Azrael Read Free

Regina was going to be a first-rate journalist in spite of her name and connections. But she was damned if she was going to spend a beautiful, cool, October Thursday, with the sky bright blue and the trees trying to make up in a week for a year of single-color drabness, listening to sermons and lamentations over a small white wooden box. She’d stay in the office instead. Go over circulation reports. Relay her mother’s instructions to writers and artists and researchers. Wait for late-breaking stories.
    Feel guilty.
    And petty, and cowardly, and like a phony. Mother was at the funeral. Jimmy was at the funeral. Regina’s brother seemed to like nothing about the family business except the people who worked for it. He probably thought of, supervised and carried out more community and charity work than any nineteen-year-old in the world, with the possible exception of European royalty. Regina loved him, but she didn’t understand him very well.
    She did understand that her mother and Jimmy were right about noblesse oblige. The way Old Man Symczyk had carried on, you might have thought it was a privilege for him to have his grandson die, if only as an occasion of proof of the respect in which he and his were held by the first family of the community.
    Regina felt guilty about that, too, and guilty at the thought that at the age of twenty-four, when most of her friends were already disillusioned or divorced, she was still worried about her right to avoid an unpleasant experience versus her obligation to help other people get over theirs. Maybe she should suggest a Lifestyles piece on it—the Me Decade Meets the Old Guilt.
    She was about half ready to start taking herself seriously when the phone on her mother’s desk buzzed.
    And kept buzzing. Her mother’s secretary should have picked up, but he was probably in the bathroom or something. Regina sighed, punched a button, and picked up the phone.
    “Petra Hudson’s office,” she said. She had always loved the idea of somebody’s office answering the phone. One of Regina’s small triumphs at the Kirkester Chronicle, the hometown paper her mother had given her to run the way other mothers give their children the wooden spoon to lick, was to forbid the practice of sending memos attributed to your desk. Some of the old-liners, the I-was-working-here-before-anybody’d-ever-heard-of-your-father crowd, had grown very protective of the authority of their desks, but Regina was in charge, Regina had made a decision and Regina had made it stick. Desks did not send memos, people did. If a newspaper couldn’t say what it meant, what good was it?
    Regina’s mother had watched the memo war with a sort of absent amusement. Petra Hudson could have settled the matter by fiat at any time, but Regina would be damned if she was going to ask, and Mother, to her credit, did not volunteer. It was one of the things Regina admired about her mother—she didn’t meddle.
    Regina admired a lot of things about her mother, and respected her, and even loved her, but it was a distant kind of love, communicated through the media of nannies’ reports and letters to and from boarding schools here and abroad, while Mother fought the good fight to keep the Hudson Group in Hudson hands after the death of James Hudson, Sr.
    Sometimes it seemed to Regina that she was not so much a daughter as she was a Chosen Successor. The feeling had been stronger over the last few years, since it had become obvious that Jimmy had no interest in the family business, but it had always been there. Why else had they named her Regina, for God’s sake, if they didn’t expect that someday she would reign?
    Thank God she loved the business.
    Now Regina sat (temporarily) on her mother’s throne, holding her mother’s electronic scepter to her ear.
    “Western Union calling,” a voice of indeterminate sex announced.
    Regina smiled. It was appropriate that somebody’s office should pick up the phone to find an entire