The Edge of Doom by Amanda Cross

hand. Louise had been their mother as well as Kate’s; no doubt they now considered her more their mother than Kate’s; she had not behaved in so wildly appalling and unaccustomed a manner before their arrival in the Fansler family.
    “Now, Reed,” Kate said, responding with more irritation than she knew to be deserved, “there’s no need to act as though we were all living in some earlier time—if there ever was an earlier time when bored and lonely women did not have lovers.”
    Reed did not take up this argument, which he doubted Kate even intended to pursue. “You must understand, dear Kate,” he went on in a kindly manner certain to increase her irritation, “that their mother embodied their ideal of womanhood. No doubt they chose their wives because they assumed them to resemble their mother in all important aspects.”
    “ ‘I want a gal just like the gal who married dear old dad,’ ” Kate sang, with something regrettably close to a sneer.
    “She was their mother also,” Reed repeated in a more conciliatory tone. “I think you should meet with them and offer them sympathy, pointing out your own state of shock and, incidentally, the fact that you had hardly planned for your biological father to turn up in that tumultuous way.”
    “He wasn’t a bit tumultuous; he was as cautious as possible; even you noticed that.”
    “What on earth is the matter with you, Kate? I’ve never known you to be so intolerant and so impatient. Try to see it from their point of view.”
    “If you learned tomorrow that your mother had had an affair, even that your father wasn’t your father, would you get your knickers in such a twist?”
    Reed seemed to consider the question. “The truth is, I can’t imagine such a possibility. But don’t you see, that’s just the point. Neither could they. And this new DNA technique doesn’t offer them the chance to call Jay a liar and an impostor. The same method even proved Jefferson’s congress with a slave, and he was one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence though a little less certain about the independence of slaves.”
    Kate abandoned her protests. “Say you’ll come with me, Reed. Do you suppose we’ll meet again at Laurence’s club, or perhaps in the Oak Room?”
    “If I know Laurence,” Reed said, “we’ll meet in his office, with the door shut. Laurence behind his desk, William and David in chairs side by side, and you and I on a couch opposite the three of them. You must promise me to listen, to sigh sympathetically, and to indicate in your looks as in your speech that you too are devastated by the thought of your mother’s perfidy.”
    “Devastated? I think it’s the best thing that ever happened to her, and it’s made me happy to know she had it off with a good lover, at least for a time.”
    “Kate!”
Reed was glowering. “I’m not accompanying you to that meeting unless you promise to behave as I have indicated.”
    “It’s a promise,” Kate said. “I’m certainly not facing those three alone, even if I have to pretend that adultery in women is far more serious a matter than a husband’s fling.”
    “There is no need to exaggerate,” Reed said.

    They met the following afternoon, late, after Kate’s class and office hour. She arrived alone. The men had all preceded her there, and rose at her entrance, though not without simultaneously glaring at her, the Fansler faces devoid of smiles. She was not offered any refreshment, and might have asked for something—surely a cup of tea would have been appropriate—but Reed glared in his turn, and she subsided on to the couch beside him. She could not, she realized, remember when she had last been in a room with all three of her brothers and no other Fansler. She regarded them now as though they were strangers to whom she had just been introduced. They wore suits with vests and somber ties, although their colored shirts would surely not have been thought suitable in earlier times.