“Your mother died right after you were born?”
“I was a couple of months old.”
“Who raised you?”
“Her older sister, my Aunt Kate. She was just a kid herself, new Barnard grad, living in Greenwich Village. I don’t remember too much about it other than her taking Puck and me to lots of restaurants. Then she got married to Walter Lazar—the author? He was a reporter back then. Kate divorced him after a year and went back to school. Anthropology—she studied with Margaret Mead and started going on expeditions to New Guinea. That meant boarding school for Puck and me, and that’s where we stayed all through high school.”
“Together?”
“No, he was sent to prep academies, and I went to girls’ schools.”
“It must have been tough, being separated.”
“We were used to being shifted around.”
“What about the half siblings you mentioned?”
“Ken and Jo? They lived with their mother, in San Francisco. Like I said, there’s no contact at all.”
“Where was your father all this time?”
“Being famous.”
“Did he support you financially?”
“Oh, sure, the checks kept coming, but for him that was no big deal, he’s rich from his mother’s side. The bills were paid through his bank, and my living expenses were sent to the school and doled out by the headmistress—very organized for an artiste, wouldn’t you say?”
“He never came to visit?”
She shook her head. “Not once. Two or three times a year he’d call, on the way to some conference or art show.”
She pulled something out of her eyelashes.
“I’d get a message to come to the school office and some secretary would hand me the phone, awestruck. I’d brace myself, say hello, and this thunderous voice would come booming through. “Hello, girl. Eating freshly blooded moose meat for breakfast? Getting your corpuscles moving?’ Witty, huh? Like one of his stupid macho hunting stories. A summary of what he was doing, then good-bye. I don’t think I spoke twenty words in all those years.”
She turned to me.
“When I was fourteen, I finally decided I’d had enough and got my roommate to tell him I was out of the dorm. He never called again. All you get with a Great Man is one chance.”
She tried to smile, lips working at it, struggling to form the shape. Finally, she managed to force the corners upward.
“It’s no big deal, Dr. Delaware. Mother died when I was so young I never really knew what it was like to lose her. And he was . . . nothing. Like I said, lots of people have it worse.”
“This issue of being ordinary—”
“I really do like it. Not a shred of talent, same with Puck. That’s probably why he has nothing to do with us. Living reminders that he’s produced mediocrity. He probably wishes we’d all disappear. Poor Jo obliged.”
“How did she die?”
“Climbed a mountain in Nepal and never came down. His wives oblige him, too. Three out of four are dead.”
“Your mother must have been very young when she died.”
“Twenty-one. She got the flu and went into some sort of toxic shock.”
“So she was only twenty when she married him?”
“Just barely. He was forty-six. She was a Barnard girl, too, a sophomore. They met because she was in charge of bringing speakers to campus, and she invited him. Three months later she dropped out, he took her to Paris, and they got married. Puck was born there.”
“When did they get divorced?”
“They didn’t. Right after I was born, he went back to France. It wasn’t long after when she died. The doctors called him, but he never came to the phone. Two weeks after the funeral, a postcard arrived at Aunt Kate’s, along with a check.”
“Who told you this?”
“Puck. He heard it from Aunt Kate—he went out to visit her in New Zealand after he finished college.”
“Ken and Jo are older than you and Puck?”
“Yes. Their mother was his second wife, Mother was his third. The first was ThÉrÈse Vainquer—the French poet?”
I shook my head.
“Apparently she was pretty hot in postwar Paris, hanging around with Gertrude Stein and that bunch. She left him for a Spanish bullfighter and was killed in a car crash soon after. Next came Emma, Ken and Jo’s mom. She was an artist, not very successful. She died around fifteen or sixteen years ago—breast cancer, I think. He left her for my mom, Isabelle Frehling. His fourth wife was Jane something or other, an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They met because the museum had a bunch of his paintings stored in their basement and he wanted them exhibited in order to revive his painting career—it’s pretty dead, you know. So is his writing career. Anyway, he dumped her after about a year and hasn’t married since. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s got another sweet young thing right now. Illusion of immortality.”