by Rosina Lippi
Patricia C. Walker
Senior Secretary and Office Manager
English Department
To: Patricia C. Walker
Cc: John Grant, Department Chair
Administrative Assistant
From: Angeline Mangiamele
Re: follow up (5)
While the promised pages from the technology guidelines manual were in my box, the PIN number was not.
Until this matter can be resolved, Rob has given us his PIN number to use.
To: Angeline Mangiamele
Cc: John Grant, Department Chair
Assistant
From: Patricia C. Walker
Re: follow up (4)
The English Department has an official policy on the use of the photocopier. This policy was reviewed by the faculty on March 18, 1989, and approved by Professor Calhoun, the presiding chair, the next day. Quoting from page four, paragraph four: “No person shall lend out his or her PIN number to any other person, or take other steps to share, barter, or distribute photocopy allowances.”
Rob Grant transferred into the English department from central administration just a month ago, so I’m assuming he hasn’t had time to review the relevant departmental guidelines. I have put photocopies of the relevant pages in his box and yours. Those ten pages have been deducted from your monthly allowance. The PIN number for Tied to the Tracks is in a sealed envelope in your box.
Tony laughed out loud over the e-mail printouts and memos Angie handed him when he showed up past noon on Wednesday. “By God,” he said with sincere appreciation. “The woman has balls, you got to give her that. Did she really give us six-six-six for a PIN?”
They were in the reception area of the editing suite, where Angie and Rivera had spent the morning trying to impose some order on the miles of video from the Jubilee.
Rivera was rummaging around in the bags of Mexican carryout that Tony had deposited on the coffee table. It was meant to make up for the fact that he had slept in while they had been busy, and it worked. Angie took the bag of tacos Rivera was waving in front of her.
“Six-six-six,” Tony snorted. “The minx. She knows not with whom she toys.”
Angie flicked a glance toward Markus, who was, after all, one of Patty-Cake’s numerous blood relatives. She said, “The monitor was sent express overnight. It should be here tomorrow morning if not this afternoon.”
“The sisterhood would be proud of Patty-Cake,” Tony said, ignoring the change in subject.
“Which is a good thing,” Angie said more loudly. “Because it’s going to take us days and days to catch up with the screening.”
“What sisterhood?” Markus asked.
“The High Holy Sisterhood of Administrative Assistants,” Rivera said, sending Angie a Give it up shrug. “The source of all true power.”
“And staplers,” Tony added. “If there had been a dozen of the sisterhood around during the Civil War, we’d all be whistling ‘Dixie.’ ”
“Don’t call it that,” Angie said. “Some people take offense.”
“They do?” Tony said, and craned his head around to Markus. “Hey, are you offended if I say the words ‘Civil War’?”
“Not me, but plenty are,” Markus said. He had been organizing newspaper clippings, and there was a smudge of ink on his cheek, which made him look especially young. He said, “Try calling it the War Between the States, that’s pretty neutral.”
“Then by all means,” Tony said with a royal wave of one hand. He was in an excellent mood, which probably meant he had not spent the night alone. Angie tried to remember when he had left the Jubilee and who had been with him, but the Liars had monopolized her attention from the second they won her picnic basket and company at supper. She had been so busy with them that she hadn’t even seen John go, nor had she heard from him last night. For which, she was sure, there must be a very good explanation.
She stretched out on the couch, trying to find a comfortable position, and finally sat up to dig beneath the cushions. From the depths she retrieved a shoe, the cell phone Tony had lost days ago, a half-eaten packet of crackers, a DVD case, and a bright purple plaid bra, 38DD, which she threw at Tony’s head, where it hung, one cup over each ear.
“Rakish,” Rivera said. “A fashion gamble, but I think it’s working.”
Markus barked a laugh, and then dropped his head and hid his mouth behind one hand.
“Tony,” Angie said, trying to sound stern, “the editing suite is not your personal clubhouse.”
“Why not?” Tony pulled the bra off his head and sniffed it with his nose wrinkled. “Bathroom, shower, microwave, television, a couch to sleep on, and every bit of hardware and software the geekish heart beneath this oh-so-debonair exterior has ever lusted after. Best of all, my mother doesn’t have the phone number here and there’s no cell phone reception.”
“Your mother.” Markus stood up suddenly. “Tony, I forgot to tell you that your mother called and said she’d call back”—he glanced at the clock, which read five minutes after noon—“on her lunch break.”
Tony was just getting to his feet when the phone rang.
“Too late,” Angie said, and Rivera added: “Don’t be a coward, Russo. Millie’s on the phone.”
Rivera had been saying for years that they could make a whole film around Millie Russo’s phone calls to her only son. Tony refused to discuss the possibility, but he always put his mother on speakerphone. Angie had yet to figure out if his purpose was to spread the misery around, or entertain them.
“Tony,” Millie said now from her kitchen in East Orange, “I’m calling to ask, you ever think about real estate?”
“Hi, Ma,” Tony said. “How you doing?”
“You know, same as always. So, you ever give real estate a thought?”
“Real estate? What for?”
“Real estate. Why not.”
“Ma, would you just spit it out?”
“Listen to Mr. Impatient. You don’t got ten minutes for your mother?”
“Sorry, Ma. Go ahead.”
Millie sniffed. “You remember Jerry Tedesca, the tubby boy with the overbite was in high school with you? His uncle Mario died. His heart, and him only seventy-nine.”
“And Jerry was at the wake.”
“That’s what I’m telling you. You know what Jerry drives? A Mercedes, the biggest one they make. Still got that new-car smell, leather seats as soft as butter. He drove me and your aunt Dot home.”
“And Jerry Tedesca is in real estate.”
“That’s what I’m telling you. Real estate. He made close to a million dollars last year.”
“Real estate, Ma.”
There was a moment’s silence. “What, you can’t sell a house?”
Angie let out a squeak, and Rivera poked her.
“Ma.”
“I’m just saying. How hard can it be to get a real estate license? Your second cousin Eddie got one, and God knows he’s got nothing much going for him in the brain department.”
“Ma, I’ve got a job.”
“You drive around all day in a nice car, looking at houses. You want, you can fill the trunk up with cameras, take pictures on your lunch hour.”
“I’m fifty years old, Ma. I’ve got a job I like and I’m good at.”
“It’s never too late to improve yourself. You could go back to school. Move in here with me to save some money, go and study business. Angie, you tell him,” Millie shouted so that the speakerphone vibrated. “A backup plan is a good thing.”
“A backup plan is a good thing,” Angie echoed obediently, and Tony shot her a dirty look.
“Why do I bother?” Millie asked with a sigh. “He never listens. You never listen, Tony.”
“We’ll talk to him about it, Mrs. Rus
so,” Rivera volunteered.
“I know you will. Such good girls, and single. Tony—”
“Ma.”
“I’m just saying.”
By six o’clock Angie had finished setting up the new monitor and done all the prep work for the screening sessions they meant to start first thing Thursday morning.
She should be exhausted, but instead Angie found it impossible to dial down the rapid flow of her thoughts. She considered going back to Ivy House and starting dinner, or to the Piggly Wiggly to look at new entries in the memory book. Miss Annie had called to say the local histories she had requested were finally available, there was two weeks’ worth of mail to catch up on and bills that were surely overdue.
All this was true, but there was another truth, a more important one: John was downstairs in his office, and she hadn’t seen or heard from him all day long.
There had been no lack of other visitors. It seemed as if a dozen people had dropped by, including Rob, who had come up on his lunch hour to look through old photos, something she had asked many different people to do.
The photo box was meant to look like an odd assortment thrown together hastily, but in fact Angie and Rivera had spent some time deciding what would go into it. Most of the pictures were of Miss Zula and her family over the years, some which Angie knew a great deal about, some which were more mysterious. Most of the photos were candid and many were badly composed.
Angie left Rob with the box and a notepad for more than half an hour, because she had come to the conclusion that it was best to leave people to sort through things on their own, and to take what information they provided without questions or prompting.
From the box she had left him Rob pulled out a half dozen photos to study, and he had written a few sentences about each of them. One of the pictures he had put aside to talk to her about, and Angie felt the small, sharp thrill that came with the feeling that a crucial piece of a larger puzzle was about to be turned over.
This particular photo, badly framed, overexposed, was of Miss Zula as a young woman, standing on a porch. She was dressed in what must have been her very nicest clothes: a tailored suit with a flower pinned to her lapel, more flowers on the rim of a small hat, white gloves, and a dark wool coat with a fur collar hung over her shoulders. She was laughing into the camera and she looked unreservedly happy. To her right was her mother, dressed in dark colors. There was a resemblance between Zula and the older woman in the shape of the mouth and eyes, but while Miss Zula was smiling, her companion’s expression was grim, almost disapproving.
“Miss Louisa,” Rob said. “There aren’t many pictures of her around that I’m aware of. My grandmother used to say she was as sour as June apples. Have you heard much about Miss Louisa?”
“I had an interesting conversation with Sister Ellen Mary at the rectory,” Angie said. “But we haven’t had much luck getting Miss Zula to talk about her. What’s your take on her, clinical depression or borderline personality or just plain mean?”
“All three, probably,” said Rob. “If you get a chance, ask my mother while she’s here. Lucy has some Miss Louisa stories.”
Angie shouldn’t be surprised to hear that Lucy was coming; the wedding hadn’t been canceled yet, after all. She said, “When do you expect your mother?”
“Friday morning.”
There was a bit of an awkward silence in which they both must be thinking the same thing. Rob must know about his brother’s plans—about his change of plans—but he could no more bring up the subject than she could. Angie studied the photo in front of her, afraid that if she opened her mouth, words she could not take back would spill out. Then she remembered another photo, one she had shown to almost everyone who came into the office. She pulled it out of a drawer.
She said, “I’ve shown this to five people and every one of them has given me different names.”
This was a black-and-white photo, too, but the contrasts were sharp and true. On the back someone had written 1947 in a slanted, wavering hand. There were three people in the picture: a tall black man wearing an overcoat and a fedora standing behind two women, one in her late twenties and white, the other an elderly black woman with thin white hair and the kind of large, even white teeth that Angie recognized from the glass on her grandfather’s bedside table. Both women were dressed for church or some other formal occasion, and the photo had been taken on a porch.
Angie looked at this photo every day and she was always struck by it for some reasons she could name, and others that were still unclear. The man’s posture had caught her attention first. He had put his hands on the shoulders of the women before him, his right hand on the younger woman’s right shoulder, his left on the older woman’s left, and he was leaning forward slightly with his upper body, as if he wanted to draw them both closer. The younger woman had begun to turn her head toward him. She had a beautiful profile, her jaw strong and clean and the line of her cheek a perfect curve, but what caught Angie’s imagination was her hand, which she had lifted as if she meant to touch her own right shoulder, where the man’s hand rested. The camera had caught that motion and turned her hand into something alive, trembling and full of life just over her heart. Angie followed the arc of the moving hand as she had every time she picked up this photo, but this time a flash of recognition came to her.
Rob had already reached back into the photo box to bring out the one he had found of Miss Zula and her mother. When he put it down on the desk, it was clear to see that the two photos had been taken on the same day on the same porch, maybe only moments apart. The flash had malfunctioned on one but not the other, so that Miss Zula and her mother were overexposed while the other people—and who were they?—were in focus.
“Look,” Rob said, “you can see a little of Miss Zula’s shoulder here.”
His finger hovered over the edge of the first photo and traveled to the one next to it. “Like a bridge,” Rob said, putting exactly the right image in Angie’s mind. They stood for a moment trying to understand the story the two photos made when they were put together.
“That’s got to be Abe Bragg,” Rob said finally. “I’ve never seen of photo of him out of uniform before, and the hat put me off at first.”
Of course, Angie thought. Another missed connection, but like Rob, she had seen very few photographs of Miss Zula’s older brother. There was one of him in the parlor at Magnolia House, but in his Air Force dress uniform.
“I don’t know who the two women are,” said Rob. “Did you ask Miss Maddie? She might be the one who took the photos, as she isn’t in them.”
“I’ll have to remember to show them to her next time I’m over there.” Something she would do as soon as possible, but Angie didn’t want to say so, for reasons too complicated to consider.
“Why not ask Miss Zula directly?”
Rob’s law degree made itself evident at the most inconvenient moments, as with this completely reasonable question that Angie didn’t want to answer. If she tried to mislead him with a partial truth by telling him that she didn’t want to force a confidence, he would see through her. The whole truth was that she didn’t want to take the chance that Miss Zula would appropriate the photo and ask her not to pursue it without further explanation. There were few subjects that Miss Zula seemed reluctant to discuss—at least thus far—but her brother was one of them.
“I will,” Angie said. “At some point. But I have to tread carefully with Miss Zula.”
Rob was looking at her closely. “Of course,” he said finally, the lawyer still foremost in his expression. “I can see that.”
The last visitor of the day had been the one Angie least wanted to see. Harriet Darling came rushing in, out of breath and sputtering apologies, because, she told Angie, her appointment with Tony had been for 3:30, and here it was a full hour later.
To Angie it made perfect sense that Tony himself was late. He was no more reliable than Harriet when it came to being punctual.
“I guess he forgot. He’s
out showing Markus the fine points of using a light meter.”
Harriet’s face broke into a smile that made her look so young that Angie wished she had a camera to record it.
“In’t that just sweet?” Harriet said. “Taking Eunice’s Markus under his wing like that.”
“What did you need to talk to him about?” Angie asked.
“Why, the wedding, of course. Y’all are doing the videotaping, and I’ve got notes here”—she dug in her bag and pulled out a leather portfolio—“I’ll just have to go over it all with you.”
