“When did you get back?” he asked Beatrice.
“Not long ago.”
“Are you well?”
She looked at her mother as though for confirmation. Was there a nod, a smile?
This is hard on her, Strulovitch thought—meaning everything. This is too cruel. She’s a child. “You look well,” he lied.
“I doubt that,” she said. “But thanks, anyway. I’m unharmed, if that’s what you mean. And unbetrothed, if that’s what you really want to know.”
“It’s enough you’re here.”
“It’s enough for me too.”
It was enough she was here. It was everything she was here. But some unquiet, unappeasable sprite of fatherly fault-finding nudged aside the joy he wanted to express. “If you’d told me you were coming home today,” he said, “you’d have saved everybody a lot of trouble.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to save everybody a lot of trouble.”
In her stony unforgivingness she resembles Shylock, Strulovitch thought. Were he to ask her what she was thinking he had little doubt how she would answer.
I will be revenged on the whole pack of you.
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Shylock Is My Name Page 24