“Oh, don’t do that,” Oswald said. “You’ve got to stand by your reporter, even if he is a little beady-eyed mink.”
Oswald and I had come up together on the DP, tearing apart each other’s prose. Neither of us ever fell into a mood so bleak that the other couldn’t talk him out of it, and Oswald soon had me laughing with his impression of the Broncos’ backup quarterback Norris Weese (Oswald was a Nebraskan and a fellow Broncos fan) and his savage quotation of classmates dumber and more popular than us. Oswald’s gift for ressentiment was redeemed by his Eeyore-like self-esteem levels. His long sexual drought had recently ended with his bedding of a sophomore poet who was obviously going to shred his heart but hadn’t got around to it yet. Out of respect for my own drought, still ongoing, he rarely mentioned her to me, but when he left me alone again I knew that he was going to her, and I fell back into a pit of remorse.
Around ten o’clock I managed to reach Anabel on the phone.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m feeling really bad about not protecting you better. I want to try to make it up to you.”
“The damage is done, Tom. You already made your choice.”
“But I’m not the person you think I am.”
“Who do you think I think you are?”
“A bad person.”
“I’m only going by the evidence,” she said with a hint of playfulness, a possible softening of her judgment.
“Do you want me to resign? Would you believe me then?”
“You don’t have to do that for me. You can just try to be a better editor in the future.”
“I will. I will.”
“All right, then,” she said. “I don’t forgive you, but I do appreciate your returning my call.”
This was where the conversation ought to have ended, but Anabel, even back then, had a specific lack of resolve when it came to hanging up a telephone, and I didn’t want to hang up without having been forgiven. For some seconds, neither of us spoke. As the silence lengthened it began, for me at least, to pulse with possibility. I strained to hear the sound of Anabel’s breath.
“Do you ever show your art?” I said when the silence had become unbearable. “I’d be interested in seeing your films.”
“‘Come up to my room and see my etchings.’ Is that why you called me back?” Again the playful lilt. “Maybe you want to come over and see my art right now.”
“Seriously?”
“Give it some thought and decide if you think I’m serious.”
“Right.”
“My art doesn’t hang on a wall.”
“Right.”
“And no one goes in my bedroom but me.”
She said this as if it were a prohibition, not a circumstance.
“You seem like an interesting person,” I said. “I’m sorry we hurt you.”
“I should be used to it by now,” she said. “It seems to be what people do.”
Again the conversation might have ended. But there was a factor in play which never would have occurred to me: Anabel was lonely. She still had one friend at Tyler, a lesbian named Nola who’d been her confederate in the butcher-paper incident, but the pressure of Nola’s prospectless crush on her made her difficult to take in high doses. All the other students, according to Anabel, had turned against her. They had reason to resent the special status she’d wangled as a filmmaker at a school that didn’t have a film program, but the real problem was her personality. People were attracted to her looks and wicked tongue and to the real-seeming possibility that she was an artistic genius; she had a way of drawing all eyes to her. But she was fundamentally far shyer than her self-presentation led anyone to imagine, and she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness. The instructor who’d encouraged her to make films had also later propositioned her, which (a) was piggish, (b) was apparently not unusual, and (c) destroyed her faith in his assessment of her talent. She’d been on the institutional warpath ever since. This had clinched her pariah status, since, according to her, the other students cared only about professorial validation, the professorial nod, the professorial referral to a gallery.
I learned some of this and many other things in the thrilling two hours we spoke that night. Though I didn’t feel myself to be an interesting person, I did have listening skills. The more I listened, the more her voice softened toward me. And then we uncovered an odd coincidence.
She’d grown up in Wichita, in a stately house on College Hill. She belonged to the fourth generation of one of the two families that wholly owned the agribusiness conglomerate McCaskill, the country’s second-largest privately held corporation. Her father had inherited a five percent share of it, married a fourth-generation McCaskill, and gone to work for the company. As a girl, Anabel said, she’d been very close to her father. When the time came to send her away to Rosemary Hall, which her mother had attended before its merger with Choate, she said she didn’t want to go. But her mother was insistent, her father uncharacteristically unwilling to indulge her, and so she arrived in Connecticut at the age of thirteen.
“For the longest time, I had everything turned around exactly wrong in my mind,” she told me. “I thought my mother was terrible and my father was wonderful. He’s extremely smart and seductive. He knows how to have his way with people. And when he started betraying my mother, after I went away to school, and when my mother started drinking after breakfast, I realized that she’d been trying to protect me by sending me away. She never admitted it to me, but I know that’s what it was. He was killing her, and she didn’t want him to kill me, too. I was so unjust to her. And then he killed her. My poor mother.”
“Your father killed your mother?”
“You have to understand the way McCaskill works. They’re obsessed with keeping the business in the family, so nobody on the outside can know what they’re doing. It’s all about secrets and family control. When a Laird marries a McCaskill, it has to be forever, because they’re obsessed with family solidarity. So after I went away to school and my father started cheating on my mother, there really wasn’t anything for her to do but drink. That’s the McCaskill way. That and drugs and dangerous hobbies like piloting helicopters. You’d be surprised how much of my extended family is strung out on something. At least one of my brothers is strung out as we speak. You either go to work for the company and increase the family riches — which is what they call the McCaskill way — or else you kill yourself with hedonism, because there’s no reality principle to hold you back. It’s not like anybody in the family needs to make a living.”
I asked what had happened to her mother.
“She drowned,” Anabel said. “In our pool. My father was out of town — no fingerprints.”
“How long ago was this?”
“A little over two years ago. In June. It was a nice warm night. Her blood alcohol would have knocked a horse down. She passed out in the shallow end.”
I said I was very sorry, and then I told her that my dad had died in the same month as her mother. He’d retired only two weeks earlier, after counting the years to his sixty-fifth birthday, never speaking of “retirement,” only of “retirement from teaching,” because he still had so much energy. He was looking forward to reconstructing his caddis-fly collection and finally getting his PhD, to learning Russian and Chinese, to hosting foreign-exchange students, to buying an RV that met my mother’s requirements for outdoor comfort. But the first thing he did was volunteer for a two-month zoological mission to the Philippines. He wanted to scratch his old itch for exotic travel while I was still young enough to be spending summers at home, so that my mother wouldn’t be alone. When I drove him to the Denver airport, he told me that he knew my mother could be difficult but, if I ever felt impatient with her, I had to remember that she’d had a rough childhood and wasn’t in the best of health. His speech was loving and the last I ever heard from him. A day later, he was in a small plane that hit the side of a mountain. A four-paragraph story in the Times.