All the Flowers Are Dying by Lawrence Block Page A

mother’s funeral. Michael’s been back once since then, on a quick business trip the summer before last, and then last year Elaine and I flew out there shortly after their second daughter was born.
    Antonia, they called her. “We wanted to name her for Mom,” Michael told me, “but neither of us really liked the name Anita, and Antonia has all the same letters, plus an
O
and an extra
N
. June says that means
Anita
is living
on
.”
    “Your mother would like that,” I said, wondering if it was true. I’d left the woman thirty years ago, and even then I had never been too clear on what she would or wouldn’t like.
    “We were sort of hoping for a boy. To keep the name going, you know? But to tell you the truth we were both a little relieved when the sonogram indicated we were going to have a girl. And Melanie, well, she was very clear on the subject. She wanted a baby sister, period, end of story. A brother would not be an acceptable substitute.”
    “They might have another, you know,” Elaine said on the flight home. “To continue the Scudder name.”
    “It’s not that uncommon a name,” I told her. “Last time I looked, there were hundreds scattered all over the country. Maybe thousands, for all I know, plus a whole family of mutual funds.”
    “You don’t mind not having a grandson?”
    “Not at all, and I’ve got to say I think Antonia goes a lot better with Scudder than Antonio would.”
    “Well,” she said, “I’ve got to agree with you there.”
    The point is that there’s a distance between me and my sons, and geography is only a part of it. I didn’t really get to watch them become the men they are today, and I can only view their continuing evolution as from across a great divide. All of which makes TJ’s company especially gratifying. For all that I don’t know about him—like his last name, and what, if anything, the
T
and the
J
stand for—I get to see him up close and watch at point-blank range his continuing self-realization.
    A few years ago he started hanging out on the Columbia campus, apparently having mastered the art of flimflamming the campus security forces. He audited classes over a whole range of subjects, did almost all of the assigned reading, and probably got more from the enterprise than ninety percent of the kids who were taking the same courses for credit. Now and then he wrote a paper, just for the hell of it, and, when the instructor struck him as sufficiently sympathetic, he’d hand it in. One professor in the history department was desperate to have him enroll and was sure he could put together an aid package that would give TJ an Ivy League education at virtually no cost. TJ pointed out that he was already getting just that, plus he got to pick his courses. When Elaine suggested that a Columbia diploma could open a lot of doors, he countered that they led to rooms he didn’t want to go into.
    “Besides,” he’d say, popping his eyes, “I’s a detective, I’s already gots a career.”
    More recently he’d sampled some classes at the business school. He dressed the part, and left the hip-hop patter behind when he got off the train at 116th Street, but I suspect at least some of the professors knew he didn’t belong there. If so, they would have to realize that they were dealing with someone who actually wanted to attend their lectures without the goal of a Columbia MBA. Why on earth would they want to discourage him?
    I don’t think their program focuses much on the stock market, but he got interested, and found books and magazines to read, and by the time classes broke for the summer he was set up in his room at the Northwestern as a day trader, with CNBC running all day on the little television set and his computer—a high-powered successor to the one we’d given him for Christmas some years ago—all set up for online trading. He had an Ameritrade account, though I can’t imagine he had much capital to fund it with, but it was enough to get him