Free The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross by Amanda Cross Page A

brought into the marriage.”
    “No doubt,” Richard dryly said. “But since all this wife brought in was her misguided affection for Witherspoon, that’s unlikely to serve her very well. Of course, she may have some family bonds stashed away, in which case he’ll do his best to get them. The men can always afford the better lawyers, alas.”
    “No doubt the men look at it differently,” Kate said, her mind elsewhere.
    “We certainly can guess how Witherspoon looks at it. And he’s got two daughters from the former marriage, both unlikely to have great sympathy with the poor alcoholic. Maybe Roxanna and Arabella will come to her defense. I had the most awful row with him, you know, not too long ago. That’s why it’s an additional pleasure to contemplate his absolute awfulness. He worked every angle to get tenure for one of his acolytes, a twerp with his nose in manuscripts and his brain in a sling. A born ass-licker and fool. Witherspoon got his way, of course, and I was marked down as an enemy, a mark not of distinction, since there are so many of us, but of honor. The only good part of the story is that the twerp left to devote himself wholly to some manuscript collection. Did Witherspoon behave himself at dinner?”
    “Oh yes. The older daughter is very gracious, and I likethe younger one. I’m surprised the wife had the gumption to have a love affair.”
    “Its end was no doubt the inevitable last straw. Witherspoon made no bones about the fact that if the child had been a boy he would have forgiven everything. He’s that kind of monster.”
    “Do you think he’s really the father?”
    “God knows. Roxanna is pretty definitely his, and she’s gorgeous, so who has an opinion about genes? Of course, the wife was pretty luscious in those days; he’d never have bothered otherwise, that being all women are good for.”
    “Do you know anything about the lover? He sounds mysterious, like the tutor who might have been Edith Wharton’s father.”
    “I know the scuttlebutt: he was thin, with glasses and buckteeth, and very sweet. He was an adjunct teacher in art history, which she dabbled in. I don’t know what became of him; gossip has it they used to walk around the campus holding hands. I feel sorry for her.”
    Kate was amazed, not for the first time, at the extent of her colleagues’ interest in one another’s lives. Richard was, of course, unofficial keeper of the gossip; since his heart was always in the right place, she was willing to decide that his was a valuable function. What Witherspoon would have thought of it was another question. Did she care what Witherspoon thought about anything, or only what he did?
    What had he done, apart from being a failure as a human being and a father? Kate decided to walk for a while, after bidding Richard a grateful farewell. She wandered around the city streets, noticing dogs (no Jack Russell terriers) and the general air of menace which by now everyone in New York, and probably elsewhere, took for granted: it seemed the mark of an age. Compared to which, Kate told herself, the momentary absence of a dog was hardly to be counted.And yet, there had been, somewhere along the family chain, a failure of trust, which was how menace began. Was it Kant who had said that trust was the basis of civilization? Letting her attention wander unbidden over the cast of characters at that dinner, and in Richard’s account of the Witherspoons, Kate found herself eventually at Central Park at Seventy-second Street; she sat on a bench to observe the spot where Jasper had been tied when Arrie retrieved him. It was a well-chosen location, easily approached and abandoned from four directions, sufficiently crowded with people and dogs entering and leaving the park to make one more man and dog unnoticed. Man? A man had removed Jasper from the building, according to the doorman’s report. Dogs were not allowed in the playground, so a number of them were tied to the entrance, waiting,