Chapter 86: Fall 1984

I came home from the office on Friday a week later and was greeted at the door by my son. “Hi, buddy, what’s up?”

“Mommy’s crying,” he told me.

“Mommy’s crying? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you do something?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he repeated.

“Did I do something?”

“I don’t know.”

I just nodded down at him. “Okay, I’ll go talk to Mommy. I’m sure we did something.” He headed back to the living room, and I followed him. I dropped my briefcase in the living room, and then went down the hall to our bedroom.

As Charlie reported, Marilyn was sitting on the bed in her fluffy bathrobe, crying and looking very sad. I loosened my tie and sat down on the bed next to her. “What’s wrong?” I asked. I put an arm around her shoulder and hugged her against me. Marilyn started crying again and leaned her head on my shoulder. “It’s all right, what’s wrong?” I asked soothingly.

I was worried that my wife might be experiencing postpartum depression. She hadn’t on our first time, but we didn’t have twins then. Or was this just some routine thing? Marilyn jumbled out the story in her usual confusing fashion, and I just nodded and listened and smiled to myself. She was working on toilet training Charlie, which was generally going okay, but he had a couple of accidents today. The girls were squawking and wanted to eat at the same time. Dum-Dum got into the pantry and started eating her kibble from the bag. She missed two phone calls. Blah blah blah, nothing very life threatening.

The real kicker, though, was when she tried to dress in some pre-pregnancy clothes and couldn’t fit into her old jeans. Not her ‘skinny jeans’ either, just regular stuff. “I’m still fat and ugly!” she wailed.

I tried to keep from laughing, biting my lip to do so. Charlie came in then, and he must have heard her, because he came up and wrapped his arms around her knees and said, “That’s okay, Mommy. We still love you.”

I cracked up at that point and started laughing. I hugged Marilyn again, and agreed, “Yes, Mommy, we’ll still love you even though you’re fat and ugly!”

“You’re awful! I hate you both!” she screamed at me. I just laughed harder and fell back on the bed, with Marilyn still hugged up against me. I laughed for several more minutes, while Marilyn complained about men in general and Charlie protested he still loved her.

After a few minutes, I pushed myself upright, and smiled down at our son. “Mommy will be fine. You need to go on out to the living room now, while Daddy talks to Mommy.”

“Okay!” he scooted on out of the room.

Marilyn sat upright. “Great! He’ll still love me if I’m fat and ugly! Should I kill him now or later?”

“You can’t kill him. Don’t forget, one of these days he’ll be the one to pick out the old folks’ home we get sent to!”

“You’re no help at all!” Still, she smiled at me as she said this.

“Come on, get up, there must be some clothing you can fit into. No more of this.” Marilyn grumped at me some more, but I pulled her to her feet and nudged her towards the dresser. “Listen you went through this with Charlie, too. Yes, you’re bigger now than before, but you didn’t grow much more with the girls than with him, and we’re going to get you back in shape.” This was true. Charlie had come in at just shy of eight pounds, but his sisters had averaged just over five pounds each.

“Hmmph!”

We were standing in front of the mirror over the dresser, and I wrapped my arms around her from behind and hugged her. “You know what you need to do. You’re going to eat sensibly and work out with me every morning and you’ll be back in shape in no time flat.”

“What if I don’t lose all the weight?”

I grinned at her. “Depends on what stays bigger!” I waggled my eyebrows at her.

“Men! You can forget about that! That’s never going to happen again! Ever!” she protested.

I smiled at her in the mirror and rubbed against her rump. I knew it was going to be a couple of months before anything could happen anyway. “We’ll see. I think you’ll want another Carl Buckman Experience before too long!”

“NEVER!”

I laughed and pushed her towards the closet. “Now, get dressed. You can have a drink again, so I am opening a bottle of wine. No excuses.”

Marilyn calmed down after that. She began walking on her treadmill again every morning with me while I worked on the weights and did some katas. (Charlie would sometimes come in as well and try to lift the weights just like his old man. He wasn’t very successful, but it made me laugh regardless.) Sometimes she walked while feeding the girls. I found that interesting but not arousing. That’s not one of my particular kinks. She claimed that she was going to wean them onto bottles after a few weeks anyway, which was fine by me. I could hold out on any urges I had - and I was certainly feeling some urges - until she was all healed up and no longer lactating. Her mood improved immensely a week later when she had lost a couple of pounds and fit into a pair of jeans again.

Marilyn continued to proclaim, for a little over two months, that I was never again going to satisfy those urges. That changed by the end of September. She had her eight-week checkup with Doctor Harrington, who pronounced the girls healthy and Marilyn healthy, too. She didn’t tell me her plans, but that night, after putting the girls in their cribs, she went into our bedroom and changed into a pink peignoir set I had bought her for Christmas. I was glad Charlie was a sound sleeper, because otherwise he would have been very surprised to see what his parents were up to out on the couch in the living room!

The business moved ahead quite nicely through the fall. We created our first investment pool for outside investors, the Buckman Investment Pool. Missy wasn’t really qualified to run it, but she was qualified to dig through her endless Rolodex and find somebody who could run it for us, with our supervision. She and Jake Junior got our blessing and thanks. They raised $25 million and we put it into a number of different companies throughout the fall and winter, some of which I remembered from history, and some of which I didn’t. This was a different kind of business. While the Buckman Group invested in shares of the Buckman Investment Pool, we sold shares to others (minimum investment, $250,000) and took a management fee off the top and got a managing partner’s cut of the profits and distributions. There was a different dynamic involved, to a certain extent, in that we were more interested in pushing these investments to an IPO, so we could generate a big return on the investment, although we reserved the right to hold onto the shares after that.

Harlan, Anna Lee, Roscoe, and their new daughter, Mary Beth, visited us in October. Harlan saved up a year’s leave and flew the family home. The big problem in living in Hawaii is that it takes you a full day to fly anywhere on the east coast, and a full day to fly back, which just kills your vacation and leave time. They visited for a long weekend, Friday through Monday, and we put them up in the spare bedroom, with Roscoe bunking with Charlie and Mary Beth bunking with the twins. Friday was the 12 ^th and we celebrated Charlie’s third birthday. That Saturday we went to a Pee Wee motocross race, and watched Bucky win his first race! Very exciting, and Charlie thought it was just fantastic! Then we went over to the Tusks’ and had a barbecue.

(Previously I would have taken Harlan, a big football fan, to a Colts game down at Memorial Stadium. That spring, however, the Colts had decamped in the middle of the night to Indianapolis. My mother was as big a fan as Harlan, and if she hadn’t been homicidal before, she probably was now! Oh, well... )

In November, I made arrangements with Taylor for a family trip to the Bahamas again, and we stayed at the same villa, Hougomont, that we had stayed at in the spring. This time we took the kids, to see how the place worked with children and whether it was practical to take kids back and forth. Holly and Molly were a handful, and Charlie was only slightly less trouble, but we survived. By the middle of the week, I called the real estate office and had Mr. Peepers over, and we started haggling over price. I bought Hougomont plus the two empty parcels, one on each side. That gave us well over a thousand feet of private beach, and plenty of room for privacy. John overnighted me a check for $1,000,000 as a deposit, and I promised to fly down for a quick trip before Christmas to close on the sale.

At Christmas, Charlie got a bicycle and a helmet. He fell a lot, but he kept trying, going in circles in the driveway. He would make ’VROOM VROOM’ sounds as he pushed and rode it around. Bucky was facing some future competition!

We gave Charlie his bike about a week before Christmas, actually. We were going to Utica for Christmas and taking a few weeks off for a long family vacation in the Bahamas. In a few years the kids would be in school, and that schedule would rule. For now, we were still flexible. We kenneled Dum-Dum for a couple of weeks and then flew up.

As I mentioned once before, the Lefleur tradition is that they celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, in the afternoon, not the evening. There were now so many kids and grandkids that adults pulled names from a hat in the fall, and they were only responsible for that child, and you didn’t buy for everybody. Nobody could afford buying a present for every single person! Today, however, Marilyn and I were going to break the rules.

Everything went normally. Santa showed up about 1:00 and did all the ‘Ho, ho, hos!’ and handed out a small present from Big Bob and Harriet to each child. They also had to pose for a picture with him. Even the adults had to sit on his lap! Afterwards, Santa was sent packing, and the presents for the kids were passed around, which always ended up in a whirlwind of wrapping paper and a cacophony of noise. Normally after that happened, a bunch of folding tables and chairs would be brought out for dinner. However, before that happened, Marilyn and I interrupted things.

“Excuse me! We have something to say,” I said to the room. It fell on deaf ears. Nobody was listening to anybody, just to the screaming kids running around. “Excuse me!” Nothing. I looked at my wife. Maybe she could bring order to the chaos. It was her family, after all.

“You need to be louder.”

“I was loud.”

“Well, yell, then!’

I rolled my eyes. Great! I stood up and waved my arms, and then yelled out, “EXCUSE ME! WE HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY!” At that point the adults, at least, looked in my direction. The kids kept yelling, but the parents saw me standing. I repeated myself, “EXCUSE ME! I NEED TO SAY SOMETHING!”

Marilyn’s family started shushing the little ones, and I turned to my wife. “Okay, they’re your family. You want to say this?”

Marilyn waved me off. “This is your idea.”

“Some help you are!” I turned back to the others. “Okay everybody, give me a minute or two, please.” Most of the others nodded, including Big Bob and Harriet. We had told them of our idea before, and they liked it, and now they started telling everybody to be quiet and listen.

“Thank you. As most of you know, for the last few years I’ve been in business down in Maryland, and we’ve been pretty lucky and done fairly well. Anyway, this year I bought, uh, actually, we bought a vacation home in the Bahamas. This family has been very good to me, and Marilyn and I would like to offer everyone here some time there. If you’d like to use our place for a week, let us know, and we’ll make the arrangements for you. All you’ll need to do is get to the airport.”

As expected, the room broke out in a state of barely controlled pandemonium. The kids didn’t understand any of it, but they sure understood the word vacation! The teenagers were interested, too, and wanted to know when. It was the older Lefleurs, Mark, Luke, and John, and their wives and children who wanted to know more.

Marilyn and I had decided on some ground rules ahead of time. They could call Marilyn and schedule something and Marilyn could keep a schedule (or more likely tell me, because I wouldn’t lose the schedule!) We’d pay for flights out of Syracuse, which was the nearest big airport. I wasn’t paying for them to fly down on a chartered jet, but I would cover business class. Syracuse connected to New York, for instance, and New York has daily flights to the Bahamas. They would have to pay for their own food and amusements while down there. We had decided the same rules would apply to any of the original brain trust at the Buckman Group, too.