I Never Met a Spring

Chapter 3 The Board Chair

The board of the Calder Foundation met four times a year. The next meeting was in three weeks. The chair was a woman named Eleanor Voss, seventy-one years old, whose family had made its money in shipping and whose name on a museum wall was the only reason some donors gave at all. Eleanor had known Daniel's father. She had known my mother. She did not like Daniel, which I had always assumed was one of the small mercies of my life.

I called her.

"Ada," she said. "It's Sunday."

"I know. I need to see you. Not at the office."

There was a pause, the kind Eleanor used to make it clear she had understood more than you had said. "Come for tea. Four o'clock."

Eleanor's house was on the hill, a stone house with a garden that was famous in the city and a library that was bigger than mine. She poured tea herself, which was a thing she did to remind you that she did not need a housekeeper to be a hostess.

"Tell me," she said.

I told her. The deed. The photograph. The letter. The foundation account and the management company in Wren Harbor and the scholarship money. I did not tell her about the baby I had lost or the two years I had spent on the couch with a doctor telling me there was nothing physically wrong. Those were mine.

Eleanor listened without moving her cup.

"How much?" she said when I was done.

"Four thousand a month for two years. Just under a hundred thousand."

"From the operating account."

"Yes."

"Which has a board-approved budget. Which has an audit every spring."

"Yes."

Eleanor set her cup down. "The audit is in six weeks. If the transfers are still in the account when the auditors arrive, they will find them. If they are not, they will find the missing money anyway, because the grants don't reconcile."

"I know. I want to bring it to the board myself, before the auditors do. I want to repay the donors. I want the scholarship fund whole."

"And Daniel?"

"I want him removed from the foundation. I want him to have no access to any account, no signature, no role. I want his name off the letterhead."

Eleanor looked at me for a long time. "You are not asking me to punish him. You are asking me to help you punish him."

"I am asking you to protect the foundation."

"That is the same sentence," she said. "Which is why I will help you. But Ada, you should know that the board will not want a scandal. Some of them will want it quiet. Some of them will want you to say nothing and let the auditors find it and blame it on a bookkeeper."

"Then I will need the donors."

"Some of the donors will not care. They give for the dinners and the photographs."

"I know."

"And some of them," Eleanor said, "will care very much. The ones who give because of the scholarship. You will have to tell them that the money their daughters and sons might have used was spent on a house for a woman in Wren Harbor. That is not a quiet conversation."

"I know."

Eleanor picked up her cup again. "Then we will have the conversation. Bring me the records." She sipped. "And Ada. Do not tell Daniel until the board has met. If he knows, he will move the money somewhere else and we will spend a year in court."

"I won't tell him."

I did not tell him. For three weeks I sat across from him at dinner and answered his questions about the office and asked none of my own. He came back to the bedroom on the tenth night, and I let him, because I needed him to believe the marriage was still sleepwalking toward spring. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. I lay awake beside him and listened to him breathe and thought about the girl on the porch with her basket of laundry and her son who had his jaw, and I counted the days.