“So you threw her out into the world. If it hadn’t been for Gabriella, who knows what would have happened to her? The two of you—what a couple of sanctimonious righteous bastards you are.”
She took my insults unflinchingly. She couldn’t understand why I would be angry over such logical parental behavior, but she’d seen me beat up her husband. She wasn’t going to risk exciting me.
“Was Art already married then?” I asked abruptly.
“No. We told him he was going to have to find a wife, start a family, or we’d have to tell Father Stepanek, tell the priest, about Louisa. We promised we wouldn’t say anything if she moved away and he started a family.”
I didn’t know what to say. All I could think of was Louisa at sixteen, pregnant, out on her own, the holy ladies of St. Wenceslaus parading in front of her door. And Gabriella riding in on her white horse to the rescue. All the old insults from the Djiaks about Gabriella’s being a Jew came back to me.
“How can you pretend to call yourselves Christians? My mother was a thousand times the Christian you ever were. She didn’t go around blathering a lot of sanctimonious bullshit; she lived charity. But you and Ed, you let your brother seduce your child and you call her wicked. If there really was a god he would annihilate you for daring to come to his altar, babbling about your righteousness. If there is a god, my only prayer is that I never have to be within a mile of you again.”
I lurched to my feet, my eyes hot with furious tears. She shrank back in her chair.
“I won’t hit you,” I said. “What good would it do either of us?”
Before I’d reached the hall she was already on her hands and knees cleaning up the broken glass.
34
Bank Shot
I staggered from the house to the car, my stomach heaving, my throat tight and tainted with bile. All I could think of was to get to Lotty, not to stop for anything, for a toothbrush or a change of underwear. Just go straight to sanity.
I made it there on luck. A blaring horn at Seventy-first Street brought me briefly to myself I skirted my way carefully through Jackson Park, but I almost hit a bicyclist darting across the Drive at Fifty-ninth. Even after that I kept finding the speedometer needle around seventy.
Max was drinking cognac in Lotty’s sitting room when I got there. I smiled jerkily at him. With a great effort, I remembered the two had gone to a recital together and asked how they’d enjoyed the music.
“Superb. The Cellini Quintet. We knew them in London when they were just getting started after the war.” He reminded Lotty of an evening in Wigmore Hall when the power had gone off, and how the two of them had stood holding flashlights over the music so their friends could continue the concert.
Lotty laughed and was adding a memoir of her own when she broke off. “Vic! I hadn’t seen your face in the light when you came up. What is the matter?”
I forced my lips to the form of a smile. “Nothing life-threatening. Just a strange conversation that I’ll tell you about sometime.”
“I must be off anyway, my dear,” Max said, rising. “I’ve stayed far too long drinking your excellent cognac.”
Lotty saw him to the door, then hurried back to me. “What is it, Liebchen? You look like death.”
I tried smiling again. To my dismay, I found myself sobbing instead. “Lotty, I thought I’d seen every horrible thing people could do to each other in this town. Men killing each other for a bottle of wine. Women pouring lye on their lovers. Why this should upset me so much I don’t know.”
“Here.” Lotty put some brandy to my mouth. “Drink this and settle yourself a bit. Try to tell me what happened.”
I swallowed some of the cognac. It washed the taste of bile from my throat. With Lotty holding my hand, I blurted out the story. How I’d seen the resemblance between young Art and Caroline, and thought his mother must have been related to Caroline’s father. Only to learn that it was his father who was related to Caroline’s grandmother.
“That part wasn’t so awful,” I gulped. “I mean, of course it’s awful. But what made me so sick is their horrible scrubbed piety and the way they insist Louisa was to blame. Do you know how they raised her? How strictly those two sisters were watched? No dates, no boys, no talk about sex. And then her mother’s brother. He molested the one girl and they let him stay around to molest the other. And then they punish her.”
My voice was rising; I couldn’t seem to control it. “It can’t be, Lotty. It shouldn’t be. I should be able to stop something that vile from going on, but I don’t have any power.”
Lotty took me in her arms and held me without speaking. After a time my sobbing dried up, but I continued to lie against her shoulder.