8. Connor
CONNOR
The archivist calls first thing. She got in early and did it before anybody else was on her floor.
“I have the card,” she says. No hello.
“Go ahead.”
“The name on it is Celia Ward.” A pause. “Mr. Kingsley, I want it noted somewhere that I only looked because you asked me to.”
“It’s noted. Thank you.” My voice comes out level. My free hand has found the edge of the counter and gone white on it. “One more thing. What’s written in the reason box?”
Paper. She’s got the card in front of her.
“Retrospective reel research,” she reads. “And then—someone’s added, in the same pen—archival review, family office authorization.”
The whole story, in a box on a card, written weeks in advance by somebody with a steady hand.
Celia Ward. Gray cardigan. Reading glasses on a chain.
A woman who’s said good morning, Mr. Kingsley to me for years, who once, when I was going through a bad stretch at thirty-one, quietly moved a meeting so I wouldn’t have to be in a room with somebody.
I’d have told you she was the least dangerous person in that building.
I stand in my kitchen with my hand still on the phone and try to make her name fit the shape of what happened, and first it won’t go, and then it goes too easily, and that’s worse. In a family like mine the damage always comes through somebody who knows how you take your coffee.
I drive to Rowan Street and I don’t rehearse anything. If I rehearse it I’ll soften it, and I’ve been softening things my entire life.
Celia’s at her desk in the corner, in the gray cardigan she keeps on the back of her chair, her lunch already in a paper bag by her keyboard at that hour. She sent flowers when my father-in-law had his heart scare. She remembers I don’t drink coffee after noon.
“Celia.”
“Mr. Kingsley.” To the monitor. Always to the monitor.
“Come in here a minute.”
The small conference room. I shut the door, and she stands with her hands folded in front of her like a woman waiting for a bus.
“You checked out the wedding footage.”
Nothing on her face. Nothing at all. “There’s a request. It was properly documented.”
“You signed it.”
“I sign a great many things.”
“Celia, look at me.”
And she doesn’t. Years of my life rearrange themselves while I stand there, because she’s not doing anything unusual right now.
She has never looked at me. Not when I say good morning, not when I’ve thanked her for a thing she did well.
I took it for shyness, all this time. She’s been keeping something from me since before I was married.
My scalp goes hot.
“You went down to that basement in September,” I say. “Nothing was happening in September. There was no project. There was no reason to be in that room.”
“The archive is being reviewed for the Jubilee. Fifty years is a great deal of material and it doesn’t organize itself.” Her voice is completely steady. “The request was documented.”
“Documented as what?”
“Retrospective reel research.”
She says it like a woman reading a train schedule, and that’s what finally gets me, because it isn’t a lie.
It’s better than a lie. Somebody sat down and thought about how this would look if anyone ever asked, and wrote it in a box on a card in a basement, weeks before my wife walked out of a ballroom.
“Whose idea was the wording?”
“I’m not able to speak to that.”
“Did you watch it?” My voice climbs and I let it. “Did you watch the whole take, Celia? Because if you did, then you knew. You knew what was on the end of it and you took it anyway. She was kind to you. She sent a card when your mother died. She asked about your knee.”
The smallest movement in her throat. Her chin comes up and her eyes stay on the carpet, and when she speaks it’s almost nothing.
“I don’t take material out of an archive on my own initiative, Mr. Kingsley.”
That’s as close as she will ever come. Both of us know it, and neither of us is going to say the name out loud in a conference room with a glass wall.
“I have worked for your mother for a long time,” she says. “I would like to keep working.”
And then she does it. She looks up. For the first time in all these years, Celia Ward looks me straight in the face, and there’s no defiance in it.
There’s fear, old fear, worn smooth with use, and underneath it a tired pity, like she’s watching a man find out about a house fire that’s been out for years.
“You should ask her,” she says. “Please don’t ask me again.”
My mother is in the garden room at the back of the house, where the glass sweats and the radiator ticks, cutting rose stems on a slant and dropping them into a vase one by one.
She’s working bare-handed, stripping the thorns off with her thumb, and there’s a scratch across the inside of her wrist, a thin line of dried blood she hasn’t looked at.
The shears flash and flash. She doesn’t turn around.
“You’ve been to the office,” she says. Not a question. She’s had a call already. Of course she has.
“I know who signed the card.”
“Then you know less than you think you do. You know a name on a piece of paper.”
“That woman is terrified of you.” My voice is already up and I don’t bring it down. “She’s worked in that building most of my life and she looked at me today like the place was burning. What do you do to people, that they end up like that?”
“I employ them,” my mother says, “for a long time.”
“You had the footage pulled in September.”
“Connor.” She sets the shears down on the newspaper and turns, and here it comes, in exactly the voice she’d use to tell me the roads are bad past the county line. “I want you to listen to this once, so that we needn’t have it again.”
“Fine.”
“If you embarrass this family again—in a ballroom, in a newspaper, in a courtroom, anywhere at all—you will lose every dollar this name has ever put in your hands and every door it has ever opened for you. That is not a punishment. That is simply what would happen.”
The room is warm and wet-smelling, cut greens and stems, and my heart goes hard and slow.
“Every door,” I say.
“Every one.” She picks the shears back up. “You will find that it isn’t only money. Money is the easy part.”
“You put my wife on a screen in front of a ballroom. You sat on that tape for weeks and you picked the night.” My hand has closed on the back of a wrought-iron chair and the cold of it is going up my arm. “And you’re standing here doing flowers.”
“I am finishing a vase.”
“I’m going to tell him,” I say. “Grandpa. All of it.”
The shears stop. It’s small. Most people in that room wouldn’t catch it. But they stop.
“You will do nothing of the kind.”
“He’ll find out.”
“He is an old man with a machine breathing for him at night, and he built every dollar you are standing on.” And there at last, under the calm, is the first live thing she’s shown me all day, and it has nothing to do with guilt.
She sounds like a woman guarding a border.
“You will not walk into that room and hand him this. If you have any respect at all for what that man made, you will let him have his Jubilee.”
So that’s real, and I hold on to it with both hands. My mother does not want her father knowing what she did.
There’s no relish in her. I keep waiting for it and it never comes. She’s telling me the weather, and then she goes back to the roses, because the vase isn’t done.
Then Genevieve Foster walks in.
She’s got her coat over her arm and she stops in the doorway when she sees my face, and I watch her put the whole thing together fast. First hint that I’ve badly underestimated her.
“Genevieve,” my mother says. “Wonderful. Connor, you two are having lunch.”
“We are not.”
“It’s on the calendar.”
“Whose calendar?” I turn to Genevieve. “Did you make this lunch?”
“No,” she says.
“Did your father?”
“My father was told it was happening.” She hangs her coat over the back of a chair, slowly, buying herself a second, and then she looks at Diana. “May I have the room?”
My mother goes. Not fast, and not without a look at me over her shoulder, but she goes, and that tells me what the Fosters are worth.
Genevieve waits until the door’s shut.
“Ask me,” she says.
“Did you know about the photographers?”
“Yes.”
My hand goes out to the back of a chair before I’ve told it to. “You knew.”
“I knew somebody would be in the alley.” She’s very still while she says it, and her thumbnail is pressing a line into the strap of her bag, hard enough to leave a mark.
“Not which outlet. Not the paragraph at the bottom. Not what your mother did at the fundraiser—nobody told me that.” She stops.
Starts again, lower than she means to. “But I put my hand on your arm at the car, and I knew what it would look like.”
“Why?”
A silence, longer than she wants me to see.
“Curiosity.” She says it like she’s handing over a key she’d rather keep. “I’ve been raised for a life where a photograph like that is the start of something. I wanted to see one.” Her jaw sets. “I knew you were married. I did it anyway.”
I stand there and can’t even work up a temper, because she’s just handed me a straight answer, and nobody in my own family has managed one all week.
“There’s nothing here,” I say.
“I know. I knew in the alley.” Her mouth goes crooked. “You spent that entire meeting talking about your wife. You didn’t notice you were doing it. You told me a story about a hotel with blue tile.”
My throat closes so fast it hurts.
Genevieve picks her coat back up. “For what it’s worth, I liked her. Lena.” A beat, and her eyes go somewhere over my shoulder, and this is the part that isn’t smooth. “She’s the only person at those things who ever asked me a question that wasn’t about my father.”
“Genevieve—”
“I’m cancelling the lunch.” She pulls the strap of her bag up onto her shoulder.
“And I’m not doing this again. Not the exits, not the seating, none of it.
If your mother wants to explain that to the Fosters, she can pick up a telephone.
” At the door she stops. “This was your idea. You tell my father.”
That last part isn’t for me. It’s aimed straight through the wall at the woman in the next room, and she says it loud enough to carry.
Walter’s waiting for me in the front hall, because of course he is. He’s got the cane hooked over his forearm and a look on his face like a man holding a card he’s been waiting all morning to play.
“Rough one,” he says.
“Move.”
“You’ll want to hear this.” He steps into my path anyway. “The ownership office had a call this week. Your wife’s asked for access to Bennett House. She’s coming with an architect.”
I stop.
“An architect,” Walter says again, tasting it. “Preservation fellow. Reid, I think it was. Andrew Reid. She gave his name over the phone like they’d already been working together a while.”
I get past him without answering, which he takes as a win, and I make it out the front door into the cold with my ears roaring.
I’d like to be a better man about this than I am. The architect’s not the problem. The problem is that she said his name over the phone like a woman who’s already got a plan and somebody helping her with it, and I found out from Walter, in a hallway, secondhand.
I sit in the car in the drive with my hands on the wheel and don’t start it.
Then I get my phone out and I look him up, which I’d give a great deal not to have done.
He’s the second result. There’s a firm, and a page about him, and a photograph taken on a scaffold in front of a building I recognize, that bank on Dell with the terra-cotta, the one everybody made a fuss about.
He’s in a canvas jacket with a hard hat in his hand and he’s laughing at whoever’s behind the camera.
Forty-something. Gray coming in at the sides. He looks like a man who’s slept.
And he’s got an easy smile. Not handsome exactly, not the way the tabloids mean it. Just easy, like nothing much has ever been complicated for him, like he’d say a true thing to a woman on the first try without checking the room first.
I lock the phone and put it face down on the passenger seat.
Then I pick it up and look again, and this time sour heat climbs the back of my throat and sits there.
My back teeth find each other. My thumb is moving before I’ve decided anything, spreading the photo wider, his hands, the easy way he stands, and I hate him.
A stranger on a scaffold, and I hate him with a heat that has no manners and nothing to stand on.
She’s done nothing. He’s probably decent. The heat doesn’t care.
I look at that photograph until I could draw it.
Then I put the phone face down on the seat and start the car, and the whole drive back into the city my jaw aches and my knuckles stay white on the wheel, and at every red light my hand starts toward the phone and I make it come back.
Jealous. Of a canvas jacket and a man who’s slept, over a wife who’s left me.
I carry it into the city like a live coal in both hands, and I don’t put it down.