The Question Authority Read online

  The Question Authority

  The

  Question Authority

  a novel

  Rachel Cline

  The Question Authority

  Copyright © 2019 by Rachel Cline

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  Book layout by Mark E. Cull

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cline, Rachel, 1957– author.

  Title: The Question Authority : a novel / Rachel Cline.

  Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018055869| ISBN 9781597098984 (pbk.) | ISBN 1597098981 (pbk.)

  Classification: LCC PS3603.L555 Q47 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055869

  Publication of this book has been made possible in part through the financial support of Ann Beman.

  The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, and the Riordan Foundation all partially support Red Hen Press.

  First Edition

  Published by Red Hen Press

  www.redhen.org

  “Good morning little school girl, can I go home with you?”

  —traditional

  Wednesday February 18, 2009

  1

  Nora

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  Sometimes I get grief and resentment confused. Also fear and anticipation. It’s not that I don’t know what the words mean, but that whatever it seems like I should be feeling (grief over my mother’s death, excitement about a potential date) is not what I am feeling. It’s been like this since I was a kid, but it’s taken me until recently to put it together: I have a fundamental emotional wiring problem. Is fifty-three too old to be learning new things about your psyche?

  The trouble of the moment—what’s keeping me awake on a work night—is the problem of my lost cat. “Lost” is a misnomer; I let him out. I had this idea that by letting him roam I was honoring his essential cat-ness, his life as a hunter and wanderer. Only it’s February and I live in New York City and, even though Brooklyn Heights is a tree-lined neighborhood where you rarely see a car traveling at more than parking-seeking speed, it’s been almost three days now. People have found him before, and called me—he has a tag—but that was only one night away, at most.

  Given the timing, it’s likely that my cat-freedom gambit was some kind of hedge against my mother’s death. Adeline died eighteen months ago: three months before I adopted the cat. Prior to her death, I’d convinced myself that she wasn’t all that important to me—that her role in my life was more like that of an eccentric aunt than the woman who’d breastfed me till I was three (or so she claimed). Every single time she saw me, she opened with a criticism (“You look pale.” “What happened to your hair?” “What are you wearing?”); she’d never noticed or admitted that I was fundamentally depressed from age thirteen to thirty-five (when: Prozac); and—adding insult to injury—she did none of what they call “advance planning” for her own demise. She left me not only broke but awash in legal and financial perplexities. I had no choice but to move back into this apartment, the apartment I grew up in, after I’d sold its contents. Maybe by letting the cat roam, I felt better about feeling trapped myself?

  In any case, I was proud of my liberated cat, of trusting him to find his own way home—it mirrored the way I was raised. Back then, I was not the only kid around here with an apartment key on the same length of twine as the key to her roller skates. I had a best friend, and a three-dollar-a-week allowance, and—as long as we stayed on the right side of Atlantic Avenue and were home for dinner—we did what we pleased. Beth did, anyway. She was the brave one. But that’s another story.

  Tin Man, please come home.

  Thursday February 19, 2009

  2

  Nora

  Iwake up on Thursday morning expecting the cat to be with me, emanating warmth and profound disinterest from his customary sleeping spot in the V between my butt and my feet. The light in the bedroom is gray and bright— unmistakably after seven—but finding that Tin Man’s spot is empty throws my whole morning routine into question. I hate my job, I hate my life, I live in the emptiest apartment in the universe . . . what’s the point? Under normal circumstances, I would just bury my face in the cat and tell him how much I love him and how little I want to get up, but with no cat, I’m stymied. I don’t want to say that stuff out loud to myself—it sounds pathetic and ridiculous. I sit up and gaze dolefully at the stupendous view. The harbor is silver-gray and choppy and the orange lozenge of the Staten Island Ferry chugging by is perfect in color, shape, and size. The cranes and gantries of Port Newark have a poetic quality in the hazy distance. Even Governor’s Island looks charming. What am I to do with my conflicting emotions?

  I live in my grandfather’s apartment. He’s long dead, and it’s got nothing in it but the crap I bought at IKEA when I moved in, but it’s a penthouse with four bedrooms, three baths, a library, a music room, and two working fireplaces—a relic from a time when a poet could actually get rich. Back then, brownstones were going up everywhere (like condos, these days) and were far too hoi polloi for a grand figure like my poet granddad. Now, it’s worth a fortune—even after the recent crash. But I am not allowed to sell it under the terms of his trust. This is something my mother might have fixed before she died, if she’d been willing to admit that dying was in the cards, but she wasn’t, and didn’t, and so. Here I am again in Brooklyn Heights.

  To anyone who didn’t grow up here, the first impression is always of wealth. Walking under old, leafy trees, you catch glimpses of chic sitting rooms and private gardens; historic landmarks and secret-seeming alleys; adorable carriage houses and ornate mansions; as well as churches for all comers. Standing at the edge of the Promenade to watch the sunset, you will invariably hear someone (perhaps your own inner real estate agent) pronounce the words “million-dollar view.”

  When my grandfather got here, in the early twenties, it was “America’s first suburb,” and indeed a wealthy enclave. But when my mother dragged me back to this apartment in 1963, the Heights was actually a fairly Bohemian place. That first summer, I attended a settlement house day camp with black and Puerto Rican kids where we sang spirituals and spent our days in city parks and pools. The formerly grand hotels that dotted the neighborhood were all then sheltering welfare recipients, but the ethnic mix of kids at camp came from nearby apartments—as did artists and writers and folk singers and even, briefly, Marilyn Monroe.

  And now, in 2009, it’s changing again. Lots of empty storefronts, but no more welfare hotels. On the street I still see people I recognize from the old days: the grumpy shoemaker; Julie Something’s little sister, now model-beautiful and married to a famous artist; the homeless woman with wild hair, who I fear may be Josh Pinsky’s mother. The Key Food is still a tragedy, but there is now also a Gristedes and something called Garden of Eden, where you can, most of the time, buy a decent-looking artichoke. There are long waiting lists for Friends, Saint Ann’s, and Packer, but they say P.S. 8 has a new principal and is turning around.

  I do eventually get out of bed, shower, dress, and set out for wor
k. Yes, another thing I can’t complain about to anyone, ever: I walk to work. It takes about fifteen minutes, but today it takes twenty, because I am scanning every gated gap between buildings, every shrubbery, delivery entrance, impassible/filthy patch of former snow, and tempting garbage pile for some sign of my missing companion. And so, I am late. By the time I have clocked in, dumped my coat in my cubicle, and logged into my email, I find I have been summoned to my boss’s office for a meeting that began five minutes earlier. This is not a common occurrence.

  Jocelyn waves me in and starts talking before I have even sat down. I am distracted by her breakfast. In her chapped left hand she holds a cup of diet vanilla yogurt. With her right she pours in half a package of M&M's and then begins to stir with a plastic spoon. The colored dyes from the candy swirl into the white gel, making it look like a bath product or a toilet cleaner. I’m so appalled that I don’t really hear what she’s saying until my brain reacts to the word “pedo-whatever,” in close proximity to the word “McGillicuddy,” which is Jocelyn’s universal nickname for all public school teachers. She concludes with the statement, “So I’m looking for a quick turn from you, Nora. There’s a hearing on for Monday morning,” and she pushes an accordion file at me. I reach forward instinctively because the accordion file is unevenly loaded and balanced on top of all the other things that live on Jocelyn’s desk, including numerous coffee-cart napkins, a calendar from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden that’s still showing last year’s cherry blossoms, and what I can only assume are several years’ worth of memoranda from HR. She said, “Monday morning,” but as it’s now almost ten on Thursday, what I really have is about twelve hours. And did I hear that right? Are we settling a case with a child molester?

  “I’ve never settled a personnel case before,” I blurt.

  “Yeah, it’s the same thing as liability or special ed. Just look at the comps, come up with an offer, and then back off like twenty percent.”

  “But the guy’s a pervert and we’re settling?”

  “Yeah. He got caught before, too.” She pats the file folder. “Don’t get too mashed into the details; just offer.”

  She’s acting like this is business as usual but it’s not, it can’t be. I’ve only been here three months but . . . “Can’t we just fire him?”

  “First off, they have a union, right? They have due process— documentation, a warning, probable cause, blah-de-blah-blah.” She shakes the fountain of red hair off her shoulders. Jocelyn has the head of a twelve-year-old girl on the body of a fifty-five-year-old Irish broad. Sometimes I think she’s like my alternate-reality self, the one who grew up in a row house in Queens instead of a palatial co-op in Brooklyn Heights, and who was never a freelancer or a Talking Heads fan but stuck it out for forty years of paper pushing at the Education Department, and who never doubted that course. I guess I’m supposed to be nodding at her explanation but it still doesn’t make any sense to me.

  “I thought we had ‘zero tolerance.’”

  “Think about it. They’re not that easy to catch in the act—I mean, that’s happened, but like then someone calls the cops.”

  I try to picture how a pedophile operates in a school. Of course, I already know: he writes understanding notes in the margins of the girl’s homework, tells her she’s pretty, that she can come to him any time she ever “needs to talk.”

  “The girl’s a teenager,” Jocelyn explains, “so half the time they think they’re in love. It’s like a spy movie, you know?”

  In eighth grade, my best friend was fucking our teacher— as were several others at our fancy girls’ school, the Academy. In 1971, the word “pedophile” was not so commonplace and Bob Rasmussen was all of twenty-six, not what we then called a “dirty old man.” But I have come around to the realization, and it’s taken me a long time to get there, that he was a predator. “So, what do we offer in a case like this?”

  The cases I’ve had to settle so far (which is what I do, settle lawsuits—think insurance adjuster) have been mundane: staff members claiming they were wrongfully terminated or made to work “out of category”—the worst-case scenario is that we wind up paying them what they want, or giving them their jobs back. It’s depressing, but no one is materially harmed. (Well, except maybe the schoolchildren whose schools don’t have science books or working toilets because of all the money the department has to spend on lawsuits.) Anyway, when we settle we just give the other side some grand sum and, in return, they stipulate that they won’t sue us anymore, or defame us, or join a class action. I can’t imagine what the agreement could possibly say in a case like this one: we’ll pay you to go away and in return you’ll pretend you weren’t really a pedophile?

  “What we offer is that he walks away from the job for something less than what it would cost to keep him on payroll till he retires. If he won’t take that, we keep paying him but he spends the rest of his working life in the rubber room.”

  “There’s no version where he gets punished?”

  “The rubber room is a lot like jail, if you ask me.”

  “Except you go home at three o’clock and get the summer off!” This is pissing me off more than I would have expected. I’m somewhat inured to the whole sexual predator thing at this point—it doesn’t shock me, it just makes me sad—but I have a lot of resentment about how much people get paid, compared to my paltry $48K. I never minded being broke when I thought I’d be unbroke as soon as my mother died. Now I see how everyone else my age has this figured out by now—even fucking perverts. “I might need some help, Jocelyn. Can one of the attorneys consult?”

  “I don’t have an attorney to spare right now and anyway it was that nitwit Jodie Koo that let this one sit around for two and a half months without realizing there was a hearing scheduled. I’m giving it to you because you’re fast. Don’t even read the file. Just hold your nose and settle.”

  Jodie got the boot about a week ago, I think. There’s this illusion that city jobs are safe, but that’s only if you’re in a permanent civil service title. People get fired all the time around here. So I pick up the accordion file, wrap my arms around it to contain the loose papers jammed inside, and nod my “Yes, boss.” Jocelyn’s door is propped open by a plaster bust of Elvis Presley, which is highly unlikely to be hers.

  3

  Bob

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Date sent: Feb 18 2009 12:32 AM

  Subject: On the Road

  Peanut,

  Here I am in Tuba City, at what they call a “family restaurant.” I thought you would appreciate the irony, as I make my journey of fatherly remorse. The wait-a-little is cute. Just now, she caught me staring and, to my absolute amazement, smiled—probably why I decided it was time to make my report to you. I guess, out here, even a used-up hulk like me might still look like a ticket out. I’m wearing Dad’s old Rolex, which is definitely a rich guy’s watch, so maybe it’s that. You convinced me it was too beautiful to leave in the lockbox. When was that? Five years ago? He’d been dead for ten. You said no one was ever going to mistake me for a Connecticut Yankee insurance man and that was true. But in Tuba City I could be anyone!

  “Where you headed?” she asks me. She refills my water glass and I see she bites her nails like I do. Involuntarily, I close my fingers into my fist so she won’t see the connection.

  “Laramie,” I say. “Flew into Phoenix though, so I could drive through here, again. It’s been maybe thirty years.”

  She nods, but without interest. It’s hard to imagine someone finding this landscape boring but I guess if you’re seventeen and it’s where you live . . . She’s barely seventeen. And she has that mix of cockiness and uncertainty that always kills me. I decide I’ll call her “Catnip.” Don’t worry, I’m still on the straight and narrow, here. But part of that is telling the truth about it from the get-go, so there’s no tantalizing forbidden thing, just ordinary desire that happens to everyone. Right?

  “So, what�
�s in Laramie?”

  If I were on the make I’d tell her about Doria. No one suspects a dad. But I lie: “Just on a break.”

  “I’ve never been on a vacation,” says Catnip, without self-pity. “If I had the time off, I don’t think I’d spend it driving around stupid towns like this one, though, but to each his own.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I say, lifting my water glass. But there it ends, so I’m going to put the laptop away and get back in the Chevy Cruze, which is surprisingly fun to drive.

  Pulled over:

  This landscape looked so different when I had you with me. Grown-up you, I mean—the trip I think of as our honeymoon. We were listening to Moby-Dick on tape. You’d never read it. “All talk, no whale,” you said, and I was shocked at your ignorance. I gave you a “teacher” look, and you called me “Miss Crabtree” and we thought that was the funniest thing ever because we were so happy, then. Happy Version 2.

  Happy Version 1 is ancient history, of course: holding Doria’s sweaty little hand when it fit into mine like a baby mouse. Sleeping together, all of us in a pile, when the kids still called me Daddy and thought I could do no wrong. Watching Archer learn how to flirt by hanging around with girls twice his age. Chasing your own sweet self through the mirror maze at the Topsy Turvy House.

  But let’s go back to Version 2: your bare feet on the dashboard, that stupid toe ring you bought at Wall Drug. Lounging by the pool in the middle of the night. I made up new constellations and tried to fool you, Brooklyn girl. The Dragon’s Tooth, the Great Loom, the Salt Crystals. You said, “I could see that.” You said they should be called “Cold Fire” and “Light Storm,” like fast cars. Your accent made it sound tough instead of sappy. Or was I just too far gone? I’m going to look for that motel we stayed in, near Flagstaff. The morning we left, there were girls in the pool. I heard them but I didn’t look. I thought I was cured—that finding you again after twenty-odd years had cured me.