I mean we can, but it won’t really change anything—not in the real world.”
“If we don’t change the world to suit us,” Kathy had said, “then it’ll change us to suit it.”
“What’s so bad about that?”
“I don’t like who it can make me become.”
No, Isabelle had never mastered the knack of it. And in the very end, neither had Kathy.
Pushing the bundle of mail from her lap onto the passenger’s seat beside her, Isabelle sat up. Her vision was blurred and all she could see of the windshield in front of her was a haze. She gripped the steering wheel to keep her hands from shaking. The engine idled, a low throaty drone that played a counterpoint to the hollow rhythm of her own accelerating heartbeat. The ache in her chest was as familiar as the handwriting on the envelope that had reawoken the pain.
If she could have it all to do over once more, there was so much she would change. She would have listened to Kathy’s warnings. She wouldn’t have let herself fall prey to Rushkin and his promises. But most of all, she wouldn’t have let Kathy die. Given another chance, she’d give up her own life first. But malignant diseases paid no attention to anyone’s wants or wishes, and neither the world nor the past could be changed simply by wishing.
It was a long time before Isabelle finally put the Jeep into gear and returned to her landing. She tossed the bundle of mail into the bow of her rowboat, got in and cast off from the dock. She rowed with the steady strokes of a long familiarity with the task at hand, back to the island, her gaze on the receding shore but her thoughts circling around the memories of her friend. She’d become unusually adept at hiding them, even from herself, but the letter had drawn them up from out of the shadows and there was no putting them back now. They swept about her like a flock of noisy gulls, each clamoring for special attention, not one concerned with the pain their presence woke in her. They rose up from their secret places, pushing through the cobwebs, churning up a fine cloud that had lain undisturbed for years.
Isabelle was choking on their dust.
Alan slouched on his sofa, a half-filled tea mug balanced on his chest as he watched the evening news with the sound turned down. Not until his own features were replaced by those of the Mully family did he thumb the mute switch on his remote. Margaret Mully was holding forth, her eyes fired with the righteous indignation that Alan had long since learned she could turn on and off again at will. Her husband and surviving daughter stood on either side of her, willingly deferring the floor to her.
He’d seen the Mullys waiting impatiently for the reporters on the courtroom steps while he was trying to make his own escape from the cameras, but he hadn’t lingered to hear what Kathy’s mother had to say. He hadn’t needed to; he’d heard it all before. Yet his overfamiliarity with her rhetoric hadn’t stopped him from sitting through the news and listening to her now. He knew it was a perverse impulse. All it was going to do was make him angry, but he didn’t seem able to stop himself.
“Of course we’ll appeal,” Mully was saying. “The verdict handed down today was an appalling miscarriage of justice. Please understand, it’s not simply a question of money. Rather, it’s where the money will go. All we’re trying to do is preserve the good reputation of our daughter and to insure that her work is presented to the public in its best possible light.”
Such as editing out any references Kathy had made to her childhood, Alan thought cynically, which would effectively undermine the principle theme of half the stories in the first collection. The bowdlerized versions would make no sense and render the affected stories unpublishable—certainly by the East Street Press’s standards. But Kathy’s mother was far more concerned with getting her hands on Kathy’s royalties, and in controlling what came back into print so that she could rewrite history.
What Mully meant to do with her daughter’s work cut a raw wound through Alan’s sense of aesthetic propriety. If she wanted to rewrite the past, he’d told the woman before all the lawyers became involved, let her do it in her own prose, under her own byline, though considering the woman’s lack of any real literary talent, it would never happen. Still, she was as stubborn as Kathy had ever been, and much as he hated to admit it, rewriting history was a trait that both mother and daughter had shared.
Kathy had always claimed that her parents were dead. If only that had been true.
On the television screen, one of the reporters was pressing Mully on a question that Alan wished they’d been able to raise in court, but the judge hadn’t allowed it. Kathy’s competency at the time she wrote her will was in question, not her mother’s motives.
“But what will you do with the money,” the reporter demanded, “if it isn’t donated to the NCF? A foundation that your own daughter was instrumental in establishing, I might add.”
Alan wondered if he was the only one to catch the momentary flash of anger in Mully’s eyes.
“We’ve been considering the creation of a trust fund or a scholarship,” Mully replied, “but we haven’t made any final decisions. It’s all still so upset-ting ....”
“But surely the NCF is just as worthy a cause?” the reporter went on. Alan decided he liked the woman. “And since it was your daughter’s—”
“The Newford Children’s Foundation panders to the offspring of prostitutes and drug addicts,” Mully broke in, her anger plain now to anyone viewing the broadcast. “If we don’t stop giving them handouts, then—”
Alan hit the “off’ switch on his remote and the television screen went black. He wished it were as easy to turn off Mully and her “decency crusade.” The saddest thing about giving a woman like that a forum was that right now throughout the city, people were sitting in their living rooms listening to her, nodding in agreement. But the children helped by the Newford Children’s Foundation came from every walk of life. The desperation that sent them looking for help made no distinction between secular or religious concerns, between the rich, the middle-class or the poor. It wasn’t concerned with the color of one’s skin or the lifestyle of one’s parents.
Alan set his tea on the coffee table and rose from the sofa to stand at the bay window facing out onto Waterhouse Street. He remembered when they all lived here, in various apartments up and down the street. When they all fol-lowed their various muses, their paths crisscrossing through each other’s studios and offices, their writing and art and music fueling each other’s inspiration. Their sense of community had come apart long before Kathy’s death, but for him, Kathy’s dying had been the final page of the story collection they’d started when they all first came together in the early seventies.
Most of them still had their stories, and the stories went on, but they were rarely to be found in each other’s pages now. It wasn’t just a matter of having grown apart. The changes lay deeper, inside each of them, different for each of them. One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled. But Alan had never expected there to come a time when most of those companions of his young adulthood would all be strangers. He hadn’t expected the bitterness or the estrangement that had wedged its way in between so many of their relationships.
He was still standing at the window when the telephone rang. He almost let his machine take the call, but finally turned back in to the room, crossed to his desk and lifted the receiver.
“Grant here,” he said.
“I
Alan smiled, recognizing Marisa’s voice. He glanced over to the mantel-piece, where a self-portrait she’d painted a few years ago hung just above a row of the East Street Press’s first editions. In the dim light, her shock of blonde hair seemed to glow, casting a light that radiated from the canvas.
“I don’t think I’ll ever measure up to your standards of propriety,” he told her. “The next thing I know, you’ll be wanting me to wear a tie to bed.”
“That depends. Are we talking necktie or bow tie? And would a tie be
Alan smiled. “And how are you, Marisa?”
“Right now I’ve got this picture in my head of you wearing nothing but a tie and I’m trying to decide if it’s amusing or scary.”
“Thanks so very much for that boost to my self-esteem.”
“You’re welcome,” Marisa said. “But that’s not why I was calling. Did you see the news tonight?”
“Margaret Mully in all her untrammeled glory? ‘Fraid so.”
When he’d left the courthouse, Alan hadn’t felt as though he was coming away with a victory. But he should
