Silver Girl (33 page)

Meredith was shaking. “Who?”

“Your husband. Freddy forbade Leo from ever entering the offices where the dirty deeds were done. According to Mrs. Misurelli, Leo never once set foot on that floor.”

“Oh, my God,” Meredith said. She felt a wash of relief, like cool water over her burning concern. “So Leo is off the hook?”

“Unless something unforeseen comes out, yes. The Feds are finished looking at Leo. They’re looking at this Deacon Rapp kid who had
thirty-one million bucks
squirreled away. He was in cahoots with his uncle, who deposited the money in four banks in Queens.”

“So I can talk to Leo?” Meredith said. “I can call him?”

“Now for the bad news,” Dev said. “Leo has been cleared. And this pisses off the investors and their lawyers, why? Because they want to hold another Delinn accountable. So who are they going to focus on now?”

“Me,” Meredith said.

“You.”

She stood up.
The other investors are clamoring for your head.
She walked over to the bookshelves and stared at Wolf Flute’s collection of barometers. Oh, the hours Meredith had spent acquiring and collecting things, instead of worrying about her own freedom.

But Leo is free,
she thought.
Leo is free!
She allowed the massive weight of those worries to slide off her shoulders, which felt amazing, but nothing felt as good as dropping the insidious nugget of doubt that Meredith herself had felt about Leo. She had never believed that he’d been involved in the Ponzi scheme, but she’d feared, deep down, that he might have known about it and been too loyal to his father to turn him in.

This mysterious woman, a secretary of Freddy’s that Meredith hadn’t even known existed, had provided the only palatable answer: Freddy had forbidden Leo from visiting the seventeenth floor.

In light of this new information, did Meredith care about her own fate? Hadn’t she said she would sacrifice herself if Leo was set free?

“That brings us to the sticking point,” Dev said.

“The fifteen million,” Meredith said. Her voice sagged. Hadn’t they gone over this? “Are you going to ask me about the fifteen million?”

“Do you have anything else to say about it?” Dev asked. “Anything?”

“No,” Meredith said.

“Are you sure?”

“I told them already,” Meredith said.

“Okay,” Dev said. “Then all you can do is to keep thinking of places where that money might be, where the Feds might look. But you shouldn’t contact Leo or Carver until you’re cleared. It’s more imperative now than ever, okay?” He paused. “Hey, but the good news is that Leo is free.”

Meredith closed her eyes. She had refused to say the words before, but she would say them now. “Yes,” she said. “That is good news.”

Meredith set down the phone. Leo was free. There would be a quiet celebration at Carver’s house tonight, possibly just Carver and Leo and Anais sharing a meal, listening to music, and laughing for the first time in months.

Meredith poured herself a glass of wine. She yearned to step out onto the deck, but she couldn’t risk the exposure. Leo was free, but she was still in peril, possibly more so than before. Meredith wished Connie were here. Meredith looked obliquely out the glass doors. She saw Harold’s dark head emerge in the smooth green glass of a cresting wave, then disappear. Only one seal.

Meredith’s new novels were lying on the table. She could allow herself the pleasure of cracking one open, but the experience would be wasted on her. There was too much to think about.

The Feds thought they knew her, the investors thought they knew her, the American media thought they knew her: Meredith Delinn, wife of financial giant Frederick Xavier Delinn, mother of two privileged sons, socialite. They thought she sat on boards, they thought she organized charity galas, they thought she shopped. And whereas she had indeed done those things, there had been other things as well. Worthy things.

Meredith had taught English at Samuel Gompers High School in the Bronx for five years. It had been hard work, frightening work, frustrating work—Meredith challenged any federal agent or any soft-handed cubicle-sitter at the
SEC
to give it a try. She had forced tenth graders to read; some of them she had
taught
to read. She had thrown Carson McCullers’s novel
The Member of the Wedding
at them. For some kids, the book was like a blanket over their heads—they couldn’t see a thing. But for some kids, that book was a bright portal that led them to other books. Meredith read a poem to her classes every day, and some days no one was listening—they were too busy talking about the Knicks or Hector Alvarez’s new Corvette or doing smack. And some days they said,
We don’t give a shit about no red wheelbarrow or no white fucking chickens.
But some days, Meredith read Gwendolyn Brooks or Nikki Giovanni, and more than half the class looked mildly engaged. “A Boy Died in My Alley” got a response of
Hey, man, that’s like Lippy Magee getting knifed behind the free clinic.
And Meredith said, “Okay, everybody take out a pencil.”

She made a pittance, she took the subway, she was exhausted when she got home to the apartment—and sometimes Freddy was still at work. When Meredith got pregnant, she worried as she rode the 6 train uptown, and she was more exhausted when she climbed the four flights of stairs with bags from D’Agostino’s. She thought about quitting, but then Freddy announced that he was leaving Prudential and starting his own hedge fund. Why should he be working so hard to make money for a huge corporation when he could be making money for himself?

Meredith stayed at Gompers another year, then another year after that. They needed the health insurance. Freddy was having a hard time making the new business fly. Meredith got pregnant again. They didn’t have space for another child, and they couldn’t afford to move.

One night, with her belly hugely swollen, and Leo, at eighteen months, wailing in his crib, and Freddy out with some potential investors, who in the end never seemed to want to invest, Meredith lay in the bathtub and cried. She thought of her father saying,
Brilliant and talented, that girl can do no wrong.
Had he been lying? And if he was telling the truth, then what on earth was she doing here?

Meredith drained her glass of wine and stared at her beautiful salad. Could she bring herself to eat anything?

It was getting dark, and Meredith knew she should turn on some lights, but she had the dreadful feeling that if she turned on the lights, the person who was watching her would see her in the illuminated room eating alone. She picked at the salad in the gathering dark—not because she was hungry, but because Connie had made it for her. Connie was such a good cook, a good friend, a good person. Meredith had said all those beastly things to her years ago, but Connie hadn’t mentioned it once. Meredith hoped Connie was having fun tonight; she and Dan would still be at dinner. If Meredith had a legitimate scare, she could still call Connie’s cell phone. She could call now, but not later.

In those years, Leo and Carver went to day care, which bothered Freddy, but there was no money for a nanny. They moved to a two-bedroom apartment on East 82nd Street, but it was still a walk-up. Freddy used to leave the apartment before the boys were awake and get home after they were asleep. He lost weight. Meredith begged him to have a milkshake with his lunch, she begged him to see a doctor, but for Freddy there was only work and more work. Getting the company up and running. Attracting clients. How would he attract clients? He worked on the weekends. Meredith was left to handle everything at home. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t have two little kids and run a household and grade thirty essays and do lesson plans. Carver was already showing signs of anxiety disorder; he screamed and cried when Meredith dropped him off at day care, and he screamed and cried when she picked him up.

And then Meredith got pregnant again.

She was waiting for Freddy in the apartment when he got home from work, waving the pregnancy test in her hand like a wand: a wand that was going to reveal everything that was wrong with their life. She wanted things to be easier; she wanted things to be different. Her job was hard. That very day Meredith had come across two girls fighting in the bathroom, and one of the girls had a razor blade concealed inside her lower lip. The most disturbing thing was that Meredith had known how to restrain the girl and where to look for the blade. Why should she know such things? She wanted to leave Gompers at the end of the year. She hated the commute on the subway. She hated dropping the boys off at the dreaded day care. Carver clung to the front of Meredith’s shirt; he clawed for her glasses. The workers had to peel him off her. And now she was having a baby.

She stared Freddy down. She loved him, but this was not the life she’d expected.

“I’m taking the children,” she said. “And I’m going to my mother’s.” She was disappointed at how cliché this sounded, but what was
not
cliché was the thought of sleeping in her childhood home, the big white Colonial in Villanova with the expansive back yard where the boys could run through the sprinkler and play on the swings. Meredith would have an extra set of hands. She would enroll the boys at Tarleton.

Freddy, Meredith remembered, had seemed to shrink. Then, he smiled. “Another baby?” he said.

“Another baby,” Meredith said, and she smiled, too, in spite of herself. But then she hardened. “I mean it, Fred. I’m leaving. Until things change, I’m going home.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Fred said. “You’re going to stay right here, and I’ll make things better. I will take care of everything.”

The
SEC
and the Feds postulated that Freddy had been operating his Ponzi scheme for at least a decade, but when Meredith looked back, she knew with gut-rotting certainty that it had started the year after Meredith threatened to leave. Because Freddy was good to his word: everything got better. Instead of schlepping all the way to the Bronx every morning, Meredith stayed home with the boys. She delivered Leo to a summer preschool program at the Catholic church, she took Carver for a chocolate milk at E.A.T. Café, then home to play blocks, watch
Sesame Street
, take a nap. One sweltering day in the middle of the summer, Meredith was headed down the building’s stairs in her flip-flops, and she missed a step. She fell all the way to the landing. She was hurt, but not
hurt
hurt; however, she decided to call off their outing to the deliciously cool, air-conditioned halls of the Museum of Natural History. By the time she got upstairs to the apartment, she was bleeding.

She was only twelve weeks along, and she’d barely told anyone about the pregnancy (her mother, Connie, the principal at Gompers, who asked why she wasn’t coming back), but still, the miscarriage struck Meredith as a tremendous loss. She was positive the baby would have been a girl, whom she would have named Annabeth Carson after her grandmother and Ms. McCullers.

Freddy had taken the miscarriage in stride, and when Meredith accused him of being unfeeling, he said, “We can’t both be basket cases. We have the boys to think about. And we’ll get pregnant again, sweetheart. Don’t worry. We’ll have our little girl.” He held Meredith, and he said these encouraging things, but when his cell phone rang, he switched right into work mode.

It was that autumn, Meredith remembered, that the money started rolling in. They got full coverage with Blue Cross and Blue Shield. They pulled Leo out of the Catholic preschool and sent him to Saint Bernard’s. Freddy wasn’t home any more often, but when he was home, he was happier. He had solved the problem of attracting clients. It seemed the way to attract clients was to tell them they
couldn’t
invest in Delinn Enterprises. Delinn Enterprises was only looking for certain kinds of investors; many people got turned away. Freddy had investors banging down the door. He put back on the weight he’d lost, and twenty pounds besides. He ordered lunch in every day: reuben sandwiches, lobster bisque, omelets with goat cheese and smoked salmon. He had business dinners at Gallagher’s and Smith & Wollensky. He had no time for exercise. He got his first gray hair at age twenty-nine. Meredith had wanted to pluck it, but he wouldn’t let her. He wanted to look older, he said. He needed gravitas, he said.

After the New Year, they moved to a three-bedroom apartment with an eat-in kitchen in the East Sixties. It was a doorman building. They bought a car and kept it in the garage. They began renting a house in Southampton for two weeks a summer.

In September, Carver joined Leo at Saint Bernard’s. Meredith tried to get pregnant again but didn’t have any luck. She suspected that Freddy’s sperm were too stressed to swim. Freddy gave Meredith carte blanche to hire a nanny and a cook, even though they ate out almost every night. With both kids in school and a Filipino nanny, Meredith was free to go back to work. Gompers, or any other public school suddenly seemed out of the question, and before she knew it, working at all seemed out of the question. Freddy declared that business was gangbusters, and he whisked Meredith down to Palm Beach for the weekend, leaving the kids with Cecelia, and they loved Palm Beach so much that Freddy wanted to look at property.
To buy.

Meredith’s life became consumed with managing all that she suddenly had: The boys, their needs, their sports, their school functions. There was yet another new apartment—the penthouse at 824 Park Avenue—that they had bought, as well as a house in Palm Beach, the Pulitzers’ former house. Freddy had snapped this up at auction “for a steal,” he said. (As a testament to her remove from Freddy’s financial dealings, Meredith never learned how much the Pulitzer house had cost them.) The Frick Collection asked Meredith to serve on its board of directors, and she was on the Parent Action Committee at the boys’ school, which allowed Meredith to meet other busy, important people who each seemed to want to get her involved in something else. She and Freddy had
things
to attend—events, benefits, dinner parties, nights at the symphony and the Metropolitan Opera. There wasn’t time for Meredith to work. She was too busy being Mrs. Freddy Delinn.