The Murderer's Daughter

Chapter 41

After a week at Harvard, Grace understood the place. Basically, it was Merganfield on steroids. Though, to be clear, the precious little highly gifties at Merganfield were more uniformly smart than the Harvard student body.

From what she’d observed, there were two ways her fellow students dealt with their good fortune at being accepted into the exemplar of Elite American Education. The first was to be honestly obnoxious, dropping the H-word into every conversation, wearing crimson wherever you went. The second was to pretend to be coy. (“I go to school in Boston.”) Either approach spoke of smugness and self-congratulation and Grace had actually passed a group of freshmen and heard a girl say, “Let’s face it, we’re going to run the world. So how about we do it compassionately?”

She decided to adopt a third tack in order to optimize her time in Cambridge: Stick to herself and get out as quickly as possible.

That meant declaring a major early — easy, she’d already decided on psychology because nothing else seemed remotely interesting and Malcolm was a happy man — then getting requirements out of the way by taking on a far heavier load than recommended.

Extra credits could be accumulated easily by filling free time with the Mickey Mouse courses known as “guts.” So-called serious classes turned out to be no big deal, either. The cliché about Harvard turned out to be true: The toughest part was getting in.

But while grades and exams were no issue, the way the university fashioned its social structure was. During your first year, you got assigned to a freshman dorm. After that, it got complicated.

Grace’s dorm was a building called Hurlbut Hall overlooking Crimson Quad, where she lucked into a sizable single room with a tottering old desk, a nice view of lawn, trees, and ivied brick, and a defunct fireplace. Someone had taped the outline of a cop-show corpse to the scarred oak floor and Grace left it in place. Someone else had taken the time to glue hundreds of pennies onto the wall of the corridor just outside her door. What the intended message was, she never learned, but every so often coins went missing.

Malcolm and Sophie flew out with her for orientation and remained for a couple of days to settle her in. When they saw her room, they looked at each other and nodded approvingly.

Grace said, “Good.”

Malcolm said, “Hurlbut? Great. Now you’ve got plenty of time to build your group.”

Grace said, “What group is that?”

“For your sophomore year you move to a house with a suite of other students.”

“What’s the difference between a dorm and a house?”

“Well... not much, I suppose. But your house will remain with you for three years, the goal is for you to feel proprietary. My house was Lowell.”

“You had a group?”

“Indeed, I did. Including Ransom Gardener. Not only do we continue to do business together, we remain chums. That’s the benefit of the system, Grace. One acquires enduring relationships.”

“Did Mike Leiber go here, too?”

The question surprised Malcolm. “No, Michael’s an MIT grad, but for our purposes, he’s self-taught.”

So you didn’t need all that social nonsense. Grace said nothing, distracting herself with the taped body outline. Clean job, maybe a science major. She’d enjoy living with the geometry.

Sophie said, “It needn’t be difficult, dear. Over a year’s time you create a group of friends and move in together.”

“What if I prefer to remain alone?”

Another long look passed between them.

“Hmm,” said Malcolm. “It’s usually not done that way.”

“I can’t stay in this room next year?”

“Dorms are only for freshmen, Grace.”

“That’s kind of rigid.”

“Tradition, Grace.” Malcolm frowned and Grace realized she’d made him uncomfortable. As she considered her next response, Sophie said, “You know, Mal, I think there are some single rooms in Pforzheimer.”

Grace said, “What’s that?”

“Another house, dear.”

Malcolm said, “You’ll be fine, Grace, no rush, give it time.”

But he looked more nervous than Grace had ever seen him and even Sophie didn’t seem too calm. They’d been more restless than usual during the flight from L.A., fidgeting, talking, and drinking more than usual. Neither the taxi ride from Logan airport nor setting foot on campus had settled them down.

Grace realized their anxiety could be a problem if they felt they needed to stick around and overprotect her. As much as she appreciated them, the whole point of this was beginning a new phase in her life.

She smiled and hugged both of them and said, “Well, I’m sure it’ll work out. This is amazing. I love it, thank you so much.”

Malcolm said, “In terms of — I’m sure you’ll own the place soon. But if there’s ever an issue you feel you need help with—”

“You bet,” said Grace. She spread her arms and smiled and touched her mattress. “Meanwhile, this is perfect.”

She hugged both of them, doing it for their sake but also feeling something rising from deep inside her. They owed her nothing but had chosen to change her life. These were wonderful people. Angels, if angels had actually existed.

She would make them proud.

She told them so and Malcolm blushed and Sophie’s eyes moistened and she said, “You always do, Grace.”

Malcolm dared a squeeze of her hand. Sophie touched her face briefly.

Grace embraced them once more and flashed the most confident smile she could muster.

Inside, she was thinking: Pforzheimer.

That night they had dinner at Legal Seafood where everyone ate too much and Malcolm drank too much and ended up offering multiple toasts to Grace’s “extraordinary achievements.” The following morning, when she saw them off in front of the Inn at Harvard, they looked uncertain and Grace added more reassurances, careful to look nonchalant even though her own tension had grown during her first night in Hurlbut. Sleep had been a challenge, woken as she was by whoops and stomping feet in the corridor well into the morning hours. The best and brightest acting like any other group of adolescents.

The taxi back to Logan finally arrived and Grace waved goodbye at its rear window until the vehicle slipped out of sight on Massachusetts Avenue.

Malcolm and Sophie had changed their minds about flying straight back to L.A., opting instead for a quick trip to New York for some “museum overload.”

Boston had no shortage of great museums and Grace knew they’d decided to stay close until they were sure she really was okay.

Another sixteen-year-old might’ve been peeved by that.

Grace enjoyed being cared for.

Early into a straight-A+ first semester, Grace had figured out that, like the L.A. County social service bureaucracy, Harvard prided itself on accommodating “special needs.” She spoke to a resident dorm advisor and lied about needing solitude in order to deal with “an inborn sensory sensitivity to light and sound” and bagged a single at Pforzheimer for the following year.

“It won’t be much by way of square footage,” said the advisor, an ectomorphic grad student in literature named Pavel. “Not much more than a closet, really.”

“No problem,” said Grace. “A closet will help with my hang-ups.”

Pavel squinted. “Pardon — oh, heh, good one. Yes, yes, good. Heh.”

With that out of the way, Grace was free to continue acing every course and by the end of her sophomore year, she’d begun to kiss up to specific psych profs in order to lay the groundwork for nabbing a research job in her junior year. Though Malcolm and Sophie had introduced her to alcohol in an optimal way — allowing her to taste fine wines, avoiding power struggles — she’d decided early on to avoid any mind-altering substances and stuck to that.

Not boozing or doping wasn’t easy in a libertine environment if you lacked spine or got too social. In addition to the expected overindulgence in weed, Grace had observed plenty of coke sniffing and hallucinogenic dabbling. Even some heroin use, mostly by self-tortured theater students.

But the big drug at Harvard was alcohol. On many a Friday afternoon, beer trucks pulled up to the eating clubs that were Harvard’s version of fraternities, and unloaded cases of cheap brew. The college had no official Greek life but it was only a matter of nomenclature. Like much at Harvard, entry to the clubs was by invitation only and males dominated. Of course, girls were needed for the parties and feminism blew out the door when beer and fun beckoned and more than once Grace had been beckoned by a drunk preppie as she walked past a club.

As her college career progressed, she watched lithe vixens grow beer bellies and the reek of vomit in dorms and houses was eau de Monday.

Grace found herself a different form of recreation: hunting appropriate males with whom she could have pleasurable, unemotional sex.

“Appropriate” meant no jocks or elitists, nor anyone too gregarious because none of those could be trusted to keep their mouth shut. The same went for letch professors and horny grad students, anyone who might conceivably be able to wield power over her. The final group she eliminated were the blue-collar townies who trolled for Ivy League pussy in the bars that littered Cambridge. Too much potential for class envy.

That left a select group of targets, shy boys, loners, like herself, but no schizoids whose avoidance of others was rooted in deep, crazed hostility. One Unabomber was enough.

Over the three and a half years Grace spent at Harvard, she slept with twenty-three young men from Harvard, Tufts, BU, BC, and Emerson. Pleasant lads lacking self-confidence and experience who were thrilled to have Grace educate them.

She had her own definition of “special needs.”

In the process of grooming and snagging, she learned about herself as well — what bored her, what turned her on quickest. How it needed to be more than the thrill and release of orgasm; she had to take control. What one slightly built but energetic lad studying the history of American film had termed “you like doing the director’s cut.”

When he’d said it, Grace had been riding him and she stopped and panic tightened his face. “Uh... sorry...”

“Is that a problem, Brendan?”

“No, no, no, no, no—”

She winked, offered the merest pelvic twitch. “You’re sure I’m not being too bossy?”

“No, no, no, I love it. Please don’t stop.”

“Okay, just as long as we’re in agreement.” Laughing, she planted his hands on her breasts, showed him how to softly twist her nipples, and resumed rocking and rolling. Beginning slowly for her own benefit, then picking up speed. Brendan came seconds later. Stayed hard until she finished and came a second time.

“Excellent,” she told him, figuring he’d be good for another couple of romps. Five times with anyone was her max, more often she broke it off after one or two. No sense getting them too attached. Plus she bored easily.

She was up-front about breaking things off but refused to explain. For the most part, flattery and her best blow job took care of any transitional issues.

As Grace neared her twentieth birthday, she’d amassed enough credits to graduate a semester early and had produced a sixty-seven-page honors paper on cognitive processing that earned her a departmental distinction and a summa on her diploma. One of her psych profs, a gentle, thoughtful woman named Carol Berk who’d spent her professional life studying minuscule correlates of family structure, guided her to join the psych honor society, Psi Chi, nominated her successfully for Phi Beta Kappa, and suggested Grace remain at Harvard for grad school.

Grace thanked her and lied. “I really appreciate the vote of confidence, Professor Berk, maybe I will.”

But she’d had it with cold weather and self-importance and the tendency to politicize everything from breakfast cereal to reading material. She’d also lost patience with having to explain why she preferred not to attend social gatherings. Had overheard one too many of her alleged peers refer to her as “different” or “weird” or “asocial” or “autistic.”

On top of all that, she was beginning to tire of the shy boys, had found herself working harder to come.

But none of that really mattered.

She’d known all along what her next step would be.

As her junior year drew to a close, she phoned Malcolm and told him she’d be coming home for the summer. He and Sophie had seen her a month before, the second of their twice-yearly visits, and she’d hadn’t mentioned anything about returning.

He said, “No summer school this time?”

“No need, I’m finished.”

“Finished with your research?”

“With nearly everything. I’ll be graduating a semester early.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope,” she said. “Done, kaput. I’d like to talk to you about doing some research in L.A., and about grad school.”

“So you’ve definitely decided?”

“I have.”

A beat. “That’s terrific, Grace. Clinical or cognitive?”

“Clinical and I want to do it at SC.”

“I see...”

“Is that a problem, Malcolm?”

“Of course not, Grace. Not in terms of your qualifications, that is. With everything you’ve accomplished and the kind of GRE score you’re bound to get, any school will be happy to have you.”

“Including SC?”

Another pause. “Yes, of course, the department would certainly be pleased.”

“Interesting grammar,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Not they will be, Malcolm. They would be. It’s conditional on something?”

“Well... Grace, do I need to spell it out?”

“If it’s something other than the obvious,” she said. “E.g., you and me, nepotism blah blah blah.”

“I’m afraid that’s it, Grace.”

“Are you saying your presence will disqualify me?”

“I’d hope not.” He laughed. “There I go with more conditional... I must admit, you’ve surprised me with this, Grace.”

“Why?”

“Pardon?”

“Why the surprise?” she said. “There’s no one whose work I admire more than yours.”

“Well,” he said. “That — that’s extremely gracious... you’re saying not only do you want to study at SC, you’re planning to be my student?”

“If it’s possible.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I have to say, it’s not the kind of thing that comes up in departmental meetings.”

Grace laughed. “Paradigm shift. You always say that they can be useful.”

He laughed back. “So I do, Grace. So I do.”

She wasn’t sure what he had to go through, but a month later, she had her answer. Formally, she’d be required to apply like everyone else. But Malcolm’s tenure and status and “other factors” made her acceptance inevitable.

Grace had a notion of what other factors meant: He wasn’t her biological father. So, officially, no nepotism.

That, she confessed, did tighten her chest a bit and make her eyes hurt.

But on balance, everything was working out just as she’d planned.