The anger ebbed, and Shannon looked abruptly drained. When he spoke, he sounded exhausted. “I didn’t kill Christina because there was anything improper going on. In my whole life, I’ve been intimate with Margaret, and no one else. That must be hard for you to believe, but it’s true. I know how everything’s free and easy now, and everyone’s supposed to be sleeping with everyone else, but we aren’t like that in my family.”
If he’s putting on a show of outraged innocence for my benefit, thought Gottlieb, it’s the best I’ve ever seen.
The session turned to more mundane matters. Gottlieb asked him about his eating and sleeping (so-so), and did he have recurrent nightmares (he hadn’t), and how were his attention and concentration (okay, all things considered). He asked if at times he still felt that things weren’t real, the way he felt the night of his arrest (he didn’t). He asked him questions calculated to tease out subtle threads of paranoia, or grandiosity, or bizarre ideas about religion. None emerged. Gottlieb wondered, Can he really be this unremarkable?
“By the way,” mentioned Gottlieb as he prepared to end their meeting, “your brother and sister told me you’d once taken Christina to see a therapist. It would have been when she was twelve or so.”
“They told you that?” He sounded as if the disclosure was a small betrayal.
Gottlieb nodded. “Why did you?”
He folded his arms in front of his chest. Gottlieb thought he was considering how much to divulge. “It was that summer she went to camp,” he said finally. “She didn’t last long there, remember? I may have mentioned this already, but at first the lady from the camp said Christina had been homesick. That didn’t sound like her at all, and I said so. Well, then the lady, I forget her name, suggested that Christina should get professional help. She said Christina had no idea how to relate to other children, and there’d be a lot of trouble down the road if she didn’t change.”
“Did she get into specifics?”
“No. I had the feeling that she wasn’t being open with me. In fact, I remember telling Margaret that I thought she was being kind of slippery.”
Gottlieb made a row of doodles on his notepad. “How long was Christina in treatment?”
“Not long. A month, six weeks at most. Christina hated going. We practically had to drag her there. A waste of time and money, she kept telling us. Looking back, I think she was right. As best we could tell, she got nothing out of it. And even with insurance, we had to pay a fair bit out of pocket. I made a decent living, but we didn’t have money to throw away like that. After a while, we just stopped.”
“Do you remember the name of the therapist?”
“Let me think. It’s been a while.” Shannon threw his head back, shut his eyes. “He was a child psychologist named Kendall, Kenton, something like that. Kenyon, that was it. Malcolm Kenyon. He had an office near Lincoln Park.”
“How would you feel about my talking with him?”
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t much care one way or the other.”
CHAPTER XI
G OTTLIEB SLEPT LATE ON SATURDAY MORNING; eight thirty found him still in bed. He almost always rose at least an hour earlier, no matter how poorly he’d slept the night before.
Sharon was already up. By the time he rousted himself from the bed and went downstairs, she sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the paper. Her favorite CD was on, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg’s performance of The Four Seasons.
He walked over to her, put a hand on her shoulder. “Hi. How long have you been up?”
“I don’t know, half an hour or so.” She looked him over carefully. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, of course I am. Why do you ask?”
“Because you almost never sleep this late. You must have been exhausted.”
He shrugged. “Busy week, for a change.”
“Think we’ll ever be able to take it any easier? Before we keel over and drop dead, I mean.”
“I hope so.” He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down next to her.
She passed him milk and Equal. “I was about fix myself scrambled eggs. Want me to make you something?”
“That would be nice. I’m kind of hungry.” He found himself thinking of Cassandra and the conversation during their recent lunch. “An omelet, maybe?”
“Well, there’s a switch from the usual Special-K.” She sauntered to the fridge. “Hmm, not much in the way of in-
gredients. How about onion, green pepper, and feta?”
“Sounds fine.”
He glanced at the paper while she chopped onions and peppers and crumpled feta. “Will you be going out today?”
“I may go to the mall. I need summer outfits, and a couple of the dress shops are having a sale. How about you?”
“I want to read awhile, maybe work on the new article. After that I’ll run a few errands. Pick up the cleaning, go to a car wash, stop at Barnes & Noble.” He stirred the coffee, his mind half elsewhere. “Maybe I can interest Peter into going with me.”
“Don’t count on it.” The mention of Peter’s name caused her voice to chill, her face to tighten.
“Would you like to take a walk when we get back?”
“Sure, if it’s not too hot. Don’t forget, we’re going out tonight.”
“We are?”
She rolled her eyes back. “Honestly, Hal, sometimes I think you could use a brain scan. We’re having dinner with Ted and Sue Edelstein at that new Spanish place they’ve been raving about.”
“I remember now.” They had, in fact, discussed it only two days ago. Ted Edelstein, a cardiologist, had an office down the hall from Hal’s. His wife, Sue, was a stockbroker. Gottlieb enjoyed them, more or less, notwithstanding Ted’s adenoidal New Jersey accent and Sue’s tendency to drone on about things like the merits of closed-end mutual funds.
The Gottliebs’ social circle consisted of six or seven other couples whom they saw with a varying frequency, every three or four weeks to every three or four months. Their friends were people like themselves. Professionals, many of them doctors and lawyers, but they also included an art dealer, a vice president of one of Chicago’s largest department stores, and their rabbi. The men had solid, prestigious careers, as did most of their wives. They lived comfortably but not lavishly. Despite their high incomes, they struggled to pay college tuition, first and second mortgages, and often alimony and child support from earlier marriages. Meanwhile they tried to fund their
SEP/IRAs and Keoghs, lest they become old and poor instead of merely old. Their eight-and ten-room homes, their Infinitis and Lexuses, and their not-infrequent trips abroad were nice enough but provided no sense of security.
Gottlieb thought of Cassandra’s verdict: I know about three unhappy couples for every happy one. Were the couples of their circle happy? They got along, by outward appearances. Hal witnessed little overt warfare, no Virginia Woolf routines. Not uncommonly, they seemed vaguely bored with one another, as if neither one could say anything of more than fleeting interest to the other. Perhaps he meted out too harsh a judgment; perhaps it was just that everyone always seemed so tired. No matter how good the restaurant, or the movie or play or concert, they and their friends often fought to stay awake. They came by their exhaustion honestly. Husband and wife routinely worked ninety hours a week between the two of them. By the time they did the other things—raised children, ran errands, worked out, maintained some semblance of a social life—most of them ran on empty.
In the half a decade since returning to Chicago, Gottlieb had gotten close to no one in their circle. He knew their tastes in food and movies, he knew the names and approximate ages of their children, he knew odd bits of trivia about them (Sue Edelstein had an identical twin sister who ran a fishing lodge in Alaska with her husband. Sam Roth flew helicopters in Vietnam before entering the rabbinate). But he knew none of their important secrets, and they knew none of his. If he met with a real catastrophe, if one of his children were seriously ill or if his marriage foundere
d, he wouldn’t turn to them.
If he never saw any of them again, he would scarcely miss them. An unpleasant thought, disturbing, which made him feel somehow defective.
⸎
As Gottlieb attacked the omelet with gusto, Sarah came into
the kitchen and stood next to him. “Hi, Daddy. We wondered if
you were ever getting up!”
He looked at her with mock indignation. “Can’t I can’t sleep late once in a while?”
“Well, I suppose so.” She lay on arm on him, her tiny hand almost lost in the crook of his elbow. “Will you play with me after you have breakfast?”
“Maybe later, honey. There are some things I have to do this morning.”
“You could take her on your errands,” suggested Sharon.
“Hmm. Yes, I could.” He turned to her. “Maybe we could even stop at Baskin-Robbins.”
She clapped her hands together. “Yesss!” Sarah loved Baskin-Robbins ice cream above all other treats. She loved to deliberate over picking out a flavor, a choice usually based on color. The more exotic, the better. A frequent favorite, therefore, was rainbow sherbet.
He resolved to ask Peter to join them but guiltily hoped the boy would turn them down. He didn’t get to spend much time alone with his daughter, and he didn’t want Peter to wreck it with his moodiness, his leaden silences.
⸎
Gottlieb secluded himself in the study as soon as he showered and dressed. He carried with him several computer printouts, abstracts of articles he’d gleaned from Physicians On-line. He also carried psychiatric publications brought from his office, intending to skim through them. A Clinical Psychiatry News, recent issues of The American Journal of Psychiatry and Psychiatric Annals. The Psychiatric Annals seized his interest more than the others. This issue featured several articles on aggression in the workplace, a phenomenon which disturbed him greatly. It disturbed him that any cretin with a grudge and a credit card could walk into a gun shop and buy enough weapons and ammo to turn his factory or office into a slaughterhouse.
Reading took more effort than usual; his mind wandered. Mainly it wandered in the direction of James Shannon.
Gottlieb, to his surprise, had begun to like him. The media accounts of his patient’s offense hadn’t led him to expect that. Like most people, he despised the perpetrators of crimes against children. But he did like James Shannon. He liked the simple, unpretentious nature of the man. He also liked his honesty; he found it difficult to imagine Shannon lying. He was touched by his devotion, his submission to God’s will, and what seemed to be his disinclination to feel sorry for himself. Many of Gottlieb’s forensic patients wallowed in self-pity.
He’d known Shannon for about a month now, had met with him on five or six occasions. He’d also met with his brother and sister, and the lawyer who happened to be a lifelong friend. These meetings had led him to the tentative conclusion that James Patrick Shannon had never committed a significant illegal or immoral act. That is, until one summer evening when he bludgeoned and strangled his sleeping daughter.
The late Christina Shannon: now there was a mystery. Her striking looks—the blonde ringlets, the flawless face, the wide-set dark blue eyes—were etched in Gottlieb’s memory. He’d never seen her in the flesh, of course, but dozens of newscasts and articles had made no secret of her attractiveness. But what had she been like? Who was she? A bright child, well behaved but distant. An unpleasant aura had clung to her, had made her difficult for others to relate to. I would have liked to like her, her aunt said. She was my only niece.
What had she been like? Extremely spoiled, Gottlieb hazarded, especially by a sickly mother who gave birth to her late in life. A mother who gave birth to her at a point when both parents had almost given up having children. Spoiled, and with a mean streak. He recalled her father’s anecdotes about the goldfish, and her reaction to her mother’s spilling hot coffee on herself. But did spoiled and mean make her evil, whatever the word meant?
Despite his work with evildoers, despite having read at length about them, Gottlieb had paid small attention to the concept of evil per se. He relegated it to philosophy, not medicine, and philosophy had never sparked his interest. His only exposure to it had been a single introductory course, a survey. Some of it he’d found vaguely interesting: Socrates’s use of the dialectic; Augustine’s musings on the City of God; Rousseau’s notion of the noble savage. Some of it—Hegel, Kant, and Schopenhauer, in particular—he found impen-etrable, and wading through it had been excruciating. Much of it he regarded as pilpul, erudite nonsense, the Yiddish equivalent of agonizing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Philosophic discussions of good and evil struck him as much ado about nothing, a needless muddying of the obvious. Good was when you helped people, when you tried to leave the world in better shape than you found it, when you showed reverence for life and living creatures. Evil was when you did the opposite. To the limited extent that Gottlieb considered it at all, he believed it resulted from ignorance, faulty parental and cultural influences, and bad biochemistry in one’s central nervous system. It was pretty much the view he’d put forth on Roundtable. He did not believe in a discrete embodiment of evil, or a central agent of it – in other words, he did not believe in Satan. His interest in Satan began and ended with Paradise Lost, a work he admired but saw as a product of poetic license. He regarded the notion of a horned devil with cloven hooves as similar to the notion of Venus springing to life fully formed from ocean foam.
None of which shed much light upon Christina Shannon. The more he learned of her, the more questions occurred to him. Why had no one liked her? (Perhaps some people did, although he hadn’t found them yet). Why had they asked her to leave that camp? Why had she shown no grief when her mother died? How had things really been between her father and herself when the two of them were suddenly thrust together, without her mother as a buffer? Why didn’t her aunt and uncle give the tiniest hint that they mourned her passing? As the story of the Shannons came to light, Gottlieb knew that crucial parts of it were still missing.
He remembered that James Shannon had given him the name of Christina’s therapist. He took out the Chicago Yellow Pages and flipped through them quickly. A few moments later he found what he was looking for: Malcolm Kenyon, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, Practice Limited to Children and Adolescents.
He would call Dr. Kenyon the first thing Monday morning.
⸎
Gottlieb tried to force himself to read, to jot down some notes for his article, but half an hour later he gave up. Just as he left the study, Peter came downstairs. The boy wore a pair of rumpled khakis and an orange T-shirt emblazoned with DAZED AND CONFUSED. The outfit looked as though he’d slept in it.
It was a few minutes before eleven, but his heavy-lidded eyes were barely open. He hadn’t washed or combed his hair. His father’s first thought: He looks homeless.
“Good morning, Peter.”
The dull eyes remained downcast. “Hi.”
Gottlieb glanced at his watch. “You’re sleeping late today.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not like I have a lot to get up for.”
“I’m going out with Sarah later, run a few errands, stop at Barnes & Noble. Want to come along?” He tried to make the invitation sound as though he meant it.
“Uh-uh.”
“Well, what are you going to do with yourself?”
Peter’s eyes stayed glued to the floor. “I don’t know, just hang around. Maybe call Gordy.”
Gottlieb fought off despair as he tried to imagine the stultifying emptiness of his son’s day. He recalled a quote from one of his old textbooks on adolescent psychiatry: “Idleness is particularly demoralizing to young people.”
Just what he needs, Gottlieb fretted, to become even more demoralized than he is already.
⸎
The afternoon passed quickly as he and Sarah picked up the dry cleaning, went to a drive-through car wash. and stopped at Blockbusters to rent Th
e Little Mermaid. She’d already seen it twice, her father reminded her, but no matter. She deemed it the best movie in the world.
Then they went to Barnes & Noble. He left her in the children’s department while he headed towards the history section, seeking out books on the Holocaust and World War II. Since meeting Cassandra, he found himself with heightened interest in the Holocaust, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and the lives of its leaders. The next time he saw her, he’d ask her for a reading list. The next time he saw her. He looked forward to it with an unaccustomed eagerness, an eagerness tinged with no small measure of anxiety.
He wondered what she’d be doing tonight. A bike ride in the early evening, and then she’d read or work on the computer? Or, maybe she’d go out to a movie? Perhaps she had a date. But he guessed she’d be alone, and altogether comfortable in her solitude.
It occurred to him that he’d rather be spending the evening with her than with his wife and the Edelsteins.
He met Sarah, bought Hitler’s Willing Executioners for himself and a Dr. Seuss for her, and they drove straightway to the Baskin-Robbins. She asked him to hold her up so she could get a better look at the row of flavors. A swirly purple-and-white one caught her fancy. Blueberry ripple.
He opted for lemon sorbet, and they took their selections to a table. Between the licks of ice cream, she kept up a constant line of patter, mainly questions. One of her friends, Ellie McFarland, had just gotten an orange-and-white tabby kitten, and maybe they could get a kitten too, and what did he think of The Little Mermaid, and are mermaids real, and why does ice cream make your teeth hurt, and why doesn’t Peter like her, and what happens to the moon when the sun comes up?
Half-listening to her, his thoughts drifting here and there, he recalled his own grave doubts about their decision to have a second child. He was already forty-three, Sharon almost thirty-nine. Wouldn’t they be too old? They’d be raising another adolescent when they were in their late fifties, paying for college in their sixties. Furthermore, their lives were still much too unsettled for his liking. They’d reconciled just a short time before, after a wrenching separation precipitated by her affair. An affair with his former partner and putative best friend, no less.
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