The second effect of George's death was of course upon his children. Fourteen-year-old Mitchell had become a particular focus of public attention after his father's demise: his looks were beginning to deliver on their promise (he would be, by general consensus, the handsomest Geary yet) and the way he dealt with the invasiveness of the press spoke of a maturity and a dignity beyond his years. He was a prince; everyone agreed; a prince.
Garrison, who was six years his senior, had always been far more retiring, and he did little to conceal his discomfort during this period. While Mitchell stayed close to his mother throughout the period of mourning, accompanying her to philanthropic galas and the like in his father's stead, Garrison retreated from the limelight almost completely. And there he would remain. As for Tyler and Karen, both of whom were younger than Mitchell, their lives were left unexamined by the columnists, at least for a few years. Tyler was to die in 1987, along with his Uncle Todd, Norah's fourth husband, when the light aircraft Todd was piloting came down during a sudden storm near Orlando, Florida. Karen-who in hindsight probably most closely resembled her father in the essential gentility of her nature-became an archeologist, and rapidly distinguished herself in that field.
The third consequence of George Geary's sudden demise was the reascension of Cadmus Geary. He had weathered the physical and mental frailty that had been visited upon him just as he'd weathered so much else in his life, and now-when the Geary empire needed a leader, he was there to take charge. He was by now in his eighties, but he behaved as though his little sickness had been but a palate cleanser, a sour sorbet that had sharpened his appetite for the rare meat now set before him. In a decade of naked acquisitiveness, here was the triumphant return of the man who'd written the modem rules of combat. At times he seemed to be at pains to compensate for hi& late son's humanity. Anyone who stood against him (usually for principles espoused by George) was summarily ousted; Cadmus didn't have the time or the temper for persuasion. Wall Street responded well to the change. Old Man Cadmus Back in Charge, ran the headline of The Wall Street Journal, and in a couple of months there were profiles running everywhere, plus the inevitable catalogues of Cad-mus's cruelties. He didn't care. He never had and he never would. This was his style, and it suited the world into which he had resurrected himself more than a little well.
There'll be more about Old Man Geary later; a lot more. For now, let me leave him there, in triumph, and go back to the subject of mortality. I've already told you how Laurence Geary died (the whore's bed, Havana) and Tyler (Uncle Todd's plane, Florida) and of course George (in the driving seat of his Mercedes, Long Island) but there are other passages to the great beyond that should be noted here. Did I mention Cadmus's mother, Verna? Yes, I did. She perished in a madhouse, you'll remember. I didn't however note that her passing was almost certainly also murder, probably at the hands of another inmate, one Dolores Cooke, who committed suicide (with a stolen toothpick, pricking herself so many times she bled to death) six days after Verna's demise. Eleanor, her rejected daughter, died in hearty old age, as did Louise Brooks, who gave up her career in cinema in the early thirties, finding the whole endeavor too trivial to be endured.
Of the significant players here, that only leaves Kitty, who died of cancer of the esophagus in 1979, just as
Cadmus was emerging from his own bout of frailty. She was two years younger than the century. The next year, Cadmus remarried: the recipient of the offer a woman almost twenty years his junior, Loretta Talley, (another sometime actress, by the way: Loretta had played Broadway in her youth, but, like Louise, tired of her ppwer-lessness).
As for Kitty, she has little or no part in what follows, which is a pity for me, because I have in my possession a copy of an extraordinary document she wrote in the last year of her life which would fuel countless interesting speculations. The text is utterly chaotic, but that's not surprising given the strength of the medications she was on while she was writing it. Page after page of the testimony (all of which is handwritten) documents the yearnings she felt for some greater meaning than the duties of mother, wife, and public philanthropist, a profound and unanswered hunger for something poetic in her life. Sometimes the sense of the text falls apart entirely, and it becomes a series of disconnected images. But even these are potent. It seems to me she begins, at the end of her life, to live in a continuous present: a place where memory, experience and expectation are all folded together in one delirious stream of feeling. Sometimes she writes as though she were a child looking down at her own wasted body, fascinated by its mutinies and its grotesqueries. She also talks about Galilee.
It wasn't until I read the document for the third time (combing it for clues to her beliefs about George Geary's murder) that I realized my half brother was present in the text. But he's there. He enters and exits Kitty's account like the breeze that's presently ruffling the papers on my desk; visible only by its effect. But there's no question that he somehow offered her a taste of all that she'd been denied; that he was, if not the love of her life, at least a tantalizing glimpse of what changes a love of real magnitude-reciprocated love, that is-might have wrought in her.
Let me now give you a brief guided tour to the Geary residences, since so many of the exchanges I will be reporting occur there. Over the years the family has accrued large amounts of real estate and, because they never needed to realize the capital, seldom sold anything. Sometimes they renovated these properties, and occupied them. But just as often Geary houses have been kept for decades-regularly cleaned and redecorated-without any member of the family stepping over the threshold. As of this writing, I know of houses and apartments the family owns in Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, Montana, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Hawaii. In Europe they own properties in Vienna, Zurich, London, and Paris; and further afield, in Cairo, Bangkok, and Hong Kong.
For now, however, it's the New York residences that I need to describe in a little detail. Mitchell has a pied & terre on the fringes of Soho, far more extravagantly appointed inside, and far more obsessively guarded, than its undistinguished exterior would suggest. Margie and Garrison occupy two floors dose to the top of the Trump Tower, an apartment which commands extraordinary views in all directions. The purchase was Margie's suggestion (at the time it was some of the most expensive space in the world, and she liked the idea of spending so much of Garrison's money) but she never really warmed to the apartment, for all its glamour. The decorator she hired, a man called Jeffrey Penrose, died a month after finishing his transformation, and posthumous articles about him mentioned the Trump Tower apartment as his "last great creation; like the woman who employed him-kitschy, glitzy, and wild." So it was; and so was Margie, back then. The years since haven't been kind, however. The glitter looks tawdry now; and what seemed witty in the eighties has lost its edge.