The Hellfire Club

napkin in his lap.

'Gee, I love it when your eyes flash, too, Alden,' she said. 'It makes you look so young.'

'Actually, Nora, you're the oldest person at this table.'

For both her husband's sake and Daisy's, Nora forced herself to relax.

'You were tempered in ways the rest of us were not, and that's why you're so beautiful! I've admired beautiful women all my life, beautiful women are the saviors of mankind. Just being able to see your face must have pulled a lot of guys through over there.'

She opened her mouth, closed it, and looked back at Alden. 'Aren't you sweet.'

'You must have had a great effect on the young children that passed through your hands.'

'I think your viewpoint cheapens everything,' Nora said. 'Sorry. It's disgusting.'

'If I could snap my fingers and make it so that you'd never gone to Vietnam, would you let me do it?'

'That would make me as young as you are, Alden.'

'Benefits come in all shapes and sizes.' He distributed a smile around the table. 'Is there anything else I can clear up for you?'

For a moment nobody spoke. Then Daisy said, 'Time for me to return to my cell. I'm feeling a little tired. Wonderful to see you, Davey. Nora, I'll be in touch.'

Alden glanced at Nora before pushing back his chair and getting up. Davey stood up a second later.

Daisy grasped the top of her chair and turned toward the door. 'Jeffrey, please thank Maria. Lovely lobster salad.'

Jeffrey's courtly smile made him look more than ever like a dapper second-story man disguised as a valet. He drifted sideways and opened it the door for Daisy.9

Alden and Davey took their chairs again. 'Your mother'll be right as rain after her nap,' Alden said. 'Whatever goes on in her studio is her business, but I have the feeling she's been working harder than usual lately.'

Davey nodded slowly, as if trying to decide if he agreed with his father.

Alden fixed Nora with a glance and took a sip of wine. 'Planning something with Daisy?'

'Why do you ask?'

Davey flicked his hair out of his eyes and looked from Nora to his father and Back again.

'Call it an impression!'

'I'd like to spend more time with her. Go shopping, have lunch someday, things like that.' Alden's gaze made her feel as though she were lying to a superior.

'Terrific,' Alden said and Davey relaxed back into his chair. 'I mean it. Nice thought, my two girls having fun together.'

'Mom's been working hard?'

'Well, if you ask me, somethings going on up there.' He looked at Nora in an almost conspiratorial fashion. 'Was that your impression, Nora?'

'I didn't see her working, if that's what you mean.'

'Ah, Daisy's like Jane Austen; she hides all the evidence.

When she was writing her first two books, I never even saw her at the typewriter. To tell you the truth, sometimes this voice in my head would whisper. What if she's just making it all up? Then one day a box came from one of my competitors, and she whisked it away into her studio and came back out and handed me a book! Year after that, the same thing happened all over again. So I just let her do her thing. Hell, Davey, you know. You grew up in this crazy system.'

Davey nodded and looked across the table as if he, too, wondered whether Nora possessed secret information.

'All my life, I've dealt with writers, and they're great -some writers anyhow - but I never understood what they do or how they do it. Hell, I don't think even they know how they do it. Writers are like babies. They scream and cry and bug the hell out of you, and then they produce this great big crap and you tell them how great it is.' He laughed, delighted with himself.

'Does that go for Hugo Driver, too? Was he one of the screaming babies?'

Davey said, 'Nora-'

'Sure he was. The difference with Driver was, everybody thought his dumps smelled better than the other brats'.' Alden no longer seemed so delighted with his metaphor.

'Daisy said you met him a couple of times. What was he like?'

'How should I know? I was a kid.'

'But you must have had some impression. He was your father's most important author. He even stayed in this house.'

'Well, at least now I know what you and Daisy were talking about up there.'

She ignored this remark. 'In fact. Driver was responsible for-'

'Driver wrote a book. Thousands of people write books every year. His happened to be successful. If it hadn't been Driver, it would have been someone else.' He struggled for an air of neutral authority. 'You have a lot to learn about publishing. I say that respectfully, Nora.'

'Really.'

Davey was combing his hair off his forehead with his fingers. 'What you say is true, but -'

His father froze him with a look.

'But it was a classic collaboration,' Davey continued. 'The synergy was unbelievable.'

'I'm too old for synergy,' Alden said.

'You never told me What you thought of him personally.'

'Personally I thought he was an acquaintance of my father's.'

'That's all?'

Alden shook his heard. 'He was this unimpressive little guy in a loud tweed jacket. He thought he looked like the Prince of Wales, but actually he looked like a pickpocket.'

Davey seemed too shocked to speak, and Alden went on. 'Hey, I always thought the Prince of Wales looked like a pickpocket, too. Driver was a very talented writer. What I thought of him when I was a little boy doesn't matter. What kind of guy he was doesn't matter either.'

'Hugo Driver was a great writer.' Davey uttered this sentence to his plate.

'No argument here.'

'He was.'

Alden smiled meaninglessly, inserted another section of lobster into his mouth and followed it with a swallow of wine. Davey vibrated with suppressed resentment. Alden said, 'You know my rule: a great publisher never reads his own books. Gets in the way of your judgment. While we're on this subject, do we have anything for our friend Leland Dart?'

This was the most: exalted of their lawyers, the partner of Leo Morris in the firm of Dart, Morris.

Davey said he was working on it.

'To be truthful, I wonder if our friend Leland might be playing both ends against the middle.'

'Does this have something to do with the Driver estate?' Nora asked.

'Please, Nora,' Davey said. 'Don't.'

'Don't what? Did I just become invisible?'

'You know what's interesting about Leland Dart?' Alden asked, clearly feeling the obligation to rescue the conversation. 'Apart from his utter magnificence, and all that? His relationship with his son. I don't get it. Do you get it? I mean Dick - I sort of understood what happened with the older one, Petey, but Dick just baffles me. Does that guy actually do anything?'

Davey was laughing now. 'I don't think he does no. We met him a month or two ago, remember, Nora? At Gilhoolie's, right after it opened.'

Nora did remember, and the memory of the appalling person named Dick Dart could now amuse her, too. Dart had been two years behind Davey at the Academy. She had been introduced to him at the bar of a restaurant which had replaced a mediocre pizza parlor in the Waldbaum's shopping center. Men and women in their twenties and thirties had crowded the long bar separating the door from the dining room, and the menus in plastic case:; on the red-checked tables advertised drinks like Mudslides and Long Island Iced Teas. As she and Davey had passed through the crowd, a tall, rather fey-looking man had turned to Davey, dropped a hand on his arm, and addressed