Gaits of Heaven (26 page)

“Neither had Eumie,” I said. “So, she made a fatal mistake. She teased you.”

“Like she did me,” Monty said. “She taunted you, didn’t she? She threatened to tell everyone. She threatened to tell Wyeth what a jerk his father was. Eumie did that. She did it to me.”

“You’re not a jerk,” Caprice said.

“I’m a liar,” Monty said.

“You’re not lying now,” Rita told him. “And your daughter loves you.”

“Dylan,” said Quinn Youngman. “The themes, the images, the raw sense of being where you belong!”

“No one is going gentle into anything,” said Dr. Needleman.

“He means
Bob
Dylan,” said Peter York, “not Dylan Thomas.”

“The poet and prophet,” said Quinn. “You can’t imagine what he meant to all of us. You know, Ted, it might help you to listen to Dylan. Being where you belong. He gave voice to—”

“Cut the bullshit,” said Wyeth.

“You don’t understand what he meant to us,” Quinn said.

“Liar,” said Wyeth.

I, of course, had read the notes taken by Quinn’s therapist that were on the disc Wyeth had stolen and then left in his computer. I, however, considered the information confidential.

“Ted, you acted in self-defense,” I said. “When you discovered being Jewish, you found yourself. Eumie threatened to kill your identity. She threatened to kill you.” I thought of Phyllis’s Monty and of what she’d said about him. Once Ted defined himself as Jewish, he knew who he was.

Ted was sobbing. “She said I was a goy,” he managed to say. “Me! That’s what she said.
Oy vey!
”

Kevin Dennehy stepped forward. He picked up Ted’s crutches in one hand. With the other, he helped Ted to his feet. With no protest, Ted went with him. On his way out, Ted asked whether he could call someone.

“A lawyer,” Kevin said.

“No,” said Ted. “A rabbi.”

I like a happy ending. The ending to this story is happier
than I might have imagined and certainly happier than I feared when Kevin Dennehy took Ted Green into custody and Ted made his ridiculous demand for a rabbi. It’s clear to me that I underestimated Kevin, whose network in Cambridge rivaled my network in dogs and who was thus able immediately to summon the kind of psychologically minded rabbi Ted needed. The rabbi somehow succeeded in getting Ted to accept that he’d been born gentile. I recently had e-mail from Ted on that very topic. He said that he’d at first found the full realization quite traumatic. After that, he’d hurled himself into the study of Judaism. With no encouragement from the rabbi, he intended to convert. As to his legal situation, he has a good criminal lawyer, Oona Sundquist, as it happens, and the evidence against him isn’t all that strong. Among other things, it turns out that Vee Foote had been overprescribing for both Ted and Eumie. Their other physicians had been irresponsible in failing to coordinate with one another. As I understand it, Ted’s defense is going to rest on the contention that if Eumie hadn’t been loaded with prescription drugs to begin with, then the overdose that killed her wouldn’t have been a fatal one at all. I don’t buy the argument, but I’m no lawyer, so what do I know? If the jury shares my view, justice will be served, I think, and not only with regard to Eumie’s death. That business about Ted’s mother having died during spring break in his senior year of college? About the former Ms. O’Flaherty having conveniently perished just in time to miss his graduation? Just how did she die, anyway?

Speaking of lawyers, including the disbarred, Anita Fairley recovered from the hypomanic episode that was induced by an antidepressant prescribed by Vee Foote. Anita does not confide in me, but Rita heard that the Fiend was threatening to sue Dr. Foote for putting her on an SSRI known to pose a risk of hypomania and failing to monitor her condition; and that Dr. Foote was insisting that instead of taking the drug as prescribed, Anita had taken twice the correct amount. Furthermore, Anita’s rapid and extreme reaction had been very rare. For what it’s worth, I believe Dr. Foote.

Although Rita says that the Brainard-Green family meeting was the worst effort she has ever made at a therapeutic intervention, it had one outcome that even she admits is worthwhile. In their meeting in the kitchen, the physicians were surprised and appalled to discover the quantities and varieties of psychoactive drugs they were collectively prescribing for the Brainard-Greens. Furthermore, although Rita maintains that Quinn Youngman did not make himself obnoxious, the psychopharmacologist’s superior knowledge evidently made the other doctors aware of the extent of their own ignorance. They responded by hiring Quinn for a series of teaching sessions to be followed by group supervision.

Rita is still dating Quinn Youngman, who, she informs me, confided to her that he had been making a distorted presentation of self and now wanted to establish a genuine relationship with her. Far from devoting his youth to sex, drugs, radical politics, and Bob Dylan, he’d conformed to the expectations of his conservative family, at least until he’d discovered science. After that, he’d concentrated on getting into medical school and then on graduating at the top of his class. Rita reinterpreted his confession. In her view, he had a truly radical past in the sense that beneath the conformist self imposed on him by his parents, there existed a rebellious part of himself even in his adolescent years. Thus he hadn’t really lied to her; rather, he’d liberated himself from a false persona.

Adolescence. Oh my. Wyeth. With his father in jail, one source of money was cut off. Then the foundation that had been funding Johanna’s research on feminist linguistics failed to renew her grant. These misfortunes had unexpected consequences. First, Johanna lucked into a position with the national office of a chain of day spas specializing in facials, laser treatments, and the like. She plans advertising campaigns, writes brochures, and maintains Web sites. Her original field was feminist linguistics, women and words, so the departure is less radical than it might at first seem. Second, Johanna’s brother, someone I’d never heard of before, took an interest in Wyeth and even accompanied Wyeth to a few sessions with Peter York. As Rita explained to me, in many matrilineal societies, the mother’s brother plays a powerful role in a child’s life. Anyway, this mother’s brother, who lives in Cambridge, almost forcibly removed Wyeth from Cambridge for a month and took him on a backpacking trip in the Sierras. The idea, I guess, was to make a man of Wyeth, to give him a sort of WASP bar mitzvah. I hope the ritual works.

About Caprice and her father, Monty, I have nothing but good news. With the secrecy about his Internet porn addiction dispelled, they are spending a lot of time together. They cemented their new bond by going to CHIRP for two weeks. Its former director was fired during a scandal about kickbacks, and Rita says that the new one is uncorrupt and excellent. Monty continues to participate in a support group for people with his addiction, and Caprice attends meetings of Overeaters Anonymous as dutifully and fervently as I go to dog training. She is losing weight. As part of her new approach to diet and exercise, she still walks Lady. Also, she read and claimed to enjoy
No More Fat Dogs
, which she kindly credits with helping her to follow the principles of building muscle while decreasing calories. I can see the book’s influence: she certainly does eat an awful lot of green beans. She continues to see Missy Zinn, who, by the way, is seeing Peter York in the romantic rather than the therapeutic sense of the word.

Barbara and George have gone into couples therapy with Frank Farmer, whose broken leg is healing well. His dogs are as naughty as ever, but they’re still winning. Dolfo now lives with Barbara, George, and Portia. He is housebroken. Barbara is taking him to obedience classes and feels confident that he will pass his Canine Good Citizenship test within a few months. As planned, Barbara and George volunteer with an urban wildlife program. George is very enthusiastic about the work he is doing there. In fact, he and Steve are doing a project together. It’s about Cambridge black squirrels.

I still listen to Eumie’s gift now and then, but it has done its work. Rowdy and I went to a rally event. It wasn’t an official trial. So what? Rowdy was wonderful. My heart was pounding for the first minute or so on the course, but then I got lost in my dog, and I had fun. Indeed, everyone is benefitting from therapy of one kind or another. Rita isn’t in therapy with Frank Farmer, but he is supervising her. Dr. Foote is reputed to be consulting a hypnotherapist about her dog phobia. According to Rita, Missy Zinn is in treatment with India Cohen, the social worker who accompanied Wyeth to the meeting. One evening when Rita and I were going to have dinner out together, I was supposed to meet her at her office. I arrived early. Rita’s door opened, and out walked her last patient of the day. She was Oona Sundquist, formerly George McBane’s lawyer, now Ted Green’s. In my world, dogs are never left out. Lady is seeing, in the therapeutic sense, the Reiki healer and the massage therapist I met at Ted Green’s. Both of them treat dogs as well as people. Lady adores them, and her anxiety seems to be decreasing.

I do have some final dog news that was passed on to me by Barbara Leibowitz, who found it on the Web. Dolfo’s breeder is being sued by irate puppy buyers because she misled them into believing that they were paying high prices for golden Aussie huskapoos, whereas her breeding stock actually consisted of mixed-breeds she had adopted from shelters that lacked the funds to spay and neuter animals before placing them for adoption. She has repeatedly inbred her stock, so her lines do have a certain consistency, but her puppies were not precisely what she said they were.

Which of us is?