The Unknowns (23 page)

“I understand,” he says, making it sound like a compliment to my explanatory skills. “And your ability to do this has made you quite a lot of money.” The quasi-British inflection makes it unclear whether he’s using the word
quite
to intensify or to qualify the amount of money I’ve made. “It can be very disruptive, money,” he says. “A lot of my clients made their money all at once, in a big lump, like you. There’s a strange thing that happens: the fulfillment of a dream always brings with it some larger disappointment about the dream itself. Have you found that?” It’s impossible not to see Maya in him.

“Something like that,” I say. “It was different because I wasn’t trying to get rich.” I was trying to get out of Colorado, and to distract myself from my loneliness.

“Yes, that would help,” he says, and he seems glad about it. “Well, I’d be happy to show you what’s here and talk you through it. If you’d rather be alone with the work, I can step into the other
room. But there’s something in particular I think you might be interested in.”

We haul ourselves out of our seats and he leads me to a podium on which a bronze Mercury, in winged helmet and sandals, extends his left arm upward. The original Flash had a helmet like that. It makes me think of the famous cover of
Flash
issue 123, “Flash of Two Worlds,” in which the streamlined Flash of the modern era crosses into a parallel universe and meets his helmeted Golden Age counterpart.

“Giambologna,” Marcom says. “The link between Michelangelo and Bernini.” He clears his throat. “There’s a story about Giambologna in Vasari. He was a young Turk, very impressed with himself and his abilities. He’d just arrived in Rome, and he made a wax model and finished it with exquisite care and delicacy, and he took it to the studio of the great Michelangelo.” He uses the Italian pronunciation. “And Michelangelo took the model out of Giambologna’s hands, this young upstart who had, you know, dared to cross his threshold, and he began to remodel it. He destroyed Giambologna’s model, reshaped it into something completely different. And he handed it back to Giambologna and said,
Now go away and learn to model before you learn to finish
.”

He’s not smiling anymore.

“Now, would you mind telling me why you’re here?”

I’ve had it all wrong.

“Have you come to do some kind of violence to me?” he says.

“Jesus,” I say. “No. That’s not it.”

“You came to see what a monster looks like?”

“I just wanted to find out the truth.”

He takes a deep breath, and as he lets it out his features soften. “Then I’m very glad you’re here,” he says. “There are certain accusations, even today, that still compel belief merely by being issued. Are you in love with her?”

“Yes, I am,” I say, taken aback by the question but also suffused with the kind of pride we reserve for unambivalent feelings.

“I’m glad,” he says. “I hope she always has someone to love her, especially someone like yourself.” The word
love
sounds strange in his precise diction, the way it does in old movies. “You couldn’t have gotten to where you are if you weren’t a rational person. And so I’m going to implore you: Look at the evidence. Look at the science, the pseudoscience, that these people use to justify themselves. Just look—skeptically, rationally look—and make up your own mind.”

“I’ve read the literature,” I say. “It doesn’t resolve anything. That’s why I had to talk to you.”

“Imagine my position,” he says. “I’m charged with proving a negative. I’m sure I made mistakes with her. I had to bring her up alone, and I was out of my depth. But I did not once touch her in a sexual way. My God, to have to make that statement!”

This kind of impassioned denial, true or false, always has the aspect of a performance. “Maya told me about how she remembered it, what it felt like,” I say. “I don’t know how to say this, but… it fit with other things about her childhood, things she remembered all along.”

He stiffens, and I can see how she would have been scared of him. “Those things are post hoc!” he says. He shuts his eyes for a moment in a barely visible effort of self-mastery. “Are there things I would change? Of course there are. Show me a parent who would say otherwise. But this stuff about molestation, about abuse—this is pure revisionism! Her childhood wasn’t always easy, but it was entirely innocent of
that
!” After everything I’ve felt for him over the past half hour—the way he spoke to me about technology, about art, about money; the way he showed me his despair—I don’t like disappointing him.

“How did you know who I was?” I say.

“Daphne’s sister Gail,” he says. Everything is always more
complicated than it seems. We face each other in silence among the bronze and marble.

“Tell me what it was like,” I say. “When she was a kid.”

He looks at me gratefully, and I realize I’ve made a terrible mistake: I will have Donald’s image of his daughter superimposed on my eyes every time I look at her.

Watching Maya grow up was a daily heartbreak for Donald, because what she was growing up into was her mother: the same small features, the same fine dark hair and slender shoulders, the same intelligence and self-possession. The toughness that I thought had been cultivated to protect her from his depredations was present, apparently, in the twenty-year-old Barnard junior with whom Donald fell overwhelmingly in love as a graduate student at Columbia. Their marriage wasn’t always easy—“I’m not an easy man to be married to,” he says—but he’d wanted an intellectual equal for a wife, and he’d found one. “You must be the same way,” he says.

Maya’s birth forced him to reevaluate his ideas about himself. “My parents were not loving people,” he says. “I don’t think I had a template for parental affection. And then the moment she was born I was swallowed up by this child, by this astonishing surge of love I felt for her. I didn’t understand what was happening.”

Four years later he’d almost found his balance when everything collapsed. They were trying for another child, and Daphne had failed to conceive after a year and a half. The CT scan found something growing inside her, not a baby but a tumor. For a year the cancer and the chemotherapy fought like hyenas over her body, and at the end there was nothing left of Donald’s wife but the wisp of a corpse and the six-year-old who seemed to have stepped out of photographs from her mother’s childhood. For weeks Donald couldn’t look at his daughter without crying.

When he began to emerge from his mourning he promised
himself that Maya wouldn’t be starved for attention. He left his job at the Getty and went into business as a dealer so he could set his own schedule, collect her from school, attend plays and soccer games (although Maya turned out to be uninterested in organized events; she preferred forming secret clubs with her friends). He worried about losing his salary, but Daphne’s parents helped, and then he turned out to have a knack for buying and selling that might have gone undiscovered had he remained at the museum spending other people’s money. So he picked her up from school every afternoon, and they ate dinner together every night, and he helped her with her schoolwork in the evenings. When she turned thirteen and began reading real books in English class, he would read them too and discuss them with her at dinner. Every summer they went to Europe; by the time she was sixteen she’d seen the Uffizi, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Sagrada Familia, and how many of her classmates could say that?

Between Daphne’s death and Maya’s desertion he had only one real relationship with a woman. He couldn’t tolerate dates; sooner or later he always developed a passionate loathing for the anxious divorcee sitting opposite him in the restaurant. They fell into two categories: the ones who tried to be what they imagined he was looking for, who treated every question as a test with a correct answer, and the ones who made a show of being themselves, who got boozy and loud and, when he declined their invitation to come inside for a nightcap, mean. He gave one of them a try, for Maya’s sake mostly. Donald and Valerie were together for almost two years, and the three of them went away for the weekend a few times, and to Italy once. Valerie and Maya got along fine, but in her presence Maya became polite: cheerful and courteous and well hidden. Remarkable that she knew how to do that at thirteen.

She decided to go to college back east. Donald made a pro forma case for UCLA but he was proud that she wanted to go off on her
own, to make good on the independence that had been forced on her twelve years earlier. He tended to look down on the intellectual culture of his adopted state. They’d moved there for him to take the Getty job, a good job for a young man, and to be closer to Daphne’s parents in Pasadena. He imagined Maya would stay on the east coast, in Boston or New York, and eventually he’d move back as well, relocate the gallery or accept a position at the MFA or the Frick. He’d take her to the theater or the ‘21’ Club, treats she couldn’t afford for herself, and he’d give a toast at her wedding and make her cry.

The first weeks of her freshman year they talked every Sunday and often more. She described her classes, her professors, her friends. There was already a new reserve about her, but he understood that she was surrounded by excitement of all kinds, intellectual and political and social—he remembered it from his own college days—and keeping her father in the loop wasn’t a priority. He planned a trip to New York, although it wasn’t wholly necessary, so that he could come up to Concord and take her out to dinner and get a look at the daughter who had somehow reached adulthood with no parent but him.

The dinner was awkward. He asked about her classes, and she answered in that maddening polite way he’d seen her use on Valerie, as though everything he was asking was beside the point. She became animated only when discussing trivial things, parties and friends and the details of communal living. She threatened to major in something called cultural studies. He didn’t recognize this blithe girl, so unserious about herself. The roommate, a real bimbo, didn’t help. Back in his hotel room afterward he worried that Ward was the wrong choice, that he should have pushed her to go somewhere more rigorous. He reminded himself that she had never acted out during her adolescence. He had allowed her to set her own hours, to stay at friends’ houses as she pleased, to keep her social life largely hidden from him, and she had repaid him by graduating near the top of her
class. Here, finally, was her teenage rebellion, a few years late but appropriate, even necessary. He chose to interpret it as an act of generosity that she had waited until she was out of the house before it began.

They didn’t talk much for the rest of the semester. He tried to take it in stride. He allowed her to spend Christmas vacation with her friend in Boston, summer in the Middle East. She was, after all, an adult.

And then the letter arrived.

On his first reading he didn’t understand what she was saying. The language she used was foreign and distracting, full of the jargon of political correctness. (He’d worried about that when she’d chosen Ward, and here it was, flowering up from his daughter’s hand.) She made vague allusions to events that he couldn’t identify: “what you did to me all those nights.” He reached the end mystified as to what she was accusing him of. What had he done to her, all those nights? When she was a girl he had tucked her into bed, read a chapter of
Great Expectations
or
Oliver Twist
, and turned out the light. At some point this had ended, and she began putting herself to bed. And then, with a heave of revulsion, he got her meaning.

He was dimly familiar with the idea of repressed memory. He understood repression in the Freudian sense, feelings pushed out of conscious awareness. But the contemporary notion that shocking, dramatic events can somehow go unrecalled for years, only to emerge, intact, on the therapist’s couch… he hadn’t noticed when this piece of sophistry had entered the popular wisdom. And now his daughter believed that her childhood, the decade he’d spent battling for her happiness in the face of her mother’s death, was a pretext, a cover story for awful crimes against her. He’s no longer the loving father, he’s the pervert, the twisted man who can satisfy himself only by turning on his own child. Every tender thing between them, every wound dressed, every wish assuaged—all vanished.
The dinner-table seminars, the bedtime readings from Dickens, the bike-riding lessons and trips to Paris and Rome, the years he put up with Valerie so that Maya would have someone to talk to when she began menstruating—these were no more than the most elaborate cover story ever devised. And his marriage, the passion between him and Daphne—do pedophiles have such feelings, or was this false too, a scheme to generate what he really wanted, a prepubescent? Donald’s voice has gotten louder and his hand smacks the armrest of his chair. The moment he opened that letter, this became his story: the accusation, the defense.

He phoned and phoned, left message after message, until the roommate, that awful Emily, picked up and asked him to stop calling. He contacted the university and got passed around the phone network until he reached someone at Campus Affairs, an ignorant feminist, who said something about student privacy and made it very clear that, as far as she was concerned, anyone accused of molesting a child was guilty until proven innocent. He called organizations that dealt with child abuse, but none of them had anything to say about false accusations, and one asked for his name and address in a way he found sinister. He wanted to call his lawyer, but by then he had realized that he should watch his mouth, even with his attorney of fourteen years, whose son’s wedding he had attended six months earlier. His life had become a Kafka novel, or one of the stories you used to hear from the USSR: an innocent man is caught up in the omnipotent machinery of persecution. And so he found himself in the public library, intellectual home to every conspiracy’s victim, where he used the Internet for the first time. That’s how he learned about the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Donald spoke by telephone to a volunteer there, who reassured him that he was not alone and who sent him a packet of newsletters and clippings describing the epidemic that had swept his daughter away.