On the other side of the room, Charlotte’s oldest daughter, Marianne, stood leaning on the white molded mantle of the fireplace. She had been crying, but all that was left of that was the red bloating around her eyes and mouth. Marianne was a brilliant girl, but not pretty. Charlotte looked away from her to the small Chippendale desk where Miss Parenti had piled the stiff white linen cards she would use to write thank-you notes to the people who sent flowers. She would do every note by hand, and Miss Parenti would provide her with a log that told her some little something about those people she had actually met on one occasion or another. A lot of the flowers would come from people who knew Tony professionally, or who worked at the bank, or who had some other ceremonial reason for marking his passing, and she could acknowledge those formulaically. She had come to hate the flowers that had piled up in her foyer these last few days. She hadn’t expected people to refrain from sending them, even though she had placed one of those notices in the paper—the family would appreciate donations to the Philadelphia Women’s Hospital in lieu of flowers—but she hadn’t anticipated how overwhelmingly awful they would smell. She no longer went out to the front of the house unless she had to, and she never had to. She was grateful for the gates that kept the reporters from pressing their noses against her windows and going through her trash.
Marianne was a senior at Harvard. If this didn’t throw her completely, she would graduate summa and go on to Oxford in the fall. Tony had been tremendously proud of her. The other three girls were more along the lines they were expected to be. Julia was a sophomore at Colby Sawyer, majoring in Dartmouth boys. Cordelia and Sarah were still at the Madeira School in Virginia, dreaming of coming out in the way that debutantes had come out in the thirties. Charlotte had no idea if they were thinking of their father. They weren’t crying openly, as Marianne was, but that said less than it might have in another kind of family.
Marianne shifted from one foot to the other. She was tall and thin, as Tony had been, and she had Tony’s great hooked beak of a nose that had made him look English to people who didn’t know who he was. It made Marianne look lopsided.
“I still don’t understand what you think you’re doing,” she said. “You don’t know anything about the bank. How can you possibly take over where Daddy left off?”
“I don’t intend to take over,” Charlotte said. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Then why do you want to sit on the board?”
“Because I like to look out for my own interests. In my mother’s day, women never did that kind of thing. Even when I was growing up, the policy was to keep the girls in the dark and train the boys to take over. But the world changes. Sometimes it even changes for the better. I want to keep an eye on things. I don’t trust David Alden.”
“David won’t take over at the bank,” Marianne said. “He’s too young. It’ll be one of the vice presidents or something, or they’ll bring in somebody from the outside.”
“David will still be there, and he’ll still be in an important position. No matter how the board feels about him—and, by the way, I think the board likes him. Your father liked him—but no matter how they feel, David knows more about what your father was doing and what needs to be done in the wake of his death than anybody else. Sheer prudence will make them keep him on, and I do not delude myself that I’ll be able to change their minds just because I decide to sit on the board. I still think it makes sense to be careful. Your father always thought you might like to go into the bank one day.”
“Go into the bank,” Marianne said. “You sound like Dickens.”
“Of course I don’t. Dickens was a vulgar writer, far more vulgar than that silly man, who was that, Henry Miller. One of the Biddle women gave a party for him back in the days when his books were banned because they were supposed to be pornography, and everybody was incredibly impressed with how avant-garde she was. Even I was impressed, and I was only a child. We were more easily impressed in those days.”
“Wouldn’t it make sense to talk about it?” Marianne said. “He died, for God’s sake. Somebody blew his face off. He was assassinated.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“I’m not exaggerating. That’s what the papers are saying. He was assassinated. Some terrorist group killed him because they oppose globalization, or something, and he was one of the chief architects of globalization. You should see the British papers. My roommate had her mother send them to me.”