His Illegal Self Read Online Free PDF Page A

first choice, had been nice enough to go to Yale instead. The Austen professor had been sucked up to, the prickly dean had been pacified and now there was nothing left to do but enjoy this milky tea, and maybe elicit the story of how this steel-blue Roger Fry had come to this American wall where it managed to look so dull and erotic all at once. There was a sleepy log fire in the grate and Dial could look down at the rolled lawns which, in spite of the efforts of the gardeners—three in sight just then—were littered with the tweedy colors of the fall. Dial experienced a delicious sense of possession you could never get from a state-owned park.
    As the faculty had observed all day, the vermilions of an East Coast fall, the “red peak,” was just one weekend away. This was not an excitement she had ever felt in Dorchester where the yellowing leaves on the highway dividers suggested death by poisoning and triggered angry memories of too-thin coats, chilly ankle-high drafts blowing down the hallway of her childhood home, her “study.”
    Dial’s companion settled back into her teal wingback chair and predicted the red peak once again. This was Patricia Abercrombie, a Chaucerian of fifty, lumpy, round faced with piano legs and a pasty sad sort of face with deep vertical lines in her upper lip. To Dial there seemed to be something missing, a lack of some element of character that made her appear out of focus or underwater. Indeed, if Dial was now insincere in the surprise she showed about the coming red peak, it was mainly in the hope that if she could only demonstrate enough interest, enough goodwill, she might penetrate the Abercrombie bark and somehow touch the living wood.
    Patricia Abercrombie, being thirty years a Vassar girl, and far sharper than she appeared, retreated from all this shallow brightness.
    I believe, she said at last, raising her pale red eyebrows as she lifted her cup. I believe we have a friend in common.
    Oh? said Dial, to whom this seemed beyond the bounds of possibility.
    Susan Selkirk, said the chair.
    Now it was Dial who had her heartwood touched, not pleasantly.
    You know of whom I speak?
    Yes, I was at school with her.
    The chair’s eyes clearly registered this for what it was, a cowardly attempt to deny a friendship. Susan was our son’s friend, she said softly. But she was our orphan baby, really.
    Oh.
    I think she’s terribly lonely, the chair said.
    Of course, said Dial, hearing a sort of moo in her false sympathy.
    That’s the other side of everything, said the chair, holding her gaze. Very sad and very lonely. Poor girl.
    Patricia Abercrombie broke away to write something on the corner of her
New York Times.
Dial watched with perfect numbness, having gone through the entire selection process assuming that this aspect of her history was unknown and would, had it been unearthed, have immediately disqualified her. She watched as the chair tore a small strip from the
Times.
Dial knew what it was going to be. It was impossible, but it would be Susan’s phone number.
    On the other side of the world she would recall the weird mixture of fear and satisfaction she had felt as she took that paper in her hand. Patricia Abercrombie
smiled
at her. This time Dial did not notice the lines on her lip—but the glint in her green eyes. God, she thought, who in the fuck are you?
    Nothing more was said about the piece of paper, and soon she walked with Patricia Abercrombie across the grass where she was “delivered” with her secret blistered heel into the care of the dean.
    Whatever conspiracy had been enacted was not acknowledged. There was not so much as an extra squeeze in their farewell handshakes and it would not be until, years later, reading
Vassar Girls,
that she had any inkling of the eccentric power she had brushed against so casually.
    And what will you do now? the Dean asked her, when Patricia Abercrombie had gone, and her social security card had been copied and her health plan had been