Hardscrabble Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

and he did consider himself a real American, even if the words wouldn’t come into his mind
     fully formed—had so thoroughly lost this battle that they had become irrelevant. The culture was Hispanic, or Italian, or
     Jewish, or decadent, or dead, but it was not the culture of Emerson and Thoreau, of Jefferson and Adams, of New England brains
     and Virginia elegance. If the men who had signed the Declaration of Independence were to show up today on the steps of Independence
     Hall, they would be branded a bunch of liberal intellectual elitists and rendered unelectable in any state but Massachusetts.
     If his own several times great-grandfather was to rematerialize in the middle of the small plot of land he had settled on
     when Philadelphia was still a colony, he would find himself in the middle of a restaurant catering to food from the Caucasus.
     It was all wrong, but there was nothing he could do about it. The best he could manage was to support people like Drew Harrigan,
     who at least stood against the tide of foreignness that had risen everywhere and would go on rising if something wasn’t done
     to make it stop. That was odd, because in a way Neil Elliot Savage disliked Drew Harrigan more than he disliked the foreignness.
     With Drew, he came perilously close to hate.
    The firm’s offices were in a set of interlocking brick houses near Ritten-house Square. They had been there for over a hundred
     years, and would be there for a hundred more, unless the neighborhood went to hell. The driver pulled up to the curb outside
     the main entrance. Neil got his briefcase and his coat and waited for the man to come around to open the door. He had spent
     all day arguing with a tall, thin, majestic young nun, and his head was throbbing because of it. Besides, she looked familiar.
     He was sure he’d seen her somewhere before, but he couldn’t place where. He didn’t know a lot of nuns. He didn’t meet them
     in the ordinary course of his business. His partners knew better than to throw him into contact with the Catholic Church,
     and especially with anything to do with the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia.
    The driver opened the door. Neil got out, went across the sidewalk and up the steps, and rang the bell. Miss Hallworth opened
     up almost immediately, as if she’d been waiting at the window.
    “Good evening, Miss Hallworth,” he said, handing her the coat he hadn’t bothered to put on. Miss Hallworth was black, but
     he didn’t mind her. He really wasn’t a candidate for a white sheet. “Is Marian in the office?”
    “She’s waiting for you in the conference room.”
    Miss Hallworth was taking his coat to the walk-in cedar closet where all the partners’ coats were kept, and only the partners’
     coats. The nun this afternoon had had a long wool cloak, like something out of a medieval drama. He couldn’t remember what
     she’d done with it when she’d sat down. Hewondered what Drew Harrigan would have done about her if they’d had to meet face-to-face. It gave him a shameful feeling of
     triumphant glee just to imagine it. Drew Harrigan wasn’t the most secure person on the face of the earth. He was especially
     insecure about his intelligence, which was meager. That nun would have ripped him up one side and down the other.
    The problem was, Drew probably wouldn’t have minded it. Neil let himself into the conference room. Marian Fuller was sitting
     in one of the chairs along the side of the table, tapping on a laptop.
    “Come in and sit down,” she said. “I’m not being serious. I’m on the Internet.”
    “I didn’t know you could get on the Internet in the conference room.”
    “You can get on the Internet anywhere in these offices. Even the bathrooms. Don’t ask me. It was Grayson Barden’s idea. Bringing
     the firm into the twenty-first century.”
    “The twenty-first century seems to be starting with an ice age. I think it’s below zero out there.”
    “It’s minus eleven,”