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Show his daughter Luel, though, Sadie's legacy becomes something cleverer, more charming, more dangerous. I can see them bending over their desk together now, the small, dark, exquisite eyes furrowed together, their thin, handsome lips consulting as one. It is the same look I had seen once at the GoldenGlow, when father and daughter had come, carefully scheduled in turn with the other relatives, to pay the dutiful call to Sadie. They brought the absurd gifts one brings an invalid relative: a silk dressing gown, a stuffed plush dog, a color TV too large for her room. But they took away her rings. "Why?" Sadie had protested in her frail, birdlike voice, but she could not keep their hands from violating her jewelry box. They had already counted everything. "You're losing them," they had said, "Or they're being stolen from you." Sadie had sat erect on her bed. "I gave some of them away." "How many?" Luel and her father had asked, almost in unison. "Four." "To whom?" "A friend." By now, of course, Luel and her father know that the friend was me. Illicit receipt of the rings is part of the basis of the suit. |
