"Problems?" Bat asked.
"Oh, yeah. The problems are beginning to show up. Coincidences that don't make sense. Oh, yeah. We're going to have problems."
23
1
JONAS ENJOYED ASSEMBLING PEOPLE HE CARED FOR at the ranch at Christmas. It wasn't always possible. The year Nevada died, and the next year, he didn't feel like it. He couldn't imagine the party without Nevada. He invited Jo-Ann the next year. And he brought Angie. Bat had felt obliged to go to Mexico for Christmas. Four sat down at the table: Jonas and Jo-Ann and Angie and Robair. It wasn't enough. He had actually considered inviting Monica, to fill the house. Then last year he was just out of the hospital for Christmas, so they spent the holiday in the apartment in the Waldorf Towers — the same four, plus Bat. This year there would be more people but no Robair, who had died in August.
This year Bat would bring Toni again. Jonas asked Jo-Ann to bring Ben Parrish. He had to face the man sometime. So did Monica, so he had invited her, too, and her cartoonist friend Bill Toller, if she wanted to bring him — or whoever was sleeping in her bed this year.
Since the heart attack Jonas had let his pilot's license lapse. He had not taken the biennial physical, because he doubted they would pass him. Bill Shaw was technically pilot in command of the Beechcraft Bonanza they flew from Las Vegas to the ranch, but Jonas sat in the left seat and flew the airplane. He hadn't lost his touch and was exhilarated by having his hands on the controls of an airplane again.
He landed first at the Cord Explosives plant and went in to see once more the office where his father died. The plant manager didn't use it. It was kept as an office for the Cords, whenever one of them came to the plant. Jonas went out into the plant and shook hands with as many as he could of the workers, mostly Mexicans, who still operated this highly profitable seminal enterprise of the Cord empire. They hadn't seen him for a long time, and they didn't see Bat often either. His visit was good for their morale.
Bill Shaw carried Jonas's luggage into the ranch house and then took off in the Bonanza to be with his family in Los Angeles for Christmas. Angie was in the house, trying to do what Robair had always done: decorate for Christmas and organize the meals. She was a good girl and was doing her best, but Jonas realized she couldn't do what Robair had done, much less what Nevada had done; and he reached an abrupt conclusion that he would sell the ranch. This would be his last Christmas there.
2
Toni was dismayed by Jonas. She couldn't really like him, because she couldn't like his influence over Bat; but she was jolted by the change in the man. She remembered what Bat had told her when she came here for Christmas five years ago: that the household would live to Jonas's schedule, that probably consciously but even unconsciously he would dominate totally. He would be the center of everything. He still was, but not in the same way. Everyone gathered around him. Everyone deferred to him. But it was for a new reason — that they sensed he was a dying lion. What was worse he obviously sensed the same thing and had settled into the role. It was appalling. He was only fifty-three!
At Christmas in 1952 she had observed the immense energy of these people. Now she saw something else: that none of them loved Jonas, and he didn't love them. She was distressed by the thought that maybe they were incapable of love. They shared a sense of family, a stalwart loyalty toward each other; but it wasn't love; it was something else, a defensive family allegiance that inspired them to strike out at anyone who threatened the demesne. That was their only commitment to each other: to protect the turf. They would rush to each other's defense, not because they cared for each other, but to defend the empire.
Monica stood by the fireplace chatting with her friend Bill Toller, who had to have accommodated her to come here and be subjected to this evening. Monica patently didn't like any of the Cords, including her own daughter. She knew why Jonas had invited her here: to let her see what her daughter had married. Jonas was punishing her for something out of the past. He was succeeding. Monica was at no pains to conceal her antipathy for the Hollywood hustler her daughter had married, nor her indifference for the son Jonas had discovered.
Toni had done a little research into the life and character of Benjamin Parrish. She had a word for him. Slick. She had anticipated slick, and he was slick. He was a bulky man, ten years older than Jo-Ann, and he was all but absurdly protective of her. He was also playing a transparent game of deference toward Jonas and Bat. He smoked only when he stood by the fireplace, where the draft would carry his smoke up the flue.
Jo-Ann had matured since Toni last saw her at her graduation two years ago. Matured? No, she had deteriorated. At twenty-three, she was a damaged woman; heavy drinking and constant smoking had marked her. She had been an unhappy girl when Toni first saw her at the 1952 Christmas party ... a bitter, cynical young woman at the graduation ... a scarred woman now.
And, damn it, they were all responsible for it, except maybe Bat. Jonas had expectations of her, and he let her know she didn't meet them. Monica didn't want to acknowledge she had a daughter who looked nearly as old as the mother. The mother and father weren't proud of their daughter and had let her know it. What the hell did they expect of her?
Toni could see that Angie was devoted to Jonas, perhaps pitiably so. It looked as if Jonas accepted her devotion the same way he accepted the devotion of employees — he would reward it, but he thought it was no more than his due. Angie was realistic and probably comfortable.
Bat. He was of course the one most interesting to Toni. She had watched him change. He had always been a Cord, she understood. Some of the combined elements of his character and personality — the relentless drive, the focused and endless span of attention, the calm and unaffected egocentricity, all coupled with an unremitting erotic appetite — had been enigmatic until she met Jonas and saw the same combination of traits in him. In Bat, all but the last had been tempered by what he was of his mother, as Toni judged, but under the continuing influence of his father he was more and more a Cord, with the tempering influence diminishing. It was said of Jonas that he was not a man to be crossed, that he was remorseless when crossed. She wondered if Bat had not acquired that trait, too.
Bat had developed a slight farsightedness and carried in his breast pocket a pair of eyeglasses with dark horn rims, which he pulled out from time to time and settled on his nose, giving him an owlish aspect that was almost always submerged in his facile, active smile. He paid more attention to tailoring than his father did and wore clothes his New York tailors cut precisely to fit him. Time had not ravaged him the way it had Jo-Ann; to the contrary, it had caressed him; he was, if anything, more handsome than he had been before.
They were thirty-one years old. If they were going to marry and have a family, the time was now. But it was anything but certain it was going to happen. She was not certain, in fact, it was what she wanted. The demand he had made in Lexington, Massachusetts, nine years ago still stood. He wanted his wife to be a homemaker and mother. He wanted his wife to be an ornament to his life. He said he'd learned better, but she was not confident he had.
She had said she was willing to be wife and home-maker and ornament, in time. She had said she would in time give up her career and spend twenty years rearing children. And no man she had ever met matched Bat Cord. Still— He had too much Jonas in him. He seemed to be filling up with it.