‘There you are,’ Sloan said with an air of discovery as Roman entered the dining room.
There were three places set at the table, Royal Worcester on San Dominican mahogany. The dining room was similar to the others Roman had seen with the addition of a patriotic wooden eagle.
Sloan removed a bottle of white wine that had been perspiring in a silver basket and filled their glasses. As a bit of before-dinner conversation, he asked Roman whether he could identify the various pieces in the room. It was a simple, tedious task, but Roman did it with a smile. After all, what else could Sloan imagine that they had in common? Loving? Hating? A slaughtered girl? It was an intimation of Roman’s social standing that Sloan didn’t bother to suggest who the third diner might be until she appeared.
‘Oh Hillary, we were wondering where you were. This is Mr Grey; he’s staying over for the weekend. My daughter.’
Hillary had a cool hand, like the glass of wine. Roman had seen her picture in the living room in a frame from Biddle, Banks and Bailey. As she sat down, she still seemed to be in a sterling silver frame. Her hair was long and so fair as almost to be white. She’d inherited her father’s eyes of ice blue and a full mouth from someone else. She was dressed in a chic blouse, pants and an embroidered leather vest. Roman guessed her age at nineteen.
‘Something new,’ she said as a greeting.
‘I’m glad to meet you, too,’ Roman said. Before she could take umbrage, he gave her a wide smile of brilliant teeth against his dark face.
She looked from Roman to her father trying to figure out the connection. ‘Well, Father, I thought I knew all your friends.’
Sloan blushed. ‘Mr Grey is here to compile a list of the collection for the Metropolitan Museum.’
‘Ah.’ It was neat and informative. She’d not only put her father down with an ease that showed practice but also put the visitor in his place. There was an embarrassed pause while she innocently smoothed her napkin over her lap.
‘Let’s eat,’ her father said suddenly, as if it were a good idea.
The supper was overcooked scrod and a salad, the sort of meal designed for a middle-aged man watching his weight. Roman grew sympathetic to Sloan’s digestion as the girl led the conversation from one sore subject to another in a soft, sweet voice. She was like a surgeon probing with a scalpel not to dispel pain but create it.
‘My father’s a very good collector. I’m so happy your museum is becoming aware of that fact. I bet there’s not another man in Boston with his eye for value. Remember the time’ – she turned for aid from her father – ‘when that old Irishwoman asked you to look at that chest. You know, she’d been a maid to one of the Cabot families her whole life, and all she got out of it was a dirty old bureau. She was practically in rags, you told me. Anyway, Father took one look at it and knew it was a, what, a William and Mary, that’s right. He paid her fifty dollars for it, brought it here and cleaned it, and sold it two months later for three thousand dollars.’
She slid a fish knife down the flaccid spine of the scrod.
‘My friends are all against the war. I mean, half of them are in Canada, and the rest are trying to break a toe or something before their physical rather than let themselves be turned into cannon fodder. So far as I’m concerned that’s a lot braver than just letting yourself be inducted. The silly boys aren’t as original as they think, though. Father was just as smart as they are now and it was a lot more unpopular in World War II. It took real nerve claiming a bad back then, don’t you think?’
By the time she was finished she’d picked her father as clean as the fish. Sloan’s eyes had the watery look of a man who was knocked out and merely refused to fall. The unusual aspect in the girl’s attack, what made it so effective, was an absence of any feeling. She didn’t act from betrayal or pique the way a daughter should. It reminded him of the absent presence in the framed pictures. There were no photos of her mother in the house. The ones of Sloan and the girl together belied the idea that he ever held her on his lap for anything but portraits. He was the sort of father who sent his daughter from one boarding school to another, probably showing up late if at all on Father’s Day and then making contact with the other fathers instead of with Hillary Sloan. Now he was paying for it.
She wasn’t just a girl anymore. Roman could feel her physical presence, the line that led down her cheek to a stylishly long neck to the casually unbuttoned blouse and the fact that no bra restrained her breasts as she twisted back and forth from her father to the fish. At the same time he was aware that she was studying him. It was unusual enough for a man like him to be sitting across from her whether he was from the museum or not. The few electric shocks she directed at him – ‘I’ve always supposed that immigrants understood better how bestial this country is’ – got no reaction, and this mystified her further.
Roman began feeling sordid for having insinuated himself into the Sloan household to hear a dinner conversation that, except for its degree, was taking place in a million other American homes at the same time. He had to remind himself that it was necessary. The vilos, the old witches of Romania, could work magic on a person only when they had something of his – a fingernail, a hair. Something to make him concrete. Roman didn’t spend on magic, but he understood the truth of the system. He needed the frigid, arrogant pulse of the Sloans, or else he would be blind the way he had been on the highway trying to decipher a stretch of road and a handful of photographs. He was no detective. This was the only way he could work, the way the Romany had always worked.
Hillary was talking about a rock festival. Sloan listened with a frown of disapproval. As she spoke, she raised her arms above her head, the imprint of her nipples through her blouse adding another level of intimidation. Sloan looked aside.
Roman watched with interest. Few gaja understood the physical language between people, and the girl herself probably didn’t know what a good job she was doing of undermining her father. When her luxurious stretch was done and she saw that Roman had not diverted his eyes to his lettuce, she stared straight at him. His eyes still didn’t fall.
‘That’s a beautiful vest,’ Roman commented. ‘Kid leather had a religious significance during the Middle Ages. Especially black kid.’
‘Oh, she has one of those, too,’ Sloan said, eager to tell what he had given her.
‘Really? You’re an expert on any number of things,’ Hillary said. He watched the pupils of her blue eyes narrow with dislike. ‘I guess that’s a lesson. Those who can’t afford things know the most about them.’
‘I’m afraid that’s the truth.’ Roman smiled disarmingly.
The dessert came, glass bowls of sherbet. Sloan took small, disheartened scoops of his. His daughter took one large spoonful, praised it extravagantly, and let the lemon-colored ice melt into a puddle of conspicuous consumption. Roman enjoyed his completely.
‘Have you got reservations up in the White Mountains?’ Sloan asked. It was a last attempt to establish his role as patriarch.
‘Reservations at a rock festival would be a little illogical, Father,’ Hillary said, as if she were explaining affairs to a slow child. Her nostrils dilated, and her fingers rose a quarter inch from the table.
‘Cigarette?’ Roman asked. His hand held out his pack of Gauloises to her. Because that was what she had been thinking of and what her minute gestures told Roman, she took it before she could stop herself. ‘They’re strong things, but they’re all I have,’ he said.
To give back the cigarette would be a confession of weakness. Hillary accepted his light.
‘Très chic,’ she said with a motion of the Gauloise.
‘Très cheap,’ Roman told her.
Sloan attempted to drag the conversation back to the festival. His daughter led him on effortlessly. There had been a change in the relationship between the girl and the visitor. She showed off for Roman. He sat back and watched them, taking in the polite Sloan ferocity, their Royal Worcester, their inlaid mahogany prosperity, their worm-eaten ancestry, their hair and fingernails.
As an exercise in imagination, he placed a dismembered body on the table in between the father and daughter and tried to see if it fit.