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By Root 1715 0

she was in a gay mood, laughing and cavorting with Branden. Wasn’t he a genius, a great psychologist, a man of destiny? she cried to Barbara and Elayne. Somewhat wryly, they agreed. As dusk fell, she rested her head on his shoulder and took his hand. He put his arm around her, and they murmured to each other. Their voices were low, excluding the others, and their glances were “too personal and lasted too long, as if they were gazing deeply into each other and could not bear to look away,” Barbara wrote in 1986. During that long car ride, Barbara couldn’t ignore the pitch and tone of their voices and finally realized that her twenty-four-year-old husband and his forty-nine-year-old mentor had moved beyond the bounds of mutual admiration and familial affection. “She’s in love with you!” she shouted angrily at her husband, once they were alone in a motel room. “And you’re in love with her!” Branden denied it, both to his wife and, he claimed, to himself; he insisted that the twenty-five-year age difference between them and the fact that they were both married made a romantic liaison impossible, outlandish. What O’Connor thought or said is not known.

Two days later, back in New York, the sexually ardent older woman invited the young man to come to her apartment in the afternoon. Frank was on duty at the florist’s shop; Barbara was in Midtown, working in her first job as a receptionist for Woman’s Day. With a note of caution and, possibly, an eagerness that had the tone of a demand to Branden, she asked, “Do you understand what happened to us two days ago?” As Branden recalled the scene, he faltered, and she said, “In the car … what we said to each other. It sounded like love. Or have I misunderstood everything?” Now at the height of her mental and emotional powers, she had been rehearsing just such a moment of triangulated passion for at least half her life. Branden, as flattered and incautious as he may have been, was out of his depth. For all his flirtatiousness, he had never really contemplated an actual affair with his literary and intellectual idol, he later said. Nor would he have raised the subject of the car ride if she had not.

Nonetheless, he felt an unfamiliar sense of elation, power, even mastery. The woman with the magnificent eyes and the penetrating mind was looking to him for romance; and when he looked back at her, “the image [of myself] I saw reflected [in her eyes] was that of a god,” he later wrote. “I am in love with you,” he said aloud. It was a fiction that would last for fourteen years.

It wasn’t a conscious fiction, not at first. That they had fallen in love struck them both as philosophically inevitable and romantically and morally correct.

That first afternoon, they told each other that whatever they did they would not hurt each other or their spouses. Rand suggested that the affair be “nonsexual, in the ultimate sense,” meaning that their lovemaking would stop short of intercourse. Branden agreed, disappointed but also relieved, he recalled. As crusaders for integrity and honesty, they prepared to present the facts to Frank and Barbara. They decided to ask for permission to meet by themselves twice a week. “I’m sure they’ll agree to that. We have a right to something,” Branden recalled Rand declaring. He heard anger in her voice and recognized it as a response to the presence of potential impediments. “It was not named but it was felt, and it was in our eyes as we looked at each other in silent understanding,” he wrote in 1989. “We would not be stopped.”

A few days later, Rand opened the fateful discussion. As recounted by both Brandens, she and Nathaniel were already seated on the living-room sofa, holding hands, as first Barbara and then Frank came in at the end of the workday. According to Nathaniel, Frank appeared calm and expectant; the nervous young suitor gathered that he and his wife had already discussed the situation. Not so Barbara, whom Branden had not informed. Rand said simply that she and Nathaniel were in love. “There is nothing in our feeling [for each other] that can hurt or