Janet Cooke was a Swarthmore graduate, mocha and pretty, a Metro reporter when Don Grady was assistant managing editor, AME, for Metro. She impressed white editors with her ghetto reporting—“gritty,” “real,” they said. Midway through her second year on the job, she came to them with a story about an eight-year-old heroin addict. Don believed her, they published, she won the Pulitzer. Then someone at Swarthmore read the Pulitzer coverage with her bio in it and remembered she’d failed to graduate. They called the paper. The editors questioned her. For two days she held firm. Third day, locked in a glass office, surrounded, she confessed: she’d made all of it up. Her résumé, the story. The paper had to give the Pulitzer back.

“Why didn’t you believe her?” Mabel asked him. “I’ve always wanted to know.”

“It was just a feeling I had. I had lots of feelings that, well, went the other way, that were wrong.”

“Did you? Somehow I don’t believe you.”

“She was easy to see through,” Stanley said.

“I’ve often liked to envision alternative universes. Ones where, you know, the bottom dwellers are the treetoppers and vice versa. Think of it. Adam as the night editor. You as the executive editor. You would have let the stories be the stories they were,” she said. “Instead of shoe-horning them into the same old stories.”

“But that’s what Don wanted when he believed Janet Cooke. He wanted a new story. He thought her story was. An eight-year-old. My God, it was shocking.”

“There was nothing new about it! It was the same story, dressed up a little different: they’re depraved, even when they’re eight years old. Wasn’t that the oldest story of all? Didn’t Janet Cooke tell every white man what he’d suspected? She played to their worst fears. If she hadn’t lied about herself, they’d never have found out little Jimmy was a lie.”

“‘Jimmy’s World,’” Stanley said. “I’d almost forgotten about it.”

“In this house it’s never been forgotten.”

How odd that Don would have wanted to run the paper. It put into a new perspective his relationship, such as it was, with Adam. Adam had bested Don. Stanley frowned.

“What’s that for?” Mabel said. She got up to pour another glass of wine.

“These titans.”

She didn’t get it. “Which?”

“Adam and Don, of course.”

“And?”

“Their long battle.”

“Oh, please. A bloodless maneuvering only the Room gives a shit about.”

“Yes, you’re probably right about that.”

“Am I? I was hoping you’d argue with me.”

“Oh, Mabel! You know more than I ever would about—about both of them.”

“Not Adam.”

“He’s always been … affected, yes, affected—by you.”

“Really?”

“We often talk about you.”