Fatal Reaction

door-to-door canvass. I walked up to the sink and stood there for a long time trying to imagine what it must have been like. What was it that Mr. Running Shoes was trying to clean up in the kitchen? What was it that he was trying to conceal? How had he felt on that fateful day, standing where I stood? Panicked surely, or at the very least, afraid. Covered with blood, terrified of discovery... And what else? Frantic. Desperate. I stared again at the sink before me.
    Off to the right on the counter by itself, about an arm’s length from the sink, stood a drinking glass. A drinking glass. Off to the right. Exactly where I’d set it if I were standing doing dishes and stopped for a drink of water. I stared at it for a long time. Yes, he’d been frantic, desperate, and afraid. But there was also a good chance he was thirsty.
     
    There was something very comforting about the dining room at the Four Seasons, very civilized. When I arrived, I found my mother comfortably settled at the very best table overlooking Michigan Avenue being fussed over like royalty by the head waiter and the maitre d’. Her hair, always perfect, had just been done and she was wearing a blouse of butter-colored silk and a string of Mikimoto pearls. I dutifully kissed the air beside her cheek before sliding into my seat. I wondered whether it was normal to be so nervous having lunch with your own mother.
    Of course, Mother wasn’t your normal mother. Dubbed the first lady of Chicago by the gossip columnists, she was instantly recognizable to anyone with even a passing interest in the society page. In the blue book of Chicago’s upper crust, Astrid Millholland was the one who decided whose name got included on the A list.
    To say that she had not been the warmest or most nurturing of parents would be something of an understatement. Even from the time I was very young, it must have been clear to her that I lacked not just the physical beauty that had been her birthright, but also the star quality of her personality. I was awkward where she was graceful, intelligent where she was charming, and her disappointment in me suffused even my earliest memories.
    And yet, as I grew older—or possibly just grew up—I had finally begun to see her from a different vantage point. I told myself that beneath the flawless exterior, the preternatural poise, my mother was just a woman. Driven to succeed in one of the few arenas available to her, indeed the only one she’d ever known, she was no better and not terribly much worse than many women of her generation and social stratum.
    Strangely enough, I had hoped the new apartment might turn out to be a kind of bridge between us. While I had no illusions about developing the kind of closeness I suspected that other mothers and daughters enjoyed, I at 'east hoped in time for some kind of rapprochement—a Pattern of civil relations and possibly even common ground. To a limited extent it seemed to be working. At least we now had something to talk about that didn’t inevitably lead to one of us stalking away from the table—usually me.
    And while I had been bloodied more than once in fierce business situations, sitting across the table from my mother in the alien environs of a ladies’ lunch, I found myself paling at the prospect of what I intended to do. I let her rail about the “crime” Paul Riskoff had committed on the co-op roof and discuss her latest ideas for the new apartment, all of which seemed to involve moving walls at what I suspected would turn out to be shocking expense.
    Finally, with a plate of crab cakes in front of me, I managed to get up the nerve. Without going into the details I explained to her about Danny Wohl’s sudden death and how I had been drafted to take his place in the negotiations with Takisawa. But when I began explaining the difficulties I anticipated in dealing with the Japanese, she cut me off.
    “Of course, the Japanese can be terribly difficult,” interjected Mother. “It’s an entirely different culture. Do you remember Lissy Magnuson? Her daughter, Sarah, was two classes ahead of you at Chelsea Hall. Lissy’s husband, Herbert, served as ambassador to Japan under Reagan. They contributed so much money to his campaign that Lissy really thought they ought to have been sent to France. Well, compared to Paris you can understand how Tokyo was a tremendous shock. For one thing, the ambassador’s residence was ever so much smaller than her house in Lake Forest. And