Free Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone Page B

while the regular secretary went sailing in the Gulf of California.
    â€œIn again?” old Magowan asked her. “I hope you won’t be asking for a raise.”
    Putting on a faint smile required all the goodwill she could bring to bear on the subject.
    â€œWe’re doing some work around the house,” she told him. It was true that she had been coming into the city more often, avoiding Owen’s moods.
    â€œHow’s your husband?” asked Magowan. The astuteness of senility, Anne thought. “Still with Altan?”
    â€œThat’s right,” she said.
    She spent part of the morning proofing the newsletter section of the book and then made a start on an article. In it, she tried to re-create a passage she and Owen had made years before between Cape Sable and Mount Desert Island. It had been a frightening trip; they had been fogbound and becalmed in the path of the Yarmouth ferry. Running on an outboard, they had listened to the big boat sounding off in the dark, coming closer and closer until its lighted galleries slipped by them like a dream and vanished again. That night, as Anne remembered it, they had been good sailors together. Eventually she gave up on the story. The chummy gallantry with which she sought to infuse it was unavailable that morning.
    At lunchtime, she went out for a container of yogurt. The springlike weather lured her down to the river, through Greenwich Village streets where she had grown up. Until she went away to school, her family had lived in a three-story red brick house on Bedford Street.
    Before going back to the office she walked a few blocks of West Street, letting herself be dazzled by the sun on the water. A couple of worn female prostitutes were lounging against a warehouse at the foot of Morton Street but the day had brought out a lunchtime crowd that made the waterfront strip feel manageable. It annoyed Anne to feel like a suburbanite in her own childhood streets. Decades before her father had bought his town house, some of her people had carried hooks on the Village piers.
    Back at the office, she felt flighty and bestirred by the soft city air. It had also occurred to her that she had been postponing the call to her father’s office. The prospect of asking him for money—which was what it all came down to—filled her with shame and anxiety. For a while she stalled, fiddling with the wooden leads of her attempt at the Cape Sable crossing story. Finally, after four, she put the call through. It was Margaret’s tuition that was on her mind and that, she decided, was what she would explain to him.
    Antoinette Lamattina, who had been her father’s private secretary since Anne was a child, answered at his office.
    â€œAnne, honey!” Antoinette cooed. “He’ll be so happy to hear you!”
    She had not spoken to her father on the phone for several months. They had not met for over a year.
    â€œYou’re in a spot,” her father informed her when they were connected.
    â€œIt could be worse,” she told him.
    â€œWhy don’t you let me go over your accounts?”
    She sat with her hand shading her eyes, staring down at her desk.
    â€œYou know,” she said, “I am hating every goddam minute of this.”
    â€œYou never call,” he said. “I never see the Kid.” It was his fond name for Maggie.
    â€œCan you blame me, Dad? I don’t want to hear the riot act. Look,” she said, “I’m concerned about Maggie’s tuition. Our public schools up there are not great.”
    She heard his bitter, self-satisfied laughter. It made her seethe.
    â€œDo you think I’d let her go to public schools up there?”
    She gave him no answer.
    â€œI want you to come and see me,” he said.
    After a moment she said, “All right. Soon.”
    â€œI want to tell you something, Annie. And you can pass this along to him.” Her father managed to use Owen’s name as