"Oh, Miss Olivia. Your father? I haven't seen him since we helped him upstairs. He fell asleep and didn't come down for any supper."
"What about Belinda?" I asked.
"I heard her in the kitchen a little while after you left. I came out to help her find something to eat and then she went upstairs, too. I thought she fell asleep as well, but an hour ago, I heard someone come to the door and she left."
"Okay, Carmelita. Call me if you need me for anything," I said and left her my home number.
Samuel was watching television in our den when I returned to our new home. He wanted to know all about the work I had done, but I told him I was too tired to repeat or describe it.
"Suffice it to say, it was considerable, Samuel, but there's a great deal left to do."
"Well," he said slapping his hands together and rubbing the palms, "starting tomorrow, I'll be there to help, Olivia. I'll take up the slack. That's a promise. We're going to build something here."
"We already have built something here, Samuel. We've got to hold onto it," I said dryly.
"Sure. Absolutely," he agreed.
I had some tea and toast and then decided to go right to bed. Samuel remained downstairs watching television. In the days to come, I had to interview and appoint our servants, as well as see if I could get Daddy back to work. I needed all my strength. I remember I was so exhausted, it didn't occur to me until I had my head on the pillow and the lights were out that tonight was the first night I was sleeping in my new home.
In the days and then weeks that followed, I became more and more concerned about Daddy. He returned to work, but I could see he was still drinking too much. Consequently, he wasn't taking good care of himself and occasionally looked as if he had slep
t in the clothes he wore to the office. I noticed that he often had problems with his concentration. It took him an hour to read and review something that would ordinarily take him minutes. He started to look so much older to me, too. His hair was grayer; the lines in his face grew deeper and his once powerful, straight posture degenerated until he walked with a slight bend in his torso as if his sadness had turned into lead weight on his shoulders.
It was pointless to ask him about Belinda. Now that I was gone from the house and Daddy was distracted, she was like a balloon someone had released in the wind. There was no way to get control over her. Her whims blew her randomly from one place to another. She avoided me as much as possible, was rarely home when I visited, and if she was, she was always getting ready to meet someone. Daddy was simply overwhelmed. I tried to get him to see what was happening.
"She was never very stable as it was, Daddy, and that was with my and your supervision. Now that I'm out of the house, you've got to take more interest in what she does, whom she sees and where she goes. Don't give her so much money. Get her to think about her future."
"I know," he would say. "I will," he would promise, but it was as if his mind was a magnet that had lost its powers. Everything that had stuck to it before, floated off, drifted away, fell out of his memory and his thoughts.
Samuel saw what was happening to him and to Samuel's credit, he did try to help. He visited Daddy almost as much as I did whenever Daddy didn't show up at the office or when I was too busy to get away myself. If he saw Belinda out at a bar or restaurant, he would try to take her home or get her to stop drinking so much. He knew how much it bothered me to hear about her exploits from other people, so he tried to soften the blow by telling me first.
Samuel was happy getting away from the office, despite his great oaths and proclamations to be at my side building our business. He quickly came to consider himself our public relations expert.
"We need to socialize with other business people, Olivia, and you're not fond of all this, what you call, fluff, take care of it," he assured me and then proceeded to work up an expense account that quadrupled any we previously had, justifying it always by claiming it was a tax deduction or it brought in new business. It rarely did. In fact, some of the people he entertained had little or nothing to do with what we did and when I pointed that out, he would say, yes, but they are connected to people who are important to our business.
Daddy didn't disapprove of what Samuel did and at times, he even accompanied Samuel and seemed to enjoy himself. There weren't many occasions when he did these days, so I held back on my criticism. Samuel, on the other hand, seemed to realize and accept the limits of his own abilities, interests and concentration, and did not try to take on any of the responsibilities I had assumed.
"That's more Olivia's area of expertise," he would say. As it turned out, practically everything that involved real work was "Olivia's area of expertise."
However, in the beginning at least, I thought some of what Samuel was doing had value. We quickly became the darlings of the charity and social circuit, included on everyone's A-list for invitations to just about any and every high social affair. Samuel insisted I improve my wardrobe and buy some more expensive jewelry, much of which he chose for me and charged to our account. He never stinted on his own wardrobe either.
We began to host our own elegant dinner parties, and through Samuel's socializing, met more influential people such as politicians and government officials, many of whom did have some authority over our enterprises.
The social affair I looked forward to the most, of course, was Nelson Childs' wedding. It had been months since I had last seen him. He had finished his legal education, passed the bar, and joined his father's firm. His name had already been engraved on the sign outside his father's law offices, and every time I rode past and saw it, my heart would skip a beat. There were times I deliberately took a longer route just to ride past that sign. Later, I would chastise myself for it, telling myself I was behaving like a lovesick schoolgirl. He wasn't my beau; he was marrying someone else and I was married to someone else. What did I think I was doing?
Everyone who had been invited to Nelson's wedding knew how much preparation and thought had gone into designing the affair and reception. There was great expectation. Daddy and Belinda were invited of course, but Belinda told me she would not be going. I wasn't unhappy to hear that. It was one of the few times I had been able to find her at home recently. She was in her room packing a bag for a trip she was taking with some new friends.
"Who are these people?" I demanded.
"Just some people I met. You wouldn't like them," she added quickly.
"Why, because they drink and don't hold down jobs?" I fired back at her. She paused and put her hands on her hips.
"No, because they like to have fun more than they like to work."
"They don't have to work? What are they, spoiled rich kids like you or thieves?"
"I don't want to talk about them with you, Olivia," she said, tears in her eyes.