“I didn’t accuse him. I was simply curious.”
“Oh? Just what did you think Adam was being paid for?” Mrs. Fielding got up out of the chair as though her joints had stiffened during the hour. “This man Pinata is obviously a bad influence on you to have affected your thinking like this.”
“He has nothing to do with—”
“I want you to call him immediately and tell him he is no longer in your employ. Now I’m going over to my cottage and get some rest. The doctor says I must avoid scenes like this. The next time I see you, I hope the cause of them will have been removed.”
“You think firing Pinata will solve everything?”
“It will be a start. Someone has to start somewhere.”
She walked to the door with brisk, determined steps, but there was a weary stoop to her shoulders that Daisy had never seen before. “I despair,” her mother had said.
Why, it’s true, Daisy thought. She despairs. How extraordinary to despair on a bright, sunny afternoon with Pinata somewhere in the city.
She looked across the room at the telephone. Its shiny black cord seemed like a lifeline to her. All she had to do was pick up the receiver and dial, and even if she couldn’t reach him personally, he would get her message through his answering service: Call me, meet me, I want to see you.
The phone began to ring while the sound of her mother’s step was still on the stairs. She crossed the room, forcing herself to walk slowly because she wanted to run.
“Hello?”
“Long distance for Mrs. Daisy Harker.”
“This is Mrs. Harker.”
“Go ahead, ma’am. Your party’s on the line.”
Daisy waited, still hoping, though she had no reason to hope, that it was Pinata, that this was his way of reaching her in the event Jim or her mother might be around when he called.
But the voice was a woman’s, high-pitched and nervous. “I know I shouldn’t be phoning you like this, Mrs. Harker, or maybe I should say Daisy, though it don’t seem socially proper to call you Daisy when we never even been introduced yet—”
“Who is this calling, please?”
“Muriel. Your new... new stepmother.” Muriel let out an anxious little giggle. “I guess this is kind of a shock to you, picking up the phone and hearing a perfect stranger say she’s your stepmother.”
“No. I knew my father had married again.”
“Did he write and tell you?”
“No. I heard it the way I hear everything else about my father — not from him but from somebody else.”
“I’m sorry,” Muriel said in her quick, nervous voice. “I told him to write. I kept reminding him.”
“It’s certainly not your fault. You have my best wishes, by the way. I hope you’ll both be very happy.”
“Thank you.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“I’m in Miss Wittenburg’s apartment across the hall. Miss Wittenburg promised not to listen; she has her fingers in her ears.”
To Daisy it was beginning to sound like an April Fools’ joke: I am your new stepmother — Miss Wittenburg has her fingers in her ears... “Is my father there with you?”
“No. That’s why I decided to phone you. I’m worried about him. I shouldn’t have let him go off by himself the way he did. Hitchhiking can be dangerous even when you’re young and strong and have no outstanding weaknesses. I guess,” Muriel added cautiously, “being as you’re his daughter, you know he drinks?”
“Yes. I know he drinks.”
“He’s been pretty good lately, with me to keep an eye on him.
But today he wouldn’t take me along. He said we didn’t have the money for bus fare for both of us, so he was going to hitchhike up alone.”
“Do you mean up here, to San Félice?”
“Yes. He wanted to see you. His conscience was bothering him on account of he walked out on you last time when he lost his nerve. Stan has a very strong conscience; it drives him to drink. It’s like he always has a bad pain that has to be numbed.”
“I haven’t seen him or heard from him,” Daisy said. “Are you sure he intended to come right here to the house?”
“Why, yes. Why, he even mentioned how maybe you’d all have some champagne to celebrate being together again.”
Daisy thought how typical it was of her father: to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower, to London for the coronation, to San Félice for a champagne celebration. Her sorrow and anger met and merged in a relationship that weakened them both and conceived a monster child. This child, half formed, tongueless, without a name, lay heavy inside her, refusing to be born, refusing to die.
“Stan wouldn’t like me phoning you like this,” Muriel said, “but I just couldn’t help it. Last time he was up there, he got involved with that waitress, Nita.”
“Nita?”
“Nita Garcia. That’s what he called her.”
“The report in the paper said her name was Donelli.”
“It said Stan’s name was Foster. That don’t make it true.” Muriel’s dry little laugh was like a cough of disapproval. “Sure, I’m suspicious — women are — but I can’t help thinking he’s going to see her again, maybe get in some more trouble. I was hoping... well, that maybe he’d be in touch with you by this time and you could set him straight about associating with the wrong people.”
“He hasn’t been in touch,” Daisy said. “And I’m afraid I couldn’t set him straight if he were.”
“No. Well. Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She seemed ready to hang up.
Daisy said hurriedly, “Just a minute, Muriel. I wrote my father a special delivery letter on Thursday night asking him an important question. Was this the reason he suddenly decided to come and see me?”
“I don’t know about any special delivery letter.”
“I sent it to the warehouse.”
“He didn’t mention it to me. Maybe he never got it. He was reading some other letters from you, though, just before he decided to leave. He kept them in his old suitcase. You know that old suitcase of his that he lugs around full of junk?”
Daisy remembered the suitcase. It was the only thing he’d taken with him when he’d left the apartment in Denver on a winter afternoon: “Daisy baby, I’m going to take a little trip. Don’t you stop loving your daddy.” The trip had lasted fifteen years, and she hadn’t stopped.
“He was reading a letter of yours,” Muriel said, “when he suddenly got the blues.”
“How do you know it was from me?”
“Right away he started talking about how he’d failed as a father. Besides,” she added bluntly, “nobody else writes to him.”
“Did he mention what was in the letter?”
“No.”
“Did he put it back in the suitcase?”
“No. I looked right after he left, and it wasn’t there, so I guess he took it with him.” Muriel sounded both apologetic and defensive. “He doesn’t keep the suitcase locked, just chained.”
“How did you know what particular letter to look for?”
“It was in a pink envelope.”
Daisy was on the point of saying she didn’t use colored stationery when she remembered that a friend of hers had given her some for her birthday several years ago. “What was the address on the envelope?”
“Some hotel in Albuquerque.”
“I see.” The Albuquerque address and the pink stationery dated the letter positively as being written in December of 1955. Her father had moved from Illinois to New Mexico at the end of that year, but he had stayed barely a month. She recalled sending his Christmas presents and check to a hotel in Albuquerque and receiving a postcard from Topeka, Kansas, a couple of weeks later thanking her for the gifts and saying he didn’t like New Mexico, it was too dusty. There’d been a doleful quality about the postcard, and the handwriting was shaky, as if he’d been ill or on a drinking spree or, more likely, both.