“Robert,” she said, “could we stop by Saint Margaret’s on the way?”
“Certainly, Mrs. Barrett.” He put on his turn signal and changed lanes, too professional to point out that the church was not at all on the way.
Snow was falling as the car pulled up to the curb in front of the church, icy crystals whisked smoothly aside by the windshield wipers. “I won’t be long,” she told Robert as he helped her from the backseat. He nodded, shut the door, and offered to escort her up the stairs, but a glance told her they had been recently swept and salted, so she declined.
The children’s choir rehearsal was under way when she entered the church, and the sweet loveliness of their voices and the rich, achingly familiar tones of the piano struck her with such force that she forgot to ease the tall, heavy door gently shut. It closed behind her with a muffled boom, drawing the attention of Sister Winifred, who had been quietly walking the aisles, raising kneelers and replacing hymnals and missals, and the young choir director, who was inexplicably standing near the front pew rather than with the choir. Camille offered the choir director an apologetic smile as she unbuttoned her coat and settled into the back pew, and the younger woman smiled back.
The choir director joined the accompanist at the piano, and the choir began to sing “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” a lovely carol that Camille knew better as the Longfellow poem “Christmas Bells.” A few years before, Camille and Paul had discovered an original manuscript of the poem—or rather, one of Camille’s most reliable contacts in the auction world had—which they had donated to the Longfellow House on Brattle Street in Cambridge. “Do you remember . . .” she murmured, before shock and remembrance choked off her words. For a moment she had forgotten that Paul was not sitting beside her listening to the choir, to the piano, as he had so often before. For a moment she had forgotten he never would again.
Overcome, she closed her eyes against tears. She knew it comforted everyone else to see her bearing up so well, so bravely, but in the sacred peace of St. Margaret’s, she could set the mask aside. She missed Paul desperately, with every thought, with every breath. She kept busy—everyone advised her to keep busy—but what would she do when she ran out of distractions? How would she bear the long, bleak, empty years without him? Thoughts of the future chilled her heart as if nothing lay ahead of her but cold, grim, endless winter, windswept and barren.
Intellectually, she knew this was not so. In her darkest hours, she reminded herself that all around her, life was flourishing, that she had important work yet to accomplish, that she would not always feel so rawly despondent as she did at that moment. But her heart—her heart declared that solace and resignation would forever elude her.
She had loved Paul too long to imagine any happiness without him—life, surely, but no joy.
She had never thought to marry, much less to know truly great love. She had known marriage was expected of her; from childhood, her mother and a series of nurses, governesses, and headmistresses had taught her that young ladies of her class had no greater duty and ought to have no other ambition but to marry suitable young gentlemen and carry on as their mothers and grandmothers had done since time immemorial—acting as her husband’s hostess, furthering his ambitions and discouraging his vices, bearing children to carry on the family line, managing the household staff, supporting charitable endeavors, displaying perfect manners and elegant dress, shrewdly managing her fortune.
Camille loved her mother and grandmothers but found their lives astoundingly dull. Instead, from the time she could read a newspaper well enough to understand her family’s role in the industry, she longed to emulate her father—Graham McAllister, Pulitzer Prize winner, scion of the McAllister media empire that had begun in 1861 when his grandfather founded a Republican newspaper in Hartford to champion Abraham Lincoln’s policies throughout Connecticut. By the time Graham assumed the role of CEO upon his father’s retirement, the McAllister News Group consisted of hundreds of newspapers in cities large and small from coast to coast, dozens of radio stations, and several television networks. In recent decades, Camille’s brother, Asher, had survived the decline of print media by diversifying into the Internet and new media well ahead of his competitors.
From the cradle Asher had been groomed to take over the corporation from their father one distant day; from an equally early age, Camille had been expected to play no part whatsoever. When she became the editor of her preparatory academy’s newspaper, her parents had been charmed but not impressed. When she decided to major in journalism at Radcliffe, her mother had been taken aback—she had been somewhat skeptical of the need for Camille to attend college at all—but her father had approved her choice, evidently perceiving it as a sign of filial admiration. Both parents expressed the appropriate amount of sincere pride when Camille won a national student journalism award for her insightful, elegant feature biography of one of Radcliffe College’s founders, Alice Mary Longfellow. And yet somehow they were utterly astonished when, upon receiving her degree, she announced her desire to come to work for the McAllister News Group, as Asher had done two years before.
“Hear, hear, sis,” said Asher, raising his glass to her from the opposite side of the dining table. “Welcome to the sweatshop.”
“Congratulations are a bit premature,” said their mother, maintaining her composure admirably well. “Camille, darling, what could you possibly be thinking?”
“I want to be a journalist,” Camille declared. “I want to cover the big stories—Watergate, Vietnam, nuclear testing in Nevada. The IRA. The Soviet Union breaking our trade agreement.”
Martha—Muffy to family and friends—shook her head. “I can’t imagine there are any positions suitable for young ladies on the staff of our papers. Isn’t that so, Graham?”
“There aren’t many,” he acknowledged, but Camille was aware of his appraising gaze. “So, Camille, writing for the school papers all these years hasn’t been just a diverting hobby?”
“No more than studying for my degree has been.”
“Graham, don’t encourage this folly,” Muffy admonished. “Camille doesn’t need a job—goodness, the very idea! If she finds she has too much time on her hands now that she’s finished school, I can find any number of worthwhile charities that would be glad to have a McAllister on the board.”
“I want to be a journalist,” Camille repeated firmly. “Not out of boredom but because the work is important and I happen to excel at it.”
“We have a few girl reporters,” Asher remarked. “We could always use a few more. Camille could write circles around most of them.”
Camille threw him a grateful look, which he answered with a grin and a wink. “All I want is the same opportunity you offered Asher,” she said, turning to her father. “If I were a man, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. You would’ve already told me where to report on my first day.”
Graham shrugged, but he seemed to be suppressing a grin. “I suppose that’s true.”
“With good reason,” her mother said, incredulous. “A man has to support a family. Some less fortunate girls have to earn their keep. Camille shouldn’t take a job that ought to go to someone who truly needs it. She’ll only have to resign when she marries.”
Camille thought it wiser to refrain from admitting that she was not certain she would ever marry. “All I want is a chance,” she said, keeping her gaze fixed determinedly on her father. “If I can’t hack it, fire me, but at least give me an opportunity to sink or swim instead of demanding I stay on the shore.”
“Asher started at the bottom, in the mailroom,” her father reminded her. “I would expect no less of you. How fast can you type?”
“Graham,” Muffy protested.
“Eighty words a minute,” Camille replied
“You can do better.” Her father sat back in his chair and folded his arms. “Very well. I’ll give you a job. You won’t like it
, but if you want something better you’ll have to work for it. I won’t show you any special favors. No one will know you’re my daughter.”
“Trust me,” Asher broke in. “He’ll be harder on you than anyone.”
“I want to go on the record as opposing this ridiculous scheme in no uncertain terms,” Muffy declared.
“Noted, my dear,” said Graham, smiling. “Remember, Camille, your mother did try to warn you, as did I.”
As it happened, her parents’ warnings were not without merit. The entry-level job was in Bridgeport, a twenty-five-minute train ride away, and it paid barely enough to cover her fares and lunch. Camille loathed fetching coffee and dry cleaning for harried editors, and she gritted her teeth every time some leering cub reporter addressed her as “doll” or “girlie,” but she loved the energy of the newsroom, the frantic pace, the insistence upon confirming sources, the relentless pursuit of the truth. Some days she typed other writers’ copy until her fingers ached, longing to put her own words down on paper, fighting the urge to revise clumsy phrases or correct dangling modifiers. Usually she succeeded, but on one particularly frustrating day—first she had been sent out in a torrential downpour to bring back lunch for the editorial board and had spent the rest of the day with bedraggled hair and damp clothes, and later a copyeditor had communicated the need for haste not by telling her a particular errand was urgent but by smacking her on the bottom with a rolled-up newspaper—her pride got the better of her. In part because she feared her writing skills would atrophy if she did not put them to good use, in part because she was angry that her bosses could find no better use for a summa cum laude graduate of Radcliffe than Girl Friday, she rewrote an article for the financial page rather than merely transcribing it, cutting three hundred words, polishing the dull prose that remained, and bringing the point into much better focus.
She filed the story, barely making deadline, and stayed two hours late to clean up other people’s messes before finally storming home, nearly the last to leave the office. “Rough day?” her father inquired when she dragged herself across the threshold.
She refused to complain. “No worse than most,” she replied lightly, climbing the stairs with a spring in her step, keeping her chin up until she was safely out of sight in her own bedroom. There she sank blissfully into a hot bath, silently cursing the copyeditor, taking great satisfaction in imagining him going home to a dim, one-room flat half the size of her bedroom and munching a cold bacon and cheese sandwich on stale bread for supper, while an excellent four-course meal with her family awaited her downstairs in her parents’ elegantly appointed dining room as soon as she dressed and descended. If those arrogant men only knew who she was—but no, she didn’t want that. She wanted to earn their respect through her own merits, not because of her surname.
The next day she arrived at work with the usual double box of doughnuts only to discover the bullpen in disorder, puzzlement intermingled with consternation and amusement in her coworkers’ expressions. “Mr. Myers is on a rampage,” the senior typist warned her, and only then did Camille remember the article.
“Who rewrote my piece?” Myers thundered, waving the early edition over his head as he stormed through the newsroom. “It cleared editorial. Who changed it afterward?”
Camille’s heart plummeted as she envisioned her short-lived newspaper career fluttering out the window on wings of ink-stained newsprint. “I did,” she announced clearly. Why not own up to it? They would find out sooner or later, and she was no coward.
“You?” Myers gaped at her. “The coffee girl?”
“I also pick up doughnuts and dry cleaning.”
Someone guffawed, but Myers strode over to her, cheeks florid, cigarette clenched in his teeth so tightly she expected it to snap in half. He halted only inches away, but she was taller and he had to tilt his head to glare up at her. “Who do you think you are, Brenda Starr? Lois Lane?”
“Your article was too long and too imprecise,” she replied coolly. “I did you a favor by cleaning it up before it went out into the world with your name attached to it.”
She heard a hoot of laughter and a low whistle. Myers spluttered an angry rebuttal, but Camille did not flinch. She scarcely listened. She was too busy silently berating herself for losing the first, and probably only, job she would ever have in the newspaper business.
“The girl’s right.”
Everyone turned at the sound of the low, gravelly voice of the editor in chief. Just outside the doorway to his office, he stood puffing on his cigar as he compared Myers’s handwritten draft to the printed article above the fold on the front page of the finance section.
Camille held her breath. The room was silent. Everyone watched as the editor finished reading. “You should thank her, Myers. Buy her lunch or send her flowers. You’ve never sounded better.” He shot a pointed look around the room. “Now, get back to work. We’ve got another issue coming out tomorrow.”
Everyone leapt to obey, except for Camille, who stood frozen in place as it dawned on her that she had not been fired. Myers shook a finger in her face before storming off to his desk.
“I admire your nerve,” the senior typist murmured as she hurried past with an armful of mimeographs. Camille managed a weak smile in reply, sensing, or hoping she sensed, a seismic shift in the newsroom.
She was wrong. She spent the rest of that day typing advertising copy and fetching sandwiches, and the next few weeks brought more of the same drudgery. Then, just as she had convinced herself she had let her best opportunity for advancement slip through her fingers, the features editor asked for a volunteer to cover a local flower show. She shot her hand in the air and told him he would have three hundred words by deadline. “Make it two hundred,” he replied, and ducked back into his office without asking her name. She gave the editor two hundred fifty words, swallowed her protests when he cut it down to an even hundred, and glowed with triumph the next day when it appeared at the bottom of the last page of the features section, sans byline.
That evening, over a pre-dinner cocktail, Asher presented her with a clip of the piece, beautifully matted and framed. Their father smiled, but their mother cast her gaze to the heavens and sighed. Camille flung her arms around her brother and kissed him on the cheek, and as soon as supper was over she hurried upstairs and gave the memento pride of place on her bedside table.
As trivial as it was, the article marked a breakthrough. Other assignments to cover similarly banal events followed, but Camille imagined her mother and her mother’s friends as her audience, and infused the stories with the detached humor and inner-circle asides they would appreciate. Readers actually wrote in to praise the work of the anonymous new reporter, and before long Camille found herself a regular reporter for the society page, deserving of a byline.
“McAllister, huh?” the copyeditor mused when he finally noticed her last name. “The guy who owns this paper is named McAllister.”
“No kidding,” Camille remarked, typing away at one hundred words a minute. “People might think we’re related.”
The copyeditor barked out a laugh. “You wouldn’t be working here if you were.”
“It would make a great story, though, wouldn’t it? Rebellious debutante toiling away anonymously at her father’s paper, determined to prove herself and earn her own accolades.”
“No one would ever believe it,” he said, shaking a cigarette from a pack, shaking his head too. “The problem with fiction is that it has to be plausible.”
“Then I’ll stick with reporting the facts,” said Camille, nodding to the story emerging from her typewriter.
By the time the team of crack reporters who were her coworkers figured out her identity, two years had passed and she had accumulated enough clips to land a staff reporter job at the larger, more prestigious newspaper in Hartford. At first there too she was relegated to the social and sentiment stories she and her few fe
male colleagues disparaged as the “pink ghetto,” but eventually she wised up. She could wait forever for an editor to discover her talent and assign her a plum story, or she could pursue her own leads, discovering the most important stories of the day before her editors could assign them to someone else.
Year by year she worked at her craft, honing her skills, establishing contacts, garnering acclaim and the occasional promotion. Her mother attended her friends’ children’s weddings and bemoaned Camille’s unmarried state, while her father critiqued her clips and offered her more prestigious, lucrative positions he insisted she had earned. Camille refused to lament her lack of a husband and declined her father’s well-intended offers to propel her career forward more rapidly than he would have any other reporter not named McAllister. She had become fiercely protective of her independence, all the while ruefully aware that her sizable trust fund emboldened her to take risks that her less affluent colleagues could ill afford.
Ten years out of college, she was happily single, increasingly well regarded in her chosen profession, and firmly ensconced in the political and national news sections of Connecticut’s most respected newspaper, with her articles frequently picked up by papers all across the country. Her days of describing society teas and flower shows were well behind her.
Her work kept her on the move, from New York to London, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin, and, more often than not, Washington. When colleagues and the occasional envious rival declared she would run the McAllister News Group someday, Camille laughingly dismissed the idea. “I’ll leave running the corporation to my businessman brother,” she would say. “I just want to write.”
Nevertheless, she faithfully kept her filial commitments to the McAllister Foundation. One snowy mid-December evening in Washington, she was attending a charity gala at the Smithsonian when her attention was drawn by the sound of a piano prelude by Claude Debussy, flawlessly and beautifully executed, though the six-piece band had taken a break. Curious, champagne flute in hand, Camille traced the sound to the piano, where she found a dashing, dark-haired man playing for a small group of admirers. She needed only a moment to recognize the three-term congressman from Boston, Paul Barrett. They had never met, but he was known for his idealism and uncanny ability to walk away from negotiations with everything he wanted and yet leaving his opponents with the satisfied sense that they had triumphed.
Christmas Bells Page 19
