So I used it. I felt proud of the result of my work: a story that revealed that a local high school was using dangerous chemicals in art classes with poor supervision and inadequate ventilation, and had come close to causing one student’s death.
H.G. praised me. John Walters praised me. Wrigley II praised me. This last had me all puffed up with pride until Wrigley also handed off the story to O’Connor for a rewrite and basically took it away from me.
To my further irritation, O’Connor complained about that before I could, then he went on to make it a much stronger story, discovering that a teacher at another school in the district was out on permanent disability, probably as a result of exposure to the same chemicals. I hadn’t dug deep enough, or in enough directions.
I felt angry with myself over that, and had just decided that he deserved all the glory anyway, when I learned about his next campaign on my behalf. Before the shouting between O’Connor and Wrigley was over, everyone in the newsroom knew exactly who had made sure I’d get my first byline in the Express.
When Lydia asked me-in front of O’Connor-how it felt to have that byline, I told her that I would find it less embarrassing and painful to fall flat on my ass while crossing a busy street.
My only comfort was seeing the frown that remark brought to O’Connor’s face.
Lydia frowned, too, as she watched him walk away. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“He’s way too involved in my career, thank you. I want to earn my bylines on my own. And I don’t want to share them with that jerk.”
“He’s not. You ask me, you’re the one who’s being a jerk. He said something out of line, and he knows it, and besides, that was before he knew about your dad.”
I felt as if I had swallowed a block of ice. “What?”
She had the look on her face that a person gets when he or she suddenly figures out that a really good idea was actually a really bad idea. Shouldn’t fill blimps with hydrogen. Shouldn’t dive headfirst into unknown waters. Shouldn’t tell everyone at work about the health problems of your best friend’s father. She broke eye contact.
“You told him about my dad?” I asked, horrified.
“Not much…” she said faintly.
Translation: too much.
I tried to explain that although I knew her intentions were good, I’d rather that details about my personal life-and my father’s health-did not become the property of newsroom gossips. When she insisted that O’Connor wasn’t the type to spread gossip, I reminded her about the Men’s Room Incident.
“Are you ever going to let that go?” she said.
The real problem was that I would have preferred O’Connor’s respect rather than his pity.
That was a Monday. The next day, I came into the newsroom and went to my desk without hearing one double entendre, without a single “honey,” without so much as a sour look. In fact, the whole room became quiet, then everyone managed to be really busy all of a sudden. Shades of the features department. I felt uneasy, and that unease only increased when I happened to surprise a look of sympathy on Wildman Billy Winters’s face.
O’Connor had told them.
Over the next few hours I received several offers of help, compliments on the art supply story, and friendly reporting advice from veteran newsmen who had wanted nothing to do with me for weeks. I managed to get through the day without letting my temper get the better of me, mostly because I was afraid that if I started to express my true feelings about their sudden solicitousness, my brief career in journalism would be over.
On Thursday, while I was out grocery shopping, Aunt Mary took a phone call. Helen Swan, calling to ask if I’d come to dinner with her at Lillian Vanderveer Linworth’s palace. Mary said she knew I’d be delighted, and asked what I should wear.
To say that she then forced me to go would be unjust. I didn’t really want to see Helen at a party at some Lady Bountiful’s mansion, but I surrendered when Mary told me she had decided I must accept the invitation. I knew what sort of contest of wills I was in for if I resisted Mary, and at that moment I didn’t have that much fight left in me.
Helen greeted me warmly when I picked her up at her home. It was the first time I had been there since Jack had died, and I found I could feel his presence-or maybe the lack of it. She talked cheerily as she gathered up her purse and turned off lights, but I found myself staring at an old chair, thinking of Jack Corrigan telling a story at one of the parties they had held for the staff of the college paper.
We stayed only long enough for her to grab her keys and lock up the house. That we didn’t linger was okay with me.
On the way to the Linworth mansion, she stressed that no matter what happened or what I heard, we were at a social event at the invitation of one of her good friends, and writing about it was strictly forbidden.
As soon as Lillian Linworth’s decrepit butler opened the door to the royal library, I saw O’Connor. I almost turned on my heel and went right back out. The only thing that kept me from doing so was seeing that he was as shocked as I. We both looked at Helen. She was smiling and saying, “Conn, what a pleasant surprise…”
His brows lowered, and his mouth made a flat line. Then he said, “I doubt it is either a surprise to you or pleasant for Ms. Kelly to find me here.”
Mrs. Linworth seemed deaf to all of that, and introduced herself to me as Lily.
I was supposed to call her majesty by her nickname?
Then she said, “Conn, would you please serve as bartender this evening? What will you have, Ms. Kelly?”
I asked for a vodka and soda on the light side. I thanked O’Connor when he handed my drink to me, sipped it and found that it was about four times as strong as I would have made it myself.
He was drinking scotch on the rocks. While Helen and Lillian chatted across the room, he stood next to me in awkward silence. He made the ice in his glass swirl rhythmically with a slight motion of his wrist, and studied the cubes as if they might roll over like the goodie inside an eight-ball toy, the answer to some problem printed on one side. There was something in his face that either hadn’t been there before or which I hadn’t perceived. Not anger or frustration…I had seen plenty of each of those in the last few weeks. Sadness, maybe? Maybe he was missing Jack.
I found myself feeling guilty for continually snubbing him, and thinking that I ought to apologize to him for being such a pain in the ass, but before I could say anything to him, three more people were ushered into the room, and O’Connor moved forward to greet them.
We were introduced to Auburn Sheffield, Warren Ducane, and Kyle Yeager. I went straight toward the one who interested me most: Auburn Sheffield.
Not that the others weren’t interesting. Kyle Yeager was cute in a Clark Kent kind of way, and Warren Ducane struck me as one of those men who find themselves adrift in their middle age. But Auburn-not every day you get a chance to talk to a guy like him.
I had grown up hearing the story of his rebellion against his family. His home was named in honor of it, after all. In fact, there was a scenic turnoff in the road leading up to Auburn’s Stand that was known to anyone who had spent his or her adolescence in Las Piernas. Local make-out hot spot. Not that anybody ever took this Catholic girl up there.
Within a few moments, Auburn was regaling me with little-known facts about Las Piernas history, including plenty of great dirt on the Sheffields-his uncle Hector was apparently a dangerous lunatic. The Sheffield name was on a street, a subdivision, a library, an elementary school, and a number of buildings downtown. They had made a fortune selling ice cream, and, he said, stayed cold and rich ever since. Auburn had to be seventy or eighty years old, but I’ve encountered plenty of people half his age with less life in them.