Bleeding Hearts(40)

“Oh, she was real Main Line, all right,” Bob Cheswicki said. “Original Main Line, if you know what I mean. Railroad money. Lots and lots of it.”

“The town house she and her husband lived in was hers?”

Bob nodded. “Through her mother’s side of the family. It goes back to before the Declaration of Independence. That’s her mother’s side of the family all over, if you want to know. They’ve got lineage that sounds like it was made up by David O. Selznick. Four signers of the Declaration of Independence. Nine members of the Continental Congress and sixteen who attended the Constitutional Convention in one capacity or another. So much background, you’re surprised they didn’t strangle on it, except maybe they did. By the time Jackie’s mother married Jackie’s father, the mother’s side was stony-broke and not a hope in hell of recouping their losses. Not in that climate. Jackie’s mother was an only child.”

“And in those days young women of good family didn’t go into business,” Gregor said. “Yes, I see. But there was money on the Isherwood side?”

“Oh, yes, you bet. Lots and lots of it. It came to Jacqueline, of course. She was an only child too. Not very attractive though. At least I think she wasn’t.”

“You think?”

Bob Cheswicki shrugged. “By the time I saw her, she was in the morgue, and nobody is attractive in the morgue. I’ve seen pictures of her, of course, but you can never tell with pictures. People who take very bad ones can be very good-looking in real life.”

“Fair enough.”

“But I also figure she wasn’t very attractive because she married Paul Hazzard. I mean, this is serious Main Line money we’re talking about here. Sure, we get a case or two a decade of some debutante running off with her ski instructor, but it happens a lot less than the public wants to think. These women have their heads screwed on straight ninety-nine percent of the time. They don’t marry nobodies unless they have to. They know they can do better than that.”

Gregor had finished about half his glass of wine. He topped up and thought about what Bob had just told him.

“From what I understood,” Gregor said cautiously, “Paul Hazzard wasn’t a nobody. Of course, if what you mean is a nobody in Main Line social terms, I understand, but—”

“No, no,” Bob insisted. “I mean a nobody. This is—thirty years ago at least we’re talking about here. When they were married, I mean. Paul Hazzard was a psychologist with a degree from Harvard and another one from Johns Hopkins. He had a very respectable practice and a decent income. He’d just written his first book. But he was still nobody. There was nothing at all to indicate that he’d turn out to be the psychological guru best-loved by just about everybody. I think, if you’d told one of the people who knew Paul Hazzard when he was first married to Jacqueline, if you’d told that person then that Paul Hazzard would eventually write a book that would sell two and a half million copies in hardcover—he’d have laughed in your face.”

Gregor thought he ought to get hold of this book. In his experience, books did not sell in the millions of copies like that without having something interesting about them.

“Maybe there was a way to tell,” Gregor told Bob. “Maybe Jacqueline Isherwood saw something in Paul Hazzard that everybody else missed. I don’t know what it’s like these days, but when I was young, women used to pride themselves on being able to do that.”

“Maybe,” Bob Cheswicki said. “But you have to go back to the background. It’s not the kind of chance one of these women would normally take, unless, as I said, she had to.”

“Meaning you think Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard was just plain enough not to be able to command the sort of husband she wanted in the marriage market she would ordinarily have been expected to compete in—I have to keep reminding myself we’re talking about thirty years ago here.”

“I know what you mean,” Bob said. “But it’s not much different in those circles even now, you know. It comes from having so much money, you never really have to work. What do you have left to compete for except each other?”

“Do the men compete for the women?”

“The men are spoiled brats.”

“Let’s get back to Jacqueline and Paul,” Gregor said. “They got married and then what?”

“And then nothing,” Bob told him. “They got married and they were happy, as far as anyone can tell. There were three children, all Paul Hazzard’s from a previous marriage. Caroline, James, and Alyssa. The children all went to the best private schools and then to the Ivy League. Paul wrote his book and started giving seminars on, I don’t know, that stuff.”