Great Big Beautiful Life(33)

“That’s right.” She covers the glass with the towel again. Hits it with the hammer. “In 1875, Gerald Rupert Ives came screaming into the world.” She flicks a glance my way. “He was the one who built the House of Ives as the world knows it. But I’ve always thought of him as the beginning of the end. The stepping stone that decided the entire path. The first domino that tipped. The one who, for better or worse, set every moment of my life into motion.”





The Story


Their version: Gerald Ives created modern journalism. He was also a failed politician, a lavish partier, and a womanizer who abandoned his family without batting an eye.



* * *



? ? ?

Her version: Gerald Ives never spoke an ill word of his father, but he never once heard his father say a kind word about him.

Gerald was raised to be a businessman, and was hardly eight years old when he first realized he’d been born in the red. In debt. At a loss.

He came out with his father’s face and an expectation he could never live up to, no matter how many tutors his parents locked him in a room with. He was supposed to do great things. That was the contract Lawrence thought he’d entered into with the universe, and thus every second Gerald didn’t, he was failing.

He was disappointing.

He was falling short.

Things were different for his younger sister.

Eight years after Gerald was born, Georgiana “Gigi” Ives arrived, firmly in the black. Beautiful like her mother, quiet like her father, quick witted like both of them. And she was naturally content, which only earned her more adoration.

Gigi went where she pleased. She did as she wished. She studied painting and dance and piano, and played out in the grass with the nanny on sunny days.

And Gerald watched through the window, his tutor barking at him, “Again, again,” until every math problem was solved, every Italian verb correctly conjugated, every important mining-related fact memorized and recited back.

Their house in San Francisco was large and opulent, but to him, it felt like a cage he paced, searching for weak points.

He tried—at so many points in his life, he tried—to codify what it was that made his father detest him. Or what exactly about Gigi and his mother drew out that small, soft smile on his father’s lips.

Why they could drift, light as sunbeams, across the house and he would watch them go, more than approvingly, when only Gerald’s rage could ever turn his father’s eye.

Once, after they’d fought, Gerald had gone into an outbuilding on their property and punched a hole clean through the wall. His mother had found him there, still shaking with unspent energy even as blood dripped down the back of his hand to the cold dirt floor.

Gently, she’d touched his shoulders. “He’s afraid, you know,” she told him. “That’s why he’s so hard on you.”

Gerald had nodded, and later wished he hadn’t. He didn’t know. He’d never seen any evidence at all that Lawrence Ives was afraid of anything, and even on his deathbed, Gerald would wonder what his mother had meant that day.

But instead of asking, he’d tucked away his anger, tamped it down—it did no good anyway—and did only and exactly what his father asked, until he was twenty-five and, finally, Lawrence deemed him responsible enough to join the family business.

Sort of.

He gave him a newspaper. One.

“A trial,” Lawrence had said, without even meeting his son’s eyes, simply scribbling his signature to make the change official.

Look at me, Gerald remembered thinking. Just look at me, for once.

He didn’t.

One week after Gerald took charge of the San Francisco Daily Dispatch, he changed the motto to “Where Truth Is King.”

One week after that, he cleaned house.

He and his father didn’t fight about it. They didn’t talk about it. But for the first time, Gerald knew Lawrence was watching him.

Gerald didn’t understand mining. He had no natural talent for prospecting. He’d never feel the silver calling out to him from deep within the earth.

But he had something his father didn’t. A fearlessness. If everything fell apart, Gerald thought, who cared? This was his chance, and he’d never get another one.

He had to keep his father’s eye on him, and that meant taking big swings.

He bet everything he had on talent. He poached the best writers, the best cartoonists, the best editors from the Pulitzer family’s papers and the Hearsts’ presses too. He nearly doubled his new staff’s pay, and with the money he had left, he bought the newest and best equipment.

Gerald Ives never spoke ill of his father.

But he ran his newspaper with a vengeance.

Lawrence had raised him to be a businessman, but his mother had raised him to be a populist, and he took all of her ideals and fed them back to the people, for a price.

He attacked corruption. He pointed out hypocrisy.

The truth is king, he told his staff again and again, and his readers too, who began to have the sense that maybe all the other newspapers of record weren’t quite telling the truth.

Some of his competitors folded. Others, he acquired.

He ran two of his father’s papers into the ground, then bought them out from under him, and still the two men sat across the dinner table from each other in silence, Lawrence’s eyes discreetly lifting off his soup to take inventory of his only son.