Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

Cynthia had learned the hard way to be vigilant about giving out her cell number, but she wound up having to change it every six or eight months anyway. No matter how careful you were, inevitably you were going to start getting calls from total strangers — charities legit and otherwise, journalists, angry socialist crackpots — all of them wanting something, because when you were giving money away, people were terrifically inventive about finding you. At which point it was time to change phones again. Sometimes she’d find herself in the embarrassing position of not knowing her own contact information, but Dawn was always on top of it.

Dawn was in charge of the home phone as well. Though they’d unlisted it, that number had stayed the same for years; Cynthia just never answered it anymore. At the end of the day Dawn gave her a typed list of whatever messages had been left. They were about 95 percent junk, but Cynthia couldn’t bring herself to just change the number or disconnect it; it was too much like telling people who used to know you that they didn’t know you anymore. Adam wouldn’t have minded. The cache of things capable of troubling Adam seemed to clear itself every week or so. She was shocked, sometimes, by the things she had to remind him of, the people they’d met and places they’d visited and times they’d had together that produced a blank, apologetic look on his face when she brought them up.

On Friday afternoon, with Adam and April still in the air on their way to Shanghai, Dawn handed Cynthia the day’s list of home-phone calls and then, unusually, lingered in the door to her office while she read it. Dawn had come to work for her with the announced goal of saving up money to apply to business school; Cynthia had grown to depend on her to such a degree that she now paid her not just enough for business school but so much that business school itself would seem like too big a sacrifice. She was twenty-four, just a couple of years older than April, and scary-competent, and if she’d wanted to she could have found myriad ways to manipulate Cynthia’s obvious affection for her, but she wasn’t that type of person. Boundaries were never an issue. They talked about everything. The poor girl’s taste in men was even worse than a twenty-four-year-old’s should be, and with Dawn’s mother living with a new boyfriend in Queens and functionally out of the picture, Cynthia suffered through Dawn’s nonworking hours imagining all the mistakes a beautiful young girl like that might make.

“What?” Cynthia said quietly, looking over the list.

Dawn shook her head. “Nothing. Just wanted to see if you recognized that last name. I wasn’t sure if it was on the level. But I guess not. Sorry not to catch it.”

Cynthia’s gaze hadn’t actually made it all the way to the bottom of the page. She looked down again and saw the name Irene Ball.

“Nope,” she said. “A name like that I’d remember. Why?”

Dawn shrugged. “She said she was calling on behalf of your father. She wouldn’t say why, though. I kind of had a feeling it was bogus. She actually called three times.”

Cynthia looked down at the name again.

“I mean, this is totally something I should know, but didn’t you tell me that your father had passed away?”

“That was my stepfather.”

Dawn blanched. “I’m sorry. Oh my God. Teach me to ask personal questions.”

Cynthia glanced up at her, then reached out and squeezed her hand. “Please,” she said. “It’s me.”

Saturday morning Cynthia sat in the dining room drinking a protein shake the weekend cook had made, languishing over the paper, and staring out the window at the boat traffic on the churning East River. It was a novelty to have the house all to herself. Not that she was completely alone; there was a housekeeper moving around audibly in the master bedroom above her head, and the cook was on until four, doing prep work for a cocktail reception Cynthia was hosting the next night. It would be strange to host anything without Adam there too, but that kind of thing was happening more and more, as they had to split up to accommodate the foundation’s reach. She was about to go downstairs and read through a few grant proposals on the StairMaster when the home phone rang on the sideboard behind her. She turned to look at the caller ID, which read only, PRIVATE NAME, PRIVATE NUMBER. She pursed her lips. No one else was going to pick it up. Just before the fourth ring, which would send it to voice mail, she answered.

Irene Ball was a real person, all right. She had been keeping company — that was the expression she used — with Cynthia’s father for the last four years. Her thin, formal voice suggested she’d be about his age, at least, even if her name sounded like that of a stripper.

“Irene Ball,” Cynthia said. “And my father gave you this number?”

There was a pause. “Yes, of course,” Irene Ball said. “I wouldn’t just call out of the blue. I understand this is an awkward conversation for us to be having.”

She had stayed with him even through his illness—

“Illness?” Cynthia said. There was another pause, either shocked or decorous, but either way Cynthia, who was becoming flushed, didn’t have the patience for it. “Look, Irene,” she said, “just please go on the assumption that I don’t know what you’re talking about, all right?”

Cynthia had last seen him more than a year ago, when, unusually, he’d turned up in New York. She knew he’d been living in Florida; once or twice a year she’d transfer some money to a bank account in Naples, and at some point he would thank her politely with a note. It was hard to know how much to send him. She could have made him a millionaire if she felt like it, but since he never asked her for anything, she didn’t really know what he needed, nor what he might take offense at. When he called to say he was in the city she invited him to stay with them for a few days at least but he said he couldn’t, he said he had business to attend to. So they wound up having him over for dinner. The kids sat at the table mute and amazed. He told them stories about her childhood, and hugged them all warmly, and left, and shortly afterward, Irene now said — or maybe, it occurred to Cynthia, shortly before — he was diagnosed with liver cancer. The chemo weakened his immune system, he got pneumonia, he had a heart attack while in the hospital, the cancer turned up in his pancreas as well … long story short (there’s an expression, Cynthia thought), he had not been out of the hospital for the last month and felt quite sure he was never going to get out again at all, and in light of this, he had made a decision.

“He’s asked his doctors to stop treating him,” Irene said, “and they’ve agreed to honor that request. He’s still lucid enough to know what he’s doing, except when the pain medication kind of overwhelms him.” She was weeping now, which was moving but also confusing and inappropriate, like weeping from a TV newscaster. “I don’t think he should do it. I want him to keep fighting. He’s a wonderful man. He talks about you all the time. When he sees your name in the paper he always cuts it out and shows it to me.”

What was there to say to that? Instead of calling his child for help, he clipped her name out of the newspaper and showed it to people. “So he’s in the hospital right now, or out of it, or what?”

“There’s a hospice down here that has an opening. It’s such a nice place. It’s—”

“Where?”

“Sorry?”

“Where,” Cynthia said, her face heating up, “is here? Where is my father? I mean, like on a map?”

“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. I just assumed … My apologies. We’re in Fort Myers, Florida. I have a—”

“Is he there with you right now?”