Conspiracy Theory(15)
It was, Lucinda thought, a good thing that she was both too old and too young for Power to the People and the Weather Underground. If she’d been born a couple of years earlier or later than she was, she would have armed herself to the teeth and died in a bank robbery without having the faintest idea what she was hoping to accomplish. Or maybe she wouldn’t have, because Grandma Watkins would definitely not have approved. Grandma Watkins was dead now, of course—if she was alive, she’d be a hundred and thirty—but she’d lived long enough to see the New Left, and she hadn’t been impressed.
Lucinda considered doing the dishes, and decided against it. It was the first thing the volunteers went for when they came in in the morning. Lucinda more and more often thought she ought to let them at it. She’d spent her entire childhood washing dishes. These girls had spent their entire childhoods visiting the Museum of Fine Arts and having French lessons. She washed her hands under the tap in the sink and dried them on the clean dish towel she always left hanging from the refrigerator door. Sometimes she wondered what the people of Mount Hope, Mississippi, would think of Philadelphia, where there were more Catholics than anything else, and the Catholics weren’t the strange ones. She knew what they would have thought of Annie’s atheism, if they could have been convinced that Annie was an atheist at all. People in Mount Hope tended to think that everybody really believed in God, deep down, even if they said they didn’t. She knew what they would have thought of Father Tibor Kasparian too. They would have been purely convinced that he worshiped the devil.
She went to the swinging door that led to the hall and stuck her head out. The hall was empty, but it almost always was at this time of night. She had been hoping to catch Father Kasparian on his way out.
“There anybody out there listening?” she called.
There was a rumbling somewhere in the distance and a blond head appeared halfway to the foyer. “I’m here, Miss Watkins. I’m doing some paperwork on the lunch project. Can I do something for you?”
“I was just wondering if Father Kasparian was still around somewhere.”
“Oh, no. Should we have held on to him? I mean, nobody told us to. And Mrs. Wyler was here to say good-bye to him—”
“Annie’s back?”
“She came in about ten minutes ago. Really, he hasn’t been gone long. You could probably catch him if you ran. He must be headed toward the bus stop. You know you can’t ever catch a cab on this block. You could just—”
“No, no. It’s all right. As long as he got that package I made up for him—”
“Oh, he did, he did. Mrs. Wyler made sure. I didn’t know that Armenians had their own church different from everybody else’s. Did you? I thought they were just Catholics, like the Greeks.”
“The Greeks aren’t Catholics.”
“They’re not?”
“Never mind,” Lucinda said. “Where did Annie go? Is she all right?”
“She went to her room. I think she’s a little upset about something, although you really can’t tell with her, can you? She’s always so quiet. My mother says the Rosses have always been like that, very odd really, and nothing at all like most people, but—”
“Excuse me,” Lucinda said.
Then she retreated into the kitchen, backing up so quickly she bumped into a cabinet on the way. She blamed the private schools. They took these girls with nothing in their heads and gave them social consciences that were more social than conscience, and then Adelphos House got stuck with them. Community Service Internship Interval. It was awful.
It was also awful that Annie had come back early, and upset. Lucinda counted to thirty, long enough for the blond girl to retreat to her papers, then went back out into the hall and up the stairs. When Annie came back early, it could sometimes be good news. The girls weren’t out tonight or the johns weren’t buying. When Annie came back upset, it was usually the start of a major catastrophe.
If we’re about to go to war with the mayor again, I’ll just spit, Lucinda thought— and then she mentally erased the spit, because Grandma Watkins wouldn’t have had the kind of fit that is only available to goddesses and ice queens.
7
David Alden checked through the last set of spreadsheets in the file, clicked back to make sure he had looked at everything he was supposed to look at, made a note to himself to find out just how exposed the bank was in the mess that was about to become of Price Heaven, and gave the command to print. That was something he’d learned during the first week of his first real job. No matter how extensive your computer files, no matter how well you’d backed them up with copies and disks, you must always make a hard copy. If you didn’t, some fifteen-year-old slogging his way through a yahoo high school in Dunbar, Oklahoma, would come along and wipe you clean. David always wondered why the CIA and the FBI didn’t hire these kids to make sure their computer records had been sanitized. Hell, he wondered why the bank didn’t—except that he didn’t really wonder, because he knew. The bottom line about the bank was that it kept all records, no matter how damaging, no matter how obscure, and it kept them forever. If they were ever to get hit with a scandal or a meltdown, there would be no point in shredding documents, because there would be far too many of them to shred, and far too many independent computer networks to clean out, and far too many hard copies in far too many file cabinets in far too many home offices. Human beings had a mania for documentation. They took pictures of themselves doing nothing at all. Here’s Uncle Ned, drinking lemonade at last year’s VFW picnic. They kept birth certificates, First Holy Communion records, Confirmation scrolls, high school diplomas, marriage licenses, driver’s licenses, family Bibles, school pictures, postcards. David imagined the average American house as a stockpile of paper, the closets filled to overflow with souvenirs and mementos, the basements and the attics stocked with brown cardboard boxes going to mold and mildew, keeping the faith. Or maybe not. David was sometimes acutely aware of the fact that he had never been in an average American house, not once in all his thirty-six years, not even on a visit to the families of college friends or business colleagues. In the circles in which he moved, nobody would be caught dead with four bedrooms and two-point-five baths on half an acre in New Jersey. No matter how well they played the game of being a friend to Working Americans—the bank’s own television commercials sounded like hymns to Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens—there was a river of distaste running through the upper echelons of every business he knew, and the distaste was for all things suburban and middle-class. Especially middle-class. There was a reason why they sent their children to private kindergartens that cost in tuition more than most public school teachers made in a year, and it wasn’t just for the prestige, or for meeting the right people. It took work to build an adult who never watched television, never listened to pop music and didn’t even know the way to the local mall. It took something more than that to make sure your children would be instantly recognizable, and distrusted, by outsiders. Cocoons are not comfortable things. Nobody ever stayed in them unless they had to.