“Gregor, for God’s sake, come on. We’re due downtown at a cocktail party at seven. Remember? I told you—”
“I remember,” he said. He did too. He just didn’t want to. He hated cocktail parties. He hated parties of all kinds, except the ones they gave on Cavanaugh Street, where he was allowed to pile a plate high with food and take it off to sit on the sidelines with Father Tibor.
“Gregor, you’d better get dressed. You’d really better. I was intending to take a cab—”
“Anything, as long as you aren’t driving.”
“Well, I’ll have to drive if you don’t get up and hurry. What is all this stuff anyway?”
Gregor got out of his chair and began to wander toward the bedroom. “Has Donna Moradanyan made it up with Russ yet?” he asked. “Is there still going to be a wedding? I notice nobody took the decorations down.”
“Donna says the next time she sees Russ, she’s going to shoot him,” Bennis said.
Gregor turned on the light in his bedroom. When he had first moved into this apartment, years ago, he had kept it very stark. The bare minimum of furniture, the bare minimum of carpeting and kitchen equipment, an absolute absence of the personal. Now he was better. He had a painting in the living room and a nice rug under his bed and his pictures of Elizabeth (before her last illness) on top of his bureau. The bedroom was even messy, so that it looked reasonably lived in. For a while after Elizabeth had died, Gregor had become obsessively, depressingly neat. He had now gotten over it.
He found a gray suit and a blue suit and a whole line of white shirts hanging in his closet, fresh from the dry cleaner’s. He found clean socks rolled into a ball and a tie in the top drawer of his dresser. He laid everything out on the unmade bed and started to get dressed.
“What’s all this writing about?” Bennis asked him again. She was standing right outside the bedroom door, shouting at the crack.
Gregor put on his socks. “Patricia MacLaren Willis,” he said, “except from what I’ve been able to uncover, nobody called her that. They called her Patsy.”
“Patsy Willis. Not bad.”
“Not Patsy Willis, Patsy MacLaren.” Gregor shrugged his arms into the sleeves of his shirt. “This is paper research you’re listening to, don’t forget. She was the last surviving member of a fairly well-heeled family from the Main Line, not enormously rich like the Hannafords—”
“Can it.”
“—and not social, but with enough money in the bank so that even after both her parents died their estate was able to put her through Vassar without having to resort to scholarships or loans. She graduated with the class of 1969.”
“Not a really great year except at places like Berkeley,” Bennis said. She’d graduated with the class of ’73.
“Whatever. Anyway. Patsy MacLaren graduated, and then she went off to do the Indian meditation thing for a year with her college roommate. It took two years, actually. We have a statement from one of the administrators of her trust at the Morgan Bank—former administrators, to be precise. This isn’t the kind of trust you would have approved of, Bennis. Patsy MacLaren was eating capital.”
“I’m surprised the administrators let her get away with it.”
“They had to. Capital was all there was. I said her parents were well-heeled but not rich. According to the bank, Patsy went through a really heavy period of sixties rebellion, complete with LSD and long hair and even a try at going back to the land, and by the time she got back from India and all those places, she didn’t want to have anything to do with what she called ‘the ravages of capitalism.’ I’m quoting now. The man I talked to was still a little annoyed about it all.”
“Check the buttons on your shirt,” Bennis said automatically. “You always do them up wrong. What happened to Patsy—what? MacLaren? What happened to her after that?”
Gregor already had his pants on and his belt buckled. He looked at his shirt and discovered he had buttoned it wrong. He undid it and started over again.
“She went to graduate school,” Gregor said. “At the University of Pennsylvania. In some kind of liberal arts. I think it was English, but I’m not sure. She went for three years.”
“Did she get a degree?”
“Not as far as I’ve been able to make out.”
“What happened then?”
“She ran out of money, and soon after that she got married. There was a notice in the newspaper. That was the only way the administrators at the bank knew anything about it. There wasn’t any reason that they should. The trust was folded by then. I still would have thought that simple courtesy would require—”