Angels of Detroit (12 page)

“I mentioned we’re hiring a consultant,” Tiphany began again, “that we’re going to discredit—”

“You’d have me deny it all,” Mrs. Freeman said, waving the paper at her assistant and then dropping it back on top of the folder before turning once again to the window.

Mrs. Freeman was conscious of noises behind her, whiny ones that brushed up against her neck and made her shiver, but she found that if she concentrated her attention elsewhere, down into the alley below, for instance, the sound grew less and less irritating until finally it went away.

Mrs. Freeman knew what Arthur wanted to hear, and she could see even in a quick skimming that Tiphany had provided it: denial, obfuscation. But now, turning her gaze west toward the suburbs, in the direction of her home, where her husband was at that moment eating plain yogurt and scanning the newspaper for arcane facts with which to quiz her over dinner, Mrs. Freeman decided that this time she could not, would not, give Arthur the answer he was looking for.

“This particular catastrophe,” she said, addressing the wet, misty interstate overpass outside her window, “is what was once, in more prosaic times, known as ‘collateral damage.’ But in recent years we have begun to think of such casualties as remnants of a primitive past—something akin to raccoon coats and flagpole sitting. We seem to have forgotten that in wars people die, and not because of the quality of our craftsmanship, but because war is distasteful.”

Yes, she thought, she would say that and not a word more. The company expected her to apply a balm, as if with some possible combination of syllables she could return charred schools to their virgin state—as if it were her responsibility, as if she or the company had anything to apologize for. A story might come out in the paper. Stories were always coming out in papers. There would be no point in challenging the facts, which would undoubtedly be correct: sometimes missiles landed where they shouldn’t. Sad? Yes. But scandalous? Not at all. It was simply inevitable, one of the unfortunate costs of war.

Mrs. Freeman recalled a story she had once heard from one of her more philosophically inclined acquaintances—a rare highlight from an otherwise tiresome dinner party. The story was about a Swiss engineer, a man who around the time of the First World War had come to the United States determined to answer the problem of how
to drop bombs from airplanes. That is, so the bombs might hit an actual target, rather than landing wherever they might, left to guesswork and chance and the pull of gravity. It was a problem no one until then had managed to solve. The Swiss engineer’s solution, after years of work, involved gyroscopes and gears and more math and physics than Mrs. Freeman could ever hope to understand. But the details were beside the point. The curious piece was the engineer’s motivation: not to win wars, but to do God’s will. He was a good Christian, of the old-fashioned variety. He believed a precise bombsight would reduce human suffering, narrowing destruction only to what needed to be destroyed. And he succeeded, introducing the precision and accuracy no one else could. And yet still one nagging problem remained, then as now: a bombsight depended, above all else, on sight. Over the last decade, HSI’s engineers had developed a drone that could blow the cap off a pop bottle from thirty thousand feet. But first you still had to know where the bottle cap was.

Were it up to Mrs. Freeman, there would be no blowing up of anything. She would let the missiles rust in their weapon bays, deterrents for worst-case scenarios. But as long as there was a need, she felt no guilt about her work; nor could she agree with those cloudy-minded idealists who had begun to pollute the plaza outside the building like so much discarded chewing gum. She would gladly add her name to any list of signatories opposed to armed aggression, but she was no longer naïve enough to believe one could dissolve an army and defend oneself instead with wishful thinking. Arthur might fret and Tiphany plot, but in this case they were beyond reproach, and with nothing left to be resolved, Mrs. Freeman saw no reason to attend to the buzz of her intercom. Let it nag if it wished. She had moved on.

“Your one-fifteen,” cracked a voice over the speakerphone, Tiphany changing tacks.

“Fine,” Mrs. Freeman called over her shoulder. “Send him in.” And in the pause that followed, she caught herself gazing around her office,
one of the few habits of her former life she had never managed to break—the need to make sure everything was in order before company arrived. But the place was as it always was, as she had aspired for it to be: good enough. It was not the largest or most impressive room in the building, but Mrs. Freeman had grown tired of offices she couldn’t pace without getting winded. On the day she’d toured the third floor of the newly constructed HSI Building, scouting for the office that would be her hermitage five days a week, Mrs. Freeman had taken only one look out the windows at the front of the building, at the view of a street lined with other office buildings, all that sterile glass like dead shark eyes. That day Mrs. Freeman had determined the proper place for her was as far from all that as she could get, which proved to be a room designated to hold file cabinets, along a forgotten corridor at the back of the building. Her new office had the same full wall of windows as the rest of her colleagues, but hers were shaded, without need for blinds or tints, by the interstate overpass. Here the landscape was of empty billboards and brick walls painted with faded advertisements, all of which, even if they were only remnants, comforted her like a favorite moth-eaten sweater, reminding her of a familiar world, the very industrial wasteland where she’d gotten her start.

With the exception of her office and those belonging to the lowest rung and most unnecessary members of middle management, the rest of the rooms overlooking the alley housed files or hosted meetings with clients and suppliers no one cared to impress. The relative squalor in which Mrs. Freeman worked clearly upset her administrative assistant, whose makeshift desk in the darkest, most out-of-the-way corner of the hallway was degrading and embarrassing and was most likely the catalyst for Tiphany’s designs and ambitions. But Mrs. Freeman felt she had reached an age at which her comfort, as well as her diversions, could deservedly come at someone else’s inconvenience. Surely she had earned that much.

Mrs. Freeman wished now that she had told Tiphany that she wasn’t ready to see her one-fifteen. There were so many things she would
rather have been doing than to have to endure yet another meeting, but had Mrs. Freeman tried to tell Tiphany—whose
ph
always made her bite her lower lip a fraction of a second too long—that she was busy or indisposed or that she needed to reschedule, she knew what the young woman would have said, so well was she conditioned:
Wouldn’t it be better to see him now, Ruth, while you have a few minutes, rather than later when you’ll have to work around your afternoon appointments? You have a busy day …
Et cetera, et cetera, and, of course, Tiphany would then proceed to remind Mrs. Freeman about some other meeting, which admittedly Mrs. Freeman would also have forgotten, and Tiphany would recall to her some early business dinner with someone named Steve, one of the many Steves with whom Mrs. Freeman was always having to eat an early business dinner. Or if not dinner, it would be the symphony or the ballet with her husband, who would be sullen later were she to stand him up, and all these reminders would be delivered in such a way as to suggest that any change in plans might topple the system altogether.

“Hello?”

Mrs. Freeman turned to discover a young man with dirty blond hair standing uncomfortably in her doorway, looking as if he intended to ask her for directions.

“Yes,” she said, “yes, what is it?” And she cocked her head to signal she was already moving on.

“Ruth Freeman?” The quaver in the young man’s voice clashed with the bright confidence of his smile.

Her one-fifteen. Yes, of course, she remembered now. A reporter of some sort from one of the papers, a man to whom she had promised a few minutes of her time. Fine. But giving the young man a second look, Mrs. Freeman found herself growing less certain. The person standing in her doorway was a tall, handsome young man, his jaw square, his white teeth strikingly rectangular. There was a color to his skin that suggested a familiarity with sunlight. Except for the standard-issue khakis and the light-blue button-down shirt, the young
man looked nothing at all like a reporter, the pale, sickly breed that generally eked out its existence under the fluorescent tubes of newsrooms.

But perhaps, she supposed, her notions about newspapermen were becoming old-fashioned. Those dinosaurs were dying, and soon, she understood, the newspapers themselves would be extinct. But how then would her poor husband fill the hours? Perhaps this young man was one of those emissaries from the Internet age, in his well-worn Chelsea boots, the only part of the ensemble that suited him.

He had called her two days before to set up this meeting, saying he wanted to talk about the protests, about the drone, about the school, about the accident. Tiphany had tried to tell Mrs. Freeman it was a bad idea.

“Come,” Mrs. Freeman said, “come,” and she waved the young man over to the window. But he had taken only half a step when Tiphany’s voice erupted again from the speakerphone.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Ruth,” the voice lied. “I just wanted to remind you the board meeting has been moved up to one-thirty. I’m just about finished with the presentation for Arthur—”

Taking one last disappointed glimpse out the window, Mrs. Freeman shuffled her flat-heeled shoes over to her desk, cutting Tiphany off before she could say any more. The silence that followed would be fleeting, Mrs. Freeman knew, but nonetheless she smiled at the young man, and his long eyelashes fluttered in return, and for a moment it almost seemed he was he trying to flirt with her. Or did he sense the conspiracy she was inviting him to share?

Still, though, she couldn’t quite shake the peculiar feeling she had about this young man, with his broad shoulders and his gelled hair. He was exactly the sort of young man she was used to seeing in five-thousand-dollar suits strutting the marble halls of investment banks, the sort of young man who at an earlier age would have been charging off Viking ships, hell-bent on rape and pillage. Every woman in her circle, it seemed, could lay claim to at least one such son. Cassandra
Boyle had two—twins even—and every time she saw them, Mrs. Freeman felt a chill.

“Come in,” Mrs. Freeman said again, “and shut the door behind you.” Perhaps it was the mother in her, but her first instinct, as he approached, was to look around her desk—an executive excess large enough for five or six of her employees to share—for something to offer the young man. Finding nothing other than a stale, half-filled cup of coffee with a stained rim, she frowned apologetically and directed him toward a chair.

As the young man approached, he paused to glance out the window, and Mrs. Freeman saw the rain had stopped. Some of the clouds had even parted. But now, improbably, fat white flakes appeared to be falling from the sky.

“Is that snow?” she said. And then, “It’s almost the middle of May.”

“You know what they say,” the young man said hesitantly, and a single ray of sunshine streaked through the glass, falling upon his cheek. “Global—”

“What are you?” Mrs. Freeman asked, studying him now for the first time in profile. “Twenty-five?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your age,” Mrs. Freeman said.

The young man hesitated, remaining at the window but eyeing the chair, as if torn between the two. “Eight,” he said. “Twenty-eight,” and his Adam’s apple poked out above the top button of his shirt.

“I was thirty-seven when I got my first job,” Mrs. Freeman said, leaning back in her chair. “Thirty-seven.” She paused to read his reaction, but the young man seemed to have little idea what to make of this. “I’m now nearly twice as old as I was then,” Mrs. Freeman continued, “but I still remember the day of my interview. I remember it vividly. On the man’s desk there was a box of cigars in a fine wooden case etched with fleurs-de-lis, and I recall thinking it magnificent, like nothing I’d ever seen, representing everything I’d imagined an important businessman being. I’d never worked a day in my
life, and I was starting at the bottom of the bottom. It was the year I finally finished college. My first husband and I had married young, and I was only nineteen when my first daughter was born. My second came a year later. I raised them for fifteen years, and when they were finally old enough to take care of themselves, I went to college. I had no qualms about leaving my first husband to do it. I was thirty-seven, and I’d never had a cigar.

“The man who was interviewing me was named Maxwell, I believe, undoubtedly his last name, since in those days I would never have had occasion to use his first. Mr. Maxwell was a connoisseur of fine cigars, and even kept a what-do-you-call-it … humidor in his office. I remember being surprised at how otherwise shabby his office was, considering that Mr. Maxwell owned a textile company, which he had inherited from his father, who had inherited it from his father, and he from his. For all I know, they brought a bolt of cloth over with them on the
Mayflower
. As Mr. Maxwell’s assistant, I was obliged to take minutes during meetings with his management staff. I was the only one to whom he never offered a cigar. And do you know what?” Mrs. Freeman said, inching toward the edge of her seat. “I’m one of those managers now. I have been for a very long time. I’ve gone through more than thirty years of meetings since then—more than your entire life—and I’ve still never been offered a cigar.”

Mrs. Freeman wished she had a box of her own now, a fine box to offer the young man. She knew how it was done. She had watched captains of industry guillotine the tips and light them, sucking grotesquely. She knew how they smelled. She knew everything except how they tasted.

“Coffee?” she said.

“Please.”

Mrs. Freeman gestured for him to sit, and with a finger raised in expectation, she searched the instrument panel of the phone for her administrative assistant’s extension.