The Corrections: A Novel (49 page)

(Denise, though only three years younger than Robin, could not conceive of wearing a purple nylon parka or failing to shave her armpits. She didn’t even
own
white sneakers.)

Robin’s first concession to her new wealth was to spend the summer house-hunting with Brian. She’d grown up in a big house and she wanted her girls to grow up in one, too. If Brian needed twelve-foot ceilings and four baths and mahogany details throughout, she could live with that. On the sixth of September they signed a contract on a grand brownstone on Panama Street, near Rittenhouse Square.

Two days later, with all the strength in his prison-built shoulders, Billy Passafaro welcomed W——’s corporate-image vice president to Philadelphia.

What Robin needed to know and couldn’t find out, in the weeks following the attack, was whether, by the time he lettered his message on a two-by-four, Billy had learned of Brian’s windfall and knew which company she and Brian owed their sudden wealth to. The answer mattered, mattered, mattered. However, it was pointless to ask Billy. She knew she wouldn’t get the truth from Billy, she’d get whatever answer he believed would hurt her worst. Billy had made it abundantly clear to Robin that he would never stop sneering at her, never address her as a peer, until she could prove to him that her life was as fucked-up and miserable as his. And it was precisely this totemic role she seemed to play for him, precisely the fact that he’d singled her out as the archetypical possessor of the happy normal life he couldn’t have, that made her feel as if
hers
were the head he’d swung for when he brained Rick Flamburg.

Before the trial she asked her father if he’d told Billy that Brian had sold Eigenmelody to W——. She didn’t want to ask him, but she couldn’t not. Nick, because he gave Billy money, was the only person in the family still in regular communication with him. (Uncle Jimmy had promised to shoot the desecrator of his shrine, the little prick nephew, if he ever showed his little prick Elvis-hating face again, and eventually Billy had stolen once too often from everybody else; even Nick’s parents, Fazio and Carolina, who had long insisted that there was nothing wrong with Billy but, in Fazio’s words, “attentive deficiency disorder,” no longer let their grandson inside their Sea Isle City house.)

Nick unfortunately grasped the import of Robin’s question right away. Choosing his words carefully, he replied that, no, he didn’t recall saying anything to Billy.

“It’s better if you just tell me the truth, Dad,” Robin said.

“Well … I … I don’t think there’s any connection there … uh, Robin.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t make me feel guilty. Maybe it would just piss me off.”

“Well … Robin … those … those feelings often amount to the same thing anyway. Guilt, anger, same thing … right? But don’t you worry about Billy.”

She hung up wondering whether Nick was trying to protect her from her guilt, trying to protect Billy from her anger, or simply spacing out under the strain. She suspected it was a combination of all three. She suspected that during the summer her father had mentioned Brian’s windfall to Billy and that father and son had then traded snidenesses and bitternesses about the W——Corporation and bourgeois Robin and leisure-class Brian. She suspected this, if nothing else, because of how badly Brian and her father got along. Brian was never as outspoken with his wife as he was with Denise (“Nick’s the worst kind of coward,” he remarked to her once), but he made no secret of hating Nick’s bad-boy disquisitions on the uses of violence and his teeth-sucking satisfaction with his so-called socialism. Brian liked Colleen well enough (“She sure got a raw deal in
that
marriage,” he remarked to Denise) but shook his head and left the room whenever Nick began holding forth. Robin didn’t let herself imagine what her father and Billy had said about her and Brian. But she was pretty sure that things were said and that Rick Flamburg had paid the price. Nick’s response to the trial photographs of Flamburg lent further credence to this view.

During the trial, as her father fell apart, Robin studied the catechism at St. Dymphna’s and made two further claims on Brian’s new money. First she quit her job at the experimental school. She was no longer satisfied to work for parents paying $23,000 a year per child (although, of course, she and Brian were paying nearly that much to school Sinéad and
Erin). And then she embarked on a philanthropic project. In a badly blighted section of Point Breeze, less than a mile south of their new house, she bought a vacant city block with a single derelict row house standing on one corner. She also bought five truckloads of humus and good liability insurance. Her plan was to hire local teenagers at minimum wage, teach them the rudiments of organic gardening, and let them share the profits from whatever vegetables they could sell. She threw herself into her Garden Project with a manic intensity that was scary even by Robin standards. Brian found her awake at her Global Desktop at 4 a.m., tapping both feet and comparing varieties of turnip.

With a different contractor coming to Panama Street every week to make improvements, and with Robin disappearing into a utopist sink of time and energy, Brian reconciled himself to remaining in the dismal city of his childhood. He decided to have some fun of his own. He began eating lunch at the good restaurants of Philadelphia, one after another, and comparing each to his current favorite, Mare Scuro. When he was sure that he still liked Mare Scuro best, he called the chef and made a proposal.

“The first truly cool restaurant in Philly,” he said. “The kind of place that makes a person say, ‘Hey,
I
could live in Philly—if I had to.’ I don’t care if anybody else actually feels that way. I just want a place that makes
me
feel that way. So whatever they’re paying you now, I will double. And then you go to Europe and eat for a couple of months at my expense. And then come back and design and operate a truly cool restaurant.”

“You’re going to lose vast amounts of money,” Denise replied, “if you don’t find an experienced partner or an exceptionally good manager.”

“Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it,” Brian said.

“‘Double,’ you said?”

“You’ve got the best place in the city.”

“‘Double’ is intriguing.”

“So say yes.”

“Well, it might happen,” Denise said. “But you’re still probably going to lose vast amounts of money. You’re certainly overpaying your chef.”

Denise had always had trouble saying no when she felt wanted in the right way. Growing up in suburban St. Jude, she’d been kept at safe distances from anybody who might have wanted her in this way, but after she finished high school she worked for a summer in the Signal Department of the Midland Pacific Railroad, and here, in a big sunny room with twin rows of drafting tables, she became acquainted with the desires of a dozen older men.

The brain of the Midland Pacific, the temple of its soul, was a Depression-era limestone office building with rounded rooftop crenellations like the edges of a skimpy waffle. Higher-order consciousness had its cortical seat in the boardroom and executive dining room on the sixteenth floor and in the offices of the more abstract departments (Operations, Legal, Public Relations) whose vice presidents were on fifteen. Down at the reptile-brain bottom of the building were billing, payroll, personnel, and data storage. In between were mid-level skill functions such as Engineering, which encompassed bridges, track, buildings, and signals.

The Midland Pacific lines were twelve thousand miles long, and for every signal and every wire along the way, every set of red and amber lights, every motion detector buried in ballast, every flashing cantilever crossing guard, every agglomeration of timers and relays housed in a ventless aluminum shed, there were up-to-date circuit diagrams in one of six heavy-lidded filing tanks in the tank room on the twelfth floor of headquarters. The oldest diagrams were drawn freehand in pencil on vellum, the newest with Rapidograph pens on preprinted Mylar blanks.

The draftsmen who tended these files and liaised with the field engineers who kept the railroad’s nervous system healthy and untangled were Texan and Kansan and Mis-sourian natives: intelligent, uncultured, twangy men who’d come up the hard way from no-skill jobs in signal gangs, chopping weeds and digging postholes and stringing wire until, by virtue of their aptitude with circuits (and also, as Denise later realized, by virtue of being white), they’d been singled out for training and advancement. None had more than a year or two of college, most only high school. On a summer day when the sky got whiter and the grass got browner and their former gangmates were battling heatstroke in the field, the draftsmen were happy indeed to sit in cushioned roller chairs in air so cool they all kept cardigans handy in their personal drawers.

“You’ll find that some of the men take coffee breaks,” Alfred told Denise in the pink of the rising sun, as they drove downtown on her first morning. “I want you to know they’re not paid to take coffee breaks. I expect you not to take coffee breaks yourself. The railroad is doing us a favor by hiring you, and it’s paying you to work eight hours. I want you to remember that. If you apply yourself with the same energy you brought to your schoolwork and your trumpet-playing, you’ll be remembered as a great worker.”

Denise nodded. To say she was competitive was to put it mildly. In the high-school band there had been two girls and twelve boys in the trumpet section. She was in the first chair and boys were in the next twelve. (In the last chair was a part-Cherokee girl from downstate who hit middle C instead of high Ε and helped cast that pall of dissonance that shadows every high-school band.) Denise had no great passion for music, but she loved to excel, and her mother believed that bands were good for children. Enid liked the discipline of bands, the upbeat normality, the patriotism. Gary in his day had been an able boy trumpeter and Chip
had (briefly, honkingly) attempted the bassoon. Denise, when her time came, asked to follow in Gary’s footsteps, but Enid didn’t think that little girls and trumpets matched. What matched little girls was flutes. But there was never much satisfaction for Denise in competing with girls. She’d insisted on the trumpet, and Alfred had backed her up, and eventually it had dawned on Enid that rental fees could be avoided if Denise used Gary’s old trumpet.

Unlike sheet music, unfortunately, the signal diagrams that Denise was given to copy and file that summer were unintelligible to her. Since she couldn’t compete with the draftsmen, she competed with the boy who’d worked in Signals the previous two summers, Alan Jamborets, the corporation counsel’s son; and since she had no way to gauge Jamborets’s performance, she worked with an intensity that she was certain
nobody
could match.

“Denise, whoa, God, damn,” Laredo Bob, a sweating Texan, said while she was cutting and collating blueprints.

“What?”

“You gonna burn yourself out going that fast.”

“Actually, I enjoy it,” she said. “Once I’m in the rhythm.”

“Thing is, though,” Laredo Bob said, “you can leave some of that for tomorrow.”

“I don’t enjoy it
that
much.”

“OK, well, but y’all take a coffee break now. You hear me?”

Draftsmen were yipping as they trotted toward the hallway.

“Coffee time!”

“Snack cart’s here!”

“Coffee time!”

She worked with undiminished speed.

Laredo Bob was the low man to whom drudge work fell when there was no summer help to relieve him. Laredo Bob ought to have to been chagrined that Denise—in full view
of the boss—was performing in half an hour certain clerical tasks to which he liked to devote whole mornings while he chewed up a Swisher Sweet cigar. But Laredo Bob believed that character was destiny. To him Denise’s work habits were simply evidence that she was her daddy’s daughter and that soon enough she would be an executive just like her daddy while he, Laredo Bob, would go on performing clerical tasks at the speed you’d expect from somebody fated to perform them. Laredo Bob further believed that women were angels and men were poor sinners. The angel he was married to revealed her sweet, gracious nature mainly by forgiving his tobacky habit and feeding and clothing four children on a single smallish income, but he was by no means surprised when the Eternal Feminine turned out to have supernatural abilities in the area of labeling and alphabetically sorting thousand-count boxes of card-mounted microform. Denise seemed to Laredo Bob an all-around marvelous and purty creature. Before long he began singing a rockabilly chorus (“Denise-uh-why-you-done, what-you-did?”) when she arrived in the morning and when she returned from her lunch break in the little treeless city park across the street.

The chief of draftsmen, Sam Beuerlein, told Denise that next summer they would have to pay her not to come to work, since she was doing the work of two this summer.

A grinning Arkansan, Lamar Parker, who wore enormous thick glasses and had precancers on his forehead, asked her if her daddy had told her what a rascally, worthless crew the men of Signals were.

“Just worthless,” Denise said. “He never said rascally.”

Lamar cackled and puffed on his Tareyton and repeated her remark in case the men around him hadn’t heard it.

“Heh-heh-heh,” the draftsman named Don Armour muttered with unpleasant sarcasm.

Don Armour was the only man in Signals who seemed
not to love Denise. He was a solidly built, short-legged Vietnam vet whose cheeks, close-shaved, were nearly as blue and glaucous as a plum. His blazers were tight around his massive upper arms; drafting tools seemed toy-sized in his hand; he looked like a teenager stuck at a first-grader’s desk. Instead of resting his feet on the ring of his high wheeled chair, like everyone else, he let his feet dangle, his toe-tips dragging on the floor. He draped his upper body across the drafting surface, bringing his eyes to within inches of his Rapidograph pen. After working for an hour like this, he went limp and pressed his nose into Mylar or buried his face in his hands and moaned. His coffee breaks he often passed pitched forward like a murder victim, his forehead on his table, his plastic aviator glasses in his fist.