The Good Fight

by Danielle Steel

  Meredith tried not to think of the kiss, but it had been memorable. “True, but he’s good to talk to. So can I come out?”

  “Sure.”

  Meredith left the office early and was at Claudia’s tidy little farmhouse in Sharon at seven-thirty. They made small talk for a few minutes and Meredith helped her put the children to bed and read Sarah a story and then they came back to the kitchen to scrounge something for dinner. And before Claudia could start cooking, Meredith took the envelope from Germany out of her purse and handed it to her.

  “What’s that?” Claudia looked puzzled. She had assumed their silence meant that she had been declined, and had stopped waiting for a response.

  “Open it and take a look,” Meredith said, her eyes glowing as she watched her friend take it in shaking hands. It was like going back to Germany all over again, holding the envelope and knowing the answer was in it.

  “Did they turn us down?”

  Meredith refused to answer, and Claudia took the letter out of the envelope and began reading. Suddenly her eyes flew to Merrie’s and opened wide. “Marks?” she said in German. “That’s insane!”

  “Are you crazy?” Meredith corrected her. “Do you realize what your parents’ estate was worth, the art and the houses alone, not to mention the money and all the rest? That’s peanuts, but very nice peanuts in the scheme of restitution, and they took your pain and suffering into account. We did it!” Meredith said and threw her arms around her, and they danced around crying and laughing. And then Claudia got serious again.

  “We’re not going to appeal it, are we? I don’t think we should.”

  “I suspect this is one of the largest amounts they’ve given anyone and we shouldn’t push our luck,” Meredith confirmed.

  “I totally agree.” They sat at the kitchen table then, talking about it, and how glad Claudia was that she had filed the claim. It was only right.

  Meredith spent the night in Connecticut with her and went back to the city in the morning. She helped Claudia give the children breakfast, and when she left to go to work, Claudia gave her an enormous hug.

  “You’re my hero, Merrie,” she said with tears in her eyes.

  “Merry Christmas…or Happy Chanukah. You deserve every bit of it and more.”

  “Thank you,” Claudia whispered, and they hugged again.

  Meredith rode back to New York on the train smiling the whole way. It didn’t make up for what had happened to Claudia, but Meredith had the satisfaction of knowing it was a job well done for a friend she cared about deeply.

  * * *

  —

  After the unbridled joy of Claudia’s restitution award, which she had told Thaddeus about and he was stunned, 1968 got off to a bad start. In January, the Tet Offensive shocked everyone with their eyes on Vietnam. Seventy thousand North Vietnamese and Vietcong launched a simultaneous attack on 126 towns and villages in South Vietnam, and ultimately the North claimed it as a victory.

  Claudia called Meredith a week later.

  “Did you see The New York Times today?” She sounded shaken and like she’d been crying.

  “Not yet. I’ve had a busy day at the office, and the news is so depressing.”

  “Seth was killed at the Battle of Hue in the Tet Offensive. He was married and had three children,” and had apparently followed the military career his parents had wanted him to. And now he was dead at thirty-three. They both fell silent for a minute thinking about him. Claudia was sad, even though she hadn’t seen or heard from him in ten years.

  And a month later, My Lai was even more horrifying, when U.S. soldiers took revenge and murdered civilians, mostly women and children and elderly people, in an attack on the local population that was beyond comprehension. The world was out of control.

  But the most painful blow of all in Meredith’s eyes came on April 4, when Martin Luther King Jr., one of Meredith’s heroes, was killed in Memphis, Tennessee. Claudia called her immediately when she heard, and Meredith was devastated. She couldn’t imagine a world without him. She had gone to his marches, sit-ins, protests, and demonstrations and believed in what he stood for. She went to Atlanta for the funeral, and mourned and cried with all of those who loved him. She was shattered by his death.

  She hadn’t even begun to recover from it when John F. Kennedy’s brother Robert, the senator, was gunned down in California two months later. All of their shining heroes were being killed.

  Meredith was still reeling from all the bad news when Angela, her associate, dealt her another blow. She walked quietly into Meredith’s office a week after Robert Kennedy was killed and told her she was leaving. Her future husband had used his connections and found her a fantastic job at a distinguished Wall Street law firm.

  “You’re quitting?” Meredith looked stunned. She had come to rely on her, loved working with her, respected her, and had been planning to offer Angela a partnership in her firm. There had been no sign that she was unhappy. “Why?” Meredith asked, feeling betrayed, and Angela was honest with her, which was one of the things Merrie liked about her.

  “Are you serious? I’ve been offered an opportunity I can’t pass up. It’s a major career move for me, and let’s face it, this isn’t. I love working with you. You’re an amazing woman, but we have different goals. All my life I’ve dreamed of making it in the white man’s world. That’s why I went to Wall Street in the first place. I didn’t go there for my health. I want to be a big deal one day, a senior partner, a managing partner in a big firm, and the first woman to do it, the first black woman to do it. And I want to make a shitload of money. I can only do it in a white man’s world. I’m every bit as good and smart as they are, and I want to prove it. I want every guy on Wall Street to know my name.

  “I’m not like you. You’re a purist and some kind of saint. You care about causes and wars and Negroes on buses and getting them the vote. I admire you like crazy for it. Martin Luther King is your hero, and Medgar Evers. J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller are mine. You care about the underdog, you really are a saint, Merrie. I care about my pay. I grew up dirt poor and I learned that no one was ever going to get me out of there but me. I don’t think you care about how much money you make. I do. We all make choices in life. I know what mine are. It affects who I marry, what I do, where I work. And I’m never going to set the world on fire sitting here.” She was brutally honest, and Charlie had been right about her in the beginning. Angela was ambitious, and driven by it. The two women sat looking at each other for a long moment, and Meredith didn’t know what to say.

  “When are you leaving?” was all that came to mind.

  “I’m giving you two weeks’ notice. They want me to start right away.”

  Meredith nodded.

  “You can leave sooner if you want.” There was no point hanging on, and she’d have to take over her workload anyway.

  “Thank you, Merrie,” Angela said quietly and stood up and left her office. There was no sentiment to her. She was smart but all she really cared about was herself. Meredith had been a stepping stone for her, and never really a friend. Meredith sat there feeling betrayed and overwhelmed. She was disappointed that Angela didn’t have the same ideals she did. She realized that she had been naïve and had assumed she did, just because she was black. Angela hadn’t lied to her, but Meredith assumed they had the same goals, and never saw it coming, or suspected she might leave.

  She went for a walk after that to clear her head and think about it. She wasn’t heartbroken or angry, but she felt let down that Angela wanted to quit. She thought that Angela was better than that, but she was an opportunist and a shrewd woman. It reminded Meredith of something her grandfather had said, that fighting for other people’s freedom could be a lonely life at times, without allies or friends, but it was worth doing anyway. She had no regrets about the life she had chosen, and few illusions. She had given up havi
ng a husband and children to fight the good fight and other people’s wars. Her grandfather was right. It was lonely at times, but it was the only life she wanted.

  When she went back to the office, Charlie told her that Angela had packed up her things and left at lunchtime, and said she wasn’t coming back. She hadn’t stayed to say goodbye or left Meredith a note to thank her. She had moved on, and put a stack of files with her cases on Merrie’s desk.

  That was just the way it worked sometimes, she told herself as she opened one of Angela’s well-organized files. She was going to have a lot of work to do, but Meredith had never shirked from hard work and she didn’t intend to now.

  * * *

  —

  She’d been working late every night trying to catch up when she got a call a few weeks later from Gunther, who said he was coming through New York. But he didn’t know when or if he could see her. He was as elusive as ever, and Meredith knew that Claudia was right about him. He was a heartbreaker waiting to happen to someone else. She didn’t want or need to chase the impossible dream, and was smart enough not to take the bait. She wished him a good trip, told him she was busy too, and hoped he never called again. He wasn’t even able to be a friend. And as a woman, she found him too dangerous.

  The rest of the year slid by in a haze of disappointment. Nixon was elected, which she found depressing too, although her father was thrilled. And then her father got sick at Christmas, and was diagnosed with cancer, and much to her shock and her mother’s, he died five weeks later, at sixty-four, a year after he had retired. Once he stopped working, he had just faded away, and her mother was a complete wreck when he died. She was unable to organize the funeral and incapable of making a decision. She cried all the time and was confused. She acted like she was ninety, not turning sixty, and Merrie was frustrated with her seeming helpless most of the time. Her father had done everything for her, and she couldn’t manage her life, and called Merrie ten times a day with minor problems. The TV wasn’t working, or the dishwasher. She had forgotten to pay her rent.

  It was a welcome distraction when an elderly black man came to see her one afternoon. Someone had written her name down for him on a piece of paper, and he came to see her without calling first. He looked so dignified and respectful, sitting in her waiting area in a suit and tie, that she went out to talk to him and invited him into her office. They talked for a long time, and he told her that his son had been killed by a lynch mob in Mississippi ten years before for using a white restroom at a gas station.

  But he’d come to see her about his job. He was seventy-six years old and had been a doorman at a building on Park Avenue for forty-seven years. He’d been an elevator man before they had put in automatic elevators years before. He said he was respectful to everyone, and knew all the tenants by name and their regular guests. He carried packages and luggage, and assured her he was still strong and claimed he had never had a sick day in twenty years. And he had been fired two weeks earlier and replaced by a man who was fifty-four years old, smaller than he, not as strong, and had a limp. He was undeniably younger, probably Russian or Romanian, and could barely speak English. She could easily figure out that his replacement was white.

  His name was Jebediah Parker, and he said everyone called him Jeb, and Meredith gently asked him what he wanted. Did he want money from his employer, severance pay?

  “No, I want my job back. I still got years in me. I’m not ready to retire yet.” She smiled as he said it. He looked younger than his age, had a firm step when he walked into her office, and seemed energetic. “Can you make them hire me back?”

  “I can try,” she said honestly. “They may prefer to give you some kind of severance pay.”

  “I don’t need that. I want my job. I can’t get another job at my age. I want to work.”

  She wrote down all of his pertinent information, and his employer’s, and he asked if he should pay her before he left, and she told him that they could settle it after she could see what she could do for him. She was hoping to threaten them with a discrimination case and unlawful termination for his race. She promised that she would write a strong letter to his employer and see how they responded to it. Jeb shook her hand firmly and thanked her politely before he put his fedora on his head and left her office. She wrote the letter and mailed it that night. She implied that they had grounds for a lawsuit, but assured his employer that what he really wanted was his job back. He had told her the building where he worked, and it was only a few blocks from her mother’s apartment.

  The response from his employer was swift. They made it clear that they didn’t want a lawsuit, and were willing to give Jeb his old job back. They would put the new man on another shift. She called Jeb immediately and told him the good news.

  “They said you can come back tomorrow,” she told him, and he laughed.

  “You must have scared them real good!” he said, sounding delighted.

  “I think I did.”

  “I’ll come by and pay you tomorrow before I go to work,” he promised. “You did a powerful nice thing for me. I’m glad I came to see you.”

  “So am I, Jeb. And you don’t need to come by. All I did was write a letter. This one’s on me.”

  “I can’t let you do that,” he said, sounding worried. “You got me my job back.”

  “You can come to see me again if they give you any more trouble. I’ll send you a bill next time.” He thanked her half a dozen more times and then they hung up, and Merrie was still smiling when she walked home that night. She was delighted with the result. And she had other things on her mind when she went to work the next day, and saw Charlie grinning at her when she opened the door of her office.

  “New romance?” he asked with a knowing look.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Secret admirer then?” And then she noticed the largest bouquet of red roses she’d ever seen sitting on the desk in her office. She couldn’t imagine who might have sent them to her, and she opened the envelope with the card in it. In a careful handwriting, the card said “Thank you for my job. Sincerely, Jebediah S. Parker.” She smiled from ear to ear as she read it.

  “Well?” Charlie asked, still smirking at her.

  “Satisfied customer.”

  He looked surprised by that. None of their clients had ever sent her roses before, and there were at least three dozen in the bouquet. “The man who came by to see me the other day, who’d lost his job as a doorman.”

  “Did he win a jackpot in Vegas?”

  “No, he got his job back as a doorman, and he’s a gentleman.” She was still smiling when she sat down at her desk and got to work, and put the roses on the table in front of the window. She wrote Jeb a thank-you note, and couldn’t have been happier with the result. Some days the good fight was easier than others. It made up for all the other times when it wasn’t.

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks later, on the way to lunch, she ran into Ted, whom she hadn’t seen in several years, although he called her occasionally, and he looked thrilled to see her. She asked about Emily and the kids, and he seemed embarrassed for a minute.

  “Actually, we’re getting a divorce. She’s having an affair with the tennis pro at our club. It’s a humiliating soap opera, don’t you think? But it wasn’t working before that anyway.” He tried to make light of it, but he was thirty-four, had four kids, and eleven years of marriage with a woman he’d been reluctant to marry. What was the point? It seemed like such a waste to Merrie. His parents had pushed him into it, and now his whole life was a cliché, and had been dictated by them. He had sold out to his father ever since college, with a divorce as the door prize a decade later.

  It didn’t seem worth it to her, despite the kids. Why bother? “I’d love to have dinner with you sometime,” he said, with a gleam in his eye, still looking handsome and boyish. But she didn’t want
a child in her life, she wanted a man, and he’d never be one. She was happy to be friends with him, but the worst of it was she didn’t respect him. “What are you up to?” He seemed genuinely interested, but their lives were so different.

  “Work.”

  “No boyfriend?” he asked hopefully, which seemed pathetic to her.

  “Not really.” The occasional date he didn’t need to know about. “My father died. He never got over my brother’s death, and he retired too early. Now my mother is falling apart. No kids, but now I’ve got my mother to take care of and worry about.” Since she didn’t want to flirt with him, she decided to be real instead.

  “Have you seen Claudia?”

  “She’s great.” Meredith smiled as she said it and told him about Seth dying in Vietnam.

  “I read about it,” he said seriously. “Sad.” They had all chosen their paths and paid their dues by then, some more than others. Ted and Seth had both given up their dreams to please their parents. She and Claudia had never sold out, or given up who they were. Claudia was still writing articles and working on books, and Meredith was still supporting the causes she believed in and establishing her law firm. She wondered what Ted was going to do now, and if he’d just find another girl to marry that his parents approved of and chose for him. It seemed like a dismal fate to her. They talked for a few more minutes, and she called Claudia and told her she’d seen him, when she got back to her office.

  “How does he look?” Claudia asked, curious about him. “I ran into one of Seth’s friends the other day, and he was bald and overweight. I didn’t even recognize him.”

  “Ted looks the same. But there’s something missing. I think he got lost along the way. I think you pay a price for taking the easy way out. He’s still funny and cute, but there’s nobody home. I’m not sure I could spend an evening with him. He never grew up, he’s just Daddy’s boy, his minion.”

  “It’s too bad. Underneath all that, he’s a sweet guy,” Claudia said and then remembered something. “I need a favor from you, by the way. There’s a book signing I want to go to tomorrow night in the city. Thaddeus says he has too much work and can’t go. Will you go with me? My favorite author has a new book out and I’d love to meet her. I’ve read everything she’s written, and she’s really inspired me. Will you come?”