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LOVE IS EXCEPTION MAKING 241
increasingly frosty after this revelation, which Blumenthal immediately
transmitted to her. Still she said nothing publicly. She and Nathan
appeared on their way to refi guring a new and more distant relationship
as colleagues and business partners. The Collective could sense the tension,
but none understood the full dimensions of what was happening
in their upper stratum.
It was Barbara Branden who fi nally called off the charade. The letter
of half-truths had done little to ease the pressure under which both
Brandens lived. Haggard and sickly, Nathan was deteriorating daily
under the weight of his lies. He had told Barbara about Patrecia, making
her complicit in both his affair and his rationalizations to Rand. As
Rand began to shift her allegiance to Barbara, she was struck by a deep
guilt. In August, when Rand announced she planned to make Barbara
her legal heir in place of Nathan, she could stand it no more. Barbara
gave Nathan an ultimatum: it was time Ayn knew the whole truth,
including the complete history of his relationship with Patrecia. If he
couldn’t tell her, she would. With a sense of fatalistic relief, Nathan gave
his ex the go-ahead.
It was the worst and most violent of Rand’s many breakups. When
Barbara told her the full story of Nathan’s relations with Patrecia,
Rand was white-hot with fury. She summoned Nathan, cowering in his
apartment several fl oors above. Barbara, Frank, and Allan Blumenthal
waited with her. When Nathan arrived, Rand blocked him from the living
room, seated him in her foyer, and unleashed a torrent of abuse. He
was an impostor, a fake. She would destroy him and ruin his name. In
a crescendo of rage she slapped him hard across the face, three times.
Nathan sat motionless, absorbing her words and her blows. Years later
he and Barbara remembered her parting words verbatim: “If you have
an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—
you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve any
potency, you’ll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!” 63 Then
she ordered him out of her apartment. It was the last time the two would
meet.
Rand’s anger was boundless. She would never forgive, never forget.
More than the fury of a woman scorned, it was the fury of a woman
betrayed. For nearly fi ve years, Nathan had lied to Rand about his feelings
for her and his relationship with Patrecia. Their hours of intense
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