by Paul Levine
We sat on chairs with carved knees and ball-and-claw feet. Overhead was a cut-glass chandelier. Mrs. Penelope Maxson personally poured steaming tea from a china pot decorated with roses. She never took her eyes from mine as she handed me the cup and saucer with a steady hand. She was a trifle too large for the long, fitted silk chiffon dress the color of a sapphire. White beads formed leaf-like shapes over the shoulder and down each sleeve. Red beads swirled like a cloud of dust over an ample hip. The dress was cut daringly low, and Mrs. Maxson threatened to spill over with the tea.
She had a fine head of gray hair piled high, a long patrician nose, and green eyes she had graciously passed on to her daughter. “Lemon?” she asked, barely suppressing a smile. “They tell me you Yanks use lemon, though I haven’t the foggiest idea why.”
Pamela smiled. “Some of them even drink their tea over ice.”
“No!” protested Mrs. Maxson, a twinkle in her eye. “Whatever for, to quell a fever?”
“Philistines,” I agreed, realizing they were putting me on. I declined the lemon and accepted a dash of milk.
We made tea talk. Mrs. Maxson was too polite to ask why someone used my face for a soccer ball. Instead, she discussed the relative qualities of West Bengal Darjeeling compared with Russian. Charlie Riggs allowed as how he favored the smoky aroma of Lapsang souchong from the Fujian province because Darjeeling always reminded him of muscatel.
I know more about Dutch beer than Chinese tea, so I kept quiet and watched Pamela, who sat regally on a stiff chair, her legs crossed demurely at the ankles, cup and saucer balanced daintily on her lap. She had changed into a summer sweater of white cotton and a long denim skirt. A tad casual for the formal room, perhaps, but it didn’t bother me. I just admired the lady’s ankles, as Victorian men must have done in similar rooms a century before. Mrs. Maxson seemed entranced by Charlie, who was waxing enthusiastic about the furniture, which, to me, looked like Early Flea Market.
When he finally stopped talking, Charlie Riggs slathered clotted cream and strawberry jam onto a warm scone and inhaled the aroma of the sweet cakes and steaming tea. I hadn’t seen him this happy since he had snookered a young public defender in a pretrial deposition in a homicide case.
“And what was the cause of death?” the PD had asked.
“Acute lead poisoning,” Doc Riggs said with a straight face.
The young lawyer could barely contain his joy. “Really?”
“Yes, indeed. Of course it was caused by two .38 slugs in the heart from your client’s gun.”
I forgave him later.
Charlie bit into the scone and decorated his beard with a glob of the cream. Then he looked around the room, furrowed his bushy eyebrows, and said, “If I’m not mistaken, Mrs. Maxson, that sofa is Early Hepplewhite.”
“Quite right,” she said, smiling. “About 1765, best we can tell.”
“And those too,” Charlie said, gesturing toward gilt-wood armchairs, “perhaps a bit later.”
Mrs. Maxson nodded. “We’ve established them at 1790.”
This went on for a while. The cabinets on either side of the fireplace dated from 1795, the mahogany table with satinwood inlay about 1775, and the pianoforte—just like Beethoven’s—was made in 1798 by Rolfe of Cheapside. I decided neither to comment on Rolfe’s marketing strategy nor to bang out my risqué rendition of “Louie, Louie.”
“Would you care for a brandy snap?” Mrs. Maxson asked me.
I scooped up a confection of ginger and whipping cream and washed it down with—who knows?—some Indian, Russian, or Chinese tea.
“Pamela tells me you’re a barrister,” Mrs. Maxson said.
I nodded, tipping my cup.
“I’ve always adored the law,” she said. “When Pamela was at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, I so hoped she would pursue that noble profession.”
My smile was sincere. Where I come from, lawyers are called shysters, mouthpieces, or ambulance chasers.
“Mother never approved of my life, nor I of hers,” Pam said tartly.
“Pamela!” Mrs. Maxson’s smile dropped at the edges, giving her an odd, frozen look.
“Mother can scarcely say ‘psychiatry’ without breaking out in hives.”
“It’s not psychiatry I object to,” Mrs. Maxson protested. “But in your practice, the people…”
Pamela shrugged.
“When I think back,” her mother said a bit gloomily. “Mr. Maxson had just passed on, and Pamela was quite distraught, naturally. Then those poor girls were killed, right here in the Cotswolds, and Pamela was at such an impressionable age. Perhaps that explains how she chose such a…gruesome profession.”
“When I was studying psycholinguistics at Cambridge, Mother practically disowned me.”
“Kidnappers! Her specialty was kidnappers.”
“Ransom notes contain marvelous clues,” Pam said. “I developed a computer program that analyzed every word of the note. The computer then compared how the words in the note are used compared to the same words in ordinary speech. Properly done, this yields signature words that reveal the kidnappers background.”
Mrs. Maxson shook her head. “I thought it was just a phase, that when she decided on medicine, it would be for a traditional career. Pediatrics perhaps. But she was a house woman, what you call, what is it, Pamela…?”
“An intern.”
“Yes, at St. Thomas Hospital in London. Do you know it, Dr. Riggs?”
“I believe Florence Nightingale worked there.”
“Yes.” Mrs. Maxson nodded. “Then to Maudsley Hospital for psychiatry and Broadmoor for the criminally insane. One place worse than the next. Dealing with policemen and the deranged. Oh my, don’t get me started. Perhaps if I’d raised her differently…”
“I don’t think she turned out half bad,” I said, in a semi-chivalrous way.
“Well, Mr. Lassiter, I ask you, should a young lady like this be spending her time in those horrible prisons?”
“Hospitals, Mother!”
“Hospitals, with cages over the windows and those awful squeaky floors…”
“Linoleum,” Pam said. “Mum hates linoleum.”
“Working the worst imaginable hours, how can a young woman even find a suitable husband? I mean when a man comes home from the office, he wants a good roast beef, not a repulsive story, isn’t that right, Mr. Lassiter?”
“Actually, I’m cutting back on red meat.”
“If a woman has no time to form relationships with men—”
“But then,” Pam interrupted, “you’ve made up for both of us, haven’t you, Mother?”
I heard the tinkle of china in Mrs. Maxson’s hands. The afternoon sun slanted through the heavy windows, but the room had turned frosty. So this is what the English do at their genteel teas. Haul out the dirty linen.
Mrs. Maxson straightened in her chair. Her face betrayed nothing, the perfect example of the stiff upper lip. “Pamela, no argie-bargie, not today.”
“As you wish, Mother.”
Mrs. Maxson managed a formal smile that reminded me of Nancy Reagan. “I won’t say another word about it, but I’ll never understand why a proper lady would want to soil her hands with that sort of work. Don’t you agree, Mr. Lassiter?”
“Well…I don’t know,” I sputtered. “Pam’s work is very important. The day may come when she can re-create the personality, the emotional and mental makeup, the domestic situation, even the appearance of the psychopath.”
Pam gently placed her cup in its saucer on the side table. “How unexpectedly gallant. Rising to my defense when all this time you scoffed at my work.”
“Not so,” I protested. “I always respected it, even if I didn’t understand it.”
“Rapists!” Mrs. Maxson exclaimed, ignoring our byplay. “My daughter spent a year interviewing rapists in their cells. Can you imagine?”
“I categorized them by their behavior,” Pam explained impassively. “The angry, the socially inept, the sadomasochistic.”
“Sadists. So very sick,” Mrs. Maxson chided.
“All of us have the capacity to inflict pain,” Pam said quietly.
“Closet sadists?” I asked.
“We are all born psychopaths, born without repressions,” she said. “Society teaches us the restraints of proper behavior and helps us develop a conscience.”
I allowed Mrs. Maxson to pour me another cup of tea. “Some learn and some don’t,” I said.
Pam said sternly, “And if the restraints come off, if society encourages antisocial behavior, we are only too willing to comply.”
Charlie Riggs sliced himself a piece of fig loaf and said, “The Nazis are proof enough of that, burghers manning the ovens.”
“And on a lesser scale,” Pam said, “the average man will inflict pain when it is acceptable to do so. In a college study thirty years ago, students were encouraged to give ever-increasing electric shocks to volunteers.”
Charlie nodded. “The Milgram study.”
The shocks were bogus,” Pam continued, “but the students didn’t know that, and they were only too happy to comply, even as the voltage increased and the volunteers writhed in apparent pain.”
“Homo homini lupus” Charlie said sadly. “‘Man is a fox to man.’”
We thought about that a moment, the shadows lengthening outside the gold-curtained windows. The mood of the afternoon tea had turned melancholy.
“Well, I don’t know how we got off on that ghastly subject,” Mrs. Maxson said after a moment. “Perverts and monsters. How I resent all of them, including their psychiatrists, for blaming women for their evil. With the Yorkshire Ripper, they blamed his wife. With the Hungerford killer, his mother. Your profession, Pamela, is so…so…”
“Misogynistic,” Charlie offered.
“Exactly!”
“But then,” Pam said, looking straight at dear old Mum, “it’s difficult to overestimate the damage a mother can do.”
Mrs. Maxson sighed and carefully replaced her cup and saucer on the silver tray. They must have been down this road before. She smoothed an imaginary crumb from the shimmering blue dress and shifted in her chair as if the tea were coming to a close. “Dr. Riggs, may I offer you a last slice of mincemeat cake with the brandy-butter sauce?”
Charlie patted his stomach and demurred, and Mrs. Maxson dispatched the pastry cart with a wave of the hand to her kitchen girl and told us we’d be having roast quail for dinner. I figured a five-mile run would be the prerequisite for that feast and would have made it, too, if a nap hadn’t sounded so good. Mrs. Maxson showed me a room at the end of the second-floor corridor, and the four-poster practically invited me to drop in. The bed was high enough to store a steamer trunk underneath. Topside, it had a thick mattress, cool pink sheets, and high fluffy pillows.
I stripped down and drew the heavy curtains, blackening the room. The combination of jet lag, Thorazine, and two thousand calories of sweets took its toll. I was already asleep and dreaming of clear skies and steady winds when a sixth sense told me of a presence in the room. Unless I was dreaming.
I opened my eyes and, in the light of a candle, saw Pamela Maxson. She wore white panties and a white bra, and my waking sensation was that an erotic nurse was about to minister to her patient. She was fuller of hip and larger of breast than she appeared fully clothed, an enchanting swirl of womanly curves. She slid out of the panties and unfastened the bra. She shook her long auburn hair free over a bare shoulder and put the candle on the nightstand.
“I really don’t own a bikini,” she whispered, crawling into the cool bed and burying her head against my chest. “Red or otherwise.”
***
There was the initial excitement of fresh silken skin and sweet womanly scents. There was the slight awkwardness of exploring new but familiar terrain. There was the customary kissing and touching and sighing and nuzzling, and there was finally the joining of bodies. Which, no matter the depth of feeling, the mutual care, comes down to the mutual thrusting of loins, the roar of engines in sync, the pure physical explosion of chemical energy. But even as my motor revved I thought the same was somehow out of kilter. There was, after all, no depth of feeling or mutual care. My pursuit of her had been halting and unsure, her response caustic and defensive. Then, the sudden change of moods; she became interested. In me or my neuroses, I didn’t know which. But she was asking all the questions. She was filling in the blanks about me. That was fine. But who was this woman? I didn’t know her at all. I didn’t know the meaning of what we were doing, or why suddenly I needed to know, or why my spirits had plunged. It never used to be that way. Not in the days of the AFC Traveling All-Star Party Team. But damn, we change without knowing when or why.
So, after we unlatched, as my heartbeat slowed to its normal snail’s pace, I had a short argument with the friend who sits on my shoulder, a smarter guy than me.
Lonely. That’s what I feel. My arms wrapped around a beautiful woman who came to me, and I feel lonely…
What are you complaining about, Lassiter? You got yours, didn’t you, fella?
Yes, but…
But what?
I want some caring with the caresses.
You’re breaking my heart, big guy.
There’s even some new words out there. Commitment. Love.
I’m gonna bring out the violins any minute now.
This didn’t feel right. So meaningless.
Postcoital depression. Discuss it with your therapist. Hey, isn’t that her…?
***
Somewhere, under the blanket of sleep, I heard a tapping against the windows and felt a chill in the room. There was the sense of movement, of clouds clearing, that perception below consciousness. Then invisible fingers flipped the switches and turned on the juice, warming up the brain.
I stretched an arm across the cool sheet and found myself alone.
“Looking for someone?”
“Found her,” I said.
She stood at the foot of the bed, draped in a black velvet robe with gold piping. A candle flickered on the mantel. Outside, a summer storm pelted the windows with rain.
“I must be dreaming,” I said.
“And not of me on a beach, I’ll wager.”
“Why do you say that?”
She sat on the bed.
“Now that you’ve had me, the repressed wish has been fulfilled. Time to move on to other wishes, other dreams.”
She said it analytically, coldly, and I didn’t like the way it sounded. “Is that a general comment on the male gender or should I take it personally?”
She was silent, so I said, “Or do you have some fear of abandonment?”
“You treated me as a transitional object,” she said, “as a child would a teddy bear. To you, I’m something halfway between yourself and another person. Just a comforter for your infantile narcissism.”
Oh. So that’s what it was. It’s so convenient to have a doctor in the house. Still, like most men, I prefer not to have my ego bashed just after sex. “Hold on, now. If I’m not mistaken, there was an appreciable amount of cooing and sighing coming from your side of the bed. Unless you were acting, things were pretty equal in the heat department.”
“Is that it?” she demanded. “Were you measuring my galvanic skin response, the square inches of the blush on my chest? Is that all it is to you, the thermodynamics?”
“Time out! I was lying here peacefully. You’re the one who came in, slithered out of her pants, and—”
“Bastard! Rotten bastard! It’s what you wanted, the old slap and tickle.”
“Wrong. I wanted more.”
She stood and turned away. With the candlelight behind her, her profile appeared in silhouette. “And I didn’t want to be treated as a need-satisfying object as you would your mother.”
“My mother? I never knew my mother.”
“It shows. Your suckling my breasts was the manifestation of an obsessional need.”
“Where I come from, it’s consid
ered appropriate, even appreciated by many females of your generation.”
“Really? Boasting now of your prowess, adding another notch to your belt.”
“No, damn it! I think we made a mistake here. We weren’t ready for this. You shouldn’t—”
“Blast and damn! It’s my fault, is it? Why didn’t you send me away?”
“Because I wanted you. I just don’t know what you expected.”
“Not a bloody thing! You’re all alike.”
“I’m glad it isn’t personal.”
“It is, you blockhead. Have you ever tried talking, comforting? Afterward, you didn’t say a word unless your silent melancholia followed by snoring is considered suitable communication among females of my generation.”
Suddenly I wasn’t lonely anymore. I wanted to be alone. I was tired of having my head analyzed and my lovemaking criticized. I went on the offensive. “As long as we’re talking about mothers, you were downright rude to your mother today.”
“Now you’re an expert on etiquette as well as orgasms, is that it?”
“My granny taught me to be kind to stray cats, to wipe my shoes before coming in the house, and to pee before I got in the shower. I figured out on my own it isn’t nice to call your mother a tramp in front of company.”
“You think you know everything, don’t you?”
“I know you’re a grown-up lady and so is your mother, and the two of you ought to just let each other live the way each one wants.”
She sighed and her shoulders sagged. When she spoke, it was softer. “It’s best if you stay out of what doesn’t concern you and what you know nothing about.”
“I’m willing to listen, to learn.”
She thought it over before speaking, then said, “My father didn’t die. That’s been her story for twenty years, but the truth…”
Somewhere down the corridor, a telephone rang.
