That’s an approach he knows Polhaus will go for, but the sixty-four-dollar question is, Does Lydia actually have any useful information to provide? Nothing Nietfeldt’s seen so far has led him to conclude that Mock is in any kind of regular contact with the fugitives. Could be he’s stringing the Galtons along. Might be a nice chunk of change for the man who steers things to a storybook conclusion. But all Mock’s been seen doing is talking to the Rorvik girl and that’s about it. Flew to New York to try to pitch an SLA book at some publishers, but that was a fairly predictable development, boring if not incriminating.
Curiously, Polhaus hasn’t ordered any kind of surveillance at all on the Rorviks or Jeff Wolfritz. An FBI camera crew was dispatched to the thing at Ho Chi Minh Park, and that was that. Rounding out the file. It was just kind of assumed after Susan’s speech had been broadcast all over the country that they were too hot, too obvious, for the SLA to come near them. It strikes him that in overlooking the obvious, they may have fucked up royally. Rorvik makes for a nice link in the chain: SLA to Atwood, Atwood to Rorvik, Rorvik to Mock, Mock to SLA. He examines the photographs taken that day last June. The girl from Palmdale, latitude 34.5523°N, longitude 118.0709°W, elevation 2780. Yearbook editor, pep chairman, Girl Scout counselor. Another nice girl who didn’t know what she was talking about, pointing fingers, making a fuss. He makes a mental note to begin a background check tomorrow.
OF COURSE i DID, Hank. You are holding a newspaper in my face, shaking it and asking whether I really said those things, and you know that I did. For how long did you think that I would allow you to humiliate us? To sneak around like somebody with something to hide? To lie to the Federal Bureau of Investigation? You never could dance; years ago you were smart enough not to try. Drove your custard-colored Fiat and put a flower in your lapel and swept every girl off her feet, but you knew you couldn’t do much with your own. And now you’re trying, and it is just pathetic.
You always used to know your limitations.
Every day that this continues I feel another part of myself die. You have been laughing at me for years, saying that my propriety is old-fashioned and disproportionate. But for me there’s never been anything else. Your family always got its neon charge from its taste for notoriety. Didn’t matter what your name was actually worth or where the celebrity had come from. But we had nothing but our good name. Our good name and an old house. My mother taught me that I had to hold tight to anything I had that was worth anything. When we married, I thought I could do something for you. Poor fellow whose father disgraces his entire family, taking up with an actress. Entertaining Hollywood fools on the high seas. Building a castle and filling it with gaudy junk, like a Jew. I thought I could do something for you! You said I was your angel. That was what we both wanted.
But it all caught up with us. Your daughter makes your father look like a Benedictine. Bad to worse. I should have known back when the nuns said they couldn’t do anything with her. I should have told them: Then do nothing, and both of you endure it. Because that is the business they’re in. Cast the spirit, inhibit the flesh. Teach each its place. But I listened to you. You listened to her, and I listened to you. Let her go to day school. Let her pick where. If I had only looked, I would have seen where it was all leading. So would you. Maybe you did. Now you think you can do what you’ve always done. Accommodate the circumstances, find “another situation” for her. Not this time. There is no other situation.
She stopped belonging to us long ago. That’s no surprise. We’ve both known it. I knew all about the boys. You think I am rigid and severe, but I have made my concessions to the times. I don’t brag, or complain. I listen to the others at the country club, and that is their response to their lives. They valorize the concessions they make or they protest them publicly. But I never have. Even when Stump appeared, I said this is how things are done now. Thinking, How unhappy do I have to become in order to be contemporary? Because it seems to me that in order to accept the contemporary, one has to spend a lot of time pretending, and what one mostly pretends is that one is numbly satisfied with every idiotic alternative that society proffers. So I know that she no longer belongs to us.
But now she belongs to everyone. People draw her, did you know that? I mean they draw pictures, like kindergarten children. They just have to draw their favorite photographs of her! I was down at Stanford last week, and there they were, all over White Plaza and the Old Quad. Stanford! Some very poor draftsman had put ink to paper and copied that photo of her with the gun, in those baggy, ugly coveralls. What could that be about, when you actually have the photograph and you need to draw it anyway, to work its contours under your hand? What I think is, I think they are trying to take some of her for themselves or to put something of themselves in her. Some of them are our photographs, you know. They came right out of our album. I gave them up with misgivings. You thought it would help. They belong to them now. She belongs to them now.
Day after day in the newspapers, on the television. You lose something. You become a reflection, all detail and very little depth. It’s as if she’s in a trance, the glowing replica of every living soul’s fears and wishes, mute and impenetrable. In tracing those pictures, they trace her, like forming the sign of the cross. She is exactly what they say she is. When her presence no longer is required on the television and in the papers, the day she stops, perhaps she will have come to herself. But I know that the girl she comes to won’t be the one we knew. And you want her back. Believe me, I understand you. But what I believe is that if you were to think clearly about it all for a minute, you’d see that she’ll never come back. She can sit on this sofa beside us, she can sleep on the bed in the spare room, she can scrape her plate into the garbage pail, and to me it won’t be her here. People think I can’t be hurt, but I am. I am hurt down to the marrow. And I am not letting you give her another out.
Take that newspaper, Hank, and put it down. Yes, I talked to the FBI. They came to me, and I told them exactly what I knew about Guy Mock, what he’d proposed. And then I told the Los Angeles Times. And they printed it, on a bright Sunday morning. For once she can hear through the press what I have to say. About her and her friends. She can try to guess what we know and how close we are. She can wonder which of the people she has to deal with are trustworthy and which are trying to take advantage of her. Guy Mock is hopping mad? Well, I hope so. I hope that this ends it with Guy Mock. You don’t even notice it anymore, Hank, how it is to have to contend with slippery little nobodys like Guy Mock. I know how she felt in that closet, the world reduced to the little rectangle of light that occurred whenever someone opened the door. Guy Mock, the psychics, the radicals, the FBI: They all come around to present their magic lantern show. Each of them shows up to give us his particular version of the rectangle. And now they’re just part of your life. But they’re not supposed to be part of our lives. Well, Guy Mock won’t be. He promised you something that you know deep down he couldn’t deliver. That girl is in trouble. There is no avoiding it. You can’t save her from what she’s brought upon herself. He thought we would be his meal ticket, but I’ve cut him off. And they — she and the rest of them — they’ll never let him get close to them again.