by Susan Conant
Reaching into his pocket, Oscar pulled out a set of keys and took calm, efficient steps toward the van.
“When we get to the hospital,” Brat continued, “with luck, Gareth’s still nuts enough so they admit him.” She gave me a wry smile. “Timing is crucial. If he’s merely deluded, they won’t take him. The trick is to get him there the second he’s ready to turn violent.”
“He does get violent?”
“Yes,” Brat said, “but usually just with psychiatrists.”
Oscar was now in the driver’s seat. As he started the engine, Brat asked me casually, “You ever find a copy of the book?”
“Yes,” I said. “I found it in a used-book store.”
“Claudia must’ve missed that one.”
“When you told me she had dozens of copies, you meant library copies.”
Brat finally moved from the panel truck and headed toward Gareth. Over her shoulder, she said, loudly enough for Claudia to overhear, “‘The portrayal is felt to be unflattering and unfair.’ Her very words.”
It seemed best to remove Rowdy from the events that would follow. Watching for traffic, I led him across Huron Avenue. When we reached the sidewalk, I stopped briefly to glance back. As she’d foretold, Brat had her brother’s arms pinned behind him. She was so strong that even the big aqua backpack didn’t impede her. As if Gareth were a sort of semihuman piano, she was hauling him to the back of the truck. I felt inexpressibly sad. Rowdy eyed the proceedings with detached curiosity. Bizarre behavior is of great interest to dogs.
When Brat finished heaving Gareth into the truck, she slammed the doors. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she called to me across Huron Avenue. “Hey, he’s not heavy,” she hollered sourly, “he’s my brother.”
CHAPTER 28
When I got home, I couldn’t sleep. I paced restlessly until I realized that I was unwittingly mimicking Gareth. My body, I decided, was making a freakish effort to understand behavior that had baffled my supposedly higher faculties. Reluctant to awaken Rita by going upstairs and knocking on her door, I went outside, stared up at her windows, and found them dark. If I tried to reach Steve in Minneapolis, his mother might answer; and I didn’t feel like talking to her. I contemplated trying to find out whether Gareth had acted violent enough to earn himself a hospital bed, but had no idea which hospital to call. McLean? Mount Auburn? The Cambridge Hospital? Some small private facility I’d never heard of? For all I knew, part of the family routine might consist of driving from one emergency room to another in search of the right—or wrong—match between Gareth’s rage and the sight of some poor psychiatrist’s face.
Eventually, I found peace in what would strike a lot of people as a ridiculous activity: I wrote a belated letter of condolence about the death of a dog, an Alaskan malamute named Attla, who’d belonged, and always would, really, to David and Shilon Bedford, who started out as sledding enthusiasts, got carried away, so to speak, and now run a sled dog outfitting company, Black Ice, in New Germany, Minnesota. The name Attla was a tribute to the famous Athabascan musher George Attla. The canine Attla lived up to the legend. He was a big dog—a hundred and five pounds—and a little old-fashioned-looking for the U.S. show ring, but he earned his Canadian championship. Attla’s great strength, however, was just that: brute force. On a team, he drove so hard that his phenomenal power set the pace for the other dogs. Even running uphill, even with extra weight to haul, he wouldn’t break pace or change gears. With tears in her voice, Shilon Bedford had told me, “Attla had no mental wall! He was such an honest dog! He never gave anything but his best.” Attla had retired from his racing career a few years ago to lead an easy life in an honorable position in the Bedfords’ first kennel. Last spring, he’d shown the first signs of congestive heart failure. The disease progressed fast. In August, Attla had refused his food. “And when a malamute stops eating,” Shilon had said, “you know the end is near.” I’d learned of his death only a month ago.
Attla died at the age of ten and a half. My letter to Shilon and David was little more than a note to say how much I’d admired Attla and how sorry I was for their loss. What assailed me as I wrote was a depressing sense of the painful overcomplications of human lives: Brat’s fury at her mother, Claudia’s crazy effort to impose normality on Gareth’s madness, the apparent hopelessness of his condition, the complex questions of Claudia’s love life and Tracy Littlefield’s truthfulness, the murders of Jack Andrews and Professor Foley, the death of Shaun McGrath, the chaotic mess of Estelle’s dreadful novel and her pitiful faith in its merits, the sad pretensions of Randall Carey, Jack’s seeming reincarnation in his posthumous child, the violence of Hannah Duston and her captors, the death by hanging of Elizabeth Emerson, Steve’s refusal to spend Thanksgiving with my father, mine to spend it with his mother . . . The list seemed endless.
What finally brought me comfort was the rediscovery of my eternal refuge: My friends had loved Attla as intensely as I loved my dogs. How often is it possible to love so purely? How often is it possible to know exactly how other people feel? So if a letter of condolence about the death of a dog sounds foolish, go ahead and smile. But if you do, hope that you never love a dog.
When I awoke on Friday morning, even before I opened my eyes, I could tell that Kimi had taken advantage of Steve’s absence and my unconsciousness to pursue a campaign she’d been patiently waging for months, a crusade based on her conviction that wherever people slept must be the prime spot. Her goal was to insinuate herself under the covers and between the sheets. Like a skilled dog trainer, she’d set out to teach me this new routine by breaking the exercise into its component parts and working on it one small step at a time. Months ago, she’d started by worming her way almost imperceptibly up toward the headboard. Once I’d mastered the head-on-the-pillow phase, she’d proceeded to the next step by waiting until I was asleep to slip one front foot under the top sheet. It is, I suppose, remotely possible that she whispered subliminal messages in my ear: You will let Kimi under the covers! Nothing will make you happier than to have a big, hairy dog nestled next to you between the sheets! At first, she removed the paw the second I awoke. Today, she gave me a few moments to learn to tolerate its presence. Before my religious conversion, I’d have grabbed Kimi’s paw, removed it, and told her to forget the doomed crusade, thus unintentionally reinforcing the behavior by paying attention to it. Now, I emerged from sleep trying to plan a positive behavior-shaping strategy to achieve my goal.
To say that I woke up thinking about dog training is to say that I woke up happy. My dogs and I were alive and healthy. I was blessed with the incomparable friendship of dog people and the love of an excellent vet. Compared with Gareth Andrews, my father was barely eccentric, even if Steve thought otherwise. Once I got really clever at applying positive reinforcement to dog behavior, I could switch species and shape his mother right up, preferably by conditioning her to move to Fiji. Kevin Dennehy was due back from his ashram today. I’d leave the murders in his beefy, competent hands. The construction in my neighborhood was almost finished: The vile rats would retreat. And for all the complications I’d encountered in accepting Rita’s bet, I actually had learned a lot about Hannah Duston and would certainly be able to write something that had nothing whatsoever to do with dogs.
The optimism stayed with me throughout the morning. In response to a tactful complaint from my third-floor tenants, I cleaned the accumulated bits of freeze-dried liver, solidified cheese, and miscellaneous other transmogrified dog treats out of the coin-operated washer and dryer in the basement. Although the sky remained clear and the air dry, I surveyed my snow shovels and went out to stock up on sand and ice-melting crystals. When I returned, the machine had a message from my cousin Leah, who announced that she had a ton of stuff for me about Hannah Duston. Confident that the world would shape itself around her plans, she said she’d arrive for lunch at twelve-fifteen.
The intellectual nourishment Harvard provides for its freshmen is undoubtedly rich and va
ried. According to Leah, however, Harvard has worked out a deal to buy up the beef, poultry, meat by-products, animal liver, and fish meal that fail to meet the standards of Bil Jac for inclusion in its fresh-frozen dog chow. No other theory, she maintains, can fully account for the hamburger patties served to undergraduates. Until I’d tasted Harvard’s food myself, I dismissed my cousin’s complaints as the usual college-kid gripes about mystery meat. I’m still not convinced that she’s absolutely correct. The appearance of the brownish-colored layer in the middle of my lasagna, for example, strongly suggested Pro Plan Turkey and Barley Formula, and the lamb and rice in my Greek casserole could have been Iams or Pedigree.
Since the contents of my cupboards, refrigerator, and freezer consisted mainly of what would have been more of the same, I ran to the row of gourmet shops on Huron and arrived home with an assortment of salads and cheeses just as Leah’s bicycle rounded the corner from Concord. A few years earlier, when she’d habitually been costumed in cycling shorts, leotards, rugby shirts, running shoes, and other such athletic gear, her idea of strenuous exercise had been to train for marathon long-distance phone conversations by working up a sweat placing a series of short local calls. Now that she’d cast aside the bright aerobic colors of the body, she pedaled around Cambridge dressed exclusively in the hue of the mind: existential black. Her only concession to the spurned style of her youth was a shiny ebony helmet. Her red-gold hair streamed out beneath it, and her face was flushed from the cold and the exercise. Imagine a medieval damsel as painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti on Prozac. Perch her on a bike, replace her tubercular pallor with the glow of health, and there you have Leah, who greeted me by scanning the bags in my arms and caroling, “Free food!”
But Leah is graced with infinite forgivableness. From the saddlebags on her bike, she produced numerous volumes, photocopies, and lists of references about Hannah Duston.
Five minutes later, when she’d hugged the dogs and I’d set the kitchen table and spread out our little feast, we sat down to lunch, and I said, “Leah, you’ve really brought me a ton of stuff. Thank you.”
“When my parents called, it gave me something to talk about. Some of it’s just background. Colonial New England. Indians. But this isn’t all. Some things weren’t in the stacks. I’ve put in requests.” She picked a mussel out of her pasta salad and ate it. “Widener really does have almost everything. It’s a good thing that Harry Elkins didn’t make it to a lifeboat.”
Harvard’s main library is a memorial to Harry Elkins Widener, who went down on the Titanic.
“It was hardly a good thing for him,” I said. “Wasn’t he a young man?”
“No. I think he was in his twenties. Anyway, now he’s immortal. What more could one desire?”
“Life. And if we’re going to get philosophical, what I’d like to discuss is ethics.” I summarized everything I knew and wondered about the whole history of Jack Andrews, Claudia, Brat, Gareth, Professor Foley, Oscar Fisch, Tracy Littlefield and her son, Drew.
“You don’t know that Claudia had an affair with anyone,” Leah pointed out. “What you know is that her daughter says she did. And that her daughter hates her.”
“That’s true.”
“And that madness runs in the family.”
“Leah, so far as I know, it isn’t genetic. Besides, the only certifiable person in the family is Gareth. Jack seems to have been perfectly sane, Brat is unconventional, and Claudia is . . . Well, she stole a lot of library copies of the book with the chapter about Jack’s murder, but I’m sure she doesn’t consider herself a thief.”
“Kleptomaniacs don’t, do they?”
“I don’t know. Apparently, her rationalization is that she was portrayed unfairly in the book. Mostly what she is, is erratic. She’ll be melodramatic, and then kind of vague, and then, with Gareth—” I broke off. “But Gareth doesn’t count. It’s hard to imagine how you’d act normal when Gareth’s around.”
“Maybe he killed his father so he could marry his mother.” Leah paused to devote herself to chicken salad. “Symbolically, one assumes.”
“One certainly does!”
“How old was Gareth?”
“When Jack was murdered? Sixteen.”
“Oedipus might not’ve been any older than that. I don’t think Sophocles says. You want me to look it up?”
“Not really. Rita would say that Freud would say that—”
“So what’s Gareth’s alibi?”
“For his father’s murder? I don’t think anyone’s ever asked. Jack died sometime after five o’clock on a Monday night. He used to work alone in the building between five and seven. Gareth and Brat were presumably doing their homework or something. I have no idea. They must’ve known about the rats, and they probably knew about the poison. They both used to hang around Damned Yankee Press. I don’t know where Gareth was when Professor Foley died, either. I should ask Kevin to find out. Gareth has delusions about Professor Foley, but then he has delusions about everyone else, too.”
“What about Brat?”
“Oh, I’m sure Gareth probably has crazy ideas about her. I don’t remember if he mentioned her, but—”
“No, I mean maybe she murdered her father.”
“Brat? She worshipped him. She still does.”
“How old was she?”
“Eleven. But it’s really impossible. For one thing, she loved Chip. He wouldn’t have been tied up if she’d been there.”
“Maybe to keep him from drinking the poison?”
“That’s an idea. Possibly. But, Leah, Brat venerates Jack’s memory. She adored her father.”
“So if she found out about Tracy Littlefield? You know, Holly, a lot of parents act as if little kids can’t hear. And she was Daddy’s little girl. Maybe he didn’t quite get it that she could understand, and he let something slip. And then, of course, there’s always Electra.”
“Who?”
“She hated her mother for murdering her father.”
“Brat does hate Claudia, or at least she’s chronically furious at her. But Brat doesn’t think that her mother killed her father. She really does believe that Shaun McGrath murdered Jack.”
“Deep in her heart,” Leah persisted, “maybe she knows that it was really her mother.”
“Claudia is at least a plausible suspect.”
“Is she outrageously gorgeous?”
“Who, Claudia? No. She’s attractive enough in a Cambridge sort of way. Her husband, Oscar, looks at her as if he thinks she’s gorgeous. Exotic, maybe. He’s very protective. He’s decided that she was the victim of Jack’s financial abuse. And eighteen years ago, she was probably more fetching than she is now. Maybe men think she’s beautiful. Maybe Professor Foley did. It’s always hard to predict. Steve will tell me about some woman he says is a nice person but who is really dumpy and homely, and then, to me, she’ll look like the cover of Vogue. Or he’ll think that someone is a knockout when I think she looks like a million other people.”
“So what’s the ethical dilemma?”
“Do I tell Kevin about Tracy Littlefield? Also, do I tell Brat about Drew? Or, maybe, do I tell Tracy about Brat and let her decide?”
“No to all three,” said Leah firmly.
“Thank you. It’s so comforting to have a Harvard student in the family.”
“Think nothing of it. Speaking of which, I have to get back. Oh, there’s one more Hannah thing you’re going to want to take a look at. It’s all about her. I’m getting it for you. It’s an old dissertation.”
“Widener didn’t have it?”
“Widener doesn’t have dissertations. The new ones are in Pusey, but after nine years, they get moved to the depository. I put in a request on Tuesday, I think it was. They probably have it for me by now. I just couldn’t carry any more today.”
“Are you allowed to check it out?”
“I don’t know, but if it looks good, I can Xerox it for you.”