Llamas

Abstract

Llamas Blake Cass (bio) One day when Mother was cleaning the house—a decidedly rare task for her—she discovered in the den, a room my father used as an office, a credit card statement for fifty thousand dollars. During this period of his life my father's normal income could hardly have broken six figures, and so this was quite a sum of money to owe. Mother sat at his desk and waited for him to get home, smoking her secret Winstons to calm her nerves. I suppose it was then her little conspiracy theory took root. When my father got home, Mother presented him the bill, and without saying a word, he walked out of the room. Mother found him upstairs in their room, packing. She asked if he would like to explain how he had gotten a such a large credit line on his salary. My father said he had anticipated she would demand some answer and that, since he was unable to explain himself, he understood he would have to leave. I received this information directly from Mother that same evening. Towards the end of our conversation, she said, "I always knew. I always had a sense of it." "Of what?" I said. "Isn't it obvious?" she said. "The proof is right in front of us." "Proof of what?" I said and prepared myself to rally to my father's defense. "That your father is in the CIA," Mother said. I knew she was serious when she continued with a sigh, "My father must have brought him into it. Now I know what all of their 'trips' were about." Mother is a bit of a kook. This business about the CIA comes from the fact that her father went to prison for tax evasion. He always claimed his innocence, and Mother innocently believed him, just as she still believes some of his more outrageous claims, like that he was in the CIA and helped to organize a failed assassination of Castro. I tried to argue but her reasoning was clear—my father often went on "business trips" and was sometimes gone for weeks at a time. Plus consider this fifty-thousand-dollar credit card bill and of course his refusal to explain it. It did not seem strange to me that my father might have access to money we didn't know about. His family rose to prominence through the whiskey business. The label is now defunct, run into the ground by an inept uncle. Although my father's side of the family comes from Kentucky, he spent most of his youth in D.C., where his father worked in various [End Page 74] Whitehouse administrations, finishing out his career as an ambassador to several Eastern European countries. My father attended St. Alban's, where he roomed with one future vice president and one presidential hopeful. My great-grandfather was a senator from Kentucky for two terms. We were once a wealthy, powerful people and would have remained so if my father did not feel the need to rebel. He came home from Yale on winter break—this during his sophomore year—and Christmas morning announced his intention to go out West. My grandfather, of whom I have no memory, told my father that should this happen he would lose his inheritance. My father did go out west, and my grandfather remained true to his word, locking my father out of his stake in the family fortune. I have come to believe that my father's inheritance was reinstated by my grandmother later on in life and that my father simply kept it a secret, using his money to carry on as he liked, doing things a wife is not supposed to know about. As part of the divorce settlement, Mother took the house and a small upfront sum. I hated the idea of Mother being alone in a house that represented so much failure. But when I mentioned the possibility of selling it, she said, "It's strange. It never felt like he was here, even when he was home. Do you know? We never had one big fight. Not one. Except when he...