Gregor cleared his throat. “Where is everybody?” he asked. “I thought I’d come in here and find a horde of angry civilians, all wanting to know when the police would let them go home.”
“We are home,” Liz said reasonably. “Except for Maris, of course, and she’s passed out on the couch in the living room. My mother is asleep. The night nurse is with her. Geoff is asleep, too, but Mark’s in with him reading something or the other. Jimmy’s taking a shower.”
“It might be best if you got him out of here,” Gregor said. “It might be best if you got yourself out of here, too, and your mother, as soon as you can manage it. There’s no way to cordon off this house. When the press hits, you’re going to be overrun and there isn’t going to be much you can do about it.”
“I know.” Liz got up. “I’m going to make myself some tea. Do you want some?”
“No, thank you.”
“Coffee? Wine? Maris has a Chanel No. 5 bottle full of Gordon’s gin, if you want me to make you something stronger. One thing you have to say about Maris. She never stoops to cheap liquor.”
“She’s also a disaster waiting to happen. Mr. Card is probably right about her feeding stories to the tabloids. I’m sure you already know that.”
“Oh, absolutely. She’s probably getting paid for it, too. It would explain how she could afford to buy some of the things she does. Steuben glass. All those Ann Taylor dresses. Unless she’s running up her credit cards again. Which she probably is.”
Gregor cocked his head. “Doesn’t any of this bother you? You must know she doesn’t have your best interests at heart. Why do you put up with her?”
Liz opened the refrigerator door and got out a large glass tray. When she put it down on the table, Gregor saw that it was piled with sandwiches, some ham and cheese, some turkey and Swiss, some tuna fish. The kettle went off on the stove and she took it and poured water into the cup she’d left at her place.
“I’ve tried to explain it to Jimmy,” she said as she put the kettle back and sat down, “and I’ve tried to explain it to Mark, and I think maybe it’s a girl thing. Or maybe it’s just that I ran into Maris for the first time in years just after Jay had died.”
“Jay was your husband?”
“Exactly. Anyway, I don’t know if I can explain it. It’s just that, I can remember her, Maris, our first day of school, ever. Kindergarten, Center School, 1956. I remember sitting at this table in the middle of all these other children I didn’t know, and Maris walked through the door with her mother and she was—perfect. I don’t think I’d had a definition of perfect before then. She was so perfect I wanted to cry, and the more I watched her, the more perfect she got. She was beautiful and smart and—golden. If that makes any sense.”
“It makes sense that you felt that way. It makes sense that there are children like that. I don’t see how it explains the present situation.”
“Yes, well.” The sandwiches on the tray were cut into triangular quarters. Liz picked up a triangle of tuna fish on whole wheat and looked it over. “She was like that all through school. Oh, there were other girls who were prettier, really. Belinda Hart was phenomenal when she was young, all huge china-blue eyes and blond hair. But Maris, you see, Maris was smart as well as pretty. Very smart. She could do anything. She was salutatorian of our class. She was president of half a dozen clubs, and not just social nonsense, either. She was a championship debater.”
“But you must have been a good student, too,” Gregor pointed out.
Liz shook her head. “Not really. For one thing, I was too recalcitrant and contrary. One year they gave us an assignment to write an essay to submit to the Veterans of Foreign Wars for their Memorial Day essay contest. The winner got to read his essay in front of the whole town at the end of the Memorial Day parade. I wrote an essay about how evil war was and how we should never allow the government to draft anybody. If it had been a couple of years later, I might have gotten away with it, but it was 1965.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Yes, exactly. Anyway, I was always getting myself into that kind of trouble, so my grades were up and down. And my class rank was mediocre. I squeaked into the National Honor Society at the very bottom of the list.”
“But Vassar took you,” Gregor said.
Liz smiled. “I aced my boards—perfect scores on both aptitude tests and all three achievements. And I got a National Merit scholarship. I actually made the Philadelphia papers for it. So Vassar took me. They were, by the way, the only one. I got turned down at everything from Yale to Tufts. If Vassar hadn’t come through, I’d be waiting tables at JayMar’s right this minute.”