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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 Therese 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.”
    She crossed her legs and held one knee
with both hands.
    Tossing out details about a man who
supposedly had no role in her life.
    She read my mind. “I know, I know, it
sounds as if I cared enough to find all this out, but I got it from Puck. A few
years ago, he was into this discover-your-roots thing. I didn’t have the heart
to tell him I couldn’t care less.”
    Folding her arms across her chest.
    “So,” I said, “at least we know the log
cabin wasn’t somewhere you’ve actually been. At least not with your father.”
    “Call him Buck, please. Mr. Macho, the
Great Man, whatever, anything but that.”
    Touching her stomach.
    Remembering the ulcer she’d had before
college, I said, “Where did you live the summer after you graduated from high
school?”
    She hesitated for a second. “I volunteered
at a Head Start center in Boston.”
    “Was it difficult?”
    “No. I loved teaching. This was in
Roxbury, little ghetto kids who really responded. You could see the effects
after one summer.”
    “Did you ever consider a teaching