Her father, for his part, had nothing but sympathy for his youngest. She was, maybe even to her detriment, the one child he indulged, the only one whose presence he always welcomed. Over the years, their bond was precious to both of them. She kept watch over him whenever he was home, while he came to think of her as a confidante.
This was a point Willow wanted to impress on Tancred: she was convinced that she’d known her father best – his personality, his deepest thoughts, his sense of humour, his playfulness, his strange ideas, his follies. Although she’d loved her father unconditionally, love had not blinded her to his flaws. That is to say, she had a realistic idea of who the man named Robert Azarian had been. It was crucial that Tancred take Willow’s word for this, if he was to grasp a second point she wanted to make.
At her mother’s death, Willow’s father had been forty-three and extremely wealthy. He had inherited millions and worked to make countless millions more. When he died of cancer in 2005, he died a multi-billionaire whose main company, Azarian Holdings, was involved in any number of enterprises in any number of countries.
At her father’s death, the last thing on Willow’s mind was the state of Azarian Holdings or her father’s will or her inheritance or anything of the sort. Her grief was such that her siblings were, rightly, troubled by her state of mind. Three years after her father’s death, however, financial matters did begin to impinge on Willow’s mind. Her grief gave way to an obsession with her father’s legacy. Robert Azarian had left each of his children two hundred million dollars and a one-fifth share of his businesses and assets. He had made his eldest son, Alton, head of Azarian Holdings, but his five children were equally served by his will. In effect, each inherited almost a billion dollars.
Along with the money and assets, he also bequeathed to each a memento mori, each memento holding special significance for the one who received it.
Alton inherited a mounted and framed poem,
Gretchen, a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater,
Simone, a painting of the Emperor Nero beside a man with a raven on his shoulder,
Michael, a bottle of Linie Aquavit,
and Willow inherited a near-faithful imitation of a six-panelled, Momoyama-period Japanese screen known as Willows by the Uji Bridge. Willow’s screen had had its last panel replaced by a blank, lacquered, willow-wood panel. Toward the bottom of this last panel – on the same side of the screen as the reproduction – was a lozenge-shaped brass tag, two inches high and four inches long. Engraved on the tag were the words
Salix Babylonica (Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon …)
The screen was such a perfect memento of her father that it added to Willow’s grief. She could not see it or even think about it without remembering him.
She’d studied languages at a number of universities. She could fluently speak English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese. But she had taken Japanese, thanks to her father. Robert Azarian, knowing that Willow wanted to add an Asian language to her arsenal, had suggested it himself. He’d had a covert motive, it’s true. Azarian Holdings – whose chief interest then was in cellphones – was opening an office in Osaka and he could not avoid spending time in Japan. So, he and Willow had travelled to the country together, Robert extending his stay so his daughter could complete her first course in Japanese.
During their months in Japan, they had – when both were free – travelled around the country together, taking trains to Kyoto, Nara, Kobe and Tokyo. She could still recall the small towns along the way, the baseball diamonds, the fields and houses, the tall buildings and neon lights. It was on these travels that Willow discovered her love for the painted screens of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japan: gesso, gold leaf, a season coming to life panel by panel as the screen is opened. Leave it to her father to remember her enchantment and remind her of the works she’d loved, to recreate a screen on which there were weeping willows, Salix babylonica, her symbol.
Three years after her father’s passing, when she was again able to think of things other than his death or at least to think beyond her next fix, she remembered words he’d spoken in his final days. She’d been holding his hand as he lay on his bed. He had awakened briefly from his chemically induced sleep and, seeing her beside him, he’d said
– Willow, you, your brothers and sisters … you’ll all have more than I’ve left, if you want it. But you’ll have to work for it. Promise me you will … promise me you’ll work for it …
He’d repeated the word promise, more and more faintly as he was drawn back into his opiate antechamber. She had, of course, promised. But later, thinking about her promise to him, the words work for it struck her. At his death, her father had made each of his children near-billionaires. They would make millions more from their shares in Azarian Holdings. It was more than enough. What, then, was there to work for?
When she’d conveyed their father’s words to her brothers and sisters, none had found them particularly significant. To her siblings, the words were banal, their meaning clear: they were all meant to help Alton run Azarian Holdings. It was their duty to work together as a family.
But that made no sense! Where Azarian Holdings was concerned, Alton was the authority. What’s more, Alton was as prescient and talented as their father had been. And why not? Robert had taught Alton everything he knew about business, as his father, Avram, had taught him. The company was thriving. There was no work for the other siblings, save for staying out of Alton’s way. This could not have been the work their father had in mind.
The third Christmas after her father’s death, when she and her siblings had gathered at Gretchen’s, Willow asked
– Is all of Dad’s money accounted for?
The young children were in the playroom with their toys, watched over by their nannies. The teenagers were with boyfriends or girlfriends or they were in the den watching television. Willow, her brothers and sisters (and their spouses) were at the dining room table, a plate of freshly baked keta, still warm, before them.
– All Dad’s money? said Alton. A lot of it went to charity. He donated hundreds of millions to causes all over the world. The rest he put back into the company.
– I know Dad was generous, Willow had said, but something doesn’t add up. Why did he leave us so little?
The others had guffawed in unison – a strange sound, as if something were suddenly caught in a number of throats. How could she say that he’d left them ‘little’? None in her family accepted that it was in any way ‘little’ to be left almost a billion in cash and assets. The conversation had almost immediately turned to other matters.
That was where things stood, as far as her siblings were concerned. Yes, perhaps, in theory, their father had been worth more than was disbursed in his will. But once you took his charitable donations into account, it was all above board and, frankly, not worth the bother.
But between bouts of heroin-brought stupor, Willow thought about her father’s words. She was convinced that she and her siblings were meant to be doing something other than gathering money from their inheritance. The maddening thing is that there were clues this was the case, clues that her intoxication shrouded. For one thing, every one of the mementos her father left them was, in its own way, provocative. Take hers, for instance: the screen with its painting of willows by the Uji bridge was a message of some sort. It had to be. If her father had simply wanted to remind her of their precious time together in Japan, a reproduction of Willows by the Uji Bridge would have been more than enough. It would have been perfect. But her father, or whoever made the reproduction, had removed part of the screen – had removed a willow – when they’d replaced the final image with a blank panel of wood. Why ruin the work? To what purpose? To let her know that the trees painted were weeping willows? But that was obvious. Although Psalm 137 was lovely, it simply did not jibe with seventeenth-century Japanese art. And on the back of the willow-wood panel, the