Time Bomb (24 page)

“No, no, there’ll be no better time.” He looked away from me, touched the keyboard again. “Can I offer you something? Juice? Tea?”

“Nothing, thanks. If the things I’ve brought up are too hard for you to discuss right now, perhaps there’s some topic
you’d
like to get into?”

“No, no, let’s stay on track. Bite the bullet. Her mother. My wife. Elizabeth Wyman Burden. B. 1930, D. 1974.” He tilted his head back, gazed at the ceiling. “An exceptional woman. Deductive and intuitive and extremely talented—musically talented. She was very adept at the viola da gamba. Howard played the modern viola, seemed quite promising but dropped it. I helped Elizabeth develop her abilities. She complemented me beautifully.”

He twisted his mouth, as if searching for the right expression, settled on regret. “Holly was nothing like her, really. Nothing like me either, really. Both of us, Betty and myself, are—were—highly intelligent. That’s not a boast, simply a descriptive statement. As a couple, we were intellectually oriented. As is Howard. I saw early that he had a gift for mathematics and tutored him intensively—not remedial tutoring; he was always an excellent student.
Supplementary
tutoring, so that he wouldn’t sink to the level of the public school system—be dragged down to the lowest common denominator.”

“The school wasn’t meeting his needs?”

“Not by a long shot. I’m sure your experience has shown you the entire system’s oriented toward mediocrity. Howard thrived on what I gave him, stayed on the math track. He’s a graduate actuary, passed all ten exams the first time, which is almost unheard of. Youngest man in the state to do so. You should speak to him about Holly, get his point of view. Here, I’ll give you his number. He lives out in the Valley.”

He turned back toward his desk, took a small piece of paper out of a drawer, and scrawled on it.

I put it away.

He said, “Howard’s exceptionally bright.”

“But Holly wasn’t much of a student?”

He shook his head. “When she got C-minuses it was because of teacher charity.”

“What was the problem?”

He hesitated. “I could spin you some yarn about poor motivation, being bored in class, never finding her niche. But the truth is she simply wasn’t very intelligent. An IQ of eighty-seven. Not retarded, but the low end of the normal range.

“When did you have her tested?”

“At age seven. I did it myself.”

“
You
tested her?”

“That’s correct.”

“Using what test?” I said, expecting some sort of quick-and-easy questionnaire lifted from a self-help book.

“The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. It’s the test of choice, isn’t it? The most extensively validated?”

“The Wechsler’s an excellent test, Mr. Burden, but it requires quite a bit of training in order to administer and score it properly.”

“Not to worry,” he said, with sudden cheer. “I trained myself. Read the manual carefully and boned up on a number of related articles in psychology journals. Then I practiced on Howard—he took to it like a duck to water. Scored one forty-nine, top tenth of a percent, I believe.”

“The Wechsler’s not supposed to be sold to laymen. How’d you get hold of it?”

Sly smile. “Not thinking of filing a complaint, are you, Doctor?”

I crossed my legs casually, returned the smile, and shook my head. “You must be pretty resourceful.”

“Actually,” he said, “it was painfully simple. I filled out an order blank at the back of one of the psychology journals, sent in my money, put a Ph.D. after my name, enclosed a card from my business at the time—‘Demographics, Incorporated. Applied Social Research.’ It must have sounded sufficiently psychological to the company, because a week later the test came, parcel post.”

Flaunting his duplicity. But then, why would someone who made his living hawking Tibetan Harmony Bells and personal power pills shy away from a bit of self-serving subterfuge?

“I did a fine job of testing,” he said. “More thorough than any school psychologist would have been. And I took the trouble to retest her twice. At ages nine and eleven. The results were almost identical—eighty-seven and eighty-five. No outstanding deficits or marked strengths, no imbalance between Verbal and Performance scores. Just a general dullness. My theory is that she experienced some sort of intrauterine trauma that affected her central nervous system. Perhaps due to her mother’s advanced age—Betty was thirty-nine when she conceived. In any event, there had to be some kind of brain damage, didn’t there? It might have been worse but for our unique situation.”

“What do you mean?”

“Given
average
heredity, she might very well have turned out truly retarded. With Betty and me as parents, she was given a genetic boost into the Dull Normal range.”

I said, “Do you have her testing profile?”

“No. I threw it all out years ago. What would have been the point?”

“Did you ever consult a specialist about her learning problems?”

“In the beginning I gave the school a chance to come up with something—saw the usual assortment of civil service flunkies. Counselors, special education teachers, whatnot. Holly didn’t fit into any of their classification groups—too smart for Educable Mentally Retarded, too dull for a normal classroom, no discipline or management problems that would have qualified her for Educationally Handicapped. They had conferences—those types love to have conferences. Sat there and talked down to me with their jargon-thought they could hide behind jargon because I didn’t have a degree after my name.”

“Would there be any records of those conferences?”

“No. I demanded they destroy them. I’m in the information business. I know how records can come back to haunt. They tried to protest—some stupid regulation—but I prevailed. Sheer force of personality. They were such a weak-willed bunch, so dull themselves. Endless talk, no action. I realized early on that I was on my own; any meaningful remediation would have to take place at home. So I washed my hands of them. It’s the same way I feel about that policeman Frisk. That’s why I took the initiative to call you. I know you’re different.”

The second negative reference he’d made to the school. I said, “Did you discuss your feelings about the school with Holly?”

He gave me a long stare. Searching. Illuminated by unwelcome insight.

“Doctor, are you trying to say I planted hatred in her mind?”

“I’m trying to get a picture of how she felt about the school.”

“She hated it. She must have. It represented failure to her. All those years of incompetence and insensitivity. How else could she have felt? But she wasn’t about to kill anyone because of that.”

He gave a derisive laugh.

I said, “What kinds of remedial things did you do?”

“Gave her my personal attention—when she’d accept it. Sat down with her every evening after dinner and walked her through her homework. Tried to get her to concentrate, tried to bribe her—what you’d call operant conditioning. That didn’t work, because she really didn’t want anything. Eventually I did get her reading skills and math levels to a point where she could function in the real world—simple instructions and computations, road signs. She wasn’t interested in—or capable of—any higher abstractions.”

“How was her attention span?”

“Just fine for things she was interested in—cleaning and straightening, listening to pop music on her radio and dancing to it when she thought no one was looking. Non
existent
for things she didn’t care about. But isn’t that true of anyone?”

“Dancing,” I said, trying to picture it. “So her physical coordination was okay?”

“Adequate. Which is all anyone needs for the dances they do today.” He flapped his arms and made a grotesque face. “Betty and I used to dance seriously. Long-forgotten baroque and classical terpsichore—gavottes, minuets. Steps that really required virtuosity. We were quite a pair.”

Drifting back, inevitably, to self-congratulation. Feeling as if I needed a thick rope to tug things back to Holly, I said, “Did you ever consider medication—Ritalin or something similar?”

“Not after I read up on the effects of long-term amphetamine usage. Stunted growth. Anorexia. Possible brain damage. The last thing Holly needed was
more
brain damage. Besides, she wasn’t hyperactive—more on the lethargic side, actually. Preferred to sleep late, loll in bed. I’m an early riser.”

“Did she have periods of emotional depression?”

He dismissed that with a wave. “Her mood was fine. She just lacked energy. At first I thought it might be nutritional—something to do with blood sugar or her thyroid. But all her blood tests were normal.”

Blood tests. Half-expecting him to answer that he’d punctured her vein himself, I said, “Did your family doctor have any suggestions when he gave you the results?”

“Never had a family doctor. Never needed one. I took both of them, Howard and Holly, to the Public Health Service for their blood work. For their immunizations too. Told the civil servants there that I suspected some kind of contagious infection. It’s their responsibility to check that kind of thing, so they were forced to do it. I figured I might as well get something back for my tax dollars.”

Genuine glee at dissembling. How much of what he told me about anything could be believed?

“Who managed their childhood diseases? Where did you take them when they had fevers and needed antibiotics?”

“They were very healthy children, rarely ran high fevers. The few times they did, I brought it down with aspirin, fluids—exactly what a doctor would tell me to do. The couple of times they needed penicillin, they got it from the Health Service. Measles passed them by. Chicken pox and mumps I managed according to the books—genuine medical books. The
Physician’s Desk Reference.
I can read instructions as well as any doctor.”

“Self-sufficiency,” I said.

“Exactly. In some quarters, that’s still considered worth-while.”

Trumpeting his achievements had made his Mr. Peepers persona fade completely. He looked belligerent, flushed, somehow bigger, huskier. A bantam cock swelling as he scanned the barnyard for rivals.

Changing the subject, I said, “There’s quite an age difference between Holly and Howard.”

“Eleven years. And yes, she was an unplanned child. But not an
unwanted
one. When Betty learned she was pregnant, she was surprised but happy. And that’s saying a lot, because she wasn’t a healthy woman—bleeding ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but she suffered from problem flatulence, very bad chronic pain. Nevertheless, she carried on like a trooper, nursed Holly for eleven months—exactly the time we’d allotted to Howard. She was an excellent mother, very patient.”

“How was Holly affected by her death?”

“Quite severely, I’d assume.”

“Assume?”

“Assume. With Holly there was no way of knowing how she really felt about anything, because she didn’t talk, didn’t express herself very well.”

“Did she attend the funeral?”

“Yes, she did. I had one of the mortuary attendants watch over her in a room off the chapel during the service and when we went out to the grave. Afterwards I sat down with her and explained what had happened. She stared at me, didn’t say anything, cried just a bit, and then walked away. Out to the lawn. To sit. Spin her fantasies. I let her do it for a while, then took her home. A couple of times I heard her crying at night, but when I went in she stopped and rolled away and refused to discuss it with me.”

“How did you explain to her what had happened?”

“I told her her mother had been very sick. She knew that—she’d seen Betty take to bed. I said she’d gone into the hospital to be treated for her stomachaches but that the doctors had been stupid and made mistakes and they’d killed her with their stupidity and we’d have to go on without her and be strong. That we were still a family and would carry on as a family.”

“Your wife’s death was due to medical malpractice?”

He looked at me as if I were in the “dull normal” range. “The woman had a nonfatal condition, Doctor. She
bled
to death on the operating table, in the presence of a full surgical team.”

“Did you pursue it legally?”

He gave a sharp, mocking laugh. “I talked to a couple of attorneys, but they wouldn’t take the case. Supposedly it wasn’t cut and dried enough, given her prior medical history. The truth was, they had more than their share of whiplashes. They didn’t want to bet their contingency fees on something that required some real research. I suppose I could have found some ambulance chaser to take it on, but at the time I had other things on my mind. Two children to raise, a business to run—I was doing all direct-mailing back then, still building up my lists. Much more labor-intensive than it is today. So I needed all my energy for that.”

“It must have been a difficult time for you.

“Not really. I attacked it systematically, kept everything organized. Howard stayed on the straight-A track.” He stopped. “Still, I suppose the way Holly turned out was partly my fault.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I have an impressive array of intellectual skills and talents but I wasn’t successful in communicating them to her—in getting her going on some sort of goal-oriented program. She persistently shut me out and I allowed it, because I didn’t want to be cruel. So perhaps I was too kind.” He shrugged. “Of course hindsight is always twenty-twenty, isn’t it?”

Luxuriating in bogus confession.

Despite my aversion to snap diagnoses, a diagnostic label kept creeping into my mind:

Narcissistic personality disorder. Pathological egotism.

It fit. Even with the way he’d chosen to make a living.
Beauty and Balance. Access and Excel.
The catalogue was a paean to narcissism. I was willing to bet he’d put his brainchild ahead of his children. Put himself ahead of everyone and everything.

I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be one of his children, and my sympathy for Holly climbed an-other rung.

“So,” he said, “we seem to be doing well. What else can I help you with, Doctor?”