Born To Be Wild

FORTY-EIGHT

Chris Noth played Lucky on As the World Turns before his role on Law & Order.

BORN TO BE WILD

Sunday Cavendish walks into her grandfather’s library, past paneled bookshelves filled with books, dark leather furniture, and thick draperies. It’s old-money rich, understated and elegant.

“Hello, Grandfather.”

Nelson Blakeney Cavendish II, eighty-one years old, looking frail but with a lovely head of white hair, is sitting in a big leather chair reading the newspaper. He looks up, nods.

She walks to the leather chair opposite him and sits down. “My father is in town.”

She watches him closely as she says it. Slowly, he folds the newspaper and lays it on his lap. “Your mother told me.” He shrugs. “What does he want?”

“I don’t know, he hasn’t told me. I understand that Grandmother eavesdropped on your conversation with him twenty-seven years ago, that you tried to kill him with a gun but he took it away from you.”

The old man doesn’t hesitate, shrugs. “I’m glad he did. It would have been difficult to keep his death by gunshot out of the papers and behind the doors in the D.A.’s office.”

“Difficult even for you?”

“Yes, even for me. Not impossible, I would probably have managed it, since I was the one who put the D.A. in office in the first place and the last thing he’d ever want to do is embarrass me.”

“Grandmother said my father accused you of breaking the law-extortion, stock manipulations-business as usual?”

“Your grandmother was always a fanciful woman.”

“Then why is it you never call me by my name?”

He stares at her a long moment. Finally he says, “It’s a ridiculous name given to you by a pompous, hypocritical charlatan who has done nothing in his life but swindle people out of their money with the idiotic promise of setting them on the path to eternal life. It makes me sick, always has.”

“Me as well,” Sunday says.

He looks surprised.

“The thing is, I’m not at all sure my father is a charlatan. Have you ever watched him on TV?”

Her grandfather looks disgusted. “Oh, he’s a good actor, I know that. He has an oily charm that appeals to gullible people. Don’t let him draw you in because that’s why he’s come back-to draw you in, to make you believe all of us were wrong about him.”

“That’s certainly possible,” Sunday says. “Was it true? Did you cheat people? Break laws? Ruin lives?”

He gives a scratchy laugh. “You, of all people, ask me that? You know as well as I do that power, no matter how wisely used, can have bad consequences, for some. When elephants fight, the grass suffers, as they say. You do it yourself every day. Have you done a head count of the people you’ve hurt with your company policies? Your buyouts? You don’t think much about who gets hurt, do you? Of course not. Your mother never did either. She enjoyed having power, until you managed to take it from her. Are you honest enough to admit it? Tough enough?”

She looks at him steadily. “You wanted to kill your own son-in-law because he stood up to you?”

She waits a moment, but he doesn’t answer her.

“Why did you react so violently to what he said to you?”

“You’re like a damned lawyer. You don’t answer a question, you ask another one. Your mother trained you well.”

“My mother never trained me at all. What she did was send me out of the country. Or was it you who did that? You who saw to it that I, the hypocrite’s seed, was removed from your sight?”

He sips a glass of water from the carafe at his side. He sets the glass down, looks at her thoughtfully. “Self-pity doesn’t suit you, it hangs better on Susan. Maybe it was good for your character that your mother cut you loose-very well, that we cut you loose. Yes, I was the one who insisted I wanted you gone.” He snaps his fingers in her face. “Gone.”

She is stiff with pain, but she tries not to show it. She’s known how he felt, but hasn’t ever admitted it, never asked him or her mother. She stares at him. She smiles. “Why then, thank you, Grandfather.”

“You’re good. Very good. You would have made an excellent lawyer.”

She draws a breath, shrugs. “Think of it as part of your heritage, Grandfather-and his.”

Her grandfather looks at her broodingly-

“Clear!”

The last scene. A relief. Once out of her makeup, back into jeans and a T-shirt, Mary Lisa walked out of the studio into the bright late afternoon sunlight. She rummaged in her purse for her sunglasses. There were people from the studio scattered around her. She raised her face to the sun, smiled. She’d wait for Lou Lou right there.

But then she heard Lou Lou yelling her name. She heard a scream, and then the rumble of a motorcycle. It was close, coming closer. It was jumping the curb, roaring louder than a rocket now, coming straight at her.