The Portrait

Chapter 1

The Grace Cathedral choir in San Francisco was singing “Amazing Grace” as Charles Mackenzie Taylor stood at his father’s funeral, letting his thoughts drift to the familiar music. It was a beautiful warm June day. His father, Patrick Taylor, had been a fierce and bold leader, greatly respected in the community, head of Golden State Bank, which his own grandfather had founded, and which three generations of Taylor men had owned and run. It had been one of the largest commercial banks in California since the Gold Rush days. Patrick had died at eighty-five after a year-long bout with cancer. He was a force to be reckoned with and a hard man to please. He had continued to go to the office until his last few months, and the bank was officially run by a highly experienced CEO and a competent staff, overseen by a board of directors, of which Patrick had been chairman.

Charles was Patrick’s only child, brilliant in his own right, with no interest whatsoever in the family bank or the world of finance, unlike all his male ancestors before him. He would be the first Taylor heir who would never run the bank, although out of a sense of duty and a recent promise to his father, he had agreed to step into his father’s shoes as chairman of the board, which he dreaded. Several members of the board were close to his father’s age, had conservative, antiquated ideas, and took rigid positions on most things, and Charles found them as difficult to get along with as his father had been. The rest of the board were CEOs of large companies, leaders of the financial community, and included two women, one of whom was the widow of one of their largest investment clients, and the other of whom ran a hedge fund. They all had the right credentials, very little imagination, if any, and no desire to do anything innovative. Charles felt as though he couldn’t breathe whenever he walked into his father’s office. They had never gotten along. It was no secret that Patrick had never approved of him, and now Charles had to run the board.

At forty-nine, Charles had been a renegade all his life, with a passion for new ideas and an unfailing instinct for the needs and trends of the future. Despite the trust he had been left by his grandparents and his father, he had made his own fortune doing what he loved, starting new businesses. His education had been almost identical to his father’s, but Charlie had done entirely different things with his. He had attended Princeton as an undergraduate, then Harvard Business School in the entrepreneurial program, which Patrick said was unnecessary, with a bank to run. Charlie had started to build his future as a junior at Princeton, when he created a delivery service for fellow students, bringing them everything from food to medicine and pharmaceutical needs, including industrial quantities of condoms, and eventually branching out to deliver everything from mattresses to office equipment. He expanded his business model through friends at other universities, and eventually had nearly a hundred branches throughout the United States. He sold the business for what even his father considered an astounding amount of money. It was one of the earliest and most successful startups, and set the bar high for others who followed in his footsteps with their own startups. The concept was simple and it worked. During the years he was growing the business, Charlie’s father referred to him as The Delivery Boy, and was furious when the business kept Charlie from taking his place at the bank, and gave him an excuse not to. It took his father years to admit to himself that Charlie was never going to be a part of the family business, and that there had never been any hope of it. Charlie was destined to fly in his own skies, on wings broader than his father’s.

By the time Charlie got to business school, he was already a very rich man from the sale of his startup, not even considering his trusts. But he wanted the same credentials as his ancestors. He set up another startup, this time in healthier fast food, at first in the United States and eventually worldwide. It wasn’t an elegant, distinguished way to make a fortune, but it was extremely efficient. He hadn’t sold the company yet, had hung onto it for a long time and refused several offers, but it was ultimately his plan to sell. He would launch another startup afterward. He was thinking about that now and wasn’t sure which new direction he would take. He liked shiny new ideas that others hadn’t thought of yet. Simple ideas that worked. He had a passion for business. He had put his heart and soul into it. Business was his first love. He loved everything about it.

Being at his father’s funeral brought back memories of his mother. She had died when he was thirteen. His memories of her had faded now, but he remembered her as a beautiful, lovely, gentle, kind, loving woman, everything his father wasn’t. His father was cold and austere, unbending and unforgiving. He had never remarried. Three months after Charlie’s mother died, his father had sent him to St. Paul’s, a boarding school in the East and another family tradition. It was a long way from San Francisco, and no one ever visited him there. Charlie felt his mother’s absence acutely that first year. Time had helped heal the wound, but he had never really gone home again, except for short visits. After St. Paul’s, he had gone to Princeton, where he had stayed for an extra year to run his fledgling delivery business, and then gone on to Harvard Business School. His father had a large, handsome house in San Francisco, where Charlie had lived before he left for school and stayed during his visits, but after business school, Charlie had bought a very beautiful home in Atherton and set up offices in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley, home to venture capital and many startups.

He had married young, on an impulse at twenty-six, when he was finishing business school for his MBA. He’d been dating Faye, a girl five years older than he was, from a family of bankers in New York. Her family was similar to his, though slightly less austere. She was an only child like him, and she was in the throes of a wildly rebellious stage. Once at Harvard, she dyed her hair purple, and they had fun together. She was smart, an outstanding law student, and wanted to save the world. They’d only been dating for a few months at school, on a boring holiday weekend, when Charlie convinced her to fly to Las Vegas with him. It sounded like a great idea. They got outrageously drunk, wound up at the Elvis Chapel, which they thought was hysterically funny, and woke up married. Predictably, neither family was pleased, and called them irresponsible. Both sets of parents wanted them to have the marriage annulled, but both families were respectable. Faye was incredibly smart and graduated from Harvard Law School at the top of her class, and she and Charlie decided to give the marriage a try. It worked for a while, but not for long. Her rebelliousness faded when they moved to California and she got a job at one of the most important venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Charlie had convinced her to come west and look for a job in tech when he went back to San Francisco. She turned into her parents almost immediately, with conservative views. Her purple hair disappeared, along with almost everything else he had liked about her. She thought fast food was beneath him, although it was earning him millions. She turned out to be critical and cold, instead of fun and sexy as she had been at Harvard. They were both considering divorce by the end of the first year, and regretting their rash leap into marriage, when Faye discovered she was pregnant, and they decided to stick with it.

Neither of them was thrilled at the prospect of the pregnancy, and a child, but they both fell in love with baby Liam. Faye went back to work immediately. The baby had arrived three weeks early when she was on a road tour for an IPO, to take a company public, and he had to stay in the hospital for a month. Charlie and Faye made a schedule to take turns visiting him daily, but their work schedules were ferocious, and Charlie traveled all the time. He discovered then that he had more parental instincts than Faye, who appeared to have none. She was more interested in her job and career than a baby, and Charlie had little time to devote to him.

The child was entirely cared for by a series of nannies. Liam was a bright boy and an undemanding child, who learned early on to be self-sufficient. He expected little of his parents. Faye insisted on sending him east to boarding school at Andover, where her father had gone. When Liam left at fourteen, Charlie missed him, but he knew from his own experience that it was already too late. They had missed the boat, and like both his parents, Liam was an only child. Charlie knew when Liam left that he would never be home again for long. The years had flown by. Liam had just graduated from Yale, was going back to Yale for graduate school to study architecture, and was leaving for Europe in a few days with friends to visit châteaux in France and castles in England, as a prelude to his graduate studies. Amazingly, Liam was good-natured, forgiving, and independent, and never seemed to hold Charlie and Faye’s neglectful parenting against them. He wasn’t close to them, but he didn’t resent them either. He was mature and philosophical about their failings and accepted them as they were.