Galilee. Clive Barker

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СКАЧАТЬ was underway, a search which continued through a rainy Saturday and Sunday without a single lead being turned up. It wasn’t until seven-thirty or so on Monday morning that a man walking his dog along the shore at Smith Point Beach chanced to peer into a car that had been parked there he’d noticed, close to the sand, for three days. Inside was the body of a man. It was George. His neck had been broken. The murder had taken place on the shore itself—there was sand in George’s shoes, and in his hair and mouth—then the body had been carried back to the car and left there. His wallet was later found on the shore. The only item that had been taken from it was a picture of his wife.

      The hunt for George’s killer went on for years (in a sense, I suppose, it still continues; the file was never closed) but despite a million-dollar reward offered by Cadmus for information leading to the arrest of the murderer, the felon was never found.

      ii

      The major effects of George’s demise—at least those relevant to this book—are threefold. First, there was Deborah, who found herself strangely alienated from her husband by the suspicious facts of his death. What had he hidden from her? Something vital; something lethal. For all the trust they’d had in one another, there had been one thing, one terrible thing he had not shared with her. She just didn’t know what it was. She did well enough for a few months, sustained by the need to be a good public widow, but once the cameras were turned in the direction of new scandals, new horrors, she quickly capitulated to the darkness of her doubts and her grief. She went away to Europe for several months, where she was joined by (of all people) her sister-in-law Norah, with whom until now she’d had nothing in common. Stateside, rumors began to fly again: they were living like two middle-aged divas, the gossip columnists pronounced, dredging the gutters of Rome and Paris for company. Certainly when the pair got back home in August 1981, Deborah had the look of a woman who’d seen more than the Vatican and the Eiffel Tower. She’d lost thirty pounds, was dressed in an outfit ten years too young for her, and kicked the first photographer at the airport who got in her way.

      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 modern rules of combat. At times he seemed to be at pains to compensate for his 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 Cadmus’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.

      iii

      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 power-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.

      iv

      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, СКАЧАТЬ