The Hotel Nantucket (65)

“No, thank you.”

Paul chuckles. “Don’t tell me you’re on the wagon. If your mother and I thought you needed rehab, we would have sent you to rehab.”

“No,” Chad says, though he hasn’t had a drink since that fateful night. “But I’m all set for right now.”

Paul sits in a pose of introspection, leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, fingers tented, head bent. “So what I’m hearing you say is that you got a job.”

“Yes,” Chad says. “At the Hotel Nantucket, cleaning rooms. I work for the head of housekeeping, Ms. English, who’s an extremely cool person. There are three girls—women, I mean—on the crew with me. They all live on the Cape and commute over and back every day, so, because the boats weren’t running earlier today, it was just Ms. English and me, which is why I’m late. I usually finish around five.”

Paul nods along to all this, a signal that he’s listening. “I just closed a five-billion-dollar deal. Do you have any idea why I work so hard, Chadwick?”

Chad isn’t sure how to answer. His father’s not brokering peace in the Middle East or curing childhood cancer or teaching undergraduates the novels of Toni Morrison. He’s betting on the success of ideas, technology, natural resources. Every once in a while, this does the world some good; his firm buys a pharmaceutical company that brings out an important drug or backs a fledgling company that does something to improve people’s lives. But mostly, Chad understands, Paul is playing a game on an exclusive field, which results in a lot of winning. A lot of money. “Because you like it?” Chad says.

This elicits a patronizing laugh. “I do it to provide for you and your sister and your mother.” Paul raises an arm theatrically. “I didn’t grow up with any of this.”

Right, Chad knows. His father comes from a regular background, though not one as impoverished as he might like people to believe. He grew up in a split-level house in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, which is close to the Main Line but pointedly not on it. It was Chad’s mother, Whitney, who had the sterling pedigree—an estate in St. David’s, private school at Baldwin, a father who was a managing partner at Rawle and Henderson, the definition of a Philadelphia lawyer. Paul met Whitney at Smokey Joe’s bar on Route 30 when she was at Bryn Mawr and Paul was a scholarship student at Haverford. It was Whitney’s father who helped Paul get into the business school at Wharton and then introduced him to the gentlemen at the Brandywine Group.

“I know,” Chad says.

“You have the rest of your life to work,” Paul says. “I thought we agreed that you would take the summer off to enjoy yourself.”

Chad feels a lump in his throat. “I don’t deserve to enjoy myself.”

“I thought we agreed, as a family, to put what happened behind us.”

“I can’t just put it behind me, Dad,” Chad says. He seeks out Paul’s eyes. His father is essentially a decent guy who knows the difference between right and wrong. The mandate to keep “what happened” a secret is coming from Chad’s mother. She has her reputation to think of. It’s bad enough that so many people at home know; Whitney Winslow doesn’t want her social circle on Nantucket whispering about it as well. “Have you heard from the lawyers?” Chad swallows. “Or Paddy’s family?”

“Yes,” Paul says. He exhales like he’s about to deadlift three hundred pounds. “The surgery was unsuccessful. Patrick lost sight in the eye permanently.”

Paddy O’Connor, Chad’s best friend from college, his best friend possibly ever in his life, is blind in his left eye. Permanently. Chad feels blinded himself. He bends over his knees.

“We’re offering a generous settlement—paying all the medical bills in addition to compensation for the eye.”

How much is an eye worth? Chad wonders. What is the value of a full field of vision when you meet the woman you want to marry or hold your newborn child for the first time? Or when you go to MOMA to see van Gogh’s Starry Night or watch the sun set in the evening? Half of Paddy’s eyesight is gone. He can still see, but—Chad looked this up right after the accident—he’ll lose depth perception, and he’ll have difficulty judging distance and tracking moving objects.

“I want to contribute,” Chad says.

“That’s very generous of you, son, but—”

Chad pulls the sixty-five dollars out of his pocket and slaps it on the table next to Paul’s gin and tonic. He has nearly forty-eight hundred dollars saved from his paychecks. He’ll give everything he makes this summer to Paddy. The amount will be dwarfed by whatever Paul has offered, but Chad wants Paddy to know that he didn’t just roll over on his beach towel, beer in his hand, joint between his lips, and let his parents handle this. He went out and got a job where he deals with other people’s dirty diapers and forgotten late-night candy bars and bathroom swamps.

Paul eyes the money. “I’d like you to give your notice at the hotel tomorrow.”

“No,” Chad says.

“Your mother doesn’t like how it looks,” Paul says. “You working as a menial laborer—”

“Menial?” Chad says. “I have another word for it: honest. It’s an honest job, cleaning rooms for people who work hard themselves and who come to Nantucket to relax and have a vacation. You haven’t seen these rooms, Dad; they’re every bit as nice as the rooms in this house. The hotel is a special place—”