Chapter Sixty-Two: Removing Eleanor

Eleanor received him in the formal sitting room, where she had received everyone who had ever mattered enough to be made to wait.

The tea service was laid out on the low table, untouched. The lamps were lit against the early dark. She sat upright in the same chair she had occupied the night Marcus brought her the folder, though Damien did not know that, and she looked, he thought, like a portrait of herself, finished and varnished and impossible to harm.

"Sit," she said.

"I'd rather stand."

"Then you will have to look down at me, which I suspect will be very uncomfortable for both of us." She folded her hands. "Sit, Damien. We are not at the board."

He sat.

He had written the letter that afternoon, three times, and had it in the inside pocket of his jacket. He took it out now and laid it on the table beside the untouched cups. It was one page, plainly typed, and he had been careful with every word.

"It's a resignation," he said. "From the chair. It says you are stepping down in order to cooperate fully with the independent counsel. It says nothing about Meridian that isn't already public. There is a statement attached, which I have shown to no one, saying that you did so voluntarily." He kept his voice level. "If you sign it tonight, there is no motion tomorrow. There is no vote. You leave the way you would have chosen to."

Eleanor looked at the paper. She did not touch it.

"How very civilized," she said.

"I'd like to do this without humiliating you. I would like that to count for something."

"It counts," Eleanor said, and for a moment something moved at the back of her eyes. "I will tell you why I will not sign it."

"If I resign, it is an admission," she said. "A voluntary one, in my own hand, on company letterhead. I will not be the author of my own confession. I have not said one word to anyone in fifteen years that I could not defend, and I do not intend to begin now by putting my name to an apology I do not feel."

"Mother."

"If you remove me, Damien, it is an act of power. It can be questioned, litigated, resented. It is something done to me, and I can live inside that." She tilted her head. "You, however, will have to learn to live inside it too. I should tell you that the day you take that chair from me, you stop being the man who told the truth to the board. You become the man who decided what his family could survive. I would not wish that knowledge on you."

There was no cruelty in it. That was what made it so terrible. She was warning him, he saw, with the same flat, genuine concern with which she had once warned him about drafts and unwashed apples.

"No," he said. "I'm telling you first. To your face. With a door open that you can walk through. That is the difference, and I think you know it."

"Perhaps." She almost smiled. "You have always been better at distinctions than I."

She poured tea after all, her hand perfectly steady, and he did not have the heart to refuse the cup.

"Marcus came by this morning," Eleanor said. "To apologize. He wept. I have not seen him cry since he was eleven." She stirred, once. "I told Helen to show him out. I find I have nothing to say to my brother that would improve either of us."

"Did he say why."

"He said he'd been frightened." Her mouth thinned. "I believe that. It is the one honest thing he has told me in thirty years, and it is entirely useless."

The clock on the mantel ticked. Outside, in the dark, a car slid past without slowing.

"I'll be there tomorrow," Eleanor said. "I will not resign, and I will not ask anyone for a favor. If the board wishes to vote me out of a chair I have occupied for decades, it may do so in front of me." She set down her cup. "I would only ask that you not look away when it happens. I never taught you much, but I taught you that."

"I won't look away," Damien said.

He left the letter on the table, and she did not pick it up.

The session on Thursday lasted eleven minutes.

Foster presided, as vice chair, from the seat at the left hand of the head of the table. Eleanor took her usual chair, the one with the slightly higher back, and Ivy, from her place against the wall, watched her do it as though nothing at all had changed. Damien sat at the foot. Voss, at Eleanor's elbow, looked ten years older than he had a week ago.

"Agenda item one," Foster said. "A motion to remove Eleanor Cross as chair of this board."

"Madam Chair," said a dry voice. Teague. "Forgive me. Ms. Cross. Do you wish to be heard?"

"Briefly," Eleanor said, and rose.

She did not look at anyone in particular. She spoke to the long walnut table as if it were a person.

"I built this company with my husband, and I ran it for eleven years, and I handed it to my son in better health than I found it. That is true. I also made a decision fifteen years ago that I will not defend to you today, because the investigation will examine it and I intend to cooperate with it." She drew a short breath. "I will not resign. I want that recorded. I would like the minutes to say that I was removed, not that I left."

She sat down.

The vote went around the table, each director's name called in turn.

Foster, yes. Ingram, yes. Bellamy, yes. Chen, yes. Teague, yes. Walsh, who did not look at her, yes. Okafor, after a visible pause, yes.

"Marcus Cross," Foster said.

Marcus had not spoken all morning. He sat very still, hands folded, face composed into an expression of grave and heavy regret, the look of a man attending a funeral for someone he had loved.

"Yes," he said. "With a heavy heart."

At the head of the table, Eleanor did not turn her head. She did not move at all. She looked straight ahead at the glass wall, at the city laid out beyond it, and her face was a mask so perfect that Ivy would have believed it, if she had not seen the knuckles of the folded hands go white.

"And Eleanor Cross," said Foster, very quietly.

"No."

"Eight to one," Foster said. "The motion carries."

They took the nameplate while the room was still emptying.

It was a small thing, a brass plate set into the polished wood in front of the chair at the head of the table, and a young man from facilities removed it with a little screwdriver, as though lifting something out of a wound. Damien had not realized until then what it said. Every chair at that table carried an initial and a surname, a custom older than he was. The plate in front of his mother's chair read E. CROSS.

The same two letters. The same small, careful surname. He had seen them in his own handwriting on a legal pad a week ago, copied from a document fifteen years old.

She passed him in the corridor on her way out, walking exactly as she had walked in, with Voss hurrying behind. She stopped.

"That was well done," Eleanor said. "It is what I would have done."

"I know," Damien said. "That's what frightens me."

"Good." Her voice was very low. "Then do it differently, if you can. I never found out whether it was possible."

She walked on. He did not look away until the elevator doors closed.

Ivy found him an hour later in the empty boardroom, standing at the long table with the brass plate in his hands. He turned it over once, slowly, and the letters caught the light.

"Same letters," he said.

"I know."

He crossed to the banker's box stacked against the wall, the one the judge had labeled that morning in a firm black marker, MERIDIAN, and lowered the plate carefully inside. It lay there on top of the folders, small and bright and perfectly ordinary.

"Let it be part of the record," he said.

Ivy came and stood beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched, and neither of them said anything for a long while, two people looking down at a piece of brass that had cost a family everything it had.