The Delilah Complex (13 page)

I
t was still light when I left the apartment and headed downtown for the parents’ meeting at the rehearsal studio. As I walked from Madison to Lexington to get on the subway, I watched the sky deepen. The twilight was thick and colorless that night and the skyscrapers blended into the gray of the evening, their tips disappearing in the cloud cover and ensuing darkness. The autumnal gold and red leaves were like bursts of fire against the dusky evening.

On the ride, I obsessed over the video, but as I walked into the lobby I forced myself to let go of Dr. Snow’s problems and just be Dulcie’s mom.

Young stars and parents alike sat on metal chairs in the makeshift auditorium, sipping soda, bad coffee, or even worse wine, listening to the director talk about the upcoming out-of-town preview. He handed out schedules that included the name of the hotel the theater company had commandeered for the weekend, the directions, the times of the performances and other pertinent travel arrangements. Then he talked about the kind of stress the kids were all facing and what we could do to help our children as they approached this momentous performance.

Dulcie sat between my ex-husband and me and shifted in her seat, unable to find a position to hold for more than a minute or two. Her glance never left the director’s face, and several times I noticed she was chewing the inside of her cheek, something I hadn’t seen her do in years. Her nervousness was escalating.

Afterward, the three of us had dinner at the Time Out café, an easygoing but trendy restaurant two blocks from the rehearsal studio. She had a soda; Mitch and I both had wine. It was much better than what had been offered at the meeting.

We got along well, this man whom I’d been married to for almost half my life, and I. After all, we had a common goal—to be the best parents we could be to our daughter. Dissolving a union is never easy, but our experience was sad as opposed to brutal, and neither of us felt animosity toward the other. We’d managed to stay friends through the proceedings, which I credit entirely to Mitch. He was generous and thoughtful.

If I am going to be truthful, I will say that part of my reason for being so reasonable was because Mitch and Dulcie have a very special relationship. They are more alike than she and I are. They share the same love of theater and film, of books and of physical activities such as skiing and mountain climbing. They have the same tall, lanky frame, the same near-sightedness, and the same taste in food, preferring their meals less spicy than I do.

I have, at times, been jealous of the bond they share, forgetting that Dulcie and I are also close. But having lost my mother so young, I worked too hard at connecting to my daughter and sometimes, in a moment of clarity, knew it did more to push us apart than bring us together.

We were on dessert. Well, Mitch and Dulcie were, each
of them working on a slice of cheesecake. I was making do with an espresso. I’d been watching Dulcie all night, waiting to see the nerves relax even a little. But they hadn’t. Something was up.

“You okay?” I asked my daughter.

She nodded and then looked at Mitch.

I knew that look. I’d been seeing it for years. My daughter’s way of working out her problems never changed: she went to Mitch first and after that the two of them brought the dilemma to me.

When I’d talked it over with Nina years ago, she’d told me that it wasn’t unusual for the child of a therapist to be wary of that parent’s insight. That bringing in the nonpsychologist parent first gave the child a ballast and a buffer. Nina had helped me to accept the alliance, but that didn’t mean it made me happy.

“Morgan, it’s about the trip to Boston,” Mitch said, translating Dulcie’s look.

“Okay. Spill,” I said to her, trying for a lighthearted tone, hoping I could signal that I would just listen first and not react. But inside I was instantly worried. Instantly afraid. Some of this was my own projection about what she was going through, but more of it was coming from Dulcie.

Since she was a tiny baby, I had always picked up on her pain, both physical and emotional. Often, I’d be doing something miles away from her and get a sudden pain in my throat, or stomach, or hand, only to find out when I arrived home that she’d gotten sick or cut herself.

Other times, I’d felt a pang of homesickness or fear and found out that while she was on her sleepover or at camp she’d missed us and wanted to come back, or that in school some other kid had been mean to her.

Earlier that night, I’d felt nervous. I’d written off the feeling as what I’d assumed was her normal stage fright.

“I’d like Daddy to come with me to Boston.”

I felt relieved. “Of course he can come, honey. We’re both coming. You don’t even have to ask. Does she, Mitch?”

My ex-husband returned my gaze, warning me with his expression that I wasn’t hearing what Dulcie was saying.

“That’s not it, is it?” I asked her.

She was holding her lips pressed together, not wanting to explain, leaving it to me to do the work for her. It was easy enough. “You want me to stay home?”

She nodded and rushed into an explanation. “It’s not that I don’t want you to come. I just don’t want you to see the mistakes. I want to get all that out of the way first. I don’t want you to see the play till we open in New York. Till it’s right. Till it’s perfect.”

I nodded. Something that had been bothering me was suddenly making sense. “Hon, is that why you usually tell me to pick you up at one time, only for me to get there and realize I’m about ten or fifteen minutes later than the other parents? You don’t want me to see the rehearsals?”

She bit her bottom lip. “I just want you to see the play. On opening night. All perfect.”

There was something else she wasn’t saying, but I knew from the way her blue eyes had clouded over that she wasn’t going to tell me any more than that. She had inherited some of Mitch’s negative traits, too. That stubborn shutting down being one of them.

I picked up my glass of wine and took a long sip and tried to separate my hurt from a real clinical assessment of what my daughter was doing and why. But all I could think was what had I done to my daughter to make her think that I wanted—or needed—her to be perfect?

Putting my hand on hers, I leaned toward her. “Sweetheart, I don’t need your performances to be perfect. I’m not judging you.”

Tears came too quickly. “If I can’t do it right, you won’t let me keep doing it.”

“What makes you think that?”

No words now, just a shaky shrug of her shoulders,

“I love you, Dulcie, whether you get up there and belt out the songs like Judy Garland or flub your lines, or sing off-key. As for you continuing with acting, that’s a family decision. One that we’ll all make together when the run of this play is over. We’ll look at your schoolwork and what kind of stress you’re feeling and we’ll decide together.”

She nodded, but I didn’t know if I’d convinced her. Later, when I was alone, I’d deal with everything I was thinking. Right now all that mattered was saying something that would alleviate my daughter’s distress.

“I promise I am not going to stop you from pursuing this if it’s what you really want. You believe that, don’t you?”

She nodded.

“What about Boston?” she said with a slight catch in her voice. “Can Dad go with me? Can you wait to see me till it’s the final show?”

“If it matters to you that much…” I let the rest of the sentence drift off.

“It does. The rehearsals always go bad. Lots of the other kids have convinced their parents not to come watch.”

I glanced at Mitch. There were no answers in his eyes.

I
waited until after we got home. And then I waited until after Dulcie had done her homework. I waited until after we sat and watched an episode of
Seinfeld
together, both of us laughing even though we knew all the jokes ahead of time. And finally I waited until after she got undressed and into bed and fell asleep.

Still I didn’t do anything. I put a pot of water on to boil. Waited for a cup of tea to brew. Waited for a teaspoon of honey to melt. And then there wasn’t any excuse I could give myself to wait anymore. Even though I didn’t have any solid information that I could give him. Even though I couldn’t break any confidence.

I could tell him that one thing I’d noticed in the photographs at the station house that hadn’t made sense at that time did make sense now, couldn’t I?

Didn’t I need to?

No one in the Scarlet Society group had told me anything about it. Shelby hadn’t mentioned it when we’d talked in private. It was something I had noticed on my own.

I picked up the phone.

And then hung up.

What if my talking to Jordain would make a difference to his investigation? What if the information I had dovetailed with facts he’d found out but hadn’t quite fit into place? I went over the argument again in my mind. Going to the police with information that had to do with any patients wasn’t something you just did. There was nothing more sacred in our business than the confidentiality between me and the people who came to me to help them.

I fell asleep after lying in bed for what seemed like hours, going over both sides of the argument, trying to tackle it with logic, without coming to a solution. The apartment was quiet except for the occasional sound of a car on the street five stories below. Where was he? The man who had killed Philip Maur and Timothy Wheaton. Was he on the videotape that Shelby had given me? Had any of the women I was working with in the group had sex with him? What was his connection to the Scarlet Society? And what was my responsibility?

I got up, throwing off the sheets, and walked barefoot through the dark hallway to Dulcie’s room. The door was open halfway and my eyes had adjusted to the gloom while I lay in my bed, restless and worried.

My daughter was lying on her back, one arm under the sheets, the other thrown across her chest. Her face was smooth and peaceful. I couldn’t see the shadows under her eyes that I’d noticed that night at dinner. All I wanted to do was keep her safe. Keep her happy.

Somewhere beyond these walls was a man who had already killed twice. I didn’t know why. And I didn’t know what I could do about it. But I knew that the men he had
killed had children who would miss them, whose lives would never be the same again.

Lost girls. Lost boys.

Could I really keep what I knew from Noah Jordain?

A
t lunchtime the next day, Nina asked if I wanted to take a walk.

“Yes, if you’ll come with me to run an errand. I have to go to Tiffany to pick up a present for Dulcie.”

She nodded. “I’ll get my jacket.”

The temperature still hadn’t dropped; it was a sunny sixty degrees out. The walk should have been delightful but I was preoccupied and tired, and she knew it.

“What’s bothering you?” she asked as soon as we were out on the street.

I didn’t deny that I was troubled. Nina had known me too long and too well.

There were two things on my mind, but I was only ready to talk about one of them. I still hadn’t figured out how to deal with the information I had about Timothy Wheaton and Philip Maur, but Nina and I had already fought once in the past few days about my talking to the police, so I chose the safer issue and told her about my daughter’s request that I not go to Boston for the preview.

There was a lot of pedestrian traffic that afternoon since it was one of those energizing fall days when everyone
who lives in cities like New York and Paris and London takes to the streets. If only it could stay like this, we all say to one another about the bracing air and vibrant trees.

“Being a motherless daughter makes me question every damned decision,” I said as we walked downtown on Madison Avenue, too engrossed in the conversation to do any window-shopping.

“Is that it? You didn’t have a mother for long enough, so you don’t know what to do?”

“Why can’t that be it?”

“Well, even if you’d had a mother for your whole adolescence, you still wouldn’t be prepared for this particular problem.”

“I’d have road maps.”

“You might. But that’s too obvious. I think something else happens when Dulcie exerts her will like this.”

I sighed. I really couldn’t expect less of her, could I? Nina was first and foremost a therapist. “What?”

“Morgan, when Dulcie told you that she didn’t want you to go with her, do you remember how you felt?”

“I just concentrated on how to react. On what to say to give her support and make her feel that I would take her seriously, that I love—”

“Stop. You can make me so mad sometimes. Are you listening to yourself?”

We’d gotten to the gray granite building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. The art deco lines, clean and sleek, were from an older time, and the familiarity was comforting. The parts of New York that never change are landmarks for those of us who have lived here all our lives. The hamburger shop on Madison Avenue and Sixty-third Street where my mother took me when I was six was still there. So was Saks Fifth Avenue, where my
father used to take me on my birthday for shopping sprees. The Christmas tree that arrived every year at Rockefeller Center brought back memories of each Christmas when I took Dulcie to the lighting. There were other places, too, but some were gone, torn down to make room for new buildings. I missed those signposts of the past.

I sighed. “Do we do this on the street, right now, Nina?”

“No. Right now we go into the store and act very civilized and enjoy the rarefied air, but we continue this after we’ve picked up your gift. What is it, anyway?”

To celebrate Dulcie’s lead in
The Secret Garden
, I’d ordered a monogrammed gold key on a chain, symbolizing the one Mary Lennox found that led her into the hidden space that had been abandoned for a decade.

“A necklace.”

We walked through the glass doors and into the quiet hush of the jewelry store. Little blue boxes from Tiffany, with their white satin ribbons, were a luxury that I wanted Dulcie to enjoy as much as I had when my father had given them to me. My sweet sixteen present, my high school graduation gift, my college graduation gift, had all come from Tiffany. As had my wedding ring. And Mitch’s. Dulcie’s baby rattle and her first baby cup.

Nina stood by while the salesman showed me the gold key, carefully pointing out the inscription on the back: the date of the opening along with “To Dulcie. Love, Mom and Dad.”

On our way back to the office, Nina and I stopped at an espresso bar, where we sat at a small table that had just been vacated. We ordered cappuccinos and small sandwiches.

“Okay, let’s get back to it,” she said after the waitress had left.

“Do we have to?”

She nodded.

“I don’t remember where we were,” I lied.

“I know you too well for that, Morgan. You have never forgotten where you were in an interrupted conversation in your life. What I asked was how you felt when Dulcie told you that she didn’t want you to go to Boston with her.”

I started to think. Nina interrupted.

“No, no thinking. Just tell me. Fast. How did you feel?”

“That she didn’t want me.”

“Who didn’t want you?”

“That my mother—” I stopped. Shocked. Even with everything I knew about psychoanalysis and with all the psychotherapy I’d had, I hadn’t made the connection myself.

“Dulcie going into acting is bringing more of your memories of your mother to the surface, isn’t it?”

My throat tightened. I nodded.

“She loved acting so much,” Nina said, her voice softening as she, too, thought about her old friend.

“I remember how she used to get dressed up to go to tryouts. I’d sit on the edge of the bathtub and watch her meticulously apply her makeup and spray on her perfume. I’d wait for her to come home, too. She was always so excited when she got back, telling me about everything that had happened and how sure she was about getting the role and that when she did, we’d move into a bigger apartment but…” I was remembering too much now and didn’t want to go on. I’d thought of something I’d never realized before. “Nina, she wasn’t going to tryouts, was she? She was going to bars, right? She was trying to pick up guys so they’d pay for her drinks and her drugs.”

She nodded.

“And they lived happily never after,” I said, repeating
the line that had made my mother famous for a few heartbeats and that ultimately had done more damage than good, spoiling her for a life that would never live up to what it had been before. She’d been seduced by her brief stint at stardom and nothing ever came close: not her marriage, not her family, not her friends, not even me.

And I was letting my daughter step into that same spotlight.

I shuddered.

Nina took my hand. “Dulcie isn’t your mother, sweetie. She’s your daughter. And she has a mother. She has you.”