A Private Sorcery (10 page)

Her feet will not warm. She tucks them under her. The despair shifts, one of those figure-ground illusions where the vase becomes a face, and her eyes well with tears that flow in the darkness as she sees that it is not only he who has lost her, but she who has lost him.

S
HE WAKES THINKING
of Reed. In the shower, it occurs to her that Saul must have had a phone number and address for Reed. Never a snoop (her stepfather, Joe, whose suspicions of Eleanor had extended to Rena as if they were collaborators in a scheme against him, had so routinely searched her drawers and backpack she'd told her mother they should leave him notes tucked between her underwear), she'd not thought to pick the lock on Saul's rolltop desk.

She snaps the lock with a metal nail file. It appalls her how easily it comes to her. Behind the rolltop, she finds scraps of paper with scrawled telephone numbers. The abbreviated pocket version of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
. Saul's address book. Under
M
, Reed's address, no longer on John Street where she'd left the messages last year for him but on East Eighty-Eighth.

She calls her job to say she'll be late, takes the Ninety-Sixth Street crosstown bus to Second Avenue and walks the eight blocks south. The building has a frayed green awning and no doorman. Next to 6E, she
sees Bria's name. Bria Estefan. She rings the bell and waits.

A man in a maintenance shirt enters the lobby with a bucket on wheels and a spaghetti string mop. Rena taps on the glass. He opens the door.

“I'm looking for Bria Estefan.”

“She's gone. Been gone a month, maybe more.”

“Did she leave a forwarding address?”

“You go talk to the super, Rafael. He's in the office downstairs.” Rena takes the stairs to the basement. In the office, Rafael is drinking coffee and reading the
Post
. He peers at her over the top of his paper.

“I'm looking for Bria Estefan. Actually, I'm looking for her boyfriend, Reed Michaelson.”

“You, darlin', and everyone else in this city. She went back to Brazil, someone said.”

“For good?”

“One of the cops who was around here said she'd been deported, but then she paid rent for April. You figure.”

“I'm Reed's sister. There are some papers I need for the family.” Rafael takes a loose cigarette from his pocket and lights up. Clumsily, remembering Ascher when he'd needed things done, she pulls out two twenties from her wallet and lays them on the desk. Rafael exhales a plume of smoke. The twenties disappear under the
Post
.

“The cops took a couple garbage bags of stuff, but you can pick through the rest. Tell the guy cleaning the floor I said to open 6E for you.”

Six E stinks of cigarettes and cat piss. A partially eaten jelly doughnut sits on the kitchen counter, a roach expired on the red center. Long black hairs festoon the bathroom sink. Women's clothes are strewn over the unmade bed. Rena picks up a snakeskin print dress. Victoria's Secret, size 2.

She opens the closets and drawers. Either the police have taken most everything belonging to Reed or he had been only temporarily parked here. Under the bed, she finds a pair of men's running shoes and a set of barbells. In the kitchen cabinet, a can of the loose green tea Reed
drank by the potful when they'd roomed together. There's no desk, no bookshelves, just a pile of fashion magazines and paperbacks, mostly romances in Portuguese it seems from the covers, on a table pushed against the living room wall. Only one book jumps out at her as Reed's: the
Michelin Atlas Routier
.

She carries the atlas to the couch. It's a spiral-bound collection of detailed maps of France chopped into a hundred-some sections, either, she imagines, a souvenir from his last job when he'd worked on Franco-American trading agreements or something collected during his Columbia years when he'd gone through a Francophile period in which he'd revered Godard and slept with the French 101 teaching assistant, a girl with beaded cornrows from Port-au-Prince.

Camping in the Sierras, Reed had shown her how to read a topographical map, how to imagine a landscape from the shadings of brown and green and the density of the switchback squiggles.

The couch reeks of perfume. She puts the
Atlas Routier
in her tote. It's hard to imagine Saul in this room with Reed and Bria, how he found his way here.

She covers her face. The answer is obvious. Through her.

5
Leonard

The morning we're scheduled to be visited by Ms. Sandra Wright, the probation officer doing the presentencing investigation, your mother announces the worst sinus infection she's had in ten years.

Ten years, I think. Not eight? Not twelve? I pull out the legs on her bed tray and set it across her lap.

“After you've eaten, we'll see how you feel.”

Your mother turns her face to the wall, though not before, I notice, stealing a glance at the croissant.

I call Morton, who reassures me that I can do the interview on my own. Although he doesn't come out and say so, his tone suggests that Ms. Wright's visit is a formality, that nothing could incriminate you further. Still, I cannot help feeling it's important, if for no other reason than it's the only thing at this stage I can do.

At three, a taxi stops in front of our house. I cannot recall having ever seen a cab in our neighborhood. A young black woman carrying a raincoat and a briefcase gets out of the back. I wait for her to ring the bell before going to the door.

I take her coat, ask if she had trouble finding the house.

“No. Piece of cake. I don't get out of the city too often doing these things. Unless you count going up to the Bronx.” She smiles. My heart sinks. “Sure is pretty.”

I ask if she'd like some coffee.

“Love it. That afternoon slump.”

I settle Ms. Wright in the living room while I start the coffee and put cookies on a plate. The tray is still upstairs with your mother, so I end up shuttling what seems like a ridiculous number of times back and forth from the kitchen to get everything onto the coffee table.

Ms. Wright eats two cookies and puts three spoons of sugar in her coffee. I cross my fingers and hope this bodes well for you. She takes a clipboard with a stapled form that looks like a medical history from her briefcase. “Well, I suppose we should get going.”

She reads from the form. “The purpose of this interview is to assist the probation department in making its recommendations to the judge for the sentencing of …” She looks at a sheet of paper at her side. “Mr. Dubinovsky.”

“Dubinsky.”

“Sorry about that,” she says sotto voce, as if there is an official exchange between us and then some other parenthetical, more human one. “I'm batting oh-for-eight this week.”

She finishes reading the bureaucratese, then hands me something to sign: paragraph after paragraph of informed consent. I skim the words. Foolishly, I'd imagined that the people going over your case would find you so anomalous, such an interesting case, that everything would be handled delicately. If Morton and the penal officers have found anything curious about a shy, intellectual psychiatrist being held for conspiracy to commit armed robbery, they have given no sign. As for this Ms. Wright, there seems to be nothing new under the sun, life a series of daytime talk shows—transvestite lesbian nuns, men who love women with bad skin, people who believe vegetables have a soul.

She asks me to describe you in my own words, and I have to refrain from a nasty quip about who else's words could I use. Spurred by Ms. Wright's friendly lack of curiosity, I permit myself a touch of florid overstatement. I describe you as the dreamy grandchild of a socialist grandfather, as having grown up with a mother who was bedridden. I lower my voice and point upstairs. A pacifist who refused to fight the boys on
the school bus who would stick their legs out to trip you. How you'd chosen Swarthmore because of its Quaker affiliations, been a student volunteer at a prison where you first became interested in the interface between social disintegration and deviant behavior. I watch Ms. Wright, amazed that she sees no irony in this.

My anxiety ratchets up a notch as I see that Ms. Wright is taking only the most occasional notes on the clipboard. Worried how the judge will piece your story together, I add more and more details, hoping that if I say more, Ms. Wright will have to convey more. I describe your medical school years, how you always selected the rotations in the city hospitals rather than the private suburban ones, how you went into psychiatry thinking it would provide more of a home for a social analysis of illness.

Ms. Wright leans forward, and for a moment my heart leaps as I think it's to ask a question. She takes another cookie.

I tell her how demoralized you felt during your residency by the focus on the biological aspects of psychiatric difficulties and the perfunctory hand-waving toward the social underpinnings. I describe your reasons for taking your first job at a hospital in the Bronx, thinking surely Ms. Wright will admire you for this. You'd come to feel that there was something wrong, intellectually and morally, I tell Ms. Wright, with treating patients who came to your clinic with depressions related to the depressing aspects of their lives as though their fundamentally economic problems were psychiatric disorders. For those patients with what you thought of as real psychiatric problems, you felt even worse—that the best you could do given your enormous caseload was a patch-up job.

She runs her tongue over her teeth as if checking for bits of chocolate.

Afterwards, though, after Ms. Wright puts her clipboard back in her briefcase and we call the cab to return her to the train station and she thanks me for the coffee and cookies, afterwards when I'm shuttling everything back into the kitchen and starting dinner for your mother, I realize that the judge will have no problem piecing my story together
because he'll never hear it. Too much to write, too much even to take notes on. The whole thing will, undoubtedly, be condensed into a paragraph or two, something like
accused has long history of unrealistic expectations and disappointments in vocational sphere
.

W
HEN WE CAME BACK
from your grandfather's funeral in that tenth year of our marriage, your mother took to her bed. It was May and, as I said, I believed her fatigue to be simple grief. In June, I enrolled the two of you in a day camp, thinking that she needed a quiet summer. A bus would come for you before eight and deliver you tired and dirty at five. After dinner, we would climb the stairs and the two of you would visit with your mother until I'd see her pressing her fingers to her temples, when quietly I would suggest that you say your good nights. She'd smile feebly at me and I'd smile back. For the first time, her complaints about me had ceased. Briefly, I felt cheered by this turn of events, but when the headaches escalated from evenings to all day—headaches that sent her to our bedroom by eleven in the morning where she would lie with a cold washcloth covering her forehead—I had to acknowledge that it was not a good sign, that it was as though with her father's death, her whole system of resentment had lost its ballast and she'd collapsed en suite.

Stone did bloodwork. We went to see one of her father's colleagues, who did an EEG and talked with her about stress. Tactfully, he suggested she might see a therapist to discuss this. Trying too hard to be offhand, I mentioned someone she'd once met, but she caught the scent of my growing suspicions, indignant that no one believed her. “No one's saying that you don't really have headaches,” I explained. “Rather, we're wondering if they're brought on by something of a psychological nature.” Your mother looked at me with disdain. She switched from washcloths to an ice pack on top of her head.

By July, your mother was convinced that the headaches were the result of allergies, and we installed an air conditioner in the bedroom so she could keep the windows closed. By fall, she was complaining of dizziness, which she stated was worsened by noise. In November, we
moved our bedroom up to the third floor of the house so she could be away from your after-school horseplay. The dizziness became pain in her back for which no orthopedist could identify the source. Conversation, never abundant, shrank to discussions of her symptoms: how the headache might one day be better but the dizziness worse; how she thought the houseplants were irritating her sinuses. From backaches, we moved to heart palpitations, and from there to nausea. This time not asking, I scheduled an appointment for her with a psychiatrist who specialized in psychosomatics. She went once and then canceled the next three appointments, claiming that the nausea prevented her from leaving her bed.

On the first anniversary of your grandfather's death, I hired Mrs. Smiley. She toured the house: the linen closets your mother had never bothered to put in order and that had further deteriorated this past year as you boys fetched your own sheets and towels, the basement piled with laundry I tried to do in the evenings, the dusty living room, the oven I'd never thought to clean. “I have my pattern,” Mrs. Smiley said. “Mondays I do laundry. Tuesdays I clean bathrooms and the kitchen. Wednesdays I vacuum and dust. Thursdays I shop. Fridays I bake and cook for the weekend. There's a story I watch every day at noon while I eat my lunch. I have a coffee and piece of cake at four. I don't use the telephone. I'll need a car to do the shopping and a shelf to keep my things because I don't work in my street clothes.”

Within a month, the house was spotless and we had all fallen into Mrs. Smiley's routine. Your mother's ailments didn't abate, but they ceased their previous expansion. I was certain this improvement, if you could call it such, was due to Mrs. Smiley, the only person I've ever known your mother to feel intimidated by. If your mother wanted something from Mrs. Smiley, she'd instruct me to convey the message:
Perhaps you could ask Mrs. Smiley to give me a little more orange juice; this sinus condition leaves me so dehydrated. Tell Mrs. Smiley to make more of that applesauce cake. When I'm nauseous, it's the one thing that goes down easily.
As for Mrs. Smiley, she seemed to have a precise instinct as to how much she could push your mother. Slowly, she laid
down her rules. “If she's going to stay in bed,” Mrs. Smiley informed me, “the sheets have to be changed every day. I do beds at ten.” So every day your mother had to move downstairs while Mrs. Smiley tidied our room. A week later, holding at arm's length a soiled dinner plate that had been left on the bedside stand, Mrs. Smiley announced that her pot roast could not be eaten lying down. Obediently, your mother took to joining us for twenty minutes each evening at the table.