A Family Divided Read online

  “Are you from around here?” asked the husband.

  “Well…, yes and no,” Jason said. He laughed at the confused looks from his response.

  “I was born and raised in Saint Paul but moved east to attend college and law school. I was a partner with Chatfield & Smythe, a prestigious Washington D.C. law firm,” he said, emphasizing his sarcasm as he formed air quotes around prestigious, “but tired of the stress and adversarial nature of high stakes litigation. Last summer I visited Grand Marais on vacation, and as I drove into town, the sailboats moored in the harbor brought back fond memories of summers I spent here with my uncle. He taught me nature photography and how to sail. So, when I came into a little money I left the rat race behind and moved home. So here I am.”

  “Did you take all these pictures?” the wife asked after a few minutes perusing the gallery. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Thank you, I’m glad you like them. I took most, but I’ve also included some of my late uncle’s best work.”

  “Is that one for sale?” She was pointing at a large framed print hanging behind his desk. It was a masterpiece capturing twenty foot Lake Superior waves crashing onto Agate Beach in Gooseberry Falls State Park, waves similar to those that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald over fifty years before.

  “I’m sorry ma’am, but no. I can’t let that one go.”

  Jason found the image on an undeveloped roll of film in the old Nikon SLR camera his uncle left him when he passed away. It was the last picture he had taken.

  “But everything else is available for sale. Take all the time you want to look around.”

  * * *

  “We’ve found a couple photos we’d love to purchase,” said the wife after twenty minutes perusing the collection. “They’d look beautiful in our three-season porch.”

  “But we’re on a tour bus and have no way to get these home,” interjected her husband. “Can you have them shipped to Minneapolis?”

  “Of course,” Jason said. “I’d be happy to arrange it for you.”

  Between his fee for the will he had finished while the couple shopped and his profit on the two photos, less the FedEx fees which he wouldn’t pass on to the pleasant couple, Jason made less than he made in an hour as a Washington D.C. lawyer. But he sailed three or four days a week, no longer required blood pressure medication and slept eight hours every night for the first time in years.

  Chapter 6.

  “Curtis, repeat after me,” said the officiant, a retired district court judge who had been Curt’s friend since high school. “I Curtis, take you Laura, to be my wife, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”

  The Pacific Ocean created a beautiful backdrop to the white, flower covered trestle, an outdoor wedding chapel on the well-manicured ocean-side estate’s back lawn. White wooden folding chairs faced the ocean and the trestle under which the bride and groom stood, face to face, with hands clasped. Laura’s bridesmaid, her sister Allison, stood next to her. Curt’s best man, Eric Rogers, a friend and colleague from Jennco, stood next to him.

  The wedding couple had dressed casually, Curt in a mauve silk shirt over white pants, Laura in an ivory, knee-length linen dress. Both wore sandals. Palm trees swaying in the light ocean breeze and the subtle, saline scent of seawater added to the idyllic atmosphere.

  Curt released his right hand to tuck Laura’s windblown hair behind her ear. She smiled at him with a new wife’s love. He returned her smile with a new husband’s love.

  Jessica, Joshua and Brent sat in the front row, their faces expressing different emotions.

  Joshua smiled, sharing his father’s happiness.

  Jessica’s feigned smile was a weak attempt to cover discomfort attending her father’s marriage to a woman twenty years his junior.

  Brent looked bored, hoping this would all be over soon.

  The wedding was a low-key event, with few guests, just family and close friends, as Curt’s wife of thirty years passed away just six weeks before following a six-year battle with cancer.

  * * *

  Laura Dahlstrom had been Curt’s administrative assistant for almost eighteen years. He hired her when she was twenty-three, more for her excellent typing skills than her good looks, although the latter soon became the focus of his attention. They fell in love and began a long-term, committed sixteen-year affair.

  But their relationship had been an extramarital affair, often clouded in deceit. Midday trysts disguised as working lunches. Nights together at her house when Curt was supposedly at his downtown apartment, ostensibly to avoid the notorious Southern California freeway commute home after a long day in the office. Vacations staged as Curt’s business trips.

  Laura tolerated being in love with a man who put his desire to end a failed marriage on hold until his children had grown and left home, then as his wife battled cancer. But for years she longed for the day they could live together without social stigma and deceit.

  * * *

  “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the officiant said as Curt and Laura embraced.

  The small crowd broke into enthusiastic applause, however the hands of two seated in the front row remained folded in their laps.

  Chapter 7.

  “Thank you,” Joshua said as he accepted a champagne flute from a strolling waiter’s tray. He was standing with Jessica and Brent as the wedding guests mingled about the well-manicured lawn. The siblings knew none of the other guests so mingled with each other.

  “Check that out,” Jessica said, motioning with a nod causing Brent and Joshua to turn. They saw Curt embrace Ryan, Laura’s fifteen-year-old son, both smiling. Curt patted his new stepson on the back as he turned to greet a group of well-wishers.

  “It’s hard to believe,” Jessica said. “Dad’s going from an empty nester to the father of a teenager.”

  “Yeah. But he looks as happy as I’ve ever seen him,” Joshua said.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Brent responded. “This marriage is bullshit, Dad and his trophy wife with her bastard son.”

  Three champagne flutes simultaneously raised to drink as no sibling had anything more to add to the conversation. After a moment Brent said “Excuse me.” He downed his flute’s remaining contents, dropped it on the grass next to him and turned to leave the small group.

  Joshua shook his head in disgust as he bent down, picked up the empty flute and placed it on a passing waiter’s tray.

  “Congratulations Dad,” Brent said as he approached his father, finding him alone for a moment at last. He held out his hand for a shake.

  His dad reciprocated with clear indifference.

  Their handshake lasted three seconds.

  Neither man attempted an embrace.

  * * *

  Brent and his adoptive father had never been close. When he was young Brent despised how his parents focused their attention on his younger twin siblings. As he entered his teens he and Curt argued often, and Brent antagonized him by missing curfew or taking his car without permission. As Curt and Mary’s relationship began to deteriorate their marital disagreements became more volatile, and Brent always stepped in to defend his mother. Following one intense argument Mary slapped Curt. Brent intervened, pushed Curt on the chest with both hands and the two nearly came to blows.

  After leaving home to attend Stanford Brent rarely visited on weekends and never sent his dad a Father’s Day or birthday card. His decision to remain on the east coast after Harvard allowed him to continue his distant familial relations.

  * * *

  “Thanks for coming all the way from New York,” Curt said. “It was great to see you three kids all here. I wasn’t sure you’d come…, you know…, with your mom gone only six weeks.”

  “Come on Dad, I wouldn’t miss your wedding. I’m just so glad to see you’re happy.”

  A strained silence replaced the conversation.

  “So, how’s business?” Brent asked.

  “I’ve neve
r been more positive about Jennco’s future,” Curt said. “Our technology is cutting edge, and as the autonomous vehicle market moves forward we should ride along with it.”

  “Wow, that’s fantastic. Driverless cars are all you hear about these days.”

  “The industry accepted term is autonomous vehicle.”

  After another pause Curt continued.

  “We have a sensor under development with enhanced long-range detection, and our initial tests confirm its accuracy exceeds other manufacturers’ products. With heavy weights at high speeds, long-range detection is critical in autonomous long-haul trucks, and we are a leading candidate to dominate the lucrative, niche market.”

  “You know Dad, I’ve been thinking about moving back to California. I love my job, and all the challenges it presents, but New York’s getting old, and I miss California. And I was thinking…, is there any chance there may be opportunities at Jennco where I could leverage my significant consulting experience?”

  “We’ve always got spots opening in middle management,” Curt replied. “It might be below your expectations, you know, with all your New York City consulting experience.”

  Intended or not, there was a sarcastic tone in consulting. After a pause, Curt continued.

  “But it would be the best way for someone new to the industry to learn the company’s operations from the ground up.”

  At a loss for words, Brent replied “Of course.”

  “But if we figure something out, there’s one thing you have to keep in mind.”

  “Oh yeah, what’s that?”

  “Don’t assume you’re on a fast track to the corner office just because you’re my kid.”

  Curt turned to greet some approaching friends, leaving Brent standing alone, staring down at his shoes.

  Chapter 8.

  “What a bunch of bullshit!” Louis Hartwig, president and CEO of Pacific Coast Industries, shouted as he slammed the latest Pacific Business Journal on the large conference table in his spacious, extravagant corner office. Expensive, original artwork adorned the walls and a large, antique Persian rug covered the mahogany wood floor.

  Hartwig had returned from a board meeting when he noticed his face on the magazine’s cover in his in-box. The journal featured an article titled Pacific Coast Industries: Arrogant Competitive Intelligence Gatherer or Unethical Corporate Spy? It opened with a Hartwig quote from an interview conducted less than a year earlier:

  “I can envision a time when a company’s competitive intelligence budget will rival its research and development budget.”

  It also implicated Scott Jorgensen, the company’s vice president of corporate intelligence, as instrumental in achieving Hartwig’s corporate espionage agenda.

  The article accused Pacific Coast Industries of unethical means to extract proprietary information from its competitors. These included hacking competitors’ computer databases, company employees posing as journalists or investment analysts to gather market data from its competitors’ unwitting employees and paying its competitors’ high-level engineers huge amounts to steal trade secrets. It also employed a small army of engineers whose only function was to reverse engineer competitors’ products and redesign them just enough to avoid infringing their patented designs.

  The article’s author relied on several anonymous sources within the company to corroborate Hartwig was a loose cannon who ignored ethical and legal constraints in his intelligence gathering efforts. Most described his management style as “obsessive micromanagement.”

  Louis Hartwig possessed the perfect background for his infamous management style. A former Marine drill sergeant, he left the Corps to attend college at Princeton, earning a degree in psychology, and graduated first in his class with a Harvard MBA. He combined skills learned in all three venues into a unique approach to business, management by brains combined with intimidation. And as he continued to climb the corporate ladder, he enrolled in night law school to expand his corporate law knowledge. He never sat for the bar exam despite graduating in the top ten percent of his class while running a billion-dollar corporation.

  Hartwig was an egotistical, aggressive businessman who rose from product manager to CEO through hard work and a tenacious negotiating style, although he often relied on devious means to undermine internal competitors’ chances for promotion. And he took micromanagement to a new level.

  He worked long hours and expected the same from his employees. At five o’clock each Friday before a three-day holiday weekend he would roam the corporate headquarters’ cube farm and make a mental note of vacant cubes and dark offices.

  Convinced a senior manager bypassed for promotion was rebelling by not working hard enough, he ran a report from the executive parking garage detailing her in and out times over the previous three months. When the report showed she averaged thirty-six hours a week in the office, he fired her on the spot, ignoring her pleas that as a single mother she worked at least as many hours from home each week after Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported her undocumented live-in nanny.

  In his spare time Hartwig raced vintage, open wheel sports cars, and owned two Ferraris built before World War II. His office bookshelf displayed scale model replicas along with trophies and pictures of him in the winner’s circle. He applied his micromanagement habits to his auto racing and trusted no one but himself to perform any mechanical work on his precious automobiles.

  “Jane!” Hartwig shouted out his office door. “Get Sally Gorman on the phone for me right now.”

  Jane Cornelius had been Hartwig’s secretary for over twenty years. He hired her when he was a product manager in the R&D department, and as he rose through the ranks, she followed him. He treated her as though she was there at his beck and call, often shouting her name without knowing whether she was on her phone or even at her desk. As he refused to have a computer monitor on his desk, she opened his emails, printed them and placed copies in his in-box, sorted by date in order of importance.

  Sally was in an important meeting but when Louis Hartwig summoned, he demanded his employees drop everything and respond.

  * * *

  Sally, Pacific Coast Industries’ shareholder and media relations director, cringed when her cell phone vibrated and she read the text: Call Louis ASAP. In her position she often had to put a positive spin on negative media attention directed at the company, often a difficult task. She excused herself from the lunch meeting with her company’s outside media consultants and stepped into the hallway to call her boss. Her athletic five foot nine frame, toned butt and bouncing shoulder-length blonde hair kept the attention of the two men at the table as she walked to the lobby in search of privacy to make the call.

  * * *

  Sally Gorman graduated magna cum laude from UCLA with a journalism degree seven years earlier. She deferred acceptance to Stanford Law to gain business experience and rose through the Pacific Coast Industries’ corporate communications department. But as each year passed she was trapped by the golden handcuffs of a lucrative corporate salary. Her climb up the corporate ladder presented more challenging responsibilities, and her accomplishments caught the attention of upper management. When her boss sold all her stock in front of a scathing, negative earnings report the SEC charged her with insider trading. Hartwig promoted Sally to director.

  Law school became an almost forgotten afterthought.

  She had considered switching companies, longing to work for an enterprise where ethics were a corporate value, where positive spins were fact, not smoke and mirrors to distract the public from the truth. She often disagreed with Scott Jorgensen, at times heated exchanges, when he wanted to push the spins too far. But Hartwig always intervened to support him.

  She fell victim to the lifestyle offered by the obscene salary Hartwig paid her and her Mercedes Benz company car, and would take a large pay cut if she moved. She also executed a non-compete agreement preventing her from working for any PCI competitor for two years.

  Louis Hartwig c
ontrolled her life for the foreseeable future.

  Sally’s success in the business world came at the expense of an unfulfilling social life. Her long hours and frequent, often unexpected, business trips kept her from developing any meaningful romantic relationships. A master at using her stunning good looks to manipulate the middle-aged men she negotiated with, she weakened their bargaining resolve with an unwarranted expectation her subtle, sensual flirting was sincere.

  But that was the extent of her male relationships.

  At first her business success offset her lack of a love life. But tired of the never ending crises management and the lonely weekends spent alone in her expensive and impeccably decorated ocean-side condominium, she vowed to reevaluate her priorities soon, to learn to say no instead of accommodating Hartwig’s unreasonable demands. She hoped there was a man out there who could tolerate her Type A personality long enough for her to mellow and discover a way to enjoy life.

  But for now she had to focus on defusing the current Pacific Coast Industries’ crises. She entered Louis Hartwig’s direct dial number and cringed when he answered after the first ring.

  “How in the hell did this article get printed without you knowing about it?” he shouted into his speakerphone. A pleasant hello was a rarity for Louis Hartwig. “They called me an unethical corporate spy! What the fuck are you doing to undo the damage?”

  Sally hadn’t seen the article. Suppressing sarcastic, but appropriate, comments she continued with her safest, canned response.

  “Listen, Louis, the article contains nothing but assumptions and innuendos, supported only by quotes from the proverbial anonymous sources. If we unleash a big, defensive media campaign it will only make us look guilty. I’ll shoot off a terse letter to the editor denying the accusations, asserting PCI would never rely on such underhanded means as it has the best R&D department in the industry. Like we’ve done before, a strong, positive spin.”

  She shook her head, glad this conversation was on the phone, making it unnecessary to hide her disgusted look at the bullshit she just spewed forth.