Lawrence Block - Sins of the Fathers

“How did the date go?”

“What makes you so sure I went?”

“You did, didn’t you?”

“I was earning eighty dollars a week. Nobody was taking me to great dinners or Broadway shows. And I hadn’t even met anyone I wanted to sleep with.”

“Did you enjoy the evening?”

“No. All I could think about was that I was going to have to sleep with this man. And he was old .”

“How old?”

“I don’t know. Fifty-five, sixty. I’m never good at guessing how old people are. He was too old for me, that’s all I knew.”

“But you went along with it.”

“Yes. I had agreed to go, and I didn’t want to spoil the party. Dinner was good, and my date was charming enough. I didn’t pay much attention to the show. I couldn’t. I was too anxious about the rest of the evening.” She paused, focused her eyes over my shoulder. “Yes, I slept with him. And yes, he gave me fifty dollars. And yes, I took it.”

I drank some coffee.

“Aren’t you going to ask me why I took the money?”

“Should I?”

“I wanted the damned money. And I wanted to know how it felt. Being a whore.”

“Did you feel that you were a whore?”

“Well, that’s what I was, isn’t it? I let a man fuck me, and I took money for it.”

I didn’t say anything. After a few moments she said, “Oh, the hell with it. I took a few more dates. Maybe one a week on the average. I don’t know why. It wasn’t the money. Not exactly. It was, I don’t know. Call it an experiment. I wanted to know how I felt about it. I wanted to… learn certain things about myself.”

“What did you learn?”

“That I’m a little squarer than I thought. That I didn’t care for the things I kept finding hiding in corners of my mind. That I wanted, oh, a cleaner life. That I wanted to fall in love with somebody. Get married, make babies, that whole trip. It turned out to be what I wanted. When I realized that, I knew I had to move out on my own. I couldn’t go on rooming with Wendy.”

“How did she react?”

“She was very upset.” Her eyes widened at the recollection. “I hadn’t expected that. We weren’t terribly close. At least I never thought we were terribly close. I never showed her the inside of my head, and she never showed me what was going on inside hers. We were together a lot, especially once I started taking dates, and we talked a great deal, but it was always about superficial things. I didn’t think my presence was especially important to her. I told her I had to move out, and I told her why, and she was really shook. She actually begged me to stay.”

“That’s interesting.”

“She told me she’d pay a larger share of the rent. That was when I found out she’d actually been paying twice as much as I was all along. I think she would have let me stay there rent-free if I wanted. And of course she insisted I didn’t have to take any dates, that she wouldn’t want me to do it if it was putting me uptight. She even suggested that she would limit her activities to times when I was at work — actually a lot of her dates were during the afternoon, businessmen who couldn’t get away from their wives during the evening, which was one reason why it took me as long as it did to realize how she was making her living. She said evening dates would have to take her to a hotel or something, that the place would be just for us when I was around. But that wasn’t it, I had to get away from the life entirely. Because it was too much of a temptation for me, see. I was making eighty dollars a week and working hard for it, and there was an enormous temptation to quit work, which is something I never did, but I recognized the temptation for what it was. And it scared me.”

“So you moved out.”

“Yes. Wendy cried when I packed my stuff and left. She kept saying she didn’t know what she would do without me. I told her she could get another roommate without any trouble, someone who would fit in with her life better. She said she didn’t want anyone who fit in too well because she was more than one kind of person. I didn’t know what she meant at the time.”

“Do you know now?”

“I think so. I think she wanted someone who was a little straighter than she was, someone who was not a part of the sexual scene she was involved in. I think now that she was a little disappointed when I took that first double date with her. She did her best to talk me into it, but she was disappointed that she was successful. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so. It fits in with some other things.” There was something she had said earlier that had been bothering me, and I poked around in my memory, looking for it. “You said you weren’t surprised that she was seeing older men.”

“No, that didn’t surprise me.”

“Why not?”

“Well, because of what happened at school.”

“What happened at school?”

She frowned. She didn’t say anything, and I repeated the question.

“I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.”

“She was involved with someone at school? An older man?”

“You have to remember I didn’t know her very well. I knew who she was to say hello to, and maybe I was in a class or two with her at one time or another, but I barely knew her.”

“Was it tied in with her leaving school just a few months shy of graduation?”

“I don’t really know that much about it.”

I said, “Marcia, look at me. Anything you tell me about what happened at college will be something I would otherwise find out, anyway. You’ll just save me a great deal of time and travel. I’d rather not have to make a trip out to Indiana to ask a lot of people some embarrassing questions. I—”

“Oh, don’t do that!”

“I’d rather not. But it’s up to you.”

She told it in bits and pieces, largely because she didn’t know too much of it. There had been a scandal shortly before Wendy’s departure from campus. It seemed that she had been having an affair with a professor of art history, a middle-aged man with children Wendy’s age or older. The man had wanted to leave his wife and marry Wendy, the wife had swallowed a handful of sleeping pills, was rushed to the hospital, had her stomach pumped, and survived. In the course of the ensuing debacle, Wendy packed a suitcase and disappeared.

And according to campus gossip this was not the first time she had been involved with an older man. Her name had been linked with several professors, all of them considerably older than she was.

“I’m sure a lot of it was just talk,” Marcia Thal told me. “I don’t think she could have had affairs with that many men without more people knowing about it, but when the whole thing blew up, people were really talking about her. I guess some of it must have been true.”

“Then you knew when you first roomed with her that she was unconventional.”

“I told you. I didn’t care about her morals. I didn’t see anything wrong with sleeping with a lot of men. Not if that was what she wanted to do.” She considered this for a moment. “I guess I’ve changed since then.”

“This professor, the art historian. What was his name?”

“I’m not going to tell you his name. It’s not important. Maybe you can find out yourself. I’m sure you can, but I’m not going to tell you.”

“Was it Cottrell?”

“No. Why?”

“Did she know anyone named Cottrell? In New York?”

“I don’t think so. The name doesn’t ring a bell or anything.”

“Was there anyone she was seeing regularly? More than the others?”

“Not really. Of course she could have had someone who came over a lot during the afternoons and I wouldn’t have known it.”

“How much money do you suppose she was making?”