So Prohibition and the grim years of the Great Depression passed, and the Gearys were now one of the richest families in the history of the continent. They owned steel mills and shipyards and slaughterhouses. They owned coffee plantations and cotton plantations and great swaths of land given over to barley and wheat and cattle. They owned sizable portions of real estate in the thirty largest cities in America, and were the landlords of many of the towers and fancy houses and condominiums that were built on that land. They owned racehorses, racetracks, and racing cars. They owned shoe manufacturers and fish canneries and a hot dog franchise. They owned magazines and news papers, and distributors who delivered those magazines and newspapers, and the stands from which those magazines and newspapers were sold. And what they could not own, they put their name on. As though to distinguish his noble family from the peasants with whom he had ceased to do business in '33, Cadmus allowed Kitty to use tens of millions of Geary dollars in philanthropic endeavors, so that in the next two decades the family name went up on the wings of hospitals, on schools, on orphanages. All these good works did not divert the eyes of cynical observers from the sheer scale of Cadmus's acquisitiveness, of course. He showed no sign of slowing up as he advanced in years. In his middle sixties, at an age when less driven men were planning fishing trips and gardens, he turned his appetites eastward, toward Hong Kong and Singapore, where he repeated the pattern of plunder that had proved so successful in America. The golden touch had not deserted him: company after company was transformed by Cadmus's magic. He was a quiet juggernaut, unseen now for the most part, his reputation almost legendary.
He continued his philandering, as he had in his younger days, but the hectic business of sexual conquest was of far less significance to him now. He was still, by all accounts, a remarkably adept bed partner (perhaps consciously he chose in these years women who were less discreet than earlier conquests; advertisements for his virility, in fact); but after the Louise Brooks episode he never came so close to the blissful condition of love as when he was in full capitalist flight. Only then did he feel alive the way he had when he'd first met Kitty, or when he'd followed Louise to Germany; only then did he exalt, or even come close to exaltation.
Meanwhile, of course, another generation of Gearys was growing up. First there was Richard Emerson Geary, born in 1934, after Kitty had suffered two miscarriages. Then, a year later, Norah Faye Geary, and two years after that George, the father of Mitchell and Garrison.
In many ways Richard, Norah, and George were the most emotionally successful of any of the generations. Kitty was sensible to the corruptions of wealth: she'd seen its capacity to destroy healthy souls at work in her own family. She did her level best to protect her children from the effects of being brought up feeling too extraordinary; and her capacity for love, stymied in her marriage, flowered eloquently in her dealings with her children. Of the three it was Norah who was most indulged; and Cadmus was the unrepentant indulger. She rapidly became a brat, and nothing Kitty could do to discipline her did the trick. Whenever she didn't get what she wanted, she went wailing to Daddy, who gave her exactly what she requested. The pattern reached grotesque proportions when Cadmus arranged for the eleven-year-old Norah-who had become fixated upon the notion of being an actress-to star in her own little screen test, shot on the backlot at MGM. The long-term effects of this idolatry would not become apparent for several years, but they would bring tragedy.
In the meanwhile, Kitty dispersed her eminently practical love to Richard and George, and watched them grow into two extraordinarily capable men. It was no accident that neither wanted much to do with running the Geary empire; Kitty had subtly inculcated into them both a distrust of the world in which Cadmus had made a thousand fortunes. It wasn't until the first signs of Cadmus's mental deterioration began to show, in his middle seventies, that George, the youngest, agreed to leave his investment company and oversee the rationalization of what had become an unwieldy empire. Once in place, he found the task more suited his temperament than he'd anticipated. He was welcomed by the investors, the unions, and the board members alike as a new kind of Geary, more concerned with the welfare of his employees, and the communities which were often dependent upon Geary investment, than with the turning of profit.
He was also a successful family man, in a rather old-fashioned way. He married one Deborah Halford, his high school sweetheart, and they lived a life that drew inspiration from the kind of solid, loving environment which Kitty had tried so hard to provide. His older brother Richard had become a trial lawyer with a flair for murderers and rhetoric; his life seemed to be one long last act from an opera filled with emotional excess. As for poor Norah, she'd gone from one bad marriage to another, always looking for, but never finding, the man who would give her the unconditional devotion she'd had from Daddy.
By contrast, George lived an almost dull life, despite the fact that he ruled most of the Geary fortunes. His voice was quiet, his manner subdued, his smile, when it came along, beguiling. Despite his skills with his employees, stepping into Cadmus's shoes wasn't always easy. For one thing, the old man had by no means given up attempting to influence the direction of his empire, and when his health crisis was over he assumed that he'd be returning to his position at the head of the boardroom table. It was Loretta, Cadmus's second wife, who persuaded him that it would be wiser to leave George in charge, while Cadmus took up an advisory position. The old man accepted the solution, but with a bad grace: he became publicly critical of George when he disapproved of his son's decisions, and on more than one occasion spoiled deals that George had spent months negotiating.
At the same time, while Cadmus was doing his best to tarnish his own son's glories, other problems arose. First there were investigations on insider trading of Geary stocks, then the complete collapse of business in the Far East following the suicide of a man Cadmus had appointed, who was later discovered to have concealed the loss of billions; and, after half a century of successful secrecy, the revelation of Cadmus's Prohibition activities, in a book that briefly made the bestseller list despite Richard's legal manipulations to have it withdrawn as libelous.
When things got too frantic, George took refuge in a home life that was nearly idyllic. Deborah was a born nest-builder; she cared only to make a place where her husband and her children would be cared for and comfortable. Once the front door was closed, she would say, the rest of the world wasn't allowed in unless it was invited; and that included any other member of the Geary clan. If George needed solitude-time to sit and listen to his jazz collection, time to play with the kids-she could be positively ferocious in her defense of her threshold. Even Richard, who had persuaded juries of the impossible in his time, couldn't get past her when she was protecting George's privacy.
For the four children of this comfortable marriage-Tyler, Karen, Mitchell, and Garrison-there was plenty of affection and plenty of pragmatism, but there was also a string of temptations that had not been available to the previous generation. They were the first Gearys who were regularly followed around by paparazzi during their adolescence; who were squealed on by classmates if they smoked dope or tried to get laid; who appeared on the cover of magazines when they went skinny-dipping. Despite Deborah's best efforts, she could not protect her children from every sleazehound who came sniffing around. Nor, George pointed out, was it wise to try. The children would have to learn the pain of public humiliation the hard way, by being hurt. If they were smart, they'd modify their behavior. If not, they'd end up like his sister Norah, who'd had almost as many tabloid covers as she'd had analysts. It was a hard world, and love kept no one from harm. All it could do, sometimes, was speed the healing of the wounds.