CHAPTER THIRTEEN J: THE COST OF A NAME
While the crowd settled into its chairs, Elliot Voss stood alone behind the exhibition hall.
Nora found him beside a stack of folded barriers.
She had not planned to approach him again.
He called her name before she could turn away.
“Your mother came to our house once,” he said.
Nora stopped.
“When?”
“About a year after the fire.”
“What did she want?”
Elliot looked toward the wet gravel.
“She wanted my father to meet some of the children.”
Nora felt anger rise.
“Did he?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He said he had already done enough for them.”
Elliot’s voice sounded different without the crowd nearby.
He seemed to be speaking to the gravel rather than to Nora.
“My father was ill by then,”
he said.
“He was tired of being questioned.”
Nora folded her arms.
“The children were tired too.”
Elliot nodded.
“I understand that now.”
“Do you?”
He looked at her.
“I remember Ruth standing in our doorway with a list of names.”
“What did she say?”
“She said the children had been told to thank a man they barely saw.”
Nora waited.
“She asked my father to stop correcting them when they remembered someone else.”
“What did he do?”
“He shut the door.”
Elliot rubbed his forehead.
“I was seventeen.”
“Old enough to hear her.”
“Yes.”
Nora felt no satisfaction in his agreement.
She had imagined a confrontation in which Elliot would admit everything and she would know exactly how to respond.
Instead, he seemed to be discovering the consequences of his own memories as he spoke.
“My father was generous to this town,” he said.
“He paid for schools and parks.”
“He may have done those things.”
“He did.”
“Then people can remember them too.”
Elliot looked surprised.
Nora continued before he could speak.
“But generosity doesn’t give somebody the right to take another person’s place in a story.”
Elliot looked toward the chairs.
“People will think I lied for him.”
“Did you?”
He hesitated.
“I repeated what he told me.”
“After people questioned it?”
“Yes.”
“After Walter asked you to listen?”
Elliot’s face tightened.
“Yes.”
Nora felt the answer settle between them.
“Then you’ll have to decide what to do with that.”
He reached into his coat and took out the printed speech he had prepared.
The pages were damp at the corners.
“I don’t know what to say now.”
“Start with what you know.”
“What if that isn’t enough?”
“It wasn’t enough for my mother either.”
Elliot looked down at the speech.
He tore nothing and made no dramatic gesture.
He simply folded the pages and put them away.
Nora left him beside the barriers.
When she returned to the chairs, Walter asked whether she had spoken to Elliot.
“Yes.”
“Did he apologize?”
“No.”
Walter nodded as though he had expected that.
“Did he listen?”
Nora considered the question.
“I think he finally heard himself.”
Walter looked toward the stage.
“Sometimes that’s the beginning.”
Nora sat beside him.
She did not tell him whether she agreed.
