Caroline shook her head weakly, perhaps hoping to suggest that she was too infirm to have reached the phone by the bed.
“Is that a no? You’re saying no? You weren’t listening?”
“No, Gary,” she said in a tiny voice.
“I heard the click, I heard the breathing—”
“No.”
“Caroline, there are three phones on this line, I’ve got two of them in my study, and the third one’s right here. Hello?”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I just picked up the phone—” She inhaled through gritted teeth. “To see if the line was free. That’s all.”
“And sat and listened! You were eavesdropping! Like we’ve talked and talked and talked about not doing!”
“Gary,” she said in a piteous little voice, “I swear to you I wasn’t. My back is killing me. I couldn’t reach to put the phone back for a minute. I put it on the floor. I wasn’t eavesdropping. Please be nice to me.”
That her face was beautiful and that the agony in it was mistakable for ecstasy—that the sight of her doubled-over and mud-spattered and red-cheekgd and vanquished and wild-haired on the Persian rug turned him on; that some part of him believed her denials and was full of tenderness for her—only deepened his feeling of betrayal. He stormed back up the hall to his study and slammed the door. “Mother, hello, I’m sorry.”
But the line was dead. He had to dial St. Jude now at his own expense. Through the window overlooking the back yard he could see sunlit, clamshell-purple rain clouds, steam rising off the monkey puzzle tree.
Because she wasn’t paying for the call, Enid sounded happier. She asked Gary if he’d heard of a company called Axon. “It’s in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania,” she said. “They want to buy Dad’s patent. Here, I’ll read you the letter. I’m a little upset about this.”
At CenTrust Bank, where Gary now ran the Equities Division, he’d long specialized in large-cap securities and never much concerned himself with small fry. The name Axon was not familiar to him. But as he listened to his mother read the letter from Mr. Joseph K. Prager at Bragg Knuter & Speigh, he felt he knew these people’s game. It was clear that the lawyer, in drafting a letter and sending it to an old man with a midwestern address, had offered Alfred no more than a tiny percentage of the patent’s actual value. Gary knew the way these shysters worked. In Axon’s position he would have done the same.
“I’m thinking we should ask for ten thousand, not five thousand,” Enid said.
“When does that patent expire?” Gary said.
“In about six years.”
“They must be looking at big money. Otherwise they’d just go ahead and infringe.”
“The letter says it’s experimental and uncertain.”
“Mother, exactly. That’s exactly what they want you to think. But if it’s so experimental, why are they bothering with this at all? Why not just wait six years?”
“Oh, I see.”
“It’s very, very good that you told me about this, Mother. What you need to do now is write back to these guys and ask them for a $200,000 licensing fee up front.”
Enid gasped as she’d done long ago on family car trips, when Alfred swung into oncoming traffic to pass a truck. “ Two hundred thousand! Oh, my, Gary—”
“And a one percent royalty on gross revenues from their process. Tell them you’re fully prepared to defend your legitimate claim in court.”
“But what if they say no?”
“Trust me, these guys have no desire to litigate. There’s no downside to being aggressive here.”
“Well, but it’s Dad’s patent, and you know how he thinks.”
“Put him on the phone,” Gary said.
His parents were cowed by authority of all kinds. When Gary wanted to reassure himself that he’d escaped their fate, when he needed to measure his distance from St. Jude, he considered his own fearlessness in the face of authority—including the authority of his father.
“Yes,” Alfred said.
“Dad,” he said, “I think you should go after these guys. They’re in a very weak position and you could make some real money.”
In St. Jude the old man said nothing.
“You’re not telling me you’re going to take that offer,” Gary said. “Because that’s not even an option. Dad. That’s not even on the menu.”
“I’ve made my decision,” Alfred said. “What I do is not your business.”
“Yes, it is, though. I have a legitimate interest in this.”
“Gary, you do not.”
“I have a legitimate interest,” Gary insisted. If Enid and Alfred ever ran out of money, it would fall to him and Caroline—not to his undercapitalized sister, not to his feckless brother—to pay for their care. But he had enough self-control not to spell this out for Alfred. “Will you at least tell me what you’re going to do? Will you pay me that courtesy?”
“You could pay me the courtesy of not asking,” Alfred said. “However, since you ask, I will tell you. I’m going to take what they offer and give half of the money to Orfic Midland.”
The universe was mechanistic: the father spoke, the son reacted.
“Well, now, Dad,” Gary said in the low, slow voice he reserved for situations in which he was very angry and very certain he was right. “You can’t do that.”
“I can and I will,” Alfred said.
