The Submission - Amy Waldman [9]
“I thought someone was supposed to vet the finalists for suitability—”
“They did,” Paul said. “The security consultants. I didn’t see the report, obviously, but they concluded there were no problems, nothing to flag.”
“How is that possible?” Wilner asked.
“They looked for criminal records, custody battles, arrest warrants, bankruptcy filings. Links to any organization on the government’s terrorist watch list. Both finalists came back clean. Suitable, if you will.”
“He’s unsuitable by definition!” Wilner said.
“I can’t believe the lawyer, of all people, is making that argument,” Claire said.
“Of course he’s not unsuitable by definition,” Ariana said almost soothingly. “Claire, let’s figure out the sensible thing to do by looking at this clearly. Objectively. When I do crits I always encourage my students to step back and look at their work as if it were someone else’s—you see much more clearly that way. So try to step back and forget which design you backed.”
“Ariana, my backing the Garden has nothing to do with this. If your pick had won and the designer was Muslim, I would still say we should go ahead with it.”
“Well he isn’t Muslim!” Ariana snapped. There was silence as the import of what she had revealed sunk in. She tried to backpedal; it was the first time Paul had seen her off-balance. “I mean, what are the odds that he would be …” Her voice trailed away as she plundered her purse for some phantom item.
Leo spoke up in his luxe baritone. Paul spotted three specks of white—cake crumbs?—in his jet-black beard. “Claire, I absolutely agree with you—it’s unconscionable to even think of stripping this man of his victory. But people are afraid. Two years on we still don’t know whether we’re up against a handful of zealots who got lucky, or a global conspiracy of a billion Muslims who hate the West, even if they live in it. We’re rarely rational in the face of threats to our personal safety, let alone our national security. We must be practical—our job is to get the memorial built. If we fight for this I will lead that fight—”
At this perceived usurpation, Paul’s ego rose in protest. Was Leo implying, somehow, that Paul wasn’t up to the job? Maybe Paul’s silence implied as much, but he had been preoccupied by the question of whether to wake the mayor and governor, who might expect to be told immediately of this development, though the very fact of a midnight awakening would suggest something wrong, and Paul had yet to decide whether they should proceed as if something was wrong.
Leo continued: “But let’s first make sure it’s a fight we want to take on. We must consider the public reaction, the possibility of an uproar. You know better than anyone the sense of ownership the victims’ families feel—rightly, of course—toward this site. Fund-raising will be more difficult, possibly much more so. The memorial could be ensnared in years of controversy, even litigation. Is that cost worth the point we want to make?”
“Although if this designer ever finds out we took it away from him, he could litigate, too,” Violet interjected, worried.
“Leave the lawyering to me, Violet,” Wilner said. “He’s not going to find out anything.”
Claire broke in, her voice strong, almost abrasive now. “So that’s what you propose? That we quash it, when the majority of us believed it to be the best design? That’s a total betrayal of what this country means, what it stands for. My husband must be turning—” She pulled up short. “He would be appalled if he were alive,” she resumed, with a new quietness.
“But your husband’s not alive, Claire, and that’s why we’re here.” The historian spoke as gently as he could, which wasn’t very gently. “History makes its own truths, new truths. It cannot be unwritten, we must acknowledge—”
“Nonsense,” she interrupted, in a tone that sounded more like “Shut up.” “Things—ideals—change only if we allow them to. And if we do, they’ve won.”
Elliott, the critic, interjected, “Look, my sympathies here are with the Muslims—I know you’ll take that in the right spirit, Bob—in that