Household Gods

Nicole brought herself back to earth with an effort. “Oh,” she said. “All right. If Lucinda says it, it must be so.”

Nicole and Cyndi shared a smile. Sheldon Rosenthal’s secretary reckoned herself at least as important to the firm as the boss. She was close enough to being right that nobody ever quite dared disagree with her in public.

Something else caught Nicole’s eye and mind, which went to show how scattered she still was after her morning from hell. She pointed to the photographs on her secretary’s desk. “Cyndi, who takes care of Benjamin and Joseph while you’re here?”

“My husband’s sister,” Cyndi answered. She didn’t sound confused, or wary either. “She’s got two-year-old twins of her own, and she stays home with them and my kids and her other sister-in-law’s little girl. She’d rather do that than go back to work, so it’s pretty good for all of us.”

“Do you think she’d want to take on two more?” Nicole tried to make it sound light, but couldn’t hide how hard Josefina’s desertion had hit.

Cyndi heard the story with sympathy that looked and sounded genuine. “That’s terrible of her, to spring it on you like that,” she said. “Still, if it’s family, what can you do? You can’t very well tell your mother not to be sick, you have to stay in the States and take care of other people’s kids.” She hesitated. Probably she could feel Nicole staring at her, thinking at her — wanting, needing her to solve the problem. “Look,” she said uncomfortably. “I understand, I really do. You know? But I don’t think Marie would want to sit any kids who aren’t family, you know what I mean?”

Nicole knew what she meant. Nicole would have felt the same way. But they were her kids. She was left in the lurch, on a bare day’s notice. “Oh, yes,” she said. She hoped she didn’t sound as disappointed as she felt. “Yes. Of course. I just thought… well. If my family were here, and not back in Indiana… Oh well. It was worth a try.” She did her best to make her shrug nonchalant, to change the subject without giving them both whiplash. “Ten-thirty, you said? I’ll see what I can catch up on till then. Lord, you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to get here this morning.”

“Traffic.” Cyndi managed to make it both a four-letter word and a sigh of relief. Off the hook, she had to be thinking.

Lucky Cyndi, with her sister in town and not in Bloomington, and no chance of her disappearing into the wilds of Ciudad Obregon. Nicole mumbled something she hoped was suitably casual, and retreated to her desk. She was still riding the high of Ogarkov’s news, though the bright edge had worn off it.

The first thing she did when she got there was check her voice mail. Sure enough, one of the messages was from Sheldon Rosenthal, dry and precise as usual: “Please arrange to meet with me at your earliest convenience.” She’d taken care of that. Another one was from Mort Albers, with whom she had the eleven-thirty appointment. “Can we move it up to half-past ten?” he asked.

“No, Mort,” Nicole said with a measure of satisfaction, “you can’t, not today.” It was just as satisfying to have Cyndi make the call and change the schedule — the pleasure of power. Nicole could get used to that, oh yes she could. Even the little things felt good today. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow she’d be doing them as a partner. Today — her last day as a plain associate — had a bittersweet clarity, a kind of farewell brightness. She answered a couple of voice-mail messages from other lawyers at the firm. She wrote a memo, fired it off by e-mail, and printed out a hard copy for her files. Frank would have gone on for an hour about how primitive that was, but the law ran on paper and ink, not electrons and phosphors — and to hell with Frank anyhow, she thought.

It was going to feel wonderful to tell him she was a partner now. Even if -

She quelled the little stab of anxiety. He had to keep paying child support, as much as he ever did. That was in the divorce decree. She was a lawyer — a partner in a moderately major firm. She could make it stick.

The clock on the wall ticked the minutes away. At ten twenty-five she started a letter, hesitated, counted up the minutes remaining, saved the letter on the hard drive and stood up, smoothing wrinkles out of her skirt. She checked her pantyhose. On straight, no runs — thanks to whichever god oversaw the art of dressing for success. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders, and forayed out past Cyndi’s desk. “I’m going to see Mr. Rosenthal,” she said — nice and steady, she was pleased to note. Cyndi grinned and gave her a thumbs-up.

Nicole took the stairs to the seventh floor. Some people walked all the way up every day; others exercised on the stairs during breaks and at lunch.

Nicole never had understood that, not in a climate that made you happy to go outside the whole year round — even on days when the smog was thick enough to asphyxiate a non-smog-adapted organism. People who’d been born in L.A. didn’t know when they were well off.

She stood in the hallway for a minute and a half, so she could walk into Sheldon Rosenthal’s office at ten- thirty on the dot. It was an exercise in discipline, and a chance to pull herself together. She thought about ducking into a restroom, but that would have meant heading back down to the sixth floor: she didn’t — yet — have the key to the partners’ washroom. Her makeup would have to look after itself. Her bladder would hold on till the meeting was over.

Then, after what felt like a week and a half, it was time. She licked her dry lips, stiffened her spine, and walked through the mock-oak-paneled door with its discreet brass plaque: Sheldon Rosenthal, Esq., it said. That was all. No title. No ostentation. Noble self-restraint.

That restraint was, in its peculiar way, as much in evidence inside as out. Of course the office was a lot more lavishly appointed than anything down on her floor: acres of deep expensive carpet, gleaming glass, dark wood, law books bound in red and gold. But it was all in perfect taste, not overdone. It was a perk, that was all, a symbol. Here, it said, was the founding partner of the firm. Naturally he’d surround himself with order and comfort, quiet and expense, rather than the cheap carpet and tacky veneer of the salaried peon.

Lucinda Jackson looked up from the keyboard of — of all things — an IBM Selectric. Not for her anything as newfangled as a computer. She was a light-skinned black woman, the exact shade of good coffee well lightened with cream. She might have been fifty or she might have been seventy. One thing Nicole did know: she’d been with Mr. Rosenthal forever.

“He still has the client in there, Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” she said. Her voice was cultured, soft, almost all traces of the Deep South excised as if by surgery. “Why don’t you sit down? He’ll see you as soon as he can.”

Nicole nodded and sank into a chair so plush, she had real doubts that she’d be able to climb out of it. Her eyes went to the magazines on the table next to it, but she didn’t take one. She didn’t want to have to slap it shut all of a sudden when she received the summons to the inner office.

Twenty minutes slid by. Nicole tried to look as if she didn’t mind that her life — not to mention her day’s work — had been put on hold. When she was a partner, she would be more careful of her schedule. She wouldn’t keep a fellow partner waiting.

At last, with an effect rather like the parting of the gates of heaven in a Fifties movie epic, the door to the inner office opened. Someone her mother had watched on TV came out. “Thanks a million, Shelly,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m glad it’s in good hands. Say hi to Ruth for me.” He waggled his fingers at Lucinda and walked past Nicole as if she’d been invisible.

She was almost too bemused to feel slighted. Shelly? She couldn’t imagine anyone calling Sheldon Rosenthal Shelly. Certainly no one in the firm did — not even the other senior partners.

“Go on in, Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” Lucinda said, at the same time as Rosenthal said, “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”

“It’s all right,” Nicole said, carefully heaving herself up and out of that engulfing chair. It wasn’t all right, not really, but she told herself it was — the way hazing is, a kind of rite of passage. And after all, what could she do? Complain to his boss?

Rosenthal held the door open so that she could enter his sanctum. He looked like what he was: a Jewish lawyer — thin and thoughtful type, not fat and friendly — in his mid-sixties, out of the ordinary only in that he wore a neat gray chin beard. He waved her to a chair. “Please — make yourself comfortable.” Before she could sit down, however, he pointed to the Mr. Coffee on a table by the window. “Help yourself, if you like.”

The mug on his desk was half full. Nicole decided to take him up on his offer — a show of solidarity, as it were; her first cup of coffee as a partner in the firm. She filled one of the styrofoam cups by the coffee machine. When she tasted, her eyebrows leaped upward. “Is that Blue Mountain?” she asked.

“You’re close.” He smiled. “It’s Kalossi Celebes. A lot of people think it’s just as good, and you don’t have to rob a bank to buy it.”