Corman didn’t want her to see the apartment any more than Edgar had, but didn’t know how to prevent it without looking like a felon hiding evidence of his crime. “Okay,” he said.
“Eight o’clock, I believe.”
“Yeah, fine.”
For a moment she watched him silently, her eyes turning oddly inward, as if they were watching something other than him, a movie playing in her mind.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow night,” she said finally. A tiny smile fluttered onto her lips, clung there like a little girl holding to a liferope, then fell away. “Good night, then, David,” she said, turned and made her way back through the jungle of silk and satin until she seemed far, far away from him, beyond the rolling surf of even the most distant sea.
He left Tavern on the Green an hour later, and by that time, he’d run into Jeffrey, too, exchanged empty pleasantries, and slunk away. It was a relief when Clayton had finally come by and dismissed him with a quick nod.
The lights were still twinkling behind him as he headed downtown along Central Park West. For a moment he stood silently under the sheltering trees, stared back at them, then turned south again, making his way slowly down the cobblestone walkway that bordered the park. The rain had stopped, but large, isolated droplets still fell from the overhanging branches, splashing against his jacket or streaking past his face as he moved slowly under them. The traffic was very heavy, but there were only a few people along the edges of the park. Across the avenue, a tall slender man hurriedly walked an even more emaciated Airedale. A few yards away, a doorman slumped listlessly in a lighted vestibule, then pulled himself quickly to attention as an elevator door opened in the lobby behind him.
At 65th Street, Corman crossed the avenue, then continued south. He walked on a few blocks, glanced back toward the park, then slowed immediately, finally coming to a full stop. He could see an old man sitting silently on one of the wet wooden benches. The white beard glimmered slightly in the street light, and as Corman inched closer to the curb, he saw the face emerge slowly from the darkness, assuming the features he thought he recognized from his encounter in the chapel. There were the same bushy eyebrows and carefully manicured silver beard, the same dark, deep-set eyes with their long black lashes, but it was not Dr. Rosen, only some other lone figure, hunched in the rain. The resemblance held him nonetheless, and for a long time, Corman stood a few yards away, his eyes focused on the old man while he let the impulse build slowly, steadily, until he had no choice but to follow it.
For an instant he couldn’t move but simply stood in the door, facing him. Then he drew in a deep breath, like a swimmer before a long dive, and plunged forward. “I was at Sarah’s … the photographer.”
Dr. Rosen stood rigidly at his door, staring at him expressionlessly. The pen in his hand twitched gently, but everything else remained utterly still. The earlier rage was entirely gone, replaced by a strange resignation, the eyes settled, firm and untrembling. It was as if the explosion in the chapel had sounded the final note of his resistance. “You came earlier,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
“Posing as a graduate student.”
Corman nodded.
“Did you use your real name?” Dr. Rosen asked. “Corman, isn’t it?”
“My real name, yes,” Corman said.
Dr. Rosen’s face grew stoney, as if his body had suddenly turned into a slab of granite, solid, immobile, unimaginably old. “What do you want, Mr. Corman?” he asked.
Corman realized that he had no precise answer to that question. For a moment he felt stymied. “The diploma,” he said finally, nodding toward the office. “The one they found with Sarah’s things. It came from your office.”
Dr. Rosen’s gray face studied him with a concentration Corman remembered only in pictures of doomed romantic poets, driven, tormented, people caught within the throes of tragic fermentations.
“What do you want?” Dr. Rosen asked again.
“To talk about her.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to understand what happened.”
Rosen shook his head. “You will never know what happened to Sarah.” He began to close the door slowly, with a strange courtliness, as if he were doing it with regret.
Corman raised his hand to stop it. “The diploma,” he repeated. “It came from here.”
Rosen eased the door forward again. “Yes, it did,” he whispered, lowering his head somewhat, his voice growing less robust and taking on the muffled quality of a whisper.
“It still smelled of lemon oil,” Corman added. “So you must have brought it down with you that night.”
Rosen looked at him plaintively, and with an expression of such overwhelming grief that Corman realized immediately that all his darkest ruminations about Rosen were entirely wrong. “To save her,” he said.
The door stopped its forward progress as Dr. Rosen stepped back slightly, watching Corman intently, but with eyes that seemed battered into softness. “To save her,” he said quietly. “But she’s dead now, and nothing can be done about it.”
The last words came in a gentle coda, and instantly Corman understood how much the sounds of things mattered to Dr. Rosen, how much he shaped each word with the intonations of his voice, giving each one the music called for by its meaning in the context of the sentence, pure as his daughter’s indecipherable imitations, her titanic striving to be like him.
“She’s gone,” Dr. Rosen said. “Gone. So what’s the use of going into Sarah’s death?”
“I want to know what happened,” Corman said. “Over the last week or so, I feel that I’ve sort of …”
“Come to know her?” Rosen asked.
“Not exactly.”
“What then?”
“Come to know you,” Corman blurted before he could stop himself.
Rosen looked at him, amazed. “Me?”
“As a father,” Corman added. “How you tried to save her.”
Dr. Rosen’s eyes studied him thoughtfully for a few seconds before he spoke again. “After the accident, the way her mother died …” He shook his head. “It’s how arbitrary things are. Random. You have to work within that frame, don’t you?”
Corman said nothing.
“That there is absolutely no pattern to anything,” Rosen said. “None at all.”
Corman watched silently as Dr. Rosen drew in a long slow breath, then continued.
“And so, you try to intervene,” Rosen said. “Rewrite the world, you might say. You have a daughter, and you try to save her. You try to teach her everything she needs to know. You try to control her experience. That’s all I ever wanted to do for Sarah.”
She rose in Corman’s mind as he listened, the air surrounding her dense and lightless, the rain falling in long gray sheets as she stood at the window, the doll clutched to her breast.
“She lived on my terms,” Dr. Rosen went on. His eyes took on a fierce wonderment. “She was a perfect daughter.” The wonderment deepened into amazement, intense, magical, a prophet in the midst of his promised transformation. “She heard every word I said, did everything I asked.”
“Even with the baby,” Corman said.
Rosen’s face darkened. “Yes, even that.”
“You wanted to eliminate the risk.”
“All risk,” Rosen said. He looked at Corman pleadingly. “Isn’t that what every father wants to do?”
Corman saw the rain sheeting in windy blasts across the dark windows of the fifth-floor landing. She was leaning against the wall, the doll held loosely, dangling from her hand, the rain slapping mercilessly at its bare plastic legs. “Is that what broke her?” he asked. “The baby?”
Rosen shook his head. “Only the last thing. She was already slipping away.”
“Why?”
“She was never well, Mr. Corman,” Rosen said. “There were tendencies. In her mother’s family.”
“Toward what?”
