“It’s made a very nice pile of money for everybody involved,” Nick commented. “How do you mean, Caroline was apocalyptic? Was she making threats?”
“Oh, no. Caroline never makes threats. She doesn’t even threaten suicide anymore now that she went into therapy. No, you know, she was just talking about the cosmic significance of it all.”
“The cosmic significance of Candida DeWitt’s memoirs?”
“Of course not. The cosmic significance of Jacqueline’s dying. In Caroline’s mind, Jacqueline did it deliberately. She knew Caroline had just started therapy, so she got herself killed to avoid the inevitable confrontation. I’m putting it badly. But it doesn’t make much sense even when Caroline explains it herself.”
“But what did she think of Candida DeWitt’s memoirs?”
Alyssa shrugged. “She was against them, of course. I mean, we all are, aren’t we? No matter how understanding I’m being, I’d just as soon not see all that raked up again. Do you suppose she’ll get on talk shows, talking about the sex?”
“She might.”
“It would make Daddy absolutely livid. Caroline’s going to make Daddy absolutely livid too. She was nattering on and on about what she was going to say to him as I left. I don’t envy him that conversation, I tell you. Why he puts up with it, I don’t know. Daddy’s always telling those people who come to those seminars he runs that they shouldn’t put up with anything at all.”
“Well,” Nick said judiciously, “he hasn’t been giving very many seminars the last few years.”
“That’s true,” Alyssa said.
“Maybe he doesn’t feel up to holding out against your sister Caroline. She can be something like a force of nature.”
“That’s true too,” Alyssa said.
“Why don’t you pour me a glass of wine while you’re up,” Nick told her. “Some kind of sherry if you have it. You should try not to let this upset you too much, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, I know what you mean, all right.” Alyssa found a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and poured Nick an oversize glass of it, just the way he liked.
Really, she thought. Families were such a pain. So very impossible. So very—so very there. If it were up to her, she would redesign all their personalities. Daddy and Caroline would be interested in opera instead of psychology. James would be terribly respectable and very concerned about the poor. The only one she would leave the same would be herself. She might not be perfect, but she was very, very, very, very sane.
She handed Nick his glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and drifted away in the direction of the front window, which looked down the hill into what must once have been a thriving urban enclave but was now not more than a collection of concrete overpasses, twisting into the blackness like prophecies of ugliness. Maybe they should move out to Radnor someday. Maybe they should move permanently away, to somewhere like Bermuda.
“Do you know what I think?” Alyssa asked Nick without turning around to face him. “I think it was the worst possible thing that Caroline never married. It’s made her too caught up in herself.”
5
JAMES HAZZARD SOMETIMES WONDERED what he would have done with his life if he had been born fifty years earlier than he had. He had visions of what it had been like during those fifty years. He had received them from the ranks of black-and-white movies he kept in the media room off his office. MGM, Warner Bros., RKO, Fox—every one of them had made its contribution to the image of the Gypsy fortune-teller, that fat old woman in dirty clothes, hunched over a crystal ball in a filthy trailer parked on a darkened patch of ground at the edge of town. Every one of them had seen fit to make the prophecies real and the Gypsy women embodiments of evil. Maybe they had to do that because, being Hollywood, they were pathologically afraid of older women. Maybe they were just being silly. Surely any Gypsy fortune-teller whose prophecies were real could make a million dollars on the stock exchange and not have to live in a filthy trailer.
James Hazzard’s office was in a four-story brownstone in one of the few nice residential neighborhoods left in central Philadelphia. A discreet brass plaque fastened to the center of the pearl-gray front door was all there was to mark the building as a place of business. The plaque said
JAMES HAZZARD
ASTROLOGER
in upright Roman letters identical to the ones used to announce the existence of the society gynecologist next door. James Hazzard’s suits came from Brooks Brothers. His shoes were custom-made at John Lobb in London and sent to him by Federal Express. He had been in a filthy trailer once, when he was a sophomore at Brown, but that was just to get laid. The girl involved had had as much prophetic insight as a Pet Rock. James didn’t have much prophetic insight himself, but he did have a talent for reading people. He knew what they wanted and what they hoped for and—best of all—what made them afraid. When the time came to put up or shut up, he always knew what to say.