Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone

Author:Robert Stone [Stone, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9780544357013
Google: g2zAAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B005OI1KU2
Barnesnoble: B005OI1KU2
Goodreads: 241953
Publisher: Bt Bound
Published: 1992-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

29

WHEN ANNE was a little girl, her father’s office had been in a nineteenth-century building on the corner of Broadway and Rector Street. Visits there had always been treats, often at Christmastime, so that she remembered his chambers as decorated and cheerfully lit against the gloom of late December afternoons. Outside, there had been holiday crowds and Trinity Church and a walk to Schrafft’s across City Hall Park in the winter’s first exciting flakes of snow.

At Schrafft’s she would have a Broadway soda and her father would tease the Irish waitress and drink whiskey. His drinks had always appeared rich and festive, an elixir, the stuff of adult happiness.

During the early seventies, Campbell and Olson had moved its offices into the sky, occupying a suite on the ninety-first floor of the World Trade Center. Whereas the old offices had been filled with ship models, company pennants and brass nameplates, the new place, as Anne still thought of it, might have been a bank in some shopping mall in space. Clouds dissolved against its sealed windows. Impossibly far below, the new landscape—gentrified North River and sleek condominiums along the Jersey Palisades—spread out like a conceptual rendering of itself.

Yet, as ever, Antoinette Lamattina, who had been her father’s secretary for thirty-five years, was waiting for her in the outer office. Antoinette was old times and good times personified, Anne’s gift-giving fairy godmother.

“Annie, honey,” Antoinette cried. “It’s been so long we haven’t seen you!”

Looking into the secretary’s shrewd, kind black eyes, Anne nearly choked up.

“Oh, Antoinette,” she said as they embraced. She had never called Antoinette Lamattina by her first name until she herself was out of college. “You look wonderful.”

So Antoinette did at nearly sixty, gray, slim and elegant, as though she thrived on chaste bereavement, frequent communion and the occasional excursion to Roseland Ballroom. She was a childless policeman’s widow. Glowing, she led Anne toward her father’s inner office.

“Captain! Look who’s here.”

Watching her father rise to meet her, Anne was at once impressed with his quickness and apparent health. He was just under six feet tall, only an inch or so taller than she. All that remained of his notorious good looks were slimness and a smooth face. His handsomeness had been of the softer, youthful sort. His regular features and fair skin had grown a little roseate.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Have a look at you,” Jack Campbell said to his only daughter. Smiling Jack, they called him around the harbor. Bitterly.

She had been halfway toward embracing him when he stopped her for his inspection. Blushing and self-conscious, she stood her ground.

“You look fabulous,” he said. “Want a drink?”

“Absolutely.”

Jack had Antoinette summon one of the illegal Irish girls the firm employed. The colleen brought them a single-malt, as irregular as herself. It was tanked across the Atlantic in barrels and bottled, a few dozen measures at a time, in Halifax. This private stock was the last vestige of the family’s rum-running days.

“I watched,” Jack Campbell said. He inclined his glass toward a telescope on a tripod beside one window.

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