wOw Readers,

Below is the text from chapter two of Apologize, Apologize!, wowOwow’s first selection for the brand new wOw Book Club.

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For a special treat, the author Apologize, Apologize!, Elizabeth Kelly, will be on wowOwow.com answering your questions beginning March 30. Keep visiting wowOwow for more updates, and please feel free to begin sharing your thoughts today about Apologize, Apologize! Click here to read chapter one.

Chapter Two of Apologize, Apologize!
Peregrine Lowell, my grandfather, was president and sole owner of Thought-Fox Inc. A big wheel in the Democratic Party, he owned hundreds of newspapers and magazines in dozens of countries, including some of the world’s most influential dailies. An aggressively merciless proprietor, he had a reputation for being hands-on when it came to editorial content, viewing the op-ed pages of even the lowliest community publication as his personal soapbox. One time, he got so inspired by the proposal to ban outdoor cats in some little town in Iowa that he wrote a guest editorial championing the rights of songbirds.

Not content simply with interfering in the grinding minutiae of his empire’s daily operations, he also considered it his duty to despise and denigrate everyone who worked for him, reflexively pointing to his signature on their paychecks as evidence of his superiority.

My grandfather both demanded and deplored compliancy, which meant he posed a unique set of challenges for the people around him. Fortunately, working for him was generally a temporary condition. He set some sort of industry record for firing people, a distinction he welcomed, saying, "Good people come, and good people go," and sounding a whole lot like a raptor that’s just decapitated a goldfinch.

Nicknamed the Falcon by Bingo and me—seemed clever when we were kids—he sat darkly in the tops of trees, sleek and straight, eyes like stones, defined from all angles by his remote habit of trenchant surveillance. An Anglo-Irish Protestant on loan to New En-gland from Ulster, he was bored by the conversation of field mice, and it showed.

It’s safe to say that he terrified and intrigued me. Stuck for a moment alone with him in the butler’s pantry at his sixty-third birthday party when I was ten, I weakly inquired what kind of icing he liked best, chocolate or vanilla, feeling as if I were interviewing Dracula about his preference in blood type.

"What are you squeaking about?" he asked, looking down on me, his contempt a talon, snapping my neck with the power of his disdain.
"Never mind," I said, temporarily unable to swallow. I had asked him a question. For years, I never asked him another. A distinguished Dickens scholar, he’d published several books on the subject, but ornithology was his true passion, part of a family tradition that extended to the naming of male heirs. His old man was named Toucan by his father, Corvid, my great-great-grandfather, an unchecked eccentric from an aristocratic background—nicknamed Cuckoo Lowell by all who knew him. He bizarrely practiced ornithomancy, a form of divination using flight patterns.

The Falcon wanted us named after birds—Larkin and Robin were his choices—but Ma infuriated him by naming us after dogs instead.
"It could have been worse," Bingo said. "She could have called us Sacco and Vanzetti."
——-
The Falcon lived on a century-old estate called Cassowary, a few hundred choice acres of woodland, marsh, and open field tucked into the New England coastline and within spitting distance of Boston. A black wrought-iron gate at the entranceway had this cheerful, biblical admonition engraved across the top, his idea of a welcome mat: "For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away."
My grandfather wasn’t big on small talk.