Bitter Business

all—anyway, her marriage was over and she was completely adrift, so Dad told her she had to come home.”
    “Did she want to?”
    “Who knows? My little sister is a life member in the analyst-of-the-month club. She hasn’t the first idea what she wants, but Dad told her he’d cut off her checks from the company if she didn’t come back to Chicago, so she did. Dad had hatched this plan of putting her on the board and getting her more actively involved in the company.
    “Naturally, the rest of us were all against it. I remember telling him, ‘Lydia has failed at her life and made a mess of her two marriages. Now you are trying to wave a magic wand and make it all right. It’s fine to want to help her, but don’t use the company to show her your love. The company is what you love. She loves you. Talk to her, tell her you’re there for her, show her you love her that way—not by putting her in a business situation she knows nothing about.’ ”
    “What did your father say?”
    “He said, ‘I want Lydia on the board. I want Lydia working for the company.’ He told me that he wanted to do something to help Lydia mend her life since she felt that so much of what was wrong was his fault.”
    “How was it his fault?”
    “It wasn’t his fault!” Dagny insisted. “It’s never been his fault. It’s never been anybody’s fault but Lydia’s. You can’t believe the stuff she’s put us through. Take our last board meeting as an example. Did Daniel tell you about what happened?”
    “No, he didn’t mention it.”
    “Well, it was originally scheduled for February eighth, which was a Wednesday. Dad, Philip, and I had kept our calendar clear six weeks ahead of time; Daniel, too. Eleven o’clock on Tuesday night Dad gets a call from Lydia. She’s still down at Tall Pines and she can’t make it back for the meeting and we’re going to have to reschedule.”
    “Was she in Georgia on vacation?”
    “Worse than that. Her therapist told her that women who have her kinds of emotional problems were very often molested as children, but have repressed the memory. The therapist told Lydia that she needed to dig into her past. I’ll never forget it. Lydia kept on trying to draw one or the other of us off into whispered interrogations about whether we’d seen anything happen to her when we were all children. I couldn’t believe it, but Dad lent her the plane so that she could visit Nursey. She’s the woman who took care of us after Mother died. It turns out Lydia wasn’t having any luck with Nursey, so she wanted to stay a couple more days to see if she could pry anything else out of her. The whole thing was deeply, deeply sick.”
    “And did Lydia ever discover any evidence that she’d been molested?”
    “No. Of course not. And that’s what’s so infuriating. Aren’t there enough real victims in the world without someone as privileged as Lydia going around trying to invent misfortune?”
    “So why didn’t you hold the meeting without her or even conference her in by phone?”
    “Dad wouldn’t hear of it. We’re a family company and he said we should be flexible. Yeah, right, we’re flexible. Let me tell you how flexible we are. Lydia deigned to return to Chicago that Friday evening, too late to hold a meeting. When she got home she informed us that she was leaving early Sunday morning for two weeks at Canyon Ranch—that’s a spa in Tucson—which meant that we had to hold the board meeting on Saturday. Normally that wouldn’t have been a big deal, but that Saturday was Dad and Peaches’s first wedding anniversary and I was having a hundred people to my house for dinner that night. Of all the days of the year that Saturday was absolutely the most inconvenient one possible for me, but as usual, Lydia got her way. And then, to top it all off, when we finally did hold the meeting, Lydia sat at the conference table and paid her bills. You had to have been there. Philip was doing this little show-and-tell on a new surfacting agent that the specialty chemicals division is going to start marketing and Lydia was busy writing out checks and licking stamps. We met for two hours and Lydia did not say one single word the entire time. I’ve got to tell you, Kate. I was so furious I could have strangled her with my bare hands.”
     
    By the time I left Dagny’s house, it had begun snowing in earnest, and I was grateful for the fact that once I got to Wacker Drive, there was hardly any traffic. To my