For a few hours, while her family ate and argued, Sadie could forget that the following day she’d be thrust into that den of snakes known as school, where the grown-ups loved her and the children hated her. But the moment the last Peregrine departed—inevitably, her bachelor cousin Bruce, who never had anywhere else to be and was a little in love with Rose—she settled into a funk, sick with anxiety.
Now that she was grown, Sadie rarely managed to get uptown early enough to do the shopping with her father, but she never missed breakfast itself, even when she was out late the previous night, and the mere act of getting out of bed seemed as monumental a task as flying up to East Ninety-third Street on the strength of her own arms. Likewise, she still dreaded Sunday afternoons. For she had wound up in a career that carried its own form of homework: the reading of manuscripts, on which she was always, terminally, behind, despite her being—sometimes she thought this her only skill—a pretty quick reader. In the midafternoon, feeling full and sleepy and thirsty (and sometimes drunk), she kissed her parents good-bye and headed home to read the latest coming-of-age tale—for that is what they all were, lately, and all of them set in the Midwest—or memoir of addiction.
Except often the city got the best of her. On sunny days, she might find herself walking down Madison and browsing in the overpriced, awful shops or strolling through the park, eyeing the dogs in the dog run and the families lolling about in the grass. Or her father might suggest a matinee and, well, she had so little time with him lately, how could she refuse? Rainy days, she often wound up at the Met, sitting in an obscure corner and watching the passers-by study Chinese pottery or medieval armor or the enormous, frightening canoes of the Pacific Islands, with those grim ancestral faces carved into their prows. Night would fall, all too quickly, and Sadie would hurry home, order a pizza or Chinese, put on her pajamas, and sit on the couch, surrounded by rubber-banded manuscripts, which seemed, in her absence, to have reproduced themselves, like rabbits. But then, at nine, she’d think Masterpiece Theatre—which she and her parents had always watched together, her mother driving her mad with questions (“Is that her fiancé or her brother?”)—and turn on her small television, with its clothes-hanger antennae. Or Tal would call and say “Can I come over?” and of course she would say yes.
Come Monday morning, she’d have nothing read. Though the fact of the matter was Delores didn’t really care these days. She was in her sixties, a holdover from publishing’s slightly less tarnished age, when independent firms, the Knopfs and such, put out serious books and editors didn’t need to seek approval on titles from marketing departments or regional salespeople. Her voice could be heard three offices down, and she dressed in peculiar flowing garments—some invented hybrid of hostess dress, tunic, and caftan—and enormous pendants built around monstrous, irregularly shaped pearls that bubbled and flared in a volcanic manner and left pink indentations in her pale, lined neck.
Forty-odd years earlier, when Delores had found herself a job in the typing pool, their firm was a largish literary house, with a host of well-reviewed and popular authors, and a Boston office devoted to books on subjects political and texts for college classes. A sharp-witted, chain-smoking Vassar grad, she’d climbed quickly to the top of the editorial heap, and, in the 1960s, discovered a group of popular and controversial neorealists, heirs to Dreiser’s earnest throne, one of whom became her lover. All this Sadie discovered during her first year with Delores, who went to lunch, two or three times a week, with agents or authors (really: old friends) and returned to the office soused (or, at the very least, relaxed) and wanting to chat. These lunches were, like Delores, a relic of the company’s grand and glorious independent past. A year before Sadie arrived in Delores’s outer office, they’d been gobbled up by a British conglomerate (albeit willingly: the company was bankrupt) and forced to move from their book-lined Union Square offices—rooms in which many of the century’s greatest writers had fretted over galleys—to the media giant’s putty-colored midtown headquarters. (“On the West Side,” Delores complained—a refrain not unfamiliar to the daughter of Rose Peregrine. “I wouldn’t mind so much if we were, at least, on the East Side, where things are civilized.”) Now Delores held court in a boxy room, with wide Venetian blinds and black halogen lamps. She’d tried to bring her old desk—a beautiful oak thing, with grapes carved along the legs—but the corporation wouldn’t have it. No one, they told her, could bring in outside furnishings. Not plants, not lamps, and certainly not desks.
Not surprisingly, Delores—who wore her cedre hair in an archaic puff and covered her watery green eyes with saucer-sized lenses of 1970s vintage—was unhappy with her new digs, despite having successfully dismantled the smoke alarm in her office with a mother-of-pearl-handled letter opener, and converted one of her stainless steel file drawers into a makeshift bar. Over the four years of Sadie’s employment, Delores began coming into work later and later, swaddled in her enormous whiskey mink, and departing earlier and earlier.
In Sadie’s first year, when she’d still been a little nervous around the lady, Delores had greedily insisted on reading most of the submitted manuscripts herself, staying home Fridays to do so, like many editors, and, though she no longer did any serious editing of the few books she took on (“What’s the point? It’s all crap”), she refused to allow Sadie to try her hand at it. But gradually, the tide had turned, so that now Sadie not only did all the reading and editing (drafting letters to authors, in which she outlined changes, which Delores merely signed without so much as glancing at them), but also handled most of the purchasing of manuscripts. It worked like this: A manuscript came in from an agent. Sadie unwrapped it and placed it on Delores’s desk. An hour or a day later the manuscript turned up on Sadie’s desk, a Post-it note stuck to its top, saying “Looks interesting. Pls. read” in Delores’s slanting scrawl. Sadie read the thing—sometimes that night, sometimes weeks later, depending on the urgency surrounding the manuscript in question—and wrote up a report for Delores, leaving manuscript and report on the woman’s desk. An hour or a day later, the thing, once again, landed back on Sadie’s desk, with another Post-it, saying either “I agree. Terrible. Pls. call Liza and say ‘pass.’” or “Yes!!!! Spend up to 50K. Tlk. to Val if nd. more.” Sadie would then call the agent, make an offer, and complete the negotiations. Once the book was bought, it was she who went through it, line by line, and it was she who asked the writers in for coffee or lunch, passing off her edits as Delores’s own.