The window lowered electrically. “Yes?”

“We were supposed to discuss details,” I said.

“The details,” she said, “are, I'll do everything. Don't worry about it, don't complicate things, and it will all fall into place. All right?”

My throat got very tight.

She put the car into drive.

“Yes, ma'am,” I said, but before the second word was out she'd roared off.

I went back into the hospital, got coffee from a machine near the admittance desk, and took it up to my office, trying to forget about what had happened and determined to focus myself on the day's challenges. Later, seated at my desk, charting the morning's rounds, my hand slipped and some of the coffee spilled on the blue brochure.

I didn't hear from her again until a week before the conference, when she sent a starchily phrased letter inquiring if I cared to deliver a paper. I called and declined and she sounded relieved.

“But it would be nice if you at least welcomed the attendees,” she said.

“Would it?”

“Yes.” She hung up.

I did show up on the first day to offer brief words of welcome and, unable to escape graciously, remained on stage for the entire morning, with the other co-chair—Harvey Rosenblatt, the psychiatrist from New York. Trying to feign interest as Katarina strode to the podium, wondering if I'd see another side of her, softened for public consumption.

Not that there was much of a public. Attendance was thin—maybe seventy or eighty therapists and graduate students in an auditorium that seated four hundred.

She introduced herself by name and title, then read a prepared speech in a strident monotone. She favored complex, meandering sentences that lost meaning by the second or third twist, and soon the audience was looking glazed. But she didn't seem to care—didn't seem to be talking to anyone but herself.

Reminiscing about her father's glory days.

Such as they were.

Anticipating the symposium, I'd taken the time to review Andres de Bosch's collected writings, and I hadn't raised my opinion of him.

His prose style was clear, but his theories about child rearing—the good love/bad love spectrum of maternal involvement that his daughter had used to title the conference—seemed nothing more than extensions and recombinations of other people's work. A little Anna Freud here, a little Melanie Klein there, tossed with croutons of Winnicott, Jung, Harry Stack Sullivan, Bruno Bettelheim.

He leavened the obvious with clinical anecdotes about the children he'd treated at his school, managed to work both his Vienna pilgrimage and his war experiences into his summaries, name dropping and adopting the overly casual manner of one truly self-impressed.

Emperor's new clothes, and the audience at the conference didn't show any great excitement. But from the rapt look on Faithful Daughter's face, she thought it was cashmere.