Chapter 5 - An Offer of Submission
By Wednesday afternoon, the cracks in the Mercer facade were no longer private.
The *Philadelphia Business Journal* ran a three-paragraph notice in their daily commercial real estate digest: *“Workout Rumors Swirl Around Mercer Holdings Portfolio Following Departure of Senior Advisory Firm.”* It was a discreet, corporate way of announcing that the vultures were circling the carcass.
In the Mercer estate in Gladwyne, the heat had been turned down to sixty degrees to conserve the dwindling supply of heating oil in the underground tank. The vast, high-ceilinged rooms felt like a stone crypt.
Vivian Mercer sat in her small morning room, wrapped in a chinchilla coat that Arthur had bought her in 1994, her fingers stiff with cold. On the small mahogany secretary desk sat three unopened legal envelopes with the bright red stamps of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department.
Across from her sat Arthur Mercer Sr.’s younger brother, Julian, his face red from the three fingers of scotch he had poured himself from Daniel’s dwindling private reserve.
"You have to settle with her, Vivian," Julian said, his voice wheezing through his cigars. "I talked to my people at Morgan Stanley this morning. They won't touch the Chestnut Street paper. The whole town knows Emma Cross was the only thing holding that house of cards together. If she’s out, nobody’s going to refinance a dime. We’re all exposed. I have two hundred thousand in personal debentures tied to that commercial trust!"
"She is an upstart!" Vivian hissed, her eyes wild behind her gold-rimmed glasses. "Her father worked with his hands, Julian! His hands! Are you telling me that eighty years of the Mercer family in this state is going to be wiped out because some little girl from the Lehigh Valley had her feelings hurt?"
"Her feelings?" Julian laughed, a dry, bitter cackle. "Vivian, she doesn't have feelings. She has your notes. She owns the paper on this roof! If she forecloses, we’re out on the road. Do you know what they’ll say at the club? Do you know what the Montgomerys will say?"
At the mention of her maiden name, Vivian’s mouth tightened until her lips virtually disappeared into the web of wrinkles around her mouth. That was the core of it. Not the loss of the stone, not the loss of the cars, but the humiliation of the Montgomerys looking down on her from their pristine, solvent estates in Devon and Radnor.
The front door slammed downstairs.
A moment later, Daniel walked into the morning room. He was wearing the same suit he had worn on Monday, his tie shoved into his pocket, his face pale and grey. He dropped a thick, leather-bound binder onto the secretary desk in front of his mother.
"What is that?" Vivian asked, recoiling as if it were a dead rodent.
"It's the inventory," Daniel said, his voice flat, hollowed out of all emotion. "I had an appraiser from Freeman’s come through the lower floors this morning while you were upstairs."
Vivian rose from her chair, her chinchilla coat slipping slightly from one shoulder. "You did what? You brought an auctioneer into this house?"
"We have to raise two hundred and fifty thousand dollars by Monday, Mother," Daniel said, looking at her with eyes that were completely dead. "Not to save the buildings—those are gone. Mid-Atlantic is filing for a receiver on Friday. The two hundred and fifty thousand is just to stop the emergency foreclosure on *this* house. To keep the sheriff from putting the padlock on the gate next Tuesday."
"Sell the silver," Vivian whispered, her hands fluttering toward the corner cupboard where the eighteenth-century tea services were kept. "Sell the portraits in the dining room."
"The silver is electroplate, Mother," Daniel said, his voice rising in savage, mocking disgust. "Father sold the original colonial silver in 2008 during the subprime crash and replaced it with high-end reproductions. The appraiser laughed at it. And the portraits? Nobody wants third-generation Pennsylvania merchants who died in debt. They’re worth three hundred dollars a frame at auction."
Vivian sank back into her chair, her breath coming in shallow, fluttering gasps. "No... no, Arthur wouldn't have..."
"Arthur did," Daniel said. "He did it for thirty years. He lived on credit, he lied to the banks, and he lied to you. And when he died, he left us with a mountain of garbage. Emma cleaned it up. She spent three years working eighty hours a week to make us look like aristocrats, and you shoved her onto the floor because she wouldn't let you rob her personal bank account."
Vivian’s face crumpled. For the first time, the haughty, untouchable veneer cracked completely, showing the terrified, helpless child underneath. "She... she was disrespectful, Daniel. She didn't understand our ways."
"Our ways?" Daniel shouted, the sound echoing through the cold, empty house. "Our ways are fraud, Mother! Our ways are bankruptcy and vanity! That’s our legacy!"
He pulled out his phone.
"I’m going to call her. I’m going to offer her whatever she wants. I’ll sign over the voting rights to the entire Mercer partnership. I’ll sign an agreement that gives her complete control over every asset we have left. I’ll agree to a post-nuptial agreement where I don't get a single cent in the event of a split. But she has to stop the foreclosure."
"She won't take it," Julian muttered into his scotch.
"She has to," Daniel said, his voice dropping into a desperate, frantic whisper. "She loved me. You don't just turn love off in seventy-two hours. She’s just angry. She wants to see us crawl. So I’ll crawl. I’ll take Mother down to her office on Market Street and we’ll both get on our knees if that’s what it takes."
Vivian’s head snapped up, a final spark of venom flashing in her pale eyes. "I will not get on my knees for that girl!"
May you like
Daniel turned on his heel, his face contorted in an expression of absolute disgust. "Then you can sit on your luggage on Mercer Lane, Mother. Because those are your only two options."
***
