Billy-boy. Never would open the envelope and peek inside, because he’s a gentleman. The snow’s turned to sleet, clicking hurriedly against the window glass. The room’s in perfect order, every last meager object occupying its ordained place. Where would Billy put a Western Union envelope not intended for his own eyes? The bureau.
But no splash of yellow interrupts the nice clean surface of my battered thirdhand bureau. Just the mirror and the hairbrush and the vanity tray. Washstand is likewise pristine. Heart goes thump thump, pushing aside my ribs. Hand clenches mittens. Where the devil, Billy? Where the devil did you put that telegram? Darling, love-struck Billy, consumed by worry, all of twenty years old and not thinking straight. Books lined up in rigid order on the wall shelf. Bed all made, flat as a millpond. Above my head, someone thumps across the attic floor and slams a door shut, and the furniture rattles gently.
Rattles. Gently.
Thump thump thump goes my neighbor down the stairs, around the corner of the landing, down the next flight. The washbowl clinks its porcelain clink. The way it does in the pit of a New York winter’s night, when you are expressing your carnal need for another human being, no matter how regardful you are of the walls and furniture and sleeping boarders.
I sink to my hands and knees, and there it is, wedged upright between the wall and the bureau. A thin yellow envelope. Yank bureau away from the wall a couple inches, stick arm in gap. Miss Geneva Kelly, 11 Christopher Street, New York City. And I am correct about Billy Marshall’s principles. The glue’s undisturbed.
For the smallest instant, I just sit there, back against the wall, legs splayed. Envelope pinched between my fingers. Black ink staring back. My name. The large Roman capitals WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM. As if I didn’t know.
But no little black stars. Nobody’s dead. That’s something, isn’t it?
I stick my index finger in the crease and rip.
1924 JAN 31 PM 6 41
MISS GENEVA KELLY
11 CHRISTOPHER STREET NEW YORK CITY
MAMA SICK STOP ASKING FOR YOU STOP COME HOME EARLIEST STOP LOVE JOHNNIE
ELLA ALWAYS hated how, when you went to a cocktail party in Manhattan, or met someone over drinks or dinner or brunch with friends, the first question was always: So what do you do?
Meaning, your job.
She understood why, of course. New York was the city of dreams; it was where you went to chase those dreams, if you wanted them badly enough. In New York, of all places, your career defined you; people understood you on the basis of what you did for a living. If your dream was money, you worked on Wall Street. (Ella had yet to meet any investment banker who pursued his career because of a single-minded childhood desire to help companies meet their capital needs.) If your dream was also money, but you weren’t so good with numbers, you worked for a law firm. If your dream was money and you were okay at numbers but were only willing to work eighty hours a week instead of a hundred, you went into management consulting. If your dream was … well, come to think of it, Ella had yet to meet anyone in New York whose dream wasn’t money. But they were there. She saw them in restaurants and at Starbucks and on street corners. The actors and singers and writers and dancers and musicians and models. Whose dreams were also money, but in service to some other, more complicated dream.
As for Ella. She wasn’t sure why she came to New York, really. She always dreaded that question—What do you do?—because the answer was so boring. I’m an accountant. Cue the eyes shifting around the room, seeking an opportunity elsewhere. The dull, automatic Uh-huh as she explained that she was actually a forensic accountant, parachuting from dead company to dead company, dissecting the carcass to figure out what had gone wrong and who was to blame. Which was kind of like solving a complicated murder mystery, except with numbers. But by then, her new acquaintance wasn’t really listening. The word accountant turned a switch in people’s brains, so that anything else you said just made a garbled Blah bla-bla-blah in the air, like Charlie Brown’s teacher.
Whatever. Why did Ella come to New York? She came to New York because she got a job offer after college from a large Manhattan accounting firm, with health insurance and a 401(k) and a starting salary generous enough to afford her very own tiny walk-up apartment on the Upper West Side, close to the park, not too many crack vials on the stairs outside and—most importantly—no roommate to ask her how her day went and eat all her leftover ziti in the fridge. End of story. End of dream.
Of course, once she met Patrick, she thought she knew what had brought her to Manhattan. Fate! She was fated to meet Patrick there, fated to fall in love with him. She’d been so close to taking a job with that firm in Boston—and really, Boston was a better fit for her, felt more like home to her—and she hadn’t. So she was meant to be a New Yorker. Meant to be Patrick’s wife. Her dream was love.
THANK GOD, THEN, SHE HAD a backup dream. Her job. Sure, she’d veered off the partner track long ago, once she realized that making partner basically meant spending all your time trying to win new business and manage client expectations. But she liked what she did. In the first place, every few months, she got assigned to a new carcass, and if Tolstoy had been a forensic accountant, he would have said that thriving companies were all alike, but each company failed in its own way. Usually because somebody was doing something illegal.
This was especially true in the financial services industry, in which Ella had ended up specializing, partly because she worked from the New York office and partly because she ended up knowing Wall Street so intimately: the inevitable result of marrying someone who worked there. So many scoundrels, so much greedy ingenuity. (That was the second reason she liked her job. Matching wits against all those greedy, scoundrelly minds.) So she looked forward to being called into a partner’s office at the start of a new gig. You never knew where you might get sent, or why.
Today in particular. She’d been on the beach for four weeks now, waiting for a new assignment. Doing routine internal business—PowerPoint slides for business pitches, interviewing college students, that kind of thing—that left far too much of her intellect free to wallow in the forensic analysis of her failed marriage. She preferred numbers. So orderly, so incapable of deceit. She stared at the family photo on the credenza behind Travis’s desk—kind of artsy, black and white, silver Tiffany frame, smiling wife and clean-cut twin boys of maybe five or six years, wearing white polo shirts and chinos—and wondered, for the first time, if Travis had ever cheated on them.
Until three weeks ago, she would have said no. Of course not. Travis was a solid, decent guy, not the cheating type at all. Never made a pass at her. Never treated the PAs with anything other than professional courtesy. Profoundly boring middle-aged haircut. But then, three weeks ago, she would have said the same thing about Patrick. Earnest, romantic. Loved his mom. They’d been trying for a baby for almost a year, a baby Patrick really wanted. And then—
“—get in a taxi now?”
“I’m sorry. Lost my train of thought. Taxi where?”
“Is everything okay, Ella?”
“Sure! Fine. Just need another cup of coffee, I think.”
Travis stared at her and spoke slowly, patiently, like he probably spoke to his twins when they weren’t paying attention. That was the kind of guy he was. Never lost his cool. Just like Patrick. “To Wall Street, Ella. Corner of Broad. You’ll be working right at the bank’s headquarters this time.”
“Oh. Right.” Ella knew better than to ask which bank. Instead, she glanced down at the spiral-bound briefing book on her lap, which lay unopened, navy blue cover flat over an inch-thick stack of white paper, held shut by two remarkably tensile, white-rimmed thumbs.
The title seared her eyeballs.
STERLING BATES INC.
MUNICIPAL