She heard the sound of voices in the hall and inhaled the aroma of pipe tobacco floating over the frosted glass partition of her cubicle. The pipe would belong to Carl Covington, a faintly foppish man with a mane of white hair that he wore just a little too long. Carl aspired to be a grand old man of publishing, but it was difficult to be a grand old man of publishing when the house you worked for was owned by an only slightly aging wunderkind of publishing. The voices belonged to Faith Silver, whose claim to fame was a brief friendship with Dorothy Parker in their heyday, and Bill Quarrels, a swaggering overgrown boy with a big brutal body and an adolescent mind. According to one of the secretaries who commuted from the same Westchester town as Bill, every morning as he stepped off the train in Grand Central Terminal, he put his hand in his pocket and slipped off his wedding ring, and every evening as he boarded the train home, he slipped it on again. The three of them were on their way to the Wednesday editorial meeting.
Faith stuck her head with its dark, dated Dorothy Parker bob around the partition of the cubicle. “Time to gird the loins for combat,” she said.
Charlotte looked up from the pale blue envelope. As if it had a will of its own, it fell into the wastebasket. She stood. “I’ll be along in a minute.”
The voices moved on down the hall.
She began gathering papers, then thought better of it, opened the bottom drawer of the desk, lifted out her handbag, and took out her compact and lipstick. She believed in going into these meetings with all flags flying.
As she lifted the powder puff and began to dab, she brought the compact closer to examine her skin. The fine porcelain grain that had made her vain as a girl was coarser now, but at least the sickly yellow cast of those years was gone. She smoothed the streak of white that ran through her dark hair. Occasionally she thought of dyeing it, but somehow she’d never got around to doing so. She wasn’t hanging on to it as a reminder. She just liked the dramatic effect. Her fingertips smoothed the web of fine lines beside her eyes, as if she could massage them out of existence, though she knew that was impossible. Perhaps it wasn’t even desirable. A few weeks earlier, an enterprising saleswoman in the cosmetics department of Saks Fifth Avenue had tried to sell her a cream to get rid of them. “It will erase your past,” she’d said.
The promise had been so terrifying in its appeal that she’d put down the tube of Helena Rubinstein lipstick she’d been about to buy, turned, and walked out of the store. No one but a fool would try to erase the past. The only hope was to stand guard against it.
Even now, in her dreams, she heard Vivi crying, not the childish whimpers and sobs of temporary discomfort but a shrieking rage born of an empty belly, and chilled-through bones, and the agony of rashes and bites and festering sores. Sometimes the crying in the dream was so loud that it wrenched her awake, and she sprang out of bed before she realized the sound was only in her head. Then, still sweating, she took the few steps down the short hall from her room to her daughter’s and stood beside the bed, listening to Vivi’s breath coming soft and safe in the miraculous New York night that was broken not by boots on the stairs or banging on the door but only by the occasional siren screaming that help rather than trouble was on the way.
Waking hours brought different nightmares about her daughter. Every cough was the first sign of tuberculosis, every stomach upset the harbinger of a bug that had been lying dormant, every rash the return of disease, and the knowledge that these days there was penicillin to treat it didn’t mitigate the terror. Vivi could not possibly have escaped without consequences. Her slight fourteen-year-old body had to be pregnant with dormant disaster.
Sitting in the audience at school performances, she measured Vivi against the other girls. Was she the runt of the litter? Were her bones permanently deformed by malnutrition? Had her mother’s fear and remorse scarred her psyche? But standing beside her classmates in her starched white blouse and blue jumper, Vivi bore no evidence of earlier hardships. Her hair gleamed dark and glossy in the glare from the overhead lights. Her legs stretched long and coltish in the navy-blue knee socks. Her wide smile revealed a sunny streak and improbably white teeth. All the hours Charlotte had spent queueing for food, every mouthful she hadn’t eaten so Vivi could, every chance she’d taken, even the compromises she’d made had been worth it. Vivi looked just like her classmates, only better.
Nonetheless, some differences did set her apart. She was one of twelve students, a single representative in each class, on scholarship. The other girls inhabited sprawling apartments, duplexes, and penthouses on Park and Fifth Avenues filled with parents and siblings, dogs and domestic help. Vivi lived with her mother in four small rooms on the top floor of an old—in America, a seventy-year-old building was considered old—brownstone on East Ninety-First Street. At Christmas, other girls headed to grandparents who inhabited Currier and Ives landscapes, or north or west to ski, or south to the sun. Vivi and her mother carried a small tree home from a stand on Ninety-Sixth Street, put it up in a corner of the living room, and decorated it with ornaments bought at B. Altman the first year they were here, and added to annually. The ornaments were new, but the tree, Charlotte insisted, was a tradition. Her family had always celebrated Christmas. It had taken Hitler, she liked to say, to make her a Jew. That was the other thing that set Vivi apart. There were fewer Jewish girls in the school than scholarship students. Neither condition was ever mentioned, at least in polite company, as the phrase went.
The point was, despite those deprivations and disadvantages, Vivi was flourishing. Only the other night, sitting in the living room, Charlotte had looked up from the manuscript she was reading and seen Vivi at the dining table doing her homework. There was a desk in her room, but she liked being near her mother. The experts whom Charlotte read said that would soon stop, but she didn’t believe them. Experts dealt in generalizations. She and Vivi were singular. Vivi had been sitting with one foot in her regulation brown oxford tucked under her, a silky curtain of dark hair falling forward as she bent over her book, her mouth pursed in concentration. Looking across the room at her, Charlotte had barely been able to keep from shouting with joy at the sheer miracle of it.
She put her handbag back in the drawer, left the cubicle, and started down the hall to the conference room.
Horace Field was already in his place at the head of the long table. He was always the first to arrive at meetings. That was partly the result of his impatience, but only partly. He sat, leaning back in his chair, but the relaxed pose and the loose Harris tweed jacket couldn’t hide the dormant power of his muscled shoulders and arms. Sometimes Charlotte wondered if, in his mind’s eye, he was still the lean loping young man, the former college tennis player, she’d seen in a photograph in an old issue of Publishers Weekly from before the war. In the picture, he sported a trim mustache, and as she’d sat at her desk studying it, she’d been sure he’d grown it to look older. She’d met him once briefly at the time, but she had been too young herself to realize how young he was. He really had been a boy wonder. The mustache was gone now, and his hairline was beginning to recede. She’d noticed that when Carl Covington looked at him, he couldn’t help stroking his own white mane. Horace must have noticed it, too, because once he’d barked at Carl to stop petting himself like a goddamn dog. Horace’s face, beneath the receding hairline, was still boyish, except occasionally, when he didn’t know he was being watched. Then frown lines, no, fury lines settled between his eyes, which were icy blue and watchful. No one was going to blindside him.