to the project. It was funny how wildly others misjudged her income. Most people thought she had much less than she did, because it was inconceivable to them that a writer could make money. But some, like the headmaster here at the Gordon School, had erred in the other direction, suggesting she might want to give at the ‘Diamond’ level, which started—started—at $100,000. God knows what kind of money was required to put one’s name on a building; Elizabeth Perlstein, class of ’88, was either one of those tech billionaires or married to one. Luckily, Cassandra had mastered the art of the graceful demurral, the ability to avoid the definitive no while never saying yes. Instead, she had waived her speaking fee, which was considerable, and persuaded her father to join her on the stage here for a fund-raiser, in which she would lead him, for the first time ever, through a public discussion of what had happened to him in the ’68 riots. Tickets to the talk alone were $50 and there was a private dinner for those willing to pay $250. The school stood to raise almost $50,000 from the event. Not Diamond level, but Platinum, and more than good enough by Cassandra’s estimation.
‘We feel so lucky to have you,’ the headmaster said. ‘We thought the University of Baltimore symposium would have snapped you up.’
‘Oh, this is so much more meaningful to me,’ Cassandra said. The fact was, the University of Baltimore had not even contacted her, nor had they asked her father to contribute an oral history to its extensive Web-based archive. She had been hurt by this omission, but not surprised, for there had been a small backlash against My Father’s Daughter once it found commercial success. The critical talking point, first advanced by a so-so lesbian African-American novelist, was that Cassandra had usurped a major political event and turned it into—she knew the words by heart—a story about a white girl’s birthday party, ruined by the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, wah-wah-wah. The words had rankled, but Cassandra hadn’t been foolish enough to respond. Still, in quiet moments, when that stinging criticism came back to her, she argued in her head with her nemesis, a one-book wonder rumored to owe at least three books to three different publishers. Don’t write me out of history. You, of all people, should know what it’s like to be silenced, to be told that you have no role—because of race, because of gender, because of sexuality. My story is my story. And my father—complicated, less than admirable man that he was—saved a woman’s life that day. Yes, her pillow had received those words many times over.
But this was only the fortieth anniversary. Perhaps by the fiftieth, they would be included. Fifty, ten years from now. Caught off guard by the realization that she was now at an age where, actuarially, she could not presume her father would be with her ten years in the future, Cassandra missed some point the headmaster was making. She smiled and nodded. Smiles and nods covered a multitude of oversights.
‘Pedant,’ Ric Fallows said a few hours later, after listening to her account of the meeting.
It was one of his favorite words, his all-purpose condemnation. Pedant, pedantic, pedantry, pederast, the last of which he seemed to use interchangeably with pedant, although he clearly knew better. The irony, of course, was that Cedric Fallows was far more pedantic, in the literal sense of the word, than those he labeled.
The pedant of the day was a neighbor here at Broadmead who had the temerity to complain about Mr Fallows sitting on his patio in his bathrobe. And nothing else. Given the retirement community’s village-like aspect, with garden apartments built around shared courtyards, he could be glimpsed by his neighbors in deshabille.
‘Only if they’re looking,’ he pointed out when Cassandra raised the issue.
‘Well,’ Cassandra said, ‘apparently they are. And they can live with the bathrobe. Just not the lack of anything beneath.’
‘That was last summer. Why bring it up now?’
‘Because spring is icumen in,’ she trilled. ‘Lhude sang the cuccu in his bathrobe.’
He smiled. ‘It’s summer that’s icumen in. And your Middle English is deplorable.’
But she had played his game, used a learned reference to lighten a tense moment. She could let the subject drop, move on to a discussion of their upcoming appearance at the Gordon School.
‘I’m not sure I want to go,’ he said, surprising her. She thought her father would be dying for this bit of recognition. He had never had the academic career he envisioned, never published the big book in his head, the one he thought would change the way people read myths. ‘Fuck Joseph Campbell,’ he blurted out from time to time. Cassandra still wasn’t sure if he saw Campbell as the usurper of his ideas or the antithesis of what he had hoped to say.
‘We’re committed,’ she said nervously, thinking of those blueprints, the advance ticket sales. ‘They’ve advertised—’
‘Oh, I’ll be there, if I must. But why can’t you tell it, as you did in your book?’
‘Because it’s your story.’
‘It was. Somehow it became yours.’
She weighed what he was saying. A complaint? An acknowledgment of a literal truth? Or something in between?
Yet her father had always seemed proud of her book. She remembered the first local signing, the one where no one had come, in a struggling independent in downtown Baltimore. Cassandra didn’t have many friends left in the city. Her friends were from college, her years in New York. In New York, at her first-ever publication party, the bookstore had been full of friends and publishing types, and there had been a dinner afterward in a restaurant. In Baltimore, where the publicist had assumed she would be championed as a hometown girl made good, there were exactly five people: her father and Annie, her mother and her mother’s best friend, and a woman who had clearly misunderstood the thrust of the book, believing it a history of the civil rights movement in Baltimore. The evening was notable, however, for it marked the first time since Cassandra’s high school graduation that her parents and Annie had been in the same room. (A midyear graduate from college, she hadn’t bothered to walk, just packed up her things and gone straight to a sublet on the Lower East Side, back when the Lower East Side was still the Lower East Side.)
She had been nervous that night, reading in front of her parents. And Annie. The section she had earmarked for bookstore appearances suddenly seemed inappropriate, centering as it did on her attempt to re-create the moment her father met Annie. Her parents had raised her to be direct and down-to-earth about sex, but did that apply to their own sex lives? Her mother had explained the biology of the matter to her when she was eight, while her father had spent his life instructing her in the more indefinable nature of desire. She had been six or seven when her father had pointed out a woman near the Konstant Kandy stand in Lexington Market. ‘That woman,’ he said, gesturing with the spoon from his ice cream, ‘has a magnificent ass. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth compared such an ass to a peach, or maybe it was a nectarine, but that’s a little flat-footed for me. What do you think? A cello, perhaps, or an amaryllis bulb, with the backbone stretching up like the stem, the head the flower?’ No, the timing was off, for Roth’s book certainly wasn’t around when she was six. In fact, she remembered seeing its yellow cover on her father’s nightstand, in the apartment he shared with Annie, and thinking, He says he’s too strapped to get me new shoes, yet he buys himself hardcover books. But her father considered books as essential as food. He would have been baffled if anyone suggested not buying the book he wanted the moment he wanted it. Besides, her father’s library was a gold mine for a dirty-minded girl. Cassandra had read Roth and Updike and Mailer. She read Candy, although she didn’t understand it until she read Voltaire in a college lit class. Her father’s contemporary books, much more than his library of classics, prepared her well
