The Son

Chapter Fifty-six. J.A. McCullough

Once again she was a fool, they all knew it, even Milton Bryce. Domestic oil was a dead end, you lost money on every barrel you pumped. But she had a feeling. That was what she told them. Then she put it out of her mind. It was the biggest bet of her life and she was at peace.

She was happy with Ted, she was happy with her children, they were all doing well, even Susan and Thomas. Ben had finished at the top of his class and gone off to A&M. He did not care much for sports but he was conspicuously bright, interested in others, a good listener, the opposite of his siblings, who seemed to believe they had some special arrangement with fate (Susan) or were barely aware of anything outside themselves at all (Thomas). Susan had survived a single semester at Oberlin before moving to California; she would be unreachable for months and then the phone would ring at three A.M. and there she was, asking for some outrageous sum of money. Though she seemed happy. Jeannie would agree to the sum and Susan would tell of her adventures. As for Thomas, the oldest, he continued to live in her house. She was happier about this than she liked to admit, she knew she ought to push him out, but — his eccentricity — it seemed better for him to be close to home. There was the example of Phineas, but Thomas was not him.

Thomas was content to live with his mother and she was content to have him, he had a car, a large allowance, trips with his friends. He’d been a gorgeous child and it had ruined him; even now he expected to be the center of things. A man in love with his own face, that was how Ted put it, and she supposed she couldn’t blame him, he really did look like a young Peter O’Toole, the fact of which he was enormously proud, so much so that she was often tempted to point out that Peter O’Toole did not live with his mother.

As for his eccentricity, he hid it so well that she sometimes wondered if she were mistaken, though other times she was certain, and scared, and waiting for him to be caught in public. In truth, there was not much to be worried about. Everyone knew Tom McCullough, and Texans were good at ignoring things they didn’t want to see, it was a leftover from the frontier days when you couldn’t choose your neighbors.

Yes, her children were happy. It was a real pack, even Susan. These were good years. And perhaps because of this she continued to unwind her properties, to undiversify, she sold the steel company and the insurance company she had bought with Hank, most of the real estate, she plowed it all into oil, domestic acreage, which everyone was happy to sell her. It happened so easily she sometimes wondered if she was walking into her own suicide — financial suicide, at least — which would leave her family greatly diminished.

She wondered if it was the same liberated feeling that allowed her father to blow his inheritance on the ranch. Though her father was an actual fool. This was something else. She had gone touring around the Middle East with Cass Rutherford and while he found nothing amiss, in fact he thought things were getting better — the infrastructure, the competence of their drillers and geologists — she found the whole thing disturbing. Twenty years earlier, it had been men on camels. Now it was housing blocks, trash everywhere, people staring you down on every street corner. That was the problem with television — everyone saw what you were taking — what these Arabs saw was rich foreigners buying up their oil at ten cents on the dollar. By the end of the trip, she felt so corrupt and depressed that she’d considered getting out of the business altogether.

After a few weeks at home she came to her senses, but the uneasy feeling remained. Something was going to happen and the overthrow of Mosaddegh was a miracle unlikely to ever be repeated. And so she had begun to look at domestic acreage. She was a fool, though later they would call it women’s intuition, though it was not, it was just a question of seeing what was actually in front of you, instead of what you wanted to see.

Oil went nowhere. Then Bunker Hunt bet big in Libya and got massacred and the Egyptians went into Israel and the embargo hit. The boom had lasted ten years. And still this dissatisfaction. She had won her bet but they would not recognize her. They being… she was not sure. The world? Her dead father and brothers and husband? You expect a medal, she thought. And she did. It was not entirely unreasonable, some notice from the other operators, a bit of recognition, a mention of her alongside the Richardsons and Basses and Murchisons, the Hunts. She was certain — ragingly certain — that if Hank had pulled off what she had, his name would have been included. Maybe she had a victim complex. That’s what they wanted her to think.

She focused on her home life, maybe for the first time ever. Here was her medal: a happy house, happy children. Ben and Thomas and all their friends, who, like them, had gotten exceptions from the draft. They made her house their own, drinking and swimming at all hours, it was like being an older sister, young people drunk in the kitchen, drunk in the yard, they would tell her their problems.

THEN, QUICK AS that, as if a single twig had been holding it all up, it was over. Ben was down at the ranch; his truck went into a bar ditch. Milton Bryce had gone with her to see him — he did not look himself, she was not sure how, he had only a single black eye — they had parted his hair wrong — she walked out of the room and they had handed her something sweet — a Coke? — and then she was thinking of her brothers and then she remembered nothing.

They had buried him and then nothing more was expected, she had sat down in the old familiar house and everything became gauzy and unreachable. She had allowed, in some far corner of her mind, that something might happen to Thomas or Susan — their judgment was terrible, the risks — but Ben had been the linchpin, the steady soul. And if he… she had a feeling she would lose them all. She had failed in some fundamental way. They had been right about her all along.

Thomas also seemed to sense this, to sense that his brother’s death was her fault, that there was some power she had failed to exert, over the driving habits of young men, or the sharp curve in the road, or the bar ditch that flipped the truck. One day he went out and never came back. Susan called to say that he’d arrived in California; he’d driven all night. Gone forever, as it turned out. She sold the house in River Oaks and moved in with Ted.

She could admit it was different from losing her husband. She knew she would survive, she knew she would recover, do not take this as a lesson, Jonas told her, but she did, she had expected too much, and if it was not a lesson, then what was the point?

EVEN IF GOD existed, to say he loved the human race was preposterous. It was just as likely the opposite; it was just as likely he was systematically deceiving us. To think that an all-powerful being would make a world for anyone but himself, that he might spend all his time looking out for the interests of lesser creatures, it went against all common sense. The strong took from the weak, only the weak believed otherwise, and if God was out there, he was just as the Greeks and Romans had suspected; a trickster, an older brother who spent all his time inventing ways to punish you.

She was bitter, Ben had changed her, first for the better and then for the worse, she was furious and defeated, when she was not too low she assembled a vast dissertation, praise from various figures, approval from the Colonel, success in business, the covers of magazines, her marriage and worthy lovers and her saving of the McCullough name, it buoyed her for a time, it held her above the darkness, but always, always, she plunged. None of it mattered.

The boom continued. Time magazine came around again: now she was the woman who’d predicted the embargo. Incidentally, was she a feminist? No? Back on the cover she went, not entirely defeated, though it was not the same, not the same. A publisher approached her about a memoir, something inspirational for other people, women, they meant, your life story, the way you think and solve problems, something for the young to take inspiration from, though likely they meant housewives.

But what would she say? That the Colonel had been right? That you could only depend on yourself? It would not exactly fill a book. She tried anyway, and for a time a dream came back to her from youth, sitting behind a desk, answering letters from all her subjects, the cameras lingering on her every word, she wrote about her father and two brothers and the mother she had never known, her husband and son, where should she stop, children in the graveyard, the dead pouring forth until she set the papers aside. She knew why the Colonel had hated talking about the old days. Because the moment you looked back, and began to make your tally, you were done for.

BY ’83 THERE were wildcatters going bankrupt left and right, but for Ted and most of their friends, the boom had been nothing more than a period of unusual wealth, in which the royalty checks they all lived on had been preposterous instead of merely large.

Jonas was fine, frugal as always; no belt tightening necessary. He still commuted down to Boston a few days a week in his old Volvo, maybe from Martha’s Vineyard, maybe from Newport, maybe from his lake house in Maine, though if he really did anything at his legal practice, she didn’t know. Mostly he seemed to wake up at the same time every morning, spending hours writing lists of what needed to be done: winterize boat, paint railings on porch (he considered himself handy), call about Volvo noise, Bill squash (racquet), porch screens, tuition, Bohemian Club, reservations at… He got great satisfaction crossing things off his list; sometimes he would write things he had already done (breakfast with Jeannie) just to cross them off again.

She considered selling the ranch, keeping the house but selling the land, she had no family left in Texas; in Midland you could buy a Rolls-Royce or office building or even a Boeing for pennies on the dollar, there wouldn’t be work in the oil business for a long time, that was clear. It was time to sell. There was no point being so far from her only living brother and her children.

She and Ted were at the ranch, fighting about this very thing (one did not sell land, he thought), when Consuela came to tell her there was someone at the door.

IT WAS A Mexican woman around her own age, wearing a dress and jewelry as if expected for a party. Jeannie hadn’t yet showered that day; she brushed back her hair and smoothed her blouse and felt short.

“I am Adelina Garcia.”

This meant nothing.

“I am Peter McCullough’s daughter.”

This meant nothing as well. Then it did. She reached for the doorknob.

“Peter McCullough did not have any daughters,” she said. “I’m afraid you are mistaken.”

“He is my father,” the woman repeated.

When Jeannie didn’t react, the woman got an imperious look. “You are my niece,” she said. “Regardless of our ages.”

Maybe it was the language barrier, but she could not have picked a worse thing to say. “Well you have met me. And I am busy.” Jeannie closed the door. The woman stood on the porch a long time then walked slowly back to her car. Jeannie wondered how she’d gotten through the gate.

It was an old trick. Though usually you heard about it through a lawyer. Still, she felt unsettled, and back in the library, she lost all her strength and collapsed against Ted. He leaned around her to see the television.

“Anyone important?”

She felt sick; something told her to follow the woman but she could not make herself get up.

“What do you want to eat?” he said.

“That was a Mexican person claiming to be my relative.”

“Your very first?”

She nodded.

“Welcome to the club.”

She sat there.

“Call Milton Bryce,” he said, not looking up from the television. It was Dallas. People were obsessed with it. “Call him right now if you’re really worried about it.”

But she was not sure that was she was worried in that way. She decided to think about it. She waited until dinner and decided it was nothing.

WHAT ELSE MIGHT she have been? She had plenty of friends from old families who were always carrying on about how helpless they were, no driver’s licenses or social security cards, the worst sort of bragging, they were helpless, absolutely helpless, and proud of it.

The things that made them happy meant nothing to her. She was a leftover from another time, maybe, like her great-grandfather. But even that was not true. She was not like him at all. She’d had no imagination, she’d chased only what she could see, she could have done more.

She had a feeling she ought to apologize, but to whom, and for what, she didn’t know. She looked around the room. It was still dark. When it finally happens, she thought, I won’t even know it, and then she wasn’t afraid.