Marion Palm is an expert on women who embezzle. She does not think of women as embezzlers. Embezzlers are men; for women, embezzlement is a practice.
Women who embezzle do not live lavishly. The reason for the practice has nothing to do with status. It has to do with justice and enforced reciprocity. Women who embezzle will save the money, pay some bills, and then buy a Jet Ski for their family. Women who embezzle will bid extraordinary amounts on rare Victorian dolls on eBay.
Women who embezzle are not apologetic, but they may cry when caught. When women who embezzle embezzle from churches, they fall to their knees and pray. They do not pray for forgiveness. They pray for safety and protection. Women who embezzle from offices do not cry but cross their arms and stiffly smile, as if to say, What did you expect? They’ve worked at the office for twenty years and are seen as a piece of furniture. A filing cabinet. They may be eager to be caught. They may want credit for their greed and ingenuity.
Marion Palm has embezzled $180,000 over the years from her daughters’ private school in Brooklyn, where she works part-time in the development office. Her daughters’ quarterly tuition payments are paid by her husband’s family trust. She’s never seen his money and so it does not exist. It’s explained to be the interest from Great-Grandfather Henry Palm’s fortune. The money is now represented as a series of digits online, in unending transit through international wires.
She’s spent some of the money she embezzled on appliances, exercise equipment, and several family trips to Europe. Her husband, a writer of difficult fiction and terse prose poems, receives a monthly allowance from the trust and believes it is enough for a family of four because he does not know what things cost. He does not know how to worry about money, and Marion has never asked him to. He enjoys the Sub-Zero refrigerator, an environmentally friendly boiler, a state-of-the-art elliptical machine, and a new patio. He believes these are things all families deserve.
Marion Palm has embezzled $180,000, spent most of it on her family, but saved $40,000 in cash for herself. It was hidden in the basement of the brownstone. She collected it this morning after she read an email from her supervisor informing her that the school was about to be audited by the IRS. Her supervisor was panicking, because Marion has been, in essence, doing her supervisor’s job while the supervisor suffers a glacially slow mental breakdown. What should I do? the supervisor asked. The board keeps asking me questions about the books and I don’t know any of the answers. When are you getting here? As you well know, these stress situations trigger my fight-or-flight. Come to my office immediately. Did you inform me that you would be late? Marion deleted the email.
Marion has saved the knapsack for an occasion like this.
Shelley
Marion isn’t picking up. Daniel, her officemate at the school, hasn’t seen her. Neither has the hall master nor Marion’s supervisor. There was a meeting Marion missed, and Daniel reports to Nathan the meeting agenda. Daniel is another father and unpleasant. Marion sits across a desk from Daniel, and Nathan doesn’t understand how Marion can tolerate Daniel and why she bothers to try. Daniel air-quotes incorrectly. Nathan feels him air-quote over the phone.
“I haven’t seen her ‘per se,’ but if you do see her, please remind her that Deb needs to speak to her. She said it was urgent. We need to discuss the Pumpkin Patch vis-à-vis logistics and also, of course, marketing ‘strategy’ for the Wing Initiative.”
Nathan wonders if these words mean anything, and despairs for his wife.
“So you haven’t seen Marion today?”
“No, as I said—”
“Thank you. My wife is missing.” Next Nathan must call his wife’s closest friend, Shelley, another Brooklyn mother. This one divorced her husband to move to the Hudson Valley to ride horses and sculpt and sleep with mountain men, or so Nathan hopes. He likes Shelley and was bored by her lawyer husband. When they divorced, he wished Shelley well. Marion hasn’t spoken to Shelley much since she moved, but now the girls say their mother has hopped on the Hudson Line to visit her.
He should have called Shelley first, but hoped the girls were confused and Marion was sitting at her desk listening to the terrible Daniel. If his wife left him, she would go to Shelley.
He calls Shelley and leaves a message. It’s a strange message to leave. He imagines his wife and Shelley hiking cathartically, discussing or not discussing him. Perhaps the girls know more than they say. But in terms of trauma for children, abandonment must rank high, so he sits on the couch with his daughters to watch television.
Two episodes pass and Jane is asleep, curled into her father; she’s the type who misses nap time.
Nathan runs his fingers over Jane’s braids and asks Ginny what she thinks may have happened to her mother.
Ginny is wedged into the other end of the couch, as far as possible from her father and her sister, long legs tucked. When her body acts teenish, when she needs this physical distance between herself and her family, Ginny is disquieted. She feels as if her center of gravity has moved.
“Your mom is visiting Shelley?”
“That’s what she told us.”
Ginny’s waiting to tell how they didn’t pay for their cheeseburgers. It was odd, her mother’s behavior. When they finished eating, Marion told Ginny and Jane she would meet them outside on the sidewalk and left the diner alone. They were to sit for two minutes more at the table and then follow. After doing as they were told, Ginny and Jane found their mother hiding in a dephoned phone booth at the end of the block. She told her daughters to run, and she ran faster than them. Her blue knapsack was particularly unsettling, the way it bounced on her back. Ginny wants to understand her mother’s actions before she tells her father.
“I thought Mom was mad at Shelley,” Ginny says.