“Truly?”
“Yes, truly.”
“In that case, perhaps you’d like to pay your debt by taking me somewhere for a cocktail and dinner,” she suggested.
“I’d like it very much, but I’m not sure that it would be discreet.”
“Oh, nonsense. Why not?”
“You’re a student, aren’t you?” he queried.
“Sort of one. I’m doing graduate work.”
“Well, perhaps a teacher may be allowed a little more freedom with a graduate student than with an undergraduate.”
“I shouldn’t worry about it, if I were you. Don’t you know who I am?”
“Of course. We were introduced inside. Your name is Madelaine Jorgensen.”
“Haven’t you heard of my father?” she asked, a little impatient.
“No less than Daniel Jorgensen. And I get your point. I am, in a sense, in protective custody. Where would you like to go for your cocktail and dinner?”
“My car’s there at the curb. I’d like to go to Kansas City, if you don’t mind.”
He didn’t, and they went. Three days later, when Madelaine went home, it was not, after all, to stay. She went to tell her father, Dan Jorgensen, that she had found the man she wanted and meant to have. Home was in the western part of the state on the site of the old wheat farm that Grandfather Jorgensen had once cultivated, but there was no wheat now on what remained of the land.
The old frame house had been torn down long ago and replaced by a brick colonial, painted white, on the crest of a long rise. Dan Jorgensen, who had married late and buried his wife soon, was well into his sixties at this time. He had a strong sense of his own importance, an irascible temper and a bad heart. He didn’t know it, of course, but he was not destined to survive his last well, which was almost dry. The others already were.
He was somewhat ambivalent about Madelaine’s pronouncement.
He felt on the one hand that the man, whoever he was, was probably motivated by cupidity and ought to be exposed and somehow punished. On the other hand, he decided that the chap had damn well better be reasonable and available if Maddy wanted him.
“Who is this fellow?” he said.
“His name is Bradley Cannon.”
“Bradley Cannon? Never heard of him.”
“He teaches mathematics at Peermont. It’s his first year there.”
“One of those professor fellows? Seems to me, with your advantages, you could do considerably better for yourself,” the old man gruntled irritably.
“I don’t want to do better. I want Brad.”
“Are you sure he’s all right? These intellectual fellows go off the deep end sometimes. They have no common sense or judgment.”
“He’s no left-winger or anything like that, if that’s what you mean. As a matter of fact, I doubt if he has any very deep convictions about anything.”
“Well, at least I’m glad to hear he teaches mathematics. There’s some sense to mathematics. Can’t say I’d relish having a son-in-law who taught poetry or philosophy or any of those fancy things that don’t do anything but get a man confused.”
“He’s a very good teacher of mathematics, I understand. He’ll probably go up at Peermont pretty fast.”
“If you marry him, he’ll go up faster than that. I’ll see to it myself.
“I thought you might be willing to help.”
“If you’re sure you want this fellow, you bring him out here so I can talk with him. He’ll marry you, all right, if he knows the difference between a good time and a bad one.”
“Oh, he’ll marry me, all right. You needn’t concern yourself with that in the least. I’m sure I can manage it without difficulty.”
“I’ll bet you can. Same as you manage me and everyone else when it serves your purpose.” He stared at her with sudden suspicion. “You got yourself into a condition? You been sleeping with this fellow?”
“If I had been, I wouldn’t tell you, but I haven’t. Not yet.”
“You’ll do as you please. I know that. When do you plan to get married?”
“I’m not sure yet. Possibly in the spring. What I’d like to do is invite him out here for a week at Christmas.”
“Sure. Bring him out. Right now, though, I’m going out to shoot some quail. You want to come?”
“Is quail season open?”
“If it is or isn’t, I’ll shoot quail on my own property if I want to.”
“You go ahead, then. I don’t feel like hunting today.”
When he was gone, she went up to her room on the second floor and began to read, but she was not interested in the book that day, or very much in any book any day. After a while she simply sat quietly by a window and stared out and down a long poplar-lined drive to a road at its end.
For some time she thought of her past, of her life in this house with a strong and possessive father who had made her, in her turn, as strong and possessive as he. Then, tiring of this, she began to think of Bradley Cannon, whom she wished to possess.
She became aware after a long while that the light was fading outside the window, the poplars along the drive slim and wavering shadows in descending dusk. She had not heard her father in the house since his departure, and this was odd, she thought, for he was not a quiet man, and the light had surely been too weak for shooting for some time.
Going into the hall, she walked down to her father’s room and knocked. There was no response, so she went on downstairs to the kitchen, where she was told by the cook and the maid that her father had not returned!
She left the kitchen by the back door and walked across a wide yard to a barn that had little purpose except to house the cars. She was standing at a corner of the barn peering across fading fields when she saw two men approaching along a fence with a burden between them. The men were hunters, as it turned out, and the burden was Daniel Jorgensen, who was dead.
At first she thought that he had been shot accidentally, but this was not true. He had simply dropped dead in a field and had lain entangled in a thicket until the pair of hunters had come along to find him.
Later in his room, where she had him carried, she stood beside his bed and tried to summon grief and a feeling of definitive loss, but she was curiously empty and inept, as if she had been caught unprepared for a performance. She had difficulty, now that his eyes were closed and his face set, in convincing herself that he had ever been alive to her in any real sense.
She buried her father three days later, and two days after that returned to Peermont and withdrew as a student. She called Brad in the evening and asked him to come and see her, which he did. They walked that evening across the campus of Peermont and sat in chill darkness for almost an hour on the stone steps of the library.
“What are you going to do now?” he said.
“First,” she said, “I’m going home and arrange for the sale of all the property there. I don’t want to keep it, now that father’s dead.”
“Are you sure that’s the wise thing to do?”
“Yes. You can be assured I’ll get everything out of it that it’s worth, and probably more. There won’t be as much money for me as most people think, but there will be plenty. About a million, I’d guess.”
“Where are you going afterward?” he asked with real interest.
“I’m coming back here and buy a house near the campus. I like it here. It’s the most pleasant place I know to live. I may live here the rest of my life. I don’t know. I’ll see how it works out.”
“I’m terribly sorry this has happened, Maddy.”
“Are you? I’m not sure that I am. I’ve tried to analyze my feelings, and I’m not sure. I don’t seem to feel any particular sorrow.”
“You’ve had a shock, that’s all. You’re alone now, aren’t you? Will you be living alone in the house you buy?”
“I don’t know.” She turned on the stone step and looked at him levelly in the darkness. “That depends on you.”