“Out?” Holtzer said.
“Off campus,” Jamie said.
“No,” Holtzer said at once, “I’m afraid that would be quite impossible.”
“Because you see,” Jamie said, “my wife and I have had some meaningful discussions with Lissie in the last two days...”
“Ah, have you?”
“Yes, and we thought our... constructive therapy, one might call it... would stand a much greater chance of success if we were able to see Lissie in surroundings that weren’t at such odds with what we’re—”
“No,” Holtzer said, “I’m sorry.”
“I recognize that my suggestion isn’t entirely in keeping with the letter of the disciplinary action...”
“Indeed not,” Holtzer said.
“But certainly if the spirit can be served...”
“How would taking her off campus...?”
“I feel her mother and I could better bring about an understanding of the school’s aims and hopes by seeing Lissie in an atmosphere more conducive to acceptance.”
Holtzer said nothing.
“Acceptance of the nature of the discipline,” Jamie said. “And a firm commitment to seeing that such behavior isn’t repeated.”
“Well... perhaps just for lunch,” Holtzer said.
“Thank you, sir,” Jamie said. “I’ll report back to you, and if tomorrow’s experiment works, perhaps we can extend it over next weekend’s visit.”
“Yes, good luck,” Holtzer said, sounding somewhat puzzled.
“Thank you again, sir,” Jamie said, and hung up.
“You are the world’s biggest bullshit artist,” Connie said, shaking her head.
For lunch that Sunday, they took her off campus to a place called Dominick’s which had been highly recommended by Lissie’s French teacher, but which proved to be the worst Italian restaurant Jamie had ever eaten in. They left her at four-thirty, and were back in Rutledge in time to catch the tail end of a party at the Kreugers’. Young Scarlett Kreuger, dressed for the party in a rather daringly low-cut blouse and a skintight black skirt — daring for a seventeen-year-old, at any rate — asked Jamie how Lissie was coming along, and he told her she was doing just fine.
The second weekend posed some problems.
The Crofts had made plans as long ago as the beginning of January, when the show opened, to go see Hadrian VII with Jeff and Junie Landers. They’d bought the sell-out tickets from a scalper, paying through the nose for them, and the seats were for this Friday night, February 21. Moreover, there was a big Washington’s Birthday party scheduled at the McGruders’ for Saturday night, and a Rutledge painter named Mark Hopwell was opening a one-man exhibit at the Silvermine Guild that Sunday afternoon.
Connie was willing to forsake the New Canaan opening — although she really was interested in Hopwell’s work — but she damn well wasn’t ready to give up either the Broadway tickets or the big Saturday night bash. Their argument about Lissie’s detention and Jamie’s determination to “make it easier for her” took place on the Monday after their initial visit to school. Junie Landers had just called, asking where they wanted to eat in the city that Friday night, and Connie had told her she’d discuss it with Jamie and get back to her. Jamie, who had completely forgotten about the theater tickets, immediately said, “Well, what about Lissie?”
“What about her?” Connie said.
“We promised we’d go up there this weekend.”
“Well, we can’t,” Connie said simply. “We have theater tickets.”
“Then what’s she supposed to do up there all by herself?”
“Stop it, Jamie, she won’t be ‘all by herself.’ And besides, if she’s been acting up, she deserves the damn punishment.”
“You sound like Holtzer.”
“Are you so sure she wasn’t smoking pot?”
“I’m positive.”
“Because I’m not.”
“She told me she wasn’t, and I believe her.”
“But she was causing a lot of trouble in the dorm.”
“Kid stuff. Pranks.”
“Pranks, fine. You go see her this weekend. I’m going to see Hadrian VII, and I’m going to the McGruder party on Saturday night.”
“Where maybe Alistair York can dance with his hand on your ass.”
“Yes, maybe. Better his hand than nobody’s.”
“Maybe you can even ask him to join you and the Landerses at the theater this Friday.”
“Good idea. And maybe he’d like to take me to Silvermine on Sunday, while you’re up there in Shitsville holding your daughter’s hand.”
“I thought she was your daughter, too.”
“Jamie, you’re being utterly ridiculous about this,” Connie said. “If you want my opinion, the restriction...”
“I’m only trying to...”
“... will do her a lot of...”
“... make it easier for...”
They stopped talking simultaneously. They looked at each other. “So?” Connie said.
“So I’m going up to see her.”
“Without me,” she said flatly.
“Fine, without you,” he said.
He drove up to the school on Friday at six, an hour after Connie was picked up by the Landerses and not Alistair York but a woman named Alice Keyes, whose dentist husband had abandoned her for his nineteen-year-old receptionist two weeks before Christmas. As the Landerses’ Jaguar pulled out of their driveway, Jamie could see Connie and Alice sitting stiffly beside each other on the back seat, looking for all the world like a pair of bereaved widows. With Holtzer’s blessing, he took Lissie to dinner that night in a restaurant called the Yankee Stonecutter, and later fell asleep watching the eleven o’clock news on New Haven’s Channel 8. The headline story was about the explosion of a terrorist bomb in a Jerusalem supermarket. He awakened at 2:00 A.M., surprised to find himself in bed alone, the television still on, a vampire movie unreeling in black and white. He went to the bathroom to pee, got back into bed, watched the movie for another ten minutes, and then switched off the set and the bedlamp.
On Saturday, he ate breakfast alone at the motel, and then picked Lissie up at ten-fifteen. They spent the morning together antiquing, and had a truly superb lunch at a seafood restaurant just outside Wallingford. He was, he admitted to himself, beginning to enjoy Lissie’s Intermediate Discipline. Moreover, he suspected she was enjoying it as much as he. And whereas he knew his excursions to Shottsville weren’t accomplishing what Jonathan Holtzer and the Henderson School expected them to accomplish, he doubted the school’s trustees would have frowned upon the strengthening of ties between a father and his daughter. Electra aside (you insidious bastard, Lipscombe), he discovered his daughter as a young lady that weekend, a discovery tantamount in importance to his first glimpse of her at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York on the morning of December 19, 1951.
There was, in Lissie at seventeen, something comfortably reminiscent of Connie at eighteen — which was when he’d met her and fallen in love with her. The same good looks were there, of course, transmitted by those strong Harding genes, her mother’s nose and cheeks, her mother’s flaxen hair, the same lithe slender body, the physical twinship almost complete save for Lissie’s poverty-stricken bust and the fact that her eyes were blue whereas Connie’s were green. But there was more of Connie there as welclass="underline" Lissie’s outspoken frankness, her obstinate refusal to accept sham of any kind, her fierce pride, her sense of justice, and an innocence he found spookily like her mother’s had been.