I received a letter several days later. It was written on one of those small, stiff cards that are the color of butter. At the top were the embossed initials of the sender—JLA—in flowing script. The letter was brief, and bitter.

Dear Mr. Truell:

This letter is hard for me to write, but essential for you to read. My husband is a fine and courageous man who has done so many wonderful things for his country. But in the days since you came to see him, he has not been well. I am worried that he may take his life. I am told you are unmarried, so perhaps it is impossible for you to understand what it is like to feel so powerless to protect someone you love. But I wish you could feel what I am felling, because it might help you to behave with greater humanity toward others. Each of us has secrets he wishes to keep private. Think of your own life, and the things you would least want the world to know. Then remember what you did to my husband, and perhaps you will feel a sense of shame.

Yours sincerely,

Joan Abelard

17

17

The Mirror’s vice president for labor relations posted the buyout offer on a bulletin board in New York. Nobody thought it would come so soon, but the paper’s advertising revenues had collapsed in January. It had been a bad Christmas for retailers—wasn’t it always a bad Christmas?—and they were cutting back their advertising sharply in the New York and national editions. It wasn’t just seasonal. Some of the business reporters in New York said that the problem was “structural.” Advertisers weren’t sure that newspapers—especially national papers like the Mirror—were the best way to reach consumers.

Everybody in the bureau seemed to know about the buyout by midmorning. The offer had been extended to news department employees over the age of fifty-five. If they retired by the end of 1997 they would receive a special severance payment equal to two weeks’ salary for each year of employment at the Mirror. A lot of the older reporters were gathered over by the Coke machine, next to the library, talking it over. That kind of worried gossip was something new for us. Job cuts happened to other people, in other industries—to steelworkers, foundrymen, textile workers—but not to reporters and editors.

The bureau seemed numb, as people digested the news. For years we had been able to proclaim our disdain for commerce—anyone from the advertising department had been banned from even setting foot in the newsroom—because we knew the paper was making scads of money. Weiss had encouraged his department heads to spend everything in their budgets so that accounting wouldn’t try to cut the budget for next year. The notion that we should perhaps save the unspent money and add it to the paper’s profits was regarded as heresy.