So many women in black veils at his funeral. Matilda had tried to sort out which had been her husband’s mistresses but had given up in rueful exasperation.
It had taken some months for her to sort out Lloyd’s complex financial interests, fighting off incursions by rivals as she went. When she felt she had a firm grasp, she’d sold off some assets and reorganized others, and then she’d gone out and bought herself a struggling publishing house, D. Wenceslas & Sons.
“Why books?” Henry had asked. “Why not philanthropy? I know plenty of boards that would love to have you.”
“I like books,” she’d said. “I don’t care for boards.” Furthermore, she’d given birth to five sons and spent nearly forty years with a philanderer and was now free to do whatever she liked. Maybe that was why Lloyd had left her in charge. Maybe he’d been making one of his oblique apologies.
After Pearl Harbor, it had been her idea to print thousands of cheap paperbacks off the Wenceslas backlist and donate them to the troops. The gesture was one of genuine goodwill, but, as she’d thought might happen, the boys hadn’t stopped wanting books after they came home. Sales were strong. Thanks partly to her, paperbacks weren’t considered trashy anymore, just affordable and convenient.
She lives in an apartment near Bryant Park, and it is from there she has come when she swings abruptly off Forty-Second Street and through the glass doors of the building that houses Wenceslas headquarters. From the elevator she marches directly to her office, ignoring the greetings from the secretaries and typists that rise up like cheeps from birds’ nests. She’d chosen an office on the fifth floor with the editors, not the fourth floor with the sales and numbers types, and some of them can be glimpsed through their half-open doors, always reading, sometimes reading and talking on the telephone simultaneously.
“She hasn’t canceled, has she?” Matilda asks her secretary, Shirley, who has followed her into her office. She tosses her beret onto a bookshelf and dumps the dog, Pigeon, unceremoniously onto the floor. On all available surfaces, piles of books rise above a general mess of paper: string-tied manuscripts, mock-ups of covers, clippings, correspondence.
Shirley sets down a silver bowl of water for Pigeon, retrieves the beret and places it carefully atop the hatstand. “No, not yet.”
* * *
—
Not long after Lloyd died, Matilda had found herself wondering about Addison Graves. She had a vague memory of Lloyd telling her Addison had been released from Sing Sing, but after that…nothing.
There didn’t seem to be anyone to ask. Even the longest-serving employees at L&O had no idea, and the lawyer, Chester Fine, was dead. When Addison was in prison, Lloyd had gradually stopped mentioning him. Matilda had taken the end of their friendship as a natural, sorrowful consequence of the loss of the Josephina and the uncertainty surrounding the dispersal of blame. Perhaps the courageous thing would have been for Lloyd to defend Addison more vocally, but he’d had an entire company to think about, thousands of employees. And what of the passengers and crew who drowned? Certainly their families required a—not a scapegoat. Certainly they deserved justice. That Addison’s odd young wife had perished was a tragedy, but at least the children had been saved.
“He never told you?” Henry said, inexplicably aghast. They were alone in the Liberty Oil offices, sitting opposite each other at a table heaped with files and ledgers.
“Told me what?”
And so Henry had relayed what his father had confessed about the smuggled crates of bullets and shells and nitrocellulose, about how Lloyd, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, had been the one responsible for the ship’s loss but had allowed Addison to take the fall. “He made little attempts to set things right,” Henry said, “but he would never come clean publicly, which was probably the only thing that would have mattered to Addison Graves. Sending that cargo was beyond foolish. It wouldn’t even have made a real difference to the war effort, of course. It was a symbolic gesture. And then he had to be ashamed until he died.”
Matilda stared at her son. After some time, she said, “What happened to the children? They were sent to their uncle, weren’t they? In Wyoming?”
“Minnesota, I think.”
“Do we have the address somewhere?”
“I suppose. Somewhere.” A cautious glance. “Why?”
“I’d like to do something for them. I don’t know what.”
“We might not be able to find them. They’re grown.”