Send the Ugly One, He’ll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!

Chapter Twenty-Seven — What She Did With It

The first thing Maren Ashcroft did as chair of Ashcroft Whitfield was not a revenge. It was a payroll.

Sal Ferro brought her the reorganization memo in the second week, and it was a good memo — it had been drafted by a firm in New York whose partners had never once set foot in the building — and it said, in paragraph nine, with the bland efficiency of a consultant’s summary, that the elimination of four back-office functions and the consolidation of two subsidiaries would permit a reduction in force of approximately eighty-one positions, generating annual savings of $6.4 million.

Maren read the memo twice and then called Sal into her office.

“Eighty-one people,” she said.

“That’s the number,” Sal said. “It’s in there because a firm this size always has eighty-one extra people. It’s not a suggestion, it’s an observation.”

“Which positions.”

“Back office. Records. Two of the three in facilities, some of the client-service assistants on the second floor.” He shrugged. “The ones who’ve been here twenty years. The ones who cost the most per head and do the least per head, structurally.”

Maren turned the memo over and wrote on the back in her tiny tight hand, and did not look up.

“Mrs. Halloran worked in a house for thirty years,” she said. “She cost the most per head and did the least per head, structurally. She made bread and she told the truth to an eleven-year-old girl at half past eleven at night, and it is the single reason I am sitting in this chair. And a consultant in New York would have had her on a list of redundant domestic, because that is how a consultant sees a person: as a cost with a shape.” She put the pen down. “So: no. We’re not doing eighty-one. We’re doing zero.”

Sal looked at her.

“You understand that the savings are real,” he said. “You understand that I’m the one who’s supposed to tell you the savings are real, because I’m the one who’s supposed to be the hard man in the room, and I want to be honest with you, professor, because that’s the deal we’ve had since the first day: if you tell me to keep eighty-one people because they remind you of a housekeeper, I’m going to tell you that’s sentiment, and that sentiment is expensive, and that I’ve watched three men wreck themselves in this business by being sentimental about payroll.”

“I know,” Maren said. “And I’m not asking you to keep them out of sentiment. I’m asking you to keep them out of arithmetic.” She turned the memo back over and slid it across the desk. “The savings are real. The eighty-one positions are real. But the memo is wrong about which column they belong in. It says cost. I say they’re capital. This firm has lost eleven years of institutional knowledge because a man was moving the books around in a basement, and the only reason we know the basement exists is that a records clerk named Florence Adeyemi showed me a box that was misfiled in 2003 and had not been looked at since. Florence is on your list, Sal. She’s on it in paragraph nine. She is fifty-eight years old, she has been in that basement for thirty years, and she is the only person in this building who knows where anything is.” She leaned back. “So here’s the arithmetic. We’re not cutting eighty-one. We’re redeploying them. Florence gets a title and a budget and two juniors and a mandate to digitize the whole archive, and the other eighty get retrained into the functions we actually need — compliance, records, client service — because the firm has a hundred and forty years of paper and a five-year regulatory backlog and nobody in New York knows it because nobody in New York has ever opened a box.”

Sal Ferro looked at her for a long moment.

“That’s going to cost about the same as cutting them,” he said.

“It’s going to cost more,” Maren said. “And in eleven years it will have been the cheapest thing this firm ever did.”

He picked up the memo and stood up and said, at the door, in a voice that had gone slightly rough: “You know what your father used to say about this building? He used to say, people are a liability.” He opened the door. “I never once believed him. I’ve been waiting eleven years for somebody to say the other thing out loud, and I want you to know I heard it, because I’m going to be telling that story for the rest of my life.”

She kept the house on Commonwealth Avenue for eleven months and then gave it to the firm.

Not the building — the building was sold, at a good price, to a family with three children, and Maren went to the closing and signed the papers and did not go back inside. What she kept was the library, or rather the idea of the library, and what she did with it was this: she took the four thousand volumes of her mother’s collection, moved them to a floor of the firm’s building, opened them to the employees’ children, and wrote a check to fund a librarian’s salary for ten years, and she called it the Estelle Marchetti Reading Room, and she put the photograph of her mother at the kitchen table in a frame in the lobby, at eye level, with no plaque and no caption, so that any person walking in would see a woman in her twenties with a coffee cup and a look on her face, and would not know who she was, and would have to ask.

Hollis Prine came up from Naples for it, in a wheelchair at eighty-four, and was wheeled into that lobby by Camille Ashcroft, who had called him eleven months earlier and had listened to him for two hours and had gone down to Florida twice since, and who was, at that point, working three days a week at a small foundation in Woburn doing something that Maren never fully understood and that Camille had never once described as a job without rolling her eyes.

Hollis looked at the photograph for a while and then said, to no one: “She’d have hated the frame.”

“Why?”

“Because she always said that the worst thing you can do to a person is make them decorative,” Hollis said. “And that’s a lovely frame.” He looked up at Maren. “Good. Let her hate it. It means she’s still in the room.”

And at the end of that first year, in November, Maren did the tenth item on the list, which was not a transfer of money, because the transfer of money had been done in the second week and had been done anonymously and had been done in the amount of eleven years of care at a facility in Brookline.

She went to see the woman in the chair.

Neve Ashcroft was eighty-eight years old and had been in the facility for eleven years, and she had been Gordon Ashcroft’s mother, and she had spent most of her adult life in a house in Brookline that had been sold when her son’s firm had gone under, and she did not know where she was, most days, and did not know who anyone was, most days, and had not known her own son’s face on the last Thursday he had ever come to visit her, which had been eleven days before a wedding in October.

Maren had thought a great deal about whether to go.

She went on a Thursday afternoon in November with no folder, no satchel, no coat worth noticing, and she sat down in the chair beside the window and looked at her grandmother, and her grandmother looked back at her with the pleasant, unfocused attention of a woman watching weather.

“Hello, Mrs. Ashcroft,” Maren said. “My name is Maren. I’m Gordon’s daughter.”

Neve Ashcroft considered this for a long moment.

“Gordon,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Gordon is a little boy,” Neve said. “He’s six. He has a coat with the collar gone. He won’t go out in it, he says the collar is the part that matters.” She looked out the window. “He’ll be home at five.”

Maren sat in a chair by a window in a facility in Brookline and looked at the woman who had raised her father — who had, by every account Maren could find, spent forty years in a house with a husband who never once looked at her with anything but calculation — and she said, because there was nothing else to say, and because the truth in that room was the only currency that worked:

“He’s sixty-one now. He lives in a small apartment in Winthrop with a view of a parking lot. He doesn’t come here anymore, and I think that’s because the last time he came, you didn’t know him, and it broke something in him that he didn’t know he had.” She leaned forward. “I’m the one who pays for this room. He doesn’t know. I’m not going to tell him, and I’m not going to tell you why, because I don’t entirely know why, except that a woman wrote me a letter asking me not to be cruel, and I have decided that paying for a stranger’s mother, in secret, and saying nothing about it for the rest of my life, is the most useful definition of the word I have.”

Neve Ashcroft looked at her with her pleasant unfocused eyes.

Then she reached out and put her hand on Maren’s hand.

It was not recognition. Maren knew that. It was the reflex of a woman who had spent her whole life putting her hand on people’s hands in rooms where nobody was listening. But her hand was warm, and it held on, and she did not let go for about four minutes, and Maren Ashcroft sat there in the November light with her grandmother’s hand on her hand and did the arithmetic of her own life — forty percent of a firm, four hundred employees, eleven years of ledgers, a mother dead and a father ruined and a stepmother gone and a sister in recovery and a husband who ran an empire — and came out at the end of it with exactly one conclusion, which was that this, this right here, this four minutes of a stranger’s hand, was the thing she was going to be measured on when she was eighty-eight years old and sitting in a chair of her own.

She went back every Thursday after that.

She went for eleven years.