moment, in the unblinking intentness of the smile Mr. Aldren had trained on her, the smiling wolf behind the smiling dog showed through, the cruel and hungry animal biding its time. He said, “You’re free for lunch, I assume.” To which Melanie replied, “I think I can squeeze you in.”
“Look at her,” Bob said. “Have you ever seen her so happy? You don’t know how long she’s had to wait. Hard to begrudge her a couple happy hours.”
“Yeah, although—”
Bob looked straight ahead at the empty lectern. “I’m asking you not to judge her.”
3
F ROM THE MEMORIAL SERVICE Louis drove his father to a cheap hamburger restaurant in Harvard Square, a place with the air of a selfconscious institution, and it was there, in a booth near the door, that he was introduced to a figure that took away what little appetite he had. His father named the figure while holding the top half of his hamburger bun in his palm like a calculator and spreading mustard on it. The figure was 22 million dollars. It corresponded to Louis’s mother’s new approximate net worth.
Scarves and coat sleeves were brushing his head as various lunch hours were exhausted and the restaurant emptied out. Cold air blew in through the busy doors. He asked what his mother was going to do with so much money.
His father looked a little bum-like in his ancient suit, with its narrow lapels overlapping as he hunched over his hamburger. “I don’t know,” he said.
Louis asked if they were going to stay in the house in Evanston.
“Where else would we go?” his father said.
Was he thinking of retiring?
“When I’m sixty-five,” his father said.
Unequal to the asking of more questions, Louis watched in silence as his father cleaned both their plates and paid the check with a ten-dollar bill, leaving a tip of dimes and quarters.
It was midaftemoon when he got back to WSNE. The clouds were darkening further, deepening and collecting themselves for serious nighttime rain, and in the studios it might already have been midnight. All the lights were burning, the building’s various circulatory systems humming audibly, the phones in the advertising department as silent as always. Through the Studio A window he could see the afternoon announcer, an alcoholic-looking veteran named Bud Evans whose few cobwebs of hair were painstakingly arranged over his chapped, bald scalp. He was gazing uneasily over the boom mike at his guest, a gentleman with golden shoulder-length locks and a Hawaiian shirt. For five or six seconds neither spoke. It was like a pensive lull in conversation, except that they were on the air and the lull was being broadcast. Still feeling carsick, Louis went to the men’s room and leaned over the urinal with his forehead pressing into tile. His urine broke up a tarry wad of tobacco shreds. Moving like a person with a hangover, he sat down at the terminal in his cubicle and began to enter commercial logs. He did this for three hours, which at the wage he earned netted him somewhat under twelve dollars, assuming he eventually got paid. When he left Waltham, rain was dropping out of a sky the color of a TV set’s afterglow. On Clarendon Hill he went straight to the bathroom and vomited a clear ropy liquid into the beige toilet.
Louis was, at twenty-three, a not entirely untroubled person. His relationship with money was particularly tortured. And yet what he realized, when the import of the figure began to sink in, was that up until the moment he’d sat down in the burger joint with his father, he’d basically been content with his life and its conditions. A person accustoms himself to what he is, after all, and if he’s lucky he learns to hold in somewhat lower esteem all other ways of being, so as not to spend life envying them. Louis had been coming to appreciate the freedom a person gained by sacrificing money, and to pity or even outright despise the wealthy—a class represented in his mind, justly or not, by the various
“Look at her,” Bob said. “Have you ever seen her so happy? You don’t know how long she’s had to wait. Hard to begrudge her a couple happy hours.”
“Yeah, although—”
Bob looked straight ahead at the empty lectern. “I’m asking you not to judge her.”
3
F ROM THE MEMORIAL SERVICE Louis drove his father to a cheap hamburger restaurant in Harvard Square, a place with the air of a selfconscious institution, and it was there, in a booth near the door, that he was introduced to a figure that took away what little appetite he had. His father named the figure while holding the top half of his hamburger bun in his palm like a calculator and spreading mustard on it. The figure was 22 million dollars. It corresponded to Louis’s mother’s new approximate net worth.
Scarves and coat sleeves were brushing his head as various lunch hours were exhausted and the restaurant emptied out. Cold air blew in through the busy doors. He asked what his mother was going to do with so much money.
His father looked a little bum-like in his ancient suit, with its narrow lapels overlapping as he hunched over his hamburger. “I don’t know,” he said.
Louis asked if they were going to stay in the house in Evanston.
“Where else would we go?” his father said.
Was he thinking of retiring?
“When I’m sixty-five,” his father said.
Unequal to the asking of more questions, Louis watched in silence as his father cleaned both their plates and paid the check with a ten-dollar bill, leaving a tip of dimes and quarters.
It was midaftemoon when he got back to WSNE. The clouds were darkening further, deepening and collecting themselves for serious nighttime rain, and in the studios it might already have been midnight. All the lights were burning, the building’s various circulatory systems humming audibly, the phones in the advertising department as silent as always. Through the Studio A window he could see the afternoon announcer, an alcoholic-looking veteran named Bud Evans whose few cobwebs of hair were painstakingly arranged over his chapped, bald scalp. He was gazing uneasily over the boom mike at his guest, a gentleman with golden shoulder-length locks and a Hawaiian shirt. For five or six seconds neither spoke. It was like a pensive lull in conversation, except that they were on the air and the lull was being broadcast. Still feeling carsick, Louis went to the men’s room and leaned over the urinal with his forehead pressing into tile. His urine broke up a tarry wad of tobacco shreds. Moving like a person with a hangover, he sat down at the terminal in his cubicle and began to enter commercial logs. He did this for three hours, which at the wage he earned netted him somewhat under twelve dollars, assuming he eventually got paid. When he left Waltham, rain was dropping out of a sky the color of a TV set’s afterglow. On Clarendon Hill he went straight to the bathroom and vomited a clear ropy liquid into the beige toilet.
Louis was, at twenty-three, a not entirely untroubled person. His relationship with money was particularly tortured. And yet what he realized, when the import of the figure began to sink in, was that up until the moment he’d sat down in the burger joint with his father, he’d basically been content with his life and its conditions. A person accustoms himself to what he is, after all, and if he’s lucky he learns to hold in somewhat lower esteem all other ways of being, so as not to spend life envying them. Louis had been coming to appreciate the freedom a person gained by sacrificing money, and to pity or even outright despise the wealthy—a class represented in his mind, justly or not, by the various
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