The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (10 page)

She’d made the down payment right after the breakup with Peter, using every cent she owned or could borrow. It was a tiny studio in one of several huge apartment towers near Lincoln Center, a place with a doorman and private, armed security guards who roamed the grounds twenty-four hours a day.

But it was hers, all five hundred square feet of it. Hers and the bank’s, that was. Homeowner, she congratulated herself, her spirits rising bravely. Maybe it didn’t have a Jacuzzi or a circular driveway, but it also didn’t have Peter Aronson sitting on his butt complaining dinner wasn’t ready, or waiting impatiently for ironed shirts and matched socks to magically appear.

She tried to imagine Peter’s tall, manly body amid the delicate flower portraits hung with bows, the scented candles, and the gilded cherubs hovering over the doorposts. The vision dwarfed everything she owned, making it all seem make-believe and doll-housey.

That was the Peter effect, all right. He’d towered over her, an invalidating and overwhelming presence that sucked her in, taking away her separateness, relieving her of all responsibility. At first, she’d been attracted to his wealth and position, but most of all to his suitability. He was the quintessential “catch.” But as time went by, she realized that it wasn’t her he wanted, not really. She was simply raw material—a girl from the “right” family, an heiress, he pointed out to her on more than one occasion, no hint of amusement in his face. He had taken on the task of “redesigning” her, as it were, to fit the lifestyle he planned for himself.

He made her take tennis lessons—even though she had no interest in tennis—and helped her buy the perfect white outfit. He gave her books to read and told her what to think about them. Often, he laughed at her opinions. “Don’t be childish” was his favorite phrase. He was constantly tutoring her on how to behave and what to say in front of his friends. Slowly, but surely, she’d felt herself growing smaller and smaller until she was afraid she’d disappear altogether.

No one had the right to do that to someone else. She shook her head as if once again reviewing the rightness of her decision. Even if there was some truly superior male out there, whose expertise and knowledge far outweighed her own, the most she would ever agree to do would be to walk by his side.

Still, a rich, handsome Jewish surgeon, and she’d said “No, thank you” a month before the wedding.

Her mother and Kenny had been furious, Gran sad. Only Suzanne had partially understood, and then in her own strange way. She’d called him “the ultimate consumer-boomer” to his face and laughed at his pretensions at serving humanity. “How? By performing unnecessary hysterectomies and milking rich patients and the health system?”

Francesca straightened up her clean, orderly house, then brought in
The New York Times
. Something else in Bosnia—those horrifying photos of senseless suffering. She turned quickly to the comfort of the stock pages. Nothing morally ambiguous or heart-rending here, she sighed, relieved. Her no-load mutual funds were blooming petunias, well watered; the interest on her money market funds a worm’s crawl upward. High-tech stocks had wilted, though. But that could change.

She was all right, all right, she comforted herself, feeling suddenly lonely and tearful. I’m the piggy who built the house of bricks. I’ll be safe and you’ll be sorry….

She took out her thick-leaved day planner, glancing through her packed schedule for the months ahead. Equity. Equilibrium. Calm waters. Days divided into predictable and manageable segments where nothing terrible could happen. My own apartment, my own job, my own investments, my own life. She lifted her chin bravely. And every month the victory renewed itself through the ritual of check signing: mortgage, credit card, utilities, Gran….

Her grandmother had often offered to forget about the loan. But it seemed downright underhanded to Francesca to have asked for a loan for the down payment and then to renege somehow and turn it into a gift. The fact that family was involved shouldn’t make any difference. Fair was fair.

Suzanne, of course, disagreed completely. “Not accepting it as a gift is hostile, even aggressive in a way,” she’d argued. “I mean, it’s family, after all, and you’re denying her the joy of giving!”

Usually, Suzanne was big on the “joy of giving” when it came to strangers. With family, it was the “joy of taking” she was best at. Suzanne never had a problem demanding money from the family for the myriad causes she passionately supported as well as occasional “grants” for herself. But when it came to fulfilling her family obligations, well, that was another story.

Take the Passover seder, Gran’s pride and joy and the sole annual family event left. Every single year, Suzanne attempted one excuse after another to avoid coming.

Poor Gran. Getting the family together was like herding cats. Every year, it took more and more of her bullying powers to pull it off. Still, she usually managed it. And then they’d all sit around with the
hagadah
in their laps (so it would be easier to hide it when the Inquisitors came knocking on the door!) while Great-Uncle Moise droned on in Ladino, Hebrew, and English about foolish, wise, and ignorant sons, the hand of G-d, and the plagues of Egypt.

But the meal was worth waiting for: roast lamb and prunes;
mazzah mojada, buñuelos
, and
sfongato;
brick-red apples, raisins, and almonds mixed with spices and sweet, red wine. And all of it served in
la loza Pascual
—as Gran called it—the stunning antique porcelain used only seven days each year. And all through the evening, the beautiful silver heirloom wine goblets were expertly replenished with the finest Chardonnays, Reislings, and semi-dry Rosés, in addition to the traditional
raki
, a liqueur distilled from dried raisins. Except for the unleavened matzoh—that inedible cardboard!—it was always a memorable feast.

She felt a sudden sense of guilt. Gran had left several messages on her machine asking her out to lunch, and she still hadn’t gotten back to her. It wasn’t right, she scolded herself briefly, glancing at her watch.

That late!

She grabbed a doughnut, eating it in little pieces so the calories would leak out; then she stuffed the thick wad of systems specifications into her expensive leather attaché case. She was going to convince those macho clowns that the new currency-trading back-office system had to be based on a PC peer-to-peer network, and not those antediluvian giant mainframes. If it was up to them, they’d still have punch cards safely tied with two rubber bands and paper tape all over the wall! Any new ideas, especially if they were being championed by a woman half their age and weight, were going to be resisted.

She squared her shoulders, turning on her alarm system, then hurried out the door before it began the Sing Sing wail of breakout that always put the nice old lady in 34E into incipient heart-attack mode.

The elevator paused on the nineteenth floor to allow two dark-skinned women in white uniforms to enter. One pushed an expensive carriage enthroning a pink-skinned baby boy.

The baby looked up at Francesca adoringly, his blue eyes sparkling. Francesca adored him back, feeling a sharp pain in her chest that dulled into a familiar ache. It was a pain she knew well; one she had had checked out medically. After a million tests, it came down to this: an irreducible side effect of living the life she’d chosen. A protest, as it were.

She had learned to ignore it.

But this morning, it seemed worse than usual, almost like a hysterical cry welling up from her gut; the cry of an unreasonable child in a shopping mall throwing a bloody fit.

Babies.

There weren’t going to be any Third World ladies in white uniforms for hers. No, not for hers.

When the time came.

When the man came.

When marriage and home came.

When her turn came…

When…she thought, letting the single word dangle, almost feeling his silky hair and tasting the warm, fat curve at the back of his neck. She tapped her bulging briefcase nervously against her thigh. Tick-tock, tick-tock, she thought, wondering if that was supposed to be funny.

Petite was a problem in the New York rush hour subway crowd. Pushed and jostled as if she were weightless, she felt her arms and shoulders pull apart with the reach toward the overhead strap and the downward pull of her heavy attaché case. But outside, surrounded once again by the straight and logical forms of steel and concrete, her dignity and competence revived. She was part of this powerful machine, she thought, almost proudly, banishing irrational visions of soft, clingy things.

At the elevator banks of MetroCorp, she signed in at the security desk, smiling at the courteous greetings of the well-groomed guards. Lately, she had been looking them over with unforgivable interest. Of course, it was unthinkable. They were
high-school graduates
, for Pete’s sake! Some had probably even earned
equivalency degrees
after
volunteering for the military!
Still, they were young and attractive. More important, they looked straight and (she scanned for wedding rings) perhaps available?

A young man in a uniform.

A young man in a suit.

A young man.

Or even, she thought, examining the middle-aged male who entered on the twenty-second floor, a man not so young, with nicely combed hair, an expensive sweater, and no wedding ring. A man who wasn’t too tall…

She got off the elevator and made her way through the maze of six-foot-high partitions that divided the enormous room into tiny cubicles. As she rounded the corner, she was surprised to see people gathered in small groups, speaking to each other in low whispers.

“What’s going on?” she asked, full of instinctive dread. It had to be something bad. Something good would have been louder.

“Francesca,” Robert Murphy, her supervisor, greeted her somberly, putting a brotherly arm around her shoulder and refusing to look her in the eye. Without another word, he walked swiftly into his office and closed the door behind him.

She felt her amorphous dread solidify and sink down her windpipe to her knees. She stumbled into her cubicle, dropping her briefcase a little too high off the floor. The resulting thud seemed full of editorial content.

“It’s not the end of the world, you know,” Gilbert Odessa’s voice intruded on her thoughts. He stood in the doorway. A large security guard stood behind him, holding a cardboard box.

She looked up, surprised. He looked visibly, humanly distressed.

In the two years that Gilbert Odessa’s cubicle had adjoined hers, this was the first sentence he’d ever addressed to her that didn’t contain the words
bit, byte, chip
, or
algorithm
. She had always considered him simply an extension of his hardware.

“I mean, it’s not like a serious illness or anything. It’s just a job,” he said, in a tone of voice that reminded her of a small child who’d just found new underwear and socks in his Christmas stocking.

Francesca felt the rush of questions push up urgently, but somehow, looking at Gilbert and then at the guard, she didn’t really want the answers. Instead, she nodded sympathetically, silent and wary.

Gilbert pushed his glasses up his slippery, glistening nose, and Francesca felt him lean toward her in a way that someone else—a woman of normal instincts who hadn’t sat near Gilbert Odessa for two years—might have wrongly interpreted as an intimate gesture.

“My mother died at forty-four,” he told her, undeterred by her lack of verbal encouragement and her slight recoil. “Massive stroke. Didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. Married to the same guy for twenty-five years. Never worked a day in her life. Lived in the same house for twenty years….” Gilbert looked at the guard, who’d just lifted the box and set it down meaningfully upon his desk.

He patted his balding head mournfully. “Life is totally unpredictable. Anything can happen to anyone,” he said, devastated. Slowly, he began loading his personal belongings: the pictures of ducks, the duck ashtrays, the duck mugs, the wooden decoys, the Donald Duck stuffed toy, and the framed photographs of himself wearing a ducktail haircut. When he was finished, he came back.

“Good-bye, Francesca. It was nice working near you.”

She took two steps toward him, gripping his hand with both of hers. “Good-bye, Gilbert.”

He walked with the guard to the elevators.

And then he was gone.

Just like that.

Francesca sat down, her stomach gripped with a horrible queasy fear, as if she’d just witnessed an auto-da-fé. Better get to work. Fast, she told herself with a swift glance around to see if her diligence was going to be noticed. She took out the specifications and turned on her computer, reassured by its vibrant hum and the comforting flash of green words. No use worrying, she told herself, typing in her password. Just get the work done. It was important work, work only she, and she alone, was really expert at in her division. Indispensable work, she reassured herself.

ACCESS DENIED
, the computer flashed at her poisonously.

Access denied.

She took a deep breath, rebooted, and tried again, typing her secret password in much more slowly and carefully.

“
ACCESS DENIED
!” it screamed.

Before she could dial her supervisor, her telephone rang.

It was Human Resources.

The interview took ten minutes, nine of which she didn’t hear. She left with a letter in a white envelope and a tall, handsome security guard who accompanied her, unsmiling, back to her desk. He, too, handed her a carton.

She ignored him, sitting down in her chair and looking at the missive in her hands. Like an engraved invitation to Hell, she thought, taking out her letter opener and slitting its throat.

“Dear Employee,” it began.

The bank has been MERGED WITH THE AMERICORP BANK GROUP, who are now STREAMLINING OPERATIONS. MOST REGRETTABLY, as a result, your entire division HAS BEEN ELIMINATED. In light of this, METROCORP DEEPLY REGRETTED its inability to continue offering you, as a VALUED EMPLOYEE, a position SUITABLE TO YOUR HIGH LEVEL OF ABILITY AND PERFORMANCE. On behalf of Metrocorp, please accept DEEPEST THANKS, a month’s salary, and BEST WISHES ON ACHIEVING PERSONAL CAREER GOALS ELSEWHERE.