The Tutor and the Senator's Widow novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Pencil Down
On the fourth session Eleanor puts down her pencil, a late senator's man arrives with papers, and in the dark hall she kisses Sam and tells her to say no.
On the fourth Tuesday, Eleanor Fitzhugh put her pencil down in the middle of a sentence.
"I don't want to learn the formula tonight," she said.
I looked up from the textbook.
We were at her dining table on Monument Avenue, under a chandelier that cost more than my car.
I had been explaining standard deviation for forty minutes, and she had been writing every word of it in a neat, slanted hand.
"Okay," I said. "Do you want to do the practice quiz instead?"
"No."
"A break?"
"No." She took off her reading glasses and let them hang on their chain. "I want you to tell me something that isn't on the syllabus."
I was twenty-two years old, I had known her for three weeks, and I was paid forty dollars an hour.
Nothing in my training covered this.
"Like what?" I asked.
"Why a graduate student with a scholarship is tutoring for cash on a Tuesday night."
"Rent," I said. "My scholarship covers tuition, not the Fan District."
She smiled a little, and it changed her whole face.
Eleanor was forty-one, tall, with auburn hair pinned up in a knot that was always coming loose, and she wore the same grey cardigan every session.
I had stopped pretending I didn't notice the way she held the pencil.
Her fingers were long, and there was always ink on the side of her hand.
"That's a real answer," she said. "Thank you."
"That's a boring answer."
"I've had a month of boring answers from people who loved my husband."
Her husband had been State Senator Alden Fitzhugh, and he had been dead since March.
His portrait hung in the hall, white-haired and kind-looking, with a campaign pin on his lapel.
I opened my mouth to ask what she wanted instead.
The doorbell rang.
It was 9:40 at night.
Eleanor closed her eyes for a moment.
"Stay here," she said.
"I can go out the back."
"No." She stood up. "I'd like him to see you."
I did not ask who he was.
I heard the front door, a low male voice and the clean sound of expensive shoes on the hall floor.
The man who came into the dining room was about sixty, with a grey crew cut and a leather folder held against his chest.
I knew who he was from the photographs in the hall.
He had been the senator's chief of staff for twenty years.
"Mrs. Fitzhugh," he said. "I'm sorry for the hour."
"You always are," Eleanor said.
He looked at me.
I looked at my textbook.
"This is my tutor," she said. "She is helping me finish my degree."
"How wonderful," he said, in the voice people use for a dog that can walk on two legs.
He put the folder on the table and turned it so she could read the cover.
I did not mean to read it, but the page was upside down in front of me, and I read upside down for a living.
It said TRUSTEE RELEASE, and under it, FITZHUGH LUMBER EMPLOYEES' RETIREMENT PLAN.
"Lowell asked me to bring it tonight," he said. "Just your signature on page six."
"I haven't read it."
"It's routine."
"Then it will still be routine on Thursday."
He didn't move.
"The senator would have wanted this settled, Eleanor."
"The senator," she said, very evenly, "always told me to sign without reading, and I am done doing that."
I had never seen a person get colder without getting louder.
He picked up his folder.
At the door he said, "Lowell is concerned about you, you know. Everyone is."
"Everyone is very kind," said Eleanor.
When the front door shut, she stood still in the hall for a long time.
I came out and found her with one hand pressed flat against the senator's portrait.
"That was the sixth time this month," she said quietly.
"Who are those people?"
"People my husband's sons pay to be polite to me."
I didn't know what to say, so I said what I would say to a student.
"Do you want me to stay until you feel okay?"
"I want you to walk me through the house while I lock it."
That was a strange request, and I did it.
We went room to room, and she turned every lock twice.
At the end of the hall was a heavy oak door with a brass key in it.
"The study," she said. "Nobody goes in there."
"Okay."
"I haven't gone in since March."
She turned the key and pulled it out and dropped it in her cardigan pocket.
The hall light was off, and only the streetlamp came through the transom.
She stood very close to me, and I could smell cedar and ink.
"Sam," she said.
I had never heard her say my name that softly.
"Yes?"
"Say no, and I will pay you for tonight and never ask again."
Her hand came up and rested against my jaw.
Her thumb was shaking.
I did not say no.
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