She remained pleased at having spoken so bluntly to Wellington, but at the same time was now embarrassed at the memory of it. Hadn’t she, really, attacked him for just those qualities that made him indispensable? If the family was going to use him because of those traits, it didn’t seem right to simultaneously attack him for their possession.
She thought of talking to Howard about that, but decided not to; she didn’t feel like poking any of the aching teeth right now, and they traveled most of the way to Chambersburg in silence.
Robert’s building, as grubby as ever, had taken on a warm patina by now in her mind. What few pleasant memories she was storing up these days had mostly to do with this seedy rundown building, its creaking stairs, that familiar door at the third floor rear, and the shabby one-room apartment within.
Tonight, Howard didn’t knock. He pushed open the door, and Evelyn frowned to see that the room was in darkness. Had Robert gone out to the store or something? Had something happened?
Howard was facing her, and hadn’t noticed the darkness. “After you,” he said, with a tiny bow.
She moved forward, telling herself not to be silly, and fumbled for the light switch beside the door as she crossed the threshold. Then a hand pressed into the middle of her back, she was shoved forward, the door slammed, and for one open-mouthed second she was in total darkness.
Then the lights came on, and everybody shouted, “Surprise!”
A surprise party? At a time like this? For God’s sake!
Robert. Howard. Uncle Joe and Aunt Margaret. Greg and Audrey. All smiling, all pleased with themselves. And how could she show them she was furious, she thought they were stupid and thoughtless and shallow? To do a thing like this, when everything was so tense, when that second of darkness would be bound to terrify her... But she couldn’t let them know any of that, of course, she had to clutch at her shattered nerves and try to smile and act pleased, because they had meant well. But she could have punched their happy faces.
There were presents on the bed, in wrapping paper. Joke presents, like a paperweight, and nice presents, like a deerskin jacket, an original from Paris. And there were drinks, and the others all continued pleased with themselves, and it was impossible to go on being angry.
A little later, it occurred to her that she’d managed to find fault with both ends of the spectrum today. Bradford had forgotten her birthday, and she’d objected to that. Robert and Howard and the others had remembered it, and tried to make it normal and happy and memorable, and be darned if she hadn’t objected to that, too. The combination of that thought and a few scotch and waters lifted her spirits considerably.
It turned out that Greg and Audrey were staying at a motel just outside town, that Greg had now joined Robert as a part of the stand-by force, and that Audrey desperately wanted some assignment, something to make her feel that she too was a useful part of all this.
Most of the talk avoided the central subject, though, as everyone made an obvious effort to keep the evening light and cheerful. Evelyn did manage one brief discussion with Joe about BJ and James Fanshaw; Joe had talked with Fanshaw on the phone Sunday night, and had met him in New York yesterday, and had filled him in on the whole Bradford situation. Fanshaw had agreed with Holt’s prognosis that Bradford would never return to his original mental state, and had suggested that BJ’s shooting of a horse had been his way to keep from shooting his father. BJ seemed to be suffering a severe case of blighted hero worship. The father who had always been perfect was no longer perfect; the son whose own life had been affected in not entirely beneficial ways by living in the shadow of that perfect father had been unable at this point to accept his father’s fallibility; he had come to the house to destroy the imperfect father, had been driven by too many conflicting desires and inhibitions, and had shot the horse as a way to draw attention to himself and force someone else to take over the reins of his life; at which point he had stopped communicating with the outside world entirely and was now in a state of catatonia in the Long Island sanitarium. “Fanshaw,” Joe said, “seems like a good man. I wish I’d known about him before, he’ll probably be very useful.”
They were off that subject, and onto the subject of skiing in the Canadian Laurentians, when the knock sounded at the door a little before eleven. They at once all became silent, and watched Robert go to the door and open it.
The landlady stood there, peeking curiously past Robert’s shoulder as she said, “Telephone for you, Mr. Pratt.”
“Right,” Robert said. The phone was in the hall, down on the first floor. “Be right back,” Robert said, and went out, shutting the door.
Joe and Howard both made small attempts at conversation while they waited, but it was impossible. This is how easy a happy mood can be killed now, Evelyn thought, and waited, listening to the silence.
At last Robert came back, looking depressed and in a vague way startled. “That was Sterling,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “At nine-thirty this evening Elizabeth died, of a heart attack.”
8
Wellington, reading the dossier on his family that he was not supposed to know existed and that his superiors were not supposed to know he had access to, came across the information that his daughter, Deborah, now seventeen, was no longer a virgin. It had occurred nine days ago on Monday, the twenty-ninth of October, while Wellington had been at Bradford’s estate, replacing the Chinese with his own men and incidentally cooling out Howard and Robert. The defloration had been accomplished by a young man named Lister, on the living room floor of his home in Chevy Chase, his parents being out for the evening. Lister’s high school yearbook photograph was attached; Wellington, looking at it with cold hatred, vaguely recognized it as a face he’d seen a few times around the house. But he took so little interest in the house and the doings of the people there, he had always taken so little interest, that he couldn’t say now for certain whether he and Lister had ever actually exchanged words in any sort of conversation.
He closed the dossier. He never dipped into it without regretting it, but knowing it was there made it impossible not to dip in. Like having a chance to know the future, when even if one suspects he will only learn the grim details of his own imminent death he cannot stop himself from looking.
This was one of the particularly bad times. Not as bad as the first of Carol’s affairs, nothing again would ever be that brutal, but close. And this was no way for a man to learn such a thing about his daughter, it was vile and crude and nasty. As well as pointless; what had Deborah’s introduction to sex to do with Wellington’s reliability?
The worst of it was that he could never respond to the things he learned in here. The dossier did not exist, so he could not know its contents, so he would have no reason to take action. Not against any of Carol’s four lovers over the years. And now, neither against Lister nor for Deborah. Nor for himself. Again like one who knows the immutable future, he had total knowledge but it never changed anything. He was a spectator to his own life, aware of it all but helpless, like a ghost who can be neither seen nor heard. He hung above the life he lived, in agony but unable to move, impaled on this dossier like a butterfly run through with a pin.
The phone on his desk rang: the unmarked line. He answered, and the familiar voice said, “If you have a moment.”
“Of course.”
He hung up. On the way out of the office he gave the dossier to his secretary, to return surreptitiously to the files. Of course, the surreptitiousness was unnecessary, since long ago she had reported him to their common superiors, but he was certain she behaved just as circumspectly as though she hadn’t. It was this farce of pretended ignorance, wonderful in its ubiquitousness, that eventually squeezed all the juice from life.