The Son

Chapter Forty-seven. J.A. McCullough

She was back in the office in Houston. Milton Bryce in his thick lawyer’s glasses, already combing his hair over, telling her to make an offer on Brown and Root. But there was very little oil flowing anywhere; she couldn’t see the point in a pipeline company.

“They also do dams, military bases, things like that,” Bryce was saying. “A lot of work for the Corps of Engineers. You know Herman Brown died…”

“I heard that.”

“And now George is trying to get out of the business. I mean now. This week.”

Something about his insistence put her off; she stopped listening.

“It’s clean and you could probably get the whole thing for forty. If I had the money myself…”

She made a note to look into it, but a few days later, Ed Halliburton scraped together an offer, despite the fact that, along with the rest of the industry, his well-cementing company was hitting bottom. George Brown sold out for thirty-six million dollars; within a decade the company was grossing seven hundred million a year, building bases for the army in Vietnam.

It was hardly her only mistake. For years after Hank’s death, she’d felt the need to calculate and recalculate every risk, as if everything she did was being recorded for others to judge, as if her most private thoughts would become public. She became deliberate to a fault, building cases for every decision, she was never not reading, she was never not thinking; it was unusual for her to have a conversation that she had not already rehearsed in her mind, and there were times she convinced herself that not even Hank could have kept pace. Though in more sober moments, she knew there was something missing. The men around her were always sure they were right, even when there was no good reason. That was what mattered. Being sure of things. If you were wrong, you just defended your position even more loudly.

Meanwhile, everyone was stealing from her. T.J. Block, their partner on several drilling projects, had for “purposes of convenience” moved into Hank’s office. In her haze she had signed off on new leases, not having the energy to look into them herself, though the problem was also Hank: he had made so many verbal agreements, had his fingers in so many projects, so many promises… she could not keep track. She could not tell when someone was lying to her. She was being charged twice for the same orders of casing pipe and drilling mud, she couldn’t tell if it was her drillers ripping her off or the suppliers or both, everyone saw an opportunity, there were offers to buy her out. Hank’s sisters sued her for half the company and her own employees thought she was stupid; they were slow to follow orders, seemed to think she could not tell the difference between a good job and a bad job, they were reluctant to start big projects that they were certain she would abandon. There were casing problems, cementing problems, flow problems, the equipment broke constantly… to Hank they had given their best, to her they gave nothing.

Of course, they all assured her this wasn’t so. She was not sure if she was being paranoid or going crazy or was just in over her head and ought to sell the company to T.J. Block, who acted like it was already his. Everyone seemed to know things she didn’t; she wondered if her phone had been bugged.

So far as everyone was concerned it was Hank they had worked for. She was nothing more than an appendage, a pretty blond housewife who — instead of opening a clothing boutique or horse stable or something sensible — had decided to amuse herself at her husband’s office.

She began to suspect she might really crack up, that she would have to take the kids and leave Houston and move back to the ranch, and then she and Milton Bryce were going to lunch and instead of stopping to park she kept going. Down the street and out toward the countryside.

“I was not hungry anyway,” he said.

She continued to drive out of the city until there was nothing but tall straight pines and oaks, the light coming green over the road. She said, “Who is definitely not stealing from me?”

He was quiet and then he stayed quiet. She wondered if he had turned against her like the others.

“Bud Lanning is not bad,” he finally said.

“Bud Lanning ordered four thousand feet of casing pipe to finish a two-thousand-foot hole.”

“Gordon Lytle?”

She had made a mistake.

He mashed his hair over.

“What do you think of Mr. T.J. Block?”

“He is fine,” said Bryce. “Except for being a liar and a thief.”

She felt herself smile and the relief came over her and then faded and then she was furious. They continued down the road in silence.

“You didn’t ask,” he said. “And it’s not really my place to offer these opinions.”

“What if I just fired everyone right now?”

“You’ll want to change the locks first. And you’ll need to hang on to at least one of the secretaries. Maybe two.”

She turned the car around at a logging road and headed back to town.

They spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the Museum of Fine Arts. Finally she decided she could hold down a sandwich. Even that turned out to be too ambitious but nonetheless, that night she had the locks changed and in the morning, as people began to show up at the office, she fired them all except Edna Hinnant, the secretary.

THE NEW EMPLOYEES were better and yet… in order to be respected she had to know their jobs as well as hers; if she did not understand fracture flow and jet perforation versus gun perforation and different methods of sand consolidation and acidizing and propping agents… she wanted only to sleep but there was so much to review, more than would ever have been expected of Hank. She felt herself wavering again; there was no point in working so hard at something that no one wanted her to be doing.

Later she would realize that it was simply that she’d had nothing else. Her children were not enough and she had always known she was nothing like her grandmother, nothing like the other women in the neighborhood, whose lives were sunk into their outfits and fund-raisers, who might spend a week trying to get the seating at a party just right. She had always seen herself a certain way; the fact that others felt entitled to an opinion on the matter — on who she ought to be — should not have come as a shock, though it did. While other women got prescriptions for Valium, she got one for Benzedrine, and every time she felt herself fading or she wanted to stay in bed or take a long lunch she reminded herself of the Colonel, who had kept working until he was ninety years old.

Endless reports, mental exercises to keep her mind fresh. Any numbers she saw — a license plate, house number, street sign — she would multiply, divide, manipulate in some way, 7916 Oak Drive, seventy-nine times sixteen, which was eighty times sixteen minus sixteen. Twelve hundred eighty. Minus sixteen. Twelve sixty-four.

As for the men around her, they remained polite while resisting everything she did. She convinced Aubrey Stokes to sell her a lease instead of passing it up to the majors, but just as she was about to hang up the phone, he said:

“I’ll get some papers over there this afternoon. Just to make sure we’re on the right page.”

She was too surprised to reply.

“Nothing personal, Jeannie.”

But it was personal. There wasn’t a single oil operator in the state who didn’t consider his word as good as his bond, who didn’t look down on the easterners and their endless need for lawyers and documents. But men who’d taken Hank’s word would not take hers. They acted as if she’d landed from outer space or they sweetly ignored her attempts to talk business and turned the conversation toward her family and her health (she was under a lot of pressure); they did not trust that she could be relentless or focused when nature demanded she stay home with her babies.

She took all the pictures of the kids out of her office. She could not have people suspecting she was thinking about her family when she ought to be thinking about work, and equally — though it took much longer to admit this to herself — she could not disturb the fantasy that these men had about sleeping with her. She wouldn’t, and didn’t, but you did not want them thinking that door was closed. You did not want pictures of your kids.

After she fired everyone she spent seven days a week in the office and, knowing she would need the same of Milton Bryce, tripled his salary and gave his wife a credit line at Neiman Marcus. As for her children, Tom and Ben sensed they would have to bear up. Susan was lost for good. The boys had always been well-behaved and self-sufficient; Susan had been a colicky baby and as a toddler she was always sneaking into bed with Hank and Jeannie, claiming she’d had a bad dream. By the age of four or five, if she were not getting enough attention she would reach for something convenient, perhaps a vase, perhaps her water glass, and, while pretending to inspect it, drop it to the floor.

Hank had known how to deal with her. He had patience and an ability to compartmentalize that Jeannie could not muster. His mind was a neatly ordered place and if Susan threw a fit he could give her his complete attention and then forget her the moment he walked out the door. The nanny is taking care of her — there is no more need to worry—that was how his mind worked, it was switches inside a computer. But Jeannie, even after getting to the office, would stay angry with her daughter for half the days. She took the fits personally, she took her daughter’s softness personally, there were strains of weak blood in all families, there were those who sat and soaked in their own problems and those who got up and helped themselves. Jeannie, at her daughter’s age, had taught herself how to ride and rope, she had taught herself to compete with men on their own terms. Her daughter competed by being loud and disruptive, an impossible princess; even before her father died she saw him as a saint and her mother as something else; whatever Jeannie did it was never enough.

Of course her daughter was only being what a girl in Texas was supposed to be. It was Jeannie who was the odd one.