Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller by Clifford Irving Read Free Book Online

were off on a tour of the barns, Dennis’s mother said to him, “I like your young woman. She’s so even tempered. So warm and bright. The children like her too.”
    “She’s what they need,” he said. “This time it will work. I won’t fail again.”
    “You didn’t fail the first time, Denny darling. You chose the wrong woman.”
    “That’s a failure of judgment, Mother.”
    At the Thanksgiving feast, after he had carved the turkey, Dennis’s father said to Sophie, “Dennis told me you went to Cornell. I taught at Ithaca College. Did he mention that? It was about a hundred years ago. But if you spent four years far above Cayuga’s waters, you can’t be a stranger to Watkins Glen. All the students come to our waterfall when the weather warms up.”
    “I remember,” Sophie said. “I came here to swim under it. You felt as if you were drowning, and it was thrilling, not frightening. It seems like a hundred years ago to me too.”
    “What did you major in?”
    “Chemistry. But what I really liked was nineteenth-century English lit. Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge.”
    “Then you must have studied with John Yates. The expert on the Romantics. John was a friend of mine.”
    “No, with David Daiches.” Sophie began to cough, and reached for another helping of turkey and cranberry sauce.
    “I knew Daiches too, but not well. More of an expert on Scotch whisky, he was. He went off to the Chair of Poetry at Cambridge, in England. And before him there was the illustrious Vladimir Nabokov. I go a long way back, you see. Were you a good student? Did you love the Hill?”
    “I wasn’t very industrious. I was homesick, and I was so cold there.” Across the table, Dennis’s Rochester sister laughed. “Dennis says that in Colorado you live at 9,000 feet! Now that’s what I call cold!”
    “Cold,” Aunt Jennie repeated, nodding, her hands shaking.
    “But it’s not so,” Sophie said politely. “There’s no humidity high up in the Rockies, and hardly any wind. People in the East talk all the time about the windchill factor. We don’t have it. The snow is so soft and dry you can’t make a snowball with it until April. They call it champagne powder. In winter the sun is strong enough for me to grow bougainvillea in my greenhouse. And gardenias, and orchids. Dennis will tell you …”
    Sophie had spoken with all the quiet passion of a woman in love. But in this instance, in love with a place—her snowbound wilderness.
    She went to bed early that night, and Dennis stayed up to drink a nightcap of scotch with his father.
    “Daiches”—his father mused—”your bride-to-be’s English professor, taught me the little I know about the making of single-malt whisky. ‘You get the best brands,’ he said, ‘and cheap too, at Macy’s in New York.’ He drank a lot of it, so he should have known. Dylan Thomas came to visit him. Friendly fellow, but a serious boozer— gave a reading of his poetry up on the Hill. He and Daiches had a merry old time of it. I was introduced to Dylan. Tragic life.” He frowned. “You know, Dennis, it doesn’t make sense.”
    “What doesn’t, Dad? That Dylan Thomas had a tragic life?”
    “That Sophie could have studied under David Daiches. It was in the late forties and early fifties that he was in Ithaca. By the time she would have graduated, he was long gone to Cambridge.”
    Dennis knew his father forgot things and sometimes got dates confused. He had just turned seventy-five.
    “I know exactly what you’re thinking,” his father said. “The old man’s a bit gaga. First stage of Alzheimer’s. But I’m telling you, Dylan came to visit Cornell in 1950. I went over to hear him read at Willard Straight Hall. Magnificent voice. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
    “So how could she have been there? That would make her well over sixty years old.”
    “You’re right,” Dennis said, “she must have got him mixed up with someone else.” He leaned over and gave his