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

Chapter Twenty-Nine — The Man in Winthrop

Gordon Ashcroft lived for nineteen more years in an apartment on the second floor of a three-decker in Winthrop, with one window facing a parking lot and, beyond it, a strip of water that was Boston Harbor on a clear day.

Maren visited him four times.

That was the whole account, and she had worked it out in the first year and kept to it exactly: once a year, on the Sunday before Christmas, for about forty minutes, with a bag of groceries carried up the stairs by hand, and no lawyer, and no folder, and no business, and no interviews, and no reporters — because a reporter had come, in the second year, and had stood in the parking lot and had asked her a question through the car window, and Maren had said, in a voice that ended the conversation completely, He’s a man in an apartment. There’s no story here. Go and find one somewhere else.

The visits had a grammar too.

Gordon Ashcroft had learned to make coffee badly. He had a chair by the window and a radio and a library card, which Maren had noticed on the third visit and had not commented on, and he had, by the fourth year, a set of books on the table that were all about the same thing — the history of Boston banking, a biography of a man whose name Maren recognized from her mother’s books, and one slightly battered paperback on marine engines that she could not place at all.

They did not talk about the firm.

They did not talk about the wedding.

They did not talk about the garage, and they did not talk about the receipt, and they did not talk about the three tickets or the Cayman account or the eleven years of ledgers in a library, and the one time — in the seventh year, the year Estelle was born, the year Maren came up the stairs with a bag of groceries and a photograph in her pocket and put the photograph down on the table, a photograph of a baby with her fist in her mouth and no visible scar on a left cheek — Gordon Ashcroft looked at it for four minutes and said, in a voice that had gone completely flat:

“What’s her name.”

“Estelle.”

Gordon Ashcroft sat in a chair by a window in Winthrop with a photograph on the table in front of him and said nothing at all for eleven minutes.

Then he said: “She had a laugh you could hear through a wall.”

And Maren said: “I know. I have it.”

And that was the entire conversation, and they never had another one like it.

He found out about the facility in the fifth year.

Maren never learned exactly how. She had a theory — a bill, a clerk, a form that came to the wrong address, or possibly the day supervisor on the second floor, who was a decent woman and who, in the fifth year, had said one sentence too many to one person too many — but she never learned it, and she had long ago stopped needing to know how things were found out, because she had found out, in fifteen years, that everything in a family is eventually found out, and the only question that matters is what a person does in the four hours after they know.

A letter came to her office on State Street on a Tuesday in February of the fifth year. It was on a sheet of lined paper, folded three times, in an envelope with a stamp and no return address, and it was in her father’s handwriting, and it was four sentences long.

It said:

Maren.

I worked out that you’ve been paying for my mother’s room since the year after the wedding. I went there on Thursday. They told me at the desk that they weren’t permitted to say, and I told them I didn’t need to know the name, I only needed to know whether it was paid, and they said it was paid for eleven years in advance.

I am not going to say thank you, because you’d know it was a lie.

But I sat with her for three hours, and she didn’t know me, and I held her hand, and this time I stayed until they closed the floor.

Maren Ashcroft sat at her desk on the fourth floor of the building her great-grandfather had built, at eleven o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday in February, with a sheet of lined paper in her hand, and read those four sentences eleven times.

Then she folded the paper along its creases, and put it in her inside coat pocket, next to her mother’s letter, and did not cry, and did not file it, and did not tell anyone — not Lucian, not Sal, not Camille, not Ines — and went on with her morning, because it was Tuesday and there was a board meeting at two and a subsidiary in New Jersey with a problem that had to be closed before the quarter.

She kept the letter there for the rest of her life.

Gordon Ashcroft died in the nineteenth year, in June, in a hospital in Chelsea, at eighty years old, of something ordinary.

Maren was in the room. Camille was in the room. Camille had, by then, spent fifteen years calling a man in Naples every Sunday and had become the sort of person who knew how to sit in a room with a dying man without talking, and she sat in the corner chair with her hands folded and did not once glance at her phone.

Gordon Ashcroft was not conscious for most of the two days.

But he was conscious for about twenty minutes on the first afternoon, and in those twenty minutes he opened his eyes and found his younger daughter standing at the window with her back to him, and his elder daughter in the chair, and he said something that neither of them could hear, and then he said it again — and Maren came and stood at the side of the bed and leaned down and he said, in a voice that had no strength in it and no performance in it and nothing in it at all except the enormous labor of getting the sentence out:

“I should have asked you.”

And Maren Ashcroft — twenty-four the year she had stood on a staircase in crimson and destroyed him; forty-seven now, chair of a firm with four hundred employees, mother of a girl named Estelle, wife of a man the whole eastern seaboard was afraid of, the woman who had paid for eleven years of a stranger’s mother’s room and never once said so — looked down at her father’s face and said the one sentence she had kept folded in her coat pocket for thirty-eight years.

“I know,” she said. “You should have.”

He died on the second day at four in the morning, and she was asleep in the chair by the window, and Camille was awake, and it was Camille who called her and said her name, and Maren woke up and looked at her sister’s face in the half-dark of a room in Chelsea and understood at once, and stood up, and the two of them stood there on either side of the bed for a while in the early light with the machinery switched off and the room gone quiet.

“There’s no funeral,” Maren said.

“No.”

“Then what.”

Camille looked at their father’s face.

“Bread,” she said. “Mrs. Halloran is ninety years old and lives with Bernadette now, and Bernadette called me on Tuesday and said Mrs. Halloran wants to send bread to the house.” She picked up her bag. “I told her yes. I told her we’d sit in the kitchen and eat it, and that nobody would make a speech, and that would be the whole thing.”

Maren looked at her sister in the gray light of a hospital room in Chelsea.

“Okay,” she said.

And that was the funeral: two sisters and a plate of soda bread in a small kitchen in Somerville, with a woman of ninety and a woman of forty and a wall clock ticking, and nobody made a speech, and nobody said a word about the firm.