The first time I drove to South Dakota I was seventeen years old and on my way to my one and only year in college. In fact it wasn't even a year, just one lousy, cold as my second mother's heart, semester. Then, I was with three other guys, this time I'm alone. Then we were trying to make it in record time because we left late, though I don't remember what kept us from leaving on time. Probably being seventeen years old. This time I'm right-laning it, checking out the scenery, taking in the glamour of our beautiful countryside. At least I will be when I finally get past the less than splendid scenery of Route 80 in New Jersey. Then I was on my way to what I thought was going to be my future; today I'm just enjoying the ride and thinking about a girl I haven't seen in almost twenty years.
Many things happening in a short period of time led me to this trip. Not the least of which was a relationship that was wrong from the beginning for several reasons, definitely lasted beyond its time and ultimately caused two deaths.
Jack Scully adored his daughter. In fact, with the possible exception of his liquor, Kathy was the only thing Scully even cared about anymore. It wasn't always like that. He had, for many years run one of the most successful food brokerage companies in the New York market, but the truth of the matter was Jack had become almost completely ineffective, with the honchos of the companies we represented, with their local people, with the supermarket customers we were charged with selling our clients products to, and most of all, with the people who worked for him. He'd become a joke, an alcoholic joke. And that caused him to stop trying, eventually leading to where Scully Sales is now. And as all this was going down he turned more and more to his daughter, his darling daughter, to get some kind of positive feedback. Some reinforcement that he still had worth.
But whatever loving words of support Kathy offered him were insufficient. He recognized he had in fact become worthless, beyond worthless, a detriment to his company and a hated figure in the industry. He had become more and more bitter and paranoid as he lost manufacturers to other brokerage companies. His bitterness and paranoia made him drink more and the more he drank the worse his demeanor and decisions became. He was in a downward spiral; pilots call it a graveyard spiral and he was turning more and more to Kathy, beautiful, bright, loving, sexy, Kathy.
When I saw them together, a few minutes after my first encounter with her at the Christmas party he threw for us at his beautiful, mansion sized home, she acted like a truly loving daughter. Her attentiveness seemed real and their conversation was anything but stilted. There was no doubt in my mind she had great love for her father but she didn't seem to mind taking advantage of his situation. The more he doted on her the kinder she treated him and the kinder she treated him the more he doted on her.
Soon after we became close she told me she had a 1998 Corvette in her garage for more than six months before she drove it. She said she just felt so comfortable in the '97 Jaguar that she didn't want to change and couldn't figure out what possessed her to ask him to buy her the 'Vette.
I think it was the second, maybe third night we'd spent together when she first told me how sad Jack Scully was. She said that He'd sometimes cry when she was alone with him, beginning without warning or for any apparent reason. Often it would happen in the middle of a sentence, either hers or his. She said they were watching a video at his home one night, a comedy, and one moment they were laughing and the next he was crying. Not sobbing she explained but not just misty eyed either, real tears. She spoke to her mother about it, who chalked it up to some middle-aged crisis. A man's change of life is how Kathy said she put it. Perhaps Mary Scully really felt that but based on my understanding of how Jack treated his wife it could also have been she just didn't care about him anymore. But Kathy, early on, tried to convince me that her parents' marriage was still strong.
There is a major difference in being bright and being smart. Kathy was bright; you don't graduate from Princeton -- hell, you don't get into Princeton -- if you're not extraordinarily bright, but for the longest time I thought she had no feel for the world around her. Especially for her mother's quiet sorrow and though more understandably, for what I was feeling.
With me, at least in the beginning, she had an excuse. If I never knew from moment to moment what I was feeling about her, my job or my future, how the hell was she supposed to know? But it was tough for me to comprehend how Kathy wouldn't be aware of how little love there seemed to be between her parents, how little time Jack Scully devoted to his wife, how little interest he had in her life.
Jim had often spoken of the Scullys' relationship. He told me that Kathy's mom would always initiate whatever conversations took place between her and her husband of nearly twenty-five years and how he would seem to have great difficulty responding with any sign of interest. And as Kathy was still spending significant amounts of time at her parents' home, I wondered why she didn't seem to notice.
Looking back I realize now that her recognition of her father's sadness came long after she had become so used to her mother's sadness that she ceased to see it anymore. And like so many of us, what she said about her parents' relationship had little in common with what she knew of it in her heart.
When are they going to do all road construction late at night when the roads aren't filled with cars? I'm nowhere, I can't get out of New Jersey and it won't feel like I've really gotten ANYWHERE until I get into Pennsylvania. And by the way what in the name of God did people do before air conditioned cars? I got this thing cranked up full blast and I'm just all right.
For the first five years I worked for Jack Scully we had our Christmas parties in halls. For the last three we've had the parties, scaled down I must add, in his home, in Old Westbury. Old Westbury is the exclusive Northern suburb if you will of the town of Westbury, Long Island, New York.
Our office is located in Westbury, which is made up of two towns, a middle class white section and an African American section, literally on the other side of the railroad tracks. The great paradox is that the very integrated Westbury High School sits on the main road in and out of Old Westbury, almost directly on the border separating the two towns. But the teenagers of Old Westbury go to the highly regarded, virtually all upper class Wheatly High School, a much longer bus ride away. I've got a feeling that none of their parents have ever made an issue of the distance. When it comes to busing students, there's busing and there's busing.
Scully Sales is located in a two-story building, across from Benny's, the best restaurant within ten square miles. The main street has a good array of shops and clearly has a small-town look and feel to it. And at least to a certain degree it brings the three very divergent groups together, albeit on a very superficial basis. I've often thought that whole area would be a perfect location for a sociology thesis.
As for having the party at Scully’s mansion I'm not complaining mind you, good food and free liquor with great cigars for dessert is nothing to sneeze at, and his home is beyond anything I've ever seen from the inside. But business setbacks aside, Jack was still filthy rich and we all would have liked going to a party every Christmas further from the town we drove in and out of fifty weeks a year.
Jim told me the 'old man was worth around fifteen million bucks. He called Jack the old man even though they were exactly the same age. Jim himself was a big, round man, but he looked ten years younger than Jack did. And Jim looked his fifty-three years. I never specifically asked Jim why he called Scully the old man but I'm sure it had more to do with the way Jack acted rather than the way he looked.
Jack Scully was one of those people that as soon as you got to
know him even a little you'd say to yourself, "This guy was never
a kid." And anyone who knew him at all said he rarely let himself
have any fun and never ever did this man, this rich, bitter man
ever experience anything approaching joy. Even when he drank he
just got meaner and meaner until he was close to passing out. At
that point, for perhaps two or three minutes Jack Scully would
truly be mellow and become a nice guy. But it was just for those
few minutes and when he would awaken, with a scotch hangover,
He'd be his old miserable self. Jim said he was the
quintessential lousy drunk. The whiskey didn't make him or anyone
around him anything but depressed, and that how he looked to me
at all his Christmas parties and that how watching him made me
feel.
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Material Copyright © 1998-2003 by Jim Bearden