Rafael Yglesias - Only Children

“He belongs to me! Stop trying to take him away! I know what I’m doing! Get out!”

“Belongs to you?” Eric was collapsed by her remark, his understanding of her, of Luke, of the world, deflated into shapelessness.

“Goddammit! Are you ever going to listen to me?” Nina’s face trembled from the force of her shouts. Eric backed out of the room, although he wanted to punch her, although he feared for Luke’s safety, because he feared more for her; she seemed ready to explode, not figuratively, but actually blow open — skin, eyes, bones ready to fly off.

He stumbled out backwards and bumped into someone waiting just beyond the door. “Excuse me,” Tom said, catching Eric and turning him slightly.

“I’m sorry,” Eric said, horrified that Nina’s father had overheard. But she had yelled so loudly that probably they had all been able to listen in. Now I’ll never get the money, Eric knew, and felt despair and rage at Nina. He knew, and Nina knew, that her brother and sisters were envious that she had had Luke. All she had to do was be as much of a Wasp as they, and keep a good face on Luke’s condition, but she had failed, failed as miserably as a Jewish wife would have.

“I need some help with the wood in the barn,” Tom said easily, free from self-consciousness.

“Sure,” Eric mumbled. He felt as if he were being called to the principal’s office. He followed Tom to the barn. There was a stormy wind coming off the bay, the late August air thinned by the hint of fall, and its chill bowed Eric beside Tom’s rigid, unaffected body. Eric felt smaller, younger with each step.

Tom got busy once inside. He didn’t talk or explain what he wanted. Tom carried several large birch logs from the pile. Eric hurried and took most of them and set the biggest on the chopping block. “Hurt my hand on the boat yesterday,” Tom said. “Could you split these?”

Eric had been schooled by Brandon to split wood, but he wasn’t nearly as skilled as his brother-in-law. Clearly this was an excuse to talk. Eric wielded the ax. He hesitated before taking his first chop. He suddenly felt his ability to split the birch straight through was at issue, that he had to do it to win back Tom’s confidence.

Tom watched him casually, one hand resting on a smooth worn beam.

Eric kept his eyes on the break in the wood. He raised the ax, brought it down hard, but steady. The blade passed right through, thudding into the block below, the now split halves of birch fainting away from each other.

Without skipping a beat, Tom said, “I wanted to discuss some business with you.”

“Un-huh,” Eric said, and put another log on the block. He pretended to study its surface for a good fissure.

“I’ve sold some land recently—”

“Brandon told me,” Eric said. Tom might be accustomed to circumspection when it came to money, but Eric believed Wall Streeters were supposed to have the blunt intimacy of doctors about a client’s financial condition. “Six million, he said.”

Tom frowned. “Go ahead,” he said, nodding at the log.

This time, Eric’s ax got caught halfway through. He split it on the second blow. Brandon would have thought that a failure.

“Actually, it’s closer to ten million. Brandy overheard only part of the sale. I wish he hadn’t heard anything. I’d like you to keep this to yourself. I would rather, given how much the children talk among themselves, that even Nina not know.”

“Fine with me,” Eric said, and meant it.

“Usually my cash assets are managed by First Boston. But my man there died and I’m not happy with the new people. I wondered if you had any suggestions?”

What was this? A way of saying he didn’t want Eric to handle it? Or an opening, to see if Eric was bold enough to go through? Fuck it, he didn’t care. “Yeah. I’d like to handle it. I doubt you’d get anyone who would take care of you better. After all, in the long term, it’s in my interest to make sure your capital grows. Churning your money is gonna hurt me. Other managers might not care.”

“Exactly my thought,” Tom said, and seemed relieved. He moved away from the beam, approached Eric, and looked him in the eye. Eric felt the compulsion to glance away, to be faced down by those curious, judging eyes. But he understood those eyes now, now that they also belonged to Luke. Eric knew they masked pain and fear. Eric stared back and this time Tom lowered his eyes. “But that isn’t all I have to consider,” Tom mumbled.

“You mean, how good am I? Treat me the way you’d treat any other broker. Give me some of it, see how I do, and then either give me more or take it away.”

Tom nodded. “What do you think would be a fair start?”

“It’s up to you. Give me at least six months before you make a judgment — unless I’m losing a ton. I won’t, though.”

“How about two million?” Tom said.

“Fine.” A tremble of reality shot through Eric. He was in the presence of his dream; it had become solid, food offered to his hungry mouth.

“How do we handle this — this arrangement in terms of the children?”

“Usually I would only tell Nina. I don’t gossip about my clients. But I don’t have to tell her.”

Tom held his neck with his left hand, leaned his head back, and stretched, a doctor feeling for tumors. “You should tell Nina if that’s what you would normally do. But ask her not to discuss it with the others.”

Eric explained the mechanics of the transfer of the money, that his fee would be the industry standard of 1 percent annually of the two million, with a 20 percent performance incentive on any profits, and that for the time being he would only charge the commission that the floor broker takes, adding nothing for his own pocket. With that out of the way, he could speak confidently. Tom became almost childlike as Eric expounded his current view of the market, interrogated Tom about his tax situation, made gentle fun of Tom’s previous broker’s strategies (they would have been fine, actually, if the double-digit inflation and bond collapse of the mid-seventies had not followed hard upon the death of the go-go sixties’ stocks; it was the classic position of its time, the shoals that almost every financial adviser had crashed on), and recounted some of his own triumphs, musing on how much money Eric would have made for Tom if he had had the money then.

When Eric returned to the house, he felt okay, even though the Winningham summer house had taken on the aspect of a funeral home. They all talked in hushed voices, averted their eyes when Nina walked past like a widow out of her mind with grief, unapproachable and pitied, Luke still in her arms, his eyes watching everything, moaning from time to time, one little hand clutching his mother’s sweater. Even with all that, Eric was calm. What he’d lacked his whole life was a chance, a shot at the big time. At last, he’d landed a big fish, a client with real dough. And if Eric performed, there would be more, and the best part, the best part was that it would all one day come back to his son. He looked at the sisters and at Brandon.

Let them make Nina miserable for now.

Those weaklings would never create any grandchildren.

The money would go to Luke.

And swelled by Eric’s genius, his son would be rich.

NINA COULDN’T bear the stuffy nursery room, the mumble of voices from various bedrooms, the shrill sound of her blood in her ears, the desperate moths thudding on the windows, and the squirming, restless movements of her baby.

She bundled Luke in a heavy blanket and walked out of the nursery, through the living room, ignoring the startled looks of her family, and on out into the night.

Here there was air and refreshment. The tall birches swayed against a bright sky jammed with stars. Luke was silent the instant the real world surrounded them. The bay, a gray presence behind the trees, swelled and contracted gradually, like a body breathing in sleep. She felt so much better away from the shelter of home, much more safe in the wild. She wished Eric and Luke and she could become pioneers, travel away from the prison of everything and into the free nothingness.