“I have to go down to the lobby,” Susan said. “There’s no pay phone on this floor.”
“Thank you,” Jennie said in her soft voice.
Susan hung up and then stood.
Susan Reynolds was listed on the manning chart of the Department of Social Services of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as an “Appeals Officer, Grade III.” She was single, twenty-six years old, naturally blond, blue-eyed, with a fair complexion, and, at five feet five and 130 pounds, was five pounds heavier than she wanted to be.
She occupied a third-floor office in the Department of Social Services Building in Harrisburg. Through its one window, she had a view of the golden dome of the state-house. Her office was just barely large enough to hold her desk and chair, her bookcase, her three filing cabinets, and the three straight-backed chairs intended for use by visitors.
On half of one shelf of her bookcase, Susan kept a small vase, sometimes holding a fresh flower; a photograph of her parents, and a photograph of herself standing in the snow with half a dozen other young women taken while they were all students at Bennington College in Vermont.
The other five shelves of the ceiling-high bookcase were filled with books, notebooks, binders, and manila folders all containing laws, regulations, interpretations, and court decisions having to do with providing social services to those entitled to it.
Just who was entitled to what social services under what conditions was frequently a subject of bitter disagreement between those who believed in their entitlement to one social service or another, and those employees of one governmental agency or another who didn’t think so.
It was often difficult, for example, for someone who had been a recipient of a monthly check from Harrisburg intended for the support of his or her minor children to understand why, simply because one of the children had turned nineteen, the amount of the check had been reduced.
The laws—and there were several hundred of them—generally provided that support—and there were forty or fifty different types of support—for dependent children terminated when the child reached his or her nineteenth birthday. Or was no longer resident in the home. Or had been incarcerated or become resident in a mental institution. Or joined the Army.
Ordinarily, the situation could be explained to the recipient at the local Social Services office. But not always. If he or she wanted to appeal, the initial appeal was handled locally. If the local social services functionary upheld the decision of the social worker, the recipient could appeal yet again.
At that point, the case moved to Harrisburg, where it was adjudicated by one of twelve appeals officers, one of whom was Miss Susan Reynolds.
When she had first come on the job three years before, Miss Reynolds had been deeply moved by the poverty and hopeless situations of those whose appeals reached her desk.
Emotionally, she had wanted to grant every one of them, feeling that there was simply no justification in wealthy America to deny anyone whose needs were so evident. And, in fact, for the first three weeks on the job she had granted relief to ninety percent of the appellants.
But her decisions were subject to review by her superiors, and more than ninety percent of her decisions granting relief had been overturned.
She had then been called before a review board that had the authority to terminate her probationary appointment as an Appeals Officer, Grade I.
It had been pointed out to her, politely but firmly, that she had been employed by the Department of Social Services to adjudicate appeals fairly, and not to effect a redistribution of the wealth of the Commonwealth without regard to the applicable laws and regulations.
She had seriously considered resigning her appointment—an act she
knew would please her parents, who were mystified by her choice of employment—but in the end had not, for several reasons.
First, she knew that many, perhaps even most, of the decisions she had made had not been fair, but rather based on her emotional reaction to the pitiful lives of the people who had made the appeals. And second, she decided that she could make adjudications in the future that, while paying attention to the letter of the law, could be tempered with compassion.
Most important in her decision not to resign was her belief that if she stayed on the job, she would be able to make some input into the system that would make it better. It was such a god-awful mess the way it was now, she had thought, that improvement had to be possible.
She hadn’t been able to make any improvements to the system in her three years on the job—she now realized that thinking she could have had been really naive—and she had been forced to accept that a substantial number of the appeals she was called upon to adjudicate had been made by people who believed there was nothing morally wrong in trying to swindle the state out of anything they could get away with.
But on the other hand, she thought, she had been able to overturn the adverse decisions of a large number of social workers that would really have hurt people with a legitimate entitlement to the small amounts of money provided by the state.
And she had been promoted twice, ultimately to “Ap peals Officer, Grade III.” And both times she had wondered if she had been promoted because she was doing a good job, or whether someone higher up had examined her record and found it satisfactory using the percentage of appeals rejected as the criterion.
Susan looked at the photograph of the Bennington girls on her shelf—Jennifer Ollwood was standing next to her in the picture—then shifted the frame slightly.
She picked up her purse and left her office, stopping at the adjacent office, of Appeals Officer, Grade IV, Veronica Haynes, a black woman who, Susan had decided, believed that the only people who should receive aid from the state were the aged in the last few weeks of their terminal illness.
“If anybody asks, Veronica, I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”
Veronica smiled at her. “Couple, as in two? Or several, as if you’re going out for coffee?”
“Several, wiseass,” Susan said, smiling, and walked to the elevators.
On the way down, she looked in her coin purse and found that it held two nickels and a dime.