The threat, uttered with all the venom she could muster, made me choke with laughter. I swallowed some Sancerre to try to control myself, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Jade’s mountain rumbled and shook as he joined in. Joel gasped in horror. Only the two LeBlanc women remained unmoved, glaring at each other.
“What I ought to do, I ought to send you to reform school, Corinne Alton LeBlanc.”
“What you ought to do is cool out,” I advised, putting my glass down on a chrome table. “It’s a good offer. Take it. If you don’t, she’ll only run away.”
Brigitte tightened her mouth in a narrow line. “I didn’t hire you to have you turn on me, you know.”
“Yeah, well, you hired me. You didn’t buy me. My job is to help you resolve a difficult problem. And this looks like the best solution you’re going to be offered.”
“Oh, very well,” she snapped pettishly, pouring herself another drink. “For six months. And if her grades start slipping, or I hear she’s drinking or doping or anything like that, she comes back here.”
I got up to go. Corinne followed me to the door.
“I’m sorry I was rude to you over at Lily’s,” she muttered shyly. “When the kittens are born you can have the one you like best.”
I gulped and tried to smile. “That’s very generous of you, Corinne. But I don’t think my dog would take too well to a kitten.”
“Don’t you like cats?” The big brown eyes stared at me poignantly. “Really, cats and dogs get along very well unless their owners expect them not to.”
“Like LeBlancs and Pierces, huh?”
She bit her lip and turned her head, then said in a startled voice, “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”
“Just teasing you, Corinne. You take it easy. Things are going to work out for you. And if they don’t, give me a call before you do anything too rash, okay?”
“And you will take a kitten?”
Just say no, Vic, just say no, I chanted to myself. “Let me think about it. I’ve got to run now.” I fled the house before she could break my resolve any further.
SETTLED SCORE
I
“IT’S SUCH A difficult concept to deal with. I just don’t like to use that word.” Paul Servino turned to me, his mobile mouth pursed consideringly. “I put it to you, Victoria: you’re a lawyer. Would you not agree?”
“I agree that the law defines responsibility differently than we do when we’re talking about social or moral relations,” I said carefully. “No state’s attorney is going to try to get Mrs. Hampton arrested, but does that-”
“You see,” Servino interrupted. “That’s just my point.”
“But it’s not mine,” Lotty said fiercely, her thick dark brows forming a forbidding line across her forehead. “And if you had seen Claudia with her guts torn out by lye, perhaps you would think a little differently.”
The table was silenced for a moment: we were surprised by the violent edge to Lotty’s anger. Penelope Herschel shook her head slightly at Servino.
He caught her eye and nodded. “Sorry, Lotty. I didn’t mean to upset you so much.”
Lotty forced herself to smile. “Paul, you think you develop a veneer after thirty years as a doctor. You think you see people in all their pain and that your professionalism protects you from too much feeling. But that girl was fifteen. She had her life in front of her. She didn’t want to have a baby. And her mother wanted her to. Not for religious reasons, even-she’s English with all their contempt for Catholicism. But because she hoped to continue to control her daughter’s life. Claudia felt overwhelmed by her mother’s pressure and swallowed a jar of oven cleaner. Now don’t tell me the mother is not responsible. I do not give one damn if no court would try her: to me, she caused her daughter’s death as surely as if she had poured the poison into her.”
Servino ignored another slight headshake from Lotty’s niece. “It is a tragedy. But a tragedy for the mother, too. You don’t think she meant her daughter to kill herself, do you, Lotty?”
Lotty gave a tense smile. “What goes on in the unconscious is surely your department, Paul. But perhaps that was Mrs. Hampton’s wish. Of course, if she didn’t intend for Claudia to die, the courts would find her responsibility diminished. Am I not right, Vic?”
I moved uneasily in my chair. I didn’t want to referee this argument: it had all the earmarks of the kind of domestic fight where both contestants attack the police. Besides, while the rest of the dinner party was interested in the case and sympathetic to Lotty’s feelings, none of them cared about the question of legal versus moral responsibility.
The dinner was in honor of Lotty Herschel’s niece Penelope, making one of her periodic scouting forays into Chicago ’s fashion scene. Her father-Lotty’s only brother-owned a chain of high-priced women’s dress shops in Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto. He was thinking of making Chicago his U.S. beachhead, and Penelope was out looking at locations as well as previewing the Chicago designers’ spring ideas.
Lotty usually gave a dinner for Penelope when she was in town. Servino was always invited. An analyst friend of Lotty’s, he and Penelope had met on one of her first buying trips to Chicago. Since then, they’d seen as much of each other as two busy professionals half a continent apart could manage. Although their affair now had five years of history to it, Penelope continued to stay with Lotty when she was in town.
The rest of the small party included Max Loewenthal, the executive director of Beth Israel, where Lotty treated perinatal patients, and Chaim Lemke, a clarinetist with the Aeolus Woodwind Quintet. A slight, melancholy man, he had met Lotty and Max in London, where they’d all been refugees. Chaim’s wife, Greta, who played harpsichord and piano for an early music group, didn’t come along. Lotty said not to invite her because she was seeing Paul professionally, but anyway, since she was currently living with Aeolus oboist Rudolph Strayarn, she probably wouldn’t have accepted.
We were eating at my apartment. Lotty had called earlier in the day, rattled by the young girl’s death and needing help putting the evening together. She was so clearly beside herself that I’d felt compelled to offer my own place. With cheese and fruit after dinner Lotty had begun discussing the case with the whole group, chiefly expressing her outrage with a legal system that let Mrs. Hampton off without so much as a warning.
For some reason Servino continued to argue the point despite Penelope’s warning frowns. Perhaps the fact that we were on our third bottle of Barolo explained the lapse from Paul’s usual sensitive courtesy.
“Mrs. Hampton did not point a gun at the girl’s head and force her to become pregnant,” he said. “The daughter was responsible, too, if you want to use that word And the boy-the father, whoever that was.”
Lotty, normally abstemious, had drunk her share of the wine. Her black eyes glittered and her Viennese accent became pronounced.
“I know the argument, believe you me, Paul: it’s the old ‘who pulled the trigger?’-the person who fired the gun, the person who manufactured it, the person who created the situation, the parents who created the shooter. To me, that is Scholastic hairsplitting-you know, all that crap they used to teach us a thousand years ago in Europe. Who is the ultimate cause, the immediate cause, the sufficient cause, and on and on.
“It’s dry theory, not life. It takes people off the hook for their own actions. You can quote Heinz Kohut and the rest of the self-psychologists to me all night, but you will never convince me that people are unable to make conscious choices for their actions or that parents are not responsible for how they treat their children. It’s the same thing as saying the Nazis were not responsible for how they treated Europe.”