Bleeding Hearts (4 page)

“I know they do it every day.” Nick sighed. “That’s not the point. The point is that the selling angle for these memoirs is the death of your stepmother—”

“Oh, I know.”

“—and the fact that Candida and Paul were screwing like rabbits the whole last two years of your stepmother’s life—”

“I don’t think Jacqueline was capable of screwing like a pickle-jar top. She was a poisonous woman.”

“I don’t care if she was Mrs. Attila the Hun. The point, Alyssa, is that it is extremely unlikely that Candida is going to write these memoirs simply to make a little money. If she needed a little money, we could give it to her. Did you get the impression, when you talked to her, that she would be willing to accept a settlement?”

The chocolate-chip cookie was lying, half eaten, in Alyssa’s lap. She had tucked her feet up under her and was now sitting more or less in the lotus position on the edge of the couch. Nick was so intelligent about these things; he really was. He was so good at starting at the beginning and thinking things through to the end. Maybe that was what he got from being a lawyer.

Alyssa picked up the cookie and took yet another bite of it.

“Candida,” she said slowly, “didn’t really seem to be after much of anything. At least, not much of anything from me. She just—announced it all. Like a town crier giving the news.”

“But it was her idea for the two of you to meet?”

“Oh, yes,” Alyssa said.

“Why you? Why not Caroline, or James? Why not Paul?”

“I don’t think Candida and Paul are speaking, exactly,” Alyssa said. “That’s because of all that stuff with the police when Jacqueline died, which Candida has a perfect right to be upset about, because Paul behaved like an ass. I don’t know if she’s ever met James. And as for Caroline—”

Alyssa and Nick shot each other very, very meaningful looks. They both knew Caroline better than they wanted to.

Nick said, “Even assuming it makes sense that of all the people in the family, she’d call you, isn’t it a little odd that she’d call anybody at all? Why didn’t she just sell her book—is the book sold?”

“What? Oh, yes. I mean, it’s not written yet, you know, but I think there’s an agreement already signed for the book when it’s finished. From Bantam, I think she said.”

“There, then. She’s sold the book. Why didn’t she just go ahead and write it? Why warn the family of a thing of this kind?”

“Maybe she was just being straightforward and above-board.”

Nick sighed. “This is Candida DeWitt we’re talking about. She didn’t play field hockey at Westover. She managed to get an amicable palimony settlement out of a Greek shipping tycoon. Don’t talk crazy.”

“Maybe it was a compulsion with her, then. Maybe she’s one of those people who just can’t keep their mouths shut.”

“If she were one of those, she’d be dead by now,” Nick said. “I’m sorry, Alyssa. I probably like all this as little as Caroline does. It doesn’t feel right to me. Did Caroline have anything useful to say when you talked to her?”

To Alyssa’s mind, Caroline never had anything useful to say. To be incoherent and hysterical was the essence of being Caroline. She got up and brushed the crumbs of the now-demolished cookie off her skirt. The maid would vacuum in the morning the way she vacuumed every morning.

“Caroline”—Alyssa made her way to the drinks cart to pour herself a glass of wine—“was being positively apocalyptic, complete with pop-psych jargon, of course. God, I’m sick of pop-psych jargon. It’s been a bore ever since Daddy took up with it.”

“It’s made a very nice pile of money for everybody involved,” Nick commented. “How do you mean, Caroline was apocalyptic? Was she making threats?”

“Oh, no. Caroline never makes threats. She doesn’t even threaten suicide anymore now that she went into therapy. No, you know, she was just talking about the cosmic significance of it all.”

“The cosmic significance of Candida DeWitt’s memoirs?”

“Of course not. The cosmic significance of Jacqueline’s dying. In Caroline’s mind, Jacqueline did it deliberately. She knew Caroline had just started therapy, so she got herself killed to avoid the inevitable confrontation. I’m putting it badly. But it doesn’t make much sense even when Caroline explains it herself.”

“But what did she think of Candida DeWitt’s memoirs?”

Alyssa shrugged. “She was against them, of course. I mean, we all are, aren’t we? No matter how understanding I’m being, I’d just as soon not see all that raked up again. Do you suppose she’ll get on talk shows, talking about the sex?”

“She might.”

“It would make Daddy absolutely livid. Caroline’s going to make Daddy absolutely livid too. She was nattering on and on about what she was going to say to him as I left. I don’t envy him that conversation, I tell you. Why he puts up with it, I don’t know. Daddy’s always telling those people who come to those seminars he runs that they shouldn’t put up with anything at all.”

“Well,” Nick said judiciously, “he hasn’t been giving very many seminars the last few years.”

“That’s true,” Alyssa said.

“Maybe he doesn’t feel up to holding out against your sister Caroline. She can be something like a force of nature.”

“That’s true too,” Alyssa said.

“Why don’t you pour me a glass of wine while you’re up,” Nick told her. “Some kind of sherry if you have it. You should try not to let this upset you too much, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, I know what you mean, all right.” Alyssa found a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and poured Nick an oversize glass of it, just the way he liked.

Really, she thought. Families were such a pain. So very impossible. So very—so very
there.
If it were up to her, she would redesign all their personalities. Daddy and Caroline would be interested in opera instead of psychology. James would be terribly respectable and very concerned about the poor. The only one she would leave the same would be herself. She might not be perfect, but she was very, very, very, very sane.

She handed Nick his glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and drifted away in the direction of the front window, which looked down the hill into what must once have been a thriving urban enclave but was now not more than a collection of concrete overpasses, twisting into the blackness like prophecies of ugliness. Maybe they should move out to Radnor someday. Maybe they should move permanently away, to somewhere like Bermuda.

“Do you know what I think?” Alyssa asked Nick without turning around to face him. “I think it was the worst possible thing that Caroline never married. It’s made her too caught up in herself.”

J
AMES HAZZARD SOMETIMES WONDERED
what he would have done with his life if he had been born fifty years earlier than he had. He had visions of what it had been like during those fifty years. He had received them from the ranks of black-and-white movies he kept in the media room off his office. MGM, Warner Bros., RKO, Fox—every one of them had made its contribution to the image of the Gypsy fortune-teller, that fat old woman in dirty clothes, hunched over a crystal ball in a filthy trailer parked on a darkened patch of ground at the edge of town. Every one of them had seen fit to make the prophecies real and the Gypsy women embodiments of evil. Maybe they had to do that because, being Hollywood, they were pathologically afraid of older women. Maybe they were just being silly. Surely any Gypsy fortune-teller whose prophecies were real could make a million dollars on the stock exchange and not have to live in a filthy trailer.

James Hazzard’s office was in a four-story brownstone in one of the few nice residential neighborhoods left in central Philadelphia. A discreet brass plaque fastened to the center of the pearl-gray front door was all there was to mark the building as a place of business. The plaque said

JAMES HAZZARD

ASTROLOGER

in upright Roman letters identical to the ones used to announce the existence of the society gynecologist next door. James Hazzard’s suits came from Brooks Brothers. His shoes were custom-made at John Lobb in London and sent to him by Federal Express. He had been in a filthy trailer once, when he was a sophomore at Brown, but that was just to get laid. The girl involved had had as much prophetic insight as a Pet Rock. James didn’t have much prophetic insight himself, but he did have a talent for reading people. He knew what they wanted and what they hoped for and—best of all—what made them afraid. When the time came to put up or shut up, he always knew what to
say.

James’s office was a large room that took up most of the space on the brownstone’s second floor, carpeted in pearl gray like the door downstairs, painted in cream, hung with house plants that spilled green leaves out of planters into the vast empty overhead space made by the twenty-foot ceiling. Science, that was the ticket. All of the people who came to James Hazzard liked to believe they were disciples of science, although of an alternative and More Humane kind. They wanted to feel connected to the force of the universe and get in touch with their feminine side. They wouldn’t have sat still for one minute in a dirty trailer, or by the side of an old woman who had not taken care of her teeth. They were all desperate and they were all miserable and they were all scared to death.

Now it was seven-thirty and James’s last appointment for the evening had just walked out the door. Her name was Katha Parks, and she was a kind of meta-example of fear and trembling. She had the most successful catering business on the Main Line, a personal income of well over two million a year, a Ferrari Testarossa, a vault full of jewelry, and a vacation house in Montego Bay—and she was frantic. That was the only word James had for it. Frantic. She worked out three hours a day. She never let more than eight hundred calories pass her lips in any twenty-four-hour period. She refused to see her maid until she’d put on her makeup. It was crazy. And, James thought, the richer and more successful they were, the crazier it got. That was why people like Katha Parks were willing to pay $1500 an hour for a personal charting session with James Hazzard himself.

James made his way around the huge marble copy of a drafting table he used instead of a desk, went to the office door, and looked out into the hall. Light spilled down the stairwell from the third floor. James went to the rail and called up.

“Max? Are you still there?”

“I’m still here,” Max called back.

James winced. Max was sounding definitely swish, angry-swish, the way he did when some fool woman came on to him and wouldn’t take no for an answer. James didn’t mind the swish in itself—he was a cosmopolitan man with a tendency to regard sex as a pleasant activity no matter whom he did it with, or of what sex—but he did mind what it represented, which was an impending explosion. It had been a long day. James wasn’t ready to deal with Max in one of his revolutionary-warrior moods. He wasn’t ready to deal with a telephone operator with a bad attitude. He wanted a strong cup of coffee with a shot of Scotch in it followed by a long, pleasant dinner at the Harmony Café.

James went around the stairwell and climbed to the third floor. The light on the landing was not on—Max was always saving electricity and being a Friend of the Earth—but the light coming from Max’s office was enough. James went in and found Max sprawled out in the swivel chair behind his desk, looking like a cross between a college student and a life-style ensemble in one of the better sportswear catalogues. Max was a devotee of $100 jeans and $600 plaid lumberjack’s shirts. James sometimes thought Max kept Ralph Lauren Polo in business all on his own.

“Coffee just perked two seconds ago,” Max said, not looking up. He was frowning at a stack of papers in front of him. James recognized columns of figures and got bored. “Pour some for yourself, will you? I’ve got to finish up here before we talk.”

“When you finish up here, are you going to tell me what pissed you off?”

“Dina Van Rau pissed me off. You’re going to have to raise the admission prices to the seminars. To at least three fifty a head. There’s no way around it. Expenses are up and the profit margin is down.”

“I’ve been thinking about John Calvin,” James said. “About the theology that said some people were born saved and other people were born damned and you could tell the difference because the saved people had more material wealth. Does that sound familiar to you?”

“Pour me some coffee too,” Max said. “I’ve got to go out tonight to one of those places where they serve nothing but herb tea and bean sprouts. God, I hate the healthy foods movement.”

James hated the healthy foods movement too. He especially hated the part of it where people like his father thought you were an unenlightened mess in need of immediate therapy if you had a cocktail every night before dinner. He poured two cups of coffee, doctored them both liberally with Johnnie Walker Black, and passed one over to Max.

Max had finished with his columns of numbers. He took the coffee James was handing him, put his feet on his desk, and said, “Your sister Caroline called. Not five minutes ago. She was hysterical.”

“Caroline is always hysterical. Was it something in particular this time?”

Max nodded. “Candida DeWitt, that’s what it was. Apparently nobody got around to telling her what was going on until today, and then your sister Alyssa just blurted it all out, and now Caroline—”

“—is acting like a Victorian virgin with the vapors. I’m glad you took the call instead of me.”

“I don’t mind talking to Victorian virgins with the vapors. Especially your sister Caroline. She’s like listening to the Donahue show. Do you suppose she is a virgin?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“It would be really wonderful if she were. Nobody’s a virgin anymore. I think virginity’s a very frustrating thing, don’t you? As soon as you try to do anything with it, you lose it.”

“Was all that supposed to make sense?”

“It makes perfect sense,” Max said lightly. “Never mind. Are you all worried about Candida DeWitt?”

James took a long sip of his coffee, which was smooth and soothing and just the right kind of bitter for the end of a working day. Oddly enough, he wasn’t in the least bit worried about Candida DeWitt. The death of Jacqueline Isherwood and the circumstances surrounding it had driven Caroline half crazy and embarrassed Alyssa and Nick, but they had been good for James. SOCIETY VICTIM WARNED, the headline on the
National Enquirer
said, and it was followed by a story about how “psychic James Hazzard, the victim’s stepson” had told his stepmother she would die a violent death within the month if she didn’t take steps to protect herself, which, of course, she hadn’t, so she did. It was all a lot of nonsense. James had never claimed to be a psychic, just a “trained astrological counselor,” whatever that meant. He had certainly never warned Jacqueline that she was about to die a violent death. He had never warned Jacqueline about anything. God, how he had hated that woman. Prissy, frumpy, uptight, and absolutely humorless—James just knew Paul had married her for her money. There couldn’t be any other reason. James himself hadn’t said four words a day to her for the last five years before she died. Jacqueline made his skin crawl.