The Delilah Complex

Thirty

At lunchtime the next day, Nina asked if I wanted to take a walk.

“Yes, if you’ll come with me to run an errand. I have to go to Tiffany to pick up a present for Dulcie.”

She nodded. “I’ll get my jacket.”

The temperature still hadn’t dropped; it was a sunny sixty degrees out. The walk should have been delightful but I was preoccupied and tired, and she knew it.

“What’s bothering you?” she asked as soon as we were out on the street.

I didn’t deny that I was troubled. Nina had known me too long and too well.

There were two things on my mind, but I was only ready to talk about one of them. I still hadn’t figured out how to deal with the information I had about Timothy Wheaton and Philip Maur, but Nina and I had already fought once in the past few days about my talking to the police, so I chose the safer issue and told her about my daughter’s request that I not go to Boston for the preview.

There was a lot of pedestrian traffic that afternoon since it was one of those energizing fall days when everyone who lives in cities like New York and Paris and London takes to the streets. If only it could stay like this, we all say to one another about the bracing air and vibrant trees.

“Being a motherless daughter makes me question every damned decision,” I said as we walked downtown on Madison Avenue, too engrossed in the conversation to do any window-shopping.

“Is that it? You didn’t have a mother for long enough, so you don’t know what to do?”

“Why can’t that be it?”

“Well, even if you’d had a mother for your whole adolescence, you still wouldn’t be prepared for this particular problem.”

“I’d have road maps.”

“You might. But that’s too obvious. I think something else happens when Dulcie exerts her will like this.”

I sighed. I really couldn’t expect less of her, could I? Nina was first and foremost a therapist. “What?”

“Morgan, when Dulcie told you that she didn’t want you to go with her, do you remember how you felt?”

“I just concentrated on how to react. On what to say to give her support and make her feel that I would take her seriously, that I love-”

“Stop. You can make me so mad sometimes. Are you listening to yourself?”

We’d gotten to the gray granite building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. The art deco lines, clean and sleek, were from an older time, and the familiarity was comforting. The parts of New York that never change are landmarks for those of us who have lived here all our lives. The hamburger shop on Madison Avenue and Sixty-third Street where my mother took me when I was six was still there. So was Saks Fifth Avenue, where my father used to take me on my birthday for shopping sprees. The Christmas tree that arrived every year at Rockefeller Center brought back memories of each Christmas when I took Dulcie to the lighting. There were other places, too, but some were gone, torn down to make room for new buildings. I missed those signposts of the past.

I sighed. “Do we do this on the street, right now, Nina?”

“No. Right now we go into the store and act very civilized and enjoy the rarefied air, but we continue this after we’ve picked up your gift. What is it, anyway?”

To celebrate Dulcie’s lead in The Secret Garden, I’d ordered a monogrammed gold key on a chain, symbolizing the one Mary Lennox found that led her into the hidden space that had been abandoned for a decade.

“A necklace.”

We walked through the glass doors and into the quiet hush of the jewelry store. Little blue boxes from Tiffany, with their white satin ribbons, were a luxury that I wanted Dulcie to enjoy as much as I had when my father had given them to me. My sweet sixteen present, my high school graduation gift, my college graduation gift, had all come from Tiffany. As had my wedding ring. And Mitch’s. Dulcie’s baby rattle and her first baby cup.

Nina stood by while the salesman showed me the gold key, carefully pointing out the inscription on the back: the date of the opening along with “To Dulcie. Love, Mom and Dad.”

On our way back to the office, Nina and I stopped at an espresso bar, where we sat at a small table that had just been vacated. We ordered cappuccinos and small sandwiches.

“Okay, let’s get back to it,” she said after the waitress had left.

“Do we have to?”

She nodded.

“I don’t remember where we were,” I lied.

“I know you too well for that, Morgan. You have never forgotten where you were in an interrupted conversation in your life. What I asked was how you felt when Dulcie told you that she didn’t want you to go to Boston with her.”

I started to think. Nina interrupted.

“No, no thinking. Just tell me. Fast. How did you feel?”

“That she didn’t want me.”

“Who didn’t want you?”

“That my mother-” I stopped. Shocked. Even with everything I knew about psychoanalysis and with all the psychotherapy I’d had, I hadn’t made the connection myself.

“Dulcie going into acting is bringing more of your memories of your mother to the surface, isn’t it?”

My throat tightened. I nodded.

“She loved acting so much,” Nina said, her voice softening as she, too, thought about her old friend.

“I remember how she used to get dressed up to go to tryouts. I’d sit on the edge of the bathtub and watch her meticulously apply her makeup and spray on her perfume. I’d wait for her to come home, too. She was always so excited when she got back, telling me about everything that had happened and how sure she was about getting the role and that when she did, we’d move into a bigger apartment but…” I was remembering too much now and didn’t want to go on. I’d thought of something I’d never realized before. “Nina, she wasn’t going to tryouts, was she? She was going to bars, right? She was trying to pick up guys so they’d pay for her drinks and her drugs.”

She nodded.

“And they lived happily never after,” I said, repeating the line that had made my mother famous for a few heartbeats and that ultimately had done more damage than good, spoiling her for a life that would never live up to what it had been before. She’d been seduced by her brief stint at stardom and nothing ever came close: not her marriage, not her family, not her friends, not even me.

And I was letting my daughter step into that same spotlight.

I shuddered.

Nina took my hand. “Dulcie isn’t your mother, sweetie. She’s your daughter. And she has a mother. She has you.”