Ruffly Speaking (36 page)

“I keep telling you.” Rita shook her head. “It’s much more complicated than that. The hearing loss alone was not what made her paranoid.”

“Well, it didn’t help,” I said.

“If she’d done anything about it, it wouldn’t have hurt, either,” Rita snapped.

I’d found Rita and Stephanie amazingly unsympathetic about Alice Savery’s hearing loss. The news had come as no surprise at all to Stephanie. “If the only thing the person’s doing about it is denying it, I can always tell,” Stephanie had said. “There’s a certain expression one sees on people’s faces when they’re missing a lot of what’s being said and trying to pretend that they’re getting it. Of course, I have an advantage. I watch people’s faces.” She had paused, cleared her throat, and added, “Also, one tends to assume that other people’s hearing is more or less like one’s own. My starting assumption with Miss Savery was probably rather different from yours.”

Willie greedily eyed the ankles of a passerby, but they belonged to a runner who was too quick for him. Looking almost regretful that Willie had missed an early evening snack, Rita said, “Holly, the point about this woman, Alice Savery, is that everything was part of a pattern of cutting herself off so that she became quite literally alone with her own thoughts. Yes, she had trouble hearing, but, from what I can tell, her attitude was, to a large extent, well, so what? What do other people have to say that’s really worth listening to? So, in part, when she dominated interaction, she was covering up her hearing loss. But, at the same time, she was expressing a certain arrogance that has more to do with character structure than it does with hearing or not hearing. Admittedly, there is a theory that there’s a link between uncorrected hearing loss and paranoid ideation. But what’s often overlooked is that it goes uncorrected because the person doesn’t
care
about what other people have to say, or, quite unconsciously, discovers that not hearing is a handy way to avoid potentially corrective input. The hearing loss and the paranoia sustain each other.”

Moving at Rita’s sore-footed pace, we’d reached Huron, walked up a block, and crossed to the intersection with Sparks Street, which leads to Brattle. Like Highland, Sparks is affluent, verdant, and beautiful. Like Highland, it had also been the site of a murder. A feminist law professor, a very pretty woman, had been walking down Sparks Street early one evening when she’d been stabbed and killed by an assailant who was never caught. Since then, even with my big dogs along, I’d superstitiously avoided Sparks Street. But Rita minces along so slowly that it made sense to take the shortest route to our destination.

“Except... Except, Rita, Alice Savery wasn’t totally cut off, you know. She listened to the radio. She could hear well enough for that. She had a TV. She got
The New York Times.
Her house was filled with books. And a lot of what she said was
true.
Rabies
is
incurable. The tobacco industry
does
have powerful lobby groups. And... Did I tell you this? There really is a tobacco mosaic virus, and it actually
is
spread by—”

“But a carefully selected reality,” Rita said crisply. “And with several gross distortions. Like the insects.”

“Yes, but... Rita, when the AIDS epidemic first started, there really was some concern about that. Some little town in Florida? I forget the details, but it was in all the papers. And it’s true that mosquitos spread heart-worm and malaria and some other diseases. AIDS just isn’t one of them. And about rabies, everyone in England —the entire country—is as paranoid as Alice Savery was. There’s a six-month quarantine on all dogs entering Great Britain, even if they’ve had their rabies shots, and if you sneak one in and get caught, they destroy the dog. It’s ridiculous, because there is absolutely no way that an immunized dog could introduce rabies, but if you point that out, all you hear is this huffy, pompous, ‘Well, there is no rabies in Great Britain.’ It’s their big fear about the tunnel to France, that it’s going to let in rabies. They’re completely paranoid about it.”

“Phobic,” Rita corrected. “Paranoid is what Alice Savery was. Not only did this woman project her fears and impulses and whatever on to the external world, and not only did she latch on to realities that happened to mesh with her inner life, but, once having done so, she proceeded to
elaborate
the elements, to manufacture connections, to hook them up with one another in ways that they just aren’t hooked. The other crucial thing about this system of hers—and this is always true in paranoid people, Holly—is that this was a system in which she herself was the central object. Yes, radon is dangerous, and, yes, so are viruses and cigarette smoke and all the rest, but, in reality, they pose separate and
impersonal
threats. Alice Savery was not, in fact, at the center of anything.”

“What I still can’t get over is... Obviously, I realized that there was something radically wrong with her.”

“So did she. That business about aluminum? There used to be some theory that aluminum caused Alzheimer’s, and what that was about was her sense of her own deterioration.”

“But, Rita, I honestly thought that Morris’s property
had
been stolen from her. She had me convinced that someone, a shady lawyer, I don’t know, but someone had gotten hold of it. Or I thought that maybe her brother owned it and got into a poker game with a card shark and—”

Rita nearly tripped. “
Savery
? Holly, Savery was not—

“I don’t trust people with no first names. Hitler. Mussolini.”

“Adolph. And... Benito, wasn’t it?”

“You see?”

“Well, Savery’s was Alfred, and according to the biography I just finished, he was a perfectly decent person. The poor man died of pancreatic cancer when he was only in his midforties. In fact, I’ve wondered. This is pure speculation, but I’ve wondered if the events surrounding his death weren’t what triggered her paranoia. To all appearances, she was completely devoted to him, but at the same time there must’ve been a certain amount of envy there, too. Savery really was important; he was at the center of things. Alice was peripheral. She went to Radcliffe; she probably started out with as much potential as he did, for all we know. She must’ve felt shortchanged. Then he gets sick. She nurses him. He dies anyway.
Major
loss. And guilt? Normal anger that he’d deserted her. Anger when she discovered her financial position? Anger that he was Savery and she was just Alice? I don’t know.”

“Maybe Alice blamed that on a virus, too,” I said. “Maybe she thought that’s what caused the cancer.”

“Maybe she blamed it on herself. Unconsciously, of course. There’s no way we can know what her feelings were. What we do know is that she had them—everyone does—and that she couldn’t acknowledge them.”

I said, “What Alice Savery really couldn’t acknowledge was her own responsibility. I still can’t believe that she was the one who sold that lot. I mean, she had to sell it. It was either that or sell the whole place, the house, the garden, everything, and move somewhere else. If she wanted to keep living on Highland Street, it was a perfectly sensible thing to do. And one of the amazing things is that she actually went around telling people this story about how it had been stolen, and everyone just thought that what she meant was that it had appreciated. And if you look at what it’s worth today and what she probably got for it, and if you ignore everything else, well, it
was
a steal. You know, Rita, in a sort of simple way, what really killed her was that she honestly didn’t have enough money to keep up that house.”

“Bullshit,” Rita said bluntly. “Well, not total bullshit. But, look, nothing could be more characteristic of paranoid people than this bizarre portioning out of the resources that are available. Alice was existing on cornflakes, and at the same time she was buying all those electronic gadgets, and they couldn’t have been cheap.” I’d been correct in supposing that the ultrasound device used to torment Ruffly had come from a mail order house. I’d just been wrong about what kind. As it turns out, just as dog fancy has its catalogs, so does paranoia. Phobia? Whichever. The police found the catalogs in Alice Savery’s house, and Kevin Dennehy told me about them. The catalogs had sad, misleading names that sounded like brands of over-the-counter sleeping pills and lines of feminine hygiene products:
Rest Assured. Security Plus.
They had been the source of the test kits and monitoring devices I’d seen, and of the emergency escape ladder as well. They’d also supplied Alice Savery with three ultrasound devices, one for each floor of the house. Weirdly enough, some of the protective gadgetry was useless to someone with a major hearing loss and no assistance dog. The front door alarm Ivan had triggered was meant for travelers to hang on the inside knobs of hotel room doors. Alice Savery probably couldn’t have heard it unless she was standing next to it. Besides, she never went anywhere. Instead, she stayed home and watched. Here and there throughout the house were little observation posts, chairs positioned to face windows.

The post in the kitchen was where the police found the most powerful of Alice Savery’s ultrasound devices. The Bark Quell emitted 140-decibel bursts pitched above the range of human hearing. Although the Bark Quell-had an automatic, yap-activated mode, Alice Savery had evidently preferred to operate it manually. My hunch about why she pushed the button herself is that she wasn’t trying to quell barking at all. Why silence a dog she couldn’t hear? I suspect that she was trying to drive Ruffly and especially his viruses away from the open windows of Morris’s house that faced the open windows of her own. It’s possible that Alice imagined that ultrasound could repel not only dogs but their supposed germs, too. Maybe ultrasound really does scare away viruses. Matthew Benson might know. I don’t. The squirming and wiggling of microorganisms doesn’t interest me at all. Why settle for mere pseudopodia—false feet—when you can have real paws?

“She bought those gadgets,” Rita said. “But that’s comparatively trivial. Years ago she could’ve sold that carriage house or fixed it up and rented it. She had plenty of options.”

“That’s not how she felt. Like the carriage house. You know, Rita, if she’d lived to collect the insurance money for that, she wouldn’t have realized at all that what she’d done was tantamount to burning it down herself. I don’t know whether she was responsible, but she didn’t
feel
responsible.”

“You certainly are determined to let her off the hook,” Rita observed.

“Not really. No, I’m not. Alice Savery murdered Morris. She did it in a sneaky way so that she could tell herself that she wasn’t responsible, but she did murder him. And when she made Avon Hill warn the kids not to go into her carriage house to sneak cigarettes, she deliberately lured Ivan there. She set him up. She was the one who poured gas around in there, and when Ivan did what he was
bound
to do, she locked the door and trapped him inside. She opened the valve on Stephanie’s gas grill. No one made her do it, and she knew that Stephanie smoked out on the deck. But if you look at what Alice Savery did, then evading responsibility was the whole point, wasn’t it? If Stephanie didn’t smoke, if Ivan hadn’t—”

“And Morris Lamb?”

“If Morris hadn’t been the way he was, if he hadn’t been Morris, maybe, but... We’ve been over it and over it, but I’d still like to know exactly how she did it. You know, my best guess is that Morris didn’t just go around sort of randomly picking things. Morris was, uh, exuberant, but he wasn’t stupid. For what it’s worth, I think that he stayed strictly with the stuff in the raised bed, and I think that Alice Savery planted things there knowing that they’d at least make him sick. There’s no shortage of ordinary plants that’ll do it. In fact, I’m working on a new column about that, and it’s worse than I remembered. It’s practically enough to make you scared to take your dog outside. Lantana, foxgloves, lupine, aconite, laurel, rhododendrons, flowering tobacco, larkspur, and, of course, delphiniums, and Doug had already planted some fairly weird stuff that is safe—some special kind of marigolds and violas and a whole variety of greens for
mesclun
—so it isn’t as if she’d stuck one big hemlock plant in the middle of a bed of lettuce. The other thing is, even though the plants were in a plastic tunnel, it was still pretty early in the spring, so the plants must’ve been immature and not necessarily all that poisonous, except... except, of course, that she believed Morris had AIDS. I mean, when I heard he died, I stupidly thought he had AIDS, too, and so did everyone else. Of course, that was after the fact. But it’s still no excuse, really. Anyway, I think that Alice watched Morris pick the stuff from the raised bed, and I think that she saw the light stay on in his bathroom—it’s on her side of the house— and I think that she went out and did some selective weeding in his garden. And after that, I think it was like selling the lot next to her house; as soon as she’d done it, she talked herself into believing that she just was not responsible. Her land was stolen; Morris poisoned him-self; she’d never even told Doug that raised beds existed, never planted the idea to begin with. And I am positive that if she’d survived that fall, she’d have put the blame for it all on Rowdy. And on me, too.”

“For the hundredth time, it really was not your fault.”