“Hey, great!” I joined the excited chorus. “How’d you swing that?”
“Praise where praise is due.” Marilyn Lieberman patted the shoulder of the woman on her left. “Deirdre’s got inside connections.”
Deirdre Messenger ducked her head. Her straight, fair hair fell forward, hiding her flushed cheeks.
“Been screwing Gateway’s chairman in a good cause, Deirdre?” someone said.
When the women around her laughed, Deirdre gave a short, mirthless bark. “It just feels that way. It’s really Fabian. He’s done some legal work for them. ... ”
Her voice trailed off, leaving us feeling as though we’d said something improper. Unlike most of us, Deirdre didn’t have a special expertise but tapped her husband’s wealthy contacts to fund the projects on whose boards she sat.
Sal Barthele, chair of Arcadia’s board, pulled the meeting back together. “Vic, you want to talk about security now? Or do you need time to catch your breath?”
“No, that’s okay.” Because Arcadia House is a battered women’s shelter, people think we must spend a lot of energy fighting off abusive men. Truth is, most of these guys are cowards who don’t want outsiders to know what they do in private. We’ve only had three try to storm the place in the seven years we’ve been open.
Still, we want Arcadia to be absolutely safe for women and their children. Two weeks ago someone had managed to climb over the wall, swing an ax through the wooden play equipment, and run off before the woman on night duty had been able to call the cops. Marilyn Lieberman hired a temporary security guard, but I was asked to suggest some permanent solutions. None of them was cheap: take down the brick wall and put up iron—but would that make residents feel they were in jail; a system of light sensors around the perimeter; a permanent nighttime security force.
My own preference was for replacing the wall. Although the current one was six feet high—the maximum the city code allows—it was easy to scale. And being brick it blocked a view of the street from inside the house. We did have a TV monitor on it, but it was child’s play to evade that. Near-term, though, a new wall was the most expensive solution. The discussion continued, passionately, until Sonja Malek looked at her watch, gasped something about her sitter, and swept her papers into her briefcase. Everyone else started packing up.
Sal pounded the table. “You ladies ready to vote on this? No? Why doesn’t that surprise me? We put the same energy into deciding what kind of toilet paper to buy as we do deciding whether we want the kids tested for AIDS. You ladies want to learn how to rank your passions or you’ll be worn out before you’re fifty. You be ready to vote next month, or Marilyn and I are going to make the decision for you.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Someone saluted Sal smartly as people started straggling to the door.
Deirdre Messenger came over to me. “So where were you until eight-thirty, Vic?”
She spoke with a jocularity that grated on me. It implied an intimacy that didn’t exist. I’d known her only vaguely when I was in law school with her husband—she used to join us for lunch in the law building’s common room. She’d been beautiful, then, in a dreamy, fairy style. Twenty years later her cornsilk hair had darkened only slightly, but her dreaminess had disappeared into a taut bitterness.
I didn’t snub her now; she didn’t recover easily from slights. “Just the usual curse of the computer, made more exciting by my decaying office. I lost a whole report and had to re-create it from scratch. Fortunately I’d been scrupulous about updating my research files, so I could rough out a document in a hurry.”
Marilyn Lieberman and Lotty had stopped to listen to my tale of woe. To them I added my encounter with the homeless woman and her children.
“Vic! You didn’t leave them down there, did you?” Marilyn cried.
I flushed. “What should I have done?”
“Called the city,” Lotty said crisply. “You have friends among the police, after all.”
“And what would they have done? Arrested her for neglect and put the children into foster care.”
Lotty’s thick brows snapped together. “One child has asthma, you say? And who knows what’s going on in the others’ lungs. You don’t always use good judgment, Vic: in such a situation foster care might not be so cruel.” Her Viennese accent became more pronounced, a sign with her of anger.
Marilyn shook her head dubiously. “The problem is—there are shelters for women with children. Of course there are. But they aren’t always safe places. And most of them are only open at night, so you have to figure out something to do during the day.”
“I thought of suggesting she come here,” I said, “but I know you don’t—”
“We can’t,” Marilyn interrupted. “We can’t start blurring the line, when we need all the beds we have for domestic violence cases.”
“So what are you going to do?” Deirdre had stood to one side as we spoke, as if she didn’t feel part of the group and yet was loath to leave us.
I took a breath and looked at them challengingly. “I suggested she move into one of the empty offices upstairs. The place is coming down in a few weeks, after all.”
Sal Barthele, who’d been talking to the head of the shelter’s counseling staff, came in on the tail end of our discussion. “You’ve lost your white liberal mind, Vic. What’s Conrad say to this?” Sal, who’s black herself, takes an amused interest in my ups and downs with a black man.
“I just date the guy. I don’t ask his advice every time I blow my nose.”
“I’m not asking about his male mind, sugar—doesn’t worry me. What does his cop mind say?”
“I expect if I tell him he’ll agree with Lotty. The city will come in, send the children to three separate homes, where at least one will be sexually molested. The mother will lose her remaining grip on reality and turn into one of those tormented creatures you see on Michigan Avenue, ranting to herself and looking ready to throttle any passerby who talks to her.”
I spoke more bitterly than I’d intended, and everyone shifted uneasily. I hugged myself, trying to pull in, away from my anger. When Deirdre grunted aloud, as though she’d been kicked in the stomach, the sound seemed remote.
“Easy does it, Vic.” Marilyn’s voice—professional, calm, for distraught women or staff members—brought me back to the room. “Not all foster care ends so disastrously. In a case like this, don’t you think you should give the system a chance? Surely it’s better than leaving the kids underground without proper sanitation or food.”
“Maybe I could try to talk to her,” Deirdre offered tentatively, as though I might ridicule her ability.
“Good idea.” Marilyn used her counselor’s voice for people successfully resolving problems. “Deirdre does a lot of work for Home Free, you know—the housing advocates.”
I hadn’t known that. Home Free wasn’t a name I recognized, but what energy I have for volunteer work goes to women’s programs, so I don’t know a lot of the work done in other equally needy arenas.
Deirdre was looking at me pugnaciously, as though challenging me and fearing me at the same time. Her expression pushed me back a step.
“If you can persuade her to get some help, more power to you I wanted her to let me bring the asthmatic kid to Lotty—you would take a look at her, wouldn’t you ...?”
“Vic, I would—I will—of course. But don’t let your idealism carry you away. You know why we couldn’t eradicate TB from the street fifteen years ago when we had the possibility? Because people won’t take their medication unless you’re there to oversee it. I can look—I do look—at a hundred sick, desperate people a month, but I can’t make them be well.”
I managed a grin. “Lotty, if I get the girl to your clinic I will stand over her with my Smith & Wesson until she takes all of whatever drugs you deem her to need.”
“I like that,” Marilyn said. “A progressive Dirty Harry. Make my day: don’t take your antibiotics.”
Even Lotty had to smile at that. Sal ad
ded a ribald cap to the joke and Marilyn gave a loud crack of laughter.
Under cover of their noise Deirdre muttered at me, “I know you don’t think I can do it, but why don’t you tell me where your office is.”
My anxiety not to hurt her made me imbue her offer with more importance than I thought it was worth. “Sure. Let’s give it a try. The Pulteney Building, southwest corner of Wabash and Monroe. Want to meet me around three tomorrow?”
“You’re joining the hordes at my house Wednesday night. I’m spending tomorrow in the kitchen.”
I flinched from the venom in her voice. She and Fabian were hosting a retirement party for my favorite law professor. I’d been surprised but much pleased to have been included in the guest list. Now, though, I was getting annoyed, with Deirdre for throwing me off balance, and with myself for trying to placate her, a combination that made me wave my hands wildly when I answered.
“I hope you’re not sacrificing your day for me; I eat anything. Cold pizza, McDonald’s, you name it.”
She bared her teeth, trying for a smile. “I’m not doing it for you, Vic: I’ve got every damned high hat in the city coming to watch Fabian grin and shuffle in front of Manfred Yeo, hoping he can get the federal judgeship he’s aching for. I’ll be spending the day mincing vegetables and stuffing goddam little cream puffs so people will know what a proper gent Fabian is.” She finished with a savage parody of an English accent.
I winced. “If it’s that hideous a prospect, I’ll stay away—give you one less cream puff to stuff.”
“Don’t do that, Vic: you’ll be the one human in the house. Anyway, Manfred wanted you to come. Fabian asked if there were any of his old students he wanted to see, and he mentioned you especially. Of course, all the ones who’ve gone on to be judges and shit will be there, but you were one he knew Fabian wouldn’t think of.” Her voice and face softened, making her look fragile.
“How many people will you have?”
“Thirty-five. Senator Gantner’s son is showing up. If I could, I’d hide in the basement of your office building. I’ll come down to see you Friday afternoon.” She pulled a coat over her hunched shoulders, waited a minute to see if any of the remaining group would leave with her, and walked out alone.
“There’s something wrong with that woman,” Sal pronounced when we’d heard the front door shut behind her. “I get the feeling she’d be happier in one of the beds upstairs than around the table down here.”
“She’s just shy,” Marilyn said. “She always does her homework for the board here, and I know she does a good job for Home Free. It’s hard on her, not having a career when the rest of you do. What was she upset about now, Vic? Your homeless family?”
“Oh, she and Fabian are hosting a big do on Wednesday, but Deirdre’s so bitchy about it that it’s making me think I should come down with the flu. She’s making all the food for thirty-five people. He makes a good living—why can’t they cater it?”
“You going to Fabian Messenger’s?” Sal laughed. “Doesn’t he give highfalutin advice to Republican bigwigs? What do you two have in common?”
I laughed. “Only the fact that we went to law school together in the golden days of student protest. He took names for the administration during the famous sit-in while I was inside helping organize the first women’s union. Then he did three years as a Supreme Court clerk and returned to his alma mater in glory. Now he sits on the right hand of the right-handed while I hang out in a rat’s nest downtown. Speaking of which, Sal, you got any leads on space for me? Because if I don’t find something soon I’m going to move into your office at the Golden Glow.”
Sal put an arm around me. “Now, that’s a potent threat, girlfriend. But I warned you at the outset that the Glow is a fluke: most of what I buy and sell is residential rehab in neighborhoods you don’t want to work in. Maybe I could find a place like this, but times are slow. Don’t hold your breath.”
Sal had negotiated the purchase and reconstruction of Arcadia House, but it was in Logan Square, too far from the Loop businesses that make up the bulk of my work.
“That’s what I need, Sal—a whole house. I could live on top and work downstairs.”
My tone was sarcastic, but she cocked an interested eyebrow. “Not a bad idea, Vic. Don’t laugh it off.”
We walked out together. Marilyn and Lotty, who were discussing the pregnancy complications of one of the residents—she’d been kicked in the abdomen in her sixth month—trailed after us. I stayed near Lotty until Marilyn and Sal had driven off.
“Why are you angry with me about the woman in the Pulteney?” I asked.
“Am I angry? Maybe so. I sometimes think you’re too arrogant with other people’s lives.”
“When a surgeon calls someone else arrogant, you know there’s a problem.” I tried to make it a joke, but it fell flat. “I don’t want to be a god for this woman. I just don’t know what to do to help her.”
“Do nothing, then. Or do the smart thing: let the appropriate agencies look after her. I worry, Vic, when you decide to intervene in other people’s lives. Someone usually suffers. It’s often you, which is hard enough to watch, but last year it was me, which was even harder. Are you going to get these children badly hurt and then bring them to me to patch up?”
In the orange glow of the sodium lamps I could see the rigid lines in her expressive face. A year ago some thugs mistook Lotty for me and broke her arm. Her anger and my remorse had cut a channel between us that we rebridged only after months of hard work. Every now and then it gapes open again. I wasn’t up to beating my breast tonight.
“I’ll try not to—either hurt them or involve you.” I slammed my car door shut.
3
Prodigal Son
I dressed carefully for my meeting with Darraugh Graham, in black wool with a white silk shirt and my red Magli pumps. Close to, you can see where the leather has become frail with age. I tend them anxiously, with polish and waterproofing, new soles and heel tips: to replace them would take almost a month of rent money. They bring me luck, my red Magli pumps. Maybe some would get passed to my homeless woman if I wore them to her hideaway.
On my way out I pawed through my closet for old blankets and sweaters to take to her. I’d have some spare time at lunch to drop them off.
It was only seven-twenty when I clattered down the three flights of stairs, early enough that I wouldn’t have to run the three blocks from the garage to Graham’s office. I couldn’t afford to arrive with my shirttails hanging out and hair in my eyes.
The two dogs I share with my downstairs neighbor recognized my gait and began an insistent barking. By the time the old man got to his door I was already out front. Calling over my shoulder that I’d run the dogs tonight, I jumped into my car and took off.
Meetings with Darraugh are usually dry to the point of making my mouth chalky. Efficient subordinates and disciplined senior staff, brought in as their expertise dictated, run through reports with the smoothness of a Rolls transmission.
Early-comers to the boardroom get coffee and rolls. That’s where I hear about children’s basketball practice or difficulties with the snowblower. At eight o’clock Darraugh sails in and all idle chat ceases. There have been occasions when I was sliding into my seat after him, earning a frosty stare and a pointed invitation to begin speaking while still disposing of my coat and papers. I don’t do that anymore. I’m almost forty. I can’t afford to get fired.
Today when Darraugh marched in he had an ill-kempt young man in tow. I blinked. IBM at the height of its glory never displayed the amount of starch and pinstripe in Darraugh’s boardroom. Anyone who came to work with a three-day growth, shoulder-length hair, and a dirty sport jacket hanging over jeans would be instantly slung into a black hole. I wondered if this was some junior exec gone wrong whose expulsion from paradise we were all to witness.
Darraugh did not introduce him, but a couple of men near me greeted the youth with a cautious, “Hi, Ken, how’s it going?” Fo
r the duration of the meeting Darraugh acted as though Ken were an empty chair. The young man added to the illusion by hunching over and staring motionless at his belt buckle.
At the end, after Darraugh had informed us of the group’s consensus and his secretary had assured us we would have minutes by two, Ken pulled his head out of his lap and prepared to stand.
“Just a minute,” Darraugh barked. “MacKenzie, Vic, will you stay behind? I’ll catch up with you downstairs, Charlie, to go over the Netherlands proposal. And Luke, we have a three o’clock, don’t we, to discuss the Bloomington plant.”
The rest of the room meekly filed out. Ken slid back into his chair, his hands deep in his jeans pockets, and gave the sigh linguists around the world recognize as contempt for the entire adult race.
Darraugh put up a hand to straighten his tie knot. “This is MacKenzie Graham. My son. Victoria Warshawski.”
“Your agent,” Ken muttered to his chest.
Darraugh affected not to hear him. “MacKenzie is home from college. We hope temporarily.”
“I can see why,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying.
My client scowled, but Ken looked up with a sudden glimmer of interest.
“From Harvard. Where our family has gone for two hundred years.” Darraugh bit off the words.
“If I’d broken tradition and gone to Yale it would be the same story,” Ken said.
“Am I supposed to play twenty questions over this? Would it have made a difference if he’d gone to Berkeley?”
“Yes, it would,” Darraugh snapped. “If it had been Yale or Berkeley he wouldn’t be on probation: he’d be out on his ass earning a living. As it is they’re giving him a year off. He can go back next January if he keeps himself—”
“Clean in thought, word, and deed,” his son finished for him. “I was caught hacking. Everyone does it, but they only punish the people who get caught.”
“How true. For that and a thousand other felonies. Everyone embezzles, but only Ivan Boesky got caught.”
Ken flushed and resumed his study of his belt buckle. “The point is,” Darraugh continued, “he’s on probation with the government as well. He broke into Department of Energy classified files. If it weren’t for the people I know in Washington he’d be doing five-to-ten in Leavenworth.”
Tunnel Vision Page 2