Pharmakon

by Dirk Wittenborn

  My father blamed my mother for getting us off on the wrong foot in Greenwood. June Lutz, head of the PTA, den mother, Girl Scout leader, piano teacher, and everything else a mom was supposed to be in 1953, waited until the movers had gotten all our furniture into the house before coming over to welcome us into the neighborhood with a freshly baked plate of brownies.

  My mother was upstairs when Mrs. Lutz knocked. As she hurried down the stairs, she saw the smiling neighbor holding the baked offering through the glass of the front door. My mother made herself smile and wave. My father had told her she was obviously clinically depressed and had tried to talk her into going into therapy. “I’ll go when you go” was what she had said. Even though she felt as if her life had miscarried, she was prepared to pretend she was happy, to open the door and ask Mrs. Lutz in, offer her coffee, introduce her to the children, say all the things that are expected: “How sweet, you shouldn’t have, you have to give me the recipe.”

  If only the mover hadn’t chosen that exact moment to ask, “What do you want us to do with the crib?” It was Jack’s crib. Back in Hamden she had told the movers to throw it away. Her husband had insisted they bring it. It was the smell of the mattress that got her, Jack’s smell. My mother was so rattled by loss, all she could do was point to the cellar door. Mrs. Lutz watched incredulously as my mother suddenly turned her back and retreated back up the stairs to the dark, narrow room she had reserved as her bedroom. My mother forgot all about the brownies until Willy found them on the doormat the next morning.

  My mother wanted to go across the street, knock on the door, and explain. But she knew she could not tell Mrs. Lutz about why a crib sent her running without telling her about Jack, which meant telling her about Casper, which meant she could remain silent, but she would not lie about what had killed her youngest. When Willy broke the plate, my mother gave up. She could explain herself or the dish, but not both.

  When my father learned of the brownie incident he went out and bought a hand-painted platter from Portugal to replace the broken plate, had it gift wrapped at the store, and delivered it to the Lutzes himself. He had come to Greenwood wanting things to go well.

  At first, it seemed like he could make it right. Mr. Lutz answered the door, told my dad to call him Chuck, and invited him in for a drink. Mrs. Lutz loved the plate. My father was so eager to make a fresh start, he made small talk with Lutz about the pros and cons of rotary versus reel-blade grass motors. It was all going well until Chuck asked him, “Where in Connecticut did you say you were from?”

  Friedrich hadn’t said he was from Connecticut. He guessed the realtor had mentioned it. “Outside of New Haven.”

  “Fall must be beautiful in Connecticut.” Mrs. Lutz was putting the plate on their mantle.

  “I bet it’s pretty nice here, too. I noticed your sugar maples.”

  “You want to rake the leaves, you can have ’em.”

  Friedrich laughed at Lutz’s joke.

  “You’re the first psychologist we’ve ever met.” Mrs. Lutz was throwing away the gift wrapping now.

  “We’re just like anyone.”

  “Didn’t I read something about a psychologist being murdered in New Haven by some student who went off his rocker?”

  Friedrich studied them. Did they know about him and Casper? How much did they know? Who told them? Fiona, Lucy . . . who else knew? Did everybody know? “It was a psychiatrist.”

  “They’re real doctors, right?”

  Friedrich was so worried about what they might know about him, he didn’t even take offense. “Psychiatrists are MDs; I’m a PhD.”

  My father put down his drink and stood up. “Anyway, we have a lot of unpacking to do. I just wanted to explain about my wife.”

  “Oh, there’s no need to explain.”

  “I just wanted you to know Nora’s . . . shy.”

  “We’re having a Kiwanis picnic down by the park this Saturday.”

  “Maybe another time. Sorry about the plate, and sorry she couldn’t come to the door.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” That wasn’t what my father was worried about. “We understand.” They didn’t, of course.

  That night my father sat my mother and siblings down at the dinner table and told them there were several items that wouldn’t be unpacked in Greenwood. Casper, the Wintons, and Jack. They were not to discuss those subjects with any of their new friends.

  “Why not?” Fiona asked. She missed Hamden already.

  “You want us to lie.” Lucy liked making up stories.

  “No. I don’t want you to lie. I just don’t want you to bring it up.” Friedrich looked over. Nora was staring down at her dinner plate as if she were reading a map.

  “Why? We didn’t do anything.” That was Willy.

  “What your father means is, it’s no one’s business but ours.” My mother was talking to her coleslaw.

  “We’re making a fresh start. There is no need to let anyone know what happened in Hamden.”

  “You mean they wouldn’t like us if they knew?” Willy was good at pinning my father down.

  “They might have second thoughts.”

  “About what?”

  “Christ, don’t be obtuse. People gossip. When they gossip, they get things wrong. I’m telling you, it’ll go better if you don’t talk about it with outsiders.” That included me, once I was born.

  People did gossip. The Lutzes talked to the Murphys, who told the Goodmans. The Friedrichs were an “unusual” couple, which meant odd, which in a matter of weeks translated as “weird.”

  According to Fiona and Lucy, my father doomed them to geekiness when he removed the street number from the front steps. If he had told the neighbors a psychopath had come to his house once and he didn’t want it to happen again, they would have understood his desire to make his house difficult for anyone outside the neighborhood to locate. As it was, the neighborhood first just thought he was peculiar for removing it, and then decided he was crazy for blaming the post office for not delivering his mail. Our family’s secret and my father’s paranoia cut the family off as surely as if he had relocated to an island or constructed a drawbridge. When someone in the community who hadn’t yet heard we were weird sent my parents or sisters or brother an invitation to a wedding, a christening, a bar mitzvah, a dance, by the time it finally arrived, the event had occurred, and it was assumed we had deemed them unworthy of even a response. The Friedrichs were thought to be snobs, people with better places to go and people to meet. In truth, we were in quarantine.

  My siblings never mentioned Casper, the Wintons, or Jack. But they talked about Hamden all the time. For them it was a place where my parents had friends, cocktail parties, neighbors they liked, and a backyard where other children wanted to play. And though they made it clear our family was never normal, they enchanted that time and place into a magical kingdom where laughter came easier and parrots flew in from nowhere. All I knew was the weirdness of living in a house with no address and having a mother who wept when you blew out your candles. It’s strange, feeling you’d already missed the boat at age six.

  Greenwood affected each of my siblings differently. Lucy, in an effort to give our neighbors an explanation for our peculiarities and distance herself from the weirdness, told the Lutzes we were adopted. And to this day Dr. Goodman believes my father’s oddities were due to a brain tumor. Willy watched TV and ate Oreos. A lot of Oreos. So many Oreos, in fact, he was now twenty pounds overweight. A seven-year-old with breasts is not the first one chosen for fun and games. The public school system of Greenwood had infuriated my father and Willy, who was born in December, by insisting my brother wait a year to start kindergarten. He was the oldest, biggest, smartest, and saddest boy in his class.

  Fiona believed she could avoid contamination by being perfect. She got straight As, won piano recitals, and made friends with the least attractive people in high school so that she would seem even more perfect.

  The secret was safe, or rather, I was
safe from it. I knew Jack was in the room. But the other ghosts stayed away . . . until I learned how to swim.

  I was seven and everybody in my family could swim but me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like getting wet. I could play in the bathtub for hours. And I was all for wading in lakes, rivers, ponds—even the ocean. I wasn’t afraid to go in the water. What terrified me was losing touch with the bottom. Even with a life preserver on I could never bring myself to push off, to let go of what I knew and float free.

  My father tried every motivational approach a psychologist could imagine. Praise, bribery, positive thinking, scientific explanation, accompanied by my mother in her modest, black-skirted swimsuit, my father in his plaid trunks would demonstrate over and over again that the body floats as long as there is air in your lungs. Nothing he said could convince me that I wasn’t the exception to his rules, that I wouldn’t sink like a stone. In frustration he once resorted to good old-fashioned shame and humiliation: “A dog can swim, a cat can swim, Christ, even a hydrocephalic can swim.”

  My mother told him, “That’s cruel, Will.” And once she explained what a hydrocephalic was, I agreed.

  “I just don’t want the boy to drown.” My mother said nothing, and thought of Jack. Which is exactly what I was thinking of. If Jack had drowned in a birdbath, what was to keep me alive if I dared venture out of my depth?

  I wanted to swim almost as much as I wanted to please my father. I’d stand chest deep in cold water until my lips turned blue and my fingertips were as wrinkled as white raisins, waiting for the courage that kept the rest of my family afloat. Then, just when I’d finally be ready to do it, Willy would cluck like a hen and shout, “Chicken!”

  “He does it to get attention. You should really send him to a child psychologist that specializes in phobias.” That was Fiona.

  “Don’t worry, Zach; I took junior lifesaving.” Lucy was, if nothing else, well-intentioned.

  Then my father would say, “Trust me, Zach. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

  Thinking but not saying, That’s what you told Jack, I’d wade out of the water, turn my back on them, and try to comfort myself with the warmth of a damp towel.

  Embarrassed that I could not swim, ashamed that I did not trust my own father, and knowing that if I tried to explain, mentioned Jack’s name, I’d make them all sad, I resorted to deception.

  When my family went to a lake or a river or the sea, I’d forget my bathing suit, feign I was coming down with a cold, swear to God I had a stomachache.

  “If that’s how you want to be,” my mother would say. I did not want to be afraid. I was.

  In the first week of the July of my seventh year, my father announced we would spend the upcoming Saturday picnicking on a then unspoiled white dune stretch of New Jersey shore called Island Beach State Park. I, of course, didn’t want to go. Panic was followed by delirious and unexpected relief when Fiona at the last minute volunteered to stay home with me. “I really should practice for my piano recital.” Fiona was seventeen.

  “I don’t feel comfortable, you two being alone.”

  “It’s a duet. Gayle’s coming over. We have to practice.”

  “You’ll keep an eye on Zach.”

  “Of course.”

  My parents drove off with Lucy and Willy in the back of the Plymouth and me promising to be good.

  Three minutes later a flat-topped wrestler in the 168-pound weight class named Joel appeared, greeting me with a simple, “You tell your parents, you’re dead meat.” When I tried to follow them down to the basement rec room where a phonograph and a stack of 45s were waiting to cover the sounds of heavy petting and dry humping on the squeaky-springed old couch by the furnace, the door was slammed in my face. Fiona giggled as the lock slid home, the 45 dropped, and Chubby Checker told me, “It’s pony time, boogety boogety booogety shoo.” The couch began to squeak. Usually my sister danced to that song. I thought it odd she and Joel would be so secretive about moving furniture and stopped listening.

  Fifteen minutes later I was so bored, I wished I’d gone to the beach. The air was still and oppressive, the house unair-conditioned. What to do? A bowl full of lemons on the pink Formica kitchen counter gave me an idea: I’ll set up a lemonade stand, charge five cents a cup . . . I counted the Dixie cups stacked in cellophane—there were twenty-five—and did the math. If I sold them all, I’d make more than a dollar.

  When my father saw my siblings watching TV after school or on a Saturday, he’d always say, “Why do you rot your brain when you could be reading, learning a foreign language, or getting some exercise? Christ—anything. When I was your age, I had a job. And the nickel I earned made a difference in the Depression.” The truth was, I would have happily spent that Saturday watching TV if Dad hadn’t put a padlock on the doors of the TV cabinet.

  Convinced a display of enterprise, get up and go—i.e., a lemonade stand—might atone for my failure to swim, I took out a large knife and began to halve lemons, careful not to add one of my thumbs to the recipe—four lemons, a gallon of water, most of a pound bag of cane sugar, and ice. I made a sign with a red crayon on cardboard: ICE COLD LEMONADE, 5¢.

  It was lukewarm sugar water at best, but I set up a card table on the sidewalk in front of our house, and much to my amazement, cars began to stop. I had made thirty-five cents when a Cadillac pulled up to the curb. The man who got out wore a clean white lab coat, just like the ones the doctor friends of my father wore at Needmore, a state mental hospital. Sometimes my father would bring us along when he went to see patients they were testing drugs on. It had a lawn bigger than a football field. And after my father did his business, he’d take us fly-fishing in a river too shallow to attempt a swimming lesson.

  The man who got out of the Cadillac had a stethoscope in his pocket. When he first looked at me, he seemed more lost than interested in lemonade. After a puzzled silence, he said: “You can’t be who I think you are.”

  “I’m Zach Friedrich, Dr. Friedrich’s son.”

  “Of course.” He fished a dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to me. He didn’t drink the lemonade, but he told me, “Keep the change.”

  “My mom and dad are at the beach with Willy and Lucy.” Gray was on the porch, eyeing us as he pried the last kernels of corn off last night’s cob. Mouth full, Gray ruffled his feathers and called for the dogs.

  “Spot! Thistle!” Inside the house the pointers jumped up on the couch, noses to the window, and barked ferociously.

  “You here all alone?” He had a slow, calm voice, like the one my father used when he talked to you after a bad dream, or to explain why you needed “quiet time,” i.e., solitary confinement in your room.

  “My sister’s babysitting me.” The man in the lab coat stepped into the shadow of the maple tree. “She’s in the basement with her boyfriend, Joel, but . . .”

  “But what, Zach?”

  “Joel said I’d be dead meat if I told.”

  “I’m good with secrets.”

  “Are you a friend of my dad’s?”

  “Old friend. I know your whole family. Even Gray.” Unlike most grown-ups, with the exception of Lazlo, he seemed to be actually interested in what I had to say. “So then why didn’t you go to the beach?”

  “I can’t swim.”

  He smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. He had fingers like my mom’s, long and thin and pink. “Want to learn?”

  “I tried. I can’t. I’m hopeless.”

  “That’s what they said about me.” He had a nice smile.

  “No fooling?”

  “No fooling. Everybody made fun of me. Wrote me off. It’s hard when you can’t do something that’s so easy for other people.”

  “How’d you learn to swim?”

  “Scientific technique. It always works. But it’s a secret. If I show you, you can’t tell anybody.”

  “I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  He looked at his watch, only there wasn’t one on his wrist. I
guess he forgot to put it on. My father was absentminded like that. The dogs were still barking, Gray whistled. “I guess I can squeeze you in.” It was just what my father said when he talked to his patients on the phone. “Get in the car.”

  “We better tell my sister.”

  “Then they’ll know I know about Joel and we’ll both be dead meat.” We shared a laugh and I skipped toward the Cadillac. He opened the driver’s door.

  I started to get in, then froze. “What about my bathing suit?”

  “You won’t need it. It’s part of the secret technique.” Just before we drove away, he told me, “Put on your seat belt.”

  We drove south on Route 1 with the radio tuned to a ballgame. The Yankees were playing the Dodgers. He knew more about different players’ batting averages and time on base versus at bats than the announcers. When I asked him how come, he said, “When I was in the hospital I listened to a lot of radio with the other patients.”

  “You were sick?”

  “Very. That’s where I learned how to swim.” When I said I was hungry he stopped and bought us foot-long hot dogs and orange pop.

  After a while we turned off the highway and headed down a long dirt road. Yellow dust billowed up around us and the air smelled like Christmas trees on account of we were in the middle of a forest of stunted pine, and just when I was thinking we were an awful long way from home, he stopped the car. When the dust settled, up ahead, through a break in the trees, there was a stretch of water blue and glassy and smooth as a marble.

  “What’s this place called?”

  “It doesn’t have a name, Zach.” I liked that idea.

  The small lake was deserted. I was relieved that there were no children to shout “Chicken! What are you scared of?” No grownups to offer encouragement. It was just the man in the white coat and me and a crow being chased away from a nest full of eggs by a songbird who had been sitting on them.