A Thousand Pardons (8 page)

Because she was the one who had killed Harvey. She knew it was ridiculous, which was why she’d never said it out loud to anyone, but the fact remained that he had offered himself to her and she had rejected him and patted him condescendingly on his drunken head and sent him off to his death. She’d watched through the Peking Grill window to make sure he got into a cab, it was true, but what consolation was it to know that you’d done the minimum, when there was something more that you might have done, only you didn’t do it? She could have called his cellphone to make sure he’d checked in to the Roosevelt, or she could have called the hotel itself. She could, for that matter, just have had sex with him, and then waited thirty seconds until he fell asleep and taken the train back to Rensselaer Valley an hour late and told Sara some lie to explain it and Harvey would still be alive now. Was she too good for that, did she imagine? It would have been the first sex she’d had in at least a year, probably longer. Maybe it was the last such proposition she’d ever get. If so, it would serve her right. With her haughtiness and her rectitude and her timidity, she had sent that sweet man on the road to die. She was too afraid even to tell his son that she was sorry for his loss, for fear that he would see right through her civilities to all she knew.

But now a second chance had come her way to speak to Michael, and if she thought the first one was potentially awkward, it had little on what awaited her this afternoon. Harvey didn’t have a regular accountant, it seemed, but he did have a lawyer, and she and Michael had been summoned to the lawyer’s office at 2:30. Helen had spoken on the phone to this charmless gentleman, whose last name was Scapelli, for a couple of hours already, and so she knew what to expect from this meeting, though Michael did not. Scapelli’s office had no waiting room or reception area, so Helen sat and waited in a chair about two feet from his desk as he unself-consciously took phone calls about other matters. The recessed shelves above and behind him, where she might have expected to see diplomas or family photos, were given over to a large collection of mounted, autographed baseballs. When Michael
got off the elevator at about 2:45, though she remembered him vividly she was astonished to see him as he apparently dressed every day, even for a meeting such as this: a short-sleeved Roots t-shirt worn over a long-sleeved one, torn jeans, and black Converse sneakers of the type (if not the color) that was popular when Helen herself was a kid. Michael, she had reason to know, was thirty-two years old. He was a musician and a DJ, which, Harvey had once explained to her, were really the same thing in this day and age. Harvey had left him everything, which consisted of the house in New Paltz, the now-totaled car, and the business.

“Have a seat, Michael,” Scapelli said absently, even though Michael had not waited for the invitation. He slumped in the tattered armchair beside Helen’s and nodded to her, a little hesitantly, as if he wasn’t sure the two of them were there for the same meeting.

“Helen Armstead,” she said to him. “I worked for your dad.”

“What’s up,” Michael said.

“So we are technically here for the reading of your father’s will,” Scapelli said, “though it’s kind of a formality in this case because you both already know what’s in it and it’s only about five lines long anyway. We’ve already talked about the house—have you changed your mind about any of that?”

“Nope,” Michael said. “Sell that puppy.”

Neither man’s face betrayed a hint of the surprise Helen felt at this bit of unsentimentality. What business of hers was it, though? Still, she couldn’t help feeling a kind of empathetic sting on behalf of the young man’s mother. Michael glanced at her, suddenly embarrassed.

“I mean, lots of good memories there and whatnot,” he said. “But New Paltz? Professionally it’s just not possible for me. Plus the fact is I really need the money.”

“Of course,” Helen said. “I mean, it’s entirely up to you.”

“Plus who wants to be that guy? The guy living in his dead parents’ house?”

“Which brings us to the business at hand,” Scapelli said. “Your father didn’t keep the most meticulous records, but we’ve spent the last few days doing some forensic work—”

“Say what?” Michael said.

“Some forensic accounting work, that’s just the term for it, and, in a nutshell, your father’s estate right now consists mostly of debt. The big issue is income tax, on which he was apparently a little behind. Now don’t worry, you’re not legally responsible for that debt just because he willed his estate to you. We can just declare Harvey Aaron Public Relations a bankrupt entity and shut it down, and, from your point of view, that’s that. But there are other ways to go as well, which is why Ms. Armstead is here with us today.” He nodded meaningfully at Helen to let her know, as if they had rehearsed all this, that here was her cue.

Helen looked at Michael’s boyish face—his boyish expression, actually; the face itself was no longer in that range—as he struggled to overcome his own seeming fatigue enough not to lose the thread of what was going on. “I don’t know how much you and your dad talked about his agency,” she said, “but the tragic—one of the tragic things about his death was that it came just at the time when, after a long slump, it was really starting to turn around again. He had that great, very public success with Peking Grill, I’m sure he told you about that—”

Michael raised his eyebrows as if she were speaking some other language.

“And in the wake of that,” she went on desperately, “a number of new clients signed on, more than he’d had in many years.” She was just improvising that last flourish, in an effort to say something that would cause some emotion to register on Harvey’s son’s face; but she assumed it was true, and Scapelli didn’t say or do anything to contradict her. “He was such a decent man, your father, and everyone feels so terrible that just when people were recognizing his basic, his basic—”

“So what we are proposing,” Scapelli prompted her, with a kind of gentlemanly impatience.

“So what we are proposing, is that we keep the business open for a while, indefinitely really, because if we just finish up the work we’ve already been hired to do, the fees due on those existing contracts will cancel out the debt that your father was in, and if things keep going the
way they’ve been going, after let’s say nine months or a year there should even be a little bit of a legacy for you, an inheritance, not a ton of money but definitely, definitely the way your father would have wanted it. I know he loved you very, very much.” How she knew that, she could not have said, but she felt the truth of it, and anyway he didn’t seem to disagree.

Michael lowered his eyes for a few seconds, then looked back at her. “You’re not asking me to take over the business?” he said.

“Not at all. Just to delay shutting it down, via bankruptcy or any other way.”

“Then who
is
taking over the business?”

Helen colored. “His staff,” she said. “All of us. I mean, you could also look at it as a good deed in that you wouldn’t be putting people out of work.”

“And—no disrespect or anything, it’s just I don’t know—who are you? I mean were you his assistant or something?”

She swallowed. “I’m the junior vice president,” she said.

Scapelli had begun discreetly looking at his watch. He was no older than she was, and there had to be some story behind his ending up in this one-man practice with its water-stained ceiling and mismatched furniture, but she didn’t imagine she’d ever learn it. “In a nutshell, you’re being asked to do nothing,” he said to Michael. “Do you have any problem with that?”

“Nosirree,” said Michael.

“Terrific. On my end I will basically be going into stall mode with the IRS and the agency’s other creditors, which is a lot easier to do now that your father, so to speak, has the ultimate waiver. Anything that helps them collect, they’ll be open to. As for you, you’re not at any personal risk if things don’t go as well as Helen here seems to think they will, not for several months anyway. At the first whiff of trouble, we can just file Chapter Eleven and case closed. Any further questions, Michael?”

“No,” Michael said gratefully; like Scapelli, he seemed in a hurry to be done with this meeting, in fact to be done thinking about it, despite the momentous nature, to Helen’s mind, of everything that was
being discussed. It would have been easy to read Michael’s almost panicky dismissal of his father’s life’s work as ungrateful or unfeeling, she thought, but she saw in it nothing worse than a desire to get used to his new circumstances as quickly as possible, to look only forward, the way you were advised to stare, on a tightrope or a bridge or some other precariously high place, straight ahead rather than down.

The two men were standing and shaking hands, and then Scapelli was putting his lifeless hand in hers to signal that their appointment was over. “I imagine there will be some paperwork to fill out?” Helen said genially, not entirely sure what she was talking about.

“Not really,” Scapelli said.

There was only one elevator, and so Helen and Michael rode down together in uncomfortable silence. There wasn’t even an attendant in the lobby, if it was fair to describe the half-lit rectangle between the elevator and the front door as a lobby in the first place. The building’s main security system seemed to be its own essential undesirability, which left it all but invisible. Helen felt a sudden affinity for buildings like this one and the tentative, marginal enterprises they housed, much like the building that housed Harvey Aaron Public Relations, the marginal enterprise of which she had apparently just put herself in charge. Still, she did not feel as scared as she figured common sense would probably dictate. On the street it was unseasonably warm for the beginning of November. “Which way are you going?” she said to Michael.

“Which way are
you
going?” was his answer.

She pointed north with her thumb. “I think I’ll walk back,” she said. “Take the air.”

“I’m getting on the F,” he said in a relieved tone that suggested the F was in the opposite direction. But then he did not move in that direction right away. “So,” he said. “I mean, is there any reason for us to be in touch?”

She felt as if she was going to cry. “I think it would be a good idea,” she said. “Just from time to time. Of course you have the number there. And you could come by, too, any time. I mean, you’re the boss. Literally.”

He laughed at that, a little. “You know,” he said, “I have to admit, all these years I never really got what it was my dad did all day.”

“I didn’t at first either,” she said. “That was what we talked about the very first time we met. His explanation was lovely, actually. I’ve used it myself many times since then.”

But Michael wasn’t listening closely enough to take the bait. “I mean I used to Google him, for God’s sake, and nothing came up. Do you even know how impossible that is?” He frowned. “Not to mention that you guys don’t even have a website, which is like insane in this day and age.”

“That’s right, we don’t,” Helen said. “We really should. Is that something you’d know how to set up?”

He rolled his eyes to indicate the childish level of expertise required. But she could see the smile he was trying to suppress too. Really, even though he may have been too old to pull off the look and accompanying career path that he seemed determined to pull off, emotionally he still read as a little boy.

“Why don’t you come by in the next day or two,” she said, feeling triumphant, “and help us out with that? Whenever is good for you. Just come by.”

He nodded, and they shook hands and set off in opposite directions, Michael to the F, Helen to the forlorn little office to tell Mona and Nevaeh that they still had jobs. That was a moment to look forward to. Neither woman seemed to have much love for the work itself, but a job was a job, and insurance was insurance, and they were all mothers.

BACK AT THE AGENCY the three women whooped and threw up their hands and even exchanged hugs, something that would have been unthinkable not that many weeks ago; and Helen was full of optimism for the business, based, as she readily admitted to herself later on the train home, less on any sort of practical sense of how to run things or plan for the future than on the loud, unembarrassed, supportive sororal energy that now suffused the small office, where before there had been mostly
sullen time marking and an excessive emphasis on personal privacy. Mona and Nevaeh thanked her tearfully for saving their jobs, held her hand, and told her sentimentally that this was just how Harvey would have wanted it and that he would be proud of her. Then, two weeks later, Nevaeh stood up calmly from her desk on a Friday afternoon and announced to Helen that today would be her last day.

Helen could not believe her ears. It was plain from the studiously passive look on Mona’s face that she had known this was in the works for some time and had shown where her loyalties lay by choosing not to mention it.

“But I thought—” Helen said and then couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t know anymore what she’d thought. Nevaeh, standing in front of her desk, looked down at her with a kind of curtailed pity.

“My aunt got me a job down at the Department of Housing,” she said. “I wish the best for y’all here, but that’s a city job, and city jobs ain’t going anywhere. This here, I can’t live with the uncertainty.”

Helen was very sensitive to any assumption that she was the boss of this place; true, her title had been senior to theirs (even if titles had always had an element of whimsical inflation around there), and from the day of Harvey’s death they had looked expectantly to her not because they thought she knew better but because they just didn’t have the interest or commitment to it that she did. But race, she often felt, made the whole dynamic too complicated. She felt that way right now. The three of them were still crowded into the one outer room: no one would have stopped her if she’d moved her few things onto Harvey’s desk, but she still hadn’t done it.

“Isn’t it customary to give two weeks’ notice?” Helen said.

Nevaeh shrugged genially.