Thinking of all this now, Jasper (as he flicked on his headlights against the gathering dusk over northern Massachusetts) found much to be heartened by. Certainly, there were some problem areas to be conscious of (passivity; possible latent hostility), but things were far from as bad as they might have been, surely. No drug use, abortions, arrests, juvenile detention. Clearly, she was working below her academic potential, but Jasper believed that would change once she was in his family’s supportive and nurturing environment.
He stopped at a diner near Brattleboro, ate a hamburger and then carried on north. At Exit 27, he followed the off-ramp onto a two-lane highway that cut through monotonous corn and wheat fields. Eventually, out his right passenger window, appeared the brooding profile of Mount Orford, over the Vermont border, in Quebec. He knew its shape from the summer he had spent in New Halcyon, all those years ago. He was getting close.
He reached Newport at midnight and drove along Main Street, turned left at School Street then right onto Prospect, where, a few doors down, he found the Little Gnesta, the Swiss chalet–styled bed-and-breakfast at which he had made a one-night reservation. He parked behind the building and then climbed, stiffly, out of his car.
He was almost overcome by the remembered aroma of honeysuckle and ragweed, mountain flowers and nearby Lake Memphremagog—a perfume that carried him back to that summer almost twenty years ago. Before moving toward the porch, where a flurry of moths swarmed the lit bulb over the door, he paused and marveled at the strangeness of his situation: that single moment of unguarded passion on a beach not ten miles away, a single moment from his youth that might have vanished like so many other lost instants, but which, owing to the vagaries of human reproduction, had reverberated down the years, to this moment, his return, and his standing on the brink of a momentous meeting. He turned his face up to the night sky, to the vast, heart-quaking star field so much larger and clearer here than back home, where light pollution from nearby New York City erased the evidence of the heavens. Facing that twinkling black expanse, he pondered the mystery of how a single sperm cell of the hundreds of millions he had produced found its way to the egg nestled in Holly’s womb, there to set in motion a new life, a cosmos of thought and feeling. The randomness—the sheer statistical unlikelihood of that occurrence—seemed objectively reflected in the gasping array of stars and galaxies overhead, an infinity of cosmic accidents that had produced this beautiful Earth. A rationalist (he had abandoned his parents’ formal religion at age eighteen), Jasper nevertheless did, privately, retain the belief that there was a force for good shaping everyone’s ends, that no occurrence, regardless of how dire, was without meaning in some larger plan—a faith that had survived even the calamities of his parents’ deaths, and of Pauline’s stroke, and which now buoyed him with the conviction that the advent of Chloe in their lives could only be a harbinger of good and joyful things.
He shouldered his overnight bag and went inside.
In the pine-paneled lobby, a crookbacked old woman behind the desk handed him his door key, and he shuffled down the hall to his room. Exhausted, he did not even bother to shower, and instead only hastily washed his face and brushed his teeth before falling into bed.
2
He was up with the alarm at eight the next morning. He took special care shaving (he did not want his daughter’s first impression of him to include a bloody scab where he had nicked himself), got dressed in the light-colored summer-weight suit he had packed in his overnight bag, then went down the hall past the dining room, where a lively breakfast among strangers was in progress. He eschewed this—he was feeling far too nervous to sit and make small talk with people he did not know—and walked up to Main Street, where he found a health-food diner. He ordered, but was unable to eat, a bowl of granola. At eleven-thirty, with a half hour to spare, he paid the waitress and then set out.
Perched like a chess piece on its manicured square of green, the courthouse was a compact Federalist structure of red brick with green trim, a clock tower rising from a triangular pediment over three tall windows. At the sight of it, Jasper felt a new attack of nerves: his armpits, freshly deodorized, prickled hotly and he felt his heart begin to canter. He mounted the shallow stone steps to the entrance. Inside, it took a moment for his eyes to grow accustomed to the cool gloom of the wood and marble interior. A uniformed security guard seated at a table (no metal detectors here) asked his name, consulted a clipboard, then pointed him to a stairway that led to the second floor. “Courtroom Two,” he said.
At the top of the stairs was a gallery off which a series of courtrooms was arranged. The hall was empty—save for a short, harried-looking man in a gray suit standing by a closed door marked 2. The man looked up from his BlackBerry. “Mr. Ulrickson?” he said, pocketing the device. He held out a hand. “Farkiss, your daughter’s attorney.” They shook hands. “Is Mr. Pollock with you?”
“No,” said Jasper, nervously glancing around. “He said he would catch an early morning flight from New York. But I haven’t seen him.”
“Well, airlines these days,” Farkiss said. “This hearing is a mere formality anyway. At least, it should be. You never know with these judges. I mean—not that you should be worried. I’m sure it’ll go like clockwork.”
“Very good,” Jasper said distractedly. “And … my daughter?”
“My God!” Farkiss cried. “I’m sorry! I’m crazy this morning.”
He pointed toward a closed door a few feet down the hall. “She’s with her social worker, who thought it would be good for you and your daughter to meet privately for a few minutes before the hearing. They’re waiting for you.”
Jasper thanked him, then moved down the hall. He stopped in front of the carved and polished wooden door Farkiss had indicated. Squared his shoulders and knocked. A chair scraped within. He heard the click of heels approaching. The door cracked open. A middle-aged woman’s face appeared in the gap; pinched and suspicious, it suddenly lit up in a smile.
“Mr. Ulrickson!” she said, throwing open the door. “I know you from your book jacket. And of course the Tovah show! I’m Doreen Edwards. We’ve spoken on the phone!” She made a self-mocking face. “But it’s not me you want to see!” She leaned in close and dropped a hand on his forearm. “Come.” She took a step backward, allowing him to see into the room.
Ten feet away, sitting at a long wooden table, was a slender blond girl.
“Your daughter!” Edwards caroled. She added, in a hurried whisper, “I’ll leave you two for a few minutes.” She threw a smile at Chloe and then slipped around him and out into the corridor, closing the door behind her.
Chloe, without taking her eyes off him, pushed back her chair and stood.
He was rooted to the spot, frozen, unable to move. She came forward shyly, like a child edging toward a stranger, looking up at him through lowered lashes, a timid smile on her lips. But Jasper would have known her anywhere, stepping, as she did, straight out of his past. She was dressed as he had never seen Holly dressed: in a smart ensemble of white blouse, dark pencil skirt and heels, in which she walked inexpertly, her slim ankles quivering with each step. But her wheat-blond hair, in a bun at the back of her head, with a few loose strands dangling, was Holly’s hair, and her face was Holly’s face, which, until now, he would not have been able to bring to mind but which was instantly restored in his memory: the long green eyes tilted up at the outer corners, the straight, delicate nose, the high cheekbones and tapering chin. The only obvious difference was in the mouth; Chloe’s had rather more ample lips, the top one as if pulled up in the center in a pronounced triangle that revealed a glimpse of her two large front teeth, white as a baby’s.
Chloe, for her part, was surprised by the look in Ulrickson’s eyes. His expression—hopeful, shy, even a little frightened—was so at odds with the picture Dez had painted of the ruthless predator who seduced and abandoned her mother. It reminded her of how Ulrickson had looked on Tovah’s show, gentle and kind, and it reminded her of t
hose phone calls she had had with him, his voice seemingly filled with genuine interest in her. For a confused moment, she felt as if she were meeting her real father, and something rose up in her, a tide of yearning that she associated with being a small child. She caught herself, recalled Dez’s stern admonishments, his lectures about Ulrickson’s deviousness, coldness and disdain; he had warned her not to be fooled by the man’s studied “nice guy” act—and, remembering this, she again steeled herself against him, vowing that she would (as Dez had put it) “avenge her mother.” Thus resolved, she stepped forward on her unsteady high heels and stood close, smiling up at him, tilting her head to the side in just that way that men, she knew from movies and television, found irresistible. “Daddy?” she said softly.
Jasper, in trying to imagine this moment, had seen himself overcome with emotion, sobbing as he had done on the phone, gathering her up in his arms. But he found himself seized by a strange reticence, as if an invisible arm were thrust out to hold her at a distance. Was this Pauline’s influence? That look of warning in his wife’s stricken eyes seemed to flash before him. Overriding this, he moved stiffly, awkwardly, to take her in his arms. He was flooded with Holly’s until-this-moment-forgotten-but-now-instantly-remembered aroma of ginger and vanilla—not a perfume, but the actual smell of her skin and hair. He felt the warm pressure of her breasts against his shirtfront, the encirclement of her arms, and then he was stepping away, breaking contact, which had, like a shot of adrenaline, kicked his heart into galloping motion.
“My God!” he said, holding her by her shoulders. He was dazed, off-kilter. When trying to imagine her, he had conjured a hybrid of himself and what he could remember of Holly. But there was not even the most distant echo of his features in her small, perfectly formed face, with its lingering hint of baby fat. “You’re just so—so much like your mother,” he said.
“Am I?” she said, veiling her eyes as if too shy to accept his gaze. But when her lashes lifted again, she was staring straight at him, unwaveringly. She knew that men were always helpless against a show of shy bashfulness mixed with challenging boldness.
“And you’re so much taller than I was expecting—taller than your mother,” he babbled. “You’re just much more … more …”
The correct word to complete this thought eluded him. His eyes played quickly over her figure, as if he might find there the term he was seeking. Noting the movement of his eyes, she shifted her weight onto one foot, swaying her balance so that one hip jutted out slightly, bringing out the curves of her silhouette. Jasper’s eyes followed those curves, tracing the contour of her torso in its fitted blouse, her narrow yet rounded hips, her long, naked, flower-stem legs. Until now she had somehow existed in his mind as a child, like Maddy—not as a near woman. He was reminded of the surprise he had felt at Maddy’s birth, when she emerged from Pauline, at the C-section, not as a half-formed entity that would need time to “develop,” like an old-fashioned photograph in its chemical bath (as he had vaguely imagined), but instead as a fully articulated, finished newborn, from the tips of her moist eyelashes to the pale moons in her minuscule cuticles.
From the flush that suffused his cheeks, Chloe thought that his scrutiny of her was having the desired effect, so she was surprised when he said, in an unexpectedly controlled and paternal tone, “You’re just more grown-up than I thought you would be.”
She smiled. “Well, I did turn eighteen.” She shook a tendril of hair away from her face.
“That’s right,” Jasper said. “End of May. Two months ago …”
So she was the same age as Holly was that summer! She looked older, in her chic outfit, as if she were a young lawyer who had come to try a case.
“Should we sit?” she said, pulling him by the hand back to the table. He lowered himself onto a seat, and she resumed the chair she had been sitting on. Their knees, he was aware, were almost touching. She leaned forward and grasped his hands. “So you’re not disappointed?” she said.
“Disappointed?” he echoed.
“I guess we don’t look much alike,” she said, “except I’m taller than Mom. I must get that from you.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “I could never be disappointed. Not at all. I’m still just stunned. Overwhelmed. There’s something about seeing you in person. It’s not like talking on the phone.”
“I know!” she said, smiling and revealing a glimpse of wet, pink gums. “It’s crazy. You look just like you did on TV—only handsomer.”
He stared at her, unable to form a response. He was distracted by the soft, somehow yielding look in her caressing eyes, a kind of beckoning vulnerability or submission, and by the flickering play of a smile around her lips, a knowing little grin, as if some secret existed between the two of them. She dropped her eyes shyly, then raised them again and looked up at him through her lowered lashes. She spoke as if confiding a shameful secret, even though her words carried no such message. “So,” she said, “I guess it’s supposed to be a short hearing?”
“Yes, very short,” Jasper said woodenly. “About five minutes.”
“And then I’m yours!” She brought one of his hands to her face, resting the palm against her cheek. She kissed it. “All yours!” She wondered if this was too much, if she was moving too fast—Dez had instructed her to play out the early stages of the seduction slowly, teasing him along gently. She returned his hand to his lap, but continued to smile at him in just that way that made men weak.
There was a sharp rapping at the door and a male voice said, “About to go in.”
“Oh,” Chloe said, on a note of disappointment. “That was fast.”
They rose. She slid an arm around his waist, snuggling against his side. When he, still feeling that strange physical reticence, failed to respond, she reached around him and seized his free hand and snaked it around her. He felt her narrow, mobile waist under his moist palm. “Like that!” she said, smiling up at him. With her free hand, she reached for the small wheeled carry-on bag that sat beside her chair, and which Jasper, until that moment, had failed to notice. He realized, with a pang of obscure guilt, that it probably contained all her worldly belongings.
They moved together, linked, to the door, which he opened, and they stepped into the hall. He saw, across the polished marble floor, Farkiss and Doreen Edwards, but he did not recognize the older man, in an elegant dark suit, who had joined them. This man dropped whatever he had been saying and came toward Jasper, hand extended. “Murray Pollock,” he said.
Despite their phone exchanges, they had never met in person. Tall, with a large head of frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, Pollock had one of those saggy, sagacious faces that exude a becoming melancholy.
“Congratulations,” he said mournfully, shaking Jasper’s hand. He turned to Chloe. His drooping eyelids widened and his lips pulled into a smile. “You must be Chloe!” he said, shaking her hand. “My goodness, you could pass for twenty-five!” He turned to Jasper. “I’m not sure I would have realized, on the physical evidence, that she’s your daughter—no insult intended.”
“There isn’t much resemblance, is there?” Farkiss chimed in. He had joined them and was moving his eyes up and down Chloe’s figure.
“Perhaps the height …?” Pollock said, like an art appraiser comparing notes with a fellow expert.
“Yes, the height …” Farkiss said.
Under this close scrutiny, Chloe flushed and shot a glance at Jasper, who realized, with sudden incredulity, that both men were coming alive under the catalyst of his daughter’s beauty. Their roaming eyes and heightened color and eager smiles were manifestations of that atavistic male response that Jasper knew so well from publishing parties, editorial meetings—gatherings of any type where males and females mingled. He was obliged to admit to himself that his tall, glowingly beautiful daughter was precisely the kind of female to ignite such primitive responses, to turn ordinarily sensible men into babbling idiots. It was a phenomenon he could ordinarily forgive, except that the female, i
n this instance, was his child.
He cleared his throat. “So,” he said pointedly, “this hearing should be short?”
Pollock dropped Chloe’s hand as if it had scalded him. “Indeed,” he said soberly, turning to Jasper. “Not more than ten minutes.” He cut a sidelong glance at Chloe, who, hands folded innocently over her skirt, toes turned slightly inward, affected a great interest in the ornately carved ceiling overhead.
“Yes,” Farkiss said, also sounding chastised. “And we ought to be going in soon. Oh,” he added, “I should warn you that Judge Howard is known for being a little—”
But at that moment the door to Courtroom Two opened and the bailiff, in beige court uniform, stepped into the hall and summoned them into the room. Not the grand, cathedral-like chamber Jasper had been expecting, it was a small room lit by fluorescent panels in a low ceiling. The lawyers led the way, followed by Edwards, then Jasper and Chloe. The social worker took a seat in the observers’ gallery, which consisted of just two rows of wooden benches, like church pews, at the back of the room. Jasper was directed to sit at one end of a table facing the bench, Chloe, at the opposite end. The lawyers sat between them. Pollock pulled from his briefcase a sheaf of documents. Farkiss followed suit. As they waited for the judge, Jasper leaned back slightly in his chair and peered around the lawyers’ heads at Chloe, who was staring straight ahead, apparently unaware that he was looking at her. Sensing his gaze, she waited a few beats, allowing him to drink in her doll-like profile, then she turned and beamed at him one of her most heart-stopping smiles. As if caught in the surreptitious act of spying on her, he felt a blush invade his face. He produced an answering smile, then turned away.
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