HART WAS STANDING in Kingsfield’s study. He hadn’t been able to sleep and, leaving Susan in the large bed upstairs, had come down and wandered through the house until he found the small study, perched behind the living room.
He had turned on only the desk lamp. He wasn’t quite sure that the neighbors, knowing that Professor Kingsfield was gone for the weekend, would assume that it was Susan in the house.
The desk was surprisingly small. The same clutter of objects that filled the other rooms but more personal-an engraved ashtray and pen set. The pictures on the wall fascinated him most. A picture of Susan, about five years old, standing on the beach smiling. She looked different in short curly hair. A picture of the three of them together; Kingsfield, Susan, and her mother, a pretty woman, smiling, holding the hands of the other two.
“Are you interested in the study?” Susan had crept up on him in the dark, following the study light. It startled him, having her there without warning. Sleeping in her father’s bed was one thing but he felt like an intruder in the study. She picked up an oblong inscribed silver box, opened it and produced a cigar. Brushing by Hart, she sat behind the desk and struck a match on the big leather chair.
“I played in this study when I was a little girl. I used to run the Dictaphone.” She leaned back in the chair, striking the pose of the Columbia student who had been photographed in Grayson Kirk’s office. The allusion was lost on Hart. But the sight of her naked, smoking her father’s cigar and leaning back in the chair made him nervous. She could do it-it was her father-but he was an intruder.
“Sit down, boy,” she said, in mock seriousness. “They tell me you have special problems. Maybe you ought to get involved with a nice girl and settle down.”
She opened the cabinet behind the desk, took out a bottle of bourbon and poured Hart a glass. “Have a drink of this, son, it will give you strength for the battle ahead.”
He sat down with the drink.
Behind Susan’s head was a graduation picture of thirty or so serious, suited young men. Kingsfield was in the middle of the group. Susan could tell Hart was looking past her.
“That’s the Law Review of 1929: two chief justices, and Dad. He put the picture where you have to look at it.”
“I feel funny,” Hart said. “This is his special room.” He picked up the silver ashtray. It had an inscription on it, a squash prize, 1926. “Do you think he’d like us drinking in his room?”
“Hell,” Susan said. “He’s in New York. He’ll never know you or I were here. There is absolutely nothing, nothing, not one thing in the entire world, to worry you. You just lean back and talk to me. Besides, don’t you think he’d want you to see it all? You’re behaving just the way he’d want you to behave. Picking up his little silver mementos, looking at his Law Review picture. You act like a student in a seminary. It’s just what he’d want. To have you fondle his things.”
She blew the smoke out of her mouth in a hard push and looked at Hart as though she was tired. He smiled, trying to break her new mood. He put his feet up on the desk, touching her toes with his.
“You know, Susan, when I’m in class with your father I feel like he knows me, as though when he calls on me he had it all planned out, like he’s watching my progress. I feel like we’re talking about things. You know, when he asks me a question, like he cares about how I do.”
She turned in her chair, looked past him, took a sip of her drink and laid the cigar on the table. Then she looked directly at his eyes, hard. She took a deep breath.
“You’re going to get screwed. You’re a nice guy but you’re going to get screwed. There isn’t any middle ground. If you start thinking like that you’ll never be able to survive. Hell, it’s all got to roll off your back. Do you think my father even knows who you are? Do you think he’d care, even if he did know? What do you think law school is all about? You have to ignore it, or you have to be able to take it. You have to float with it or you have to wade through not thinking it’s there.”
Hart was surprised she’d taken it so seriously. He put the little ashtray back on the table. “Listen,” he said, “you’re a beautiful naked girl sitting right across from me and if you start getting serious, you’ll blow my mind.”
He got up and came around the desk, put a hand around her head and pulled it into his chest. He stood that way, waiting for her to move.