There’s something wrong with me, she thought now, staring at her desk, and it’s not natural.
Natural or not, she had to go to Maine. She got her attaché case off the floor and began to stack her papers into it. At the end, she put in the brochure from East Village Legal Services, too. She had been carrying it with her everywhere for days, and she didn’t see why she shouldn’t bring it to Maine.
Maybe it would operate as an antidote to all these ridiculous people she really didn’t want to see.
7
KELLY PRATT HAD BEEN staring all day at a piece of paper that said “Brayne Estate—Disposition,” and all it had gotten him was a backache and a throb in his head the size of the Heart That Ate Cleveland. It didn’t help that the first item under the title had been a disclaimer: “Effects of Lillian Kent, Hereinafter known as Lilith Brayne.” It helped even less that the calculations had been done well before the general use of computers, and that a couple of the figures had been corrected, by hand, in the margins. Kelly was supposed to make something sensible of this piece of paper, to present to the lawyer and to Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, and he just hadn’t been able to do it. Now he was practically on his way up to Maine, with his suitcase packed, and his best yachting clothes laid out for him on the navy blue satin wing chair back in his bedroom, and all he could think about was what an idiot he was going to look like when the three of them got around to asking him questions.
Kelly Pratt was a tall, broad man in his early fifties, going to paunch but hiding it well, who wished he had changed his last name at the same time he had changed his first. He had changed his first-—which had been Hubert, for God’s sake, Hubert Pratt—right after he had gotten out of the army and right before he had gone into college. Being called “Hubie” for two straight years in Korea would have been enough for anybody. He had chosen “Kelly” because, in spite of the fact that he was working his way to business school and a sensible career in accounting, he had secret fantasies of becoming an actor. There was an actor everybody said he looked like, named John Forsyth, who had a television program in afternoon reruns that year called Bachelor Father. The father in question on that program had a niece who lived with him named Kelly. That was where Kelly got his name. It would have bothered him endlessly if anybody had realized that he had taken his name from a girl, but nobody did, so that worked out all right.
Now, thirty years later, Kelly Pratt looked even more like John Forsyth than he had then, and John Forsyth had been in a new television program, and Kelly liked to imagine himself as Blake Carrington. That was the good thing about this trip to Maine. Spending the weekend with a couple of old movie stars was exactly the kind of thing Blake Carrington would do, although he probably wouldn’t bring their accounting work along to go over the figures. Normally, Kelly would never have gone on an errand like this himself. The tiny accounting company he had started with his best friend from college, Abraham Kahn, had grown. It wasn’t the size of the giants like Arthur Andersen or Deloitte, but it took up three floors of a good building in midtown Manhattan and kept a hundred and fifty people on payroll. When they started out, Kelly had wanted to do as much corporate work as they could get, but Bram had been adamant. “Do personals,” he’d said, “big accounts, but personals.” And Bram had been right. Kahn and Pratt handled the business affairs of three stars of the Metropolitan Opera, two internationally famous symphony conductors, all six of the principal characters on the most important soap opera still shot in New York, and the entire roster of the most successful team in the history of the National Football League. Kahn and Pratt even appeared on and off in Liz Smith’s column. It had become a status symbol of a sort for Kahn and Pratt to agree to handle you. Lately, there had even been a trickle of rock-and-roll stars through the door, including a woman who spent more of her time on stage half-naked than reasonably clothed. Kelly had been all excited about it, but Bram had refused to let him take her on. Rock stars made Bram very, very nervous.
Now Bram was sitting in the visitor’s chair in Kelly Pratt’s office, smoking a pipe, his long legs stretched out across the carpet. Kelly sometimes thought it was Bram who should have changed his name. Tall and lean, with the chiseled features of a Yankee aristocrat, Abraham Kahn could have passed himself off as a John Endicott or a Martin Cadwalader any time he wanted to. Instead, he belonged to the Harmonie Club and a Conservative synagogue and kept an Israeli flag hanging on a pole next to an American one in a corner of his office.