Bitter Business

sort of pall.
    Dagny Cavanaugh, with no secretary to answer her Phone, picked up herself after a half-dozen rings.
    “I just wanted to see how things are going,” I said after we’d exchanged pleasantries. “I saw your brother Philip this morning, and he said you were still pretty upset.”
    “It’s not just me. It’s everybody. The police were back again this morning. They finally managed to track down Cecilia’s family. It turns out she had a son. A little boy who’s four years old and lives with her mother.”
    “How awful. And she never talked about him?”
    “She never saw him,” replied Dagny, her voice trembling with indignation. “I just got off the phone with her mother. She belongs to some sort of fundamentalist Christian church. She told me that when Cecilia became pregnant the family gave her the choice of accepting Jesus as her savior or giving up all rights to the baby. I guess Cecilia refused to be saved. Now the little boy is being raised in this cult.”
    “So how did they take it when they found out what happened?” I asked.
    “Her mother just kept on telling me over and over again that she wasn’t going to pay for the funeral.”
    “Maybe they really can’t afford it?”
    “No. That’s not it. I got her to give me the name of her minister. I wanted to call him and see if he would reason with her. He explained to me, as cold as ice, that in their church, when a child refuses to be saved, that child is declared dead to the family and the congregation. They buy a casket, hold a funeral, the whole thing. The Dobsons won’t pay for a funeral for their daughter because in their minds they’ve already buried her.”
     
    I hated leaving the office in the middle of the afternoon to drive to my parents’ house. Even before I’d picked up the Superior Plating file, I was in danger of being dragged down by the undertow of too much work.
    The absolute last thing I needed was to bum a couple of hours dragging myself to Lake Forest for some pointless meeting. I was so aggravated at my errand that I completely forgot that they were doing construction on the Kennedy Expressway, which gave me an extra half an hour to contemplate the sorry state of road construction and family dynamics in the city of Chicago.
    By the time I arrived at my mother’s door, I was twenty minutes late and in an evil mood. A maid I’d never laid eyes on answered the door, but that didn’t surprise me; in domestic-employment circles, having once worked for my mother is akin to having been wounded in combat. Rocket, our ancient and arthritic black Lab, skittered across the polished marble of the foyer to greet me. He was an old, fat dog that wheezed like a freight train and hobbled like an old man. I dropped down on one knee and scratched his head.
    I introduced myself to the maid, who, unimpressed, took my coat and disappeared with it. I stood beneath the graceful curve of the staircase and checked my reflection in the large gold mirror that has always hung there. Growing up in that house, I distinctly recall catching glimpses of myself in that mirror and for a fraction of a second seeing my mother’s face looking back at me. But when I’d stop and really look, I would see what was actually there reflected in the glass.
    My mother is a great beauty. Even closing in on sixty, she possesses the miraculous alchemy of skin and bone that is a magnet to the eye. I have her eyes, her skin, her hair, the same expression of irritated petulance when someone crosses me, but somehow when it was all put together and passed along to me, the magic got left out. Today the face I saw in the mirror was tired. My hair was working itself loose from its customary French twist. I pushed the hairpins back into place; then I walked the hallways of my childhood home to find my mother.
     

7
     
    I followed the sound of voices into the music room, so named because Vladimir Horowitz had once played there for Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat. I vaguely remember meeting them—a dark little man who I told my nanny looked like a monkey and his sour-faced wife, so sad and thin. The room, like all of the places in my mother’s house, was beautiful. The walls were covered in yellow silk the color of dull gold and the cabbage-rose chintz of the sofas was offset by the blue-and-white-striped damask of the side chairs. There was an antique Steinway baby grand piano at one end of the room, and beyond that, French doors that opened out onto the