Private Affairs Page 6

  "Of course we thought about it," Matt retorted, but Elizabeth cut in quietly. "We know you'd help if you could. We want to make it on our own."

  "How?" Lydia asked curiously. "You're so young; we never could have done it at your age."

  "A second mortgage on the house; a loan from the bank. It will be close, but—"

  "We'll owe money all over town," said Peter.

  "But we'll own a newspaper," said Matt.

  Holly looked from her father to her mother. "You're excited. Your faces look all shiny."

  Matt's eyebrows rose. "Shiny?"

  "Like you said mine was when I got those two parts in the concert."

  "It's called burning your bridges," Peter observed.

  Holly swung on him. "Why are you so stuffy?" she demanded. "You're just like Grandpa, and you're not nearly as old as he is. Or are you just thinking about yourself? College and all that." Her voice wavered on the last words.

  "See!" Peter shouted triumphantly. "You're worried about it, too!"

  "We've taken care of that," Elizabeth said. "We're setting up a trust for each of you; you won't lose college, we promise."

  "Just a minute!" Spencer demanded again. "We keep getting off the subject! What the hell do you know about running a newspaper?"

  "Not a lot," Matt said. "But I've run a printing company for sixteen years, so I know the business end; we studied journalism, both of us were editor of our college paper; and Elizabeth's been writing for the Examiner for years."

  "That's it?" Spencer asked. His face was red; his palms made slapping sounds as he clasped and unclasped his hands.

  "Not quite. We've researched the paper and its competition. We're not going in blind; we know the problems and we have ideas for solving them. And the Chieftain has a good managing editor; he'll keep it going in the beginning, until we know what we're doing."

  Spencer slammed both hands on the table. "Putting the welfare of your children in the hands of someone you don't even know. You can't even be sure he'll stick around to help you."

  "Don't talk to me as if I'm a child!" Matt roared. Elizabeth put a hand on his arm and he lowered his voice. "Did I ever tell you my father wanted to be an artist?"

  "Zachary?" said Spencer, surprised. "No."

  "It wasn't something he talked about a lot. But when he was young he studied every art form he could think of: painting, sculpture, woodcuts, silkscreen, even linoleum cuts. And he was good. He just wasn't great. So he stopped; he didn't want to be a second-rate artist. Instead he bought into the printing company that later became his, and did lithography for the artists who lived here, and in Taos. An invisible assistant, he called himself. Except, he hated it. He told me he hated every minute of it and the more he hated it the more he put everything he had into it, not only for artists, but for himself, designing brochures and posters and maps for tourists: his only way of being an artist. Then, one day, the hating stopped and he was proud of what he made. That's why he was so terrified of losing it. Though I think he dreamed that someday, when he retired to Nuevo, he'd try again, to see if he'd do better than when he was young. Or just to have fun with what he called his small talent."

  "But he died before he could try," said Elizabeth.

  "Right. He died."

  Spencer grimaced at the lanterns hanging above the table. "I hear what you're saying, but it doesn't wash. Nobody knows what's going to happen; nobody has a guarantee of living long enough to do everything. That's no excuse for risking your security, throwing away a thriving business—"

  "We've weighed the risks," Matt said flatly. "And you have no right to tell us—"

  "Daddy," Elizabeth said softly, "don't you understand? We need this."

  "You mean your marriage is in trouble, is that it? And you think buying a newspaper will make it better?"

  "We're not talking about our marriage," Matt said.

  Elizabeth heard the ominous note in his voice. "Our marriage probably has as many ups and downs as yours," she told her father lightly. "What I meant was, we think we have to do this now. If we don't, we might never do it. We might keep putting it off—"

  "We put it off!" Spencer's voice rose. "We put off indulging ourselves; we were responsible adults! Why can't you keep the printing company—a guaranteed income!—and buy into a paper? Be partners with someone! Do a little bit at a time—"

  "No." Matt pushed aside his plate and leaned his arms on the table. "We believe in ourselves. We have to try with everything we have, because if we hold back, and then fail, we'll never know if we might have succeeded if only we'd had enough courage."

  "I understand that," Lydia said very quietly. Spencer's face darkened. "Now listen—!" he began.

  "My dear, it's my turn to talk," Lydia said. "And I want to say that I'm very impressed with Elizabeth and Matt, and I envy them."

  "Mother!" Elizabeth exclaimed.

  "Your father was miserable the last five years he was working," Lydia said. "He may sputter at you about waiting, but he knows he was counting the days until he could get out. You're quite right; he was afraid to do it before he had his full pension, and I admit I was worried, too, and didn't encourage him. But I was counting the days, too, until we could leave. Not because I didn't like my job—I loved it—but who could live with an angry, frustrated man?"

  "Elizabeth knows something about that," Matt said.

  "But what if it doesn't work?" Peter demanded. "I mean, what if you . . . what if. . . ."He stopped. How could he say he was afraid his parents would be failures?

  "What if we fail?" Matt asked, for him. 'Then we go job hunting. Are you afraid, Peter?"

  "I guess so. Shouldn't I be?"

  "Sure. We all should be. We've been comfortable and secure for years; now we're talking about taking some big chances. And we're asking you to take them with us."

  "Peter." Elizabeth leaned forward. "We've thought about this a lot; it's something we want and need very much. You and Holly have your lives ahead of you, but when you get older the years slip away so fast ... I wish I could make you understand how it feels to turn around and find it's another spring or summer or Christmas and another year of your life is gone. And you can't get it back; you can't make up for what you haven't done in those twelve months. What we're afraid of is waking up one day and finding out it's too late to do the things we dreamed about and gave up and started thinking about again after Grandpa Zachary died. If we don't try now, when we have our health and enough energy to begin something new, we're afraid we may never try. Then we'd look back someday and know we missed our chance, maybe our only chance. And we don't want to live with that regret."

  "I didn't think we had such an awful life," Peter mumbled.

  Holly turned on her brother. "Can't you have some imagination? You and I could get jobs, you know! If you don't shape up you'll be a stodgy old man before you're fifteen."

  "Somebody has to be careful around here!" Peter shouted, and on the

  last word his voice cracked, ending on a high note. He flushed in embarrassment "I can't help it if nobody feels like me."

  "We do feel like you," Elizabeth said. "But we also feel we have to make a choice. Can't you understand that? Isn't there anything you want to do now without waiting?"

  "Be an anthropologist and study Indians," Peter said promptly. "But you always say I have to go to college first, that I have to do things in the right order. Isn't that what Grandpa said he and Grandma did? Wait till the right time to buy their shop?"

  Elizabeth and Matt exchanged a glance, amused and exasperated, won-dering why parents' good advice often came back in a way they never expected. "It's close," Elizabeth admitted. "But not the same. A bookshop doesn't take the same time and energy as a newspaper; some jobs can't be started after a certain age. And I keep trying to tell you, Peter: the years are running away from us. We've waited sixteen years for this dream to come true. What if you had to wait sixteen years to be an anthropologist, or Holly had to wait that long to get a part in a Broa
dway musical?"

  "I'd die," Holly said simply.

  "Or learn to wait," Elizabeth said, smiling. "But then one day you'd say, 'Okay, it's now or never.' And you'd go after it."

  "Peter," Lydia said, "there's no such thing as absolute security. Maybe everybody should take a big chance at least once. Maybe everybody should be greedy for more, at least once."

  Elizabeth put her hand on Lydia's, feeling that from now on, they would be friends in a new way. "Thank you," she said, and kissed Lydia's cheek. "That means so much to me."

  "How about me?" Holly demanded. "I thought it was a good idea, too! I think you're as wonderful as Grandma does!"

  "And we thank you," said Matt. "We need you behind us."

  "Well, if it works, of course it would be . . . fine," rumbled Spencer, not wanting to be left out of what was clearly building to a vote of confidence. "And of course I'm behind you as much as Lydia; and we'll help with something, if things get really tight. ..."

  "Well, I can help too!" Peter exclaimed. "If you need money I'll sell my pottery collection—and get a job," he added with a dark look at his sister.

  Matt took Elizabeth's hand, feeling her slender fingers link with his. "We won't ask you to sell anything, Peter, or go to work just yet. All we want is your faith in us. That's all we want from all of you. Because we have faith in ourselves. We know we're going to make it." He looked at Elizabeth with love and anticipation, and put his arm around her shoul-

  ders. "When something is now or never," he told all of them, "and when you're working with someone you love, you don't hold back. You put everything you've got into it."

  Holly drew in her breath at the look on her parents' faces. A sharp pain went through her: envy, hope—and a fear that maybe no one would ever look at her like that. "When do we start?" she asked, trying to share in their intimacy.

  "In a couple of months," Elizabeth said. "When we close on buying the paper. October, probably. We start in October."

  As Matt's arm tightened around her, she looked around the table at her family. A warm breeze lifted a corner of the tablecloth; the lantern lights flickered. "We're so happy," she said. "We know what we're getting into, and we know that everything is going to be so wonderful, from now on."

  "Happily ever after," Holly said in a small voice.

  "Yes," Elizabeth said. "I guess it sounds silly, but that's exactly right. The two of us. Happily ever after."

  H A P T E R

  I

  .t was the beginning of the best time they had ever known: our golden time, Elizabeth called it, but softly, almost as if she were crossing her fingers, as she had in childhood, wondering how long it could last.

  Because it was also a time when they felt as if they had launched a small boat on a stormy sea, one minute riding high and confident, the next plunged into worries about the crazy chances they were taking. They signed large documents filled with small print—each time cutting off a piece of themselves, Elizabeth thought—until it was all done: Lovell Printing sold, their house mortgaged; money borrowed from the bank. The only thing untouched was Zachary's house and land at Nuevo; at the last minute, Matt hadn't been able to bring himself to sell them. Then they signed the last documents, wrote a terrifyingly large check—and the Santa Fe Chieftain was theirs.

  That night they took the family to see it. With Spencer and Lydia, and Holly and Peter behind them, Matt turned the key in the front door of the Chieftain building. But then, while the others went ahead, he and Elizabeth held back, gazing at the dark building that hulked unusually large in the light of the street lamp. Elizabeth shivered slightly in the cool October

  Private Affairs 57

  air, and Matt took her hand. "Forward," he murmured, and they followed the others inside.

  A newspaper office is never really silent; even when empty it echoes with the day's frenetic activity: people rummaging through papers, photographs, and books, piling them on desks and the floor, tacking cartoons and notes helter-skelter on walls and partitions, leaving cold coffee in the bottom of Styrofoam cups, typing stories for new editions to join yellowing old ones piled haphazardly in corners and under desks.

  As Holly and Peter dashed ahead with Spencer and Lydia following, their footsteps rang on the hard floor, but Elizabeth and Matt heard instead the familiar echoes that made them feel they'd gone back in time: to the university, and the daily campus newspaper; to the Los Angeles Times where they'd had summer jobs as intern reporters; to the years when they grabbed every chance to be together—in the classroom, in parks and city streets, in bed—falling in love, planning their future.

  "And it's here," Elizabeth whispered in the large room. She gestured toward a glass-walled corner office. "Yours," she said, her voice shaking with the enormity of what they had done. "It's yours, Matt. Publisher and editor-in-chief. Try it out."

  Still holding hands, they walked into the office and Matt twirled the high-backed leather chair at the desk. From there he could see the entire newsroom crammed with file cabinets and desks, those in the center for four reporters, two photographers, and two secretaries; others along one wall, separated by low partitions, for the managing editor, features editor, and advertising and circulation managers.

  "Our empire," Matt mused.

  "We snap our fingers," Elizabeth said whimsically, "and a staff leaps to obey."

  "Creating hordes of new readers. ..."

  "Luring advertisers. . . ."

  "Moving mountains at our command. ..."

  "Or at least moving the furniture," Elizabeth said as their laughter filled the small office. "Matt, I feel like a little girl with my first real toy."

  He kissed the tip of her nose. "I keep wanting to giggle. Except that that's for kids."

  "I like feeling like a kid once in a while."

  He grinned. "Your father thinks we should be worrying."

  They smiled at each other. "I love you," Elizabeth said.

  "Now that is the best part of all. How many publishers and features editors are crazy about each other? Which reminds me. We're running this show together, but I have all this grandeur"—he looked at the

  cramped space and shabby furniture—"and all you have is one of those cubicles out there. We'll build you a real office, next to this one."

  Elizabeth shook her head. "I should be with the others. They expect it, and we don't want to make them more suspicious of new owners than they probably are." She took a deep breath. "Matt—I'm beginning to believe it."

  He grinned again. "So am I. Elizabeth, my love, this is ours and it's going to be all right."

  They put their arms around each other, excited, scared, eager, exhila-rated. "Free," Matt murmured, his lips against Elizabeth's hair. "Beginning again: my own way, my own dream." He caught himself as he felt the surprised tensing of Elizabeth's body. "Our way. We'll do everything we dreamed of. We waited so long, now we'll do it all. My God, we're going to be the greatest Mom and Pop business in America!"

  Elizabeth laughed and they kissed, holding each other, their bodies fitting together.

  "Excuse us," said Peter, lounging in the doorway. "We thought we were here for a guided tour from the boss. Bosses."

  "/ didn't want to interrupt you," Holly said. "I thought it was crude."

  "So I'm crude." Peter shrugged, attempting nonchalance. "I just thought it'd be sorta nice to see what we bought."

  "Yes it would be," said Elizabeth, still in Matt's arms. "I just thought that first it would be sorta nice to kiss your father."

  Peter reddened. "Sorry," he mumbled.

  "No problem," Matt said casually. "We'll make time for everything. And right now," he added as Lydia and Spencer came up, "the tour is about to begin."

  Elizabeth watched Matt lead the others through the long, low building, organizing the tour so that when they reached the back loading ramp, he'd given them a complete explanation of how a newspaper is planned, written, printed, and distributed through the city and nearby towns. But she was only
half listening, letting her mind wander. We'll make time for everything. Nothing was ordinary anymore; everything was new. She thought about what she would be doing tomorrow and in the days to come. Making assignments instead of having them made for her. Writing the way she wanted instead of the way she was told. Working with Matt. Owning their paper.

  Ours.

  The glow began to fade the next morning, when sunlight showed the Chieftain to be simply another of Santa Fe's brownish-pink adobe build-

  ings where there was work to be done, and Elizabeth and Matt tried to build up courage for their first meeting with the staff.

  "Friday morning," Matt said. "Next issue of the paper due out next Thursday. All we have to do is get to know a bunch of people who have their own ways of doing things, convince them we're not going to change everything at once, make them feel needed, and at the same time sell ourselves as new owners who deserve respect and loyalty because we know what we're doing. ..."

  "Nothing to it," Elizabeth smiled. "Just be our usual charming selves." She picked up an envelope on Matt's desk. "Someone's already writing us letters."

  "Maybe they have a welcome wagon." Matt saw her face change as she read. "What is it?"

  "Ned Engle. He's quit. As of today."

  "Quit— r

  Matt skimmed the letter, his face darkening. "The son of a bitch. He gave me his word he'd stay on as managing editor. At least six months, he said; that lying son of a bitch—"

  "Matt, he knew this paper inside out; what are we going to do without him?"

  Matt paced the small office. "Bastard. Didn't even wait to see how we run the place—//we run it. Six days to get the paper out. You'd think he wants us to fall on our face. . . ."

  "Of course he does!" Elizabeth exclaimed. "That's exactly what he wants! He's waiting for us to call and beg him to come back."

  Matt stopped pacing. "Right. And he can wait until he grows roots. We're not going to be at the mercy of any son of a bitch who thinks he holds all the cards."

  Elizabeth's throat was dry. Her father had warned them, but they'd brushed it aside, so sure Engle would be there, his competence making their inexperience less obvious, giving them time to learn and take charge. "The reporters," she said, casting about. "They know the paper. Couldn't one of them take over, just for a while?"