Hardscrabble Road(113)

“You won’t. I know what’s in the will, Neil. I have a copy of it.”

“Do you?”

“I’ve got copies of everything. The will. The deeds. Everything he owned, and everything we owned together, and everything I owned by myself. Not that I would have known what to do with the money if I’d been left to myself, but Drew bought stock for me, and real estate. I know you have all the originals, but I have copies. Drew said it was safer.”

“It is. It’s a lot safer.”

“I want to do whatever we have to do about the will. I control a lot of things now. The franchise, isn’t that what it’s called? The merchandising. I don’t suppose that will last all that long now that he’s dead, but it’s got to be taken care of.”

“I can take care of those things for you,” Neil said. “And Drew had a business manager. She can—”

“—Yes, I know Drew’s business manager.”

Neil hesitated. “If it’s, well, if it’s a personal thing, I can assure you that nothing Drew ever did gave me the least impression that—”

Ellen was genuinely startled. “Do you honestly think I’d suspect Drew of having an affair with that woman? Or with any of the women in his office? Drew was a lot of things, but one of them was not the kind of man who gets attracted to that kind of woman. Do you know what he used to say about Danielle? That she probably took her briefcase to bed with her. And he didn’t mean when she was sleeping alone.”

“Ah,” Neil said, “yes.”

“It bothered you when he talked like that, didn’t it? It bothered all of you. The women in the office, too. I mean, after all, what was he? Some small town hick with a tenth-rate education. That’s not mine, by the way, I heard a woman at a party say it once, when she thought she was alone with a friend in the ladies’ room. But you think that about all of them. Rush Limbaugh. Alan Keyes. Oliver North. They’re your version of slumming.”

“I really don’t think I know what you mean,” Neil said.

He was stiff now. She could feel it. She got up and began to walk around the office, doing the unthinkable, the one thing she had been told by everyone, even Drew, that she was never to do. She started picking up the brica-brac. It was ancient and venerable bric-a-brac: a painted wooden duck decoy that had never been in the water; a picture of a woman in a shirtwaist dress in a thick silver frame; a little canoe made out of birch bark and tailored into a perfect miniature. She could feel him flinching every time she picked up something else. There were no Steuben glass crystal hand warmers here, and there never would be.

“You know,” she said, “I know you think I’m stupid, and it’s probably true. I’m not very quick at a lot of things, and there’s a lot I don’t understand. But I understand this. All those people you can’t stand have rights, too. They have the right to be heard. They have the right to be taken seriously.”

“Nobody has the right to be taken seriously. You earn that by the content of your ideas.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. But maybe you don’t, so I’ll let it pass. The thing is, I’ve thought it all out, and I’ve decided that I’ll be a lot better without you than with you. And that goes for Drew’s staff. There have to be people out there who can run an office without thinking their shit doesn’t stink because they got their degree from Mount Holyoke. There have got to be people with skills that I can actually work with.”

“You’ve never had any problem working with me,” Neil said.

“That’s because I’ve never had to work with you. You could ignore me while Drew was alive. You can’t ignore me now. I don’t want to spend my time meeting in offices surrounded by all your dead partners who probably thought the Irish were the next worst thing after refrigerator mold, if they even knew what refrigerator mold was. I don’t care if people hate me for being Catholic, but I care when they laugh at me for it.”

“I’ve never laughed at anybody for being Catholic.”

“Not in public, no. But you do. At least, you laugh at my kind of Catholic, at rosaries and scapulars and pictures of us making First Holy Communion   in a white dress and a veil like a make-believe bride. I didn’t make that one up, either. That was one of the women at the office. I want the will read, and settled, and then you’re fired. You never wanted Drew’s business anyway. Now you’re rid of it.”

“I think you’re making a mistake,” Neil said. “You think I’m too stupid to think for myself,” Ellen said, “and that could be true. We’ll just have to see. As soon as we get the will read and it becomes official that I’m taking over the franchise, I’m going to fire the office staff. All of them.”