Page 22 of We Could Be So Good
That’s six months. Sixmonths. Andy wants to say that his father could run the newspaper from a wheelchair or a hospital bed or a hot-air balloon and do a sight better than Andy could on his own two feet. Andy can’t run his own life; there’s no way he can be trusted with the livelihood of theChronicle’s hundreds of employees, not to mention the responsibility of not fucking up thenews.
He can’t just come right out and say that in no way is he ever running theChronicleor anything else. It’s too embarrassing. He’s never actually had to explain to anyone that he’s a disaster—that’s how obvious it is.
“I’m not ready,” Andy finally says.
“You’d have help,” his father says, sounding far too reasonable for a man who’s obviously suffering under some kind of delusion. “Lou Epstein will still be managing editor. He’s been in this business nearly as long as I have.”
“Then make him the publisher!”
“That’s not how it works,” his father says, not without sympathy. “You’llowntheChronicle.”
“You’llown theChronicle. You’re not dying.”
“Not yet.”
Andy pinches the bridge of his nose. They’ve already had this conversation half a dozen times. His father, at sixty-five, believes his days of usefulness are coming to an end; Andy doesn’t see why the publisher of theChronicleneeds to be able to walk or hold a pen or do any of the things that Andy’s father is finding increasingly difficult.
“Nobody will respect a twenty-six-year-old publisher,” Andy says, and he already knows what his father’s answering argument will be.
“They respected me when I was twenty-six, and your grandfather when he wasn’t much older than that.”
Andy wants to argue that this was because his father had been twenty-six in the twenties, when rules were different, and his grandfather had been that age in the late 1800s, when rules were nonexistent. But that isn’t the problem—the real problem is that his father and grandfather had the kind of personalities that commanded the attention of an entire room and the will to execute any plan they thought of. Andy apologized six times that morning to the man at the bagel shop for not being able to make up his mind about whether he wanted cream cheese and still would have forgotten his bagel on the counter if Nick hadn’t reminded him.
Andy doesn’t know if his father simply never bothered to get to know him and therefore can’t see how bad an idea this is, or if he’s so desperate to pass his life’s work on to his only son that he’s refusing to see reason. Either way it’s a depressing thought.
“One other thing,” his father says, his face carefully neutral. “Consider how it will look if it comes out that you’ve abandoned your apartment to live with a bachelor friend in a seedy neighborhood.”
Andy’s first thought is that he’s never mentioned Nick’s neighborhood, but he shouldn’t be surprised that his father made it his business to check the file of anyone Andy was spending time with. The first part of the decade left its marks on Andrew Fleming Jr.: once he realized that the FBI had a file on him the size of a phone book, he started keeping tabs on everyone around him, because there’s nothing like being accused of being a Soviet spy to make a man a little paranoid that the people around him might be reporting to Uncle Sam. Or Uncle Khrushchev, for that matter.
Andy’s second thought isn’t a thought at all, but a bone-deep sense of mortification. “Sir, what are you saying?”
His father sighs and takes off his glasses to clean them withhis handkerchief. “I’m suggesting that whatever you do, you do it with your eyes open.”
“I’m not—Dad.” He squeezes his eyes shut, hoping that when he opens them, he won’t be in a room where his father is accusing him of having a queer affair with his best friend. Or, not accusing so much as being blandly indifferent, which is even more rattling.
His father is right that staying with Nick poses a risk: people love jumping to conclusions, especially scandalous conclusions, and that’s exactly what they’ll do even if nobody knows about Nick’s private life. While it’s normal enough for young men to have roommates, it isn’t normal for a man in Andy’s situation—a man who owns his own apartment and whose father has multiple spare rooms.
But Andy isn’t going to leave. He hates living alone; he likes living with Nick and Nick likes it, too. Andy’s mother never went in much for motherly advice, but one thing she was fond of saying was that if you want something, you have to grit your teeth and jump in with both feet—that it matters less how you land than that you get there in the first place. Andy had always grimly thought to himself that this was exactly what you’d expect from the life philosophy of a person who went to war zones for a living. Andy was happy shrugging his way through life.
Right now, though, there isn’t anything his father could possibly say to dissuade Andy from staying in Nick’s spare room. He remembers his parents hollering at one another, his father shouting that Andy’s mother was going to get herself killed, his mother shouting back that at least she stood for something, and Andy thinking, disloyally, that his father was right. And he had been right, in the end.
He and his father have never really fought—even their disagreements about Andy’s future at theChronicleare just conversations. Conversations they both hate, but still just conversations.
He grips the arms of his chair, braced for the full force of his father’s wrath.
Instead he gets a half smile and a sigh, neither of which he can begin to decipher but which leave him with the distinct impression that his father doesn’t particularly care what kind of mess Andy makes of his life.
***
The story, as Andy and everybody else know it, goes like this.
Andy’s grandfather, Andrew Fleming I, arrived at Ellis Island round about 1890 with a nickel in his pocket or whatever they call nickels in Scotland. He spent the next few years doing honest upstanding American capitalist things that definitely had nothing to do with any of the waterfront gangs that ran half the city in those days.
Somewhere around the turn of the century he met an enterprising young reporter named Cecilia Marks, who was making a name for herself by getting thrown into prisons in order to interview murderers, stowing away on steamships, chaining herself to various legislative buildings, and in general making herself irresistible to the likes of Andrew Fleming I, who had never met a danger he didn’t want to embrace with both arms.
When the paper that employed Miss Marks threatened to fold, Andrew did the only sensible thing a man could do in that situation and bought the paper. Suitably wooed, Miss Marks became Mrs. Fleming, even though in the newspaper she retained her old byline. The paper succeeded; more papers were acquired; ason was produced, staid and responsible in a way that shocked the sensibilities of both of his parents. Young Andrew went off to fight a war, survived it, returned home to find that his father hadn’t, and took over theChronicle.
In the twenties, theChronicle’s circulation exceeded half a million, which was none too shabby in a city that already had a couple dozen daily papers, not counting the weeklies, not counting the Black papers or those in other languages. TheChronicle’s success carried on through the thirties and right on through the war, not stumbling in the least when Fleming, again following in his father’s footsteps, married his star reporter. He divorced her almost immediately—but not before fathering a child.
