People Like Us by Dominick Dunne Read Free Book Online Page A

you are going through like someone else who has been through it.”
    There were murmurs of assent in the room.
    “The thing that makes me most angry is when people say to me, ‘At least you have another child,’ ” said Faith Haber. “What do you say to these people?”
    “I have no answers. I know of no secrets to assuage your pain. I can only tell you that you go on. You carry on somehow. You live your life. You work hard. In time you’ll go to films and parties again. You’ll see your friends and start to talk about other things than this. You’ll even learn to laugh again, as strange as that may seem now, if you allow it to happen. My wife and I—”
    He stopped. He never said “my ex-wife and I.” “Don’t call me your ex-wife,” Peach had once said to him. It was too complicated to explain about himself and Peach, what it was like between them. Only he and Peach understood that, and, anyway, that was not what he was here to talk about. Dealing with loss. That was the theme tonight.
    “But it is always there, what happened to us. It becomes a part of you. It has become as much a part of me as my left-handedness.”
    He talked on, but he knew that what he said was not reaching them. They wanted an answer.
    “Out there, in Vacaville, California,” he said, finally, “there is a man called Lefty Flint. Lefty Flint held his hands around my daughter’s neck for five minutes, choking her until she was dead. Lefty Flint read the Bible all during the trial. Lefty Flint was sentenced to only three years in prison. In two years he will be out, having atoned, he thinks, for the murder of our daughter.”
    Gus stopped, withdrawing into his thoughts. He remembered the trial. He remembered her friend, Wendy, who said, on the stand, “It was when she opened the door and saw Lefty Flint standing there that Becky knew, before he even raised a hand to grab hold of her body, that the end of her life was at hand.”
    “Objection, your honor,” Marv Pink, the defense attorney, had screamed at the judge. “The witness cannot state what was in Miss Bailey’s mind.”
    “Sustained,” said the judge.
    “What would you do if you ever saw him?”
    There was a silence before Gus realized that someone in the group had asked him a question.
    “What?” he asked.
    “What would you do if you ever saw Lefty Flint, after he gets out?” It was the single father whose sixteen-year-old son had been beaten to death with a baseball bat in a racial encounter.
    Gus looked at the man. “The thought haunts me, because I feel almost certain it will happen, as if some higher power is directing such an encounter.”
    “What would you do?” asked the man again.
    “I may appear to be a calm man,” answered Gus, “but there is within me a rage that knows no limits.”
    “What would you do?” persisted the man.
    “What I want to do is kill him. Does that shock you? It shocks me. But it is what I feel.”
    He did not add, “It is what I am going to do.”

4
    On Thursday Justine Altemus canceled out of a benefit performance of the Manhattan Ballet Company, for which she was on the committee, to have dinner with Bernard Slatkin at a little restaurant on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. On Friday she backed out of a family dinner at Uncle Laurance and Aunt Janet Van Degan’s to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary to go to the television studio and watch Bernie’s newscast and have dinner with him afterward at a restaurant on Columbus Avenue frequented by theatrical people. On Saturday morning she called Ceil Somerset and said she couldn’t possibly go to the country for the weekendbecause she had such a terrible cold and spent the entire weekend in bed with Bernie at his apartment on Central Park West. On Monday she told her mother she wouldn’t be sitting in her box at the opera that night for the new production of
Tosca
, which the Van Degan Foundation had partially financed, and took Bernie to Clarence’s,