“But then you do care how it looks.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. It’s about other people and what they expect. I could care less.”
“I don’t care what people think of us,” Madison said, not sure if this was what he was talking about, really. “I don’t. Everyone keeps waiting for me to panic about it, or something. It doesn’t bother me.”
Her father paused, because now that she’d said something, they couldn’t just keep watching the pasta.
“Are people talking to you about our situation?”
“No,” she said. “I think they’re afraid, still.”
“So we’ve got that at least. For a bit longer.”
He was folding everything together, tossing the pasta until it was coated with the crumbs and the oil.
“I know we haven’t had much chance to talk, Mad. But I’m going to have to go to Washington again. It sounds as if that means they’re accusing me of something, but they aren’t. But it’s still something that will happen, so I wanted to warn you.”
“Who are you testifying against?”
He laughed, but didn’t answer. “The whole thing is a farce, but it’ll make everyone else feel better. Come on, sit down.”
She ate the pasta so quickly she almost choked on the half-masticated mouthfuls, having briefly forgotten she was drunk. And then her father stood and crossed to an end cabinet, the one close to the mud room where they kept things like birthday candles and an expensive ice cream maker that had never been used and the old standing mixer that had been replaced but still haunted the kitchen. He reached onto a high shelf and brought down a bottle of Laphroaig. Madison’s least favorite—the smoky smell of the peat always made her nauseous when she smelled it on him. He brought a glass over to the table and poured himself three fingers.
“What do you mean, make them feel better,” she pressed. “Who?”
“I thought your mother would have explained some of this already,” he said.
She shook her head.
“She told me to have faith in you. She told me you’d take care of it.”
“She said that? That’s good. I’m glad she included you in that.”
He drank his glass down in two swallows, and Madison watched his hand reach out, without even looking in the direction of the bottle, to refill it.
“Your mother knows all about this,” he said. “She takes the long view. Always has. This is what’s important, Mad. You have to marry someone whose strengths are the opposites of your own.”
“You don’t take the long view?”
“I don’t know,” he said, but then he answered other, unspoken questions. “Some good might come from it. Maybe they can explain to me what happened. That’d be . . . that’d be rich, right?”
She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You don’t know what happened?”
“Oh, I know exactly what fucking happened. Everybody lost heart,” he said. “They couldn’t just ride it out. Jim was my undoing, just like we always joked he would be.”
There was silence for a moment, and then Madison asked, “Who said he would? What did Jim do?”
Her father stood again and crossed to the butcher block, dotted with bread crumbs and the ends of peeled garlic cloves. He stared at the remains of the meal he’d made, then began sweeping it all into the trash.
“Do you remember Alan Pratt? You were too small, right?”
“I mean,” she said, “I’ve seen the pictures. You used to vacation with them, right? Mom still sees Karen, doesn’t she?”
Karen was, she was pretty sure, Alan Pratt’s widow. He’d died soon after quitting the firm, but she didn’t really know anything else about him. She knew she’d heard old stories, about nights when her parents were just a couple, when they lived in the city. The four of them together: Alan and Karen and Bob and Isabel. Six-hour dinners, going dancing. The people her parents had been thinking they’d try to be, before they got married to each other.
“We haven’t seen Karen in years.”
He said this quickly, as if admonishing someone at the dinner table for a faux pas, a belch or an indiscreet confession.
“But Alan, he would have seen all this coming. He would have known. Alan was—I never should have let him go.”
She hadn’t known that her father had fired that man, Alan Pratt. She’d always heard the stories and thought they were friends.
“But it didn’t matter,” she said. “He died right after, right? Wasn’t he sick?”
“Sick and tired,” her father muttered. “That’s what he used to say, when I’d go to visit him. He never wanted me there, really. It embarrassed him, he’d try to make jokes. Gallows humor and all that.”
“But it’s nice you visited him.” She might as well have been speaking to the television, to a news report that would continue regardless of her response.
“But I couldn’t have known, when we fired him. You spend your life figuring out what you’re good at. You say, okay, I’m going to be the opposite of that guy. He’s going to fail, and I’m not. I thought the best thing I could do was be the anti-Alan, be aggressive, trust my instincts. I might have made a mistake, there.”
“Dad,” she said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He seemed to see her again, for a moment.
“No one does,” he said. “Just watch, I’ll be sitting there in front of Congress and they won’t even understand their own lectures. You think they understand the repo market? They don’t even know the term. You think they have a clue what was going on with the put options, those bets? The shorts? That’s where they should be looking. Whatever I did, even Jim, whatever he did back in June, we were too late. It’s irrelevant.”
“Why,” she said, but he wasn’t listening.
“It just doesn’t make sense. Of course you act, when nothing makes sense. You can’t just wait there like a fucking sitting duck.”
She had a feeling, then, that something cold and quick had come into the room and taken a seat at the table beside them. She wanted to reach across the table to touch her father’s hand, to recall him to this night, to her face, but something had shifted and it had seemed possible he might react like a cornered animal, and strike.
“Daddy,” she said carefully. “I don’t understand what you’re telling me. Have you said any of this, yet, to Mom?”
“Now isn’t the time,” he said. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I just wanted to hear about you. About the party. Will you tell me about it? This can all wait.”
It seemed so obvious to her that it couldn’t, but she didn’t know what she could say to him to force his hand.
“I saw people do cocaine tonight,” she said. He put his palms to the table and pulled himself forward, closer to her.
“Jesus, really? Who? At Bill Welsh’s house?”