“Maybe you could suggest something cheaper,” Paul Christian had said. “For your father.”
That was when Paul Christian had stopped speaking to Janet.
“Send him a whole tuna,” Dwight Christian had advised when Janet reported this development. “Have it delivered. Packed in ice. Half a ton of bluefin. Goddamn, I’ll do it myself.”
Paul Christian had stopped speaking to Dwight a month before, after stopping by his office to say that the annual dinner dance on the eve of the Hawaiian Open seemed, from his point of view, a vulgar extravagance.
“ ‘Vulgar,’ ” Dwight Christian had repeated.
“Vulgar, yes. From my point of view.”
“Why don’t you say from the point of view of a Cambodian orphan?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I could see the point of view of a Cambodian orphan. I could appreciate this orphan’s position on dinner dances in Honolulu. I might not agree wholeheartedly but I could respect it, I could—”
“You could what?”
As Dwight Christian explained it to Inez he had realized in that instant that this particular encounter was no-win. This particular encounter had been no-win from the time Paul Christian hit on the strategy of coming not to the house but to the office. He had come unannounced, in the middle of the day, and had been cooling his heels in the reception room like some kind of drill-bit salesman when Dwight Christian came back from lunch.
“Your brother’s been waiting almost an hour,” the receptionist had said, and Dwight had read reproach in her voice.
As tactics went this one had been minor but effective, a step up from turning down invitations on the ground that they could not be reciprocated, and its impact on Dwight Christian had been hard to articulate. Dwight Christian did not believe that he had mentioned it even to Ruthie. In fact he had pushed it from his mind. It had seemed absurd. In that instant in the office Dwight Christian had realized that Paul Christian was no longer presenting himself as the casual victim of his family’s self-absorption. He was now presenting himself as the deliberate victim of his family’s malice.
“I could buy the orphan’s point of view,” Dwight Christian had said finally. “I can’t buy yours.”
“Revealing choice of words.”
Dwight Christian said nothing.
“Always trying to ‘buy,’ aren’t you, Dwight?”
Dwight Christian squared the papers on his desk before he spoke. “Ruthie will miss you,” he said then.
“I’m sure you can get one of your Oriental friends to fill out the table,” Paul Christian said.
Later that day the receptionist had mentioned to the most senior of Dwight Christian’s secretaries, who in due course mentioned it to him, that she found it “a little sad” that Mr. Christian’s brother had to live at the YMCA.
That was January.
At first Dwight Christian said February but Ruthie corrected him: it would have been January because the invitations to the dance had just gone out.
The dance itself was February.
The Open was February.
In February there had been the dance and the Open and the falling-out with Janet over the canned tuna. In February there had also been the Chriscorp annual meeting, at which Paul Christian had embarrassed everyone, most especially (according to Ruthie) himself, by introducing a resolution that called for the company to “explain itself.” Of course the newspapers had got hold of it. “Unspecified allegations flowed from one dissident family member but the votes were overwhelmingly with management at Chriscorp’s annual meeting yesterday,” the Honolulu Advertiser had read. “DISGRUNTLED CHRISTIAN SEEKS DISCLOSURE,” was the headline in the Star-Bulletin.
The Chriscorp meeting was the fifteenth of February.
On the first of March Paul Christian had surfaced a second time in the Advertiser, with a letter to the editor demanding the “retraction” of a photograph showing Janet presenting an Outdoor Circle Environmental Protection Award for Special Effort in Blocking Development to Rep. Wendell Omura (D-Hawaii). Paul Christian’s objection to the photograph did not appear to be based on the fact that the development Wendell Omura was then blocking was Dick Ziegler’s. His complaint was more general, and ended with the phrase “lest we forget.”
“I’m not sure they could actually ‘retract’ a photograph, Paul,” Ruthie Christian had said when he called, at an hour when he knew Dwight to be on the golf course, to ask if she had seen the letter.
“I just want Janet to know,” Paul Christian had said, “that in my eyes she’s hit bottom.”
He had said the same thing to Dick Ziegler. “An insult to you,” he had added on that call. “How dare she.”
“I respect your point,” Dick Ziegler had said carefully, “but I wonder if the Advertiser was the appropriate place to make it.”
“They’ve gone too far, Dickie.”
After the letter to the Advertiser Paul Christian had begun calling Dick Ziegler several times a day with one or another cryptic assurance. “Our day’s coming,” he would say, or “tough times, Dickie, hang in there.” Since it had been for Dick Ziegler a year of certain difficulties, certain reverses, certain differences with Dwight Christian (Dwight Christian’s refusal to break ground for the mall that was to have been the linch-pin of the windward development was just one example) and certain strains with Janet (Janet’s way of lining up with Dwight on the postponement of the windward mall had not helped matters), he could see in a general way that these calls from his father-in-law were intended as expressions of support.
Still, Dick Ziegler said to Inez, the calls troubled him.
He had found them in some way excessive.
He had found them peculiar.
“I may not be the most insightful guy in the world when it comes to human psychology,” Dick Ziegler said, “but I think your dad went off the deep end.”
“Fruit salad,” Dwight Christian said.
“That’s hindsight,” Ruthie Christian said.
“What the hell does that mean?” Dwight Christian had stopped drinking martinis and lapsed into a profound irritability. “Of course it’s hindsight. Jesus Christ. ‘Hindsight.’ ”
“Janet loves you, Inez,” Dick Ziegler said. “Don’t ever forget that. Janet loves you.”
8
DURING the time I spent talking to Inez Victor in Kuala Lumpur she returned again and again to that first day in Honolulu. This account was not sequential. For example she told me initially, perhaps because I had told her what Billy Dillon said about the crackers, about talking to Dwight and Ruthie Christian and to Dick Ziegler, but it had been late in the day when she talked to Dwight and Ruthie Christian and to Dick Ziegler.
First there had been the hospital.
She and Billy Dillon had gone directly from the airport to the hospital but Janet was being prepared for an emergency procedure to drain fluid from her brain and Inez had been able to see her only through the glass window of the intensive care unit.
They had gone then to the jail.
“I suppose Dwight’ll be breaking out the champagne tonight,” Paul Christian had said in the lawyers’ room at the jail.
Inez had looked at Billy Dillon. “Why,” she said finally.
“You know.” Paul Christian smiled. He seemed relaxed, even buoyant, tilting back his wooden chair and propping his bare heels on the Formica table in the lawyers’ room. His pants were rolled above his tanned ankles. His blue prison shirt was knotted jauntily at the waist. “You’ll be there. I’m here. You can celebrate. Why not.”