Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  “Jonathan—wait, okay? I hear you. I really do, and I get what you’re saying. But I need to find out the truth here. I need it.”

  “I can see that, but it doesn’t change anything from my perspective, I’m afraid.”

  “She was a little girl, Jonathan. Can’t you appreciate that? A crime may have been committed and swept under the rug.”

  “Then go to the authorities.”

  “I can’t. They wouldn’t act on the questionable lead of a neighbor thirteen years after the fact.”

  “You’re right, so why would you expect me to?”

  “Because it’s personal.”

  “You’re damn right it’s personal. Personal to that poor girl, who is in all likelihood dead, and personal to what’s left of her family, which is one tortured old woman who’s got enough to go to her grave with without you piling it on by the shovelful.”

  “But what if what I find could give her some peace?”

  “That’s hardly likely, and you know it. If you find anything at all, it’ll be something you won’t want to tell her. You’re already afraid to ask her for the name, because you know that this can bring about no good. I don’t even want to know why you’re so obsessed with this, but I can tell you that your story sounds like a load of shit. I don’t think Mrs. Bloom has asked for your help at all, and I think my wing-nut ex-wife was actually right about something for once. You’re a sick, sad alcoholic, and you think your own suffering has given you carte blanche to do whatever comes into your head. I’ll tell you this once, Nick. Leave it alone. Leave it be, and I’ll forget we ever had this conversation. And never, ever contact me or my wife again.”

  He hung up.

  * * *

  I was watching Eric keep vigil for what he hoped would be his last night in the crate—there was no way he was going to let himself fall asleep—when Jonathan called back. It was late, just past three. I was at the bottom of the bottle of Jameson. Feelin’ fine. Jonathan sounded sleepless and upset.

  “Nick, Jonathan again.”

  I said nothing.

  “I’m going to give you what you want.”

  “That’s gracious of you,” I slurred. “Why the sudden change of heart? Ethics flown with the night bird?”

  “I’ve been up all night tossing over this. There’s something on my conscience, and as much as I dislike you, I’ve decided that you may be the only person reckless enough to do something about it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Look, as it turns out, I’ve met the man you’re looking for. I met him once golfing at the club just a few weeks after Dorris and I moved into the neighborhood.”

  “Does he live in the neighborhood?”

  “No, no. He just golfs at the same club. A lot of the docs do. You were right about that—it’s a small, tight circle in pediatrics out here. Anyway, I’m going to make this short, so pay attention. I can tell you’re well on your way to oblivion, so get a pen.”

  “Hold on,” I said, weaving my way upstairs to the study with the extension in hand.

  “Got it?” he said.

  “Yep. Go.”

  “Okay. His name is Simon Cunningham. C-U-N-N-I-N-G-H-A-M. He’s retired now, but he’s in the book. Lives in Twin Pines, not in my section, but in one of the ones over the hill. Shouldn’t be hard to find him. Otherwise you could probably still find him at the club.”

  “All right.”

  “Now, listen carefully. I want you to remember this. You may need it if you want him to talk to you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Good.” He sighed, and I could hear him taking a long sip of something with ice in it. “So, as I said, when Dorris and I moved in a few years back, I met Simon at the club through some mutual friends. We played a round with a bunch of guys and had some drinks afterward. Simon and I got to talking and he asked me where I was living. When I told him, he asked me where specifically. Said he knew a lot of the people around there. When I said we were living next to the Blooms, he did what everyone does when that name comes up. He said how sad it was what had happened with their daughter and then their granddaughter. I’ve known that family for forty-five years, he said. Treated Karen when she was a baby. Treated Robin, too.

  “He said this while we were still on the course and still sober, and he didn’t say a lot for the rest of the round. He went very quiet and broody, which, again, I attributed to having brought up the Blooms. They’re a downer for everyone, and he seemed to know them better than most. But later, in the lounge, after we’d had a few drinks, he said something completely out of nowhere that at the time didn’t mean a whole lot to me but which now I can’t stop thinking about. I just can’t help believing that he was talking about the Blooms.”

  He took another drink and shifted his position. I could hear fabric rustling very close to the receiver, as if he were lying in bed or reclining on a couch adjusting pillows.

  “So we were sitting in the lounge together drinking, and he said, ‘Listen, Katz, remember something for me, will you?’ He’d only known me for a few hours, mind you, and I’m a good thirty years younger than he is, but his tone of voice and the look on his face were uncomfortably intimate, as though he’d lost track of where he was and thought he was talking to a contemporary he’d known all his life. He paused for a long time, looking right into my eyes in the saddest, guiltiest way, like he wanted to confess something but couldn’t bring himself to do it . . . Then he said something really odd.”

  Katz took another long drink and sighed heavily. His breath shushed loudly across the receiver.

  “He said, ‘Keep this in mind every day for the rest of the time you practice medicine. Do that for me, will you?’ Sure, I said, of course . . . I figured, you know, placate an old man when he’s drunk. Just let him say what he needs to say and move on.”

  “Makes sense,” I said, leadingly.

  Katz coughed and went on.

  “So I said, ‘What is it, Dr. Cunningham?’ And then he said this thing that I couldn’t forget even if I tried. Not even if I tried, and I have tried. He said: ‘When you remember the oath you took, when you try to remain true to it in your practice, remember this. Sometimes the greater harm is done by doing nothing.’

  “I must have looked very puzzled, because he added, ‘What I mean to say is that your worst professional regrets—the ones that haunt you all your life—those are much less likely to revolve around the things you did than the things you failed to do.’

  “He said that last bit while looking away, and it trailed off with his voice. He didn’t say another word or even look at me for the rest of the evening. And that was it. I’ve never seen him since, and I’ve never, until now, quite understood what he meant. But I can’t escape the feeling that he was talking about the Blooms, and by keeping silent myself, I can’t help feeling that I am perpetuating whatever harm he felt he may have done to them by keeping silent in the first place.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Maybe I’m all wrong on this—and I hope I am—but I just had to tell you. If it’s nothing, then Simon will think what I thought—that you’re a loose cannon and a lunatic, and he’ll tell you to piss off. But if I’m not wrong, well, maybe he’ll tell you something worth knowing, and maybe some of the harm can be undone. If that’s the case, you might be right—something good can come out of it, if only peace of mind for some of those concerned.”

  I could hear him breathing and sipping again on the other end.

  Finally, I said, “Thank you, Jonathan. I can’t tell you how much this means.”

  “Don’t thank me, damn you. This phone call never happened,” he growled, and hung up.

  * * *

  I stayed up with Eric until five, when Gruber hauled him out clean and slapped him across the face like a Jewish mother when her daughter gets
her period. Welcome to the pains of life, fella. Good job.

  I stared at the name on the piece of paper in front of me. Simon Cunningham. Katz was right. It was in the book. So were ten others, but only one MD. Address in Twin Pines East.

  Beneath the name was my scrawling shorthand of the convo with Katz. The pen had been a good idea. The details of the exchange came mostly as a surprise to me when I reread them that afternoon.

  19

  Nothing more from Robin yet. But then, she probably figured there was no need. She probably thought what Katz and everyone else thought about me. Wild-headed freak. He’ll do anything. Let him run the rushes and see what he shakes out.

  And they were right. But who cares? I thought. I had nothing to lose by pestering an old man about a patient he’d had thirteen years ago. If Katz was telling the truth, Cunningham was probably ripe to confess, privacy be damned. He was retired anyway, and like Katz he could always deny we’d ever spoken, chalk it up to the delusions of a selective amnesiac alkie shut-in who spies on his neighbors for fun.

  I showed at Cunningham’s address at two in the afternoon. I’d gotten up—actually, more like sobered up, I hadn’t slept much—earlier than usual. With the help of some bracing chemicals, I showered, shaved, and made myself generally presentable as the kind of guy you could spill your sins to on your doorstep on a serendipitous Thursday afternoon.

  What the hey? I bet you’d be surprised how many people are sitting at home alone day after day just waiting for some white-shirt-wearing do-gooder with a bowl haircut and a face as bland as a boiled egg to show up as if by God and take your past from you like a backpack full of bricks and just walk away with it.

  I was going to do that for Dr. Simon Cunningham if he would let me. Present myself, like the great saving Mormon man (without the magazine and the spiel), and make myself the receptacle of his bad conscience.

  How could he refuse?

  I walked up the concrete walk, over the lawn-serviced lawn, past the oxidized birdbath and the knee-high sculpted Cupid with bow, all wavy hips and baby tits, gone pumiced and gray with the rain. I saw the mold tinge on the north side of the house, and the blanched exposure on the south.

  I ran my hand over the modular white stucco wall, and I rang the irregular bell. It sounded like a water bird drowning, or landing, or abortedly taking off. A frantic beating of wings and splashing and a strangled squawk. An outdoorsman’s novelty gag, I guessed, like the talking bigmouth bass. Get a chuckle every time.

  I was forever ringing bells on doorsteps, or having them rung. The same day over and over again, and I’m on either end. Ring. Answer. Ring. Ignore. Ring, ring, ring. Tell me your troubles, I’ll tell you mine. Babble, chatter, make meaningless noise. Punctuate the time, and the awkwardness of the transitions. You and me and everybody else, coming and going, a world of cars and stoops and living rooms and nothing in between.

  Is this how they envisioned suburban life when they built here? All of us going from couch to garage to parking lot, to cubicle to parking lot to store, to garage to home theater? None of us ever walking more than a hundred feet, and never dressing for the weather because we aren’t out in it long enough to care.

  Did they expect us to be fat, agoraphobic cave dwellers who never mingle or play out of doors, never stroll or loiter or happen on each other by chance, except possibly through the intercession of our dogs? When they built these pods and segues of modernity and plastered them with the promise of a dream, did they know how stunted they would make us? How deformed?

  Generic, yes. Unoriginal, sure. They planned for that and wanted it. We all did. We do.

  And so you know as well as I do how it went, at first, meeting Dr. C.

  The details hardly matter.

  The man and his home, the furniture and the decor, what he looked like and how we shook hands. It was all exactly as you’d expect. The same. He was a retired pediatrician. Fill in the blanks. Kindly, glasses, cardigan sweater, duck hunter, teetotaler, grandfather of three.

  What did I care anyway? What do you?

  He could have been a caterpillar smoking a pipe or the witch behind the wardrobe, and I could have been the Grand Inquisitor or a hole in the ground. It didn’t fucking matter. He was a mouth that said these words and I was the ears that heard them.

  He told me what I needed to know, and he did it because, like me, he didn’t give a tinker’s anymore what happened to him, and he thought he deserved what was coming.

  He led me into his study. The club chairs, the side tables, the desk. The diplomas, the snapshots, the taxidermy. On stands, in frames, and on the walls. And that groggy gray light of a lake-effect afternoon, coming in low through the dirty, too small casement window.

  I told him what I was there for. I told him about Katz’s tip. I didn’t have to say much.

  “I should have been stripped of my license,” he said when I’d finished.

  No intro, no explaining needed. He was ready as guns and bursting with it, and then I knew that it was all coming out. Every bit. And I wouldn’t have to do a thing to ease it.

  “You see a lot of things as a physician, Nick,” he told me. “Even in a small family practice. And most of the time you are bound to be silent. What is said, what passes between a doctor and his patient is as sacred, as protected as what passes between a parishioner and his priest. But a child—a child cannot speak for itself. Not really . . . Their bodies are a complete mystery to them, like something separate, unattached, and they come into your office so frightened and surprised by the things that just show up, that just happen to them, and they don’t know why. Injury, trauma, sickness are confusing. They have no causes or consequences associated with them. They are just events, just more time passing, some discomfort, and maybe the introduction of instruments or substances they’ve never seen, never imagined. But none of it means anything intellectually. Only emotionally, and even then, only dimly in the present, as something like a sore throat or a sick stomach, that they wish would go away . . . And then when it does go away, it’s gone. Forgotten in the eternal present.”

  He smiled tightly.

  “Except, of course, that it isn’t. It isn’t gone. It exists somewhere, stored away. Influencing. Because like every other thing that happens in childhood, no matter how small, it remains. It gets recorded in every detail, and it composes the person who ultimately becomes the adult.”

  “The child is the father of the man,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Oh, it was just something my mother used to say. It’s from a poem.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding. “Well, that’s right. That’s exactly right. I’ll have to remember that.”

  He seemed then to drift away into his thoughts, as though sifting through them for the right thing to say. He was silent for several minutes, and then abruptly, he said:

  “HPV. Do you know what that is, Nick?”

  “No, Doctor. I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Human papillomavirus,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, still not knowing.

  “Robin Bloom presented with the human papillomavirus. HPV.”

  This is not what I came for, I thought. He’s gone. I’m going to get a list of childhood ailments and a watery stare. Yes, yes. Robin Bloom. I remember. Let me see. She had mono and strep, too.

  “She presented with HPV at twelve years of age,” he said, fixing me with a look that was clearer than my own, and piercing. “Do you understand what that means?”

  Twelve years of age. He put the emphasis on “twelve.” Why was the age so important? Too young? Too old? No idea. His eyes were waiting for an answer.

  I shook my head.

  “HPV is a venereal disease, Nick. You must have come across it in college or somewhere along the way. It’s practically the common cold of sexually active young peo
ple. It generally causes warts and sometimes other growths to appear on the genitals.”

  “Uh. Look. Wait—” I groaned, putting up my hand. “I don’t think I want to hear this.”

  “I don’t care whether you want to hear it or not,” he growled. “You’re going to hear it. All of it. I have never said this to another human soul since the day I said it to Anita Bloom, and I need to say it. I need you to hear it.”

  He looked blankly at the floor, and added, in an almost automatic way:

  “Robin Bloom had—”

  He broke off for a moment, overcome, then resumed in a choked whisper:

  “—warts on her vulva.”

  He paused again.

  “And,” he continued, “she had them clustered in and around her anus and rectum as well.”

  “Oh, Christ. Please, Doctor,” I said.

  “Listen,” he shouted. “All you have to do is listen.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Go on.”

  He waited.

  “Please go on,” I said again. “What did you . . . What was the treatment?”

  The red faded from his face. He seemed able again to focus on the facts.

  “Usually you burn off the growths with liquid nitrogen, but that frightened Robin too much. So I gave her a topical solution instead. Something you’d apply twice a day.”

  “And this cleared them up?”

  “I assume so, yes.”

  “What do you mean, you assume so? Didn’t you follow up?”

  “No,” he said loudly, curling the word firmly on his tongue. “No,” he said again, more quietly. “I did not.”

  He fell silent again, the back of one hand pressed tightly against his mouth. Then, abruptly, he cast the hand wildly in front of him.

  “Don’t you see? That’s the point. I didn’t follow up, not with Anita Bloom, and not with anybody else. I didn’t report what I’d found to the authorities, which is what I should—what I was legally bound to have done.”