The Corrections

She hung up wondering whether Nick was trying to protect her from her guilt, trying to protect Billy from her anger, or simply spacing out under the strain. She suspected it was a combination of all three. She suspected that during the summer her father had mentioned Brian’s windfall to Billy and that father and son had then traded snidenesses and bitternesses about the W—— Corporation and bourgeois Robin and leisure-class Brian. She suspected this, if nothing else, because of how badly Brian and her father got along. Brian was never as outspoken with his wife as he was with Denise (“Nick’s the worst kind of coward,” he remarked to her once), but he made no secret of hating Nick’s bad-boy disquisitions on the uses of violence and his teeth-sucking satisfaction with his so-called socialism. Brian liked Colleen well enough (“She sure got a raw deal in that marriage,” he remarked to Denise) but shook his head and left the room whenever Nick began holding forth. Robin didn’t let herself imagine what her father and Billy had said about her and Brian. But she was pretty sure that things were said and that Rick Flamburg had paid the price. Nick’s response to the trial photographs of Flamburg lent further credence to this view.

During the trial, as her father fell apart, Robin studied the catechism at St. Dymphna’s and made two further claims on Brian’s new money. First she quit her job at the experimental school. She was no longer satisfied to work for parents paying $23,000 a year per child (although, of course, she and Brian were paying nearly that much to school Sinéad and Erin). And then she embarked on a philanthropic project. In a badly blighted section of Point Breeze, less than a mile south of their new house, she bought a vacant city block with a single derelict row house standing on one corner. She also bought five truckloads of humus and good liability insurance. Her plan was to hire local teenagers at minimum wage, teach them the rudiments of organic gardening, and let them share the profits from whatever vegetables they could sell. She threw herself into her Garden Project with a manic intensity that was scary even by Robin standards. Brian found her awake at her Global Desktop at 4 a. m., tapping both feet and comparing varieties of turnip.

With a different contractor coming to Panama Street every week to make improvements, and with Robin disappearing into a utopist sink of time and energy, Brian reconciled himself to remaining in the dismal city of his childhood. He decided to have some fun of his own. He began eating lunch at the good restaurants of Philadelphia, one after another, and comparing each to his current favorite, Mare Scuro. When he was sure that he still liked Mare Scuro best, he called the chef and made a proposal.

“The first truly cool restaurant in Philly,” he said. “The kind of place that makes a person say, ‘Hey, I could live in Philly—if I had to.’ I don’t care if anybody else actually feels that way. I just want a place that makes me feel that way. So whatever they’re paying you now, I will double. And then you go to Europe and eat for a couple of months at my expense. And then come back and design and operate a truly cool restaurant.”

“You’re going to lose vast amounts of money,” Denise replied, “if you don’t find an experienced partner or an exceptionally good manager.”

“Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it,” Brian said.

“ ‘Double,’ you said?”

“You’ve got the best place in the city.”

“ ‘Double’ is intriguing.”

“So say yes.”

“Well, it might happen,” Denise said. “But you’re still probably going to lose vast amounts of money. You’re certainly overpaying your chef.”

Denise had always had trouble saying no when she felt wanted in the right way. Growing up in suburban St. Jude, she’d been kept at safe distances from anybody who might have wanted her in this way, but after she finished high school she worked for a summer in the Signal Department of the Midland Pacific Railroad, and here, in a big sunny room with twin rows of drafting tables, she became acquainted with the desires of a dozen older men.

The brain of the Midland Pacific, the temple of its soul, was a Depression-era limestone office building with rounded rooftop crenellations like the edges of a skimpy waffle. Higher-order consciousness had its cortical seat in the boardroom and executive dining room on the sixteenth floor and in the offices of the more abstract departments (Operations, Legal, Public Relations) whose vice presidents were on fifteen. Down at the reptile-brain bottom of the building were billing, payroll, personnel, and data storage. In between were mid-level skill functions such as Engineering, which encompassed bridges, track, buildings, and signals.