“TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF. WHO IS ANTONIA KING?”
Per Olufsen leans back against the damask-covered seat in the lounge at the Minneapolis Four Seasons and crosses his legs. Raindrops pelt the window by our table, running in rivulets down the glass.
I sit up straighter and square my shoulders under my navy suit jacket—the same one I’ve worn to every interview and meeting since graduating from law school last month. Per is CEO of Sweden’s Air Trek Industries, the fastest-growing luxury airline company in the world. He’s dressed in a white linen shirt, open at the collar, no tie, and jeans. An outfit only a hipster billionaire would wear at the Four Seasons.
I sneak a glance at myself in the mirrored wall behind him. The young lawyer who meets my gaze looks the part, for sure: black hair tamed into a sleek low ponytail. Serious dark eyes. Pale olive skin, smooth from the moisturizing sunscreen my aunt has drilled me into wearing, even on a rainy day. Does the woman in the mirror seem a bit desperate for approval, though? Does a scared little girl, shaking under a dirty cot, peer out at me from behind her polished exterior?
I rearrange her expression, willing her to soften around the forehead, the mouth. Blink twice, banish the fear from her eyes.
Better.
Before he can notice my lightning-quick fix, I turn my attention back to the man across the table to begin the most significant conversation of my career. That is, the career I’ll have if I can nail it today.
All the businesses in town went crazy when Air Trek announced weeks ago that its first midwestern hub would be the Twin Cities. My cousin Harrison, whose self-proclaimed purpose during my last seven years at Harvard has been to remind me that Minnesota remains the center of the universe, emailed me local news coverage of ordinarily staid and emotionless MBAs filling the downtown bars, cheering “In your face, Chicago!” Everyone began to plan for the thousands of humans with fat wallets the airline would bring through the Cities. Especially those stranded by blizzards. Hotels! Restaurants! Pricey down-filled products!
I was prepping my resume for my real dream—a future in Washington, DC, where I could bring power to people like the little girl I used to be—when Air Trek’s announcement hit the news. Each of the Big Four law firms in Minneapolis–St. Paul threw in a bid to become Olufsen’s local counsel of record, producing a cyclone of recruiters who descended on campus, trying to sweep any of us who were still available into their game. I showed up out of home-state curiosity, nothing more. Then I met Melanie.
Melanie Dwyer, of Grogan, Dwyer, and Lenz. The only woman who was a named partner in any of the firms, she dominated during their presentations with her velvety alto and encyclopedic knowledge of corporate governance.
“You were meant for this opportunity, Toni,” she said when we met in the Law School faculty lounge, with its sweeping grandeur, its ornate framed portraits of old, old white men. Presidents, Supreme Court justices, alumni all. “Come to Minneapolis and win Air Trek with me. Let’s make our mark together.”
She said I could leverage my Minnesota roots to take me to the halls of power someday, and that success at Grogan, Dwyer would position me better as a leader for my state than an entry-level legislative assistant role on the Hill ever could. And if things worked out, she’d mentor me right to the top.
My problem wasn’t envisioning a different path to a future in DC—it was returning to Minnesota at all.
I was furious at my brother for bailing on me, and I blamed my uncle for driving him away. I back talked, scowled, slammed my bedroom door from age fourteen till the day I left for college.
And yet, Christopher wanted me back. As counsel of record for King Family Construction.
My uncle called me in Cambridge at the start of my third year of law school to announce his intentions. I had a bigger reason to stay away from Thebes than I did to return: James Hollings still lived there.
“You belong back here with us,” Christopher said. “You’re family.”
Part of me lit up with hope to hear him say that word. Family. I had to admit—hearing he wanted me to return, even with all my ambivalence, felt surprisingly . . . good.
But his demands for all of us—Paul and me, his own kids—to toe the family line, business included, had pushed my brother to leave. And as much as I disapproved of my older brother’s decisions, our fights belonged to us. We brought them with us from our past. I might judge Paul, but no one else, certainly not my uncle, got a pass from me to do the same. My loyalty to my brother gave me yet another reason to feel squeamish about returning to the fold.
Christopher, as usual, pressed his case.
“What about your aunt? She would be thrilled to have you back,” he said.
Would she? Thrilled required a capacity for excitement that Evelyn had long ago relinquished. She started dulling all emotions with vodka martinis around the same time that Paul left. And who could blame her? After Harrison and I discovered her upstairs stash of Smirnoff in a cabinet behind the toilet in the guest bathroom, vodka helped our days go down easier too.
“Corporate law isn’t really my thing,” I said.
“Fair enough, Antonia. But remember: every other potential employer you’ll meet is only interested in that piece of paper from Harvard Law School. Don’t rule out a future with us.”
To placate my uncle, I took the Minnesota Bar Exam in February, even before graduating. It was practice for DC, I told myself, although I didn’t tell Christopher.
Then Melanie Dwyer came to campus and convinced me that my admission to the Minnesota Bar had been no practice run. “Start your career at a leading firm and all the pols in the state will know your name,” she said. “Build up a war chest. Do well with me, and you’ll earn the support you’ll need for a future in Washington.”
Maybe this kind of corporate law could be my thing. Or at least, as Melanie promised, my first thing on the way to my next thing.
PER OLUFSEN INSISTED ON MEETING INDIVIDUALLY WITH every lawyer who might be assigned to his team before making his choice between law firms. If Grogan won, my place was guaranteed. If they lost, I’d get the boot. A challenge I couldn’t resist.
To say I was nervous about meeting with Olufsen was an understatement. But I couldn’t let Melanie, or anyone, know that.
“I’ll impress him,” I told her yesterday when she informed me of my upcoming interview. “I’ve got this.”
I spent hours last night with my laptop, researching Per’s business from my room at the Motel 6 on Freeway Boulevard, where I’ve been staying since I moved from Cambridge two weeks ago. When I’m in work mode, my surroundings never matter. Fast Wi-Fi, a microwave in my room to heat up my Stouffer’s mac-and-cheese dinners, a bed that’s not my car. The opposite of the poufy French country sofas and Wedgwood Florentine china settings Aunt Evelyn favored. I finally passed out on top of the scratchy bedspread around 3:00 a.m. after scrolling past the millionth tabloid profile of Per and his latest model-girlfriend.
Now I’m bleary with exhaustion. But I’ve memorized his background, Air Trek’s top line financials from the past eight years, and all the international flight patterns out of the Twin Cities. I’m ready to ace this test.
“Well,” I say, “I’m fascinated by the third-quarter turnaround Air Trek made in 2012 after the Düsseldorf factory opened. I’ve analyzed some of the numbers and—”
He waves his hand to stop me.
“No, no, I don’t care. Tell me about you.”
I force a laugh. “I’m so boring. Really. Um, I graduated in the top ten percent of my class?”
“Ms. King. May I call you Toni? Good. You see, I want to know the person behind the person on my team. I have your resume. I know your academic credentials. Instead, let’s work to find common ground, you and I.” He uncrosses his legs and leans forward. “People, Toni. People make Air Trek a success, not its 2012 third-quarter financials. So, tell me. What is it that you think could bring us together?”
Per’s clear blue eyes are trained on me like I’m the only one in the lobby restaurant. With his deliberately mussed white-blond hair and his complete self-assurance, I can see how the most beautiful women in the world melt in his presence. I, however, feel my throat close.
He sips his cappuccino. That unrelenting gaze over the rim of his cup makes my right leg twitch.
I have to say something.
“Um, okay. Well, one thing we have in common: I’m from Europe too.”
“Really! Where?”
I see him trying to read my face with curiosity: she’s too dark to be from Northern Europe, not dark enough to be an African transplant, could be Middle Eastern . . .
“Sarajevo.”
“Ah. Post-Milošević? You must have been very young during the war. Bosniak, I assume, if you ended up in the States?”
I’m surprised by his easy knowledge of my context. Then I remember that I’m talking with a real Swede, not a third-generation Thebes farm-family Swede. Most Americans I’ve spoken with aren’t quite sure where Bosnia is—Asia maybe? Some know, vaguely, that Serbia and Bosnia were fighting. Or wait, wasn’t it a genocide? What are you, they ask? I try to explain that ethnically I’m Bosniak, but my parents converted from Islam to Christianity before I was born to try to survive and . . . that’s when I feel their interest drain away.
By the time I left Thebes, I was tired of having to explain myself, explain away my dark features in a family of sunshine blonds, tired of the whispers and side glances from townspeople who remember when Eddie King lived in the house on the hill outside of town and how taking on those Bosnian orphans did him in. Eddie, who still lurked, ghostlike, in the hidden corners of Thebes’s collective memory, twenty years later.
“Antonia King” was a costume I’d worn for most of my life anyhow, so I just put on a slightly different costume when I left for college. Midwestern girl, typical American upbringing, blah, blah, no drama. It was a huge relief. At Harvard, I met real European royalty. And American versions of royalty. A girl from northwestern Minnesota brings her own kind of exoticism into that context, and it was more than enough for me to handle. I shook off my origins like a dog coming in from the rain.
But here’s Per Olufsen, responding to my origins with neither boredom nor horror, but simply as fact.
I can work with facts.
“I was so little when we were brought over,” I say, wrapping my hands around the warm mug in front of me. “My brother told me stories about our past in secret, at night, because we were expected to erase it all to become Americans. We’d be scolded by our uncle for asking questions about Sarajevo, or our birth parents. And nothing but English was permitted in our house. I lost what few words of Serbo-Croatian I had.”
“Your uncle?”
“Adopted. He brought us to the States from Bosnia to live with him and my aunt and cousins. Christopher King. He runs a manufacturing company in a small town a few hours northwest of here.”
“Why was an American from Minnesota in Sarajevo during the siege? Was he with the United Nations peacekeeping forces?”
My uncle is a lot of things. Intently persuasive. Almost impossible to defy. Even loving, in his gruff, demanding way. But peacekeeper? Not one bit.
“He and his older brother were working construction for Barrington Development, an American company contracted to build hotels in Sarajevo. People here thought the Balkans would be capitalist hubs after Yugoslavia dissolved.”
“Sure, I know about Barrington,” says Per. “Some of their buildings from that era are still unfinished. Lots of lawsuits back in the day. A case study in what not to do at Air Trek.”
“I guess at the time they were a big deal. Anyhow, they had lots of money to hire lots of people. Christopher and Eddie were just back from the Gulf War. Eddie was injured, there was a recession, and the economy was bad in Thebes.”
“They worked in Greece too?”
I laugh. “It’s the Thebes you’ve never heard of. Thebes, Minnesota. Christopher and Eddie went to Bosnia to earn enough cash to start the family business. Then the siege happened. They found us totally by accident after a bombing several months in, while they were surveilling the area to make sure it was safe to go back to work.”
“They saved your lives. Miraculous.”
I go numb. What am I doing? Christopher saved my life and I’m repaying him by interviewing for a job in Minnesota that isn’t with King Family Construction. Behind his back. After I told him that corporate law wasn’t my thing. I swore Harrison to secrecy when I told him about the Grogan possibility. We both know that any plan Christopher doesn’t make himself he considers to be the wrong plan.
Be the woman in the mirror, Toni, I remind myself. Win this job and you can win his approval. He will come around. He has to.
“So, the business is run by Christopher and Eddie?” Per asks.
Eddie. When I was four, I watched our new American father nod off in a corner of the living room, his bottle of blue pain pills overturned on the floor. Pus oozing from the stump that had been his lower leg before Iraq. Paul was at school. And me? Quaking under the sofa. Paralyzed by the memory of my mother’s stilled hand, half a world away.
I could see the moss-green phone in the kitchen from my hiding place on the floor. The metal step stool below it. I knew there were three buttons I was supposed to push in an emergency. But I was frozen.
Paul found us this way when he came home. “What’s wrong with you?” he screamed. I had no answer. He made it look so easy to grab the receiver and press the right numbers. “If he dies, it’s all your fault!”
When the ambulance came, Paul was thumping on Eddie’s chest while tears ran down his face. “Please wake up,” he recited in a whisper. “Please, please.” And by the time Christopher arrived, I was huddled next to Paul on top of the blue sofa, clinging to him as if for my life. Presenting a united front, once again. But my brother’s accusation had lodged itself in my heart.
“Eddie died years ago,” I say.
Facts, I remind myself. That’s what I’m trading with Per. “Christopher turned their earnings into a manufacturing company. It’s grown into the leading business of Thebes.”
“The manufacturing industry. How compelling! I find fewer and fewer people I meet these days have any connection to how things are made. And ultimately, airplanes are things.”
“I grew up seeing the before and after whenever King Family Construction took on a project.”
“A Bosnian migrant and a child raised in the great tradition of American manufacturing. This is fascinating! So, what stays with you from your earliest years?”
Per’s glowing attention is like Helios the sun god himself, bursting out of ancient Greek mythology to quell the Minneapolis rain. Impossible to resist. He wants to know about stories I’ve buried so deeply that I’ve only ever spoken with Paul about them. Per is my uncle’s opposite. He says: tell me your stories and we shall be friends. Christopher says: ignore the past, what good will it do?
I’m enveloped by the warmth of Per’s bright light. I want to feel how he makes me feel: Important. Suffused with meaning. Safe.
“My brother was the caretaker of all the stories from our former life,” I say. “Our past is a fairy tale to me. Even my real name became imaginary. Nobody used it but Paul.”
I was Mujo, and you were Andela, he would whisper to me, before we were Paul and Toni. Our mother gave us those names and we can’t forget them. Or her.
Andela, after my mother’s mother, I say to Per, who died when she was still a girl. Mujo, after her favorite folk song: a boy, shoeing his horse in the moonlight so he can ride off to fight the invading Turks, while his mother begs him to stay.
Once I start, I can’t seem to stop. It’s as if I’m floating above myself and this man sitting at the Four Seasons, watching myself talk. I tell Per how just before my brother dropped out of high school, he had his old name tattooed across his chest, along with the turbaned, bearded face of a nineteenth-century folk hero known as the Dragon of Bosnia. Paul remembers our birth father telling us the tale. The swirls of ink that permeated my brother’s skin both repulsed and fascinated me. Was this Bosnian face over his heart a signal that our American life wasn’t real? Was I less real to him than a story? The dark beard and dark eyes: could this be what our father looked like too?
I tell Per that our father was taken away when I was only months old.
“Taken?” he asks.
“Paul says it must have been to a prison camp. He did a bunch of online research at one point, but he never found anything specific.”
Per shakes his head and sighs. “Tragic,” he mutters.
Oh no. Is he tipping away from fascination and into sympathy for the poor little orphan girl sitting across from him? That won’t do. I force myself back into my body, shake off the floating sensation. No matter how brilliant Per is at drawing out personal information, this is still an interview. My goal isn’t to make him feel sorry for me. Sweat begins to creep along my neck and under my arms. Am I screwing this up? Is my past too much for anyone “normal”?
“And your mother?” Per leans even closer to me over the table. “What happened to her?”
No.
He can’t have her, no matter how kind the sound of his voice.
My exhaustion, his golden gaze: all of it weakened me temporarily, allowed me to go soft. Time to snap back into place.
I lean forward to meet him.
“Per,” I say, “This is all pretty personal stuff. I’d hate to have my potential new boss think I’m oversharing on such an important client interview. Can I ask you, if it isn’t too bold, to keep this piece of my history between us? Please?”
I make sure my eyes radiate vulnerability. Innocence. Dark pools of . . . whatever he wants to see.
“Of course,” he says, squeezing my hands. “Your secrets are safe with me.”
________
The day after our meeting, I flip-flop between panic that I’ve thrown the deal with my revelations (Per thinks: How could a weak little runt with a tragic past represent me and my multi-billion-dollar company?) and panic that I’ve talked myself out of a job (Per says: “Melanie, get rid of the weak little runt with the tragic past and you’ll have my business.”). How did something I never wanted turn into something I want more than anything? But Per’s magnitude, Melanie’s panache—the sheer brain power involved in the operations has seduced me. And even though it’s unexpected, won’t my uncle be excited for me if I land such a prominent gig in his own state? With a salary worth writing home about. If I went straight to Washington, there’s no question I’d be working for someone whose politics he despises. For pennies. All decisions he would disagree with, to say the least. Working at Grogan would be an olive branch, wouldn’t it? If I win this job, will he finally say to me, “Antonia, you’ve made me so proud”?
WHEN GROGAN’S PARTNERS EMERGE FROM THE CONFERENCE room at 4:00 p.m. with thirty-year-old scotch and shot glasses for all to announce that we’ve won the biggest client the Twin Cities had seen in a generation, I almost pass out from relief amid the cheers and high fives. And when Melanie pulls me aside to say Per told her she’d assembled exactly the team he had hoped to find, right down to the marvelous young recruit straight out of Harvard Law School who sealed the deal for him, all is right with the world.
With Melanie’s perfectly manicured hand on my shoulder, I sign my life away to Grogan, Dwyer, and Lenz, my heart pounding with excitement about my win and fear about sharing the news with my uncle.
MY FEAR IS WELL PLACED. THE DAY AFTER I TELL HIM, Christopher emails me a bill for my full three-year ride at law school. And announces that I’ll never see another cent.