Authors: Christopher Hebert
Having witnessed a few similar flare-ups years before, Ruth and Tom assumed that this one, too, would pass. They were living then not far from Palmer Woods, and at nine-thirty they left for church, their route taking them down Woodward, where they were alarmed to find the street already trashed, all those precious cars overturned like stones. Everything was on fire.
Later that day came reports of a fireman shot dead by a rooftop sniper. The National Guard took up positions—terrified boys who had never seen anything like this. And then, at last, came the tanks and the infantry troops fresh from Vietnam. It took five days for the streets to clear.
And once the streets were cleared, they never really filled again.
Forty-three people died, most of them black. More than a thousand people were injured. The blacks called it a
rebellion
, claiming they were fighting back against police brutality and discrimination
and all kinds of other iniquities, but it would be years before Ruth could understand what that meant, before she could feel anything other than anger. Only then would she come to see them as something more than a mob hell-bent on destruction.
Within a year, all of Ruth’s closest friends (the ones who had not gone already) left the city for the suburbs. For a while, the people she had known were replaced with others she didn’t. Black doctors and lawyers and executives moved into neighborhoods that had always been completely white. Ruth was ashamed sometimes to remember how much she and Tom fretted for their safety, for their prosperity, how they watched moving trucks through curtained windows, wondering where it all would lead. It didn’t take long to find out. At the time, they felt lucky to have gotten out when they did, when it was still possible to sell a house for something. There were only so many black doctors and lawyers and executives to go around. The city emptied faster than it could be filled. First one house at a time went empty, and then entire streets, and then entire blocks, and then entire neighborhoods, and eventually entire zip codes. And nothing would ever be the same again.
§
All that had happened long ago, to someone else, to someone that Ruth, at sixty-eight, truly felt she barely knew. As she looked out now over the river from the third floor of the HSI Building, it occurred to her that the eighteen-year-old girl who had left Francis Statler to stand alone by herself at the Belle Isle fountain would have been staring then at the very spot where she currently sat. Of course, the tower hadn’t been built then. That was a different city in 1958, the sort of city that could still afford to maintain a conservatory and an aquarium and a lavish fountain that shot water forty feet into the air.
Ruth had gone back to Belle Isle for the last time the previous fall, wanting to share the aquarium with her granddaughter before it was permanently closed. Her younger daughter had brought her family in
from Connecticut for the weekend. Ruth and little Hannah found the island dead, the casino and the children’s zoo already shuttered. The shoreline roads she’d cruised as a girl were empty, the bushes overgrown, the sidewalks disintegrated. The parking lot in front of the fountain was barricaded, the water shut off. It was fall and overcast, and the leaves were off the trees, and on all the battered grass there wasn’t a single dog or child to be seen. Ruth felt as if she were the last cold war spy, sent to some vast, desolate place for an exchange of top secret microfilm. Even her favorite orchids in the conservatory weren’t enough to mask how far the place had fallen. The bark of the palm trees had been carved up with initials. Squares of plywood covered the broken panes of greenhouse glass.
Hannah kept saying, “Grandma, I think we should go.”
“It didn’t used to be like this,” Ruth tried to explain. But eyes can’t be talked out of what they see.
On all of Belle Isle, only the yacht club had been kept up. It didn’t belong to the city. In its latest manifestation, the building was a Spanish Colonial stucco anomaly with it own private wooden bridge. Ruth couldn’t help suspecting the club had chosen this least logical of architectural styles precisely in order to signal its detachment from the rest of the city. Her second husband was a member, as was virtually everyone else in their circle, as were all the other HSI executives. It was the only reason any of them came onto the island anymore, the place to go when one wanted to feel as though one were somewhere else.
Everything was gone. Hudson’s, where she’d spent almost as many hours as she had at school, had been imploded years before, 2,800 pounds of explosives turning the twenty-eight stories—more than two million square feet—into 330,000 tons of rubble.
The Gratiot Drive-In, where Francis Statler had finally kissed her, was a strip mall now. It was hard to say if that was better or worse than remaining an abandoned hulk, a freestanding waterfall run dry.
And the cars, which had been all anyone cared about then—the city largely imported them now. They were someone else’s pride and joy.
There were more than ten thousand empty houses in the city. Her childhood home in Palmer Woods was one of them. The last time she drove by—for no reason other than curiosity—the roof wore an immense blue tarp, and the glass was gone from the windows, even in the small dormers in her brothers’ old bedrooms. She couldn’t bring herself to stop. A few other houses in the neighborhood looked just as bad, but as a whole Palmer Woods was still one of the best neighborhoods in the city. On the way back out to Woodward, she passed Francis Statler’s house. It, at least, was as presidential as ever, the lawn still perfectly manicured. Someone else owned it now.
For weeks after that drive through Palmer Woods, Ruth had debated buying her old house on Balmoral Drive. She’d gone as far as to have a contractor acquaintance of her husband’s go through it to see what it might take to restore the place. Nearly half a million dollars was his estimate, all for a house that in her lifetime would never be worth even a fraction of that. David, her second husband, would never agree to live there. She knew better than to ask.
For David, there was no city. As far as he was concerned, the whole place had been bulldozed decades ago, leaving nothing but an immense blank he sometimes needed to pass through to visit friends in Grosse Pointe. That Ruth consented to come here every day to work was for him just another mark of her eccentric character. Her colleagues would have been mystified to learn that at home she was in this regard the hopeless romantic, and that David, despite his full-time devotion to leisure and exotic produce, was the practical one.
Ruth was not ashamed to admit that part of her lived in the past. David was content to live in the eternal present. Nothing was permitted to remain in his life longer than a couple of years. Periodically he would cast away every last piece of furniture, and she would come home to find last year’s Asian transformed into this year’s
rustic modern. He’d never worn down the heel of a shoe or the tread of a tire. Things came and went. It was a wonder he hadn’t yet grown tired of her, although without her he could never have afforded such profligacy.
She rarely complained.
At thirty-three, Ruth Freeman had decided to remake her life. And unlike the city, she had succeeded. And that was why she sat here now, in a walnut-lined boardroom surrounded by a phalanx of balding men in boxy suits impatiently waiting for her to sign off on the proposal before her, to add her rubber stamp to theirs.
The presentations were over, their case laid out. All they needed, all they had wanted for the last hour, was her okay. She could not blame them for their irritation. For decades she had been training them to imagine they had her agreement, her consent. Without that, she never would have made it to where she was, the only woman among their ranks.
But it was impossible for her not to think back on her old life. And on the other lives she might have lived. If not with her first husband, whose vision of her was only as large as the kitchen and the bedroom, then with Francis Statler, that strange, gentle boy. Sometimes she wondered if he had ever found a world in which he fit. His family had moved away while Francis was in college back east, and Ruth lost track of him after that. He never resurfaced for reunions, never appeared in any corporate profile. She could have found out, of course, if she had wished, but in truth she liked it better this way. She wanted to leave the past as it was, as it remained in her memory, with Francis showing up at her door unexpectedly at the end of August 1958, the week before he was to leave for college, and announcing it was over.
“We’ve had a lot of fun,” he said, reaching out for her hand. “But it’s time to move on.”
And as he strolled back down her walkway, she wept, quietly at first so he wouldn’t hear. But as soon as he was gone, she let it all go,
burying her face in her pillow, glad for once of the din of her brothers in the room next door. That letting go was the first of many, and it was important to her that it be preserved.
She let go of the house on Balmoral, too. Some things were beyond saving. By now it was probably gone for good, scooped into Dumpsters, another blight erased. As if somehow emptiness could hide what had been there before. And now the neighbors who remained tossed grass seed onto the filled-in foundation and tasked their children with keeping the lot mowed. They did not want to think about the contagion, that with every passing year their own homes were worth less and less.
Where did it all go, the rubble they swept away? Where was there a landfill big enough to swallow an entire city? What sense would they make of it, archeologists two hundred million years from now trying to sift through these layers of sediment and reconstruct what had happened here?
Almost nothing remained, but it wasn’t nostalgia she felt for the city of her youth. Nostalgia was for coping with the passage of time, with the inevitability of decay. Nostalgia was the Motown they played on the radio. But nostalgia had no answers for a tragedy of this scope. That was what David couldn’t seem to understand, the way her heart prickled sometimes at the thought that things could have been different, that in some ways she felt herself to be at fault. And that she and everyone else she had known back then had awakened too late, and by the time they realized the destruction they’d set in motion, all the accent walls and fresh coats of paint in the world could not undo it.
From her teenage years, only the cherry-flavored ginger ale remained, that dreadful stuff. It still made her tongue curl.
And the other executives continued staring at her, waiting for her to complete the circle of ayes.
“The factory’s redundant,” Arthur was saying yet again. “And given what it would cost to repair and modernize, we don’t have any other choice.”
“What about the city?” Ruth said, her eyes drifting back to the shuttered island out the window. “What about that?”
“There comes a time,” Arthur said, “when you’ve got to accept you’ve done everything you could.”
“A drop in the bucket,” Ruth said. “An investment, PR.”
Arthur frowned with fatherly disappointment. He was eight years younger than she. “We’ve talked about all that, the costs and benefits.”
Quietly in the corner, pencil poised as she took the minutes, Tiphany was nodding.
“You have all the votes you need,” Ruth said. “If you want to shut it down, shut it down.”
“The board prefers consensus.”
“Well,” Ruth Freeman said, rising from her chair and letting her pen clatter to the table, “they’re not going to get it.”
Huddled together in the still, dark night, staring off at the same distant point, they must have seemed they were waiting for something exciting to happen. Thirty yards away, down the alley behind the HSI Building, the door of the loading dock was open, its shadow slightly shortened by a single overhead bulb.
April had discovered it was hard to maintain her balance, biting her nails while squatting. Her legs had grown so wobbly, she wondered whether she’d be able to get up and move when called upon to do so.
April, Holmes, and Fitch, dressed in black, pressed themselves up against the low alley wall, just out of range of the surveillance cameras. They were so silent that for long stretches the entire outside world seemed to fade away, making it feel to Fitch as though he were completely alone—just him and the relentless thumping in his head.
McGee had reported that the loading dock was where the custodians and the guards came to smoke. It’s where she’d gone herself. To
avoid having to disable the alarm every time someone needed a break, they left the door open, even though it was against company policy. By now, nearly morning, the custodians were gone, but the door remained open.
April, Holmes, and Fitch had their orders. They were to wait.
While she waited, April thought about Inez, who was at home, undoubtedly wondering why April was so late in coming back from the meeting. April didn’t like to lie. And really, she’d told only a partial lie. Technically, there
had
been a meeting, but it had lasted only fifteen minutes, just long enough for them to go over the plan for the last time. It was the plan itself April had neglected to mention. But by morning Inez would know where April had really been. By then it would be all over the news. And then what?
And then April would never lie to her again.
Too brief, Holmes thought, too brief. Fifteen minutes hadn’t been enough time to check everything he needed to check. His tools. What a disaster it would be to get inside and realize he hadn’t brought the right tools. It was too dark now and too late. His eyes remained fixed on the building, but his mind built an image of the inside of the black case where he kept his picks. He could picture them, their curves and edges, but he couldn’t be sure each one was in its place.
Wedged between the others, Fitch leaned his head back against the wall. Trying to clear his mind, to quiet the thumping, he found his thoughts drifting to a girl. There were so many girls he’d forgotten, and he would’ve been happy, as he stared at the open door of the loading dock, to think of any of them, with the single exception of the one girl who came to mind. Even in his memory her face wasn’t pretty. She’d been seventeen, two years older than him, and when she walked, her hips had swayed like a woman’s. But what he remembered most acutely, besides her body, was that she’d made him feel like a coward. And now, with the HSI Building looming above him, Fitch was beginning to feel that way again.