Chapter 10
He was an old man.
Not until recently had Daniel Matherly thought of himself as aged. He had refused to acknowledge his elderly status far past the reasonable time to do so. Unsolicited literature mailed to him by the AARP was discarded unopened, and he declined to take advantage of senior citizen discounts.
Lately, however, the reflection in his mirror was tough to dispute, and his joints made an even better argument that he was definitely a… graduating senior.
Today, as he sat behind his desk in his home study, Daniel was amused by his own thoughts. If reflecting on one’s life wasn’t proof of advancing age, what was? His preoccupation with his degenerating body was a firm indication that it was degenerating. Who else but the very old dwelled on such things?
Young people didn’t have the time. They didn’t ponder death because they were too busy living. Getting an education. Pursuing their chosen profession. Entering or exiting marriages. Rearing children. They couldn’t be bothered with thoughts of death. “Mortality” was just a word that they kept shelved to think about in the distant future. Occasionally they might glance at it and grow uneasy, but their attention was hastily diverted to matters related to living, not dying.
But the distant future inexorably drew closer until the day arrived when one could no longer save the topic of his own mortality for later contemplation, when one must take it from the shelf and examine it closely. Daniel wasn’t morbidly fixated on the inevitable, but he knew that the time had come for him to address it and consider all its implications.
The faithful Maxine thought that he slumbered peacefully every night, but he didn’t. When he told Maris that he slept like a baby, she had no reason to doubt him. As a young man, he had never required more than four or five hours of sleep per night. Those required hours had decreased in proportion to his aging. Now, if he was lucky, on any given night he would sleep for two or three hours.
The others he spent lying in bed reading his beloved books—classics he had devoured as a boy, bestsellers that other houses had been lucky enough to publish and profit from, books he himself had edited and published.
When he wasn’t reading, he reflected on his life—his proud moments and, in fairness, those he wasn’t proud of. He thought frequently about the prep school friend who had died of leukemia. If he’d been born several decades later, he probably would have been treated and cured to live a long and fulfilling life. To this day, Daniel missed him and longed for the years of friendship they had been denied.
He remembered the pain of losing his first love to another man. Looking back, he acknowledged that the young lady’s choice had been right for both of them, but at the time, he had believed he would die of a broken heart. He never saw her after her wedding day. He heard that she and her husband had moved to California. He wondered if her life there had been happy. He wondered if she was still living.
His first wife had been a lovely woman, and he’d been devastated when she died. But then he’d met Rosemary, Maris’s mother, and she had been, without question, the love of his life. Beautiful, charming, gracious, artistic, intelligent, a perfect companion and ardent lover. She had been supportive of a husband who put in long hours at the office and was too often distracted by the pressures of managing a business. He had appreciated her patience and devotion to him and their marriage but was certain he had failed to let her know the extent of his appreciation.
In hindsight, he regretted all the times his responsibilities at Matherly Press had kept him from Rosemary. He wished he had those days back. His choices would be different. He would rearrange his priorities, appropriate more time and energy to his family.
Or, in all honesty, he would probably make the same bad choices, commit the same mistakes all over again.
Thankfully, his regrets were few and minor, although there were a couple of major ones. Once he had fired an editor out of pique, over a silly difference of opinion. Slyly, he had leaked the secret that the man was homosexual, this at a time when it wasn’t accepted or even tolerated. He hinted that the man’s personal life had begun affecting his work—which was an outright lie. The man was an excellent editor and his work ethic was impeccable.
Despite his qualifications, no one would hire him because of Daniel’s rumor. He became a pariah in the industry he loved and ultimately moved away from the city. Daniel’s spite had ruined the man’s promising career and had cost publishing a talented contributor. He would carry the guilt over that to his grave.
Several years following Rosemary’s death, he had engaged in an affair he wasn’t proud of. It had been difficult for a middle-age bachelor to conduct a romance while living with a teenage daughter. It required finesse and a constant juggling of schedules. The woman had been jealous of his relationship with Maris. She became demanding, continually forcing him to choose between her and Maris. Daniel finally let his head overrule his desire. He realized that he could never love anyone who didn’t love and accept his daughter wholly, completely, and without reservation. He ended the affair.
Through decades he had managed to maintain his reputation as an excellent publisher. He seemed to have been blessed with a sixth sense for which manuscripts to grab and which to decline. During his tenure, he had increased the company’s worth a hundredfold. He had earned more money than he could possibly spend, more than Maris could spend in her lifetime, and probably more than her children could spend.
Money was a nice by-product of his success, but it wasn’t what motivated him. His drive came from wanting to preserve what his ancestors had worked so painstakingly to create. Before he turned thirty, he had inherited the stewardship of the family business. It had fallen to him to protect and improve it for the next generation.
Which was Maris, his crowning achievement. She was a thousand times more precious to him than Matherly Press, and he was more dedicated to protecting her than he was to protecting his publishing house from the wolves that got bigger and hungrier each year.
He couldn’t shelter her completely, of course. No parent could spare his child life’s knocks, and even if he could, it would be unfair. Maris had to live her own life, and integral to living were mishaps and mistakes.
He only hoped that her disappointments wouldn’t be too severe, that her triumphs and joys would outnumber them, and that when she reached his age, if she was fortunate to live that long, she would look back on her life with at least the same degree of satisfaction as he had been graced to do.
He wasn’t afraid of death. To no one’s knowledge, save Maxine’s, he’d had several recent discussions with a priest. Rosemary had been a devout and practicing Catholic. He’d never converted, but he had absorbed some of her faith through osmosis. He firmly believed that they would enjoy the afterlife together.
He didn’t fear dying.
He did fear dying a fool.
That was the worry that had robbed him of sleep last night. Deeply troubled, he’d been unable to read the nighttime hours away. Morning had brought no relief from this pervasive uneasiness.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something, that a revealing word or deed or demeanor that he would have detected when he was younger and sharper—five years ago, even one year ago—was escaping him.
Was this paranoia valid? Or a symptom of encroaching dementia?
Before his grandfather’s death, Daniel remembered him ranting about his nurse’s thievery. One day he accused her of being a German spy on a mission to assassinate U.S. war veterans. With the conviction of the mentally unhinged, he had claimed that the housekeeper was pregnant with his child. Nothing could convince him that the sixty-seven-year-old Englishwoman couldn’t possibly be with child.
Was that where he was headed? Was this obscure and unnamed disquiet the harbinger of full-blown senility?
Or—and this is what he chose to believe—was it an indication that he had lost none of his faculties, that he was as astute as ever, and that the intuitiveness that had successfully guided him through fifty years of publishing was still reliable?
Until they proved to be untrustworthy, he chose to trust his instincts. They were telling him that something wasn’t right. He sensed it as a stag senses the presence of a stalking hunter from a mile away.
Perhaps he was just overly troubled by Maris’s unhappiness. She wasn’t as good as she believed at concealing her feelings from him. He’d picked up signals of marital disharmony. The cause and severity of that disharmony he didn’t yet know. But if it was disharmonious enough to visibly disturb Maris, it disturbed him.
And then there was Noah. He wanted to trust the man both as a protégé and as a son-in-law, but only if Noah deserved his trust.
Grunting with the effort, Daniel brought his leather desk chair upright and opened a desk drawer. He withdrew his day planner and unzipped it, then removed a business card from one of the smaller compartments.
“William Sutherland,” the card read. No company name or address. Only that name and a telephone number engraved in crisp navy blue block letters.
Daniel thoughtfully fingered the card, as he often had since obtaining it several weeks ago. He hadn’t called the number. He hadn’t yet spoken to Mr. Sutherland personally, but after this morning’s ruminations, he felt that the time was right to do so.
It was a sneaky and underhanded thing to do. Merely thinking about it made him feel deceitful. No one ever need know, of course. Unless—God forbid—something came of it. Probably nothing would. Probably he was overreacting. But it wasn’t within his makeup to be careless. There was too much at stake to let twinges of guilt overshadow prudence. Given a choice between conscience and caution, there was no choice. The adage applied: Better to be safe than sorry.
As he reached for the telephone, he resolved to be more watchful, alert to nuances in speech and expressions, more attuned to what was going on around him. He didn’t want to be the last to know… anything.
He didn’t fear dying. But he did fear dying a fool.