Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

erstwhile employer and mentor, Frank Petrie, is, Don’t give information. Get information.
    “Lisa never married,” her mother said.
    “No, marriage wasn’t what Lisa wanted,” David said.
    “Her studies were everything to her.” Marsha gathered the crumbs from her silk skirt onto one hand and carefully brushed them off in one comer of the tray.
    “The mother has a college degree, too. Did your aunt mention that?”
    “David.” Marsha flapped a hand in his direction.
    “Six years she studied, three at night, three full time , at Brooklyn College , competing with all those young hotshots. She got wonderful grades, wonderful.”
    I smiled at Marsha, and she patted my damp leg.
    “She taught school, too. A very intelligent woman. That’s who Lisa took after. Her mother. A bachelor’s degree. Just like the hotshots.”
    “Is that how you met, at college?”
    “Fourteen years,” he said. He took a last puff on the cigarette and put it out. “That’s how long we waited for Lisa.”
    “David, we shouldn’t—”
    “Rachel needs to know these things, isn’t that so, Rachel? She came here to get the facts, so that she could help us. We never thought there would be a baby, not for us. Fourteen years it took.”
    We sipped tea for a moment in silence. Finally David opened the album. But I had already seen Lisa. Across from us, on the baby grand piano in a standing silver frame, was a photo of a pretty young girl smiling.
    “She was an extraordinary child,” Marsha told me as David turned the pages, “not average.”
    I looked at Lisa in her carriage, Lisa in the bath, Lisa sleeping.
    “She did everything early, before the books said,” Marsha told me, looking at me for approval.
    “Everything early,” I repeated.
    “This was the summer she went to camp,” I heard David say, “but we missed her. Marsha kept saying, ‘David, we have the beach right here, we have the Atlantic Ocean at our beck and call, why does Lisa have to be in the Adirondacks with all those mosquitoes and no ocean?’ So, what else, we went up on visitors’ day and brought her home. At the end of July. Slow season. I could take her to the beach every day. No problem. She was some swimmer, that child. Like a fish.”
    “She was a varsity swimmer,” Marsha said, “at Abraham Lincoln High School .” She got up and brought over the medals and one of the trophies that sat on the shelves across from the couch.
    “She was the valedictorian,” David said. “She made a speech on graduation day. Smart. Like her mother. There was nothing that girl couldn’t do, if she set her mind to it.”
    “When did Lisa get interested in t’ai chi?” I asked.
    “While she was in college,” Marsha said. “Just before she broke her engagement, the end of her sophomore year.”
    I could feel David tense. Marsha looked into her lap.
    “You liked the boy?” I asked.
    “He was going to be a dentist,” she said, “like his father .“
    “Water under the bridge,” David said.
    Had Ceil told them / had been married to a dentist, that I too had let a professional man go?
    “In her third year,” Marsha said, “that was when—”
    “ China , China , she wanted only to go to China . To study. She was nineteen. What did she know? Imagine, running to China , a nineteen-year-old kid, alone, on the other side of the world.”
    “So, did she go? Did she study in China ?”
    “Go? Did she go?” David bellowed.
    For a moment he looked as if he were on fire, red smoke swirling about him as his aura turned the color of his rage.
    “You tell me if you’d let a kid like that go off on her own to a foreign country. What did she know, to do a dangerous thing like that, by herself? She stayed here. It was for her own good. Everything we did was for her, everything.”
    “She studied here,” Marsha said. “At Barnard. Eastern philosophy and Chinese language.”
    “She spoke Chinese, what else, beautiful, just as good as if she had lived there, you should have heard her.”
    “After her postgraduate studies, five years at Columbia on a fellowship, that’s when she met Avram , the director of the school where Lisa worked. She studied with him since then.” Marsha picked up a napkin and held it to her mouth for a moment. “ Avram adored her, you know. He said Lisa was his best student.”
    “Then she was here, living here with you?”
    “Oh, no. She was at the Printing House,” Marsha said. “On Hudson Street. Not far from you. She