“Uh, no, ma’am,” the trader was saying. He was stocky, his head square, his face red as he spoke. She imagined a roll of fat on the back of his neck, just where his marine-short buzz cut met the collar of his shirt. “No, he’s not down here. No one’s seen him on the floor. I’m not surprised. You have no idea, really, how bad that’d be right now. If I were that f—er”—and here the news bleeped out his colorful language and Madison started, not having realized they could even do that on news shows—“I wouldn’t want to show my face in this building. Not today, not tomorrow, not for a long time. My buddy’s got a bottle of Laphroaig he’s been saving up for bonus season next year, but we’re busting it out right now. It’s an Irish wake down here, all right? No one wants to see Bob D’Amico’s face down here. Not on the floor. Not the guys he screwed over. They always used to tell us one firm, right? That’s our motto, ‘one firm.’ What a load of horses—t.”
Madison felt her cheeks warming, as though he could see her, had spoken to her directly. One firm. That was how her father said good night when the partners came over for dinner, as he sent them tumbling down the driveway to their waiting town cars, their wives unsteady on their stiletto heels after a night of drinking. One firm, their voices raspy with alcohol, when he shut himself up in his study with his friends and only Madison was allowed to come in, to bring them more rocks glasses or, if he was in a good mood, make the drinks. That was how they toasted, glasses clinking so hard that sometimes the other guys, Jim McGinniss usually if he’d already had a few, cracked theirs in excitement. Her father was famous for this: one firm. He always said that loyalty was cheaper than staving off some idiot’s revenge, that if he took care of his guys for life they would be his forever. He told her this sometimes after he’d had a few drinks, while she sat at his feet watching a basketball game, her French homework spread before her on the coffee table. She’d read an article once in Vanity Fair that was all about this, about how much the firm meant to everyone there, about how her father didn’t like it when partners had showy affairs or got divorced or eschewed their ties on casual Fridays. It wasn’t horseshit. It was her father’s whole life.
The trader’s shirt was too tight on him. It looked like it was choking his neck a little bit. She imagined putting her fingers to that mottled red skin, both hands around his thick neck, and squeezing. The reporter had said that few members of the trading floor had even come in to work. The men who were there had spent their morning packing their desks into cardboard boxes, which to Madison seemed a specious ploy for sympathy. These guys wouldn’t be walking out of the building with cardboard boxes. They’d have their secretaries clear their desks of their few personal items. They’d do none of the dirty work themselves. This weepiness, this packing of the things, this would all stop as soon as the cameras did.
She could hear her father, even now: Only the lazy or the ignorant get their news from those scum-sucking malcontents on TV news, all right? Got it? Capiche?
Her father loved to throw Italian flourishes into their conversations, as though he spoke the language. He didn’t. He wasn’t first generation, he liked to remind her. You had to go back to his grandmother for any real Eye-Talians, but most of the men he worked with thought he spoke Italian. Sometimes, in articles about him, they reported that he was fluent. Sometimes he liked to introduce himself as Roberto rather than Robert or Bob. But Madison knew. Capiche was about as close to his roots as they got in this house. A few Italian words sprinkled here and there and the annual Christmas-Day car ride to Nonna Connie’s house in Williamsburg, where Madison ate all the gnocchi she wanted because Isabel would never say anything in front of her mother-in-law. It wasn’t the potential weight gain that bothered her mother, Madison knew, or that wasn’t what bothered her the most. It was the wanton disregard for discipline, Madison’s willingness to let everyone around her see how bottomless her appetites were, how raw her hunger. If you wanted something, her mother believed, you took steps to acquire it in the privacy of your own home, so that by the time you were out in the world again, you had everything you needed. You did not let other people see you as grasping, desperate.
But as soon as Nonna took the lid off the saucepan, Madison was always ravenous, even though the kitchen was the only part of that house that smelled good. She always held her breath in the hallways and the bathroom to avoid the smell of a house decaying around its longtime inhabitant, mixed with the nostril-invading musk of her grandmother’s air freshener. The house was perfectly clean, of course—Bob D’Amico might not have been able to convince his mother to move into a luxury high-rise, but he wouldn’t have let her live in actual squalor—and yet Madison didn’t like to touch the surfaces, the lace doilies on the countertops, the butter left in a dish on the counter rather than sensibly in the refrigerator.
The trader was still being interviewed on the news.
They don’t want him there at the office? Madison thought. Fine. We want him here. The too-loud rumbling of his voice off the marble floors in the foyer. All the noise, just from him being in the house. All the sounds that make us flinch. We want to flinch here, Daddy.
She closed her eyes. Just go downstairs, walk outside, and get in the cab. Just come home.
She had done this once before, and it had worked. Not right away, but it had worked. When the firm had evacuated on September 11. When her father walked up the West Side Highway and rented a suite of rooms at the Sheraton in midtown, sent one guy back downtown to slip between the barricades and retrieve the servers from the cordoned-off building that had once been their office. She’d read all of that years later, online. Back then she was still small, and she’d left her mother and Lily sitting in tears in the kitchen watching the small TV, a bottle of wine on the table between them, their fingers intertwined.
Madison had come in here to his study, curled up on his sofa, and whispered the same words to herself until she could sleep: Just come home. Just come home.
Now, something hit the thick double doors with a thud. Madison sprang up from the sofa, the remote control slipping from her fingertips and hitting the parquet floor with a dull shriek. Lily was yelling her name. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, nothing had disappeared.
She unlocked and opened the doors, which forced her to make an elegant, swooping motion with both arms, as though welcoming Lily to some sort of morbid, empty party. Vampire’s Ball—she’d heard her father and his friends say that, to describe the nights when they went out with the men who were about to be fired, who already knew they were goners. He thought she didn’t listen, when his friends came over. But she listened to everything. Or she used to. Somewhere, at some point in the past year, she’d dropped the thread. All summer, waking up to her parents’ voices cutting each other off, like poorly trained backup singers: she knew that this had unnerved her at the time, but all she could think now was that she hadn’t been nearly unnerved enough. That she’d listened for months without hearing a single word.
And now she was being punished for it.