The Chair by the Second Pillar

She read it once, folded it along its original creases, and put it back. What she did then had been decided on the bus, in the manner of all her decisions: entirely, and without appeal. The letters would go, on her death, to the state historical society, sealed for fifty years from the date of writing — long enough, she instructed the society's curator in a letter of her own that she wrote that evening at her kitchen table, for everyone in them to be beyond embarrassment and for no one in them to be beyond instruction. "They are not evidence," she wrote. "The evidence is filed, and has done its work. These are a man, in the autumn of his disgrace, writing to his wife in the evenings because the days had become unsuitable for speech. Let them wait until they can be read as what they are." She enclosed the rental receipts — twenty-six of them, eleven dollars a year at first and more later, kept in order in a rubber band that had perished and been replaced — because the society, she suspected, would find the receipts explained the letters better than any cataloguing could. Two hundred and ninety-six dollars, plus the increases. It was the cheapest archive in the history of the state, and the only one that had ever indicted a bank.

The Prairie Trust's vault officer walked her to the door, and she stood a moment on the pavement looking across Locust Street at the marble front of the building she had besieged for a year with a handbag and a teacup. Somewhere inside it, the bank was changing its plumbing in ways no centennial would photograph. The requests desk by the door — the desk with the tray — had been removed in the renovations, and in its place the bank had installed, at Garrett Lindholm's design, a numbered receipt system of almost comic rigor: every request from any person, in person or in writing, was logged in a bound book kept open on a lectern in the lobby, issued a number, and answered, in writing, within ten days, by a named officer whose name was entered against it. Any citizen could inspect the book. Citizens did — a retired schoolteacher had made a hobby of it, and the bank had learned to write its answers as if she were reading over its shoulder, because she was. Garrett, whose career the review had ended in its original form, had asked for the records assignment himself, and ran the bank's archive and its new retention charter with the air of a man who has found, late, the work his competence was actually for. *Nothing goes in a tray,* read the first line of the charter he had drafted and the board had adopted entire. *Everything goes in a numbered book, in the open, and the book is the bank's memory of being asked.*

And the auditor's office had its door again. In the corridor of the executive floor, where a blank door had stood since 1999 — passed daily, for a quarter of a century, by officers who had trained themselves not to wonder at its blankness — the painters had finished in the spring, and the door now read, in the bank's old gilt lettering: EMIL STADLER, CHIEF INTERNAL AUDITOR. Beneath, smaller, as she had specified: *He refused to sign.* The office behind it was occupied, under the reformed charter — which required the chief internal auditor to report to the board's audit committee and to no one else, and to certify the bank's filings from the office's own work, and to have the right, written into the bylaws this time, to append a dissent that no officer could remove — by the fourth person to hold the post since the troubles, a woman of thirty-eight who had asked, at her interview, to see the room before she saw the salary schedule, and who kept on her desk, beside the framed charter, a hand-cranked adding machine she had bought at an estate sale in the year of the review, as a reminder — she told visitors who asked — that a tape cannot be revised by anyone's secretary in the night.

Nadia Kowalski was promoted in the same spring, to branch manager of the bank's east-side office, the one with the long windows and the difficult parking, and she wept at the announcement, briefly and professionally, and then asked — as the only condition anyone had ever heard her attach to anything — to be allowed to keep her Monday mornings free until further notice, because there was a desk she still relieved at the main office when the line allowed, and a chair by the second pillar, and a standing order she had given herself in her first month at the bank and had no intention of retiring from: the tea was to arrive before it was asked for, because some things a bank should do before it is asked.