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he?”
    She gave a small laugh.
    “Morris Bayard Lowell.” Enunciating.
    Another laugh, totally cheerless.
    “Buck Lowell.”

CHAPTER 4
    I’d heard of M. Bayard Lowell the way I’d
heard of Hemingway and Jackson Pollock and Dylan Thomas.
    When I was in high school, some of his
early prose and verse were in the textbooks. I’d never thought much of his
paint-splotched abstract canvases, but I knew they hung in museums.
    Published in his teens, exhibited in his
twenties, the postwar enfant terrible turned Grand Old Man of Letters.
    But it had been years since I’d heard
anything about him.
    “Shocked?” said Lucy, looking grim but
satisfied.
    “I see what you mean about things
changing. But the only relevance he has to me is his role as your father.”
    She laughed. “His role? Roll in the hay is
about it, Dr. Delaware. The grand moment of conception. Old Buck’s a
love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of guy. He cut out on Mother when I was a few weeks
old and never returned.”
    She smoothed her bangs and sat up
straighter.
    “So how come I’m dreaming about him,
right?”
    “It’s not that unusual. An absent parent
can be a strong presence.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Anger, curiosity. Sometimes fantasies
develop.”
    “Fantasies about him ? Like going to
the Pulitzer ceremony on his arm? No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t around enough
to be relevant.”
    “But when he comes into the picture,
things change.”
    “Who he is changes things. It’s
like being the President’s kid. Or Frank Sinatra’s. People stop perceiving you
as who you are and start seeing you in relationship to him. And they get
shocked—just like you did—to find out the Great Man spawned someone so
crashingly ordinary.”
    “I—”
    “No, it’s okay,” she said, waving a hand.
“I love being ordinary: my ordinary job, my ordinary car, my ordinary
apartment and bills and tax returns and washing dishes and taking out the
garbage. Ordinary is heaven for me, Dr. Delaware, because when I was
growing up nothing was routine.”
    “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