The House Girl

by Tara Conklin

  Mr. Battle is the lead plaintiff in this class action lawsuit seeking reparations for the historic harm of institutional slavery in the United States of America.

  Lina flipped the cover of the brief closed. She walked out of her office, past Sherri’s cubicle, past all those associate offices with half-closed doors, past the elevator, and up six flights of stairs until she reached Dan’s office.

  Outside, Lina paused to catch her breath. Then she pushed open the door.

  “Dan, I need to talk to you.”

  Dan looked up slowly from the papers on his desk. “Lina. Yes?”

  “I quit,” she said and felt an uncomplicated, lovely thrill.

  “What?”

  “I quit. I’m leaving.” Again, that rush.

  “Hmm …” Dan frowned. “Why?”

  Although Lina had anticipated this question, she still wasn’t sure how precisely to answer it. “I—I—I can’t do this job anymore. I don’t want to do it. Clifton isn’t for me.” The words flew across Dan’s expansive carpet and landed on the polished surface of his desk, weightier than any brief, truer than any law.

  “Ha. I used to think the same thing.” Dan tilted his head back. His eyes roamed the ceiling and then he lowered his gaze. “All right then, go.” He shooed his hand at her. “And make sure you release all your time. We’ve decided to bill Dresser by the hour for all the reparations work. None of this contingency bullshit.”

  “Okay,” Lina said. “Will do.” She had been expecting some kind of drama, raised voices or persuasive argument, or at least a hug, but Dan remained firmly rooted behind his mammoth desk and Lina did not move toward him. “Bye, Dan,” she said.

  Dan smiled a tired smile; his climate-controlled bookshelves shifted off with what sounded like a sigh. “Good-bye, Lina.”

  LINA RETURNED TO HER OFFICE. Sherri was standing just outside her cubicle. “I heard you quit!” she said, giddy with the gossip.

  “Already? But it just happened.”

  “Yeah, well. Mary.” Sherri shrugged her shoulders, her neck disappearing for a moment within the muddle of her curls. “But listen, what do you need? The security guards will be here soon so—quick, how can I help?” Lina had never seen Sherri so eager to assist.

  “Security guards?”

  “Clifton doesn’t like people hanging around. No long good-byes. Too much opportunity for sabotage.” The last word Sherri said with a drawn-out drama as though this were a Bond film and Lina the turncoat.

  Lina handed Sherri her copy of the brief with its numbered exhibits and the additional documents she’d uncovered in her search for Josephine Bell. “I need three copies of this. In three separate envelopes,” she said.

  “No problem.” Sherri winked at Lina. “You know, I never pegged you for a Clifton lawyer anyhow.”

  Lina scanned the hallway for approaching security guards, but saw what could only have been a stray law school student attempting without success to send a fax. She heard the young woman curse faintly. Lina closed her office door, picked up her phone, and dialed the number for the Bell Center archives.

  “Nora,” she said. “It’s Lina Sparrow. I was hoping we could talk about the Stanmore Foundation.”

  SHERRI RETURNED WITH THE COPIED documents and helped Lina pack up her things. There wasn’t much—Oscar’s small painting, the snow globe, the photo of her parents, an extra pair of pantyhose. The statuesque Meredith passed Lina’s open office door and stopped, wide-eyed.

  “You’re leaving?” she exclaimed, and hugged Lina good-bye with a sincerity that made Lina wonder if, all this time, she had misjudged Meredith. Perhaps they could have been friends after all, and Lina felt a shallow stab of regret.

  “We’ll miss you, Lisa,” Meredith said, and Lina only smiled and grabbed her cardboard box, which was small enough to fit under one arm. She marched steadily down the long hallway toward the elevator bank, pausing only at the office of a corporate partner who liked to play high-volume reggae music on his Bose system. Steel drums and Stir it up, little darling drifted from his half-cracked door. Lina listened for a moment, catching a glimpse of a bald, bobbing head, and then kept walking.

  In the elevator, Lina exhaled as she sank away from the canned office air and light, down to the gleaming lobby of black marble and chrome, out onto the sidewalk, people and sunshine and smog, honking cars, a bus wheezing to a stop at the corner and Lina quickened her pace to catch it.

  THIRTY-SIX MINUTES LATER, LINA STOOD in a different sort of office building, this one ivy-covered and loud with rushing students, walls cluttered with posters announcing end-of-year exam dates, review sessions, books for sale. After wandering through a maze of narrow, cluttered corridors, Lina finally found the right door: PORTER R. SCALES, STERLING J. HAWKES PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY. According to the website for “Modern American Painting,” the class he was teaching this semester at Columbia, Porter was currently holding open office hours. Lina knocked.

  “Just a moment,” Porter’s voice called, and she heard the rustling of papers, a cough, and Porter opened the door.

  “Lina! How nice to see you. I thought it was odd, someone knocking on my door. No one comes to office hours. I mean, not a single student. Am I so brazenly clear in my lectures? Or do they just not care?”

  “Brazenly clear, I’m sure,” Lina said.

  “Please come in,” Porter said and Lina stepped into his office, which was small and jumbled but with a lovely view over the Columbia quad, emerald-green trapezoids bordered with straight-edged paths, the students moving along them with the purpose and steady pace of worker ants.

  “I can’t stay long,” Lina said. “I just wanted to give you this.” She handed over the packet of copied documents. “This is everything I’ve uncovered in my research into Josephine Bell. Josephine was the artist, not Lu Anne. These documents prove it.”

  Lina paused. Her heart was beating very fast.

  “And I’ve written down the phone number of Nora Lewis, the archivist at the Bell Center. She’s agreed to speak with you. The Stanmore Foundation isn’t playing fair. Their lawyers are destroying evidence. Nora will give you the details.”

  Porter took the papers from Lina and looked at them with confusion.

  “But why are you giving all of this to me?”

  “I’ve quit my job. And the reparations case has been suspended,” Lina said quickly, not pausing to explain any further. “But Porter, I want you to write about Josephine Bell. I want you to tell her story. I want her to get credit for what she did. Please. She can’t just disappear.”

  Porter said nothing. And then a smile spread wide across his face, of understanding and of gratitude. “Of course. Of course I’ll tell her story. This is huge, Lina.”

  “I hope so.”

  “You know, I’ve been wanting to write about her. Since this whole thing blew up. A book, maybe. It’s been a while since I wrote a book. I want to call it The Forgotten Slave or maybe Genius Denied. Something like that.” Porter narrowed his eyes and tilted his chin in contemplation.

  For a moment, Lina did not respond. She gazed around Porter’s office, at the framed Bell reproductions on the walls, Lottie, Bell Creek at Dawn, and then she saw another familiar picture, a pencil drawing no larger than an apple, of a young Porter, shaggy and smiling, and etched in the corner, a name: Grace Janney Sparrow. “What about calling it The Artist: Josephine Bell?” Lina said.

  “Ah, yes.” Porter nodded vigorously. “You’re right, of course. Much better.”

  At the door, Porter paused, looking away from her, hands in pockets, and Lina remembered the last time they had seen each other, beneath the neon sign. The attraction she had felt for him that night had vanished, and Lina stepped forward and hugged him with a deep, genuine, platonic affection.

  “Thank you, Porter,” she said. “I’m so glad we can be friends.”

  AS SHE CROSSED THE COLUMBIA quad, Lina called Jasper, a number she now knew by heart.

  After an interminable
number of rings, he picked up, his voice flat. “Hello, Lina.”

  “Jasper, don’t hang up!”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to apologize.”

  “Why did you set me up like that? I felt like an idiot. Too white. Jesus Christ.”

  “Listen, I’ve quit my job.”

  “You’re kidding. Over this?”

  “Yes and no,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it. Where are you now?”

  Jasper did not answer immediately. A hot button of panic began to pulse within her. What if he wanted nothing more to do with her? “I’m sorry, Jasper,” she said. “I really want to see you again. I don’t want this to be the end.”

  There was a pause of rampant possibility, and Lina let her mind and heart be still for just this one small moment to wait for Jasper’s response.

  “I don’t either,” he said.

  Lina stopped walking, and a part of her went quiet. The urgency of the morning, the thrill of quitting, all of it dropped noiselessly away. “Can I meet you somewhere?” she asked.

  Jasper hesitated. “I want to, Lina, but I’m not sure I have time.” He was on his way to Grand Central, he told her, heading to his mom’s for a couple of days to talk about Josephine Bell and his father. “There’s a lot we need to think about,” he said.

  “But I have some documents to give you,” Lina responded, gratified that finally she was in a position to help him. “It’s everything from the reparations case. You’ll want to see these—they’ll help you make any claims on the Bell work.” She also felt a strong need to finish what she had started just hours ago in Dan’s office; it was like an itch, almost an ache.

  “Lina, why is it so hard to say no to you?” Jasper laughed. They agreed to meet at the clock in twenty minutes, ten if Lina could find a cab and traffic was moving.

  Lina hung up the phone. Backpacked students swerved around her on the path, their bodies bent under the weight of their loads, but she didn’t move. She stood and breathed in the smell of spring. Here the quad’s lush lawn seemed to produce a different quality of air, better than sidewalks or subways or corporate law firms. Her attention was drawn across the grassy expanse and Lina watched in awe as a young man flung himself into the air with expert grace and precision and caught, behind his right calf, a yellow Frisbee.

  LINA ARRIVED AT GRAND CENTRAL first and sat on the ground beside the tall, four-sided clock, her back against the kiosk wall. The stone floor chilled her and she pulled her cardigan tight around her shoulders. To Lina, Grand Central Station had always seemed the absolute center of the universe, and the arched ceiling—painted that otherworldly blue with planets and stars within their careful orbits, marking out stories in the sky—seemed to confirm her theory, and the shared faith that, yes, this was where paths crossed in a dance of fate and luck and science, this was where new constellations formed. Here, if your patience held, you might see every person, not every person on the planet but everyone who mattered to you, past and future, and you might lock eyes or you might pass each other by and never know that chance had brought you once before in such proximity, close enough to touch. Lina loved that sense of possibility. The opening up of humanity, so many faces presented here in states of departing and arriving, each a perfectly contained, self-directed presence and yet vulnerable too to the greater forces of timetables and weather, accidental looks, brushed hands, stumbles, the lost and found. Perhaps the man she would marry was in this hall right now. Perhaps her new roommate. Or whoever had bought Oscar’s Enough portrait of Grace, someone who now looked every day at a picture of her mother. Perhaps Dan’s wife and children, hurrying to their weekend home. Or her father with Natalie. Or even Grace herself, continuing a journey that began long before Lina was born, that had nothing and everything to do with Lina. Maybe a shiver traveled down Grace’s back and she looked behind her, just as that dark-haired woman did now, paces from where Lina sat, the woman’s face pale and blank, her arms crossed against her chest, her body set in a posture of waiting.

  Lina saw Jasper before he saw her. He was walking down the incline that led from Forty-second Street, through the public art room and down into the hall. He was backlit, his face and body mere silhouette, but Lina recognized the square of his shoulders, the long legs, the smooth head. He wore his librarian clothes and carried a duffel bag in one hand. She squinted into the light and waved. He waved back and before Lina could stand, he was at the kiosk, placing his bag on the ground, sitting beside her on the cold stone.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “I wanted to give you the documents. You may need some of this, if you do try to assert rights over all the Bell pictures.” She handed a packet to Jasper, the librarian–rock star, the white-black man, the near-stranger who was not a stranger to her.

  “I still don’t know what we’re going to do. I’ll talk it over with my mom. But thanks.” He slid the packet into his bag. “So, no more lawyer.” He turned to look at her. “What are you thinking now?”

  There were many ways to take this question and many ways to answer it. Right now Lina was thinking about Josephine Bell, and Jasper, and how improbable it was that the one had led her to the other. How improbable and wonderful that Jasper was here at all, sitting beside her on the cool stone. She looked at him, at the eyebrow arching plumb true over his left eye, at his eyes gleaming gold as the rim of the clock over their heads. He was waiting for an answer. Lina, what are you thinking now?

  “I’m not sure,” she answered. “Maybe immigration law. Or maybe I’ll go work for Mr. Dresser, or leave the law altogether. I need to think about it for a while.” Just a few weeks ago, the idea that she did not have a plan, that no chart outlined her future career goals, would have been unthinkable. But something had released in her, expectation and desire had altered. She did not want six-minute increments and clients’ whims to dictate how she spent her waking hours; she did not want to live a life ruled by reason.

  Lina looked up at the celestial ceiling and she thought of her mother, the woman who hummed a wordless tune, who smelled of pepper and sugar, the woman in Oscar’s paintings, the woman Porter had loved, the woman who drew those portraits, who invented a family tree, the woman who could not bear to leave her daughter but could not bear to stay.

  And Lina remembered the scrap of paper, the number that, for the past three days, she had carried deep in her pocket. “My dad gave me something,” she said. “A phone number to call.” She wriggled down to pull it out. She flattened out the wrinkles on her thigh, smoothing the paper with her palm.

  “Whose is it?”

  “My mother’s. I haven’t seen her or spoken to her in twenty years. Since I was four. I thought she was dead. But she’s not.”

  A confluence of arriving trains spilled people onto the concourse, and Lina felt herself and Jasper suddenly cocooned by the shuffling feet and knobby knees of passengers in transit. She heard snatches of conversation, caught a whiff of floral perfume that followed a woman with a pink suitcase gliding silently behind her on rollers.

  Jasper sat up straight and turned to Lina. “Twenty years. That’s a long time,” he said. Just that, and as the rush of passengers trickled away, Lina felt an intense gratitude that she did not have to explain, she did not have to answer any questions. Yes, it had been a long time. And in those years lived an ocean of sadness and of love, she and her father, moments over meals, together in silence and in play, Oscar’s laugh and paint-stained fingers, the small straight line that appeared between his eyebrows when he focused hard, the line that Lina saw furrow deeper every year, elaborate birthday hats and tidy grocery charts, and her childhood self posing for that portrait with the frog, and Lina suddenly and vividly remembered the frog, with a smell like moss, shimmering eyes, and its skin had not felt slimy, only damp and clean in her own small hands.

  Lina handed Jasper the phone number.

  “Will you dial?” she asked.

  Jasper pushed the nu
mbers and Lina took back the phone and listened to the empty distant ringing. Jasper’s hand slid into hers, the fingers strong and warm, and she felt a little heart pulsing there in her palm where her skin met his, and she waited for a voice to answer.

  Josephine

  Josephine walks along the edge of the road, the dry dirt making the smallest of sounds beneath the weight of her boots. At first she is cautious and she starts at every noise, stopping in the bushes at the hoot of an owl, the far-off bark of a farmer’s dog, but then she is bolder and she edges away from the shadows, toward the unrutted center of the road. She walks steadily, with purpose. The road lies straight ahead and straight behind and it is clear of people and animals. The wheat fields to her left and right ripple in a soft breeze, and it is silver that she thinks of, not yellow. It was yellow she always saw at Bell Creek when she’d look out over the distant fields, yellow as Missus painted them, but these fields are silver now as the stalks bend in the moonlight, a luminous and reflective silver that seems not of this world or any she has ever imagined.

  Missus Lu did not bury my baby, Josephine thinks. It would have been an easy thing, another small body laid down among the others. Did she hold that little boy and look into his eyes, hear his cry and only then decide to spare him? Or had she determined all along to show mercy? Josephine thinks of the seventeen small mounds, and the one long one for Papa Bo, and Missus Lu will soon lie there too, and then Mister beside her, and who next? Who will be left? Who have they loved? Who has loved them? She feels a sharp pity for Mister and Missus Lu, the people who have owned her, and then the feeling is gone.

  She thinks of Rebecca, her mother, and the slave cemetery situated just east of the Bell family plots, just beyond a rigid row of poplars. Mister liked to say the trees grew that way by nature’s design but Josephine always believed it was some person who planted them, some human hand that made that division, for nothing in nature is ever so straight and clear. On the north side of that line of trees, Rebecca lay buried, and Hap, Calla’s children, and perhaps Lottie and Winton too someday. Josephine hopes they will lie there together, that the end of their days will see Lottie and Winton side by side.