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life’s ugliness as possible, and who was there to protect them but men?—fathers, husbands. Against his conviction that marriage is a bourgeois convention, ludicrous, unenforceable, yet Gerald Karr had entered into such a (legal, moral) relationship with a woman, and he meant to honor that vow. And he would honor that vow, in all the ways he could. So it was, Rhonda’s father would not have told her the story of the stabbing and yet by degrees Rhonda came to absorb it for the story of the stabbing was told and retold by Mr. Karr at varying lengths depending upon Mr. Karr’s mood and/or the mood of his listeners, who were likely to be university colleagues, or visiting colleagues from other universities. Let me tell you—this incident that happened to Madeleine—like a fable out of Aesop. Rhonda was sometimes a bit confused—her father’s story of the stabbing shifted in minor ways—West Street became West Broadway, or West Houston—West Twelfth Street at Seventh Avenue—the late-winter season became midsummer—in Mr. Karr’s descriptive words the fetid heat of Manhattan in August . In a later variant of the story which began to be told sometime after Rhonda’s seventh birthday when her father seemed to be no longer living in the largestucco-and-timber house on Broadmead with Rhonda and her mother but elsewhere—for a while in a minimally furnished university-owned faculty residence overlooking Lake Carnegie, later a condominium on Canal Pointe Road, Princeton, still later a stone-and-timber Tudor house on a tree-lined street in Cambridge, Massachusetts—it happened that the story of the stabbing became totally appropriated by Mr. Karr as an experience he’d had himself and had witnessed with his own eyes from his vehicle—not the Volvo but the Toyota station wagon—stalled in traffic less than ten feet from the incident: the delivery van braking to a halt, the pedestrian who’d been crossing against the light— Caucasian, male, arrogant, in a Burberry trench coat, carrying a briefcase—doomed —had dared to strike a fender of the van, shout threats and obscenities at the driver and so out of the van the driver had leapt, as Mr. Karr observed with the eyes of a front-line war correspondent— Dark-skinned young guy with dreadlocks like Medusa, must’ve been Rastafarian—swift and deadly as a panther —the knife, the slashing of the pedestrian’s throat—a ritual, a ritual killing—sacrifice—in Mr. Karr’s version just a single powerful swipe of the knife and again as in a nightmare cinematic replay which Rhonda had seen countless times and had dreamt yet more times there erupted the incredible six-foot jet of blood even as the stricken man kept walking, trying to walk—to escape which was the very heart of the story—the revelation toward which all else led.
    What other meaning was there? What other meaning was possible?
    Rhonda’s father shaking his head marveling Like nothing you could imagine, nothing you’d ever forget, the way the poor bastard kept walking—Jesus!
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    That fetid-hot day in Manhattan. Rhonda had been with Daddy in the station wagon. He’d buckled her into the seat beside him for she was a big enough girl now to sit in the front seat and not in the silly baby-seat in the back. And Daddy had braked the station wagon, and Daddy’s arm had shot out to protect Rhonda from being thrown forward, and Daddy had protected Rhonda from what was out there on the street,beyond the windshield. Daddy had said Shut your eyes, Rhonda! Crouch down and hide your face darling and so Rhonda had.
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    By the time Rhonda was ten years old and in fifth grade at Princeton Day School Madeleine Karr wasn’t any longer quite so cautious about telling the story of the stabbing—or, more frequently, merely alluding to it, since the story of the stabbing had been told