The Adored, Page 4

  Father. Parent, mentor, teacher and friend. Ruler, tyrant, despot and adult. Coach. Disciplinarian. Fathers came in all dimensions. The seven Brunswick brothers had seven fathers, each different and different in their differences. Each of the boys was the only child in their family, and as they grew older, their relationships with their fathers shaped them.

  Sebastian Ball Sr. was very similar in style to Arthur Trout. They were exceptionally close to their sons and trusted them the way you trust your best friend—without hesitation. They had each made their sons partners with full authority in their businesses. The Ball, Trout differences? Ball trusted and loved his son Sebastian from the outside. Trout wanted to know what made Winston tick. When Winston was young, Arthur was fascinated that he had helped create such a wonderful, small human being. He knew and loved Winston from the inside. The Balls listened intently to each other and allowed the other full support. But before the listening, they had not a thought of what the other was thinking. Each Trout knew the other intently; they knew what the other wanted to do and would do. They allowed each other that freedom.

  Of the seven brothers, it was Parker Barnes who was most troubled in his relationship with his father. Jonathan Barnes insisted that Parker make his own mark in the world through his own efforts, something that the father had not been required to do. Resentment grew in Parker as he found his father distant, dictatorial and condescending. There was an oppression that grew daily in Parker distancing him from fatherly love.

  Nothing could have been more opposite than the relationship of Admiral Johnson and his boy Traynor. The support system a frequently absent admiral had in place for Tray was a regimen of self-reliance skills that Tray would carry into adulthood.

  Tragedy was the commonality in the lives of the Moiras and Wheelwrights. Captain Kim Moira, hero of the 1971 war with Pakistan, left India for the US after the death of Kishenlal’s mother. Kish’s mother suffered a painful death due to malaria, and it was a terrible sadness for the boy without the mother who loved him so dearly. However, no less dearly than Cynthia Wheelwright loved her only son as she died young at fifty-eight due to pancreatic cancer. The Wheelwrights’ tragedy was compounded by the personal economic collapse of the family fortune, lost by Mark Wheelwright as he kept 90 percent of his fortune in Ocean Bank stock. When the great recession struck, Mark was nearly wiped out. While all seven boys were close at Brunswick, Kish Moira and Edward Wheelwright were among the closest. Later, they both attended Harvard’s College and Business School. And from the time they were seventeen, they managed the Brunswick Fund, very successfully, applying lessons learned along the way. It was the best form of education—take what you learn and apply the very day you learn it.

  Gideon Bridge was raised mostly by his grandfather, the head of the family law firm. Gideon’s father, George, would drift in and out of the boy’s life on holidays. Grandfather Roy Bridge and his wife took their daughter-in-law and grandson to live with them after George Bridge divorced his wife for a young woman and became the playboy of Greenwich, spending every waking hour in the company of whichever sports star living in town was not actively playing. In the spring he hung out with a linebacker for the NY Giants, in the summer it was a wing on the Rangers and in the fall and winter it was a pitcher on the Mets. The pitcher and George would always make plans to go to Barbados after October 5th since the Mets were never in the post season. For Gideon it was a life of law. Grandfather Roy Bridge was determined that a Bridge would keep the family law firm alive, and he taught and mentored young Gideon in the ways of the law.

  Martha Bridge was somewhat shocked by Gideon’s choice of college: Brandeis University. “Isn’t that a Jewish school?” his mother asked.

  “Sort of mom, but it won’t make me Jewish,” Gideon replied after they discussed his application.

  “Why don’t you go to MIT, like Winston?” she pursued. “They win Nobel Prizes all the time there.”

  “I’m going for the law; their pre-law program is the best. And the sciences, they win more MacArthur Genius Awards than anyone.”

  She could see his determination, and she did not want to be discouraging, “It sounds like you’ve done your homework, son. Just don’t come back a Jew.”

  Gideon went to Brandeis, and he did not come back a Jew. He came back a Mormon. Of his six closest friends, his “brothers,” three, Gideon, Winston and Edward, were Catholic; Sebastian, Tray and Parker were Protestant; and Kish was Hindu. Religion was in their parents’ day who you were; for the brothers, religion had become what you were and that was quickly fading.

  On the day Gideon was preparing for his conversion and induction into the Mormon faith, his mother and grandfather accompanied him to the Mormon Temple. Gideon tried reassuring his mother, “Mom, it’s still Jesus.”

  “Gideon, it’s not our Jesus,” she replied.

  During the Baptism Mrs. Bridge cried audibly all through the ceremony. She thought to herself, “If you live long enough, everyone will turn on you.”

  Not quite, in fact in Gideon’s case, he was a Mormon for exactly one and a half years. He felt that religion should help him see things in a new light. When he performed his mission work in Venezuela, he came away unimpressed and uninspired. The happiest day of Mrs. Bridge’s life was not when Gideon returned from South America, but when he said, “Mom, you’re right, he’s not our Jesus,” and with that Gideon repatriated himself into the open arms of Catholicism, Harvard Law and the Bridge Law firm.

  And now all seven brothers were men, embarking on the work of their lives. Kish and Edward had success in investment banking and kept the Brunswick Fund growing significantly. Traynor Johnson completed his studies at the US Naval Academy and became a Navy Seal. Parker Barnes joined the family construction business after graduating from Columbia with a degree in architecture. Winston Trout did likewise joining this father’s solar engineering firm after MIT. And Sebastian Ball Jr., well, the acorn did not fall far from the tree. He went to UPenn’s Wharton School, as had his father, and was able to make money as readily as his hedge-fund-owning dad. Together they made a formidable team, and the son had vision and the guts to support his visions. So these seven boys, each an only child of a wealthy family, became “brothers” at the age of four and inseparable as they emerged as adults.

  But as they grew life’s consequences would affect them; in a most dire way for some.

  Chapter 10

  After a year at the Auburn Prison, CJ Strong had settled into a routine of sorts. He found he could handle the day-to-day business of being a prisoner, but what got to him, what weighed on him like a crushing weight was the coercive nature of every second of every day. The physical place was crushing with its thirty-foot-high grey walls and armed guardhouses at the corners of the yard. He remembered his religious teaching that God was omni-present; in Auburn only the guards were omni-present. Whether in his cell, at work in the prison power plant, when reading to illiterate prisoners over lunch two days a week, playing basketball during his hour and half of “freedom” as an honor prisoner, at meals, in showers, or as he went to sleep at night, the omni-present guards hovered, cajoled, prodded, encouraged, threatened, leered, and occasionally looked the other way. And that was when CJ Strong worried the most, when the guards looked the other way. It usually meant a fight with or a beating by other prisoners was about to occur. It also meant older male prisoners were seeking sex from younger male prisoners. He was terrified of that, the threat of that. In his time there, nothing happened. He had been approached by prisoners; guards had suggested that certain prisoners wanted to see him in the back of the library.

  Strong felt the only way he could survive at Auburn was to be like his name: Strong. Stronger. Strongest. He needed to have an iron will to move on, to avoid capitulation, which he learned from reading meant to cede, to yield, to give up or in. He would not. He worked out five days a week in the gym. At six-foot-one-inch tall, he was filling out at Auburn. A slim kid turned much more powerful man. Benc
h presses, curls, squats, push-ups, chin ups, repetitions, hundreds of reps. Till his arms ached, till they cramped. Thousands of sit-ups until he could pop himself up from a lying position without the use of his arms. In the prison yard, he looked forward to the karate taught him by a great black man, a black belt. The black belt took CJ and two Latino prisoners under tutelage and all progressed quickly with the prison yard sensei conferring brown belts, made in the prison shop, on the three after four months.

  Near-freedom came to CJ once a month when Louise Strong took the four-hour bus trip to visit her son. It was what CJ treasured the most. Louise Strong always had been a cheerful force in life and in his life. It had been just the two of them for seven years after his father was shot dead in the pool room in Stamford. They knew each other’s every feeling. And so it was that during the first two years of imprisonment, there were glorious days in the life of Curtis Strong and in the life of Louise Strong—in the lives and hearts that each adored.

  Chapter 11

  In the early autumn sun on a late September afternoon sitting on a grassy hill, the seven brothers and one girl, one Valerie McGuire, pondered their great questions from Mr. Conetta’s Great Questions class. In the girl’s case, she pondered the great question: “How much I love Eddie Wheelwright; let me count the ways.”

  The two young lovers had met as new lifeguards at Tod’s Point Beach in Old Greenwich over the summer. And while Parker Barnes and Sebastian Ball also lifeguarded at the Point with Eddie and Valerie and both vied for the freckled faced Miss McGuire’s young heart, it was the ramrod straight Wheelwright whom she fell for. Or tripped for, for on the very first day of lifeguard drills, when Valerie stumbled over a rock on a two-mile timed run with nine lifeguards through the woods, only Wheelwright stopped to help her up. In that valiant moment, a small spark ignited between the two, and by the summer’s end, the spark grew into an inferno of youthful passion.

  When Parker made no progress in his pursuit of Valerie, he simply conceded that Eddie had won the girl. Sebastian Ball was not as gracious. Even then, at seventeen going on eighteen, Sebastian competed with Eddie for girls. Over the prior winter, he had lost the hand of a debutante at Brunswick’s sister school, Greenwich Academy, to Wheelwright. Try as he did through the summer to budge Valerie from her loyalty to Wheelwright, she never wavered.

  “It’s not you, Sebastian. You’re fine, you’re handsome, you’re a leader among your friends, you’ve got all the right things going for you, including that Mercedes,” she told Ball on a walk around the Point. Well, she told him with an outstretched arm and the palm of her right hand pressed against his chest as he tried kissing her. “But I really care about Eddie, so please, let’s be friends. I know how much you guys care about each other. Promise me, I won’t come between you.”

  Ball kept the promise. He never made another pass at Eddie’s girl-friend, but he did find himself longing. He thought she was the most beautiful girl he had met to that point in his life with her athletically proportioned body, her long brown wavy hair always blowing in the afternoon breeze at the beach, and her tanned freckled skin. He felt he could do so much for a young woman who had no money, no strong economic future. But it was not to be. This time Eddie had won out.

  So as the brothers pondered Conetta’s great questions the seven had grown to eight. Valerie had been accepted. It turned out to be the only way Eddie Wheelwright would stay focused, if Valerie was included; otherwise, when the boys got together as they did almost daily, if Valerie was not there, neither would Eddie. Or if Eddie was there and Valerie was not, he would be daydreaming about her. She was constant in his thoughts.

  Winston Trout, the smartest, offered up his great question as they sat on the grass on the rolling hill of his father’s estate overlooking Long Island Sound: “How will I solve the energy crisis?” Given that his father owned Trout Solar, a start-up solar panel inventor and developer; it was a logical problem to set out solving.

  The smallest boy in the group, Kish Moira, felt his future and one of the great questions for him lay in, “How to adequately feed the world?”

  “Somehow we’re not breaking out of our known cosmos,” Gideon Bridge said.

  “What do you mean, Gid?” an intrigued Valerie asked.

  “Kish, your family comes from the most undernourished country on the planet. Winston, your dad is solving the energy crisis. We’re doing what we know—where’s the challenge?”

  “Gid, the challenge is there. If you’ll notice, gas for your Audi has almost doubled in the last two years,” Winston Trout shot back with a smile.

  “Guys,” Valerie began, “does your teacher mean what your parents want you to do or what you want to do?” The girl didn’t have money but she did have brains.

  Sebastian Ball laughed, “Is there a difference?” Not to Ball who was already committed to his father’s vast and rich hedge fund. At eighteen Ball worked two afternoons a week at Ball Enterprises.

  “Sure, there’s a difference,” Wheelwright added.

  “And?” Ball challenged.

  “We need to decide what we need to do to make a difference.”

  “What the Peace Corps. You and Val?” Ball laughed at the thought Eddie and Valerie had proposed earlier.

  “Yes,” the female part of the Wheelwright/McGuire brain said. “How can we share democracy with countries where freedom is rare?”

  “Come on, Val.” Where are you gonna find that? Russia? You and Wheelwright trotting off to Kiev to unleash the Communist downtrodden.”

  There, he had done it again: Sebastian Ball in all his omniscience, challenging, rejecting and ultimately putting down in irony the ideas of his friends. The brothers and Valerie loved him, for he was superior to them in his world view and in his sense of power. But there were those times when he headed to deep space on a lone ship.

  “Nice, real nice, asshole,” Gideon Bridge, who took nothing from Ball, enjoined. “For Christ’s sake, Sebastian, grow up. For one of us, you’re the least of us,” the conscience and debater of the group reacted angrily. “You really gotta stop this, ‘I’m the lord of the Riff’ bullshit, Ball.”

  A chastened eighteen-year-old Sebastian Ball saw the fire in Bridges eyes. Gideon was the one member of the group whose command of the English language and balls to stand up to him kept Ball in his place. Not above them but one of them.

  “How about you, Gid?” Tray Johnson, the Admiral’s son asked.

  “My great question? I don’t know, Tray,” a calmed Bridge replied. “I think it’s going to be, “How can we help the poor?” I mean we have so much, yet we see so little of what so many cope with. Does that make sense?”

  “It does,” Parker added. “Mine is similar. How do we not hurt others?” I don’t know the answer, but I’m framing my question around that thought. Tray, you?”

  “My father always likes to talk about peace. Being the warrior he seems to go to opposites. He always quotes Curtis LeMay, the general who ran the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command where they have all the B52 bombers. LeMay was the guy who fire bombed Tokyo in World War II, but when it came time for a motto for his Air Command he chose, ‘Peace is our Profession.’ So something like that, how do we keep peace in the world?”

  “Valerie offered up ours, but I also have a second idea floating around, “How do we remain lifelong friends?”

  And in that long day out on the grass at the end of summer, the seven boys and one girl pondered Mr. Conetta’s challenge and for some, put in place a framework that would guide their lives.

  Chapter 12

  The first thing you notice about the Auburn maximum security prison is the walls. Huge imposing walls. Walls that run for blocks. And as these walls change directions, there are guardhouses sitting atop them, large guardhouses, more like apartments, surrounded by glass.

  Robert Chambers, the preppy murderer, served his time there. William Kemmler, the first person executed in the electric chair, got the juice there. Joey Gallo, the mobst
er who made a mess of Umberto’s clam house in Little Italy when they rubbed him out, spent happier days at Auburn. And while the State Asylum for Insane Criminals was part of the Auburn System, Robert Buffum, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Abraham Lincoln himself, committed suicide there by slashing his throat in his cell. Some unfortunate things happened to Mr. Buffum after his meeting with the president: he became an uncontrollable alcoholic, suffered psychological damage resulting from his time as a prisoner of war in the hands of Confederates, and he spent three years in a mental hospital. After that hospital stay, he began to drink again, got into an argument with a man who denigrated President Lincoln and shot and killed the man. He was indicted for murder and sent to the Asylum as an insane criminal.

  Interestingly, not two miles from the prison is the historic home of William Seward, former US Senator and Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, who was brutally stabbed in his Washington home on April 14, 1865, the same night President Lincoln was murdered at the Ford Theater. Seward’s attacker, Lewis Powell, was a co-conspirator of John Wilkes Booth. Seward recovered from his injuries and later retired to his home in Auburn where he died on October 10, 1872.

  It had started to snow in the morning when he left Stamford on the Greyhound bus to New York. Billy Stevens was to take a bus from New York’s Port Authority to visit his cousin, Curtis “CJ” Strong, who had been imprisoned in Auburn for four of his twenty-five years to life sentence. While CJ’s and Billy’s mothers were sisters and the boys were best friends growing up, Billy had not come to visit CJ in the time he had been at Auburn.

  The bus to the prison was free for family members and brought the visitor right to the front gate of the prison. By 11 a.m. the snow had started to accumulate, and some of the people who had been waiting for the bus to Auburn decided to leave after it was delayed one hour. Stevens thought about turning back; after all, he was not looking forward to seeing his friend and telling him what really happened on the night the Guatemalan drug dealer was murdered. It also meant he would not get back to Stamford until after midnight.