Replay

SIX

Jeff didn’t involve himself in much after that except making money. He was very good at making money.

Motion-picture stocks were one fairly easy pick. The mid-sixties had been a time of heavy movie attendance and the first multimillion-dollar sales of films like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Cleopatra to the networks. Jeff shied away from small electronics companies, though he knew many of them would multiply tremendously in value; he just didn’t remember the names of the winners. Instead, he poured money into the conglomerates he knew had thrived through the decade on such investments: Litton, Teledyne, Ling-Temco-Vought. His selections were almost uniformly profitable from the day the stocks were purchased, and he plowed the bulk of that income back into still more shares.

It was something to do.

Sharla had enjoyed the fight, despite the fact that she’d perversely bet on Liston when Jeff told her to go with Cassius Clay. Jeff’s reactions to the evening had been decidedly more mixed: not so much to the fight itself, but to the setting, the crowd. Several of the high rollers and bookies in attendance had recognized Jeff from the publicity that had spread through the gambling world after his record World Series win; even some of the men who’d had to pay off large portions of that multimillion-dollar pot gave him wide grins and "thumbs up" signs. He might have been excommunicated from their circle, but he’d become legendary within it, and was accorded all the honor due a legend of that magnitude.

In a sense, he supposed, that was what had bothered him—the gamblers' visible respect was too clear a reminder that he had begun this version of his life by pulling a massive, if unfathomable, scam on the American underworld. He would be remembered forever by them in that context, no matter what his subsequent successes in society at large. It made him want to take a long, hot shower, get rid of the implied stench of cigar smoke and dirty money.

But the problem was something more concrete, too, he thought as the limousine sped down Collins Avenue past the vulgar facades of Miami Beach’s hotel row. It was, specifically,

Sharla.

She had fit right in with the fight crowd, had looked perfectly at home among the other pneumatic young women in their tight, flashy dresses and excessive makeup. Face it, he thought, glancing at her in the seat beside him: She looks cheap. Expensive but cheap; like Las Vegas, like Miami Beach. From the most cursory of appraisals it was clear to anyone that Sharla was, quite simply, a machine designed for fucking. Nothing more. The very image of a Girl Not To Take Home To Mother, and he grimaced to think that he had done precisely that: They’d stopped in Orlando on their way down here for the championship bout. His family had been overwhelmed and more than a little intimidated by the extent of his sudden financial triumphs, but even that couldn’t hide their contempt for Sharla, their anxious disappointment at the news that Jeff was living with her.

She leaned forward to fish a pack of cigarettes from her purse, and as she did so the black satin bodice of her dress fell slack, giving Jeff a glimpse of the creamy expanse of her generous breasts. Even now he desired her, felt a familiar urge to press his face into that flesh, slide the dress up and over her perfect legs. He’d been with this woman for almost a year, sharing everything with her except his mind and his emotions. The thought was suddenly distasteful, her very beauty a rebuke to his sensibilities. Why had he let this go on for so long? Her initial appeal was understandable; Sharla had been a fantasy within the fantasy, a tantalizing pièce de résistance to go along with his restored youth. But it was an essentially empty attraction, as juvenile in its lack of substance or complexity as the bullfight posters on the walls of his college dorm room.

He watched her light the cigarette, her deceptively aristocratic face bathed in the dim red glow of the lighter. She caught him staring, raised her slender eyebrows in a look of sexual challenge and promise. Jeff looked away, out at the lights of Miami across the still, clear water.

Sharla spent the next morning shopping on Lincoln Road, and Jeff was waiting for her in the suite at the Doral when she returned. She set her packages in the foyer, moved immediately to the nearest mirror to freshen her makeup. Her short white sundress set off her glorious tan, and her high-heeled sandals made her bare brown legs look even longer and slimmer than they were. Jeff ran his thumbs along the sharp edges of the thick brown envelope in his hand, and he came very close to changing his mind.

"What are you doing inside?" she asked, reaching back to unzip the breezy cotton dress. "Let’s get into our suits, grab some sun."

Jeff shook his head, motioned for her to sit in the chair across from him. She frowned, pulled the zipper closed over her tawny back, and sat where he indicated.

"What’s with you?" she asked. "Why the strange mood?"

He started to speak, but had decided hours ago that words would be inappropriate. They’d never really talked anyway, about anything; verbal communication had little to do with what passed between them. He handed her the envelope.

Sharla pursed her lips as she took it, tore it open. She stared at the six neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills for several moments. "How much?" she finally asked, in a calm, controlled voice.

"Two hundred thousand."

She peered back inside the envelope, extracted the single Panagra Airlines first-class ticket to Rio. "This is for tomorrow morning," she said, inspecting it. "What about my things in New York?"

"I’ll send them wherever you like."

She nodded. "I’ll need to buy some more things here, before I leave."

"Whatever you want. Charge it to the room."

Sharla nodded again, put the money and the ticket back in the envelope, which she set on the table beside her. She stood up, undid the dress, and let it fall to the floor around her feet.

"What the hell," she said, unhooking her bra, "for two hundred thousand you deserve one last go."

Jeff went back to New York alone, back to his investments.

Skirts, he knew, would be getting shorter for the next few years, creating an enormous demand for patterned stockings and panty hose. Jeff bought thirty thousand shares of Hanes. All those exposed thighs had to lead somewhere; he bought heavily in the pharmaceutical houses that manufactured birth-control pills.

Eighteen months after they’d moved into the Seagram Building, Future, Inc.'s holdings had risen to a paper value of thirty-seven million dollars. Jeff repaid Frank in full, and sent a long personal letter with the final check. He never received a reply.

Not everything worked exactly as Jeff planned, of course. He wanted to acquire a major portion of Comsat when it went public, but the stock was so wildly popular that the issue was limited to fifty shares per buyer. IBM, surprisingly, remained stagnant all the way through 1965, though it took off again the following year. Fast-food chains—Jeff chose Denny’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and McDonald’s—went through a big slump in 1967, before skyrocketing up an average five hundred percent one year later.

By 1968 his company’s assets were into the hundreds of millions, and he had approved an I. M. Pei design for a sixty-story corporate-headquarters building at Park and Fifty-third. Jeff also mandated the purchase of extensive parcels of land in choice commercial and residential areas of Houston, Denver, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The company bought close to half of the undeveloped property in L.A.'s new Century City project, at a price of five dollars per square foot. For his personal use, Jeff bought a three-hundred-acre estate in Dutchess County, two hours up the Hudson from Manhattan.

He went out with a variety of women, slept with some of them, hated the whole meaningless process. Drinks, dinners, plays and concerts and gallery openings … He grew to despise the rigid formality of dating, missed the easy familiarity of simply being with someone, sharing friendly silences and unforced laughter. Besides, most of the women he met were either too openly interested in his wealth or too studiedly blasé about it. Some even hated him for it, refused to go out with him because of it; immense personal fortunes were anathema to many young people in the late sixties, and on more than one occasion Jeff was made to feel directly responsible for all the world’s ills, from starvation in the inner cities to the manufacture of napalm.

He bided his time, focused his energies on work. June was coming, he reminded himself constantly. June 1968; that was when everything would change.

The twenty-fourth of June, to be precise.

Robert Kennedy was not quite three weeks dead, and Cassius Clay, now stripped of his title and reborn as Muhammad Ali, was appealing his conviction for draft evasion. In Vietnam the rockets from the north had been striking Saigon since early spring.

It had been midafternoon, Jeff recalled, on a Monday. He’d been working nights and weekends at a Top 40 station in West Palm Beach, playing the Beatles and the Stones and Aretha Franklin and learning the essentials of broadcast journalism on his own time, selling his interviews and stories to the station and occasionally to UPI audio on a per-piece basis. He remembered the date because it was the beginning of his Monday/Tuesday "weekend," and when he returned to work that Wednesday he’d somehow managed to arrange the first big interview of his career, a long and candid telephone conversation with retiring U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. He still didn’t know why Warren had consented to talk to him, a noncredentialed novice reporter from a small-time radio station in Florida; but somehow he’d managed to pull it off, and the great man’s pithy ruminations on his controversial tenure had been picked up by NBC for a healthy sum. Within a month, Jeff had been doing news full time at WIOD in Miami. He was off and running; his entire adult life, such as it had been, could be traced back to that summer week.

There’d been no reason for him to choose Boca Raton; no reason not to. Some Mondays he’d drive north, to Juno Beach; on others he might head down to Delray Beach or Lighthouse Point, any of a hundred interconnected strips of sand and civilization that lined the Atlantic coast from Melbourne to South Miami Beach. But on June twenty-fourth, 1968, he’d taken a blanket and a towel and a cooler full of beer to the beach off Boca Raton, and now here he was again in that same place on that same sunny day.

And there she was, lying on her back in a yellow crocheted bikini, her head propped on an inflatable beach pillow, reading a hardcover copy of Airport. Jeff stopped ten feet away and stood looking at her youthful body, the lemony streaks in her thick brown hair. The sand was hot against his feet; the surf echoed the pounding in his brain. For a moment he almost turned and walked away, but he didn’t.

"Hi," he said. "Good book?"

The girl peered up at him through her clear-rimmed, owlish sunglasses and shrugged. "Kind of trashy, but it’s fun. It’d make a better movie, probably."

Or several, Jeff thought. "You seen 2001 yet?"

"Yeah, but I didn’t know what it was all about, and it was kind of draggy up to the end. I liked Petulia better; you know, with Julie Christie?"

He nodded, tried to make his smile more natural, relaxed. "My name’s Jeff. Mind if I sit with you?"

"Go right ahead. I’m Linda," said the woman who had been his wife for eighteen years.

He spread his blanket, opened the cooler, and offered her a beer. "Summer vacation?" he asked.

She shifted on one elbow, took the dewy bottle. "I go to Florida Atlantic, but my family lives right here in town. How about you?"

"I grew up in Orlando, went to Emory for a while. Living in New York now, though."

Jeff was striving for an air of nonchalance but having trouble; he couldn’t keep his eyes off her face, wished she’d take off those damned sunglasses so he could see the eyes he’d known so well. His final memory of her voice reverberated in his skull, tinny and distant, a telephone voice: "We need—We need—We need—"

"I said, what do you do up there?"

"Oh, sorry, I—" he took a swig of the icy beer, tried to clear his head. "I’m in business."

"What kind?"

"Investments."

"You mean, like a stockbroker?"

"Not exactly. I have my own company. We deal with a lot of brokers. Stocks, real estate, mutual funds … like that."

She lowered the big round sunglasses, gave him a look of surprise. He stared into the familiar brown eyes, wanting to say so much: "It’ll be different this time," or "Please, let’s try it again," or even simply "I’ve missed you; I’d forgotten how lovely you were." He said nothing, just looked at her eyes in silent hope.

"You own the whole company?" she asked, incredulous.

"Now I do, yes. It was a partnership until a few years ago, but … it’s all mine now."

She set her beer in the sand, scrunching the bottle back and forth until she’d dug out a space to hold it upright.

"Did you have some kind of big inheritance or something? I mean, most guys I know couldn’t even get a job in a company like that in New York … or else they wouldn’t want to."

"No, I built it up myself, from scratch." He laughed, starting to feel more relaxed with her, confident and proud of his achievements for the first time in years. "I won a lot of money on some bets, horse races and such, and I put it all into this company."

She regarded him skeptically. "How old are you, anyway?"

"Twenty-three." He paused a beat, realized he was talking too much about himself, hadn’t expressed enough curiosity about her. She had no way of knowing he already knew everything about her, more—at this point in her life—than she knew about herself. "What about you; what are you studying?"

"Sociology. Were you a business major at Emory, or what?"

"History, but I dropped out. What year are you?"

"Senior this fall. So how big of a deal is this company of yours? I mean, have you got a lot of people working for you? Have you got an office right in Manhattan?"

"A whole building, at Park and Fifty-third. Do you know New York?"

"You have your own building, on Park Avenue. That’s nice." She wasn’t looking at him anymore, was drawing daisy-petal curlicues in the sand around the beer bottle. Jeff remembered a day, months before they were married, when she’d shown up unexpectedly at his door with a bunch of daisies; the sun had been behind her hair, and all of summer in her smile.

"Well, it’s … taken a lot of effort," he said. "So, what do you plan to do when you get out of school?"

"Oh, I thought maybe I’d buy a few department stores. Start small, you know." She folded her towel, began gathering her belongings from the blanket and stuffing them into a large blue beach bag. "Maybe you could help me get a good deal on Saks Fifth Avenue, hmm?"

"Hey—hold on, please don’t go. You think I’m putting you on, is that it?"

"Just forget about it," she said, cramming her book into the bag and shaking sand from the blanket.

"No, look, I’m serious. I wasn’t kidding around. My company’s called Future, Inc. Maybe you’ve even heard of—"

"Thanks for the beer. Better luck next time."

"Hey, please, let’s just talk a little longer, O.K.? I feel as if I know you, as if we have a lot to share. Do you know that feeling, like you’ve been with someone in some previous life, or—"

"I don’t believe in that kind of nonsense." She threw the folded blanket over one arm and started walking toward the highway and the rows of parked cars.

"Look, just give me a chance," Jeff said, following alongside her. "I know for a fact that if we just get to know each other we’ll have a lot in common; we’ll—"

She wheeled on her bare feet and glared at him over the sunglasses. "If you don’t stop following me I’m going to yell for the lifeguard. Now, back off, buddy. Go pick up somebody else, all right?"

"Hello?"

"Linda?"

"It’s Jeff, Jeff Winston. We met on the beach this afternoon. I—"

"How the hell did you get this number? I never even told you my last name!"

"That’s not important. Listen, I’m sending you a recent issue of Business Week. There’s an article about me in there, with a photograph. Page forty-eight. You’ll see I wasn’t lying."

"You have my address, too? What kind of stunt is this, anyway? What do you want from me?"

"I just want to get to know you, and have you get to know me. There’s so much left undone between us, so many wonderful possibilities for—"

"You’re crazy! I mean it; you’re some kind of psycho!"

"Linda, I know this has started badly, but just give me the opportunity to explain. Give us the leeway to approach each other in an open, honest manner, to find—"

"I don’t want to get to know you, whoever the hell you are. And I don’t care if you’re rich, I don’t care if you’re goddamn J. Paul Getty, O.K.? Just leave … me … alone!"

"I understand that you’re upset. I know all this must seem very strange to you—"

"If you call this number again, or if you show up at my house, I’ll call the police. Is that clear enough?"

The phone slammed loudly in Jeff’s ear as she hung up.

He’d been given the chance to relive most of his life; now he’d trade it all for another shot at this one day.

The Mirassou Vineyards teemed with pickers working the slopes southeast of San Jose, great buckets of fresh green grapes atop their heads as they wound their way like harvest ants down to the crusher and the presses outside the old cellar. The hills rippled with wide-spaced rows of trellised vines, and here among the masonry buildings the oaks and elms were a splendor of October colors.

Diane had been angry at him all day, and the bucolic setting and arcane intricacies of the winery had done little to appease her. Jeff never should have taken her along with him this morning; he’d thought she might be fascinated, or at least amused, by the two young geniuses, but he was wrong.

"Hippies, that’s all they were. That tall boy was barefoot, for God’s sake, and the other one looked like a … a Neanderthal!"

"Their idea has a lot of potential; it doesn’t matter what they looked like."

"Well, somebody ought to tell them the sixties are over, if they want to do anything with that silly idea of theirs. I just don’t believe you fell for it, and gave them all that money!"

"It’s my money, Diane. And I’ve told you before, the business decisions are all mine, too."

He couldn’t really blame her for the way she’d reacted; without benefit of foresight, the two young men and their garageful of secondhand electronic components would indeed seem unlikely candidates for a spot on the Fortune 500. But within five years that garage in Cupertino, California would be famous, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak would prove to be the soundest investment of 1976. Jeff had given them half a million dollars, insisted they follow the advice of a retired young marketing executive from Intel they had recently met, and told them to make whatever they wanted as long as they continued to call it "Apple." He had let them keep forty-nine percent of the new enterprise.

"Who in the world would want a computer in their house? And what makes you think those scruffy boys really know how to make one, anyway?"

"Let’s drop it, all right?"

Diane went into one of her petulant silences, and Jeff knew the matter wouldn’t really be dropped, not even if she remained silent about it from now on.

He’d married her a year ago, out of convenience if nothing else, soon after he’d turned thirty. She’d been a twenty-three-year-old socialite from Boston, heiress to one of the country’s oldest and largest insurance firms; attractive in a reedy sort of way, and able to handle herself quite well in any gathering where the individual net worths of the participants exceeded seven figures. She and Jeff got along as well as could be expected for two people who had little in common other than their familiarity with money. Now Diane was seven months pregnant, and Jeff had hopes that the child might bring out the best in her, forge a deeper bond between them.

The young blond woman in the tailored navy suit led them inside the main winery building, to the tasting room in one front corner. Diamond-shaped racks of bottled wine lined the walls, broken by softly lit recesses in which photographs of the vineyards were displayed, along with cut flowers and standing bottles of the Mirassou product. Jeff and Diane stood at the rosewood bar in the center of the room, accepted ritual sips of Chardonnay.

Linda had, apparently, meant everything she’d said after that disastrous meeting on the beach seven years ago. His letters to her had been returned unopened, and the gifts he’d sent were all refused. After a few months he had finally stopped attempting to contact her, though he added her name to the list of "Personal/Priority" subjects to be kept track of by the clipping service to which he subscribed. That was how he’d learned, in May of 1970, that Linda had married a Houston architect, a widower with two young children. Jeff wished her happiness, but couldn’t help feeling abandoned … by someone who had never known him, as far as she was concerned.

Again he had sought solace in his work. His most recent coup had been the sale, at enormous profit, of his oil fields in Venezuela and Abu Dhabi, and their immediate replacement with similar properties in Alaska and Texas, plus the contracts for a dozen offshore drilling rigs. All deals completed, of course, just before the OPEC sword had fallen.

The women whose company he sought had all been similar, in most respects, to Diane: attractive, well-groomed companions, versed in all the most rarefied of social skills, accomplished, and, on occasion, enthusiastic in bed. Daughters of fortune, a sisterhood of what passed for the American beau monde. Women who knew the ground rules, had understood from birth the boundaries of and obligations attendant upon the holders of great wealth. They were his peers now; they constituted the pool from which he should in all rationality select a mate. His choice of Diane among them had been almost random. She fit the appropriate criteria. If something greater were eventually to grow of their pairing, well and good … and if not, then at least he had not come to the marriage with unrealistically high expectations.

Jeff cleansed his palate with a bit of cheese and sampled a semisweet Fleuri Blanc. Diane abstained this time, patted her swollen belly by way of explanation.

Maybe the child would make a difference, after all. You never knew.

The plump orange cat skittered across the hardwood floor in a headlong broken-field run good enough to match the best performance of O. J. Simpson. His prey, a shiny yellow satin ribbon, had suffered crippling damage and would soon be shredded if the cat had his way with it.

"Gretchen!" Jeff called. "Did you know Chumley’s tearing up one of your yellow ribbons?"

"It’s O.K., Daddy," his daughter answered from the far corner of the large sitting room, near the window overlooking the Hudson. "Ken’s home now, and Chumley and I are helping to celebrate."

"When did he get home? Isn’t he still in the hospital in Germany?"

"Oh, no, Daddy; he told the doctors he wasn’t sick and he had to get home right away. So Barbie sent him a ticket for the Concorde, and he got home before anybody else, and as soon as he walked in the door she cooked him six blueberry muffins and four hot dogs."

Jeff laughed aloud, and Gretchen shot him the most withering look her wide-eyed five-year-old’s face could muster. "They don’t have hot dogs in Iran," she explained. "Or blueberry muffins, either."

"I guess not," Jeff said, keeping his expression carefully somber. "I suppose he’d be hungry for American food by now, huh?"

"'Course he would. Barbie knows how to make him happy."

The cat darted back in the other direction, batting the tattered ribbon between his paws, then settled on his side in a patch of sunlight to gloat over his conquest, kicking at it in sporadic bursts with his hind legs. Gretchen went back to her own games, absorbed in the alternate reality of the elaborate dollhouse that Jeff had spent more than a year building and expanding to her specifications. The miniature trees in its green felt front yard were now festooned with bright yellow ribbons, and for the past week she’d been following news reports of the end of the hostage crisis with a depth of interest most children invested only in the Saturday-morning cartoon shows. At first Jeff had been concerned about her fascination with the events in Tehran, had wanted to protect her from the potentially traumatizing effects of watching all those rabid mobs chanting "Death to the U.S"; but he’d known the episode would have a peaceful, upbeat conclusion, so he chose to respect his daughter’s precocious grasp of the world and to trust in her emotional resilience.

He loved her to a degree he had not thought possible, found himself simultaneously wanting to shield her from all darkness and share with her all light. Gretchen’s arrival had done nothing to cement his marriage to Diane, who, if anything, seemed to resent the constraints on her life that the child represented. But no matter, Gretchen herself was source and object of all the deep affection he could encompass or imagine.

Jeff watched as she took another ribbon from one of the doll-house trees, taunted fat old Chumley with it. The cat was tired, didn’t want to play anymore; it put a soft paw entreatingly on Gretchen’s cheek, and she buried her face in its furry golden belly, nuzzling the animal to full contentment. Jeff could hear its purr from across the room, mingled with his daughter’s gentle laughter.

The sun slanted higher through the tall bay windows, fell in brilliant striated beams upon the polished floor where Gretchen snuggled with the cat. This house, this tranquil, wooded place in Dutchess County, was good for her; its serenity was balm for any human soul, young or old, innocent or troubled.

Jeff thought of his old roommate, Martin Bailey. He’d called Martin soon after Gretchen was born, reestablished the contact that had somehow, in this life, been broken for so many years. Jeff hadn’t been able to talk him out of what would prove to be a particularly disastrous marriage, one that had originally led the man to suicide; but he’d made sure Martin had a secure position with Future, Inc., and some excellent stock tips now and then. His friend was divorced again, miserably so, but at least he was alive, and solvent.

Jeff seldom thought of Linda these days, or of his old existence. It was that first life that seemed a dream now; reality was the emotional stalemate with Diane, the blissfulness of being with his daughter, Gretchen, and the mixed blessings of his ever-growing wealth and power. Reality was knowledge and all that it had brought him—good and ill.

The image on the screen was one of pure organic motion: liquid rippling smoothly through curved chambers, expansion and contraction alternating in a perfect, lazy rhythm.

"… no apparent blockage of either ventricle, as you can see. And, of course, the Holler EKG showed no evidence of tachycardia during the twenty-four hours that you wore it."

"So what exactly does all that boil down to?" Jeff asked.

The cardiologist turned off the video-cassette machine that had been displaying the ultrasonic depiction of Jeff’s heart, and smiled.

"What it means is that your heart is in as close to perfect condition as any forty-three-year-old American male could hope it to be. So are your lungs, according to the X rays and the pulmonary-function tests."

"Then my life expectancy—"

"Keep yourself in this kind of shape, and you’ll probably make it to a hundred. Still going to the gym, I take it?"

"Three times a week." Jeff had profited from his anticipation of the late-seventies fitness craze in more ways than one. He not only owned Adidas and Nautilus and the Holiday Health Spa chain; he’d made full use of all their equipment for over a decade.

"Well, don’t stop," the doctor said. "I only wish all my patients took such good care of themselves."

Jeff made small talk for a few more minutes, but his mind was elsewhere: It was on himself at exactly this age, in this same year, yet more than twenty years ago. Himself as a sedentary, over-stressed, and slightly overweight executive, clutching his chest and pitching face-forward on his desk as the world went blank.

Not this time. This time he’d be fine.

Jeff preferred the comfort of the back room at La Grenouille, but Diane considered even lunch an occasion at which seeing and being seen was of prime importance. So they always ate in the front room, crowded and noisy though it invariably was.

Jeff savored his poached salmon with tarragon, basil, and mild-vinegar sauce, doing his best to ignore both Diane’s present sulk and the conversations from the tables pressed tightly on either side of them. One couple was discussing marriage, the other divorce. Jeff and Diane’s luncheon talk was somewhere in the middle.

"You do want her to be accepted at Sarah Lawrence, don’t you?" Diane snapped between bites of bay scallops à la nage.

"She’s thirteen years old." Jeff sighed. "The admissions office at Sarah Lawrence doesn’t give a damn what she does at that age."

"I was at Concord Academy when I was eleven."

"That’s because your parents didn’t give a damn what you did at that age."

She set down her fork, glared at him. "My upbringing is no concern of yours."

"But Gretchen’s is."

"Then you should want her to have the best possible education, from the beginning."

One waiter cleared their empty plates away as another approached with the dessert wagon. Jeff took advantage of the interruption to lose himself in the multiple reflections from the restaurant’s many mirrors: the fir-green walls, the crimson banquettes, the splendid floral bouquets that looked freshly cut from a Cezanne landscape.

He knew Diane was less concerned for Gretchen’s education than for her own freedom from daily responsibility. Jeff saw his daughter little enough as it was, and he couldn’t bear the thought of her living two hundred miles from home.

Diane picked crossly at her raspberries in Grand Marnier sauce. "I suppose you think it’s all right for her to continue associating with all those little urchins she keeps dragging home from public school."

"For Christ’s sake, her school is in Rhinebeck, not the South Bronx. It’s a wonderful environment for her to grow up in."

"So is Concord. As I know from personal experience."

Jeff dug into his Peach Charlotte, unable to say what was really on his mind: that he had no intention of seeing Gretchen mature into a clone of her mother. The brittle sophistication, the world-be-damned attitude, great wealth seen as a birthright, something to be assumed and utterly relied upon. Jeff had acquired his own riches by a stroke of supranormal good fortune and by force of will. Now he wanted to protect his daughter from money’s potentially corrupting influence as much as he wanted her to reap its benefits.

"We’ll discuss it another time," he told Diane.

"We have to let them know by next Thursday."

"Then we’ll discuss it Wednesday."

That put her into a serious pout, one he knew she could resolve only by a concentrated, almost vicious, splurge at Bergdorf’s and Saks.

He patted his jacket pocket, took out two foil-wrapped tablets of Gelusil. His heart might be in excellent shape, but this life he’d created for himself was playing hell with his digestion.

Gretchen’s slender young fingers moved gracefully over the keyboard, yielding the poignant strains of Beethoven’s "Fur Elise." The fat orange cat named Chumley slept sprawled beside her on the piano bench, too old now to frolic with the reckless abandon he once had shown, content merely to be close to her, soothed by the gentle music.

Jeff watched his daughter’s face as she played, her smooth, pale skin surrounded by the dark curls of her hair. There was an intensity to her expression, but it was not caused, he knew, by concentration on the notes or tempo of the piece. Her natural gift for music was such that she needed never struggle to memorize or drill herself on the basics of a composition once she’d played it through the first time. Rather, the look in her eyes was one of transport, of a melding with the wistful melody of the deceptively simple little bagatelle.

She rendered the coda of chords and double notes over a repeated-note pedal point with expert legato, and when she was done she sat silent for several moments, returning from the place the music had taken her. Then she grinned with delight, her eyes those of a playful girl again.

"Isn’t that pretty?" Gretchen asked ingenuously, referring only to the beauty of the music itself.

"Yes," Jeff said. "Almost as pretty as the pianist."

"Oh, Daddy, cut it out." She blushed, swung herself coltishly from the bench. "I’m gonna have a sandwich. You want one?"

"No, thanks, honey. I think I’ll wait till dinner. Your mother should be back from the city any time now; when she gets home, tell her I took a walk down by the river, O.K.?"

"O.K.," Gretchen called, scampering toward the kitchen. Chumley woke, yawned, and followed her at his own ambling pace.

Jeff stepped outside, walked along the path through the trees. In autumn the corridor of elms was like a half-mile shaft of enveloping flame. Emerging from it, Jeff saw first the broad meadow descending gently toward the Hudson, then the steeper drop a hundred yards to the left where a rocky chain of waterfalls cascaded in the chill. The dramatic entrance to this place never failed to give him a thrill of awe, that such beauty could exist; and of pride, that it was his possession.

He stood now at the crest of the sloping green, contemplating the vista. Two small boats moved quietly down the river beneath the blaze of fall colors on the far side. A trio of young boys ambled along the opposite bank, idly tossing stones into the coursing water. At the top of a rise above them was a stately home, less grand than Jeff’s but still imposing.

In another three months the river would be frozen solid, a great white highway stretching south toward the city and north toward the Adirondacks. The trees would be bereft of leaves, but seldom barren: Snow would lace their branches, and some days even the smallest twigs would be encased in a cylinder of ice, glittering by the millions in the winter sunlight.

This was the land, the very county, that Currier and Ives had mythologized as the American ideal; they’d even sketched this precise view. Standing here, it was easy to believe that all he’d done had been worthwhile. Standing here, or holding Gretchen in his arms, embracing the child he and Linda had once yearned for but could never have.

No, he wouldn’t send his daughter to Concord. This was her home. This was where she belonged until she was old enough to make her own decisions about leaving it. When that day came, he’d support whatever choices she might make, but until then—

Something unseen stabbed his chest, something more painful and powerful than he had ever felt before … except once.

He crumpled to his knees, struggling to remember what day it was, what time it was. His staring eyes took in the autumn scene, the valley that had, an instant before, seemed the very emblem of hope regained and possibilities unbounded. Then he fell on his side, facing away from the river.

Jeff Winston gazed helplessly at the orange-red tunnel of elms that had led him to this meadow of promise and fulfillment, and then he died.