A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (13 page)

And what did I do with the best picture of all five girls, the best picture that I had ever taken?

Not a thing.

I also sent one of the pictures of the five girls to Mary Paige. She sent me a thank-you note so perfect that it was a little annoying. Then she called.

“Really, the picture is so wonderful.” She sounded completely sincere. “I love it. We both do. And my mother wondered if she could get one just of Faith, with the other girls cropped out. I realize that it wouldn’t work on this one, but Annelise said that there are others, and that one of them is a marvelous picture. I’d pay you for the print, of course.”

I hate that.
I’d pay you, of course.
People only say that when they are trying to get away with asking you for a favor without being accountable for the favor aspect of it. And they also think that because it is a favor, but not really, they can get away with paying you a lot less than a service is worth. So from your point of view it is a complete loss. You aren’t paid what you are entitled to and you don’t rack up the credits for having done a favor.

“I don’t really work that way.”

“But surely the others have wanted a picture just of their child.”

If they had, they hadn’t said. I had done portraits of the girls with their siblings. I did all their prints at cost, which was a huge savings, but their mothers—even though they were my best friends in the whole world—had paid me the sitting fee.

It was that sitting fee that Mary Paige was trying to avoid.

“Could I just come look at the others and see if there are any that I’d like? I’d pay you for the print, of course.”

“I don’t really think that any will work in the way you want them to.”

“But I’d still like to come see.”

She didn’t give up, did she? Did she really care this much about avoiding a sitting fee? “You’ll have to trust me on this,” I said.

“This is my child. I’m entitled to see the pictures of her.”

“Do you mean to make this a legal issue?”

“It
is
one, isn’t it?”

Frankly, I didn’t know. “We didn’t study it in law school. I do retain the copyright.”

“I really must insist.”

She was making much too big a deal out of this. I think she was just determined to have her own way to show that she could. For my part, I didn’t want her to see that one picture. I didn’t want her to see the extent to which her child had hurt mine. But I had numbered the proofs in the binder so I couldn’t remove that ninth picture.

Actually I could. I could develop and enlarge one of the ones off the contact sheet. I could substitute it for the one I didn’t want Mary Paige to see.

But what was the point? This wasn’t between her and me. It was among the girls, and the damage had already been done, whether she saw that picture or not. The only way to win was not to care. I did care about what had happened between her daughter and mine, but whatever Mickey Mouse power struggle was going on between her and me, I didn’t need to care about that.

I tried to be as gracious as I could. “Then, of course, you can come look at them.”

Once again she had forgotten what agony setting foot in her grandparents’ former home would be. She was very interested in how I had decorated the house. In the front room, she picked up the hem of one of the drapes to look at the workmanship, which seemed inappropriate, but I suppose she would have excused herself because she was an “interior-design professional.” She fingered the lining, establishing that the drapes were indeed interlined with flannel. She was probably disappointed at that; now she couldn’t tell me that the drapes would have been better if they had been interlined.

That wasn’t fair. I had no reason on earth to think that Mary Paige would have relished lecturing me about the importance of flannel interlinings. That was my mother’s specialty—offering “constructive criticism” when it was too late to be of any use. It was too easy for me, whenever I felt a little threatened by another woman, to invest her with my mother’s tricks.

Instead Mary Paige was extremely complimentary about what I had done with the house. Any cutting remarks she saved for the woes of living in a rented house. “It’s perfectly dreadful. You can’t do anything to make it your own. I can’t wait until we are more settled.”

“How long is your lease?” I asked.

“It’s a year, but I certainly hope to be out of there long before that. We really do need to be close to school. I want Faith to have what I had with this house. Alden can really be a neighborhood school if you live in the right house.”

But this house had belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Chester T. Paige, Mary Paige’s grandparents, not her parents. I wondered where they had lived.

When we went back into the kitchen, I began to doubt that she had really been in the house as much as she had claimed. By eliminating the butler’s pantry, we had gotten an el extension at one end of the kitchen, but clearly she was puzzled by the space, unable to figure out where it had come from.

Mary Paige was, however, gushingly sweet about the pictures. Why not? She had won. “It was so good of you to include Faith. She was delighted. She is so fond of the other girls.”

She flipped right by the good one. She was only looking at Faith. She had no appreciation for the aesthetic composition of the whole picture and certainly no sense of any message or meaning.

I hadn’t reexamined the proofs before she came, but as we leafed through the booklet, I spotted a picture that could be cropped to come up with a nice head shot of Faith. I used Post-it notes to show Mary Paige how the finished product would look. “It doesn’t have the rhythm of the whole picture, but Faith looks very pretty.”

“Doesn’t she though? And this is much nicer than the ones my sister had done of her kids. So I think we should make it bigger than those … just because you’re such a talented photographer, not because I am competing with my sister although I suppose it sounds like that.”

It certainly did. “How big are those?”

“Oh, like this.” She gestured with her hands, and I guessed that her sister had made an eight by ten. So we were talking about at least an eleven by fourteen. “I’d pay you,” she kept saying.

Fine. I handed her my standard rate sheet.

“These aren’t per print, are they?”

“Yes, and there is the cropping fee as well.”

“You certainly do think well of your work, which, of course, you should. It is lovely.”

Clearly the cost of prints was much more than Mary Paige had ever imagined.

“On second thought you were right,” she went on, careful not to look at me, “cropping really doesn’t work. I should have trusted you.”

She looked at her watch and thanked me, but declared that she had to run. I felt sorry for her. She knew that she had bullied me into this. She had wanted me to jump through her hoop, and then it turned out that she couldn’t afford the hoop.

We spent Thanksgiving with Jamie’s
parents in Pittsburgh. I like them; they are gentle, observant, intelligent people. Jamie’s older brother married into a big, close-knit Polish Catholic family, and the joyous excess of their holiday celebrations has subsumed the Meadowses’ quiet Quaker traditions. The rest of us—Jamie’s parents, Jamie and I, and his unmarried younger brother—have chosen to accept the exuberant hospitality of the other family, but we do all feel as if we are at the edge of someone else’s party.

Jamie and I went for a walk Saturday afternoon, and he warned me about his upcoming trial, scheduled to start after the first of the year.

I looked at him oddly. “We’ve been through trials before. This is going to be longer. Is there more than that?”

“There will be a level of publicity that we’ve never experienced before.”

Jamie’s firm specializes in corporate civil litigation. Civil court is where you go when your neighbor builds a new deck and the steps end up on your property. Of course, since his firm’s clients are large corporations, the issues between the disputing parties are much larger and much less personal. Most of his cases have very little “human interest.” Rarely is there one good guy and one bad guy. Both companies have probably done something wrong, and Jamie’s job is to devise a legal strategy that ensures the best outcome for his client.

He compartmentalizes better than I do. If I were a litigator—something I do not have the personality for—I would do best if I loathed my client’s adversary. I would want to be on a crusade at all times, carrying the banner of freedom. I would burn out in a week.

Jamie does not want to be on a crusade. He doesn’t want to demonize individual people. He doesn’t want to make things personal.

I used to think it odd that here he, a Quaker, dedicated to respecting other people’s individuality, didn’t like it when things got personal.

“That’s just it,” he had said. “I don’t want
things
to get personal. I want people to be personal. Things need to stay things.”

So while he had often been extremely busy, working long, long hours, no case had ever left him feeling as if he had been tied to an emotional train track. He would be physically weary, but not emotionally or spiritually.

But this case was different. It was a criminal case.

Jamie’s clients in this case were the senior executives of a major utilities/telecommunications/everything else now-bankrupt corporation, and the federal government had been investigating their accounting procedures. Because the clients had been far too creative in their accounting, Jamie’s firm had been expecting that a civil suit would be filed in federal court.

The clients’ alleged actions had caused real hardship for many of the company’s employees. People in Texas wanted to punish the fiends that had robbed these nice working folks; they wanted justice, they wanted a crusade. Too many previous high-profile cases against the executives of failed Texas corporations had come after federal investigations that had seemed to last forever. This time political pressure was forcing the state to act quickly.

The district attorney’s office had filed criminal indictments. They had charged Jamie’s clients with crimes, go-to-jail crimes.

Jamie’s firm almost never did criminal work, and in the normal course of things, it would have passed this case along to another firm. But this firm’s speciality was preparation. Its lawyers always knew more than the opposing counsel. Their documents were better indexed; their arguments were supported by more citations. This case was particularly complex, but Jamie had thoroughly mastered its intricacies. Although none of the clients trusted one another anymore, they all trusted Jamie. So, even though they were each lawyering up individually, they wanted Jamie to be lead counsel.

At first he relished the challenge, but he had soon remembered why he had always avoided criminal work. In a criminal trial, a jury does want there to be a good guy and a bad guy. Furthermore, this case was getting considerable publicity, and the media personalizes everything in a way that Jamie couldn’t stand. Complex accounting procedures do not interest
People
magazine. An unflattering picture of someone’s expensively dressed second wife getting into an expensive car … now that’s clear evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

On the Monday after Thanksgiving,
Jamie went down to Houston for more pretrial work, and as we had agreed, I sat down and filled out the kids’ Sidwell applications. Erin had to write an essay. When she handed it to me, it was folded and she was glaring. I was not to change a word.

I disciplined myself not to read it until she had left for school. It was about her cousin, my brother’s son, the professional poker player. She wrote about how he could do any mathematical equation in his head and about how well he had explained probability to her. She wondered why he wasn’t going to college if he was so smart.

It read like a first draft. Her ideas were interesting, but she kept circling back as she thought more about each issue. She did have a strong thesis, but it was in her conclusion because it hadn’t occurred to her until then.

I know my weaknesses. If this had been a college application or if I had felt that the honor of our family was riding on the children going to Sidwell, I would have “edited” this essay, reordering the argument and fixing the sentence fragment that was glaring, zitlike, out of the third paragraph. Families who had hired tutors to prepare their twelve-year-olds for the SSATs were doing just that. Their kids’ essays wouldn’t have any sentence-fragment zits in them.

But I couldn’t imagine ever taking Erin and Thomas out of Alden. So I refolded Erin’s essay and added it unchanged to her application.

Tuesday I filed a request with the Alden registrar to have the kids’ transcripts sent to Sidwell. The following day I got an e-mail from Chris Goddard asking to see me the next time I was at school, offering to come down to either the lower or the middle school. I was helping with a writer’s workshop in the second grade on Thursday, so I e-mailed back, adding that I could come to his office at the high school.

Which was a mistake. His beautiful office with its high ceilings and gracious windows was freezing. He was, not surprisingly, dressed in a heavy sweater and a thick tweed blazer.

“No wonder you offered to meet me at the lower school,” I said. “It’s so cold in here. How do you stand it?”

“Because it’s useful. Any time I want a meeting short, I hold it here. People become remarkably efficient.”

My stupidly girlish vanity was pleased that he had been willing to meet me elsewhere. “I suppose you’re wanting to know why we are applying to Sidwell.”

He looked momentarily puzzled. Clearly that hadn’t been why he had wanted to see me. “Actually not. We believe families should explore all their options.”

That sounded canned. “Did you read that on a greeting card?”

“No. I wrote it on the back of my hand.” He hooked his shirt cuff aside as if to show me the lettering. His hand was narrower than Jamie’s, his fingers were longer and more tapering, and needless to say, there was nothing written on it. “What they say in the lower school is that your husband is a Quaker and so this is a bit pro forma.”