Bitter Business

an outside group. Philip and Dagny are the insiders because they go to the office every day and suck up to my dad. Eugene and I are left out in the cold. The three of them pay themselves whatever they feel like. Whatever’s left over they pay out in dividends like throwing scraps to a dog. Well, I for one am fed up.”
    “I’ve read through the minutes of the board meetings for the last five years,” I reported. “I saw no mention of you ever having raised any of these concerns. I’m interested in why you seem to have suddenly developed such strong feelings about the manner in which the company has been run.”
    “That’s immaterial,” interjected one of Lydia’s lawyers, a man named Cliff Schaeffer, who was married to a woman I went to law school with. “We came here to discuss the terms of a possible buyout—”
    “I told you. It would be pointless to even try and discuss it with Daddy on the board,” Lydia continued, completely ignoring him. “He just pats me on the head and tells me to go out and play. Daddy’s behavior is all very preconscious. He has difficulty dealing with the conflict between his image of me as an idealized child and the reality of my being a grown woman capable of making decisions on her own. He’s blocked because he doesn’t want to face his own fears about aging and declining sexual potency. It’s obvious from his decision to marry Peaches. If he’s not willing to listen to his inner child, it’s futile to expect that he’ll be able to listen to his actual child.”
    “You still haven’t told me why you want to sell your shares,” I prodded.
    “I have a new therapist who has been helping me fight back against my father’s domination for the first time in my life. Finally I’m beginning to understand the systematic financial oppression that men like my father perpetrate. She’s made me realize the importance of severing the connection between financial and emotional control so that I can deal with each of them separately.”
    I stifled a giggle, but Lydia didn’t seem to notice. She just droned on about her inner child in a tone of great gravity. I looked at the other people in the room. Arthur Wallace watched his wife with the same rapt attention made famous by Nancy Reagan whenever she appeared at her husband’s side. In the meantime Lydia’s attorneys shifted restlessly in their seats.
    As she spewed out a steady stream of psychobabble about how her shares in Superior Plating represented the bonds of emotional slavery to her father, I began to make a mental list of other attorneys at the firm whom I might be able to convince to take on the company’s file. Any affection I might feel for Daniel Babbage aside, it should have been clear to everyone in that room that Lydia Cavanaugh Wallace was a very disturbed woman. This was clearly turning into the kind of case I’d gone into corporate work specifically to avoid—messy, personal, and offering no satisfactory conclusions.
    I looked across the conference table at Lydia, still engrossed in her rambling monologue about her inner self. Cecilia Dobson’s death was an omen, I decided. One that I was not about to ignore.
     

8
     
    Once Lydia had run through her reasons for feeling oppressed, she signaled the end of the meeting and swept out of the room. Cliff Schaeffer, her lead lawyer, hung back for a quiet word with me. Besides having been at school with his wife, I’d been across the table from him on a couple of deals. In general I’d found him a snarling pit bull of an advocate, not to mention something of a jerk.
    “Since when did you start representing mental cases?” I asked with more truth than tact.
    “The shares belong to her,” he replied. “She has the right to sell them if she wants.”
    “I’m not disputing that. I’m just curious about how you bill her—is it only for a forty-five-minute hour?”
    “What’s your point?”
    “My point is, how can you know whether she’s even really going to sell? She’s sat on the board of Superior Plating for the last seven years. She’s drawn a salary from them for the last fourteen and not once has she voiced a single concern about her shares or how the company is being run. Don’t you think that if she’s capable of making a snap decision to sell her shares, she’s just as likely to change her mind and decide to keep them? I understand that you’re going to get paid either way, but how can you expect me to negotiate in good faith with a