Self-Defence

sister who died several years ago.' Pause. 'All my grandparents and uncles and aunts are deceased. My mother passed away right after I was born.'

Young, I thought, to be so surrounded by death. 'What about your dad?'

She looked down quickly, as if searching for a lost contact lens. Her legs were flat on the floor, her torso twisting away from me, so that the fabric of her blouse tightened around her narrow waist.

'I was hoping we could avoid this,' she said softly. 'And not because of the dream.'

Wheeling around. The intense stare Milo 'd seen in the courtroom.

'If you don't want to talk about him, you don't have to.'

'It's not a matter of that. Bringing him into it always changes things.'

'Why's that?'

'Because of who he is.'

She gazed up at the ceiling and smiled.

'Your line,' she said, extending one hand theatrically.

'Who is he?'

She gave a small laugh.

'Morris Bayard Lowell.' Enunciating.

Another laugh, totally cheerless.

'Buck Lowell.'

4

I'd heard of M. Bayard Lowell the way I'd heard of Hemingway and Jackson Pollock and Dylan Thomas.

When I was in high school, some of his early prose and verse were in the textbooks. I'd never thought much of his paint-splotched abstract canvases, but I knew they hung in museums.

Published in his teens, exhibited in his twenties, the postwar enfant terrible turned Grand Old Man of Letters.

But it had been years since I'd heard anything about him.

'Shocked?' said Lucy, looking grim but satisfied.

'I see what you mean about things changing. But the only relevance he has to me is his role as your father.'

She laughed. 'His role? Roll in the hay is about it, Dr. Delaware. The grand moment of conception. Old Buck's a love-'em-and-leave-'em kind of guy. He cut out on Mother when I was a few weeks old and never returned.'

She smoothed her bangs and sat up straighter.

'So how come I'm dreaming about him, right?'

'It's not that unusual. An absent parent can be a strong presence.'

'What do you mean?'

'Anger, curiosity. Sometimes fantasies develop.'

'Fantasies about him? Like going to the Pulitzer ceremony on his arm? No, I don't think so. He wasn't around enough to be relevant.'

'But when he comes into the picture, things change.'

'Who he is changes things. It's like being the President's kid. Or Frank Sinatra's. People stop perceiving you as who you are and start seeing you in relationship to him. And they get shocked- just like you did- to find out the Great Man spawned someone so crashingly ordinary.'

'I-'

'No, it's okay,' she said, waving a hand. 'I love being ordinary: my ordinary job, my ordinary car, my ordinary apartment and bills and tax returns and washing dishes and taking out the garbage. Ordinary is heaven for me, Dr. Delaware, because when I was growing up nothing was routine.'

'Your mother died right after you were born?'

'I was a couple of months old.'

'Who raised you?'

'Her older sister, my Aunt Kate. She was just a kid herself, new Barnard grad, living in Greenwich Village. I don't remember too much about it other than her taking Puck and me to lots of restaurants. Then she got married to Walter Lazar- the author? He was a reporter back then. Kate divorced him after a year and went back to school. Anthropology- she studied with Margaret Mead and started going on expeditions to New Guinea. That meant boarding school for Puck and me, and that's where we stayed all through high school.'

'Together?'

'No, he was sent to prep academies, and I went to girls' schools.'

'It must have been tough, being separated.'

'We were used to being shifted around.'

'What about the half siblings you mentioned?'

'Ken and Jo? They lived with their mother, in San Francisco. Like I said, there's no contact at all.'

'Where was your father all this time?'

'Being famous.'

'Did he support you financially?'

'Oh, sure, the checks kept coming, but for him that was no big deal, he's rich from his mother's side. The bills were paid through his bank, and my living expenses were sent to the school and doled out by the headmistress- very organized for an artiste, wouldn't you say?'

'He never came to visit?'

She shook her head. 'Not once. Two or three times a year he'd call, on the way to some conference or art show.'

She pulled something out of her eyelashes.

'I'd get a message to come to the school office and some secretary would hand me the phone, awestruck. I'd brace myself, say hello, and this thunderous voice would come booming through. 'Hello, girl. Eating freshly blooded moose meat for breakfast? Getting your corpuscles moving?' Witty, huh? Like one of his stupid macho hunting stories. A summary of what he was doing, then good-bye. I don't think I spoke twenty words in all those years.'

She turned to me.

'When I was fourteen, I finally decided I'd had enough and got my roommate to tell him I was out of the dorm. He never called again. All you get with a Great Man is one chance.'

She tried to smile, lips working at it, struggling to form the shape. Finally, she managed to force the corners upward.

'It's no big deal, Dr. Delaware. Mother died when I was so young I never really knew what it was like to lose her. And he was… nothing. Like I said, lots of people have it worse.'

'This issue of being ordinary-'

'I really do like it. Not a shred of talent, same with Puck. That's probably why he has nothing to do with us. Living reminders that he's produced mediocrity. He probably wishes we'd all disappear. Poor Jo obliged.'

'How did she die?'

'Climbed a mountain in Nepal and never came down. His wives oblige him, too. Three out of four are dead.'

'Your mother must have been very young when she died.'

'Twenty-one. She got the flu and went into some sort of toxic shock.'

'So she was only twenty when she married him?'

'Just barely. He was forty-six. She was a Barnard girl, too, a sophomore. They met