Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“Look,” Ben said weakly; Helen could see he was tiring. “I know this isn’t a very lawyerly thing to propose, but just in terms of, as you say, softening the ground, I think if you could just get me in a room with her—”

Bonifacio was already shaking his head. “If what you want is to let everyone know how sorry you are,” he said, “then good luck, God bless, and get yourself a new lawyer. But I’ll tell you what I will do. Since you seem to need to get it out of your system like that, why don’t you say you’re sorry right now?”

“Right now?” said Ben.

“Right here and now. And then never again.”

Ben looked down at the floor, and then, with great difficulty, at his wife. He did seem changed, Helen thought, but only in a kind of animal way, wounded and in pain and without his usual instincts. “Please believe me,” he said to her. “Even though I don’t necessarily understand everything I’ve done, I take total responsibility for it. You and Sara don’t deserve any of this. I am so sorry.”

“I don’t know why,” Helen said quickly. “You got what you wanted. It’s all destroyed now. I don’t know why you don’t go back to the house and put up a big Mission Accomplished banner.”

“Feel better now?” said Bonifacio. “I didn’t think so. Still, if you get the urge again, you can repeat as necessary. Just as long as it’s always in this office, and always in front of me.”

Helen drove home (Ben’s license was now suspended) faster than she liked; she wanted to beat the school bus and be home when Sara arrived, and also to minimize the time spent near him. Ben asked to speak to Sara alone when she got home, and Helen almost agreed to it, just to spare herself the guilt and agony of seeing her daughter’s face at the climactic moment of their betrayal of her, a betrayal the girl might have seen coming years ago if she hadn’t been so young, too young to anticipate or even, very likely, to imagine it. But it had to be borne, for her sake. Sara didn’t cry; instead she withdrew solemnly, deep inside herself, nodding at all the appropriate times, her face a mask, never once contradicting or mocking them, as she would have done in almost any other sort of conversation. Then she went into her room and closed the door and played music (nothing sad or angry, just the same pop music she always played) while Ben packed his suitcase to check in to Stages, and Helen sat in the kitchen and her anger gave way to a meditation on her own role in having failed to prevent the end of life as they had all known it up to now.

For the next few weeks, everywhere she went — which, she realized with the sad, clear vision brought on by misfortune, wasn’t really that many places (the Starbucks, the Price Chopper, the middle school, the dry cleaner, the dump) — her neighbors and casual friends pretended not to see her, or to be busily on their way elsewhere across the street, not because they condemned or looked down on her but because the level of disgrace she’d been subjected to was so epic that they weren’t even sure how to acknowledge it and thus how to talk to her in the way that they used to. Only her closest friends made a show of everything being just as it was before, which was worse, in a way. There was now an element of performance to their friendship, even when no one else was around to see or be upbraided by their example, which brought home to Helen that it was really themselves these friends were performing for — burnishing their estimation of themselves as people who would not abandon an unjustly scandalized friend.

And in truth it was that notion of herself as a victim that put Helen off too, that made her come up with excuses when friends called to invite her forcefully to lunch or to ostentatiously offer her a ride to the next Parents’ Coffee at school. She had genuinely no idea of the depths to which her husband had been descending over that summer, but did that exonerate her — having no idea? It had been well over a decade since she’d had any job other than to maintain a happy home and family environment for their only child, and she had failed at that job rather decisively. So spectacular was her failure that the mushroom cloud over her happy home environment was featured in the newspaper every day for a week, not just at home in Rensselaer Valley, where there was never much going on, but even in Manhattan, where the destruction of some rich Brahmin at the hands of his own perverse compulsions was always a tabloid chestnut.

Every day was a limbo, in which the house — a white, weathered, green-shuttered ranch with a finished basement, which everyone always said was more spacious inside than it looked from the outside — served as both prison and fortress. Ben had not contacted his wife and daughter since passing through the doors of Stages — quite likely he was forbidden to, for a while anyway, according to some twelve-step protocol — and Helen made no attempt to contact him. Though they’d never discussed it, or even said goodbye, it would not have surprised her terribly if she never saw him again. When eighth grade began for Sara a week or so after his departure, it was still much too soon for anyone there to have forgotten anything; at the end of the first day Helen asked her how it had gone, seeing her classmates again, and Sara gave the worst, most distressing answer possible, which was that she didn’t want to talk about it.

Then there was the question of money. It hadn’t disappeared, exactly, but it was hard to trust that the seventy-five thousand posted for bail would ever grace their account again; and then a Manhattan judge, at the request of Cornelia’s lawyers, had taken the extraordinary step of freezing all of Ben’s assets, including the house, which prevented them from selling it, for financial or any other reasons. The lawyers argued that Helen and Ben’s pending divorce action was nothing more than a cynical attempt to shield themselves from future civil liability, and the judge, without deigning to ask Helen or anyone who knew her whether she was the sort of person who would break up her child’s home as a legal maneuver, agreed. Stages cost $850 a day, and there was no timetable for Ben’s discharge. Bonifacio’s retainer was sixty-two thousand dollars. Helen had a checking account with about eight grand left in it. Her life was such that her only expenses were food and gas, but still.

She would have to go back to work, and she had to do it somewhere other than Rensselaer Valley, because there were no jobs there outside the service industries and because they needed a fresh start anyway, out from under the dark umbrella Ben’s madness had opened up above their lives. They needed to begin again. It was just the two of them now. Helen thought about returning to Manhattan after fourteen years and permitted herself to get a little excited, despite the fact that her previous, and really only, job experience had been as a sales manager at Ralph Lauren, a job she’d quit during her second pregnancy when a doctor had consigned her to bed. She had little sense of how employable she might now be in the city (or anywhere else, really), and so she decided to set up a few exploratory interviews. On a Monday morning in mid-September she dropped her daughter, sad and stoic, outside the front doors of the junior high school, then sped home, changed into a suit, and drove herself to the train station.

It had been a long time since she’d held a salaried job. Not that she’d been idle all these years; on the contrary, being a young, bright housewife of means in a community like Rensselaer Valley meant that your commitments gradually expanded to fill your days and then some. People found you; they called you up and invited themselves over on behalf of an array of local organizations: the elementary school, the library, the pool club, the book club, the Democratic Town Committee. She’d even written some stories for the local weekly. All that, of course, was shot to hell now, less by scandal than by the toxicity of pity. Helen had four interviews lined up for today and high hopes for none of them. She was forty-three and had had to go online to learn how to put together a decent-looking CV. No one to help her with that stuff now, and only herself to help Sara with it when the time came. Helen took a deep breath and shook herself to ward off the pessimism she felt settling over her. The train, after all, was full, even though it was past the start of the workday. All these people were headed to the city, yet none of them, or very few, could have had the pretext of a nine-to-five job there. So she wasn’t alone. There were plenty of others in the same position which now seemed so marginal to her, even if none of them had gotten there quite the way she had.