He was seventy-one. He had been on the Meridian board for eleven years and had been Tom Morgan's friend for thirty, since the days of the two secondhand turboprops in Teterboro. He was a big, slow, white-haired man with a soft Virginia accent and a habit of speaking last in meetings, after everyone else, so that the room had to wait for him. He had called Naomi three times since Tuesday morning. She had not called him back. She had told Lena to tell him she would see him on Thursday.
He looked at her down the length of the table.
"Naomi," he said. "I want to say something, and I want to say it in front of everybody, because I said the other thing in front of everybody two years ago, and I think that's only fair."
The room was very quiet.
"Two years ago," Harold said, "when your father died, I sat in this room and said that of course we all wanted to honor Tom's wishes, and of course you were very capable, and of course there would need to be a transition plan. I remember saying it. I remember how it sounded. I told myself I was being prudent. I was being prudent. I've been prudent my whole life. It's made me a good deal of money." He paused. "But I've been thinking since Tuesday morning about what was actually in my head when I said it. And I'm not proud of what I found there. I think I looked at you, a young Black woman, thirty years old, and I decided something about you in about a second. And I didn't even have to think about it. That's how you know it's deep."
Naomi did not move.
"I watched that video twice," Harold said. "I watched you stand in that aisle and get told you didn't belong there, by a woman who could have been my wife's sister, and I watched you not raise your voice, and not lose your temper, and hand that captain his own authority back in front of everybody. And then I watched you turn to the cabin and apologize. To them. For something that had been done to you." He shook his head slowly. "Tom never could have done that. He'd have thrown her off the airplane himself. And I'd have cheered him for it."
He sat back.
"I move that we adopt the proposal as presented," he said. "And I move that the expansion vote be deferred to the next meeting, as the chair has requested. And I'd like the minutes to reflect that I said I was wrong. I don't say it often. I'd like it on paper."
Somebody laughed, softly. It was Lena, by the door. She put her hand over her mouth.
The vote was nine to nothing.
* * *
Six weeks later, in early December, a letter arrived at Meridian's headquarters in New York addressed to Ms. Naomi Morgan, by hand, in blue ink, on heavy cream stationery with an engraved address in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Lena brought it to her unopened. "I didn't think I should read this one first," she said, and put it on the desk and went out and closed the door.
Naomi looked at the envelope for a long time. Then she opened it.
The letter was two pages long. The handwriting was small and very neat and slanted slightly to the right, the handwriting of someone who had been taught penmanship in a good school a long time ago and had never quite lost it. In a few places the ink was smudged, as though the writer had rested her hand on the page before it dried.
Dear Ms. Morgan,
I have started this letter perhaps thirty times. I have not been able to find a way to begin it that does not sound like an excuse, and so I am going to begin it the only way I can think of, which is to say that I am sorry. I am sorry for what I said to you on October 20th, and for what I thought when I said it, and for the many years of thinking it before then that made it possible for me to say it so easily. I knew what I meant when I said it. I have told myself many things since, about the seat and about my husband and about my daughter and about the morning I was having. Some of those things are true. None of them are the reason.
I want you to know that I am not writing to ask you for anything. I am not writing to ask that my membership be restored, which I understand it has not been, and which I think is the correct decision. I am not writing to ask you to forgive me, though I would be lying if I said I did not hope that someday you might. I am writing because on the day it happened I stood in the doorway of that airplane and turned around and looked at you and wanted to say something, and I could not find it. I have found some of it now. I wanted you to have it.