He was at least fifty and had never been married. He was strange, but he thought she was stranger. Dr. Gruska had come to the conclusion that Lindsay was screwed up after he’d read a short play she had written, an assignment showing how members of a family related to each other. Lindsay had made up a family, but Dr. Gruska had probed and prodded. He’d gone so far as to read some of her play aloud in class. Then he’d called her to his office after class. He’d asked her questions about her father, wondering aloud if she had a thing for him. He suggested to her that he could help her sort things out. They could begin right now if she liked.
Lindsay had walked out, saying nothing. She was shaking and cursing and afraid within five minutes of leaving his wretched little office. Time had dealt with the worst of it, but not her intense hatred of Gruska, hatred coated with a goodly dose of fear. She would have never gone back, but she needed the class to graduate. She’d forced herself to apologize two weeks later; it was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do. He’d nodded, looking grave. He’d said only that she could call him or come to his office at any time. She could trust him. She realized then that he’d probably looked her up in old newspapers, and now he knew she’d been raped by her brother-in-law. She realized then that she wasn’t certain what the papers had reported; she’d refused to read any of them. For all she knew, she’d been the one to seduce Alessandro and to shoot him. She closed off her memories. Now she was taking Gruska’s final—essays, he’d told the class, because they were graduating seniors, psych majors, and reportedly somewhat literate. She read her notes as she walked toward the cafeteria, thinking it was a great deal of bullshit. She’d never had a thing for her father; all she’d ever wanted was for him just to recognize that she was there and that she was his daughter. Was that abnormal? Probably no more abnormal than her choosing psychology for a major because she’d hoped, deep down, that she would gain some insights, some self-awareness, to help her stop trembling with terror whenever a man came close to her. Some courses, some professors, had been helpful. Outwardly, no one would ever be able to guess what had happened to her—she’d filled herself with insights from every psychological theory; she’d grown up; she understood that the prince was mentally ill and she had been just a helpless girl drawn in by him; she accepted her fear of men as not being normal, but quite natural, of course, because of what the prince had done to her. She accepted all of it, took it in mental stride, smiled occasionally with cool objectivity at the idea of anyone being actually afraid of the opposite sex, but in the stillness of the night, when she was alone, the pain of those memories could still overwhelm her, the pain and the humiliation, her own stupidity. But she handled it now. At the very least, psychology had taught her how to handle it. Except handling Gruska, the jerk.
She was stuffing papers back into her purse when she saw the letter from her grandmother that had arrived yesterday afternoon. She’d forgotten to read it. She pulled it out and put it to her nose, still smelling the faint odor of musk roses, her grandmother’s favorite scent, made especially for her in Grasse, France, by one man named d’Alembert, after the eighteenth-century French philosopher. Gates Foxe was eighty-two and d’Alembert had made her perfume for nearly forty years now. Lindsay had flown to San Francisco at Christmas at her grandmother’s request. Lindsay hadn’t seen her in several years. She’d slowed down, but her mind was still sharp and she still loved life and still tried to control those around her. Only there wasn’t anyone around her anymore. Royce had remarried the year before. His new wife had been there for Christmas and it hadn’t been very much fun. The new wife, formerly Holly Jablow, widow of the former Washington state senator, Martin Jablow, was thirty-five. She was vain and greedy and when she wasn’t focused on her new husband, she was focused exclusively on herself. She loved mirrors. She quickly saw her husband’s dislike for his daughter and adapted in the next moment. She was grating and sweetly patronizing, giving Lindsay advice on her clothes, on her hair, on her fingernails. Lindsay had suffered her in silence. As for Jennifer, Lindsay had seen her mother only once. She was too thin, too nervous, smoked incessantly, and was sleeping with a man who was twenty-six years old. Jennifer had been forced to introduce Lindsay to the man when she’d come to her apartment one afternoon unannounced. She treated her daughter like a rival. Lindsay had left quickly, feeling cold and very sad and very alone. She’d felt all ties to San Francisco falling away from her.
Lindsay pulled the two pages from the envelope, a smile on her face, expecting to hear chatty news about friends and vagaries about the rich and richer in San Francisco. Her grandmother had a light touch with her at least. The letter began as she’d expected.
Just news at first, chatter about Moffitt Hospital and how the board of directors was loath to spend enough money to modernize the new radiology rooms. She mourned the horrible proportion of Democrats to Republicans in northern California. Then Lindsay stopped smiling.
“I don’t think anyone bothered to tell you because you really don’t exist to your father, as you well know—his fault, not yours. Sydney is pregnant. I have no idea if the prince is the father, nor does your father know, by the way. I suppose the family will pass the child off as a di Contini regardless. They really have no choice, since Sydney stayed with Alessandro and played the contrite wife wrapped in a coat of endless remorse. I found I could still be surprised, even after all these years. Sydney is different in some ways, Lindsay, but you would have to see her for yourself to understand how I mean it. She was here by herself a couple of weeks ago. There’s a brittle hardness about her, but also an inwardness, an awareness, that makes her not quite like her former self. It’s as if she were now responsible for the world. Odd, but true somehow. It’s been four years, hasn’t it, since you last saw her? Since that awful time in Paris?”
Lindsay went still. Her grandmother knew she hadn’t seen Sydney since that horrible time in Paris. Why was her grandmother calling that all up? It didn’t matter; an intelligent adult with sharpened insight always dealt with things and smiled and went on with life.
“She told me the prince is as he always was, and I take that to mean that he still likes young girls. Forgive me if this makes you uncomfortable, Lindsay, but it has been four years now and it’s time for you to face up to it. I saw at Christmas how guarded you were, how you wouldn’t even get near that nice boy, Cal Faraday, who is Clay and Elvira’s son and a very smart boy in his first year of medical school. I know what your father says, Lindsay, this damnable litany of his, but he’s wrong and you mustn’t believe him. The rape wasn’t your fault, none of it. Grow up, my dear girl, put this behind you—”
Lindsay raised her head and looked out over the Columbia campus. How very easy it was to analyze and to judge, to proffer well-meant advice to another person. That was something else she’d learned as a psychology major.
She quickly folded the letter and stuffed it back into the depths of her bag. She walked to the psych building, up the indented stairs to the second floor and into room 218, and sat down in her usual chair. No one said much of anything. Every male and female in the room scented the finish line. Everyone just wanted it done and over with. Dr. Gruska and his graduate assistant handed out blue books; then they handed out a single sheet of paper with essay questions on it. She pulled out her ball-point pen and began to write.
She wrote for three hours, filled up two blue books, handed them silently to the graduate assistant, didn’t look at Dr. Gruska, and quickly left the building. The day was even warmer now. She had no more classes. She was free. She was through with Columbia. Soon she would have a B.A. degree and no job and no ideas for a job.
She took the ferry across to the Statue of Liberty and sat there in the hot sun watching early tourists wander around and exclaim and gawk, and thinking about precisely nothing.
That evening, to her surprise, Cal Faraday called her and asked her out to dinner and a movie. He’d just finished his first year at Johns Hopkins and was in New York for a few days visiting friends. She said no, her voice very friendly, and went to bed with a mystery.
Taylor was off-duty. He was wearing his favorite dark brown corduroy pants, a white cotton shirt, and a leather jacket slung over his shoulder. He was on his way to pick up Dorothy Ryan for dinner at her apartment at Lexington and Sixty-third. He was whistling, feeling better about things and about himself. Dorothy was pretty, funny, and quickly climbing the ladder in advertising. He’d first seen her at a Giants game when the Tennessee Titans had carved up his team like a Christmas goose. She’d been yelling and cursing and soon he found himself watching her instead of the game. He’d bought her a beer and a hot dog and they’d gone to bed that night.
She had fun with sex, teasing him, kissing him all over, making him squirm and moan, and then letting him bring her to orgasm. She was loving and kind and utterly content with her life the way it was. When she said she wasn’t interested in marriage, he believed her. It was a relief. He started whistling louder, his step picking up, when suddenly he heard a loud scream, then another, then a series of gulping cries. It was from a two-flat brownstone
