The Mangan Inheritance

Part One

The doorbell. Mangan went to the front door, looked through the peephole, then unlocked. The apartment super entered, followed by one of his Puerto Rican workmen.

Hi. You have bathroom trouble?

He showed them the dripping tap. The super turned it on, then off. Washer. Something else wrong?

No. Everything else is fine.

How is your missus? I don’t see her jogging on the roof. The super laughed, recalling this pleasant eccentricity. Mangan looked at him. Didn’t he know?

She’s not living here anymore. We’ve separated.

Oh. I am sorry.

How did one answer that? Mangan acknowledged sorrow with a nod.

I leave now. My man will fix the washer, okay?

As he went back to the front door, the super paused and peered into the living room. On its white walls like an afterimage were whiter rectangles where her pictures had been. Rugs and most of the furniture had been removed. Books fell about on the looted shelves. How could the super not know she had gone? Hadn’t he seen the entrails of her belongings heaped on the sidewalk when the mover’s truck did not come?

As the super let himself out, Mangan called, Happy New Year. But he shut the door without replying. Perhaps it was his Christmas envelope? Last year they had given away two hundred and fifty dollars in tips in this building alone. Without Beatrice, Mangan had felt he must economize. But the super had not known that Beatrice was gone.

Alone in the living room, Mangan moved toward the picture window. Snow fell outside. In the Orient, white is the color of mourning. Snow, the voice of silence, shutting off the city’s sound track. Tonight in many offices the staff will go home early. In others, people will sit on desk tops, drinking liquor from paper cups, eating cocktail tidbits sent in from the delicatessen down the block. Horseplay, office jokes, smudged kisses. Happy New Year.

For tonight, what should I wear? Do you know what he does sometimes when he’s alone in the apartment, Beatrice told her friend Dr. Hopgood. He goes into the bedroom and spends an hour trying on his clothes. Changing outfits, looking at himself in the mirror. Narcissistic, wouldn’t you say? Or perhaps, said Dr. H., some deeper problem of identity. Beatrice could quote an analyst to suit her purpose. She did not understand rituals. She would never buy worry beads.

The Puerto Rican workman came from the bathroom. Finish.

Thank you.

The workman, unassailable in his monolingual armor, nodded and let himself out. Mangan remembered that he should call early. They had a class of some sort at nine-thirty, their time. He went into the kitchen for coffee to help him with this.

Ridgewood Convalescent, good morning.

May I speak to Mrs. Mangan, please?

One moment, please, I’ll check.

Art therapy. Joan Mangan speaking.

Hello, Mother.

Jamie! his mother said. Where are you? How are you?

I’m in New York. I just called to say Happy New Year.

New Year’s is tomorrow, said his literal-minded mother.

Well, I just thought I’d call before the circuits got all jammed up.

Yes, good idea. What are you doing, are you going to a party tonight?

I might, yes.

Do, his mother said. This is no time of year to sit alone. Will you be calling your father tomorrow?

No, I wasn’t planning to. I called him on Christmas Day, remember?

Oh, yes, so you did. I must give them a ring myself. I’ve been so busy. I tell you, you should see this place. It’s a madhouse.

But it is a madhouse. Still, it was nice that she did not think of it as such. So, they’re working you hard, he said.

"Oh, I tell you. Dr. Edie’s on vacation and Dr. Hollins is all on his own, poor man. Matter of fact, I have a room full of customers waiting outside this minute. But it’s lovely to hear your voice, dear. Thank you for calling me. I would have called you, you know."

I know. Happy New Year, Mother. And God Bless.

Oh, Jamie? When you speak to your father tomorrow, would you say hello from me? I’ll tell you the truth, I haven’t called him because, if I do call, I always get her.

All right, he said. She had forgotten he wasn’t going to call. She forgets quite a bit, Dr. Edie said. Goodbye, Mother.

Goodbye. Happy New Year. And Jamie? Next year will be better, you’ll see. You’ll put all this behind you.

He hung up and went back to the picture window. Large snowflakes sifted down, blurring his view of the East River and traffic on the Drive below. Mother in her cubbyhole in Santa Monica, California, swiveling in her brown Nauga-hyde armchair, her back to the Pacific Ocean, a phone receiver vised between her shoulder and ear. Beyond, in the big dayroom, people in playclothes waiting for pills and counsel from Dr. Hollins, an old, tall man in steel-rimmed spectacles. Your mother has been a great help to us here. Her art class is very popular. Art is good therapy for our patients. Besides, it’s therapy for her, you know. The Christmas card she sent this year had a Californian motif, two pelicans skimming over a wave, the drawing delicate and graceful, yet with the touch of kitsch that showed in all her work.

Christmas cards. You mean you’ve already done them? Beatrice had asked. At once he was sorry he’d brought it up. He said he hadn’t sealed the envelopes yet.

All right, I have an idea. I’ll have a little notice printed saying we’ve separated and that from now on my address will be the beach house and that you’ll be at the apartment. You could slip the notices in with the cards. It would be a way of letting people know what’s happened and how they can reach us.

He thought it a terrible idea but did not argue. Ten days later a package of printed slips arrived in his mail. She had not listed the Amagansett address. The slips read:

WE HAVE DECIDED TO SEPARATE. FROM NOW ON BEATRICE CAN BE REACHED AT 77 EAST 71ST STREET, WHILE JAMIE WILL REMAIN AT 455 EAST 51ST STREET.

Turnbull lived at the Seventy-first Street address. That made it final. Mangan put the slips in the Christmas card envelopes and counted them before mailing. There were ninety-seven cards in all. By Christmas morning he had received only forty-six cards in return, by far the largest number of which—thirty-four—came from tradespeople, press agents, and theater professionals with whom Beatrice had dealings, and were addressed to both of them or to Beatrice alone as though the slips had not been noticed. There were seven cards from friends who had mailed early. These wished them both a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. That left three cards addressed to him alone. One was from his mother. There was a card from his friends the Connells bearing a scrawled invitation asking him to come to their annual New Year’s party. And there was a card and a long sympathetic letter about the breakup from his friends Jack and Rosa Hutter. The Hutters were now living permanently in London.

Three cards. One from a relative, two from friends. He turned around, walked through the living room and into the bedroom, where the window gave on a view of the street. Below, two professional dog walkers came from Beekman Place, small wiry men, their hands bunched against their chests like charioteers as they gripped the several leashes of the pedigreed pets they were paid to exercise. The dogs, excited by the snowfall, tried to gambol and wrestle and race. The walkers, moving side by side, held them to a fast walk, turning and turning in the small culde-sac of East Fifty-first Street which ended at a flight of steps leading down to the East River Drive.

But why not Beekman Place? Beatrice had said. Of course we can afford it. Anyway, this isn’t Beekman Place, it’s East Fifty-first Street. Where else are you going to get a view of boats passing by when you wake up in the morning? And a location like that is an investment. If we buy an apartment there, it will never go down in value.

She meant, of course, that it was her money. He could use it, but it was her money, made by her. Her presence on a Broadway stage now brought her a weekly salary of four thousand dollars, and on the rare occasion when she acted in a film she was paid ten times that amount. She had insisted on joint savings and checking accounts. She said money shouldn’t be allowed to come between people. But it was her money. There was no getting away from that.

In the street, a brown Mercedes sports car rushed recklessly out of Beekman Place and braked to a stop below his window. Kevin, the doorman on duty, came from under the street awning, bent-backed as he fumbled with the clasp of a large umbrella. As the door of the Mercedes swung open, a snow flurry gusted up, obscuring Mangan’s view. Tiny tendrils of water trailed diagonally across the windowpane. He heard a noise behind him and, turning, reentered the living room to find that the day’s letters had been shoved under the door jamb. He sifted them with the toe of his loafer, then bent and flipped a few pieces of mail over, reading the addresses. All were for her. He did not pick them up but moved on into the kitchen to pour his fourth cup of coffee that morning. Last week, leafing through an anthology, he had come upon some lines of Byron’s.

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,

’Tis woman’s whole existence.

He picked up the coffeepot. By Byron’s standards, he was not a man. He poured coffee and at that moment the doorbell rang loudly. He expected no one. He went to the door as to an intruder and through the tiny, wide-angle lens of the peephole, distorted like a figure in nightmare, discerned his runaway wife. His heart hit. He unlocked the door.

May I come in?

Wordless, he beckoned. She advanced as though onto a stage, her face assuming the smile which was so much her shield that it came on her unbidden, even in moments of anger. Smiling, she became the Beatrice Abbot who was known and admired by thousands of people she had never seen, a woman by no means a beauty, but attractive, with blond hair cut in a simple bob, nicely offsetting her large brown eyes. Even now, in her thirties, she emanated a pubescent charm and fostered this illusion by dressing in simple clothes—a tweed skirt, a shirt, and, sometimes, a cashmere sweater. Today, however, to Mangan’s great surprise, she wore elegant knee-length boots of polished cognac-colored leather, and a long and very beautiful dark mink coat, its rich gloss beaded with melting snowflakes. On her head (she who never wore a hat) was a Cossack shako of the same fur, and while her brown cashmere dress was one he had seen before, it was ornamented by an extraordinary necklace of turquoise beads, large as pullets’ eggs. Happy New Year, she said. Was she being sarcastic? Looking at her, he surmised not. And how have you been, Jamie?

All right.

She smiled at him again, then moved center stage into the living room, opening the beautiful coat, resettling it on her shoulders like a cape. I thought of phoning to ask if I could come, but I was afraid you’d say no. So I just got in the car and drove over. I hope you don’t mind.

"Got in what car?"

It’s Perry’s.

And is that his fur coat?

His Christmas present to me. She pirouetted as though modeling the coat, then sat down in the one easy chair which remained in the living room. So, she said. "And how was your Christmas?"

All right.

What did you do?

What do you care?

She sighed, leaning back in the chair, head lax, booted legs outstretched, looking for a moment like some youthful Regency buck. I’m sorry, she said. It would be nice if we could manage not to fight with each other.

He walked to the large window and sat on the long window bench facing her, his hands gripping his kneecaps. Eliot’s lines came into his head:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you.

In the three weeks since she left me another one walks always beside us. What did you come for? he asked. Did you forget something?

She ignored this. Weinberg’s been trying to reach you all week. Have you been away?

No. I just didn’t feel like talking to him.

Well, there’s a problem. I want to go away for a few weeks. But Weinberg says that before I do, you and I should talk about the divorce.

Where are you going? At once he regretted asking. What did it matter where she was going?

Perry’s family have a place in Jamaica. I thought we could stay there until my rehearsals start at the Kennedy Center. She stood, letting the fur coat fall back on the chair. Do you mind if I make a cup of coffee?

There’s some on the stove, he said, eying her as she went into the kitchen, her gait slightly unsteady in the unaccustomed boots. The boots would be Turnbull’s taste. For a moment he imagined her booted and furred, riding crop in hand, flogging Turnbull’s bony naked rump, he squealing in pain and joy. Behind him the expanse of windowpane began to chill his back. He heard her jiggle the percolator and then she came out of the kitchen, a full coffee mug held carefully in her right hand as she settled herself again in the chair with an easy, isn’t-this-fun gesture he’d seen her use on strangers. Was he now just a stranger? He turned to stare out the window, saw the river cold under a whited sky. In its choppy gray channel a bulldog tug moved upriver, hauling a funerary file of garbage scows.

Weinberg’s idea, she said, is to go for a no-fault divorce. He feels that would be by far the best for both of us. I don’t know. I’ve no opinion. I’m just repeating what he told me to ask you.

Ask me what? If I’ll go for a no-fault divorce?

Well, remember we sort of decided that day—the day I told you—that I’d take the beach house for now and you’d stay on here?

You decided it. Not me.

All right. But you know what I mean.

He thought of the printed slips she sent to be put in with the Christmas cards. The utter deceit of all that. Anger made his voice hoarse. You never had any intention of living in the beach house, he said. You moved straight in with Turnbull.

What does it matter?

She was right, of course.

Look, let’s not lose our tempers, she said. One thing. I want you to keep this apartment. I’m ready to sign it over to you. Completely. I’ll keep the beach house. Okay? She smiled then, a forced smile, the smile of one who is being more than generous. He could almost hear her say it. More than generous.

No, it’s not okay, he told her. Payments and maintenance on this place come to thirteen hundred a month, in case you forgot. And now that you’ve left me, I can’t afford that. Last month, for instance, I made four hundred dollars. And in November I made twelve hundred. That was a big month for me. Besides, you own both places. We bought them with your money.

Your money, my money. She kicked out her legs, her heels thudding on the parquet floor. Tell you what. I’ll make the monthly payments here for, say, two years. After that you can continue them, or if you feel like it, you can sell the apartment and keep the proceeds. The thing is, we spent seven years together and this breakup is because I want out. So I’d like to be generous with you. What’s the matter? Did I say something funny?

No.

Well, do you want the apartment?

I told you. No.

What about the beach house? Maybe you’d rather have that? At least we own that outright, so you’d have no payments to make.

I don’t want the beach house. I don’t want anything from you. And what’s this rush about the divorce? Are you going to marry Turnbull?

She hesitated. Weinberg said if I told you you might try to hold things up. You wouldn’t, would you, Jamie?

As she spoke she leaned forward, her knees coming like polished ovals out of the sleek brown hide of her boots, her face, smiling now, framed in the three sides of a rectangle formed by her blond, bobbed hair, that face so familiar, yet now the face of a stranger. He felt a slight shiver of fear that this stranger could know so well the winning cards to deal against his resolve.

Why would I hold things up? he heard himself ask. Indeed, he had been meaning to make trouble if she wanted to marry Turnbull, but now dead pride invaded him like a dybbuk. Are you trying to buy me off? Is that it?

Of course not. That’s mean.

Anyway, he told her, there’s no settlement that could make up for what you’ve done to me.

What exactly have I done to you?

Nothing, nothing. Humiliatingly, tears filled his eyes. Go on, he said. You can go now. You can tell Weinberg it’s okay, you’ve fixed me. But you’d better warn him you’ll have to take over this apartment. Because I’m moving out.

But there’s absolutely no need to do that. It will just be sitting here empty. She got up, came to him, and put her arms around him. Oh, Jamie, I’m sorry. I am sorry.

And once again he had been the weak one, once again he had confessed to her what he least wanted her to know. A nobody has no pride. The dybbuk left him. He stood, letting her embrace him, a shameful person who had wept to gain her sympathy. I didn’t mean to insult you, she said. I know how awful all this has been for you. And his voice, controlled now, said he hadn’t meant to shout at her. He did mean it about the apartment, though. And he would call Weinberg tomorrow.

Tomorrow is New Year’s, she said, releasing him. The day after would be better.

Turning from him as she spoke, picking up the long fur coat, slipping into it, her back to him, showing him only the brown fur, the polished leather boots, the fur shako and blond bob, as though she were some animal, all hides and hair. How could he have imagined he could confide his new fear to that furred animal back? Then she turned to face him and for a moment was the girl who had improbably asked him to marry her, who had joined with him in matrimony before a clerk at City Hall, who in Doctors Hospital had delivered the stillborn son he had never seen. All that, that life, was over. Tomorrow would be New Year’s Day and Weinberg’s office would be closed. The day after would be better. She had finished her business here.

By the way, he said, you’re not going to the Connells’ tonight, are you?

I don’t know. I thought we might drop in for a few minutes, later on. Why? Are you going?

Not now.

Oh, come on, Jamie, that’s silly. There’s always an enormous mob there. We can easily avoid each other if that’s what’s worrying you.

Did Bob Connell ask you? I mean, specifically.

I don’t remember. I suppose there was an invitation.

Well, they invited me. Specifically. The Connells are my friends.

I thought they were my friends, too, she said. But let’s not argue about it.

You and Turnbull must have a dozen other parties you can go to.

All right. Whatever you like. You go. We won’t. She opened the front door, then put her hand on his sleeve and looked up at him. And listen. Please use the apartment. It’s just going to go to waste.

I don’t want it. Clear?

She removed her hand at once. Fine, she said and walked off down the corridor, all moving mink and wobbling polished boots. Absurdly, he wanted to call her back and start the encounter all over again. For days he had planned how he would behave if they met. He would be polite. He would make her believe he was better off without her. He would be magnanimous, yet indifferent, for indifference is the ultimate revenge. Instead, he had wept, had lost his temper and had even begged for a favor, asking her to stay away from the Connells’ party.

Beatrice? he called in a loud, uneven voice. She had reached the elevator. His voice went up to a shout. "I’m not going to the Connells’ tonight. I’m going to Montreal to spend New Year’s with my father. I may not be back for a while. I’ll leave the keys with the super."

What about Weinberg?

I’ll call him from Montreal.

Good. She pressed the elevator button. He slammed the door on her image. Polite, magnanimous, indifferent. Didn’t that describe her behavior perfectly? He went into the living room, saw her coffee mug, and carried it into the kitchen as though to rinse out this evidence of her visit. But, irrationally, was filled with a wish to have one more look at her and so ran to the bedroom window in time to see a movement of fur and boots as she got into the little Mercedes. Kevin, the doorman, shut the door. The Mercedes slewed around awkwardly, then, accelerating, skidded slightly in the snow as it zoomed toward Second Avenue. She’ll wreck it, he thought. She never did know how to drive.

So she would have left

As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,

As the mind deserts the body it has used.

That was her way. Primitives fear the photograph, the shutter click, their image stolen, then given back to them as a lifeless souvenir, entombed in a piece of paper. Beatrice had snapped the shutter, stealing away the man he once had been, presenting him with himself as her useless husband. He took that husband figure into the bathroom, stripped it of its garments and stood it for a time under the shower, the water too hot, reddening the skin. He dried body and hair, then went naked into the bedroom, where, in the triptych mirror she had installed, he saw a face in stasis, eyes which had no light behind them, a waxwork countenance, lifelike, but not alive. The primitive photographed, robbed, abandoned.

He began to dress. He hung up the suit he had taken out to wear to the Connells’ party, instead picking out a turtle-neck sweater, tweeds, wool socks, and brogues. He did this without premeditation, just as a few minutes ago he had called out to her that he was going to visit his father in Montreal. He had not seen his father in seven months and when he called him on Christmas Day had not felt able to admit to him that Beatrice had walked out. Yet now, suddenly, he needed his father. His father might be the one person who could help him. To his father he was his father’s only son, continuance in a line which stretched back to Ireland and their grandfather’s claim to be descended from the poet Mangan himself. Fumbling with the address book, he found and dialed his father’s number. Our Father Who art in Montreal, please be at home. It rang, it rang. Waiting, he looked out of the window. Gray channel of river under a whited sky; two cargo ships, light in the water, moving downriver toward the ocean.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

In Montreal someone picked up the receiver. He heard his father’s voice.

Where do you live? The immigration officer’s intonation was French-Canadian.

New York.

Seven years ago when Mangan moved to the United States he had applied for American citizenship. Thus, it was an American passport which he now passed across the counter to identify himself to the officials of his native land. The officer gave a cursory look at his photograph and returned the passport to him, saying: What is the purpose of your visit?

To see my father.

Do you have any gifts, liquor, or cigarettes with you?

No.

The officer stamped a customs form, handed it to him, and, for the first time in their encounter, smiled. Happy New Year, sir.

Thank you. Same to you.

Carrying his bag, he entered the customs area, handed the form to a customs officer, and was waved through automatically opening doors to a mill of waiting faces in the arrivals lobby. On the phone, a few hours ago, when he told him about Beatrice, his father had treated it as a true bereavement, saying, Of course, come on up. And—look—we’ll meet your flight. Now, in evidence of this concern, here was Margrethe, larger than life, in his mother’s bitter phrase, pushing to the front of the waiting crowd, tall as Mangan himself, her blond hair falling down about her shoulders, dressed in a blue ski parka and matching stretch pants, her Viking eyes steely with delight as she ran to fold him to her in a warm, moist, kissing embrace.

In the past, during similar displays of affection, Mangan had experienced an illicit sexual thrill at holding and being kissed by this handsome prize of his father’s old age, a Danish girl six years younger than himself. But tonight when her warm lips touched his cheek he did not feel his usual droit de sang and entertain his fantasy of cuckolding his father. Instead, he felt, suddenly, grateful, glad to be seen at last not as Beatrice’s husband, but welcome in his father’s house, a son come home.

Come, I have my car, said Margrethe, speaking in the clipped, English-accented tones she had learned in a Danish school. And so he went with her into the blear vise of a Montreal winter’s night, waiting in freezing wind as she unlocked the Volvo. Then, snug beside her, the heater roaring, they drove out onto an access road lined with snowbanks high as horse jumps, pitted with yellow dog piss, great gray dirty slabs which would not melt till spring. Facing them, waving them on, his fur hat and greatcoat hoar as Banquo’s Ghost, a Montreal policeman, whistle in mouth, leather mitts pawing the smoking Arctic air. Canada: cruel landscape, its settlement a defiance of nature. Home.

So, Margrethe said. When did she leave, exactly?

Three weeks ago.

Maybe you don’t want to talk about it?

No, that’s all right.

Was it Perry Turnbull she went with?

He turned to her in astonishment. She ignored his look, her attention on the traffic as she slipped in and out of lanes at high speed, her profile immobile as an image on a coin. How did you know about Turnbull? he asked.

"Ah, so it was him. She turned for a moment and gave him a warm triumphant smile. It was something she said when she was here last time."

But that was more than a year ago.

The Volvo leaped forward as though running away from this dangerous revelation. I remember, Margrethe said. She told me this man has a big place in Jamaica.

Yes. She’s going down there with him.

Margrethe laughed. What an extraordinary person she is. Were you sad when she left?

Sad? Nobody had asked him this question. I think I felt insulted.

She must have been a difficult person to know. I mean, to really know. She’s such an actress.

CÔTE-DE-LIESSE said the green and white expressway sign leading him back in memory to his boyhood, to a time before Beatrice, to turnings he wished he had not taken.

And so charming, Margrethe said. I used to watch her working on your father. Poor Pat, I think he sort of fancied her.

So as I lusted for Margrethe my father lusted for Beatrice. "How is Pat?" Mangan asked.

He’s in great form. He’s having a party tonight, did he tell you?

A big party?

Oh, you know. Margrethe leaned forward, concentrating as the Volvo rushed up an off ramp then slowed with a lurch at the approach to Côte-de-Liesse Road. The old gang. We’re having drinks and then, later on, a buffet.

Windshield wipers rose and fell, guillotining the view. Down Sherbrooke Street past Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where he had been born in crisis, a placenta previa, his mother in danger. Margrethe was silent: the only sounds the roar of the car heater, the wipers’ slick downslap and dragging rubbery upsweep. Ahead, a townscape little changed from the years when this was his world, Westmount Park, the public library, the hockey rink, the rows of suburban avenues climbing steeply up to the Boulevard, dividing line on the social Monopoly board between the managers of banks and businesses, who lived, aspiring, on the lower slopes, and the owners of those banks and businesses, who were ensconced on the higher reaches of Westmount Mountain. The Volvo turned in at Lansdowne Avenue, the street on which Mangan grew up, beginning a climb past red-brick Victorian-style houses, their wooden porches silted with old snowdrifts, their walls and steps salted down to break the carapace of winter ice. Halfway up, the Volvo turned in at a narrow driveway, facing the front steps of a semidetached house with a front of gray Scots fieldstone. Mangan and Margrethe got out. To the left of the door, a lighted window, its curtains undrawn. Framed in this window, looking down at him, his father, dressed for a party in navy blazer, royal-blue shirt, red silk foulard. His father inclined his head in a mock-comic bow of welcome, exposing a tonsure of baldness ringed by longish gray hair. There’s Pat, Margrethe said happily, running up the steps, pushing open the front door, beckoning Mangan to follow her.

He waved to his father, then went up into the small entrance hall, picking his way through its familiar winter confusion of scattered rubbers, circulars, and unopened suburban newspapers to enter the living room, a place of contrasts, its wooden Bauhaus chairs and end tables bought in the thirties at great expense, now old and warped as a thrift-shop assemblage. Books furnished the room. In an Adam-style grate a log fire burned brilliantly. His father, kissing and being kissed by Margrethe, raised a hand to wave to him.

Don Duncan, his father’s oldest friend, stood with his back to the fire, glass in hand, smiling and nodding in welcome. His father, releasing Margrethe, came to shake hands. How was your flight?

His father’s grip was firm. His father’s way of dealing with people and crises was to be brusque, cheerful, a little distant, a trait developed in his work as managing editor of The Gazette, where people and crises were the daily material of his trade. Possibly he had copied this manner from some managing editor he had known in his youth, but in Mangan’s eyes it gave his father a gravitas which other men seemed to lack. Incongruously, it occurred to him that to his father he was tonight’s top local news story. son cuckolded by celebrity mate.

What about a drink? his father asked. Scotch and water, isn’t it? He nodded. His father went to the pantry.

I have to go up and change now, Margrethe said. "You know