Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(26)

“That’s what caused her heart trouble?”

“Yes, and I accept full responsibility for it. If not for me, she would never have known about that drug. Or needed it either, your aunt always claims.” He drained off the last of his wine and set his glass a bit too firmly on the counter beside him. “Although,” he said after a moment, “I suppose it did provide valuable data for my colleague.”

“She went on field trips with me?” Kate asked. She was trying to wrap her mind around this. “She was interested in me? She liked me?”

“Why, of course. She loved you.”

“I missed her one good spell!” Kate said. It was almost a wail. “I don’t remember it!”

“You’ve forgotten how you used to go shopping together?”

“We went shopping together?”

“She was so happy, she said, to have a daughter she could do girl things with. She took you shopping for clothes and lunch, and once you went for manicures.”

This made her feel eerily disconnected. Not only had she mislaid the memory of experiences she thought she would have treasured all her life, but also, they were experiences that she assumed she would have hated. She couldn’t abide shopping! Yet apparently she had gone along willingly, and maybe even enjoyed herself. It was as if Kate the child had been a completely different entity from Kate the grown-up. She looked down at her blunt, colorless nails and could not make herself believe that once they had been professionally filed and buffed and painted with polish.

“So that’s why we have our Bunny,” her father was saying. There was a blurriness in his voice, perhaps due to the wine, and the lenses of his glasses were misting. “And of course I’m delighted we do have her. She’s so pretty to look at and so lighthearted, the way your mother used to be before we married. But she’s not, let’s say, very…cerebral. And she doesn’t have your backbone, your fiber. Kate, I know I depend on you too much.” He reached out to set his fingertips on her wrist. “I know I expect more of you than I should. You look after your sister, you run the house…I worry you’ll never find a husband.”

“Gee, thanks,” Kate said, and she jerked her wrist away from him.

“No, what I mean is…Oh, I always put things so awkwardly, don’t I. I just meant you’re not out where you could meet a husband. You’re shut away at home, you’re puttering in the garden, you’re tending children in a preschool, which, come to think of it, is probably the last place on earth to…I’ve been selfish. I should have made you go back to school.”

“I don’t want to go back to school,” Kate said. She really didn’t; she felt a flutter of dismay.

“There are other schools, though, if that was not the right one for you. It’s not as if I’m unaware of that. You could finish up at Johns Hopkins! But I’ve been indulging myself. I told myself, ‘Oh, she’s young; there’s plenty of time; and meanwhile, I get to have her here at home. I get to enjoy her company.’?”

“You enjoy my company?”

“It may be, too, that that was another reason I thought of pairing you off with Pyoder. ‘I’d still get to keep her around!’ I must have been thinking. ‘No harm done: it’s a marriage only on paper, and she would still be here in the house.’ You have every right to be cross with me, Kate. I owe you an apology.”

“Oh, well,” Kate said. “I guess I can see your side of it.”

She was remembering the evening she had come home from college. She had arrived unannounced with several suitcases—all she had taken away with her—and when the taxi dropped her off at the house she’d found her father in the kitchen, wearing an apron over his coveralls. “What are you doing here?” he had asked, and she had said, “I’ve been expelled”—putting it even more baldly than need be, just to get the worst of it over with. “Why?” he had asked, and she had told him about her professor’s half-assed photosynthesis lecture. When her father said, “Well, you were right,” she had felt the most overwhelming sense of relief. No, more than relief: it was joy. Pure joy. She honestly thought it might have been the happiest moment in her life.

Her father was holding the wine bottle up to the window now, plainly hoping to find another drop or two in the bottom.

She said, “When you say ‘On paper…’?”

He glanced over at her.

“If it’s just a formality,” she said, “if it’s just some little legal thing that would allow you to change his visa status and after that we could reverse it…”

He set the bottle back down on the counter. He stood tensed, possibly not breathing.

“I suppose that’s not that big a deal,” she said.

“Are you saying yes?”

“Oh, Father. I don’t know,” she said wearily.

“But you might consider it. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I suppose,” she said.

“You really might do this for me?”

She hesitated, and then she gave him a tentative nod. In the very next instant she wondered what on earth she could be thinking, but already her father was pulling her into a fierce, clumsy hug, and then thrusting her away again to gaze exultantly into her face. “You’ll do it!” he said. “You really will! You care enough about me to do this! Oh, Kate, my darling, I can’t even put into words how grateful I am.”