Man With a Squirrel (15 page)

Molly continued. “I walked over, cutting through Harvard Yard. Yesterday and this morning I'd done some research—it doesn't take much, her own book gives you the guidelines. That's the advantage of having case histories. I prepared enough symptoms to get through an hour I figured, as long as I added some confused stalling. I planned on winging the second half.

“Her suite's a two-room deal with its own john and a sign on the door, brass plaque, giving her name and the initials she professes; and another, paper, sign asking you to ring. You stand in the hall waiting for her to talk through the intercom and buzz you in, at which point you are in an empty room. There's nothing but a gray carpet, two chairs; no magazines of ancient news, fashion, or exploration. The room is fifteen feet square. Not even a window. No place to put your coat. Aside from the door you entered, there are two other doors, closed. You can't help thinking it's a test. You are supposed to guess which door.

“Immediately you feel watched. It's a genius setup to put the client at a disadvantage. A voice has let you in, and there's no person. It's like finding yourself in midair. Not knowing which way you are supposed to fall, you fail even to fall. You lose substance. You look at the two doors, you look at the two chairs, and you think, I'll choose the wrong chair. You think, She's spying from somewhere, sizing me up; you eenie-meenie and sit on Mo, the winning chair, and wait, making a bet with yourself which door is going to open.

“Suppose, like most of the poor goofs coming in, you are already disoriented or emotionally hard-pressed? That's the method-acting approach I had worked up. I was planning to play the scene like, maybe, Diane Keaton in
Annie Hall.
”

Molly was no actress. But if she were, Fred would advise her to try for something closer to where she started from, like Holly Hunter in
Miss Firecracker
or
Broadcast News.

“I must have sat five minutes,” Molly said. “The room was lighted from the ceiling, and otherwise, except for cleaning fluid from the carpet, the place was a sensory-deprivation chamber. The walls were bleached beige, the doors wood painted white. Not a sound got into the room. No sound in, no sound out.

“So I sit with my bag on my lap, rehearsing my part, until a door opens and Cover-Hoover strides across the room toward me. She's dressed in a plain, nice blue silk dress with white spots, no big deal, just a pro, the Doctor.

“‘You are safe here,' she says. That's the opening gambit. I must say I respond better to a frank, ‘What's up?'

“Her office looks out on Brattle Street. Big windows full of sun and geraniums, her desk with a phone, and papers, and serious dark books, and a nice vase from a place, with thirty-five bucks' worth of fresh flowers. You stand there feeling sick and shabby and filled with envy at the way this woman has gotten everything together. You are ashamed you come from a blank room with nothing in it but gray carpet and two chairs you can't choose between. It's genius.

“Eunice showed me a place on a small couch to sit, and before she sat down on a chair four feet away and slightly higher than mine, she offered to close the blinds. ‘It will make you feel safe.'

“Thinking it would help my act, I mumbled, ‘Please, close them, close them.' She reached up and did that. She has a gorgeous body, good breasts—like the vase of flowers, something you are supposed to notice, study, want, and envy.” Molly fumbled her hands together in her lap. She smiled at Fred, looked down at her perfectly adequate and pleasant bosom, and shrugged.

“Say something,” Molly demanded.

Fred said, “I'm afraid I'll break the spell.”

“OK,” Molly said. “Thanks. So this fucking woman sat waiting for me to open my fool mouth, until I did. I told her, ‘I came to your talk the other night and I was moved. I have been resisting you. I am afraid. For years I have struggled with a memory that has no shape, only a weight—nothing to see. And it's been growing.'”

“That's good,” Fred said. “It's ominous and vague and offers her room to be the smart one.”

“The person who defines the force,” Molly said. “That was my thinking. So I told her what I had prepared—chronic trouble sleeping and, when I do sleep, waking and experiencing the strong sensation of another person, or a strange being, in the room.”

“Unless he's sleeping on Clayton's couch,” Fred said.

Molly stood and took off the black jacket of her suit and draped it over the back of a side chair. She wore a white blouse under it, and pearls. She ran her fingers through her tight curls and sat down again. “I mentioned the constant sense I have of being always next to a serious, impending danger. Sensation of flying. And the scar I cannot account for.”

“What?” Fred asked, startled.

“That got her attention too,” Molly said. “She said—her first words after she asked me if I wanted the blinds closed—‘Show me.'

“Now Fred, you know me. I'm not one of these Vagina-of-the-Month Club women that gets together over coffee and everybody talks up their episiotomy, like the new
Our Bodies, Ourselves
pretends; all smoke and mirrors in my opinion. But it was my own damned fault. You mention the symptoms, you have to be able to demonstrate them, and everything else I had offered was in the ectoplasm field. So the only scar I had to show is where the stob went in when Pheely pushed me out of the apple tree.”

Fred grinned. “That put you at a tactical disadvantage,” he allowed.

“I had a choice between two tactical disadvantages. One, I refuse and immediately my story goes up in smoke—unless I can be convincing about scars only I can see, of which there are numerous examples in the literature—or, two, I drop my pants.”

Fred said, “And you can't afford to look like you're planning your next move. You have to respond fast.”

“Exactly. So the doctor sat there waiting, gentle, smiling a little. Not pushy. She had all the time in the world to watch which door, which chair, or which mistake I was going to try. I figured I had to raise her, so I took off all my clothes, deliberate, and challenged her: ‘Many deny they see his mark on me.'”

Fred said, “That's really good. It gives you center stage, but it's a bit extreme…”

“I wanted to challenge her.”

They heard, from the kitchen, the sound of Sam and Terry fighting about who got the bathroom first, to brush their teeth on the way to bed.

“I made her come onto my turf and look me over, me testing her now,” Molly said. “It was not the way I had imagined spending my lunch hour. Cover-Hoover, being a true psychic, or adept, or whatever, found the old ragged pinch of scar on my left buttock. She hissed in when she touched it and said, ‘Does it feel hot?'”

“Mmm. She saw you and raised you, Molly.”

“Meanwhile, playing for time, I made her swear she truly could see and feel it,” Molly said. “Then I sort of collapsed and told her, ‘I can't remember anything. I'm afraid.'

“‘He's long dead,' Eunice said. ‘He can't touch you again.'

“She was absolutely convincing, working like water that insinuates itself into every opening and is going to damned well drag itself to sea level, and you along with it. As soon as she said, ‘He can't touch you,' I started manufacturing visions of who this
he
might be.

“It was as if I'd hypnotized myself, almost, standing there, as Terry used to call it, barefoot. I was surrounded by a violent aura of fear I couldn't put a villain to, or see, or recall—I was inventing it after all—but the sensation and the emotion were real enough to bottle and sell. With this thing lapping around me like a fog, I put my clothes on again—got through that gracefully enough, I think—before I thought of asking her, ‘What do you mean he's long dead? Who's long dead?'

“I don't know why the poor old man who came out to the house that night was the first person I thought of. Because he touched me with an intimate fear, I guess.

“Eunice said, ‘No need to rush this, Molly. May I call you Molly? Please call me Eunice. You did right to come to me. No human power by itself can withstand the darkness that has reached its long finger into your body.'

“It's embarrassing, Fred. When she said that, I felt the long finger of darkness reaching into me through the old scar on my ass. Which I know for a fact came when I was ten and fell out of a tree. My mother thought I'd got my period.

“Listen, I can't go through the next hour line by line. I am absolutely furious with Ophelia. Do you know how she set me up? Do you know what she did?” Molly started shaking.

“She told Cover-Hoover that she, Ophelia, suspects her older sister, Molly—me—was used in witches' Sabbaths by my poor old dad, before the accident in the warehouse that killed him when I was eight and she was six.

“She told Eunice she suspects Dad was head witch in regular satanic worship on some blasted heath in Newton Lower Falls. God, did I walk into that one.”

Molly burst into what was either laughter or tears; a noisy, generous fury of emotion that lasted a full minute and then was gone. She stood, wiped her eyes with a napkin, blew her nose, and said, “I'm taking a long hot shower, Fred. The bugs of fear and loathing and self-pity are all over me. That woman's Typhoid Mary. I've never met anything like it.”

“I'll come up with you.”

Molly put a hand on his arm. “Fred, I'm sorry. Do you mind? Use the downstairs couch tonight? I can't stand being in the same bed with anyone. I'm crawling all over.”

“I can sleep on your floor,” Fred offered. “Do you mind if I take a look at Cover-Hoover's book?”

Molly smiled wanly. “Better sack out downstairs,” she said. “My poor old dad, who went to the red-eye Mass every morning of his life, at six-thirty, before he came back to the house to give us breakfast.”

“It's always who you least expect,” Fred said. “That's one of the rules of fiction.”

18

Fred woke at five, walked through the village of Arlington, and breakfasted at Dunkin' Donuts. After looking through
Power of Darkness,
he was bemused and interested at the situation Molly had gotten herself into. She had walked into a trap baited with the most persuasive pheromone known to the human spirit: Eau de Soupçon.

The premise of the book was reassuringly simple, arguing from effect to cause and starting from a series of symptoms of malaise like what Molly had described. Add to that the following guidelines: If you
think
you might have been abused, you were; and failing to recall it likely proves it, because that's exactly what
they
want.

Ophelia was a fool playing games with such a subject. You can get the person out of the woods, but you can't get the woods out of the person. The fear that's in each of us will be believed under any of a million names, because the fear itself, the prime evidence, is always real.

The worst of it was not the theoretical basis of the argument, or its scientific trappings; the worst part was the implications the sad stories of abuse, so proudly presented, had for the lives, the families, and the identities of the self-proclaimed victims. The role of victim must for some become a full-time occupation. Cover-Hoover, if her pioneering theory was to be proved, must be able to point to a stable of willing guinea pigs who would announce themselves as “broken” individuals now (and forever) in the healing process.

It was unpleasant and sad, Molly said, and
very
soft science, like that book
The Bell Curve,
big a couple years back, which while pretending to measure intelligence quotients was nothing more than a long way of complaining that black people had failed to remain at home in Africa. “Do not send to know for whom the bell curves,” Molly had remarked at the time, tossing the book onto the floor. “It curves for thee.”

*   *   *

Fred had little company at Dunkin' Donuts: two solid Greek girls behind the counter, a sweating male who was probably the father of one of them cooking in back, and two men, like himself, drinking coffee. Fred bought a dozen donuts and more coffee and took it all back to Molly's. Terry preferred donuts that squirted, and Sam liked chocolate on chocolate. Molly claimed no interest in donuts and would eat whatever the kids left. Fred made the kids drink milk to offset the sugar.

“Sorry about last night,” Molly said after the kids had left for school, as she was putting herself together. “The woman put me in a tailspin.”

“How did you leave things with her?”

“I honestly don't know.” Fred leaned to kiss her good-bye and she jerked away like a girl with brand-new breasts starting. “Sorry, Fred,” she said. “It's just … well, sorry, I guess, is all I know.”

“OK,” Fred said. “I'll clean up here. I'm waiting to go into town until after I talk with this detective, Bookrajian, since Dee says I should.” He saw Molly out the kitchen door into the garage, heard the garage door heave open and close again, and Molly's Colt putter away into a cold gray morning.

*   *   *

“You left a message I should call?” Bookrajian said when he called back at ten. Fred by this time was pacing Molly's kitchen, cursing himself for putting himself in hock to a telephone. He wanted to pick up the matter of Manny. Every departing minute threatened to take the head end of the Copley portrait farther into the distance.

“Yes. I did business with Oona Imry, and I understand from Dee Glaspie, who writes parking tickets for the city…”

Bookrajian interrupted, “Go on.”

Fred said, “I understood you people were satisfied the death was an accident. The nephew said you were ready to release the body.”

“Are you kidding?” Bookrajian's amazed bluster caused Fred to hold the receiver away from his ear. “Oh, the nephew. That fucking snake son of a bitch? You a friend of his?”