A Thousand Pardons (24 page)

“You didn’t bring any books. Don’t you have homework?” Helen had asked instead.

Sara had closed her eyes. “Obviously,” she’d said. “Obviously I have homework. It’s the weekend, and I am not five years old. Did you seriously just ask me that?”

Her own office did not of course have glass walls, so Helen shrieked a little in surprise when she entered and saw a statuesque young woman, whom she had never seen before, standing calmly beside her desk.

“Helen?” the woman said. “I’m Angela. I work for Mr. Malloy. If you have a few minutes, he’d like to speak to you upstairs.”

“Of course,” Helen said, trying to recover. “I mean, it’s very nice of you to come escort me, but the phone would have been fine too.”

Angela smiled and held up a small silver key chain, with just one key dangling from it. “Special elevator,” she said.

Though she knew full well that Mr. Malloy’s office was only on six, somehow Helen had expected it to be higher, and the view to be better. When she entered, Malloy was looking out his broad picture window, through the rain, at the office building directly across the street. His hands were in his pockets, and he was smiling. Angela withdrew and pulled the door closed. He caught the reflection in the glass and turned around. “Ah!” he said. “The elusive one!”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind. I brought a visitor around to meet you earlier. I would have warned you, but I didn’t receive any warning myself.”

Helen sat down without waiting for an invitation, and crossed her
legs and folded her arms. “The team meets every morning at ten-thirty,” she said hoarsely.

“Yes, of course it does. Unfortunately I only remembered that when we got to your empty office, but I didn’t want to go down the hall and scare everybody. So how are you doing, Helen? Of course I know you’re doing very well, I hear good things, but I mean how do you like it here? Are you happy?”

If he’d left off that last bit, she could have given the reflexive answer one was supposed to give one’s boss; instead, she just smiled and gamely nodded. She wondered what he had been hearing about her, and from whom.

“Good good good,” Malloy said. “And your family?”

It was likely that he knew all about her family, just because he seemed to make it his business to know such things, but the question had a generic enough sound that she felt comfortable answering just by putting one thumb up in the air. “So you mentioned bringing someone to visit me,” she said. “A client?”

His glasses rose a little higher on his cheeks as he refreshed his smile. “Yes, in fact. A man of the cloth. I have to say this is a new one in my experience. He works for the New York Archdiocese of the Catholic Church, if you please, and he comes here as the personal representative of the archbishop, who naturally can’t be seen skulking around in places of ill repute like this one. They are in need of our services—specifically of the world’s best crisis management advisers. I took the liberty of scheduling a meeting between the two of you tomorrow morning, at their place this time, and that meeting, my dear, you will not miss.”

She struggled to think of something to say, but she was not fast enough to stop him from trying to interpret her silence.

“It’s true that I have taken a special interest in you,” he said. “Arturo and the rest of the merry band downstairs, they do a good job, but frankly I don’t think they see it yet.”

“See what, sir?”

“See you. See what you do.”

“I’m starting to wonder,” Helen said, “if I’m seeing it yet myself.”

“Well, sure,” Malloy said. “That doesn’t surprise me. But I see it. What you’re doing is the wave of the future. I think we’re going to rewrite the textbooks for crisis management before we’re done.”

“There’s a problem of scale,” said Helen. “The bigger it gets, the less real it seems to me.”

“I think what you should be asking yourself,” Malloy said kindly, “and what others will be asking themselves as they continue to watch you succeed, is not how real the process is, whatever that may mean, but what the results are.”

His office was not as big as she’d imagined. He kept the blinds wide open. Her eyes refocused on a woman in the building across the street who was hitting a printer repeatedly with the heel of her hand, and then again on her boss, an old man with seemingly infinite patience, or maybe he just didn’t have that much to do.

“You’re telling me the archbishop wants to meet with me?” Helen said.

“Well, I can’t guarantee you that His Eminence will be there in the room with you, but as near as dammit, as they say. They thought they were coming to talk to me, but I told them that you were my designated crisis management specialist around here.”

“And what,” she asked, “is the nature of their crisis?”

Malloy smiled crookedly. “Oh, come on,” he said. “I assume you read the papers.”

Angela knocked, and entered holding her key chain. A few minutes later Helen was downstairs in her office again. She felt sleepy. She felt like an instrument, but of what? She’d taken a job just to support her family, but now the job had grown to love her unabashedly and her family didn’t seem to need or even want her anymore. She shut her door just to give herself a few extra seconds if the basketball player and his agent happened to show up. Her phone rang; the caller ID showed the same number left on the weekend messages. Above the number was the unhelpful semi-legend LKSD INN CLT VT. She picked up and absently said her name.

“Helen?” a man’s voice said urgently. “Oh God, is this really you? Or an assistant?”

Helen’s face twitched in surprise. “No, this is me,” she said. “Who am I speaking to?”

“There’s no one else on the line? Or in your office? Do these calls get recorded?”

The voice had a little catch in it, like a sob. “It’s just me,” Helen said, a little testily in spite of herself. “Who is this?”

“It’s Hamilton,” the voice said.

“Hamilton? Why are—how did you—is something the matter?”

“Yes,” he said in a whisper.

“Where are you calling from?”

“A pay phone. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You’re not still in the city, though?”

“No, definitely not. I’m in some motel or something. I don’t remember how I got here. There’s a lake out the window. Champlain, maybe? I got on a binge after I saw you and I don’t remember how I got here.”

“Hamilton,” Helen said, “that was five days ago.”

“I remembered you said the name of your place was Malloy,” he said, sounding more like he was crying now, “and I found your card, and I need help, and I can’t call any of the people that I would normally call.”

“Why not?”

“I think I may have done something bad,” Hamilton said.

     6

I
N 1889, TWO CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES opened a home for wayward girls in Malloy, New York—at the time a town of fewer than three hundred citizens, which would seem to indicate an unusual rate of local waywardness. The home later became an orphanage, and a convent was established to staff it, which led to an influx, after World War I, of young Catholic women on missions from all over the world, though a good ninety percent of them were from Ireland or England. For decades the nuns were actually the most worldly element of Malloy, a town otherwise composed mostly of farmers and, from the 1930s onward, workers at the maximum-security prison near Plattsburgh. Such was the church’s civic influence that the convent went on to establish a school, called St. Catherine’s, in 1939, open to Catholic children of either gender. Over the decades, the prison expanded, the town correspondingly thrived, but the congregation, somehow, inexorably shrank. The orphanage was closed in the sixties, the convent in the seventies. The school, though, stayed open, and was still thought of, at least by those who could afford it, as a worthy alternative to Malloy’s one public elementary school, infamous for its dangerously low standards in all respects. St. Catherine’s enrollment was now only slightly less than what it was when Helen attended. At least that had been true seventeen years ago, the last time Helen was there. It might be gone completely now. Helen, with no remaining connection to the place—no family, no friends she remained in touch with—had lost track.

This was the first time she’d driven that far north since then: in yet
another rented car, along Route 7 through the western edge of Massachusetts, with a road map spread out awkwardly across the steering wheel. She should have asked for a car with one of those GPS systems included, even though the time that saved might well have been offset by the time it would have taken her to figure out how to operate the thing. She was useless with small gadgets, as her daughter seized every opportunity to remind her. Two hours after dropping Sara off in Rensselaer Valley, Helen still had the girl’s remonstrations ringing in her ears: what the hell are you doing, it’s a school day, are you kidnapping me or abandoning me, you’ve finally snapped, I knew it would happen one day, if you pick me up and then ditch me like this then don’t expect me ever to come home again, I don’t understand why the hell you won’t even tell me where it is you have to go in such a hurry. At least now, as she crawled through the Berkshires, there was no voice but her own to reprimand Helen for not having figured out some faster, smarter way to go. At yet another stoplight she checked to make sure her silent phone was still getting a signal. No call from Sara, no call from work yet, no call from Ben, no call from Hamilton. She’d be lucky to get to Vermont by dark at this rate.

He’d never come right out and asked Helen to come rescue him, but there was no doubt that’s what he wanted; and she understood that, even in his most unguarded moment, Hamilton expected people would try to anticipate his needs, because that’s what he was used to. He would not say what was wrong, he would not tell her what he had done. Though technically not an actual client, purely in terms of visibility he was one of the biggest names on Malloy’s books, and so Helen felt justified in canceling all her appointments, heading for home to pack two bags, and directing the switchboard to tell anyone who asked that she had been called away on an emergency. She told Hamilton not to leave his motel room. He said he was hungry, though. She called the motel’s office, pretending to be a guest—this while she was walking from her apartment to the Hertz outpost three blocks away—and got the number of a pizza restaurant in the nearest town. She called them, ordered a pizza to be left on the doorstep outside Cabin 3, and paid with her corporate credit card. Then she drove to Robert Livingston
Middle School and tried to explain to the security guard there that she was a parent who needed to take her child out of school immediately. In the end it took nearly twenty minutes just to get an assistant principal to come down the hall and talk to her.

Sara surely could have survived at home on her own for a day or two—fed herself, gotten herself to school on time, refrained from burning the apartment to the ground. She’d never been asked to do that before, though, and Helen knew what her reaction would be; she could hear the whole enraged listing of worst-case scenarios that would ensue. All in all, it just seemed simpler and less worrisome to dump her on her father for a few days. Helen wasn’t unmindful of the bluff-calling element either. If they didn’t like it, that was on them. Certainly more had been expected of Helen, in terms of self-sufficiency, when she was Sara’s age. More had been expected of everyone else she knew.

Somewhere around Pittsfield the traffic eased up and she started making better time. At the stoplights, when she wasn’t reconsulting the map, she kept trying to account for the fact that she was going to Vermont, of all places, or rather for the fact that Hamilton had gone there. Why Vermont? To make a movie? To hide? She’d read somewhere that even a cellphone with a dead battery could be used to track its owner’s whereabouts, if it came to that. Cellphones had changed everything, in terms not just of communication but of privacy, secrecy, absence, alibis. All the minutes of her own adolescence spent frantically composing some plausible story, as you walked the last hundred yards home at ten or eleven at night, about where you’d been! All the desperate effort that went into looking as though you believed what you were saying! Once, just a month or two before they left Malloy, she spent a Friday night riding around in Charlie Lopinto’s father’s car with Charlie and his older brother and three other friends, and the cops pulled them over, not because they were drinking or speeding but because the brother had apparently had some massive fight with his folks earlier that evening and now they were reporting that the car had been stolen. Helen and her friend Libby cried so hard when they told the cop they hadn’t known anything about it that he finally consented, snappishly, to let them go without escorting them home to their parents. They had
to walk about three miles to get there, though, and it was late, and Helen could still remember Libby tenderly wiping all the ruined mascara off of Helen’s face and making her rehearse their story one last time before she went in to lie to her mother and father about why she was getting home at that hour.

Maybe Hamilton was even there that night—not in the car, but somewhere along their route, among one of the groups of friends they stopped to talk to. He probably wasn’t, but she could no longer remember every detail. She hated forgetting things like that, things she’d seen and done, even though it was only natural. Confession, when she was a kid, used to scare her for that very reason. Forgetting something wasn’t the same as lying, really, but sin-wise there was not enough of a distinction.