Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [226]
After this confrontation, her journal entries apparently halted. So did all communication with Nathaniel Branden. Her attorney and old friend Pincus Berner had died in 1961, but she called his partner, Eugene Winick, and set a date to cut Branden out of her will. “I intend you to be my heir,” she said to Barbara, who, in a blaze of guilt and apprehension over the imminent change in Rand’s will while she, Barbara, was still withholding parts of the truth, rushed to see Nathaniel; he had only recently told her, to her horror, that his affair with Patrecia had been going on since 1964. “It’s too late for you to tell her” the whole truth, Barbara recalled saying to her former husband. “I have to do it.” After calling Allan Blumenthal and soliciting his help, she did.
Joan Blumenthal later said that she intuitively knew about the affair between Rand and Branden but was “afraid to say it, afraid to think it.” Her husband, Allan, was aware of nothing of the kind until Barbara told him the story on the afternoon of the evening they visited Rand. The well-mannered psychiatrist at first reacted with indignation on behalf of his cousin. Even when Barbara revealed the details of Branden’s secret sexual involvement with Patrecia, he defended Branden. “How could [Ayn] have failed to know where this would lead?” he demanded. “How could she have done this to Frank and you?” He had not yet heard Rand’s side of the story. Within days, he would change his mind and switch allegiances.
The second shoe fell on August 23, a warm Friday evening in New York. Frank answered the door of the apartment to Barbara and Blumenthal, ushered them into the living room, and took a seat in an armchair for the last scene in the drama of Nathaniel Branden. Barbara informed Rand that she and her ex-husband had both been lying about Patrecia. Nathaniel had been involved in a sexual affair with the actress for four and a half years. Barbara said she had known about the affair, but not about its duration, for two years. Rand’s face remained impassive as Barbara measured out the truth and falsity in each of Branden’s serial explanations for postponing sex with Ayn: the aftershock of the breakup of his marriage, his distress about the triangle with Frank, a loss of desire resulting from Rand’s early and increasing demands for emotional intimacy, posited on morality—all were partly responsible for his retreat. Age was another barrier, though not the crucial one. He had felt genuinely baffled by his growing love for Patrecia, worried about Rand, and was ashamed of the pain he was causing everyone. He had struggled to find a way to make her happy. But he had not been impotent.
“Get him down here,” Rand said quietly and menacingly.
Blumenthal tried to intervene. Nathaniel couldn’t handle a confrontation right now, he told her, and was already filled with horror and remorse.
“Get that bastard down here or I’ll drag him here myself!” she hissed.
Branden had been waiting in his apartment. He rode the elevator to six. Rand met him at the front door and pointed to a straight chair in the foyer. “Sit there,” she told him. She did not want him to enter the living room. He slouched in the chair, appearing numb and exhausted. She launched into a tirade of indignation and abuse that was almost unintelligible at times, so thick and rasping did her Russian accent suddenly become. She seemed not always to know that it was 1968 and that “it was Nathaniel she