Free Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane by William Peter Blatty

The Senator, for his part, thought she looked preternaturally sexy. She unearthed for him dreams of lust that he had long ago misplaced.
    Their dates had been surreptitious, but at last, when they were discovered, the rumor spread like crabgrass that sweet little Alice was diligently trading her body for the promise of passing grades.
    The scandal was squelched by their engagement, but in the wake of the announcement came a flurry of dark murmurings among the male undergraduates. They were threatening to lynch Hesburgh for “crimes against fraternities” and “the practice of demonology.” One burly junior, a tackle on the football team and clearly enamored of Alice, was ready to swear under oath that he’d seen Hesburgh “in a wizard’s cap drawing a pentangle around Alice while talking white mice danced around him in trance.” This bizarre threat, however, came to no fruit. Nor did the pleadings of Alice’s mother that she was “mesmerized by an Electra complex,” the argument melting to ashes in the face of Alice’s reminder that she’d never seen her father, who had hied himself to the wilds of Tierra del Fuego with a lady softball player just three days after Alice’s birth.
    Alice married Hesburgh.
    They were settled now in Georgetown in a house along the Potomac near the university campus. Hesburgh was now forty-five and Alice merely thirty. She could pass for less and frequently did. On moonlit nights when the fusty Senator was deep in filibuster, Alice would slip into tennis shoes and a shaggy, oversized sweater and import her sizzling charms into a local campus beer hall. At times she attended football rallies, and once, in an incredible extension of her thought-provoking activities, was nominated for “Homecoming Queen” by a campus club at Georgetown. The Senator only discovered it when a request came to his secretary for some “eight-by-ten glossies” of Alice. Their life was not serene.
    Alice was not a homemaker. For example, the Senator’s milk bills ran to ninety dollars per month, a rather compelling figure when one considered that they were childless. Alice would open a bottle of milk, pour out a cupful, and leave the bottle uncapped on a table, where inevitably it soured. She also loved to redecorate, room after room and over and over again: from Modern to Japanese to Provincial to Early Tudor to whatever struck her fancy. Whenever the Senator balked, she would scream about Medicare, which Hesburgh staunchly opposed. “Old folks are dying,” she would shrill, “and all you can think about is milk … that and Chinese Modern!” He could never find proper rebuttal. He saved it for the Senate floor, where he would lacerate waste in government with a fury that left him hoarse.
    Yet it was jealousy that moved him most mightily, even drove him into inanities. Once, in his bedroom (Early Mandarin that month), after discovering that Alice had been given the lead in the senior class play, he dared to threaten her with a letter opener (Persian, left over from July), husking in wild, bathetic tones, “If I can’t have you, no one will!” He was prevented from further idiocy by the entrance of the maid bringing Alice a glass of hot milk.
    The two of them were standing now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The bronze head of a boy, pulled dripping from the Aegean where countless years of lying on ocean bottom had turned it a flaky green, now stared out at them with lustrous eyes that gave it a look of life. Hesburgh, intent, was spelling aloud from a guidebook: “E-p-h-e-b-e—Ephebe. Ephebe of—”
    Alice interrupted him, nervously twirling a glove. “Oh, never mind, darling; it’s really such a bore.”
    Hesburgh pursed his lips, glaring up from the guidebook into the eyes of the Ephebe. “It’s a classic work of art,” he gritted.
    “Hm?” throated Alice, automatically primping her hair as she spied an attractive male some yards away in front of a Picasso. He’d