Pharmakon

by Dirk Wittenborn

  When you didn’t agree with my father, you were fighting him. And if you fought him, he knew how to make you feel like you had lost even if you won. Part of my mother’s job was to jolly him out of these moods.

  “Zach’s too young. In a few years, I’ll go with you.” She smiled at him, fingers poised over the keyboard.

  “I don’t want to wait a few years. I’ve waited too goddamn long for this as it is.”

  I sat with my siblings, trying to figure out what “this” was that made my father slam his fist on the table so hard her tea sloshed over the lip of the cup and a stack of computer printouts toppled onto the floor. As my mother cleaned up the mess, she said, “For God’s sake, I’m not saying you can’t go. Go on without me.”

  “If I wanted to go on without my wife, I wouldn’t have married you.” The way my father said it, it wasn’t clear if it was a compliment or a threat.

  Fiona heard it the same way. “Does that mean you’re going to divorce Mom if she doesn’t go to Europe?”

  “This is a private conversation.”

  It was Lucy’s turn to give it to him. “If it’s private, why don’t you close the door? Or go to the bedroom?” Lucy smiled innocently.

  “Or go out to the car like you used to do back in Hamden.”

  My sisters giggled conspiratorially. Willy and I didn’t get it.

  “This happens to be my house, and I’ll say what I like in it.” My father was not a shouter, it was when he lowered his voice and cut the emotion out of it that told us it was time to shut up.

  Having silenced the peanut gallery, he softened his tone, reached out, and took hold of my mother’s hand. “Nora, this trip, this kind of opportunity, this is what we’ve been working for all these years.”

  “This is what you’ve been working for.”

  “Well, if it’s all for me, why do I want you there?”

  “I’m not sure.” My mother had never been to Europe.

  “Christ, most wives would jump at the chance to go to Paris. Why would you want to be here when you could . . . ?” My father shook his head in genuine bafflement. “What aren’t you sure of?”

  My mother raised an eyebrow. “A great many things. But we’ll leave that for another time. What I am certain of is, I don’t want to miss Zach’s play.” Struggling to decipher the code they spoke in, I had completely forgotten I was to be the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

  “You are going to pass up an all-expenses paid trip to Europe with your husband to attend a third-grade play?”

  “Yes.” My mother hadn’t had time to help me with my costume or rehearse my lines. I felt guilty for thinking she didn’t care.

  My father thought for a moment, then clapped his hands. “Well, since it’s Zach’s play, why don’t we let Zach decide if he thinks it’s a good idea.”

  “Fine, but you’re not going to like his answer.”

  I was summoned out of the kitchen. My mother smiled at me as I stood between them. My father was suddenly positively cheerful; he loved a test. There was not a touch of intimidation in his tone when he said, “Now, Zach, I want you to answer us honestly. Speak from your heart.” My brother and sisters crowded in the doorway to hear my judgment. “Would you rather your mother go to your play or go to Europe and see all the things she’s always wanted to see but never had the chance? And help me with my work, which, by the way, is what pays the bills around here?”

  My mother knew what I wanted. I’d been pestering her to help me learn my part for days. There was no question my heart was set on her being front and center as I charmed the rats and led the children into the mountain after the townspeople had cheated me. Just as I was about to say “Stay, don’t go, I need you,” my father smiled at me with a warmth as real as a heat lamp. Knowing and fearful that that smile could be replaced by a look so cold and withering you felt like the sun had excluded you from the privilege of its warmth, I answered, “I think you should go with Dad.”

  My mother was shocked. “You don’t really mean that.” I didn’t. I missed her already, in fact. But more than anything, I missed that look that was now on my father’s face. When I added, “Dad’s right, you should listen to him,” my father chuckled and winked at me.

  “Smart boy.” His hand was on my shoulder, but I was in the palm of his hand. My father always called me his friend; now I was his accomplice. We had our own spiderweb of connection.

  My brothers and sister cheered the same way they had when Casper was captured. My mother was puzzled and relieved. The last battle was over. “You know you can change your mind about this if you want to, Zach.”

  “I don’t want to.” I had disappointed her; I was her last excuse from complete immersion. I had also disappointed myself, and yet I was happy. To please my father was a rare and wondrous thing, like an eclipse.

  And so Willy and I were left in the care of my sisters, which was not unlike being suckled by benevolent wolves. My mother had left the kitchen so heavily stocked you would have thought she was anticipating a natural disaster.

  Breakfast for me was a candy bar, dinner, pizza ordered in. The casseroles my mother had precooked were never served. Willy surprised us; as soon as my parents left for the airport, he took all his Oreos and flushed them down the toilet. Stranger still, he then ran to the supermarket (Willy was not a big runner) and bought chicken breasts and heads of broccoli. Back home, he weighed out four-hundred-calorie portions, and every day for the next two weeks, that was all he ate.

  Freedom from my parents meant different things to each of us. I fell asleep in front of the TV and stopped bathing. Every night was date night for my sisters. Boys roamed our house as if it were a Boy Scout jamboree, and Chubby Checker records were played at full volume.

  Curiously, the one area where responsibility was not shirked was my third-grade class play. Lucy helped me memorize my lines, Fiona made me a costume of green-and-yellow satin. Gray the parrot supplied the feather for my cap. Together they taught me how to play a four-note tune on the recorder. They all got dressed up and sat in the front row. Everybody clapped, even Willy. And afterward I heard my teacher say I was the best Pied Piper they’d ever had, and then add with a sigh, “It’s a shame how his parents suit themselves.”

  It was strange how much better we all got along without my parents there. Thirteen days later we spent the whole day vacuuming and Windexing and gluing together the stuff we had broken. And that night, after we watched 77 Sunset Strip on TV, Fiona and Lucy said good-bye to their short-lived freedom by having a beer and smoking the last of their cigarettes. Lucy blew smoke rings. “We have to get our stories straight.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Well, we can’t tell Mom we missed her.”

  “We didn’t miss her.” Willy volunteered.

  “Exactly, but if Mom thinks that, she’ll get upset, and she won’t go away again.”

  Lucy chugged the last of her beer and belched. “I got it. Just tell Mom, it’s not the same when you’re not here.”

  “What do we tell Dad?” I asked.

  Fiona thought for a minute. “That you learned a lot about yourself.”

  They all thought that was really funny. After that they began to trade anecdotes about, as Lucy put it, “how totally bonkers Dad is.”

  The TV glowing before us like a campfire, Willy, Lucy, and Fiona shared stories in the darkened room about their childhood. Some I’d heard but never really listened to, others happened before I was born or too little to remember. I listened as they tried to top each other about who Dad had done the most twisted thing to.

  Fiona started out recalling the bowl Dad had filled with tadpoles caught in the shadow of Sleeping Giant. “He put it right by my bed and told me, ‘If you look at them every morning when you wake up, one day you’ll get a surprise.’ And sure enough, one day I wake up and look over, and they were all dead. And when I ran to Dad and told him, ‘The tadpoles are dead,’ he said, ‘I told you you’d get a surprise.’ ”

>   “So what?” I didn’t get it.

  “He wanted me to look at them every morning so I’d see them turn into frogs. Like a science class experiment. And when they died, he acted like that was what he had wanted me to see.” What I could see was that it bothered Fiona.

  It was Willy’s turn now. “When I was three, Dad told me I could have anything in the world if I peed standing up.”

  “If you were three, Willy, you wouldn’t remember,” I interjected. Their stories were scaring me.

  “This happened,” Lucy assured me.

  “And after I peed standing up, I asked for a broom so I could be just like Mommy. Then you want to know what Dad did?” Willy was practically shouting.

  “No.”

  “He bought me a pair of boxing gloves and told me I was going to need them if I was going to act just like Mommy.”

  But Lucy won the prize. “Remember the dead mouse in the orange juice bottle?”

  “It was a milk carton,” Fiona reminded her.

  “Whatever. When you were little, Zach, Mom was an unbelievable slob.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, she just seemed tired all the time, and took naps, and let the dishes pile up, and left food out. Used to drive Dad crazy. One day—”

  Fiona interrupted, “Don’t tell this one, Lucy.”

  “It’s not that scary. One day, he’s making us dinner—”

  “Dad made you dinner?” I’d never seen my father cook.

  “He used to do stuff like that when Mom was depressed.”

  “Mom was depressed?”

  “Let me finish my story. So, he’s making us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—”

  “They were ham and cheese,” Willy corrected her.

  “Okay, ham and cheese sandwiches, and he sees a mouse running along the counter. And Dad takes the knife and throws it.”

  Willy, smiling, nodded “yes” to the story. “Amazing shot. Stabs it from like three feet away.”

  Lucy continued. “And then he picks it up and holds it up in the air. Its legs are still wiggling. And then he opens the refrigerator door . . .”—Lucy leaned close to tell this part of the story— “. . . and he puts it in a milk carton. He tells us, ‘A little surprise for your mother in the morning.’ ”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Mom never noticed it.”

  “Why did Dad want to do that to Mom?”

  Fiona took a deep drag from her cigarette, then exhaled through her nose like a dragon. “I think it was a crude attempt at shock therapy.”

  I decided it was safer not to ask what shock therapy was.

  When my parents came home the next day, they had hugs and kisses and presents for us. Eventually, my father took a long, hard look at my brother and said, “Willy, have you lost weight?”

  Willy said, “No,” even though he’d shed ten pounds.

  Every few months after that, my mother and father would leave for a week or two, sometimes three, on a pharmaceutical junket. Strangely, I missed them most when they came back home.

  Casper didn’t trick the surveillance cameras or knock out the guards or send us ominous, creepy warnings. He never escaped from Needmore. But there was no escaping him. Even in his impregnable isolation, he had always been, and still was, the force that drove our lives.

  If it had not been for Casper, we would never have made our forced march south to the pharmaceutical wilderness in New Jersey, settled on the PCB-polluted Raritan, or tried to call a place like Greenwood home. I think my father, during all those years of hiding out on Harrison Street, knew that Casper would one day catch up to him. The gun in his bedside table, the dogs that were encouraged to bark at strangers, losing the street number from the front of our house, my father had been so busy looking over his shoulder, he couldn’t enjoy what he had. He had spent so many years waiting for the past that haunted him to take corporeal form for a final reckoning that when the thing he feared most did happen, and he and we, much to his amazement, survived, my father had forgotten how to relax.

  It was clear my father and mother both believed there was no longer any physical threat from Casper. The front door was now left unlocked. The dogs were defanged with leather muzzles that left them prey to the bullying of neighborhood cats. The revolver was taken out of the bedside table and hidden in the top drawer of his dresser in the closet. Not even my father’s reach was that long. And had they had the slightest fear Casper could escape the life sentence my father had given him, they never would have left us alone for weeks at a time.

  But still my father could not shake the idea that catastrophe was just around the corner. Though Casper had been recaptured, simply by existing Casper was a constant reminder that bad things can, do, and probably will happen if your name’s Friedrich. Part of my father’s lingering paranoia stemmed from growing up on a farm. He was full of stories of boys and girls who had been strangled by scarves caught in the gears of farm machinery or mutilated by thresher blades and runaway tractors, and of entire families murdered overnight by a hidden army of bacilli in a mason jar of stewed tomatoes that should not have been brought up from the cold cellar. Coming of age in the Great Depression, he knew money couldn’t be trusted. But it was Casper who made him think life was out to get him.

  No matter how hard my mother tried to distract him with herself and work, my father had a way of steering the conversation, especially at dinner, around to the subject of calamities and how to avoid them. Willy gagging on too large a bite of steak prompted a lecture on how to perform a tracheotomy. I still remember his guiding my fingers on his throat to demonstrate the ribbed ridges of the windpipe that we were instructed to slice open with a steak knife, as opposed to the jugular, which would cause you to bleed to death, even if you happened to have needle and catgut on hand. The menu of hypothetical disasters in the restaurant of life was long and varied. Petting a neighbor’s pet rabbit was an invitation to tularemia. Eating from a slightly dented can of tuna fish was a death wish via botulism. No question, if there were game show called Worst Possible Scenarios, we would win: poisonous snakes, spiders with necrotic venom, tics that could kill you with Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Willy maintained that my father warned us about everything so that they wouldn’t have to feel guilty if one of us died while they were gone.

  Who knows? Perhaps my father’s warnings, reminders, and cautionary tales saved our lives many times over. My father tried to protect us with knowledge. But contrary to what he and I believed, he didn’t know everything.

  Not all Casper’s magic was bad. In the logic of my mind, if it had not been for Casper, my mother never would have fallen back in love with my father. And just as his initial imprisonment at Townsend had sent us retreating south to Greenwood, his brief escape and convenient entombment at Needmore prompted us to make our next move.

  There had never been any love lost between us and Greenwood. My father had always hated suburban life—houses built eight to an acre, neighbors looking over hedges and peering into windows, observing our life the way my father observed patients through Needmore two-way mirror. The Illinois acres my father grew up on had been hardscrabble, but there were three hundred of them. He was suspicious of sidewalks that told you where to walk, and homes that lacked a barn.

  Before Casper obliged us by his timely capture in the medical library of Johns Hopkins, the thought of living in the country, of not having neighbors who could hear our screams for help, was out of the question. But now, as the new decade of the swinging sixties unfolded before us, my parents could no longer use him as an excuse for not going after the life my father had told himself would make him happy back in the days when he drove past the big houses of Hamden in the White Whale.

  And so it was Casper Gedsic’s recapture that gave my father permission to begin his search for a house that would provide a suitable and conducive home for his dreams. He traded in the Plymouth that had carried us south for a gaudy new red 1962 Buick Skylark station wago
n, equipped with air-conditioning, to make the quest more comfortable.

  Every Sunday my parents would pack the Friedrich tribe into their new wagon and set off in search of a new homestead. North, south, east, west, my father did not have a specific location or destination in mind, just so long as it was within an hour’s drive of work and conducive to a change in his state of mind.

  Getting lost, turning left when we should have gone right, rolling countless miles down country lanes and gravel roads, choking on the dust of the realtors who led the way up ahead, bickering about what radio station to listen to, where to stop for lunch, why Willy insisted on taking off his shoes if he knew his feet stunk, could Lucy have a horse? (yes, if you get a summer job and pay for it yourself ), could I finally ride the minibike Lazlo had given me? (maybe), could Willy have a rifle and get a hunting license? (no), could Fiona please stop playing her goddamn guitar? can we join a country club? (why not?), can I go to the bathroom? (you should have thought about that when we stopped for gas), if Lucy can have a horse, why can’t I have a rifle? (because you’ll shoot it). At first it was fun, in a kind of hellish way.

  But finding a place where he could feel at home was not easy for Dad. My mother told us and whoever else was listening that all she wanted was for her husband to find something that would make him happy. My father slowly and torturously made it clear that happiness was something he knew nothing about. He would tell the realtors in no uncertain terms that he was interested in an old house, a house with character, i.e., a house that had a sense of a past he had not known but sensed he would have liked to have had.

  When he was shown charming colonials with Revolutionary War provenance or elegant country homes with white pillars built to last in the 1920s, Dad would at first get all excited and imagine the antiques he would collect to fill them—a sideboard we didn’t have against the dining room wall we had not bought; imaginary wing chairs like the ones he had sat on at the Wintons’ placed on either side of a fireplace we did not own.