The Sins of the Fathers (15 page)

"High school graduation."

"And this is your wife?"

"Yes. I don't know when that was taken. Six or seven years ago, I would guess."

"I don't see a resemblance."

"No. Wendy favored her father."

"Blohr."

"Yes. I never met him. I'm told she resembled him. I couldn't say one way or the other, on the basis of my own knowledge, but I'm told she does. Did."

I returned Mrs. Hanniford's photo to its place on his desk. I looked into Wendy's eyes. We had become too intimate these past few days, she and I. I probably knew more about her than she might have wanted me to know.

"You said you thought she was compelled."

I nodded.

"By what?"

I put the photo back where it belonged. I watched Hanniford try not to meet Wendy's eyes. He didn't manage it. He looked into them and winced.

I said, "I'm not a psychologist, a psychiatrist, any of those things. I'm just a man who used to be a cop."

"I know that."

"I can make guesses. I'd guess she could never stop looking for Daddy. She wanted to be somebody's daughter, and they kept wanting to fuck her. And that was all right with her because that was what Daddy was, he was a man who took Mommy to bed and got her pregnant and then went away to Korea and was never heard from again. He was somebody who was married to somebody else, and that was all right, because the men she was attracted to were always married to somebody else. It could get very hairy looking for Daddy because if you weren't careful he might like you too much and Mommy might take a lot of pills and it would be time for you to go away. That's why it was safer all around if Daddy gave you money. Then it was all on a cash-and-carry basis and Daddy wouldn't flip out over you and Mommy wouldn't take pills and you could stay where you were, you wouldn't have to leave. I'm not a psychiatrist and I don't know if this is the way it works in textbooks or not. I never read the textbooks and I never met Wendy. I didn't get inside of her life until her life was over. I kept trying to get into her life and I kept getting into her death instead. Do you have anything to drink?"

"Pardon me?"

"Do you have anything to drink? Like bourbon."

"Oh. I think there's a bottle of something or other."

How could you not know whether or not you had any liquor around?

"Get it."

His face went through some interesting changes. He started off wondering who the hell I thought I was to order him around, and then he realized that it was immaterial, and then he got up and went over to a cabinet and opened a door.

"It's Canadian Club," he announced.

"Fine."

"I don't believe I have anything to mix it with."

"Good. Just bring the bottle and a glass." And if you don't have a glass, that's all right, sir.

He brought the bottle and a water tumbler and watched with clinical interest as I poured whiskey until the glass was two-thirds full. I drank off about half of it and put the glass down on top of his desk.

Then I picked it up quickly because it might have left a ring otherwise, and I made hesitant motions and he decoded them and handed me a couple of memo slips that could serve as a coaster.

"Scudder?"

"What?"

"Do you suppose a psychiatrist could have helped her?"

"I don't know. Maybe she went to one. I couldn't find anything in her apartment to suggest that she did, but it's possible. I think she was helping herself."

"By living the way she did?"

"Uh-huh. Her life was a fairly stable one. It may not look like it from the outside, but I think it was.

That's why she carried the Maisel girl as a roommate. It's also why she hooked up with Vanderpoel.

Her apartment had a very settled feel to it. Well-chosen furniture. A place to live in. I think the men in her life represented a stage she was working her way through, and I would guess that she consciously saw it that way. The men represented physical and emotional survival for the time being, and I think she anticipated reaching a point where she wouldn't need them anymore."

I drank some more whiskey. It was a little sweet for my taste, and a little too smooth, but it went down well enough.

I said, "In some ways I learned more about Richie Vanderpoel than I did about Wendy. One of the people I talked to said all ministers' sons are crazy. I don't know that that's true, but I think most of them must have a hard time of it.

Richie's father is a very uptight type. Stern, cold. I doubt that he ever showed the boy much in the way of warmth. Richie's mother killed herself when he was six years old.

No brothers or sisters, just the kid and his father and a dried-up housekeeper in a rectory that could double as a mausoleum. He grew up with mixed-up feelings about both of his parents. His feelings in that area complemented Wendy's pretty closely. That's why they were so good for each other."

"Good for each other!"

"Yes."

"For God's sake, he killed her!"

"They were good for each other. She was a woman he wasn't afraid of, and he was a man she couldn't mistake for her father. They were able to have a domestic life together that gave them both a measure of security they hadn't had before. And there was no sexual relationship to complicate things."

"They didn't sleep together?"

I shook my head. "Richie was homosexual. At least he'd been functioning as a homosexual before he moved in with your daughter. He didn't like it much, wasn't comfortable about it. Wendy gave him a chance to get away from that life.

He could live with a woman without having to prove his manhood because she didn't want him as a lover. After he met her he stopped making the rounds of the gay bars.

And I think she stopped seeing men in the evenings. I couldn't prove it, but earlier she had been getting taken out for dinner several nights a week. The kitchen in her apartment was fully stocked when I saw it. I think Richie cooked dinner for the two of them just about every night. I told you a few minutes ago that I thought Wendy was working things out. I think both of them were working things out together.

Maybe they would have started sleeping together eventually. Maybe Wendy would have stopped seeing men professionally and gone out and taken a job. I'm just guessing, that's all any of this is, but I'd take the guess a little further. I think they would have gotten married eventually, and they might even have made it work."

"That's very hypothetical."

"I know."

"You make it sound as though they were in love."

"I don't know that they were in love. I don't think there's any doubt that they loved each other."

He picked up his glasses, put them on, took them off again. I poured more whiskey in my glass and took a small sip of it. He sat for a long while, looking at his hands. Every now and then he looked up at the two photographs on top of his desk.

Finally he said, "Then why did he kill her?"

"No way to answer that. He didn't have any memory of the act, and the whole scene got mixed up with memories of his mother's death. Anyway, that's not your question."

"It's not?"

"Of course not. What you want to know is how much of it was your fault."

He didn't say anything.

"Something happened the last time you saw your daughter. Do you want to tell me about it?"

HE didn't want to, not a whole hell of a lot, and it took him a few minutes to get warmed up. He talked vaguely about the sort of child she had been, very bright and warm and affectionate, and about how much he had loved her.

Then he said, "When she was, it's hard to remember, but I think she must have been eight years old.

Eight or nine. She would always sit on my lap and give me hugs and... hugs and kisses, and she would squirm around a little, and-"

He had to stop for a minute. I didn't say anything.

"One day, I don't know why it happened, but one day she was on my lap, and I-oh, Christ."

"Take your time."

"I got excited. Physically excited."

"It happens."

"Does it?" His face looked like something from a stained-glass window. "I couldn't... couldn't even think about it. I was so disgusted with myself. I loved her the way you love a daughter, at least I had always thought that was what I felt for her, and to find myself responding to her sexually-"

"I'm no expert, Mr. Hanniford, but I think it's a very natural thing. Just a physical response. Some people get erections from riding on trains."

"This was more than that."

"Maybe."

"It was, Scudder. I was terrified of what I saw in myself. Terrified of what it could lead to, the harm it could have for Wendy. And so I made a conscious decision that day. I stopped being so close to her."

He lowered his eyes. "I withdrew. I made myself limit my affection for her, the affection I expressed, that is. Maybe the affection I felt as well. There was less hugging and kissing and cuddling. I was determined not to let that one occasion repeat itself."

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.