Free Concrete Angel by Patricia Abbott Page A

with a richly-colored, thick rug. A slight odor of stale cigars—but better ones— also hung in the air. Maybe the odor of a fine whiskey and perfume perhaps? She wasn’t going to be put in the Eastern State Penitentiary, she realized. Hank had seen to it. People charged with a crime didn’t get ushered into offices like this one. Somewhere along the way, her fortune had changed. Someone realized her circumstances. Hank had probably given them a deal on their printing needs for the next fifty years. Men like him didn’t have wives incarcerated in the Eastern State Penitentiary. It was unthinkable—unallowable no matter what the cost.
    The store manager came in, Bill Something, a fellow St. Joseph’s graduate though ten years earlier. Hank abandoned his silence for loquaciousness. A rush of glad-handing followed; jocular remembrances of St. Joe’s; memories about which priests were still teaching in Hank’s day; talk of cafeteria food; of theatricals with all-male casts; the punishments dispensed by the principal; a few common friends. This took five minutes, during which my mother said she stood like a convicted felon awaiting sentence.
    “Those were the worst minutes in my life,” she said.
    The two men eventually ran out of high school remembrances, agreeing Eve would get professional help.
    “I’ve something in mind already,” Hank told the store manager. “A place for Eve. I’ve heard good things about this facility. Talked to the administrator today—right after your call.” (Mother didn’t get upset at these words, assuming it was a lie meant to extricate her.)
    “It’s a sickness,” the store manager said, nodding his approval at Daddy’s solution. “We see it all the time here—as you can imagine.” He looked obliquely at Mrs. Hank Moran and shook his head. “Can’t help herself, you know. And she’ll keep doing it until she gets some counseling. Or goes to jail.”
    My mother, with great effort, controlled the urge to whack him with her purse. Did he think she was deaf or mentally deficient? Speaking to Hank like she wasn’t in the room. And Hank had done it, too, not once glancing at her. Ashamed of her like her father was all those years ago but better at hiding it. Some boys’ school behavior he’d learned at his costly Catholic high school, where girls were seen only as suitable for childbearing or dance partners.
    The men talked over her head—literally. Why had no one spoken to her for the entire two hours she’d sat in that dark office? Why had her husband been brought here? Why must he speak for her, take care of her? If it’d made sense when she was fifteen, it didn’t now. There was a woman in the Senate, for god’s sake. It was the 1960s. Her gynecologist was a woman, the vet who tended the Morans’ horses too.
    “Won’t do you a bit of good to smack her around either,” the security manager added, snapping her out of her stupor. “It’s a compulsion she’s got.” A bead of sweat suddenly mustached his lip. “A disorder or something.” Hadn’t he said this minutes before? “You’ll have to ask the men in white coats what to call it. I see it all the time. Itchy fingers.”
    The store manager’s desire to both align himself with Hank and demonstrate his power over them was making him babble. The heat in the office rose. Hank must have seen the dangerous look in Eve’s eyes because he began edging her toward the door.
    “Well, thanks for giving—us—another chance,” he told Bill Something. “There won’t be another incident, I can assure you. She’ll stay away from Wanamaker’s in the future. Right, Eve?”
    He didn’t look at her. No one was looking at her. She nodded anyway.
    “Forget about it,” the man said, released from the need to dominate the room. “I know you’ll take care of the little lady. Make sure she gets the kind of help she needs.” He looked at my mother directly for the first time. “Our upbringing, you know. The Church.