The Sins of the Fathers

He stood up and walked to the window. I sat there wondering whether Wendy had known about her father and decided it was ten-to-one that she had. He was the chief character in her personal mythology, and she had spent all her life looking for an incarnation of him. The ambivalence of her feelings about the man seemed to derive from some knowledge over and above what she had been told by Hanniford and her mother.

He stayed at the window for a time. Then he turned and looked thoughtfully at me. "Perhaps I should have told you," he said finally. "I didn't conceal it on purpose. That is, I gave little thought at the time to Wendy's... illegitimacy. That's been a completely closed chapter for so many years that it never occurred to me to mention it."

"I can understand that."

"You said you had a report to make," he said. He returned to his chair and sat down. "Go ahead, Scudder."

I started all the way back in Indiana. Wendy at college, not interested in boys her own age, interested always in older men. She had had affairs with her professors, most of them probably casual liaisons, one at least other than casual, at least on the man's part. He had wanted to leave his wife. The wife had taken pills, perhaps in a genuine suicide attempt, perhaps as a grandstand play to save her marriage.

And perhaps she herself hadn't known which.

"At any rate, there was a scandal of sorts. The whole campus was aware of it, whether or not it became officially a matter of record. That explains why Wendy dropped out of school a couple of months short of graduation. There was really no way she could stay there."

"Of course not."

"It also explains why the school wasn't desperately concerned that she had disappeared. I'd wondered about that. From what you said, their attitude was fairly casual. Evidently they wanted to let you know she was gone but weren't prepared to tell you why she had left, but they knew she had good reasons to leave and weren't concerned about her physical well-being."

"I see."

"She went to New York, as you know. She became involved with older men almost immediately. One of them took her to Miami. I could give you his name, but it doesn't matter. He died a couple of years ago. It's hard to tell now just how big a role he played in Wendy's life, but in addition to taking her to Miami he let her use his name when she applied for her apartment. She put his firm down as her employer, and he backed her up when the rental agent called."

"Did he pay her rent?"

"It's possible. Whether he paid all or part of her support at the time is something only he could tell you, and there's no way to ask him. If you want my guess, her involvement with him was not an exclusive one."

"There were other men in her life at the same time?"

"I think so. This particular man was married and lived in the suburbs with his family. I doubt that he could have spent all that much time with her even if either of them wanted it that way. And I have a feeling she was leery of getting too involved with one man. It must have shaken her a great deal when the professor's wife took the pills. If he was sufficiently infatuated with her to leave his wife for her, she was probably committed to him herself, or at least thought she was. After that fell apart she was careful not to invest too much of herself in any one man."

"So she saw a lot of men."

"Yes."

"And took money from them."

"Yes."

"You know that for a fact? Or is it conjecture?"

"It's fact." I told him a little about Marcia Maisel and how she had gradually become aware of the manner in which Wendy was supporting herself. I didn't add that Marcia had tried the profession on for size.

He lowered his head, and a little of the starch went out of his shoulders. "So the newspapers were accurate," he said. "She was a prostitute."

"A kind of prostitute."

"What does that mean? It's like pregnancy, isn't it? Either you are or you aren't."

"I think it's more like honesty."

"Oh?"

"Some people are more honest than others."

"I always thought honesty was unequivocal, too."

"Maybe it is. I think there are different levels."

"And there are different levels of prostitution?"

"I'd say so. Wendy wasn't walking the streets. She wasn't turning one trick after another, wasn't handing her money over to a pimp."

"Isn't that what the Vanderpoel boy was?"

"No. I'll get to him." I closed my eyes for a moment. I opened them and said,

"There's no way to know this for certain, but I doubt that Wendy set out to be a prostitute. She probably took money from quite a few men before she could pin that label on herself."

"I don't follow you."

"Let's say a man took her out to dinner, brought her home, wound up going to bed with her. On his way out the door he might hand her a twenty-dollar bill.

He'd say something like, Ì'd like to send you a big bouquet of flowers or buy you a present, but why not take the money and pick out something you like?'

Maybe she tried not to take the money the first few times this happened.

Later on she'd learn to expect it."

"I see."