A momentary burst of silence hit my left ear. Rowdy jerked his head and pulled away from the stairs. “Buddy, I am so sorry,” I told him. Far above us, something moved. We headed up the stairs. On the second-floor landing, I hit every light switch and saw no one. Straight ahead, a door opened to a filthy green-tiled bathroom that looked like the stage set for a film on home safety hazards. Teetering on a little marble shelf above the ancient sink, as if deliberately positioned to tumble into the basin, was a battered electric radio plugged into the same four-way adapter that also sprouted the cords of a grungy Water-Pik and a new-looking rotating-bristle toothbrush, both of which sat on top of a toilet you don’t want to hear about. On a filthy bath mat rested a rusty electric heater heavily patched with duct tape. A three-legged stool next to the empty tub supported a little student lamp positioned like a duck ready to dive into the water. Alice Savery evidently enjoyed reading while she soaked. Her taste in books, it seemed to me, should have run toward sizzlers, but cosied up next to the lamp as if prepared to nudge it into the tub was a beautifully bound volume of A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust’s In Memory of Things Past. Courting lost time. The old Venetian blinds that covered the window had ivory-colored slats like the thinly milled tusks of poacher-killed animals. Maybe Rowdy smelled them. I had to drag him out.
On the landing, I again shouted to Miss Savery. Then I headed up the worn wooden servant stairs to the third floor. On both sides of the treads, books were stacked so high that Rowdy and I were forced to ascend single file. I went first. On top of one stack of especially scholarly-looking tomes were two dismantled smoke detectors, their battery compartments gutted. Chunks of plaster from the hospital green walls crunched underfoot.
When we’d finally picked our way up, I was sweating from the trapped heat, and my lungs sounded like an artificial respirator in need of a tune-up. The landing offered a choice of four closed doors. A foot or so above the knob of one door was a large blotch of smudges that looked like a nonrepresentational finger painting grudgingly produced by a depressed child. Working on scent rather than sight, Rowdy headed for that door. He had raised a paw to add a bas-relief to its decoration before I tugged him back, gave him an informal version of the down signal, and murmured that I’d be back soon. I turned the doorknob, wormed past Rowdy, entered the room, and quickly pulled the door shut behind me, leaving Rowdy’s leash securely caught in it.
The room I entered had a low ceiling, but it was long and wide, and its walls were so heavily lined with books that it looked like some out-of-the-way section of the stacks of a university library. Despite three open, unscreened windows that admitted smoke-tinged air, it smelled predominantly of old paper.
Directly ahead of me was an ugly, beat-up teacher’s desk. The only light came from an old-fashioned gooseneck lamp on the desk top, which also held three or four Harvard Coop notebooks, a mug of pens and pencils, a large red fire extinguisher like the one in the kitchen, an antique Underwood manual typewriter, a black telephone wired to what looked like two answering machines, and three or four other electronic devices that I couldn’t identify. I’d found Alice Savery. I no longer needed Rita’s aid. I popped it out of my ear and dropped it into a pocket of the black dress.
She was sitting at the desk. She faced away from me. As approaching sirens finally began to wail, she rose from her seat. Before she had finished turning around, I said, “Your carriage house is on fire, but the little boy got out. Now you need to come with me.”
Her gray hair with its Roman cut made her head look like a steel helmet with the visor raised, and the khaki clothes that had seemed practical and above style when I’d first seen her in her garden now looked unmistakably military. Her eyes were fiercely narrowed, as if she suffered from some form of chronic conjunctivitis that made vision painful. Although I’d removed the aid, Alice Savery’s voice was loud and somehow impersonal. Her tone was at once authoritative and pitiful: “Alfred would never have let them get away with it,” she said firmly. The small gray-and-brown figure peered to the left, then to the right. “They stole my garden. I had roses, beautiful roses. And in my white garden, there were two weeping pears that they cut down. They brought in a machine to tear up their roots.”
I found myself speaking very simply. “Miss Savery, your carriage house is burning. The fire could spread. It could be dangerous here. We need to leave. Come with me.”
Her slate-gray gaze moved systematically back and forth without pausing even briefly on me. “Can you smell it in the air?” But she was voicing an observation, not asking a question.
“Of course. The smoke—”
She blew out a scornful breath. “At first, one finds it all so very easy to dismiss. It can be so dreadfully, dreadfully subtle. One learns to adopt a multifaceted approach. There are some who disagree, but I count myself among those who subscribe to the theory that aluminum does indeed play a contributory role.” The strained expression on her tight face suggested a painful struggle with some complex problem of logic. Once again entirely sure of herself, she gave a stiff smile accompanied by a mechanical jerk of the chin. “Secondary smoke is an entirely different matter.” She paused a moment. When she spoke, her voice was still loud, but her tone now suggested the expectation and fear that she might be overheard. “They have very powerful lobby groups.” Projecting her voice as aiming it at the most distant seat in a large lecture hall, she added a single word in a confiding stage whisper: “Viruses.”
As I understood the tobacco industry and its lobby groups, the term was apt enough. Alice Savery, however, turned out to be speaking literally. Her objection to cigarette smoke was based not so much on the threat it posed to human lungs as on its capacity to infect plants with something called the tobacco mosaic virus. I wondered whether it existed at all. The rabies virus certainly existed. So did HIV. As Alice Savery saw it, those were the two principal viral weapons directed at her, and their chosen agents of contagion were, respectively, dogs and homosexual men. “This Lamb,” she almost shouted, “made no effort whatsoever to disguise it. One knew immediately.” She shook a bony fist. “When one works in one’s garden, insect bites are an inevitability, not to mention two potentially rabid—” She broke off. Her eyes blazed at me. “He committed suicide. He was an extremely foolish person.”
“Come with me,” I said gently. But, again, Alice Savery paid no more attention to my words than she did to the wails of the sirens or to the shouts of the firefighters that now reached me through the open windows. Desperate to communicate with her, I went striding to the big window that faced the backyard, and I pointed dramatically at the carriage house. Flames seemed to leap out to kiss the thick streams of water from the hoses.
Alice Savery followed me. At last taking in what I’d been trying to convey, she stared briefly at the scene, but then moved away from the window and back toward her desk. “They stale my garden.” She was enraged and grieved. “And now they’re burning down my carriage house. The children have done that, you know. They steal my flowers. Only yesterday, they came and ripped them out. They hide in my carriage house, and they think I don’t know. They sneak in there, and they smoke cigarettes. My poor—
I approached her slowly and cautiously, as if she were a strange dog that might suddenly turn on me without warning as I tried to rescue it from danger. I offered her my arm. She took it. I led her to the door. As I turned the knob, I told her, “My dog is waiting in the hall, but he’s very friendly, and I promise you that he’s had all his shots. He won’t hurt you.” Rowdy’s leash was jammed in the closed door. In opening the door, I freed him.
Only when Alice Savery caught sight of Rowdy did I finally realize that my assurances—indeed, every word I’d spoken—had been utterly wasted.
“Miss Savery, you can’t hear anything I’m saying, can you?” I asked softly.
Even if Alice Savery had heard me, her terror would probably have blotted out my voice, and even if she’d been a dog lover, Rowdy would have been a bizarre
sight, a big smoke-black dog, his pink tongue hanging out as he panted from the heat, a black jersey bow on top of his massive head. Alice Savery’s steely fingers dug painfully into my arm. Then she let go and sped across the room toward her desk, presumably in search of whatever ultrasound device she’d used on Ruffly. I tried to beat her to it. We reached the desk almost simultaneously. Her hand grabbed for one of the gadgets. I snatched the gadget. “He won’t hurt you!” I bellowed. I tried to let her see my lips, but she wasn’t watching. “He’s perfectly friendly!”
As if to prove my claim, Rowdy moved toward Alice Savery. She sidestepped, threw panicked looks left and right, and suddenly darted toward the dim end of the room that lay at the front of the house. As I bent to pick up the leash that trailed from Rowdy’s collar, I heard what sounded like the rattle of chain. When I looked up, Alice Savery was at the window that overlooked Highland Street, her back toward me. I shouted her name. Anyone who can hear finds it almost impossible to believe that someone else cannot.
Hooked over the windowsill was a wide, sturdy-looking metal bracket, and out through the open window, Alice Savery was dropping the metal chains and rungs of the emergency escape ladder the bracket was meant to support. Years of manual labor seemed to have given her the strength and agility of an athlete. When I was halfway to her, she had one leg over the sill. Her hands clutched the bracket. I dropped Rowdy’s leash and sprinted, but she’d already swung her lean body over the sill, and one of her feet must have found a rung.
“Don’t!” I hollered. “Stop!”
She transferred her full weight to the ladder, and the bracket dug into the rotten wood of the sill. Then, as her frozen face vanished beneath the window, the bracket moved, and its hooks shifted. In seconds, the old wood gave way under Alice Savery’s weight.
34
A month later, Rita’s freshly streaked hair was long enough to cover her ears completely and reliably. Even when she shook her head, the aids didn’t show at all. Aid, I should say. To leave her left ear free for the telephone and to give herself a chance to adapt to amplification without total bombardment, she’d taken to wearing only the aid that went in her right ear. Three days earlier, however, she’d stepped into the shower, soaked her head, poured on shampoo, and discovered only when she was halfway through lathering her hair that one of the unbearably uncomfortable foreign objects to which she would never adjust was still firmly lodged in her right ear canal. It was now at the audiologist’s for repair or replacement. Consequently, I was walking on Rita’s left. Rowdy was ahead of Us at the end of his six-foot leather lead, sniffing bushes and, early on the warm summer evening, making sleddog-sure that we didn’t hit a patch of thin ice. Willie trotted Merrily along in what Rita considers perfect heel position, that is, anywhere that might even remotely be considered vaguely in the vicinity of her left side. His eyes crackled, his beautifully trimmed black coat gleamed, and every one of the tiny black Scotties running around his new red collar and down his leash looked exactly like him.
“I keep telling you.” Rita shook her head. “It’s much more complicated than that. The hearing loss alone was not what made her paranoid.”
“Well, it didn’t help,” I said.
“If she’d done anything about it, it wouldn’t have hurt, either,” Rita snapped.
I’d found Rita and Stephanie amazingly unsympathetic about Alice Savery’s hearing loss. The news had come as no surprise at all to Stephanie. “If the only thing the person’s doing about it is denying it, I can always tell,” Stephanie had said. “There’s a certain expression one sees on people’s faces when they’re missing a lot of what’s being said and trying to pretend that they’re getting it. Of course, I have an advantage. I watch people’s faces.” She had paused, cleared her throat, and added, “Also, one tends to assume that other people’s hearing is more or less like one’s own. My starting assumption with Miss Savery was probably rather different from yours.”
Willie greedily eyed the ankles of a passerby, but they belonged to a runner who was too quick for him. Looking almost regretful that Willie had missed an early evening snack, Rita said, “Holly, the point about this woman, Alice Savery, is that everything was part of a pattern of cutting herself off so that she became quite literally alone with her own thoughts. Yes, she had trouble hearing, but, from what I can tell, her attitude was, to a large extent, well, so what? What do other people have to say that’s really worth listening to? So, in part, when she dominated interaction, she was covering up her hearing loss. But, at the same time, she was expressing a certain arrogance that has more to do with character structure than it does with hearing or not hearing. Admittedly, there is a theory that there’s a link between uncorrected hearing loss and paranoid ideation. But what’s often overlooked is that it goes uncorrected because the person doesn’t care about what other people have to say, or, quite unconsciously, discovers that not hearing is a handy way to avoid potentially corrective input. The hearing loss and the paranoia sustain each other.”
Moving at Rita’s sore-footed pace, we’d reached Huron, walked up a block, and crossed to the intersection with Sparks Street, which leads to Brattle. Like Highland, Sparks is affluent, verdant, and beautiful. Like Highland, it had also been the site of a murder. A feminist law professor, a very pretty woman, had been walking down Sparks Street early one evening when she’d been stabbed and killed by an assailant who was never caught. Since then, even with my big dogs along, I’d superstitiously avoided Sparks Street. But Rita minces along so slowly that it made sense to take the shortest route to our destination.
“Except... Except, Rita, Alice Savery wasn’t totally cut off, you know. She listened to the radio. She could hear well enough for that. She had a TV. She got The New York Times. Her house was filled with books. And a lot of what she said was true. Rabies is incurable. The tobacco industry does have powerful lobby groups. And... Did I tell you this? There really is a tobacco mosaic virus, and it actually is spread by—”
“But a carefully selected reality,” Rita said crisply. “And with several gross distortions. Like the insects.”
“Yes, but... Rita, when the AIDS epidemic first started, there really was some concern about that. Some little town in Florida? I forget the details, but it was in all the papers. And it’s true that mosquitos spread heart-worm and malaria and some other diseases. AIDS just isn’t one of them. And about rabies, everyone in England —the entire country—is as paranoid as Alice Savery was. There’s a six-month quarantine on all dogs entering Great Britain, even if they’ve had their rabies shots, and if you sneak one in and get caught, they destroy the dog. It’s ridiculous, because there is absolutely no way that an immunized dog could introduce rabies, but if you point that out, all you hear is this huffy, pompous, ‘Well, there is no rabies in Great Britain.’ It’s their big fear about the tunnel to France, that it’s going to let in rabies. They’re completely paranoid about it.”
“Phobic,” Rita corrected. “Paranoid is what Alice Savery was. Not only did this woman project her fears and impulses and whatever on to the external world, and not only did she latch on to realities that happened to mesh with her inner life, but, once having done so, she proceeded to elaborate the elements, to manufacture connections, to hook them up with one another in ways that they just aren’t hooked. The other crucial thing about this system of hers—and this is always true in paranoid people, Holly—is that this was a system in which she herself was the central object. Yes, radon is dangerous, and, yes, so are viruses and cigarette smoke and all the rest, but, in reality, they pose separate and impersonal threats. Alice Savery was not, in fact, at the center of anything.”
“What I still can’t get over is... Obviously, I realized that there was something radically wrong with her.”
“So did she. That business about aluminum? There used to be some theory that aluminum caused Alzheimer’s, and what that was about was her sense of her own deterioration.”
“But, Rita, I honestly though
t that Morris’s property had been stolen from her. She had me convinced that someone, a shady lawyer, I don’t know, but someone had gotten hold of it. Or I thought that maybe her brother owned it and got into a poker game with a card shark and—”
Rita nearly tripped. “Savery? Holly, Savery was not—
“I don’t trust people with no first names. Hitler. Mussolini.”
“Adolph. And... Benito, wasn’t it?”
“You see?”
“Well, Savery’s was Alfred, and according to the biography I just finished, he was a perfectly decent person. The poor man died of pancreatic cancer when he was only in his midforties. In fact, I’ve wondered. This is pure speculation, but I’ve wondered if the events surrounding his death weren’t what triggered her paranoia. To all appearances, she was completely devoted to him, but at the same time there must’ve been a certain amount of envy there, too. Savery really was important; he was at the center of things. Alice was peripheral. She went to Radcliffe; she probably started out with as much potential as he did, for all we know. She must’ve felt shortchanged. Then he gets sick. She nurses him. He dies anyway. Major loss. And guilt? Normal anger that he’d deserted her. Anger when she discovered her financial position? Anger that he was Savery and she was just Alice? I don’t know.”
“Maybe Alice blamed that on a virus, too,” I said. “Maybe she thought that’s what caused the cancer.”
“Maybe she blamed it on herself. Unconsciously, of course. There’s no way we can know what her feelings were. What we do know is that she had them—everyone does—and that she couldn’t acknowledge them.”
I said, “What Alice Savery really couldn’t acknowledge was her own responsibility. I still can’t believe that she was the one who sold that lot. I mean, she had to sell it. It was either that or sell the whole place, the house, the garden, everything, and move somewhere else. If she wanted to keep living on Highland Street, it was a perfectly sensible thing to do. And one of the amazing things is that she actually went around telling people this story about how it had been stolen, and everyone just thought that what she meant was that it had appreciated. And if you look at what it’s worth today and what she probably got for it, and if you ignore everything else, well, it was a steal. You know, Rita, in a sort of simple way, what really killed her was that she honestly didn’t have enough money to keep up that house.”
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