She spoke loudly enough that the people at the kitchen end of the room could hear. Most laughed, but Emily, who’d come in with a toddler in her arms, turned red and hung her head.
It dawned on me with dreadful certainty that she wasn’t the nanny, but Deirdre’s daughter. Her broad forehead and wide cheekbones might have been stamped from Fabian’s face. The resemblance was so obvious that my failure to notice it when she’d stood next to him in the front room seemed unbelievable.
I tried to remember if I’d said anything that would make her realize my mistake. And at the same time I wondered how Deirdre could be so cruel as to put her into one of her own dresses. The pink wool not only fit the girl badly but was clearly designed for an older person, a matron, not a child. Dressing her to look like an adult only added to confusion about Emily’s status, especially since she seemed consumed with child care.
The toddler, who looked about two, squirmed in her arms. Emily tried to distract him by pointing at the chandelier, a massive piece whose pendants cracked light into winking blues and yellows. The child refused to be placated. The late hour, the noise, the strangers, all turned him fractious. He whimpered and lunged in his sister’s arms, but neither Deirdre nor Fabian paid any attention.
Finally the main table sorted itself out, with Fabian at one end and Manfred Yeo at the other. Donald Blakely, the Gateway Bank president, and Alec Gantner sat near Fabian. Women were sprinkled along the table like poppies among penguins. They, too, may have been distinguished jurists or business owners, but they looked as though they had been invited strictly as decoration.
Two small tables each seating six were tucked into the bays at the south end of the room. I dubbed their denizens the rising stars—young, well dressed, and self-assured, they gaily discussed the end of the skiing season and the start of sailing.
Joshua, perched on a couple of dictionaries, was sitting by an empty chair at the main table. I assumed his mother would move next to him, but as Fabian finished seating his dinner partner, Deirdre planted herself aggressively at my table. This could present a golden opportunity to discuss housing for Tamar Hawkings and her three children, but Deirdre didn’t look up to discussing anything more major than another bottle of wine.
Emily had been hovering near me with the toddler while people found their places. As soon as Fabian got settled she brought the child over to him. Her father made an impatient gesture and pointed down the table at Manfred. Emily flushed and dragged the boy down to him. The professor showed the usual enthusiasm of dinner guests for small children; after a quick look at her father, who ignored her, Emily headed from the room.
Deirdre called her back and fiddled clumsily with the child’s pajamas. “Yes, Nathan. Now that your daddy has proved to Manfred what a virile guy he is, coming up with a baby son at the age of forty, you can go to bed.”
She spoke loudly enough for everyone at Fabian’s end of the long table to overhear. There was a brief pause in the conversation, like a momentary drop in current. The woman on Fabian’s right gave a little scream of laughter and everyone began talking feverishly. Fabian was laughing, too, but for a brief instant fury had carved terrifying lines around his eyes and mouth.
Emily stumbled from the room again. The two bartenders joined the waitress in handing out cold carrot soup. By the time Emily returned to take the empty chair next to Joshua the staff was serving the main course. The food was excellent—a surprise, given Deirdre’s drunkenness and the rubbery hors d’oeuvres.
Deirdre’s back was to the center table, close enough to Fabian and Gantner that she could hear much of their conversation. The two men talked across the women between them, with Donald Blakely chiming in. The women made a few attempts to join in, but were shut out so effectively that they had to lean across the table and speak to each other like small planes flying under jumbo jets.
Every time Fabian spoke, Deirdre twitched in her chair. She made no effort to talk to those around her, but toyed with her food while she continued to drink. The six of us with her went through the social pretense of pleasure in our awkward situation. I felt as though I were swimming up a waterfall.
The most pitiable was a young woman named Lina, who’d been stuck on Deirdre’s left. She was married to one of Fabian’s students—the editor of the Law Review—and confided that she had just turned twenty-one when she married Brian at Christmas. As her hostess divided her mind between wine and Fabian’s remarks, Lina kept trying to talk to her—about the dinner, the house, Chicago’s opera, anything to prove that Deirdre was fine, her angry twitches a passing nightmare.
I did my duty with Brian by asking him about his classes and his and Lina’s Iowa home. A woman across from us who worked for Donald Blakely at Gateway Bank gamely joined in with a discussion of a client in Cedar Rapids. We were doing ... not well, but enough to make it seem we were at a party, when Lina brought up Deirdre’s children.
“You must be so proud of them,” she said desperately. “Everyone tells me how smart they are. And your daughter seems wonderful with her little brothers.”
Deirdre jerked her head up. “My darling daughter is a saint.” Her voice was heavy with sarcasm. “I couldn’t do without her and her daddy would die if he lost her.”
Lina turned her head, furtively blinking back tears. The rest of us sat stunned for a moment. Finally I leaned across the man on my right to talk to her.
“Brian’s been telling me about your riding. The only time I was ever on a horse was when my dad got a friend in the mounted patrol to let me ride around Grant Park in front of him. I was thrilled and terrified at once. How did you begin?”
Lina bit her lip but gallantly produced an answer. Eleanor Guziak, the banker, joined in, speaking in the exaggerated way people use when embarrassed. As Brian and one of the other men started talking I looked past Deirdre to Emily. The girl was poking at her food, turning it over and over with her fork, but making no pretense of eating.
“What do you do, Vic?” Lina asked. “Are you a lawyer too?”
“I went to law school with Fabian and worked on the Public Defender’s Homicide Task Force for a while, but I’ve been a private investigator for ten years now.” My tongue felt thick from mushing social drivel in the midst of the Messenger family’s disarray.
“Oh, Vic is one of our most prominent do-gooders.” Deirdre, apparently realizing that she’d alienated her guests, was striving for jocularity. “She didn’t stop working for the poor and desperate when she left the PD’s office. Why, she even puts up homeless families in her own office.”
Lina turned wide blue eyes to me. “You do? That’s so wonderful of you. I get upset every time I go downtown and see homeless people lining the sidewalks, but I feel so helpless—”
“I’m helpless too,” I interrupted her. “The amount of misery is overwhelming and I’m not brave enough, smart enough, or rich enough to know what to do about it.”
“But to put a family up in your office—” Lina began.
“I haven’t. Deirdre’s exaggerating.”
“Come, come, Vic. You’re much too modest,” Deirdre lunged in. “You told us on Monday you helped a homeless family camp out there.”
She was too drunk to pitch her voice properly. Conversation at the main table broke off as people began listening in.
“How do the rest of the tenants feel about your generosity?” Alec Gantner, the senator’s son, had turned around in his chair to look at me.
I forced a smile. “Deirdre’s blowing a small thing into a big one. I found a woman with three children hiding behind the boiler when I went down to work on the wiring Monday. My building is going under the wrecking ball May fifteenth; only a handful of tenants is left. I thought the woman could live in one of the vacant offices for six weeks, instead of down below with the rats—as you can imagine, the basement is full of them. But when we took her three kids to the hospital last night, she got scared they’d be taken from her and disappeared. End of story.”
“You didn’t think to consult the owners?” Donald Blakely, the Gateway banker, called over.
“That’s why I was working in the basement: the owners haven’t cared enough about the tenants to do routine maintenance. I certainly didn’t care enough about them to tell them about this woman: all they would have done is called the cops and get her arrested for trespassing.”
“They’d be within their rights,” Gantner said.
“The real problem is liability,” Eleanor Guziak said. “I think Donald’s point is that if the woman gets hurt, or injures someone herself, the owners are still on the hook for damages, even if they’ve let the building run down.”
I didn’t think that was Donald’s point at all, but Eleanor was following the first law of corporate advancement: make the boss look good at all times. Donald seconded her warmly, then demanded to know where the building was.
“So you can call the cops yourself? No, thanks. Anyway, the woman has disappeared. I don’t know if she’ll come back to my building because it’s familiar, or stay away because she thinks she’ll be arrested.”
“Donald doesn’t want to call the cops. He wants to help the woman out, don’t you, Donald?” Deirdre said.
“Deirdre.” Fabian’s voice was heavy with warning.
“No, don’t you ‘Deirdre’ me. I know what I’m talking about. Gateway Bank is the biggest booster of housing for the homeless in town. We studied them at Home Free.” She lifted her glass to toast Blakely. “So Vic shouldn’t feel shy about giving Donald her office address. It’s the Pulteney Building, isn’t it, Vic, down near Monroe.”
I was surprised that she could recall that chance-dropped fact, and furious that she had made my private problem public.
Blakely smiled blandly at Deirdre and looked at Fabian. “The real problem is the number of drunks and crazies who are wandering the streets.”
“Funny how we only got drunks and crazies in such large numbers in the last decade,” I snapped.
Gantner and Blakely affected not to hear me. Gantner turned his back on me again and loudly reported on a conservative think-tank study that proved most homeless people roamed the streets by choice. I snapped my fork down on my plate so hard that a piece of salmon ricocheted from it and landed on my silk blouse. As I got up to ask one of the staff for a glass of club soda, I saw Emily looking anxiously from me to Deirdre.
I went over to her. “What’s the problem, honey? Worried that I’m arguing with your folks?”
She pulled on the ends of her tangled hair. “Would the cops arrest the mother if they found her?”
I didn’t think that was what was really bothering her, but I answered her seriously. “They might. Most people would say she was being a bad parent, letting her kids live down there.”
“But you don’t?”
“I don’t know enough of her story. I keep thinking she may be doing the best thing she can when she doesn’t have very many choices.”
“What were they doing there?” she muttered.
“You mean, how did they get there? I don’t know—I’ve been wondering about that myself. I walked around the basement earlier today but couldn’t see any openings into it.”
“But what do they live on?”
“I don’t know that either. She does manage to find food for the children.”
“Aren’t the rats dangerous?” Her gray eyes were painfully large in her anxiety.
“Rats won’t bother them unless they have food,” I said with more conviction than I felt. “I go down to that basement a lot to work on the wiring and they never come near me. I think the mother is too smart to let her children eat where there are rats.”
Fabian was looking at us from the end of the table, his countenance darkening. Emily, focused on me, couldn’t see him.
“What about the father, though? What was he doing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he lost his job and is ashamed that he can’t support them.” Emily seemed to carry too many loads to burden her with Tamar’s tale of domestic violence.
“Emily!” Fabian’s voice cut across the table talk. “Ms. Warshawski doesn’t need you bothering her.”
Emily flushed again, but the anxiety fled behind the mask of stupidity she donned so easily.
“She’s not bothering me. I like talking to her.”
I put a hand on the girl’s shoulder to reassure her. Through the wool dress I could feel the tension at my touch, a forced immobility of the muscles. I removed my hand and saw a slight relaxation. What was she afraid of? Surely not that I was making a pass at her—but of Fabian’s reaction to me.
“You don’t need to worry about the Hawkings family,” I said to Emily. “That’s my job. Okay?”
“Okay, I guess.”
She stared at me, wanting something, perhaps some assurance about her own family that I couldn’t give her. After a long moment she looked at her brother, who was clutching her sleeve. She gently turned him around in his chair and started whispering tales of bravado, how if they found rats they would beat them with sticks, then look at them with such mean faces the rats would run away. The little boy laughed. I wished I could have given similar comfort to his sister.
9
End of Revelry
Fabian beckoned me so imperiously that I was tempted to ignore him and return to my seat, but Emily’s mute anguish made me accede to his summons.
“I couldn’t help hearing your conversation with Emily just now.”
“You were paying close enough attention it would have been strange if you’d missed it.”
“I heard you tell her it was your job to look after this homeless woman. I’d rather you didn’t make it Deirdre’s job as well; she’s got enough on her hands without taking on your stray charities.”
My eyes opened wide at this incongruous remark, but before I could command a coherent response he continued.
“You should turn the matter over to Jasper Heccomb.”
“Jasper Heccomb?” I echoed like a half-witted parrot.
“The head of Home Free,” Fabian said impatiently.
“But ... that isn’t the same guy who led the antiwar movement on campus when we were students, is it?”
“Heccomb?” Blakely interjected. “I guess he was something of a radical in his youth, but he seems to have gotten that out of his system. Runs Home Free very effectively.”
“Come on, Donald—if he’d gotten it out of his system he’d be underwriting bond issues.” That was Alec Gantner. “Do you know him, Ms. ... uh ... ”
“Warshawski,” I supplied. “He was a senior when I started school here in sixty-nine. So I didn’t know him, but I tagged around after him. I never knew what happened to him. When did he go to Home Free?”
“He went to Home Free five years ago.” Deirdre spoke behind me, her voice loud, each syllable carefully measured. “And he’s been doing just the kind of job Alec and Donald approve of.”
Donald turned in his chair and smiled at his hostess. “Thanks, Deirdre. I’m glad to know that. Home Free is one of the charities Gateway supports and in days of tight capital you like to believe your charities are well run.”
Back in my chair I looked bitterly at Deirdre. Having stirred up me, her daughter, Gantner, and Blakely she was calmly finishing her salad. She was even speaking cheerfully to Lina, as though sobered by our anger. I didn’t need to stay for any more of this charade. I’d come because—supposedly—Manfred had put in a special plea for my presence. I’d had my moment to bask in the great man’s sunshine. My career certainly didn’t depend on staying to butter up him, or Fabian, or even the son of my United States senator.
Before I could leave the room, Fabian tapped his wineglass with a spoon to quiet the crowd. He stood to speak.
“I know many of you have to get up early tomorrow to squeeze the most billable hours out of the day”—polite laughter—“so I want to thank you all now for coming. After you’ve eaten Deirdre’s fabulous Grand Marnier souffle you won’t want to lis
ten to my twaddle anyway.”
He smiled easily, the perfect family man and host. They could have afforded a caterer, I realized, but that wouldn’t have given Fabian as much to brag about as a wife who stayed at home to make perfect souffles.
He moved into an adroit tribute to Manfred. As he started to speak the staff went around filling our glasses with Dom Perignon. The money he’d saved on whisky had gone to champagne, apparently.
“Our little gathering tonight is a tribute both to Manfred and to the rule of law,” Fabian concluded. “He has taught trial lawyers and judges, prosecutors and defenders, and even somehow trained both liberals and conservatives. Some of us have contested mightily with one another, but, as Shakespeare said, we gather here to eat and drink as friends, and to do honor to the best friend both we and the law have ever known.”
We all stood to salute Manfred with champagne. I looked at my watch. It was ten-thirty, but my hopes of sidling out the door were halted as Fabian began to speak again.
“Other people also want to make some remarks, but before they speak, the youngest person present wants to say something. He’s not a lawyer, at least not yet, but he knows, as Daniel Webster noted, that ‘there’s always room at the top’—and with Manfred’s departure we have, of course, a great gap at the top. Joshua?”
As the little boy climbed down from his chair, the dictionaries he’d perched on slid out from under him and landed on the floor. Those who could see what had happened laughed. Joshua turned red. Emily bit her lip and helped her brother move clear of the books. She then turned her chair so that he could see her face.
Putting his hands behind him, Joshua started to recite Prospero’s farewell speech. He spoke fast, in a high, soft voice:
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
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