Lawrence Block - Sins of the Fathers

He sighed, fixed his eyes on mine. “How much of this did you guess at, Scudder?”

“A little of it. I thought it might even have gone farther than that.”

“I’m not an animal.”

“People do things you wouldn’t believe. And they aren’t always animals. What happened the last time you saw Wendy?”

“I’ve never told anyone about this. Why do I have to tell you?”

“You don’t. But you want to.”

“Do I?” He sighed again. “She was home from college. Everything was the way it had always been, but there was something about her that was different. I suppose she had already established a pattern of getting involved with older men.”

“Yes.”

“She came home late one night. She’d gone out alone. Perhaps she let someone pick her up, I don’t know.” He closed his eyes and looked back at that evening. “I was awake when she came home. I wasn’t purposely waiting up for her. My wife had gone to sleep early, and I had a book I wanted to read. Wendy came home around one or two in the morning. She’d been drinking. She wasn’t reeling, but she was at least slightly drunk.

“I saw a side of her I had never seen before. She… she propositioned me.”

“Just like that?”

“She asked me if I wanted to fuck. She said… obscene things. Described acts she wanted to perform with me. She tried to grab me.”

“What did you do?”

“I slapped her.”

“I see.”

“I told her she was drunk. I told her to go upstairs and get to bed. I don’t know if the slap sobered her, but a shadow passed over her face and she turned away without a word and climbed the stairs. I didn’t know what to do. I thought perhaps I ought to go to her and tell her it was all right, that we would just forget about it. In the end I did nothing. I sat up for another hour or so, then went to bed myself.” He looked up. “And in the morning we both pretended nothing had happened. Neither of us ever referred to the incident again.”

I drank what was in my glass. It all meshed now, every bit of it.

“The reason I didn’t go to her… I was sickened by the way she acted. Disgusted. But something in me was… excited.”

I nodded.

“I’m not sure I trusted myself to go to her room that night, Scudder.”

“Nothing would have happened.”

“How do you know that?”

“Everybody has mean little places inside himself. It’s the ones who aren’t aware of them who fly off the handle. You were able to see what was happening. That made you capable of keeping a lid on it.”

“Maybe.”

After a while I said, “I don’t think you have much to blame yourself for. It seems to me that everything was already set in motion before you were in a position to do anything about it. It wasn’t a one-sided thing when you responded physically to Wendy squirming around on your lap. She was behaving seductively, although I’m sure she didn’t realize it at the time. It all fits together — competing with her mother, trying to find Daddy hiding inside every older man she found attractive. Lots of girls try to seduce professors, you know, and most professors learn to be very good at discouraging that sort of thing. Wendy had a pretty high success ratio. She was evidently very good at it.”

“It’s funny.”

“What is?”

“Earlier you made her sound like a victim. Now she sounds like a villain.”

“Everybody’s both.”

Neither of us had very much to say on the way out to the airport. He seemed more relaxed than before, but I had no way of knowing how much of that was just on the surface. If I’d done him any good, I’d done so less by what I had found out for him than by what I’d made him tell me. There were priests and psychiatrists who would have listened to him, and they probably would have done him more good than I did, but I’d been elected instead.

At one point I said, “Whatever blame you decide to assign yourself, keep one thing in mind. Wendy was in the process of turning out all right. I don’t know how long it would have taken her to find a cleaner way of making a living, but I doubt it would have been much more than a year.”

“You can’t be certain of that.”

“I certainly can’t prove it.”

“That makes it worse, doesn’t it? It makes it more tragic.”

“It makes it more tragic. I don’t know if that’s better or worse.”

“What? Oh, I see. That’s an interesting distinction.”

I went to the Allegheny desk. There was a flight to New York within the hour, and I checked in for it. When I turned around, Hanniford was standing next to me with a check in his hand. I asked him what it was for. He said I hadn’t mentioned more money and he didn’t know what constituted a fair payment, but he was pleased with the job I had done for him and he wanted to give me a bonus.

I didn’t know what was fair payment, either. But I remembered what I had told Lewis Pankow. When somebody hands you money, you take it. I took it.

I didn’t get around to unfolding it until I was on the plane. It was for a thousand dollars. I’m still not sure why he gave it to me.

In my hotel room I opened a paperback dictionary of saints and flipped through it. I found myself reading about St. Mary Goretti, who was born in Italy in 1890. When she was twelve a young man began making overtures to her. Eventually he attempted to ravish her and threatened to kill her if she resisted. She did, and he did, stabbing her over and over again with his knife. She died within twenty-four hours.

After eight years of unrepentant imprisonment her murderer had a change of heart, I learned. At the end of twenty-seven years he was released, and on Christmas Day, 1937, he contrived to receive Communion side by side with Mary’s widowed mother. He has since been cited as an example by those who advocate the abolition of capital punishment.

I always find something interesting in that book.

I went next door for dinner but didn’t have much appetite. The waiter offered to put my leftover steak in a doggie bag. I told him not to bother.

So I went around the corner to Armstrong’s and wound up at the corner table in back where it had all started just a few days ago. Cale Hanniford walked into my life on Tuesday, and now it was Saturday. It seemed as though it had been a lot longer than that.

It had started on Tuesday as far as I was concerned, but it had in fact started a lot earlier than that, and I sipped bourbon and coffee and wondered how far you could trace it back. At some point or other it had probably become inevitable, but I didn’t know just when that point was. There was a day when Richie Vanderpoel and Wendy Hanniford met each other, and that had to be a turning point of one sort or another, but maybe their separate ends had been charted far in advance of that date and their meeting only arranged that they would happen to one another. Maybe it went a lot further back, to Robert Blohr dying in Korea and Margaret Vanderpoel opening her veins in her bathtub.

Maybe it was Eve’s fault, messing around with apples. Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.

“Buy a lady a drink?”

I looked up. It was Trina, dressed in civilian clothes and wearing a smile that faded as she studied my face. “Hey,” she said. “Where were you?”

“Chasing private thoughts.”

“Want to be alone?”

“That’s the last thing I want. Did you say something about buying you a drink?”

“It was an idea I had, yes.”

I flagged the waiter and ordered a stinger for her and another of the same for myself. She talked about a couple of strange customers she’d had the night before. We coasted through a few rounds on small talk, and then she reached out a hand and touched the tip of my chin with her finger.