Her sudden closeness made it hard to breathe. Forty-eight hours of too-much followed by five days of not-enough; his inability to control the women in his young life filled him with such outrage and humiliation it hollowed out a void inside himself that he filled with dreams of omnipotence. As he got older and the prison of the crib turned into solitary confinement in the spare room, he would pick a scab until it bled to remind himself he was real.
It was shortly after she was ordained and they had moved into a small parish on the shore of Lake Superior that his mother stood at the kitchen stove scalding milk for cocoa. Stirring in the dark chocolate, she told her son, age five, to wait and let it cool. Eager for the bittersweet taste on his tongue, he took a sip, burned his mouth, and began to weep. When his mother chided, “That’s what you get for being greedy,” he threw the cup of cocoa in her eyes.
Infection followed. The child had not meant to blind her, of course, but by then remorse did not come naturally to him. He quickly noticed that now that his mother could not see him, he could do no wrong in her eyes. It seemed to Scout his mother was happier blind, but he kept that thought to himself.
In the long winter of his youth, he focused on schoolwork and hockey. Blessed with a slap shot as monstrous as his id, he never failed to credit the team and Jesus Christ when the sports reporters from the local papers interviewed him about his uncanny ability to score goals. More than a few headlines in the Upper Peninsula read, SCOUT TO THE RESCUE.
From Scout’s curriculum vitae, all White Stone Trust knew about the young man was he had spent twelfth grade at a boarding school in Massachusetts that had educated presidents and valued hockey, and that he had been admitted early decision to an Ivy League university, both on a full scholarship. He had a 3.9 grade point average with a major in economics and a minor in classics, scored enough goals to be scouted by the pros, and found time for amateur theatrics.
He applied for summer internships at a number of financial institutions. Morgan, First Boston, Kuhn Loeb, Goldman Sachs, White Stone, Dillon Read, among others. All of them would have wanted Scout on their team were it not for an “incident” that occurred during spring break of that junior year in college.
He had begun dating the drama major who directed him in The Tempest, unwittingly typecasting him as Caliban. She thought he was a sensitive soul because he could cry on cue. Scout was decidedly more conservative, at least in appearance, than her previous beaus.
With her parents’ knowledge and blessing, she had invited Scout to spend an off-season romantic week, just the two of them, at her family’s summer cottage on an island off the coast of Maine. Three cozy days into the holiday, she had called her parents to say she was having a wonderful time. Scout would later remember overhearing her tell her mother, “He’s the one, Mom.” But the next day her parents got a very different kind of call from their daughter: tears verging on hysteria. She had taken the ferry back to the mainland by herself and was in a phone booth. Too upset and embarrassed to get into specifics, she told her father she had passed out and Scout had done things to her.
Her outraged father, being a lawyer, told her to call the police and flew up and joined her. The police took note of the fact that she had been having consensual sex with Scout for several months prior to the incident. Her medical exam showed no bruising or physical indications of rape, though the doctor did comment that her pubic hair had been recently shaved. Not that that precluded sexual assault, it just made the men, and curiously the one female member of that small-town constabulary, inclined to believe she had gotten what she had asked for.
Since it happened out of state and no criminal charges were filed, the incident would have gone away if the girl’s father hadn’t been a tenured professor at the university’s esteemed law school. The president of the university was called; disciplinary committee notified. Because there were no corroborating witnesses and the incident boiled down to “he said/she said,” Scout’s record remained blemish-free, but a nasty residue of salacious rumor lingered around his name.
Unable to get justice for his daughter, the father/law professor contacted every one of the financial firms Scout had interviewed with. One by one the rejection letters appeared in Scout’s mailbox. No one was more surprised than Scout when White Stone accepted him into their summer analyst program—except, of course, for the poor girl’s outraged father, who had written a letter detailing the sexual assault for the benefit of a senior managing director at White Stone by the name of Moran.
Once Scout got to New York, he had every reason to think his troubles were behind him. But that first week on the job, more than once when he looked up from his desk he saw Porter Moran, the grand wizard of the Private Wealth department, staring at him just the same way people back in the Upper Peninsula would scrutinize a fox that showed signs of being rabid.
Moran, as a partner and head of Private Wealth, operated in a different universe than most investment bankers. His clients weren’t publicly held companies; they were private individuals with a net worth of $250 million at the very least. Porter’s specialty was handling multigenerational wealth—families whose collective assets pushed the billion mark, which was a lot of money in 1982.
He was a big man in his fifties, partial to double-breasted vests and peaked lapels; six foot three, two hundred and fifty pounds at least, but surprisingly light on his feet. He moved with a grace that brought to mind both John Wayne and Jackie Gleason. A lifetime of wining and dining rich clients had left him puffy, but beneath all that muscle marbled with fat, it was obvious that once upon a time Porter had been a very handsome man.
Some of the families who were clients of Porter had recognizable brand names seen on the shelves of supermarkets and drugstores; others you would never have heard of. Often they were intermarried. The real dividend from the Private Wealth department came from the stockpile of connections and assets these families had banked over the years, and which Porter could, at auspicious moments, draw upon and leverage to give White Stone an edge.
It wasn’t anything Porter Moran said to Scout—in fact, they had never exchanged a word—it was the way the rainmaker for Private Wealth eyeballed him that worried Scout. Two weeks into the job, Scout was convinced that Porter Moran had already decided his talents were superfluous.
Finishing work just after 9 p.m. on the last Wednesday in June, Scout ducked into a deserted men’s room on the fifth floor before heading to the night elevator. As he aimed at the piss biscuit, Scout’s brain was railing at the unfairness of the shadow that incident with the girl over spring break had cast over his future. He hadn’t hurt her. He’d simply borrowed her body for a few hours. Done things he’d been thinking about doing since they first met. What galled him most was that he probably could have talked her into it, but she would have asked why and he knew his answer would have bothered her. Sharing the experience would have spoiled it.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, Porter Moran stepped up to the urinal next to him. The fly of Porter’s trousers had buttons rather than a zipper. The big man waited until he had his stream going. “So what really happened with the girl? . . . And don’t bullshit me.”
Dick in hand, Scout summarized the incident in three short sentences with the clinical precision of a veterinarian. Then added, “She was passed out. I had some fun of my own with her. No permanent damage.”