Free City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg Page A

of course our sympathies are with you and the children.”
    “The kids are going to be fine. They adjust to these things, as you probably remember. I can’t imagine why Daddy wouldn’t have mentioned this, even with his condition.” The party had snapped back into focus. There had been a distinct thickening, a press of bejacketed arms and shoulders. Somewhere nearby, a platter trailed the scent of roast meat. The piano was being molested again. Was being molested still.
    “I’m wondering now if this is why your Uncle Amory has been so grim about the mouth this evening. He’s looking for you, you know. He claims it’s Board talk, something to do with the firm, about which I’m as you know completely ineducable. Now where has he gotten to?” The little woman rose preposterously on her toes, as though an extra inch of height might allow her to pick her brother out of the crowd. Regan was relieved when she de-levitated, disappointment slathered perhaps too broadly on her visible face. “Well, I don’t see him. But I’m sure you’ll bump into each other before the night is out. He was adamant about not letting you go until he’d had a chance to confer.”
    Regan would not reward Felicia by letting her see she felt menaced. “Well, I’m sure you’ve got many people to confer with yourself, and my drink needs freshening.”
    “Naturally.”
    “But as I said, you’ve really outdone yourself. Is there a theme, by the way, tying all this together?”
    “You didn’t get the invitation?”
    “I must have read it in a hurry.”
    “ ‘Masque of the Red Death.’ A little private joke of my brother’s. Plague years and so forth, he says. He has that unusual sense of humor, you know.”
    “Very droll.”
    “Fabulous to see you, Regan.”
    It had been their longest exchange in several years, and certainly their most disconcerting, and so at some point, Regan had let her guard down, at least as regarded hands—and now Felicia pounced. Her palms, closing around Regan’s, were like cool, carnivorous plants. The pressure she could generate was enormous. “And Regan, dear, we must keep our chins up. It’s our lot in life, as it’s the lot of men to be incorrigibly men, and who’s to say, in the end, which is harder?”
    So they had known, Regan thought, less in bitterness than in foreboding, as she returned to the crowd. When she looked back, her stepmother was again a dark mark against the hearth, like a bundle of kindling awaiting the flames.
    STEERING CLEAR OF AMORY GOULD had never been easy, and tonight was no exception. The dangers of the reception hall were obvious; the room was getting fuller and drunker the closer it got to twelve, and he could have been lurking behind any number of masks. On the other hand, smaller spaces exposed her, too. She sequestered herself in a bathroom for a while but couldn’t stay there forever, and when the scale there beckoned her to check her weight, as Dr. Altschul had forbidden her to do, she removed herself to an adjoining room normally used for music (whence the piano sounds had come). She stood with her back to one wall for support and sipped her third champagne. Tough it out till midnight, she thought. One more hour, and you’ll have put in your time. From atop an orange-draped table, a TV stained the gloom. Dick Clark hadn’t aged since she’d been in college. A man switched over to the football game. Anybody mind? “Please do,” she said.
    If you’d suggested fifteen years ago—say, the weekend of what turned out to be her father and Felicia’s engagement party, at the Goulds’ summer house on Block Island—that she would one day have a measure of power over these people, the men in their gabardine slacks, the kerchiefed wives in their pedal pushers, she wouldn’t have believed you. Offstage, she was by and large a wallflower, lacking her brother’s loquacity. It was what had drawn her to the theater at Vassar: someone had already written your lines. And