia. But you have to have competence Harold. In Liberalism much more so than the Conservatives, they back off of a lot. Look what Nixon did in foreign affairs. Yes, it screwed up a lot at home, but Carter inherited a damn strong position in the world and squandered it. So how and where do you want us to back off. That’s what this meeting is about, isn’t it?

Actually, I want you to look at this, he said and handed us both a file.

The file detailed the activities of an international group of companies based primarily in Hong Kong and Malaysia. They were a species of Heaven and Earth Society, or triad, semi-legitimate but criminal at the core. Unlike the Japanese Yakuza or American Mafia, they operated on the triad pattern of illegitimate and legitimate enterprises meshed together. The entities fed each other in a sort of symbiotic relationship, rather than the illegitimate feeding the legitimate as in purely criminal organizations. The last page brought me up short. It seemed that, in the United States, it was headed by a very old enemy of mine former ARVN Colonel Vo Dihn Chim.

Do you think these people pose a danger, Nicholas?

Marginally. We’ve lived with the triads for over a century now. Aside from the occasional innocent bystander their effect is minimal. They enclose themselves in the Asian community; it is beneath them to deal with us round eyes. To have another one of them dealing with the Southeast Asian community doesn’t seem to be that much of a threat.

I see Gwen in this, said Tori, but only halfway. Where did this come from Harold?

Harold just laid a letter out on his desk. It had the logo of a magazine that was founded and still owned by the old railroad corporations in California.

Dear Mr. Reilly: