The Divorce Papers: A Novel (35 page)

MARIA MATHER MEIKLEJOHN

404 ST. CLOUD STREET
NEW SALEM, NA 06556

June 22, 1999

Dear Daniel–

I’m planning to meet with Chief Pogodinski later in the week. I understand he’ll be talking to you too. He wants to know if we have any enemies, people who might bear us grudges—other than each other, of course. You see, we don’t count. We can’t commit vandalism to our own property. If either of us had done the deed, it would not be considered vandalism but extreme landscaping and renovation. Vandalism is a crime against the property
of others.

What I resent most about your accusation against me is the low opinion you have of my character and capabilities. As if I would do so cowardly, paltry, and ham fisted a deed. If I was feeling destructive, I’d simply have turned on all the faucets, closed the drains, and drowned the fucking house.

There’s no damage like water damage. It’s so easy, so economical, so reliably devastating. And I’d have left a note on the fridge. “I did it. xoxo, M.”

But I didn’t do it, asshole. Someone else doesn’t like you. Better lock your bedroom door and windows.

M.

P.S.Instead of hurling absurd and irresponsible accusations at your wife, you might talk to the neighbors. Someone might have seen something. A truck raging across our front lawn isn’t, after all, a normal St. Cloud Street event; it might have attracted notice.

TRAYNOR, HAND, WYZANSKI

222 CHURCH STREET
NEW SALEM, NARRAGANSETT 06555
(393) 876-5678

MEMORANDUM

Attorney Work Product

I got a call this afternoon from Jim Pogodinski. He has a lead on the vandalism at the Durkheims’. He sent one of his officers around to interview their neighbors this morning; one of them noticed a man on Saturday, first sitting in a pickup across the street and then nosing around the property. He took down the license number. The police are running the plate. They’ll keep us posted.

TRAYNOR, HAND, WYZANSKI

222 CHURCH STREET
NEW SALEM, NARRAGANSETT 06555
(393) 876-5678

MEMORANDUM

Attorney Work Product

The police have gotten to the bottom of the vandalism at the Durkheims’. It’s a sad, sad story, and (needless to say?) our client had nothing to do with it. The culprit is Louis Falk, a fireman in the NSFD and a resident of Emsworth, NA. His daughter, Candace, was a patient of Daniel Durkheim’s. She died four weeks ago, on Memorial Day, at age 6. She had been Durkheim’s patient since she was 2 and first diagnosed with a terrible brain cancer, an atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor (AT/RT). Her prognosis had always been grim, but Durkheim had managed to keep her alive much longer than anyone expected, almost four years. For the last two years, she was undergoing a highly experimental protocol, which Falk’s insurance wouldn’t cover. To pay for the drugs and chemo, he mortgaged his house and maxed out seven credit cards. When she died, he had accumulated debts of over $300,000. He had said nothing about this to Durkheim, only that he could cover the costs and that everything possible should be done for his daughter. Two weeks ago the bank foreclosed on his house. When the police came to question him, he met them on the porch and said, “I did it.” He hasn’t said anything since. His wife is beside herself. They have two other children and nowhere to live. Durkheim feels dreadful, not having known anything about the Falks’ finances. He’s hired a lawyer (not from K&B, but a proper bankruptcy attorney, someone from the Booker firm) to help the Falks sort out their finances and prevent foreclosure. He’s asked the police not to file charges against Falk, on the grounds of Falk’s severe mental distress.

Pogodinski said he couldn’t let Falk go scot-free but would work it out so that he’d only be charged with misdemeanor vandalism. (He told Durkheim that because he—Durkheim—had made such a huge fuss,
thinking it was his wife, “the whole damn police force knew about it and expected something to be done.”) Pogo’s also offered to work with Durkheim to see that Falk doesn’t lose his job. (He’s already been in touch with the fire chief and the head of the firefighters’ union; they’re working on a medical leave.) They’re both trying to keep the story out of the
Courier
. Durkheim may have to ask his wife to talk to the editor about it. (Peter Maple is her cousin.) Pogo said he suggested to Durk-heim that he apologize to her. I haven’t said anything to 3M about this; I’m waiting to see if D2 does it.

Falk used his own pickup to tear up the Durkheims’ grounds; the Hummer was pure fantasy by the reporter writing for the Police Blotter.

THE WHITE HART

Shipton-under-Wychwood

28 June 1999

My darling Sophie,

I got your loving, deranged letter and felt it called for a letter in return, loving but not deranged, more fact-based, less volatile. I have no desire, no interest at all, in dying before my biblical allotment, and with luck and, no doubt, overzealous medical intervention, I shall live as long as the Ancient Ps, who now drink gin at breakfast as well as lunch and dinner and swear it is the elixir of life. It’s easier all around, I must say. No chance of either of them remembering anything said.

I am not simply watching and waiting. The proper term is “active surveillance”; I will have annual checkups and PSA tests and, if necessary, biopsies. I consulted a very smart diagnosing urologist, my man Maturin, who then sent me to a barbershop quartet of specialists, all eminent but with the personality disorders we would expect to find in what Maman calls dick doctors. They were in order of descending pathology: Sweeney Todd (bass/classic butchery), Dr. Who (baritone/robotic laparoscopy), Johnny Appleseed (countertenor/radiation pellets), and
Jack Frost (tenor/cryosurgery). Except for the urologist, they all hawked their own procedures, warning me as violently against their colleagues’ quackery as against W&W. One of them actually said to me when I refused to sign up right then and there, “Well, it’s your funeral.” Next up: Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush. In fact, by every indicator—PSA, stage, Gleason score—I am an excellent candidate for waiting. Now, please calm down.

If you’ll have me, I’d like to come up to New Salem in the fall for a visit. I’d like to meet your gang and watch you at work. Hearsay, Your Honor. What do you say? I’m working well. Nothing like a bit o’ cancer to set right one’s priorities (at least briefly; no doubt, I’ll backslide—and downslide—as soon as I get comfortable with encroaching mortality).

It will be all right, Sophie girl. All my love,

Papa

P.S. I found this old stationery in my desk. Do you remember the White Hart? We stayed there in 1978, I think it was, when Christopher and Bridget Hill retired from Balliol. You and Luc spoke French the whole time and pretended not to understand English. You insisted that Maman translate, so of course she mistranslated wildly, enraging you and cracking you up. It was one of the too-good times, do you remember?

TRAYNOR, HAND, WYZANSKI

222 CHURCH STREET
NEW SALEM, NARRAGANSETT 06555
(393) 876-5678

MEMORANDUM

Attorney Work Product

A meeting has been scheduled with Ms. Meiklejohn, Dr. Durkheim, Kahn, and me to talk settlement. There’s been a slight rapprochement over the Falk crisis. Last Friday, unsolicited, 3M did an intervention with her cousin at the
Courier
and managed to keep the paper from publishing anything about Falk. Dr. Durkheim did not apologize to his wife for his accusation or thank her for making the call. Instead, he called Maple to express admiration for his “editorial judgment and leadership.” Maple, who reported all to 3M, would have none of it. He told him he had no interest in writing an article which would expose Mather Med to “general obloquy” (his words) and there was no way of writing the article without discussing the cost of the child’s treatment and the Children’s Cancer Center’s complete indifference to the family’s financial plight. “We all know that medical expenses are the second-most common grounds for bankruptcy in this state,” he said. “I didn’t expect that kind of ruthless insensitivity on the part of this community’s hospital. Down the line, we may look at the larger issue and then write a story about the very sick children whose health insurance doesn’t cover their diseases, but we will not write about Falk’s vandalism, now or later. That’s not the crime here.” Durkheim sputtered out a thank-you and hung up. Later that evening, he suggested the four-way meeting to his wife as a way to get things moving.

Setting up a time was almost impossible. Kahn doesn’t keep his own calendar, but he doesn’t allow his secretary to book anything without first consulting him. After two days of back-and-forth, I threw up my hands and told 3M that she’d have to arrange things. I gave her the times I had available. I said we would meet in their offices. (Joe taught me always to offer to go to them. It makes us look obliging, even deferential. But that is not the
case. Having it in his office allows us to break it off and walk out. Which I suspect will be the outcome. The Durkheims are not yet ready to deal; they still want to fight.)

More to the point, 3M called her husband last night on his inside line at home and told him if he wanted the meeting, he’d have to set it up, since Kahn was being a first-class asshole (her word). This morning at 9:06, Kahn’s secretary called to say we could meet July 7, 4 p.m., in their offices. 3M says her husband gets up at 5:45 and makes his business calls at 7, leaving terse, acerbic messages when the sluggards aren’t there to answer. Do you want to attend? I assume not, but then you might not trust me to behave myself in the same room with Kahn. Do I have to shake his hand? My plan is to reiterate the offer I sent them. It’s their turn for the counter-counter. Do you agree?

Drama

Dear Sophie—

I want to apologize to you for making a scene in Kahn’s office. (I don’t want to apologize to anyone else; I needed to get a few things off my chest, and I find I love embarrassing Daniel. The end of the white-glove wife.) I also want to thank you for standing up for me. Kahn is a swine, there’s no other word for him. Do you know Becky Danton, formerly Becky Peele? Felix Someone in your firm represented her, and Kahn represented her husband, Jason Peele, ex-chair of Narragansett Industries, in their divorce. How’s that for fearful symmetry. Maybe you read the file? I recommend it. It is unbelievable, except, of course, it isn’t, because there it all is, in black and white, in our very own Tyler County Court House. In Becky’s case, Kahn ordered DNA tests for their three children, ages 11, 6, and 2, to make sure they were her husband’s. She told me all about Kahn over dinner last Friday. Our daughters are in the same class at Peabody. We’d talked a few times in the parking lot, she was very kind when she heard that D and I had separated, but she called me up last week and said we should get together; she might be able to provide useful information. She’d heard from a friend at the hospital that Daniel had hired Kahn. She’s filed charges against him, against Kahn, with the state bar, and they’re doing an investigation. (There’s an NA law about the assumption of paternity within marriage that he apparently violated by ordering DNA tests for the children when Jason Peele hadn’t claimed adultery.) I don’t know if you caught that reference in my tirade, but Kahn plainly did. I don’t know that Daniel knows he is up on ethics charges. (My father did a hostile takeover of NI two years ago and ousted Peele. Peele had a golden parachute, which my father refused to pay. They’re still in litigation; if my father has his way, which I expect will happen, Peele will die in chancery. Becky said to kiss my father on both cheeks for her.)

My analyst is always telling me to be “awake at the moment.” Well, I was awake this afternoon. I said everything I wanted to say, everything I needed to say, even everything I could have hoped to say. Even now, in repose, I can’t think of anything I’d want to have done or said differently, though if I had had a fork at hand, I might have plunged it into Daniel’s thigh or Kahn’s throat. But that would have been a mistake; that would have been going too far.

Now I suppose we must get down to business, get “serious,” as you said to them.

My cousin wants to do the story on the sick children; he just doesn’t have the staff now to do it. I like knowing that; it’s like money in the bank.

Best,
Mia