When Marlene was a child, people said she was strange. She came from good solid stock, as they used to say back in 1940, and if the source of her later maladjustment couldn’t be found there, the seeds of her intelligence could. Marlene’s mother, Daphne Hatterson (nee Fitzwilliam of the Boston Fitzwilliams) was a columnist for the Philadelphia Herald who wrote under the well-known, if somewhat transparent nom de plume, Fitzwilly. Her father was the celebrated legal mind Daniel Hatter-son. So, although she was certainly an odd duck, Marlene was never a dim one. She was smart as a whip, a phrase her father often used to deflect criticism from his unusual child.

Smart as a whip, but what did that mean? Marlene sometimes wondered, since it was only the whip’s victim who felt the smartness, the serpent of leather itself being but a droopy thing, and not smart at all. Marlene was perplexed by these sorts of questions, and voiced her queries quite loudly to anyone who would listen, much to the chagrin of her parents, who only smiled gently to puzzled guests as though they found their daughter amusing and not exasperating.

Marlene insisted on calling her mother, not Mum, not Ma, not Mother, not even Mommy (which would have been bad enough) but Daph, which the older woman feared might not be a term of affection.

"She’s high-strung, but very bright," said Mrs. Wallbridge, Marlene’s teacher, at parent-teacher night. "You simply must stimulate her mind."

Daphne, however, suspected that the very problem might be too much stimulation. The girl never seemed to relax, to play like other children. Marlene often came into Daphne’s study and asked impossible questions about existence and whether or not they were all just some dream in the mind of a great head hanging somewhere in the universe.

"Think of the implications! No control, Daph. We wouldn’t be in control!" she said one day and began to turn in circles, round and round the room.

"Simmer down, Marlene. Don’t get so excited." Daphne stared over the top of her cat’s-eye glasses at the flushed girl and wished for the thousandth time that her husband would spend less time at the office and more time helping her raise the child he had so desperately wanted.

Tragically, however, Daniel Hatterson would soon be spending no time at all with his daughter. Marlene’s father died suddenly and somewhat dramatically, when Marlene was twelve. The respected orator died of a stroke that felled him in the middle of a particularly impassioned plea to the jury. He had been speaking for half an hour with a degree of fervour necessitated by the fact that his client was quite obviously guilty of a gruesome crime which involved an axe, a meat grinder and a can of paraffin. Daniel had just raised his fist heavenward, and cried, "You must see, Gentlemen, that this is no ordinary case! The extenuating circumstances profoundly alter . . ." It was then that Daniel Hatterson’s face turned a most unpleasant shade of vermilion and he pitched into the jury box. One of the jurors later said he thought Hatterson was throwing himself on the mercy of the court as a last resort.

Marlene was a member of the school astronomy club, which met on Thursdays, so she arrived home late that afternoon to find the house swarming with various relatives (none of whom she liked), a policeman, and the Reverend Collins. Her mother met her at the door, a box of tissue at the ready, and told her only daughter that her father had had an accident at work, that it had been bad, that Marlene would not be seeing her father again.

"Do you mean he’s dead?" asked Marlene, looking past her mother to the grief-swollen house.

"Yes, darling," said her mother, and she put her hands on Marlene’s shoulders in case she wanted to be hugged.

"Did someone kill him?"

"No. Nothing like that!" Daphne Hatterson’s hand went to the scarf held at her throat with a small pearl brooch, which softened the unflattering severity of her mourning dress.

"Well, did he fall or choke or something?" Marlene was not pleased that these people should know the important facts when she did not. It only served to confirm her feeling of being constantly on the outside of something, set apart, of not being in the know.

"No, dear. He got sick. A stroke." Daphne glanced quickly over her shoulders at the friends and relations. Reverend Coll-ins’ brow was furrowed. Daphne turned back to her daughter, waiting for what she prayed would be tears. She could do something about tears. She clutched the box of tissues almost hopefully.

"And he’s dead." Marlene let the dry, brown leaf of this truth sink to the bottom of her stomach. "Well, that’s not truly an accident, is it? I mean, slipping in a shower is an accident. Getting hit by a bus is an accident. A stroke is rather more like an act of God." She stared directly at the Reverend, who cleared his throat and slipped away to get more tea.

A few days later, after the funeral, the house was full with people eating sandwiches. The men drank scotch, the ladies tea and reminisced about the great man. Marlene spent the afternoon in the garden where she twisted the heads off the snapdragons and lilies while the relatives clucked and sighed, and kept an eye out for Marlene because the girl was, well, an eccentric child and should be watched.

Once the will was read, and the clothes packed off to the Salvation Army, mother and daughter never again mentioned Marlene’s father. Daphne thought it was better that way, un-aware that the sudden erasure of her father only served to confirm Marlene’s suspicions that the things most people took for granted in the world as being solid and trustworthy were not so at all. Daphne mistook the fact that Marlene no longer voiced these opinions as proof she was growing out of them. As she drew comfort from this false knowledge, she saw no reason to stir up the hornet’s nest of her daughter’s mind. If Marlene had exchanged a fatiguing curiosity for a shell of crusty withdrawal, Daphne was not troubled.