The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross by Amanda Cross Read Free Book Online

right about the past entrenching itself in the present and future. But if I give up this wonderful question, you have, in turn, to promise to tell me if there ever is an answer. Agreed?”
    Kate agreed, and with relief. The story was beginning to frighten her in the hold it was getting on Caroline and Tom Rayley. She called Tom Rayley and told him of the bargain, urging him to forget myths and concentrate on his satisfactory daughter.
    And there for a time the matter rested.
    THE RESURRECTION OF the myth was an outcome of Kate’s meeting with Henrietta Grant. They found themselves together on a panel, both last-minute substitutes; each, it later transpired, had agreed to fill in as a special favor, Henrietta to the remaining panelist, Kate to the man who had organized the panel in the first place. They were introduced five minutes before the panel began, each trying to remember where she had heard the other’s name. Both thought of Caroline as the connection during the first paper, and they nodded that recognition to one another as the man’s words on the New Historicism in the Renaissance prepared the way for Henrietta on the New Historicism inFrench writing of the eighteenth century and for Kate on English writers of the nineteenth.
    “Shall we have a drink?” Henrietta asked when they had answered the last of the questions and watched the audience disperse. “Or do you feel duty bound to remain for the next panel?”
    “Neither duty bound nor so inclined,” Kate answered. “After all, we are substitutes; it’s not as though we had signed on for the whole bit. And even if I had, the truth is I would like to have a drink with you.” They soon settled themselves in the bar of the hotel where the conference was being held. Kate felt she deserved a martini complete with olive.
    “How is Caroline?” Henrietta asked. “I understand working with you has been a real opportunity. Not that I’ve seen her lately.”
    “I wouldn’t call it an opportunity. We’re friends, which is a good thing. The fact is,” Kate added, as her martini and Henrietta’s Scotch arrived, “I never expected really to meet you, any more than I expected to come upon two sets of twelve-year-old twins playing volleyball. Or upon Huck and Jim on a raft, if it comes to that. Certain scenes live only in the imagination.”
    “The twins are not
that
much younger than you,” Henrietta laughed. “My twins, at least, have turned out rather well. I’ve lost track of the other two, so they remain always twelve in my mind also. They moved away after that summer.”
    “I wonder if they tell the story of Caroline’s arrival.”
    “I’m pretty sure they do. They got used to telling it that summer. It’s not the sort of story you forget.”
    “It’s all passed into legend by now. How does it feel to be part of a legend?”
    “It was an amazing moment. I feel a kind of wonderabout Caroline, as though, after that birth, as amazing and as charming in its way as that of Botticelli’s Venus, she was bound to be a marvel, do something that would reverberate, become, in her own way, a myth.”
    “The birth of the hero, as Raglan and others have it, only this time a woman hero. More Moses than Eppie in
Silas Marner
. And of course the two sets of twins add a note, a kind of amazing circumstance.”
    “Not really,” Henrietta laughed. “Think of the Bobbsey Twins. Just a convenient circumstance.” Henrietta looked for a moment down at her hands. “I do hope Caroline’s stopped brooding about it. I worry about the Rayleys; I worry about her. Like one of those babies conceived
in vitro
: How can anything in life equal its first moment? I mean, can a life hold two miracles?”
    “The whole point of heroic lives is that they do, isn’t that so? The miraculous birth, therefore the awful and wonderful destiny. Not that I can imagine that for Caroline, who is such a sane person, which heroes rarely are.”
    “Male heroes,” Henrietta said, and