Page 3 of Pro Bono

On the third and final day, Charlie swam his best event, the 200-yard Individual Medley. He touched the wall a body length ahead of the others and then, panting heavily, grinned up at his friends and coaches and savored their shouts and hand clapping for a moment. As he was getting out of the pool he glanced at the bleachers and saw his mother waving at him.

He’d had no idea that his mother would be at the sectional meet. Since his father had died when he was eleven, she’d continued to attend athletic events as a parental duty, usually only home meets or games, but here she was. She hurried to the bottom row of the bleachers, trotted up as soon as he had his towel around him, and hugged him. Then she pulled back and said, “Charlie, this is Mack Stone. We knew today would bethe finals, so we figured we’d drive up and surprise you. Mack, this big guy is my baby.”

Mack had a suntanned face and aviator glasses, and an expensive haircut slightly too long to be showing gray on the sides. Was he about Linda’s age, or had they both just slipped into the vagueness of middle age, not young but playing young, like actors? He was mainly shocked that his widowed mother was here with a man. Mack Stone held out his hand, smiled, and said, “Congratulations, Charlie. That was a terrific effort.”

There was a condescending upward tilt to Mack’s head so he could look down his nose and give a fake smile. Charlie said, “Thank you.”

Linda said, “I guess the meet must be about over. Maybe you can sneak off with us and go to dinner before we start the drive home. I’ll tell the coach so he doesn’t wonder where you are.”

“I’ve still got the relays,” Charlie said. “You go ahead. I’ve really got to ride home on the bus with everybody else.” He glanced over his shoulder. “In fact, the coach is giving me the eye right now. I’ll see you at home tonight.” He brought himself to look at Mack Stone. “Nice to meet you, Mack. Thank you both for coming.”

When the school’s bus dropped Charlie off at home a bit after midnight that Sunday night, a strange not-new Mercedes was in the driveway. He went inside the house and there were only a couple lights burning, one in the foyer and the other on the stairs. In the morning when he woke up, Mack Stone was in the kitchen and Charlie’s mother Linda was cooking breakfast for him.

After that, his mother spent much of her time going places with Mack Stone. Charlie came from school to an empty house many days, and on the other days it was worse, because they were both there. The period when Linda was the clear hostess and Mack was a guest didn’t last verylong. Soon she stopped referring to her bedroom as “my room” and called it theirs.

Mack didn’t appear to do anything the way Charlie’s father had. He never seemed to go anywhere, or talk about friends or acquaintances. When Charlie asked his mother, “What does Mack do?” She said, “What do you mean?” He said, “For a living.” She said, “He’s in business.”

Charlie tried out that idea for a couple days, but couldn’t find any substance in it. He tried to google Mack’s name, but there were millions of Stones. He noticed Mack had a laptop computer, and would spend time tapping away at it, but when Charlie would get close enough to look at the screen, it was usually on some catalog or advertisement. Whenever Mack referred to anything on the screen, it was “I found a really great deal on a hotel in Cabo,” or “You’d look great in this dress.”

Finally, Charlie asked him directly what he did for a living.

Mack said, “Why do you ask?’

“I just wondered. You never seem to go anywhere, unless it’s with my mother. Do you work when I’m at school or something?”

“I’m an investor,” Mack said. “My money goes out and works for me. I sometimes direct it from one place to another, or use the profits and dividends to invest in new companies. But most of the time a smart investor picks something good and sticks with it.”

Things remained this way until Charlie’s freshman year ended, and then his mother announced a surprise. She’d decided he was going to attend a summer program at a school in northern California. She gave him a glossy, colorful booklet describing what the place offered. It seemed to value the skills that would have been good for an aspiring knight—horsemanship, archery, martial arts, and literature. There were also tennis, golf, swimming, and kayaking. The place was coeducational, and the photographs included roughly equal numbers of male and femalestudents. Charlie decided that since his mother had already made up her mind, his smartest move would be to agree to it, and since he was going to agree, to do so without visible reluctance or audible complaint.

He went for six weeks in July and August, and they were the best six weeks of his life so far. Being with contemporaries of both sexes in a place where the only real adult supervision consisted of coaching and ended with dinner was like a dream. His only regret at the end of the program was having to leave.

He flew into Los Angeles on August 16, when the temperature was 108. He stepped out of the baggage claim door, waited for forty minutes, and then watched Mack’s Mercedes pull up to the white curb and saw him and his mother both smiling. The air conditioning was blowing through their hair in a frigid breeze.

At dinner on the 19th, Linda announced to Charlie that she had hired a very special and well-known consultant in educational futures, who was coming the next day to present to him a proposal for his. “Her name is Camilla Barton. Mack, tell him what you think of Camilla.”

Mack replied, “Charlie, a guy like you needs an Ivy League school, and getting people into those schools is a whole study in itself. I asked some friends who have hired her for their kids. She knows how to do the trick—what works now and what doesn’t anymore. She also has connections and relationships, and that’s the ingredient you can’t fake.”

Charlie had a strong feeling that this was some kind of scheme to keep him out of their lives a bit longer, but he didn’t want to start an argument without knowing what he was objecting to. He had been skeptical about his mother’s idea of sending him up north for the summer, but the summer had been much better than she knew or would ever have allowed. He would wait a day and see.

Camilla Barton turned out to be a middle-aged woman with very short dark hair and a briefcase. She wore a lot of jewelry—a necklace and bracelets made of large chunks of transparent plastic with wisps of gold leaf embedded in them.

She said, “I’ve studied your records, and talked to your counselor and your academic advisor, Charlie. The smartest move that someone like you could make, and one that could change your life, is to transfer to the right prep school now, before it’s too late. The school that I consider your best bet is old, and it’s known to admissions offices everywhere. It’s in New Hampshire.”

Miss Barton left him with a collection of brochures for eastern prep schools. The one she had recommended most highly was the Thorsen Academy. He looked up the school online and learned it was 2,960 miles from Los Angeles. His mother was trying to do her best for him, but she was also at least acquiescing to Mack’s plan to move him out of the way of their relationship.

There seemed to Charlie to be no point in resisting their effort to push him out. In two years, he’d be applying to colleges no matter where he was, and he’d probably never live at his mother’s house again for longer than a school vacation.

Charlie went off to the new school, made friends easily, and discovered that the place deserved its academic reputation. For a Southern California teenager, the New Hampshire fall was a beautiful curiosity. A bit later the iron-gray skies, rain, cold winds, and then later deep-drifted snow seemed unnecessarily harsh, but by then he’d learned that the strategy for enduring dissatisfaction was to work harder.

When Charlie flew home for winter break, his mother and Mack Stone met him in the front entrance of the house and told him they had decided to get married. When he came home again for summer break, there wasthe wedding. His mother had told him months earlier that Mack wanted him to be his best man, but Charlie had replied that he wouldn’t. After a lull, she had written him a letter formally asking him, as her only close living male relative, to walk her down the aisle. He had written back, “Down the aisle of what?”

She called him and said they had rented a wedding venue named Ocean Ranch Celebration Gardens for the ceremony and invited three hundred guests. She said, “I know you disapprove. I know you will dread it. But please do this for me because I need you to.”

He did as she asked. The scene of the wedding was lush, a parklike expanse above the ocean with a pavilion shaded by tall eucalyptus trees. He noticed that just about every one of his mother’s friends and her supposedly extinct male relatives was there, together with spouses and children, including some surviving Warrens. She wore a light blue gown that looked elegant on her long, thin body and her slightly graying hair was styled the way it had been when he was a child. Everyone seemed to have a good time at the wedding. Early the next morning she and her new husband Mack Stone flew off to their European honeymoon. Before they returned ten days later, he had left for New Hampshire, where he’d enrolled in a late summer session.

When Charlie returned at the end of that year, Mack and Linda were living about the same, but he could see that there was tension. The first time Mack was out and he was alone with his mother he said, “You and Mack aren’t getting along the way you were when I left. Did something happen, or what?”

She said, “It’s nothing, really. It’s just that some of Mack’s investments haven’t been doing so well this year. And you know how I can be—worried and anxious when there’s really no need to be. You probably remember how your father used to be. He could tell you the bankbalance without looking at the checkbook, how much was coming in or going out. I didn’t realize how comforting that was for me. Things are different now. Mack isn’t like a man who works in an office and operates a firm. Investing is different. And he has the personality for it.”

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