Not a Creature Was Stirring(83)

“Goodness,” she said, when the waitress left. “I think that woman’s going to have us married within the hour.”

“Within the week, at any rate.” Gregor smiled. “That’s Linda Melajian, youngest daughter of the house. They sent her over because she has the best memory.”

“The best memory?”

“The rumor is she’s better than a distance mike with a tape recorder attached. She can pick up conversations three miles away and repeat them verbatim.”

“It must be nice,” Bennis said, “to live in a place where everybody knows who you are.”

Linda Melajian came back with Bennis’s coffee, and Bennis drew the cup to her and started doctoring it with sugar. She put in a lot of sugar, as if she wanted to be not only awake but hyperactive.

“So,” she said, “on to the important part, the story of Emma and Daddy and how it all happened with the money. Do you know about the money?”

“About the living trusts?” Gregor said. “Yes, we know about that.”

“I thought you might. You were in there with Floyd Evers for a long time. Didn’t you think that was strange?”

“I thought it was very strange,” Gregor said.

“In case you aren’t used to dealing with people like us, let me tell you it isn’t the done thing to cut your daughters out of your estate. It wasn’t even in the old days—when the money was made, I mean. Conventional wisdom on the Main Line is that you provide your sons with opportunities and your daughters with escape routes. Husbands being what they are, that is.”

“Didn’t that lead to a lot of daughters being married for their money?”

“Nope,” Bennis said. “The Main Line rich have always had very good lawyers. The daughters got incomes outright and the capital was entailed. That’s what we thought was going to happen, Anne Marie and Myra and Emma and I. Daddy was a very old-fashioned man.”

“What about divorce?”

Bennis took a sip of her coffee and shuddered. “God, I hate it this sweet. But it’s the only thing that wakes me up. Look, Mr. Demarkian. The Main Line—the old Main Line—doesn’t get divorced. That’s as true today as it was in 1910. Oh, there have always been exceptions, women who ditched their husbands and went to live in the South of France or whatever. But there are at least four clubs in this city that won’t accept divorced people, and the Philadelphia Assembly won’t accept them, either. One of the girls my coming-out year had a mother who’d been married before, and she wasn’t allowed to attend her own daughter’s debut. And that was in—what?—1972? It’s even worse now. People are getting more conservative, not less.”

“That doesn’t sound like money would be much of an escape route.”

“You don’t have to get divorced to leave your husband, Mr. Demarkian. The Main Line is full of married-but-separated ladies.”

Gregor raised his eyebrows. This was like listening to a recap of a novel by Henry James. The odd thing was how real it sounded. He had no trouble at all imagining the old Main Line as just what Bennis said it was.

“But,” he said, “you and your sisters don’t have an escape route. Your brothers don’t have many opportunities, either.”

“That was just spite,” Bennis said. “Daddy was just as spiteful as he was old-fashioned. He thought the boys were a lot of mush-headed wimps. With us, with the girls, it was very different. And the thing is, I could hardly blame him. I mean, he did think one of us had tried to kill him.”

“Emma,” Gregor said.

“He didn’t know it was Emma. And maybe we didn’t either, but I’ll get to that. I think Anne Marie tried to tell him once, but he wasn’t about to listen. He just went out and bought fifteen editions of King Lear and put them up all over his study. And did all that with the money, of course. But if he’d been sure it was Emma, he would only have cut out Emma. He’d have loved that, really.”

“Not a nice man,” Gregor said.

“No,” Bennis agreed. “Daddy was not a nice man.”

“This was in 1980?” Gregor said. “Was that when he was confined to the wheelchair?”

“This was in 1980,” Bennis said, “but by then he’d been confined to the wheelchair for years. Since Teddy was ten, as a matter of fact. I was in Paris at the time. I remember, though, because Daddy ended up in the wheelchair and Teddy ended up in the leg brace because of the same accident. Of course, Teddy always claimed Daddy had tried to kill him.”

“Of course?”