Hardscrabble Road (28 page)

She had no idea what she was going to do next—she had imagined herself walking in and meeting the receptionist, or something;
maybe she had just imagined herself walking in to find the staff all assembled and ready to listen to her—but while she was
working it out, Martha Iles came into view, realized she was there, and stopped.

“Ellen?”

Ellen Harrigan hated that voice. She truly hated it. It had everything in it she had learned to fear, early. Wellesley. Harvard
and the Kennedy School of Government. Girls sitting at the front of the class in the desks right in front of the teacher’s
own, their hands always in the air. It mattered only a little that Martha was so plain she might as well have been a chipmunk.

“Ellen, what are you doing here?” she said. “I’ve got a right to be here,” Ellen said. “This was Drew’s office. It’s going
to be mine, now. It’s going to be mine because he’s dead.”

“Yes,” Martha said, sounding exasperated. “We know he’s dead, Ellen, it’s been on the news all night. But we have work to
do. Drew wasn’t just a person, he was an enterprise, and dead or not we’ve got obligations we’ve got to fulfill.”

Danielle Underwood came out from behind the partition that led to the offices in the back. She was prettier than Martha, and
her accent wasn’t anywhere near as awful, but Ellen knew that she was much the same. All these women were alike, really, all
these women with careers, thinking they were better than everybody else, thinking they were special. Ellen took great satisfaction
in remembering that these days, when you called somebody “special,” you weren’t talking about how bright they were.

It was hot in here now, hot-cold, hot-cold, hot-cold. Ellen unbuttoned her coat. “I don’t think you should make decisions
without talking to me,” she said. “I’m going to be in charge here now. I don’t want you doing things that are going to be
blamed on Drew if I don’t know about them first.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” Martha said. “You have no idea what goes on in this office. You have no idea what it is we do. You
can’t give orders about something you know nothing about.”

“I can give orders about something I own,” Ellen said. “And I own this. Whatever it is, now that Drew isn’t here.”

“You don’t own this yet,” Martha said. “The will will have to be probated. In the meantime, I’m going to keep this office
running the way it ought to be run, the way Drew wanted it run, the way I ran it for him. And if you don’t like it, you can
see the lawyers.”

“Martha,” Danielle said.

“Don’t shush me,” Martha said. “This is ridiculous. She doesn’t know the first thing about the work Drew was doing. She doesn’t
even know what he did besides be on the radio, and she only knows that because she’s got her radio dial turned to his program.
She’s a walking clothes rack, that’s all she is. He married her because she looks good in photographs.”

Ellen smiled slightly. That might very well be true, at least up to a point. She thought Drew might also have married her
because she made him feel comfortable. Unlike Martha, or Danielle, or the “right-wing blondes” who had taken over television
lately, she didn’t have that Seven Sisters–Ivy League accent, and she hadn’t grown up taking summer vacations on Martha’s
Vineyard.

She suppressed a sudden, almost irresistible urge to tell Martha Iles exactly what Drew Harrigan liked to do in bed. She went
all the way back to Drew’s office, let herself in, and looked around. It was neat. There were no papers on the desk. There
were photographs, mostly of her. She thought they should have had children. Then she changed her mind. To be left with children
to bring up after their father had died young was not a good thing. She’d had an aunt that had happened to. Both the children
had grown up wild, and one of them had landed in jail for shoplifting when she was only twenty-two.

Martha Iles was hovering at the office door. Danielle Underwood was hovering right behind her. Ellen went over to Drew’s desk,
pulled out the swivel chair, and sat down. It was an enormous desk, like the ones executives had in movies from the 1950s.
Ellen hated movies from the 1950s. She hated movies from the 1940s, too. She hated all things from back in history. It was
all too long ago, and the people never made any sense. She did like this desk, though. This desk made her feel invincible.

Martha Iles came a little farther into the room. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” she said. “I don’t know what
you think you can accomplish. You can sit behind a desk, anybody can, but that doesn’t mean you can do the work that comes
across it.”

“It means I can fire you,” Ellen said.

“Not today, you can’t,” Martha said.

“Then I’ll wait,” Ellen said. “I’ll call the lawyers this afternoon and we’ll see what happens, won’t we? No, I’ll call them
now, here, from the desk. I’ve got Neil Savage’s home number. I’ll bet I can get him over here right this minute. Don’t you
think so?”

“I think you’ve lost your mind,” Martha said.

Ellen thought that this was something she hadn’t considered. With Drew gone, she was both rich and powerful, if only powerful
in this little sphere here, in the office. She could grow to like this, and when she had destroyed it, when she had fired
them all and sold whatever needed to be sold and settled whatever needed to be settled, she could go back home and never have
to worry about anything again. She knew that people were supposed to have a lot of trouble coming back home when they had
been away for a long time, but that was because they became accustomed to the way things were done in the places they’d gone.
Ellen had never been accustomed to any of it. She could slip back into life at home as easily as if she’d done nothing more
radical than take a day shopping at Wal-Mart. She was even looking forward to shopping at Wal-Mart again.

Drew had wanted to live in this world, but Ellen had never understood why.

S
ister Maria Beata of
the Incarnation was having a bad morning. The only consolation for it was the fact that it wasn’t her usual bad morning.
There had been no reading from St. John of the Cross or, even as bad, St. Thérèse of Lisieux at refectory. She thought that
if she had to hear all that treacly nonsense about the Bride and the Bridegroom one more time, she’d spit in the soup. The
reading this morning had been from St. Teresa of Avila herself, and it had been deliberately bland and unconnected to “the
world.” The last thing Reverend Mother wanted was for her nuns to think too long and hard about what had happened to Drew
Harrigan, of all people, in their own barn. They’d never been happy about letting people into that barn in the first place.
Of course, they had said prayers at Mass this morning and at Office for the repose of Mr. Harrigan’s soul, but they’d said
those before, the night he died. They just hadn’t known his name then. It wasn’t the Mass or the Office that was bothering
Beata, or the readings at refectory, or how crazy she sometimes got in the long silences that were the background music of
all that went on in Carmel. She was not listening for the voice of God this morning, and she wasn’t distressed at the fact
that she wasn’t hearing anything. It was still true that she might have made a mistake, coming here, but she didn’t have time
to think about it now. She knew in her bones that there were aspects to this situation Reverend Mother hadn’t considered,
and she wasn’t looking forward to the fact that she was the only one here who would be able to warn her.

Sometimes, in periods of enormous stress, she thought about the life she had had before coming to Carmel, and about the fact
that Reverend Mother
had been reluctant to receive her because of it. In the long months when she was discussing her vocation through the grille
a couple of times a week, she had sometimes thought that she would have had an easier time being accepted if she’d been a
drug addict and felon instead of Susan Titus Alderman, graduate of Bryn Mawr and the Yale Law School, Rhodes Scholar, Harkness
Distinguished Fellow in History.

“It’s not the intelligence,” Reverend Mother had said, when she first came to Carmel. “The intelligence is an asset. It’s
the ambition. You’re a very ambitious woman.”

“I don’t think I am,” Beata had said at the time, and by now she had decided that she had been telling the truth. She had
not been ambitious. The constant struggle had made her tired and annoyed, even though she engaged in it and even though she
was good at it. She looked back on all of that as a kind of delirium, implanted in her by a father for whom competition was
an end in itself. You played to win no matter what you played. You made sure always to be among the first in any group you
might enter. If she had joined a street gang, she would have been the leader of it in six months flat. As it was, she was
president of her class twice during her years at Exeter, head of the yearbook committee, star of the Branch-Soule Debating
Society, most active member of the Broadside. She was the kind of student schools featured in their recruiting catalogues
and highlighted in their alumni newsletters. She was organized, efficient, intelligent, and relentless. And by the time she
came to Carmel, she was sick of the whole thing.

No, she thought again, it wasn’t the ambition that was the problem. It was the alienation she felt at the way so many of the
men and women who had built this order saw God. She did not want to experience an ecstatic union, not even on St. Teresa’s
terms, and St. Teresa was as levelheaded as they came. She didn’t want to be a Bride to anybody’s Bridegroom, not even when
the Bridegroom was Jesus Christ himself. The imagery alone made something deep inside her shut right off. It seemed to her
that it ought to be possible to approach God as a mind instead of a heart, to approach Him in the clear light of the reasoning
He’d endowed human beings with to begin with. Maybe she should have been a Benedictine, or a Dominican. If the Jesuits had
admitted women, they might have been her best bet.

This morning, her best bet would be to ditch her habit and escape the monastery, but she knew she wouldn’t do that, and not
only because she didn’t want to leave, unhappy as she was at times lately. Along with the need to win, her father had implanted
in her the need to take responsibility, so here she was.

Here Reverend Mother was, too, pacing back and forth in front of her desk. Beata came in and bowed as she had been taught
to do. Everything at
this Carmel was elaborately formal. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t know about a cloister until you were already inside
it.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Reverend Mother.”

“What?” Reverend Mother said. “Oh, you mean Drew. I suppose I should feel loss, but I don’t. I’d like to think that was because
I was being perfected in my vocation. We’re supposed to be detached from the people and things we knew in the world. But it
isn’t that. Drew and I never really got along very well. We haven’t spoken much in years.”

“Yes, Reverend Mother. It’s still a loss, though, isn’t it? I’m sorry to be so obtuse, but I don’t have any brother or sisters.”

“I had only Drew. We weren’t even close as children. Never mind. You wanted to see me? Immaculata is getting a little mulish
about the amount of time you’re spending away from the desk. And yes, I know it’s hardly your fault, but she is what she is.”

Beata let that go. Immaculata most certainly was what she was, and what she was was a woman who had entered the convent because
she’d had no other place to go. Beata had known nuns like that growing up—well, all right, religious sisters—and the breed
always made her nervous. There was an undertone of anger and resentment in them that could break out at any time.

Reverend Mother motioned to the chair. Beata sat down. “I’m sorry to bother you,” Beata said, “but it occurred to me that
nobody may have told you what’s coming. And you’d have no reason to know. So I thought I’d better warn you.”

“About what? Do you mean what’s coming about Drew?”

“Yes, Reverend Mother. I know you don’t listen to the television very often, but you must have heard by now that the police
are treating this as a case of murder. And that’s going to mean certain things.”

“I suppose it will,” Reverend Mother said. “Do you mean you think they’ll treat me as a suspect? Because he was my brother,
I mean, and he died in the barn.”

“There’s that, yes,” Beata said, “but it really isn’t the most difficult thing. I doubt if they’ll seriously consider you
a suspect. You had no reason to murder him, not even in regard to the property, because the property will still be held in
escrow even with your brother gone. I will say, though, that they’re going to have a fit—”

“—Sister.”

“Sorry, Reverend Mother, but there’s almost no other word for it. They’re going to be very upset when they find out about
the property and your connection to Drew, and they’re going to want to know why I didn’t say anything about either last night.
And we can’t very well say I didn’t know, because I saw Neil Savage on behalf of the convent just a couple of weeks ago.”

“They’ll think we’re hiding something,” Reverend Mother said.

“I doubt it, Reverend Mother, although they’ll say they do. The thing is, they’re going to want to search the monastery.”

“You mean search the barn?”

“No, Reverend Mother, I mean search the monastery. The whole thing. Including the enclosure.”

“But they can’t search the enclosure,” Reverend Mother said. “Lay people aren’t allowed in the enclosure.”

“I wouldn’t really want to be the one who tried to sell that to a judge in Philadelphia at the moment,” Beata said. “Reverend
Mother, you’ve got to understand that everybody is going to be acting under constraint. There was just a huge priest pedophilia
scandal in this city, not that long ago. The police department and the mayor’s office both got hit with accusations that they’d
given the Catholic Church special treatment and that as a result of that, many more children were harmed than would have been
otherwise. They can’t be seen to be giving us special treatment in this case.”