Prizes (13 page)

He could not understand why his emotions were so out of control.

What the hell am I so worried about? he asked himself. She’s going into the record books. But that won’t change our relationship at all.

Then he looked squarely at his innermost feelings and admitted, no, it’s inevitable. Tomorrow’s got to change something. Tonight she’s all mine. In the morning, she’ll belong to the world. He had somehow forgotten that he himself was responsible for the publicity extravaganza.

Dean Kendall was aware that a minor commotion was inevitable, and thus he vouchsafed the reporters a quarter of an hour—“and not a second more”—to interview the prodigy.

Just a few minutes before noon, Isabel stepped into the limelight as—uncharacteristically—Raymond hovered in the background.

“We’ve heard you’re going to major in physics, Isabel. Can you tell us why you’ve chosen this subject?” asked Natalie Rose of United Press International.

“That’s kind of hard to explain,” the young girl responded amid the locust clicking of cameras. “But I’ve always been drawn to figuring out how things work. That’s how I broke my cuckoo clock when I was three.”

Appreciative laughter.

The
New York Times
: “What about your music? Will you be playing with the university orchestra?”

Isabel shot a quick glance at her father and then answered, “Only if
they
give me advanced standing too,
and let me just play Spring and Summer of the Four Seasons.”

More laughter. She had captivated all of them.

The articles that appeared the next day and indeed all through the week—for representatives of
Time
and
Newsweek
had also been present—were tailored to suit their respective audiences.

While the more serious papers emphasized her poise and intellect, the supermarket tabloids speculated on the possible Svengalilike role her father played.

Understandably, these far more emotive and insinuating stories upset Isabel.

“It’s not fair, Daddy,” she said, almost in tears. “One of those rags actually called you ‘a diabolical ventriloquist.’ ”

“Take it easy, honey,” he answered soothingly. “We know it’s not true, and you shouldn’t even read what the gutter press says. Their idea of news is things like who dyes Ronald Reagan’s hair.”

Isabel was not assuaged. “I know what you’re saying, Dad, and I try not to let these things affect me. But couldn’t you have arranged with Dean Kendall to have me registered in someplace private—like his office? I feel like a monkey in the San Diego Zoo.”

“We discussed it,” Raymond answered truthfully. And then, deftly crossing the frontier of mendacity, he added, “But he felt that if you were going to be treated like a normal student, gagging the press would only whet their appetite. This way, from now on the campus cops will be on the lookout for those parasites if they slink around your classrooms.”

“Are you sure these accusations don’t bother you?” she asked anxiously.

“Not at all,” Raymond replied, “as long as we both know they’re not true.” His tone was convincing, since he had come to enjoy life in the center ring.

For, after all, when they trumpeted Isabel’s genius, were they not also implicitly praising him?

Raymond had obtained an indefinite leave of absence from his post in the San Diego Physics lab, although Professor Kinoshita, head of the department, confided to his colleagues that in his view there was little likelihood that Raymond would ever return.

This left him without any visible means of support. Not only did he have to provide food and lodging for himself and Isabel, but, during a spasm of guilt, he had rashly promised Muriel to continue paying half the mortgage on the family home.

He could easily have pressured the Berkeley Physics Department to employ him in his experienced capacity as a lab engineer. For they, unlike Dean Kendall, had no qualms about welcoming his twelve-year-old prodigy to their midst. Talent is talent. But Raymond chose instead to put his tutorial skills to work.

With all the attendant publicity, he had become a kind of celebrity. The printed index cards he posted on bulletin boards in the department, offering to coach any student having difficulty with physics courses, brought more responses than he could accommodate, even at a fee of thirty dollars per session.

Indeed, when other perfectly bright students conveyed to their parents that Isabel da Costa’s father was offering private pedagogy, they urged their offspring to seize the unique opportunity: perhaps Mr. da Costa could also work miracles for them.

To Raymond, this seemed to unearth a deeply held psychological secret; namely, that many parents cherished the notion that their children were geniuses—and lacked only the right conditions to develop them.

Prudently, he had scheduled his tutorials for Saturday mornings or weekday evenings between seven and ten
P.M.
, hours when he knew that Isabel would be in the next room, hard at work.

Sundays were the exclusive property of father and daughter. Weather permitting, they would go on an excursion, or sometimes simply for a relaxing picnic across the bay in Golden Gate Park.

It was at moments like these that Isabel, who was beginning to experience the physiological transformation to womanhood, could not suppress pangs of longing for the little things in life that she was missing. She was struck, not merely by the couples young and old walking hand in hand through the park, but even by the numerous joggers breathing fresh air and chatting happily to each other as they passed down the tree-lined paths.

These were subjects that a young girl could quite naturally have discussed with her mother, but Isabel’s thrice-weekly calls to Muriel were uneasy and awkward. Even had Raymond not been present in the room, she would have felt somehow disloyal by confiding private thoughts to her mother. And for her part, the best Muriel could do was to anticipate what might be preoccupying her daughter, and discuss it—almost as a monologue—from her end of the phone.

No matter how early Isabel awakened, Raymond would already be in the kitchen preparing a nourishing breakfast which was a scrupulous admixture of proteins for growth and carbohydrates for energy and brainpower. He had become something of an expert on nutrition, devouring not only the Harvard and Johns Hopkins medical newsletters, but also the wealth of material he could access through various computer databases.

Though he went to bed before midnight, he would leave his daughter hard at work—so dedicated, in fact, that she sometimes evaded his question as to when she had gone to sleep.

Though it seemed to outsiders that Isabel led a cloistered life, she was aware of the outside world through San Francisco’s popular all-talk station. As soon as she heard her father snoring, she would reach into her bottom drawer, take out a cheap pair of earphones, plug
them into her clock radio, and listen to callers-in discuss the popular controversies of the day.

This allowed her access to an unending cast of characters, some of whom would address burning political issues, like aids, women’s rights, and Reagan’s Star Wars. She also heard passionate—and sometimes ferocious—arguments on such topics as abortion. This was particularly vivid to her, since, as a developing adolescent, the entire subject of pregnancy and childbirth was inevitably on her mind.

As her thirteenth birthday approached, Isabel grew more and more unsettled by the changes in her body. Not that she didn’t understand them
scientifically,
for she had long ago read books about human reproduction. She knew intellectually that the decrease in secretions of the pineal gland, simultaneous with the increase in the outpouring of adrenocortical hormones, accompanied by the appearance of hair in the genital area, signaled the onset of puberty.

It was quite another matter to cope with the reality of it.

Although Isabel did not want to tell her father, on a more profound level, she nonetheless wanted him to
know,
despite the fact that something irrational in her feared he might be angry.

But for now she had a pragmatic dilemma. Since Raymond rarely left her side—he appeared to have deemed only bookstores like Cody’s as safe territory—she had to find some way to obtain what she needed each month.

She was determined to take action during their next trip to the Safeway on Shattuck Avenue.

The moment of revelation came as father and daughter were placing their items onto the black rubber tread-mill at the checkout counter.

Ray looked mutely at the blue box of Kotex, then at his daughter, and asked, almost in a whisper, “Uh, do you need—uh, these things?”

She nodded.

Without another word, he turned and resumed emptying the wagon.

During the first few minutes of their ride home, he was silent. At last he said, as casually as possible,
“Why don’t we stop off and have a good browse at Cody’s?”

She clearly understood the subtext. “That’s okay, Daddy, I don’t need a book.”

“Well, maybe you want to—you know,” he said uneasily, “talk to someone.”

“That’s not necessary,” she responded. And then, sensing the moment to be propitious, she added, “If I’ve got any questions, I can always call Mom, right?”

“Yes,” he mumbled under his breath, “I think it would be a good idea if you spoke to her.”

Understandably, Isabel was a frequent topic of campus conversation. It was not merely her genius and eloquence that continued to elicit interest, but gossip also focused on the fact that her father went with her to every class.

In an early press interview he had explained that this was merely to be sure that Isabel understood the material. So that, if necessary, he could help her later.

Wags joked that Isabel was so young, she needed him to help her cross the street. Others speculated darkly on the elder da Costa’s own needs.

Consciously, at least, Ray did not want to suppress his daughter’s emotional development. And so he attempted the impossible, trying to provide her with a social life while still remaining in firm paternal control.

Berkeley could justifiably claim to have pioneered the serious study of film as an art. After all, no less a cinematic heavyweight than Pauline Kael had spent her early career programming for the local arts theater.

Of course, Raymond wanted Isabel to see the Ingmar Bergman retrospective. So one Saturday afternoon the two of them sat through
The Seventh Seal
and
Wild Strawberries.

“I haven’t got the slightest idea what any of it was about,” her father complained good-humoredly as they emerged bleary-eyed from the double feature.

“Yes,” she remarked sympathetically, “the subtitles weren’t very good.”

“Well at least they—” He stopped himself, unsure of what she was saying. “You don’t mean to tell me you understood the dialogue, Isabel?”

“Not all of it, of course,” she replied ingenuously. “I guess you were in such a rush to pull out all the relevant books on Bergman that you didn’t notice two of them were in Swedish.”

Again Raymond da Costa was moved to wonder about the outer limits of his daughter’s capacity for knowledge. If indeed there were any.

As a treat, he took her for a pizza at Nino’s Brazilian, ordering a Coke for her and a pint of beer for himself.

A group of shaggy types were grooving to jukebox music. If nothing else, their squeals of laughter indicated that they were high—and not on Miller Lite.

Their apparent leader, motorcycle-jacketed and stubble-chinned, noticed father and daughter, pointed his finger and cried, “Look! There’s Humbert Humbert and Lolita.”

Raymond’s face reddened. He had, of course, read Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel about an older man with a sexual penchant for nymphets, and the intimation was a thousand-volt shock.

Raymond lost his temper completely, bellowing, “You shut your dirty mouth.”

This merely intensified their mocking laughter.

“Stay loose, Hummy-baby. I’m not dumping on you. I mean, everybody should be free to do their own thing, right?”

Now the arteries in Raymond’s neck bulged, and as Isabel stared with mounting dread, her father pulled himself to his feet and started toward the antagonist.

“My daughter is not my
thing,
you little rodent,” he snarled.

“Hey, mellow out.” The scruffy youth held up his hands in what was at once a demonstrative and protective
gesture. “I mean, I know you’re not really screwing her.”

Raymond exploded. He lunged at the younger man, who was, if not stronger, infinitely more agile and could step aside to avoid the blow.

To Isabel’s alarm, her father swung, missed, then let out a strangled groan and fell to the floor.

“Holy shit!” the boy gasped in genuine horror at the havoc his offhand remark had wrought. “Somebody better call an ambulance. I think the old guy’s cooled.”