Bitter Business

die?”
    “He drowned.” Daniel paused, his eyes clouded over by remembrance. “Jack and the children were down at Tall Pines for Christmas—they went down every year. Jimmy and Philip decided to do some hunting, so they built a blind on the edge of the big pond that sits in the middle of the property and settled down to wait for something to come by to shoot. They hadn’t been there very long when they noticed a local girl walking by herself down toward the water. She caught their eye. It’s private property, after all, and quite an out-of-the-way spot, but a t first they didn’t do anything. Truth be told, they’d probably brought a couple of six-packs along to ward off chill, and as long as she didn’t scare off the birds, they were happy to mind their own business. It wasn’t u ntil she’d walked quite a way out into the water that they realized what she was trying to do.
    “Both boys dove in after her, but Jimmy, being older and a stronger swimmer, got to her first. By the time Philip reached them, both young people had gone under. The pond is very deep. It’s fed by a spring; so it’s almost as if there’s a current. Later, of course, they found out that she’d filled her pockets with stones. Nobody knows exactly what happened—whether Jimmy got tangled up f in her dress while he was trying to save her or whether 1 in her panic she just dragged him down. Philip dove for them until he had to give up from exhaustion. Finally he dragged himself out of the water and trudged the -six miles back to the house to tell his father what had happened.”
    “And after that, like you said, everything changed.”
    “Everything. For seventeen years Jack had been talking about the day when he would retire and Jimmy would take his place running the company. Philip, who to this day blames himself for not having been able to save his brother, felt he had to step up and try to fill Jimmy’s shoes. The other children were crushed.
    “In a motherless family, the oldest child becomes a sort of surrogate parent and they had all relied on Jimmy, especially with Jack working all the time. Eugene, especially, was just devastated. He’d worshiped his eldest brother, followed him everywhere. After Jimmy died, Eugene started acting out—running wild and getting into trouble. It took the Marine Corps to straighten him out. While I’ll grant you that neither of Jack Cavanaugh’s boys is perfect, both Philip and Eugene have spent their entire adult lives feeling as though they don’t measure up to their father’s expectations. That’s not an exactly unique scenario in my experience—hard-driving, successful fathers are often disappointed by the real or imagined shortcomings of their sons. But the Cavanaugh boys are stuck in an especially insidious situation: they don’t stand a chance against the ghost of their sainted brother.”
    “For crying out loud, Daniel,” I exclaimed. “These people don’t need a lawyer, they need a therapist.”
    Daniel gave a dry lawyer’s laugh.
    “I’ve always worried that one of these days the AMA was going to come after me for practicing psychiatry without a license. That’s what makes working with family businesses different. When you get right down to it, business is always about people, but in a family business those people are all related. They share a history. They don’t just work together. They eat Thanksgiving dinner together and remember that you used to wet the bed. In a family business, when you get down to the bone in any business crisis, it’s almost never about business. It’s about the interpersonal relationships in the family.”
    “Well,” I said after the waiter had cleared our plates, “what I want to know is, while the family is working through their interpersonal relationships by fighting over the business, how does the business survive? I mean, when you come right down to it, it’s not Jack Cavanaugh who’s the client, but Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals.”
    “That’s right,” Babbage replied. “And it’s your job to safeguard the company, from Jack Cavanaugh himself, if necessary.”
     
    Back at the office I phoned Dagny Cavanaugh while my work beckoned, unheeded. Since the first morning that Babbage had called me into his office, I’d felt tragedy gathering around me like a fog. Though I knew they were unrelated, Cecilia’s death, Daniel’s illness, even the story about what had happened to Jimmy Cavanaugh seemed to cast a