Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (86 page)

“Stick told me Kenny committed suicide, but not Andy or the other nerds, as you call them.”

“They’re okay. I didn’t mean anything. You know, they say,” he dropped his already low voice to a whisper, “that’s why Centaur’s so late. Gene destroyed the prototype when he flipped. We had to start from scratch.”

“What are you boys whispering about?” Halley called, approaching us with a platter of watermelon and cantaloupe.

“You, of course,” I said. “We were wondering why someone so glamorous and intelligent wants to work in a nerdy business like computers.”

“Nerdy business?” Jack repeated with a nervous laugh.

“It’s simple,” Halley said, picking up a piece of cantaloupe with her free hand. “Don’t tell my mother I used my fingers.” She popped the square into her mouth and chewed. Jack and I watched solemnly while she consumed it. “Excuse me,” she mumbled with a full mouth. She swallowed. “Dad’s the only person who’d hire me. It’s shameless nepotism.” She offered the platter to me. “The cantaloupe’s good.”

Jack cleared his throat. “Now, that’s not true, Hal. Don’t give the doctor a wrong impression.” He edged in front of me and used his fork to slide several pieces of watermelon onto his plate. “She had a terrific job at Time-Warner,” he told me. He said to Halley, “And I happen to know it was for double what we pay you.” Back to me. “She’s brought us tons of contacts. We switched agencies ’cause of Hal. Wales & Simpson has been great.” He commented to her, “I think the campaign for Centaur looks fantastic. You’re doing great, Hal.”

“I guess that’s why,” she said to me. “I work here for all the good feedback. But you’re neglecting me, Doctor. Dad brings you on board to study us and I haven’t seen you at all. Aren’t I worth studying?”

“Please, I beg you, call me Rafe.”

“Well, okay, if you’re going to beg me. I haven’t seen you at all, Rafe.”

“That’s right,” Jack moved next to her, bumping her slightly. “We feel neglected,” he said.

“You should be glad,” I answered. “If I show my face in your office, you’re in trouble.” For a moment, they took this hard, mouths open, stupefied. “I’m kidding.” I laughed. Jack tried a smile. Only a corner of his lips cooperated. Halley, however, really did smile appreciatively. “Seriously,” I said. “Stick’s just being nice to me. I’m doing research on the psychodynamics of …” I slapped Jack on the shoulder, rather hard. “Nerds. I’m a child psychologist and those are basically kids down there in Geek Heaven. It’s really got nothing to do with the business. Your father’s being most cooperative.”

“I love my father,” Halley said. “But he’s no Mother Teresa. If he put you down there, he expects to get something out of it.”

“Hal’s right.” Jack was earnest and also bothered by how to dispose of his watermelon pits. He modestly turned his head to spit them into his right hand, but was reluctant to drop them on his plate. He clutched them in his fist. “Stick told me you’re doing wonders for their morale. He said you’ve calmed things down a lot. Efficiency’s way up.”

That was a complete fiction. I had been there for a month. There was no progress on Centaur; the main board continued to slow down when communicating with peripherals. It’s true I had become chummy with the machine makers. I had gathered the basic material of their lives, established trust, and begun some reforms of their work environment. So far, there was no effect. They continued to shriek and pout at each other. Andy’s exercise of his authority was halfhearted; he tended to deal with everything on his own and that wasted resources. At least half of the team was busy with concepts that Andy had privately decided to abandon. “Well,” I said, “efficiency is up and Centaur’s doing great, but I don’t think I had much to do with it.” I indicated my plate’s gnawed cob, an untouched hill of potato salad, and a smear of ketchup—the last, all that remained of a hamburger. “Excuse me, I’m going for seconds.”

In fact, I left my plate near the barbecue and walked into the glassed-in porch, aiming for Mary Catharine, who was at the bar, refreshing someone’s drink and making another for herself. “This is a lovely house,” I said to her back as she rattled ice cubes.

“Thank you,” she said. “Do you need another drink?”

“No, I’m fine. Are there four bedrooms?” I asked.

“Three and a study. Want a tour?”

“Love it,” I said softly and gently touched her arm.

She peered at me through woozy eyes, confused for a moment. I smiled at her comfortingly. She shook her head as if to clear it, stepped back and attempted a perky smile that came out slightly crooked. “Let’s do it.” She left the drink she was making for a guest on the bar, took her own, and walked us into a formal dining room.

“When did you move here?” I asked.

Mary Catharine explained what I already knew, about Stick’s move from Flashworks in Massachusetts to Minotaur in Westchester. The furniture looked coordinated, as if bought in a single spree, probably by a decorator. She confirmed my assumption while we climbed to the second floor. “I threw out everything five years ago and started fresh,” she said.

That would have been around the time of the death of their second born, Michael. The rooms were tasteful but impersonal, color drained from the objects, beige or black furniture, white drapes, a few books, and abstract paintings that appeared to have been selected to fit the wall space and not intrude on the eye. There were no personal things until we reached the master bedroom. On the right side of the bed, near the wall, was a long built-in dresser for her clothes, its surface covered by photos in silver frames. A similar dresser on the other side of the room for Stick was free of objects. “My family,” she explained, when I bent over to inspect the people in the pictures. I asked after each of them. She interrupted twice to say, “This has gotta be boring,” but was easily encouraged to continue.

“They remind me of my father’s family,” I said about the faded pictures of her grandparents and their siblings when they were young: dressed up in their Sunday best, the ladies in big hats, men standing stiff, eyes wary, mouths shut tight. Mary Catharine told me their stories, especially proud of one great-aunt, the family black sheep. Great-Aunt Gina had walked out on her husband and three sons to live out west with a strange woman. Their ultimate fate was unknown. “Mama never admitted she was a lesbian. She’d say they were radicals. She said this woman turned Aunt Gina into an anarchist, a bomb-throwing anarchist. I asked her what this other woman did. You know, like how they met and stuff. Who were they throwing bombs at? I expected to hear something about Sacco and Vanzetti. Mama said, ‘She was the local librarian.’” Mary Catharine flopped onto the king-size bed and laughed. Her eyes watered. She took a gulp of her drink. The glass was nearly empty. “You know those wild librarians. Always throwing bombs and corrupting the local mothers. Finally, one day, when I was all grown up, she was visiting me … I think.” She took another gulp. “Yeah, that’s right. Mama was a guest in my own house. I said to her, ‘Mama, Aunt Gina was a dyke.’ You know what? She slapped me. I couldn’t believe it. I was a mother myself. She slapped me like I was a kid. I expected—” she belched loudly. She didn’t excuse herself; indeed, she didn’t seem aware of her eruption. She sipped the last of her drink and continued. “I was waiting for her to bring out a bar of soap.”

“Your mother used to wash your mouth out with soap?”

“Oh, yeah. All the Italian mothers did. Especially if you cursed Jesus. You’d get half a bar of soap for that. Enough to do the laundry for a week. I was a bad girl. I was a lot of trouble.” She tried her drink again; only ice was left.

“Who’s this?” I lifted a small framed photograph of a ten-year-old boy in a blue blazer, a white shirt, and a red tie. There were others, with an older Michael, that I could have chosen, but they weren’t solo portraits.

Mary Catharine smiled at the picture and gestured for it with her free hand. I brought it over, sitting next to her on the bed. She looked wistful. “My son, Michael. When he was little.”

“Is he married?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He’s dead,” she said without a quaver.

“I’m sorry. When did that happen?”

“Stupid,” she said quietly to herself.

“Excuse me?”

“Nineteen eighty-six. In Aspen. He died skiing …” She tried once again to drink from her glass. She frowned at its emptiness: there was nothing left to wash out her mouth. “Avalanche,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

“Stick never brings it up. I tell him. It’s embarrassing for people to just, you know …” She waved at the photo.

“Put their foot in their mouths?”

“Well, that’s the thing. It’s not their fault, they don’t know. Everybody asks those kind of, you know, chitchat questions—’How many children do you have?’” She laughed bitterly. “What do you say? I had two. Now I’m down to one. Half of one. Halley used to be my best girl, but you know what happens once they have hormones.” She belched again. This time she noticed. “Jesus. I’m sorry. It’s those burgers, they give me gas. I tell Stick, you know, bring these things up ahead of time, so people don’t feel they hurt your feelings. But you know what? I hate that too. Everybody walking on
egg
shells. Nothing works.” She nodded at the window. “All those men and their … what do you call them? Wives!” She laughed. “That’s right, wives. They … I don’t know. They never talk about anything. You know? Hours and hours and hours, chitchat, this and that, but later you think, what did anybody say? I swear to God, I don’t know the first thing about these people. In my old neighborhood, you knew everything. Or a lot anyway. We didn’t know about lesbians though,” she said and laughed. She stood up with a groan.

I rose, moving ahead of her to be in front of the dresser. Michael’s school picture hovered between us. Very quietly, but insistently, I asked, “Why was it stupid?”

“What?” She looked up at me, eyes unfocused.

I nodded at the boy in the blazer. “You said it was stupid. You mean, how he died?”

She nodded and swallowed hard. “He’d been warned. He knew it was dangerous. You weren’t supposed to ski that trail, that slope … I don’t know what you call it. I don’t ski. I never did. It’s Stick’s thing.” She returned the photo to the dresser. She ran a finger across the top of the frame and backed off, squinting at the window. “He knew he wasn’t supposed to.”

I waited for her to add more. She continued to squint out the window. There was another belch. She suppressed this one; only her shoulders heaved, the sound muffled. “We’d better go back to the party,” she said.

As we moved to the door, I commented, “It was something Stick had done? Skiing in an avalanche zone?”

She nodded, hardly interested in my inquiry and not at all concerned about the intimacy. “Stupid,” she commented and then asked brightly, “You want another drink?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Smart cookie,” she commented.

“Did Michael always try to keep up with his father?” I asked as we descended the stairs.

“Of course. They both do. But Halley’s a girl, so it’s different. It was hard on Stick. He was really close to Mikey. Mikey was his little twin.” We reached the bottom of the stairs and silently walked through the living room, the dining room and onto the glassed-in porch. When she arrived at the bar, she turned to me with a triumphant smile, “Good shrink stuff, huh?”

“Good shrink stuff?” I repeated quizzically.

She laughed at me. “Gin and tonic?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“You see, I’m a good host. I give my guests everything they want,” she commented, turning her back on me and reaching into the ice bucket.

“No, you didn’t,” I said.

She paused, a hand full of cubes. For a moment, I wasn’t sure she was going to acknowledge my comment. She dropped the ice, leaned on the bar, and twisted to look at me. “What did you say?”

“You didn’t tell me what I want to know.”

“What do you want to know?” she said. For the first time the words were slurred.

“Just how hard did he push?”

“Who?” Her eyes closed halfway.

“Stick. How hard did he push? How hard did Michael have to work for Stick to respect him?”

She shut her eyes and seemed to taste something, her lips moving. She took in a lot of air, opened her eyes wide and sighed. “Stick went down it the day before.”

“He skied the dangerous slope the day before?”

“Yep. You want to let me make you this drink?”

“I don’t want the drink.”

“I do.” She faced the bar and reached for the gin. “Yeah, he tried to
get
Mikey to go with him. Mikey said he didn’t want to. So Stick went on his own. Afterwards, he bugged Mikey, telling him he was too cautious. All night Stick bragged about the virgin snow. The fucking virgin snow. ‘Should’ve been out there,’ he kept saying.”

“You were there?”

“Sure. Halley was there, too. It was a family trip.” Her drink was fixed. She sipped it and turned to me.

“And Halley teased him also, of course,” I commented. “Big sister and all.”

Mary Catharine waved her hand dismissively, swallowing hard. “She didn’t mean anything. Mikey didn’t care what she said. Yep,” she sipped again. “All night we all sat around the condo listening to Stick talk about pushing the limit or testing the envelope … I can’t remember the goddamn cliché.”

“So he went to prove himself to his father?”

“It’s not Stick’s fault. Mikey knew better. He wasn’t a baby. I told him, ‘Don’t let your father get your goat.’ I was drinking hot toddies. That’s a wicked drink. Gives you a bitch of a hangover. In the morning Mikey was gone.” She pointed toward the patio doors. “I’m going back to the chitchat. You coming?”

“Sure,” I said, walking with her.

“So what do you think?” she asked as the sun shone directly on our faces and the charcoal smoke filled our nostrils. Stick was about three feet to our right, bent over the grill to turn a second round of burgers. “You’re an expert,” she raised her voice a little. “You think maybe I’m a lesbian like my Aunt Gina?” Stick straightened, stepped back from the barbecue, and stared at us. The spatula was poised in midair, a greasy sword. “Just kidding, honey,” she said and laughed. She called to one of the guests, “Jeff, I forgot your drink! Wait there. Don’t move.” She returned to the glassed-in porch.