Dr. Ressler looked at Annie and me, wondering why he'd bothered to bring us along. Jimmy was growing increasingly restive, rocking on the bed, attempting to build up the momentum needed to throw his feet to the floor. Ressler caught him up gently. "Jimmy. Listen. The hospital is making threatening noises about the bill. They've asked your mother for proof of ability to meet a prolonged stay." He hushed Jimmy's long, mewled objection. "Of course that's impossible. No one has told you because no one wanted to upset you."
Jimmy lay still while Ressler related the insurance company's refusal to retroactively reinstate him. He listened passively to the legal counsel's opinion: the letter of the law lay on the side of the insurers, a business that made no provision for individual charity. Ressler did not mention Todd's plan to save Jimmy by confessing the deed. But the professor did lay out something I heard for the first time. "Don't worry about this bill for now. Your job is to come back from this as quickly as you can. I believe we can get you reinstated. But don't mention this to anyone just yet."
The admonition made me snort in pain. But neither man paid me any notice. They were concentrating on each other. Ressler began spelling out a plan so developed that it seemed months in the making. Who knows how much Jimmy was taking in. Ressler leaned over his friend's crumpled side, speaking in low tones, as if admonishing, behave, then, and we'll give you what you ask for. Lie still and we'll give you that story.
The Cipher Wheel Days go by when he can think of nothing but what he might have done for Lovering had he been paying attention. He does not see Jeanette; neither can abide what they now know about the other. In that dead period, when Lovering's chaotic half of the office still sprawls up to the dividing line, Ressler learns, from out of the diminished Blue Sky, that Daniel is suing Renée Woytowich for divorce. Impossible: Ressler was at Woyty's the other day and father and mother were on the floor playing with the kid, beyond all dignity hopelessly in love with one another and their family. All incinerated in a matter of hours. He ought to leave it, run the other direction. But he must know.
He tracks Dan down to his office, late in the evening. Ressler knocks gingerly, hears nothing beyond the door but canned laughter. He goes in, circumspect and uninvited. Woyty sits in front of the hulking, luggable TV set that hasn't been on since Ivy's arrival. Woyty's long fast from watching, causing great concern at Stainer Central, is broken with a vengeance.
"Absolutely unavailable for chatting, Stuart. Got to assign a number to Life of Riley here."
Stuart sits down and watches Jackie Gleason play the big, bumbling, malapropian airplane factory worker whose tag line, "What a revoltin' development this is," has become a national catch-phrase. After a minute of ritual self-effacement, Dan says, "So much for the liberal humanist theory that what the world needs is more laughter. America doesn't need any more entertainment; it's entertained to the gills. I'm panning this sucker. Straight zeros. Send Life of Riley back to figurative speech where it belongs." He speaks as if there's something heroic in wandering out of the mode shelter in the middle of the bean curve. He fiddles with a Sputnik-sized wad of aluminum foil strung between the rabbit ears. "Reception's piss-poor here. Ghost so bad it makes Queen for a Day look like the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy out for a weekend."
Ressler looks at him, neither admonishing nor accommodating. All at once, Woyty is volunteering all over the place. "You came to get the lowdown on my divorce, didn't you? Scavenger. Want to know why I'm filing? Want to know the grounds?" Ressler doesn't even nod. "Go ahead, guess." But Woytowich doesn't wait. "You got it. Infidelity."
"Good Christ!" Ressler slams the desk, shoots to his feet. "Don't be an idiot! One look at her and any divorce judge would laugh the case out of court."
"Saying she's not pretty enough? You wouldn't have her? Well, Stuart, I'm relieved to hear it's not you."
"I'm saying you're a fool. She worships you. She's just had a child." Ressler can't say how he knows Renée is blameless. He knows what women in affairs look like. Dan's wife is not one. "How could she possibly be running around? She doesn't have time. She hasn't been out of your sight for months."
"Oh," Woyty answers with a placid smile. "We're not talking about recent weeks. We're going back into the distant past. A year, year and a half."
"What are you talking about? Nonsense. Before Ivy?"
"Stuart. Leave me be. The kid's not mine."
"God. Don't tell me! Not learning fast enough. You've hit a wall in the instant-genius campaign, and the only explanation is that no child of yours.…" He breaks off in disgust.
Dan gives his evidence in monotone. "Five days ago, Ivy and I were playing with the letter blocks. It occurred to me that she might not be acquiring the alphabet at all, that I might be cuing her solely on block color. I thought it might be fun to set up a control, have her pick colored disks out of a ring. She couldn't do it very well. I tried it with some large letters and she selected them perfectly. That didn't make any sense. How could she learn letters and not colors? I tried the disks again, and she was erratic. She could do blue, black, white. But it became increasingly obvious that Ivy could not differentiate red from green disks without prompting."
"Your child is color-blind." An allele that might not have come to the surface for years had Woytowich not been so keen on bestowing super-stimulated intelligence on her.
"I've told you. She's not my child."
Ressler summons up the textbook treatments of the matter. He recalls the central irony of sight: good vision is recessive; myopia dominant. He skims past that irrelevance and concentrates on remembering what he can about red-green color-blindness. "Renée doesn't have it?"
Daniel clucks his tongue dryly against the roof of his mouth. "I thought you were supposed to be the boy wonder. Don't you remember anything from Mendel?"
Ressler suddenly sees why the question is stupidly irrelevant. Red-green color-blindness is the classic example of a sex-linked, X-linked recessive. Both Ivy's X chromosomes must have the allele for her to be color-blind. If Daniel isn't color-blind, his daughter can't be. "And you don't have it?" Ressler asks, again irrelevantly, of the first man in downstate Illinois to have bought a color set. "What about the autosomal varieties? At least two different assortments, as I remember."
Daniel snorts. "One in several tens of thousands. Which do you think is more likely? A fluke mutation or a woman getting herself plowed?" He turns away in pain, deaf to anything further Ressler has to say on the matter. "Too bad, too. I was looking forward to showing her the egg-in-the-bottle in a year or two." Science. "The potato and iodine."
"You're not going to ask for visitation?"
Woyty just spins lazily toward him. "How many times do I have to tell you? She's not mine."
The improbability of the event, the lateness of the hour leave Stuart helpless. "So what do you do now?" Woytowich flicks a wrist toward the corner, indicating a duffel bag and toilet kit. "Oh, no. Dan. You're not moving in here?"
"Just until I find a place."
"Turning your back on them? Just like that?"
"They'll get half the checks."
The next day Ressler visits Renée. The woman assaults him with dazed protests of innocence. "Stuart. There's never been anyone but Daniel. Not now, not two years ago. God. Not even before I met him." Clearly innocent: the way she rocks the baby between denials. She confesses to one sorry, fully clothed grope with her thesis instructor, momentarily aroused for the first time since his tenure when the two of them compared the relative merits of Volpone and As You Like It.