Chapter 35: Sunday, Dec. 25

"Yeah. But it was too druggy to be real. Sixy would have loved it. You know, like his cut 'Orifice Rex.' But it's not my scene. I mean they were putting dildos on dogs and trying to get a chain going. And then they had this mock wedding between a midget ballerina and one of the German Shepherds. I'm so sick of that stuff. It's all fizz and no wine. And ..."

"Yes?" I prompted after a pause.

"I think Freddie's starting to lose it." She pointed to her head.

"So you decided to leave him?"

She sighed, as though it had cost her something. She nodded. "He wasn't going to let me go, though. He said no way, not now."

"How did you do it?"

"I took a walk and called a cab."

"With your walk-around phone."

"Yeah. The cabbie had a tough time finding it. Freddie was really pissed when he found I had called one and given directions. He's like a dictator. He didn't want to let me go. But he knew you knew I was up there. It's like he owns people. And everyone's a slab of meat."

"He's a criminal, you know," I said.

"I can believe it."

"I don't say that just because he thinks Adolph Hitler was a great artist. I mean he's a real criminal. He's part of an organized crime syndicate."

Diantha stuck out her lower lip and nodded, but skeptically.

I proceeded then to relate what Agent Johnson and Sergeant Lemure had told me about his background. I went into some detail. One has to be careful these days in talking to young people. Criminality has taken on such glamour. But Diantha listened as though taken with my seriousness.

She got up to rinse her cup, and I noticed the way she wore her slacks, just like her mother had so many year ago. She turned to look at me. "Hate to rain on your parade, Dad, but I know first hand that Freddie's not circumcised."

What is it about that kind of detail that cuts to the heart? Because I suffered then a keen and entirely inappropriate stab of retrospective jealousy. I can't explain it. Was I that smitten by my own stepdaughter? Was I to live in torture now until she found some suitable young man and went off to start a life of her own?

"Perhaps he faked that when he went through his 'conversion,'" I said, trying to keep my voice neutral.

"It wouldn't surprise me. Reality to him is what he says it is. The guy really is ..."

"Solipsistic ... self-absorbed."

"Yes. You always know how to say things, do you know that?"

She smiled at me then, melting my heart, touching me in ways I'm sure she couldn't imagine. I was looking again at a young vibrant Elsbeth, and again experiencing a kind of temporal dislocation.

We decided we would go Christmas shopping together for some last minute things. We would dine out, shop, and then go to the midnight carol service at St. Cecilia's, the rather High Episcopal church I attended with some regularity before Elsbeth arrived on the scene and changed my life.

I managed to get us a table at the Oriole in the Miranda, an old-fashioned place that serves excellent, old-fashioned food. Diantha had wild goose and I had tame steak, and we finished off a bottle and demi-bottle of decent wine. She couldn't quite stop talking about Freddie Bain, at the same time reaching over to touch my hand, as though clinging to me, as though torn between a rollicking life on a sybaritic if sinking pirate ship and austere survival on an odd bit of eroded rock sticking out of the water.

We shopped half-heartedly for an hour or so, mostly walking off the wine, before making our way to the incensed interior of St. Cecilia's. There, for more than an hour, we lifted our voices and our hearts, bracing hope and beauty against the solstitial darkness. Elsbeth and I had come here each of the last three years, and my eyes brimmed when we sang the verses of one of her favorites:

In the bleak midwinter,
frosty winds may moan,
earth stood hard as iron,
water like a stone;
snow had fallen,
snow on snow, snow on snow,
in the bleak midwinter, long ago.

God is good, I thought. Had he not sent his only son as a reassurance? Of course, we nailed him to a tree and left him to die. And we've celebrated his death ever since. I put such thoughts aside and thanked fate that Diantha was with me and safe.

Afterwards, outside, I noticed Diantha had tears shining in her eyes. I tried to comfort her.

"Oh, Norman," she cried, clinging to me again. "I don't know what to do."

"About what, darling?" I said.

"About Freddie. I still love him. I know he's a creep. I know he's crazy. I know he's a monster. It doesn't matter. I can't help it. I love him."

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