Bloodlines

24

“W HAT ARE YOU DOING?” SONYA YEAGER ASKED HER HUSBAND. “ARE you cooking?”

Mitch Yeager looked at her with disfavor. “No, I’m standing here in my robe and slippers at the stove, holding onto a pan, because I lost my way to the bathroom.”

“Mitch, I really get that you’re angry.”

He clenched his teeth. She had gone to one of those est seminars a year or so ago and hadn’t been able to talk right since. I get. I get. Werner Erhard was the only one who got-he got a lot of money for telling people that they couldn’t leave the room to take a leak while he insulted them. Now, there was a racket. A fucking cult. Mitch had let Sonya go to get her out of his hair for the weekend. When she wanted to keep enrolling in other courses, though, he refused-he didn’t want his kids talking like she did now.

“A man gets up to make a glass of warm milk for himself,” he said. “What’s it to you?”

“We have a cook. It doesn’t look right for you to do stuff like this yourself.”

“Who the hell is looking? And who the hell cares if they do?”

“I get that,” she said, nodding her pretty blond head. “But I could have done that for you. All you had to do was ask.”

“I didn’t want to trouble you,” he lied. He suppressed an impulse to tell her that she’d be better off spending her time with the peroxide bottle, because her dark roots were showing. She took comments about her hair to heart, and he didn’t want to have to deal with one of her crying jags.

“It wouldn’t have been any trouble, Mitch. I like doing things for you.”

Problem is, you only do one thing well, he thought to himself. Aloud he said, “Go to bed, Sonya. I’m fine.”

“Okay, I get that you want to be alone.”

“Right.” Well, if Werner could teach the bimbo that much, maybe the money hadn’t been wasted after all.

He poured the milk from the pan into a glass and took it into the larger of his two studies. He flipped a control on the Lionel train set that occupied most of the center of the room and idly sipped his milk as he watched the black steam locomotive make its way around the elaborate circuit laid out for it.

He had bought this train for that little shit who was now calling himself Max Ducane.

He tightened his fist in anger, thinking of the boy giving up the name he had given him. He had bestowed his brother Adam’s middle name on him, and now he rejected it. Rejected the Yeager name, too.

Mitch sat down in an overstuffed chair, took another sip of milk.

Some of his earliest memories were of Adam, warming a pan of milk in the small, sloping kitchen of the tiny ramshackle house downwind of the San Pedro canneries, a rented home in an area that reeked of fish processing (to this day, Mitch could not eat a tuna fish sandwich), a few blocks from the wharves where fishing boats were anchored. His father worked on boats if matters grew desperate, but mostly made a few dollars playing cards with sailors and longshoremen.

When Mitch had been a toddler and troubled with sleeplessness, Adam used to prepare warm milk for him. Warm milk was one of Mitch’s few pleasant memories from those days.

It was typical of Adam, who was seven years his senior, to act as both mother and father to Mitch, although both parents were living at that time. Their mother spent the hours she wasn’t drinking passed out on the sofa or floor. Their father, Horace Yeager, avoided the house as much as possible.

Horace had hoped that eloping with Myra Granville, the only child of his wealthy employer, would earn him advancement in the company, if not a life of luxury and leisure. Instead, the old man fired him.

Horace then sent his wife in to plead their case-she was informed that her father would not speak to her unless she was no longer living with Horace Yeager. The birth of a grandchild-thought by Mr. Yeager to be a surefire way to soften his father-in-law’s heart-only brought about a notice from an attorney, informing his wife that she would not inherit a penny.

By the time Mitch began school, Horace Yeager was living in another house with another drunken woman in another part of the country. Mitch’s mother told other people Horace was dead. Within a year, this was true-he was killed by an unknown assailant after he had won a large amount of money in a card game. The money was missing.

Not long after their father abandoned the family, a remarkable person appeared at their door. Mitch remembered looking in awe at the long black car that pulled up in front of the house. A liveried chauffeur came to the door and offered to take Adam, Mitch, and their mother “home.” Mitch was six years old. Adam, at thirteen, was less impressed, but no less eager to live at the mansion so often pointed out to him by their father.

Their mother’s response to this olive branch was to reply that the chauffeur could tell her father to go fuck himself. The man’s startled expression indicated that he was more surprised to hear a woman use such language than the boys were, but he said nothing back to her. He pulled a white envelope from his vest, placed it on the kitchen table, and left.

The envelope was embossed with their grandfather’s monogram. His mother stared at it, then said to Adam, “Open it and read it to me. I don’t want to touch the damned thing.”

There was not, as expected, a letter. There was nothing in the envelope but money.

Their mother was more than happy to touch the money. Mitch saw Adam palm five dollars out of it before he handed it to her. Adam used the five dollars to make sure they ate. The rest, their mother spent on booze.

The chauffeur continued to come by once every two weeks, always bringing an envelope. He always handed it directly to Adam. Adam and Mitch, forbidden to mention their grandfather, began referring to him as “the chief” and spent every night before the chauffeur was due worrying that the old man might change his mind about supplying money to boys he did not know and a woman who despised him.

Adam once took a greater share of the cash for their household expenses, and their mother beat the tar out of him for it. Mitch tried to help Adam fight her off, and got a black eye for his trouble.

Adam repaid her by walking to the landlord’s house and tipping him off about the chauffeur’s schedule. The landlord learned to come by the house to demand the rent within minutes after the chauffeur appeared.

Adam contrived in this way to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Mitch gathered scrap wood for the fireplace, the sole source of heat for the house. That winter, it wasn’t enough-Mitch came down with a horrible cough. Fearing pneumonia or tuberculosis, Adam used the five dollars to pay the doctor to come to the house, and to buy the medicine he prescribed for bronchitis.

As he lay recovering, Mitch worried over the burden he had placed on his brother. Somehow Adam still managed to feed them, even if it was an odd assortment of foods that now graced their table. They seemed to have a whole case of tomato soup, and a crate of oranges. To Mitch’s surprise, a week later there were two chickens and a rooster in a pen at the back of the house.

When asked about it, Adam said, “Chickens make eggs. Makes more sense to own chickens than buy eggs, right?”

“But how can we afford them?”

Adam winked and said, “I got Ma to let go of some of the chief’s wampum.”

Mitch always suspected the story of his mother’s generosity was untrue. Adam was leaving the house late at night and not getting back home in time for school. When he arrived just before dawn with a new blanket for Mitch’s bed, Mitch knew Adam had stolen it.

Adam eventually admitted it, and that he had stolen food as well.

“And don’t be mad at me, kid,” he said. “We gotta stay alive, don’t we?”

Despite a few close calls, Adam was able to avoid being caught. All the same, Mitch lived in constant fear that Adam would be sent to jail. He didn’t know what he would do if his big brother wasn’t there to help him.

Over the next three years, Adam’s thievery changed how they lived. It also changed Adam. Mitch saw him become tougher, more sure of himself. Always big for his age, at sixteen he looked as if he were twenty. He led a gang of other boys now, a group Mitch longed to join. “When you’re a little older,” Adam would promise. “But I’m going to need me a guy with an education to help out, and you won’t be getting up for school if you’re out all night with me and my boys.”

“You’re smart,” Mitch said. “And you don’t go to school.”

“There’s different kinds of smart. You stay in school.”

His mother would occasionally sober up enough to complain that she wasn’t going to have a pack of thieves living under her roof. Adam, now taller and stronger than the child she had beaten, no longer hid his contempt for her. He told her that he didn’t want to live with a drunken old whore, either, but they’d have to make do. If she didn’t want to live with a thief under her roof, she could damn well move.

One day she seemed to take him at his word. She told Mitch to pack up his belongings, that they were going to find another place to live. He saw that she already had an old valise half-filled with her own clothing.

“What about Adam?”

“We’re leaving Adam. That’s what.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you. I want to stay with Adam.”

She slapped him. “Now, you get in there and pack, or I’ll persuade you in a way you won’t like.”

To her dismay, Adam walked in the door just then. “Persuade him to do what?”

Mitch told him.

Adam looked furious for a moment, then said, “You need a drink to steady your nerves.”

He poured a glass of rye and stood by and watched as she downed it, then poured another. When she hesitated, he pushed the glass closer to her. She began crying, but drank it.

When she had downed three drinks, Adam said, “Mitch, you go into her room and unpack her bag. I’m going to take a walk with Ma and talk things over.”

Two days later, Mitch came home from school to find a policeman talking to Adam on the front porch, and felt certain that his worst fears had come to pass. He wondered if his mother, who had been sulking, had reported her own son to the police. He felt a surge of rage at the thought, rage that allowed him to overcome his dread and approach them.

The policeman’s face was sorrowful, though, and Mitch noticed that Adam seemed solemn as well.

“It’s Ma,” Adam said. “She’s dead.”

“What happened?” Mitch asked, working hard to hide what he felt-a vast relief.

“She was in an accident,” the policeman said gently.

“She was hit by a streetcar,” Adam said. “She tripped and fell right in front of it. Nothing the conductor could do.”

“Were you there?” Mitch asked.

“No,” Adam said, watching him carefully.

Mitch thought he was trying to convey some message to him. He tried to read the look and asked, “Was she drunk?”

“Now, sonny, that’s no way to think about her,” the policeman said.

Adam said, “Of course she was.”

“What’s going to happen to us now?” Mitch asked.

The policeman, not knowing his real fear, said, “You’ll be fine now. Don’t you worry.”

“Grandfather is on his way,” Adam said. “We’re going to live at his place.”

“Together?” Mitch asked.

“Always,” Adam said, ruffling his hair. “I’m not ever going to let anyone keep me away from my little brother.”

Their grandfather, Theodore Granville, proved to be a shrewd man, but not, so far as his grandsons were concerned, an unkind one. He was amused to learn that the boys referred to him as “the chief” and preferred they call him that rather than Grandfather. He had made most of his money in oil, and later in real estate, and had interests now in a variety of concerns. He was by no means a blue blood-a self-made man who had worked his own way out of poverty as a wildcatter in the oil fields, he was, Mitch came to see, not above using any means he could to gain an advantage over a rival.

For the most part, during those early years, he did not want to be troubled too often with his grandsons, an arrangement that suited the boys well. Adam cautioned Mitch that they had to do whatever the old man asked, because this good fortune could be lost as easily as it was gained. Mitch thought the chief had taken too strong a liking to Adam to kick them out, but he heeded Adam’s warnings all the same.

So they met the chief’s requirements that they be clean and well dressed and quickly learned any rule of etiquette he asked them to adhere to, and did not interrupt any gathering he held or cross the paths of his guests. He more than met their needs for food, clothing, and shelter. He provided them a generous allowance.

Adam, more easily bored than Mitch, soon involved himself in bolder adventures outside the house. Having learned that he had a knack for theft and leading toughs, he was unable to give up either pursuit. He managed to talk his grandfather into buying him a sleek boat. Later, his grandfather served as Adam’s business partner, sharing in Adam’s profits as a rumrunner.

His grandfather suffered setbacks during the Depression, but kept up appearances as much as possible. While still a teenager, Mitch learned that Adam and his grandfather had a number of shared businesses, not all of them legitimate, and each began to prepare Mitch to take his place in these concerns.

Mitch moved in higher social circles than his brother, and even gained entry to households where his grandfather had been snubbed. Not every door was open, of course. He drew the eye of Lillian Vanderveer, whose parents disapproved of him, and did their best to keep them apart.

Adam married a girl who had more looks than sense. At the chief’s insistence, Adam and his wife continued to live in the mansion. Two sons were born to them-Eric in 1934, and a year later, Ian. Mitch doted on them as if they were his own. Life seemed good.

Then, in late 1935, Adam’s luck ran out-he was arrested.

The chief used all his power, but to no avail. The papers made hay out of Adam’s arrest and trial. The old man was heartbroken. He died on New Year’s Day, 1936, and it later seemed to Mitch that he should have taken that as a sign of how terrible the year would be.

The milk was tepid now, and Mitch set the glass aside. He shut the train off and moved toward his desk. He stood for a while looking at two of the framed photos there. One was of his brother, Adam, at about the age of twenty- smiling, looking cocky as always. The other was of Mitch’s adopted son, taken when he was nine-the boy who was calling himself Max Ducane now, the boy who had so recently and so publicly renounced his ties to the Yeagers.

He reached for the photo of Kyle and stared at it.

Why had he ever given him any name at all? What did the little son of a bitch think would have happened to him if he hadn’t been adopted? Instead of letting him suffer the fate he deserved, he had given the brat his own name, and his brother’s name, and his family name, and much more. More than he himself had ever had as a boy. Put the little asshole through college-Ivy League, too. That wasn’t cheap.

He spent a moment wishing his own kids were half as bright as Kyle, but unfortunately they got their brains from their mother.

That didn’t make him feel any better about Kyle. He had, of course, always had his own reasons for anything he did on his adopted son’s behalf, but what did that matter?

The kid had betrayed him, plain and simple. Fuck him, and fuck Warren Ducane, too.

He placed the photo in a desk drawer, facedown.

He picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Have you found him yet?” he asked.

He did not get the answer he wanted.

Nothing would help him sleep tonight.