She tried mightily to find another position, but she’d left the firm without a reference. Months went by. Formerly substantial savings having been depleted by stamp duty, abortive DIY, and unanticipated bills from tradesmen, she soon fell behind on her mortgage payments.
Helen imagined herself a reserved person, but 21 Lansing Terrace had taken its toll. When the foreclosure notice from Barclays arrived, she was incandescent. Was it her fault that the job market was so anemic? Had she not arranged monthly direct debits for year upon year? It was sheer larceny—the compulsory forfeiture of countless interest payments, a fair whack of principal, and her deposit to boot! Was it fair for slackers to get housing from the state for free, when responsible taxpayers who fell on hard times were thrown on the street? True, she hated this house, but mutual loathing had locked them into the embrace of lovers, and it was her house to hate. Indeed, no one would ever revile this property with the ferocity of Helen Rutledge, who was not about to abdicate its deed to anyone for whom her ultimate foe, her bête noire, her personal nemesis, was merely an affordable bottom rung on the UK’s most worn-out metaphor.
Dear Gertrude having passed that autumn, and the council having yet to install another tenant in the adjacent semi, Helen searched the internet with a clean conscience. Moreover, she was still capable of calling up the exactitude and attention to detail that had once distinguished her performance at Manson & Ross. Only after exhaustive cross-reference and thorough perusal of shadily inquisitive threads on Ask.com and Yahoo did she settle on what appeared to be a foolproof recipe. So when Helen detonated her own toil and trouble, caldron bubble, accompanied by the rousing chorus of “Jerusalem,” it worked.
The ChapStick
The logic was faulty: expressing his resentment of having to take this trip by leaving late for the airport. Dropping everything to fly to RDA was only worsened by traveling under stress. That foot-dragging in his Clinton Hill walk-up—clearing off coffee mugs that would have waited for his return—had merely ensured that Peter Dimmock would agitate in the taxi en route, shooting glances at the time blinking on the sedan’s dashboard while glaring at the congestion on Atlantic. The jittering of his knee was probably driving the cabbie nuts. It would have been one thing to have announced firmly to his father’s live-in home health aide—an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, paid in cash; this was America, after all, rich in its unique cultural traditions—that he had heard this death’s-door business before, and this time he wasn’t coming. To instead merely cut it close on catching the flight was like being passive-aggressive with yourself.
“When you fly?” asked the driver.
“Eight ten. JetBlue, terminal five.” It was a stupid departure time, putting him smack in rush hour on the way to a stupid airport. But midevening from JFK was the only semiaffordable ticket he could scrounge at the last minute. “I’m running late, obviously. But with this traffic, there’s no point in telling you to step on it.” It was already nearing six o’clock, and they couldn’t have gone more than half a mile.
“You go to … ?”
“Raleigh-Durham. Grew up there,” he added gruffly, grateful that a Pakistani wouldn’t have the ear or the interest, and so wouldn’t comment on his passenger’s lack of a Tarheel drawl. It was a boring conversation.
“This is warmer—than in New York?”
That was an even more boring conversation, earning only a grunt. “My father’s dying. Supposedly. One more time.” Having undercut the violin section, not wanting to be misread as bidding for sympathy, Peter added wistfully, “Although eventually it really is a wolf, isn’t it?”
Silence seemed to indicate that the cabbie didn’t get the allusion. For all Peter’s skepticism, something told him that this time it was the wolf. If he hadn’t left for the airport so late, he might have afforded a little reflection on how he felt.
“I am so sorry,” the driver remembered to say at last—with a surprising passion.
In his heyday, Daniel Dimmock was the acknowledged Father of Modern Dialysis. Working circa 1960 at the embryonic form of what was now the vast and internationally acclaimed Research Triangle Park, he designed the revolutionary Dimmock Shunt—a mechanism that Peter still didn’t understand, at fifty-eight. (Peter wasn’t that dumb. He had failed to understand it on purpose.) Had the shunt been developed and patented through a commercial company rather than at a publicly funded nonprofit, Dr. Dimmock would have become a wealthy man—which the august medical researcher had noted himself a few hundred times. These many years after the man’s retirement, Peter still couldn’t assess with any confidence his father’s importance in the wider world. In the small pond of renal research, his father had been a whale. Whether that made him a guppy in the ocean of human achievement or more like a grouper was anyone’s guess.
In any event, Peter had been awed as a boy. He felt wistful about the adoration now, which he wouldn’t have wanted to sustain through an unbecomingly fawning adulthood, but might have liked to revisit—like sampling one sumptuous bite of a cream bun otherwise sickly sweet for a mature palate. He’d boasted to third-grade classmates that his father wasn’t a plain old doctor, but “more like a mad scientist.” (Maybe it was the post-A-bomb paranoia, but in those days all scientists were “mad.”) His father was lean, vigorous, and busy, and when you were a kid, or at least back then, nothing made grown-ups more impressive than the fact that they ignored you.
See, Dod hadn’t been a cruel father. He was oblivious, which was worse. Cruelty at least entailed paying attention of a kind.
Funny, that Dod—the tag still cheered Peter up. All three kids had been schooled to call the guy “Father,” a formal, old-fashioned term of address for the 1960s whose associations were too reverent, as in “Father of Modern Dialysis.” “Father” was what bedraggled, browbeaten children called their stern, religious-fundamentalist poppas in grim black-and-white art movies: “Yes, Father.” “No, Father.” “Of course you’re right, Father, this dress is much too bright and whorish, what was I thinking.” His older brother started it. Since Daniel Oliver Dimmock signed cryptic, bossy notes to their mother DOD, Luke appropriated the acronym, which outsiders often misheard as a snooty pronunciation of “Dad”; confronting paternal obstruction as a teenager, the eldest elongated the handle to “Department of Defense.” An early discovery of childhood is the power of naming, one of the few weapons at the disposal of short people in the absence of capital, clout, or brawn. For Peter and his siblings, the rechristening of “Father” was a rare victory for their team, an impish pushback that Dod had never quite decided was insolent or affectionate, when it was both.
As a son, Peter had traveled an arc from awe to disenchantment that probably wasn’t yet complete, with Dod on the cusp of oblivion at ninety-two. The filial disillusionment wasn’t sourced in parental neglect, which was standard for family men married around 1950. It wasn’t as if his father turned out to be a rather bad researcher, either, who did flawed work that killed people or something. There was no scandal, no embezzling of funds. No grievous private shortcoming like a gambling addiction or propensity for domestic violence fatally offset Daniel Dimmock’s public accomplishment.
Be that as it may, the man often stayed late at the lab without bothering to pick up the phone, while his wife’s lovingly prepared dinners would dry and char. He treated his children like annoyances, whom their mother hurriedly issued out of his way when he did come home. Conversation was dominated by which prestigious journal had accepted a paper, which colleague had cited his research, which medical conference had invited the great man to speak. He was competitive with his lab partners, and shamelessly voiced satisfaction when their experiments failed. If grant funding fell through, he didn’t mourn the fact that a vital line of clinical inquiry would now not be pursued, but raged back and forth in the living room at the personal affront: “Would I have signed off on that application if it didn’t have merit? Did those pinheads at the NIH ever notice whose name was on the title page?�
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Thus by his latter teens, Peter began to register the real reason that his father wasn’t a “plain old doctor.” The revered MD might have had a taste for protégés, acolytes, and subordinates, but he’d little time for needy, smelly patients, much less for people as a broader class. The development of effective dialysis that could be repeated year after year was a technical challenge, likewise the refinement of a smaller, more portable machine that could be employed in domestic settings. What mattered to Dod was not the alleviation of suffering, but that if suffering was alleviated, Daniel Dimmock would get the credit. Renal research was of value only because he was good at it. In sum, the man was driven solely by self-aggrandizement. If by his own middle age Peter had tried to gentle the harshness of this assessment—most high achievers he’d encountered by then were powered primarily by narcissism, varying only in their capacity to conceal it—a boy’s disappointment that his father was not, after all, a life-saving crusader but a self-serving egotist had never quite lost its bitter bite.
You’d think that at some point someone would have told a megalomaniac like Peter’s father to stuff it. But no: the more egregious his behavior, the more the God’s gift convinces the people he treats like dog shit that he must really be extraordinary, or long ago someone else would have told him to stuff it. Pricks get away with acting like pricks because they’ve always gotten away with acting like pricks, and no one wants to interfere with the natural order of the universe.
The same natural order was duplicated in the domestic sphere. Dod wasn’t one of those pushy fathers who drove his children to succeed and so to manifest his hopes for them—a cliché that would surely have improved on a father who had no hopes for his children. For Daniel Dimmock had never displayed an appetite for passing on the generational baton. Though all three kids had the grades and test scores to make a bid for the Ivy League, he’d encouraged Luke, Esther, and Peter to take advantage of in-state tuition at local public colleges, when he himself had gone to Stanford. He didn’t urge any of them to take on the big professions—law, the sciences—but promoted community service jobs like nursing or schoolteaching. Even these days, with so little to occupy his time, he never watched Luke’s news packages online, checked out clients’ enthusiastic reviews on Peter’s webpage, or saved Esther’s full-page profile in the business section of the News and Observer to boast about to friends. The good doctor had no intention of abdicating his position as the center of the familial universe, at however advanced an age. It couldn’t have been coincidental that both boys were baptized with New Testament Christian names. They were raised to be apostles.
Peter had undertaken the first of these missions of mercy to North Carolina after their father, then eighty-six, had fallen from a ladder while cleaning the gutters and broken his hip. This hackneyed beginning of the end presented an opportunity to make settling the estate after the inevitable occurred as graceful as possible. Once Luke had flown in from Portland and Esther from Beijing, the siblings conferred back at the house in Woodrow Park while their father was laid up in Rex Hospital. Peter’s brother and sister were in accord: in order to oversee their father’s finances during a convalescence fated to end badly, Peter should get power of attorney. Esther was a poor candidate for the post, having moved to China. A television journalist who covered quirky, uplifting feel-good stories for local news in Oregon, Luke was often on the road, and was eager to avoid the aggravation of managing bills and investments. Besides, Peter had already been named the executor in their parents’ will.
Like the decision to dub him executor, the fact that their father proved willing to give his youngest access to his accounts was a compliment, theoretically. A thriving consultant who helped American companies negotiate a foreign and no-little-devious business culture, Esther had further anchored herself to Beijing by marrying a native entrepreneur, thereby consigning herself to irrelevance in Raleigh. As the eldest, Luke might conventionally have stewarded their surviving parent’s affairs, despite living farther away; in the online world, Portland and Brooklyn were right next door. Yet from childhood, Luke had exhibited a chameleon side, an unsettling capacity for being all things to all people—which is how he got away with presenting doggy, Pollyanna features about the finer side of human nature rising in the face of adversity when in private he was a cynic. He wasn’t precisely a pleaser, which would have entailed actually pleasing people; he was a manipulator, which entailed seeming to please people. Given this lifelong slipperiness, neither their father nor their late mother entirely trusted Luke. Both parents regarded Peter as the moral anchor of their triad—the decent, dependable, faithful one, to whom it would never occur to take advantage of power of attorney by charging personal expenses to his father’s credit card, or to discreetly siphon off a couple hundred grand in executor “fees,” about which his siblings would never be the wiser.
Glowering at the haloed taillights of the sedulous traffic on South Conduit—it had started to sleet—Peter wondered whether being anointed as the trustworthy one might be a shade unpleasant. If he really wouldn’t abuse his legal position to self-deal—and he hadn’t—the bovine rectitude suggested a lack of imagination. The expectation that of course little Peter would unerringly toe the line imputed to the youngest a cowed quality—if nothing else, a paralytic dread of being caught. In pictures of Peter as a boy, his mouth dropped tremulously open while his eyes widened, their pupils cast upward at an imploring tilt. He’d been the weakest of the litter, the momma’s boy, the crybaby on the first day of school. The older two were always more rebellious, more mischievous, less respectful (God love them)—and therefore, it didn’t take a psychological genius to decode: more independent, more visionary, and less bludgeoned into submission to the Father of Modern Dialysis. So his parents had chosen their last-born to execute their will because he was the tractable one, and would do their bidding. Too timid to stray from the path of righteousness, Peter wouldn’t have the moxie to write himself checks on his father’s account, lest lightning strike him dead.
Being trusted was an insult.
Yet Peter Dimmock was fifty-eight years old, and that quivering portrait from first grade, which had mocked him from the frame on his parents’ buffet for decades, was out of date. He was a larger, more muscular man than his older brother, who didn’t work out, and was starting to look puffy on camera. In adulthood, Peter had developed a temper that sometimes got him into trouble, though it was the return of his primary-school timorousness, not wrath, that he blamed for the recent demise of his second marriage. June had steadily lost respect for her husband the longer he step ’n’ fetched for her father-in-law. Or maybe that wasn’t the main reason she walked out, but it hadn’t helped.
When first awarded power of attorney, Peter felt a quiet sense of victory. In running his father’s logistical life, he could turn the tables, take control—all in preparation for receiving a baton that at last the man couldn’t withhold. At the time, Peter had estimated that his ailing father would last six months at the outside, just long enough to get the old man’s affairs in order—to consolidate his assets, locate the house deeds and car registration, learn his passwords, and solicit a list of the music he preferred for the funeral in a spirit of discomfiture and sorrow.
It had now been six years. Apparently, the aged usually don’t recover from broken hips, just as it’s usually the daughters who squander their primes caring for elderly parents—and tell that to Esther the Wheeler-Dealer in Beijing. Dod was Peter’s problem, and his siblings were ever so keen that he remain Peter’s problem.
When first embarking on his fiduciary duties, Peter had been intent on demonstrating his competencies, in hopes that his father would be impressed. After his mother’s death three years earlier, he’d lost his champion, who had long claimed that her second son’s problem was having “too many talents.” (Perhaps she was right, since you were far better off with only one talent.) His mother had encouraged her youngest to nurse all manner of arty, unrealistic am
bitions, although he was also, of the three, the least likely to develop the resilient ego that pursuing arty ambitions with any success required. He tried acting at UNC Chapel Hill, where he was easily crushed by failed auditions; he’d hoped that his performances were subtle, but in retrospect a better word was flat. Doing wedding gigs after college with a killing barbershop quartet hardly paved the way to a career. When he turned to screenwriting, his dialogue was sharp, or what a hired editor called “clever,” but he never registered that film was a visual medium in which something was supposed to happen that you could see.
Finally in his thirties he converted ignominy to enterprise. Having been cured of a childhood lisp by a sympathetic young man trained in the field, Peter qualified as a speech therapist. It was a humble occupation, which didn’t transform renal medicine for all time, but did make a difference to individual stutterers and stroke patients. For a sense of importance, he leveraged his small usefulness by plying his trade in what, for a self-exiled North Carolinian, was still the greatest city in the world. Dod had never acted overtly disappointed by how Peter turned out, but he wasn’t exactly wowed.
Furthermore, you don’t readily impress as an underling. Power of attorney hadn’t conferred conquest of any sort. It had designated Peter his father’s errand boy. Daniel Dimmock had been accustomed to secretaries and lab assistants his whole professional life, so ordering around his son instead came naturally. Peter’s position as paternal flunky brought out the timidity threaded through in his DNA that he most despised about himself. Overcompensating, he’d pick fights with June, shouting and breaking things. That didn’t impress, either.
The near invalid didn’t have much to fill his day, and thus spent much of it hectoring Peter from command central, a grand leather-inlaid desk in a study plastered with framed degrees and commendations. When Dod ran him ragged with demands—for a stair lift repair, a more adjustable shower chair—Peter swallowed his impatience and thanked God for online shopping. Many of Dod’s requests were pretextual. Outliving multiple friends and colleagues, having avoided the “drooling imbeciles” of a nursing home, and tended by aides who barely spoke English, he had few people to talk to. By a good measure, then, Peter spent more time speaking to his father than keeping in touch with his own two kids. (One price when the calls were protracted: the pernicious return of the up-lilting southern accent that this proudly reconditioned New Yorker had shed. So contaminated, Peter had actually addressed the family of one Upper East Side client as y’all.) While not clinically demented, Dod did relentlessly repeat himself, and he would get exercised about the loss of small objects, blamed on sticky-fingered caretakers, that he’d merely mislaid. Why in this day and age would a semi-illiterate steal a fountain pen? When Dod alienated still another live-in aide by being accusatory, dictatorial, and unappreciative, Peter would numbly contact the Latino community center on New Hope Church Road, where another off-the-books unfortunate could be found. Meanwhile up in New York, each new medical crisis involved rescheduling a raft of appointments with clients whom a freelancer could not afford to lose, in order for Peter, who was also his father’s health care proxy, to streak down south on flights like the one he was now in danger of missing.
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