At home. In our own bathtubs. In his bathtub. I sat quietly, staring into the middle distance. And all of a sudden, I knew what I could do.
What can I say? I was Bernard Castro inventing the Castro convertible, the Earl of Sandwich conceptualizing the sandwich, Jonas Salk discovering the polio vaccine, and whoever that genius was who thought up Velcro. I was peerless Cole Porter figuring out that “Fred Astaire” could rhyme with “Camembert,” that “Inferno’s Dante” could rhyme with “the Great Durante,” and that (if you had the vision, the moral courage, the sheer audacity to do it) “the steppes of Russia” could rhyme with “a Roxy usher.”
In other words, inspiration had struck, the creative juices were flowing, Newton’s apple had bopped me on the head. In other words, having given free rein to my fantasies. I’d devised, a way to commit the perfect crime.
• • •
During these same two weeks, I also talked with Tara Tessler’s mother and father and, at a deeply disappointing breakfast at the McDonald’s near her apartment, with Mrs. Malone. (Actually the breakfast itself wasn’t bad. It was Mrs. Malone who was deeply disappointing.)
“I’m here because you said you thought we could settle this suit out of court,” said Mrs. Malone, a homely-attractive Jamie Lee Curtis type with a mannish haircut, a fabulous body, and a wary expression in her pale-blue eyes.
“Woman to woman,” I corrected her. “I said I thought we could settle this woman to woman.”
“Whatever,” said Mrs. Malone, as she methodically chewed her way through an Egg McMuffin, “So how much is the doctor willing to settle for?”
“I can see you must be wonderful at your work. So crisp and efficient. You work . . . where?”
“At the Post. In classified ads. Where we’re used to very short messages. How about giving me yours, so I can get going.”
I put down my cup of coffee and smiled warmly at her. “Won’t you let me see a snapshot of Kenny?”
“Then you’ll show me pictures of your kids, and then we’ll ooh and we’ll ahh? I don’t have time for this. I’m walking to the office, and if I’m not out of here in two minutes, I’ll be late.”
I decided I’d better deliver my message fast. “I’m not a typical doctor’s wife, Mrs. Malone. I don’t think they’re gods. I don’t think they’re infallible. Here, I brought you some columns of mine”—I offered my folder of clips, but she put up her hand in a way that said hold it right there—“that will show you how deeply I share your reservations about the medical profession.” I set the rejected folder next to her plate.
“Good. That’s very good,” said Mrs. Malone, wiping her mouth and applying fresh lipstick. “And when you translate your reservations into dollars you get—what?”
“This isn’t about money.” I leaned forward and gazed into her narrowed eyes. “I really don’t think that money should be an issue here.”
Mrs. Malone stood up and slung her purse briskly over her shoulder. “I was afraid of that. End of conversation, Mrs. Kovner.”
Without another word Mrs. Malone was out the door. I grabbed my purse and folder and hurried after her. She was speed-walking down Seventeenth Street with her arms pumping back and forth, her eyes straight ahead.
“I’ll just walk with you a little way,” I murmured, trying to match my stride to hers.
“I don’t own the sidewalk,” she said, “but you’re wasting your breath.” She speeded up. I speeded up. She doubled her pace. I did too. But she wore serious walking shoes and I wore my end-of-the-summer-sale patent pumps. I knew, as she once more increased her pace, that I wouldn’t be keeping up with her much longer.
“Could I just say a couple of things about humanity and gratitude and justice?” When you’re sweating and gasping, it’s difficult to sound eloquent, but I gave it my absolute all.
Mrs. Malone stopped short. “We’re pursuing this suit, so I’ll see you in court, assuming you plan to accompapy Dr. Kovner. But if I see you before that. I’ll sign a complaint—against, you and your husband—for harassment.”
As she sped off, I leaned against a tree and did something irrational. I prayed. “Please, God,” I prayed, despite the fact that I think of myself as a deeply committed atheist, “whatever you do, don’t let Jake find out about this.”
• • •
My encounter with the Tesslers, though far more cordial than breakfast-and-walking with Mrs. Malone, turned out to be every, bit as unrewarding. I drove to their modest Silver Spring house early one evening, while Jake was out at a dinner meeting, and met what seemed to be a pair of twins. Both Mr. and Mrs. were freckled, snub-nosed, and sandy-haired. Both had a gap between their two front teeth. And both wore green cotton-knit pants and matching green-and-white-striped shirts on their interchangeably hipless, flat-bellied bodies. Tara, an adorable miniature clone of Ray and Felice, as they urged me to call them, played quietly, with her dolls while the grownups conversed. What with the homey atmosphere and all of us on this friendly first-name basis, I felt sure I could dissuade them from their malpractice suit.
Unlike Mrs. Malone, they were quite impressed with my critical attitudes toward medicine, cheerfully assenting when I offered to read them passages from STAND UP TO YOUR DOCTOR and some of my other columns. “I think you’ll see,” I concluded, “that though I am married to a surgeon. I’m quite objective. I’m the kind of person who, if I believed he deserved to be sued, would tell you to go for it.”
“And we appreciate that,” said Ray.
“Really,” said Felice.
“However,” I said, and I launched into a brilliant discussion of malrotation volvulus, followed by a moving defense of Jake, without whom, I softly reminded them, “this beautiful child would not be alive today.”
“You could be right,” said Ray.
“Definitely,” said Felice.
“You make some very good points,” said Ray.
Felice supportively bobbed her head up and down.
“Maybe,” said Ray, shrugging his-shoulders and turning up his palms in a who-knows gesture, “the court will agree with you. So why don’t we just let the court decide?’ He poured me a glass of iced tea and added, with a gap-toothed smile, “Don’t think we aren’t grateful to your husband.”
“Truly,” said Felice.
I was starting to feel as if I was being pummeled by large, soft pillows. I shook my head clear and inquired, “Then why sue?”
“Because,” Ray answered, “it’s the American way.”
“James Frommer of Hartford, Connecticut, tripped and broke his leg in a restaurant parking lot where he was trying to mug a departing customer. He is currently suing the restaurant for failing to keep the parking lot properly lit.” One-word Felice was speaking, her hands clasped together, her eyes litigiously aglow.
“Viola Petrushansky, whose telepathic powers were so extensive that she could make long-distance phone calls without the phone, lost ninety percent of those powers after a double root canal in Bangor, Maine. Last year she brought suit against her endodontist.”
I cleared my throat and tried to speak, but Felice had not yet completed her oral argument.
“Five women in Akron, Ohio, started a class-action suit against a local department store for causing traumatic stress by opening up their private sale to the general public and letting them get away with all the best markdowns. William Jones of New York, New York, whose plastic surgeon had promised him that he’d come out looking just like Sylvester Stallone, is suing his plastic surgeon because he came out looking more like Kevin Costner. The Wygands of Butte, Montana, whose five-year-old son started wetting his bed after he saw Bambi’s mother get killed in Bambi, are suing . . .”
“Just one moment, please,” I said, loudly enough to interrupt the flow. “Are you saying that these are meritorious suits?”
“It’s not for us to say,” Ray replied. “It’s for the courts to say.”
“Unquestionably,” said Felice.
I moved into p
erilous waters. “But going to court is so expensive. If you’ve got a dubious lawsuit, does it make sense for people—for you—to be throwing all that money away on lawyers?” I waited to see if the Tesslers would mention the help that they were receiving from Mr. Monti.
Felice and Ray looked at each other, conferred without saying a word, and then turned to me.
“It’s decent of you to worry about our legal expenses,” said Ray.
Felice said, “Very.”
“But people,” said Ray, “have to do what they have to do.”
He stood up. “It’s time to put Tara to bed, so we’ll need to say good night. But be sure to give Dr. Jake our best regards.”
“Positively,” Felice said . . .
Positively not, I said to myself.
• • •
I know there might be those who would see my Tessler Malone discussions as a defeat. But scorning such negativity, I preferred to call them a temporary setback. Another temporary setback, I was forced to admit, were my efforts to help Jo and Wally with their life plans. I had many useful suggestions for instance about when they should get married (no earlier than next June, after she was finished with college and he was finished with graduate school and they both—God willing—were gainfully employed) and who should marry them (Rabbi Emmanuel Silverman, scholar and humanist) and what major problems Josephine ought to be focusing on in her therapy (just in case she’d forgotten one or two).
As I said, I had many suggestions, which I tried very hard to offer to Wally and Josephine, who—mid afternoon on September 13—had finally returned from Rehoboth Beach. It was time. With Wally no longer afraid he’d be charged with theft, and with Jo—so it seemed—no longer afraid of her father, they hadn’t any reason for continuing to hide out, particularly since their classes at Catholic U had been in session since late August.
But hiding out was not the reason that Wally and Jo had remained so long at the beach. They had stayed in order for Josephine to continue her therapy sessions with Dr. X, who had taken her into treatment and was willing to see her regularly even though she—Dr. X—was on vacation! And since Dr. X had decided to stay at Rehoboth till the Sunday after Labor Day, so did Josephine. And so did Wally. Who was standing by his woman because, as I may have already mentioned, he happens be a truly lovely person—caring, supportive, loyal, understanding, devoted, empathic, compassionate, etc. As I also may have mentioned, Jo wasn’t exactly my first choice to be the object of all this wonderfulness, but I hoped that with Dr. X’s help (supplemented by mine) she would shape up.
Unfortunately, I was having trouble supplementing. Both Wally (back living up on our third floor) and Jo (now living at Gloria’s with her mother) were frantically playing catch-up with the readings and the class work they had missed. In addition, Wally, whose graduate program included doing casework in his field, was always running out to see some schizoid Cheryl or manic-depressive Dwayne—clients with significant mental-health problems. As a result, whenever I tried to embark on a let’s-discuss-your-future discussion, Wally and Jo insisted that they had too many obligations to take time to chat.
One afternoon, however, I came upon Josephine in my kitchen and seized the opportunity to speak to her privately. I started the conversation by saying, “It may not be appropriate, now that you’re seeing a reputable psychiatrist, for me to involve myself with your private affairs . . .” and almost choked on my diet Sprite when Josephine replied, “You’re right—it wouldn’t be.”
She gave me a chance to wipe spilled Sprite off my chin before she added, “I’ve got this really great positive transference going with Dr. X, and I wouldn’t want to—you know—attenuate it.”
Since when was Josephine using words like, “attenuate”—not to mention “positive transference”? I was staggered. But, instantly regrouping, 1 said, “I wouldn’t want to attenuate it either, Jo. So let me just ask you this—what are your thoughts about when you and Wally might wish to marry?”
“I’ll be working that through with Dr. X,” Josephine crisply replied, “and you’ll be among the very first to know.”
“And Wally?”
“Oh, I’ll probably tell him even before I tell you.”
“I mean, aren’t you working your marriage plans through with Wally?”
“Not really, Mrs. Kovner. Right now my main relationship has to be with myself. Discovering my identity. Providing myself with my own self-validation. Learning to live with ambivalence. Stuff like that.”
The Josephine I was listening to was not the quivering wreck who had crept into Wally’s Chevy less than a month ago. I had to hand it to Dr. X—she worked fast. Still, remembering Jo’s conviction that her father was about to pounce on her sexually, I wondered how her literal mind would process all of her new psychological know-how.
I also wondered why Wally hadn’t stopped Josephine, down at the beach, from making the fatal phone call that had spurred her mother to walk out on her father. He had taken lots of psychology courses and surely he understood that Jo had confused the symbolic with the concrete.
“I tried to straighten her out—before the phone call and after the phone call,” Wally told me, when I raised the question with him a couple of hours after my thwarted talk with Jo. “But she was too mad to listen then, and now I can’t discuss it anymore. She has asked me—so, told me—to please stay out of her treatment. She doesn’t want to attenuate the transference.”
We were in Wally’s room—an incredible mess, but, as I’ve repeatedly reminded myself, you cannot tell adult children who live at home to clean up their rooms (or to eat their vegetables, or to not drive the car when the streets are sheets of ice). Wally, eyeing his books, was making it clear that he wished our conversation to end.
“Can you and I make a date to talk about your future plans?” I asked, picking up a few stray socks and some underwear.
Wally looked uncomfortable. “Nothing personal, Mom, but I better not Josephine feels our relationship is a bit too symbiotic. She says that it’s hard for a man to fully commit to another woman when he hasn’t separated from his mother.”
I scooped up a soaking-wet towel that had fallen behind the radiator, then hung up a suit and a jacket that were crumpled at the foot of his double bed. “Maybe Jo should consider switching her major from English literature to psychology,” I said, making heroic efforts not to sound snide. “She certainly seems to have taken to the subject.”
Wally, who had noticed the snide despite my heroic efforts, said, “You shouldn’t see this as an attack on you. It’s just that Jo is killing her father—symbolically speaking, of course—and she’s sensitive about controlling parents.”
I guess I’d been feeling a bit more stressed out than I had actually recognized because I behaved in a quite untypical way. I was bending down to fish Wally’s hightops and loafers and flipflops from underneath his desk, and instead of, as I’d intended, setting-them neatly in a row on his closet floor, I stood up and threw them with all my might—one by one by one—against his wall.
“Why should I”—bam!—“feel attacked,” I screamed, “merely because”—bam!—“I am being attacked? I’m a competent”—bam!—“can-do woman”—bam!—“and if people choose to mistake that”—bam!—“for controlling, well, boo”—bam!—“on them.”
As Wally gaped with astonishment, I took a few deep breaths and returned to my more characteristic calm. “You’ve been happy to use my help in the past,” I reminded my son with enormous dignity, “and whenever you wish to use it again, I’m available.”
I gathered up an armful of sopping towels and dirty clothes and marched out the door. “If you don’t think I’m being controlling,” I told Wally as I departed, “I’ll just go ahead and drop these into the hamper. And then I’ll be writing my column. On INGRATITUDE.”
• • •
On Sunday, September 20, I was sitting on my porch reading the Post. Jake had gone off to make hospital rounds. Wally, parked in front, was swee
ping the rest of the beach sand out of his Chevy. He had just rolled up the windows and was hosing down the chassis when a plain black van came roaring up our street. Careening from side to side, with heavy-metal music blasting at top volume, the van abruptly took aim and bore down on Wally. I’m sure it would have smashed him if he hadn’t dropped the hose and spread-eagled himself across the hood of his car.
“Hey, watch it, you asshole,” Wally yelled, clambering down from the hood, as the van, its speed unchecked, went barreling past him. “What do you think you’re—”
With a squeal of brakes and a grinding of gears, the black van slammed to a stop and went into reverse, aiming again for Wally, who stood in the middle of our street with an upraised fist. He ducked to his left; the van shot left. He ran to the right; the van was almost on him. And when he tore to the left again, diving over a hedge and landing facedown in the Dunlaps’ pachysandra, the van spun around, crashed through the hedge, and moved relentlessly toward his helpless body.
Screaming, “My God, he’s going to run over my baby boy,” I raced off the porch and over to the Dunlaps’. But before I could get there, the driver braked, insolently gunned his engine three times, backed out over the hedge—and roared away.
“Say something, Wally. Speak. Let me know you’re all right,” I called to my son, my heart achieving heart attack velocity. But he was already on his feet and brushing himself off when I and the Dunlaps, pulled from their house by the ruckus on their front lawn, got to him.
“I’m fine. I’m fine. No harm done,” said Wally, plucking a couple of leaves out of his hair. “But that asshole!”
The Dunlaps, foreign-service types who had returned to Cleveland Park after several years with the embassy in Beirut, were smiling and shaking our hands with warm cordiality. A profile in Washingtonian magazine had recently characterized them as “unflappable and gracious through car bombs and coups.” Clearly this vicious van attack—which had left me wondering whether to faint or throw up—was a piece of cake for the unflappable Dunlaps.
Murdering Mr. Monti Page 12