A Thousand Pardons (12 page)

He decided that his fear was a function of simple instinct and that there was nothing to be done about it. On his last morning in the cabin he was awake at dawn, stripping the bed and sweeping up with a broom he’d found. Through the window, as the light slid over the frozen lake, he could see that there was someone out there, maybe a hundred yards offshore, sitting in front of a hole in the ice. The thermometer on the porch read nine degrees. Man, Ben thought. For what? He drank a cup of instant coffee while staring at the guy, who did not move; then he rinsed out the cup, put the key to the cabin on the lintel over the front door, and drove off to meet the authorities.

CRISIS MANAGEMENT was what she had learned to call it, but Helen’s sense of her own particular niche in the world of public relations—in the realm, as Harvey had taught her to think of it, of public storytelling—didn’t get much more sophisticated than that. She had no idea how to draw attention to her own achievements, or how to leverage the exposure (such as when the
Times
mentioned her in a sidebar after Bratkowski was censured by the city council) that sometimes came her way as an accidental but still natural consequence of her success. She didn’t know how to find new clients—she just said yes or no to those who approached her, and in fact she didn’t yet feel she had the luxury of saying no to anyone. She didn’t know how, or else just lacked the aggression, to be the first one to cold-call whenever something went publicly wrong: a schoolteacher who was dating a student, a hair salon that burned a client’s skin, a charity whose books were cooked. Her business model, and Mona’s, was basically to pick up the phone when it rang. It was no way to get rich, that was for sure. It was a formula for getting by, and that’s what they were all doing, with no sort of plan or even provision for the future, and with no one in her life who might offer her advice.

She did have some sense of what her skills were, even if they seemed less like skills than like instincts. She got powerful men to apologize. Maybe women too, though she was a bit curious about that one herself since she’d never yet taken on a female client. The thing was, she seemed able to do it without even trying that hard. She got them to confess because they didn’t seem to want to lie to her. Once this threshold had been crossed, it was a relatively simple matter to stand nearby while they confessed to the world at large via a TV camera or a microphone, though Helen frequently had the sensation that even in that broadcast moment the camera and the mike were still somehow basically surrogates or fetishes, material symbols of herself.

Of course she worried too that this talent for inducing apology was maybe more of a lucrative quality than a personally attractive one. In the interest of avoiding hypocrisy, she took time to reflect that she was
far from guilt-free herself. Her ex-husband may have had a lot to answer for over the last year or two, but the larger fact was he had turned from one sort of man in his twenties to a very different sort in his forties, and the only X factor to point to there, the only new element, was her. She had implicitly promised her daughter a warm, stable home—had taken her from the land of her birth and spirited her around the world on the basis of that promise—and now, when Sara wasn’t in a gigantic and socially imposing public middle school where she knew no one, she was in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with her exhausted mother, ordering out for dinner, trying to remember to fold out the couch before falling asleep. (Helen had offered her the bedroom, but it was much smaller than the living room and had no TV in it.) And then there was Harvey’s death, which groundless pride had kept her from preventing and which had changed numerous lives for the worse. Who was she to tell other people to confront their sins and move on?

Still, they kept coming, if not exactly in droves. In March she got her first corporate call, even if only a local one: Amalgamated Supermarkets, a low-end grocery chain that hung on as a stubbornly sane alternative to the efflorescence of Whole Foods and Gourmet Garages, had a PR nightmare when some young mother bought a bunch of bananas with razors stuck in them. She found this out by feeding them to her children, one of whom almost died. Helen read the story over someone’s shoulder on the bus to the office, and for once her first thought was, I wonder if they’ll call us. In fact they had left a voice mail already. She headed right back uptown to Amalgamated’s corporate office, and, after a few minutes with the alarmingly young borough manager who had phoned her, she was fully if not pleasantly engaged.

“I hate it that you’re here,” he said. “It’s like a visit from the Grim Reaper. And the thing is, we didn’t do anything wrong. This is all so fucking unfair.”

“What’s unfair?” Helen asked him. He seemed young enough to be her son; he was somebody’s son, more than likely, or he wouldn’t have had an executive’s job at his age.

“Ever tried to get a razor into a banana?” he said, a little louder than necessary. “You can’t do it! It can’t be done! I sat here at my desk
last night and tried!” He held up his hands; three of his fingertips had bandages on them. “It is obvious that this broad did it herself, to try to work up a bogus lawsuit, because that’s easier than getting a job and working, a lawsuit that we’ll settle to make it go away, regardless of its transparent fucking bogusness, pardon my French, which is why I hate meetings with PR people, because PR people are always telling you to roll over and stick your ass in the air and settle, when every bone in my body is telling me we should fight this.”

Helen felt the sort of counterintuitive calm blooming in her that she had learned to expect in these situations. “You think this woman fed her son a razor blade,” she said, “to try to get grounds for a lawsuit?”

In reply the young executive—who was wearing one of those striped dress shirts with a white collar; Lord, Helen hated those shirts, they were like sandwich boards for assholes—reached into his top drawer, pulled out a file folder, and dropped it theatrically on the desk between them. “Her psychiatric file,” he said. “I had a PI pull it yesterday, and he’s got this much already. Would you like to have a look?”

“No,” Helen said. “Here’s what you do with that. You give it to your lawyer, and if you have already made another copy of it, you run that copy through the shredder. I don’t want anyone here to refer to it in public, not even by accident, and the easiest way to ensure that is for no one to have seen it in the first place.”

The man in the asshole shirt leaned forward, red-faced. Clearly it was going to take a little extra work to convert this guy. “I don’t understand you people,” he said. “You are giving this crazy bitch a license to steal from us. Where is this Harvey guy, anyway? I think a man might understand my point of view a little better.”

You people? Whom did he think she was there representing? “No one is going to steal from you,” she said. “That’s what you pay lawyers to make sure of. They will go behind closed doors and they will probably take this poor, sick woman apart, but it is important that that happens where no one else can see it. I work in the realm of the seen.”

“Okay,” he said.

“What I’m doing for you has nothing to do with money.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Well, okay, it does,” Helen said. “But only indirectly. That is, if you act correctly now, even against what you may think of as your interest, the reward will come to you and to Amalgamated later, down the road, as a result.”

He had begun to smile obnoxiously. “I have a cousin,” he said, “who’s in a church like this.”

Helen had no idea what he was talking about; she closed her eyes and shook her head once, to get herself back on track. “We have to think of it in terms of storytelling,” she said. “Imagine how you want the customers to think of Amalgamated, say, two months from now. Then we begin to tell the story that leads them to that place. If it’s a story of our guilt, of our desire to make amends, if that’s how it begins, then so be it. You have to take the long view, even if it means making some sacrifices now in the service of that greater truth.”

He tipped back in his chair. She could see he was coming around, just like they always did. “See, though, I keep coming back,” he said, “to the fact that we very probably, very likely, didn’t do anything wrong here.”

“But you don’t know. You don’t know, I don’t know, nobody knows. People want to believe you did something wrong, though. And if you keep denying what they believe, that just strengthens their suspicion. You’re already guilty in their minds. But if you take it upon yourself, if you just agree to own it, then they’re yours, then you’re the one making the choices that drive the story from that point forward. If it helps you, you can think of it as a way of making up for other things you really did do, other more legitimate grievances people might have against you—a way to atone for sins you aren’t even necessarily aware of.”

He grinned, and shook his head. “Okay, Sister,” he said. “You’re hired. Now what do we do next?”

She raised her fee again, and they paid it without a peep; but she and Sara were still just scraping by, not in debt or wanting for anything but not setting any money aside either. Everything was so overpriced here. She’d been stupid to sign the lease on this Upper East Side one-bedroom, but it was in the district zoned for a public middle school everyone said was excellent, and so she’d grabbed it, even though Sara
had only about four months of eighth grade left anyway and then the whole good-school panic would begin all over again. She’d told herself that if there ever came a day when the agency had paid all its debts and made its payroll and still had twenty thousand dollars in the bank, she would shut the place down and give the money to the seemingly resourceless Michael: she’d since lowered that hypothetical figure to fifteen thousand, but in any case it was nowhere in sight. Expenses were few yet still managed, every month, to take her by embarrassing surprise. As for the sale of the Rensselaer Valley house, she’d accepted an offer back in December, but since then the process had slowed to a crawl, and though she checked in with Bonifacio once a week or so, they didn’t even have a closing date yet.

Her great fear was always how her ongoing failure to restabilize their lives might be delaying Sara’s recovery from all the trauma of the fall; but Sara, even if she didn’t care to give her mother the satisfaction of admitting it, felt she was coping with uncertainty just fine. School, which under normal circumstances was pretty much your whole life at that age, now felt strangely and sort of exhilaratingly meaningless to her. She would be there for only one semester anyway, before everyone dispersed for the summer and then to high school. And it wasn’t like Rensselaer Valley, where there was pretty much only one high school to go to, so that all the cliques basically just relocated to a new building. You overheard some kids talking about the SHS test, or about private school, and a few delusional girls who thought they were talented enough to get into LaGuardia or Sinatra. But the vast majority would scatter in June and head off in September to one of three sort-of-nearby high schools, each of them, from what Sara overheard, even more vast and unsightly and perfunctory and treacherous than whatever middle school you had just graduated from. Wherever Sara wound up next year, she’d be starting over, socially and academically, yet again. She’d moved to New York too late to take the SHS exam anyway, not that she would have passed it, even though everyone seemed to think Asians passed it automatically. She hadn’t met anyone who’d passed it.

Unexpectedly, all of these aspects of her new life that should have depressed her—no friends, no sense of her own near-term future, everything
and everyone brand new and a total cipher—made her feel pretty bullish instead. It was like getting a cosmic do-over in terms of who you even were. It wasn’t just that no one seemed to know or care who her father was. That was the kind of story that would have bored an eighth grader to death anyway: it was more of an old-people scandal, the type of scandal that would have been on somebody’s parents’ radar, maybe, if she’d ever been invited to meet anybody else’s parents, which she had not. But it was fantastic, in a way, not knowing anyone or, rather, being unknown to everyone. She wasn’t really engaged in reinventing herself, not yet, but she had a strong and pleasing sense of being dormant, like a one-girl sleeper cell, until she got the lay of the land and figured out where and how she wanted the next few years to go.

She was unused to so much time alone, not least at home, where her mom, even without her former commute, was so tired at night that there was zero supervision in terms of homework. But the homework was easily handled anyway. It was such a relief after eighth grade in Rensselaer Valley, where everyone stressed out constantly and bragged about how little sleep they got. She couldn’t believe how little everyone here seemed to care about standing out in that way. It was really liberating. The school didn’t have any sort of team sports program—even the nominal playground was now filled with trailers brought in to provide extra classroom space. Her mom did get it sufficiently together to sign her up for an after-school basketball league on the West Side. Tuesday and Friday she rode the bus back and forth to Broadway with her uniform on under her clothes. And that too was just unbelievably low-key compared to what she was used to: no tryouts, no screaming coaches, no practices even, just games. Just playing.