it was, and he did too. Only Ellie still thought he was invulnerable - but hadn't I seen a question in her eyes once or twice? I thought maybe I had.
Died suddenly.
I felt the hairs on my scalp stir. Suddenly. Straightening up at his desk, clutching his chest. Suddenly. Dropping his racket on the tennis court. You didn't want to think those thoughts about your father, but sometimes they come. God knows they do.
'I couldn't help overhearing some of that,' he said.
'Yeah?' Warily.
'Has Arnie Cunningham got his foot in a bucket of something warm and brown, Dennis?'
'I . . . I don't know for sure,' I said slowly. Because, after all, what did I have? Vapours, that was all.
'You want to talk about it?'
'Not right now, Dad, if it's okay.'
'It's fine,' he said. 'But if it . . . as you said on the phone, if it gets heavy, will you for God's sake tell me what's happening?'
'Yes.'
'Okay.' I started for the Stairs and was almost there when he stopped me by saying, 'I ran Will Darnell's accounts and did his income-tax returns for almost fifteen years, you know.'
I turned back to him, really surprised.
'No. I didn't know that.'
My father smiled. It was a smile I had never seen before, one I would guess my mother had seen only a few times, my sis maybe not at all. You might have thought it was a sleepy sort of smile at first, if you looked more closely you would have seen that it was not sleepy at all - it was cynical and hard and totally aware.
'Can you keep your mouth shut about something, Dennis?'
'Yes,' I said. 'I think so.'
'Don't just think so.'
'Yes. I can.'
'Better. I did his figures up until 1975, and then he got Bill Upshaw over in Monroeville.'
My father looked at me closely.
'I won't say that Bill Upshaw is a crook, but I will say that his scruples are thin enough to read a newspaper through. And last year he bought himself a $300,000 English Tudor in Sewickley, Damn the interest rates, full speed ahead.'
He gestured at our own home with a small sweep of his right arm and then let it drop back into his own lap. He and my mother had bought it the year before I was born for $62,000 - it was now worth maybe $150,000 - and they had only recently gotten their paper back from the bank. We had a little party in the back yard late last summer; Dad lit the barbecue, put the pink slip on the long fork, and each of us got a chance at holding it over the coals until it was gone.
'No English Tudor here, huh, Denny?' he said.
'It's fine,' I said. I came back and sat down on the couch.
'Darnell and I parted amicably enough,' my father went on, 'not that I ever cared very much for him in a personal way. I thought he was a wretch.'
I nodded a little, because I liked that; it expressed my gut feelings about Will Darnell better than any profanity could.
'But there's all the difference in the world between a personal relationship and a business relationship. You learn that very quickly in this business, or you give it up and start selling Fuller Brushes door-to-door. Our business relationship was good, as far as it went . . . but it didn't go far enough. That was why I finally called it quits.'
'I don't get you.'
'Cash kept showing up,' he said. 'Large amounts of cash with no clear ancestry. At Darnell's direction I invested in two corporations - Pennsylvania Solar Heating and New York Ticketing - that sounded like two of the dummiest dummy corporations I've ever heard of. Finally I went to see him, because I wanted all my cards on the table. I told him that my professional opinion was that, if he got audited either by the IRS or by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania tax boys, he was apt to have a great deal of explaining to do, and that before long I was going to know too much to be an asset to him.'
'What did he say?'
'He began to dance,' my father said, still wearing that sleepy, cynical smile. 'In my business, you start to get familiar with the steps of the dance by the time you're thirty-eight or so . . . if you're good at your business, that is. And I'm not all that bad, The dance starts off with the guy asking