Leland said, “I want to know about Rainbow.” Some of the things that Roberts had said had raised the memory of what Karen had endured. Leland had closed his mind years ago to what she had had to think, what she had had to feel about him, to do what she had done. He had convinced himself that it was not his business for as long as she wanted to be his wife.

Roberts said, “The housing law was passed while Colin was in college. A political science professor used it to make a point. Colin had absorbed a lot about real estate while his father had been alive and he saw the loophole right away. He pointed it out in class. It was too complicated for the other students and probably the professor as well, and the professor lost his patience. Colin did his term paper on it and gave it the subtitle, ‘An Opportunity to Subvert the Public Interest.’ It was a brutal paper that indirectly attacked the professor. Colin was given a D in the course. Later, when he determined to change his life, he saw Rainbow as a shortcut to a better social and financial position. He couldn’t explain his need for that beyond indicating a sense of well-being that he felt in the finer homes and better restaurants of the rich and powerful. Some people moving up never feel at ease in such places.”

“I know where he lived before he moved to Collegeville Road,” Leland said. “It’s an ordinary neighborhood, almost run down. He could have done better there.”

“It suited his purposes,” Roberts said. “He wasn’t ready to venture fully into legitimate society. I told you that he forced an interest in racing. He did it because he felt that he had discovered a need for an outlet. He was trying to understand and help himself. He believed that he had to challenge the attitudes and opinions that continued to order his life. Before he had gone into the service, for example, he hadn’t done any social drinking. He was never able to forget having been in a bar and feeling a faint but genuine fear. The experience served as a guideline. There were his social and racial prejudices which were broad and very deep. Before the war, casual heterosexual contacts—pickups—had frightened him. He had an unrealistic concept of women—in spite of his hostility, he couldn’t account for liars or connivers. He saw that he had never exercised any serious caution or reserve in dealing with women. Just before he met Betty, he had begun to get the feel of the ‘game’ of society, and when he picked it up again he remembered and had to ask himself if he had not tried to run away the first time. After the divorce, he used prostitutes, many of them. He told me that he had a need—or desire—for female companionship on a level he could control. It wasn’t all illusion, he said about dealing with them. Even here he had not come very far in his understanding of the way other people are; he thought that he had to convince me that it was possible to have real relationships—that kind of money had been of little interest to him and he had treated the girls decently. It stood to reason that he would have gotten along with them. Nevertheless, he regarded those months as a ‘sordid’ period of his life. He was very busy with Rainbow, there were different girls in the apartment for days on end. Before he died he was able to say that no one had been hurt, that it had done him some good. His first marriage hadn’t accomplished that much. Still, until the end, he regretted the failure of the one and the success of the other. He hadn’t come to a true realization of his capacities and limitations at the various times of his life—”