Regrets Only

by Nancy Geary

  David smiled, remembering the conversation. Since then, he’d offered professional advice and medical consultations on subjects far more important than how to deal with the most popular girl in the class. Dixon was chairman of AmeriMed, one of the three largest pharmaceutical companies in North America, and he’d relied heavily on David’s expertise and guidance over the years. David had helped Dixon survive numerous mergers and acquisitions by providing information about the status of FDA approvals, translating into layman’s English the medical terminology in patent licenses, and keeping him abreast of potential areas of research to exploit. All the while, Dixon had grown his company into a monolith and amassed a fortune in stock options.

  But now, finally, payback time had come. Because of Dixon’s power and prestige in both the medical and business communities, and because of AmeriMed’s role in the development of the facility, he’d been named head of the search committee for the director of the Wilder Center, a position that virtually guaranteed David’s appointment.

  “So now it’s my turn to be blunt.” The reminiscence about Ramsey wasn’t just the drunken reverie of a middle-aged man. There was a point.

  “When have you been anything but that?” David asked good- naturedly.

  “Well, what I’ve got to say kills me but I’m in a bind.” He coughed. Phlegm rattled in his throat. “I need you to withdraw your application for the directorship.”

  “What?” David must have misunderstood. His reputation in the medical community was well established. He had strong ties to the University faculty, as well as to the FDA and NIMH. Navigating through various governmental agencies would be key to operating a brand-new psychiatric hospital. Dixon had capitalized fully on that experience when it served his purpose. Plus David had a proven track record of fund-raising capabilities. Sometimes he wondered whether he should have been a salesman because he was so good at getting others to part with their money in support of his causes. But most important, he had extensive experience with pharmacological advances in the treatment of mental illness. “Why would I do that?”

  “For your own good. You’re not going to get the appointment. So I’d rather have you withdraw than lose out.”

  This couldn’t be true. He was the front-runner. All the news-paper articles had given him that label. The selection process had to be perceived as fair, and the committee had initially included an African American and two Jews in its list of nominees. But he’d survived the initial cuts. Now the contest was between him and Morgan. She might be the token woman, but she couldn’t get the position over him. He was by far the more qualified.

  “Look.” Dixon leaned toward him and spoke in a conspiratorial tone. “You and I both know that what happened with the Herbert kid wasn’t your fault. It was a horrible tragedy. But the press . . . public opinion . . . The Center and its investors simply can’t endorse you. The last thing a psychiatric hospital needs is a high- profile suicide to open its doors.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Dixon stood up. “Follow my advice. Make it your own choice. Down the road, things may open up. The air will have cleared. No one will remember the Herbert death. You don’t have to be the first director.”

  “You’re giving Morgan the job?”

  He nodded. “There’s one other candidate publicly in the running, but she’s got it locked up. Although it won’t be public for another couple of months—the end of May if everything goes according to schedule. We want the announcement to coincide with the opening and we’re still doing some finishing construction work, finalizing some administrative details, that sort of thing.”

  “She treats children!” His voice sounded shrill, bordering on hysterical.

  “Not exclusively. She’s got experience almost as varied as your own. And she’s got impeccable credentials, dozens of publications, research experience. Most important, everybody respects her. She wowed the pants off the committee. That woman knows her stuff. She has unbelievable contacts. Between her personal background and her medical experience, she has access to everyone, including a hell of a lot of people with money. And we need that. You know as well as I do that the director is primarily a political position. She’s not going to be seeing any patients.”

  “Let me come in and talk to the committee. Give me one more chance.” He hated begging and hated Dixon for making him beg.

  Dixon shrugged his shoulders, leaned on one knee, and pushed himself upright. “It’s too late for that. The decision’s been made. Unless Morgan doesn’t accept the position, she’s got it. I’m giving you an out. If you don’t want to take it, that’s your business. But as your friend, I’m advising you to pull yourself out of the running.”

  As David slumped forward, he felt Dixon’s hand on his shoulder. “Give me a call next week. Let’s have lunch. Maybe the Union League.”

  David looked up. He wanted to shout. To discuss what? Your betrayal? That I’m being punished for something over which I had no control? That the committee is too filled with cowards to give the job to the most qualified applicant? That my own friend is swayed by media pressure? It would take all his self-control not to throw an order of turtle soup in Dixon’s fat face. But he said nothing.

  “I’m sorry, buddy,” Dixon remarked.

  Not as sorry as I am, he thought. He thought of Morgan in his office just after Foster’s death, her apparent concern and her apparent sympathy over the adverse publicity. Had she known then that this tragedy would be a windfall to her? How had the media learned that Foster was his patient? Apparently not from the Herberts, who hadn’t given a single comment to any newspaper that he’d seen. You know how it is. Medical records that are supposed to be confidential never are. He remembered her words. Could she have gone through his files? Would she have done something so unethical? Had he been betrayed first by a colleague and then by a friend, or was this disappointment making him paranoid?

  He rubbed his eyes. It was late, and he was tired. Ultimately the truth didn’t matter. The job was hers instead of his. The only way to avoid the inevitable was to convince her not to take the position. And short of having her drop dead, David could think of no possible strategy that could achieve that end.

  6

  Sunday, April 13th 4:15 p.m.

  Lucy, can you bring the mint jelly in for me? It’s on the pantry sideboard,” Mrs. O’Malley called out in brogue as she navigated around a boisterous game of jacks and placed a steaming bowl of mashed potatoes on the buffet. She rested her hands on her hips and surveyed her Easter table. She’d been starching and ironing linens for days in anticipation of the family gathering. The cut-glass goblets had all been washed by hand, and her mother-in-law’s china unpacked from the attic for the annual celebration. She’d even Pledged the cherrywood chairs, although she’d had to add some metal folding ones from the basement to accommodate several extra guests. Home magazines might put a premium on the visual beauty of the table arrangement, but hospitality had always been her concern. She wasn’t about to turn anyone away on a holiday.

  “Could one of you smokers come get these candles lit?” she called out. Although she could hear voices and laughter in the adjacent room, no one responded. “You’d think I was the only one here for all the work I’m doing,” she muttered.

  Meghan, her eight-year-old granddaughter, threw a red Super Ball up in the air and scrambled to collect the metal jacks, but she was too slow. The ball bounced off the back of her hand and rolled under the table. On all fours, she followed it, bumping her head as her sister, Tara, giggled uncontrollably.

  “You two have exactly thirty-seven seconds to pick up those jacks,” Mrs. O’Malley warned, shaking her finger at both girls, “or I’ll tan your hides—Easter or no Easter.”

  “Give it up, Mum,” Lucy said as she entered the dining room holding a crystal dish filled with mint jelly. “Your threats have never been taken seriously.” She smiled. “Anyway, it’s my fault. The jacks were a present from me.”

  “I dust
ed your championship trophy in that game not long ago,” her mother remarked, and then paused as if lost in thought. “Speaking of which, we’ll have to clean out your room one of these days. If you’re really planning to stay in that Southern state after all, your father wants your room for an office.”

  “Dad’s retired. And Pennsylvania isn’t the South.”

  “Whatever,” Mrs. O’Malley said, waving her hand dismissively. “It’s too far, that much I know. No good can come of leaving your family. At the end of the day, that’s all anyone’s got. But you’ve wanted an adventure since the day you were born.” Turning her attention back to her granddaughters, she said in a louder voice, “Girls, did you hear me about those jacks?”

  “Do you remember how much Aidan and I loved to play?”

  Mrs. O’Malley crossed herself at the mention of her deceased son, but said nothing.

  For Lucy, being home meant being with Aidan. It wasn’t just the visible reminders—the formal studio portrait that sat in a silver frame on the mantelpiece or his racing bicycle that gathered dust in the garage. It was that each room held memories of games, stories, and the daily events that marked the passage of life with a sibling. She could still hear his voice from upstairs accusing no one in particular but everyone in general of taking his Dire Straits tape. She could visualize the anxiety on his face when he left for his algebra exam in the seventh grade. How many nights had they lain side by side on a giant beanbag in the basement, watching reruns of TheMod Squad and dreaming of being undercover cops? “Hippies,” Mrs. O’Malley had muttered accusingly whenever she saw Linc, Pete, and Julie on the television screen, but to Lucy and Aidan the threesome were heroes.

  Now she closed her eyes, momentarily picturing the face of her brother as he lay in the morgue. Aidan had cuts over one eye and minor external bruising, nothing compared to the massive swelling that the coroner had found within his skull. Her brother had called her just that afternoon and asked her to call back as soon as possible, but the piece of paper with the message taken by her college roommate had blown off her bureau and under the bed. A breeze from an open window kept her ignorant of what might have been his final plea for help. More than a decade later, she still couldn’t look at the notation “ASAP” without feeling overwhelming numbness.

  Lying on the metallic table was his lean, eighteen-year-old body covered by a blue tarp. She’d reached over and embraced him, begging for a response, a squeeze, a tickle, a tiny finger wiggle. But by the time she’d traveled from her college dormitory to Massachusetts General Hospital nearly ten hours had passed, a lifetime since the automobile accident, and she felt nothing but cold, hard, unresponsive flesh beneath her hand.

  The clatter of serving utensils on a platter snapped Lucy out of her nightmarish fog. “I see you took the plastic off the sofas,” she teased, wanting to distract herself with the gaiety of the gathering rather than morbid times she couldn’t forget. “This must be a very special occasion indeed.”

  As a child, she’d been mortified that her mother kept protective covering over the two couches and three armchairs in the first-floor parlor. But Mrs. O’Malley’s own childhood in Ireland had been frugal; even though her husband had provided well for his family and they now enjoyed a more than comfortable retirement, waste and carelessness simply weren’t in her lexicon.

  “Mind your tongue,” Mrs. O’Malley replied, only half-amused. “You never did understand that luxuries have to last. This is quality upholstery fabric. One day when you have a home of your own, you’ll see.”

  “Everything looks beautiful. Truly. You’ve outdone yourself.” She extended the dish. “Where do you want this?”

  “Find a spot on the table if you can.” Opening a drawer in the buffet, Mrs. O’Malley pushed aside assorted napkin rings, half-melted tapers, and a stack of doilies in a hopeless search for matches. “You’d think I was mad all the talking I do to nobody but myself. Did anyone hear me about the candles?”

  Lucy laughed. “Not likely.” There were a dozen people packed into the square kitchen and spilling out onto the back porch, not to mention the array of small children who seemed to weave in and out of feet, through legs, and over and under furniture. Her father presided over the crowd that included her brother, Michael, and his wife, Mary, plus her brother’s in-laws, a recently widowed cousin, the neighbors with their ninety-three-year-old grandmother, an aunt and her husband. And in the middle of it all, she’d left Archer Haverill with a perplexed expression on his face and a glass of sherry in his hand.

  Who would have thought? They’d hardly spent a night apart since the Flower Show. “Love at second sight,” he liked to remind her.

  But bringing a boyfriend home was something new. She hadn’t introduced a single male companion since she’d moved to Pennsylvania, and each year that passed added to her parents’ anxiety that she’d end up a spinster. Once she’d mentioned Archer’s existence, her mother wasn’t about to let him slip away. Even her father had insisted. “Give your mother a day of peace and bring the lad home for her to welcome,” he’d said on the telephone a week before. “She talks of nothing else.”

  “But we haven’t been dating that long,” she’d responded.

  “Your mother told me he answered your telephone at eight o’clock in the morning. That means you’ve been dating long enough.”

  Archer had accepted her invitation without hesitation. “What about your father?” she’d asked. He spoke little of Mr. Haverill but she pictured an older man in a cardigan sweater alone with a TV dinner. Did Stouffer’s even make an Easter version with traditional fixings? That he would be alone on a holiday seemed too sad.

  “He’ll go to his club for lunch,” Archer said. “Don’t worry. My dad was raised a Quaker. Although I don’t think he’s been to a meeting in forty years, the doctrine about no special celebrations seems to have stuck. We hardly celebrate Christmas. Easter’s a nonevent.”

  Lucy moved the salt and pepper shakers to make room for the mint jelly and returned to the kitchen just as Mrs. O’Malley removed the roasted leg of lamb in a massive cast-iron pan from the oven. The smell of garlic and rosemary and the exclamations of the hungry observers filled the air, even as the cook elbowed her way to the sideboard. “Tell your father the party’s over if he doesn’t get inside right now to make himself useful.” She held up a large carving knife.

  Lucy stepped out onto the porch, inadvertently letting the screen door slam shut behind her. Mary’s baby spit out his pacifier and started to cry. Archer and her father turned in her direction.

  “A ladylike entrance as usual,” Mr. O’Malley remarked.

  “Oh blarney,” Lucy said, imitating her father’s cousin who used the phrase as often as he could. She’d never understood what it meant but liked the sound of it. Walking over to her father, she hugged him. “I hope you’re not scaring him off.”

  “To the contrary,” Archer replied quickly. “I can’t remember when I’ve had such a nice holiday.”

  “Was it the traffic through the Sumner tunnel, the two-hour Mass in Latin, or the eye-burning incense? I want to keep track of what you love best.” Seeing Archer happy made her feel the same.

  “I’m hearing from this young gentleman what a pesky bugger you are.” Her father pinched her cheek.

  “Archer, what have you told him?”

  “How hard it was to get you on a date. How I had to beg, plead, and cajole, and make promises of all kinds of riches before you’d agree to be seen in my company.” Archer winked, knowing his description wasn’t too far from the truth.

  “You’ll fit right in around here if you keep fabricating stories,” Lucy replied. Turning to her father she instructed, “You’re needed to carve the lamb. Mum’s got the knife out already.”

  “Very well then.” He took a step toward the door but turned back to face Archer. “My one piece of advice on the women in this family is that it’s best not to disobey when they’re brandishing a weapon.” With that he disappeared insid
e.

  8:23 p.m.

  Most of the dishes had been cleared and the visitors had departed, leaving the O’Malley family still at the table too full and too content to get up. Mr. O’Malley produced a new bottle of Baileys and even Lucy, who’d never been a fan of Irish cream, enjoyed a few sips.

  On her lap, Tara had fallen asleep. Her head hung back and her mouth was slightly open, just enough to let drool run out onto her aunt’s shoulder. Despite offers to assist in moving her to a bed, Lucy had resisted. The chubby body and hot breath felt warm, comforting. As Tara sighed in a dream, Lucy hugged her closer. Next to her, she watched her sister-in-law feed little Aidan, as he lay cradled in her arms. He sucked vigorously, his jaw moving rhythmically back and forth. She could see the perfect fingernails as his tiny hands gripped the bottle and could smell the wonderful mixture of baby oil and talcum powder.

  “She’s made for motherhood,” Michael remarked to no one in particular. “If I get sent to the Market Basket at four in the morning for another bottle of Similac, I’ll lose my mind. But Mary’s patience is endless.”

  “No surprise there. She married you,” Mr. O’Malley chimed in.

  “I’m glad to see you finally recognize your wife’s many gifts,” Mrs. O’Malley said as she came in from the kitchen and settled next to her husband. She took off her shoes, exposing the reinforced toes of her pantyhose, put her feet up on the empty chair beside her, and sighed in relief. “Now, you must tell me, how does one get a name like Archer?” She reached for her husband’s glass of Baileys and took a generous sip.

  “If you let Ma grill him, Lucy, you may never see the guy again,” Michael teased.