The Mask of Sanity

by Jacob M. Appel

  The dreary morning had degenerated into a dismal afternoon. Visibility dropped nearly to zero as he exited from Hager Parkway onto Chestnut Street. The weather played perfectly into his hands: if he were delayed excessively, he could always use the downpour as an excuse. At the Meadow Drive intersection, while waiting for the traffic light to change, he slipped on a never-before-worn pair of leather gloves. He’d already precut identical strands of green ribbon and transferred them from his wallet to the pocket of his jeans.

  Balint circled the side streets around Meadow Drive for ten minutes, waiting for the worst of the downpour to subside. When the rain abated to a steady shower, he drew up in front of Sugarman’s address. To his surprise, an unfamiliar vehicle was stationed under the basketball hoop.

  He didn’t dare ring the front doorbell, as he’d originally planned. Instead he once again stole into Sugarman’s backyard and mounted the wooden deck. The cedar boards squeaked beneath his feet. Raindrops pattered the lid of the kettle grill. Under the eaves, he paused a moment to dry his face.

  Neither the first nor the second windows revealed anything of interest. Peering inside the third window, he saw Sugarman—stark naked—holding a cocktail glass in one hand. A woman knelt in front of him—also naked, at least from the waist up. So this was what his rival had really meant when he said that he’d be pulling an all-nighter.

  Balint instinctively wanted to look away, but the woman’s thicket of stringy auburn hair struck him as strangely familiar. When she turned to wipe her mouth on her elbow, he was shocked to recognize the ravaged face of Gloria Sugarman/ Picardo.

  BALINT ARRIVED home weighed down with failure. Although he recognized rationally that he’d have ample other opportunities to kill Sugarman, he nonetheless felt as though a crucial moment had passed him by. His limbs hung from his body like lead. It didn’t help matters any that his pants had soaked through to his underwear.

  While he was changing his clothing, Amanda stormed into the bedroom.

  “So you decided to come home,” she said.

  “I told you I’d be at my parents’.”

  His wife sat down at the foot of the bed. “Whatever. We really can’t go on like this, Jeremy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Phoebe chose that unfortunate moment to run into the room. “Mommy! Can you show me how to braid Jessie’s hair?”

  “Not now,” said Amanda. “Go to your room. Mommy and Daddy are about to have a fight.”

  His daughter looked toward him for a second opinion. He had no choice but to support Amanda. “We’ll show you how later, princess,” he said. “I promise.”

  Phoebe hurried away and again Balint found himself alone with his wife. He could sense that Amanda was seething.

  “If we’re going to have a fight,” he said, “let’s get it over with.”

  Amanda didn’t answer immediately. Instead she removed her shoe and threw it against the closet door. Its heel left a black scar on the paint.

  “I don’t think you realize how angry I am right now,” she said. “I take care of everything around here. I get the girls ready for school and I pay the bills and I make sure there’s food in the refrigerator and that the laundry is done and that nobody misses their dentist appointments—and that’s on top of a full-time job. Do you realize that?”

  “I do realize that. And I really appreciate it.”

  “No, I don’t think you do,” retorted Amanda. “Because I almost never ask you for anything. At least, nothing taxing. I don’t even ask where you’re going or what you’re doing with your time. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “You’re always welcome to ask,” offered Balint.

  “To what end? I’d prefer not to be lied to.” So that was it: Sugarman had told her about his affair with Delilah. Now, at least, his wife’s rage made more sense. “But the one time I do ask you for something—something important to me—you make a total goddamn mockery of it.”

  “You mean Davey Sugarman?”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” demanded his wife. “What else could I possibly mean?”

  “Look, I’m sorry—”

  “Not only did you hurt that poor boy’s feelings, but you undermined my authority in front of Jessie. I don’t need to be humiliated in front of my own daughter. I swear to you, Jeremy, I won’t put up with that.”

  He’d been an idiot not to foresee this happening. Of course, Sugarman had told her. What better way to distract her from his own double-dealing?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “You bet your ass it won’t,” cried Amanda. “I’m going to invite that child over for a play date with Jessica next week and you’re going to welcome the poor boy with open arms—like he’s the fucking King of Siam. Got it? Because if you don’t, I swear to God, I’ll castrate you in your sleep.”

  BALINT WAS still reeling from his fight with Amanda when—at precisely eight o’clock the following morning—he received a call summoning him to the office of chairman of the medicine department. Nothing good ever came out of such an urgent meeting, he knew, although he couldn’t figure out specifically what he’d done wrong. Surely they couldn’t blame him for the intoxicated cardiology fellow, especially since he’d removed the offending trainee from duty immediately. The only transgression he’d committed of late—unless one included his killing spree—was his affair with Delilah, and he didn’t imagine that was the sort of offense that the chairman gave a rat’s ass about. But when he stepped into Dr. Sanditz’s office, one glance at the eminent nephrologist’s flinty face told him that he’d screwed up royally.

  Bruce Sanditz has once been a leading researcher on glomerular diseases at Johns Hopkins, but in his fifties, after several Nobel-prize-caliber discoveries, he’d given up the laboratory for a cushy administrative appointment at Laurendale. On the whole, he was widely regarded as a benevolent and easygoing chairman. As long as you brought in grants and your division ran in the black, he rarely gave you a hard time. Sanditz also had a dark sense of humor, and a penchant for practical jokes: for instance, he’d once distributed a memo asking for suggestions on setting up a program for live-donor heart transplants—obviously in jest—and then he’d posted the earnest protests he’d received from indignant colleagues on a bulletin board in the faculty lounge. Yet Balint had seen his boss display genuine anger on several prior occasions, most memorably when a junior attending complained about the cost of tickets to the department’s annual banquet. That junior attending—otherwise very talented—had been shocked to discover that his employment contract wasn’t renewed the following year. In short, Bruce Sanditz was not a man to cross.

  The chairman beckoned for Balint to take a seat. “Jeremy,” he said, “I hope I didn’t drag you away from anything important.”

  “Not at all,” lied Balint.

  He actually had three catheterizations lined up for that morning.

  “Let me ask you something. Something personal,” said Sanditz in a voice that gave away nothing. “What’s the hardest decision you’ve ever made?”

  “Do you mean in medicine?”

  “In anything,” said Sanditz. “In life.”

  Balint saw where this was going. He could already envision the chairman saying, Well, the hardest decision I ever have to make is when I relieve a division chief of his duties. Unfortunately, in your case, I can see no other way . . .

  His situation, he recognized, was desperate. A day earlier, he’d been on the brink of pulling off the murder of the century, but now he was just a peon about to be sent packing. That was the cruel reality that lurked beneath life’s surface: everyone was expendable. The president resigns and they swear in a new president. The queen dies and they find another queen. But in this case, he refused to go down without a fight.

  Balint actually contemplated answering the chairman’s question truthfully. How could he possibly forget the most difficult decision of his life? He had been seven
years old and they were on a family trip to visit his mother’s cousins, the Kimballs. The Kimballs had a daughter, Beatrice, six months older than he was, who had been born missing most of her facial bones; even with multiple surgeries, she still looked hideous—and Balint had been terrified of her. That day, pressured by his parents to “be nice” to his deformed cousin, he’d played a game of hide-and-seek with her—and Beatrice had made the mistake of concealing herself inside the refrigerator in the Kimballs’ basement. Balint had heard her pounding inside, listened to her screaming that she couldn’t get out, but he hadn’t told anyone. He’d simply gone back upstairs to play with his own toys. He couldn’t even explain why. When they found Beatrice Kimball eight hours later, after a frantic search, she’d already asphyxiated. Nobody had ever suspected him of any wrongdoing—and, looking back, he wasn’t convinced he’d done anything that wrong. It wasn’t as though he’d locked his cousin in the refrigerator. The girl had done it to herself. And then a crazy notion popped into his head: if he revealed this remote incident to Sanditz, the confession might unsettle the chairman enough to derail his boss’s plan to fire him.

  “My hardest decision,” replied Balint—returning to his senses. “When I was seventeen, I rescued a drowning woman at the beach. It seems like an obvious choice in hindsight, but I might easily have been carried out to sea by the riptide. I still remember the split second before I jumped into the ocean—the moment of reckoning when I decided to risk my own life to save someone else.”

  “Good. Very good,” said Sanditz. “Do you know what the most difficult decision I’ve had to make is?”

  Here it comes, thought Balint. “Sometimes a decision is difficult for a reason,” he ventured. “Sometimes it even requires reconsideration . . .”

  “Nonsense,” replied Sanditz. “I make a decision and I stick with it. That’s the medical man’s creed, isn’t it? Sometimes right but always certain.”

  “I guess so.”

  “So the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make,” said Sanditz, “relates to this award from the American College of Physicians.” Suddenly, the chairman’s eyes twinkled, and then a grin spread across his face. “I was going to nominate Andy Price, the leukemia guy, for that mission hospital he set up in Haiti. I also hear that Price saved your life, by the way—that you narrowly missed getting yourself decapitated by a crazy person. But then I learned about the great work you’ve been doing at that free clinic in Newark, and I decided you’re the better man for the part. Price will have his chances. Only not this time.”

  Balint struggled to wrap his mind around his reprieve. “What award?” he stammered.

  “It’s called the Wenger Award for Ethics in Medicine. Two hundred grand—no strings attached. To be given to a clinician who has mastered the art of ethical decision-making. Every institution can nominate one candidate.” Sanditz leaned forward and his balding crown reflected the overhead light. “There are no guarantees, mind you, but the head of the selection committee did his post-doc under me—and that certainly won’t hurt.”

  Balint started to regain his composure. “Thank you. I’m really honored.”

  “Send me your updated CV and I’ll write you a letter,” said Sanditz. The chairman chuckled. “Confess, Jeremy. You thought you were in the doghouse, didn’t you?”

  “You did catch me off guard.”

  Sanditz leaned back in his swivel chair. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, Dr. Balint. I like you. You remind me of me when I was an up-and-coming division chief at Hopkins. There’s not much you could do to get on my bad side . . . I suppose you might start embezzling funds or killing off your patients, but short of that, you’re golden. At least, as long as I’m chairman around here, and I’m planning on being carried out of this office in a pine box, so you’re a very lucky man.” The smile vanished from Sanditz’s face as rapidly as it had appeared. “Of course, don’t go testing me . . .”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” said Balint. “I really appreciate it.”

  “Nonsense. No need to thank me.” Sanditz glanced at his watch. “If you want to thank anyone, it’s Sugarman in surgery who deserves the credit.”

  “Warren Sugarman?”

  “That’s the only Sugarman we’ve got, as far as I know,” said Sanditz. “First-rate young fellow. Between you and me, he’s been taking my Jeanine out for the last couple of months and he’s made quite an impression on Angela and myself.”

  “Sugarman’s dating your daughter?”

  “Off the record. No need to jinx things. But we had him over for dinner last Friday night and he spent the entire meal talking you up. He says you and your wife have taken his son under your wings. Quite frankly, that’s what ultimately sold me on you for the award.”

  “It’s mostly my wife’s doing,” said Balint. “Amanda is good with children.”

  “Sugarman made it sound as though you were both equally responsible,” replied Sanditz. “And I see no reason to doubt him.”

  “That was very kind of him,” said Balint, clenching his fist in his pocket. “I know just the way to thank him.”

  Somehow, Sugarman’s kindness—assuming he lacked an ulterior motive—was even more infuriating than his betrayal. Never, not even when he first discovered the affair, had he despised another human being so much.

  BALINT’S MEETING with Sanditz swept away his despair. He again found himself as determined as ever to murder Sugarman at the first opportunity. Unfortunately, he had no reason to expect another easy opening to arise.

  Most of the week passed in a whirlwind of clinical duties: Balint filled in for the scheduled service attending on Monday and Tuesday after the assigned cardiologist came down with the flu, and on Wednesday afternoon, he delivered the first of his annual lectures to the medical students. At night he churned out draft after draft of his “statement of purpose” for the Wenger Award. Even Amanda was delighted to learn about the nomination—and she managed to share the news with half of Laurendale. Yet through all of this, the itch to murder was never far from Balint’s thoughts.

  And then fate twisted in his direction one final time. On Friday, after dinner, Amanda came down with a stomach bug. Hardly an hour passed that night without his wife racing to the bathroom to vomit. In her condition, it seemed highly improbable that she’d be meeting up with Warren Sugarman the next day for a romantic interlude.

  “You’d better leave the girls at your mother’s overnight. Better than letting me get everybody sick,” she instructed him as he prepared for their biweekly drive out to Hager Heights. “Tell her I’ll pick them up tomorrow evening when I feel better.” It was theoretically possible, of course, that his wife was faking—that her illness was part of a scheme to get the girls out of the house. But that made little sense. After all, she’d have had an opportunity to meet up with Sugarman either way. And since Balint was returning home that afternoon, she wouldn’t have gained any extra time alone.

  To Balint, Amanda’s illness offered the second chance he’d been hoping for. Even Sugarman was unlikely to arrange a substitute tryst at the last minute, so he felt relatively confident that he’d find his victim home alone. His parents proved so excited to see their granddaughters that they didn’t notice his early departure from lunch.

  Balint stopped at the Meadow Drive intersection and pulled on his gloves. Outside, the air was mild for early March. Crocus heads poked from the dead earth alongside Sugarman’s front path. Today the driveway stood vacant. All that lay beneath the basketball hoop was a puddle streaked with oil. Balint drew in a deep breath and rang the bell.

  Sugarman answered the door almost instantly, looking dapper in a silk smoking jacket. He carried a Champagne flute in one hand. “Balint! What a surprise!”

  “I was in the neighborhood. I hope you don’t mind . . .”

  “Not at all. Not at all.”

  Sugarman invited him inside and steered them into the den. The room hadn’t changed since their dinner the previous September,
except for a goldfish bowl at the end of the bar. A stack of journal abstracts lay on one of the love seats.

  The surgeon noticed him looking at the goldfish. “Davey won him last week at the Purim carnival,” he said. “I figured it was better to leave him here than to take him back to Gloria’s. I mean: it’s only a matter of time before he goes down the toilet.”

  “Not just him,” said Balint. “All of us.”

  Sugarman laughed. “You have a point there. If you choose to look at it that way . . .”

  Balint related the tale of Phoebe’s gourami. While he talked, he scanned his surroundings for weapons. One option was a fireplace poker, but these stood at the far end of the room—and he didn’t see how he could slide one from its iron holder rapidly enough. On the table nearest him rested a kaleidoscope and a wooden African statuette, but both looked rather flimsy. And then he caught sight of a marble ashtray on the opposite table. At present, the ashtray brimmed with hard candies.

  “So? To what do I owe the pleasure?” asked Sugarman.

  “You must have some idea why I’m here,” taunted Balint. “Take a guess.”

  “I honestly haven’t an inkling . . . But hold that thought, Balint, while I top off my glass. Incidentally, can I offer you a drink? I’m out of whiskey glasses—but the bourbon itself is first-rate . . .”

  Sugarman walked toward the bar, exposing the back of his skull to Balint. This was his opportunity. “Scotch and soda,” he said. As soon as the words had safely crossed his lips, he scooped the ashtray from the table and carried it toward his enemy. At the last moment, Sugarman caught sight of his attacker’s reflection in the mirror behind the bar—but too late. He turned his head and raised his arm just as Balint brought the hunk of marble down upon him. The blow caught him in the temple and he staggered backward, toppling into the row of bar stools.