Kane and Abel/Sons of Fortune Read online

  “You’re dead, freshman,” said Joanna, as she plunged the knife into the cake.

  “I knew that the moment I met you, Mrs. Gates, but I think we should have at least three children before you finally kill me.”

  “Well, Senator, you’re about to become a grandfather,” said Ruth. “My congratulations. I can’t wait to be a grandmother, although I suspect it will be some time before Annie has her first child.”

  “She won’t even consider it until she’s graduated, would be my bet,” said Harry Gates, “especially when they find out what I have planned for Fletcher.”

  “Is it possible that Fletcher might not fall in with your plans?” suggested Ruth.

  “Not as long as Jimmy and I continue to make him feel that it was always his idea in the first place.”

  “Don’t you think by now he might just have worked out what you’re up to?”

  “He’s been able to do that since the day I met him at the Hotchkiss versus Taft game nearly a decade ago. I knew then he was capable of raising the bar far higher than I ever could.”

  The senator placed an arm around Ruth. “However, there’s one problem I may need your help with.”

  “And what’s that?” asked Ruth.

  “I don’t think Fletcher has made up his mind yet if he’s a Republican or a Democrat, and I know how strongly your husband …”

  “Isn’t it wonderful news about Joanna?” said Fletcher to his mother-in-law.

  “Sure is,” said Martha, “Harry’s already counting the extra votes he’ll pick up once he becomes a grandfather.”

  “What makes him so confident of that?” asked Fletcher.

  “Senior citizens are the fastest growing section of the electorate, so it must be worth at least a percentage point for the voters to see Harry wheeling a stroller everywhere.”

  “And if Annie and I have a child, will that be worth another percentage point?”

  “No, no,” said Martha, “it’s all in the timing. Just try to remember that Harry will be up for reelection again in two years’ time.”

  “Do you think we should plan the birth of our first child simply to coincide with the date of Harry’s next election?”

  “You’d be surprised how many politicians do,” replied Martha.

  “Congratulations, Joanna,” said the senator, giving his daughter-in-law a hug.

  “Will your son ever be able to keep a secret?” Joanna hissed as she extracted the knife from the cake.

  “No, not if it will make his friends happy,” admitted the senator, “but if he thought it would harm someone he loved, he would carry the secret to his grave.”

  16

  PROFESSOR KARL ABRAHAMS entered the lecture theater as the clock struck nine. The professor gave eight lectures a term, and it was rumored that he had never missed one in thirty-seven years. Many of the other rumors about Karl Abrahams could not be substantiated, and so he would have dismissed them as hearsay and therefore inadmissible.

  However, such rumors persisted, and thus became part of folklore. There was no doubting his sardonic wit should any student be foolish enough to take him on; that could be testified to on a weekly basis. Whether it was the case that three presidents had invited him to join the Supreme Court, only the three presidents knew. However it was recorded that, when questioned about this, Abrahams said he felt the best service he could give the nation was to instruct the next generation of lawyers and create as many decent, honest counselors as possible, rather than clear up the mess made by so many bad ones.

  The Washington Post, in an unauthorized profile, observed that Abrahams had taught two members of the present Supreme Court, twenty-two federal judges and several of the deans of leading law schools.

  When Fletcher and Jimmy attended the first of Abrahams’s eight lectures, they weren’t under any illusion about how much work lay ahead of them. Fletcher was, however, under the illusion that during his final year as an undergraduate, he had put in sufficiently long hours, often ending up in bed after midnight. It took Professor Abrahams about a week to familiarize him with hours when he normally slept.

  Professor Abrahams continually reminded his first-year students that not all of them would attend his final address to the law graduates at the end of the course. Jimmy bowed his head. Fletcher began to spend so many hours researching that Annie rarely saw him before the library doors had been locked and bolted. Jimmy would sometimes leave a little earlier so that he could be with Joanna, but he rarely departed without several books under his arm. Fletcher told Annie that he’d never known her brother to work so hard.

  “And it won’t be any easier for him once the baby arrives,” Annie reminded her husband one evening after she had come to pick him up from the library.

  “Joanna will have planned for the child to be born during the vacation so she can be back at work on the first day of the term.”

  “I don’t want our first child to grow up like that,” said Annie. “I intend to raise my children in our home as a full-time mother and with a father who will be back early enough in the evening to read to them.”

  “Suits me,” said Fletcher. “But if you change your mind and decide to become the chairman of General Motors, I’ll be happy to change the diapers.”

  The first thing that surprised Nat when he returned to the university was how immature his former classmates seemed to be. He had sufficient credits to allow him to move on to his sophomore year, but the students he had mixed with before signing up were still discussing the latest pop group or movie star, and he’d never even heard of The Doors. It wasn’t until he attended his first lecture that he became aware just how much the experience of Vietnam had changed his life.

  Nat was also aware that his fellow students didn’t treat him as if he was one of them, not least because a few of the professors also appeared somewhat in awe. Nat enjoyed the respect he was afforded, but quickly discovered there was another side to that coin. Over the Christmas vacation, he discussed the problem with Tom, who told him that he understood why some of them were a bit wary of him; after all, they believed he had killed at least a hundred Vietcong. “At least a hundred?” repeated Nat. “While others have read what our soldiers did to the Vietnamese women,” said Tom.

  “I should have been so lucky; if it hadn’t been for Mollie, I’d have remained celibate.”

  “Well, don’t disillusion them would be my advice,” said Tom, “because my bet is that the men are envious and the women intrigued. The last thing you want them to discover is that you’re a normal law-abiding citizen.”

  “I sometimes wish they’d remember that I’m also only nineteen,” Nat replied.

  “The trouble is,” said Tom, “that Captain Cartwright, holder of the Medal of Honor, doesn’t sound as if he’s only nineteen, and I’m afraid the limp only reminds them.”

  Nat took his friend’s advice, and decided to dissipate his energy in the classroom, in the gym and on the cross-country course. The doctors had warned him that it could take at least a year before he would be able to run again—if ever. After their pessimistic prediction, Nat never spent less than an hour a day in the gym, climbing ropes, lifting weights and even playing the occasional game of paddle tennis. By the end of the first term back he was able to jog slowly around the course—even if it did take him an hour and twenty minutes to cover six miles. He looked up his old training schedule, and found that his record as a freshman remained on the books at thirty-four minutes, eighteen seconds. He promised himself that he would break that by the end of his sophomore year.

  The next problem Nat faced was the response he got whenever he asked a woman out on a date. They either wanted to jump straight into bed with him or simply turned him down out of hand. Tom had warned him that his scalp in bed was probably a prize several undergraduates wanted to claim, and Nat quickly discovered that some he hadn’t even met were already doing so.

  “Reputation has its disadvantages,” complained Nat.

  “I’ll swap pl