Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (74 page)

“These are only for display. We keep the stock in the basement. It comes up there and he gives it to you.”

Susan turned to me. “Do you understand this system?”

“Perfectly,” I said. “Its part of the inventory control. More shelf space, fewer goods to shoplift and it’s tougher for the employees to steal. My uncle claimed he invented it when he owned Home World.”

I had piqued the salesman’s curiosity. “Your uncle ran Home World?”

“Yes.”

He leaned on the counter, gestured to me to come closer, and asked in a low voice, “What happened to them?”

“His son-in-law sold it and then, I don’t know, they expanded and suddenly went bankrupt, right?”

The salesman shook his head and looked troubled. “It’s a jungle, I tell you. Cut-throat business. They were big,” he said, leaning back, his eyes scanning the Wiz’s formidable space.

“Let me ask you something,” Susan said to the salesman.

“Don’t start.” He put up a warning hand. “Give him the yellow. They bring it up from the basement and you got your radio. In the wrapping. Brand-new.”

“No, no,” Susan said. “That’s not my question.”

“What? What’s your question?”

She pointed to the distant pickup counter and the man in the Raiders cap. “What’s his name?”

“His name? You want to know his name?”

“Yes, what’s his name?”

“Anthony. His name is Anthony.”

“Okay,” Susan said pleasantly, wandering off. “Come on, Rafe. Let’s see if Anthony does what he says.”

He did. Susan insisted I walk her back to her office, unpack the boom box, plug it in, load tape number one and test that it worked. When I heard Gene’s voice say, “Are we being recorded?” I shut my eyes.

At least, that immediately intrigued Susan. She listened to me evade Gene’s question, and asked, “You didn’t tell him?”

I hit the Stop button. I gave her a list of the key sessions. Brief notes explained their subject matter. The heart of those sessions the reader already knows. I told Susan it would probably be sufficient for her to listen to just those tapes.

She squinted at my list. “Ten,” she said and pouted. “Even that’s ten hours. I don’t know when I have the time. Could take me a week.”

“Take two weeks. Take twenty. I’m doing nothing until I have your opinion.”

“And this nothing you’ll be doing, where will you be doing it?” I told her I planned to return to the Prager Institute and wait. She invited me to stay at their loft. “You could help me here at the clinic. You’ll be doing me a big favor. I’m short-handed. Billy’s got the flu. You could fill in for him. He’s family therapy. Mostly kids. So you’re perfect.”

“Nice try,” I said. I went downtown to Don Kenny’s show in SoHo, saw the photograph of Gene and his mother with the lion, and returned to Baltimore.

I didn’t do nothing. Since I had listened to nearly twenty hours of the tapes before taking them to New York, I prepared additional notes for my case review with Susan. And I tracked the movements of Pete Kenny and Mrs. Shoen, Cathy’s mother. After three days in New York, she took him to her home in Phoenix.

I made a series of calls. By a stroke of luck, I found a child psychologist in Phoenix, David Cox, who consulted in the local public school system. I knew Cox from a conference in Boston years ago and felt confident enough to phone him and explain my situation. I told him I assumed Mrs. Shoen would put Pete in school in the fall and wondered if he could check on the boy.

Cox went me one better. He called back on Friday, having spoken with Mrs. Shoen. Cox phoned her out of the blue, saying he had heard gossip about the tragedy and offered a sympathetic ear. Mrs. Shoen was relieved to discuss her situation. Pete still didn’t know the truth; he was told his parents died in an accident. Perhaps that is the truth, I thought. Mrs. Shoen made an appointment to come in next week and Cox assumed he would eventually get to see Pete.

“Let me know if I can be of any use,” I said.

“I could use some background on the father.”

“Sure. But for now, you should just deal with Pete, don’t you think?” Cox tried again to find out more than the sketchy details I had already surrendered, but I stalled him. “As far as I know, the boy didn’t have emotional problems.”

Cox was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his tone was polite. Too polite. “Well, besides the murder-suicide, there was the divorce.”

“I mean, of course, prior to those events. Gene wasn’t seeing me during the divorce or after it.”

“Of course there was some history to the divorce,” he commented, again with excessive politeness.

“Call me after you see Pete and we’ll talk,” I said.

Susan phoned Saturday afternoon. She had only taken four days. “Well,” she said, “I’m almost done. Why don’t you come here tomorrow?

“When?”

“Twelve? For brunch. We’ll let Harry sleep late and have Nova and bagels.”

I knew better than to ask for a preliminary judgment. I fancied I heard in her tired voice the sadness she would feel at having to tell me I had failed. The confirmation seemed inevitable. Five days of a queasy stomach and five nights of restless and abbreviated sleep had already convicted me. Sunday, although I hadn’t managed to doze off until after midnight, I woke up at four-thirty exhausted, a typical symptom of depression. I decided to drive to New York immediately.

After parking the car, I walked the quiet Sabbath streets for two hours to
get
some exercise, found a coffee shop one block from Susan’s, pushed down my irrational feelings, and reviewed my notes with a cold, if bleary, eye. I felt ready by the time I buzzed the intercom to her loft.

Harry opened the elevator door—it leads right into their living room. “I’m going, I’m going,” he said. He was in green nylon gym shorts with PAL embroidered on the side. His gray T-shirt had a hole the size of a quarter over his stomach. There was a volleyball under his arm. He entered the elevator as I exited. As he passed, he patted my shoulder affectionately. “Hope you’re here when I
get
back.”

I stood alone in the gloom of their living room. The lofts windows are at the front and back, leaving the middle untouched by natural light. Susan appeared from the kitchen area carrying a platter with bagels to the table.

“Sit,” she said as she went by.

The table was drenched by the sun. Gleams came off the silverware. My eyes watered and I longed for sleep. From my position in the shadows, a brilliant Susan poured glowing orange juice into a shimmering glass. She was a vision of goodness. A goofy goodness, however. Her hair, freed from its bun, spread out stiffly and unevenly. Her denim shorts appeared to be fashioned by her own hand, loose threads trailing down her legs. The white men’s dress shirt she wore must have been Harry’s; the sleeves were two inches too short, her thin neck was lost in the wide collar, and there was at least a foot of air between the material and her body. Still, she was an unearthly white, like the Good Witch of the
Wizard of Oz,
and the sight paralyzed me.

Noticing that I was stuck, she urged, “Come on.” I didn’t move. She put the juice down. “You did right by him, Rafe. I’m sorry. I know you hoped I would tell you that you did a lousy job, but you were good enough.”

“Good enough,” I repeated.

“Come and eat. Yes, good enough. At times, much better than good. Occasionally you were too casual. But you did a fine job. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

I trudged to the table and sat.

“You look terrible,” she said, cutting a onion bagel and handing it to me. It was hot. The cream cheese would melt, I thought, unhappily.

“I’m not sleeping well,” I said.

Susan slabbed a lot of cream cheese on a poppy seed bagel for herself. “I buy this low-fat cream cheese for Harry, so I have to eat twice as much. I hope that makes sense to you. Harry says it doesn’t.”

“It makes sense,” I said.

She speared slivers of pale red Nova with a fork and carefully arranged them around the hole of her bagel. She glanced at me. “You’re not eating either? No sleep, no food and what else are you not doing? Oh, that’s right, no human contact. Just living like a monk going over your papers.”

“What was my biggest mistake?”

“I’m not sure you made any mistakes.” Susan opened her mouth wide and took a ferocious bite.

“Come on. Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Why nothing about the prostitute?” she asked through the mouthful. She swallowed, gulped a third of her orange juice, and asked, “Why didn’t you challenge that?”

I opened my briefcase and took out my notebook.

“Oy,”
Susan said. She put a hand on the cover to stop me from flipping it open. “No. Just talk. In fact, that reminds me. What was this with the taping? With
your
memory? Felicia still calls you Mr. Memory. What for? Didn’t you learn anything from Watergate?”

“I like to think Nixon has more to hide than I do,” I said. “I guess I was wrong.”

“Why the taping?” she insisted.

“The technology was there for legal reasons having to do with the kids. Parents often consult in that room and—” I reached for my orange juice, thought about taking a sip, and didn’t. “The technology was there. I suppose I could have … I didn’t like him!” The truth came out suddenly and surprised both of us. I think. “I never liked him. You remember what you’re interested in. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the banalities of his life. All I ever expected to hear—all I did hear, really—were the classic complaints of an excessively conventional middle-class man. A thoroughly civilized, timid, unimaginative loser.” I was almost shouting.

Susan took another bite. This one was smaller. She chewed thoughtfully. Sweat broke out from under my arms and at my temples. I couldn’t remember perspiring for the past week, although it had been humid in Baltimore. I drank my juice and waited for her. After she swallowed, she said, “You’re very angry at him. He really let you down.”

“Pathetic. Puerile. Egotistical. Savage.” These were all judgments of my anger at Gene, not disagreement with Susan. The reverse, in fact.

“Welcome to the human race,” Susan said.

For two hours, she walked me through my reactions to Gene, emphasizing not my therapeutic maneuvers, but the events in my life that coincided with their implementation. We found, as the case history reveals, that often I reacted to him as an analogy to what was happening to me elsewhere. For example, the decision to confront Gene openly with the psychic material of his dream as I, for Albert’s sake, chose to convert the clinic into full-time care.

“So I was wrong to interpret the dream so bluntly,” I said at the conclusion of her review.

“No, I don’t think you were wrong. Maybe you were a little harsh.” She changed her tack. “It was quite a brilliant interpretation.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. But I don’t think you appreciate how brilliant.”

“What do you mean?”

“You uncovered all this rage at women, at his mother, which is what he turned his wife into, as you told him. When his mother rejected him—”

“He rejected her. By marrying Cathy.”

“She felt abandoned. But Gene felt she rejected him. That was your insight. You said it yourself to him. She became a vengeful woman because she felt abandoned first by her husband and then her son. And how did he react? He wished her into the terminal. He wished her to die.”

My hands were trembling. I had drunk a lot of coffee since waking at four-thirty and that was part of the reason. Only part. Susan covered my shaking fingers with her hand and stroked soothingly. “You need some sleep. Some real sleep.”

“I should have known, that’s what you’re telling me. I should have known Gene might kill his wife.”

“No! He never battered her. How could you make that leap?” Susan slapped my hand. “You’ve got to stop trying to be the bad guy. You can’t get rid of all the evil in the world by swallowing it yourself.”

“All the evil in the world?” I repeated. “What kind of shit is that?”

Susan asked gently, “Don’t you believe in evil?”

“In what sense? As the missing mass of the universe? You’re not telling me Gene was evil?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what? When Gene killed his wife it was just an evil cloud that happened to rain on him? Evil is a judgment, Susan. To us, Hitler is evil. To a member of the Nazi party, he is good. You like cream cheese. Some people like butter.”

“You wanted butter on your bagel?” she asked, amazed.

“No! Of course not.”

“I didn’t think so. Look, I’m not going to argue philosophy with you, Rafe. I’ll
get
a headache. There was no way you could know he might one day make that wish to be rid of a vengeful woman into a reality. Everything was going wrong with his life. He’d been fired, he’d lost the woman he loved, his wife probably really gave it to him. What did he have left but his son? Oh, that’s a question. What’s your opinion of that relationship?”

“With Pete?” I drank more juice before answering. “Gene hoped to repair the traumas of his childhood by how he raised Petey. Don Kenny was emotionally distant from Gene. Physically close when he was young, which Gene repeated with Pete, by the way, and then Don was totally self-concerned once his career took off. In the end, it was the Jungian nightmare. Gradually Gene repeated his father’s pattern. Gene’s performance as the dutiful husband and attentive father was self-conscious. He really wanted to be a killer in the computer business and to have sexual adventures. When he first came to me he was living this lie, trying to make it up to himself for his father’s betrayal. I concentrated on letting him discover what he really wanted. Then it was up to him. He chose promotion and Halley over his wife and son. Is that evil?”

“It’s selfish.”

“Is that evil?”

“It ain’t good.”

I laughed. “And I was supposed to let him go on with his illusions? He was miserable. His wife was miserable. They weren’t having sex, they were hardly talking. Was that … ?” I stopped.

“What?”

“I’m a fool. At least they were alive. I seem to have lost all common sense. Of course they were better off.”