The Mistress's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

keep.”
    Do I wish she hadn’t come back? Sometimes. Yes. But once it happened, I wouldn’t have wanted to stop the flow of information. It is about fate, the life cycle of information. Once I know something, the amount of effort it takes to deny it, to suspend knowledge, is enormous and potentially more dangerous than to simply move along with it and see where it takes me.
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    Blindness—May 1993. The day my novel is published I accidentally poke the New York Times into my eye and shred my cornea. The pain is searing. I fumble for the eye doctor’s number and go rushing off to his office, returning hours later with what looks like a maxi pad taped over my face. There is a message from my publisher letting me know that my book has been reviewed that morning in the Washington Post , a message from my mother saying that she’s arranged for brownies and crudités to be served at my reading tomorrow in Washington, and a message from “the father.”
    â€œIt’s Norman,” he says, his voice wobbly, tentative, choking on itself. “I got your letter. Why don’t you give me a call when you have a moment.”
    It’s been more than a month since I wrote him. If the review hadn’t appeared in the Post , would he have called? If I’d been flipping burgers in a McDonald’s instead of writing books, would I have ever heard from him?
    â€œWell, what do you know?” he says, when I return the call. He’s a swaggering big shot, but there’s something to him, some half-a-heart that I instantly appreciate.
    â€œHave you spoken to the Dragon Lady?” he asks, and I assume that he is talking about Ellen.
    â€œShe’s a little crazy.”
    He laughs. “That’s the way she always was. That’s why I had to do what I did.”
    Norman, a former football hero, a combat veteran, for some reason feels compelled to give me a pep talk. Fifty years after the fact, he quotes what Coach once told him about staying in the game, about not being a quitter. No one has ever spoken to me this way before; there’s something I like about it—it’s comforting, inspiring. He couldn’t be more different from the father I grew up with, an intellectual type. If I told Norman that I spent every Saturday of my childhood going to museums he wouldn’t know how to respond.
    â€œI’ll be in Washington tomorrow for a couple of days on a book tour,” I say.
    â€œWhy don’t you meet me at my lawyer’s office and we can talk.”
    I think of Ellen: I am not a slice of pie.
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    The next day I read in Washington; the bookstore is crowded with neighbors, relatives, my fourth-grade teacher, old friends from junior high, from early writing workshops. I haven’t had a chance to tell anyone about the eye injury in advance. When I get up to read, they’re shocked.
    â€œIt’s fine,” I say. “It’ll be okay in a couple of weeks.” I crack open the book. My field of vision is a circle about two inches wide. I hold the pages directly in front of my face. My good eye is half closed in sympathy with the injured one. I perform as much from memory as possible.
    When the reading is finished, a long line forms, people wanting books signed, aspiring writers with questions. In the soft distance I see a stranger, a woman, standing nervously, twisting an umbrella around and around in her hands. Instinctively, I know it is Ellen. I continue signing books. The line begins to thin. Just as the last person is leaving, she steps up.
    â€œWhat did you do to your eye?” she blurts in that rough voice.
    â€œYou’re not behaving,” I say. The store is packed with people who don’t know what ghost has risen up.
    â€œYou’re built just like your father,” she says.
    Later, when I try to remember what she looked like, I have only a vague memory of green with white polka dots, brown hair piled high on her