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“Then you heard me correctly when I said that you should be sorry. You are now…” He glanced at something beyond Roark’s left shoulder. “Fifty-six and one-half minutes late.”
Roark turned. On the wall behind him was a clock. White face. Stark black numerals. A dash marking each of the sixty minutes. The short hand was already on the nine. The minute hand was three dashes away from the twelve.
The old man’s lost it, Roark thought. Something’s pickled his brain. Paper fumes, maybe. Is there such a thing?
He cleared his throat. “Excuse me, sir, but I’m right on time. Our meeting was scheduled for nine.”
“Eight.”
“Originally, yes. But don’t you remember calling and changing it to nine? You left a message with my roommate.”
“I assure you that my memory is in perfect working order, Mr. Slade. I made no such call.” Hadley glared up at him from beneath dense eyebrows. “Our meeting was at eight.”
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.
Despit
e 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.
