The House Girl Read online

  “Oh, Lina,” Sherri called.

  “Yes?” Lina paused by the entrance of Sherri’s cubicle zone.

  “Two things. One, the Yankee broke up with Meredith!” This Sherri mock-whispered, one hand held to the side of her mouth. “Just this morning, first thing! You should have heard the cussing!” And here she was: gleeful Sherri, joyful and enthusiastic, brown eyes bright, cheeks aglow. Only in moments like these, when juicy office gossip was in desperate need of dissemination, did Sherri’s default posture of bored disinterest fall away. The secretaries had full access to the e-mail accounts of the lawyers for whom they worked and there seemed to exist an unwritten code of information sharing among them: any noteworthy matter, personal or professional, was dispersed cubicle to cubicle, floor to floor with the speed of an airborne tropical virus. The ethics of this were straightforward and unassailable: any lawyer fool enough to conduct their personal life via a work e-mail account deserved to have their secrets revealed to the Clifton & Harp populace.

  Lina gave her stock gossip-response smile of part shock, part disapproval, part delight. “Wow, that was fast!”

  “I know. Not even six months.” Sherri’s eyes widened.

  Lina waited. “And the second? You said there were two things?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Gleeful Sherri vanished. With great care, she picked with a fingernail at a front incisor. “Dan phoned. You’re meeting with Mr. Dresser tomorrow morning. Conference room … oh, which one was it? I can’t remember. Call facilities and they’ll have the booking.” Sherri turned back to her newspaper; her brow furrowed immediately with grave concentration.

  As always, Lina felt powerless in the face of Sherri’s secretarial indifference. She had tried, how Lina had tried! Movie tickets, thank-you e-mails studded with exclamation points, vanilla lattes delivered to Sherri’s desk. But all Lina’s efforts were met with the same emotionless smirk and an apathy so clear it seemed manufactured from glass.

  For a moment Lina lingered, and then, inspired by the amiable Garrison Hall, resolved to try a new strategy. Lina would invite Sherri to lunch. A conversation, a shared meal, and afterward their relationship would blossom and Sherri would never again shunt Lina’s phone calls to voice mail, or miss the FedEx deadline, or forget a conference room number. But before Lina could speak, a red light blinked on Sherri’s phone and she answered the call. “Meredith Stewart’s office,” she said with authority, and began writing a lengthy telephone message in looping longhand.

  Lina retreated slowly to her office. She picked up her phone, called facilities, and got the conference room number for tomorrow’s meeting. Room 2005, twentieth floor. Eight A.M. Breakfast not provided.

  FRIDAY

  Three heads turned toward Lina as she opened the meeting room door. She was five minutes early and yet, apparently, the last to arrive. It was raining and she had not stopped at her office to unload her coat and bag and now, standing in the doorway, struggling out of her wet yellow slicker, she wished she had. The men watched her for a moment, then swiveled away and resumed talking.

  Dan, Garrison, and, she presumed, Mr. Dresser sat at a small circular table with various firm paraphernalia arranged as a neat centerpiece. A coffee mug held a collection of pens and pencils, and beside the mug rested a stiff-billed baseball cap—all items emblazoned with the Clifton & Harp logo. A fourth person, a young blond man, blue-suited and glossy, sat off to one side with paper and a pen poised above it. Dresser’s assistant, of course; men like Ron Dresser never came to meetings alone.

  Small talk, Lina could tell. Dan speaking too loudly, Garrison murmuring in low pleasant-sounding notes. Mr. Dresser angled his head slightly at their efforts, the gesture of a man accustomed to being the subject of the desperate attention of others. All superfluous, his angled head seemed to say, Mr. Dresser was at ease. He wore a dark gray suit, a purple tie that glowed regally, shiny black leather shoes. His skin was coffee colored, coffee with much cream, and it was clear, even sitting down, that Dresser was large, not fat but rather monumental in length and width. His chair seemed barely able to contain him. Beside Dresser, Dan and Garrison looked like mini-men.

  Lina slid into the only empty chair at the table. Mr. Dresser was the first to acknowledge her. “You must be …” and he looked down at a paper in front of him.

  “Lina. Carolina Sparrow, but everyone calls me Lina.”

  “Mmm …” He looked vaguely unsatisfied with this response.

  “Lina and Garrison are two of our brightest young associates,” Dan said. “We are all really excited about this project. Now let’s get down to specifics, shall we?”

  Mr. Dresser leaned back in his chair, crossed right ankle over left knee, and moved the end of his tie to the side of his expansive stomach. “My friends, this will be the largest, most important case of your careers,” he said. “I don’t care if you’ve been a lawyer for twenty years, or if yesterday was your first day at this venerable institution. This is the one you’ve been waiting for. We seek to right this nation’s largest, most enduring sin. We seek redress for hundreds of years of man’s inhumanity to man, trillions—let me say it again, trillions—of dollars in unpaid wages. The plaintiffs number, at the very least, in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly in the millions. We seek not only to compensate them for their ancestors’ sweat and blood but to memorialize, to remember. Who were they? Who were their oppressors? I want names named, on both sides. The truth telling, the testimony, the media attention that this litigation will generate—a public reckoning, so to speak—will allow these historic wrongs to finally be made right.” Dresser uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “You will help deliver the healing, the truth that this country needs. This lawsuit has the potential to, quite literally, rewrite history.”

  Dresser paused. His assistant’s pen scratched across paper.

  “And even if we don’t make it to trial, we’ll settle for a whole heap of money,” Dresser said. “Now what’s not to like there?” He chuckled and looked at Dan. “Right, Danny boy?”

  Dan smiled broadly. “Right. Now let’s talk about the plan.”

  For the next 4.2 billable hours, Lina listened while Mr. Dresser and Dan discussed the strategy for the initial complaint. They would use an unjust enrichment theory, arguing that twenty-two private U.S.-based corporations from various industries—tobacco, insurance, textiles, banking, transportation, energy, mining—had been unjustly enriched by using or benefiting from slave labor in the years before passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. The descendants of those slaves are the rightful beneficiaries now of compensation for the forced labor enjoyed by those companies from the first documented slave sale in 1619 until slavery ended in 1865. That was a 246-year spread. That was roughly, Dresser calculated with a Clifton & Harp pen on Clifton & Harp–embossed paper, $6.2 trillion, including compound interest earned over time at a rate of 6 percent.

  The lawsuit would also target the federal government, Dan explained. This was where Dresser’s green light came in. “I’ve gotten confidential confirmation that, after we file the suit, the government will agree to issue a formal apology for slavery,” Dresser said. “We’ll pull the government claim and then the feds will put some pressure on our corporate defendants to settle.” He smiled. “It’s a nice little distraction, you know, atone for sins of the past, maybe divert attention away from the perceived sins of the present. But it’s the deep pockets we’re concerned with here. The government gets to look like a good guy, and we get some real weight behind us.”

  “Money won at trial or received through a settlement will go into a trust to fund a variety of programs and institutions,” Dan said, shooting glances at Dresser, who nodded in agreement. “A national slavery museum, a monument on the National Mall, college scholarships, educational programs, funds for minority-owned businesses, for community centers, for antiracism curricula in schools, the military, and the police. This is Mr. Dresser’s vision, and we’re here to help him achieve it.”

 
; Occasionally Lina or Garrison asked a question or made a remark that, generally, went unacknowledged by Dresser and Dan; even Dresser’s note-taking assistant seemed oblivious to their presence. Sometimes Lina exchanged looks with Garrison, both of them in postures of interested silence and mutual understanding that their role now was this: to be present, to bear witness to the interesting and intellectually stimulating exchange between these two successful men, to absorb as if by osmosis their intelligence, experience, and wit (Dan cracked a few jokes).

  Toward the end of the meeting, as Dresser was playing with some compound interest rate calculations, Dan asked a question.

  “And why now?” Dan said, his tone neutral. “I’m not talking about statutory limits. I’m talking historically, generations after the slavery … situation ended. Why now?”

  “Why now?” Dresser repeated and raised his gaze to a small window high on the east-facing wall that showed only a pale blue square of sky. He turned back to Dan. “Let me ask you something. American slaves built the White House, they built the Capitol building. Jefferson owned them, Washington owned them, Ulysses S. Grant—yes, the great commander of Union troops—he owned slaves. Eight presidents sitting in the White House owned African American people. And yet there is not one single national monument to our brothers and sisters in chains. Why is it that we have nineteen Smithsonian museums—nineteen, one just for goddamn postage stamps—and not one is dedicated to memorializing those people who lived in bondage and helped build this country? We would not be the world’s superpower today if we had not had two hundred and fifty years of free, limitless labor on which to build our economy. Why now, you ask? What were their names, Dan? They were our founding fathers and mothers just as much as the bewigged white men who laid the whip against their backs. Isn’t it time this country made the effort to remember them? And to calculate how much we owe them? It is past time, my friend.”

  Dresser eyed Dan steadily with, it seemed to Lina, a great dislike. Then Dresser smiled, and his teeth were very white and even as the edge of a straight razor. “I get riled up talking about all this, Dan, but no offense is intended. I know we’re on the same team here. In my own family, we have a few names, a few details. As a child, my paternal grandfather was enslaved on a Mississippi cotton plantation, that we know. My maternal great-grandmother was taken away from her children, taken and sold off. What happened to that woman? To my great-grandfather? That history sits ill with me. It sits very ill indeed.”

  The room vibrated with an uncomfortable silence. The bare emotion of Dresser’s voice, the earnestness, seemed to have cowed Dan and Garrison, and they each sat now with bowed heads, studying their hands with fierce concentration. Only Lina kept her eyes on Dresser. She felt a flush of possible understanding, an affinity with him having to do with her own mother’s lost family and the nebulous desire to know. She wondered what else Dresser had learned about his history, the grandmother sold, the motherless children, and how he had achieved such success—Look at him! The watch! The assistant!—despite this constant, roaming absence. Despite a present identity perforated with giant person-shaped holes. She felt an urge, one she promptly suppressed, to grab hold of Dresser’s hand.

  Dan raised his gaze. “Thanks for that, Ron. I’m sure we all appreciate the history lesson.” He turned his attention toward Lina and Garrison, and his hands came up, elbows on table. “Now, let’s study the briefs that have been submitted in the other slavery reparations cases and the decisions that were handed down. Garrison, I want you to outline the primary reasons plaintiffs have lost before on summary judgment, and our arguments to get around these issues. Standing and statute of limitations are the big ones. I have confidence you can put in some creative thinking.

  “Now, Lina,” and Dan pointed an index finger in the direction of her nose. “I want you to concentrate on defining the class.” The finger descended to the table, jabbing for emphasis. “This is a biggie, and I think it’s worth you looking at full-time. We need to nail this class down, and get ourselves a great lead plaintiff. Maybe a few to choose from. Think about the injury—what’s the injury here, what is the nature of the harm? We need the face of that. We need someone to show us the harm. But be careful about sympathy fatigue. There are only so many sob stories people can hear before their eyes start to glaze over. Slavery was bad, yeah, yeah, what else? I want something stirring, a new angle, something compelling. And don’t forget photogenic—these people will be on TV, they’ll be in the papers, they’ll be giving interviews. We need some great people, Lina, some great stories. The evils of slavery, of course, but also picking oneself up from the dust, yadda yadda, do you know where I’m going with this?”

  Automatically, as she always did when Dan asked her a question with only one acceptable answer, Lina nodded.

  “All right then!” said Dan. “Ron, we will get cracking asap.”

  At the door, Lina shook hands with Dresser. He placed his left hand on top of her right and clasped them together so she could not pull away. “Thank you,” he said, looking directly at her for the first time. “I know this isn’t an easy case. I know you’ll work hard for our success.”

  “I look forward to working with you,” Lina said. Dresser’s skin pressed warm and dry against hers. His eyes flashed a bright hazel.

  Lina had never considered the issue of slavery reparations before. It was not something she had studied at law school, it was not something that had ever crossed her mind. She was a twenty-first-century white girl from New York—what did she know about the enduring harm of slavery or $6.2 trillion in unpaid wages? The dozens of briefs she’d written to date at Clifton marched before her in a mental parade, each case and client distinct but essentially the same. Each client an LLP or PLC or Ltd. or Corp. Each complaint a variation on the same broken-contract theme. But Dresser had brought to Clifton something utterly new. Two hundred and fifty years of nameless, faceless, forgotten individuals. Yes, they were America’s founding fathers and mothers as much as the bewigged white men who laid the whip upon their backs. Why didn’t Lina know their names? Why hadn’t she studied their histories? Where was the monument? Where was the museum? What had they wished for and worked for and loved?

  Josephine

  At half past nine the doctor’s coach rattled into the yard. Josephine and Missus Lu had been waiting on the porch since just after breakfast, stains widening under the calico arms of Missus Lu’s dress as she rocked in her chair. Josephine fanned a hand in front of her face, feeling the sweat dry coolly on her upper lip. Her legs ached from standing, her mouth was sticky with thirst.

  Dr. Vickers climbed down from the carriage bench and removed his hat with great solemnity. The horse twitched its ears at a snarl of flies as Dr. Vickers stood for a moment gazing up at Missus Lu on the porch. His bald head gleamed shiny as a peeled potato, his belly round, his back slightly stooped, and too-short legs bowed away at the knees like a chicken’s wishbone. His face had the look of a carved apple left to dry in the sun, the skin pinched and pulling into itself, eyes wide set and dark. “Good day, Mrs. Bell,” he said.

  At once the doctor’s face and voice flared familiar, and Josephine’s breath caught as a drawer opened, a memory released. The bald head like a peeled potato, and Josephine returned to the night she had first tried to run, when she came back to Bell Creek with a pain deep in her belly, so sharp that she could not breathe. The pain: this was why she had returned. It had been dawn, there had been rain, a crow at the window. Josephine had lain atop a tall bed, Missus Lu sitting beside her and a man she did not know moving about the room, his thick-fingered hands probing at her, touching.

  Dr. Vickers stood now in the dust of the yard, a trickle of sweat running the length of his face with the speed of a caress. This was the man.

  Josephine pushed the memory away and looked to where a crow had landed at the bottom of the porch steps, striking its hard beak into the dirt. The doctor’s horse flinched and sidestepped away as the crow hopped closer to its
hooves, pecking the packed earth. The horse grunted and the crow flapped low into the air, something small and black trapped in its beak.

  The doctor started up the stairs. His body swayed side to side and the banister creaked with the strain of his weight. He held a cane in his right hand but he did not use it. With arms spread wide, he approached Missus Lu.

  “My dear Lu Anne, it has been many years. It is wonderful to see you again.” His voice was liquid in its low notes, smooth and sugary.

  “And you as well, Doctor. How long it’s been!” Missus Lu stood to greet him, her hair damp and matted around her forehead and neck, her dress dark down the back where it had pressed against the porch rocker. She swayed as she bent her knees in a vague approximation of a curtsy.

  “I was so very sorry to hear of your recent troubles,” the doctor said. “The barn. And of course your failing health.”

  “Oh, it is nothing, really, nothing to bother you over. I am so very sorry you’ve had to travel all the way out here, into the wilds of Charlotte County, to see just one poor patient! Please, come inside out of this heat.”

  Missus Lu led the doctor to the front parlor, a rarely used room that persisted in smelling of mold despite Josephine’s efforts with rose water and brush. Missus gestured for Dr. Vickers to sit, and she joined him, the two on opposite ends of the square-backed settee that was covered in a chocolate-brown cloth, the edges tucked against the wood with round brass tacks that ran across the back and down the armrests in two unbroken rows. As a child Josephine had loved to run a finger along their smooth tops, almost like counting money in your hands.