"My... what a splendid day... perfect one for bananafish, don'tcha think?"

Leave it to Jenny to reemerge from her emotional shell with a callback to an obscure JD Salinger story about a suicide. She'd gone into a mental 'estivation' for the better part of a month, speaking not a single word to anyone. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

We were trying to convince a rather dubious Poppa Edelson that dropping her off in some local nuthatch wouldn't do her much good and might do more harm down the road.

"Last thing in the world she needs is to have Albert Towley crowing about her agony across the gossip pages... where the hell is he working now?"

"Ehhh... He's teaching journalism at Columbia... but how are you going to manage taking care of Jennifer out in the middle of nowhere?"

"Best place in the world for her... Not that Oklahoma City doesn't have a fine selection of up to date medical facilities... Anyway... we've got plenty of people on our ranch... and they know how to keep their mouths shut... Hey. watch out..."

Jenny had stopped sniffling long enough to get up and walk over to and reopen the window and naturally we all rushed over to stop her. With a piqued look on her face, she brushed off our restraining hands to pick up a fire extinguisher so she could douse the remains of that bonfire she'd made. Wordlessly she emptied the cylinder and let it drop to the floor with a big klunk. Her task completed, she padded over to where she'd risen and sat back down to watch us haggle over her disposition. We had moved on to the subject of getting her out of the city.

Only a dozen years ago we could've bundled her into a taxi and been dropped off practically next to the Penn Station platform without having to shepherd her through the concourse. Those days are gone forever and we still had to worry her through the train change at Chicago so we tabled that idea and called the Platt Air Services desk to have them pick us up at Teterboro.

"Hey, didn't she tell you? We had a crackup on landing... should be on the wire services by now..."

We let him elaborate.

"It was pretty low visibility... but we'd gotten over the north end of the field and had wheels on the runway when this jackass C-130 pulls in front of us like they owned the place. Jenny pulls up the nose, hits full throttle and hopes for the best..."

"Through all this she'd been talking to the kid in back... y'know, giving her a play-by-play... so the poor thing must've heard everything... Well we clipped the son of a bitch and we're losing engines one after the other... Tower calls to see if we wanted to make a go-around on another runway... board's lit up like a Christmas tree, alarms going off right and left and we were barely above the treetops... Jenny just says 'we're gonna be in the river... call ya back' and puts us down in this old mill pond like she did this for a living..."

"Are we to assume then... that nobody got hurt?"

"Shit... we didn't even get our feet wet! Girl puts us right up in the yard of this church like she knew where she was going... We could praise the Lord in style! Is Jenny there? Put her on..."

"She's here... but she's gone bye-bye... that's kinda why we wanted the plane... Uhhh... What was she like after the crash..."

"Well we were all a little amped up for having lived through it... Jenny just yelled 'Balls!'. Told her I'd give her mine if I didn't think she had a bigger pair... then we went back into the cabin to check on everybody else..."

"She didn't run off or anything?"

"No... She was still around while they got an ambulance for the girl. I remember her tilling the kid she had nothing to worry about now that she'd made it through a plane crash... said she was a 'good luck charm'..."

"So when did she take off?"

"Well we'd gone back to the airport to let 'em know what happened and somebody there complained about this car she'd left in the lot from the time she used to come up here for the company. That musta torqued her off 'cause she said 'Fine, I'll move it' real testy like, got in and drove off..."

"Yup... That'll do it... It's the straws that break her..."

"Hey listen... don't be takin' her to some goddamn Willowbrook... That girl's something special... and they'll just treat her like she's nuthin'..."

"Well we're trying to get her up to our ranch... We can keep her out of the way and we got our pick of top notch head doctors... One of the benefits of being uh... twins..."

"Can't put her on a plane now... way she is... we'd never get her back... We were gonna call her friend Ezzie and see if she can't fix it so we can put her on a train somewhere out of town... Make a stop at some crossing out in the sticks."

"I think I can do you something better... lemme call you back... Where you at?"

"We're up in the Burgundy Room... EMpire twenty one-twelve..."

"Yeah I know the number... Gimme a half hour..."

We used that half hour to coax Jenny into the wheelchair Poppa Edelson rounded up, to wrap her in some blankets and to try and see if we could reach her through the fog her mind had wandered into. If there was anything there we couldn't see it so we fished her Ray-Bans from her purse because we wanted people to give us the funny looks and not her. On the half hour we got a call from Ezzie telling us to get a Medicar and meet her over at the Waldorf to wait for our ride. On the elevator ride down we explained to our fellow passengers that our friend 'Penny' was just in from England and simply had to take in the view from the top - how was she to know she was deathly afraid of heights? We used the same line with our driver adding that 'Mis'ess Waxman' was just going to love the penthouse suite we'd reserved for her.

Ezzie was waiting for us at the Forty-ninth Street entrance with extra muscle in the form of her man Laszlo. Our ride, she explained was still being shunted from Connecticut onto the hotel's private train platform and we'd have to cool our heels in the bar for a spell. At the time, we weren't particularly thirsty but didn't feel like hanging around the lobby. We'd picked what we thought was a nice quiet out-of-the-way corner but wouldn't you know that the Red-headed One just happened to be tanking up at the next table. Seeing Jenny, she scooched her chair around and tried to strike up a conversation starting with something about the Drake and Van De Lay firm having this big reunion party for everyone that worked for them. This got no response so she changed the subject to that new building they're working on. It seems their steel fabricator had been bugging them about some design changes and she wanted Jenny's advice before she had the old man sign off on them.

It was really important and 'Mis'ess Waxman', as we kept calling her, was completely oblivious to the Red-headed One rising fury.

"Jennifer... Jenny? Hello-o-o! Could you at least look at me when I'm talking to you?"

"Aww... leave the girl alone... She's got things on her mind." Ezzie said aloud then muttered, "Too bad none of them are the top of her skull..."

"Hmmm... Should be at Ninety-sixth Street now... Sending Laszlo with you in case she gets a little feisty..."

Emily's party looked like they were getting ready to leave so we waited them out before heading down the Waldorf platform ourselves. No point in giving her the satisfaction of an apology. On our way to the platform elevator we picked up a detail of Waldorf security on account Track Sixty-one having not been used since Andy Warhol threw a party down there in 'Sixty-five and a lot of them were simply curious. That and they were needed to shoo away the 'mole people' who'd taken up residence in the caverns under 'Terminal City'. The only people there today were the station men assigned to our platform but their presence was hinted at by this stale uriney smell that lingered in the less ventilated spots.

As much as we've come to enjoy private air travel there's still nothing in the universe like having your own private rail car, even if only for one trip. Even watching them back the 'Freydis Eiriksdottir' into the platform spur with its attendant whistles, catcalls and 'm'ombacks' was a ceremony in itself. Even if we hadn't seen the name, the 'Gemutlichkeit' curtains in the windows and the Viking helmet medallion on the observation platform rail gave us a pretty good idea about who owned this cherry beast.

"Where'd you get the dough for 'private varnish' Ezz?"

"Huh? Some of it's legacy money from my dad... Rest was a present from Lazz..."

"Yah... I have a chain of health spas on the West Side... Say, is she completely crippled? That's a pretty big clean and jerk. up those stairs..."

Laszlo was concerned that he might dump her out of the chair while navigating the steps up into the car so we tried coaxing Jenny into standing up and making the walk herself. It took a few gentle nudges but she eventually got the message and we were able to guide her onto a couch in the parlor section. Ezzie gave Jen a final looking over before a final sweep of the hair and kiss on the forehead goodbye. She hastily composed herself before taking her leave in order to supervise the coupling of our car to the Chicago train as it was being run through the turnaround loop. The operation must've been pretty well timed because we departed almost as soon as we were attached. Amazingly enough, Jenny was able to keep upright through most of the knocking around from the operation before that last lurch sent her flopping onto her side. Seeing that she'd curled her legs up as if to sleep, we took off her sunglasses, wedged a pillow under her head and covered her with the blanket.

"Are you sure this is a good idea? I mean what about when she has to use the bathroom?"

"We're just playing it by ear... for now. At least we're on a train so if something happens we can get her off at the next stop. Anyway... she'll probably come out of this when nature calls... or gets hungry... say, what are we doing about food on this thing?"

Laszlo said something about there not being enough time to stock the car's pantry so we rang for the porter and strangely enough we got the same fellow who looked after us the last time we and Jenny rode the rails together. It turns out that he'd been on good terms with EsmÈralda and had come out of retirement to look after 'Miss Freda' for her. Not that we're all that easy to forget but he did actually remember us from that last trip. He also remembered Jenny.

"Oh, I hope she's not going to be too much trouble on this trip. I'm not getting any younger... don't think my back could take peeling her off'n you two..."

"Her troubles are the reason for this trip... Poor thing tried to finish the job her plane couldn't..."

We brought him up to speed on the story as he took our dinner order. Being too worked up for a hot meal, we ordered a plate roast beef and chicken sandwiches for ourselves and a bunch of those little half-pint cartons of chocolate milk for Jenny in the hopes a happy childhood memory might draw her out of her funk. She never liked to peel them open like everyone else, preferring to stab a hole in the top for a straw with the end of a rattail comb. We didn't have the means to replicate her little ritual and she could barely muster the strength for maybe a couple sips anyhow.

The layover at the station across the river from Albany gave us the opportunity to get a few copies of their evening paper to see if they had anything about Jenny's accident. They sure went all out in their coverage of what they were calling the 'Mercy Flight Miracle', with interviews with airport officials, the C-130 crew, Jenny's copilot, the nurse and the kid's parents and pictures of the 'fallen angel' and the damaged C-130 - they even had a graphic tracing the final approach, near miss and subsequent 'death plunge' into the pond. What they didn't have was an interview with Jenny, just a note that she'd 'fled the scene after an altercation with an airport official.'

A quick call to Evelyn brought news that a few reporters had shown their noses down at the Skidmore Ryerson-Platt offices, over at Republic field and even the Platt building in town. Jenny hadn't checked in with them and naturally Evelyn wanted to know if she was OK. We had to suck it up and tell her she wasn't, that she tried to kill herself and we were taking her out to the ranch.

"We'll probably have some time between trains in Chicago if you want to come up in the old plane and meet us there... in case she comes out of this and wants to go home..."

Evelyn met the train at Cleveland with Jenny's doctor and the family lawyer in tow. Jenny was still out of it but during the night she had the presence of mind to scarf down a couple chicken sandwiches when she thought we weren't looking. At least in her feral state she knew how to look for and use a bathroom and was able to make some attempt at personal grooming when she found a brush. She had no reaction to the sight of her mother, not even to her attempt at a comforting embrace. Jenny had the same lack of response to Eddie, who'd unexpectedly joined our entourage in Chicago, though her spidey senses perked up considerably while 'Miss Freda' was knocked around the switching yards for the two transfers to Oklahoma City and the handoff to the Petroco depot just outside of town where mother greeted our arrival.

Maybe it was the ordeal of the trip but Jenny was able to muster an awkwardly childlike hug for our mom before retreating into her shell for the ride to our spread. Poor Jenny, sandwiched between Laszlo and Eddie in the back seat of the family Cadillac, looked like the poor sap being 'taken for a ride' in a gangster film but nobody was taking any chances on her making a break for it on the interstate. The mothers were able to catch up on old times up front but the rest of us had to ride in silence on account of Jenny cringing and covering her ears when we tried to put on the radio.

"Honest Mister Burkhart... we waved off the hot shot... Yeah, we know about her problem with tranquilizers..."

"What about after the crash? Do you know if she took anything then?"

"Well, we didn't know about the crash when she... Shit!"

We'd been giving that newspaper article another looking over and we'd noticed through the rotogravure marks what looked like a smear going up the spar dividing the cockpit windscreens. A quick scan through the article brought out mention that the C-130 had been stalled halfway across the runway on account of its engines having just eaten a few migratory birds.

"That had to have been the last thing she needed to see... or hear..."

Handing him the radiotelephone under our seat, we asked if he wanted to try and get in touch with the nurse on the flight. He did and after a call to the hospital that girl was taken to, was able to find her at home. The final piece of the puzzle had been found and slotted into place.

"Nothing we can do but wait till the effects wear off," Doctor Burkhart concluded, "If they wear off... With a previous brain injury one can't be too sure. Can't imagine what she's going through in the meantime..."

So we waited... and watched as Jenny tried to navigate through the fog of her new reality. She made for quite a whirlwind in our library, seizing up one book after another, frantically rifling through the pages, finally throwing it down in disgust and picking another from a shelf. That kryptonite had sunk in pretty deep. Our mom offer her a pencil and steno pad to see if maybe she could draw something as a means of communication. Jenny took up the pencil and studied the blank sheet of paper for a spell before pushing them away and burying her head in her hands. Some time later we found a couple pages of hash marks ticking off the sequence of prime numbers - one, two, three, five, seven, eleven to somewhere around the fiftieth prime. Math was one of her more comfortable subjects in school.

The one attempt to feed her at the dinner table was a disaster and a revelation into the new rules her mind was imposing on her. With practice she could manage to chew food but if anyone started talking the busted part of her brain would take over and she'd have to huff whatever she was chewing out of her mouth to keep from choking - the poor thing couldn't even coordinate a proper spit. This happened maybe three or four times before she finally put her hands to her ears, shook her head in a manic 'no' and ran off with her plate to a quiet part of the house. Jenny took meals in her room for the duration.

Her face had been frozen in a deader than deadpan gaze but one avenue of communication left to her were hugs and she used them often and with some degree of nuance. When greeting us she'd put her head on our shoulder, step back, turn us slightly and then return to put her head on the our better half's shoulder. The next time she'd greet us the order of head plants with alternate. Strangely, she was no longer to coordinate her lip muscles for a proper kiss so when greeting Eddie she added that Eskimo rubbing noses thing to her hug. As for her elders, exuberant greeting to our mother aside, she still retained a certain degree of formalism and waited for their offerings of affection which bothered Evelyn who initially thought it might be some deep-seated rejection bubbling up from Jenny's subconscious. The things parents worry over.

By the second weekend her innate work ethic was throwing a fit and Jenny started shadowing mother while she made her inspection rounds with the cleaning lady. She must've been trying to memorize which bottle was for cleaning what because we soon found her with a brush and bucket of suds merrily scrubbing down the marble steps of the grand staircase. Luckily mom didn't catch her as she's kind of fussy about how things are done around the house. Just to keep her busy and out of mom's hair we led Jenny over to the barn so she could take care of the animals. That got dad throwing a fit on account of worrying what, god forbid, if one of the animals should kick her in the head or something awful like that. Of course when we were growing up he never worried about us getting stomped on by the livestock.

So we kept her amused up in our old playroom with its collection of two-headed dolls and stuffed animals we'd accumulated over the years from well-meaning people. We never played with them though, in part because we didn't want to ruin any of them but mostly because in the scenarios we'd act out from stories we'd hear on the radio or read in books, there really wasn't much call for a set of twins. Go figure. We usually played with a set of these little posable figurines that Jenny - who'd contributed a 'dicephalic' snail to our twins collection - had modified from the wooden dummies artists sometimes practice with. She also built us a sweet ultra-modern dollhouse out of little more than painted shirt and box cardboard. Funny how people become what they played as kids.

It was on a drizzly day near the end of March that a few cracks started to show in her wall of silence. Jenny had been arranging our dolls in little tableaus as if trying to recreate some fragment of memory. Some of them were happenings we weren't around to recall but we recognized a few, like when Sadie Montelli dropped in on her and what we took to be the 'crumb cake incident'. She also played out the Homme-wreckers story using one of the dolls that had fallen apart at the limbs and supplying 'dialog' with this halfway-to-a-whistle sound. Poking around the toy closet for more set pieces, she hit paydirt when she found the remnants of the Lionel set we'd shared with Avi. She took all the boxcars out and set them on the floor as if in a railyard. Then she plucked two girl dolls, a boy doll and a Negro man doll from the collection and sat the 'children' down like they were watching the trains. In the meantime we picked out an old Ledbelly record and put it on the machine because we had an idea this might be her Helen Keller moment.

However, when she started tapping along to the record we had another inspiration and got on the house telephone to have mom ask if any of the ranch hands had a guitar they could lend us. Thanks to the law of averages there was one to be had and while 'House of the Rising Sun' played we pressed the guitar into her arms. She gave us a funny look but seemed to get the idea that we wanted her to play along with the music. Jenny strummed along into the next song but after a few looks at her tableau she got up and walked over to the record player to stop the music and examine the record. She turned it over and around a few times till she found what she was looking for, put it back on the spindle and cued it to what she hoped was what she wanted.

You should've seen the look on her face when she got it on the first try.

She never got to hear the end of the song on account of the power going out on us. It soon came back on because we have a backup generator but we'd long learned that when the electricity goes out a big blow is coming our way and today was no exception. The winds were picking up and we could see out the window that the men were securing equipment and rounding up animals. We were closing the shutters when dad came up to tell us that there'd already been a 'touch down' the next county over and that we'd better come down to the shelter. Jenny started putting the toys away but we managed to coax her into moving along once the county's tornado sirens went off.

When we were kids we used to imagine we were in the Blitz and taking shelter in the Underground and supposing some kid in London was pretending they were going through a tornado storm at the same time. Anything to get you through a crisis. We made small talk about how the twisters were getting an early start this year to reassure an uneasy looking Evelyn that this was no big deal. Our better half added that the house was made of concrete and could take a direct hit if it had to but dad wanted to show off his storm cellar. Of course neither of us wanted to mention that the reason the storm cellar door was outside was so that if the house did get smashed to pieces we'd still be able to get out or that this was the main reason the family started summering in Amityville.

"Only thing you gotta worry about around here is if we get hail... A little wind ain't so bad but when they start chucking iceballs at ya... man... them things hurt!"

"Come on Jennums, we gotta move... Jenn... come on!"

She had this look on her face like she was daring the thing to have a go at her and knowing Jenny that's probably what she was doing. We tried our best to pull her back into the shelter but when she stands her ground it tends to stay stood. It was too noisy to yell for help so we jumped on her back and kicked her in the back of the knees to give gravity at try. It didn't work and Mister Twister was now on our land and looming over the bunkhouses. As the maelstrom descended upon us we saw Jenny's mouth open as if to let out a defiant yell but we couldn't even hear our own screams.

And then it dissipated.

Not all at once mind you, we could still see it rotating as winds dumped their load and swirled back into the clouds. Jenny looked up in wonder for a spell as the shower of rain and debris fell on us then turned to let us lead her into the shelter of her mother's arms.

The storm was an all-nighter that twice tugged at the opening inward shelter door - it thumps whenever there's a pressure differential. We had power and it was a reasonably comfortable time for everyone. The kids watched television and some the men got a card game going while the rest of us continued with business started above ground. Jenny curled up in a quiet corner with a book to see if she could make any sense of it. That she didn't throw it to the ground looked hopeful but she would often turn it over and back to whatever page she was looking at, so maybe something wasn't yet working right. Sometime during the night as everyone slept we heard these curious little moans emanating from her bunk that we thought sounded like the vocal exercises she used to have to do when she was a singer.

"Hmmm... looks like the old sorority house every Sunday morning..."

That was the second thing Jenny uttered as we emerged from our 'Führerbunker' the following morning. The house and outbuildings still stood but the grounds were strewn with just about everything that had been attached to them. She picked up a sign from the milking station, studied it for a spell and handed it to us.

"I'm still having trouble with words," she declared. It had taken her a few moments to compose even that simple a phrase.

Looking a little frustrated, Jenny stomped over to a far corner of the driveway and paced around in these nervous little circles to sort out the next thing she wanted to say.

"You ever wonder... how deaf people... people who've never heard a word in their life... think about what they're gonna have for lunch? For the last couple weeks... I couldn't even think words..."

She had the first inkling that something was wrong when she'd been pulled over by a trooper for driving a commercial vehicle on the Taconic Parkway. When he handed her the ticket to sign, the words started scrambling themselves right before her eyes. At first she thought it was something wrong with the ticket but when she looked at one of her road maps the words would randomly doing the same thing. Her dyslexia would come and go as she drove down to the city and had temporarily subsided by the time she got to the ESB only to flare up with a vengeance the moment she stepped into the Panorama offices.

"Whole trains of thought were going off the rails by then... All I can remember is having to put a stop to something..."

We let the question of whether or not she was going to end it all before we grabbed her pass. She had enough things on her plate to worry about now and visitors from back east had a few more for her to chew on. Cheryl brought reports of a scandal at another rehabilitation project in Harlem when one of the developers skipped town with funds. Reporters, not being the brightest bulbs in the set, put two and two together, and finding it didn't add up, had been asking questions about Jenny's sudden disappearance. She was also curious about the destruction of the photo shoot as she and the staff had never been given the full story about what had happened. In the face of protests from the arts community, Panorama publications issued a brief statement that they'd been 'irretrievably lost in an office fire'. Incidentally, news of Jenny's other crackup got little notice downstate save for a reprint of the wire story. A small plane crash in the sticks with no fatalities just didn't rate in the big city even if it was a 'mercy flight' with a local angle.

Lori came up with progress reports on Lawson Cove but there was no question of Jenny returning to that project any time soon. Still, we'd all hoped that the paperwork would keep whatever's left of her mind occupied with something. Because of the extreme difficulty she was still having with words, she didn't do much with them. For the same reason she didn't say all that much to anyone either. She was game enough to accompany us when we called on our friends and indulged us as we gave her a tour of our little city's downtown. Much of it had been demolished on account urban renewal but there were enough of the older ones left to make an impression on her - she joked about them being the kind of buildings Superman used to leap in a single bound.

"... now I wouldn't say that I'd lost my mind. I've just... temporarily mislaid it."

We caught Jenny giving a funny look to something behind us so we wheeled around to see for ourselves. Deidre introduced herself by shouting 'So this is the famous Jennifer Platt you kids used to brag about'. She then gave us the business about being in town and not looking up one of our oldest friends from college. We zapped her back with a remark about Rachel being dead for nearly ten years now. She rolled her eyes and got down to what she'd followed us for. She'd been running down a story about a woman who'd 'suddenly lost the ability to speak or respond to being spoken to' and had gotten a lead about us sneaking someone into town in a private rail car. Finding that our personal physician was involved in the mystery lady's case she put two and two together.

"I guess the jig is up kids," Jenny sighed. "You probably should've taken me to LA... Washed-up has-been celebrities with a nervous breakdown are a dime-a-dozen there... Would've blended right in... Anyway... I'm back on speaking terms with the universe... for the time being... so I guess you missed out on the best part of the story."

"Not necessarily... The best stories are ones with an ending. Happy or otherwise..."

"I don't mind talking about it... not sure what I can say right now... but these guys... they went through a lot of trouble on my account... y'know to keep this all hushed up? Seems a shame to have to spoil all their work..."

Jenny seemed to stop in mid-thought as she studied some blueprints left on a cable spool.

"...wonder how much force it would take to blow those joints apart? Oughta be able to figure out a test for that..."

Catching Deidre's puzzled look, she explained that a hotel she'd been working on was so close to the ocean that she needed to consider the uplifting force of a storm surge in the design.

"The last thing to go on me were numbers... Even when I lost the words to them... I could still hash out primes... At the worst... all I could think of were curves... spirals... and 'alignment cylinders'..."

Jenny was a little interested in the goings on back in New York so she agreed to let Deidre come with her on a few follow up exams and therapy sessions in exchange for letting her hang around the press room to get a peek at the wire feeds and to soak up the general atmosphere. She was even willing to let her use her real name in any article, though she had been 'tempted' to ask for anonymity.

"I was planning on doing work for the Reagan campaign... that's a pretty cutthroat racket and they'll throw something like this in your face like nuthin... I suppose if I were to stay in..."

Jenny paused to think of the word she was looking for.

"...cognito and they found out anyway... they'll think they really got the goods... Almost be worth it to know who you can't trust, don'tcha think?"

Deidre opted to keep her name out of the series of articles she wrote about 'The Girl Who Got Lost In Her Mind'. This meant that some of the more revealing sessions with Jenny had to be kept hidden such as her recounting of the crash that brought her here. Through all of this, we had never even considered that she might have had that nightmare running through her mind. Sitting in our dad's plane, she went through the motions of those last few minutes.

"I think what really saved us... was that we had thrust reversers... You see... jet engines take a while to respond to throttle controls..."

We used the pause in her reminiscing to note that those reversers had been installed by Grumman so that their pilots could work out the flight characteristics of a new space vehicle the company was bidding on. They had been designed so that you could activate them in flight. We'd ridden along on one of those proof-of-concept flights and that was one time too many for us. Other companies got that contract so Wesley's team was moved over to a military project.

"Visibility was maybe a hundred... hundred fifty yards... so we couldn't see the whole runway... I think I felt the main wheels touch... when I noticed lights coming from my left... There's an Air Guard station and they use C-130s... For no good reason they stopped right in front of us... There was no question of trying to stop short... so I flipped back the reversers for a go around..."

We asked if any birds might've hit the windshield. Jenny could only recall a flash of something coming at her that made her blink and maybe a banging sound but they were just coming over the other plane and she assumed what she had seen were the propellers of the C-130.

"I got some sort of call from the tower... but I can't tell you what he said... I just told him I'd call him back. We'd just cleared some trees... I could see another wall of trees in front of a small lake coming up... and we were going down... there was one engine still going and we were starting to pull right too... I knew there was more lake on the other side of those trees... so after swerving left a little to get around them... I leveled off and let the plane take over for the rest of the ride..."

"We'd flown this route many times... she seemed to know where she wanted to go."

"It was over so fast and we had passengers to take care of... wasn't a lot of time for fear to kick in... once it was over... well... what's done is done... nobody got hurt... guess now we're gonna hafta bum a ride home. The thing I was most worried about is... was I gonna remember any of this? A year ago I was in a car crash that I have no recollection of... They tell me I was talking to people and everything... All I remembered was waking up in the drunk tank and them letting me out... but I hadn't been drinking..."

"I kept thinking... when is 'she' gonna take over? You see... when I was a really little girl... somebody mentioned that I was supposed to be twins or something like that... I had this funny notion that maybe I was really two people stuck together... but the other girl stayed quiet... until things went wrong... then she'd push me to the back of the head and run things for a while... I know it sounds stupid... but when I first met the twins... I figured anything's possible... Yeah... I know about dissa... dis... sociation... now..."

"Anyway... I have this problem with certain tranquilizers... It had slipped my mind when the nurse was giving 'em out to everybody on the flight... On that drive home... when letters and numbers started acting funny... I didn't think about what I'd taken... I just kept thinking this is it... she's making her move... least while I could think in words..."

Save for an oblique reference to 'an interaction from drugs given to her after a near-fatal accident' practically none of this made it into the article series on account of Deidre wanting to focus on the whole losing-the ability-to-recognize-words aspect. She also felt that mention of an 'internally conjoined twin' would be lost on readers without the context of her friendship with us. Apart from blowing Jenny's cover, that would've meant a sure story kill as dad has some pull in this town.

Hers wasn't the only interesting case. A former military policeman who'd walked in on an armed bank robbery in Hanoi noted that during the ensuing shootout his perception of time had slowed to the point that he could hear the individual clinks of his spent cartridges hitting the terrazzo floor. A woman who'd been sexually assaulted described a sensation of actually floating above herself while the attack was going on. That got Jenny remembering a dream where she'd woken up in an glass floored room to find the support post of a light fixture protruding through her chest. Looking around the lamp, she could see doctors frantically working on her naked body below.

"It's been maybe a dozen years... I can still hear that clunky-clacky sound the lamp was making when I grabbed at the... whaddyacallit... stanchion?"

"Not that it means anything," we cautiously inquired, "but did you happen to see us on the floor looking up at you?"

"Don't really remember... think I mostly ended up talking to Scott... Why do you ask?"

We let it drop and Jenny didn't press us on the issue. No point in poking an old piranha when there were plenty of fresh ones in the pool. The slow-going recovery of her speech faculties had put her in a deep funk that the parade of well-wishers from the East only seemed to worsen. She made a brave attempt at hosting her birthday dinner - the Platts had this tradition where they planned and paid for their own party. She really wasn't in a festive mood and the logistics proved too daunting so we ended up taking her to out one of those sit-down 'tchotchke' restaurants in The Village near Lake Hefner for the dollar-fifty burgers and steak-fries-in-a-basket we only half ate.

"Ya think... if I were to have another one... she'd resent it... like it was a second marriage kid or something? God... wish I hadn't wasted these last dozen years..."

Maternal guilt and her childhood rejection complex had gnawed away at Jenny's nerves on the ride to the airport to pick up Arianna to the point she couldn't even get out of the car. The poor kid had to sweat it out for a month and a half before her school's 'half-term' was up and was anxious to see her mom. She'd gotten the story when one of her classmate's fathers, who worked for the Hearst syndicate's London office, saw Jenny's name attached a plane crash report on the company feed.

Funny how a girl who looked nothing like her mom could still be instantly recognized as Jenny's own flesh and blood. Her eyebrows shared the same close-to-the-bone-ridge look as Lori's with a lowish-looking 'really concerned' brow made that much lower-looking by curvy-haired bangs. Even at twelve she was sporting a bigger rack than her mom's but those inquisitive blue-gray eyes were all Jennifer as was her naturally elegant posture even when holding...

"You can't say your daughter doesn't love you Jenn... She brought pizza... New York pizza!"

"If she really loved me those'd be Lombardi's..."

Suffice to say, Arianna really did love her mom, even if she did have to dump the still warm boxes in Jenny's lap to get in the car. She spent a few minutes trilling about how she got the money by swapping her First Class transatlantic ticket for coach and the logistics of getting them delivered to her connecting flight at La Guardia where the stewardesses let her keep them in the warming oven in exchange for slices off the pie she had for herself on the plane. A story about cadging an incremental bit of extra service - the girl knew how to work the room.

"Just so you know," Jenny declared between reverential bites of the cheesy sacraments, "I'm going to consider this... your birthday dinner buy."

From the long conversations we'd had with our goddaughter over the phone, we'd gotten a vibe of discontent with boarding school life - at least with English boarding school life - that she never brought up when talking to her own mom. Being the sole Yank in a class on our country's bicentennial didn't sit too well with the children of our former colonial overlords and she took the brunt of their 'good-natured' hazing. Of course she told her mom that she was having a splendid time in Merry Olde England so while Jenny and Eddie made up for lost time in the hayloft we suggested she join us for a good old-fashioned mosey along the old horse trail. We've always thought a saddle was more therapeutic than a psychiatrist's couch.

"I swear... it's like they were daring me to do the 'if it wasn't for us, you fags would be speaking German now' routine... Did balance the books a notch without having to come flat out and throw it in their faces... Had to do this oral report... Decided to do it on fulgurite... y'know the stuff lighting makes when it hits the ground? Managed to find the spot where Mister Waczinski's plane got hit... people still remembered when that happened... dug a shaft of it up... flopped it on the rostrum and told a nice li'l story about how it came to be and what happened on the B-17 that lighting bolt had to go through so it could leave it's mark on the world... I know..."

Figuring it'd probably be in the White Metal Cabinet, we asked about the piece of fulgurite mentioning that we had a few from around the ranch ourselves.

"I put it back after the presentation... Didn't belong to me... Figured it belongs to history... Anyway... it got people off my back for a while. Guess they respect that sort of thing over there..."

"For a while?"

"Yeah... things kinda got quiet till our English teacher dug up a one of mum's old works... y'know that thing she did for her church group... and used it for the next lesson... If that wasn't bad enough... he starts talking like it's some indictment of consumerism and the pointlessness of the American culture of achievement... I just had to tell him, no it isn't... it's about loneliness and fear of rejection and I didn't think my mum would appreciate having her work being used to espouse that... line of reasoning..."

"Well to be fair... Jenny did structure the story so people who got off on knocking the gray flannel set would get their money's worth... but yeah... rejection is pretty big in her book..."

"Well that really go things going... classmates started up a game to see who could find something else of hers to bugger me with... like that stuff is really all that hard to find... I mean dad works for a bloody movie studio!"

She considered her 'predicament' for a spell before admitting, "Pretty neat to have a mom so cool... other people do your bragging for ya..."

"Y'know... Jenny's been awful worried about the time she hasn't been spending with ya... If you want to ditch the rest of the term... we can fix it so you could take the rest of your lessons here..."

"That's okay... I managed to make a friend this year... We've been tinkering with that computer Avi put together for me... Finally got it hooked up to a telly so we can see what we're doing..."

"Yeah... we saw him working on that... So you manage to do anything with that?"

"I found a bunch of mum's little snail stories... we're turning them into computer movies..."

"Jenny always did want to make movies out of those... We have audio reels of a project she was working on... somewhere... if you can get a video recorder hooked up to your setup..."

The clubhouse had gone up by that time and the Aquanetters had gotten a more regular following as well. For all of Janice's gusto as a performer, she was no great shakes as a songwriter at a time when it was expected that bands come up with their own songs. She wasn't very disciplined either and Jenny, who'd agreed to kick in with some tunes for the group, often had to fill in for her sister on account of frequent bouts of laryngitis due to poor vocal training.

We had obtained our copy of the results of her work at our college's radio station when our contact with Jenny consisted mostly of letters, telegrams and the occasional long distance call. The promo record they got had no cover art save for big letters trumpeting 'Lady Desdemona' over a miniscule 'and the Aquanetters'. It was the first we'd heard about them cutting a record so we walked it over to the pile of records they'd decided not to play. Students could help themselves to the rejects. Even though a regular copy of her album awaited us in Amityville we prized this one more as it was a relic of the creative process.

Through most of her stay with us we'd been reluctant to show Jenny the things of hers we'd saved for fear they'd end up like that photo shoot. It was for Arianna's benefit that we open up our White Metal Cabinet to let her paw through our stash. Along with the record was a folder full of publicity photos taken of her in front of the band.

"Y'know... In all the shoots... even though I was just the 'guest singer'... we'd insist on posing as a group... Still... everyone could tell they were just taking pictures of me... Ah, well... it was fun... for a while at least..."

As mournful as Jenny seemed, there was a glint of the old fighting spirit in her as she eyed the ancient relics, amongst them an index card with the address of her old booking agent. Seeing that she pondered...

"You suppose... if I'm real nice about... Traci might be willing to see about getting me a gig at CBGBs? Assuming I can an act together?"

"Couldn't getcha CBGBs... it's a rathole... not a Lady Desdemona audience..."

"I can getcha any club in Cherry Grove easy... just name a date..."

"Can'tcha get me something in The Pines? They've got a better harbor and besides that I have a song I can use for that town..."

After some hemming and hawing, Jenny lined up a middle slot for the annual all-night Pines party with a few bar gigs to warm up the act - Traci had managed cobbled together a backup band from her stable of session musicians.

"And this is just fabulous dearie... Got a reporter from one of them 'fag rags' to throw ya some questions when ya get here so maybe you'll have some publicity... All you need now is a fatted calf darling..."

"Feeding one right now... dat's a wuvvy wittle cheeburger... No... I was talking to a cow... Yeah... it's a working ranch... nice place... but the surfing's not so good... Hey, make sure you've space these gigs so I can catch a wave or two..."

When Jenny makes up her mind to put on a show, it's a sure bet she'll give the people their money's worth. As it had worked out, the fellow sent to interview her only had time to do so during the flight back east. Her dad was flying in to bring her home on what she presumed to be the old DC-3. With summer heating up, the 'Douglie' was only moderately comfortable at best yet she still chose to meet him in full Desdemona regalia if not yet in character. With the AC cranked up she held court in the back seat of dad's Caddy.

"This whole 'icon' thing is a new one for me... Don't get me wrong... I did my best with my little dog and pony act... but it's not exactly something you strive for... if for no other reason than people see right through that sort of thing. No... you have to do your best and hope you can find an audience for your particular sort of madness."

Jenny did her best to soldier through an interview even though she still felt it necessary to write down what was being said from time to time to see if it matched up with what she was thinking. At her insistence her soldiered on with his range of questions that mostly dwelled on her religious and political views. Strangely, he kept sneaking looks at us while he was doing so.

"Obviously... I've gotten used to... um... unusual living situations... but it's fair to say I had to unlearn a lot of the things everyone else growing up on Long Island picked up as kids..."

"People that go around saying that God hates this or that... well no... you hate... you're just looking for an excuse to hate... you're just lookin' to wrap your hatred in a mask of righteous indignation... Puh... lease... It's like they used to say at the Jederman meetings, if your god is telling you to hate, go find another god."

She went into a little of the Jederman's philosophy towards religion and life before wrapping up with a personal observation about a 'loving couple' she'd seen down in Battery Park.

"They were completely absorbed in each other... The one his hands wrapped around the other's face... as strange as it looked it was quite beautiful... Y'know... looking at people different from you... doing the same stuff you do... really helps you to see yourself, don'tcha think?"

He didn't have much of a chance to answer as we rolled up to the gate at Wiley Post and we caught a glimpse of 'Jet Jennifer' waiting for us on the tarmac. Our intrepid reporter had been holding out on us all this time - or so we thought. He seemed puzzled by Jenny's look of wonder as we drew nearer and genuinely surprised when we explained that when she'd last seen her plane it was in the middle of a pond somewhere in upstate New York.

"Twasn't too much trouble... new wings... new tail... new landing gear... new engines... new fuselage... new interior... new instruments... new paint job... good as new!"

Jenny's dad further explained that apart from the engines and landing gear, the plane had been relatively undamaged. Wesley and his team of engineers at Grumman had volunteered their spare time for the last couple months to put her back together and donations from her fellow pilots paid for whatever parts couldn't be salvaged from the wreckage. Still, he was a little worried about whether Jenny would ever want to fly 'her' again.

To 'her' plane Jenny soothed, 'You were the little bird nobody wanted, weren't you... but you sure showed them,' and gave it an affectionate pat on the nose cone. To nobody in particular, she muttered, 'Y'know... she'd given up her last ounce of strength to see us though those last few seconds'. To her dad, she said that while she was more than grateful that they were able to save 'her' plane, there was no question of her being able to fly it for the foreseeable future. She had applied for a license to practice architecture in our state and while she could've been simply granted one as a courtesy she insisted on taking the state exam, To her horror, she had found that she'd barely squeaked by on the stuff she used to breeze through in school.

"At least," her dad assured her, "you won't have to worry about finding anyone to fly you... you've got friends in the flying community... In fact..."

He drew a neatly folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to Jenny. By a unanimous vote from the corporate council she was granted a lifetime honorary membership in the Seaplane Pilots Association.

"Oh yeah," Jenny enthused as she read the proclamation, "now that's goin' on the fridge!"

So the flight back to The City was spent on the sofa in back of the cabin while Evelyn joined her dad up front on the flight deck. At least our intrepid reporter could run with the naughty headline, 'A Mile High with Lady Desdemona'. They talked a little more about political issues - Jenny was particularly interested in the subject of marriage.

"Eventually... all these swinging singles are going to pair off... so you guys better start making plans while you've got everyone's attention on the subject..."

"First off, I think people need to realize that there is no constitutional 'right' to be married... If you're going to argue constitutionality... you'll hafta ask why a State document is routinely allowed to be signed off on by an official of The Church. You'll be better off parlaying in the legislature... because any court ruling is only going to provoke retaliation there anyway..."

"I think the most important issue in any change in the institution of marriage is going to be the problems when the subject turns divorce... I mean... you're going to have the situation where a non biological father or mother might be a better parent... but the law is generally biased towards the biological parent... and who's going to get alimony?"

"Do I think this will happen... well, eventually yes... European countries are looking into it and we usually follow along in due time... When? Probably in another generation... say thirty... forty years... once these 'baby boomers' work their way into the upper echelons of power... Mind you... if some horrible new venereal disease starts working its way through the singles community, all bets are off... They might just make you get married."

"Actually I was planning on doing work for the Reagan campaign... but I guess that's not going to happen. Politics is a pretty cutthroat business... as soon as I start in with the usual red meat stuff about how the better part of this last century we've been seeing the rise of a 'Guilt Industrial Complex'... and that in the last decade or so we're starting to see real damage being done to this country on account..."
Jenny had conducted the pre-interview for TV Panorama's segment with the presidential hopeful shortly before all this started and coined that phrase to describe the policies that she noted were more based on punishing the upper and middle-class Americans for real and imagined crimes of the past than for the good of the country or even for the 'poor and downtrodden' these policies were supposed to help. She was immediately offered a speechwriting position with the campaign and she was still mulling over the idea.

"Now... all they gotta do is throw these last few weeks in my face and I'm done and served with fries and a shake... Ah well... no use crying about it... I don't think I would've fit in anyway... Still... it would've been a great way to get people in a two-faced town to show their true colors..."

He would have to cop a peek at us when she said that. We did our usual look-around-the-room bit till he took the hint and segued into her troubles over the Harlem project.

"Yeah... well did you ever see that Frank Capra movie where these party wheels forge a deed in the junior Senator's name to keep him from exposing some bit of graft? I always used to think, 'why doesn't he turn the tables on them and amend his original appropriations bill to reflect the fact he'd already obtained the land and just needed to make it legal?' Would've had them by the short hairs if you know what I'm sayin'..."

"I got this whole thing dropped in my lap like a cold fish... had to spend the better part of last year just getting title to the property and everybody was so busy playing 'Kick the Rich Girl Slumlord'... nobody in City Hall wanted to be seen being helpful... and they wonder why people are buying stock in handbasket companies."

After a stop in Memphis to pick up Bitsey and another in West Virginia to pick up Janice and her brood, the subject of Lady Desdemona's abortive musical career was finally gotten around to. With a debut record getting good notices and a solid touring schedule, her sudden disappearance had always been one of those little mysteries of the New York music scene as Jenny had never made any sort of public statement at the time. For all anyone knew she'd just walked away.

"Things were just getting out of control... I was getting a lot of pressure from the record company to go solo... and everyone in the band was getting sick of the attention I was getting... We finally had to do this gag where I'd appear alone explaining that my backup band was a no-show... they'd come onstage to volunteer their services... just so they could assert themselves... y'know as a distinct entity?"

"Things finally came to a head when I got this call out of the blue... an old friend of mine had gotten in a bar fight and he was in an emergency room... My father's company has an exchange service so we can all keep in touch... He called there and they put him through to me..."

"I had figured six maybe seven hours to get to Boston and another two to Portsmouth... It ended up taking twelve and by the time I got there... Well his roommate had died in the night from his injuries and he'd gone off to... They worked for Electric Boat and his roommate was supposed to sail with the Thresher on another shakedown cruise... they'd been having problems with her... A friend of the family was able to pull some strings... Navy Department released a photograph of his ID badge on the bottom of the Atlantic..."

"This is a long shot... but by any chance..."

He paused to flip through his notebook to find the name he was looking for. It seems he'd been working on a story about the Navy's habit of pinning otherwise unexplained accidents on sailors it believed to be in violation of their 'personal code of conduct' and Scott's name came up in his research into the Thresher accident.

"The thing is... I've got pages of back and forth memos from Navy investigators trying to shake the testimony they wanted out of witnesses... I was able to get his FBI file... but half the pages are redacted... y'know just black paragraphs and I can't make heads or tails of what's left. Just for laughs I poked a nose over at the CIA... They said they'd never heard of the accident and wanted to know what this 'Thresher' was that I'd been speaking of..."

"All I can say is his dick never tasted like..."

Remembering the presence of Janice's brood, Jenny caught herself.

"Uh... ahem... Right... Well that... and nobody at Electric Boat was able to ID him from the pictures I had of him. Grandmother thinks he was 'sheep-dipped' for some reason. Like maybe a spy ring was screwing around with the boat. They'd been having a lot of problems with that ship. I really wish I could help you further."

"Couldn't you get your 'family friend' to pull a few strings?"

"Yeah... No... I think she lost those connections when she remarried... Maybe I can write you a letter of introduction... but you're gonna hafta make sure I've got the right words... I was supposed to get back to her on something a few months ago... Oughta have her new work number..."

"Don't come in here...," warned a panicky Evelyn as Jenny rapped on the cockpit door. There had been some bumping around in there that we'd tried not to notice. As 'liberated' as we kids might pat ourselves on the back for being, the idea of our parents doing sex still gives us all a shudder. Once Barbara started going around with Sheriff Misener, Jenny had been quietly ducking invitations to the mountain retreat, though she rarely went up there to begin with.

"Uhm... I was wondering if I might've left my flight bag up there?"

After some hemming and hawing and the sound of shuffling around, a soft-sided briefcase was brusquely ejected from the cockpit and the door locked behind it. Jenny shrugged and warily brought it back with her to a work table. It had survived remarkably well considering the plane had been knee-deep in pond water. By now our intrepid reporter was wondering who Lady Desdemona could possibly know in New York society and kept sneaking looks as she rummaged through her bag for the Viking Press editor's business card she wanted. He got a better look when she propped it up next to her portable typewriter.

"Whoa... you sure play in the big leagues... I bow and fear to the lady..."

"I don't know... it's like they say... you're either a rich girl from the North Shore and cool one from the South... Needless to say... never really fit in with either... Maybe I'll do better on the Island of Misfit Boys..."

Leave it to Jenny to come up with her Tour's headline without even breaking a sweat.

Lady Desdemona fairly breezed through the steamy Fire Island nights, greeting her audience with a boisterous 'Hello Freaks!' before opening with the oddly appropriate 'Ballad of John & Yoko'. She used several of Lennon's songs on account of the band she'd been provided with having done session work with him on a couple albums. Whenever she was asked to play 'Imagine', she always demurred with a 'been there... lived through that... never wanna go through it again,' offering in its stead a loving rendition of 'Bless You'.

When not singing she'd spend her waking hours carousing with Ashleigh and her 'coven' of man bitches at her rental cottage way down the shore at Point 'o Woods or judging a Lady Desdemona 'contest' the trannies put on in her honor with the winner being a hundred ninety pound silicone injected seventy year old Japanese 'Lady'. After the contest they serenaded the crowd with a shaky duet of 'Falling In Love Again' - the old Axis powers reunited in song.

Arianna returned from school just in time to see her mother get hauled before a legislative subcommittee that, on the heels of that other Harlem project fiasco, had come down from Albany to look into non-profit organizations like the one she and Reverend Granger had set up. One of the unspoken scams of New York society was the fact that the majority of the charitable foundations in this town were set up for the sole function of writing off the travel and entertaining expenses of their well-heeled directors. It almost went without saying that having even one insignificant little non-profit that was actually accomplishing the mission it'd been set up for in their midst wasn't sitting very well with the ruling class of New York.

That the subcommittee had nothing on her was irrelevant - if nothing else, it seemed to make the brutes all the more determined to take her down a peg. Every expense was waggled before the press gallery like a red dress in a rape trial with the log entries of her flights to Dallas and Seattle and the expense report on the Christmas party drawing special ire. One would think the Empire State had a dollar in this fight but none of the grants she'd applied for were ever approved and the accumulated rent money was only now being spent on construction. Every dime so far had been taken from Jenny's purse so they harped on the fact that she'd be reclaiming those dimes on her income taxes, painting a picture of the poor suffering children that would now go hungry on her account.

"But it's not 'their' money," Jenny replied with the bluntness of someone who'd had their fill and was now going to have their say.

"Worked a job in your sunny part of the world... Always knew when Spring arrived by the annual return of the unions looking to protect their sinecures while that year's budget got hashed out... If someone were fool enough to try and save the taxpayers some money that year... to a man they would go on about how you're taking money out of the hands of... puppies... widows... nuns... orphans... it didn't matter, but from the way they cried you'd think the money was already in their pathetic little hands and mean Mister Rockefeller was coming along to personally yank it away..."

"Mind you... having a contract on a major state project... we were in the same boat as they were... but in the construction business you learn that when the job is done... or if the money runs out... you gotta pick up your toys and go home... Don't make a difference if you got hungry mouths to feed or a payroll to make..."

"I can't say as I don't mind paying taxes, I mind very much... give you people a dollar, you spend it like you got a ten... then you come back and hit me up for a twenty... In the end I'm on the hook for a hundred... and all those things you were supposed to do with the money you've taken somehow manage to find a way of not getting done."

"Like this project... A little over a year ago I had this... thing... dumped in my lap because someone else was saddled with a bunch of buildings they had no idea about what to do with... For this last year I've been trying to do the right thing by these people... but I couldn't even get a basic thing like... like a clear title... on account of none of you wanting to be caught dead throwin' a bone to some rich little slumlord... Guess everyone wanted to score points with the electorate... even if it was... what's the word... counterproductive? And you wonder why hardly anyone wants to build in this damned town anymore..."

"Anyway... I think you'll see my books are in order..."

After a spell of uncomfortable silence, the subject of her sudden departure from The City was nudged onto the floor. Jenny replied it was none of their business as she was no longer personally involved with the project. - her grandfather's firm was able to 'repackage' their financing through a tax shelter they managed called the 'Doctors Investment Group'. Naturally, they wanted to know why she left. Jenny merely told them that she'd been informed that things would go a lot easier if she found something else to do and she really wasn't willing to go any further than that.

Reverend Granger was the next witness on the dock but his testimony about her storming out of a bank manager's office on account of seeing some book didn't seem to make any sense. Like any good lawyers, the subcommittee wasn't asking questions they didn't have some sort of answer to - their report on Jenny's plane crash made it sound like maybe there'd been a deliberate act of sabotage and the bits and pieces they'd been able to find out about her time with us made it look like maybe she'd been slipped some sort of poison as well. The Good Reverend, who had done some sniffing around himself, noted that the same company that used to own their buildings was also working on a project for that bank adding that this was the same company that had ignored her repeated requests for documentation.

After a few technical questions on financial matters he was thanked for his testimony and the subcommittee moved onto witnesses involved with the other Harlem project.

Outside the hearing room Jenny was holding court with the Foley Square regular. Funny how you can be world famous on one block in this town and a complete nobody on another.

"The ruling class in this city have become the biggest slumlords of them all... and not by accident... there's been meticulous planning on their part since at least the Nineteen Thirties... that's when all the New Deal mandated... mandated... segregation in this town... You didn't know that? They actually took out a map... and if they found one colored person living on a block, you couldn't give a mortgage to any white person wanting to live in that neighborhood... couldn't even give the ones there a loan to fix up their houses."

"When the suburbs started going up after the war... Federal government fixed the GI Bill so you couldn't sell homes to Negroes and Whites in the same development with Federal money even if you wanted to... and wasn't that a fine how-do-ya-do for all those soldiers fighting and dying so that even the Germans can live under freedom?"

"Now with this city going bankrupt... they've enacted a policy of deliberate neglect in the black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. They're undermanning the fire stations, understaffing the schools and not assigning enough cops in the parts of town they want destroyed so they can redevelop when there's money again. And these people call themselves the 'champions of the downtrodden'... You know there's people who'll burn down their own home... while they're still living in it... just so they can get priority on the waiting list for public housing? Somethin' ain't right..."

Her diatribe clattered to the floor unheard on account of everyone wanting to know more about the mysterious circumstances of her resignation from the project.

"Well first off there's no such thing as the Mafia," she corrected, "even the Feds call it 'organized crime'... no point in getting a bunch of people sore at me when they weren't even involved... and there's no point in me naming names 'cuz I'm not a squealer... besides, they'll just say they didn't do anything and I'd hafta to spend that much more of my life dealing with 'em."

Curiously enough, we and Jenny were up at the house having a cookout with Avi and Lisa when her dad showed up. He usually avoids visiting when we're around but he was interested in Jenny's testimony. Or rather...

"Y'know... your family seems to have quite a reputation around town... Got a message relayed to me from some... 'interested persons'... about your testimony. From the tone... they kinda sounded worried... like you guys might be planning some sort of retaliation?"

"As I said... your family has a reputation... something about home wreckers?"

"Oh good heavens... that was a metaphor about how much of a person you could take away before they stopped being human... I made the hero... er... victim a hitman so that the characters would be on an even moral playing field."

He had no idea what she was babbling about but indicated that as a 'peace offering' his 'interested persons' were willing make her problems 'go bye-bye'. All she had to do was 'say the word'.

"Oh... just tell 'em to let it ride... I'm having the time of my life... I wanna see how this plays out."

"You know they're playing for keeps..."

"So am I."

The next day's hearing brought a fresh crop of charges and accusations against her. A minority shareholder in the former Electric Valve company finally took it upon themselves to make their displeasure known to the subcommittee and Jenny didn't seem all that surprised. We had assumed that when the company was reorganized, the outstanding stock had been bought up but apparently the Van De Lays never bothered to let go of their lousy stinking fifteen hundred shares.

When they tried to go into her involvement with the Electric Valve company and the Lawson Cove project, her attorney tried to argue that they had no legal standing in the matter on account of the public company attached to their shares had long since divested itself of its major assets. Not only that but the Electric Valve and Lawson Group companies were private out-of-state entities without so much as a sales office in New York. Their front man fired back something to the effect that they were not part of the judicial system but that they were fact-finding committee for the legislature and could ask whatever the hell questions they wanted. At least he was polite about it.

For a moment they dropped the issue of her relationship with the Lawson Group to inquire about the hiring practices at her firm, specifically asking how many 'minorities' have been hired. This of course, was asked by the lone Negro in a legislative bullpen packed with middle-aged white men.

"You got me there," Jenny replied with all candor. "We've kinda been getting by with having our sororities and alumni associations send us interns willing to work for what we can pay 'em. That and once we get somebody... they'll have a friend they want to bring in..."

She was pressed on the issue but...

"Really couldn't tell you... I just don't notice that sort of thing... Anyway I've been away from the office for a couple months. No telling who's come or gone since... I think we had some pictures taken but they're not the sort of thing... Oh... right... Well... I suppose you'll want to get me on destruction of evidence now..."

They had no idea what she was talking about and were too concerned with getting their line of questioning in to bother with a follow up and moved on to the Harlem project. Surely she planned to hire blacks from around the neighborhood.

"Uhm... my name's Jennifer... not Shirley... and no... no I don't think we'll be hiring all that many blacks on this job... Well not officially at least... You see... the residents plan on doing a large portion of the work in exchange for points off their mortgages. The way we have it hashed out with the unions... they get basic journeyman training and dues are waived... but we don't list them as employees. I gotta say Lou Califano was one of the few people in this city that actually helped us in this project."

It should be noted that she had a reputation in the construction trade as someone who truly cared about the people who worked under her and was well regarded on account. It also helped that she'd once lobbied for a bill that would allow employers to retain their full-time workers on a sharply reduced schedule in lean times so they could keep their company health insurance benefits while collecting unemployment for the remainder of their salary. They were getting around to some Lawson Cove questions when Jenny added...

"We actually did get a youth training program started last summer... with the idea that they'd be ready to go once I got clear title to the property... By the time their training was complete, we were still waiting for a court date... Lot of 'em ended up get poached for work on that 'other' project..."

They had been working on and off with equally intermittent pay for six months before that developer finally made himself scarce. For once we got the pleasure of quietly fixing it so that they each got a fifteen hundred dollar cashier's check for their trouble. So they wouldn't feel like they were getting a handout, they were told it was a 'retainer' for future work on the project they'd originally been trained for.

The next big question for Jenny was why, if she was so cavalier about the hiring practices of her firm and the Harlem project, was she so punctilious about making sure Puerto Ricans were being hired for the Lawson Cove project?

"Because we're being paid to." Ask a stupid question.

Jenny drew some papers from her portfolio before elaborating...

"We're getting a Federal subsidy to hire local labor... Operation Bootstrap... This is some of the paperwork we hafta fill out..."

"No... The only thing they want to know is if the applicants have a Puerto Rican birth certificate or if one of their parents do. They don't ask anything about race... and we don't ask either."

"Well it's kinda hard to tell... can't really go by skin color. You could have a European face and still be darker skinned than... well than you are sir... Say what you will about the Conquistadors... on a Saturday night, they were all that fussy about who they spent the night with..."

Jenny started in on some minutia about how it was decided to rotate Puerto Rican workers that lived or had family in The City between the Lawson Cove and the Harlem projects as needed. This was so they do some of their training up at the J P & C offices and keep people busy when things had to slow down for the hurricane season. The esteemed panel had that bored look on their faces, and her testimony was cut off with the note that it was getting close to lunch.

She had barely gotten a quarter section of her 'hula' sandwich unwrapped when Mis'ess Van De Lay planted herself in the seat across from her. Like kids in lunchrooms have done since there were lunchrooms with kids in them, Jenny turned her body and chair away from Althea's direct view and to further emphasize the hint that she didn't want to speak to her, curled her arm around her food to draw it into her protective circle.

"Damn... it's like you just dare people to like you..."

One of the residual after effects of her recent illness was the difficulty in switching the mouth muscles between chewing and speaking. Jenny took such a long time in her reply that it looked like she was trying to suppress a puke.

"Can't imagine... where you got that idea... not like I go around slappin' 'suepeenies' on people..."

"Any direct contact... would have constituted 'insider trading'... My hands were tied... Besides... couldn't know for sure... till whatever happened... well... happened. Even then I was going on an educated guess... Did tell Emily to tell you to keep an eye out..."

After looking around in vain for The Redheaded One, Jenny rewrapped the uneaten portions of her sandwich and stuffed them back into her lunch sack. No use in trying to eat now. Althea drew some folded papers from her purse and stared at them for a spell.

"I caught some of your testimony this morning... Ever occur to you that maybe people wanted to make a good example out of your work?"

"The thought had crossed my mind..."

"You sure went out of your way to make yourself look... I don't know what the hell you were doing... It's like you were having your own argument..."

"Yeah... well... if I'd given 'em self-serving answers... it's not like they wouldn'tve seen right through that like one of those Neutrogena soap bars... No... you hafta let 'em think they're getting something out of you... That's how the game works around here... you oughta know that by now... This whole thing's been a game..."

"I don't think it's all that bad... for what it's worth... Arthur and I have been... pulling... for..."

Althea's train of thought was interrupted when an unknown-to-her dark-skinned man tapped Jenny on the shoulder for her attention. It was in fact the junior Will Sykes with an offical-looking folder of some X-rays he'd taken that he needed her to look at. They walked over to the cafeteria window and went through the lot. Since it was a bit of a ways away we couldn't hear what they were saying and Jenny had turned his back as well as hers to us so lip-reading wasn't going to help any. Our heats sank a bit when Will gave her one of those 'it's gonna be all right' hugs. Those are never a good sign - especially when they're from a medical doctor.

Jenny wasn't there when the afternoon session commenced - her lawyer was left to explain that she'd gone off to retrieve some needed documents. When she returned some three hours later the subcommittee, berating her for wasting their precious time was about ready to cite her for contempt but she didn't seem to be hearing them at all. She had that look on her face like Anna Karenina waiting for the next train as she made glances at the picture in a frame she'd returned with.

When they reminded him that she had a license to practice architecture in New York State, Jenny, still holding that framed picture, rose to her feet, uttered 'not a problem', frisbee-tossed the frame to their table and casually stepped out of the room.

"Anyone crazy enough to work in this town oughta have their head examined..."

Needless to say, she didn't get too far out the door before she was mobbed by the surprisingly large gathering of reporters. They had shown up sometime around the second hour of her absence sniffing for a story and with a good one to feed 'em had them practically eating out of the palm of her hand.

"Oh... I'm just a small-town girl from the South Shore of Long Island... and don't the people who run this city have a nice way of never letting me forget it..."

It would be Jenny's good fortune that a secretary's birthday bouquet was fragrant enough to put tears in her eyes.

"Not that I'm complaining or anything... I pretty much knew what I was getting into... City's full of slumlords and who do they go after... Why do they hafta make it so damned obvious?"

Her allergies couldn't take it anymore and let go a sneeze that was followed by what seemed to us to be an inordinate look of cringing fear - like she expected something really bad to happen. She recovered her composure in time for the next question.

"I think I'm gonna try and spend some more time with my family... Yeah I know... that's what they all say... but I was hoping to visit my husband's mother up in Minnesota this summer... before it's too late..."

Once back at the loft, she informed us that the real reason she was heading to Minnesota was on account of her needing further tests up at the Mayo clinic including a biopsy and something called a 'CAT' scan. It seems they found...

"Hope for your sake... the doctor's a good oil man... an Okie would be best but we'll settle for a Texan... long as he don't leave too big a divot... Yeah, we like your face..."

"Oh but that's the one lucky thing... the main field's right behind the nasal cavity so they're gonna go in Egyptian style..."

For those of you scoring at home, she was referring to the ancient Egyptian practice of 'de-braining' their mummies with a tool rammed in through the nostrils. Not exactly pleasant dinner conversation but Andy seemed intrigued enough - not that there was much attenuation in his levels of interest in a subject anymore. He was especially intrigued by her description of the size of the mystery pool.

"One of the doctors Will talked to did Jack Kennedy's autopsy... said I had about as much brain left as he did... Oh well... at least whatever I'm missing... I've probably forgotten about anyway... I'm sure this whole thing'll be forgotten in a day or two... a week tops... Nothing like a hollow gesture to get on the five o'clock news..."

By seven o'clock it seemed everyone in the city was trying to get Jenny on the horn with most of them trying in vain her number downstairs at the Skidmore Ryerson-Platt offices. Those actually getting though finding nothing more than a canned message stating that she no longer worked at the New York field office for their troubles. It would've been no use trying her phone in the loft on account of her opening the line to Madeline's switchboard back at the J P & C offices - not that they weren't fielding calls on her behalf. Even so a couple people were important enough and resourceful enough to able to get through - not that we're dropping names or anything.

"No I didn't leave anyone 'high and dry'... I was pretty much done with what I needed to do for the project... I was getting out anyway... The construction... that's all lined up... Just woulda needed to collect my fee and since I was gonna donate my part of that... why stick around?"

"My main license was from the State of California... they're a lot more stringent because you hafta know about building in an earthquake zone... If New York had actually taken their license from me... California could've pulled theirs as well. So it wasn't like I was just calling their bluff... but yeah... I kinda was calling their bluff. What can I say? Once in show business, ya' never leave..."

"Oh god no... Even if I could... I'm not fool enough to show those people up for a second time... and to show 'em up by finishing what they couldn't? Might as well carry a big ole' sign sayin' 'please tar and feather me now'... Nuh-uh... I'm done with this town..."

With her mental faculties returned to whatever passes for normal in her head, Jenny lavished her attention on what she airily called 'her muse'. With 'The Lodge' and that cluster of pre-fab houses on her grandmother's estate as a base camp, Lady Desdemona and the Aquateasers trouped up and down the shores of Long Island, New Jersey, playing a few choice gigs across The Sound like the Newport Jazz Festival over in Rhode Island and at some of the resorts over on Cape Cod. They even did a set for a private party at a certain country club in Glen Cove that Jenny had felt she could never show her face at again.

She still showed her nose from time to time at the Skidmore Ryerson-Platt offices to check up on the projects they had going. Her license had proved too hot a potato for that subcommittee to hang on to and had since been returned. Needless to say, Cheryl was a little more than anxious to have Jenny return as were Lori, Doris and the rest of the Lawson family. After the next round of tests, was her reply. After the next round of tests.

The importance of those tests manifested themselves in a grotesque way the evening before when the Ryersons checked into the hotel attached to the Mayo Clinic - incidentally Jenny took more than a few notes about the clinic that was to be built at Lawson Cove. We'd tagged along to keep Arianna company and Lori had joined our party in the hopes of meeting Eddie's mother after the tests.

There was nothing on the tube but a Lefse and Lutefisk cooking demonstration, so Eddie and Jenny retired to their adjoining room to find their own recreational pursuits. Even though Lori was going through a sheaf of papers, she was being a stinker and wouldn't let us change the station so we and Arianna amused ourselves with snarky comments about the piscatorial abundance being presented for our edification and yeah, we'd loaded up on four-dollar words like those. When we all started chanting 'lute-fiska' like it was the Jaws theme she'd had just about enough of us and still holding the papers she'd been going through, padded over to Eddie and Jenny's room.

With the door still open we could hear her explain that the completion policy Jenny had taken out on the Harlem project not only covered her in case she lost title in the middle of construction but also included a provision that paid off if she couldn't continue on account of being forced out like she pretty much was or if she had a serious illness. Even better, it seems some of the major shareholders of the insurance company backing this were State and City workers pension funds.

"The thought had crossed my mind... say... why don't you close the door behind you..."

Arianna flashed an all too knowing glance as the door clicked shut behind Lori and returned to the screen looking like she was not exactly sure which was more grotesque - scenes of Norwegians tucking away gelatinous fish lumps or the imagined sexual lives of her parents.

"After one of those Fire Island shows," Arianna recalled, "we got introduced to this lady who used to be a guy... first thing mum asks is what they did about the 'good nerves'... y'know the ones at the end of a dinkus... wanted to know if they put 'em in the same place regular women have 'em. Funny how proud people can get over things... Lady unzipped her jeans and told mum to feel it for herself... and wouldja believe she did! Doctor had a special technique or something like that..."

So that's where Lori's been for the last few weeks.

This being the older wing of the hotel, the walls and doors were pretty thick so all we could hear for a while were the louder ends of laughing sounds. We were about to say something about how Jenny had mentioned being turned on by the idea of laying under girl being made love to and feeling the other girl's movements - when Lori shrieked a few oh-my-gods that were followed by the sounds of frantic footsteps and doors being bumped into.

The three of them were mostly undressed and too panicked to do anything about it. Jenny was curled up in a ball and on her side in complete distress - gagging, snorting and spitting out some sort of blood-stained fluid. Some of the stuff had been sprayed into Lori's hair that dripped down her chest as she went back and forth for towels. Eddie, the cleanest of the three, was grabbing the towels from Lori and wiping Jenny's face as best as he could, what with her squirming around blindly. Seeing us in the room he looked like he was about to say 'honey, I can explain'. We threw our hands up in the 'we don't want to know' formation and asked Jenny if was still with us.

It was quite a spell before her nose stopped gushing long enough for her to ask for some water but she was still there and was able to dump herself into the stretcher brought up by the medics we had Arianna call for. Eddie had his hands full trying to settle down a hysterical Lori so we went down to the examining room with Jenny as her ever-thoughtful daughter called the front desk to inquire about getting a suite, like maybe at the other end of the building.

The long and the short of it was that no lasting physical damage was done save for a hapless nasal artery that had been in the direct path of the blow-out and that was soon cauterized. It was surmised that the flight over had weakened the area where they'd drilled into her skull so it was recommended that she stick to surface transportation for the foreseeable future.

To tell the truth, we'd expected the kind of bitter old lady that in those detective movies you'd only see in half-shadows but 'Margie' turned out to be the same kind of amiable midwesterner we'd long known down in our neck of the woods - Ma Kettle with an 'oofdah' accent. She introduced her new husband Sigmund 'Siggy' Nystrøm, who wouldn't you know, was in fact a sea captain - or at least he helmed one of the big ore boats that plied the inland seas of what he called the 'North Coast'. At least Jenny would've had someone to swap stories with if things hadn't gone well with Eddie's mother but they got along okay after the usual kvell about seeing each other more often. How often has a Midwesterner suggested that a girl take one of 'them easy Hollywood jobs' in order to have more time for family visits?

She even got along with Lori enough to allow her into the kitchen where the evening's dinner was being prepared - with only a day's notice we were getting store-bought 'fisk'. Not being kinfolk, we were exiled to the library where 'Siggy' and his sons Tor and Erik gave us the looking over. We, in turn were checking out the encyclopedia yearbooks and going by the last year they bought one, his sons were just out off school.

There was the requisite collection of maritime tomes including a book we've seen in the Platt family collection back when we first summered at their house that was from the days when they protected the color 'plates' with vellum paper. To this day we specifically recall three images - people in a lifeboat as their ship sinks by the stern with the bow pointing straight up, a diagram of the worlds navies represented by progressively larger battleships and a picture taken inside the Lusitania's wheelhouse with no mention of her being torpedoed - the book had come out before The Great World War. That the ship had a life before it's tragic demise was a revelation to us back then.

That lutefisk ever had life as a swimming creature is not something you'd savvy from the butter soaked wads of gelatinized off-white set before us. As a backup, our host prepared a plate of 'Viking pizza' - lefse bread covered with tomato sauce and a blend of Nordic cheeses - but with a chanting assist from the Nystrøm men we did The Fisk. If you've had gefilte fish, you're at least in one of those football stadiums that can be converted to the proverbial ballpark that is lutefisk.

Her nostrils still packed with gauze, Jenny was easily able to force down her portion even if the only flavor she could compare it to was one from recent memory. Arianna took one tentative bite of hers and sensibly decided to finish the job by swabbing the remainder in tomato sauce.

"I know you don't want to have to deal with this," Lori added, "but dammit... you were spitting up... brain boogers! You can't even sit upright on account of the pain in your nasals..."

If she couldn't lean back in her chair, Jenny would just tilt her head like she was putting on airs with everybody. The snooty look would've made for a nice effect at parties were it not for the trickling stigmata that dogged even the slightest move of her head. You know you've got medical problems when you're not only unconcerned that blood is oozing from a primary orifice, you shrug it off because it's only blood.

"You don't hafta twist my arm Lori... It's like that prizefighter... y'know the one who used to bet against himself as a publicity stunt... and now he's finally gotta collect on that bet? I just feel like a first class chump right now."

"If it makes you feel any better... at least you're sticking it to the people betting against you. You're not having second thoughts about the pension fund investors? 'Cuz these were executive pensions... not the rank and file stuff... Even if they were... betting on a life and casualty... not like you don't know what you're getting into."

The next round of Akevitt fortified Jenny's resolve to the point she was able to tuck away another quivering mound of lutefisk. As she grimaced and contorted to each nuance of fisky flavor Jenny couldn't help musing...

"I was so hoping they'd try to snatch that project out from under me... woulda loved to have seen the looks on their faces..."