He was furious.He had already decided that his father wasn’t worth much, but with his remarriage, that assessment fell even lower.John was personally affronted by what his father had done.The pain his mother felt was nothing compared to his own humiliation, because word spread quickly.Within weeks, all of Boston knew that Eugene had taken a second wife, that that wife was a good deal younger than he was, and that she was noticeably pregnant.John took his share of ribbing from his friends at school, even some from their parents, and although heswallowed it all with the good humor of the aristocrat he was determined to be, inside he seethed.
Eugene must have seen it, because before he introduced John to Patricia he took him aside with a warning.“Don’t say it, John.Don’t say it if you know what’s good for you.I don’t mind if you feel loyalty to your mother.It’d be strange if you didn’t.But I won’t have you upsetting my wife.You’ll show her respect, even if you choke on it.”
“I well might,” John mumbled.
“Come again, sonny?”
He should have known better, should have known that in the long run he couldn’t win, but he’d bottled the anger inside for too long.“You knocked her up.You got her pregnant while you were still with my mother.Is that why you married her, because she’s having your kid?”
Eugene glared at him, red-faced and rigid.“I married her because I love her.”
“What about my mother?What happened to the love you were supposed to be feeling for her?”
“Things happen sometimes.Love fades.”
“If it fades, what’s it worth?Will you love this one till it fades, then dump her, too?Will she be feeling the same kind of pain that my mother is now?This one—”
“Her name,” Eugene stated through clenched teeth, “is Patricia.”
“—must be really dumb—”
“Watch it, boy!”
“You want me to respect her, when she takes a married man away from his wife?What kind of woman does that?My mother was there.She was your wife.Were you respectingher,while you were shacking up with Patricia?”
Man of passion and impulse though he was, Eugene had never resorted to violence as an outlet for anger.Somewhere in the back of his mind, John knew that, and it was confirmed by the fact that Eugene kept his fists locked tightly to his sides.
“You’re treading on shaky ground, boy.”
“What can you do to me that you haven’t already done?Yell.Go ahead.Yell all you want.I’m used to that.Face it,” he dared say, at his most rebellious, “what you are and what you’ve done don’t concern me anymore.Two more years and I’ll be eighteen.Then I won’t even have to come when you call.”
But John had underestimated his father, who said in that same dangerously slow, tight-jawed way, “Don’t be so sure.I’m your future, John.St.George Mining is your future.”
“Not if I don’t want, it.”
“You will,” Eugene bellowed, “because the day you turn your back on it will be the day I write you off.That’ll be the end of the money, sonny.And don’t”—he raised a cautioning finger—“think you’ll be supported by the Wrights in the style you like, because there’s somethin’ you don’t know about people like that.You think they live high off the hog?Well, look close.The house on the Cape has been in the family for three generations and is shabby as hell.The membership in the country club was bought for perpetuity by the Wright who was a founding member.Do you see your aunt an’ uncle buying fancy clothes?Or flyin’ to New York for the weekend?Your cousins didn’t get new cars when they turned sixteen.The fact is, sonny, that people like that have the pedigree and the history andthe money, but they don’t shell out.So if you think you’re gonna turn to them to support you while you piss away your time with your nose up in the air, you’re wrong.”
Seeing that he’d regained the upper hand, he took a breath.“You need my money, John.Think about it, and you’ll know it’s true.”
John wanted to argue, but his rebelliousness wouldn’t take him that far.He wasn’t sure if he believed that the Wright side of the family was a dry well, but he did know that there was money in St.George Mining.He liked nice things, and nice things cost money.Until he knew his options, he couldn’t risk disinheritance.
So he met Patricia, and it took every bit of the social skill he’d developed in his sixteen years to be civil.The gossip hadn’t quite prepared him.Married, she was; the shining gold band on her finger confirmed that.Pregnant, she was; her protruding belly confirmed that.But John had imagined a husband stealer to be more sharp-edged.Patricia was pretty and soft, hatefully so.
She was also very, very young.Gossip had hinted at that, but John wasn’t prepared for someone far closer to his own age than to Eugene’s.She was, it turned out, twenty, to Eugene’s forty-eight, which was the most bizarre, the most hateful turn of all.
John couldn’t return to Boston fast enough, not so much to report on what he’d learned, since he was too disgusted to confess it, but because he needed to return to his own life and blot out his father and his father’s very young, very pregnant wife.
He might have succeeded had Sybil not taken suddenly ill.The diagnosis was cancer.The prognosis wasguarded.She had one operation, then another, and though the Wrights came often to visit, John was the one who stayed by her side.“You look so much like your father,” she would say with a smile in fuzzy moments, just before she drifted into a drugged sleep, and although he hated the comparison, he knew he would bear it if it brought her some comfort.Nothing else seemed to.The lethargy that had set in after Eugene’s marriage was magnified tenfold.The doctors told her to fight.The Wrights told her to fight.John told her to fight.But she wouldn’t.
Seven months after the cancer was found, she died.John, at seventeen, was hit in the face with the facts of life and death.His grief was intense and complex.He felt fear, confusion, anger, and a pride that kept him from sharing his feelings with others lest they think him weak.So he guarded his emotions well, pressing them into a deep, dark portion of his mind, covering them over with the practical concerns relevant to survival.Because that was the name of the game.Not only was Sybil gone, but no invitation had come from the Wrights for John to move in with any of them.They didn’t have to respect Eugene St.George to fear him, John was dismayed to discover.They gave Eugene wide berth, which meant keeping well to themselves where the matter of John’s well-being was concerned.
John was totally disillusioned.Wasn’t blood thicker than water?he wondered.Wasn’t the fact that he was his mother’s son enough to keep him in the Wright fold?But they let him go.He had to accept that what his father had told him that night in Maine was true.When the chipswere down, help wouldn’t come from the Wrights, particularly now that Sybil was gone.
Within weeks of her death, Eugene moved Patricia and their newborn daughter into the Beacon Hill townhouse to which he had never relinquished the title.If he’d been able to think charitably, John might have thanked his father for maintaining the continuity of his senior year in high school, rather than forcing him to move up to Maine.But he was beyond gratitude.He saw the move as an insult to the memory of his mother.More than that, he saw it as an enemy occupation.They were the enemy, Eugene and Patricia.Sybil had given up on life, and they were to blame.Not even the baby was without guilt.Despite Eugene’s denials, John was convinced that she was the one thing most instrumental in bringing about the marriage.
But he was over a barrel.He wanted to pack up and move out, but his father had the money.John’s weekly allowance wasn’t enough to carry him long.Turning eighteen wouldn’t matter.Twenty-five was the magic number, and “modest sum” was the term Eugene used when describing what John would receive then if he didn’t join St.George Mining.Otherwise, John’s weekly allowance would continue until he graduated from college, when he would go on salary with the company.That salary would be generous.John wouldn’t have cause for complaint as long as he stayed with the business.
John would have screamed in frustration if it wouldn’t have been uncouth.In the privacy of his thoughts, though, the curses went on.He had wealthy friends, friends with potential, friends to impress.Living with his father didn’t help his image; Eugene was and always would be theminer from Maine, in the minds of those who mattered.John knew he’d have to work twice as hard to avoid that stigma and prove himself worthy of his city friends.He’d have to build on the image of self-confidence, wealth, and sophistication that he’d already established.