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jets.
    Every
time Fabian spoke, Deirdre twitched in her chair. She made no effort to talk to
those around her, but toyed with her food while she continued to drink.
    The
six of us with her went through the social pretense of pleasure in our awkward
situation. I felt as though I were swimming up a waterfall.
    The
most pitiable was a young woman named Lina, who’d been stuck on Deirdre’s left.
She was married to one of Fabian’s students—the editor of theLaw Review —and
confided that she had just turned twenty-one when she married Brian at
Christmas. As her hostess divided her mind between wine and Fabian’s remarks,
Lina kept trying to talk to her—about the dinner, the house, Chicago’s opera,
anything to prove that Deirdre was fine, her angry twitches a passing
nightmare.
    I did
my duty with Brian by asking him about his classes and his and Lina’s Iowa
home. A woman across from us who worked for Donald Blakely at Gateway Bank
gamely joined in with a discussion of a client in Cedar Rapids. We were doing ...
not well, but enough to make it seem we were at a party, when Lina brought up
Deirdre’s children.
    “You
must be so proud of them,” she said desperately. “Everyone tells me how smart
they are. And your daughter seems wonderful with her little brothers.”
    Deirdre
jerked her head up. “My darling daughter is a saint.” Her voice was heavy with
sarcasm. “I couldn’t do without her and her daddy would die if he lost her.”
    Lina
turned her head, furtively blinking back tears. The rest of us sat stunned for
a moment. Finally I leaned across the man on my right to talk to her.
    “Brian’s
been telling me about your riding. The only time I was ever on a horse was when
my dad got a friend in the mounted patrol to let me ride around Grant Park in
front of him. I was thrilled and terrified at once. How did you begin?”
    Lina
bit her lip but gallantly produced an answer. Eleanor Guziak, the banker,
joined in, speaking in the exaggerated way people use when embarrassed.
    As
Brian and one of the other men started talking I looked past Deirdre to Emily.
The girl was poking at her food, turning it over and over with her fork, but
making no pretense of eating.
    “What
do you do, Vic?” Lina asked. “Are you a lawyer too?”
    “I
went to law school with Fabian and worked on the Public Defender’s Homicide
Task Force for a while, but I’ve been a private investigator for ten years
now.” My tongue felt thick from mushing social drivel in the midst of the
Messenger family’s disarray.
    “Oh,
Vic is one of our most prominent do-gooders.” Deirdre, apparently realizing
that she’d alienated her guests, was striving for jocularity. “She didn’t stop
working for the poor and desperate when she left the PD’s office.
    Why,
she even puts up homeless families in her own office.”
    Lina
turned wide blue eyes to me. “You do? That’s so wonderful of you. I get upset
every time I go downtown and see homeless people lining the sidewalks, but I
feel so helpless—”
    “I’m
helpless too,” I interrupted her. “The amount of misery is overwhelming and I’m
not brave enough, smart enough, or rich enough to know what to do about it.”
    “But
to put a family up in your office—” Lina began.
    “I
haven’t. Deirdre’s exaggerating.”
    “Come,
come, Vic. You’re much too modest,” Deirdre lunged in. “You told us on Monday
you helped a homeless family camp out there.”
    She
was too drunk to pitch her voice properly. Conversation at the main table broke
off as people began listening in.
    “How
do the rest of the tenants feel about your generosity?” Alec Gantner, the
senator’s son, had turned around in his chair to look at me.
    I
forced a smile. “Deirdre’s blowing a small thing into a big one. I found a
woman with three children hiding behind the boiler when I went down to work on
the wiring Monday. My building is going under the wrecking ball May fifteenth;
only a handful of tenants is