The girl did not answer at once; she bit her lower lip and seemed about to cry.
"Don't scold her so, Max! She's just had bad things happen to her."
"Dear girl," Max said more gently, "if you really been raped I kiss your feet and beg your pardon. Passèd are the raped, like it says in the Seminar-on-the-Hill. But it's not easy to trust a person that lives with Maurice Stoker."
"You don't understand him," Anastasia said distractedly; she put her hand to her forehead. "I think I've got to sit down. It's hard to know what to say after all I've heard about you…"
"Heard?" Max cried. "Ja sure, from that Dean o' Flunks husband of yours!"
She shook her head, still standing. "From my mother, Dr. Spielman! And from Uncle Ira, and Grandpa Reg!"
"What's this?" Now Max was wide-eyed, and the girl seemed on the verge of swooning. He stepped to steady her; she hid her face in his shoulder. "Young lady, who are you?"
Her voice came muffled from his fleece. "My name used to be Stacey Hector. I'm Virginia Hector's daughter… and I guess… yours too."
4
Having made this declaration, Anastasia lost her voice entirely and wept into Max's wrapper, while my advisor, shaking his head from side to side, could say only, "Yi yi yi yi!" and pat her hair. I suggested we move to the abandoned fire, and went astride Croaker to fetch more sticks against the night-chill. Max was protesting, when I returned, that while he had indeed loved Miss Virginia R. Hector extremely, he was innocent of her impregnation and could not understand why she had persisted in accusing him. To which Anastasia replied, it was not her mother who accused him, at least not in recent years; her mother had alas gone somewhat out of her senses and declared by turns that she had never been pregnant at all; that she had been pregnant but by no mortal man in the University; that Anastasia was no child of hers; etc., etc.
"It was Uncle Ira and Grandpa Reg who blamed you," she said. "I used to ask them who was this Max that Mother talked about when she'd had too much to drink — she used to drink a lot — "
"Yi yi!" Max groaned.
"— and when I was older they told me my father was a bad man named Max Spielman that had deserted my mother and caused a lot of trouble before they fired him. Please don't do that…" Max had set himself to kissing her sandals and beating his forehead upon the sand. "I never hated you the way they said I should. I used to wonder what could have made you treat Mother like that, and I decided it must have been something you couldn't help, or you never would have done it. I used to wish I'd meet you, so I could let you know I didn't hate you for anything, and even if you cursed me or hit me, the way people do sometimes, at least you'd have me there to do it to, and it might make you feel better about Mother and me. Maurice is that way, and Uncle Ira used to be too."
"Georgie!" Max cried. "Hear the voice of sweet Commencement!" He then declared to Anastasia, still on his knees before her, that so pass him Founder he was not her father, but the victim of heartbreaking accusations and false charges, the motive whereof he despaired of ever learning. That he nonetheless cursed and reproached himself for not having stood by the woman he loved, understanding (as one with half Anastasia's own loving nature would have, he was certain) that his dear lady's indictments were the fruit of some desperation; he would never forgive himself, he vowed, for not having pled guilty to the false paternity, so sparing Virginia Hector the dismal afflictions it seemed had come upon her, and Anastasia the egregious burden of illegitimacy.
"But it doesn't matter!" Anastasia said. "I forgive you anyway. There's no need to keep saying you're not my father."
"By me there's need! I wish I was your poppa, such a girl! But I'm not, I swear it!"
"Then I believe you," the girl said firmly. "Don't go on like that, now." As if he were the child and she the parent, she gathered Max's old head to her breast, which lacking the hard-cupped harness I had noted on Chickie-in-the-buckwheat's, yielded softly to his cheek — and I wished I had something to be forgiven for. The effect was admirable: Max soon recomposed himself and set to praising her virtues to me (who needed no persuasion) in a more controlled if no less enthusiastic spirit. He now believed her utterly, he said, and would add to the proofs of my untutored wisdom, and his own too-human fallibility, that I had been drawn strongly to her from the first, and had affirmed her goodness in the face of his skepticism.
"That was sweet of him," she said, and smiled me such a warm smile of gratitude, I wished I truly had never doubted her, and been impelled from the first by the sight of her spiritual merits alone. "He tried his best to hold Croaker back, too, but it wasn't any use."
"An atrocity!" Max cried. "The brute ought to be caged up."
But Anastasia protested once again that after all men were what they were, Founder pass them, and animals were what they were; Croaker couldn't help himself any more than her husband could, who often did things to her and to others that were misinterpreted as proceeding from a flunkèd nature simply because the deeds themselves were flunkèd. Besides, it pained her to see anything caged, no matter how wild or dangerous — an animal, a criminal, anything… Often in the past, she confessed, she had pitied "poor Croaker" for not having a mate equal to his passions — though to be sure she pitied even more their unequal victims: the co-eds, the policeman, the poodle, and the cute little monkeys whose expressions had looked so like wise old men's. But only look at Croaker now, she bade us, how docile and content he was, like a great spoiled child that's had his lollipop at last. How could she, she asked us almost light-heartedly, be aggrieved at her own mistreatment — which albeit hurtsome had not been fatal, after all — when in addition to sparing others the same or worse, it had so plainly done its doer a campus of good?
I was purely touched, and asked her how it came that so gentle a lady girl had wed Maurice Stoker, whom despite her excusing him I took to be a flunkèder brute than Croaker, because more conscious of his ways?
"That's well asked, Georgie," Max approved. "That's asked like a Grand Tutor." And to Anastasia, before she could reply, he professed frankly his belief that I might be no person else than a true Grand Tutor to the Western Campus, destined to rescue studentdom from the tyranny of its own invention. "Don't mock," he cautioned her; "myself I'm a skeptic; I wouldn't say such a thing in a hundred years without plenty good reasons."
But Anastasia was far from mocking; she looked up at me in wonder as Max spoke. "So that's it!"
I assumed she meant that she understood now certain earlier remarks and attitudes of mine which must have struck her as mysterious at the time (such as my alarm at her mention that Chancellor Rexford was expecting a Grand Tutor's arrival at any moment). But she drew from the pocket of her shift a small glass phial, which she said had been given her by one of The Living Sakhyan's company as they left the beach, just a short time previously.
"It was the strangest thing," she said to Max — as if scarcely presuming to address me directly. "Here I didn't even think they could talk our language, and I swear they hadn't said a word to one another the whole time they were sitting here; but suddenly The Living Sakhyan smiled at me and raised His hand — it was like He'd just come out of his trance — and it made me feel peculiar all over! Then one of His men led me up to the fire — this was while George had come back to get you. And I felt so funny, because I didn't know whether they were going to thank me for fixing their fire, or — or do something to me, or what. And it didn't seem to matter, if you know what I mean, Him being such a great man and all; you can almost feel how wise and Commencèd He is, and whatever He wanted to do, I have this feeling it was all right, and I'd be flunkèd not to let Him do it…" She turned to me, her eyes full of reverence. "But then His helper took out this little bottle and gave it to me, and said it was for you from The Living Sakhyan. 'From ours to yours,' is what he said — and he didn't even speak with an accent! I was so surprised I stood there like a dunce, and didn't think to ask what it was until they'd picked up The Living Sakhyan and were almost gone. Then the man who gave it to me sort of frowned and closed his eyes, as if I was so stupid he couldn't stand to look at me, and he said, 'It's the Disappearing Ink.' I swear that's what he said!"