"Seems a little late for that kind of wondering, doesn't it? If you weren't prepared to make a decision about her, maybe you should have kept it in your pants."
"I don't mean that."
"Not that we weren't pleased. Your mother has been running around with a pen and a special notebook writing down things for the wedding. She hasn't even finished figuring out the lists for the engagement party yet, but she has to make some moves to streamline this whole process so the bride won't be too obviously far along at the wedding. I haven't seen her this happy in twenty years."
Was the boat just drifting and rolling with the swells? Richard kept feeling worse. "Look, Dad. I've been trying to protect Mother from getting all excited and then being disappointed later, and you, too. I don't know how you found out Christine was pregnant. She didn't actually come out and tell even me."
"That's not good," said Andy Beale.
"How did you find out?"
"If I had wanted you to know that, I'd have told you. And for weeks, the mistake I thought you were making was trying to keep this to yourself and then springing it on your mother too late. But I guess you were making a different kind of mistake. With you, it's always some kind of mistake."
"That's not fair."
"Pah!" Andy Beale spat out something that was almost a laugh, but carried no happiness. "What I told you four years ago hasn't changed, Richard. I was the one who started this life with nothing but a pair of calloused hands and a reasonably serviceable brain. When the navy sent me here, they sent a million other guys here, too. I was one of the ones who had his eyes and ears open. I could see that lots of those guys were from cold, hard, barren places. Once they'd been here, they were going to come back. Hell, that's been going on since World War Two. That's why there is a San Diego. Some of us were willing to take risks and work hard. I bought my first duplex apartment by working two jobs before your mother and I were even married. I saved the rent on that one to put a down payment on another, and used your mother's savings from her nurse job to buy the third. I never looked back. We both worked for other people until we were over fifty while we were doing real estate deals at night and showing rentals to prospective tenants on our lunch hours. You get to be a big shot and tool around in a Porsche at twice the speed limit and live in a house like a palace and make milliondollar deals all day. But you'd do well to remember that none of it is yours. I let you get used to all of it because I'm not going to live forever, and I need somebody who knows how to run it after I can't. I didn't want you to inherit it at the age of fifty or sixty and know so little that you let somebody take it away from you."
"I know, Dad, and I'm grateful. I've always been grateful. I don't say it often, because I know you wouldn't think much of me if I followed you around all day saying how grateful I am."
"No, I wouldn't. But there are certain things that you are required to do, and you've known that from the beginning. Your mother wants grandchildren. Sometimes I think that's all that keeps her interested in staying alive. She's waiting to see them and spoil them. I want grandchildren, too. All the work and sacrifice and agony I went through to make something of this family is going to be thrown away and wasted if there are no more Beales to make use of it. I didn't do all that—work eighteen or nineteen hours a day, leveraging everything I had on each new deal over and over again—just so you can live this bachelor existence, screwing around until you're eighty, and then die and have everything I built confiscated by the fucking State of California. I want heirs, and I want the first one this year."
"Dad, if you know about Christine, you must realize that I'm trying to do what you expect of me."
"It's about time. I was pretty much convinced that you were gay, and she was just around to type and pick up your clothes at the cleaner's."
"So now you know I'm not gay."
"Yeah, yeah. You like girls. It's an enormous accomplishment. Now I want you to see something." He reached into the rack where the nautical maps were stowed, and pulled out a long white envelope with a string-tie closing at one end.
"If that's your will, you showed it to me when we talked about this four years ago. If I don't have a child before you die, then the money goes to the cousins. How could I forget?"
"I changed it again. This is a new one, and there are copies with people I trust all over the country, so don't even think about waiting until I die and tearing it up. It can't happen." He held out the white envelope.
Richard Beale had been up on the bridge too long. He was in a bad state of seasickness brought on by the slower speed, which had permitted some of the diesel exhaust to find its way up here. He waved the envelope away. "Why don't you just tell me what it says?"
His father shook his head in a gesture of disdain for people who had no sea legs. "All right. It says that when your first child is born, you get a one-tenth share of everything—the business, the property holdings, the bank balances." He lifted his eyes from the will and glared at Richard. "That was going to be the first of your presents that we had intended to reveal at the engagement party. I can see you know there's more coming. You're waiting for that. You're right. We waited and waited for you to share your news with us, until I got a bad feeling about it, so I added something. You've got until the end of this year."
"What do you mean?"
"We figure this baby, our grandchild, is going to be born around September or October. Is that right?"
"I don't know. Yeah, I guess so. The fall, anyway."
"Then you'd better make it work. If I don't have a grandchild by the end of this year, I give up on you."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"What does it mean? That if I don't hand you this baby by New Year's Day, I don't inherit anything when you die?"
"That's part of it. You'll also be out of the company on January 2. I'll pick somebody else to run it for me. You can go off on your own and work with what you've got, and maybe grow up and make something of yourself, or maybe not. Either way, you will have blown the opportunity you got by being born."
"You didn't say this before. It's June. If Christine doesn't work out, I don't have time to father another baby by the end of December. This is completely unfair."
"You think I got what I have by being fair to the guy on the other side of the table?"
"But this is one twenty-year-old girl. Sometimes relationships don't last. Maybe she doesn't want to marry me. Maybe she'll abort the baby."
"If she was going to, she would have. She's almost six months."
Richard was feeling worse. He couldn't meet the old man's eyes, but when he looked out the window to the side of the bridge, all he saw was the sea, then the sky, then the sea again. How did the old man know the exact moment of conception? "Then she might give it up for adoption. She always said she wants to go to college."
"Have her give the baby to you then—to us. I'll settle for a second chance to raise an heir with some sense of duty. I'll give the girl the cost of four-years' tuition and living expenses in exchange for the baby. More, even. You can keep screwing around and playing with cars, and keep being caretaker of the business until the kid is ready to take over."
"Why are you suddenly in such a rush? This doesn't have to be the only chance for a grandchild. There are millions of other girls out there who might work out."
"This is the only one you knocked up."
Richard, in his nauseated state, almost protested that it wasn't, but caught the words before he ruined himself. "What I'm trying to tell you is that I want to do what's expected, but this isn't a situation where I have absolute control."