“Yes,” she said, “yes, what is it?” And she cocked her head to signal she was already moving on.
“Ruth Freeman?” The quaver in the young man’s voice clashed with the bright confidence of his smile.
Her one-fifteen. Yes, of course, she remembered now. A reporter of some sort from one of the papers, a man to whom she had promised a few minutes of her time. Fine. But giving the young man a second look, Mrs. Freeman found herself growing less certain. The person standing in her doorway was a tall, handsome young man, his jaw square, his white teeth strikingly rectangular. There was a color to his skin that suggested a familiarity with sunlight. Except for the standard-issue khakis and the light-blue button-down shirt, the young man looked nothing at all like a reporter, the pale, sickly breed that generally eked out its existence under the fluorescent tubes of newsrooms.
But perhaps, she supposed, her notions about newspapermen were becoming old-fashioned. Those dinosaurs were dying, and soon, she understood, the newspapers themselves would be extinct. But how then would her poor husband fill the hours? Perhaps this young man was one of those emissaries from the Internet age, in his well-worn Chelsea boots, the only part of the ensemble that suited him.
He had called her two days before to set up this meeting, saying he wanted to talk about the protests, about the drone, about the school, about the accident. Tiphany had tried to tell Mrs. Freeman it was a bad idea.
“Come,” Mrs. Freeman said, “come,” and she waved the young man over to the window. But he had taken only half a step when Tiphany’s voice erupted again from the speakerphone.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, Ruth,” the voice lied. “I just wanted to remind you the board meeting has been moved up to one-thirty. I’m just about finished with the presentation for Arthur—”
Taking one last disappointed glimpse out the window, Mrs. Freeman shuffled her flat-heeled shoes over to her desk, cutting Tiphany off before she could say any more. The silence that followed would be fleeting, Mrs. Freeman knew, but nonetheless she smiled at the young man, and his long eyelashes fluttered in return, and for a moment it almost seemed he was he trying to flirt with her. Or did he sense the conspiracy she was inviting him to share?
Still, though, she couldn’t quite shake the peculiar feeling she had about this young man, with his broad shoulders and his gelled hair. He was exactly the sort of young man she was used to seeing in five-thousand-dollar suits strutting the marble halls of investment banks, the sort of young man who at an earlier age would have been charging off Viking ships, hell-bent on rape and pillage. Every woman in her circle, it seemed, could lay claim to at least one such son. Cassandra Boyle had two—twins even—and every time she saw them, Mrs. Freeman felt a chill.
“Come in,” Mrs. Freeman said again, “and shut the door behind you.” Perhaps it was the mother in her, but her first instinct, as he approached, was to look around her desk—an executive excess large enough for five or six of her employees to share—for something to offer the young man. Finding nothing other than a stale, half-filled cup of coffee with a stained rim, she frowned apologetically and directed him toward a chair.
As the young man approached, he paused to glance out the window, and Mrs. Freeman saw the rain had stopped. Some of the clouds had even parted. But now, improbably, fat white flakes appeared to be falling from the sky.
“Is that snow?” she said. And then, “It’s almost the middle of May.”
“You know what they say,” the young man said hesitantly, and a single ray of sunshine streaked through the glass, falling upon his cheek. “Global—”
“What are you?” Mrs. Freeman asked, studying him now for the first time in profile. “Twenty-five?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your age,” Mrs. Freeman said.
The young man hesitated, remaining at the window but eyeing the chair, as if torn between the two. “Eight,” he said. “Twenty-eight,” and his Adam’s apple poked out above the top button of his shirt.
“I was thirty-seven when I got my first job,” Mrs. Freeman said, leaning back in her chair. “Thirty-seven.” She paused to read his reaction, but the young man seemed to have little idea what to make of this. “I’m now nearly twice as old as I was then,” Mrs. Freeman continued, “but I still remember the day of my interview. I remember it vividly. On the man’s desk there was a box of cigars in a fine wooden case etched with fleurs-de-lis, and I recall thinking it magnificent, like nothing I’d ever seen, representing everything I’d imagined an important businessman being. I’d never worked a day in my life, and I was starting at the bottom of the bottom. It was the year I finally finished college. My first husband and I had married young, and I was only nineteen when my first daughter was born. My second came a year later. I raised them for fifteen years, and when they were finally old enough to take care of themselves, I went to college. I had no qualms about leaving my first husband to do it. I was thirty-seven, and I’d never had a cigar.
“The man who was interviewing me was named Maxwell, I believe, undoubtedly his last name, since in those days I would never have had occasion to use his first. Mr. Maxwell was a connoisseur of fine cigars, and even kept a what-do-you-call-it … humidor in his office. I remember being surprised at how otherwise shabby his office was, considering that Mr. Maxwell owned a textile company, which he had inherited from his father, who had inherited it from his father, and he from his. For all I know, they brought a bolt of cloth over with them on the Mayflower. As Mr. Maxwell’s assistant, I was obliged to take minutes during meetings with his management staff. I was the only one to whom he never offered a cigar. And do you know what?” Mrs. Freeman said, inching toward the edge of her seat. “I’m one of those managers now. I have been for a very long time. I’ve gone through more than thirty years of meetings since then—more than your entire life—and I’ve still never been offered a cigar.”
Mrs. Freeman wished she had a box of her own now, a fine box to offer the young man. She knew how it was done. She had watched captains of industry guillotine the tips and light them, sucking grotesquely. She knew how they smelled. She knew everything except how they tasted.
“Coffee?” she said.
“Please.”
Mrs. Freeman gestured for him to sit, and with a finger raised in expectation, she searched the instrument panel of the phone for her administrative assistant’s extension.
“Would you mind getting Mr. … Mr. … would you bring a cup of coffee please, and make it black.”
And then it was quiet again.
“Tell me, Mr. …”
“Fitch,” the young man said, clearing his throat of the word, as if it were the first he’d spoken in days.
“Is that your last name or your first, Mr. Fitch?”
The young man seemed vaguely panicked by the question, and she watched his fingers walk across his shirtfront, tugging nervously at his top button, and she saw with perfect clarity that it was one he normally left undone. It disappointed her to think he had mistaken her for someone who cared about proprieties of dress.
“It’s what people call me,” he said, and that bright white smile of his returned.
“I see.” And just as Mrs. Freeman was opening her mouth to say something more, to ask a question she hadn’t yet formulated, Tiphany appeared at the door with a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. The appearance of her administrative assistant, and the all-too-obvious way Tiphany checked her watch, reminded Mrs. Freeman—as it was undoubtedly calculated to remind Mrs. Freeman—of the board meeting that would be starting in nine minutes.
Tiphany lingered there another moment, and Mrs. Freeman found herself wondering if, under different circumstances, this might be the sort of young man Tiphany would have wanted to bring home to her parents, someone handsome and tall and sturdy, someone genetically predisposed to tack and jib. Of course, Tiphany would have preferred the suited variety of this Mr. Fitch, one of those Boyle boys, for instance, who could already afford to pay cash for the s
orts of cars that came in only silver and black.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Freeman said as gently as she could, and as soon as Tiphany closed the door behind her, the old woman added, “She’s a wonderful girl. I truly would be lost without her.”
And in truth she meant it, because despite everything that came between them, Mrs. Freeman preferred to believe the girl had good within her, and perhaps the fact that Tiphany tended toward the destructive was a reflection of Mrs. Freeman’s failings as much as the girl’s own. After all, Tiphany had come to her young and impressionable, and if she had been blown off course, perhaps Mrs. Freeman was to blame for that prevailing wind.
The young man, for his part, seemed to have taken little notice of her administrative assistant, or of much else for that matter, notwithstanding the coffee, and when at last he lowered the mug, setting it back on her desk, it was half empty, and Mrs. Freeman wondered how he had managed to drink it so quickly without flaying the delicate skin at the roof of his mouth.
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Freeman said, “we’ll be more comfortable over there.” And she rose and led the young man to the sofa against the far wall. When they were both seated, she leaned toward him, and in a voice just above a whisper, she said, “You know, she tried to talk me out of meeting with you. Tiphany doesn’t believe I should be talking directly to the press.”
“But you’re—” He lowered his eyes into his hands, as if the answer were written there. “Aren’t you the director? Director of corporate communications?”
“I suspect she had the board meeting moved up on purpose,” Mrs. Freeman said, “just to limit our time here together.”
“Your secretary?”
“Every time she comes in, I can see her rearranging the furniture in her head.”
“Why don’t you fire her?”
“Her greatest fear,” Mrs. Freeman said, “a fear she shares with a great many of my colleagues here, is the truth. Tiphany believes the truth is something dirty, that honesty is a sign of weakness and capitulation, that one cannot speak from the heart without losing some advantage.”
“You don’t agree?”
In that moment, Mrs. Freeman’s own greatest fear was that she had overestimated this young man, that he might not be, after all, the sort of man she thought he was, and Mrs. Freeman found herself confronting the fact that the majority of the people in the world, at least those she had met, especially those she worked with—and not excluding those she had married—never turned out to be the sort of people she hoped they would be. Mrs. Freeman wondered if she hoped for too much, or simply for the wrong things.
“Have you heard of Carl Norden?”
The young man shook his head.
“He invented the bombsight,” Mrs. Freeman said. “He figured out how to make one that worked.”
With some effort, the young man reached down and popped the clasps to his briefcase—a task with which he seemed almost entirely unfamiliar—and pulled out a small spiral notebook, which Mrs. Freeman could see in a glance had never been opened beyond the first page.
“Does he work here at HSI?”
“Carl Norden,” Mrs. Freeman said, “thought he was doing God’s will.”
The young man bent over his pad, taking notes.
“They were using his sight,” she said, “when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.”
The young man’s pencil abruptly stopped.
“Can you imagine the bombardier,” she said, “punching in altitude, velocity, wind speed, coordinates? As if any of it mattered.”
Mrs. Freeman pushed herself back a bit on the sofa, allowing more air to come between them. “But I won’t bore you with any more of my prattling.”
The young man appeared about to object, but Mrs. Freeman didn’t give him a chance. “There were some questions you wanted to ask?”
The young man looked at her nervously.
“And which paper,” Mrs. Freeman asked, “did you say you write for?”
The young man swallowed deeply. “Well—” He tried again to flash one of his expensive smiles, but it was thinner this time.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and the color returned to his cheeks in a rush of gratitude. “I will tell you,” she said, folding her hands atop her knee, “whatever you want to know.”
And yet her declaration strangely seemed to have the opposite effect of what she’d intended, peeling away even further at the young man’s confidence. He was fumbling again with his spiral pad, turning back to the very first page, upon which it appeared something had already been written, and in blue pen, not pencil. Even with the pad upside down from where she sat, Mrs. Freeman noted something strikingly feminine about the penmanship.
“I want to ask you about these protests,” he repeated, but stiffly this time, reading from the page.
“I must say, I’ve grown to admire their persistence.”
The young man’s pencil remained poised above the pad, quivering slightly in his hand. At her words, his clear blue eyes seemed to focus in on her face, and Mrs. Freeman wondered whether she had interrupted his thoughts, or whether he’d been listening to her abstractly, from a distance. And then her own thoughts returned to a cigar box and a granite-faced man with a moustache offering her her first job.
Finally the uncertain movement of the young man’s lips resulted in words. “You don’t, uh, dispute the facts? The drone … that is, I mean the school—”
At that, the tent of Mrs. Freeman’s folded fingers collapsed. “It’s the nature of facts, Mr. Fitch, to be correct, and there is nothing I could say to make them less so.”
In Mrs. Freeman’s mind flashed thirty years of meetings like these, all the petty conspiring about things that didn’t really matter, all the silly memos, the secret dealings, the strategic planning. Over the years, all that changed was the quality of her chair. And it occurred to her that had her first husband respected her just a little more, she might have spared herself all this and found aggravation domestically instead. But to say she would not have missed it would have been disingenuous. She was not sorry. Not even a bit. To get here she had needed to work ten times harder than Arthur or any of the other men around her. And after all that, even with Tiphany’s attempts to undermine her, what fun it was, at sixty-eight, to see her orders dutifully executed, not out of sentimental reverence for the aged but because after all this time she had become something like a sun, the center of gravity within her own universe.
“So you don’t deny you blew up a school?”
Gazing down again upon the young man’s hands, she saw a streak of sweat upon the pad. “How could I?”
“How long have you known about the problems with the drones?” He looked up from the page. “Or is it this bombsight you were talking about?” He seemed more comfortable going off script.
“No one has ever blown up anything,” Mrs. Freeman said, “except in desperation.”
“There must have been tests?” The young man sounded hesitant, almost apologetic. “You must have known there were … glitches?”
“Do you know what happens,” Mrs. Freeman said, “when you try to bang in one those tiny, skinny nails—those finishing nails—with a full-size hammer?”
“I’ve never tried.”
With a glance at his hands, she could tell it was true.
“You smash your thumb,” she said. “And you bend the nail.”
“I see,” he said.
But she wasn’t convinced he did. “If we really were in control,” she said, “we wouldn’t need bombs to make such an unholy mess.”
“Maybe you’d prefer to speak off the record,” the young man offered, reading once again from the page. “If there’s information that’s … sensitive …”
Mrs. Freeman felt an urge to reach out and pat his knee.
“For years there’ve been allegations against your company. Environmental abuses, reneging on labor contracts, outsourcing.” The young man had found his voice. “The city gives you tax breaks, and in
return it loses jobs and gets left with cleanup bills—”
“I have nothing to hide,” Mrs. Freeman said, and he seemed disappointed, or maybe just confused. Suddenly he was looking over her shoulder.
Mrs. Freeman realized her telephone was ringing.
Straightening her pants and blouse, Mrs. Freeman stood up from the sofa, and with what she knew to be the grace and dignity of the old woman she had become, she walked over to the desk. And even she did not know what she planned to do until the moment she pressed her fingernail against the tab of the cord, detaching it from her phone.
There was so much she wanted to say, so much that needed to be cleared up, and whatever his story, whoever he was, Mrs. Freeman wanted this young man to know, for she had decided he was someone she could trust.
But here was Tiphany, already knocking at the door. She had come to tell them their time was up. Tiphany had played her hand well, Mrs. Freeman decided, and she couldn’t help feeling a bit of pride. For decades Mrs. Freeman had held her tongue. She had quietly deferred. She had been a credit to the company but never to herself. Tiphany could be forgiven for not understanding what it had taken for her to get where she was. And Mrs. Freeman would not be the one to tell her. She envied Tiphany’s ignorance.
Mrs. Freeman would never fire her. Never.
Back at the sofa, the young man was gathering his things.
Mrs. Freeman said, “I wish I had been able to give you what you wanted.”
Eight
Some people ran into one another in coffee shops and bars. For McGee and April, it had been picket lines and rallies.
It was 1999. They were both in their second year of college, barely more than acquaintances. McGee’s plan had been to fill a bus with friends from various groups: environmentalists, pacifists, anarchists, unionists, vegans, conservationists, feminists, Buddhists, socialists, queers. But it was November, toward the end of the semester, and everyone had tests to take, papers to write, dogs to walk. McGee would’ve gone by herself, if she’d had to. She’d heard from people who knew that something big was going down in Seattle, a movement, a piece of history. She wasn’t going to miss it.
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