by Susan Conant
“The cat,” said Leah. “She scratches.”
“She doesn’t scratch me,” said Steve. “India, Lady, and Sammy are good with her individually, but not all three dogs together.”
“It’s Rowdy and Kimi you really have to watch out for,” I said. “They weren’t raised with cats, and they’re predatory. But I’m working on it.” Steve and Leah both laughed. “I am! My great strength as a dog trainer is persistence. We are making progress.”
“And then there’s Pink Piggy,” Leah said. “We forgot him.”
All color drained from Caprice’s face. “You—”
In unison, Steve, Leah, and I assured her that our menagerie did not extend to a Vietnamese potbellied pig.
“Pink Piggy is Sammy’s favorite toy,” Leah explained. “Pink Piggy has a squeaker, so Rowdy and Kimi can’t play with him because they’d tear him up and probably eat the squeaker. Sammy kills the squeakers, but they’re replaceable. The point is, though, that Sammy loves Pink Piggy, and we’re afraid that Sammy might defend him from the other dogs. Any of the other dogs. Except Lady. She’d never steal anything from anyone.”
For some reason, Caprice was smiling. “I can’t even tell all the dogs apart,” she admitted. “India is the German shepherd, and Lady is the pointer, and the other three are malamutes.”
“So,” said Steve, “you’re starting to be able to tell them apart.”
“You know Kimi,” Leah said. “You already knew her from school.”
And to my amazement, Caprice gave an impish smile and said, “Sure. That makes it easy. Kimi’s the one with the Harvard accent.”
We all laughed. If Caprice was joking about dogs, she was fitting in around here. Also, I have to admit I saw her in a new way. Before, she’d been an object of pity: a young woman whose face was distorted by obesity, a needy daughter whose mother had just died an unnatural death, the victim of her stepbrother’s verbal abuse, and so on. All of a sudden, she was someone with a sharp wit. Furthermore, the little remark she’d made hadn’t been about her obesity and hadn’t been at her own expense; she hadn’t played the role of fat clown. Anyway, the atmosphere abruptly loosened. Instead of issuing stilted, if genuine, assurances to Caprice that there was no need for her to return to Ted’s house, we talked about summer plans. Steve later told me that he’d made the same naive assumption I had, namely, that Caprice was going to attend Harvard Summer School, had a job lined up, or was volunteering somewhere. Her only plan, however, was to see her therapist.
“All of us were going to go to Wellfleet in August,” she said. “Everyone’s therapist is away then, anyway.”
“Rita says that they all go to Wellfleet,” I commented. “Rita has our third-floor apartment. She’s a psychologist. You’ll meet her. Anyway, she prides herself in not always going to Wellfleet. Every so often, she goes somewhere else.”
Caprice smiled. “Truro. It’s the next town. But I’m not going with Ted and Wyeth. I don’t know what they’ll do. They’re supposed to go to Russia in July. It’s sort of a school trip.”
I told myself that I’d seen Wyeth at his worst and that he must have redeeming qualities. Even so, it was difficult to imagine him reading Tolstoy and touring the Kremlin.
“That must be some school,” said Steve, who’d had paying jobs practically since he’d taken his first steps.
“Avon Hill likes parents to take students to the places they’re learning about. Eumie and I went to Greece the summer before last.” Caprice spoke offhandedly, as if she were mentioning an outing to Salem or Plymouth Rock. “It makes everything real when you’ve actually seen the Parthenon and Delphi and so forth instead of just reading about them. My father was supposed to take me, but he couldn’t. He had an important meeting.”
“Is your father a therapist, too?” Steve asked.
Her eyes lit up. “He’s a consultant. He’s mainly in New York, but he travels. He’s here pretty often.”
I have never been able to figure out precisely what consultants do. Obviously, they consult. But about what? And how do they do it? I always imagine them strolling authoritatively past Dilbert-style cubicles or rows of machinery while making grand pronouncements. The only thing I know for sure about consultants is that they get paid a lot. It sometimes occurs to me when I’m writing my hundredth article about pet-stain removal or flea control that instead of making grand pronouncements on those topics (Use enzyme products! Or, in the case of fleas, Infestation is easier to prevent than it is to cure!), I, too, could meander through high-tech businesses or low-tech factories while exclaiming, What this organization needs is an incentive plan! Or possibly, Responsive leadership is the key to productivity! I have only the vaguest idea of what an incentive plan is, and for all I know, leadership is totally unrelated to productivity, but I’ve never been convinced that consultants know more than I do. In fact, they almost certainly know nothing about pet-stain removal and flea control, topics on which I am an acknowledged expert.
I kept my thoughts about Monty Brainard’s profession to myself, of course.
Caprice went on. “He’ll help me think about what to do now. He might e-mail me tonight. Or call. He just got back to New York today, so he’s probably swamped.”
“You can use my computer,” Leah volunteered.
“Thanks, but I have my notebook.”
“There’s a phone jack in your room,” I told her. We don’t have phone jacks everywhere, but when Rita moved to the third floor, I hooked up my phone line to what had been her phone wiring.
The absence of dessert was normal enough; it wasn’t part of some sneaky scheme to take weight off Caprice, who had eaten average-size portions of dinner, including only one piece of French bread with a small amount of butter. Furthermore, when she helped Steve, Leah, and me to clear the table and put away the food, she didn’t dispose of small bits of leftovers by eating them as I often did myself. When the kitchen was clean, Leah invited Caprice to watch a video with her, but Caprice said that if we didn’t mind, she’d just check her e-mail, take a shower, and go to bed. I was only a little surprised. She’d had a draining day. And I was happy to realize that if Ted Green called, I’d be justified in telling him that Caprice was unavailable. Shortly after Caprice went upstairs, the phone did ring, but it was a friend of Leah’s. Ten minutes later, he turned up at the door, and the two of them took Kimi for a walk.
Steve and I opened a bottle of wine and took it, together with two glasses and the remaining four dogs, out to the yard. Even though Caprice’s room was on the opposite side of the house, we kept our voices low.
“I want to tell you,” I said, “how good I felt today when Caprice had nowhere to go, and I knew I could ask her here without checking with you. I knew you’d feel the same way I did.”
“The poor kid. What the hell is wrong with this father of hers? He just might e-mail her. If she’s lucky. And he’ll be swamped with work. What kind of bullshit is that?”
“Typical bullshit, I think. I ran into Barbara Leibowitz outside Ted and Eumie’s. After I found Eumie. She and George live next door to them. She said that Caprice will be lucky if her father shows up at all but that Caprice is better off not understanding what he’s really like.”
“How could she miss it?”
“I don’t know. At some level, she must get it. But with a family like hers…Steve, dysfunctionality would constitute a cure. The scene this morning was more horrible than I can possibly say. And then this afternoon, Ted Green just had to call here and badger Caprice because he was upset about the idea of an autopsy. He was trying to enlist poor Caprice to object to it. That’s nuts! Families can’t just go around saying that they don’t want autopsies. It’s not like requesting donations to charity in lieu of flowers. The law requires autopsies in cases of unexplained death. Period. Plus, trying to involve Caprice? That’s unpardonable.”
“What did Eumie die from, anyway?”
“Oh, an accidental overdose, I imagine. Ted kept saying that her trau
ma history, whatever it was, had caught up with her, and Caprice insists that her mother was murdered. What child wants to believe that her mother killed herself? Even semi-accidentally. It sounds to me as if Eumie had a habit of swallowing anything that was in the medicine cabinet. If she took who knows what at bedtime, her judgment would’ve been affected, and in the middle of the night, she could easily have taken the wrong thing. Or taken two doses when she meant to take one.”
“What kind of trauma was it?”
“I didn’t ask. When I was there on Friday, Eumie said something about their trauma histories, and then today, of course, Ted kept mentioning hers, but somehow I just couldn’t come right out and ask for details. I mean, trauma could be…well, except that Rita said that Ted’s book defines trauma very broadly. His book is called Ordinary Trauma. So in his terms, it wouldn’t necessarily mean sexual trauma, incest, something like that. It could be something less—”
“—traumatic,” Steve finished. As Rita is always pointing out, he is quite unpsychological. Miraculously, they are good friends anyway.
“But it really couldn’t be something trivial, either, could it?”
“It depends on what you mean by trivial. If the thesis of his book is that seemingly trivial events are actually traumatic, then it could be something that gets dismissed as trivial. I can’t think of what that would be.”
“Steve, when you’re talking about Ted and Eumie, who knows? Take the way Wyeth treated Caprice today. Now, I wouldn’t offhand consider his behavior to be traumatic. Abusive, yes. But maybe if she gets treated like that over and over, the result probably is traumatic or something close to it, anyway, especially if no one stops Wyeth from doing it. Here you and I are, taking the greatest possible care to make sure that our dogs can’t hurt one another, and meanwhile, Caprice doesn’t have the protection we routinely give our dogs. That’s horrible. Maybe it’s even traumatic. I don’t know. What I do know is that the whole situation is enough to drive anyone crazy. Here’s one more example. Ted and Eumie were going to Vee Foote for couples therapy.”
“Her,” he said.
“Her. Rita says that most of what Vee Foote does these days is diagnose everyone with depression and prescribe antidepressants. With therapy, of course. Many hours of expensive therapy. Maybe she’s redoing her bathrooms. It was her kitchen when I saw her. Anyway, seeing Vee Foote isn’t even what’s so weird, which is that they, Ted and Eumie, were seeing her for couples therapy, and now Ted says that he has to see her! And there is no doubt in my mind that she’ll continue to see him for couples therapy for as long as he’s willing to pay for it. When half of the couple is dead!”
“Holly, be fair.”
“I always am.”
He smiled. “Look, maybe the two of them, Ted and Eumie, were in the middle of something with her, and Ted needs to finish talking about it.” It was one of the most psychological statements I’d ever heard him make.
“Okay. Fair enough. For one or two sessions. And then? We’ll wait and see. But I’m telling you, Steve, it would be exactly like Vee Foote to build up a specialized practice in couples therapy that consists exclusively of treating widows and widowers. Couples bereavement therapy, let’s call it. Now, don’t you find that peculiar?”
“What’s that old saying? All the world’s crazy except me and thee.” He paused and kissed me. “And sometimes I wonder about thee.”
CHAPTER 12
Kevin Dennehy used to work out exclusively at the Cambridge YMCA, which is on Mass. Ave. near Central Square and thus conveniently near Cambridge Police Headquarters. In saying that Kevin worked out exclusively there, I mean, of course, that he worked out nowhere else; the Y is no one’s idea of a la-di-da establishment. Under the influence of his girlfriend, Jennifer Pasquarelli, Kevin then expanded his fitness horizons by joining the Original Mike’s Gym, which is on a little street off Concord Avenue beyond the Fresh Pond rotary, on the way to Belmont. Cambridge being Cambridge, the superficially unprepossessing Mike’s Gym is highly exclusive in the sense that its membership is limited to persons who go there strictly to achieve strength and stamina and not, to borrow Kevin’s words, to loll around gargling carrot juice and practicing heavy breathing. The phrases, I might mention, irritate Officer Jennifer Pasquarelli, who regularly imbibes freshly extracted vegetable juices and dutifully performs the breathing exercises of various Eastern disciplines as part of a comprehensive program intended to keep her in the state of physical perfection that she obviously enjoys. She is strong and voluptuous. Unfortunately, the program she follows is less comprehensive than it might be: it has utterly failed to endow her with even the slightest trace of the most rudimentary sense of humor. But as I was about to say, the exclusivity of Mike’s Gym consists only in part of excluding those whose purposes are frivolously nongymnastic. From Kevin’s viewpoint, the important and winning aspect of exclusivity at Mike’s is that it is populated only by town and gown, and not by newcomers who, in Kevin’s opinion, have no business being in Cambridge at all.
I easily envision Kevin as he stands under the shower at Mike’s Gym on Wednesday morning and vents his rage in an apparent effort to scrub the freckles off his face and wash the red out of his hair. My relationship with Kevin is, I hasten to add, such that I see him from the waist up and the mid-thigh down. Kevin’s anger, by the way, has nothing to do with the mean-looking scar on his torso. Although he has listened to Ted Green blather on about trauma, it hasn’t occurred to Kevin to apply the concept to his own experience in taking a bullet in the chest. In Kevin’s view, if you don’t want to get shot, you shouldn’t become a cop, and there’s no more to be said about it. Anyway, what accounts for his bout of matutinal fury isn’t posttraumatic stress but the interruption of his workout by an urgent phone call about the results of the postmortem on Eumie Brainard-Green, who had taken a variety of prescription medications in quantities far too great to be consistent with accidental overdose. The substances identified by the medical examiner include Prozac, Ambien, Sonata, and various benzodiazepines, together with a moderate quantity of alcohol. The amounts and the combination are consistent with suicide. Or homicide, of course. She had also consumed a large amount of vitamin and herbal supplements as well as soy milk and the juices of raw vegetables.
Kevin disapproves of everything about the death of Eumie Brainard-Green. For a start, he hates weird food. He also disapproves of hyphenation. Although I have talked to him about Lucy Stoner, he disapproves of my having kept the name Winter when I married Steve. He disapproves of Eumie’s neighborhood, too, not because Avon Hill is populated by the gown side of the town-gown split but because, like other gownish areas, so to speak, it has been invaded by the very rich, who flaunt their wealth and who, far from parading around in academic gowns and driving venerable Volvos, wear designer clothing and drive BMW and Lexus SUVs. He almost wishes that the dead woman had worn peasant garb, denim, and three hats at once, had driven some ancient and eccentric vehicle—an adult-size folding tricycle, for example—and had been getting a Ph.D. in some useless and probably unspeakable foreign language, which is to say that Lieutenant Dennehy wishes that she had been a familiar Cambridge type and not one of the new ones, to whom he objects principally because they baffle him. More than anything else, Lieutenant Dennehy disapproves of unnatural death or, indeed, unnatural anything else that occurs within the city limits and especially within walking distance of his own neighborhood and thus near his own mother. He feels particular rage at the young officer who was first on the scene and who was so intimidated by the Brainard-Green house and the Avon Hill neighborhood that instead of immediately protecting the scene, he had allowed the surviving family members to meander around as they damned well pleased. Kevin Dennehy does not believe in policing by ZIP code. He does, however, approve of Mike’s Gym. The invaders belong to overpriced tennis clubs with swimming pools. At Mike’s, town and gown sweat together.
CHAPTER 13
On Wednesday morning, Caprice slept until e
leven o’clock. Steve and Leah had left for work at six-thirty, and by the time Caprice staggered downstairs, I’d vacuumed up dog hair, unloaded the dishwasher, and written a four-page article, complete with sidebar, about pet-stain removal. Healthy people Caprice’s age have an extraordinary capacity for sleep and can easily seem drugged when they finally rouse themselves. Caprice’s mother had just died. Still, the young woman looked so abnormally out of it that I had to wonder whether she shared the family fondness for prescription medication. But what did I know? Damned little. And most of that damned little was, of course, about dogs. For as long as I could remember, veterinarians had been prescribing sedatives for agitated dogs. The old-time favorite was acepromazine, but these days, up-to-date vets prescribed some of the same drugs used for distressed human beings. According to Steve, all medications carried the risk of adverse reactions. He favored plain old over-the-counter Benadryl, an antihistamine that includes drowsiness among its side effects, but he occasionally prescribed tranquilizers, sedatives, and the same SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, that Rita’s patients used for depression. In fact, antidepressants were what had brought Rita and Quinn Youngman together. The circumstances were exceedingly unromantic. One of Rita’s patients had a manic episode in response to Prozac prescribed by the psychopharmacologist to whom Rita was sending those in need of medication. Rita blamed the guy for starting the woman on too high a dose, and she was furious at what she saw as his lack of sympathy for her patient, who, among other things, talked nonstop for thirty-six hours, racked up gigantic credit card bills, and ended up in a hospital emergency room. So, Rita found someone else to do her meds, as the expression goes, and that someone else was Quinn Youngman. Anyway, I knew a little about psychoactive drugs from Steve and Rita, but all I knew, really, was enough to wonder about Caprice’s grogginess.
It also concerned me that instead of eating what I’d have considered a nutritious breakfast, Caprice had nothing but black coffee and half an English muffin spread with peanut butter and jelly. When Caprice entered the kitchen, Rowdy and Kimi were there. Both leaped to their feet and, ever alert to alterations in pack membership, signaled their willingness to include her by pealing loud, friendly woo-woo-woos. When she took a seat at the table, they stationed themselves on either side of her. The contrast between the young woman and dogs was heartbreaking. Caprice was still in a nightgown and robe, her eyes were puffy, her face blotched, her hair uncombed. Rowdy and Kimi had gleaming coats, and their eyes were clear and focused. Rowdy, I thought, shared my desire to rouse Caprice from her stupor: he knew better than to poke her with his big white paw, but when he settled for offering it to her, I could sense the impulse he was restraining. His slightest movements, the upward motion of his foreleg, the turning of his big head, revealed massive muscle, and the gentle warmth of his dark eyes plainly said that he was eager to share his strength, but Caprice merely took his paw as if it were a disembodied object and then quickly released it. To Kimi, whom she knew, Caprice simply said hello, but Kimi continued to train her intelligent eyes on the young woman as if waiting for a request that Caprice was unable to issue.
